David Petraeus’s course description for his high-paying gig next year at CUNY is up. The course is called “Are We on the Threshold of the North American Decade.” That sounds like a question to me, but there’s no question mark. [click to continue…]
Here is a helpful compilation of extremely disgusting comments that Wimbledon Champion Marion Bartoli received on Twitter. That post does a good job of highlighting some of the ways in which these reactions have been sexist, misogynistic, offensive and plain dumb. Go take a look, seriously, I can’t do the vitriol of the commentary justice.
What I thought I would do, however, is follow up with the Twitter accounts of some of the people quoted, not by contacting anyone, simply by looking them up. I wanted to see whether being featured in such a post had any effect on them, and also to get some context. Not surprisingly, several have deleted the quoted tweets from their accounts. It is almost more surprising that some have not. Some have made their Twitter accounts private and others have altogether deleted them.
I thank John S. Ahlquist and Margaret Levi (hereafter A/L) for their response, “With Fortresses Like These …” to my essay in Democracy, “Fortress Unionism.” I had an odd feeling reading and rereading their essay. I though its bark was far worse than its bite. A/L warn that my strategy is “doomed”, and rests on “dangerous assumptions.” Unions are already doing what I advocate, and they are thus headed down “the drain.” Yet, given their final set of suggestions, it seems as if we really don’t have much to disagree about at all.  When all is said and done, A/L ignore most of my proposals before agreeing with others.
Rich Yeselson’s stimulating piece, “Fortress Unionism,” has attracted wide attention and appears to have provoked yet another round of soul-searching within the US labor movement. Yeselson clearly and convincingly shows how the laws and institutions governing American labor markets have, since Taft-Hartley, sapped the energy and resources of American unions, rendering them unable to effectively organize and represent workers as times have changed. He calls for unions to hunker down in their existing geographic “strongholds” and wait for someone or something else to bring workers into the streets.
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As Chris’s post below suggests, Crooked Timber is a kind of anarchist collective (albeit in ways not appreciated by David Graeber …), which reflects a variety of views. We’ve also tried over the years to encourage argument between different views (mostly on the left). In that spirit, we’re publishing a short and vigorous back and forth on the future of unions. A few weeks ago, Rich Yeselson wrote a piece defending what he called “Fortress Unionism” for “Democracy”:http://www.democracyjournal.org/29/fortress-unionism.php?page=all (PDF version “here”:http://www.democracyjournal.org/pdf/29/fortress_unionism.pdf). John Ahlquist and Margaret Levi, have written a “response”:https://crookedtimber.org/2013/07/09/with-fortresses-like-these/ to Rich’s original piece; Rich has in turn “responded”:https://crookedtimber.org/2013/07/09/hortatory-uplift-is-not-a-plan/ to the response. For those who prefer to read in printed form, here’s a PDF of the argument.
Rich Yeselson is a writer, all-round public intellectual and former labor organizer. He has contributed to Crooked Timber book seminars in the past
John Ahlquist is Trice Family Faculty Scholar and Associate Professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. Margaret Levi is Jere L. Bachrach Professor of International Studies at the University of Washington and Chair in Politics at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. Their book _In the Interests of Others: Organizations & Social Activism_ will be published by Princeton University Press later this year.
After my posts on Shelby, a few weeks ago, I decided to see what the Volokh folks have had to say about that particular decision. Not a lot, it turns out. But here’s Jonathan Adler, explaining how he thinks left and right tend to view the issue differently. Seen from the right, the decision makes sense (although Adler does not endorse it explicitly): [click to continue…]
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 …
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.
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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.