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Philip Goff is the founder of Art Uncut, an organisation which, in conjunction with UK Uncut, stages nights of music, comedy and short talks in opposition to government spending cuts. Mr Goff is a research fellow with the Phenomenal Qualities project at the University of Hertfordshire.
I think you should give his argument the consideration it deserves.
Here it is.
Art Uncut is founded on this principle, a belief about the kind of societal model that we believe to be better: a society with well-funded arts, well-funded public services, and where there is a certain amount of redistribution so that the gap between rich and poor does not get too wide. We began as a small group of artists and musicians involved in UK Uncut actions, but hope now to open up the anti-cuts movement to a broader audience: to those who are not temperamentally inclined to protest, or perhaps haven’t made their minds up yet. If we are serious about building a broad, sustained coalition of opposition with the potential for political influence, we need to reach out.
A week before the March for the Alternative on 26 March, Art Uncut staged a sell-out creative preliminary for the march: a night of music, comedy and short talks, headlined by UK Uncut, Josie Long and The Agitator. On the day, Art Uncut and UK Uncut jointly occupied BHS on Oxford Street, turning it into an artistic space with musicians, half a dozen poets and a performance from the actors Sam and Timothy West.
To entice you further, there is hostile mention of Robert Nozick in the main article and, in the comments, an artistic creation of genius, Clarence the Anti-Cuts Octopus.
Yes Lawrence of Arabia is showing on Channel Five, now. I’ve been only half or less paying attention, but I heard this loud and clear:
“Money. It’ll have to be sovereigns. They don’t like paper.”
Said by Lawrence to Allenby, on how to pay the Arabs to fight against the Turks.
He would agree, as would all our mutual friends here.
This is a point of view which is now spreading rather fast.
My Cobden Centre Radio colleague-stroke-boss Andy Duncan is enthusiastic about the latest Keynes v Hayek video. Guido Fawkes already has it up at his blog, and that’s where I’m now watching it.
My first reaction is that Keynes was the bald one, while Hayek had plenty of hair right to the end. This video has it the other way around.
Lots-of-head-hair-to-no-head-hair is one of the most important variables in political propaganda, the bald guy typically being the wicked loser, and the one with the good head of hair typically being the virtuous winner. I therefore deeply regret this particular reversal of the truth. If Keynes had really had lots of head hair, but Hayek very little, fair enough. Hayek would still have been right and Keynes would still have been wrong. But why miss a trick like this, when the truth is on our side?
Otherwise, this video seems pretty good. The important thing is that Austrianism, approximately speaking, must now lose the economic argument and be known by everyone, everywhere, to be losing the economic argument. Austrianism is now being shunned by everyone of any significance in policy-making circles. Right thinking people all now agree that Austrianism is delusional.
And right thinking people are now driving the world economy over the cliff.
For a little more chapter and verse, try reading Detlev Schlichter‘s latest.
When the world economy lies strewn about the landscape at the bottom of the cliff, Austrianism turns around and wins. It reassembles the world economy, and then, slowly at first, but later with gathering strength, drives it back to its former heights and beyond, way beyond.
Well, I like to live in hope.
Ayn Rand’s classic novel, Atlas Shrugged, which was published in 1957 and has sold vast copies, is released in a film version – or at least in a first instalment – this coming Friday in selected cinemas across the United States. I hope we can see it here in the UK. Interestingly enough, parts of the media are picking up on this. Here is an interview with an investment manager who is inspired by Rand’s “radicals for capitalism” philosophy and worldview. I am definitely going to make a point of seeing this film, whether it comes out at a UK cinema, or via DVD.
The reaction to the Financial Panic of 2008, with its massive bailouts, calls for “unregulated capitalism” (!) to be regulated, banker-bashing, etc, has certainly given Rand’s novel new resonance. I often heard it said that her villains are more convincing than her heroes, although Hank Rearden has always struck me as a well-drawn character. As for the likes of Barack Obama, Rand would have recognised what he stands for, instantly.
Well, well. This will get some luvvies in a tizz: I knew a bit about the life and times of the great, late Liz Taylor, much-married Hollywood actress and drop-dead gorgeous to boot (those violet eyes, ye gods). But I was not aware that she was such a keen supporter of Israel. . She was definitely not of the “Michael Moore school” of Hollywood.
Somewhere up there, she’s having a glass of bubbly with Richard Burton. RIP.
I am not going to tell you much about it: only that it is one of the best SF movies I have seen in a long while and perhaps the best combat movie I have ever seen. The soldiers acted like soldiers. They were competently led by people who were very human and proud to be US Marines.
Go see it, and then tell all your friends about it.
Fugitive Inklings is what the blog Fugitive Ink has turned into, and just over a week ago, it featured a delightful posting about a visit, by Madam Fugitive Inklings and her young son, to the Globe Theatre. This is one of London’s most successfully idiosyncratic recent architectural additions, being a recreation, as authentically as they could make it, of the original Globe Theatre, pretty much where it originally was, where many of Shakespeare’s plays were first performed.
Mother and son attended, not a play, but a stage fighting demonstration, done with the exact sort of weapons that would first have been used in these plays. Better yet, they got to hear about it from the man who contrived these weapons. This is one of those posting where you start out trying to pick a particularly good bit, but end up wanting to copy the whole thing. So, instead of copying and pasting any of it, I say: go there and read the whole thing.
Not long ago, I read a book called 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, which starts off with the tale of how they moved the original manifestation of the Globe Theatre from its previous home in north London, across the river to the South Bank, i.e. to where the Globe is now. And I think it was also in this book where I read that a great many of the people in the first audiences for Shakespeare’s plays were soldiers, camped outside the city limits of what London then consisted of, waiting to go off to fight on the continent. Such audiences would have paid particular attention to fights, and to the weapons used in them. And of course they would have understood perfectly all the verbal references to weaponry that occur in the plays, many of which now baffle most of us.
Here is a good piece by Rob Fisher about the latest episode of Channel 4 TV’s 10 O’clock Live. Particularly good bit:
Another highlight was the interview with Stephen Dubner, a co-author of SuperFreakonomics. The interviewers Jimmy Carr and Lauren Laverne failed to say anything remotely intelligent, but it thankfully didn’t matter too much because they did at least let Dubner speak at length. He made some good (and downright subversive) points about the incentives of politicians. He suggested that they sign up for long term projects such as “improve education” and they get paid at the end of 5 or 10 years proportional to the results. The idea is to align success in politics with success at achieving goals, and he compared this to how businesses succeed and fail. Getting this kind of thinking into the mainstream – not necessarily agreeing with the specifics but just getting people to think about economics and game theory and how politics really works – is great stuff. Well done Dubner and Channel 4.
I agree with Rob. My preferred attitude to spreading ideas has always been to unbundle them, to try to spread them, at any rate in hostile circumstances, one at a time or at least only a very few at a time. Bundling among friends is also, if you think about it, often saying just the one thing or just the few things, that the bundling of this with that and maybe also with that makes sense – this, that and that having already been long agreed about separately.
I haven’t watched 10 O’clock Live beyond episode one, but applaud Rob for doing so. We need our people everywhere, and watching (between us) everything.
Remarkable developments are in train at London’s Royal Court Theatre, in the form of a play that is about climate science, but is not Watermelon propaganda. In a guest posting at Bishop Hill, Mr and Mrs Josh (Mr Josh also does the cartoons at Bishop Hill) provide a fascinating and enticing review of The Heretic, a new play by Richard Bean:
Book your tickets now, this play is a must-see comedy.
It has everything – more accurate climate science than a BBC documentary (ok, that’s not exactly hard), brilliantly funny and wonderfully staged.
The drama centres on university climate scientist, Dr Diane Cassell, played superbly by Juliet Stevenson, whose research on sea levels in the Maldives shows no rising trend in sea levels.
This puts her at odds with Professor Kevin Maloney, Head of Dept Earth Sciences, played by James Fleet (sinisterly morphed from Hugo, in the Vicar of Dibley) whose main aim is to attract more funding to the department by toeing the consensus line on Climate Change.
When she publishes her research and expresses her skeptical views, notably on Newsnight to Jeremy Paxman, she becomes the focus of some very direct persecution.
Add in Phoebe, her daughter, and Ben, her carbon-obsessed first-year student, plus an ex-marine security guard and the stage is set. Pure comedy ensues as Ben follows the logic of his beliefs, refusing to keep warm, travel in any petroleum-based transport, and considering suicide since his vegetarian diet causes excessive methane production. Phoebe is ahead of him; severely anorexic she is at real risk of not making it. Both characters are played with worrying fragility that conveys lives overshadowed by fear, battling to understand the issues or find a set of rules to live by. Their plight is all too similar to that of Diane, struggling to work out if the death threats from environmentalists should be taken seriously.
In a feat of Montfordian proportions nearly all the major recent climate change stories are woven into the play: the lack of sea level rise, the politicisation of science by the IPCC, Glaciergate, the logarithmic effect of CO2 (in a way you will never forget), the misanthropy of some environmentalist groups, the ‘one-tree’ hockey stick, and, of course, Climategate. But the issues are put on the table, without arm twisting, encouraging the audience to go out and do their own research.
Maybe I am reading far too much into this, but this sounds like it could be something of a cultural turning point in Britain. For decades now, there has been a self-reinforcing feedback loop shutting out anything but left wing friendly dramas from the live theatre in Britain, or so it has seemed and felt to one of those who has felt shut out. No anti-lefty dramas – e.g. praising Thatcher or heroic entrepreneurs or working class vigilantes, or denouncing bossy social workers or manipulative communists or ridiculous civil servants or psychotic and tyrannical Islamists, or pointing at the state itself as the prime mover in the banking crisis – have made sense to the theatres, because the audience for such things hasn’t been there, and because writers have been disinclined even to bother writing such things. What’s the point? And because there is no non-lefty drama, the audience for such things never comes. It stays at home surfing the net or watching its preferred telly shows and movies. If it is like me, it blogs.
Crucial to the willingness of another audience to show up to see this play is that it can be urged to do so on the internet, despite the major official organs of British theatre publicity, notable the BBC and the Guardian, apparently trying, just as they have tried with Climategate itself, to be very sniffy and dismissive. If a new audience does show up in strength at the Royal Court to see The Heretic, then that could result in Britain’s theatres saying: hey, I wonder if there are other non-lefty-friendly “issues” out there that we haven’t done before, because the BBC and the Guardian haven’t allowed us to?
Never forget that theatre folk love a big row, provided only that the row isn’t too big, as it would be if they took at serious whack at Islam. They love to push the boundaries, not too far, but just that little bit beyond what is entirely safe. They love to make mischief, to get everyone shouting at each other. They love to take the piss out of whoever happens at any particular moment to be the pompous and hypocritical elite, because, potentially, maybe, that will sell tickets, contrive bums on seats. Okay, most British thesps are lefties themselves, but many of those lefties are theatricals first, lefties second, and in quite a few other cases, on the quiet, so I surmise, not actually proper lefties at all, really, even though they dress like lefties and talk like lefties.
A earlier key moment in British theatrical history happened in the late nineteen fifties. British live theatre was then the Conservative Party at play, watching third-rate Noel Coward imitations consisting of brittle, well-dressed upper middle class chat in implausibly opulent living rooms with big floor-to-ceiling French windows at the back, centre stage. That is a caricature but not that much of one. But suddenly, or so it felt, all that was smashed to pieces by John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, and all that followed from it. Look Back in Anger was also, by the way, first presented at the Royal Court. Perhaps my view of all that is a bit myopic, because the nearest theatre to my home when I was a kid was the Windsor Rep, which, I seem to recall, showed third-rate Noel Coward imitations just about all the time. But I suspect I have it about right, even if those closer to theatrical happenings then had felt in their water that the Angry Young Man upheaval had been coming for some time and thus remember it as a somewhat more gradual thing. I’m not saying that The Heretic is in the same class, as a play or as a culturally explosive event, as Look Back in Anger. I haven’t seen The Heretic yet. But this new play may perhaps, with hindsight, come be seen as one of the bigger paving stones that paved the way for something that is more like Look Back in Anger.
Goodness knows, Britain certainly contains plenty of anger just now.
Conveniently for me, the Royal Court Theatre is in Sloane Square, which is only a longish walk or a short bus or tube ride from where I live. I’m giving a talk on Monday. As soon as that’s out of the way, I will pop around to the Royal Court and fix to see The Heretic for myself.
I am, therefore I’ll think
– John Galt
I’ve heard about this many times, and laughed at what I imagined it to consist of, again and again. But I’ve never actually seen it, until, a few days back, Instapundit linked to it.
“A few days” is a decade in Instatime, so forgive me if I don’t trawl back for half an hour through half a dozen pages of Instapunditry until I spot his posting on the subject, and merely supply anyone besides me who is interested with the link to the thing itself, which I did make a note of.
Here.
I have seen some Sci Fi action scenes in my time, but for sheer, oh-my-god-that’s-incredible-when-can-I-see it? sort of level, this India-made film is extraordinary. Another sign, by the way, of India’s economic prowess, I think.
There are robots, lots of them, and of course, the all-important hot brunette in a tight costume. That’s got your attention, Perry!
(H/T, Boing Boing).
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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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