Gizmodo has a piece proclaiming the death of Flickr at the hands of the hateful and incompetent Yahoo. In many ways, Flickr has been the most important site on the internet to me (after CT of course) for the past five years. There isn’t another site that allows people who are serious about photography (including film) to display and talk about their work with others who feel the same way, that also includes a social media component. True, there are other sites that are good display vehicles (zenfolio or smugmug) but that’s like opening your shop down a dusty side-street: random traffic. And there are other sites that do the social media thing and carry photos (Facebook, Google+) but where you are showing your stuff not to photographers but to your “friends” who may or may not care. No one else does the combination. The other thing about Flickr is the crossover from online social groups to real-world friendships. In Bristol we have monthly pub meets and various other events; through other Flickr projects I’ve met and hung out with photographers in other places, notably San Francisco. I’d never have met those people on Facebook. But Flickr does look tired and Yahoo has starved it of support. It is not dead yet, but it will be a tragedy if it goes, since nothing else does the same job.
Posts by author:
Chris Bertram
As a young Trot and reader of Intercontinental Press (I’m talking late 70s, early 80s) I was somewhat astonished when people told me about Gerry Foley, who has just died. As Jeff Mackler’s obit on Red Mole Rising says, he could read in 90 languages and was fluent in more than a dozen. There’s lots of bonus detail on the history of American Trotskyism, on McCarthy, and on the extent of FBI surveillance of far-left meetings. Worth a read. RIP.
Today’s Guardian has a series of articles today concerning Britain’s colonial past and evidence of the widespread destruction of documents with evidence of crimes against humanity by British forces. Other pieces include material on planned poison gas tests in Botswana , on the coverup of the deportation of the Chagos islanders from Diego Garcia (now used by the United States to bomb various countries), and of serious war crimes during the Malayan emergency . And then there are eighteen striking photographs of the British at work in Kenya, Malaya and Aden . The Aden photographs in particular call to mind similar later ones of British troops in Northern Ireland, where of course, torture was also employed: the techniques used on colonial populations being brought to bear against Irish republicans. And, of course, the look on the faces of the soldiers as they manhandle and abuse “natives” is really no different from what we see in pictures of the French in Algeria, of American troops in Iraq and, indeed, in footage of the Israeli Defense Force in the occupied territories. A timely reminder of the evils of imperialism and colonialism.
Via Martin O’Neill on FB, I see that reminiscences of Jerry Cohen by Philippe Van Parijs, John Roemer, Myles Burnyeat, Gideon Cohen and Tim Scanlon are now online (pdf). Enjoy.
Ben Bella is dead, as the charismatic leader of the FLN in the Algerian war of independence, he was one of the great (though flawed) figures of the wave of post-war revolutionary decolonisation. Obituaries and reports in the New York Times , Guardian, Le Monde .
I’ve just finished the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard’s A Death in the Family, the first volume of his sequence of autobiographical novels, My Struggle . The novel, if novel is the best word for it, is at once brilliant and horrible. Brilliant, because of Knausgaard’s talents for description and for self-observation; horrible because of the meticulous way in which he sets out the decline of his father and grandmother. In the novel, and doubtless in real life, Knausgaard’s father is an alcoholic, who at the end of his life, barricades himself into the house of his semi-demented mother and drinks himself to death amidst his own waste. The final third of the book consists of the author’s description of himself and his brother cleaning up the mess and preparing for the funeral. Incomprehensible to the author – and to the reader – is his father’s sudden mid-life transformation from being reserved, proper, distant and controlling, first to would-be bohemian and then to hopeless drunk. Though this change provides the organizing principle of the novel, it is only one of its parts. Much of the “action” (if action there is) consists of an alienated Knausgaard recalling his adolescence and observing himself struggling to write somewhere in Stockholm. In the course of this, we get his reflections on art – and what it does for him – his feelings towards his pregnant girlfriend and children (less warm than he thinks they should be), on death, alcohol, music and much besides. I can’t say that it is anything other than compelling, even though simultaneously revolting. Of course we cannot know what Knausgaard holds back, but he gives a good impression of total candour: he notices the difference between what he ought to feel and think and what he does, actually, feel and think, and tells us anyway.
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In the thread on community colleges (which morphed into a discussion of more general education and management issues), someone mentioned Kahneman on the “halo effect” in grading (or marking) student work. Thinking Fast and Slow has been on my to-read pile since Christmas, but I got it down from the shelf to read the relevant pages. Kahneman:
Early in my career as a professor, I graded students’ essay exams in the conventional way. I would pick up one test booklet at it time and read all the students’ essays in immediate succession, grading them as I went. I would then compute the total and go on to the next student. I eventually noticed that my evaluations of the essays in each booklet were strikingly homogeneous. I began to suspect that my grading exhibited a halo effect, and that the first question I scored had a disproportionate effect on the overall grade. The mechanism was simple: if I had given a high score to the first essay, I gave the student the benefit of the doubt whenever I encountered a vague or ambiguous statement later on. This seemed reasonable … I had told the students that the two essays had equal weight, but that was not true: the first one had a much greater impact on the final grade than the second. This was unacceptable. (p. 83)
Kahneman then switched to reading all the different students’ answers to each question. This often left him feeling uncomfortable, because he would discover that his confidence in his judgement became undermined when he later discovered that his responses to the same student’s work were all over the place. Neverthless, he is convinced that his new procedure, which, as he puts it “decorrelates error” is superior.
I’m sure he’s right about that and that his revised procedure is better: I intend to adopt it. Some off-the-cuff thoughts though: (1) I imagine some halo effect persists and that one’s judgement of an immediately subsequent answer to the same question in consecutive booklets or script is influenced by the preceding one; (2) reading answers to the same question over and over again can be even more tedious than marking usually is. I thing it would be even better to switch at random through the piles; (3) (and this may get covered in the book) the fact that sequence matters because of halo effects strikes me as a big problem for Bayesians. What your beliefs about something end up being can just be the result of the sequence in which you encounter the evidence. If right (and it’s not my department) then that ought to be a major strike against Bayesianism.
I’ve just sent back the proofs for the new edition of Rousseau’s Of the Social Contract and Other Political Writings (edited Bertram, translated Quintin Hoare) that Penguin Classics are publishing in September. One of the “other writings” is the Constitutional Proposal for Corsica . Reading through, I suddenly alighted on an sentence and thought, “hang on, that makes no sense!” The relevant phrase in French (OC3: 936) is
…quand le Prince hausse les monnoyes il en retire l’avantage reel de voler ses créanciers …
For which we had
…when the Prince raises the value of a currency he derives the real advantage of stealing from his creditors …
But, but …. Surely what the prince needs to do to steal from his creditors is the exact opposite? You inflate. You inflate away the debt. You make the currency worth less, not more. Isn’t Rousseau just writing nonsense then?
It turns out not, and, thanks to the help of the estimable Chris Brooke I now understand. My thinking on this, and that of just about all modern readers I suspect, is formed by thinking of fiat currency. But if we have currency that (purportedly) derives its value from its metallic content (such as gold) then you can debase the coinage by raising its face value whilst keeping the metal content the same. (Or alternatively, you could adulterate the metal or clip the coin to get the same effect.) Finding out this kind of thing really is great fun.
This morning brings news of new plans by Britain’s Tory/LibDem coalition, this time to privatize parts of the road network. Presented (again) merely as a way of getting things working more efficiently, this is both part of a pattern and – the philosophical point here – a further reduction in the liberty of individuals. The pattern is a gradual shift of resources that used to be common in to the private or quasi-private sector. Not long ago, higher education was free: now it is not. Fairly large amounts of formerly public space in cities are now in the hands of private developers who employ security guards to enforce their rules on what can be done on their land. Government plans to privatize publicly-owned forest and woodland have been defeated, but for how long? The “reforms” of Britain’s National Health Service allow for new charges to be brought in for treatments and services deemed “non-essential” (although NHS trusts are already denying treatment for some conditions that used to be treated for free). Generally, there’s a shift from formerly taxpayer-funded services towards privatized ones that users have to pay for.
No doubt our “libertarian” friends approve of this shift, but those who don’t have an ideologically distorted view of liberty should be alarmed. First, the extension of chargeable private space means that the range of actions permitted to individuals who lack money is reduced. Lack of money reduces your purely negative freedom,[1] as anyone who tries to perform actions encroaching on the state-enforced private property of others will quickly discover. Second—and this point should hold even for those silly enough to reject the view that private property restricts the freedom of those who have less of it—the increase in privatized public space means that we are increasingly subject to the arbitrary will of private owners concerning what we can and can’t do. Rights of assembly? Rights of protest? Rights to do things as innocuous as take a photograph? All of those things are now restricted or prohibited on formerly public land across the United Kingdom or subject to the permission of the new private owner. The interest of those who endorse a republican conception of freedom is thereby engaged, as is those of liberal persuasion who think a list of basic liberties should be protected: less public space, less capacity to exercise those basic liberties. The proposed privatization of the roads is just an extension of this.
(The Liberal Democrats as part of the Tory-led coalition bear a particularly heavy responsibility for failing to prevent these changes for which the UK government has no democratic mandate. With luck they will be destroyed at the next election, as they deserve to be. Let no-one forget, though, how far the last Labour government took us down this path and legitimized these changes through measures like student fees and the Private Finance Initiative.)
fn1. For an argument to this effect and a demolition of the idea that lack of money confers lack of ability rather than unfreedom, see G.A. Cohen, Freedom and Money (PDF)
David Graeber’s three social principles – hierarchy, exchange and communism – are useful devices to think about the world, particularly when you become sensitized to the way in which one can turn into or mask another. One site of human interaction that may be illuminated by Graeber’s principles is the modern university: perhaps especially the British version which has evolved from nominally democratic modes of governance to extremely hierarchical ones within a generation.
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Julian Sanchez has a post up complaining about all us horrible lefties who are deriving great enjoyment from the fact that, in the Koch/Cato bunfight, shills for the rights of private property are being stiffed by those same private property rights. Corey Robin has a pretty good reply, so go read Corey.
Sanchez:
when it comes to the ongoing Koch/Cato conflict, there’s a bafflingly widespread round of herp-derpery rippling through blogs on the left and the right, wherein people imagine it’s clever to point out the supposed irony of libertarian scholars failing to enthusiastically embrace a couple billionaires’ putative property rights over the institution. This is just strange. …I’m not arguing that Congress should intervene somehow. I’m arguing that exercising those rights as they seemingly intend to is a bad idea; that their direct control would, in itself, be damaging to Cato’s credibility; and that I’m not interested in working for the Republican talking-point factory that all evidence suggests they envision. Like rain on your wedding day and other infamous Alanisisms, that’s kind of crappy, but not “ironic” in any recognizable sense. I realize progressives think libertarianism is just code for uncritical worship of rich people, but as that’s not actually the case, the only irony here is that people think they’re scoring some kind of gotcha point when they’re actually exposing the silliness of their own caricature.
Well of course Sanchez is correct. Libertarians are as free as anyone else to criticize people for the way they exercise their rights, they just don’t think the state should coerce people to act in various ways. They can deplore Scrooge like selfishness just as sincerely as any leftie, they just think it would be wrong of the state to force Scrooge to be be nice to the poor. So it goes.
No doubt there are some soft and cuddly propertarians out there who insist on the rights to private property (and hence oppose enforceable positive duties) but who privately devote their time, money and other resources to helping the global (and local) poor. To those libertarians, I apologise in advance. However, to those libertarians who have spent ink and energy arguing that not only would it be wrong to force to rich to help the poor but also that it would be pointless or counterproductive I do not. And then there are those libertarians who don’t even both with pointless or counterproductive but who argue that the strong helping the weak is just wrong, namely the Randians. So, pure-in-spirit rights-defenders (of whom Julian Sanchez may be one): just take it on the chin for now and spend some time arguing with the wealthy that, whilst they have a perfect right to spend their money funding Cato (or Heritage, or the AEI) they really could make better use of their rights by sending their cash to the sub-Saharan poor or similar. (See also, this very old post of mine ).
We’ve now received and published all the contributions in our online seminar on David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years . For those wanting a handy index the posts are:
Chris Bertram, Introduction
John Quiggin, The unmourned death of the double coincidence
Henry Farrell: The world economy is not a tribute system
Barry Finger Debt jubilee or global deleveraging
John Quiggin (slight return): The end of debt
Neville Morley: The return of grand narrative in the human sciences
Malcolm Harris: The dangers of pricing the infinite
Daniel Davies Too big to fail: the first 5000 years
Lou Brown: Good to think with
Richard Ashcroft: Money out of place: ‘debt’ and incentives
Rob Horning: Debt on the 12th planet
Stay tuned, as we’re hoping that David Graeber will be able to write a response to some of this soon, but that won’t happen for at least a week or so.
David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years begins with a conversation in a London churchyard about debt and morality and takes us all the way from ancient Sumeria, through Roman slavery, the vast empires of the “Axial age”, medieval monasteries, New World conquest and slavery to the 2008 financial collapse. The breadth of material Graeber covers is extraordinarily impressive and, though anchored in the perspective of social anthropology, he also draws on economics and finance, law, history, classics, sociology and the history of ideas. I’m guessing that most of us can’t keep up and that we lack, to some degree, his erudition and multidisciplinary competence. Anyway, I do. But I hope that a Crooked Timber symposium can draw on experts and scholars from enough of these different disciplines to provide some critical perspective. My own background is in political philosophy and the history of political thought: so that naturally informs my own reactions as do my political engagements and sympathies. So mine is merely one take on some of the book’s themes.
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Today’s Observer (at the Guardian website) has a review of Roman Polanski’s new film Carnage by Philip French. Here’s what Mr French had to say about Polanski’s past:
At the age of six, Polanski began a life of persecution, flight and the threat of incarceration – first from the Nazi invaders of Poland, then an oppressive communist regime, and finally the American criminal justice system after his newfound sense of freedom led him into transgression. The world must seem a prison, society a succession of traps, civilised values a deceptive veneer, life itself a battle against fate.
Like a number of other people, I posted a comment on the site. I can’t reproduce my comment exactly, because it has now been deleted for “violation of community standards” but it read something like “What? ‘transgression’ hardly seems to be an appropriate word.” Other commenters have been deleted, again for “violation of community standards” merely for quoting Mr French’s exculpatory paragraph in extenso and say that it is “ludicrous”. The Guardian’s guidelines on “community standards” are here. They are not unreasonable and contain the assurance:
In short: – If you act with maturity and consideration for other users, you should have no problems.
It is hard, therefore, to see why politely objecting to Mr French’s words should provoke deletion. Apparently, the Guardian thinks otherwise.