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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That’s the headline. The story, in the Independent of yesterday (Thursday June 6), continues:
Medical staff at two London hospitals will be taught the emergency techniques on an intensive course that until now has been used to prepare military surgeons for frontline treatment of troops in the Balkans and Afghanistan.
The conclusion they’ll draw is that gun-control (in fact weapons control generally – the courses also include stab wounds) isn’t tight enough, and the law-abiding civilian tendency will have to surrender even more of their weapons, such as, I don’t know, their Sunday carving knives.
In my quest for unearthing new clever ideas on how to slake one’s thirst, it seems an inventor has cracked the problem of how to drink a mug of tea or coffee and chew on a biscuit at the same time while using only one hand. This could prove a handy invention for Brian Micklethwait’s end-of-the-month Friday libertarian get-togethers where drink and biscuits are consumed in vast quantities. Could such a nifty idea ever get the nod in a socialist state?
Soon Natalie Solent will be going: “Boys, enough already with the soccer, there’s a nuclear war about to start over Kashmir, new laws trashing what little remains of our email privacy, a vile British government to be overthrown, a bizarre British monarchy to be argued about, leftist websites to be denounced, Weighty Issues to be Addressed, etc. etc.” And emailers should be warned that even my fascination with soccer, in the USA or anywhere else, has its limits. Nevertheless, I found this from Rick Drasch most diverting:
There are regional considerations with soccer in the US. I grew up in Connecticut (where all towns are named after English towns or Indian words), and let me tell you that soccer is THE sport in southern New England. I have been playing soccer since I was 5. In school, we had no football team; our baseball team was a joke; but our high school soccer team is one of the best in the nation. The dominance of soccer extends throughout Connecticut into Massachusetts and Rhode Island. In high school, I personally did not know of a single football team in the state.
And there was me thinking that US soccer was all South American immigrants or maybe British immigrants, or else hired foreign guns.
As kids, we were genuinely interested (or at least tried to be) in what passed for a professional soccer team for our region, which I think were the Cosmos or some lame name like that. But games were rare and not advertised, and certainly not televised.
This must now be changing fast. You can now presumably get some kind of soccer from somewhere on the internet at any hour of the day or night if you know where to look. If not now then pretty soon.
I’m not sure of the reason why soccer dominates in that region; it’s not a monetary one. One theory I have is that it is a population issue. When you have 30 kids per class (of both genders), try and field a football team. If you actually manage to do it, you’ll still get killed. Nobody wants to watch your pipsqueak quarterback get terminated with extreme prejudice by a linebacker from a school in Jersey with 3000 students.
Or it could just be that it tain’t called “New” England for nothin’, gov.
I don’t think that Rick’s heart is really in that last bit, do you? – but the point about the physical danger of American football is surely a good one. With soccer, when you are severely outclassed, all that happens is that you get beaten 8-0, the way that Saudi Arabia was beaten 8-0 by Germany the other day. In general, I’ve heard it said, soccer is less likely to inflict severe long-term injury than American football, despite and in fact because of all that pain-preventing equipment that the footballers wear which enables them to carry right on jarring themselves to what eventually turns into an early and painful death. Hence the enthusiasm of those soccer mums.
To take my imagined Natalie Solent objection seriously, why blog on about sports like this? For the same reason that all newspapers have sports pages, I guess. It’s part of life, and a big one.
There are lots of reasons why we who love sports love sports. Here’s one that I haven’t seen mentioned lately, which is that with sport you do at least know what the hell happened. The daily bread of Samizdata is, let’s be honest, politics, or more loosely, “public issues”. But the trouble with “public issues” is that so often they aren’t. Simply finding out what the hell happened can take you all the time you have to spare.
Sport isn’t like that. The USA really did beat Portugal 3-2. It wasn’t 4-2, nor was it 2 all. It was 3-2 to the USA. It was 3-1 at half time, and at the end it was 3-2. I know it, and if you care, you know it. Way to go, USA!!
Well, imagine if we didn’t know, but only had lying press releases and evasive performances from the FIFA Press Secretary to go on, like at a summit conference.
“Mr Secretary can you tell us the score?”
“Gentlemen, I’m not able to reveal the exact score at this moment in time. This will, we now anticipate, be revealed rather more fully next Thursday, after the FIFA Results Subcommittee Meeting. What I can say is that this was a clean, honest and vigorous game, much enjoyed by all concerned.”
“Yes, but who won?”
“Is it true that two of the Portugal goals were own-goals?”
“Was anybody sent off?”
“Which of the USA goalkeepers played in the game?”
“Did Figo play?”
“How well did he play?”
“Did he score any goals?”
“One at a time please. Yes madam.”
“Can you tell us what colour shirts the two teams were wearing?”
“Why yes I can ma’am, the USA’s players were wearing….”
Etc.
World Cup Finals would be so vitally important that, as with Bilderberg meetings, it would be permanently denied that they ever happened. As for them ever telling us what the score was and who won, forget it.
But mercifully, sport is not like that. It has its intricacies and secret dramas and concealed scandals, but the basic story is out there for us all to see. Sport is egalitarian not only in who gets to play it and how likely they are to get hurt, but also in who gets to talk about it in a reasonably well informed manner. Answer: everybody who wants to! No wonder so many people prefer sports talk to politics talk.
And if we libertarians want to get our voices heard and our memes circulated in human as opposed merely to libertarian or more generally political company, then those of us who are inclined to join in with this sports talk should do so.
Bring on the Argies.
Be copy now to men of grosser blood,
And teach them how to war! –
And you, good yeoman
Whose limbs were made in England, show us here
The mettle of your pasture; let us swear
That you are worth your breeding: which I doubt not;
For there is none of you so mean and base,
That hath not noble lustre in your eyes.
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start.
The game’s afoot:
Follow your spirit; and upon this charge
Cry – God for Harry! England! and St.George!
And, no, this isn’t just my muscular, traditional British chauvinism. France gets a thorough ‘Fisking’ and from a Frenchman no less!
J.P. Zmirak cuts right through the bull to remind us that the the ‘glorious’ French Revolution was anything but:
“That little thought experiment should give you an idea of what the French Revolution was really like – a digestive eruption of all the basest instincts in the lowest elements of society, led by power-drunk ideologues of the radical Left.”
The writer also goes on to point out that French Revolution had nothing whatsoever in common with the American Revolution, despite the two events so often lumped in with each other, and was driven by a wholly different impulse:
“It was utterly unlike the American rebellion against the English colonial officials – which amounted to a regional secession, led by the responsible members of the upper middle class. And for that fact we should be forever grateful – as should other countries which emulated the American model of political reform, rather than the French.”
He also goes on to lay the blame for so much future barbarity squarely upon the shoulders of those French leftist jackasses:
“At the heart of this exquisite movie is the relationship between Grace and the Duc d’Orleans. The latter is a pampered, ambitious, not very bright cousin to the tragic King Louis XVI, a Duke who throws his weight and wealth behind the Revolutionaries, in the hope that they will place him on the throne. He spouts, and no doubt believes, the new rhetoric of hysterical, xenophobic revolutionary patriotism – which would soon spread to Germany and Italy, planting the seeds of both the Nazi and Fascist movements.”
The whole article is written with the kind of florid anger born of pain and profound regret. It rings out a warning of the depravity and destruction which results from letting the bad guys get their way.
The recent massive U.S. government increase in subsidy to its domestic farmers comes in for a deserved and amusing mauling from Daily Telegraph journalist and Tory MP Boris Johnson. He is right to point out that by signing off the vast increase in aid to American farmers, Bush has compounded the damage to international free markets made when he agreed to steel and lumber tariffs earlier in the year.
On a broader point, this makes me wonder whether Bush is headed for going down in history as one of the most protectionist Presidents since the Second World War. On the domestic front his pre-election agenda seems to fallen apart with the exception of the tax cut. Instead, Bush is resorting to pork-barrel politics to shore up support in supposed key states for the Republicans ahead of the Congressional elections this autumn. Of course, we libertarians hold no illusions about politicians as a group, so I suppose Bush’s slide into cynicism should not surprise us. But I never thought I could write the following words – I am beginning to miss Bill Clinton. At least he believed in free trade, if nothing else.
It is impossible to save souls by coercing bodies. There is no such thing as a forced conversion. Men can behave morally only when they have the option of behaving immorally.
-Marc Glendening (one of the speakers at the Liberty Conference, see below, in his contribution to The New Right Enlightenment, Economic and Literary Books, 1985)
Just to make the point that the Liberty Conference on Human Rights, Civil Liberties, etc., this coming Saturday (June 8th), which I mentioned in an earlier post is not just warmed over Bolshevism, Chris Tame flagged the event up on the Libertarian Alliance Forum with the following introductory spiel:
Please note that this year’s annual conference of LIBERTY (The National Council for Civil Liberties) is quite historic, in that it features speeches and debates by libertarians and non-socialists, including myself, Marc Glendening of the Democracy Movement, Michael Gove of the Times and others.
Quite so. I won’t be there myself, even though the Libertarian Alliance (i.e. Chris Tame) offered to pay my entrance fee, but Tom Burroughes has just emailed me saying he will, and that he intends to supply a report for Samizdata.
By the way, as not mentioned earlier (and sorry about that), the Conference is in Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London WC1, starting (as I did mention) at 10 am and going on ’til 4 pm.
More from the Lemley family of California, in answer to an earlier question I posted:
My youngest daughter (5) plays soccer, and my oldest (8) doesn’t. (My oldest is more of a bookworm.) My youngest played her first year last year, liked it, and she’s going to play again next year. (The leagues play in the fall.) It’s pretty low-key, like “here’s the ball, and you go this way … not that way, this way.” She has fun with it, and we play in the backyard from time to time. The hope for her, and most girls her age, is that they have fun with the game and keep playing for as long as possible.
What this little report illustrates is why “soccer” has done so well. It’s simple. You just need a ball and a willingness to have fun kicking it this way and that. This is not a capital intensive game. You can practice it anywhere, and wear just about anything while you’re doing it. Hence the legendary successes that can be achieved by countries who are failing at virtually everything else. Argentina’s economy is a global embarrassment just now, yet they are among the favourites to win the World Cup. And hence football’s capacity to spread. “Soccer” is catching on in the USA, even as the more unwieldy and expensive “American” version of football (which is more like our rugby) fails to ignite over here or in mainland Europe, except as a way to entertain US expats.
By the way, the USA ladies team are the world champions, no less. (I heard a Channel Five commentator on US baseball mention this last night.) And in general, it seems that, like Russ’s daughter, most of the Americans who get interested in soccer get interested in playing soccer. Over here “football fever” has tended to mean millions of couch potatoes or travelling fans who merely watch soccer, a numerical fact reflected in the TV adverts which have in recent years become sodden with a truly depressing worship of football fandom. Hurrah, say these adverts, for the “real” fans, who waste their entire lives getting worked up about the results of games in which they do not play, and who might on the basis of this mania be persuaded to buy this or that beer or snackfood and thus sink even further into bloated immobility. Now I like to watch football myself, but please don’t tell me that this is the most profound thing I do. Happily it seems that my sense of being insulted and patronised rather than befriended by these adverts may be quite widely shared, and that this era of British football watching emotional excess may be fading. Most of the adverts in this genre that I most hate were actually on TV a few years ago rather than right now, and meanwhile “ITV Digital” has discovered that there are limits after all to the televised football appetites of Britain. But how much more pleasing it would be if “football fever” meant Britain’s football clubs each having a dozen amateur and youth teams playing every weekend.
What’s the betting that some time during the next two decades the USA wins the World Cup? And what’s the betting that when they do, most of the USA hardly notices?
Now, there is a headline that you don’t see too often. The sports sites here in the US, such as ESPN.com and SportingNews.com made note of the American team’s 3-2 triumph over the favored Portuguese, but didn’t make it the day’s top story — after all, the NBA and NHL finals are now underway. Plus they understood that this was a preliminary-round game, that the US might not advance out of their group and that Portugal could still win the World Cup despite this loss (although it is difficult to see how they would beat Argentina or England when they can’t beat the US, it is still possible.)
No such restraint was shown by America’s news dailies. While American sports fans yawned, American journalists fawned, comparing the win to the “miracle on ice” at the Lake Placid Olympics in 1980, in which the US hockey team beat the Soviet Union in the semifinal round. So why is the World Cup getting so much coverage here in the US? I have a theory: finally, the press has found something that America really, really sucks at.
We used to suck at the Winter Olympics, but this time around we dominated. The American economy continues to grow while Europe has stagnated; Mississippi, the poorest American state, would be midpack among European nations in per-capita income. The fourth estate desperately wanted to believe that we would not be able to hold our ground in Afghanistan, and ran “quagmire” stories right up to — and even beyond — the fall of Kabul. Now the World Cup rolls around, and FINALLY, the press has something to report on that America does not dominate. And they love it.
It’s just a theory, but I suspect that’s what’s going on. It’s not as though America is suddenly in the throes of soccer fever. I am a bigger soccer fan than 99.9% of Americans, and soccer is maybe my 5th or 6th favorite spectator sport. If you pressed me, I could probably name all the teams in the English Premier League or the Italian Series A, but I cannot name a single player on the US World Cup team. So what does that tell you?
Imagine life at the Quindlen household. Say they are pondering what to make for breakfast on a leisurely Sunday morning … someone suggests pancakes, while Anna retorts that “it is impossible to believe that anyone who does not want waffles has a proper sense of our place in history.” This is Anna Quindlen’s M.O. — she takes her own (often perfectly reasonable) prejudices / preferences on a given subject and elevates them to the level of an absolute moral imperative. Just as OxBlog proposes the four laws of Maureen Dowd, we can isolate the First Law of Quindlen: There is no need to provide evidence for my argument, because it is impossible to believe that you could disagree with me.
Anna thinks that we ought to turn the remains of the WTC site into an austere memorial instead of entertaining designs for new commercial real estate. “The demands of democracy should not be confused with those of capitalism,” she solemnly intones. And you didn’t even know that you were confused! Why the institute of democracy “demands” that this particular corner of southwest Manhattan remain eternally undeveloped, Ms. Quindlen never quite gets around to explaining, except by offering the official post-911 cliche: otherwise, the terrorists will have won.
Japan rebuilt Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The Germans rebuilt Dresden. The United States reconstructed Atlanta. (Which reminds me — wasn’t the Civil War, not Vietnam, the most corrosive war in US history? Or did US history begin on the day Anna Quindlen was born?) Why do we rebuild our war wounds? As the anti-Quindlen, Virginia Postrel, would put it, because we are a dynamic society, with the few stasists like Quindlen serving as the exceptions that prove the rule. Most of us do not believe that we have already achieved all the greatness we will ever claim. Or as Oscar Wilde said, “we’re all of us in the gutter, but some of us are looking up at the stars.”
There is nothing inherently wrong with what Anna Quindlen is proposing, but there is something wrong with her insistence that her vision is the only one that passes muster from an ethical perspective. If she wants the space to remain vacant, then she ought to organize a consortium of like-minded individuals to purchase the vacant land, and leave it perfectly barren, or erect some weird new age memorial with nondenominational angels playing Enya music on their harps, or whatever floats her boat. Until she is willing to take such action, however, her opinion of what ought to go on the WTC site counts no more than mine, which is to say, not in the slightest.
Now, if Anna Quindlen really wanted to do something nice for Manhattan, I can think of about eight blocks of choice midtown real estate, right there on the East River, that developers would love to get their hands on. That’s right, the US could hand the United Nations an eviction notice and sell the property to the highest bidder. If, by even suggesting this, it proves that I have no sense of America’s place in history, well, I guess in Anna’s world I am already guilty as charged.
Ian Rowan sees the dark side of Disney’s ‘magic kingdom’
In the currently raging debate over intellectual property which has inevitably revealed an increasingly unhealthy marriage of private guilds and corporations with the Leviathan state, those who argue in favor of draconian restrictions upon technology and the end user/citizen have made a number of sweeping claims, among the most preeminent that without such restrictions, artists will not be properly compensated for their labor, and creativity itself will wither and die.
I find this particular stance especially galling due to its hypocrisy. While Disney has indeed done some very nice work in the past if you like that sort of thing (my wife does; where I tend more toward the Warner Brothers school of animation, as a friend of mine suggests most males align themselves with the Three Stooges to the exclusion of most women), they have joined the ranks of most success stories by placing increasing emphasis upon slick appearance and lack of actual creative substance. They simultaneously lobby the state for the further extension of copyright, to the point that one can only conclude that their goal is to be able to retain the right to sue people who portray Mickey Mouse in an unflattering context until the heat-death of the universe; rest on their laurels by continuing to milk their classic creations ’til the memory is distorted beyond all recollection; and churn out ‘new’ movies consisting primarily of established and existing folk tales, or when absolutely pressed, a cookie-cutter, blandly inoffensive and ever-so-correct morality play with all the moral tension of ‘Davey and Goliath’.
Yet for me, even these established and indisputably reprehensible tactics pale in comparison to Disney’s recent “crackdown on kung fu”.
While it is relatively simple to avoid giving any of my time, attention or money to Disney’s creations, they are now claiming ownership and control over works they have not themselves produced, but which they have acquired from others. Specifically, the Disney sub-feifdoms Miramax and Dimension Films are claiming “exclusive North American distribution rights” on a fast increasing number of Asian films, to the point of threatening legitimate distributors who offer the original versions.
When released to the American public, the rule of thumb has been to dub the dialogue into English (and to replace the original soundtrack with bad rap, a separate sin and one beyond the scope of this essay). Worse yet is for films to have material completely removed, and not just in terms of plot or comedy deemed too ‘foreign’, but in the essential action sequences. Even Drunken Master 2, which was edited less than any other ‘Disneyfied’ Asian film to date, was not spared a dub job, and the result was music and sound effects far inferior to the original. It’s not for nothing that Harvey Weinstein has earned the nickname “Harvey Scissorhands”:
Asian cinema? I was doing Asian cinema fucking 10 years ago. Crouching Tiger – is that a new thing? Give me a break, I own all the Jackie Chan back catalogue in America, all the Jet Lee, all the Chow Yun-Fats. I was so far ahead of myself. [And apparently full of himself as well -Ian Rowan]
While I can regrettably understand the ‘bums on seats’ arguments from the bean-counters in favor of such a maneuver, even given the success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, a theatrical release and even a traditional home video are wholly different animals from a DVD. While this newer format has its own superset of not entirely unique issues, one would still think that its ability to contain multiple soundtracks would satisfy both the company and fans if all flavors. Foreign distributors seem to recognize this, as most imported discs contain far more languages on average than their typical North American counterpart. But the choice has been made for you, and more distressingly, Disney is resorting to the gun of the law to prevent people from acquiring the original product through lawful purchase.
A more cynical person might suggest that Disney is attempting to create the impression that they are the actual creators of these works, concealing their true origin for a number of nefarious reasons, but I don’t really care about their motivations. It’s bad enough when the state presumes to tell me what I am allowed to buy and who I’m allowed to buy from, but when a private guild goes begging to that same state for the privilege to enforce their dubious claims on that same authority, they have committed a far greater evil than any amount of tasteless over-marketing or vapid product. Weinstein’s remarks above are certainly revealing, in that he speaks as if his keen acumen in acquiring the rights to the works of others is the equal of having created those works in the first place.
Those who desire the original soundtrack and an unedited film have over the years turned to various importers for material which for whatever reason was not available in their own country. Unauthorized copying and sale still occurred, but as long as there were legitimate sources they did a reasonable business, with an informal network of fans taking advantage of the Internet to inform each other of disreputable or unreliable merchants. With the outlawing of such sources, however, Disney’s behavior will ultimately prove self-defeating. The longer they sit on and butcher these movies, the greater the demand will grow for unauthorized versions — and the laws of economics dictate that where there is demand, there will be a supply to fill it. Thus, Disney’s own actions create and encourage the very copyright violation they have sworn to stamp out.
Ian Rowan
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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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