I know philosophers who are skeptical about the value of Twitter — they think it’s merely a time sink, or they make even more ridiculous claims, such as that it is undermining genuine social relations and friendships. Oh Boy. Right now it is an amazing source of information on what is really going on in Turkey – and that doesn’t really look good when I am typing these words. The police is very violently cleaning Gezi park where citizens of all ages have been peacefully protesting. According to various Twitter sources the police is also attacking the hotels in the area which have taken in wounded people. TV coverage (at least in my country) is short and rather superficial — but luckily there is the internet with blogs, online newspapers, citizens’ radios, and twitter. The quickest source of information on what’s going on are live stream coverages like Gezi Radyo and Twitter, where also many pictures can be found. If you want an easy entry point into the tweeps to follow, start with Dani Rodrik and follow those whose tweets he forwards, like Zeynep Tufekci.
Consider this an invitation to post links to more direct sources of information, and also as an ‘open thread’ to discuss what’s happening right now in Turkey.
British Tory MP and former diplomat Rory Stewart starts speaking at about 1h 30 minutes. Definitely worth a listen, particularly as we hear the usual suspects crank up enthusiasm for war again.
And (thanks to Chris Brooke) for those who would prefer just to read, the Hansard transcript.
The Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton NJ will be inviting twenty visiting scholars to participate in a year-long program next year, and is particularly interested in applicants focusing on different forms of egalitarianism.
bq. What exactly is political equality? We have come to think of this ideal as consisting primarily of voting rights and the right to run for elected office.These political rights are, of course, fundamental.The carceral state draws our attention to that point, but voting rights are only one of the instruments available to be directed toward the egalitarian empowerment of a citizenry. How do political equality, social equality, and economic equality (and the corresponding inequalities) relate to each other? Are they separable or necessarily interdependent? What has been their historical relationship? How do questions of economics, law, institutions, social structure, culture, psychology, and human development intersect with the empowerment (and disempowerment) of individuals and collectivities? How have these intersections differed depending on time and place? In the current context, how do forms of global governance and democratic deficits relate to projects of empowerment at other levels? How have notions of empowerment differed in different historical and cultural contexts? Is it possible to articulate a clear definition of equality or should we think in terms of varying languages of egalitarianism? What have been the critiques of political equality? Must egalitarianism be understood in relation to democracy? How should we think about non-democratic egalitarianism? We encourage applications that are at once aimed at the theoretical and philosophical dimensions of these questions, as well as applications that offer concrete examples of different practices and definitions of equality.
Obviously, these are questions that many CT readers are very interested in. I’ve been to the IAS for weekend workshops, and it’s a wonderful place – spending a year there with a bunch of smart people interested in these questions would be a lot of fun. If you’re interested in applying, “further information can be found here”:http://www.sss.ias.edu/files/pdfs/announcement2014-15.pdf.
This is a guest-bleg, inspired by Quiggin’s Zombie Economics project.
I teach in NYU’s Journalism department, where we have strong concentrations in both business and science reporting. I’m looking for some way to label and describe a particular flavor of bad economics reporting, so as to make the students more alert to it, as consumers and possible producers of such reporting.
Here’s the backstory. A couple of weeks ago, my friend Tamar Gendler introduced me to the the problem of easy knowledge, the notion that if you believe a particular assertion, you can produce inductive chains that lead to overstated conclusions. “I own this bike” can be seen as an assertion that the person you bought it from was its previous owner.
But of course you don’t know if that guy in the alley had the right to sell it, so an assertion that you own the bike can generate easy knowledge about whether he did. Instead, “I own this bike” should be seen as shorthand for “If the guy in the alley was the previous rightful owner, then I am its current rightful owner.” (Oddly, this also describes the question of the Elder Wand in Harry Potter Vol. 7, pp 741 ff. Tom Riddle died of easy knowledge.)
Responding to concern about PRISM and the issue of whether intelligence collaboration with the US enabled British agencies to circumvent legal restrictions, Foreign Secretary William Hague told us that “law-abiding citizens” have nothing to fear. Not only do I not wish to be the kind of person Hague thinks of as “law abiding”, more generally it is social movements that willfully break the law that are most likely to bring about change and to threaten established power and privilege. And it is just such movements, and their leaders, who are at risk from pervasive state surveillance of our communications. [click to continue…]
These columns are discussed in the first part of _Cugel’s Saga._ The villagers of Tustvold, sprung from the dubious stock of fugitives from the Rhab Faag, have a curious social structure in which the women do all the work, and the men spend their days at the tops of columns whence they “absorb a healthful flux from the sunlight.”
>”The higher the column the more pure and rich is the flux, as well as the prestige of place. The women, especially, are consumed with ambition for the altitude of their husbands.” [click to continue…]
The House resolution calls on U.S. government officials to tell the ITU and other international organizations that it is the “consistent and unequivocal policy of the United States to promote a global Internet free from government control.”
I wonder if we will see more resolutions like this. It wouldn’t surprise me.
Bureaucratic administration means fundamentally domination through knowledge. … This consists on the one hand of technical knowledge, which, by itself, is sufficient to ensure it a position of extraordinary power. But in addition to this, bureaucratic organizations, or the holders of power who make use of them, have the tendency to increase their power still further by the knowledge growing out of experience in the service. For they acquire through the conduct of office a special knowledge of facts and have available a store of documentary material peculiar to themselves. While not particular to bureaucratic organizations, the concept of “official secrets” is certainly typical of them. It stands in relation to technical knowledge in somewhat the same position as commercial secrets do to technological training. It is the product of the striving for power.
Lee Rigby, a soldier from the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, was mown down by a car and hacked to death by two men in Woolwich, London two weeks ago. The public theatre of flowers in the street, weeping family press conference, and puzzled interviews of have-a-go heroes was still in progress when the right ‘response’ to the murders emerged as if from nowhere: ‘We must force Internet and mobile service providers to capture customer data and provide it to government agencies, no matter what the cost to democracy or in cold hard cash.’
What an utter non sequitur.
When an army family’s soldier is deployed, every call from an unknown number or ring on the doorbell is a cause for alarm. Last summer, when my husband’s battalion was in Helmand, I made the mistake of ringing a friend’s front doorbell instead of tapping on the back door, when I went round for coffee. I will never forget the look of pale horror on her face as she yanked back the door, heavily pregnant and with a child on her hip, to see at once who was outside. And how her face cracked into the silent movie version of happiness and relief to see it was only me, and not the welfare officer with news of the worst kind. [click to continue…]
Who will bring about political reform, and what are the political incentives for doing it? The question comes from an earlier post. Is there a road-map for exiting from a sub-optimal equilibrium in the way political institutions function? I don’t know the answer.
In Ireland, parties in opposition seem to agree that the lack of accountability of the executive to parliament is a problem. But why would they voluntarily cede the advantages of executive autonomy when in power themselves?
In Greece, the question as to who will introduce real reform is more serious because the problems are so much more pervasive. Behind the massive improvement that has been achieved in the primary fiscal balance, many would still hold that the political system often works badly (inefficiently, ineffectively) and that corruption is a pervasive feature of everyday life. People don’t have much confidence that the institutions of state will act impartially (the keystone of good governance, as Rothstein and Teorell tell us), or even that the rule of law will prevail in the justice system. But individuals can’t change the perverse institutional incentives by themselves. They are stuck with their decidedly dysfunctional political culture, trying to work through it as best they can. [click to continue…]
ASAP – Academics Stand Against Poverty – is an organization devoted to “promoting collaboration amongst poverty-focused academics, by helping them reach out to broader audiences on issues of poverty, and by helping them turn their expertise into impact through specific intervention projects.” It’s only a couple of years old, although its origins are a few years older. The Board of Directors, chaired by Thomas Pogge, includes professors and graduate students, and their Advisory Board includes philosophers, economists, political scientists, and others from around the world.
They have a number of on-going projects that are worth looking at, but they are just launching a new one concerning an issue that I, for one, don’t know much about – illicit financial flows. They estimate that some $1 trillion per year is transferred out of developing countries through corruption, smuggling, money laundering, and corporate tax evasion, and this directly hampers efforts at development and poverty relief. More information about this estimate and this issue is available at Global Financial Integrity. This focus on the relationship between global institutional structures and poverty is, of course, one of Pogge’s main areas of research and advocacy, as is the emphasis on issues that can create an overlapping consensus of different perspectives.
The United Nations Millennium Development Goals are a set of 8 priorities set to expire in 2015. ASAP is pushing to have illicit financial flows become an important piece of the next set of priorities. So they are looking to raise $15,000 to produce a policy paper articulating politically feasible goals concerning these illicit financial flows and to promote their inclusion in the UN’s next development framework. Take a look.
There’s a nice summary of EU plans to address the ‘slow train-wreck’ of youth unemployment here.
But as the author says, ‘where are the jobs going to come from?’
Amidst the litany of country-by-country disasters noted here is this:
‘The chart shows a downturn in Ireland’s youth unemployment, from over 30% in early 2012 to 26% now. This is why:Â “In the past four years, over 300,000 people have emigrated from Ireland; 40% were aged between 15 and 24”.-Â RTE News, 9 May2013′. My own recently-graduated daughter and most of her friends among them.
