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]
Call of Duty (CoD), a video game series published by Activision, has jumped into the murky waters of AI-powered censorship after revealing a new partnership with AI voice moderation tool Modulate ToxMod. This will be built-in to the newest CoD game, Modern Warfare 3, which will be released on November 10th this year. Currently, it is being trailed on Modern Warfare 2 and Call of Duty: Warzone. It will be used for flagging ‘foul-mouthed’ players and identifying hate speech, racial or homophobic language, misogyny and any ‘misgendering’. Players do not have the option to prevent the AI listening in.
The last bit is not strictly true. The way you can prevent the AI listening is simply not use the in-game voice coms at all. Instead use third party voice apps such as Skype, Team Speak, or whatever. This is easily doable if a team is made up of people who already know each other, known as a ‘premade’.
The opposite of a premade is called a PUG (“pick up group”), i.e. a team of random strangers in a multiplayer online game who meet via an in-game match maker system. Typically a premade is vastly more effective than a PUG & usually wins games far more often for reason that should be obvious.
Here is a rant about how “current day” ideas injected anachronistically into science fiction spoils things a little.
He is certainly very animated, but he does not quite hit the nail on the head. I replied:
Separate pronouns, body type and voice options are pretty normal in RPGs now. The only problem would be if the world-building and storyline draw too much on “current day” Californian politics, and not enough on interesting [science fiction] ideas.
Here is an example of the sort of thing I am talking about, from On His Majesty’s Secret Service by Charlie Higson.
Beckett was an ex-Tory MP, famous for providing covid/vaccines/mask-wearing/5G conspiracy theories, which had spilled over into the usual anti-immigrant, anti-EU, anti-BBC, anti-MSM, anti-cultural Marxist, Climate Change Denial pronouncements. It was an anti-trans diatribe that had eventually got him kicked out of the party and he’d soon after set up the ‘New Freedom Party.’
Bond was struck by something. It was a long while since he’d been at any kind of function that was almost entirely full of men. It felt strange. There was not even a pretence at diversity here. AEthelstan hadn’t been the least bit concerned about ensuring that half of the people he’d hired to carry out his coup should be women, or non-white, or disabled.
It is a fourth-wall-breaking shopping list (complete with forward slashes) of things the author does not like. It reveals that the author is only aware of un-nuanced caricatures of his political opponents. It stretches credibility that this is what a competent MI6 agent would be thinking about while infiltrating a meeting, and it makes no logical sense that he should be “struck” by any of this when he already knows all the opinions of the caricature villain.
Now we know we are not reading fiction set in a credible world that makes sense, and that everything that occurs within its world serves only to amuse the author’s preoccupations.
One fear when starting to read a new author is of getting several books into a multi-volume epic before it becomes apparent that the functioning of the fictional world is premised entirely on price controls solving all the problems, or some other impossible notion. At least this is so blatant, as if a teenager was writing it after reading Teen Vogue too much, I know not to start.
Either the Independent‘s “Race Correspondent” (who, to add to the comedy, is called Nadine White) has written a report almost designed to be misunderstood, or she is a satirist of genius. I present to you this story:
Juicy! Which one of ’em was it? Will Meghan’s Spotify podcast be coming back so she can discuss it? Sorry to disappoint, but the connection to the current royal family is strong as a cobweb: it seems a catalogue of gems and jewels owned by the Royal Collection “contained more than 40 mentions of offensive racial terms”. The aberrant public catalogue concerning a sub-collection of jewels, cameos, and other small items was actually published fifteen years ago in 2008 but remained on the Royal Collection’s website until the intrepid offence archaeologists of the Independent found it last Thursday. Since the cataloguing and study of the whole collection by historians is an ongoing process, those particular entries could have been written decades earlier. Here is the current webpage. Fear not, it has been purged.
And about that “offensive racial term” in the 2008 version… it wasn’t the n-word the Independent wants you to think it was.
In the latest instance, the offensive terms are mostly used to describe people of African ancestry who appear on the jewels. The words are also included in a number of names of items in the collection.
One brooch is described in the following terms: “Head of a n**** in three-quarter profile to the right, with drop-pearl earring. This type of a n****’s head is found on several sixteenth-century cameos.”
Another item depicting a white person is accompanied by this description and slur: “Athough it uses the dark layers of the stone for the profile, the features are not n*****d’.
Count the asterisks. Four, not five. Ergo it was egro, or in the final example, egroid.
UPDATE 16:20 BST: Someone at the Independent read the readers’ comments. The newspaper has now changed n**** to n***o throughout the article.
Generally, the story of a lucrative trade established centuries ago is one of brutal colonisation of the unlucky occupants of a suddenly valuable land – and a rising tide of misery thereafter. Our greater consciousness of this fact makes a visit to such a land by a posh, white lady born in India under the Raj inherently, unavoidably tricky.
Evil Joanna Lumley, arranging to be born in India in 1946.
The revelation that the adjective was the European’s secret weapon all along comes as part of a description of a scene in which Joanna Lumley eats nutmeg and says how much she likes it.
Lumley recommends grating it over your green beans with lots of butter. But first she eats a fresh one. “Honestly, it’s divine.” This is what things are when they aren’t “sensational”, “stunning”, “extraordinary”, “ravishing” or – in the case of the bum-cleaning bucket-and-hose set up on the ferry from Ambon – “enchanting”. Empires were built on exploitation – and adjectives.
I cannot help feeling that this statement from Lucy Mangan is problematic itself. If the English, or in the case of the Banda Islands, Dutch, adjective played a significant part in the subjugation of nations, surely that implies that the native adjectives that failed to stand up to the invaders were less puissant, less krachtig? I am not a believer in the popular theory that language determines thought, but since Lucy Mangan seems to be, someone ought to let her know that the theory implies that some languages are just better than others. Or did Mangan mean that Lumley ought to have been using Banda Malay adjectives rather than oppressive English ones? Wait, wouldn’t that be cultural appropriation? It’s so hard to keep up. Maybe she meant that Joanna Lumley’s sin was to use adjectives at all. Only a Raj-born 1946-ite such as Lumley wastes the people’s oxygen with words like “divine”, “sensational”, “stunning”, “extraordinary”, “ravishing” and “enchanted” when “doubleplusgood” is available, to continue the 1984 theme from yesterday’s post on “doublethink”.
Perhaps I err in trying to ascribe meaning to that sentence at all. How bourgeois to think that an anti-colonialist review of a TV travel show published in the Guardian has to withstand analysis. There was an excellent Newspeak word for phrases like “Empires were built on exploitation – and adjectives”, “duckspeak”, meaning speech that issued from the larynx without involving the higher brain centres at all, like the quacking of a duck. Note that so long as the speech was orthodox, to call someone a doubleplusgood duckspeaker was a term of praise.
Be gone!
Run to your houses, fall upon your knees,
Pray to the gods to intermit the plague
That needs must light on this ingratitude.
FLAVIUS:
Go, go, good countrymen, and for this fault
Assemble all the poor men of your sort,
Draw them to Tiber banks, and weep your tears
Into the channel, till the lowest stream
Do kiss the most exalted shores of all.
See whe’er their basest mettle be not moved.
They vanish tongue-tied in their guiltiness.
Go you down that way towards the Capitol.
This way will I. Disrobe the images
If you do find them decked with ceremonies.
The tribunes Marullus and Flavius confidently sent the rude mechanicals off with their tails between their legs in Act I Scene I of Julius Caesar. Their modern successors, lacking the power to have people sewn into a sack and thrown in the Tiber, are finding it a little more troublesome to bring about a suitable attitude of repentance in the populace.
A majority of leavers feel they had all the information they needed to make a decision in 2016. And a plurality think that they had sufficient information from both sides of the referendum campaign to make an informed decision. What they resent is the fact that political leaders have not capitalised on the sovereignty for which they voted; 39% of them think politicians have not even tried to make Brexit work.
Yet while they are frustrated, leavers did not expect instant results. A quarter of them think not enough time has passed to judge whether Brexit has gone well or badly; 61% think Brexit will turn out well or very well in the future. There was a sense among those in the audience last night that they did not expect to wake up on 24 June 2016 in a whole different Britain. Rather, Brexit is an ongoing process that, while politicians have messed it up to date, still holds the promise of greater successes to come.
So, it should come as no surprise that many – including most of those in Clacton last night – still back the decision they made in 2016. In our survey, 72% of 2016 leave voters, knowing what they do now, would still vote as they did.
I shall miss the Times. My subscription only has a few weeks left to run. I cancelled it because it is no longer permitted to comment under a pseudonym. Will I still see interesting little stories like this when I make my hejira to the Telegraph? “French cinema is full of flops, says former culture minister Roselyne Bachelot”
In an extraordinary attack, Roselyne Bachelot, who was replaced last May after two years in President Macron’s cabinet, has settled her score with an arts establishment with which she had clashed. The highly subsidised film industry is her chief target in her memoirs, 682 Days — The Hypocrites’ Ball.
To ensure France’s “cultural exception”, the film industry is “stuffed with money” allowing it turn out more films than anywhere else in Europe, but its members complain endlessly about their conditions, she writes.
“The famous ‘cultural exception’ allows very many French films ‘not to find their public’, as they say politely, or more explicitly, to be flops,” she writes. “This system also guarantees lead actors to earn fabulous fees, three or four times higher than actors in the American independent cinema.”
The system, which includes direct subsidies, tax breaks and advances on box office earnings, pours hundreds of millions of euros a year into production, “creating an assisted economy that hardly cares about the tastes of spectators and is even contemptuous of popular, profitable films,” she added.
Good stuff, but do not assume that she has seen the light about the enervating effect of state subsidy. An article I found in an outlet new to me, The Fashion Vibes, said:
However, she [Mme* Bachelot] denied that her comments about the film’s financing implied that she felt France was pouring too much government money into the film.
“Oh no! It makes perfect sense to continue it. If France is the only European country with a film industry which in turn feeds an industry on the platforms, it is because of the policy we have had since 1946 , since the creation of the National Cinema Center (CNC),” she said. We must keep it.”
*I had better be careful to use the correct title – Madame Bachelot herself was instrumental in the banning of the term “Mademoiselle” from French government documents. I have no objection to that, so long as the “ban” is limited to being an instruction to civil servants.
One night a year, all crime is legal.
THE PURGE
Survive the night.
According to Wikipedia, The Purge posits that ‘In 2014, a political party called the “New Founding Fathers of America” are voted into office following an economic collapse, and pass a law sanctioning the “Purge”, an annual event wherein all crime is legal and emergency services are temporarily suspended. By 2022, the United States is said to have become virtually crime-free, with legal unemployment rates having dropped to 1%.’
Virtually crime-free and unemployment at 1%? That compares favourably with our timeline’s 2022, but nonetheless, this is not the the sort of policy proposal I usually associate with the Liberal Democrats – but it seems Ed Davey is ready to rock: “No one should lose their home this Christmas”, says the Lib Dem website. It continues:
Leader of the Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey, has called for an emergency ban on repossessions and evictions this Winter. This comes after the Conservative Government’s mismanagement of the economy caused spiralling mortgage and rental prices.
These measures would stop banks from repossessing people’s homes who have been hit the hardest by soaring mortgage prices as well as bringing forward the promised ban on no-fault evictions, alongside a ban on evictions for arrears over the winter.
We are deeply concerned that both renters and homeowners could face homelessness during one of the most difficult Winters in living memory.
We are making these urgent calls on the Conservative Government as only days of Parliament remain before Christmas for the Prime Minister to take responsibility for the mess his Government has caused.
The Conservatives have failed time and time again to bring forward the ban on no-fault evictions they promised and have made no attempt to stop repossessions caused by their disastrous mini-Budget. They must act now before it is too late.
No-one should face losing their home this Christmas because the Conservative Government crashed the economy.
Why so tame, Ed? If it is a good thing that one group of people should be allowed to take what they have not paid for without punishment over the Christmas period, why not others? Discriminatory, I call it. Let us throw away the shackles of enforcement of property rights for everyone this Christmas!
It’s Christmas time
There’s no need to be afraid
At Christmas time
We let in light and we banish shade
And in our world of plenty
We can spread a smile of joy
Throw your arms around the world
At Christmas time
“I ended up as an activist in a very different place from where I started. I thought that if we just redistributed resources, then we could solve every problem. I now know that’s not true. There’s a funny moment when you realize that as an activist: The off-ramp out of extreme poverty is, ugh, commerce, it’s entrepreneurial capitalism. I spend a lot of time in countries all over Africa, and they’re like, Eh, we wouldn’t mind a little more globalization actually.”
– Bono, the rock musician from U2. It would be quite amusing to see him say all this on stage the next time he is in front of the crowds at Glastonbury. Watch their heads explode. (I should add that he is far from going full classical liberal, but that’s not a bad start.) He is quoted at the Marginal Revolution blog, that took the quote from a paywalled New York Times page.
Honestly, I kind of like The Rings of Power. It’s slow, and the evident fact that there must have been an episode of ethnic cleansing in the Shire at some point between the era of TROP and that of The Hobbit is sad to contemplate. But whether the mind-wiped stranger will turn out to be Gandalf, Sauron, or someone new has caught my interest, and oooooh the fabrics. Trust the elves to develop the Jacquard loom early and then not bother with the rest of their industrial revolution.
Oh, and Liz Truss will be the next prime minister.
Responding to his cancellation, Gilliam said it was “very sad that a great cultural institution like the Old Vic allowed itself to be intimidated into cancelling our production”. Likening the younger members of staff who lobbied Old Vic bosses to scrap his show to “Neo-Calvinists”, he added: “They are totally closed-minded. [To them] there is only one truth and one way of looking at the world. Well, ‘fuck you!’ is my answer to them.”
– as quoted by the Free Speech Union – “Three cheers for Terry Gilliam!” – rave reviews for a musical the Old Vic tried to cancel
Last year, it was the universal disdain for the Brexit vote, myself waking up to megaphones announcing David Cameron had resigned and Boris Johnson may take the PM position.
This year, though, the people of Worthy Farm have a new hero, one to bring everyone together: Jeremy Corbyn.
Barely a moment goes by without someone chanting the Labour leader’s name to the tune of ‘Seven Nation Army’.
Jeremy Corbyn has urged western countries to stop arming Ukraine, and claimed he was criticised over antisemitism because of his stance on Palestine, in a TV interview likely to underscore Keir Starmer’s determination not to readmit him to the Labour party.
“Pouring arms in isn’t going to bring about a solution, it’s only going to prolong and exaggerate this war,” Corbyn said. “We might be in for years and years of a war in Ukraine.”
Corbyn gave the interview on Al Mayadeen, a Beirut-based TV channel that has carried pro-Russia reporting since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
“What I find disappointing is that hardly any of the world’s leaders use the word peace; they always use the language of more war, and more bellicose war.”
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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