Quotulatiousness

July 31, 2019

All Art Is Propaganda: Christopher Hitchens on George Orwell – George Packer Interview (2009)

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Film Archives
Published on 27 Jan 2014

George Packer (born August 13, 1960) is an American journalist, novelist, and playwright.

He is perhaps best known for his writings for The New Yorker about U.S. foreign policy and for his related book The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq.

Packer was born in Santa Clara, California. Packer’s parents, Nancy (née Huddleston) and Herbert Packer, were both academics at Stanford University; his maternal grandfather was George Huddleston, a congressman from Alabama. His sister, Ann Packer, is also a writer. His father was Jewish and his mother was from a Christian background. Packer graduated from Yale College, where he lived in Calhoun College, in 1982, and served in the Peace Corps in Togo. His essays and articles have appeared in Boston Review, The Nation, World Affairs, Harper’s, The New York Times, and The New Yorker, among other publications. Packer was a columnist for Mother Jones and has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since May 2003.

Packer was a Holtzbrinck Fellow Class of Fall 2009 at the American Academy in Berlin.

His book The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq analyzes the events that led to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and reports on subsequent developments in that country, largely based on interviews with ordinary Iraqis. He was a supporter of the Iraq war. He was a finalist for the 2004 Michael Kelly Award.

He is married to Laura Secor and was previously married to Michele Millon.

Books

The Village of Waiting (1988). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (1st Farrar edition, 2001). Pb. ISBN 0-374-52780-6
The Half Man (1991). Random House ISBN 0-394-58192-X
Central Square (1998). Graywolf Press ISBN 1-55597-277-2
Blood of the Liberals (2000). Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN 0-374-25142-8
The Fight is for Democracy: Winning the War of Ideas in America and the World (2003, as editor). Harper Perennial. Pb. ISBN 0-06-053249-1
The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq (2005) Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2005 ISBN 0-374-29963-3
Betrayed: A Play (2008) Faber & Faber
Interesting Times: Writings from a Turbulent Decade (2009). ISBN 978-0-374-17572-6
The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (2013). ISBN 978-0-374-10241-8

Articles

Packer, George (28 September 2009). “A Reporter at Large: The Last Mission”. The New Yorker 85 (30): 38-55. [Richard Holbrooke’s plan to avoid the mistakes of Vietnam in Afghanistan].
Packer, George (15 March 2010). “A Reporter at Large: Obama’s Lost Year”. The New Yorker 86 (4): 40-51.
Packer, George (12 September 2011). “A Reporter at Large: Coming Apart”. The New Yorker. [An assessment of the post 9/11 decade]
Packer, George (27 May 2013). “A Reporter at Large: Change the World”. The New Yorker.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_P…

July 27, 2019

“[T]he more educated a Democrat is … the less he or she understands the Republican worldview”

Filed under: Education, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Last week in the Guardian, Arlie Hochschild explained some of the mutual incomprehension of US Democrats and Republicans based on a recent study:

In a surprising new national survey, members of each major American political party were asked what they imagined to be the beliefs held by members of the other. The survey asked Democrats: “How many Republicans believe that racism is still a problem in America today?” Democrats guessed 50%. It’s actually 79%. The survey asked Republicans how many Democrats believe “most police are bad people”. Republicans estimated half; it’s really 15%.

The survey, published by the thinktank More in Common as part of its Hidden Tribes of America project, was based on a sample of more than 2,000 people. One of the study’s findings: the wilder a person’s guess as to what the other party is thinking, the more likely they are to also personally disparage members of the opposite party as mean, selfish or bad. Not only do the two parties diverge on a great many issues, they also disagree on what they disagree on.

This much we might guess. But what’s startling is the further finding that higher education does not improve a person’s perceptions – and sometimes even hurts it. In their survey answers, highly educated Republicans were no more accurate in their ideas about Democratic opinion than poorly educated Republicans. For Democrats, the education effect was even worse: the more educated a Democrat is, according to the study, the less he or she understands the Republican worldview.

“This effect,” the report says, “is so strong that Democrats without a high school diploma are three times more accurate than those with a postgraduate degree.” And the more politically engaged a person is, the greater the distortion.

What could be going on? Bubble-ism, the report suggests. Even more than their Republican counterparts, highly educated Democrats tend to live in exclusively Democratic enclaves. The more they report “almost all my friends hold the same political views”, the worse their guesses on what Republicans think.

So do they believe in sticking with their own? No. When asked in a Pew survey whether it’s important to live in a place “where most people share my political views”, half of conservatives and only a third of liberals agreed. Although in principle more tolerant of political diversity, highly educated – and mostly urban – Democrats live, ironically, with less of it.

Take the quiz or see more of the results here.

July 20, 2019

“Boris Johnson is the only man alive who could convincingly turn The Emperor’s New Clothes into a one-man play”

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Spiked, Alaa al-Ameri says that Boris Johnson actually does have a valid point in his criticism of Islam:

Boris Johnson, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs at an informal meeting of the Foreign Affairs Council on 15 February 2018.
Photo by Velislav Nikolov via Wikimedia Commons.

Boris Johnson is the only man alive who could convincingly turn The Emperor’s New Clothes into a one-man play. He’s perfect for every role – the pompous, bumbling, vain emperor; the barefaced conmen trafficking in audacious whoppers; and, most importantly, the little boy, unable to keep from blurting out the obvious, especially when everyone around him is busy parroting the convenient lie of the day.

Not for the first time, Johnson has offended polite society by suggesting that there might be something less than perfectly laudable about some aspects of Islam. Perish the thought. In particular, offence-miners at the Guardian have discovered that Johnson once wrote that Islam has held Muslim countries back by “centuries”.

A cursory look around the world is enough to conclude that there may be something to Johnson’s argument. A deeper look at Arab and Muslim history – both ancient and recent – might at least confirm the possibility that such a statement is something other than flat-out bigotry. Or so you might have thought, if you had recently awoken from a 30-year coma. In 2019, however, such thoughts are unthinkable.

We can moralise all day long about the evils of European colonialism. But it was a historical blink of an eye in comparison to the centuries of Arab and Muslim colonialism that produced the cultures to which Johnson was referring. We can wring our hands over the influence of literalist Christianity on American politics. But this is a drop in the ocean compared to the cultural and political leverage of Islam across the globe. We can lament the potential harm to Indian democracy posed by militant Hindu nationalism. But there is nothing questionable about entertaining the notion that centuries of Muslim global imperialism – which ended less than 100 years ago – might have left behind a less than a gleaming legacy.

July 15, 2019

Galaxy Quest – still the best Star Trek movie ever made

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Mark Steyn’s site, guest movie reviewer Kathy Shaidle lovingly reviews the cult classic — and one of my all-time favourite movies — Galaxy Quest:

In a just world, O.J. Simpson would currently be serving the 24th year of a double life sentence; Ronald Reagan would have been president during America’s bicentennial instead of Jimmy Carter — and Galaxy Quest would’ve earned half-a-billion bucks at the box office when it came out in 1999.

But inept and indifferent studio marketing (plus competition from another “sci-fi” comedy, Ghostbusters) relegated Galaxy Quest to semi-cult status. Which is ironically appropriate, given its plot:

At a science fiction convention, fans await an appearance by the cast of Galaxy Quest, a hokey interstellar TV adventure series unceremoniously cancelled in the early 1980s. The show’s fatally typecast has-been “stars” (played by Tim Allen, Alan Rickman, Sigourney Weaver, Tony Shalhoub and Daryl Mitchell) are reduced to reluctantly signing autographs at tacky gatherings like this one, when they’re not cutting ribbons (in full costume) at supermarket openings.

That is, until genuine aliens — who, in cargo cult fashion, have based their civilization on Galaxy Quest re-runs transmitted through space — touch down and beg “the crew of the NSEA-Protector” to help them defeat the villain bent on destroying their planet. The adorable Thermians innocently believe the program’s “crew” are fearless, intrepid space warriors and technological geniuses, not just washed-up actors in laughable uniforms. Their language has no word for “pretend”…

Lazily calling this movie “a Star Trek spoof” unfairly slots it alongside broad, coarse parodies like Blazing Saddles or the soulless Mars Attacks! In truth, Galaxy Quest is a tender, big hearted valentine — more My Favorite Year than Airplane.

That the film’s jokes and, more incredibly, its special effects, hold up so well twenty years later is a testament to the loving care with which Galaxy Quest was crafted. Obeying the first (yet often ignored) commandment of movie comedy, all the actors “play it straight”

July 8, 2019

QotD: Orwell on capitalism versus socialism

Filed under: Books, Britain, Europe, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Orwell’s press card portrait, 1943

No one can question the dirtiness of international politics from 1870 onwards: it does not follow that it would have been a good thing to allow the German army to rule Europe. It is just possible that some rather sordid transactions are going on behind the scenes now, and that current propaganda “against Nazism” (cf. “against Prussian militarism”) will look pretty thin in 1970, but Europe will certainly be a better place if Hitler and his followers are removed from it. Between them these two books sum up our present predicament. Capitalism leads to dole queues, the scramble for markets, and war. Collectivism leads to concentration camps, leader worship, and war. There is no way out of this unless a planned economy can somehow be combined with the freedom of the intellect, which can only happen if the concept of right and wrong is restored to politics.

Both of these writers are aware of this, more or less; but since they can show no practicable way of bringing it about the combined effect of their books is a depressing one.

George Orwell, “The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek / The Mirror of the Past by K. Zilliacus”, Observer, 1944-04-09.

July 7, 2019

Does this sound like your gym?

Filed under: Business, Health, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 05:00

Instapundit linked to this older Sean Kelly article about the “Planet Fitness” chain of health clubs. According to him, it’s even less pretty than you might have thought:

Here’s what you need to know…

  1. Planet Fitness: The gym for people who don’t really want to get in shape, owned by people who really can’t afford for the members to be there.
  2. A survey of over 20 different Planet Fitness locations in 12 different states revealed that they provide no nutritional guidance. They do however supply candy and pizza.
  3. Planet Fitness seems to promise that health and fitness will ultimately be comfortable and not involve any real effort.
  4. Planet Fitness is a big, purple-colored adult daycare marketed to people afraid to go to an actual gym.
  5. Many Planet Fitness members do want to make progress of course, but the gym’s own rules and operating guidelines seem to dissuade this.

June 15, 2019

The real explanation for our lack of moonbases/Concorde 2’s/great walls/pyramids

Filed under: Books, Economics, Europe, History, Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Homoitalicus Blog responds to a new book [At Our Wit’s End by Edward Dutton and Michael Woodley of Menie] that concludes that we (western civilization) are headed toward a similar fate as the western Roman Empire:

The reason that these staggering feats of engineering haven’t been repeated is more to do with economics and politics than with any perceived lack of engineering Genius in the population. The authors fail to reflect that emerging from the massively centralised wartime economy of the West there was an enormous technological infrastructure of scientists and capable administrators just sat there with no more Nazis to fight, communist megalomaniacs to support, Atom bombs to build and test, or greatest seabourne invasions in history to plan and implement.

This was probably the greatest concentration of intellect ever harnessed to a single cause and hopefully we’ll never need to see its like again

With the war done and dusted some new purpose needed to be found for all this talent, the way of government being what it is, returning all these geniuses to normal boring peacetime activity was never an option.

Newly nationalised aircraft industries took the wartime inventions of jet engine and the rest and evolved them with massive amounts of financial input from the government into Concorde, truly a magnificent aircraft but one which could uncharitably be described as using taxpayers’ money to ferry plutocrats from one side of the Atlantic to the other. Whether it ever really paid for itself is a moot point and the unseemly haste with which it was dumped after the crash tends to imply that its 50-year-old airframes were becoming a burden, and the economic case for making a new generation of supersonic planes is weak – luckily the will in the west for another taxpayer-funded effort doesn’t seem to be there. That is progress.

Likewise the man on the moon, possible only because of the Cold War space race.

The authors might as well explain the fact that we haven’t build another pyramid of Giza or Great Wall of China.

Their assertion that a general decline in the amount of creativity (which is correlated strongly with g) is justified by the observable decline in the quality of the output of the BBC. However other possible reasons for this are the infestation of Cultural Marxism and its baleful handmaid, Political Correctness, which really mitigate against creative thought. It is impossible to imagine making The Life of Brian, or The Sweeney or countless other shows which we enjoyed in our youth nowadays largely for reasons of PC and the fact that the BBC’s mission is now brainwashing rather than entertainment. State broadcasters the world over will suffer from the same problem, as does (worryingly) the world of academe in which speakers of truth or opinion which lie outwith accepted and very tightly bounded acceptability, are routinely no-platformed or summarily sacked. The teaching of history and the humanities generally has been debased, and only the STEM subjects seem to have resisted (excluding the question of Climate Change which has taken on the trappings of a religion rather than serious science).

As a consequence it is impossible to separate the effects of CM from the mooted results of a generalised decline in intelligence, and the authors are wrong not to point this out.

They don’t consider either the likely effect of the 20th century’s great blood letting in the fields of Flanders. A substantial proportion of the best and brightest of a generation were ground into the mud there before being able to procreate. I would be surprised if that had no effect on the quality of the gene pool.

H/T to the Continental Telegraph for the link.

June 11, 2019

“[I]t may suddenly occur to you that Mazin has turned a deadly epochal disaster into … a buddy-cop movie”

Filed under: Environment, Health, History, Media, Russia — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I haven’t watched Chernobyl, but a lot of sensible people, including Colby Cosh, insist that it’s well-worth the watching:

It looks as though HBO’s miniseries Chernobyl will take the title as the prestige TV event of the first half of 2019. This is pretty remarkable, all things considered. The writer of the series, Craig Mazin, is still described on Wikipedia as “an American screenwriter and film director best known for writing Identity Thief, The Hangover Part II, The Hangover Part III, and The Huntsman: Winter’s War.” The director, Johan Renck, is a Swede who got his start as a Eurodance performer with the nom de guerre “Stakka Bo.” For the zillionth time, HBO has spread its patented secret sauce over unpromising ingredients and delivered superb television.

I am being something of a jerk about these people, of course. Screenwriters don’t have much control over which of their scripts get made and what happens to those scripts on the set, and Mazin is admired as a critic and teacher. (Unusual respect for writers is an obvious component of that HBO magic.) As for Renck, he got from trashy music to HBO through an apprenticeship in music video — the same kind of apprenticeship that brought us David Fincher, Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry. He may, in this regard, be the last gasp of a noble tradition.

It is not that the Chernobyl series doesn’t have elements of hackiness. After spending a couple of hours watching Jared Harris’s austere scientist and Stellan Skarsgård’s smarter-than-he-looks apparatchik warm to each other while trying to save Eastern Europe from obliteration, it may suddenly occur to you that Mazin has turned a deadly epochal disaster into … a buddy-cop movie. Set aside the wonderful visual poetry, the period detail and the fine soundtrack, and the spine you’re left holding is a whodunit. It’s the Case of the Exploding Reactor.

I think Mazin would probably admit this, if he hasn’t already, but if it’s not clear enough, the whole thing winds up in the last episode with a contrived courtroom drama, one which does not quite resemble anything that ever happened in connection with Chernobyl.

Here is the funny and admirable thing: the solution that Mazin’s “cops” work out is highly technical and involved, is explained in careful detail, and is more or less the real solution to the mystery of Chernobyl. Mazin, who is my age and was therefore a teenager when the reactor went kablooie, is not some Jordan Peterson-esque Soviet-history nerd or someone who wanted to turn Chernobyl into a metaphor. It just seems to have occurred to him one day, quite recently, that he knew the word “Chernobyl,” and remembered that Chernobyl was very bad, but wasn’t sure what exactly had happened. When he found out he realized there was a movie in it.

Between the accidents at Chernobyl and Three-Mile Island (in 1979), the nuclear power industry was set back literally decades … despite being one of the best — and safest — answers to the problem of generating enough electricity to keep modern industrial countries humming along while also reducing production of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Maybe someone will produce a TV mini-series to de-mystify the American nuclear accident soon, and debunk the half-truths, quarter-truths, and outright lies that still bedevil any discussion of nuclear power in the western world.

June 6, 2019

QotD: Reviewing Saving Private Ryan

Filed under: History, Media, Military, Quotations, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

When Saving Private Ryan was released in America, I made a mild observation to the effect that its premise was a lot of hooey, and received in response several indignant letters pointing out that it was “based on a true story”, that of the Sullivan brothers. Er, not quite. The Sullivans’ story is stirringly told in The Fighting Sullivans (1942, directed by 42nd Street’s Lloyd Bacon): after Pearl Harbor, all five brothers enlist — and all five die aboard the [cruiser] Juneau at Guadalcanal. As a result, to avoid the recurrence of such a freakish tragedy, the United States changed its policy on family members serving together. Steven Spielberg’s film is not “based” on the Sullivans, except insofar as General George C. Marshall, the US Army’s chief of staff, mentions their fate to explain his decision.

Rather, the film is a kind of extension of the thinking behind the policy change: when three out of four Ryan brothers are killed in action, General Marshall orders a rescue mission to retrieve the sole surviving sibling, whose general whereabouts are somewhere behind enemy lines in Normandy — and all this a couple of days after D-Day. No such incident took place: no Allied commander would have thought it worth the risk in lives to assuage one distraught mother’s potential further bereavement.

Spielberg’s mistake is that, as one of the last remaining hardcore Clinton groupies, he’s thinking in Clintonian terms — about publicity, image, spin: the death of another Ryan brother would not “look good”. When Spielberg has General Marshall read out a letter from Lincoln to a mother whose sons all died in the Civil War, we’re certainly meant to find his consoling words — that they gave their lives in a great and noble cause — inadequate. It’s a measure of the gulf between 1944 and 1998 that The Fighting Sullivans was released during the war because it was thought the supreme sacrifice of one family would be inspiring. Alas, not to baby boomers.

So much has been written about the unprecedented “realism” of this film’s war scenes that the equally unprecedented unrealism of its thinking has passed virtually unnoticed. You’ve probably seen a zillion articles about the film’s prologue — a recreation of D-Day which lasts almost as long and doubtless cost a lot more — so I’ll say only this: yes, it’s impressive; yes, every shot of blood and tissue and body parts is underlined by adroit effects; yes, every moment is a testament to Spielberg’s command of cinematic technique; but that’s the problem — you react to it as technique, as showmanship. There’s one perfect shot after another: the silence underwater, with its dangerous illusion of respite; the pitterpatter of rain on leaves gradually blurring into rifle fire. The whole thing is oddly pointless: you’re not engaged by the predicament of the troops because you’re so busy admiring the great film-maker behind them. A film cannot really be “authentic” if all you notice is the authenticity.

Mark Steyn, The Spectator, 1998-09-12 (linked from SteynOnline).

June 5, 2019

QotD: The almost unknown economic good news since 1800

Filed under: Economics, History, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Ordinary people, and some economists, and even a few economic historians, don’t know it. Hans Rosling, the late, great Swedish professor of public health, emphasized how little most people, even very well-informed people, know about the overwhelmingly good news 1800 to the present, or even 1960 to the present (e.g., falling birth rates, falling infant death rates, rising literacy). He surveyed people, in his various audiences to the number of 20,000. They were embarrassingly less accurate on the whole than monkeys would be throwing darts at the multiple choice possibilities. And the human experts, with ordinary citizens, were always biased in a pessimistic, anti-modern direction. Consider Kenneth Pomeranz, in his fine book with Steven Topik, The World That Trade Created. Pomeranz and Topik tell many interesting and accurate stories about the bad side of creative destruction (which comes from any human progress, not as is often said on the left from “neo-liberalism”). But they never acknowledge the gigantic improvements coming from it for ordinary people. Not once.

Dierdre McCloskey, “How Growth Happens: Liberalism, Innovism, and the Great Enrichment (Preliminary version)” [PDF], 2018-11-29.

May 31, 2019

History Buffs: Master and Commander

Filed under: Britain, France, History, Media, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

History Buffs
Published on 18 Sep 2016

History Buffs is back! To thank you all for your patience while I’ve been away on holiday, I’m starting off with Master and Commander!

SUPPORT HISTORY BUFFS ON PATREON
https://www.patreon.com/HistoryBuffs

● Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HistoryBuffsNH

________________________________________­­_________________________________

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World is a 2003 American epic historical drama film written, produced and directed by Peter Weir. The film stars Russell Crowe as Captain Jack Aubrey and Paul Bettany as Dr. Stephen Maturin. The film, which cost $150 million to make, was a co-production of 20th Century Fox, Miramax Films, Universal Pictures, and Samuel Goldwyn Films, and released on November 14, 2003 to critical acclaim. The film’s plot and characters are adapted from three novels in author Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey–Maturin series, which includes 20 completed novels of Jack Aubrey’s naval career.

At the 76th Academy Awards, the film was nominated for 10 Oscars, including Best Picture. It won in two categories, Best Cinematography and Best Sound Editing and lost in all other categories to The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

QotD: How we gain weight

Filed under: Books, Food, Health, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I first learned about [Stephan] Guyenet’s work from his various debates with Gary Taubes and his supporters, where he usually represents the “establishment” side. He is very careful to emphasize that the establishment doesn’t look anything like Taubes’ caricature of it. The establishment doesn’t believe that obesity is just about weak-willed people voluntarily choosing to eat too much, or that obese people would get thin if they just tried diet and exercise, or that all calories are the same. He writes

    The [calories in, calories out or CICO] model is the idea that our body weight is determined by voluntary decisions about how much we eat and move, and in order to control our body weight, all we need is a little advice about how many calories to eat and burn, and a little willpower. The primary defining feature of this model is that it assumes that food intake and body fatness are not regulated. This model seems to exist mostly to make lean people feel smug, since it attributes their leanness entirely to wise voluntary decisions and a strong character. I think at this point, few people in the research world believe the CICO model.

    [Debate opponent Dr. David] Ludwig and I both agree that it provides a poor fit for the evidence. As an alternative, Ludwig proposes the insulin model, which states that the primary cause of obesity is excessive insulin action on fat cells, which in turn is caused principally by rapidly-digesting carbohydrate. According to this model, too much insulin reduces blood levels of glucose and fatty acids (the two primary circulating metabolic fuels), simultaneously leading to hunger, fatigue, and fat gain. Overeating is caused by a kind of “internal starvation”. There are other versions of the insulin model, but this is the one advocated by Ludwig (and Taubes), so it will be my focus.

    But there’s a third model, not mentioned by Ludwig or Taubes, which is the one that predominates in my field. It acknowledges the fact that body weight is regulated, but the regulation happens in the brain, in response to signals from the body that indicate its energy status. Chief among these signals is the hormone leptin, but many others play a role (insulin, ghrelin, glucagon, CCK, GLP-1, glucose, amino acids, etc.)

The Hungry Brain is part of Guyenet’s attempt to explain this third model, and it basically succeeds. But like many “third way” style proposals, it leaves a lot of ambiguity. With CICO, at least you know where you stand – confident that everything is based on willpower and that you can ignore biology completely. And again, with Taubes, you know where you stand – confident that willpower is useless and that low-carb diets will solve everything. The Hungry Brain is a little more complicated, a little harder to get a read on, and at times pretty wishy-washy.

But listening to people’s confidently-asserted simple and elegant ideas was how we got into this mess, so whatever, let’s keep reading.

Scott Alexander, “Book Review: The Hungry Brain“, Slate Star Codex, 2017-04-27.

May 27, 2019

Victoria & Abdul, a film about “the brown John Brown”

Filed under: Britain, History, India, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Mark Steyn on the 2017 movie Victoria & Abdul:

As I mentioned on the radio yesterday, May 24th 2019 marks the bicentennial of Queen Victoria. So it would seem appropriate to have a bit of cinematic Victoriana for our Saturday movie date. Her Majesty was an important and consequential figure in almost every corner of the world, and once upon a time the biopics reflected that. But she was to a degree unknown and unknowable, which offers great opportunities to the contemporary biographical sensibility. And so the most notable films of the last two decades belong to a sub-genre of their own: the Queen-Empress and the men who caught the eye of a lonely and isolated woman in the long decades of her widowhood. John Madden’s Mrs Brown (1997) is about the Queen’s relationship with her ghillie; Stephen Frears’ Victoria & Abdul (exactly twenty years later, 2017) is about the Queen’s relationship with her munshi.

Queen Victoria (1819-1901) portrait by Bassano, 1882.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons

If you don’t know what a ghillie is, well, it’s a Scots Gaelic word for a Highland chief’s attendant on a fishing or hunting trip. If you don’t know what a munshi is, hey, relax: Nobody in the Royal Household does either, and so they’re a little taken aback to find that a Hindu waiter brought over to add a bit of imperial exotica to the Golden Jubilee in 1887 has suddenly been promoted to the hitherto unknown position of “Munshi and Indian Clerk to the Queen-Empress”.

A court favorite is always resented by less-favored courtiers – for whatever reason suffices. In Mrs Brown (the below-stairs mocking name for her ghillie-smitten Majesty), the favorite, John Brown, is resented for being a big brawny bit of Highland rough. In Victoria & Abdul, which begins four years after the Highland fling’s sudden death, the new favorite, Abdul Karim, is resented because his insinuating Moghul and Persian airs are regarded as ludicrously above his station.

Yet they all get what’s going on: As one lady-in-waiting at Balmoral titters, Abdul is “the brown John Brown”.

To confirm that we are in the realm of sequel, the Queen in both films is played, splendidly and sympathetically, by Judi Dench, and the supporting characters are largely identical, too – from Henry Ponsonby, the Queen’s Private Secretary, to her long-serving Lady of the Bedchamber, Lady Churchill. As in Mrs Brown, the latter screenplay is disfigured by solecisms. In the earlier film, the script cannot quite decide whether the Private Secretary is “Sir Henry” or “Mr Ponsonby”. In the sequel, Judi Dench sighs that, “I have almost a billion citizens” – not a sentence she would ever have uttered: she had almost a billion subjects – and, as wily old Éamon de Valera would later remark in another context, the concept of “citizenship” was all but unknown in the British Empire. One of her last major legislative acts was to give Royal Assent to the Australian constitution – which she found to be in very poor taste, as the word “Commonwealth” reminded her of Oliver Cromwell.

May 25, 2019

QotD: Orwell reviews Hayek

Filed under: Books, Britain, Economics, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Taken together, these two books give grounds for dismay. The first of them is an eloquent defence of laissez-faire capitalism, the other is an even more vehement denunciation of it. They cover to some extent the same ground, they frequently quote the same authorities, and they even start out with the same premise, since each of them assumes that Western civilization depends on the sanctity of the individual. Yet each writer is convinced that the other’s policy leads directly to slavery, and the alarming thing is that they may both be right.

Of the two, Professor Hayek’s book is perhaps the more valuable, because the views it puts forward are less fashionable at the moment than those of Mr Zilliacus. Shortly, Professor Hayek’s thesis is that Socialism inevitably leads to despotism, and that in Germany the Nazis were able to succeed because the Socialists had already done most of their work for them, especially the intellectual work of weakening the desire for liberty. By bringing the whole of life under the control of the State, Socialism necessarily gives power to an inner ring of bureaucrats, who in almost every case will be men who want power for its own sake and will stick at nothing in order to retain it. Britain, he says, is now going the same road as Germany, with the left-wing intelligentsia in the van and the Tory Party a good second. The only salvation lies in returning to an unplanned economy, free competition, and emphasis on liberty rather than on security.In the negative part of Professor Hayek’s thesis there is a great deal of truth. It cannot be said too often – at any rate, it is not being said nearly often enough – that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamed of.

George Orwell, “The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek / The Mirror of the Past by K. Zilliacus”, Observer, 1944-04-09.

May 23, 2019

QotD: “Prestige” TV shows

Filed under: Media, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Just a bugaboo of mine: These “Prestige” TV show seem to think that a bore-you-to-tears pacing is a de facto marker of “quality writing and deep characterization,” and most TV critics aren’t hip enough to get the con. A lot of these shows’ very slow pace suggests to me they are being written with a target audience of people “multitasking” on the computer as they half-watch in mind. I guess when you’re mostly reading Instagram while the TV is on, you maybe don’t notice that nothing has happened in the past three minutes. And I guess if you’re one of the one-eye-on-tv-one-eye-on-twitter crowd, you need nothing to happen for long stretches, or else you’ll be missing important stuff.

Ace, “Does ‘Prestige TV’ Just Mean Slow, Tedious, Unpleasant and Dimly-Lit?”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2017-05-15.

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