The Crack

Posted on July 11, 2015 by leslie
Citizen Smith

Citizen Smith

The Crack

Bill Hartley discovers bias in the unlikeliest of places

Most towns and cities have access to a listings magazine and in the North East of England there is one called The Crack. Packed within its pages are details of just about every arts activity you can think of. The magazine (which is free) paints a picture of a vibrant scene, everything from the mainstream, Newcastle Theatre Royal to humbler events taking place upstairs in a pub. Additionally there are film, book and music reviews introducing the reader to bands and performers that might not otherwise be encountered. All told the magazine is an invaluable guide to what’s going on in a part of the country which covers everywhere from large conurbations to rural outposts in deepest Northumberland. Strangely though there seems to be an assumption on the part of those who produce it that readers share their political opinions. You might suppose that a listings magazine would be above taking an overtly political stance and simply showcase what is available in the region. However the current edition is fairly typical.

First there is a leading article alarmingly entitled ‘Is God Dead?’ sub headed: what’s the point of living? Just in case you believed that a philosophical essay had crept into the pages of a mere listings magazine, then reading a few sentences would make everything clear. Hoping but not entirely convinced that the writer is being ironic, these gloomy headlines were prompted by the editor contemplating the sight of David Cameron standing outside Number 10. Yes folks in the editorial office of this magazine they are still in a state of shock over the result of the general election. Life may go on as usual for the rest of us but at The Crack they appear to be in a state of deep depression, which may be something of a distraction for a reader wishing to see what’s on at the local art gallery. Further along in this piece the editor gives us his views on George Osborne and what appears to be a go at macroeconomics. Surprisingly the point being made is that in comparison Gordon Brown as chancellor was a model of parsimony. Fortunately for the purposes of research I troubled to read the whole thing, otherwise Brown as heir to Stafford Cripps would have passed me by.

In fairness The Crack reflects a certain attitude to be found in the North East. Once you’ve crossed the Tees it’s another country; resentful of The South (any government spending south of the river is ‘evidence of where the government’s true priorities lie’). Here I’m quoting Emma Lewell Buck the South Shields Labour MP, on a local television show last month.

Anyway back to The Crack and still in only as far as page six. Here there is an article illustrated by a line drawing of someone done up to resemble Che Guevara: beard, beret and red star cap badge. Again I’m not sure this is entirely ironic. There is no indication why what follows has a place in an arts listings magazine. Essentially the writer is attempting to analyse the causes of Labour’s defeat at the last general election but the dust settled on that a while back so it has the immediacy of the Suez Crisis. I wouldn’t have minded this further bit of self indulgence save for a sense that it seems to have been written on the basis that readers automatically share the dismay at Labour’s defeat.

Happily once over these hurdles then the magazine adopts an air of normality and concentrates on what it is meant to be doing: covering the arts. Unfortunately it doesn’t last because by page 14 another reviewer starts banging on about socialist values (inference: you can’t really appreciate the arts in the North East unless you share these). The warning signal is when the writer drags out that old cliché ‘community spirit’: the two terms being it seems interchangeable. No mention of the fact that in the North East Labour run councils have had a good go at destroying communities. Unfortunately even some of the artistes and promoters feel that this attitude is necessary in order to fit in.

For example how about an evening at The Stand Comedy Club? Who’s appearing? It doesn’t matter: the gig is called ‘Sod the Tories’.

All of this makes the magazine seem at times like something from an episode of The Young Ones edited by the late Rick Mayall as the voice of youth using ‘Thatcher’ and ‘Fascist’ interchangeably and yes, you can find an anti Thatcher T shirt for sale in The Crack.

Another performer publishes two opposing quotes: ‘more skilful and playful than ever’ and ‘is not funny and has nothing to say’. A brave thing to do you might suppose, however the first is from The Guardian and the second from The Daily Telegraph. Inference: relax folks we know who to believe here don’t we? It’s certainly not the critic writing in a ‘right wing newspaper’. All of this just tends to sustain the view of a part of the country where nothing much has happened since the miner’s strike.   

When you thought it couldn’t get any worse the critic for Lesbian/Gay theatre gets in on it too. In The Crack sexuality as well as politics shapes the critical faculty where art of a certain kind is being discussed and you need to be appropriately qualified to comment. Before getting down to business the critic first shares her shock and dismay at…. you’ve guessed it, the Tories winning a majority.

It is a pity that the producers of this magazine choose to infuse it with Citizen Smith style politics. This adds absolutely nothing of value and reveals a crude bias that makes one wonder how objective they might be about work which does not subscribe to their world view. The Crack is a very good listings magazine that needs to escape the North East culture of victim hood and grow up a bit.

Bill Hartley writes from Yorkshire

 

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This Season’s Wine

Posted on July 11, 2015 by leslie

Furleigh 1-3

This Season’s Wine

July 2015

This season’s featured beverages range from the finest English sparkling, through good quality wines at very reasonable prices (including two different Rieslings), to some slightly more unusual soft drinks – surprising and sometimes even startling options for drivers or non-drinkers. One theme represented here, and which is becoming increasingly common, is that of mixing fruit flavours with wines and ciders; perhaps an attempt to close the gap between hard and soft drinks; or to appeal to new markets by broadening out and making products seem more accessible.

The family-owned and award-winning vineyard of Furleigh Estate in Dorset uses traditional methods, and classic Chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier grapes (with just a small quantity of Furleigh Estate’s Tyrannosaurus Red added at tirage) to produce their Sparkling Rosé. The 2010 Rosé is salmon pink and nicely effervescent, with a very strongly distinctive nose of strawberries. The taste combines said strawberries with more citrusy flavours – lime, lemon, and also fresh crab-apples. The wine is fairly dry, with little hint of sweetness despite the soft berry fruits, and makes a highly refreshing, and extremely elegant beverage, suitable for special occasions. Priced £28.50 from www.furleighestate.co.uk, or from good wine shops in London, Dorset and Oxfordshire.

Furleigh Estate

Furleigh Estate

The vineyard is marking its tenth anniversary by launching an exclusive English wine club. Benefits include the opportunity to buy new release wines at discounted prices, free bottles of wine, complimentary tours of the vineyard and private and free tastings, as well as invitations to wine and food events held at the vineyard, which provide an insight into the wine and wine-making in a relaxed and friendly atmosphere. All this is available for an annual membership fee of only £60 per person (or £75 per couple); more information can be found on their website www.furleighestate.co.uk, but it seems to me a rather fine way to show support for English wine, as well as to reap a generous number of benefits from one of our very best vineyards.

The next sparkling on my list is Hardy’s Stamp Sparkling Chardonnay Pinot Noir, which has a biscuity nose and an explosion of bubbles, which fill the mouth with a delightful riot of effervescence. Pleasantly, it’s neither too dry nor too citric – the lemony tones are tempered by that biscuit, but also by the sweeter flavours of apricot and peach. This is a worryingly moreish wine – I, for one, could happily sit drinking it all evening, with its perfect balance of sweet and dryness and of fruity, floral and mineral elements and energising finish. A delightful wine, especially for its very reasonable price of £8.99.

Hardy’s Stamp Sparkling Chardonnay Pinot Noir

Hardy’s Stamp Sparkling Chardonnay Pinot Noir

Moving on to reds, in which genre I have two recommendations: Bordiere Nord Syrah Grenache 2014 hails from the Pays D’Oc in the Languedoc-Rousillon region, surrounded by the Pyrenees and Cevennes mountain ranges. Bordiere refers to the hedgerows and rocky walls that form the boundaries of vineyards, and the wine is a deep, rich and dark colour with a purple tint. The nose is full of dark berry fruits – predominantly blackberries and blackcurrants, with some bilberries too. The taste is also rich and dark; a hint of sweetness from the bilberries and blackberries follows an initial burst of dark forests, black tar, ash and tart, glistening blackcurrants (Majestic £6.99).

Kumala brings us its 2013 Reserve Shiraz from South Africa’s Western Cape, with its modern, quirky but sophisticated lizard motif. The wine is a dark ruby red colour; with a nose of dark berry fruits and a black and rich flavour – full of spice with bites of chilli and pepper, and some higher tones of tannins and dark berry fruits – mainly blackcurrants. There are hints of darker tar and leather on the aftertaste, making this a lusciously dark and rich wine – perfect for steaks, red meats and stews. It is just a pity about the typo on the label, which speaks of “aroma’s”, with an unnecessary and grammatically incorrect apostrophe (£8.99 from Tesco.)

Kumala 2013 Reserve Shiraz from South Africa’s Western Cape

Kumala 2013 Reserve Shiraz from South Africa’s Western Cape

The first of two Rieslings that have recently impressed me is Domaine Schlumberger Alsace Riesling 2011 “Les Prince Abbes”; a rich and satisfying dry Riesling from grapes grown on steep mountain slope terraces. It pours into the glass in a luscious gloopy slosh – appearing quite thick and syrupy for a dry wine (in a good way), and with plenty of body. A pale straw colour, it has a nose predominantly of citrus fruits – oodles of grapefruit – but also the sweeter aroma of fresh apples. The taste is drier than the nose intimates; grapefruit flavours are very strong but it’s also quite a lemony wine, with hints of pineapple and dry hay along with a little spice – white pepper and ginger giving some bite, and also slight mineral elements – slate and even crumblier chalk (£13.99 Majestic.)

Secondly, but equally good, is the Trimbach Riesling 2012 from central Alsace. This has a pale straw colour and a nose of fresh apples; with intimations of minerals and hay. The predominant flavour is a tart lemon but this is preceded by gentler peach and apricot tones, while the lingering finish is of hay and more mineral elements; a very fine dry Riesling with plenty of body and character. (Available from the Wine Society priced £10.95.)

A hint of sunshine calls for a cooling glass of rosé, and winemaker Rodolfo Bastida has brought us a pale, dry ‘clarete’ style of rosé that is often to be found in the wine bars of the Rioja Alta, but seldom exported. Using only Garnacha grapes, Ramon Bilbao Rosado 2014 is a very dry, very fresh wine, salmon in colour, and with a floral rather than predominantly fruity nose (lots of glorious apple blossom in particular). The taste is sharp and rich – a fair amount of citrus fruits now showing their colours, but with some grass and straw also adding extra dryness. It has an immensely clear taste. This is a wine for those who think they don’t like rosé, to prove them wrong! Available priced £9.99 from Essentially Wine (essentiallywine.co.uk).

A completely different type of wine can be found in Echo Falls’s Fruit Fusion rosé wine with Summer Berries – a rosé of electric orangey-pink colour and startlingly intense nose of strawberries and cream. The flavour is equally startling and intense, with far more fruit drink in it than wine – it’s like an alcoholic berry juice, rich and extremely sweet, with a very creamy aftertaste – strawberries and cream to the fore again. Probably a very dangerous bottle to leave anywhere near children (I had to wrestle my glass out of the grip of my 15-month old son!). Not one for the purists, although you can well imagine it would have its fans (£5.75 from Tesco.)

Echo Falls’s Fruit Fusion rosé wine with Summer Berries

Echo Falls’s Fruit Fusion rosé wine with Summer Berries

Sheppy’s Cider has also been following the fashion for adding berry fruits to its drinks, hence the Cider with Raspberry – a slightly sparkling combination of Somerset cider and raspberry juice which delivers a bitter-sweet flavour. A pinky colour with orange tint and nose of raspberries, the initial taste is of sharp apples with a hint of citrus, which is followed by a long sweetness from the berries. The rather creamy taste and texture make it a little like liquid strawberries and cream. Refreshing, but I prefer the pure cider taste (6 for £15 from www.sheppyscider.com.)

Sheppy’s Vintage Reserve 2014, therefore, is more my cup of tea – a multi-award winner aged in traditional oak vats, with a warm golden colour – the essence of Autumn! It has a strong and rich nose of apples, and slight sparkle, which adds a very fresh and lively dimension. The flavour itself is pure apple – but only the very freshest and finest of fruits; luscious and rich. There is a good sweet-dry balance too, with a dusty dryness, yet also a fresh honeyed crunch from sweet, red apples making what is probably best described as a medium sweet cider. A truly lovely drink (6 for £12.60 from www.sheppyscider.com.)

There seems to have been an explosion of intriguingly inventive and yet health / environment-conscious soft drinks recently, such as Nix and Kix, whose opaque peach-coloured, fiery, cleansing and refreshing drinks contain cayenne pepper from a top British chilli farm, nothing artificial and under 70 calories a bottle. Their cucumber and lime flavour features both floral accents and warm tones from the pepper on the nose. The initial taste is a delicate one of distinctive cucumber, which is followed by a fiery kick and long lingering bite of hot pepper which tingles on the tongue. The ingredient list is short and natural – just water, grape juice concentrate, lime juice, cucumber extract and cayenne pepper. The lemon and lime flavour has a very strongly citrus nose yet with strong pepper tones, too. The flavour is very powerful and refreshing, with unmistakable lemon and lime followed by that hot kick of the cayenne pepper, whilst Blood orange and ginger has an immediate sharp acidic citric burst of blood orange and some warm ginger. The cayenne pepper hit is far more gentle in this one – more of a warm glow afterwards than the fiery blaze of the cucumber and lime and the lemon and lime flavours. Currently available from a range of outlets, cafes and restaurants in East London.

If Nix and Kix drinks are the cool, brash young kids on the block, Luscombe drinks are the refined, cultured attendees of elegant summer garden parties. The Passionate Ginger wasn’t as hot as I was expecting, yet is delicious nevertheless: full of natural sediment (lemon and ginger), it combines a traditional recipe of fresh root ginger and Sicilian lemons with a twist of passion fruit, which lends an intriguing and modern element. The drink itself is deeply refreshing – full of citrus flavours and floral aromas, and with gentle and warming heat from the ginger. A hint of sweetness tempers the citrus, making for a fully rounded drink.

The Madagascan Vanilla Soda is made with organic grape juice, Madagascan vanilla extract and lemon oil. This gently effervescing drink has a strong vanilla aroma with a hint of lemon and a pale straw colour; the flavour is sophisticated and graceful, with its citrus tang and strong pure vanilla taste. My final Luscombe is even more special – Damascene Rose Bubbly is romantically entitled “a celebration of the Majestic rose of the Orient”, and contains organic Muscat grape, organic damascene rose water and organic orange blossom water. An effervescent, refreshing beverage with a delicate but unmistakable rose flavour and a wonderful floral and fruity aroma, it is extremely elegant and grown-up – a perfect non-alcoholic option for sophisticated garden parties and soirees. (Available as packs of four for £7.99 from www.shopsatdartington.com.)

Last, but not least, we come to the bold and inventive Cawston Press – to whose Apple and Ginger I freely admit myself addicted – a sweet apple juice from only the finest apples, with a spicy, piquant tang of ginger which adds a further dimension to the taste and a mature twist. Their apple and rhubarb is also rather lovely, with a gloriously earthy aroma and nose overwhelmingly redolent of rhubarb – more so than the taste, actually; as the flavour of the combination of apple and rhubarb is curiously similar to pineapple, yet with hints of grapefruit as well. Nothing else has gone in the making of the juice – just apple and rhubarb, making a drink that is fresh with a lovely balance of sweetness and tartness and a very rounded taste. In Terrific Tomato, we find another interesting twist on the traditional – over half tomato juice, with the rest apple juice, lemon juice, celery juice and some added chilli, making a tomato drink that is sweeter than usual tomato juice, yet has a pleasantly fiery kick at the aftertaste.

Cawston’s new vegetable and fruit blends, meanwhile, offer innovative olfactory and taste experiences: Radiant Roots features beetroot, carrot, apple and ginger; the beetroot inclusion utterly unmistakable from both the bold purple-red colour and the nose, while the taste takes ones through first the higher tones of the apple juice followed by the very healthy earthiness from the root vegetables. A very cleansing-feeling drink.

Sweet Greens contains Cawston’s trademark apple juice along with crisp salad elements: iceberg lettuce, cucumber and garden mint. At first glance it would appear to be normal apple juice but the nose betrays more mineral elements, and the taste reflects its ingredients perfectly; the strapline of “salad in a glass” describes it accurately. The vibrant orange Sunshine Blend, meanwhile, stars apple juice, carrots, orange, celery root juice and lemon. Health fanatics will love these drinks, bursting as they are with goodness and rough and rude health (£2.99 from Tesco and independent stores.)

Em Marshall-Luck is our Food and Wine Critic

Posted in Tippler | 1 Comment

Surf’s Up?

Posted on July 9, 2015 by leslie

internet2

Surf’s Up?

Mark Wegierski sketches out the social, political, and cultural impact of the Internet

Can the Internet challenge today’s informational and cultural monopoly? Can it generate real resistance to current-day trends, or does it mainly just accentuate them? It is possible that the Internet simply does not (and perhaps cannot, for the foreseeable future) provide enough “authority” and financial, administrative, and infrastructural weight to dissenting ideas.

The Internet arose as a truly mass phenomenon in the mid-to-late 1990s. In more recent years, we have moved into the so-called Internet Two – characterized by (among others) Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Google, Instagram and smartphones. The Internet had arrived, however, after three to four decades of some of the most intense, unidirectional mass media and mass educational conditioning in human history.

It is a vitally important question whether the Internet will offer the possibilities of enhancing serious social, political, cultural, and truly philosophical debate, or if the various “news” and entertainment imageries so widely and readily transmissible through it, will simply deepen the extension of American and Canadian consumerism and political-correctness, and the (mostly American) mindless, ersatz patriotism of today.

A situation now exists where it appears that little more than one percent (a somewhat different sort of “one percent”) of the population — termed variously as “the knowledge elite,” the “symbolic analysts”, or “the New Class” — endeavors to thoroughly condition the rest of the population – through the mass media and mass education systems – in what to think, feel, and believe, and in how to act. This system has been described as the managerial-therapeutic regime, the melding of big business and big government, a social environment of total administration and near-total media immersion. Any more honest challenges to the system, whether from the anti-consumerist, genuinely ecological Left, or from antiwar, localist, paleolibertarians and paleoconservatives, or from conscientious pro-life and pro-family writers, are simply being edited out of “approved”, media- and administratively-constructed social reality.

It is an open question whether simply making some good ideas available on the Internet, can have a major social, cultural, and political impact. Although some may not wish to admit it, there is a clear hierarchy of information on the Internet. It ranges – roughly – from the mostly unmoderated, self-posting forum, or purely personal website or blog (unless the person running it has already achieved major success or notoriety outside the Web); to the widely-read, conscientiously-edited, but not major-income-generating e-zine; to major web-magazines like Salon and Slate; to the websites of major media entities such as CNN and The New York Times – who are simply reinforcing their massive presence in the world outside the Web. In the general media world, it seems that there can only be a comparative handful of “exceptions that prove the rule” – such as the vast success of The Drudge Report, and the unexpected success of (for example) The Blair Witch Project. While an act of spectacular violence can bring attention to the online writings and images of the perpetrator or perpetrators, it surely does not increase the credibility of their ideas. Far from it – it usually makes their notions appear totally loathsome.

While there now exists the possibility of easy book-printing – along with a greater hope than previously that the book (or e-book) can reach a wider audience (for example, through placement on the Amazon bookselling and retail site) – the obvious “authority” and “imprimatur” of a book appearing with a major commercial, literary, or academic publisher – constitutes a very tight barrier indeed to the intellectual transmission of “unapproved” ideas. And among many so-called “alternative” or small publishers – or such putatively non-commercial forums like public television and National Public Radio — the taboos and dogmas of “political correctness” are indeed often held with even greater fervor.

As for the subgenre of talk-radio (typified by Rush Limbaugh, who has in recent years been going through a personal drug-use scandal of his own) it could be argued that there is little there apart from a jingoistic, meaningless, ersatz patriotism – whose main purpose appears to be to drive the United States into endless foreign wars. It has not occurred to many people that allowing members of the public to rant freely on the radio (or, more accurately, being given the illusion that anyone can rant freely on the radio) tends to work purely as a temporary safety-valve that might actually diminish initiatives of constructive political engagement.

One of the general effects of the Internet is the tendency to accentuate a “hyper-fragmentation” of social, cultural, and political interests, which means that broadly-based public and political debate becomes ever more difficult.

Also, in the case of a very large number of people, the Internet is used simply for access to various entertainment and pop-culture imageries and “news,” existing in various subgenres like “porn”, celebrity-cults, rock- and rap-music, and sports, movie, and television show fandom.

Today, there are also many “displacement syndromes” in a public discourse where consideration of many serious matters is mostly proscribed. These displacement syndromes include, for example, the viewing of tobacco products, guns in private hands, fast food and soft drinks as inherently and unquestionably evil – and as targets for massive government intervention and class-action lawsuits.

The displacement syndrome is at its most acute when people express such overbearing concern about the purely physical health of individuals (especially children), while paying virtually no attention to the cultural and spiritual aspects of what might constitute a “healthier” social setting and society.

Ironically, physical health itself has been undermined (especially in the United States), by the increasing division between an overweight, spectator public, and a handful of “beautiful people” and sport-stars. Another obvious point is that overeating often arises from deep personal and social frustrations – and many persons’ sense of inadequacy is reinforced by media advertising, programs, and films that push the most excessive consumerism and celebrity-worship. In most cases, the more men imbibe readily-available erotic imagery, the less they have real sex, and the less their prospects of attaining real intimacy.

It makes more sense to examine the deep-seated social and cultural reasons why people are, for example, over-eating or looking at “porn”, rather than blaming the fast food companies or Internet sites for catering to those needs.

Other vehicles for the diminution of serious criticism of the current-day regime are those “escapisms” which are offered to the more manifestly bright, inquisitive, and comparatively decent among the youth and children today (or had been offered over the last few decades). These include things like “properly-steered” volunteer work – and such deeply engrossing endeavors as role-playing games (such as Dungeons and Dragons); various video, computer, and electronic games (including the so-called “massively multi-player online role-playing games” such as Everquest); the popular study of dinosaurs or astronomy; science fiction, fantasy, and “serious comic-book” fandom (such as, most prominently, Star Trek); and so forth. Most of these could be (to a large extent) characterized as “geek subgenres” – and what “geek” does not desire to somehow “transcend” his or her “geekhood.” Instead of awaiting the next “dark future” electronic game (however intelligently designed) – such as (some years ago) Deus Ex: Invisible War – or endlessly arguing in obsessive ways about the philosophies of The Matrix movies — young people might seek to inquire about the lineaments of the world they actually inhabit, and how it might be changed for the better.

One may note in today’s society the virtual disappearance of “middle-level” commentators. There appears to have emerged a situation with a division between a tiny handful of very comfortably-funded, mostly “court” academics, intellectuals, media-people, and commentators – and a broad mass of powerless wannabe pundits, usually with little financial resources, who appear mostly in various eclectic small publications and comparatively little-known websites. They can all too often be simply written off by the establishment media as “extremists” or “whackos” – regardless of the possible perceptiveness and clarity of their views. Indeed, it is entirely in the interests of the media and academic elite to permit the promulgation of the wildest conspiracy-theories and vitriol on the Web – since it tends to discredit those who try to make their way as serious critics and commentators there.

Those among the masses with little intellectual curiosity and engagement (whom the media-elite probably privately consider little better than “cattle” or “sheeple”) are given what George Orwell in his famous dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four characterized as “prole-feed”. Today, this consists mostly of endless, stupefying, consumption-driving advertising, “reality-shows”, and celebrity-gossip “news” – combined with rock- and rap-music, the fashion-industry, the massive excitement of sports, the titillation of various kinds of “porn”, the sneering cynicism of today’s comedy (especially stand-up comedy), and the extra jolt of horror and violence. Most of these kinds of emotional engagements are also delivered frequently enough through the regular evening “news”.

Freedom of speech appears to exist today only for those who are massively and independently wealthy, or manifestly willing to accept a relatively immiserated existence as the price for writing or saying what they honestly think and feel. Nearly all government agencies and institutions, universities and colleges, and private corporations, including major media enterprises, are very likely to fire their “offending” employees for the slightest infractions of “political correctness.” An opinion columnist can often be fired after one especially acerbic column. An independent businessperson may be ruined by a variety of tactics, whereas there may be continual pressure on major newspapers to withdraw the columns of controversial syndicated columnists. Only a professor with tenure is (more-or-less) safe from most of these pressures.

Today, a person can usually have their opinions appear somewhere on the Internet if they are committed enough, but the media and academic elite make absolutely sure that it is not possible to make any kind of living from such writing endeavors. So this genre of social and cultural commentary and criticism becomes for most a purely existential endeavor. Nevertheless, for the vast majority of persons with dissenting views, having their ideas appear somewhere on the Internet offers a great deal of comfort and reassurance, and a stabilizing sense of community, that, among other results, definitively turns them away from pursuing violence.

In today’s society, there are still some professors and political columnists of dissenting views with some putative “authority” in the media – but how long can this be expected to persist, in the face of a full-spectrum, media- and educational-system “shutdown” of many important ideas and discussions?

Challenging the current-day managerial-therapeutic regime requires the persistence or creation of major social, cultural, and political infrastructures (such as, for example, various institutes, think-tanks, foundations, and effective publications) that can, to a large extent, be free of the current-day system’s informational, cultural – and indeed – financial chokehold on free thinking. Whether the Internet can indeed facilitate the creation of such infrastructures remains to be seen.

Mark Wegierski is a Toronto-based writer and historical researcher

 

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Donald comes up Trumps

Posted on July 5, 2015 by leslie

Donald Trump, credit Wikipedia

Donald comes up Trumps

Ilana Mercer finds the Republican hopeful in fine fettle

CNN anchor Don Lemon conducted an interview with Donald Trump. It went very well, for Mr. Trump, that is. So well that Lemon’s scoop is difficult to locate on CNN’s website. Instead, Mediate.com scooped the telephonic exchange.

Lemon was at a loss. He got more sour-looking by the minute, as Trump bulldozed him with the force of his convictions and personality. There was no interrupting Trump’s train of thought. The “builder-businessman” was going to say his piece.

Americans have been listening intently. “A CNN/ORC poll released Wednesday,” reported National Journal, “showed Trump had 12 percent of the vote among Republicans and Republican-leaners, second only to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who earned 19 percent.”

Trump’s retort: “I’m not happy being behind Jeb Bush.” He went on to ponder beguilingly how Bush 3 (a man he would fire) could be soaring in the polls:

“I don’t get it. He’s in favor of Common Core, extremely weak on immigration. He thinks people come over for love. I don’t understand why he’s in first place. Maybe it’s the Bush name. Last thing we need is another Bush. But I will tell you, I’m a little surprised he’s in the position he’s in.”

As Trump sees it, his countrymen are being betrayed by the Beltway. To make America great, he’d have to restore American prosperity. Jeb Bush will not do America’s bidding. It’s not his thing.

True. Jeb Bush will not lead America to the Promised Land, in Trump’s words. No politician will. The hope is that Trump, who does not need to ride us like the others, will get the parasites-in waiting off our backs.

Trump’s strength is that he keeps coming back to the stuff of life: business, economics, making a living. Politics is the stuff that kills all that.

To Trump, actions are measures by their outcomes. Mitt Romney, by Romney’s own admission, “left everything on the field.” He gave his all in the 2012 presidential campaign. But from Trump’s perspective, “Romney did a poor job.” He didn’t win. “It’s a race that should have been won,” asserted Trump.

Still, Lemon kept trying to trip Trump: “You’re being clobbered by Republican leaderships.” While voters take Donald Trump very seriously; his party’s leadership does not.

But Trump knew better. He was not going to keep the GOP’s dirty little secrets. He doesn’t have to; he can fund his own political action committee. Yes, his rivals, opponents, the consultants, Rudy Giuliani—they may go on TV to denounce him; make light of him. But his lead in the polls is making that harder. Behind the scenes, the schemers are calling on Trump, sending him little love notes.

Lemon fastened his limp-wristed grip. Trump’s ostensible lack of gravitas was the tack to take: “Will you really be there on the stage with the other Republican candidates?” the anchor persisted in disbelief. A pumped Trump snapped, “Why would I not?!”

He, Trump, had attended the Wharton School of Business; was a great student at one of the toughest schools to get into; went on to make a tremendous fortune; wrote a business book that became the bestselling business book of all time; built a great company, employed tens of thousands of people over the years, and is a great success. How is he, Trump, unfit to stand on stage with “some governor who is nothing, and some senator who is not very good and has not done a good job?!”

Note that Trump resorts to self-praise, primarily, when denigrated by denizens of the political process. People have forgotten. So he must remind them: success is about creating value for people in the free market; not wielding force against them in the political arena.

“Our country is being run by people who don’t know what they’re doing. Our politicians are not smart. I want our country to thrive.”

And:

“Illegal immigration is killing our country. You got to have a border. If you don’t have a border, you don’t have a country.”

Lemon was aghast. Truth has that effect on the gormless. The anchor shifted the focus to Macy’s fit of pique, hoping he’d score some points against Trump in that department. The department store had discontinued Trump’s clothing line. Donald was “divisive,” Macy’s whined.

Trump’s one-two punch: “Macy’s folded under pressure. It’s not a big business for me; it’s very small. It’s ties and stuff. It’s a peanut. CEO Terry Lundgren folded under pressure. That’s the problem with our country; everyone folds under pressure. Two picketers arrive outside Macy’s and the store folds. People can’t handle pressure. That’s OK with me. It’s a very small business; let them do what they want to do. You have to ride through the pressure. They can’t handle pressure. It’s fine.”

Would that militant gay couples were as tolerant toward the poor baker who doesn’t wish to bake them a wedding cake as Trump is toward those who shun his business.

The unremitting influx of peasants pouring over the U.S. border with Mexico is having a disastrous impact on America—on crime rates, urban sprawl, traffic congestion, overcrowding, pollution, infrastructure, the loss of rural and protected land and species. Malfunctioning media—overbearing fools like Fox News’ ubiquitous Juan Williams—believe Trump’s pronouncements on these effects is “divisive.”

Au contraire. Trump’s impolitic truth-telling seems to have united a hell of a lot of hopeless Americans.

The best of Trump Lemon left for last. “Is there anything you’d like to clear up while I have you here?”

“Nothing, absolutely nothing,” Donald fired back.

There will be no Trump apology tour.

ILANA Mercer is a US-based, libertarian writer. She pens WND’s longest-standing, exclusive, paleolibertarian weekly column, “Return to Reason.” With a unique audience of 8 million, the site has been rated by Alexa as the most frequented “conservative” site on the Internet. Ilana has also featured on RT with the “Paleolibertarian Column,” and she contributes to Economic Policy Journal (the premier libertarian site on the web), Junge Freiheit, a German weekly of excellence, as well as to the British Libertarian Alliance and Quarterly Review (the celebrated British journal founded in 1809 by Walter Scott, Robert Southey and George Canning), where she is also contributing editor. Formerly syndicated by Creators Syndicate, Ilana is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies (an award-winning, independent, non-profit, free-market economic policy think tank).

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A Message of Hope from the Land of the Southern Cross

Posted on July 4, 2015 by leslie

St Patrick’s Cathedral, Melbourne

A Message of Hope from the land of the Southern Cross

Jarred Vehlen reviews Andrew Huntley’s new collection of poetry 

From Tradition and away from Tradition: Poems, 2001-2014, by Andrew Huntley, Extra Castra Publications, 2014

For generations men have spoken about the Western tradition, or all that makes up European culture; that which is handed down from one generation to the next, and is preserved in our religion, great books, art, music and architecture. Since the nineteen-sixties, this idea has been dangerously undermined, among other things, by post-modernism and deconstructionism. Its exponents would have us believe that such attempts to speak about our tradition account for nothing more than a “grand narrative”, a great fiction that is set in place to uphold traditional hierarchies and forms of authority, and ought therefore to be abandoned in favour of egalitarianism and democracy. We are told to distrust our ancestors, for they knew only a fraction of what we now know, and to question our customs and conventions in the name of progress. The pursuit for Truth is cast aside in favour of relativism. This way of thinking has led to a conscious effort to destroy our cultural heritage. Yet, despite this wholesale destruction of tradition, there appears to be a resurgence of traditional ways of thinking and of viewing our cultural history.

The first poem of Andrew Huntley’s fourth published collection of poems, From Tradition and away from Tradition, sets the tone for what is a collection of concentrated poetic meditations on the present state of the West. Through “On Reading a Book Discarded by a Dominican Library” the poet observes that, collectively, we no longer take any interest in “Blest books”; those works, theological, philosophical, literary, historical, that have formed our tradition. In our neophilic age, we “…sickly prize/ Ephemerality in word and deed…”. This turning away from once valued books in an unceasing search for novelty becomes something of a symbol of our turning away from our cultural heritage, ultimately our Christian heritage, and is the unifying theme of the collection. Continue reading →

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On the “Cuspers”

Posted on July 4, 2015 by leslie

On the “Cuspers” 

Mark Wegierski traces the trajectory of a generation

Hardly anything can be added to all the ink that has been spilled concerning generational and/or “decade-based” politics in the United States and Canada, especially in regard to the apparently overwhelming presence of the Baby Boomers. Nevertheless, the author would like to propose a new generational category — “cuspers” – to better explain certain social, cultural, and economic realities of America and Canada in the last fifty years or so. It is in a period of very rapid change – such as that which the triumph of the Baby Boomers in the Sixties has inaugurated – that generational or “decade-based” social, political, and cultural analysis becomes especially pertinent.

There has been a high degree of imprecision in regard to defining the actual period of the Baby Boom. The singer Tina Turner is often described as a typical Baby Boomer, although she was in fact born before the U.S. entry into World War II. The Canadian demographers David K. Foot and Daniel Stoffman (authors of the best-selling book, Boom, Bust, and Echo 2000: Profiting from the Demographic Shift in the New Millennium, Toronto: Macfarlane, Walter & Ross, 1998) define the Baby Boom as people born between 1947 to 1966 – surely a too-wide period of time.

The term “cusper” is proposed to apply to a category of persons sometimes identified as “the tail-end of the Baby Boom” and sometimes as “the first wave of Generation X.” These would be persons born roughly between 1958-1967. This proposed generation has existed “on the cusp” of massive change, falling somewhere between Baby Boomers and Generation X in many of their social and cultural traits. A concept similar to “cuspers” has been proposed by the little known website, “generationjones.” Also, the Hollywood libertarian Thomas M. Sipos has coined the term “Generation Keaton” – after the Michael J. Fox character in the 1980s show, Family Ties.

The “cuspers” were children, not teenagers in the 1960s, and for many of them, the Sixties’ “revolt against the elders” was highly disconcerting, and not a badge of shared identity. The “cuspers” were typically teenagers in the 1970s, and the music they listened to was most often so-called “progressive rock” – groups such as Genesis, Canadian band Rush, Supertramp, King Crimson, and Yes. Their favorite movies in that era were the Clint Eastwood action pictures, such as The Outlaw Josey Wales and Dirty Harry, as well as The Godfather – which may be interpreted as a portrayal of a highly traditionalist subculture in modern America. Two dystopian movies of the 1970s, Soylent Green and Rollerball, may also have had some appeal.

In the 1980s, “cuspers” were typically in their twenties, and they wildly embraced the whole New Wave/alternative/technopop music as their music. It was possible to give a “contrarian” reading to many of the Eighties’ songs – such as re-interpreting songs about “gay alienation” as songs of “conservative protest” against the stultifying consumerist society. The “cuspers” had a decided element of ambiguity between being critics and products of Eighties’ pop-culture. “Cuspers” enjoyed such Eighties’ movies as Blade Runner, Top Gun, Back to the Future, Peggy Sue Got Married, Romancing the Stone, Jewel of the Nile, Ladyhawke, Legend (the fantasy movie with Tom Cruise), Labyrinth (with David Bowie), Absolute Beginners (a “New Wave musical”), the two Conan films, Red Sonya, and Red Dawn. Many of these movies could be seen as expressing the theme of human authenticity against a near-dystopic world, as well as a longing for “true romance.” Politically, many of these twenty somethings were willing to vote for Reagan in 1980 and 1984. In Canada, they would be voting for Progressive Conservative candidate Brian Mulroney in 1984 and 1988 – but Mulroney’s Prime Ministership from 1984 to 1993 would prove an intense disappointment to many of them. They resented “the yuppies” of the 1980s, who they often actually saw as “socially liberal and fiscally conservative” (i.e., offensive to both social conservatives and true liberals) – but more importantly, holding all the good jobs. The “cuspers” mirrored the angst and resentments of the somewhat later Generation X, but some of their criticism could be interpreted as more “creatively-nihilist” or even socially conservative.

Nicholas Cage starring in Peggy Sue got Married

The “cuspers” had been born in a time of great social turmoil, and when they reached the age at which earlier generations had typically entered the main job-market and started families, they often encountered a series of frustrations. The highly evocative book by Adrienne Miller and Andrew Goldblatt, The Hamlet Syndrome: Overthinkers Who Underachieve (New York: William Morrow, 1989) looks at many of these problems. With quick career advancement – even for those with university degrees – often blocked by the prevalence of “the damn yuppies” and stable family life undermined by the unhappy consequences of the concatenation of sexual and social revolutions since the 1960s, many of the “cuspers” turned to protest politics. The “angry white male” phenomenon of the early to mid-1990s, and the unexpected Republican majority in Congress under Newt Gingrich in 1994 were possibly expressions of “cusper” angst. In Canada, there was the rise of the Reform Party, initially a Western Canadian-based protest party.

The prosperity of the later Clinton years tended to dissipate much of the anger building up among many disaffected persons whose concerns were not being acknowledged in the mainstream media, except in highly caricatured form.

However, the apparent economic troubles of the George W. Bush period – which were arguably exacerbated by such phenomena as outsourcing; high, uncontrolled immigration; and mass H1-B visa hiring — lead to renewed frustration among persons who were then in their forties, and simply could not afford to lose their jobs. And what has followed under Obama has been seen by many as little else than an extension of these previous trends. For example, the frustration among many native-born American computer programmers and engineers is now undeniable. And many “cuspers” who have finished “useless” liberal arts degrees – sometimes simply out of a feeling of “love of scholarship” — and hold “politically-incorrect” views, have actually been in a twilight limbo – in terms of conventional career-advancement – for years on end. Most persons in the entire post-Sixties’ period have also had to struggle to construct a decent, stable family life, in an often hostile environment (such as a close to fifty per cent divorce rate).

Perhaps the hope of some “cuspers” today is that some of their ideas (such as those partially seen in the ever-popular “retro” music of the Eighties) may attract some of the succeeding generations to adopt a similar “creatively-nihilist” critique of current-day, consumption-addled society. There have been some survey results around the turn of the millennium that have shown that American teenagers of that time had a surprisingly deep identification with religion and with the importance of fidelity in relationships, as well as some surprisingly “realistic” attitudes to certain issues, such as the necessity of America to fight terrorism. It has been suggested that the fact that today’s teens pretty well know that they are “abortion survivors” has led to increased social conservatism among them. The same society that produces highly disturbed teens also nurtures ones that are manifestly willing to die for their faith – both of which were seen at Columbine.

The aftermath of “9/11” might have introduced a brief surge of some moral clarity to America – something which many “cuspers” – despite their frequently nihilist posturing and moodiness – have often hungered for. Two great movie experiences of the early Twenty-First Century, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and The Passion of the Christ, may have been pointing the way towards a social and cultural rebirth for America and the West. And in 2015, there may be occurring a similar cultural rallying in the U.S., around American Sniper. In such a re-birth, certain “cuspers”, now in their late forties and early fifties, may be hoping to assume a vanguard role in society which they see as having been long-denied to them.

N.B. The notion of “cuspers” was initially proposed by this author on the blog of the Hudson Institute’s American Outlook, April 23, 2004

Mark Wegierski is a Toronto-based writer and historical researcher

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Mediterranean Refugee Crisis

Posted on July 1, 2015 by leslie

Pallas Athene, Klimt

Mediterranean Refugee Crisis

On watch –
In a long slow timeless wash
Reflux of freighted waters
Slim frigates ride –
Grey grace the warping waves bestride
And fall and rise again like Greeks
Upreared on dolphins
(That classic life still breathing
Like a soul trapped in a ribcage.)

Our Sea
Floats palaces and palm trees –
Towns sick with age, walls punched with holes,
Seized gates,
Flung windows, stone stares of greats
Long metamorphosed, and
Cool tiled courts
(Full ugly now with fat in shorts –
The Renaissance closing down.
Descent of Vandals –
Cloisters flap with fall of sandals
And a squeak of trolley wheels).

II

Recurring dream –
Lachrimae Christi under an olive tree
That chirrups with cicada.
Things heard and seen –
Geodesies down cobbled streets,
Domes like miracles of maths,
Bones in jewelled shrines –
Grinning saints recline
On altars overtopped with gilt.

Crossing seams –
Glassed cabinets that gleam
With faience David meets Goliath-
Hohenstaufen-Sard-
Palaiologos-Ovid-Mars-
Bourbons-Knossos-Rome and Corinth.
Flayed Venetian skins –
Cornices of red-beard kings –
Crusaders climbing their own walls.

Golden fleece and fruit,
Leaf-gods stir and bruit
In the mildest of mild autumns.
Shepherds in oils
Syrinx sheep at tumbled walls –
Arcadia besting Athens.
Homes at posterns –
Fishermen dangling lanterns
Over an abyss.

Wheel-ruts cut rock
And carry down to former docks
In a misknown metropolis.
Roofs fall to floors,
No-one knocks on woodless doors
Or waits for any answer.
We walk on flags –
(Tesserae of hunted stags
Always on the cusp of pulling down).

Libraries open,
Libraries burn, beacons showing
Fat backs to hungry lands,
Last reach of sands
(Empty Quarter, Ozymandias)
Before the temperate begins.
Hooves in the night,
Alarms far out in darkness,
Simooms carry hot howling to all coasts.

Colossi raised,
Colossi razed – highways which haze
Immediately to epic.
Passed things passing –
Even sibyl smokes soon thin
And pass into empyrean
Fan-vaults of blue
Propped by cypress – (and, oh, the silky shoe
Of the Bay at Posillipo.)

At sea-ends of streets
Breakwaters are ranged by cats –
Mange among detritus, harbours
Rainbowed diesel,
Fish float gut-up, their innards spill,
Contaminate our food-chain.
Our Sea no more –
Our Sea no less – because that shore
Landmarks our geography.

III

Cool home-ports
Manifested across miles, brought
Close by deceit of light.

Far adrift,
Proficient navies shift
And GPS themselves again.
They scan the skies
That swelled about Odysseus,
Stare the straight blue line
That falls away
To Sirte and Barbary
Seeking what they fear to find
Out there,
In the reminiscent glare
And seditious glitter of the Gulf.

“Another!” –
(Crew can’t look at each other)
Darkling marks brought Swiss-lens sharp
Wave for attention –
Hands across the sea, children
Of a Common god look up,
Are flashed –
As frantic rotors lash
The oppressive air to froth.

IV

Code of the sea:
Hoist all misery
On davits to our decks.
Code from the shore:
Lower the launch once more
We need to be seen to have done.
And sailors do –
Unable not to –
They raise the drowning drowners as their own.

This is our Creed –
To each according to his need.
Failed states have given, and received.
What would Jesus have done?
Fished them as one.
(Stella Maris still lingers in the West!)
Familiar fable –
Green fields in play on a great blue table
(Mortgagees are drinking in the sun.)

Orbs fumbled, falling –
Spires shaking, engines stalling,
To go again just as the gears
Click sudden loud
And Ocean slaps the ship around –
The grey ghost shudders then recovers,
And makes away
Along a lighted pathway as
Winds are freed from bags to blow all strayers home.

Our watch –
In the phosphorescent wistful wash
Redux of weighted waters
Slim frigates ride
Cetaceans plunge and sport beside
As sailors spit and swill the decks,
Plough again the back and forth,
Sharp weather front declining North,
And losing its identity.

Poem by DEREK TURNER, the former editor of QR

His website is at www.derek-turner.com

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Yankee Supremacists Trash South’s Heroes

Posted on June 29, 2015 by leslie

Yankee Supremacists Trash South’s Heroes

Ilana Mercer untangles the Confederate flag imbroglio 

Fox News anchor Sean Hannity promised to provide a much-needed history of the much-maligned Confederate flag. For a moment, it seemed as though he and his guest, Mark Steyn, would deliver on the promise and lift the veil of ignorance. But no: the two showmen conducted a tactical tit-for-tat. They pinned the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia on the Southern Democrats (aka Dixiecrats). “I’m too sexy for my sheet,” sneered Steyn.

It fell to the woman who used to come across as the consummate Yankee supremacist to edify. The new Ann Coulter is indeed lovely.

Also on Fox, Ms. Coulter remarked that she was “appalled by” South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley’s call “for the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the state Capitol.” As “a student of American history,” Coulter opined “the Confederate flag we’re [fussing] about never flew over an official Confederate building. It was a battle flag. It is to honor Robert E. Lee. And anyone who knows the first thing about military history knows that there is no greater army that ever took to the battle field than the Confederate Army.”

And anyone who knows the first thing about human valor knows that there was no man more valorous and courageous than Robert E. Lee, whose “two uncles signed the Declaration of Independence and [whose] father was a notable cavalry officer in the War for Independence.”

Robert E Lee

The battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia—known as “Lee’s Army”—is not to be conflated with the “Stars and Bars,” which “became the official national flag of the Confederacy.” According to Sons of the South, the “first official use of the ‘Stars and Bars’ was at the inauguration of Jefferson Davis on March 4, 1861.” But because it resembled the “Stars and Stripes” flown by the Union, the “Stars and Bars” proved a liability during the Battle of Bull Run.

“The confusion caused by the similarity in the flags was of great concern to Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard. He suggested that the Confederate national flag be changed to something completely different, to avoid confusion in battle in the future. This idea was rejected by the Confederate government. Beauregard then suggested that there should be two flags. One, the national flag, and the second one a battle flag, with the battle flag being completely different from the United States flag.”

Originally, the flag whose history is being trampled today was a stars-and-bars-flag, a red square, not a rectangle. Atop it was the blue Southern Cross. In the cross were—still are—13 stars representing the 13 states in the Confederacy.

Wars are generally a rich man’s affair and a poor man’s fight. Yankees are fond of citing Confederacy officials in support of slavery and a war for slavery. Most Southerners, however, were not slaveholders. All Southerners were sovereigntists, fighting a “War for Southern Independence.” They rejected central coercion. Southerners believed a union that was entered voluntarily could be exited in the same way. As even establishment historian Paul Johnson concedes, “The South was protesting not only against the North’s interference in its ‘peculiar institution’ but against the growth of government generally.”

Lincoln grew government, markedly, in size and in predatory boldness.

“Slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil,” wrote the South’s greatest hero, Gen. Lee. He did not go to war for that repugnant institution. To this American hero, local was truly beautiful. “In 1861 he was offered command of all the armies of the United States, the height of a soldier’s ambition,” chronicles Clyde Wilson, distinguished professor emeritus of history at the University of South Carolina. “But the path of honor commanded him to choose to defend his own people from invasion rather than do the bidding of the politicians who controlled the federal machinery in Washington.”

To his sister, Lee wrote: “With all my devotion to the Union, and the feeling of loyalty and duty of an American citizen, I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home.” Lee, you see, was first and foremost a Virginian, the state that gave America its greatest presidents and the Constitution itself.

Lord Acton, the British historian of liberty, wrote to Lee in praise. The general, surmised Lord Acton, was fighting to preserve “the only availing check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will”: states’ rights and secession.

Lee’s inspired reply to Lord Acton:

“… I believe that the maintenance of the rights and authority reserved to the states and to the people … are the safeguard to the continuance of a free government … whereas the consolidation of the states into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of that ruin which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it.”

Another extraordinary Southerner was James Johnston Pettigrew. He gave his life for Southern independence, not for slavery. Quoting Pettigrew, Professor Wilson likens the forbearance of his own Confederate forebears to “the small Greek city-states who stood against the mighty Persian Empire in the 5th century B.C.”

Not quite Leonidas’ 300 Spartans at Thermopylae, but close.

“The U.S. government had quadruple the South’s resources.” Yet “it took 22 million Northerners four years of the bloodiest warfare in American history to conquer five million Southerners,” who “mobilized 90 percent of their men and lost nearly a fourth.”

When they hoist the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, it is these soldiers Southerners honor.

Unable to defeat the South, the U.S. government resorted to terrorism—to an unprecedented war against Southern women and children.

With their battle flag, Southerners commemorate these innocents.

ILANA Mercer is a US-based, libertarian writer. She pens WND’s longest-standing, exclusive, paleolibertarian weekly column, “Return to Reason.” With a unique audience of 8 million, the site has been rated by Alexa as the most frequented “conservative” site on the Internet. Ilana has also featured on RT with the “Paleolibertarian Column,” and she contributes to Economic Policy Journal (the premier libertarian site on the web), Junge Freiheit, a German weekly of excellence, as well as to the British Libertarian Alliance and Quarterly Review (the celebrated British journal founded in 1809 by Walter Scott, Robert Southey and George Canning), where she is also contributing editor. Formerly syndicated by Creators Syndicate, Ilana is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies (an award-winning, independent, non-profit, free-market economic policy think tank).

 

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Intelligence evolving

Posted on June 25, 2015 by leslie

 

Alicia Vikander as Ava

Intelligence evolving

Robert Henderson is impressed by Alex Garland’s new film

Ex Machina

Main cast:
Domhnall Gleeson as Caleb
Alicia Vikander as Ava
Oscar Isaac as Nathan
Sonoya Mizuno as Kyoko

Directed by Alex Garland

This is yet another film exploring the potential of digital technology to radically change our lives. The subject here is the relationship between advanced humanoid robots and humans, but with a twist, namely, can sexual attraction arise between a human and a robot and can that attraction move on to something resembling deep emotional attachment?

The basic plot is simple. A young computer coder, Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) thinks he has won a competition at his workplace, the prize being a week on an isolated research station with Nathan (Oscar Isaac), the boss of the company for whom Caleb works. In fact, there is no competition and he has been chosen simply as an experimental subject.

When Caleb reaches the research station he finds it occupied by Nathan and what he thinks is a female Asian servant Kyoto. There are no other people on the research station. In fact there are only two humans for Kyoto is a robot.

Nathan asks Caleb to perform a Turing test. The classical version of the test consists of a human interacting with an artificial intelligence (AI) without knowing whether they are dealing with an AI or another human being. The test is passed if the human is convinced the AI is human. But this is a Turing test with a twist. Caleb knows what he is dealing with, a humanoid robot called Ava (Alicia Vikander). Continue reading →

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“It’s the rich what gets the pleasure …”

Posted on June 22, 2015 by leslie

“It’s the rich what gets the pleasure …”

Robert Henderson reviews Russell Brand’s rant

The Emperor’s New Clothes (2015)
Narrator: Russell Brand
Director: Michael Winterbottom    

This documentary shamelessly mimics Michael Moore with a large dollop of “The smartest guys in the room” thrown in for good measure. The end product is a tepid imitation of Moore’s style and a rather better pastiche of The smartest guys in the room.

Like a Moore documentary there is much in the film which is shocking: the greed and irresponsibility of the bankers: the overt or tacit collusion of politicians which allowed bankers to be effectively unregulated in the run up to the 2008 crash; the failure to punish with the criminal law any of those who were responsible for the banking crash; the ability of the likes of Fred Goodwin (the erstwhile CEO of the Royal Bank of Scotland) to walk away with a pension worth hundreds of thousands a year after wrecking, through his megalomania for expansion, one of the largest banks in the world. More generally the film also makes much of the growing inequality in Britain.

Sounds intriguing? But the problem is Brand, unlike Moore, never manages to get to quiz any of those responsible or even to embarrass them by getting close enough to shout questions at them. This is in large part simply a consequence of Brand /Winterbottom choosing a subject – bankers’ recklessness – where getting to speak to the culprits was an obvious non-starter. But that makes a large part of the film’s approach an anticipatable and hence avoidable mistake.

A fair bit of the film features Brand arriving at the head of office of, say, a high street bank, daringly entering the public foyer and then hitting a brick wall of indifference as he is left to grill receptionists and security guards on the wickedness of their employers. The result is underwhelming the first time he uses the ploy, but moves from underwhelming to irritating as the device is repeated several times. The nadir of this “beard them in their lairs” tactic is Brand’s arrival at the home of Lord Rothermere (whose family own amongst other publications the Daily Mail) to tackle Rothermere about his non-dom status. After Brand had vaulted over a wall to show his rebel devil-may-care tendencies, the scene ended with him conducting a meaningless conversation with a bemused housekeeper via an answer phone. There was a vapidity about all these scenes which robbed them of their potentially humorous situational content based on the incongruity of what Brand was asking rank and file employees. In the end it was simply Brand behaving boorishly.

All of this tedious, ineffective and self-regarding guff is wrapped within an ongoing theme of Brand “going back to his roots” to his childhood town of in Grays in Essex. (Brand is part of what Jerome K Jerome called “Greater Cockneydom”). He is certainly much friendlier in his dealing with the white working class than the vast majority of those on the Left these days who tend to approach them with all the delight of someone trying to avoid dog excrement on a pavement, but there is a cloying quality to his relationship with those he meets as though he is playing in a rather ham fashion the part of a cockney sparrow returning to its long deserted nest. He is also rather too keen to prove his street cred- there is an especially cringeworthy episode where Brand vaults a underground barrier and claims he has dodged the fare. More damagingly perhaps, was that hanging over his words on the state of the have-nots and the misbehaviour of the haves hung the fact that Brand is a rich man, a fact he tried to address by trying to make a very feeble joke indeed about the fact.

Ironically Brand displays a strong conservatism with a small ‘c’ when he laments the change from the Grays of his youth as a place where the shops were run by local people and “all the money spent in the town stayed in the town” to a modern Grays of boarded up shops and multinationals who suck the money and by implication the sense of community out of the place.

That is too black and white a view of then and now, but I can sympathise with Brand’s general nostalgia for the not so distant past. My memory tells me that people were generally more content forty years ago. The trouble is that Brand completely fails to address the thing which has most dramatically changed places such as Grays namely, mass immigration, which of course is all part of the globalist ideology he purports to loathe. That he should avoid the immigration issue is unsurprising because it is part of the credo of the modern Left that it is nothing but an unalloyed boon, but it does undermine horribly the credibility of the film as an honest representation of reality.

The most nauseating part of the film involved Brand using an audience of primary school children (at his old school) to get his message across by feeding them with the most intrusive sort of leading questions along the lines of “Bankers earn zillions of pounds a year while the person who cleans their boardroom takes home fifty quid a week: is that fair?” The children were charming, but using children as ideological props is a cheap shot at best and abusive at worst.

The film is at its best when Brand is working from a script with crisp graphics and commentary in the style of The smartest guys in the room. The cataloguing of the excesses of the financial industry and the stubborn refusal of the authorities in Britain to bring criminal charges against any board member of the institutions which were responsible, even the banks which required bailing out by the taxpayer, was angering. Comparing this escape from punishment by high ranking bankers (who invariably left loaded with huge amounts of money on their departure from the offending banks) with the many, often quite severe, custodial sentences handed out to the 2011 rioters for stealing items worth at most a few hundred pounds and often for much less showed a reality that lived up unhesitatingly to the old refrain “It’s the same the whole world over, It’s the poor what gets the blame, It’s the rich what gets the pleasure, Ain’t it all a bleeding shame”.

There is also some strong stuff about the growing inequality in Britain and the thing which with frightening speed is creating a massive generational divided, namely, the grotesque cost of housing which has removed from most of this generation any chance of buying a property and forcing people increasingly into extremely expensive private rented accommodation. But here again, the immigration issue was left untouched.

The film missed several important ricks. One of the scandals about the way bankers have been able to walk away from the 2008 crash without any serious action being taken against them is that there has been no attempt to apply the provisions in the Companies Act relating to directors behaviour. These provisions allow the removal of personal limited liability from directors where they have behaved in a reckless fashion. Remove their limited liability and creditors, including the government on behalf of taxpayers, could seek every penny they hold.

Then there is the extraordinary fact that the shareholders of the bailed out banks still hold shares worth something. The banks were irredeemably insolvent when the Labour government bailed them out. The shareholders should have lost everything. This fact went unexamined.

But the film’s greatest failure is to spend far too little time role that politicians played in the economic disaster through their lack of regulation and the aftermath of the 2008 crash. For example, there was nothing on the Lloyds TSB’s takeover of the HBOS which ended up capsizing Lloyds. This takeover was done at the behest of Gordon Brown and turned Lloyds TSB from a solvent bank with a reputation for prudence and caution into a bank which had to be bailed out by the British taxpayer. The bank is now the subject of a civil action by disgruntled shareholders who claim they were misled by Lloyds about the state of HBOS.

Much of what Brand dislikes I also dislike. Like him I deplore globalisation because it is destabilising at best and dissolves a society at worst; like him I think it a monumental scandal that neither the main actors in the financial crash nor the politicians who had left the financial services industry so poorly regulated were ever brought to book; like him I am dismayed at the growing inequality in Britain and the particular disaster that is the ever worsening British housing shortage. But the film offers no coherent or remotely practical solution to the ills of the age. It is simply a rage against the machine and like all such rages ultimately leaves its audience dissatisfied after the initial adrenal surge of sympathetic anger.

ROBERT HENDERSON is QR’s film critic

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