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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Dear Mr MacFarlane,
In general, I am a fan of “The Orville” the soft science fiction series of which you are the creator and star. The other day I watched Episode 5 of Season 2, “All the World is Birthday Cake”. During the course of my viewing I said some things about your work as the writer of that episode that I now regret.
I said that the crew of the Orville had no cause to sneer at the inhabitants of Regor 2 for their unscientific beliefs, given that their own protocol for First Contact with an alien species seemed to be to sashay in to the welcome banquet and start quaffing, without having done the five minutes of research necessary to find out the basic organising principle of the aliens’ society. As this reviewer said, despite possessing advanced computers and translators and all that, the crew “blindly go in, interfere in their culture and cause animosity between the Orville and a first contact species”. Not just animosity towards the Orville, either, the Regorian species is now hostile to the entire Union.
I also said that there was no way that two supposedly elite officers of the Planetary Union like Bortus and Kelly Grayson could be so stupendously foolish as to try to escape from that prison camp where they were being held. What on Earth or off it were they trying to achieve? Where did they think they would go? Both of them were visibly aliens, the only two aliens on the planet! How did they think being outside the camp would improve their situation? Surely they would have known that by far their best chance of freedom was to sit tight and wait for Captain Mercer to get them freed by diplomatic means or by the use of the Orville’s superior technology. And after all that gushing about what a joy it was to welcome a new species to galactic society, Grayson and Bortus straight-up murdering a bunch of prison guards came as a bit of a surprise. Yes, they had been unjustly imprisoned and treated badly, but (I asked sarcastically) would Mr MacFarlane recommend that Americans unjustly imprisoned in foreign jails today should grab a gun off a guard and start shooting to kill? Bang goes the last chance of ever persuading the Regorians to reconsider their rejection of contact. The Regorians were perfectly justified in sentencing Bortus and Grayson to death. In fact they should have gone ahead and executed them both even after the “new star” appeared, to save the Union the trouble.
Mr MacFarlane, I admit with shame that I insulted your skills as a scriptwriter. I made remarks to the effect that it was completely implausible that people who were depicted as having gone through a rigorous selection process to get the positions they occupied could be so lacking in forethought, so stupendously arrogant, so utterly stupid.
I humbly apologise and withdraw that untrue statement. In that respect your script was entirely plausible. Elite people at the top of their profession really can be that stupid.
Take those highly educated, highly paid software engineers working for Google, for instance. The “most powerful company in the world” created and launched an AI called “Gemini” that would produce images of people in response to text requests. Imagine the ingenuity that goes into creating such a marvel. But because they are woke, Google told Gemini to make sure that the people it portrayed were anything other than white males. All that concentrated intelligence, and they still didn’t see what would inevitably happen next… → Continue reading: Seth MacFarlane: An Apology
This is, well, epic: Every Epic Quest.
As you know, the lore demands that every Samizdata post has a political point hidden in it somewhere.
Your quest is to find it.
This catchy Chinese-language song “People of the Dragon” by Malaysian filmmaker and recording artist Namewee has had 7.5 million views since it was posted two weeks ago. For centuries the Chinese have used puns and wordplay to poke fun at the powerful, and it seems Namewee’s song is so full of coded uncomplimentary references to Xi Jinping and the CCP – in addition to completely uncoded ones – that there are whole videos devoted to explaining them all, many of which have received tens or hundreds of thousands of views in their own right.
I think I might just possibly have guessed that it was being a bit rude about Xi Jinping, and a bit rude full stop, from the number of references to long thin intermittently rigid things, one of which forms the title of this post.
The fun begins in the very first second. Up pops a green screen with official-looking writing on it, which I gather resembles the CCP censor’s certificate that is shown before every film. Look hard at the head of the dragon. Look, too, at the number 8964 which seems to be the number given to this particular film. 89-6-4, the fourth of June 1989. A day in Chinese history when, famously, nothing happened. Fourteen seconds later, the ugly splotch that appears at the top left of the first Chinese character in the video’s title seems to let down the fine calligraphy of the rest. One would have expected someone to catch something looking like that before it all went viral… oh, wait.
I first heard of this song from this post by Victor Mair at “Language Log”, who says that the AI replication of Xi Jinping’s voice at the beginning and the end of the video is uncannily good.
I felt old reading this article by Adam Morgan of Esquire magazine. For a while some thirty years ago, the terms “Worldcon” and “Hugo” were part of my daily life. What happened to them?
Inside the Censorship Scandal That Rocked Sci-Fi and Fantasy’s Biggest Awards
That evening in Chengdu, in a massive auditorium shaped like the belly of a whale, Dave McCarty—a middle-aged software engineer for an Illinois trucking company and lifelong sci-fi fan who was chosen by the convention’s leaders to oversee last year’s Hugo Awards—walked onstage to thundering applause. Within the WorldCon community, he’s nicknamed the “Hugo Pope” for serving on so many awards committees over the years.
“With the help of fans from all over the world, including many fans here in China participating for the very first time, we identified a ballot of 114 deserving finalists,” McCarty said behind a podium, wearing a black tux over a white waistcoat and bow tie. “We then asked the community to rank those choices as they saw fit.”
But that’s not what happened. Something had gone horribly wrong.
Three months later, the truth came out when McCarty shared the Hugo nominating statistics on Facebook: Someone had stolen nominations from The Sandman legend Neil Gaiman, Babel author R. F. Kuang, Iron Widow novelist Xiran Jay Zhao, and fan writer Paul Weimer. All four of them earned enough votes to be finalists—and therefore eventually winners—but for unknown reasons, someone had secretly marked their works as “ineligible” after the first rounds of voting.
Among sci-fi and fantasy fans, the uproar was immediate and intense. Had government officials in the host country censored the finalists? Did the awards committee make a colossal mistake when tallying the votes, then try to cover it up? Or did something even stranger occur?
“Banksy is a billboard, promoting a product, and a set of ideas, that are as ubiquitous as Coca-Cola and as dangerous as Greggs. We need a new set of discordant voices, able to articulate ideas that challenge the consensus view of the new Establishment of the Banksies and Cold War Steves. Voices from neither the left nor the right, but coming from a place of originality, united by a desire to reveal the ludicrousness, and moral bankruptcy, of those who refuse to see it in themselves. And perhaps, in 2024, the most subversive voices would be offering us hope, not despair.”
– David James, CapX.
For non-British readers, Greggs is a purveyor of meat pies and other marvellously unhealthy food.
Too often the culture war is misconceived as a conflict between Left and Right, with “woke” aligned with the former and “anti-woke” with the latter, but “wokeness” carries with it the kind of clout that transcends the political binary. In their 13 years of government, the Conservatives have presided over the worst excesses of this identity-obsessed ideology and the havoc it has wrought on society. Far from fighting a “war on woke”, they have been actively enabling it.
– Andrew Doyle
Douglas Young reviews George Harrison: The Reluctant Beatle
How swell to at last have a major biography of that most aloof of all rock stars, George Harrison: The Reluctant Beatle, by respected pop music historian Philip Norman, and how sobering to learn that the reclusive rocker’s feet were all too completely made of clay. Though this book is quite detailed and very well written, I now know far more information about Harrison than his underlying motives. Alas, what is still a worthy biography could have been splendid if not for several shortcomings.
Perhaps the book’s top theme is George Harrison’s remarkable cornucopia of contradictions, something he alluded to in the “Pisces Fish” song on his superb last album, 2002’s Brainwashed:
Sometimes, my life it seems like fiction,
Some of the days it’s really quite serene,
I’m a living proof of all life’s contradictions,
One half’s going where the other half’s just been.
Massive contrasts define Harrison’s story. With bomb craters from World War II still decorating his neighbourhood, he grew up in a crowded little Liverpool apartment with no bathroom, whose only heat came from a “small coal fire,” and where the weekly bath was in a backyard bucket. But massive musical success would earn him enormous wealth. Harrison was the Beatle most in the background whose growing songwriting abilities were largely ignored by the group’s leaders, John Lennon and Sir Paul McCartney. But after the Fab Four’s 1970 breakup, the lead guitarist would stun everyone with his astonishing All Things Must Pass triple album to become the most critically and commercially successful Beatle of the early 1970s.
It is comforting to learn how Harrison was usually kind, caring, and giving. Not only did he co-write “It don’t come easy” and “Back off Boogaloo,” two of Beatle brother Ringo Starr’s biggest solo hit songs, but he did not even ask for a (quite lucrative) songwriting credit for either. Even when sick in bed dying of cancer, he offered to visit the drummer’s ailing daughter. But Harrison was a stubborn loner who was often moody and brutally blunt. As Ringo put it, “There was the love and bag-of-beads personality and the bag of anger. He was very black and white.” Indeed, when Beatle brother John Lennon queried his bandmates on what they thought of his girlfriend and future wife, Cynthia Powell, Mr. Curt remarked she had “teeth like a horse.” While the second Mrs. Lennon, Yoko Ono, conceded “George was very nice,” she still complained how “very hurtful” his caustic comments could be, to which John would shrug, “That’s just George.” And on a long flight when a stewardess asked the softly chanting Hindu convert if she could get him anything, Harrison snarled, “F#%& off, can’t you see I’m meditating?”
The supposedly most spiritual Beatle who publicly sang warnings about “Living in the Material World” privately luxuriated in a 25-bedroom gothic mansion, and the Beatle purportedly most at peace as a devout Hindu nevertheless smoked lots of marijuana, drank loads of liquor, snorted copious quantities of cocaine, and chain-smoked French cigarettes. He was also an inveterate adulterer who cheated in his own house when his first wife was home and even with his closest Beatle brother Ringo’s wife. This was a conquest too far even for licentious Beatle brother John who denounced it as “virtual incest,” and the affair led to the Starrs divorcing the next year.
Surprisingly for the superb composer who wrote so many beautiful love songs, including the classic “Something,” George did not appear to be all that passionate or romantic. He not only routinely betrayed both of his spouses but did not seem to mind losing his first wife to his closest friend, Eric Clapton – who remained his best buddy. While enjoying most of his time in the world’s biggest band for all the easy camaraderie with his bandmates and being too shy to perform on his own, by the latter 1960s Harrison firmly rejected any more concert tours and had grown deeply bitter that more of his compositions were not allowed on Beatle albums. Later calling himself “the economy-class Beatle,” he felt liberated when the group finally broke up and would never seek a reunion. Asked to help Sir Paul perform
“Let It Be” at London’s 1985 Live Aid Concert, George’s typically tactless retort was that his Beatle brother “didn’t want me to sing on it ten years ago, so why does he want me now?”
→ Continue reading: Marvellously melodic but mercurial: a review of Philip Norman’s George Harrison: the Reluctant Beatle
Douglas Young asks “Any Sympathy for the Devil?” A review of the documentary The Stones and Brian Jones (2023)
With The Stones and Brian Jones, veteran English documentarian Nick Broomfield weaves a captivating collage of revealing film footage and candid interviews to paint a poignant portrait of the creator of pop music’s second biggest band. Though an idolized rock star, Brian Jones was so wracked by personal problems that he relentlessly pursued a path of self-destruction. In doing so, he became the founding member of “the 27 Club” of famous rockers whose excess killed them at age 27 (including Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse). The movie also conveys the youth culture of 1960s Britain that flattered Jones and hastened his dissolution. Throughout, the rockumentary raises many questions about the powerfully seductive allure of fame and the dangerous ways it can enable people to act their worst, with disastrous results.
Despite its brevity, the whirlwind life of Brian Jones is shown to be one of dizzyingly dramatic contrasts: so musically talented, handsome, charming, successful, and idolized by millions, yet so tortured by insecurity, loneliness, and paranoia, all amplified by an accelerating, gargantuan intake of booze and drugs. It was certainly a life of enormous promise. Having grown up in a middle-class home, Jones would assemble and initially lead the Rolling Stones, the musical group whose massive impact only the Beatles would exceed. Jones was such a musical virtuoso that he was proficient on guitar, piano, harmonica, marimba, mellotron, saxophone, clarinet, and still more instruments. Can you imagine the Stones’ passionately pulsating 1966 hit song, “Paint It Black,” without Jones’s remarkable sitar contribution, or 1967’s hauntingly hypnotic “Ruby Tuesday” sans Brian’s beautiful recorder flute?
Though a fan of Jones’s music, Broomfield still pulls back the curtain to let us at least glimpse the man’s dark side as well, and how ironic that the acutely sensitive child who so craved love and affection from perhaps emotionally constipated parents would become a supremely selfish narcissist. In fact, Jones left a long trainwreck of abused young ladies and at least five (though I have read six) illegitimate children with as many women (mostly teenagers) for whom he seems to have cared and done nothing. Whatever Jones’s reserved, traditional parents’ faults, they at least gave him a stable family and an education. Like Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway, Jones is a poster boy for the maxim that we must “separate the artist from the man” to appreciate his art since, well beyond the typical hedonistic rock star, Jones exhibited a sociopathic streak seemingly devoid of the slightest pangs of conscience. He was not only unfaithful to his many girlfriends (surprise) but, despite his wealth, the film shows no trace of his ever providing for any of his many children. When one came with his mother to try to see his daddy, Jones and his latest conquest merely laughed at them from his upstairs window as they stood forlorn in the street. He also enjoyed secretly spiking people’s drinks with powerful drugs, flicking cigarette ashes in a bandmate’s hair, and posing in a Nazi stormtrooper uniform.
No matter how emotionally Dickensian the film hints Jones’s childhood may have been, who could excuse his utter indifference, casual cruelty, and even sadism toward those closest to him? Even if Jones was a victim of emotional neglect growing up, Dennis Prager warns that victims can become the most dangerous people of all because, if lacking a moral compass, they can pervert their victimhood to justify the unjustifiable. Unchecked, there is no end to what horrors can be explained away. But can any of Hitler or Stalin’s colossal crimes be excused because their fathers beat them so brutally?
→ Continue reading: Any Sympathy for the Devil? A review of ‘The Stones and Brian Jones’ (2023)
The sad thing is that the character of the Doctor used to represent a distinctively British kind of amateur anti-authoritarianism. He took on the might of the Daleks with the equivalent of a screwdriver and a well-worn scarf. Now he surrenders to the pronoun police without so much as a quibble.
– Malcolm Clark
“End of the line? Harry Potter train waits for ruling on Hogwarts route”, reports the BBC.
Steam journeys on the Harry Potter railway line could grind to a halt if a challenge to safety rules fails.
West Coast Railways (WCR), which operates the heritage route, challenged demands for central locking systems to be fitted to the carriage doors.
The owners of the Jacobite – which appeared as the Hogwarts Express in the boy wizard films – said implementing the new measures could cost £7m.
A judgement on the judicial review is expected in January.
The train operates on the West Highland Line on one of Scotland’s most iconic railway routes – from Fort William to Mallaig – from March to October.
It crosses the Glenfinnan Viaduct, which became an attraction for a new generation of tourists after being featured in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
About 750 people per day travel to the end of the line at Mallaig every day in the peak season, with many more visitors travelling to the area to see the train go past.
What is the actual danger for any given person in using the same sort of carriage for one there-and-back journey (with a steward present on every coach) as I and millions of others used unsupervised every day for years on end? Minuscule, of course. Given that no one takes this journey because they must – it is all done purely for fun, because lots of people young and old love historic trains, Harry Potter, or both – why can’t they ask the people who choose to make the journey whether they consent to take this tiny risk?
Answer: because safetyists get their fun from making sure no one else has any. I mean that close to literally. No one whose goal was actually making people meaningfully safer would spend five minutes on this particular risk. But there is satisfaction to be had in controlling others, especially if you can tell yourself that you are overriding their own judgement of what they want to do for their own good.
My stance on this is Bill Burr’s. I’ll take it seriously when women fans show up. The men’s game is subsiding the sport with my money. Not that anyone asked my permission. I’ve done more than enough and it’s just “not my job” to watch it for them too.
– ‘Tom Payne‘
Disney used to touch our hearts, now they touch us inappropriately
– “Just a turtle“
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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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