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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Huffing and puffing Ooooh..I am so excited! It will not be long now before I will be able to gorge myself on yet another body of incoherent babbling:
When the website huffingtonpost.com launches on May 9, it will eventually see contributions from Norman Mailer, David Mamet, Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, Harold Evans, Tina Brown, Gwyneth Paltrow, and the woman who played Elaine in Seinfeld. They will offer a “round the clock commentary on our life and times”…
I don’t know about you, gentle reader, but I am positively aquiver with anticipation to discover what Diane Keaton has to say about my life and times. Yet, my enthusiasm is perhaps somewhat tempered by the inexplicable absence (thus far at any rate) of the great Professor Streisand.
I submit that huffingtonpost.com will prove to be a one-stop, on-line resource for all serious students of thespianomics (advanced module). For everyone else it should be a ‘target-rich environment’.
Enjoy!
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If Professor Striesand is not on board, how are we to be channelled with post morten quotes from Shakespeare? I really enjoyed Babs’s previous discovery of a battlefield speech “written by Shakespeare” (who she doubtless characterised as “that great European screenwriter Billy Shakestein”) and would be disappointed if we didn’t get more in this genre on intellectual heavyweight Huffington’s important new site.
Elaine from Seinfeld? Think I’d rather have Elaine from “On the Toilet”
Rich
Do Huffington and company have their official Blogging Pajamas yet?
Tim Blair ran this story a few days ago. What I found interesting is that Mr Carr and Mr Blair both slag off Diane Keaton independent of the other! Tim said “Hmm. Can’t wait for Diane Keaton‘s opinion on, say, nothing.”
Does she deserve this kind of shabby treatment? What’s Diane Keaton ever done apart from star in a few crappy movies? Oh, right…
I’m dying to hear what Gwyneth Paltrow thinks about WMDs in Iraq, trade links with China and reform of Social Security. Should be a winner. Bless her.
It really isn’t nice to mock the retarded.
How did someone such as Arianna Stassinopoulos, who was the bright light of Bernard Levin and many others, descend into becoming such a farce?
Apparently her “blog” will be just a vehicle to syndicate selected entries to various newspapers, as reported here [link], although from the list of names there I think I might prefer The Times suggestion that we should read Britney’s blog instead – indepth discussions about Ms Spears’ choice of white fluffy carpeting is infinitely more preferable to Diane Keaton’s pretentious babbling.
What WMDs ?
This just in – a random group of ordinary people who like to talk politics in public today lambasted a group of famous people for talking politics in public. “I don’t want to hear the opinions of these people. Firstly because I disagree with them, secondly because I don’t like their films, but most of all because I just hate the idea that famous people will attract more traffic to their blog, just because they are famous. ” Said a poster on a blog, earlier today. “And besides, since when did actors have valid views on politics and stuff? Now me, I’ve read like five books on poltical theory, and my job as operations manager of a small plastics importer makes me well qualified to rationally criticise the US political system.
Some people think that any left wing views expressed by these famous people will be criticised by people with differing views – however most experts agree that in fact, the whole thing will degenerate into a sorry mess of ad hominem attacks and snide remarks about plastic surgery and films that flopped.
I for one look forward to an fresh supply of large slow moving targets for fisking. Blog on, Ms. Huffington I say.
You said it. I’m thinking this could be good for a daily writes-itself-kinda-post. I may have to make a regular category for it.
What I’ve wondered is if there is any evidence that anyone is listening to these people. Can they really do anything to public opinion? They didn’t seem to help Kerry enough. If they’re not a real threat, then yes they make for nice easy targets. But if they are a real threat with public opinion, then….oh yeah -they make for easy targets.
Julian Taylor: “How did someone such as Arianna Stassinopoulos, who was the bright light of Bernard Levin and many others, descend into becoming such a farce? ”
Waddya mean, ‘descend’? Already at the Cambridge Union the Greek social mountaineer was such a byword that the sound of her corncrake tones echoing down its chilly corridors could make undergraduates scatter in panic into the bogs or the otherwise scarcely frequented library.
‘Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington– so boring that you fall asleep halfway through her name.’ (Alan Bennett)
Completely OT
If you Google the name “Natalie Solent” for the UK, and go to “images”, you get just one picture . . . of a 13 year old 20 stone schoolgirl.
Is there something we should be told?
Is part of the motivation of her blog to piss off Huffington Puffington III?
Is she the Bree Van Der Kamp of blogging?
I can see this as a good thing. The more the merrier. I have found that there is a limit to how much blather people want to hear. So let’s add in the stars from Hollywood. Maybe at some point, when a goodly portion of the mass is tuned into blogs, no matter how they get there, and hear warmed over opinions for the umpteenth time, people will finally start making careful considerations about their opinions, and perhaps the empty mysteries of life that people manufacture will be exposed.
Once the opinion/asshole/stink quotient hits full tilt, even applied to those Wise Folk on The Hill, maybe a sound individualism will develop out of sheer nausea about anyone else’s opinion.
I’m friends with Andrew Breitbart, Matt Drudge’s former right-hand of 10 years who has been hired away by Arianna for this project, and can tell you that – regardless of the quality of the posts to be submitted, or of the blog overall – this is not simply a vehicle for syndicating content to media outlets. Andrew and Arianna are both very passionate about the blogosphere and, though I think the launch period will be an (ahem) intense period of learning for them, it’s definitely not a project that is cynical in nature. I’m not a fan of Arianna’s politics in the least, but after spending time with her and talking about blogging, and spending even more time with Andrew and discussing this project, I take their efforts a million times more seriously than I’ll likely take any of the posts that Julia Louis-Dreyfus and her fellow puffed-up, overprivileged, underinformed celebrities will publish on it.
Elaine from Seinfeld? Think I’d rather have Elaine from “On the Toilet”
I’d be quite interested in George’s views.
Perry – “slow moving targets” ha ha ha ha ha!
I hope she is going to run an interview with Sean Penn so we can read about his life in Poland or N Korea or wherever it was he was going to immigrate to if Bush got in.
What do you mean, he never went?
Whom is fooling whom? The speech wrote by that kid sounded pretty high class to me – and as a singer, I have a good ear – and he said it was by that shakspeer guy. As a star, I cannot be be familiar with every lyric writer who comes down the pike. I have Al Gore begging for electorial advise, John Kerry visits my Malibu swankienda when I have time to see him. Jeesh! Why don’t you dentists out there in Little People Country get a life?
J writes:
“This just in – a random group of ordinary people who like to talk politics in public today lambasted a group of famous people for talking politics in public.”
The difference, dearie, is that we ordinary people know we are ordinary people and that our views will be ignored.
The Great and Good, like Diane “walking braindeath” Keaton and her little friends, believe they are anything but ordinary and that their views are worth a million of yours or mine.
While she might have a point in the former case, I would bitterly contest the latter.
It’s curious that of all people Diane Keaton is being singled out from among Arianna’s elite cadre of nincompoops.
I, for one, can forgive almost anything of a member of the Sleeper cast.
Andrew Kinsman,
Unexpected sight of my own name there. How weird. I couldn’t make it work, but if it as you say, I assume someone I’ve annoyed is getting their own back.
Maybe I should repeatedly link to some of Perry’s party pictures on this blog using my own name as text. Or maybe just shrug it off. Arguably the child shown is more wronged than I, if her picture is shown without permission.
Or perhaps she really is called Natalie Solent. There was no other Natalie Solent on the net a few years ago, but that could have changed.
Being one of the bless half a dozen or so who didn’t recognise a single name in that list , I do have one observation, The new blog is bound to be a troll magnet. Why harrass and abuse joe six-pack when you can do the same to the stars? And without the expense of a camera. Nkons don’t grow on trees. Although I did a F2 at a yard sale for $2.00 US. the widow had no idea it required a lens to work and figured it was broken when she tripped the shutter and ‘that little thingy flopped around’
The problem is, I can no longer think of any of these berks without thinking of the puppets in Team America – World Police.