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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Well, the reactions to the decision by Rupert Murdoch to shut the News of the World, and try and halt his empire collapsing, continue. Fraser Nelson, editor of the Spectator, used to have a weekly column for a paper once known as “News of the Screws” (for non-Brits, this paper was obsessed by the sex lives of the rich, powerful and celebs). Nelson has thoughts about it at the Spectator’s own website. I think he gushes a bit too much and as the comments suggest, readers are not happy at Nelson’s defence of much of what the NoTW stood for over the decades. But never mind that. The great thing about the Spectator commenters is that they are often splendidly barmy, if not quite as consistently rude as over at the Guido Fawkes site.
This one, by a “David Lindsay,” wins the prize for me. I quote it all, for its genuine insights and wrong-headed, state-worship of a kind that might make an old Soviet functionary blush (although it is entirely possible that Lindsay is a certain kind of “High Tory” who sentimentalises working class life). This comment reminds me of a piece of dialogue of that brilliant Peter Sellers film, “I’m All Right Jack”, when Sellers, playing the union shop steward constantly at loggerheads with “the bosses”, is praising life in Stalin’s Russia. Take it away, Mr Linsday:
“In the farewell souvenir edition [of NoTW ed], it was heartbreakingly easy to trace the decline in the writers’ educational and cultural expectations of their readers. Murdoch is not solely to blame for this. But he is hardly blameless of it, either.”
As the praise for the News of the World from George Orwell on its own final back page indicated, this was a paper of the wider culture of working-class self-improvement underwritten by the full employment that was itself always guaranteed, and very often delivered directly, by central and local government action: the trade unions, the co-operatives, the credit unions, the mutual guarantee societies, the mutual building societies, the Workers’ Educational Association, the Miners’ Lodge Libraries, the pitmen poets, the pitmen painters, the brass and silver bands, the Secondary Moderns (so much better than what has replaced them, turning out millions of economically and politically active, socially and culturally aware people), and so much else destroyed by the most philistine Prime Minister until Blair, who in her time as Education Secretary had closed so many grammar schools that there were not enough left at the end for her record ever to be equalled.
For the first hundred or more years of its domination of the Sunday market, that domination coincided with a high degree of weekly churchgoing in this country. Its strongly working-class readership must have contained a well above average proportion of what are now called traditional Catholics, but in the days when there was no other kind.
Well, with no more competition from what the News of the World lately allowed itself to become, why not one or more People’s Papers again, affordably hooking people in with a bit of entertainment in order to educate and inform them on the premise that they deserve nothing less than the human dignity and respect of education and information? Central and local government, the trade unions, the co-operatives, the credit unions, the mutual guarantee societies, the mutual building societies and the Workers’ Educational Association all still exist. Just for a start.
What are they doing “to give to the poorer classes of society a paper that would suit their means, and to the middle — as well as the rich — a journal which due to its immense circulation would demand their attention”?
I loved the patronising lines about brass and silver bands. I wish Peter Sellers were still alive now; how he would have loved this sort of comment and used it for his material. I am not sure if Mr Lindsay would get the joke.
“Recent theater encounter: Trailer for “Battle Los Angeles”. Some fat angry looking woman starts hissing. I shout “I didn’t pay $10 to listen to you. Save your opinions for that blog no one reads. Not even your friends.”. After that, not a peep. If you want to save our culture you’ve got to stand up to the barbarians.”
A commenter called Guan-ju, writing about an article at the Big Hollywood blog concerning the oafish behaviour of some cinema-goers. Well said indeed.
In my fortunate experience, I have generally not suffered from chatty couples, paper rustlers or smelly eaters. However, I often will be sitting in front of someone who keeps kicking the back of the chair. My usual response is to turn around slowly, and give the offending idiot my best attempt at the “Clint Eastwood stare”. Sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t. (Alas, the use of something handy, like a taser is banned in the UK. Shame. It would be brilliant). The trouble is, of course, is that if you go to a cinema quite late, a lot of the audience will be fairly merry, indeed drunk. At least in the UK, anyway. And of course the type of film will affect this: if you are watching a French art house film, it is probably less likely to be an issue than if you are watching something like Transformers or Dumb and Dumber, or somesuch. On the other hand, the louder the movie (think Iron Man 2) and the more crazy the action, the more the usual pin-heads are dumbstruck into silence.
Of course, while watching a Michael Moore “documentary”, I reckon that loud heckling is mandatory.
James Bartholomew, author of the splendid “The Welfare State We’re In”, weighs on on the subject of Sweden, long a poster child for socialists and possibly, even a certain type of right-winger:
“Sweden is iconic, like Marilyn Monroe or Karl Marx. It is supposed to stand for something special: a kind of paradise where socialism and a big welfare state go together with being a successful, rich country.”
Another paragraph:
“The main trouble is that, when Sweden was as close as it ever has been to being a socialist welfare state, it went bust. For a while it may have seemed like a great model, but the Swedish government ran out of money. Why? Because Sweden found, like Britain, that if you pay people to be unemployed, take early retirement or be sick, you get a gradually decreasing number of people who claim the relevant benefits. And if you have sky-high taxes, people don’t work as hard, or they cheat, or they leave.”
Read the whole thing.
I did some coke, and slept with a whore. But that’s what a superinjunction is for!
– Robbie Williams, at last week’s Take That show at Wembley, mocks the legalised suppression of free speech. Quoted by Fraser Nelson in his obituary for the News of the World, in the News of the World.
The last shuttle mission has begun… and Richard Branson announced he will be starting commercial flights next year:
Sir Richard Branson said that the reason he established Virgin Galactic was because he ‘got sick sick of waiting for NASA.’ He confirmed that space flights for the public will commence in ’10 to 15 months.’ Another endeavour after this milestone will be to launch ‘a 2 to 3 hour London to Australia flight’ via space.
If you add to this the not very far away cargo flights of the SpaceX Dragon capsule, followed by manned flights of same; the scheduled launch of the Bigelow space station in 2014; and the first flights of the SpaceX Heavy around the same time… not to mention things that XCOR, Masten, Armadillo, Boeing, Reaction Engines, Sierra Nevada and others are up to… we live in a very exciting time.
The last flight of the Space Shuttle signals the beginning of the Space Age.
“Poor old Dave, he tries to mix with some common folk and look what happens.”
A commenter, “Percy”, at the Spectator’s Coffee House blog, talking about the arrest of Andy Coulson, former press advisor to David Cameron.
It has been a bit of bad summer for Mr Cameron. He’s lucky he has been up against such a weak opponent.
You see what’s happening? Two separate grievances and two separate targets – one totally justified, the other largely not – are being joined together. The “journalistic culture” Campbell has spent the past 10 years complaining about is not newspapers that have invaded people’s privacy – but newspapers that have been too unkind to important public servants such as himself.
– Andrew Gilligan, under the headline: “Phone hacking scandal: enemies of free press are circling”. Indeed.
I’ve just discovered what many must have known for years, that the true test of a real news story is when you just don’t believe it.
When I read just now, at Guido‘s, the news that the News of the World has been closed, I thought, you’re ‘avin’ a laugh, and I was merely puzzled as to why. What, I thought to myself, is the point of concocting this bizarre joke (in the form of a fake press release), and at such bizarre length? Newspapers that are making tons of money and which have lots of readers don’t just close, merely because they’ve done something wrong. Newspapers die, but that’s entirely different.
Yet, it appears to be so. The News of the World is indeed to shut.
The only serious attention that I have ever given to the News of the World was when it broke this story about Pakistan cricket corruption. I was grateful for that sting operation then, and am accordingly a bit regretful now. Although I do agree that if you want to make your newspaper hated by everyone, then it is hard to think of a better way of doing it than to get caught busting into the phones of a murder victim and her family.
The NotW is being shut, I presume, to enable Rupert Murdoch‘s various television plans to proceed profitably. Will this dramatic step do the trick? Might it not make Murdoch look even worse, by drawing yet more attention to the skullduggery that he presided over and surely knew all about, and to the fact that he only closed the NotW when the skullduggery became public knowledge?
David Cameron, because of his close connection to the NotW gang, is also looking very bad. The line here at Samizdata on that will presumably be: oh dear, how tragic.
Bohemia has been banned.
– David Hockney denounces the smoking ban.
Buried deep in this article – which (and I realise this won’t go down very well here) is effusively positive about David Cameron and his attitude towards the internet and internet entrpreneurship, at any rate when compared with Nicholas Sarkozy – is the following extraordinary claim:
… France just banned the use of the words Facebook and Twitter on TV …
This report, however, at least adds the words “unless those specific words are a part of a news story”, which makes it somewhat less mad. Still mad, though.
Can it be true? The story seems to have come and gone sometime around one month ago, and my first guess was that maybe it was true and maybe it wasn’t, but that the wave of derision which greeted it will by now have caused the French Government to say that it never said any such thing, and that what it did was was totally misunderstood, blah blah, clarification, we didn’t say it, we did say it but we didn’t mean it, malicious twisting by foreign commercial interests saying that we said what we said, how dare they?, blah blah.
Apparently not:
The French reason that mentioning the companies by name gives unfair “advertising” to giant social media sites like Facebook or Twitter. Their logic: why give a leg up to Facebook, already worth millions, when there are dozens of smaller sites struggling to survive. So, to be extra fair, when signing off, the newscasters can suggest that their viewers follow them on a social media platform in which transmission is limited to 140 characters. Bon chance!
They’re not allowed to say “email” either.
Les Grenouilles are indeed strange people.
I came across the following in a research paper about the benefits of “clustering” of financial services and other industries:
“Singapore is a country, which, 40 years ago had the same GDP per head as Uganda. Now, it is the richest country in the world, with GDP per head of $57,238 I 2010, according to the IMF, putting it ahead of the US, Japan, Hong Kong and Switzerland.”
Seems like a classic example of how some places are actually blessed by a dearth of natural resources.
The headline says ‘Europe declares war on rating agencies‘:
Wolfgang Schauble, German finance minister, said there was no justification for the four-notch downgrade or for warnings that Portugal might need a second bail-out. “We must break the oligopoly of the rating agencies,” he said.
Heiner Flassbeck, director of the UN Office for World Trade and Development, said the agencies should be “dissolved” before they can do any more damage, or at least banned from rating countries.
Now ponder that for a moment… what is a ‘rating agency’? It is a company that states an opinion regarding credit worthiness. And those opinions are only significant if people who make investment decisions think the opinions in question actually reflect reality, i.e. the opinion has some credibility.
So what these quoted members of the political class are calling for is banning credible opinions about the consequences of decisions by, er, people like themselves.
Astonishing. And in reality rating agencies have a history of excessive optimism, only downgrading ratings long after the dots were joined by anyone who has been paying attention.
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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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