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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Earlier this month, I wrote:
Hollywood is of course notorious for this sort of thing, where actors and actresses have their notions of their own worth and talent over-inflated by agents, publicists, and the media.
So it is only fair that I point to this welcome exception to the rule – the mediocre Woody Allen:
“I’ve disappointed myself most of the time.
“People think I’m an intellectual because I wear glasses and they think I’m an artist because my films lose money.
“My relationship with the American audience is exactly the same as it has always been. They never came to see my films, and they don’t come now.
“I’ve often said that the only thing standing between me and greatness is me.”
I have a similar problem with greatness, and I’m glad to see that I am not the only one!
I have not commented on the recent riots in Sydney, which have been reported in the global media, for the reason that the scale and size of them are not particularly great. They certainly have been overblown in the media, both in Australia and overseas.
Of course, that is not to detract from the nastiness of them for the victims. People have been beaten, stabbed, and had their property vandalised in a deeply unpleasant way. But compared to what happened in Paris, these disturbances are very small beer.
However they are also very different to the Paris riots because the causes of them are totally different. In Paris, people were rioting because of the perceived heavy handedness of the French state and discrimination issues. There may or may not have been an Islamic element as well.
The Sydney disturbances were nothing of the sort. They were started by outraged ‘surfers’ and beach bums who were incited by populist media types, and also by some deeply unpleasant racist thugs. They were continued by the people that they were protesting about- the gangs of thugs who have been causing a constant law and order issue for Sydney residents for several years now.
These gangs have been allowed to ‘run amok’ because, not to put too fine a point on it, they are Lebanese Muslims. The nominally ‘centre left’ ALP state government has been too terrified of being accused of racism to uphold the rule of law. This leads to massive double standards in the enforcement of justice, which has been a feature of policing in Sydney.
There have been two developments in consequence to these riots, both of which are deeply depressing. The first is that the NSW State government is using the riots to claim for itself massive increases in police powers in order to ‘deal’ with the situation. Those who have seen the NSW police force in action over a long period are unlikely to have confidence that these powers will not be abused.
Secondly, the Australian media has indulged itself in a veritable orgy of self-flagellation about race relations in Australia and ‘multiculturalism’. The few blogs willing to point out the law enforcement issues involved have been ignored.
Equality before the law is supposed to be a core principle of any government that fancies itself to be democratic. Yet in Australia, no one wants to talk about it. Draw your own conclusions.
In the Sydney Morning Herald entertainment blog, Edmund Tadros made this rather extraordinary claim on Wednesday:
Australian blogs will never be as hard-hitting as their overseas counterparts because of our restrictive laws.
Now, I wonder, why would anyone think that? How do you define ‘hard-hitting’, anyway?
Is a hard-hitting blog one that causes events, especially public events?
Is a hard-hitting blog one that changes public opinions, or stimulates thought?
In the United States, political groups have used the internet to telling effect, and blogs have also exerted a powerful if difficult to define effect on public debate. The rise of Howard Dean, the Trent Lott affair, Rathergate and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were all things that could have happened in the context of the Australian legal environment.
Australia also had an election in 2004, but there was only one major effort to use the Internet to influence the Australian public, that being the ‘Webdiary‘ of Margo Kingston, (which was then hosted by the Sydney Morning Herald). The reasons why ‘Webdiary’ was so ineffective in the public debate were numerous, but the principle reason must surely be the total intellectual incoherence of the site and the vulnerabilitiy of the main contributors to the most paranoid interpretation of public events. The most famous example of this was probably the famous ‘anti-gravity’ article in 2003, but it was never easy to take seriously a campaign lead by a senior journalist who could not spell. Margo’s spelling errors and flights of fancy deprived her campaign of credibility and provided a rich lode of material for the likes of Tim Blair and “Professor Bunyip” to mock and ridicule her.
The more prosaic truth is that many Australian blogs are not very good, and those that are good tend to either be more interested in talking about policy of interest to a small few, or are devoted to dissecting and satirising Australian culture. The plain fact is that ‘the great Australian political blog’ is yet to be born. There’s plenty of room for an Australian blog with journalistic skills and political savvy to wake up the slumber in Australian politics, and it has nothing to do with the Australian legal climate.
But it certainly will not be a blog that chewed through $44,000 in its first 10 months as an independent entity.
The recent death of the footballer George Best has seen an outpouring of sentimental remembrance about the skill and talent of one of Britain’s greatest ever footballers. It has also seen a sober reflection of the darker side of Best’s life. As Sue Mott pointed out:
As a sportsman, he was ruinously worshipped as a god. As society’s golden boy, gloriously handsome, funny and highly intelligent, he enjoyed all life’s little luxuries in conveyor-belt quantities. He was a Hollywood film star from Belfast and while we may now lament the wine, women and song, if you had been there at the time, could you have been the one to say: ‘Shall we put the cork back in the champagne, George, I think we’ve had enough?”
It is a common theme of society that those who are blessed with extraordinary talents at one discipline are allowed special leeway in manners, morals and behaviour that are not bestowed upon lesser mortals. Had Best not been such a great footballer he would undoubtedly have been shunned by society as a drunk and a lecher. But because he was once a truly great footballer, he was treated as something different. People tolerated his drunkenness and women gave themselves to him sexually because he was genuinely seen as being cut from a higher cloth then other men. This may seem unfair, and in a way it is, but it was also the root of his downfall.
George Best, and footballers in general, though, are hardly the only sort of celebrity to take advantage of the special rules of society that are afforded to those touched by genius. And it has been going on for a long time.
Nearly 200 years ago, the poet Lord Byron made use of his fame as a poet to indulge himself in all manner of peccadillos, most of them sexual. That was perhaps not so uncommon for a Peer of the Realm back then, but it was mirrored by the behaviour of Percy Bysshe Shelley. A more dramatic example is in the personal life of Ludwig van Beethoven. Poor health, deafness, depression, loneliness and financial troubles made him a very difficult man to deal with, but he was indulged by many people precisely because he was obviously the greatest musical talent of his day.
Poets and classical composers do not have the influence on society in this day and age as they used to. The place of Byron and Beethoven has been taken by sports stars and actors and television celebrities. Some of these people, like Shane Warne are as gifted in his field as Byron was as a poet; and Warne has been noted for womanising on a considerable scale as well. Some are, in sober fact, non-entities, but we live in a vacuous time where everyone gets their ‘fifteen minutes of fame’.
Many not so talented people have also exploited their celebrity to get away with actions that would not be tolerated in others; Hollywood is of course notorious for this sort of thing, where actors and actresses have their notions of their own worth and talent over-inflated by agents, publicists, and the media. A similar fate has befallen many popular musicians over the last forty years. This sort of bad behaviour takes many forms, not just in terms of sexual self-indulgence, but substance abuse, or simply by being a difficult and unpleasant person to be around. The life and times of John Lennon reflect this- he confused his musical talent with wisdom, and spent his latter years pontificating about a society of which his understanding of seems have been very limited indeed. However, because he was such a fine musical talent, no one was willing to stand up to Lennon and tell him that he was talking nonsense.
Why? Why do we allow this select group of people, not all of whom are that talented, to get away with this sort of thing. Why can’t we “put the cork back in the champagne” as it were? There seems to be something innate to many people who must feel that they can reflect the glory of the star’s achievements by indulging them in their foibles. This can not be healthy for us any more then it is healthy for the stars. Just look at George Best now.
The biblical notion of ‘an eye for an eye’ is still taken seriously in Saudi Arabia. Literally.
In an emerging democracy like Indonesia, progress towards an open society is rarely easy and often has many setbacks. To make things worse in Indonesia’s case, this polyglot island nation is one of the main theatres of the war on terrorism. Though the main Islamic terrorist group in the region, Jemiah Islamiah, is small considering the size of Indonesia, it has been able to launch powerful and deadly attacks in Indonesia.
Under pressure from its public to crack down on Jemiah Islamiah, the Indonesian government is reverting back to the old ways of the one-party state. This story details a plan to fingerprint students at Islamic schools, thought to affect over 3 million pupils. This move has caused outrage in Indonesia, although sadly this opposition is mostly from conservative muslim groups rather from people concerned about civil liberties.
Also reflecting bad old habits is the revival of the ‘Ministry of Information’, which played a sinister role of controlling the media in the ‘New Order” regime of President Suharto. The Ministry has come out with regulations that clearly breaches Indonesian broadcasting law, but in a cynical move it has made sure that the regulations will remain in place while the regulations are challenged in the creaky and slow moving court system. The regulations are quite cynical.
Not only did the ministry grace itself with the final say on licensing issues, but it also put boundaries on content — a clear violation of the broadcasting law, according to experts.
Among them is the prohibition on private broadcasters to relay regular news programs from foreign broadcasters, thus limiting sources of information to the public.
Old habits die hard, media analyst Hinca Panjaitan said, referring to the irresistible desire by those in power to control the information received by the public.
“All the fears about the ministry are turning into reality. The media is supposed to control the government, but how is it supposed to do so when its life lies in a minister’s hands?” he said.
For Indonesia, the path towards liberty and accountable government is clearly a long and windy road, with many detours along the way.
I have long gotten a laugh from Dilbert, the socially inept engineer comic created by Scott Adams. Usually, Dilbert is harmless, but occasionally he causes real damage. Last Sunday’s cartoon, which features Dilbert’s mother in an excessive shopping adventure that ends with organ harvesting struck me as rather amusing, but according to Scott Adams’ blog, dozens of people failed to see the humour in it:
Recently I killed thousands more people. I don’t have exact numbers yet. The problem stems from my comic that ran on 11-20-05, implying that retail stores might harvest organs from bad customers and sell them on eBay. I’ve received dozens of letters (long ones!) from very angry people who assure me that the Dilbert comic will reduce the number of organ donors. The concern is that people will think their parts will end up on eBay and so they won’t be inspired to donate.
This would only have an impact on exceptionally dumb potential organ donors. But as you know, that’s a large block of the general population. Now I have to wonder how many people are smart enough to read an entire Dilbert comic and still dumb enough to think that the first person on the scene of an accident might be there just to harvest organs for eBay. It can’t be more than 1%. Let’s see, we estimate 150 million people read Dilbert, so 1% would be 1.5 million. And only 10% of them might have donated an organ anyway, so I’m probably killing 150,000 people.
It’s times like this when “oops” doesn’t seem sufficient.
I bet you did not know that cartoonists could be so dangerous. If you ever meet Scott Adams, approach with extreme caution.
In Spain, when Barcelona play Real Madrid, there is more then just three points at stake. And when Barcelona go to the Bernabeu and win, there is a lot of significance attached to it.
That is what they did on the weekend; Phil Ball looks at the history and the implications.
The most startling fact about Saturday’s game was not so much the two wonderful goals scored by Ronaldinho but rather the fact that after the Brazilian’s second and Barça’s third, several sections of the Bernabéu began to applaud him, and by implication, the whole team. Florentino Pérez looked on from the Director’s box in stony silence.
Madrid experts have been speculating all Sunday on this one, but the last living memory that any journalist has of the Madrid supporters applauding the eternal enemy was back in 1983 when Maradona ran Real’s defence dizzy in the clásico of that year. Was this a sign of Madrid’s sporting supporters, or was it just their way of protecting themselves psychologically?
Read the whole thing, as they say.
After a long overdue cleanup I rediscovered and enjoyed listening to Carmina Burana, composed by Carl Orff. This is an operatic piece of music set to texts from a collection of 13th century Bavarian poems and songs, mostly in Latin.
The music is famous for its first (and last) section, O Fortuna, which has been used in an enormous range of settings in the last fifteen to twenty years. I first heard it in an advertisement in Australia in the late 1980s. However the work is much more then that, and no doubt serious music fans could provide a far more comprehensive discussion of its merits then I am capable of. But I find both the instrumental and choral sections very lovely.
The texts are sung in their original Latin/Low German that they were composed in, and refer to themes common to people of that age and ours- the pleasures of spring, the pleasures of the tavern, and the pleasures of love. In that respect, it is not so different from much of today’s music, although The Roast Swan suggests more imagination (it is the lament of a swan who has been roasted on a spit). When we are in the tavern ends on a strikingly modern note:
Six hundred pennies would hardly suffice, if everyone drinks immoderately and immeasurably. However much they cheerfully drink, we are the ones whom everyone scolds, and thus we are destitute. May those who slander us be cursed, and my their names not be written in the Book of the Righteous.
A complete translation of the text used in Orff’s Carmina Burana can be found here.
Orff himself was as much a music educator as much as a composer, and Carmina Burana is the only work of his that is widely known to the general public.
And of that work, it is O Fortuna that is most widely recognised, by its use in advertising and movies. Most recently, it was used as the base for The Big Ad in Australia, and it has been modified by all manner of musicians, in all sorts of styles. Given that US creative industries keep pushing to expand copyright protections over their works, people with a creative bent that wish to base their work on a familiar cultural item are going to look increasingly beyond US shores and beyond US culture. This trend in turn helps to devalue the value of the copyrighted material. Which once again underlines the delicate balance of rights management, a lesson rights holders seem slow to learn.
Seventeen people have been arrested in Sydney and Melbourne and charged with various offences with relation to an intention to commit terrorist attacks on Australian targets. Police found chemical stockpiles in their raids which were similar to the sort used in the London bombings in July.
There is no indication as yet as to what the terrorists had in mind as targets, but it does appear as if the groups had reached an advanced stage of planning. As a result, a co-ordinated surveillance effort of 18 months was turned into a massive police operation involving domestic security services, the Australian federal police and state police forces. They swooped in co-ordinated raids to apprehend the suspects.
The suspects all appear to be followers of one Abdul Nacer Benbrika, a radical Muslim cleric based in Melbourne.
This is a major tactical victory against terrorists in Australia, because it demonstrates the ability of police and security agencies to effectively counter bomb-making efforts before they have a chance to succeed. Islamist extremists who wish to strike in Australia now clearly know that they will have to devote greater efforts to security and that in turn means less efforts can go into creating mayhem. This in turn means that international groups are less likely to devote resources like bomb-makers, money and propaganists towards a ‘hard’ target like Australia.
In the long term, though, it is nevertheless of concern because this affair reveals that even in faraway Australia, Islamic hatemongers can find willing tools that can be manipulated into fulfilling their murderous fantasies. Until the hatemongers are stopped, it seems that the terrorism will continue, with all the loss of life, liberties and humanity that follows.
After being to a wedding this weekend, I must confess that I have had enough of dealing with people for a little while. I am not the world’s greatest social butterfly.
Ann Althouse points to a classic article that helps for dealing with people like me, one that I deeply wish I could print out and send to most of my family members. I would highlight this passage in particular:
Introverts are not necessarily shy. Shy people are anxious or frightened or self-excoriating in social settings; introverts generally are not. Introverts are also not misanthropic, though some of us do go along with Sartre as far as to say “Hell is other people at breakfast.” Rather, introverts are people who find other people tiring.
Quite so. All things in moderation is my motto.
We can only dream that someday, when our condition is more widely understood, when perhaps an Introverts’ Rights movement has blossomed and borne fruit, it will not be impolite to say “I’m an introvert. You are a wonderful person and I like you. But now please shush.”
“The Bush administration is the most dangerous force that has ever existed. It is more dangerous than Nazi Germany because of the range and depth of its activities and intentions worldwide.”
2005 Nobel Prize winner Harold Pinter, displaying an interesting sense of historical perspective.
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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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