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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I just saw Revenge of the Sith with a group of chums and I must say it was interesting to see how varied the reactions were. For me, anyone looking for profound meaning in a George Lucas movie is well and truly in the wrong place. With that in mind I went expecting breathless fights, awe inspiring battles between vast starships and Padmé Amidala (Natalie Portman) wearing interesting outfits. And that is exactly what was delivered.
Lucas is at his best when the battlecruiser starships are blowing the crap out of each other whilst the heroes weave their nimble fighters in and out with guns blazing in cheerful disregard of the laws of physics. He also knows a thing or two about choreographing some pretty nifty lightsabre duels. The Yoda vs. Palpatine showdown is a particular eye-popper… who would have thought a 2 foot high gremlin could actually look plausible in a swordfight!
But, and you knew there was going to be a ‘but’, when it really comes down to it, George Lucas is just not that skilled a director. He does fine until it requires people to actually interact other than when they are trying to slice each other in two. At which point he proves that he can produce weak performances even from a splendid actress like Natalie Portman (who was from good to great in everything else I have ever seen her in) and Ewan McGregor (who is debatably my favourite actor). The ‘doomed romance’ between Natalie Portman (Padmé) and Hayden Christensen (Anakin Skywalker) is central to the whole story of the creation of Darth Vader and yet I could not escape the impression that neither of them really cared for each other, for which I mostly blame Lucas’ leaden hand more than the actor and actress in question. Ewan McGregor is a splendid Obi Wan Kenobi when it comes to laying waste to the bad guys with his lightsabre but again, when it comes to his relationship with Anakin, it all seemed a bit unengaged. Only Ian McDiarmid (Palpatine) really managed to transcend the stilted feeling of much of the dialogue and sound like he really meant when he said.
And although I said one does not go to a George Lucas movie to seek profundities, there was one rather splendid line uttered by Padmé whilst in the senate chamber listening to the delegate enthusing whilst Palpatine seizes power to ensure ‘justice and security’:
“This is how freedom dies. To thunderous applause.”
Pity the rest of the movie did not have more such memorable lines. 7.5 out of 10, mostly for the sheer spectacle.
Let us return to the lost age of blogging for a moment.
I thought I would share with readers this gem of the interwebby thing: The ChildCare Action Project (CAP): Movie Ministry
I have been going there for years, and it is less well-known than it deserves. (For former connoisseurs, the tinsel aesthetic is unaltered but the disruptive popups are gone.) It is full of wonders for liberal secular types like me.
If you do not know where to start, just plunge into the movie reviews here and discover the ungodly propaganda of the Hollywood elite in your favourites. You see, they are not just coddled world-insulated champagne socialists but servants of the evil one.
As a British atheist the Christians I actually meet seem to me mostly harmless, perfectly normal people. But this stuff is by turns hilarious, mind-boggling, and spine-shivering. Which is all you can ask of entertainment. And it has a salutary moral effect, too. If not quite the one intended by its dedicated creators.
P.J. O’Rourke got something similar from visiting the Praise the Lord theme-park in the 80s:
“We came to scoff. We left converted – to Satanism.”
One of the most popular subjects of counterfactual fiction or alternate histories is the outcome of the Second World War, with authors analysing the possibilities of a Nazi victory. This particular type of fiction formed the subject of an article by Gavriel Rosenfeld, an associate professor of history at Fairfield University in Connecticut, in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Such alternate histories engage with the national identities of the United States and Great Britain where the Second World War is represented as the most recent representation of national virtue, a good war, if conflicts can be described as such. Rosenfeld argues that these fictions downplay the impact of the Holocaust and tell of National Socialist regimes that modernise, liberalise or decay, putting their nightmares behind them.
Various factors explain these rosy representations of history as it might have been under Nazi rule.
In some cases, American conservatives’ intensifying fears of Soviet communism and anxieties about American national decline in the post-Vietnam years of the late 1970s and early 1980s helped to challenge the view that an American victory in World War II had actually worked out for the best.
In other cases, the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet dictatorship after 1989 provided an optimistic model for how the Nazi dictatorship might eventually have fared had it triumphed in World War II.
The motives and plausibility of these narratives aside, however, the tendency to view a Nazi wartime victory as a fantasy rather than a nightmare suggests the slow emergence in the United States of a less demonized picture of the Third Reich in American memory.
The downplaying of the Holocaust in many of these accounts, in particular, provides the most telling evidence of this trend and suggests a growing willingness to view Nazism as something less than absolute evil.
The equivalent school within British fiction dwells upon the possibilities of collaboration within an occupied nation, or the lower costs of an isolationist foreign policy.
Rosenfeld criticises these stories for being tendentious and relativist. However, one role of fiction is to explore uncomfortable alternatives and anticipate the movement of National Socialism from memory into history. Perhaps the Holocaust is ignored because these authors do not have the tools or the imagination to grapple with the enormity of the genocide and duck the challenge in their work. Most act as alternate visions of the Cold War, not as a darker age of barbarism.
One novella that conveys the evil is David Brin’s “Thor Meets Captain America”, a useful antidote to the swastika equivalents of glasnost and perestroika.
Last week, my friend Jonathan Pearce made some observations on the impending takeover of the Manchester United football club by Malcolm Glazer. This led to a lengthy comments thread that I was going to add to, but the comment in question got a little long, so I thought I would turn it into a post. In particular, I wanted to address the key question, which is simply is there any way Mr Glazer can get enough revenue from the club to pay of the large debt that has been accrued, and if so, how.
As I see it there are two sources of value in the club that the present management is not presently allowed to exploit, and to make a success of his bid Glazer needs to gain control of at least one of them. One is that television rights are sold collectively, and as a consequence the share of television money that is going to Manchester United as not comensurate with their popularity and fan base. The other is that Asian and particularly Chinese television markets are not presently competitive and as a consequence Asian television companies are paying far less for the right to show football than the matches are actually worth. I will address these two issues in turn. → Continue reading: Some more thoughts on the Manchester United business
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s social democratic (SPD) party has been hit hard in regional elections over the weekend, with voter anger at his party over the crummy state of the economy overwhelming an attempt by some of his own party members to whip up a storm of anti-capitalist sentiment in order to cling to power. Good. I honestly don’t know whether we are seeing a transition phase in Germany towards sanity and liberal economics. What is clear is that a country that has suffered double-digit unemployment for more than half a decade cannot go on like this without dreadful strains on its social fabric. Maybe some of the more intelligent parts of the German political class might get this point. We need the once-mighty German economic machine, brought to such a pitch by the late great Konrad Adenauer and Ludwig Ehrhard (friend of Hayek) brought to a purring level of growth again. It is in no-body’s interests, least of all ours in Britain, to see that nation permanently in the doldrums.
There is a related article here about what has gone wrong in Germany here in the latest edition of the Spectator. As Glenn Reynolds likes to say, read the whole thing.
Story here that says that far from being a bad thing, sitting outside in the sun for at least 15 minutes a day is good for you, latest medical findings suggest. It certainly is a bit of a change from the period, I well recall, in the 1990s, when it appeared to be the case that any exposure to sun was fraught with danger as a result of the supposed hole in the ozone layer. I recall the constant worries, fuelled in the press and elsewhere, about skin cancer and the dangers of overdoing the sunshine.
Sometimes you have to just laugh. Of course being exposed to the sun is good for you in moderation! Mankind was not meant to sit indoors or conceal every aspect of the body all the time. Anyone I know who spends the vast majority of his or her time indoors looks, well, unwell, in my opinion. I always make the effort to break out of my office at lunchtime to get what passes for sunshine in this damp country of ours. It is not rocket science.
Coming next: medical experts reveal that regular exercise, eating vegetables and playing sports can do you some good.
I am a news-junkie, so facing this morning without the Today programme on the BBC is a gruelling prospect. For BBC staff are on strike, so most live news programmes are not running today.
I was highly amused, however, that the first replacement programme on Radio 4 at six o’clock (when Today is due to start) was an In Business documentary on podcasting. Can this be entirely coincidental?
“There’s plenty of competition out there, boys. And it’s free.” Is the pretty clear message.
As strange as it may sound, I still maintain a smidgeon of sympathy with all those wretched, deluded souls who sincerely believed that technology was going to liberate us all from the leviathan. I am but fearful. They, on the other hand, must be both fearful and crushed:
The British government acknowledged Monday that it would consider using implanted ID chips to track sex offenders, raising the specter of forced chipping.
While not yet a reality, implants that can remotely check bodily functions and location are just around the corner: Microchips are being developed for a variety of health functions, and a Florida company is planning to develop a prototype of an implanted GPS device by the end of the year.
When the Food and Drug Administration green-lighted the use of ID chips in humans last month, civil liberties advocates worried that people could be forced to get chipped as a condition of employment or parole. News that the British government may implant sex offenders in the future fanned those fears.
Of course, it will start with convicted (or maybe even suspected) child molesters. Who could possibly object to that?
It is arguable that, despite the radical changes that have transformed the British economy over the last three decades, the political economy underlying the welfare state remains intact. This compact, forged following the swing to the left in 1945, was based upon a universal benefits system, that all members of the national community would benefit from. The postwar Labour government wished to extend the perceived benefits of wartime mobilisation and national solidarity, transforming the People’s War into the People’s Peace. Such was their success that the underlying principles of the welfare state and the National Health Service, ‘from the cradle to the grave’ and free healthcare for all, became defining qualities of the British national identity.
Despite the dismantling of the nationalised industries, the third pillar of the welfare state, and the contraction of the benefits system by linking pensions to prices and the use of mens testing, the underlying principles were maintained. Indeed, they were strengthened by the development of the welfare state into a subsidised service for the professional middle classes, with free health and cheap university education. What the Labour government giveth, the Labour government can taketh away. → Continue reading: Alternative methods of squeezing pips
The latest posting of my Internet acquaintance Adam Tinworth (we first linked because he is professionally interested in new architecture and I am an amateur fan of it) consists of just two paragraphs, and yet is full of insight into the way we live now. Either paragraph would have served well as a Samizdata quote of the day.
I could not decide which to pick, and in any case did not want to neglect the other, so here are both:
WiFi in airport departure lines is the mark of civilised countries. Free WiFi is the mark of truly civilised countries. Based on my experiences in Edinburgh and Washington, the UK is civilised and the USA is truly civilised.
In other news, I was reminded again today of the fact that pretty much the first thing people do when going for a meeting with someone new is Google them. If you Google me, you get this site. More and more people I’m meeting through magazine work have read this site before I meet them. I’d better be on my best behaviour, hadn’t I?
There is indeed, I think, something very Jane Austenish about blogging. Simply from the point of view of good manners it seems to bring the best out of a lot of people, and to moderate their snarkier tendencies, in just the kind of way that Tinworth has registered.
It is understandable that the Mainstream Media have focussed, when discussing blogging, on the impact of blogging on the Mainstream Media. Is blogging another way, and a better way, and a more cost effective way, and a less politically choosy way, to do what they already pride themselves on doing, namely to rake muck and to make powerful people wish that the ground would open up and swallow them?
This is a very good question, but it misses the degree to which blogging may also serve to make regular people just plain nicer and more polite to one another.
The Taliban is history and Al Qaeda is a mere shadow of its former self, so the question is why are US (and UK) forces still in effective control of Afghanistan? The latest example of appalling behaviour by US interrogators (who appear to have tortured a taxi cab driver to death at Bagram for being in the wrong place at the wrong time) is starting to turn local opinion against the over-mightly US presence. Not only do the people responsible need to be suitably called to account a good way up the chain of command, clearly there are some serious institutional problems in sections of the US military that need to be stamped on pretty harshly.
Given Afghanistan’s history, the fact locals have reacted so well to the US presence for this long is remarkable (and of course understandable considering we enabled the ‘Northern Alliance’ to destroy the Taliban), but staying for much longer is counter-productive. There is no need to kill every single Taliban/Al Qaeda supporter in Afghanistan (or Pakistan come to that) as the infrastructure that supported the September 11th attacks has been well and truly smashed.
Also, the preposterous attempts to curb narcotics production is both utterly doomed to fail and hugely counter productive in that messing with people’s lucrative livelihoods is just about the surest way to guarantee armed opposition to the allied presence in that part of the world. Sure, in an ideal world we would have no heroin and no armed factions willing to tolerate/support Islamic terrorists but in the real world it is likely to be a choice between one or the other. So please, enough with the preposterous obsession with narcotics! If the US and UK states cannot stop tonnes of the stuff coming into their own countries every year, what chance do you think they have of doing so in far off Afghanistan? The effort will of course fail dismally just as it has failed in Columbia but with the extra added ‘goodness’ of encouraging resistance to the pro-Western regime on Kabul. Sheesh.
By all means leave a couple thousand ‘liaison’/training teams behind to bolster the Karzai regime but unlike the clearly unfinished business in Iraq, it is time to declare victory and get the hell out.
Job done. Let’s go home.
Delightful vignette from the always fascinating Theodore Dalrymple:
The fact is that people who commit fraud, at least on a large scale, have lively, intelligent minds. I usually end up admiring them, despite myself. My last encounter was with a man who defrauded the government of $38,000,000 of value added tax. I am afraid that I laughed. After all, he had merely united customers with cheap goods. Unfortunately for him, he had been lifted from his tropical paradise hideaway by helicopter and then extradited. By the time I met him, though, his sentence was almost over. He had discovered Wittgenstein in prison.
“Did you have to pay the money back?” I asked.
“No,” he replied, “though I would have had a shorter sentence if I had.”
He had calculated that an extra two years as a guest of Her Majesty was worth it. I shook his hand, as a man who was unafraid: I could do no other.
This is merely the appetizer, though, for a delightful tale of literary “fraud.” Tantalizing you with an excerpt might spoil the fun, so I will simply urge you to, as the man says, read the whole thing.
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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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