Is there anything more to this “post”:http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2013/07/robin-and-the-austrians-revisited-ii-anatomy-of-a-hayek-fail/ of epic, indeed Den Bestian length than the claim that if you define the term ‘elite’ in an arbitrary and weirdly narrow way, then Hayek is not an elitist (and btw Corey Robin eats his own boogers!)? I’ve read the piece through a couple of times and not found it, if it’s there. I’ll say that this is all especially annoying coming from Kevin Vallier, who was lecturing me last year for failing to demonstrate “sufficient intellectual charity”:”:https://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/22/welfare-and-charity/ to Hayek (when I took Hayek’s words to mean what they would appear, quite literally, to mean). This year, he’s telling us instead how Corey’s purported errors allow “people who aren’t already Robin fans how to distinguish him from a responsible intellectual historian.” I’m more in favor of vigorous argument than starting from charitable assumptions myself, but the inconsistency is rather startling …
From the monthly archives:
July 2013
Today, July 8th, is the tenth anniversary of Crooked Timber. I don’t suppose that when we started, any of us expected it to last this long, but it has, retaining its distinctive character through many changes of personnel. By way of marking the occasion, I thought I’d set down how the blog came into being, and a little bit about its prehistory.
Some time early in 2003, I decided that I couldn’t keep going with my solo blog, Junius. My colleague Keith Graham had unexpectedly taken early retirement and the finger was pointing at me to head the philosophy department at Bristol. But I didn’t want to quit blogging: I’d made a bunch of friends online and I was enjoying arguing with people about ideas. Still, I knew I couldn’t keep Junius going if it meant updating a blog several times a week. So the idea struck me that I should invite some of the people I’d most liked interacting with to form a group blog. To them I added a few other friends whom I wanted to read online but who hadn’t yet taken the plunge.
[click to continue…]
Ever since the 19th century, one of the points of convergence between the free-market right and the socialist left has been that the most important freedom under capitalism is the freedom of contract. Whatever its other problems, the market is the one sphere where the rights of man obtain. As Marx put it in Volume 1 of Capital: [click to continue…]
Responding to the unsurprising disclosure that the US is spying on its EU partners in trade negotiations, and the evidence that quite a few European countries are doing the same, the NY Times editorial page strikes a pose of blase cynicism, mocking Henry Stimson’s observation that “gentlemen don’t read other gentlemen’s mail”. In the view of the NY Times, and, it would seem, of most other commentators, this is the way of the world, and only a fool would refuse to play the game.
A couple of observations on this
* Even more than with standard espionage, it is obvious that this kind of eavesdropping can only work if it is unsuspected, which is obviously not the case. The alleged sophistication of the advocates of spying is at about the same level as that of teenagers who have just discovered Ayn Rand.
* In circumstances like this, the most effective, and most time-honored, way of cheating is not eavesdropping but bribery. Officially, at least, bribing foreign officials is a serious crime under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, legislation passed under the Carter Administration and roughly contemporaneous with the original, relatively restrictive, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, arising from the work of the Church Committee. But, on the reasoning used to justify the evisceration of FISA, even in its application to supposed allies, it’s hard to see how support for FCPA can be sustained. I wonder if the NY Times shares this view.
So a while ago on Twitter, I saw this storify by @KateDaddie, talking about ethnic minority representation in the British media, in the context of this article by Joseph Harker in the British Journalism Review. As I am a notorious stats pedant and practically compulsive mansplainer, my initial reaction was to fire up the Pedantoscope and start nitpicking. On the face of it, it is not difficult to think up Devastating Critiques[1] of the idea of counting “#AllWhiteFrontPages” as an indicator of more or less anything. But if I’ve learned one thing from a working life dealing with numbers (and from reading all those Nassim Taleb and Anthony Stafford Beer books), it’s that the central limit theorem will not be denied, and that simple, robust metrics with a broad-brush correlation to the thing you’re trying to measure are usually better management tools than fragile customised metrics which look like they might in principle be better. Anyway, Kate asked me to come up with a simple probability model to give an idea of what sort of frequency of #AllWhiteFrontPages might be considered odd, and this is the way I went about it. This is being crossposted to the new Media Diversity UK blog.
Half a year ago, I invited CT readers to join me in a photo project: a photo a week on a preset theme. Dozens of people were involved at first with about twenty still active half a year later. As with related photo projects, in addition to the photo experiences, the social component has been rewarding as well.
Up front I made a decision that all themes would be adjectives and I’d go through the alphabet, which conveniently maps on to a 52-week calendar if we cycle through it twice. Bubbly, endless, obsolete, twisted and xylographic are some of the themes we’ve tackled over the past six months. It’s been eye-opening to see people’s different interpretations of the themes. It’s been fun to be reminded of the different environments in which people live (we have participants from several countries), what they tend to encounter in their daily lives, what inspires them, what poses more or less of a challenge. As an aside, it’s also led me to improve my vocabulary.
The “Wall Street Journal”:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324399404578583932317286550.html
bq. Egyptians would be lucky if their new ruling generals turn out to be in the mold of Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, who took power amid chaos but hired free-market reformers and midwifed a transition to democracy. If General Sisi merely tries to restore the old Mubarak order, he will eventually suffer Mr. Morsi’s fate.
Petraeusgate is a rapidly unfolding scandal of multiple parts and pieces. I mostly focus here on the third, which involves a potential cover-up. The first two—the crimes, as it were—are more important. But if you want to get to the newest and most scandalous revelations, jump to the third section of this post. [click to continue…]
Took the girls to see Despicable Me 2. It’s good but we agreed the first was better ‘when Gru was bad’. Also, the minions are so funny they risk being the equivalent of a resource curse for the franchise. You just have to have them do any random, yet minion-y thing and they’ll carry the film along, the lovable scamps.
In classic animation news, early cutout animation master Vladislav Feltov – be ashamed you haven’t heard of him! – is finally getting the attention he deserves, thanks to 2013 BAFTA-winning animator Will Anderson and his brilliant restoration/reimagining, “The Making of Longbird”. I remember at the University of Chicago, in 1986 (was it?), I was a volunteer at Doc Films, helping organize stuff, and someone wanted to include some Feltov in an animation festival. Of course it was quite impossible.
Before “Longbird” Will Anderson was perhaps best known for his music and his documentary approach to the Scottish labor market and its relationship to issues of law enforcement and public order.
If you – your children, your whole family – are inspired by all this greatness to drop everything and take up cutout animation, probably the most sensible thing to do is start with the McClaren’s Workshop app for your iPad. It’s free and fun.
Douglas Engelbart, an extremely important contributor to so many computing technologies that make possible so much of what we do today passed away last night. I hope we’ll see more coverage of this than is currently out there, he certainly deserves to be celebrated for his many contributions.
“My contribution”:http://jacobinmag.com/2013/07/half-poulantzas-half-kindleberger/ to the _Jacobin_ seminar on Panitch and Gindin is up. Extract:
s Panitch and Gindin’s book shows … there’s a lot that they could learn. And if most standard issue international political economy scholars don’t know much about Marxists, the opposite is not necessarily true. Panitch and Gindin not only know the debates among radicals, but have read very widely across the field of IPE, engaging with (and often usefully repurposing) the ideas and empirical material that they find useful.
I learned a lot from their book, and will be assigning it to my students. Still, I think there’s room for useful argument. To be clear, Panitch and Gindin are clearly far better read in the debates that I follow than I am in the debates that they follow. This means that some (and perhaps most) of the disagreement below is of the ‘why didn’t you write the book that I would have written if I were you’ variety, so discount it as you think appropriate. I’m almost certainly not the audience they imagined that they were writing the book for. Yet their account of the entanglement between American imperium and neo-liberalism conceals as well as reveals. There are some causal relations — arguably quite important ones — that are invisible to it.
That’s the headline on my latest piece for The National Interest. It looks at the case of (retired) General James Cartwright, former vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, under investigation for a leak relating to the Stuxnet worm, a US-Israeli cyberwarfare exercise directed against Iran. The key points
* Like most leaks, the one for which Cartwright is being investigated revealed nothing that wasn’t known to the Iranian targets of the exercise or easily inferred by anyone who had followed the story in public media
* Unlike the leaks for which whistleblowers like Manning and Snowden have been prosecuted/persecuted, this was an absolutely standard Washington leak, done for personal gain. Assuming the facts are as alleged, Cartwright, an insider, gave information (classified as secret, but actually well known) to a journalist, in return for favorable coverage. This is such standard practice that it would be hard to find anyone in government (in DC or elsewhere) who hasn’t done it
But, Cartwright had made lots of enemies and so appears excluded from the general immunity that covers such leaks. Moreover, thanks to Obama, the stakes are high. Based on the Manning precedent, he could be charged with aiding the enemy, a crime that carries the death penalty. The only comparable case of an insider prosecution is that of Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, who leaked the identity of an active CIA agent for political gain. He was sentenced to thirty months, which was immediately commuted. Even then he was prosecuted for perjury, not for the actual leak.
Having reached the point where the weapons of the security state are being turned against insiders, it will be interesting to see how things play out. Hopefully, those involved will look over the precipice and pull back.
CUNY administrators are coming under increasing fire for their decision to hire General David Petraeus to teach one course next year for anywhere from $150,000 to $200,000. The American Association of University Professors has denounced the decision. And now Republican State Assemblyman Kieran Michael Lalor, a Marine vet who fought in the Iraq War, has issued a scorching letter to CUNY interim chancellor William Kelly.
Lalor focuses on two issues. First, he charges CUNY with dishonesty. [click to continue…]
Andrew Sullivan laments Ed Whelan’s dead-endery.
“I don’t think that the word marriage can properly apply to a relationship between two persons of the same sex, just as I don’t think that a circle should be called a round square.”
Alas, the culture rolls on.
“Families can come in all shapes and sizes. Even rectangles.”
(No, really. Watch the trailer. No major studio would have put out a trailer like that 10 years ago, or five – or three.)
I’m a big fan of Laika studios. Coraline was good. ParaNorman had the most stunning stop-motion ever, plus a good story (even though my daughters refused to watch it – too scary. So I had to watch it by myself.) The Boxtrolls looks … I’ll wait and see. It could be good.
Jacobin are hosting a “book club”:http://jacobinmag.com/2013/07/jacobin-book-club-the-making-of-global-capitalism/ over the next couple of weeks on Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin’s recent book, The Making of Global Capitalism (“Powells”:http://www.powells.com/partner/29956/biblio/9781844677429). I’m one of the participants – the book is a lot of fun. I expect the discussion will be a lot of fun too.