We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Not me, that is for sure. Even harder to figure out is the film going public… and after a chat with Hollywood film producer and blogger Brian Linse the other day, I get the impression from him that even Hollywood cannot figure out the film going public.
Take two movies, both based on computer games. Firstly, Tomb Raider, staring Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft.
Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft: striking a Lara-ish stance
The Tomb Raider series of computer games were massive and more or less redefined the genre. I thought they were all quite gripping and am very eager to get my paws on the latest episode of Lara Croft’s adventures, Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness.
Angel of Darkness: Lara Croft in all her pixellated glory!
As you might expect, I was rather keen to see Tomb Raider: The Movie, directed by Simon West. It had everything going for it: Angelina Jolie is an interesting looking woman and without doubt a technically skilled actress. Although she is not quite ready to challenge Gwyneth Paltrow for her crown as ‘Best-Yank-Actress-who-can-do-a-perfect-British-accent’, she is pretty damn good nonetheless.
The film clearly had a truly humongous budget, was adequately acted and tolerably directed in parts (with a couple startlingly bad scenes: it takes a certain perverse skill for a director to make a gratuitous shower scene with Angelina Jolie laughable for all the wrong reasons). Unfortunately the story line was weak, convoluted and confusing. Worst of all, the production was dire: it was almost as if it was three separate movies, casually spliced together, differently paced as if styled by three sets of completely unconnected film makers, then finally so badly edited as to make some parts of the story incomprehensible. Although Tomb Raider: The Movie was not utterly without merits, the overall effect was shockingly disappointing. 
And yet, due to the Tomb Raider/Lara Croft brand name and massive marketing, this clunker rode out the appropriately scathing reviews and was by no means a commercial failure in spite of costing a great deal to make. A sequel is in the pipeline.
And then let us look as the second movie, Resident Evil staring Milla Jovovich as Alice.
Milla Jovovich as Alice: about to demonstrate how unhappy she is with her ex-boyfriend
The game that the movie is based on, similarly called Resident Evil is a big name in the Playstation console world, but it does not have anything like the brand recognition of ‘Tomb Raider’ and ‘Lara Croft’ with the general public.
Killer pixels: Veronica from the Resident Evil – Code V game
The Resident Evil movie, directed by Paul Anderson, clearly has a far smaller budget, it was marketed poorly to put it mildly and with the exception of Milla Jovovich (Fifth Element, Zoolander, Blue Lagoon, Two Moon Junction etc.) had a cast of more or less unknowns. Resident Evil had a simple but nearly flawlessly executed story, was artfully directed, skillfully produced and very atmospheric. It was well cast and Milla was excellent as the killer amnesiac conspirator known simply as ‘Alice’… and unlike the jarring T&A scene in Tomb Raider, the opening shower sequence with dazed Milla worked perfectly, setting the deliciously ill-at-ease tone for the whole movie.
In short, this movie rocks… vastly superior to ‘Tomb Raider: The Movie’ on every level. It has no pretensions to be high art or intellectually challenging, but it does exactly what it sets out to do with considerable flair. 
And yet unlike the dismal Tomb Raider, Resident Evil almost immediately vanished off the screens and onto video/DVD. Fortunately, because it cost so little to make, the picture seems to have still made a profit and thus in this case too, a sequel is in the pipeline called Resident Evil: Nemesis (which will no doubt cause confusion with the impending Star Trek movie called ‘Nemesis’). Movie making is a very strange business.
Go out and buy or rent Resident Evil: The Movie on DVD or Video, it is destined to be a cult classic. Avoid Tomb Raider: The Movie like it was smallpox.
Update: The Resident Evil follow-up movie has been retitled Resident Evil: Apocalypse, presumably to avoid confusion with the recent Start Trek movie flop called ‘Nemesis’
Sean Gabb‘s account of the debate he took part in yesterday evening, already referred to here (and assuming that yesterday is the proper word for the day that only ended a little over an hour ago), is already up and readable on his own website. The full text of what he said is there, together with his account of some other things he said during the Q&A. Recommended.
The titbit in the report of the evening that interested me most was somewhat off the central agenda. It seems that after the debate, which all went very smoothly and politely by the way, Sean was challenged in a rather interesting way by a young woman in the audience:
She began with flattery. She was a reader, she said, of Free Life Commentary on my web page and found it very interesting. The surest way to an intellectual’s heart is though his ego. This young lady will doubtless go far in life. She then asked why I was spending so much of my time on the mixed bag of losers and cretins who are the modern Conservative Party? Why not turn my attentions to the Liberal Democrats? These at least were already social liberals, and they might with a fraction of the effort I had wasted on the Tories come to some agreement on economic liberalism. Good question, and I had no ready answer. Perhaps I should think of one.
Yes do, Sean. I for one would love to hear it.
In this connection, our American readers in particular would surely appreciate some explanation of the parlous state that Britain’s Conservatives now find themselves in, especially when you consider how well the Republicans are now doing over there. Why is the political right that in such a mess here, while it is the left that is in trouble in the USA? I hope to offer a few answers to this question in a future Samizdata posting, but I have learned from bitter experience over the decades that what I say that I hope to do, and what I do do, are two things that often diverge with embarrassing completeness. So expect that when you read it and no sooner.
I cannot even hope to offer much on the subject of the Lib Dems, the young lady’s proposed alternative focus of Sean Gabb’s attention. Recently someone told me that there are clever young people in their ranks who are not completely indifferent to the claims of economic liberalism. Until then I despised the Liberal Democrats utterly, and had as little to do with them, and even with thinking about them, as I could contrive. But maybe they might make something approximating to libertarians some time reasonably soon. They’re already very sound about cannabis. And they are descended from the nineteenth century Liberal Party of William Gladstone. In the 1950s there were still old-fashioned Liberals like Jo Grimmond to be found among them, before they succumbed to the statism Mark 2 posture that they have adopted for the last forty years or so. Comments anybody?
Paul Staines reports on the latest rather splendid twist in the ongoing German anti-tax protests about which Adriana first reported last month on Samizdata.net
There is a brilliant story at wired news about a tax protest with a difference. It started as a wacky idea in an Internet chat-room but now thousands of Germans have sent Chancellor Schroeder their shirts. Schroeder has donated the thousands of shirts his office has received to charity. Shame he does not show some charity towards taxpayers…
The political campaign is being promoted with this rather fetching picture of Katja Kassin in the process of losing her shirt! Who says the Germans do not have a sense of humour?
Paul Staines
A Canadian Samizdata reader alerted Samizdata to a story in Canada’s National Post. The Post reports that costs for Canada’s gun registry have overrun by a factor of 500. No, that’s not an overrun of 500% (which would be bad enough) but a final cost of five hundred times the original estimate. Did I say final? I meant cost so far; it’s not final yet.
Well, at least Canadians are safe now. Only they’re not. He adds:
“Herewith is another example of why gun registration programs don’t work. Canada has a history different from the US with respect to firearms (which explains, in large part, why this became law in the first place). I think that violent, gun-related crime in Canada’s urban centers has probably increased since 1995 (but I don’t have any hard evidence to support this assertion). I can say that, in Toronto, there was a series of gang related shooting in October where every weekend (for a month) different gang members ended up dead in different parts of the city. Further to this, the gun control law has had no impact on the Hell’s Angels in Montreal.”
As chance would have it I had posted earlier today about how Simon Jenkins of the Times should not believe all that Michael Moore says about Canada being a paradise of trust. Moore is right about one thing. America does have an anomalously high murder rate. But all the strategies put in place by countries who boast that their lower murder rate is the result of gun control, and that they therefore need more of it, keep on failing. Expensively.
That would have been a good sign-off line, but I’ve one more thing to say. I was struck by the sentiments of Allan Rock, a Liberal Party bigshot who the opposition attacked for keeping mum about the spiralling costs of the gun registry. The report said:
Mr. Rock defended the registry, saying it has “saved lives” and reinforced “Canadian values” by distinguishing Canada from the United States on the issue of gun control.
Were his actual words as thin and shabby as this paraphrase implies? Does he really see mere difference to the United States as a merit in itself?
Paul Marks has seen spotted the true historical template for Tony Blair…
For some time now I have been puzzled by the fact that although Mr Blair has followed ‘left wing’ policies of ever more government spending, taxes and regulations he is widely seen as “free market”, “really a Conservative”, “very right wing” and so on.
I must stress that not only the ‘usual suspects’ (Marxists and other such) have used such language, but quite a few pro-free market and even libertarian people.
What I have tried to do is find people in history who have followed statist policies and still got a reputation as free market folk.
President Hoover comes fairly close. Herbert Hoover, as Commerce Secretary in the 1920’s, worked endlessly to increase the budget and powers of his department and showered President Harding and President Coolidge with bad advise (which, thankfully, they mostly ignored – indeed President Coolidge is supposed to have said “no one has given me more advise than Herbert Hoover – and all of it bad advise”),
As President, Herbert Hoover went along with big tariff increases and demanded that large companies keep up wage rates at a time when both prices and output were falling (thus ensuring vast unemployment) – and yet Herbert Hoover (“The Forgotten Progressive”) is widely seen as the free market man that President Roosevelt reacted against.
However, President Hoover was faced with the worst depression in American history (caused by a credit-money boom that he had nothing to do with creating) – and this is likely to warp the judgement of most men. Also Herbert Hoover was a man of strict honesty in his dealings with businessmen – which does not fit in with the cozy image (however false it may be, my dear libel lawyers) of Mr Blair and those known (however wrongly) as his friends.
I think that I have found a closer match for Mr Blair – someone who may indeed have served as a role model for him.
Louis Phillippe “King of the French” from 1830 to 1848:
Louis Phillippe was a ‘People’s King’ rather than ‘King of France’ you see, the son of the Duke of Orleans. His father had helped finance the French revolution and voted for the execution of his kinsman King Louis XVI, and has himself later been executed by his own comrades. Louis Phillippe came to power after a strong media campaign had helped whip up public hatred for King Charles X. → Continue reading: Mr Blair’s role model
Sean Gabb will tonight be speaking at a debate – “This House Believes Promoting Diversity Causes Discrimination” is what he will be arguing – organised by the Local Government Association. (Sorry, I realise now that he didn’t say where this would be.) He has been circulating the proposed text of his speech to other Libertarian Alliance people, and I can therefore (and with his permission, given by phone this afternoon) tell you the kind of thing he’ll be saying:
I will begin by questioning the notion of diversity. What does it mean? As commonly used, it means that we should work for the sort of society in which every organisation, public and private, is filled with representative numbers of women, black people, homosexuals, and the handicapped. Anything with less than representative numbers of these and other groups is to be investigated on the grounds that it is probably discriminating. In describing the ideal society according to this view of diversity, the old sneer about jobs for black, one-legged lesbians is not that unfair.
Now, this is a diversity of sorts. But it is not the diversity that really exists when not as carefully managed and constrained as a bonsai tree. This is the diversity that concentrates on superficial differences between individuals. When it comes to matters of opinion, there is no diversity. Everyone is expected – in public, at least – to endorse the kind of opinions that would not be out of place in a Guardian editorial. Let there be diversity of belief – let someone say the number of black people in this country has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished; or that America is the Great Satan, and got a jolly good hiding in New York last year, and should mind its ps and qs over the Middle East in future if it wants to avoid more of the same; or that homosexuals are the spawn of Satan, and aids is only the beginning of God’s punishment for their abominations – let anyone deviate from the Guardian line on any issue dear to the promoters of diversity, and there is an end of talk about diversity. The cry will go up for sackings from employment, for police and security service harassment, and of course for censorship laws with criminal sanctions attached. Promoters of diversity as the word is commonly used are inclined to tolerate only the diversity of which they approve. Where they do not approve, they will happily manufacture excuses for hate crime laws as arbitrary and soon perhaps as draconian as the religious laws of Elizabeth I.
That, I suspect, is the diversity promoted by the Local Government Association. …
Sean tells me that he intends soon to write a report of how this all went, in his Free Life Commentaries series, hopefully tomorrow. → Continue reading: An Old Whig in action – and perhaps a new blogger
The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else
– Frederic Bastiat
Thousands of British students have gathered in London today in order to protest against a Government proposal to introduce university top-up fees. Coming from across the UK, they started marching at noon today (I am pleased to report it is pissing down with rain) in protest against a Government plan to require students to pay for at least some of their own university education. The protestors are backed by trade unionist and assorted socialist groups, who are claiming 20,000 students are marching. Police have said there are closer to 10,000 present.
Mandy Telford, president of the National Union of Students (NUS), said: “Education should be based on your ability not your ability to pay. Going down that road is putting a price tag on degrees and that’s not positive for society.”
Society? It is not ‘society’ which takes money from one group of people by force and gives it to another, only the state (or organised crime) can do that to whole sections of the population by force. If students are entitled to take other people’s money in order to educate themselves, and the object of this education being to benefit themselves, why not also for food? For housing? For petrol? For clothing? In fact, why should they need to pay for anything from which they benefit? It seems they do indeed want that invidious form of outright theft called progressive taxation to fund the priorities of others and of course students are just the thin end of the paleo-socialist wedge being offered up here.
Ms Telford [of the National Union of Students] said students were converging on London from across the country. She said: “The march will send a very clear message to ministers. Students are angry and their families are angry.
Well I am bloody angry too! These ‘protestors’ are nothing more than parasites calling for the state to continue to engage in theft on their behalf. What makes their needs and priorities so much more important than mine that they feel they have the right to take my money for their benefit? Well up your, you scruffy leeches… you will get very little from me. Any future business of mine will be off-shore benefiting someone else’s economy, and 10,000 of the reasons are marching through London today.
It was futile to argue with politicians, I realized, to try to persuade them that your scepticism concerning their views might be well founded. Politicians developed habits of self-justification and certitude which were immune to logic or emotion: their rhetoric was like a blanket which they wrapped around themselves to keep out the bracing air of dissent.
– Princess Catherine, in Aztec Century by Christopher Evans
According to Carlton Vogt unless you have been living in a cave, you’re aware of the Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness (TIA) programme. My cave has an internet connection so I can blog about it eventually. Although the news about it has already been round the blogosphere I liked Mr Vogt’s article.
The goal of TIA is to accumulate every bit of transactional online data worldwide and use data mining techniques to provide intelligence information. This means TIA will give the Pentagon access to your credit card data, school records, medical information, travel history, church affiliation, gun ownership, ammunition purchases, library records, video rentals, you name it: “This will all be collected into a database, the purpose of which is ostensibly to fight terrorism, but which will present a massive opportunity for government abuse. There comes a point in almost every science fiction “B” movie where someone suggests that the new invention can be beneficial, but will be dangerous if “it falls into the wrong hands.”
The problem is that this technology has not only fallen into the wrong hands, it was conceived by “the wrong hands.” The chief architect of this new data gathering and mining scheme is none other than John Poindexter: “Those who are old enough will remember him from the arms-for-hostages scandal, in which many of the arms currently threatening us in the Middle East were illegally traded to Iran by the Reagan administration.
Poindexter subsequently was convicted of several felonies, including conspiracy, perjury, and obstruction of justice. The convictions were later overturned on a technicality. The disgraced former admiral re-entered public life this year as a civilian Pentagon employee.”
InfoWorld deals mainly with computer and technology related news or issues. It was most encouraging to read the following analysis by one of the senior editors in his regular column Ethics Matters: “We are in the midst of vast fundamental changes in the body of rights, legal and moral, that we have taken for granted for so long. I am constantly amazed at how passively most people have accepted these changes, which will affect the way we live and work. It is a dangerous path on which false beginnings and missteps along the way can end in disaster.
If we scroll down to the bottom line, we find that the TIA project places too much information on too many people into the hands of too few people with too little oversight. It portends disaster.
…We have the opportunity to put the brakes on here before the situation becomes that grave. Perhaps it’s time for people to shake off their post-9/11 stupor and find out what mischief is being done under the guise of fighting terrorism. You may not like what you see.”
Absolutely. The state is not your friend.
I don’t recall ever having reproduced an article in full on this blog and, only on the rare occasion, will I publish a letter in full. This is one such occasion and the quality of the letter merits it:
Modern changes ignore old gun laws
“Sir – Alan Judd is hesitant to advocate a “firearms free-for-all” (Comment, Dec 2), but one might recall that, before the First World War, when almost any British citizen could possess and carry any gun without a licence (and frequently did so, for there was a massive domestic firearms industry), armed crime in London ran at only two per cent of what it is today.
In 1946, the year the Home Office first moved against the licensing of pistols for self-defence, there were only 25 armed robberies in London: today, we have more than that every fortnight.
Confusion over our right to self-defence has not arisen because, as Mr Judd at one point suggests, we have “renounced” that capability. It is a right enshrined in our central constitutional document, the Bill of Rights of 1689, which is still in force as statute law. The right to possess arms for self-defence was one of only two rights of the individual guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, and was indeed the ultimate surety of the subject’s other liberties.
While it had been the Restoration disarmament of Protestants that provoked the arms provision of the Bill of Rights, the equal right of Catholics to self-defence was guaranteed in the same year, and case law upheld the right to bear arms for self-defence through to the 20th century.
When the first Firearms Act was introduced in 1920, it was recognised that the normal justification for owning a revolver was self-defence; it was only in 1946 that the Labour Home Secretary indicated that this would no longer necessarily be accepted as a good reason.
When the Home Office advised Lord Cullen, in the prelude to the pistol ban of 1997, that “as a matter of policy” British law did not permit the citizen any weapons for self-defence, it was therefore asserting a new policy without legal foundation that simply chose to ignore the Bill of Rights.
It is the text of a letter written to the Daily Telegraph by a gentleman called Richard Munday whom I know not but admire much, not just because he is correct, but also because he has not forgotten his heritage.
Unlike our political rulers and most of fellow citizens who have shed their birthright like dead skin in the headlong rush to serfdom. But despite having been so outrageously and cynically trampled underfoot the 1689 Bill of Rights is still the law of the land and it does, indeed, bestow on every citizen the right and ability to defend their life, liberty and property.
However, the Bill of Rights is an Act of Parliament and, since no parliament can bind its successors, it could easily be repealed by another Act of Parliament. The fact that it has not yet been so repealed is doubtless due to the Old Bill being more honoured in the breach than in the observance.
So dragging the glorious old Bill of Rights from its musty chest and waving it in the face of the policeman who will come to arrest you for exercising your rights is all very back-stiffening in theory and may earn your day in Court to shout your case. But, in practice, the merest hint of any such happening would spur HMG into passing a repealing Act which would sail smartly through the House of Glove Puppets with nary a whisper of dissent nor a turn of a single hair.
And that would be that. Back to square one.
Still, the publication of Mr.Munday’s most righteous missive brings a twitch to my jowels. It proves that some people have not buckled to the maladies of crass hysteria and infantile paranoia. Some people remember what freedom really means and more and more of them are prepared to shout it from the rooftops.
I got a call yesterday from Tim Evans of CNE saying that the Libertarian Alliance is now listed at the Stockholm Network website. For a brief few hours yesterday afternoon, if the LA’s hit counter is to be believed, the LA was getting more hits than Samizdata. So this is a plug for the Stockholm Network website. Thank you guys. If you want to learn about all those Free Market Institutes which now abound throughout Europe, this is the cyberplace to go.
Founded in 1997 in London and Stockholm, the Stockholm Network is a dynamic working group of European market-oriented think-tanks. We have two primary objectives: to build a wide network of pro-market policy specialists within Europe and to use that network to influence the future direction of European policy-making on issues of pan-European importance.
And that’s what they are doing. The blogs are a very different proposition from operations like the Stockholm Network. People don’t read the blogs to learn about Institutes, and to be steered towards amazingly long publications only in Acrobat format about European Fish Stocks – The Way Forward. They read blogs for fun, for daily ego massage and navel tickling. Nevertheless, if you want to spread ideas among the suit-wearing, fun-avoiding, core value adhearing, mission statement stating, movers, shakers, policy makers and action planners, this is all part of how you do it. You create virtual shopping malls of ideas and idea-mongers like this one, and help people to find whatever they want. → Continue reading: The Stockholm Network
Paul Marks poses a question about a hypothetical character who seems strangely… familiar
What does one do about the growth of government leading to the collapse of society?
In the United States if one is a Democrat there is no problem – such a person does not tend to believe that the growth of government causes any damage so one can tax and spend with a happy heart (until the cannibals tear out that heart).
But what if one is a Republican? Not a Democrat by another name (like the absurd Mayor Bloomberg of New York City), but the sort of Republican who (whilst he may have no libertarian principles) dimly knows that an ever expanding government will cause harm to society (i.e. the web of social interactions between human beings).
Let us say that one is the sort of Republican who spent his years at Yale getting drunk (rather than being teacher’s pet like his father), because he had enough sense to understand that what he was being taught was nonsense.
Well (if one is not a man of fanatical principle) one spouts off enough of the nonsense to get a “C average” (the lowest respectable grade), makes some networking contacts (that will prove of use later in life) and then goes off into the world.
Then say one becomes President of the United States (so one can not say “someone else will keep things going”), and faces a situation where defence spending (the only form of government spending that history shows is easy to cut) is going to go UP rather than down.
The “entitlement programs” (the Welfare State) continues to expand and society is under threat – so what do you do?
Perhaps you start by trying to find ways to “contract out” government activities, but (perhaps because you suspect there are no magic solutions to fiscal problems) you also announce that civilian government employees are going to get a 3.1 (rather than 4.1) percent pay increase this year – and justify it on “national security” grounds.
There will have to be many such moves if the United States is to be saved – but it is good to know that the President has some understanding (dim or not so dim) of the problem.
Paul Marks
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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