One of the nice things about blogging is the way you get to find out about new things, read books and watch films you’d never otherwise have come across, and so on. “Eszter”:http://www.eszter.com/ recently persuaded “me”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisbertram/ to take part in a Flickr project where you take “one photo per day”:http://www.flickr.com/groups/project365/pool/. Some days, especially dark cloudy ones with British weather, can be a challenge, and I’ve sometimes been reduced to taking a pitiful snap of a household object. But I’ve also noticed a real impact on my perception of the world. Walking around, camera in pocket, being open to the opportunity to take a picture has a striking effect on what one sees. An interesting form here, an odd pattern of rust there, a splash of colour, an unusual building or a surprising or funny scene…. And the competitive/comparative element comes in too: you hope for comments, or for a given image to be “favorited”. You quickly get to notice, too, that there are some pretty interesting people on Flickr here and there. There’s “this guy”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/fray_bentos/, for example, who has a nice line in images of buildings taken from the same point, but 20 or 30 years apart (and he supplies the architectural and social commentary to match). Or “this one”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/urbanphotos/ , (a kind of latter-day Cartier-Bresson) who captures street scenes in New York in black and white and has a sharp eye for the incongruous. So thanks, Eszter, for opening my eyes a bit.
(I can see that this is going to get expensive too: I’m already looking to buy a digital SLR and puzzling over the Nikon-Canon version of the Apple-Microsoft divide.)
This is somewhat tangential to the recent Edwards-bloggers incident. Amanda Marcotte has been recieving some loathesome hate mail, some of which she excerpted on Pandagon. The site is down right now but I’ll insert a link when it’s back up. (It’s my understanding that Melissa McEwan has been getting similar threats, though I don’t know if she’s posted any. And yes, they are two completely different people.) Dan Collins at Protein Wisdom, in the course of a post which can pretty fairly be characterized as “they were asking for it”, notes that “some of the emails, apparently, resemble the kind that Michelle Malkin receives on a daily basis.” This moves me to note that people on left sites do say crazy sexist and racist things about Malkin all the time. I think she’s a bad person, and out at the dog-whistle end of annoying, almost outstripping the human capacity to detect maddening stimuli (cf. thisYouTube video, which achieves the heretofore-thought-impossible feat of making me wonder for a moment whether she might not be crazier than Pam Oshry). Nonetheless I often see people in comments threads go straight to the “me love you long time”. That ain’t right, people. In related news, as a feminist I heartily condemn the Iranian government’s treatment of women, just not in a way that makes me want to drop tactical nukes on the women.
Looks like everyone around here is just too shy to mention it, but all this week Crooked Timber has been among the blogs discussed and/or vivisected by “Movable Snipe,” a regular feature at the website Jewcy.com. The various CT-related entries are all conveniently available here. [click to continue…]
Another “bloggingheads”:http://bloggingheads.tv/video.php?id=200, this time with Megan McArdle on global warming, minimum wage and healthcare, for those as wants to see (not as much in the way of fireworks as those who have seen our interactions in the blogosphere might expect).
Via “Matt Yglesias”:http://www.matthewyglesias.com/archives/2007/02/assassination_vacation/, a vintage “bit of Glenn Reynolds”:http://instapundit.com/archives2/2007/02/post_2501.php.
bq. I don’t understand why the Bush Administration has been so slow to respond. Nor do I think that high-profile diplomacy, or an invasion, is an appropriate response. We should be responding quietly, killing radical mullahs and iranian atomic scientists, supporting the simmering insurgencies within Iran, putting the mullahs’ expat business interests out of business, etc.
The whole “24 outlook on life”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/02/10/takin-care-of-business/ is really catching on. As I’ve been “saying”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/2005/12/19/spying-at-home/ for “years”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/2004/12/03/freedom-on-the-march/, secret state-sponsored assassination and torture programs are why I am a libertarian. Plus all the cool military hardware, obviously. Those guys had flat panel screens before anyone. And those little communicator watches, too. I bet they have iPhones already. _Exploding_ iPhones. On to Tehran!
As “Brad”::http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/02/could_this_be_t.html mentioned a couple of days ago, “Ethan Zuckerman”:http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/?p=1224 has an interesting and worrying factlet on his blog.
Having tea with my friend Abe McLaughlin this afternoon, he mentioned that, of the two hundred fifty foreign correspondents, one hundred are employed by the Wall Street Journal. I wondered about the geographical distribution of that hundred and the other reporters – would we find a huge concentration of journalists in Iraq and Israel? Would we find any in Africa other than in Cairo and Jo’burg?
The problem, it seems to me, isn’t only about geographic distribution of interest; it’s about the kinds of issues that these correspondents are likely to write stories about. As conventional newspapers cut down on their overseas reporting, it’s ever more necessary to turn to specialized newspapers such as the _Wall Street Journal_ and the _Financial Times_ to get solid, detailed coverage of what’s happening outside the US. But even if these are both genuinely great newspapers (the WSJ’s news reportage, as opposed to its editorial pages, is excellent), they tend necessarily to focus on issues that US and UK businesspeople are interested in, and subtly to spin their stories accordingly. This means that plenty of stories that would be of interest to non-business people don’t get reported on at all well in the major English language press, and that when they do get reported, their coverage often subtly reflects the priorities of a pretty specific and limited set of social interests. Nor are the blogosphere and related forms of information gathering at all a perfect solution for this problem. Even if blogs like “Abu Aardvark”:http://abuaardvark.typepad.com/ provide insight into the Arab media that you don’t get from the mainstream press, Ethan’s research on ‘global attention profiles’ suggests that the blogosphere is actually worse in some respects than mainstream media in drawing attention to under-reported parts of the world (elite bloggers tend to do a little better, but not much). I suspect (but don’t have any smoking gun evidence to prove this) that the same kinds of distortion characterize issue coverage too.
Alex at “The Yorkshire Ranter” has a go at the concept of “embodied energy“, which is currently quite fashionable in the “Environment” section of my newspaper. I have to say I agree with him.
Anyone who has ever got close even to the very fringes of Sraffian economics or the labour theory of value is bound to be suspicious of attempts to assign a “fundamental, objective” number to a physical object based on adding up dated inputs over the history of the process that produced it. Casting an eye over the research on embodied energy confirms me in this view to some extent; I get exactly the same bilious feeling as layer after layer of complexity gets added to the same basically insoluble problem. [click to continue…]
I’ll mimic Chris’s announcement by mentioning that my old, erratic, permalink-less eyesore of a “blog” (if that was even the word for it) is dead, now that Arts Journal has offered to host something a bit more normally bloggy. It’s called Quick Study, and even has RSS feeds. It feels like I’m finally on the cutting edge of several years ago.
“Henry”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/02/07/ip-law-and-bird-flu/ remarks that “my mental model of Tyler [Cowen] often sit[s] on my shoulder while I blog, making polite and well reasoned libertarian criticisms of my arguments.” This follows on from Tyler’s “own advice”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2006/09/the_phantom_me.html to his grad students:
bq. You have a model of me, a pretty good one, and you know what I will object to and what will delight me. The Phantom Tyler Cowen objects, in your head, before the real Tyler Cowen has much of a chance. That is why the real Tyler Cowen is sometimes so silent.
_My_ mental model of Tyler Cowen says, “This sounds like a rationalization to me.” Meanwhile, “Brad DeLong asks”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/02/is_henry_farrel.html,
bq. Is Henry Farrell especially sane or especially insane?
for having a model of Tyler sitting on his shoulder making comments. My mental model of Brad DeLong says to my mental model of Tyler Cowen, “Why oh why are we ruled by this idiot?” My mental model of Eugene Volokh says, “This is much worth reading.” But my mental model of Orin Kerr replies, “My sense is that this is much ado about nothing.” My mental model of Bitch, Ph.D begins to object that she is not a brain on a stick before realizing that, being a mental model, in fact she is. Uniquely, my mental model of Dan Drezner has his own mental model of himself, which he refers to as “Ed.” Finally, my model of Cosma Shalizi has the unusual property of being smarter than I am. This ought to be impossible, but of course _I_ can’t understand its explanation of how this could be the case.
Doing the usual stroll through Bloglines a little while ago (168 feeds and counting), I read:
The Weblog’s military aggression this week against The Valve and Long Sunday has been a radically unqualified success. Further action against Crooked Timber will be unnecessary at this time because The Valve and Long Sunday have been transformed into beacons of democracy and hope for the entire academic blogosphere.
That sounds less like serious de-escalation than momentary retrenchment before an eventual attempted conquest. If you want to watch one of the more self-aware blogspats in recent memory, check out the comments section for this entry at The Weblog, the field headquarters for this bloodstained militarist operation.
It’s now up to more than 400 comments. One of them indicates that the invasion of CT was originally scheduled for this weekend. The above-quoted statement indicates otherwise, but that may be an effort to throw everyone off guard.
Posting has been rather light from me recently, sorry, but it’s mainly because I can’t get over how mental some of the comments are on this YouTube video of John McLaughlin playing “Cherokee”, and it’s turned into a tight little ball of rage in my stomach that’s preventing me from achieving anything else. Check out what I’m talking about below:
Blogger Gary Farber is unfortunately going through another really rough patch, and I encourage generous CT readers to help him out. Non US-readers particularly are invited to marvel at the lack of a social safety net in our otherwise kick-ass nation.
I’m rather glad to see that Hilary Benn is the bookies’ favourite for the Labour party deputy leadership. I have no real knowledge of the state of internal Labour party politics, or of what Hilary Benn’s actual policies are. But on the other hand, neither is my support for him[1] based on pure sentimentality about his dad. Nope, I’m a Benn man for the simple reason that I think there ought to be some earthly reward for a political career that has been marked out by honesty and competence. If only for novelty value. After the disgrace that was Clare Short’s term as Secretary of State for International Development[2], Benn was a breath of fresh air. He was (and remains) utterly essential to the peace talks in Sudan. And he was the only major World Bank shareholder to stand up to Paul Wolfowitz and say what needed to be said about Wolfowitz’s utterly bogus “I Can’t Believe It’s Not An Anti-Corruption Policy”. My only reservation in voting Benn is that, to be honest, the developing world needs him a lot more than the Labour Party does, and that the SSID job is cleaner, more honest and more important than turning himself into the thinking man’s John Prescott. [click to continue…]
I’m on “bloggingheads again”:http://bloggingheads.tv/video.php?id=171 with Dan Drezner. Dan and I had a long discussion about Krugman and whether or not academics should get engaged in broader political debates, dipping into Krugman’s recent “piece”:http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/12699486/paul_krugman_on_the_great_wealth_transfer/print on inequality as we went along. One of the things I mentioned was the bit in Krugman’s _Peddling Prosperity_ where he talks about the way in which people can cherry-pick economic statistics in order to prove what they want to prove. Krugman is talking about aggregate growth statistics, but nonetheless the point travels.
by choosing your years carefully and talking a good game, you can seem to prove whatever conclusion you like … We learn that a clever propagandist, right or left, can always find a way to present the data on economic growth that seems to support her case. And we therefore also learn to take any statistical analysis from a strongly political source with handfuls of salt. Someone once said about partisan analysis that they use economic data the way a drunkard uses a lamppost: for support rather than illumination (Peddling Prosperity pp.110-111).
Cue “Alan Reynolds”:http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2006/12/reynolds_rap_on.html in comments at Mark Thoma’s place, defending a rather dubious-sounding WSJ “editorial”:http://users1.wsj.com/lmda/do/checkLogin?mg=wsj-users1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB116607104815649971-search.html attacking claims that income inequality has been growing since _1980._
there is no clear evidence of a sustained and significant increase in inequality since 1988 by any other measure. I very carefully did not say there was no such evidence about 1981-87.
Indeed.
Reynolds goes on to defend his choice of periodization, but it would appear that he has a bit of a “track record”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/12/intellectual_ga.html#comment-26687832 (to extend Krugman’s metaphor) for employing lampposts not only to provide support, but to meet those other needs and imperatives that drunks are subject to while weaving their way home after a convivial evening.
(Note by the way that Krugman’s criticisms come in the midst of a longer discussion of how chancers at think tanks rather than proper economists have come to dominate debate; while academic peer review doesn’t serve as a perfect protection against this sort of cherry picking, it does make it considerably more difficult to get away with).
Via “Matt Yglesias”:http://www.matthewyglesias.com/archives/2007/02/assassination_vacation/, a vintage “bit of Glenn Reynolds”:http://instapundit.com/archives2/2007/02/post_2501.php.