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Oliver Stone – gutted, filleted and served up for dinner in the Telegraph Fellow imperialist Norman aggressor Harry de Quetteville does an exquisite take down of Oliver Stone in the Telegraph. It is so delicious that extracting a passage just does not do it justice.
…Oh I just cannot resist…
I pushed a woman under a bus this morning. Nice looking old girl she was, looked like she’d just had her hair done. Maybe she was off somewhere special, but we won’t know now will we, not since I pushed her under the bus.
She hadn’t done anything wrong, apart from being old. But you wouldn’t believe the hoo-ha the whole scene created. Some people next to me looked positively aghast as those big double-decker wheels rolled over her. Then some others jumped on me and held me down until the police arrived.
Read the whole thing. Simply splendid.
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“”Hitler is an easy scapegoat throughout history and it’s been used cheaply. He’s the product of a series of actions. It’s cause and effect,” he said.”
Hitler a scapegoat for what?
The “effect” of the rise of the Nazis, was “caused” by the intellectual and spiritual acquiescence of the German people to the political virus with which Oliver Stone is himself infected, i.e. that the violence of government is an appropriate method of acquiring and sustaining the values necessary for successful living. The “cause” was foremost an intellectual failure – the epistemic failure to identify values as necessarily the product of autonomous human minds.
What I see in Oliver Stone is the retardation caused by the advanced stages of the virus.
Vincent Bugliosi’s “Reclaiming History” devotes an entire chapter to Stone’s monumentally mendacious “JFK”. Bugliosi wasn’t the only one to challenge Stone’s account of the assassination. The movie claims that the telephones of Washington, D.C., were shut down shortly after news of the assassination broke. Yet, reporter Sam Donaldson was working in Washington that day. How was it possible, he asked Stone, that he had personally placed phone calls at the time the phones were supposedly shut down? Stone replied, “Well, that’s something we’ll have to look into.” Maybe so, but Oliver Stone’s version of history is nothing I need to look into.
Ouch! Yup, that article is an outstanding kick in the ‘nads.
But his ‘Nixon’ was actually a superb film – and I have it from a self-described “un-indicted co-conspirator” that it was pretty accurate too.
Stone is a very talented filmmaker, but he is also a twat – unfortunately the two qualities are not mutually exclusive.
Leni Riefenstahl was also a superb film maker and, like Oliver Stone, did her best work in the for the advancement of truly evil people with wicked ideas.
I’m unimpressed by Stone, but what I’ve read of his new production doesn’t especially offend me. “Hitler is a scapegoat” probably means that Sone’s history will emphasize the corporations that funded the Nazi rise to power, and not Hitler himself. That’s never been a convincing argument, but it’s one that is often made, and often by Stone.
What does bother me is that Stone will once again act like he is the first to ponder on this theme. Hence the title “A Hidden History …”. The Hidden implies that no one but Stone knows about this, that the rest of us are victims of a great propaganda machine that only Stone has shattered. Actually, it is typical left-wing fare.
Agreed! I finally remembered, on reading last night about this latest execrable OS exploit, to go to Netflix and put that in my queue. It’s the only one of his films I could tolerate to the end (of the few I was willing to start) and I loved it. Although, that may have more to do with Anthony Hopkins than Oliver Stone.
Like marveling over Chinatown the other night after so many years had more to do with Nicholson and Dunaway… Or, hell, credit where credit’s due. And solid kicks in the head when they’re due, too.
I’m not a Stone fan. I haven’t seen it, yet and I don’t know if it is available in the UK, but 2081(Link) should be a highly Libertarian film. It’s based on Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron.
Hitler is of course a scapegoat in the sense that the defining feature of a dictatorship is not that one man gives the orders, but that everybody else obeys them.
But I don’t suppose that’s what Stone is thinking. It’s probably somehow the fault of George Bush. Most things are.
Alisa, you might not know the origins of English slang words, so I’ll simply say that ‘twat’ is a reference to the female anatomy, and lowers the male to the same status as a ‘woman’ when used. Do you really want to say that Oliver Stone is a woman?
What we need are new swearwords. I nominate ‘Labour-voter’ as the ultimate putdown! Anyone who disagrees with me is a L*b**r-v*t*r!!
Ollie Stone is a tosspotter of the first water.
I thought Platoon was meaningless, pretentious shite, Born on 4th of July was not just wank it was Baron Wankenstein. Remember the wheelchair fight? Jeesus fucking wept! I wanted to eat my own teeth.
But the crowning turd found in the bath tub the morning after the student house-party that loses you your deposit in the Stonemeister’s ouevre must be JFK.
Where to start? It is historically flawed, Jim Garrison was not a crusader after truth but a deeply unpleasant monomaniac who spouted shite as though he had been treated with the Dallas Book Suppository. It was rambling, incoherent, repetitive (recall Costner going on about the “magic” bullet in the court room ad fucking nauseum).
As far as conspiracy theory movies I hated the Da Vinci Code less and that is bloody well saying something.
And PA is right nothing evil ever happened before Dubya and Cheney. They even managed through their evil schemes to develop time-travel and the Black Death was the result of Dick working for big pharma.
For me one of the defining issues of the last decade is the truly bizarre way a mediocre US Prez has been consistently portrayed as the love-child of Idi Amin and Vlad Dracula.
I mean he was shite but…
Nuke,
I also seem to recall that “twat” is defined in the OED* as also meaning something like a “stupid person”. It is very rarely used in any kinda anatomical sense. I mean, “You’ve got a lovely twat” never got anyone but Roy “Chubby” Brown another date and stand a fair chance of getting you struck off from the Royal College of Gynaecologists. It’s probably even more divorced from the anatomical than it’s even more offensive sibling.
I actually have a better idea for a new swear… They stole “liberal” from us. So I’m stealing the meaninglessbaby-talk that is Oprah’s chosen euphemism for “vagina” the horrendous “vayjayjay”. As offensive in it’s own way to all right-thinking people as St Jade of Goody’s infamous “Ooh, I’ve got me kebab out!”
“Vayjayjay” is my second pick for the word of the dumbed down noughties. My first is not strictly a word. It’s just everyone putting a lower-case “i” at the start of the name of their product and thinking it funky because Apple did it first. I think I’ve come close here to coining iVayjayjay – the twat that twitters.
Do they have an app for that? If not I’m looking at my first billion.
*I vaguely recall this from looking up dirty words in the dictionary during English lessons at school when I couldn’t be arsed to write the billionth crap essay produced by kids on “To Kill a Mockingbird” or something. And. So. Did. You.
Two points, NickM’
I heard tw*t used in the movie ‘billy Elliot’, where a girl offers to let him see her tw*t as an inducement to stay, I think. Before this, i had thought it might be an accented version of idiot, or even twit, as in bird-brained.
Also, shouldn’t we be using words that don’t have any connection to body parts? I thought men were called these names to show that they werren’t really masculine enough, and therefore not good enough. I am sure Alisa would disagree with any hint of inequality due to gender-identity.
Language is a funny thing. Insulting your enemies by calling them female genitalia always seemed foolish to me, but maybe that’s because I rather like female genitalia.
I’m reminded of a quote from Mike Harding, many years ago, when part of his show was talking about racism. He noted that he wanted to write a song about the National Front, but there aren’t too many words that rhyme with ‘Front’, and the only one he could think of was “too bloody good for those bastards.”
Olvier Stone is to the truth as child molestation is to parenting.
Nuke, Nick, Bod
Isn’t the use of body parts as swear words a mainly Anglo Saxon taste? In my dealings with Latin (European) people I have found they seem to prefer slurs on one’s parents (son of a bitch/whore etc). They also have some wonderfully creative curses (“may your testicles fester and never fall off” if I translated correctly)
Maybe if I were a nicer man I wouldn’t know this.
MarkE,
I have no idea – my language skills aside from Comprehensive School Latin are abysmal, although what you say seems to be at least anecdotally true.
My limited knowledge of languages of Eastern Europe, and being on the receiving end of some foreign-language-slurs would support your comments.
The other English language slur I rather like is “I’d call you a c**t, but you lack the depth and charm”, which of course, further supports your claim.
My only useful addition to the discussion would be that aside from stream of consciousness rants, the anglophone slur is short, and tends to use hard k’s, f’s etc etc. Hence m*****f****r, and all the other ones we know. An english-language insult is plosive and has hard consonants. Being cussed out Mediterranean-style by a Bavarian, in German would I suspect count as performance art.
Maybe the more experienced globetrotters like Perry or Michael J. have been cussed out in other (germanic? welsh? breton? kernow? scots- or irish-celtic?) languages.
What Dom said.
What’s annoying about Stone isn’t so much his history lessons, which viewers can take or leave, but that he thinks he’s revealing heretofore unthought-of things. If he would admit that “JFK” were “an account” rather than presenting it as “the account,” I would have an easier time with him.
As for Hitler, it’s about time some revisionism started in here. It’s easier to me to think of Hitler as extremely silly than as extremely evil – a child-man who found himself in a room full of very dangerous toys and given unlimited license to play with them. “Hitler was evil” is too pat an explanation for the whole Nazi escapade – and, as another commenter points out, it lets large-scale government off the hook for everything that happened by keeping alive the idea that if we could just get “the right man” on the throne, everything would go swimmingly. Of course in reality it can’t, and it won’t go swimmingly ever with this form of government, and though I’d rather Mussolini than Hitler any day, my actual choice is for neither of the above, because there is NO SUCH THING as “the right man” who wants to be on a throne.
I once saw a German express his frustration with a lawnmower that wouldn’t start and that was certainly something to behold!
Oy.
I really don’t give a….[insert your choice of obscenity], Nuke:-)
What Joshua said about that little man with small, um, er, mustache.
I (pretend to) speak three languages as unrelated as can be, and the obscenities are all the same: certain body parts, various waste products, one’s family members (mostly parents, but spouses are not immune), one’s occupation in the oldest profession, one’s looks and one’s intelligence, and last but not the least: various non-human species.
Alisa, do you have an alternative swearword? Does L*bourvoter have the same emotive strength? Does it sound like the ultimate insult to say, “Oliver Stoned is a a… L*bourvoter!!!”?
Nuke, Billy Eliot is as a description of the NE of England I grew-up in what Alistair Darling is to fiscal continence.
Not that is anything like as smart as Kim’s line which made me chuckle.
No Nuke, it doesn’t do it for me. It has to be metaphoric, which means it cannot be too close to the truth or even in the same context as the truth. In other words, you don’t insult Obama by calling him ‘Obama’ or even ‘FDR’.
I’d rather be called a c**t than a pussy any day of the week.