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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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
Russ Lemley of Torrance, CA, and more to the point USA, emails this charming vignette of the family life of a Samizdata reader, thus:
I was probably one of 30 people (maybe that’s too high) on the west coast of the US who saw any portion of the US-Portugal game live. The game started at 2 am LA time. I got to bed last night kinda late, so I didn’t get up until 3, at just about the beginning of the second half. I actually waited a minute before turning on the TV because I was afraid to see the score. When I turned it on and saw the score was USA 3, Portugal 1, I got lightheaded and almost fainted. Then I kicked myself (figuratively) for missing the first half!
The second half I was on pins and needles. (Soccer (er – football) is boring – bah! I’m a baseball nut, and even I fall asleep watching pitching duels sometimes. Even with one own goal, that second half drove me nuts!) Although the US was playing defense to hold their lead, they held up very well considering their opponent. When the game was over, I was so ecstatic that I could hardly contain myself. But I had to. Do you know how hard it is to jump and down in elation without waking up your wife and two daughters at 3:46 am? I figured it out, and hopefully this will be good practice for the US games against Korea and Poland.
Bring on Italy!!!
Maybe not all our readers quite get what a result this was, and how good Portugal are. Luis Figo is Portuguese, and he is one of the most highly regarded players in the world. Or try this, from our good friend The Guardian, from this morning’s sports section:
In Group D the US look to be one of those teams that are always at the World Cup but never contribute much. Anything but a defeat against Portugal would be a major shock.
I’ve feel as if I’ve been reading for ever about the USA’s “soccer mums”, mostly in connection with which way they would vote. My attitude was: vote how you want ladies, where’s the soccer? I have my answer. And I’m told the US ladies soccer team is pretty good, yes? Russ, do your daughters play soccer by any chance?
They’ve just scored a final minute equaliser against Germany. Final whistle! 1-1! Let’s hope I’m as wrong about England.
Well would you ever? It seems that one of those little no-hope teams from somewhere in the north-of-Brazil region has just beaten Portugal 3-2. This is the biggest drama since Senegal beat World Cup holders France in the opening game, a result already noted here. I’ve been looking for another team to support when England get bounced out by Argentina on Friday. (Ireland are, even as I blog this, being disposed of by Germany.) I may just have found it.
As reported by The Brains Trust in their latest edition, hundreds of notes from across Europe are breaking through flimsy currency exchanges and fleeing across the Channel Tunnel into the UK. Two desperate refugees known only as ‘Frank’ and ‘Mark’ explained their plight:
“There was a time when we were welcome throughout our homelands. In every home in the country people would be delighted to let us in. Shops, restaurants, banks – even politicians – they couldn’t get enough of us. But then suddenly some sinister extremist forces began to take over in the heart of Europe.
At first it was a bit of a joke, no one thought it would ever happen. But then people began to talk about a single currency, a master race that would sweep throughout Europe. Then discriminatory laws began to appear. We could only meet each other at fixed exchange rates. There were maximum numbers of us that could work in government. Adverts appeared denouncing us and calling for people to hand us over to the authorities. I felt completely devalued.”
However, the currencies are also having a hard time finding solace in the UK. Many locals are handing them in to the authorities to be transported back to an unknown fate at home. They also face opposition from “nationalist currency activists”. One such hard currency supporter, known only as “Sterling”, explained his position:
“We’re being overtaken by a tide of foreigners. We should only allow in ones that look like us – ones with a Queen’s head on them. And they should be forced to swear allegiance to the Bank of England and leave their foreign markets at home. We should chuck all the rest back. Before you know it they’ll be taking over here.”
As the Government promised swift action against the “immigrants” Tony Blair declared that the UK need not fear for its own currency especially as it was going to get a nice, lovely, shiny new one “very, very soon.”
There are days, and today is one of them, when I think this is the only way to deal with the current affairs. For more ‘solutions’ to international and domestic problems visit The Brains Trust. I especially recommend their new peace plan offering Palestinians ‘virtual statehood’…
Many apologies but it is late here in England and I am too tired to spend hours trawling through our archive with a view to digging out all the previous postings about the link between welfare and terrorism. However, I do distinctly recall that the general theme was that it is far easier to recruit young men for terror attacks and guerilla wars when they are poor and under-utilised recipients of state largesse.
Now I am only too aware of the profound mischief and hazard produced by state serfdom but if this report in the US News about American Jihadis is anything to go by, then perhaps the phenomenon needs further examination (or, at least, revisiting):
“Fifteen thousand feet high in Kashmir and armed with a Kalashnikov–that was not how friends thought Jibreel al-Amreekee would end up. All of 19, the restless kid from Atlanta had grown up in a wealthy family attending Ebenezer Baptist Church, the home pulpit of Martin Luther King Jr. A soft-spoken youth with long dreadlocks, al-Amreekee had a passion for sky diving and reading books on the world’s religions.”
Clearly this young man (along with several others described in the article) was not the product of a broken home, a deprived slum or welfare benefits. It follows, then, that the welfare-terrorism link is rather too glib. Rich kids go crazy as well.
[Link courtesy of Pejman Pundit ]
I’m a little unnerved to hear about your unhappiness, Brian. I tend to rely on your general bouyancy to keep me from going under.
I note what you say regarding ‘er Maj but I can’t say that I find it very persuasive. She is performing the useful function of being stubbornly in the way of those seeking more power and glory (and we all know who they are, don’t we). Besides, your claim that she acts as camouflage for the nefarious doings of the nefarious is somewhat contradicted by your (correct) assertion that an Anti-Blairite resentment is beginning to fulminate. People do catch on sooner or later, albeit for different reasons.
I think the British have a rather predictable and long-standing attitude towards the governments they elect. It starts off as:
Stage 1: A great bow wave of expectation and enthusiasm followed by
Stage 2: anti-climax and disappointment which tends to become
Stage 3: feelings of unease and surly resentment which eventually translate into
Stage 4: let’s hang the bastards!!
We’ve been hovering around Stage 2 since just before the last General Election but I detect that we have, in the last few weeks, seamlessly slipped into Stage 3.
I also agree that the Tories are doing exactly the right thing by doing absolutely nothing. They cannot win, Blair can only lose, so let him. Of course, whether the Tories are acting in this strategically brilliant manner due to 1) genuine vacuity and impotence or 2) masterful political nous, is an entirely different discussion.
This (in the New Scientist and which was posted last Saturday on the Libertarian Alliance Forum) is really a story for expert Adriana to comment on, but it sounds good on the face of it.
Computer activists in Britain are close to completing an operating system that could undermine government efforts to wiretap the internet. The UK Home Office has condemned the project as potentially providing a new tool for criminals.
Of course it could just be that the Home Office is writing it, and wants to round up lots of would-be secret persons into one pen, so that it can snoop on them all with greater ease, and save itself the bother of trawling through the emails of all the people like me who don’t give a prune about secrecy.
Why the caution David? Because if they do start chucking H-bombs about the subcontinent I don’t want to add a feeling of extreme foolishness to all my other unhappinesses. It reminds me of yet another P.G. Wodehouse quote, where Bertie Wooster (I think) notes the occurrence of some ghastly modern practice or other and says something to the effect that if it catches on Western Civilisation will collapse. “And then what a lot of silly asses we should all look.” I love that.
Changing the subject, to all this royal stuff that’s going on just now (which you also mentioned in another post, David), I find myself noting the emotions that millions of my fellow countrymen now seem to feel, of fondness for their stubbornly traditional country and its stubbornly traditional head-of-state arrangements, but not sharing them. I’m a puritan. I think constitutions should describe the realities of power, not surround reality in an aerosol spray-canned mist of sentimental heritage flummery, which was once the real system but which is now just a fading memory. I’d like to live in a country where the official story of how we are governed approximates to reality.
It is said that Royalty confers respectability upon the sordid manoeuvres of politics. Exactly. That is precisely my objection to it. Let the sordid reality of politics be looked in the face, not funked. And then, you never know, people might just be persuaded to change it for the better. I don’t think that our Monarchy is better than the predations of democracy; I think it protects them. (Hans-Hermann Hoppe argues for the reality of Monarchy, not the shadow of it as we now have.)
However, there is the matter of Europe. The Europe issue is real. Royalty is just an argument about interior decor by comparison. If I have to choose between Britain becoming a sordidly real province of the European Union, and remaining a sentimentally heritaged flummery in a state of at least some political detachment from that Union, then I go with the flummery.
I summarise my objection to Britain’s “membership” of the European Union with one question: What British problems will it solve? Only career problems among the elite, it seems to me. With luck, some of them will get to run what they fondly hope will become a superpower to rival the USA. No more grovelling to Uncle Sam. No other problems will be solved that I can think of. What problems might British membership of the EU cause? Infinite. As some clever French conservative (identificatory emails welcome) once said: “When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.”
That’s how the Royals always do it. They quietly allow themselves to become identified with whatever in the country is being complained about, and all the complainers forget about any flummery objections they might have had (and in this case there were damn few complainers to start with).
The Conservative Party is finally making a difference to all this. It is keeping its hated mouth tight shut. This is helping. An anti-Blairite atmosphere may now finally be coalescing, and the Conservatives must wait in silence, and let it grow.
(I’m right now watching the Falklands Play, and I’m taping it too. Very interesting.)
Many of you will never have heard of Will Hutton and for those that haven’t, this little introduction is necessary.
Mr.Hutton is pure Enemy Class. Ostensibly a journalist he has also headed up or contributed to various lefty think-tanks. He was quite influential in the formation of the New Labour project and, like all such people, he is a fanatical Federast who has adopted an ‘Animal Farm’ mindset of ‘America bad, Europe good’. Every now and then he pops up on British TV to excoriate people who are reluctant to pay higher taxes. He sneers so much that one could be forgiven for thinking that his top lip has been surgically attached to the bottom of his nose.
He is ripe for a ‘fisking’ by a higher organism such as James C. Bennett
“As a result of these moves, and the increasing prosperity of Britain in general, the island now enjoys booming do-it-yourself stores (so reminiscent of American ones, no doubt to Hutton’s disgust) and popular television programs such as “Changing Rooms” (whose American knockoff, “Trading Spaces,” is also popular on the other side of the Atlantic.)
The most interesting thing about “Changing Rooms” is the 500-pound limit on expenditure for the domestic makeover. This is not some Martha Stewart upper-middle-class consumption extravaganza. Rather, it is the application of ingenuity to ordinary people’s spaces, and conveys the message of what can be done by individual homeowners to bring delight to their own property.
Undoubtedly Hutton would rather they spend their time petitioning the local council to repair the window, as they used to. This would end their socio-politico isolation and selfish indulgence, so un-European. In Hutton’s mind, it seems, private housing is only one step from private car ownership, private gun ownership, and Columbine massacres”.
It is worth your while reading the whole thing. Not only does it skewer Hutton but it does so much else to clarify the difference between ‘them’ and ‘us’.
I wonder why it is that my dear friend Brian Micklethwait describes me as pessimist? Not only does he describe me as a pessimist but he also considers it to be a defining characteristic by the inclusion of the word ‘usual’.
It mystifies me somewhat because I do not consider myself to be a pessimist. I did not say that there will be nuclear war in South Asia, I merely assert that there might be. Does that make me a pessimist? Maybe it does. In which case, how do I become an optimist? By asserting that there cannot possibly be a nuclear war in South Asia? It strikes me that optimism along those lines is the same as daring the whole world not to disappoint you. Perhaps that is what I should do.
Still, I note that Brian describes himself as ‘(cautiously) optimistic’, a term which begs the question: why the ‘caution’?
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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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