Chris Bertram

Anyone reading blogs over the last few years know how obsessive the wingnut element can get over faked, altered and “faked” photographs. Sometimes there’s a case to answer; sometimes there’s a picture that contradicts their narrative and they’re shrilly convinced that “it isn’t trooo!” We saw instances of both in the recent Lebanon war. Now the great-granddaddy of such controversies “looks set for reinvestigation”:http://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/news/Robert_Capa_photo_investigators_defend_war_picture_news_252312.html : did Robert Capa stage his most famous picture, the “Falling Soldier” from the Spanish Civil War? The International Center of Photography in New York has acquired a suitcase discovered in Mexico last year containing Capa negatives abandoned when he fled from Paris in 1939.

This being a blog with global reach, you never know whether what you take to be exotic isn’t mundane in the region where your snarky fellow-blogger or commenter lives or comes from. So, with that caveat, I report that I had “squirrel cocotte” for my dinner last night, with, appropriately enough, hazelnuts. Now I’ve ticked it off the list of stuff I’ve eaten, I probably won’t choose it again from a menu, but nor would I turn it down if offered by a friend. Dark, intense, a bit like venison, with hints of chocolate (since you ask).

Obviously, I’m not Crooked Timber’s resident expert on the sociology of online communities, so here’s hoping that Kieran or Eszter will be along in a moment to reassure me, but, as a keen Flickr user, I’m perturbed by their decision to start allowing video. Flickr (owned by the troubled Yahoo, of course) probably has two (overlapping) kinds of user: the person who wants a repository for their snaps to show to friends and family and the person who is into photography on at least a hobbyist level who wants to interact with similar others. It also has thriving groups of various kinds based on shared interests or locality: for example my local group has 1000+ nominal members, dozens of active members, and a fairly thriving offline complement of activities (monthly meets where much beer is consumed, photowalks etc.).

All of this is threatened by the addition of video. As the photographic element is diluted and the YouTubers arrive, some photographers will find it less congenial and will choose to go elsewhere; as they go, the pool will become more dilute, leading others to take the same decision. In other words, I predict the kind of cascade effect the Mark Granovetter and others have written about. Of course, I could be wrong, and maybe the Flickr community is more robust and adaptable than I’m allowing for. SmugMug and Pbase don’t (yet) have local groups of photographers who hang out together, critique one another’s pictures and so on. But this seems a rash decision for Yahoo to make. Does it have to do so with the Microsoft bid? Maybe.

What to do on planes, apart from sleep, follow the route on the screen or go deaf trying to hear to movie soundtrack? Well read, of course. But I’ve found that Tolstoy doesn’t really do it for me there, in departure lounges or even in similar situations (buses and trains). So it is thrillers, crime, “mystery” (as they appear to call it in Powell’s bookstore) for me. My most recent indulgence is Lee Child’s Reacher series, and most recently his _Bad Luck and Trouble_ (which I picked up in LAX on the way to Portland – I had to buy when I read the blurb: the hero is in Portland and has to rush to LA).

For those who don’t know, Reacher is a former military policeman from the US Army, with a taste for classic blues, who is spending his retirement in semi-vagrancy discovering the country of his citizenship (he grew up on military bases overseas) and gets sucked into defeating an improbable series of wicked conspiracies. Child (a Brit) writes decently and his plotting holds the attention. And whilst you wouldn’t call Reacher a liberal, he has a pretty jaundiced attitude towards the claims the American right (and indeed official America) makes for itself. There are a few weaknesses: Child makes too many plots turn on amazing coincidences and you can confidently place money on one of the apparently nice cops/FBI agents/similars turning out to be in the pockets of the bad people. So far, though, these have been forgivable flaws.

Hat tip to Steven Poole, who mentioned Child “here”:http://stevenpoole.net/blog/books-of-the-year-2007/ .

Jeremy Waldron has a great piece in the latest LRB reviewing a recent book by Cass Sunstein. He has a nice discussion of the Cheney doctrine that even a one-percent probability of a catastrophic event should be treated as a certainty for policy purposes, where the class of catastrophic events is limited to those with a military, security or terrorist dimension. Reasoning like this interacts neatly with “ticking-bomb” scenarios: now a 1 per cent chance that the there’s a ticking bomb the terrorist knows about is sufficient in to justify waterboarding or worse. Of course other potentially catastrophic developments — such as climate change — haven’t generated a “treat as if certain” policy response from the US government, even thought even the most determined denialists must evaluate the probability that anthropogenic global warming is happening at greater than one in a hundred.

Waldron is also pretty acid about Sunstein’s treatment of global warming and distributive justice, noting some of the shortcomings of the idea that poor people’s lives should be valued according to what they’re prepared to pay to avoid the risk of death. But read the whole thing, as they say.

Normblog has published an argument by the Manchester political philosopher Jon Quong to the effect that national Olympic committees (and presumably states) would be justified in imposing a top-down boycott of the Beijing Olympics on their athletes. I don’t want to engage in the China-specific aspects of the argument here, but rather to note one of the steps in Jon’s argument, viz

bq. (2) We are each under a duty of justice not to participate in, or benefit from, projects or activities that involve violations of other people’s rights. _I assume this premise is uncontroversial_. [Emphasis added by CB]

Jon adds some further clarification of this point in the following step:

bq. (3) The duty described in (2) is very stringent, and it cannot be ignored on the grounds that doing so would prevent us from achieving something we very much desire to achieve, even if this means we will never get to achieve the thing in question. Here’s an example in support of this premise. One of the things I would most like to have done in my life was talk about political philosophy with John Rawls. Suppose, before Rawls died, I were invited to a dinner party where Rawls would be the guest of honour. But also suppose, unbeknownst to Rawls, that the host of this dinner party would be employing slave labour to work in the kitchen. I am under a duty not to go to the party, even if we are certain this represents the one and only chance I will ever have to talk philosophy with Rawls, and even though my non-attendance will not halt the party. If I went to the party I would be participating in, and benefiting from, a gross injustice, and the duty not to do so is more weighty than my desire to take the once in a lifetime opportunity to engage with Rawls.

I have to say that what Jon takes to be an uncontroversial premise strikes me as very questionable indeed, at least pending some further detail about what is to count as a “project”, an “activity” and “involvement”. It seems arguable that involvement in just about any major institution or in economic activity is going to violate this prohibition. Certainly, if you buy into even a part of Thomas Pogge’s arguments about the effect of global economic institutions on the poor, then all citizens of wealthy countries routinely breach it. Drink coffee? Eat fruit imported from a nation that violates rights? And what about the past? Most residents of countries with a history of imperialism or colonialism certainly benefit from past projects or activities that involve rights violations. Many current citizens benefit from the exclusion of would-be immigrants from labour markets in ways that also involve such violations. And we could add the ways in which our taxes contribute to the sustaining of our own governments which regularly breach human rights in various ways (think Belmarsh, Guantanamo).

Following Pogge, we might want to discuss how justice might require _compensation_ in some form for such involvement or benefit, or, possibly might require some action from us to oppose injustice. But the duty of non-participation, as Quong states, it strikes me as anything but uncontroversial.

Apparently, Christopher Hitchens believes that lying “without conscience or reflection” and being “subject to fantasies of an illusory past” are traits that “constitute a disqualification for the presidency of the United States”. Whilst I largely agree with him about the immediate matter at hand (la Clinton), someone with his historical sense must know that neither characteristic has been an obstacle in the past.

Two people I’ve read with interest and profit over the years: Stanford’s Joshua Cohen and Cato’s Brink Lindsey manage to have a very reasonable conversation on bloggingheads. Topics include Rawls on baseball, Obama and Wright, the McCain campaign. Check it out.

I’m just back from a trip to the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference in Portland, Oregon. On the way my partner and I stopped off for a few days chez Maria in LA (and a very good time we had too). But all this scholarship, tourism and partying comes at a price, of course. I’ve flown a very long way indeed (and I know many of my fellow bloggers also clock up extensive miles). So what to do about all that carbon I’ve just burnt? One option would be to pay into a carbon offsetting scheme, but I’ve become convinced that many of them are either not very good, or are simply scams. There may be some good ones (commenters please …) but I’m sure I can’t tell which are worth supporting. So here’s another idea: I could just buy energy saving light bulbs and give them away to friends, students, neighbours, thereby generating sufficient carbon savings to purge my sin. But how many (at what rating) would I have to buy and give away per hundred or thousand airmiles?

Well how wrong I was. When started “a prediction thread”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/01/28/six-nations-2008/ at the beginning of the 6 Nations, I didn’t even mention Wales. But they’ve been magnificent, and “deserved their victory today”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/rugby_union/welsh/7295598.stm . There were so many great moments too: Skrela going backwards from the restart; and Wales winning that scrum against the head near the end. I expect the streets of Cardiff will be, er, interesting, tonight. Here’s hoping England sack Ashton and offer Shaun Edwards a lot of cash.

There’s been a marked increase in the harassment of photographers by the police, quasi-police, security guards and suchlike since 9/11, and the UK is no exception. Photographers have been (illegally) forced to delete pictures by officious police and have been told plain untruths about what the law says on the matter. A recent “anti-terrorism campaign”:http://www.met.police.uk/campaigns/campaign_ct_2008.htm even has posters with the legend “Thousands of People Take Photos Every Day. What if One of Them Seems Odd?”, and invites the public to involve the constabulary. Since photography is a hobby that disproportionately attracts slightly nerdy loners, lots of photographers “seem odd”, but they ought to be spared this sort of attention!

Now Austin Mitchell MP, himself a keen photographer (and “a past victim”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4291424.stm of such behaviour), is taking a stand, and has introduced “an early day motion in the House of Commons”:http://edmi.parliament.uk/EDMi/EDMDetails.aspx?EDMID=35375&SESSION=891

bq. That this House is concerned to encourage the spread and enjoyment of photography as the most genuine and accessible people’s art; deplores the apparent increase in the number of reported incidents in which the police, police community support officers (PCSOs) or wardens attempt to stop street photography and order the deletion of photographs or the confiscation of cards, cameras or film on various specious ground such as claims that some public buildings are strategic or sensitive, that children and adults can only be photographed with their written permission, that photographs of police and PCSOs are illegal, or that photographs may be used by terrorists; points out that photography in public places and streets is not only enjoyable but perfectly legal; regrets all such efforts to stop, discourage or inhibit amateur photographers taking pictures in public places, many of which are in any case festooned with closed circuit television cameras; and urges the Home Office and the Association of Chief Police Officers to agree on a photography code for the information of officers on the ground, setting out the public’s right to photograph public places thus allowing photographers to enjoy their hobby without officious interference or unjustified suspicion.

Readers in the UK could “email their MPs”:http://www.theyworkforyou.com/ and express their support for Mitchell’s stand, they could also email Mitchell himself. Since it seems to be the trendy thing to do, I’ve also set up “a Facebook group in support”:http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=11479308155 .

Rebecca Solnit has “an interesting piece”:http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/2845 in Orion Magazine on Elvis, country music, environmentalism, racism, “rednecks”, stereotyping, and one or two other matters.

Some commenters thought that I should have waited before attacking the BBC’s “White” season. After, all, they argued … legitimate topic of inquiry …. watch first, judge later, … blah blah. Martin O’Neill has been watching, and he doesn’t like what he’s seen. Specifically, he has an article in the New Statesman deploring Denys Blakeway’s film about Enoch Powell, which attempts both a partial rehabilitation of the man and manages to suggest (without saying directly) that Powell’s “rivers of blood” claim was vindicated on 7/7 (a product of multiculturalism). Anyway, I’m summarizing Martin, so surf over to his excellent piece.

“Decent left” columnist Nick Cohen, “writing for Pajamas Media”:http://www.pajamasmedia.com/2008/03/why_brits_dont_fall_for_obama.php , and explaining the alleged fact, that, unlike continental Europeans, the British are not keen on Obama:

bq. A more convincing explanation to my mind is that European support for Obama is tied to levels of anti-Americanism, and despite all Bush has thrown at them, the British are not as anti-American as the continentals have become.

And the test of how anti-American people are? It is whether they support, retrospectively, Israel’s bombing of Saddam’s nuclear reactor:

bq. At a recent meeting in London Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA officer, elegantly calibrated attitudes to the US. He spoke all over North America and Europe and whenever the subject of an aggressive foreign policy came up he asked audiences whether Israel had been right to take out Saddam Hussein’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981. In America, virtually everyone was in favor. Whatever their politics, they reasoned that a totalitarian regime was about to get the bomb and, obviously the West should stop it. In Germany, virtually everyone was against — “even the hawks are pacifists,” he said. In France, audiences split 80 per cent against, 20 in favor — “which was good of the 20 per cent considering Chirac had built the reactor in the first place.” In Britain, people divided evenly.

[Hat tip DW and MT.]