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]
“PAY UP OR SHUT UP” – “TRILLIONS NOT BILLIONS” – “Global North, PAY UP!” These are some of the signs being held up by climate activists in a photograph taken at the recently concluded COP29 conference in Baku. Perhaps the women holding the “Pay up or shut up” sign are unaware of how many citizens of the Global North wish their governments would take the second option. More probably these activists are well aware that, whatever the citizens of those countries might want, said governments are committed to taking “climate action” and are positively addicted to talking about taking climate action. The link takes you to a Guardian article that continues,
It was only on the last scheduled day of two weeks of negotiations at the UN Cop29 climate summit that developed countries put a financial commitment on the table for the first time.
In reality, this offer took not just two weeks of talks to prepare, but nine years – since article 9 of the Paris agreement in 2015 made it clear that the rich industrialised world would be obliged to supply cash to developing countries to help them tackle the climate crisis.
When it finally arrived on Friday, the initial offer of $250bn (£200bn) a year by 2035 was widely derided as too low. Early the following morning, the countries upped the figure to $300bn, which ended up being accepted, albeit amid acrimony and cries of “betrayal”.
The Telegraph‘s account says,
Cop29 ground out a last-minute compromise deal on Saturday night that offers at least $300 billion (£240 billion) per year by 2035 to help poorer countries confront global warming and allows China’s contributions to remain voluntary.
The sum demanded by the less wealthy nations had been much more following two weeks of negotiations in Azerbaijan’s Caspian Sea capital of Baku.
Mukhtar Babayev, the Cop29 president, declared open the final summit plenary after midnight on Saturday, two days after the conference was officially scheduled to end.
A final text was released following several sleepless nights for negotiators, with tensions boiling over as small island states and the world’s poorest countries walked out of one meeting.
A last-minute deal in extra time! Who could have guessed that would happen? Answer: anyone who remembered COP28 in 2023, COP27 in 2022, COP26 in 2021… but I did not come here entirely to recycle my post from this time last year (though I thought the title was amusing), but to point out that rich countries explicitly paying poor countries “to tackle the climate crisis” may have unexpected consequences.
Jizya (Arabic: جِزْيَة, romanized: jizya), or jizyah, is a type of taxation historically levied on non-Muslim subjects of a state governed by Islamic law
Modern writing about jizya as levied in the Ottoman Empire, for instance, tends to emphasize that, for the times, it represented a relatively good deal for adherents of minority religions. It gave those who paid it definite legal status as protected persons. Other descriptions of jizya are less palatable to the modern reader: many Muslim authorities saw the jizya “as a symbol of humiliation to remind dhimmis of their status as a conquered people and their subjection to Islamic laws” and, above all, as an incentive to convert to Islam.
Only it didn’t always work out that way. Robert Hoyland’s book In God’s Path tells of a pious governor of Khurasan called Ashras ibn ‘Abdallah who sent a missionary to bring the dhimmis under his rule to Islam:
…the man they hired preached in the environs of Samarkand, declaring that those who became Muslim would be freed of the poll tax, “and the people flocked to him.” . . . When Ashras realized that a consequence of his policy was a sharp drop in tax revenues, he ordered: “Take the tax from whomever you used to take it from,” and so they reimposed the poll tax on those who had become Muslim, prompting many to apostatize.
Later Islamic rulers learnt from this and similar episodes that they could avoid the trouble such a sharp reversal of policy caused and keep their jizya revenue flowing by quietly discouraging dhimmis from conversion, while, of course, loudly proclaiming how utterly vital it was that they should convert.
I am not a huge fan of celebrity chef and food campaigner Jamie Oliver, nor of children’s books whose main selling point is a sleb’s name on the cover, but this is just cruel:
The man once known as the Hammer of the Twizzlers has not merely apologised but professed himself “devastated” and pulled his book from sale worldwide. So how bad was it?
Billy and the Epic Escape, a humorous fantasy adventure novel, is set in England but involves a subplot where a wicked woman with supernatural powers teleports herself to Alice Springs to steal a child from a fictitiously named community called Borolama. She wants an Australian Indigenous child to join her press gang of kidnapped children who work her land because “First Nations children seem to be more connected with nature”. The adults responsible for Ruby, a young girl who lives in foster care and likes to eat desert bush food, are distracted by the woman’s promise of funding for their community projects. Once abducted, Ruby tells the English children who rescue and repatriate her that she can read people’s minds and communicate with animals and plants because “that’s the indigenous way”.
Ah, the Australian version of what TV Tropes calls the “Magical Negro”
She also tells them she is from Mparntwe (Alice Springs), yet uses words from the Gamilaraay people of New South Wales and Queensland when explaining her life in Australia.
OK, that is a research failure, or, more probably, a complete failure to realise that a quick browse of Wikipedia might be good. The (sadly almost extinct) Gamilaraay language is spoken in a region some 1,700 miles away from Alice Springs, where the unrelated Arrernte language is spoken. But given that this fictional character is already being portrayed as being able to read minds and talk to animals, surely the additional divergence from realism involved in depicting her as speaking the wrong language for her supposed place of origin does not make things much worse. It is like the way that the character Hikaru Sulu from Star Trek was meant to be Japanese but had a vaguely Filipino-sounding last name. Gene Rodenberry thought it symbolised intra-Asian peace or something. You could do that in the sixties and be praised for your progressive vision. These days the same behaviour gets your kids’ book placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, as if it were the junior version of Mein Kampf. There is no need for this. Though they did share an interest in healthy eating, Jamie Oliver is not Hitler. Give his silly book two stars on Amazon and move on.
Several people have asked: why does ‘diverse’ content spark backlash now when it didn’t before?
I think it comes down to one thing: removal.
In the past, inclusionary moves didn’t try to clear out the previously enjoyed things. Kim Possible did not replace James Bond, she was just another secret agent you could watch alongside James Bond. In video games, serious action girls existed alongside miniskirted vixens, and everyone was fine with that. Avatar: The Last Airbender existed alongside Teen Titans. The Hunger Games existed alongside Harry Potter or Percy Jackson.
But now, the priority seems to be not addition, but subtraction.
It’s not enough to have a new Jedi; you have to remove the old ones. It’s not enough to have a female super-spy; you have to remove James Bond. It’s not enough to have serious action girls in your video game; you have to cover up or delete the vixens. It’s not enough to have new video games with modern sensibilities; you have to remove the old ones, or censor them in re-releases. It’s not enough to have new novels that fit modern ideological priorities; you have to censor the old ones.
– Rawle Nyanzi, writing on TwitterX. I think he absolutely nails a key driver behind increasing radicalisation in the culture war.
I have heard that Trump was quite entertaining at the Al Smith Memorial dinner, but this riposte from the Guardian’s Helen Sullivan displays true comic genius. Her effortless mastery of the role of the po-faced straight man (replace “mastery” and “straight man” with gender-neutral equivalent terms if required) is a joy to behold.
03.35 BST
Trump’s speech ends and he receives warm applause from the crowd. We will end our coverage of this event now.
03.31 BST
Trump says he will bring back the SALT tax deduction. Some context from NBC’s Sahlil Kapur: [screenshot of tweet]
03.26 BST
Trump makes another transphobic joke.
03.26 BST
Trump repeats claims that he has been treated worse than any other president.
He takes a jab at Gaffigan, saying that hopefully his role as Tim Walz will be short-lived.
03.25 BST
Trump makes a joke to boos, then says, “That’s nasty. I told the idiots who gave me this stuff.”
The joke was about Harris’s support for childcare and was directed at her husband, Dough Emhoff and paid child care workers.
“Last time I did this I was wondering against crooked Hillary…I had the meanest guy you’d ever seen write stuff up and man was the room angry,” Trump says.
They said “It’s too much, but I did it anyway.”
Trump jokes that he is meant to make self-depracating jokes, then says, “So here goes. Nope! I got nothing”.
03.15 BST
“Chuck Schumer is here looking very glum, Trump says. “But look on the bright side chuck, considering how woke your party has become, if Kamala loses you still have the chance to become the first woman president,” Trump says – it is a transphobic joke.
03.13 BST
Trump again refers to Harris not appearing in person, and says she is “receiving communion from Gretchen Whitmer,” to claps and cheers.
“If the Democrats really wanted someone to not be with us this evening, they would have just sent Joe Biden,” Trump says.
Trump claims – not clear if joking – that Biden is having second thoughts and wants to come back. There is no evidence of this.
Trump says the term “fake news” is no longer in vogue.
He refers to President Barack Obama as “Barack Hussein Obama” – dog whistling for the baseless ‘birther’ conspiracy theory that Obama is secretly a Muslim born in Kenya.
03.07 BST
Trump says of Harris, “I like her a lot, but now I can’t stand her.”
“Catholics you gotta vote for me,” Trump says. “I’m here and she’s not.”
Trump lists good deeds done by Catholics.
“If you wanted Harris to accept your invitation you should have told her the funds were going to bail out the rioters and looters in Minneapolis,” Trump says, to loud whoops and cheers.
Trump is referring to the George Floyd protests that took place in the historically Catholic city of Minneapolis in 2020.
03.03 BST
“The last Democrat not to attend this important event was Walter Mondale,” Trump says, “And it did not go very well for him. He lost 49 states and he won one: Minnesota. So I said there’s no way I’m missing it.”
Mondale “was expected to do well, then it didn’t work out,” Trump jokes. “It shows you there is a god.”
Trump then says that Harris is weird and it is weird that Harris isn’t here tonight – saying the word several times, referring to the insult Harris and Tim Walz direct at Trump and his supporters.
03.01 BST
“Always: It’s a rule, you gotta go to the dinner, you gotta do it, otherwise bad things are going to happen to you from up there,” Trump jokes, getting a laugh – he is referring to God.
“But my opponent feels that she does not have to be here which is disrespectful to the event and in particular to our Catholic community,” Trump says. The crowd claps.
02.59 BST
“They’ve gone after me. Mr Mayor, you’re peanuts compared to what they did to me,” Trump says.
02.58 BST
“Mayor Adams, good luck with everything, they went after you,” Trump says to a big laugh.
02.57 BST
Trump is receiving a warm response from the crowd.
“They told me under no circumstances are you allowed to use a teleprompter and I get up here and see there is a beautiful teleprompter,” he says.
Unclear if that is a joke or more of Trump’s obsession with whether Harris is using teleprompters or not.
I particularly loved Sullivan’s deadpan re-telling of Trump’s jokes in the character of a robot explaining human humour: ‘…if Kamala loses you still have the chance to become the first woman president,” Trump says – it is a transphobic joke’ and ‘Trump claims – not clear if joking – that Biden is having second thoughts and wants to come back. There is no evidence of this’.
Do I detect a call-back to a famous anecdote about one of Bruce Bairnsfather’s cartoons depicting life in the trenches during World War I? The cartoon in question, headed “So Obvious”, shows an old soldier – probably but not certainly his recurring character “Old Bill” – slumped wearily against a brick wall with an enormous hole in it while his younger companion looks on. The caption says,
The Young and Talkative One: “Who made that ‘ole?”
The Fed-up One: “Mice.”
According to the Bairnsfather’s Wikipedia article, in the next war along, the Nazis, puzzled by the apparent paradox that humour about grumpy British soldiers seemed to actually raise British morale, made careful study of the phenomenon and explained it to their own soldiers, using this very cartoon as an example:
Quoting a Nazi textbook taken from a German prisoner of war that shows the cartoon, the clipping reads: “Obviously, the hole was not made by a mouse. It was made by a shell. There is no humor in this misstatement of facts. The man, Old Bill, was clearly mistaken in thinking a mouse had made it. People who can laugh at such mistakes are obviously not normal; therefore we should pay careful attention to their psychology. Their very decadence may prove to be a weapon of self-defense.”
Call me cynical, but I find it hard to believe that anyone, even an employee of the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, ever really believed that it was necessary to explain that the hole was not made by mice. I suspect that claimed “Nazi textbook” was in truth written by some chap in the British Ministry of Information who enjoyed his work. Helen Sullivan continues in that great comedic tradition.
Because all three of the values underpinning the revolution – liberty, fraternity and equality – are now disappearing into thin air in Europe, the birthplace of democracy.
And the political changes seem irreversible: In seven European democracies, far-right parties have entered government, and in several more states, including France, they are pushing at the gates of power. Hungary, Serbia, Slovakia and, of course, Russia, have quasi-autocratic governments. Last Sunday the Austrian Freedom party (FPÖ), a party that even the conservative media describe as “radical rightwing”, won a general election for the first time. They campaigned on the slogan “Fortress Austria”, in effect advocating an ethnically and culturally cleansed country. The term is reminiscent of “Fortress Europe” – a phrase favoured by Goebbels.
The FPÖ manifesto calls for “two genders” to be enshrined in the constitution, “remigration” to be radically implemented and for the creation of a two-tier society in which only “real” Austrians are entitled to social benefits. In the words of the FPÖ, it wants to “gain full power over government, space and people”.
“Ethnically cleansed” … “Goebbels” … “full power over government, space and people” … With the mad courage of despair, in the next sentence Mr Rau gets down to specifics about what form this onrushing horror will take:
In the area of cultural policy, it wants to follow the example of neighbouring Hungary and Slovakia and cut public subsidies for “woke events”, such as the Eurovision song contest
I wasn’t expecting that.
and the Vienna festival, which I am the director of.
Ah, now I understand.
In the eyes of the FPÖ, “woke” is presumably anything that is not brass band music, operetta or Germanic-pop schlager music.
In doing so, it is politicising a trend that has been apparent throughout Europe for many years: I remember in 2019, when I was still artistic director of the NTGent in Belgium, we demonstrated against the Flemish region’s budget cuts. The process of allocating subsidies was akin to distributing scarce food after a natural disaster: institutions and independent companies were thrown together into a pool that had far too little money at its disposal.
In neoliberal fashion, the actual problem – namely, insufficient subsidies for the arts – was translated into a competitive conflict.
From what I have read about the FPÖ, it does seem that the party’s “far right” label has more substance behind it than is usual, but the party “cutting cultural budgets on the grounds that they are not economically viable” does not contribute to my having that opinion. Mr Rau seems to think that that the disbursement of government subsidies being a political matter, taxpayer money being treated as a finite resource, and subsidy-funded arts organisations actually having to compete with each other all constitute outrages against the natural order.
Celebrant: “Do you, Ming the Merciless, Ruler of the Universe, take this Earthling, Dale Arden, to be your empress of the hour?”
Ming: “Of the hour, yes.”
Celebrant: “Do you promise to use her as you will?”
Ming: “Certainly.”
Celebrant: “Not to blast her into space…” [Ming gives him a warning look] “…until such time as you grow weary of her?”
Mete Coban, a 32-year-old former Hackney councillor, was appointed to the £147,769-a-year City Hall role in July that involves him leading efforts to make London “net zero” in terms of carbon emissions by 2030.
While Hackney’s cabinet member for the environment, Mr Coban was revealed to have clocked up 40,000 air miles in two years.
I didn’t know that the London Borough of Hackney had a cabinet, let alone a cabinet member for the environment with worldwide responsibilities.
He said the “majority” of trips related to his job at an organisation, My Life My Say, that aims to get young people interested in politics and democracy.
But asked by Tory assembly member Thomas Turrell at a City Hall meeting about his travel habits, Mr Coban pledged to avoid “unnecessary” flights and to “lead by example”.
He told the London Assembly’s environment comittee: “I’m very clear that the majority of those flights relate to my previous role as chief executive of My Life My Say, where we are standing up for young people across the country, but also globally, to stand up for democracy.
“I don’t make any apology for making sure I am banging the drum for young people at some of the highest institutions, including the United Nations.
The need to make speeches at “the highest institutions” located in Miami, Dubai, Guatemala, Istanbul, Washington DC and Malta allowed “High Carbon Coban”, a member of the political class, to have 40,000 unapologetic air miles before he felt obliged to say that he would “avoid” flying while in his present role. Except when flights are absolutely necessary for his work as Deputy Mayor of London for Environment and Energy, obviously.
A lesbian social worker was harassed by her colleagues after making “non-inclusive and transphobic” comments about a co-worker’s “gender-neutral” dog, a tribunal ruled.
Elizabeth Pitt, who worked for Cambridgeshire county council, was awarded £63,000 after bosses reprimanded her for expressing gender-critical views at a meeting of the authority’s LGBT+ employee group.
She had disagreed with a male colleague who claimed his dachshund was “gender-fluid” and that he put a dress on the dog to provoke “debate about gender” in January 2023.
Ms Pitt, 62, was formally disciplined by management after complaints were made accusing her of making “non-inclusive and transphobic” remarks.
However, the council later admitted liability for direct discrimination on the grounds of her beliefs.
I am glad that Ms Pitt won her case, but how did we get to a state of affairs where a county council actually believed that one of their employees taking a less than respectful view of another employee putting a dress on his wee dog and declaring it to be “gender-fluid” had had a “detrimental impact on the mental health and well-being of the complainants”?
When I read this account, I was surprised to find out that it happened as late as January 2023. Poor old Cambridgeshire County Council, puffing to keep up with trends that more with-it London bodies like the Royal Academy of Arts dropped in 2021. But the greater question is how and why this particular form of absurdity swept round the developed world so quickly. The wave is receding now, less quickly than it arose, but still very fast in historical terms. The “dropped in 2021” link describes how the Royal Academy of Arts abruptly withdrew the work of the textile artist Jess de Wahls from sale in its gift shop because she said “humans can not change sex”. After bad publicity, it backtracked. There is a certain irony about the way that progressive artists such as Ms de Wahls (“Her work is part of a movement to depict vagina and vulva in art”) spent their whole lives changing cultural norms with such success that their vulva-themed embroideries ended up in the Royal Academy gift shop, a development which might have surprised Sir Joshua Reynolds, only to see the wind change against them in an instant. Why did that particular memo go around in 2020? It wasn’t directly related to Black Lives Matter, but maybe that movement had something to do with it.
A historic British firm which produced model steam trains for 87 years has been forced to close its doors after getting hamstrung by red tape.
Mamod this month closed down production in its factory due to dwindling sales and spiralling overheads, in an era of gaming consoles and social media.
The firm was also hobbled by a government ban on the ‘dangerous’ hexamine fuel tablets that had long been used in the models to heat water and set the intricate engines chuntering.
Founded in 1937, Mamod’s steam trains quickly became a favourite of children across the country, boasting static generators which powered models with wire loops and scaled-down traction engines.
While it is true that model steam engines of this type had all but disappeared as toys, there is a considerable market for them among dangerous men with names like Kenneth and Stanley who might convert their garden railways to hexamine-powered rail-mobile nuclear missile launch systems.
“Israel placed fifth this year, due to low support in the jury voting. But it came second to Croatia in the popular vote. Though Ireland’s entrant, a “nonbinary” satanist named Bambie Thug, had called for Israel’s expulsion, Irish voters put Israel in second place. Israel topped the popular vote in Britain, Spain, Germany, France, Finland, Sweden, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Portugal and Italy. Europeans may struggle to tell good tunes from bad, but they know the difference between good and evil.”
“When even Warhammer nerds leave the battlefield, isn’t it time the anti-woke mob laid down their arms?”, writes Jasper Jackson in the Guardian Observer. Mr Jackson starts by introducing himself as a Warhammer player. I shall likewise declare my interest by introducing myself as a former payer of mighty sums to buy Warhammer kits for a member of my family. I was aware enough of the game to smugly chide the Observer sub-editors for failing to distinguish between Warhammer 40K and proper Warhammer. (I was promptly de-smugged by the discovery that someone has gone and changed the Eldar into Aeldari without telling me. What brought that on, then, an attack of elite T’au copyright lawyers?)
I digress. Mr Jackson continues,
But in recent weeks the sprawling Warhammer fandom has been enveloped in a dramatic controversy – or at least you would think so, from some news headlines.
“It’s Wokehammer! Games Workshop engulfed in gender row with fans after it said Warhammer squadron that was previously thought of as men-only has ‘always had females’,” screamed one MailOnline headline. What had prompted these claims of outrage was Games Workshop introducing a new female character into one of its science fantasy games, Warhammer 40,000. The character in question was part of a group of genetically engineered warriors called Custodes, which had, so far, not had any women models in it – but, according to Games Workshop, had always been included in the weighty narrative “lore” of the game.
The Mail had seen a number of tweets complaining about it, such as one from a games designer saying that Games Workshop was “‘gender flipping’ characters for ‘woke points’”. This was portrayed as a widespread backlash from fans. But, as a fan who frequently browses message boards for tips on playing and painting, or to look at interesting bits of background dug up by people who have bothered to read the many books published about the various Warhammer universes, my experience has been quite different.
If you actually look at the online spaces where fans of the games discuss the hobby they love, most don’t seem very bothered.
I commend the Mr Jasper’s eschewal of sensationalism. But as a pitch for an Observer piece, “most don’t seem very bothered” has its limitations. Eight paragraphs to learn that Reddit slumbers. What, I started to wonder, is this article for? In the ninth paragraph, I found out:
But where once those getting angry about changes bringing greater inclusivity might have been the overwhelming majority, this time they seem at best a vocal minority. That this is the mood on Reddit is even more surprising, given that the social network was once one of the primary breeding grounds for Gamergate, the toxic online movement of 2014-15 that spewed hate towards women with the temerity to create, play, enjoy and critique video games.
Despite not being a Warhammerer myself, I do have an alternative hypothesis to offer Mr Jackson as to why Gamergate exploded and Custogate fizzled: it is that people react differently to things that are different.
BONUS OVERNIGHT MUSINGS: The reason why the Warhammer community finds the retconning of the Custodes order to include females to be, at most1, slightly annoying in a “Put a chick in it and make her gay” kind of way, is that “Custodian Calladyce Taurovalia Kesh” is just one new character in a sprawling fictional ‘verse. Warhammer clearly were jumping on a bandwagon in the Orwellian way that they intoned “Since the first of the Ten Thousand were created there have always been female Custodians” despite never having previously mentioned this in the 37 years since the game was released. In addition, as someone quoted in the Daily Mail article suggested, the Sisters of Battle have a right to feel slighted2, especially given their feminist origin story: the order was created to circumvent a rule that the Ecclesiarchy was not permitted to maintain any “men under arms”. But in the end, allowing for the two nitpicks I mentioned, Warhammer’s adverts offering the Calladyce product line for sale would get four stars on eBay for the honesty of their product description.
In contrast, the whole point about Gamergate was industry-wide dishonesty in product descriptions. Jasper Jackson, who seems a nice Guardian-reading boy, thinks Gamergate was about male gamers hating female gamers, and also thinks, not entirely logically, that male gamers who hate female gamers would also hate female fictional characters appearing in their games. With those assumptions it would make sense to be pleasantly surprised that the number of woman-hating male gamers had gone down since 2014-15. The problem with that line of thought is that conclusions drawn from wrong assumptions are worthless. This summary of Gamergate given by commenter “bobby b” in 2017 was rightly praised as being far more accurate than anything you’ll find on Wikipedia:
I still get a chuckle out of how it all started – one guy who, discovering that his game-designer girlfriend was spreading her charms widely, wrote a long blog post about it, letting out the secret that her paramours were writers in the game-critique industry who were giving games high ratings for factors unrelated to the actual games (wink wink).
And then he got piled on by people defending her right to lie to him and sleep around because she was a poor repressed woman, and then they got piled on by guys saying, no, she’s a whore and so are these game critics, and then the SJW types decided all gamer-guys were nerdy neanderthals who hated women, and the fun began.
Douglas Young gives us an even-handed review of Scattershot: Life, Music, Elton and Me.
As a life-long Sir Elton John fan, it was exciting to see that his lyricist, Bernie Taupin, had penned an autobiography, Scattershot: Life, Music, Elton and Me. Whereas Beatles John Lennon and Sir Paul McCartney were the 1960s’ top composers, two of their disciples, Elton and Bernie, would be the 1970s’ reigning songwriters. This is all the more notable since the duo’s wordsmith was only in his early-to-mid-twenties when Captain Fantastic ruled FM radio with an incredible run of hit singles and albums from 1970 through 1976. Indeed, Taupin wrote the lyrics for “Your Song” as a nineteen-year-old virgin. The pair have continued to produce plenty of hits over the decades, and Taupin has occasionally written the words to songs for other performers, such as Alice Cooper, Starship (“We Built This City”), Heart (“These Dreams”), and Willie Nelson.
But as outrageously public as melody maker Sir Elton has been, his lyrical partner has generally stayed stubbornly backstage, making his memoir somewhat of a revelation. Though reared in rural England, Taupin was always in love with America’s music, movies, pop culture, and Wild West. These influences saturate his lyrics and, as soon as he could afford to, he headed for Hollywood: “I left because I wanted an alternate lifestyle and was driven by an Americanism that was always in my soul. I excommunicated myself from a culture that I didn’t feel I belonged to or was terribly interested in and embraced one that had inhabited my imagination since I straddled a broom and galloped across my old front lawn.”
By far Taupin’s longest love affair has been with America, and it is touching how grateful this immigrant remains. Of his SiriusXM program, “American Roots Radio,” he explains that “Preserving the heritage of consequential Americana had always been of the greatest importance to me,” crediting how “it served me well as an inspirational arsenal.” Taupin has no patience for fellow expats who ridicule American culture, bluntly telling them, “Don’t pillory the fabric of a nation that has invited you with open arms and p*$% on its pastimes.” Instead, having lived the last three-plus decades in a rural part of southern California, Taupin displays deep affection for his adopted homeland: “The Santa Ynez Valley is still quintessentially small-town America… They still wash your windows and pump your gas at the local Chevron, the coffee shop knows what I want without asking, and I know everyone on a first-name basis at the local market. I’m indebted to it and its inhabitants for giving me a stable and concurrently ordinary life. Everyone knows who I am, yet no one panders or fawns. I might garner a little extra attention, but in every other way I’m just another neighbour. They’re hardworking, good-natured people intrinsically patriotic in their respect for American tradition.”
Yet so much of the book is dominated by anecdotes about a huge variety of famous artists and entertainers Taupin has met, including John Lennon, Sir Ringo Starr, Bob Dylan, Katharine Hepburn, Stevie Wonder, the Rev. Al Green, Bob Marley, Billie Jean King, Freddie Mercury, and loads more. Many vignettes are quite revealing and fun. For example, surrealist painter Salvador Dali referred to himself as “The Dali,” doodled a delightful drawing on a restaurant napkin, and tossed it to a grateful Taupin, only for his hotel maid to mistakenly launder it.
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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