One live example of this was a scene from a documentary about the music group "Swedish House Mafia" titled "Take One"[0]. The documentary follows them around the world, "during 253 gigs, in 23 countries, between 2008 and 2010", but there is one scene that shows the creation of one of their greatest hits, a track titled "One".
In that scene[1], you see them fooling around in their studio, playing. Then Axwell hits a few notes. Then Sebastian Ingrosso joins in, and they lock on and get in the zone and start tweaking it. You could see the shift in the "mode" as they build it. This scene sent shivers down my spine.
The final version[2] had tremendous success.
There was a thread a few months ago titled "Cloudflare TV"[3]. I replied that I expected it to be "TV stream that filmed Cloudflare teams solving problems". Their CTO said it was an interesting idea and gives links to resources you might like, too.
When I found this video (on Hacker News) many years ago, it had a profound influence on my thinking. I still reflexively think about his words in this talk, from time to time.
I see comments just demonstrating Cleese's points. He talks about being kind to people and in return gets nastiness in defamatory statements, apparently people choosing to accept things written by the press he complains about, which he directly contradicts.
He has a story about an episode in a German bar showing how the clientele actually understood The Germans episode, when Brits widely didn't, I'm sorry to say.
"I went to the US and I forgot to pack my irony, but you know, I just didn't need it." -- Mark Radcliffe, broadcaster
I just read this. It's good, but Cleese's talk on Creativity has his best thoughts on the subject (linked elsewhere in this HN thread). However, if you're not up for investing in the video (though you really should), there are two nice articles that summarize, one from Quartz and one from Brainpickings. I regularly share these with my engineering colleagues when they feel like they are in a creative rut.
"The perfect conditions for creativity, according to Monty Python’s John Cleese":
Purity always goes wrong. [...] . It doesn’t work to be too pure, because people deny their own negative stuff and then they start projecting it onto other people.
Yeah this definitely resonated with me, it is just part of human nature to see the bad things we work on in our lives reflected in others. I focus on eating less meat? Now it is more off-putting when I see someone putting away a 20oz steak. I always make sure my car is parked courteously? Now someone who takes up two spots is even more abhorrent. It goes on and on.
That's a part of it. But there is more. Sometimes you fail to see how your behaviour is wrong because, hey, you're pure. If there's something wrong in the world, it is others' fault.
There are two main obvious variants of this. One is blindness to some aspect of your behaviour that causes harm to others but it is not in your creed, like you're courteous and think of the common good, but you're a jerk or a violent person. Time ago someone said here in a comment that he almost punched a man in his face for throwing a cigarette butt on the street.
The other is when your ideas are just wrong or the means to achieve them. Some persons think that sex and drugs are evil. Others think that repression is worse. In general, every idea of purity tends to create the image of an impossible world that just generates frustration. I suspect every idea that seems to expand into minutiae obsesively.
I'm reminded of a vaguely relevant 'pro-purity' quote from Simon Peyton Jones et al, discussing Haskell, on the virtue of its purity as a functional language:
> In retrospect, therefore, perhaps the biggest single benefit of laziness is not laziness per se, but rather that laziness kept us pure, and thereby motivated a great deal of productive work on monads and encapsulated state.
Maybe someone can explain what he means when he said "We didn’t have slavery in the U.K., except when we were the slaves of the Romans and then the Normans."
I was under the impression that America didn't have a monopoly on African slavery [0]. Is Cleese wrong or am I misunderstanding what he's trying to say?
He's correct that the UK did ban slavery within the UK rather early (or, more specifically, it was found to be illegal by the courts), and did ban it in its colonies rather early, but absolutely there was slavery in the UK a long time after the Romans, though not in particularly large numbers after the Normans. The UK was, however, the second largest participant in the Atlantic slave trade (Portugal has the dubious honour of being first).
Also, English people were never enslaved by the Normans. More or less the opposite; the Normans phased out chattel slavery, which was quite common in England when they showed up.
Or, alternatively, of course, he could be referring to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (the current one) which has only existed since the early 20th century. The slavery was all under the United Kingdom of Great Britain and to a lesser extent the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland! (Of course, the reference to Romans and Normans would argue against that rather silly interpretation...)
It's fairly common for British people to fixate on the fact that the UK was largely single-handedly responsible for abolishing slavery in the west (via the Navigation Acts in particular), while somewhat discounting the fact that the UK had previously been a huge part of the problem.
> It's fairly common for British people to fixate on the fact that the UK was largely single-handedly responsible for abolishing slavery in the west (via the Navigation Acts in particular), while somewhat discounting the fact that the UK had previously been a huge part of the problem.
And also ignoring the fact that banning the trade in slaves isn't the same as banning slavery; and ignoring the fact the when slavery finally was banned it wasn't banned everywhere; and most of the slaves became "apprentices" (ie still unpaid) for a few years before becoming free; and that reparations for slavery were paid: to the slave owners, not to the slaves.
There's a bunch of stuff about colonialism that people in the UK refuse to engage with.
From the context immediately following his statement, it seems fairly clear that he meant we didn't have slavery...to the extent that it happened in the Americas. His statements imply knowledge that slavery actually existed in some form in England:
> When I was studying law, there were three key dates. There was a legal case in which it was established, I think in the seventeen-hundreds, that slavery was wrong in the U.K. Then there was the slave trade, which I’m proud to say William Wilberforce and the Quakers did a great deal to stop. And then there was the final thing about actually using slaves in the Caribbean territories, which stopped quite some time before [the United States]. So the idea of slavery is not as carved into our conscious and unconscious as it is into an American’s.
Yes, he goes on to contradict himself a bit. The initial statement is clearly incorrect, though. And while it might be true that slavery isn't as much a part of the national psyche in the UK as in the US, it, er, probably _should_ be. 30 years isn't that much of a difference. There are plenty of practical reason that it _isn't_; the ending was of course far less dramatic, and it was far away. But I do think there's a tendency to de-emphasise it a bit too much.
> From the context immediately following his statement, it seems fairly clear that he meant we didn't have slavery...to the extent that it happened in the Americas
Only if you discount the colonies. (It probably is fair to say that British colonial slavery tended to be a _little_ less nasty than American slavery, mind you).
Ok, this proves that at least one other person thought this sounded strange; I thought maybe I was missing some minutia since I'm just some goofy American.
> The UK was, however, the second largest participant in the Atlantic slave trade (Portugal has the dubious honour of being first)
How does that square with the fact that the bulk of the enslaving for it was by Africans, by all accounts, which surely counts as participation in the vile business? (Barbary pirate slavers also ravaged the south coasts of the British Isles, as well as southern Europe.) That seems important context, which is either not known or ignored, amongst the beating up over what previous generations did.
The individual entities involved were _far_ smaller, and mostly don't have successor states. In terms of numbers, Portugal and the UK were clearly the largest offenders, unless one treats Africa as a single entity (in which case it would also be proper to treat Europe as a single entity).
>It's fairly common for British people to fixate on the fact that the UK was largely single-handedly responsible for abolishing slavery in the west (via the Navigation Acts in particular), while somewhat discounting the fact that the UK had previously been a huge part of the problem.
The West didn't invent slavery, something that existed on every inhabited continent for thousands of years, but it was responsible for it's abolishment. Don't you think that's something to be proud of?
“What was peculiar about the West was not that it participated in the worldwide evil of slavery, but that it later abolished that evil, not only in Western societies but also in other societies subject to Western control or influence. This was possible only because the anti-slavery movement coincided with an era in which Western power and hegemony were at their zenith, so that it was essentially European imperialism which ended slavery. This idea might seem shocking, not because it does not fit the facts, but because it does not fit the prevailing vision of our time.”
― Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals
> Don't you think that's something to be proud of?
Er, I mean, if I was William Wilberforce or someone I suppose I'd be moderately proud of that, yes! As someone who had no involvement in it and was born nearly two centuries after the first steps, I think it'd probably be a little bizarre for me to be proud of it.
Seems totally irrelevant to whether the UK had slavery or not, anyway.
> As someone who had no involvement in it and was born nearly two centuries after the first steps, I think it'd probably be a little bizarre for me to be proud of it.
It works both ways though. By the same logic, the West shouldn't feel guilty for slavery and stop the self-flagellation.
It's relevant to what you said. You implied that people from the UK try to wash their hands of slavery by saying they played a big part in ending it. And I'm saying they are right to use that as an argument against those who ignore history and try to pin slavery soley on the West. Without Western Civilization slavery would still be acceptable today. It took the Middle East until the 1960s! to abolish slavery. And it took Western pressure.
Probably the fact that slavery was insignificant in numbers in England itself (orders of magnitude less compared to the US for example), and even that ended quite early. So there isn't this big legacy of slavery and slave work in the UK, the way it is in the South. It's barely a blip.
So if he's talking about UK proper (that is, the mainland), he's not that far off, even though technically inaccurate. Slavery wasn't a big thing there like in the US, and didn't cause any kind of huge Civil War to put an end to what there is...
That said, the UK was responsible for much of the trade to the US itself, and had colonized, a fancy term for enslaved, a large chunk of the world. So there's that.
It seems almost disingenuous to literally only talk about the mainland of England when saying "We didn’t have slavery in the U.K".
I don't know if that was his intention, but, as you said, England has a long history of enslaving nations. Even if it didn't bring the slaves back with them necessarily most of the time, they still did horrible exploitation.
(Evidently, not trying to exclude the US here; obviously the US had some pretty brutal slavery, and the only reason we haven't colonized as much is likely due to us being a much younger country).
>It seems almost disingenuous to literally only talk about the mainland of England when saying "We didn’t have slavery in the U.K".
Well, for the UK society, etc., that's the part that matters though, and I understand him as talking from that aspect. Going out and about you didn't see people in chains, and slavery being the foundation of the economy the way you'd do in the South for example, nor were you constantly reminded of "us and them" in that way.
The UK's ruling classes, on the other hand, they're of course responsible for the colonies too - and lots of other things besides...
> and slavery being the foundation of the economy the way you'd do in the South for example
Well, not as visibly, certainly. Slavery actually had a fairly dramatic impact on the British economy, though, both in the colonies, and later, indirectly, during the US civil war, when lack of cotton caused a major economic crisis.
Right, that's why 52 of them continue to be members of the Commonwealth and 16 continue to have the Queen as their head of state. Basically slavery, eh? If you go and visit any of the colonies you'll find that they gained a lot from British rule and many of them are quite grateful for it.
I don't really think that follows; a lot of former slaves in the US stayed in the South, but that doesn't really in any way diminish how horrible the slavery was here; they still voted in presidential elections (when they were allowed to anyway), they still paid taxes to the governments that allowed slavery to continue, they still had to buy products from the people that had enslaved them. There are a ton of social, economic, and political reasons to why that I'm not really fully qualified to get into, but the exact reasons don't really matter, because here's my point: despite all these facts, it still remains a fact that American slavery was exceptionally brutal.
Even if the former slaves did learn a valuable trade while being enslaved, and at some level were grateful for it, at the end of the day, it was still absolutely horrific how they treated.
I'm not trying to accuse you of slavery apologia, but I don't really think that just because some colonies continued to have keep the queen on their money that we can say it wasn't slavery or horrible in general.
They weren't all treated horrifically. Slavery is wrong in principle, but that doesn't mean it was all horrific in practice. It wasn't all as depicted in 12 Years a Slave.
Colonialism wasn't slavery, plain and simple. There's no argument to be had here. Calling it "basically slavery" is diminishing the seriousness of actual slavery, something which still exists in the world today.
There were good things and bad things about colonialism. As it happens the British colonies tended to maintain local customs and laws instead of steam rolling everything as some other colonial powers did. We all live with laws and customs, many of which are chosen by other people. Does that make us all basically slaves?
> They weren't all treated horrifically. Slavery is wrong in principle, but that doesn't mean it was all horrific in practice. It wasn't all as depicted in 12 Years a Slave.
What does this have to do with anything? Sure, there were slaves that were treated kindly, but even if you proved that that was a majority of slaves, it really does not subtract from my point in any way, like, at all. The fact that remains that some slaves that were treated horribly still stayed in the south.
> Colonialism wasn't slavery, plain and simple.
Ok then. I guess we'll need to agree to disagree on this point. It seems like even if it's not "slavery" in your narrow definition, there's a pretty big bit of overlap between British colonization and slavery.
> As it happens the British colonies tended to maintain local customs and laws instead of steam rolling everything as some other colonial powers did.
In some places, yes, but in other places they would go around murdering a large percentage of the native populations and forcing them into labor.
> If you go and visit any of the colonies you'll find that they gained a lot from British rule and many of them are quite grateful for it.
Except for the ones that aren't, like, you know, the United States, or India. Did the US "gain a lot from British rule"? I mean, maybe, that's basically impossible to quantify, but I seriously don't know a single person in the US that is "grateful" for British rule...US schools basically teach that England was pretty evil and that's why we had to separate. While that's almost certainly propaganda and a gross oversimplification of history, the fact remains that the people of the US aren't "grateful" for the British rule, whatever that means.
rsynnott is "technically" correct, but perhaps to clarify: the concept of slavery as existed in the New World was never legal on English soil, nor when it united with Scotland to become the UK.
What this means for the fact that the English were at one point one of the largest traders of African slaves is an education in how people can be quite selective in their morals when money is involved.
Yeah, not the first time. People are knee-jerk accusing him with the latest fashionable to their peer-group catch-all characterizations all the time...
There have been plenty stories showcasing his racist beliefs of late (I won't link any, just Google it), so it's no unreasonable to read his comments in that light
I'll take your point that such readings exist, but "he's just being racist" isn't a thoughtful expression of one. It's garden-variety internet flamewar, a thing we don't want here—actually we can't have it here if we want the community to survive.
Just to be clear, the issue I'm commenting on is not what deserves the label 'racism'—it's what sort of internet discussion flamebait leads to. The existence of racism, and of differing views about it, is no reason to wreck the community one's participating in. Maybe commenters don't owe John Cleese better, but they owe HN better if they're posting here.
I agree with you that flamewars are bad, and I didn't think I was starting one by stating the obvious. In fact, leaving my comment here, I doubt I would get any objections to it except yours!
I recollect now that you posted "Please don't do this here" to me few months ago after I attributed one of Trump's action to racism, and like now you were the only one who took issue with me labeling racism by its name.
Naga Munchetty, a BBC presenter has recently been dismissed for labeling Trump as racist on air, but her dismal was overturned when the BBC decided not to be impartial about racism, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-49859060
If HN moderators believe they should run the site like Mark Zuckerberg runs Facebook, then it wouldn't be the right place for me.
Your comment in question serves to communicate anger and derision in a way that is only likely to provoke more of the same, and contributes nothing of substance.
There may be other places for this sort of content, but it’s not here.
Amusing how the article still has a "Brexit" tag despite Cleese insisting that he doesn't want to talk about it and that his "self-imposed exile" has nothing to do with it. Sorry if I'm cynical but it's kind of telling how the tags are driven solely by what gets the SEO department happy.
Yes, there's a confirmation of what he claims is going on.
Two relevant quotes of Cleese from the article:
"we’ve gone from being a reasonably literate, reasonably well-informed nation to being a tabloid culture, where we have reality television and very few plays in the West End, because they’re all musicals. This is not a culture I admire. So I have a lot of reasons for not being there."
"I’m saying it’s not English. For a lot of people that’s not a problem, but I like the English, and I’d like to be in a place where the culture is more English. And a lot of that is a lot to do with the fact that America now has always been obsessed with money. England used not to be. Now England is as obsessed with money as America. That’s not to do with race, is it? So a lot of misreporting in the papers has been taken seriously by someone as smart as you."
It seems that for him the Englishness as he defines it was not being "obsessed with money as America."
One interesting detail from his biography: before he was famous with Monty Python, and during or shortly after his studies he already preformed on Broadway.
I think Cleese, and other English people, are struggling for a language to describe their desire for cultural preservation in a way that doesn't immediately come across as xenophobic or racist.
I mean, is it possible to desire prosperity and justice for all peoples, without requiring that every nation on earth resemble the global average of cultural and genetic makeup?
This would not mean no further admixture of people and ideas. Indeed the English identity has long consisted an admixture of Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Roman, Danish, and Norman peoples and cultures.
As an American, I don't desire the "Americanization" of England any more than Cleese. But I think it's hard for many people to say what makes England English, or what might be good about that.
Also, watching from the distance (and while considering myself privileged to be able to do that, please note in advance this disclaimer before reading further, whoever reads past this voids his right to become offended and yadda yadda) I consider this admission of the interviewer quite... Pythonesque (like I've said -- when reading from a safe distance):
"I watched “The Germans” episode this week, and it was jarring to hear the N-word bandied about in such a casual way. It threw me out of the story for five minutes."
I mean, really. Watching the show made on another continent around 50 years ago. Well, newsflash, Mr. interviewer:
1) the world does not consist of the U.S. of A. alone.
2) the world didn't start to exist at the moment you've learned to tweet.
3) it's possible to have a... perspective and an awareness of the existence of the passage of time and of the existence of different continents. It's not that hard.
Not to mention that in 2020 there are enough people that claim being anti-racist also at the same time happily support ideologies which are provably inherently racist and misogynic, because they believe that not doing that would be racist.
Now for a slight digression, another interview with Cleese:
Just checked: pythonesque is definitely an already existing word.
It's so easy for humans to support at the same time something and the opposite of something and not even being aware of that and of the absurdity of being in that state. I guess there must be some studies about the effect.
Accordingly, as seen around 1970:
"Dear Sir,
I wish to complain in the strongest possible terms about the song you have just broadcast about the lumberjack who wears women’s clothes.
Many of my best friends are lumberjacks, and only a few of them are transvestites.
Yours faithfully, Brigadier Sir Charles Arthur Strong, Mrs.
P.S. I have never kissed the editor of the Radio Times."
I'm American and I don't think I'm obsessed with money; I've turned down interviews from several big corporations that offered me more money than I know what to do with because I thought the company was too evil (don't really want to start a flame war about which companies, doesn't really matter regardless).
Obviously I'm one person, maybe Americans really are more obsessed with money than British folks, and maybe this expression means something something different in England, but typically when people say a city is becoming "UnAmerican", or something similar, it's a dogwhistle for some underlying racism, usually some kind of crap about Mexicans dealing drugs or something; it's a really useful strategy, because when you call them out on it, they can always have some level of plausible deniability of saying "I don't care about race! I care about culture!" or some such nonsense; point is when Cleese says "it's not English", a part of me thinks that this is just code for something much worse.
I like John Cleese and don't want to accuse him of racism willy-nilly but this interview does kind of make me wonder.
I mean, Brexiteer who fled the country after the vote went his way. Regardless of what he says, the tag isn't... that surprising.
(FWIW, I'd be somewhat less cynical about Cleese's motivations, personally, than I would about certain other Brexit-supporting exiles. However, the guy who came up with "don't mention the war" probably knew very well how it would be framed.)
