Another week down. Congratulations for making it. Especially since we all had to dodge those damn, reefer-smoking hippies yesterday. Oh, you mean a large number of you are those reefer-smoking hippies normal adults? Well then, carry on.
Chicago fans saw too much of this over the last week.
Looks like the DoJ is going after Julian Assange. I guess the arrest warrants for the NYT writers that posted the WikiLeaks stories as well can’t be too far behind, right? Right?!
Greetings fellow marvelers of the menacing and macabre, and welcome to another installment of what is indisputably at least the eighth best weekly recurring article on this site. For the next several weeks, we shall be exploring your humble wordslinger’s favorite single genre of horror, giallo.
I will preface the reviews with a brief history of the genre itself, the horror directors most well known within it, and its larger impact on American cinema.
First, lettuce define our terms. Giallo is greasy wop-talk for “yellow,” like the color of my wife’s skin, and refers to a particular style of Italian-produced murder mystery film which often includes elements of horror fiction (such as slasher violence and eroticism). The genre developed in the mid-to-late 1960s peaked in popularity during the 1970s, and subsequently declined over the next few decades. This description is copied entirely off of the beginning of the Wikipedia article, but if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, says I.
Is that a zombie riding a shark? MAYBE. Read on!
Without getting too into the weeds on the subject, the genre covers a fairly broad range of films, from pulp murder mysteries to straight supernatural horror. There are some common elements. First, there is almost always a psychological element to the films, some insanity provoked by trauma in one of the main characters. There is always killing, and it is always very violent and very much center screen – this is not a genre of happy fluffy bunnies. There is very (and I do mean very) little focus on the cohesiveness of plot or dialogue throughout the film. Don’t get me wrong – it isn’t the purposeful insanity of, say, House, or the purely so-over-the-top-it’s-weird-ness of Zardoz. More of a…benign indifference to strict logical flow. There is, essentially, just enough of a storyline to ensure that one event leads to another, and that’s about it. There is a great focus on cinematography, on capturing interesting or provocative or just plain unusual shots. The soundtracks are usually awesome, as in, done as if the keyboardist from an early 80s synthpop or electro funk band was on some mellow acid and just decided to score some movies in his spare time. There’s even a band, called Goblin, most well known for their movie soundtracks. I could go on and on, but this gives you the gist of it. Seriously though, if any of you guys want to just meet somewhere and listen to me wax philosophic about this genre and all the movies that I love in it for six hours while drinking beer, I am always up for that.
One of the many different posters for this film. Collect them all!
We begin our exploration with one of the seminal works of the great Lucio Fulci (more on him next week), Zombi 2. Or as it was known in America, Zombie.
Italian copyright law (pre-EU) was a funny thing. Any movie could be marketed as a sequel to any other movie, without having any direct relationship. We of the superior Anglo-Saxon lineage understand that George Romero’s masterwork Dawn of the Dead was a direct sequel to his groundbreaking Night of the Living Dead. As the science of phrenology teaches us, Italians aren’t nearly as intelligent as we are, and so were ignorant of this fact. Personally, I blame all the out-race breeding. Dawn of the Dead was released in most European markets titled Zombi, and the audiences thought it was simply a stand-alone. Ever one to try and turn a quick buck on the cheap, the Italian movie industry decided to cash in, and Zombi 2 was green-lit. The title Zombie is for the American release since over here, it is not a sequel.
As a brief aside, this started a bizarre and, for the collector, irritating trend of any movie involving supernatural cannibalism to be labeled as a Zombi sequel in Europe. So there are a shit-load of movies that all have multiple titles, but if you’re hunting them down, they might be known as one thing, or might be known as Zombi 3, 4, 5, etc., depending on which production company is doing the release at any given time, and varying according to release region. In two weeks I’ll review one such, chosen to show just how far afield this trend can go. Though not one of the chief offenders of appropriating the Zombi moniker, Non si deve profanare il sonno dei morti (I Do Not Profane the Sleep of the Dead) is one of the worst, having been released with over 15 different titles. My personal favorite of the titles for that film, and the title on my copy is Let Sleeping Corpses Lie.
Anyway, I won’t go into a great deal of background on director Fulci, because I’ll cover him some in next week’s installment of giallo background since he is an important figure in the genre. Suffice to say the man has some kind of obsession with eyes. I own six of his films, and I’m fairly certain I remember seeing eyeballs punctured or mutilated up close on camera in every one of them.
That started with Zombie. After a brief opening scene in a hospital where a doctor shoots somebody wrapped in a sheet in the head, we cut to an abandoned boat drifting into New York City. Officers variously described as either Harbor Patrol or the Coast Guard find somebody dead inside, and a zombie, which bites one of the cops in the throat (they look like harbor patrol to me, though one of them makes a crack about getting a big bonus for bringing this ship in, so maybe they’re some kind of salvage crew mercenary harbor patrol cops?), killing him. His partner blasts the zombie back into the sea, and his dead partner is taken to the city morgue.
One of the “zombies” promised by the title of the film.
The daughter (Tisa Farrow) of the man whose boat was found adrift teams up with a reporter (Ian McCulloch) investigating the ghost ship, and they trace its route back into the Caribbean. There’s a hilarious scene where the cab driver on the island they fly to tells them there aren’t many boats about to be hired, and then we see them walk along a dock which is literally cluttered with civilian boats. There they meet Al Cliver (who was born Pierluigi Conti – cultural appropriation!) and Auretta Gay, who are just about to set out on vacation on their yacht and agree to take our investigators with them to try and find a sinister island that the natives are rumored to avoid.
Here’s where this movie gets fucking awesome. Auretta strips down to just a thong bottom and goes scuba diving. She encounters a tiger shark, which is attacked by an underwater zombie that keeps trying to bite it. This scene is pure cinematic gold. There was a diver, done up in water-resistant zombie makeup, and he actually fights a tiger shark they doped up so that it wouldn’t be too aggressive. When you see the guy biting on the shark, he’s actually doing that. Man, they just don’t do movies like that anymore, and it’s a goddamn shame.
So awesome it deserved another look.
While fending off the shark before the zombie showed up, the boat was damaged, and so the protagonists fire off some flares. On the island, doctor’s assistant Lucas sees the flare and asks if it’s the Devil. Yes, Lucas, the fucking Devil is firing off bog-standard emergency flares from just off shore. This is why a white guy is in charge of your island.
The foursome are rescued by Doctor Richard Johnson, who was also in one of the great all-time classic horror films, The Haunting. I’ll review it someday – it’s really superlative. A complete sense of dread built up with almost no effects whatsoever. Also, it lent the opening sample to a great White Zombie song.
Once ashore, we learn that Richard Johnson was friends with Tisa’s old man, and they were researching why the dead are increasingly returning to life on the island. The film never makes a definitive statement, but voodoo is mentioned several times, so I guess we’re going with “magic” in this one. He agrees to help the stranded newcomers but first asks them to check on his wife up the road while he tends to more zombie research right quick.
Of course, the fucking gardener was left in charge of security at the house, and he blew it. You already know the wife’s dead, because of a fantastic scene earlier in the film where she’s showering (yay, more titties!) and a zombie breaks into the house and kills her. Here you have another one of the great moments in horror history: for the first time in a major release, you get an agonizingly slow, up close, center camera shot of a big splinter of wood jamming right into and bursting her eyeball, no cutaways or wide angles to lessen the impact. I remember seeing a brief interview with Tom Savini for Bravo’s 100 Scariest Movie Moments where he recalls watching that scene building, and wondering if Fulci had the guts to do what even he hadn’t dared in Dawn of the Dead (for the tragically ignorant amongst you, Savini did the effects for that film).
See that spike on the right edge of the frame, just below the zombie’s wrist? It’s about three seconds from going straight into that eyeball.Don’t worry though, she has bigger problems to worry about than her missing eye. She gets eaten.
Fleeing in terror from the scene at the house, our protagonists are making their way back to the hospital when they stop to catch their breath. For some reason Tisa and Ian start making out when it turns out they’re in a Spanish conquistador cemetery, and the remarkably still meaty former Spaniards begin to reanimate.
Fight fight fight people die, eventually, we have a last stand at the hospital, and I won’t spoil the ending for anyone who decides to see it. But New York City at least gets overrun, so I’ll leave it at that. Serves all the progressives who live there right! If it wasn’t for major cities, there’d be no national democratic party! Down with urban dwellers! REEEEEGION WAAAAAR!!!
Look, everything I write about these movies is going to be biased because I love them all so very, very much. I could seriously sit down and watch this shit all day. The barely-there storylines, the garish, brutal on-screen killings with bright red pulsing blood, the horrifically rotting zombies dropping piles of worms out of their eyes, I even love how you can’t tell what language the fucking things are shot in (pro-tip: most of the time they’re shot without the dialogue being recorded at all, and dubs are put over it in post-production for each country that it’s going to be released in. Hell, in Zombie, half the cast were English speakers who had no Italian, and the other half were the reverse. This is because they were always filmed with an eye towards international release since none of the European nations were large enough to guarantee good gross receipts by only catering to their own native audiences). So don’t take my word for it, because I’m going to tell you to watch every one of these.
I picked this one first because I think it’s a good way for those of you unfamiliar with the glory of low-budget 1970s Italian splatter-horror to segue into the genre with a fairly familiar motif. Everybody knows zombie movies and has seen at least a few, so the transition from American “don’t show anything too graphic and try to make sense” movies won’t seem so jarring. The bottom line is, if you like horror, you will like this movie, I guarantee it. If you don’t like horror, then what the fuck are you doing reading this anyway? Fuck you too, buddy, and just get on with posting all your endless goddamn “hurr durr let’s all give HuffPo more advertising money by hate-sharing their posts” OT links in the comments below. Always remember how much Zardoz loves you all, my children.
I rate Zombi 2/Zombie six decayed heads out of seven.
I intend to take the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, which has been mocked again and again as the very epitome of boringness, and I will make the subject…anyone?…I will make the subject interesting.
To start with, I won’t call it the Hawley-Smoot Tariff, because…anyone?…because my focus is on Smoot, not Hawley. So I’ll put Smoot’s name first.
The Smoot in Smoot-Hawley was Reed Smoot, a Republican U. S. Senator from…anyone?…Utah. We first learned about Senator Smoot in Part One, in which Senator Smoot’s…anyone?…credentials were challenged because of the whole polygamy thing. After the Mormon church, of which Smoot was a leader, dropped the practice of polygamy, the U. S. Senate decided to…anyone?…decided to let Smoot keep his seat in the Senate, to which he was repeatedly re-elected, even after Senatorial elections were taken away from the state legislatures and given to the voters.
Now, class, can anyone tell me what the Smoot-Hawley Tariff was all about? You can? And here I thought you weren’t paying attention. From your spittle-flecked responses, I can see that you can identify the Smoot-Hawley Tariff as a protectionist law passed by Congress in 1930, in the depths of the Depression, and that this law has generally been blamed for making the Depression worse. In the unlikely event there’s anyone here who doesn’t already know this stuff, here’s a Wikipedia article.
After Smoot got together with Hawley, things went downhill
Ha ha, seriously, here’s Smoot and Hawley:
Senator Smoot is…anyone?…the one with the glasses. And the pocket with pens in it. Why can’t you students be more like Smoot, and less like that Bueller fellow? Where is Bueller, anyway?
The dynamic duo of Smoot and Hawley put forward their protectionist bill in 1929, and it passed in 1930. It is a key event in economic history, and Smoot, a hard worker with one of the best heads for figures in Congress, was proud of his work, even though it didn’t save him from a Democratic sweep shortly thereafter which put him out of the Senate.
But the Smoot-Hawley Tariff has also gotten a good deal of attention in the history of literature. To explain, let’s go back a bit.
Congress tightened up the obscenity laws in 1873, thanks to the lobbying efforts of this man, who was promptly made a postal inspector to help enforce the law. Can you identify him, class?
Yes, it was Anthony Comstock (1844 – 1915).
But this isn’t a history of postal censorship, so let’s move on from Comstock and look at the U. S. Customs.
Groundhog Day? No, not that kind of U. S. customs.
This kind:
U. S. Custom House, New York City, 1879.
I chose the New York City customs house for my illustration because New York City was a key point of entry for foreign literature coming into the country – or trying to come in (Los Angeles and Chicago were also key ports of entry). Until 1873, Customs officials policed a federal ban on the importation of obscene pictures and photos, but not books. The Comstock Act of 1873, in addition to dealing with the Post Office, added books and pamphlets to the list of obscene material that was to be banned. Local customs inspectors – or sometimes their superiors in Washington – had to read potentially obscene books to decide whether to ban them.
“At least inspecting this is less boring than inspecting other types of goods.”
The Comstock law passed despite some grumbling that “I do not know whether it can be left to employees of a custom house to determine with safety what kind of literature or what sort of matter is to be admitted.” This Congressman finally decided to support the bill once he concluded that the decision on whether a work was obscene would be left to the courts, not customs officials.
In practice, judicial review was limited and rarely used, and the final decision on what could be imported was made by Customs officials.
The Smoot-Hawley tariff, as introduced, would have kept the existing Customs ban on obscene books. It looked like a fairly noncontroversial item, continuing the law in force, until Republican Senator Bronson Cutting of New Mexico piped up. Cutting was an arty type of Republican, indignant when he learned that a friend of his hadn’t been able to import D. H. Lawrence’s novel about adultery, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Lawrence was actually in favor of censoring pornography, he simply didn’t think he (Lawrence) was a pornographer. He was an artist, not the same thing. Cutting agreed.
Senator Cutting [insert pun about “Cutting remarks”] proposed to take away Customs’ power to ban books on obscenity grounds. Such censorship, if it was to exist, should be exercised by the post office and by state and local governments, plus the church and the family. What qualifications did Customs people have in this area?
The Senate, in Committee of the Whole, actually accepted Cutting’s amendment. This took Smoot by surprise, and it shocked him to his core.
Smoot biograper Milton Merrill says that Smoot’s objection to dirty books was not due to some kind of repressed prurience or similar factor. Dirty books were dirty and gross, and it made no difference whether the author was some kind of artist or a good writer. There was also the fact that, as a Mormon whose moral qualifications to sit in the Senate had been attacked, Smoot was extra alert to any opportunity to rebut suspicions of dirty-mindedness.
The humorless Smoot decided to demonstrate the dangers of allowing a flood of porn to enter the country and corrupt the people, especially the youth. From the Customs officials, Smoot got copies of some of the worst porn he could find to show his fellow-Senators, many of whom perhaps were pruriently interested in this legislative documentation.
Smoot was genuinely outraged. The Senator known for his calm and detailed analyses of economic legislation spoke at the top of his voice, denouncing smutty writers like Lawrence as black-hearted villains.
When the Senate, as a Committee of the Whole, reported the bill back to itself, Smoot had a chance to challenge the obscenity provision. He wanted to reinstate the ban on importing obscene books. To be fair, this ban dated back to 1873, and Smoot hadn’t anticipated that his beloved tariff measure would be the vehicle his colleagues chose to make what he deemed a pro-smut gesture. Couldn’t Congress just keep the obscene-books ban which had been in place for over half a century, and go back to the important business of protecting legitimate American industries from unfair foreign competition?
So the poet Ogden Nash was being unjust when, in a much-cited poem, he sarcastically praised Smoot as if the Senator was inventing a new book-banning law:
Senator Smoot ( Republican, Ut. )
Is planning a ban on smut.
Oh root-ti-toot for Smoot of Ut.
And his reverent occiput.
With his outbursts of indignation, Smoot helped turn the Senate back to supporting a customs ban on dirty books. But as an experienced legislator, Smoot knew that his colleagues seemed to believe that Customs was going too far and hurting the importation of genuine, non-obscene literature. To conciliate this skepticism about Customs’ literary capacities, Smoot decided to yield somewhat and allow some reform.
For one thing, Smoot would accept an amendment by which the Treasury Secretary (as boss of the Customs Service) could allow “so-called” classics, even dirty ones, into the country on a non-commercial basis. Smoot also accepted a plan endorsed by, among others, future Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black – former Klansman and currently known as the saner of Alabama’s two Senators (this guy was the other). The Black plan would provide that the final decision on whether an imported book was obscene would be made by a federal court, in a jury trial. That ought to meet the objection that random bureaucrats were making literary decisions – the book would get a full due-process trial.
“Hey, they mutilated a copy of the Marquis de Sade’s classic Justine just so they could smuggle cigarettes!”
The Smoot-Hawley Tariff passed with the amendments somewhat softening the Customs ban on obscene books. The first true tests case involved Ulysses.
No wonder they wanted to ban Ulysses – he’s stark naked!
Customs believed that James’ Joyce’s now-classic work was obscene, but after the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, the publisher, Random House, insisted on taking the case to trial. Waiving a jury, Random House had the issue decided by federal district Judge James Woolsey. Both Woolsey and the literature-friendly Second Circuit appeals court said the book was not obscene and could be freely imported (at least as far as the Customs laws were concerned). Woolsey’s opinion is probably more famous than the more authoritative Second Circuit opinion because Woolsey had a gift for words and Random House put his opinion at the beginning of Ulysses.
The Ulysses case was historic because the influential Second Circuit, followed by other courts, rejected an old English case known as Regina v. Hicklin. In that case, an opinion by Chief Justice Cockburn said that a work could be condemned as obscene based only on isolated passages, based on the assumption that susceptible people might be harmed by these passages without regard to the surrounding material.
(Hicklin wasn’t the alleged pornographer, he was a lower-court judge who had tried to legalize the alleged pornography; the pamphlet in question was issued in the name of the Protestant Electoral Union.)
The Ulysses decision said that in deciding whether a book is obscene it must be looked at as a whole. Just because there were, say, sex scenes in a book didn’t automatically make it illegal – the entire book had to be dirty, not just a few bits and pieces.
Because the Ulysses case was so historic, and was decided under the supposedly literary-friendly provisions of the Smoot-Hawley Act, some people got the impression that winning court hearings for books Customs wanted to ban represented an advance for literature, making censorship tougher. In reality, importers rarely challenged Customs decisions in court, since legal challenges are quite expensive and it would simply be easier, if possible, to cut out the offensive bits designated by Customs.
Customs liberalized its treatment of books (and movies), not because of Smoot-Hawley, but because of a gentleman named Huntington Cairns. A lawyer, litterateur, and later counsel for the National Gallery of Art, Cairns informally advised the Customs service on disputed works, generally erring in favor of letting the works into the country, at a time when the Post Office and many local censors were stricter against alleged porn.
So Smoot’s “concession” wasn’t what protected literature against Customs overreach – maybe Smoot wasn’t as dumb as they thought.
Works Consulted
Paul S. Boyer, Purity in Print: The Vice-Society Movement and Book Censorship in America. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1968.
Milton R. Merrill, Reed Smoot: Apostle in Politics. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 1990.
James C. N. Paul and Murray L. Schwartz, Federal Censorship: Obscenity in the Mail. New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1961.
I have mentioned before that there are five Mother Sauces in French cooking. One of those is Tomato Sauce, or Neopolitan Sauce. There are many, many variations on this one as anyone familiar with spaghetti sauce, lasagna, ketsup, or salsa knows. Today I want to talk about a tasty French/Indian/Spanish fusion we in Louisiana call Sauce Picquante (sauce peekahn). It has a unique flavor that, unless you know a couple of simple tricks, can be hard to obtain. It is going to be the base for a stew called (whatever meat you use) sauce piquante, in this case chicken and sausage sauce piquante. If you read my gumbo recipe, you will find this is very similar and equally easy.
Probably not the best method, starting out.
A sauce Piquante is essentially a fancy roux. Instead of starting with flour and oil, we use a little oil and tomatoes. The tomatoes can be in the form of tomato paste, sauce, canned tomatoes, or fresh peeled and chopped tomatoes. Put 12 oz to 16 oz in a skillet over medium high heat. Mash them and stir them around until they boil, just like the basic roux, until they start to cook down. As the water evaporates and the tomatoes thicken they will also start to brown but you want this to happen slowly. Again, if it smokes or blackens, you have the stove too hot. As it thickens, it will become tomato paste and brown. When it gets to be the color of milk chocolate, add in an equal amount (4-6 oz) of ordinary dark roux and mix well. There you have it. A sauce piquante is a flour/tomato and oil roux – what some would call a tomato gravy.
My sister-in-law makes an excellent sauce piquante by mixing the flour into the tomato, then adding oil, and browning both simultaneously.
If all of this sounds like too much work for a base, then I will let you in on a little secret. Tomato paste is made by cooking tomatoes down, putting them into a can, and then steaming the cans to pasteurize them for preservation. This process often browns the tomatoes for you. You may have noticed that some canned tomato paste is brownish in color. That isn’t oxidation from a leaky can, it is cooked tomato. We want it like that.
If the paste is not already browned or browned enough straight out of the can, you can add a little oil and brown it very quickly in a skillet. Or not. It is nearly there anyway.
Sauce Piquante in Five Minutes
1 Six ounce can of tomato paste
¼ cup of dark roux (bought ready-made)
One 12 -16 oz bag of frozen seasoning mix (onion, bell pepper, celery)
One cube of beef boullion
1 tablespoon of minced garlic or 1 teaspoon of powdered garlic
1 teaspoon of Zataran’s liquid crab boil
1 teaspoon of ground cayenne pepper
Dark chicken (8 boneless, skinless thighs or 4 leg quarters)
About 2 lbs of Andouille sausage ( ¼ inch slices)
Place all ingredients in a large stock pot. Just toss them all in willy-nilly. No need to mix or stir. That will happen when it boils. Add water until the level covers the meat, cover with a lid, and bring to low boil for one hour. Stir occasionally. Put away your ingredients and wash whatever dishes you have.
Serve over rice.
The easy way to make rice.
– Get yourself a microwave rice cooker. It is a simple plastic pot with a snap-on lid and a vent. It only costs a couple of bucks. To make your rice, put two cups of water, one cup of rice (basmati best), two chicken bouillon cubes, one and a half tablespoons of butter, and about one tablespoon of dried, sweet basil in the pot. Microwave on high for 15 minutes.
You can taste the rice but don’t let anyone else taste it before serving the meal. They will eat all of your rice right out of the cooker.
You can put this together and get it boiling in just five minutes with little effort. It has a very unique flavor and is hearty and satisfying. Outside of Louisiana, I have never had anything like it. It is the perfect dish for cold days or just plain ol’ hungry people. Be careful that no one overeats to the point of not being able to get up from their chair.
Here we go, people. Almost at the end of the week. Let’s finish strong. Oh yeah, and it is apparently a holiday for some of you hippies out there. (I keed!)
And now…the links!
Ann Coulter: Safety Risk
Berkeley has cancelled Ann Coulter’s speech to be given next week. They are citing safety concerns. She has vowed to show up and give a speech anyway. (TW: Jezebel. So tread lightly if you’re going into their comments for comedic purposes. Its akin to jumping into a septic tank head-first to find out if farts stink.)
Why this isn’t all over the news is beyond me. But Venezuela’s government has seized a General Motors plant. I swear, I saw this in an Ayn Rand book. But I’m sure that it’ll work out fine this time. Just ask Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover or Sean Penn.
If a law is broken in a forest, and there’s no cop around to see it, was it really broken? But what if the cop sees it, but you slip him some cash to go away?
Question: are the words freedom and liberty synonymous? I will probably use them interchangeably but that may be wrong. Anyway… The post at hand.
Romania, as other countries like it, has many things in insufficient supply. Scarcity, after all, is the norm. One of the things not lacking, however, is legislation. We have a bunch of that and it’s mostly stupid. Well, that is harsh, but at the very least contradictory, unclear, or just plain, well… dumb. What else is abundant is corruption and government incompetence. These might as well be national sports like Oina (similar to baseball, but better). So the default MO of many people is simply ignoring the laws they don’t like. One can say the law is irrelevant without enforcement, as rules become but suggestions. But is it really irrelevant, or is there something deeper going on there?
Freedom!
Does corruption or government incompetence in fact aid freedom? Can you be free in practice – de facto – but not de jure – in the eyes of the law? Well yes… and no. Yes, as in for many this may be true, no as in not for all and it is a bad way of going about things.
As long as bad laws exist, if agents of the state decide to fuck with you, they can. You run into someone with a chip-on-shoulder situation, or the occasional example must be set, or fine/arrest quotas must be met. Police and prosecutors in many countries have the occasional urge to look good in the press by showing how the fight lawlessness, get results, and the like. This does not affect most of us. But what if you are the one in a thousand or million who gets the dubious honour of being the example set?
Remember a case a while ago where a bunch of guys in the US were visited by the cops for posting reviews on an escort site? Lizzie NB reported upon it. Well, many people probably used escort forums throughout the country without much issue – until a dozen or so unlucky bastards had the cops come to their door.
Corruption can help freedom a lot if you are well connected or well off enough to afford the cost of bribes. But if you are not, no freedom for you. And if one is connected enough, it can go beyond the understanding of freedom in a libertarian sense and go towards a freedom from consequence even if your actions violate others’ rights and liberty. Getting away with rape and murder is not really liberty.
In Romania, outside the big cities, things are controlled by the political machine of some party or other, led by “local barons.” It is not an exaggerated term; they control everything and nothing moves in their area without their say so. If you have a good job in Bucharest, corruption can aid your freedom. If you live in Teleorman County, the situation is different. Although, if you don’t want to start a business, make money, and you pay deference to the High Lord, you are pretty much left alone to your own devices. If subsistence agriculture and moonshine is the life for you, great.
As an anecdote, as a high school and university student in Romania, one of the freedoms I perceived at the time – a more innocent period where I cared nothing of politics, philosophy, ethics, law, and other things that burden the human mind – was that the internet was cheap, fast, and torrents were abundant. The government and your friendly neighbourhood ISP gave not one damn of copyright, so we could literally pirate everything – movies, books, music, software. Now, I do not want to go in discussions of IP, copyright, the ethics of internet piracy. Suffice to say is that if you were a broke Romanian student, you would have done the same. Look into yourselves; you know it to be so. But the perceived freedom of the mighty bittorrent is not so important any more as one becomes older and wiser. Or at the very least older.
Being outside the law carries risks beyond dealing with agents of the state, for which you cannot seek redress, by being exposed to underworld violence, shoddy products, unreliable contracts, and much more. The problem in countries like fair Romania is that sometimes laws are bad enough that there is little choice but trying to avoid them.
Romania is a country with fairly low freedom in principle but somewhat higher in practice. Taxes and economic regulations are quite firmly on the high side of how these things go. But they are also routinely ignored. The so called underground economy thrives. You pay many a tradesman under the table. You can buy many things without paying the VAT.
Romania has high taxes, and they are inconsistently applied. Being able to avoid high taxes is not the precisely same as not being highly taxed. The end result may be similar on some level, but you are breaking the laws, are liable for punishment, and doing things under the table leaves little recourse if something goes wrong.
Many rent property or work jobs without any proper forms – with the risks implied in not having a contract or some sort of clear deal. High taxation discourages this. So you have some added freedom if you don’t making a contract, but you lose the benefits of the contract.
Prostitution and any and all drugs are illegal, with little chance of decriminalization any time soon. The subject is not even being talked about. But you can access all the illegal drugs and/or escorts you wish (at least of the female variety, no idea of other genders). But you do all this while breaking laws and risking punishment. You can easily buy drugs in Romania, but often they are bad merchandise from shady dealers and there’s nothing to do about it if you get screwed. So yes, there is some added freedom, but not in the real sense of buying quality weed from a trusted merchant in the open.
Prostitution is quite abundant, with plenty of good choices at reasonable prices (not to advertise, mind you), but with all the implied risks from being in the underworld, many dangers for clients, more for escorts. And the cops are sometimes worse than the pimps for the safety of a woman in the trade.
Liberty in hiding just isn’t the same, constantly looking over your shoulder, jumping barriers that should not be there. Maybe it is better than nothing, but less than ideal. De facto liberty can be fickle, undependable, erratic, and inconsistent. It may give you a false sense of security, believing things will not change. But you never know when the inspector you bribed changes his mind or is replaced by another. Maybe you will bribe that one as well, maybe not. Maybe you will be picked as an example for the press of cracking down on offenders.
Another point is what is the long term effect? Can people learn to like liberty and want it in the open, or does being able to avoid laws reduce the incentive to actually go through the process of changing the laws? Will people want more liberty or become complacent with what they have? But enough with the questions.
The internet in recent times allows some more avoiding of consequences of being outside the law. One example is the previously mentioned prostitution forums. They can help clients identify bad service and escorts identify violent customers. In can help escorts escape pimps, get better work, etc. It is, of course, just a small band-aid on a large wound, but it may help some a little. But long term, no matter how much internet, cryptocurrency and whatever, it is not substitute for a small government respecting liberty. It is just what we got.
This post is based on a talk by Evan Sayet some years ago called “Understanding How Modern Liberals Think.” After giving his talk, Sayet received numerous comments that he had discovered the grand unified theory of liberalism. The talk is good, although he goes off on a few too many Team Red tangents for my taste. So this is my modified version of his idea.
When hearing prog opinions, the natural reaction of everyone else is to think that progs must be evil or stupid to believe such things. True, some of them are. But there is a problem here. For example, whatever you think about Michael Moore, he is definitely not stupid. Stupid people don’t make millions of dollars with documentaries. And whatever else you think about Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, they are not evil. They make ice cream with silly names.
Alright, so if they aren’t evil and they aren’t stupid, what is going on? As it turns out, the heart of it is an extremely convoluted thought process that goes like this: of all the different systems people have tried over history, none have created a society devoid of crime, poverty, war, and so on. So, the modern prog concludes from this that the desire to be right is the source of evil. For if no one thought they were right, no one would argue or fight or go to war and so on. If people gave up the search for truth and right, we could all join hands and live happily ever after in the Kindergarten of Eden.
So if no one is better than anyone else, if someone *is* better than someone else, it must be because that they cheated somehow. Therefore, the prog will always side with what is evil, failed, and wrong over what is good, right, and successful. It’s like life is a big roulette wheel, and if the same number comes up over and over, it must be that the wheel is biased.
And the more successful a person or group is, then the greater they must have cheated to get there. This is explains the great hatred most progs have for the US. Only a prog could look at the US, the most prosperous society in history, and see nothing but poverty. Only a prog could look at the US, the least racist society in history, and see nothing but bigotry. Only a prog could look at the US, the most technologically advanced society in history, and see nothing but ignorance. Only a prog could look at the US, the least sexist society in history, and see nothing but misogyny.
How did such an idiotic idea gain widespread adherence? Well, for most of history, you had to be smart and/or lucky to avoid hunger, disease, and poverty. After WW2, these things were largely banished. An entire generation in the US grew up under the illusion that the near paradise they were born into was a fallen world instead of the result of thousands of years of intense effort and numerous setbacks. And even more incredibly, they thought that this state of affairs was so bad that it had to be demolished. That generation has been in charge of the the US government, media, and academia for about 30 years now.
There is hope however. Since progs will inevitably make a mess of things wherever they have control (Sweden, California, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Detroit, Greece…), it is only a matter of time before their rule crumbles.
So take heart, my friends. For though the progs may seem mighty now, they planted the seeds of their own destruction long ago. And those seeds are beginning to sprout.
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