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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The satirical Songun blog has dug up a North Korean propaganda movie shot in the 1980s that is worth a look. Songun has made Always Working Together For The People available on YouTube, split into seven segments (parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7). Combined, there Is about an hour of video. I am a little weird – I watched it all.
However, I find this sort of thing quite fascinating; lots of interesting tidbits to be found. For example, part three sees Kim Jong-il being exhorted for easing all the Great Leader’s concerns about the people’s welfare (a common theme), in this instance in the field of “traffic problem”. What bloody traffic problem?? There Is nary a car to be seen motoring down the wide boulevards and highways shown. (Fair enough, those ridiculously broad motorways were designed to serve more than one purpose.) In part four, the two Kims are seen pouring over an architectural mock-up of Pyongyang in a manner most reminiscent of those Speer/Hitler snaps showing them admiring a model of the Berlin they were going to create after they won the war. Hopefully, the latter day town planners meet a similar fate as their similarly megalomaniacal forebears.
This propaganda piece is clearly a past effort to position Kim Jong-il as Crown Prince by welding him on to his father’s cult of personality. His leadership abilities are constantly lauded and he is portrayed as an indispensable part of Kim Il-sung’s revolution. The succession issue is explicitly mentioned at the end of segment six. Still, in spite of all the adulation, it is difficult not to laugh at the rather miserable figure Kim Jong-il cuts throughout the programme. Part 5 shows Kim Jong-il and daddy making a trip to the Dear Leader’s fabled birthplace, Mount Paektu. The glowing exaltations to the younger Kim pair most incongruously with his stature and bearing – unless ‘mountain spirit’ is a North Korean euphemism for ‘ample paunch’. Really, how can you not laugh at the spectacle of this malignant little gnome. As was said last week – and in great anticipation of a repeat performance – sic semper tyrannis.
The message is simple: get out now.
Chavez is calling for ‘Socialism or Death’ and that in fact means ‘Socialism and Death’. As it appears a majority actually supports him, not much will be gained by putting a bullet between this man’s eyes as clearly the problem lies deeper than the life of a single tyrant (though that is not to say that shooting tyrants is ever a bad idea).
If you are have property, sell it if you can, but get the hell out. If you are creative and intelligent, there is a whole world out there in which to rebuild your life. There may come a time in the future when you can come back, either to help pick up the wreckage of the totalitarian experiment voted for by a kleptomaniac majority, or to woo back your nation at bayonet point, but for now, for God’s sake get out with what you can as soon as you can.
And if you are a shareholder in a multi-national company… feeling a little stupid now, eh? At least try and do the decent thing and torch as much infrastructure you own tonight to leave as little to sustain the parasites who are about to nationalise your operations in Venezuela.
I am not mad myself, but I rule over mad, impious and arrogant folk. It is for this reason that I play the madman myself and pretend to be possessed by demons in order to frighten them and prevent them from harming the Muslims.
– Askiya Dawud (1549-83), emperor of Songhai, quoted in I.M. Lewis, Islam in Tropical Africa. No doubt he would also have fitted right in as a fictional mid-20th-century character in John Brunner’s The Squares of the City or a real late-20th-century emotional tyrant in Faking It.
I would like to draw your attention to what’s happened to The Times’s Law section in the noughties. Once upon a time this was a lively mini-newspaper on a Tuesday, aimed at lawyers, with two or three substantial comment pieces, news, Law Reports and lots of job ads. Now it is a single sheet of newsprint, and found buried inside a growing section entitled Public Agenda.
From an advertisement in last week’s Economist:
Devolution Trust for Community Empowerment (DTCE), a Pakistan based non-governmental organisation funded by a consortium of donors through UNDP, is plannning to undertake a social audit in 110 districts across the country compatible with baseline social audit established in 2001/02 and first annual follow-up application undertaken in 2004/05. The objective of the exercise is to obtain policy feedback on citizens’ views and experience in relation to key public services sectors like health, education, water and sanitation, police, access to justice and engagement in local governance arrangements. The study design should consider the comparison overtime [sic] with the baseline and follow-up applicaions in citizens’ views, use and experience of public services under the devolved local government system in Pakistan with a strong element of institutionalization of the social audit process.
Meanwhile, working the other way round, a flyer reaches me from De Havilland information services [no relation] for a conference on “Embedding the Third Sector in Public Services”:
Third Sector public service delivery is a new, effective and exciting avenue to further revolutionise and modernise service provision as we know it. However, this is no longer an innovation, it is a reality and public money already funds multiple public services through third sector organisations. It is acknowledged that the opportunities, expertise and fresh, grass-roots approach the third sector brings will bring improvement and better value to public services.
Major efforts to reinforce this through building an infrastructure and action planning to rationalize and embed this are underway in te Third Sector Review, recently conducted by the Office of the Third Sector. The final report is due in March [and?] will culminate in summarising the sector’s contribution and propose how this will work in a better, stronger, more resilient infrastructure.
[all sic]
The Office of the Third Sector is very pleased with what has happened to the role of charities, and will be colonising more of British civil society presently..
“Metaphors furnish clues to transformation, but they are not the powers that resist or engender such new realities,” a literary theorist once wrote.
It is fair to say not many Englishmen live in the more remote parts of Russia. Thus when someone gets an e-mail from an Englishman called Tim Newman, living in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, who is an oil business professional discussing the Royal Dutch Shell’s operations, and there is a Tim Newman working for Shell in that part of the world, it will be one and the same person, right?
Nope.
Take a look at this for a real life comedy of errors.
I know a lot of Samizdata contributors and readers are cricket buffs. So, what do you all think about the Twenty20 limited overs format now that it has had some more exposure since last being discussed here?
This afternoon I went to meet a business contact and walked past Chesterfield Street, in the area of London to the north of Piccadilly. The houses in the quiet street date back to the 18th Century and many of them, with their elegant Georgian front doors and understated proportions, have circular blue signs on the front, describing certain famous people who used to live there. One house states that Beau Brummell, “leader of fashion”, lived in one of the houses. Many foreign visitors who walk past the building and who wonder who this character was may have little idea of the man who rose rapidly to become at one stage the “most famous man in England”, setting new standards of dress and elegance for men. He lived the sort of life that puts modern gaudy celebrities in the shade. His life was a wild mixture of dazzling social success, fame and renown. But his later life was tragic, although the pain was partly self-inflicted: he eloped to France to escape from mounting debts and eventually died from disease.
A biography by Ian Kelly, now available in paperback, is an excellent story of how Brummell, descended from an upwardly-mobile civil servant and businessman, managed in a relatively short space of time to set the tone for Regency England. What I found so striking about the book was that although it showed that early 19th Century England was a very class-ridden place full of snobberies and harsh social conventions, it was also fluid and open to upward mobility to a degree that almost makes one wonder whether the age of George IV is in some ways more open than our own. Brummell’s grandfather was a servant; his father worked in the civil service and yet, by a mix of business acumen and a bit of sharp dealing in government contracts, amassed enough wealth to put his children through Eton and set his offspring up in the height of luxury. In some ways Brummell was the first person to be famous for being famous, for creating his own identity so well that he inspired people like Disraeli or, for that matter, Oscar Wilde (there is some debate on whether Brummell was bi-sexual). The Cary Grants, Errol Flynns or David Nivens are part of this suave tradition and so for that matter are such fictional characters as Sherlock Holmes and James Bond in his dark blue suits and evening dinner jackets.
Kelly is wonderful in how he describes how Brummell set about the task of creating a new style of dress that continues to affect tailoring to this day. Inspired in part by the sort of uniforms worn by Napoleon’s and Wellington’s armies, particularly the dashing cavalry regiments, and by the new-found enthusiasm for all things Greek and Roman, Brummell set about driving forward the elegant styles associated with the Regency period. The classic English male attire which he created has its echoes down the ages. Even those City financiers who now ply their trade in the Square Mile of London or the capital’s Canary Wharf financial district continue to wear suits and neckties that owe something to Brummell’s influence.
Of course, many people, including finance professionals, lawyers and the like, have adopted a more casual dress sense since the days when no man in London would be allowed to live if he was seen wearing brown shoes in the city during the week or to be seen without a hat and cane. Dress-down Fridays are now the norm, although I have noticed how people often look exactly the same on a Friday, as if Thomas Pink shirts, Dockers’ trousers and loafers are as much a uniform as the old products of Saville Row.
Anyway, in these times when scruffiness is in vogue, perhaps we need a new Brummell to ensure that the movers and shakers of global capitalism dress to do justice to the noble calling of making enormous amounts of money. London is a great town, whatever its faults, so perhaps we should do it the honour of dressing accordingly.
On the subject of the Regency period and the characters of that time, Paul Johnson’s book is definitely worth checking out.
If the report turn out to be true about the success of the US military attack in Somalia, that is good news indeed. It is being claimed that some of the people targeted were those responsible for the horrendous 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi in Kenya and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, and 2002 atrocities on in Kenya against Kenyan and Israeli civilians. If those are the bastards who have indeed been killed then that is a cause for some satisfaction.
It is interesting that the attack, which took place in Somalia, has attracted praise from the Somali president, who is no friend of the Islamists. But rather more baffling is that the EU has criticised the attack, with a spokesman for EU development commissioner Louis Michel saying “Any incident of this kind is not helpful in the long term”. I wonder how killing members of Al Qaeda is not ‘helpful’ in a fight against Al Qaeda?
The Executive Committee of the Exeter University Evangelical Christian Union has today (5JAN) issued proceedings in the High Court seeking a Judicial Review of the decision to suspend the Christian Union from the Guild of Students; such acts by the Guild violating the rights of association of religious bodies and representing religious animus. The Court will be asked to quash the decision to suspend. The committee has also instructed Paul Diamond, a leading Civil Rights Barrister to represent them.
The action was taken after the students advised both the Guild and the university authorities that it had failed to support their right as Christians to the freedoms of speech, belief and association.
The 50-year-old Christian Union (CU) at Exeter University is currently suspended from the official list of student societies on campus, has had its Student Union bank account frozen, and has been banned from free use of Student Guild premises, or advertising events within Guild facilities, because the Student Guild claims the CU constitution and activities do not conform to its Equal Opportunties Policies, which have only recently been introduced.
That’s the Christian Union point of view. Here is the Exeter Students’ Guild point of view. It appears what’s wrong with the Christian Union (though there seems to be a side dispute about what it is called) is it expects members to be Christians – and this is written down somewhere.
I find it very difficult to believe that the Student Friends of Palestine welcomes applications from hardcore Zionists, or that the change-ringing group offers opportunities for extended bongo solos, or that their Amnesty branch is really open to those who think the Uzbek government is a bit wishy-washy and needs positive reinforcement in the form of fedexed floral tributesfrom the society to its president in order to hold the line on law-and-order. It is just those bodies have not recorded such obvious facts in their constitutions.
Clubs don’t and shouldn’t appeal to everyone. That’s the whole point of them. They provide social opportunities through giving scope for people to get together with people with whom they know they’ll have something in common. That’s why traditionally they were so much a part of student life, as escape from the non-discriminatory potluck of faculty and accomodation. If Exeter Students’ Guild doesn’t get that, then why is it offering subsidy to societies at all?
Update: A notice that is rather strangely hidden away, but dated the same as the threat of action above, says that privileges have now been ‘restored’. Though nobody seems to have changed their mind about anything, there is to be a “consultation process” instead. Does this mean the Christians are expected to be persuaded not to be Christians? [Is this consultation going to involve lions?] Or is the question being postponed in the hope that it might go away, or that a new set of officers might have a better idea? All very odd.
Alex Singleton has been watching the Running Man. I have just been watching a Newsnight report about mobile phones in Kenya. The gist of the report was that mobile phones in Kenya in particular, and Africa generally, are a stunning success. As if by magic, they are transforming the prospects of ordinary people in Africa, and the relationship between ordinary people and their corrupt, aid-gobbling governments.
We watched a deeply impressed BBC reporter, Paul Mason, being told by a black lady, who I rather think may have been one of the authors of this report that indeed, mobile phones are having an impact upon Africa comparable to the switch from dictatorship to democracy – she mentioned other technology as well, like fire, the wheel and the railways – and that the mobile phone industry provided a model for progress in other areas of African life, such as education and healthcare. Her message to the governments of Africa: get out of the way, at let the business people do these things, and the people pay for these things, themselves.
Paul Mason went deep into the Kenyan countryside, braving the chaos of Kenya’s government supplied road system, into Masai territory, to study the difference between places where mobile phone technology was working its magic, and where the wretched of the earth did not have mobile phones. He was, in other words, looking for one of those gaps. But he did not find any gap. The Masai already have their mobiles, and they love them.
Not all the news nowadays is good, to put it mildly, but this Newsnight news was very good news indeed, and not just because of its news about Africa. It was what it said to me and to my fellow countrymen, and (via the BBC’s excellent internet operation) to the entire world, that really pleased me.
For some reason, my home turf of East Anglia will not stay off the news
For sale: the world’s smallest country with its own flag, stamps, currency and passports.
Apply to Prince Michael of Sealand if you want to run your own storm-tossed nation – even if it is just a wartime fort perched on two concrete towers in the North Sea.
Built in World War Two as an anti-aircraft base against German bombers, the derelict platform was taken over 40 years ago by retired army major Paddy Roy Bates who went to live there with his family.
Sealand, which is based off Felixstowe, one of Europe’s largest container ports, has in its time been raided by the authorities, who have been at their wits’ end to know what to do about the feisty Bates family. The place has even featured as an inspiration for people trying to harness encryption to make new forms of offshore banking possible, although I suspect that after 9/11, it will become impossible for a place like this to carry out totally private banking operations without countries such as Britain taking fairly robust action.
Even so, in his way, Bates has been a bit of a hero. He has established one of the longest-running ‘private nations’ on the planet in recent history. I wish him and his family the best.
This website is worth a read for material about offshore communities. And of course do not forget the Free State Project.
Dorian Lynskey in The Guardian has written about the blogosphere in a way that had me grinning by the end of the first paragraph…
I’d love to see his reaction to the Guardian arts blog, where the dynamic often suggests that the argument has spilled out of the crowded bar and escalated into a punchup in the car park.
Yes, the comment sections of blogs, and indeed blog articles themselves, can get a bit like that at times. Although he is writing about the ‘Arts’ blogosphere, some of what he observes also pertains to the political and punditry blogosphere… and some does not, which I also find quite interesting.
However where I think Lynskey is not quite correct is where he writes…
Many of the people who post [comments] on blogs appear to be annoyed not by what the writers say so much as the fact that they’re in a position to say it. You can spot this type because they write things like : “You’ve only written this to provoke a reaction.” Or: “Why did you even write this? What a waste of time.” As if writing to complain about a waste of time were not, in fact, a bigger waste of time. Or, my favourite: “Typical Guardian.” Perhaps they also post on the website of Practical Caravan magazine, complaining: “Typical Practical Caravan. So caravancentric.”
No, not really, I do not think people care that Lynskey is in a position to say what he says. I think what he is observing here is not resentment that he has a gig writing for the ‘Grauniad’ but rather a change in the culture regarding the whole journalistic profession.
People have realised that whilst they may not be journalists, they no longer need to be one in order to editorialise the news. In short, journalism is no longer an ‘institution’, it is just ‘something people with opinions do’. Some people get paid for it and other do it for free. In a sense, we are the journalists now in that we are the ones keeping journals of our opinions on the outrage-of-the-day. People who work for newspapers might be better described as ‘newspaper men’, many of whom are formatting commoditised information, or as ‘reporters’ if they are collecting information to be formatted. The editorialising role is something that the mainstream media has now largely lost their lock on.
If the Guardian tells me car bomb has gone off in Baghdad or a British minister has resigned, I believe them. However I do not need the Guardian to tell me what the significance of that is as the low-down regarding what was behind said ministerial skulduggery is probably better and fresher on Guido Fawkes.
However he is quite correct that criticising a Guardian article in the Guardian’s own comment section for being a ‘typical Guardian article’ is rather bizarre. What were they expecting? It is all the stranger as people in the UK have the advantage that most clear eyed British journalists make little pretence that their newspaper is not partisan (unlike in the USA when the preposterous myth of journalistic impartiality persists), by which I mean each paper has an identifiable political editorial line that colours everything it does… people understand that the Guardian is a left wing statist newspaper, the Telegraph is a right wing statist newspaper with occasional classical liberal pretensions, the Independent is the Al Qaeda House Journal, etc. etc.. Just as people do not read Samizdata and expect to be confronted with a paean to the NHS (that is the Guardian’s job), they should not expect to read an article in the Guardian calling for an end to state education (that is our job).
Nevertheless, love it or loath it (one guess), the Guardian has always been far and away the most internet savvy newspaper and Lynskey seems to have a much better grasp of what blogging is about than the irascible Keith Waterhouse.
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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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