A rose by any other name…

On our kitchen windowsill yesterday.

Quote of the Day

”His legs, perhaps, were shorter than they should have been.”

• Lytton Strachey on Dr Arnold in Eminent Victorians

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Variations on a Theme of Mozart | Alrio Diaz

Link

This has been on my ‘Favourites’ playlist for years.

Long Read of the Day

A Locus of Care

Justin E. H. Smith’s tribute to his late colleague Bruno Latour is a thing of beauty. It is also an insightful and generous reflection on his work.

This is how it opens…

Down in the crypt of the basilica of Saint-Maximin-La-Sainte-Baume, in the South of France, there is an exquisitely rare object. It is a skull, behind a wall of glass, and it is described by two separate and very different labels. The one label tells you it comes from a woman in her fifties, likely born in the eastern Mediterranean in the early first century CE. The other label tells you it is the skull of Mary Magdalene. Legends of her late-life migration to Southern Gaul had already been circulating for some time when the discovery of her skeletal remains in Saint-Maximin was announced in 1279, and the basilica was subsequently built up around this gravesite. In the fourteenth century the Genoese Dominican author Jacobus de Voragine tells the full story of Mary Magdalene’s shipwreck off the coast of Marseille, and of her subsequent long career of miracle-working throughout Provence. Europe was made Christian not just by real-time conversion, but also a great deal of retroactive inscription of Biblical personages, apostles, and early Church Fathers into the ancient history of what was not yet a well-delineated cultural-geographical sphere.

In 2017 my spouse and I were standing and looking at the skull behind the glass. I was inspecting the two labels, and thinking about the ironies of the contrasting accounts they presented, when, behind us, we heard a voice: Ah, c’est bien, ils nous donnent un choix, the voice said. We turned around, and saw that it belonged to Bruno Latour.

“It’s nice, they give us a choice.” With this simple, gentle affirmation, our beloved old master, so often derided in the Anglosphere for his role in landing us in the current “post-truth” desert, seemed to sublate all the irony of the contrasting accounts of the skull’s origins, into something that was, well, true — and not only true, but good: a good and true method for navigating the perilous terrain on which the truth-claims of these only purportedly non-overlapping magisteria have done their best to coexist for the past five centuries or so…

Do read the whole thing. It had a particular resonance for me because many years ago my wife and I had been astonished by seeing the (hideous, IMO) skull and the rival interpretations of it. We had been staying in the former monastery next to the basilica and had wandered into the building as casual tourists wondering why such an impressive church had been constructed in a relatively modest Provençal town.

Smith’s summing up of Bruno’s significance seems to me to be spot on:

Bruno Latour was honest and generous, and I don’t think there’s any question he took up that was not, for him, a true matter of concern. He was one of our era’s best guides between the eternal Scylla and Charybdis of dogmatism and skepticism. I am convinced that his comment about the skull in the crypt provides a key to his whole way of thinking. We have a choice — that’s what it all comes down to. Constructionism was never a matter of “just saying whatever”, and science can never be simply a matter of reading the dictates of the natural world off of our instruments, or out of our data, like a new sort of Divine Law. We have a choice as to how read the world, and it’s going to take all of our human ability, and perhaps some superhuman luck or grace as well, to read it for our own good.

It’s a great read and worth your time.

What are tech billionaires’ text messages like? Just as petty as ours, it turns out

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Most of the documents relevant to the case come varnished with three coats of prime legal verbiage, but one set turned out to be delightfully clear: the text messages exchanged between Musk and his buddies that had to be disclosed during the “discovery” process of the hearing. They come in exhibits H and J of his lawyers’ 151-page submission as 35 pages of messages, averaging 21 texts per page. That’s roughly 735 instances of pure, unadulterated billionaire-talk.

On the grounds that life is too short to be reading Musk’s text messages as well as his interminable Twitter stream, I’m ashamed to say that I had shirked the job of diving into the Delaware trove. But Scott Galloway, a prominent blogger, podcaster and NYU professor, is made of sterner stuff and took the plunge, seeking, as he put it, “a glimpse into the bowels of tech power”. And his conclusion from analysing private conversations between “some of the wealthiest and most influential people in the world”? Simply that “bowels” was the correct metaphor…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

 Trump Outmaneuvers New York Lawsuit By Changing Name To Donald 2

Breaking news from The Onion:

PALM BEACH, FL—In a cunning attempt to outmaneuver the fraud lawsuit brought against him by the New York state attorney general, Donald Trump reportedly changed his name on Friday to Donald 2. “I’m not sure who these charges are referring to, as there is no such person named Donald Trump—I’m Mr. 2,” said 2, the former president, who confirmed that his driver’s license as well as his passport and all official personal documents now read “Donald J. 2.” “I’m Mr. 2, that’s me. I have no connection to this case. It’s an entirely different guy, though I do have it on good authority that if there were a Donald Trump, he’d be totally innocent.” At press time, 2 added that perhaps the lawsuit was referring to a certain 44-year-old businessman named Donald Trump Jr.

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Always On

France, July 2022

Quote of the Day

”The cruellest lies are often told in silence.”

• Robert Louis Stevenson

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bob Dylan and The Band | Forever Young

Link

Long Read of the Day

How Photographers in the 1970s Redefined the Medium

Nice anniversary essay in Aperture by Geoff Dyer.

I became interested in photography in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and looking at these old issues of Aperture, I see how much my sense of photography was a direct consequence of what was happening before then, in the 1970s. Photographers were busy taking photographs, making work, but interesting photographs are always being taken, great work is always being made, whatever the decade. In the ’70s, though, photography was being examined and defined in a way that harked back to Alfred Stieglitz’s pioneering inquiries into—and tireless lobbying on behalf of—the “idea photography” at the beginning of the century.

Books by Susan Sontag, John Berger, and Roland Barthes (whose Camera Lucida was published in French in 1980) were intended for the intellectually curious general reader rather than the specialist, and certainly not for practicing photographers. As Tod Papageorge later remarked, “Garry Winogrand never read Roland Barthes, and found whatever he’d seen of (Janet) Malcolm’s and Sontag’s original articles about photography in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books grimly laughable.” (How about photography curators? Well, there weren’t many back then, a point we’ll return to shortly.) These back issues of Aperture show the cultural texture and grain of the times, the work being done at the coal face of photographic life. As revealed in discussions and portfolios of documentary photography, color photography (as exemplified by William Eggleston), snapshot aesthetics, and so on, what we see, close-up and from a distance (of forty to fifty years), is a landscape of awareness…

It’s basically a hymn of praise for John Szarkowski, head of the Museum of Modern Art’s department of photography, and the man who really shaped the perception of photography as a major artistic medium in the mid-to-late 20th century.

Musk, the budding diplomat

Jack Shaffer on Musk’s ‘peace plan’ for Ukraine:

This month, Musk dialed in additional attention to himself. Presumably, there haven’t been enough headlines about his on-again, off-again purchase of Twitter, his alleged romantic interludes, his dope smoking on Joe Rogan, his Tesla overpromising and all the other publicity stunts to stoke his sense of self-importance, so he’s drafted himself as a citizen-diplomat to end the Russian war on Ukraine. What better venue to promote his plan than on Twitter, where on Oct. 3 he proposed a 43-word peace plan that essentially sounded as if it had been scripted by Vladimir Putin, an HPD case if ever there was one, while sitting at his long table.

Great stuff. Worth reading.

Cliff edge looms for UK’s financial system

If you are — as I am — the lucky beneficiary of a supposedly gold-plated pension, you may be thinking that the market chaos triggered by the Truss administration economic ‘plans’ is nothing to do with you, then it might be wise to think again — as Richard Partington explains in yesterday’s Guardian.

It has a rather interesting graph:

Kwarteng’s mini-budget is widely seen as the trigger which set off a “doom loop” in bond markets last month as pension funds became snarled up in complex derivatives they had bought to guard against rising interest rates.

Schemes responsible for the money of pensioners across the UK had ploughed more than £1tn into so-called liability driven investment (LDI) funds. The schemes in question are the gold-plated defined benefit pension schemes, where the employer has promised a set level of pension each year, regardless of the fund’s performance.

Many used hedging arrangements to help ensure against shortfalls. Pensions are among the biggest buyers of government bonds, and as the value of those bonds fell, they faced demands for extra cash to cover the hedges. To raise that cash, they sold government bonds, sending the value of those assets even lower, requiring them to sell more bonds.

In the four days after Kwarteng’s ill-fated speech – before the Bank’s emergency intervention – 30-year bond yields rose by more than the annual increase in 23 out of the last 27 years. Some funds came close to the point of collapse.

And, as far as I can see, those hedging arrangements that some (many?) of the pension funds made are almost entirely unregulated. We’re back in pre-2008 Collateralised Debt Obligations (CDO) territory.

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Miss Potter’s view

The view from one of the first-floor rooms in Hill Top, Beatrix Potter’s cottage in the Lake District. It’s an nteresting house.

Quote of the Day

”Applause is a receipt, not a bill.”

• Artur Schnabel, explaining why he never did encores.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ladysmith Black Mambazo | Homeless Live

Link

Long Read of the Day

The internet is already over

This long piece by Sam Kriss is quite something. His style reminds me of Hunter S. Thompson, so fasten your seatbelt. Here’s a sample to get you in the mood.

You will not survive is not only a frightening idea. The things I hope for are doomed, and everything I try to create will be a failure, but so will everything I despise. These days, it repeats itself whenever I see something that’s trying its hardest to make me angry and upset. There’s a whole class of these objects: they’re never particularly interesting or important; they just exist to jab you into thinking that the world is going in a particular direction, away from wherever you are. One-Third Of Newborn Infants Now Describe Themselves As Polyamorous—Here’s Why That’s A Good Thing. Should I get upset about this? Should I be concerned? Why bother? It will not survive. Meet The Edgy Influencers Making Holocaust Denial Hip Again. Are we in trouble? Maybe, but even trouble is ending…

I enjoyed it. But then I always enjoyed Hunter’s journalism.

Remembering Bruno Latour

Tuesday’s piece about him prompted a few people to ask “Yes, but what was he like? in person” One answer is provided by this video of his Inside lecture/performance that he did in New York in 2018. It’s just under an hour long, so you need to make an appointment with it.

Sciences Po, where he had a Chair (and was a dean for years) has a nice tribute to him on its website.

My commonplace booklet

‘The Owner of This iPhone Was in a Severe Car Crash’— or Just on a Roller Coaster

If, like me, you have an Apple Watch then, if you have a fall or are in a serious car crash, the watch will call emergency services if you don’t display signs of life or activity immediately after the event. Which is undoubtedly a good thing. But what if you’re one of those masochists who like going on heart-stopping funfair rides? The Wall Street Journal has an interesting story about a woman who did just that.

On a sunny September Sunday, Sara White and her family headed to Kings Island amusement park outside Cincinnati.

The 39-year-old dentist zipped her two-day-old iPhone 14 Pro securely in her fanny-pack (‘bum’ for British readers), buckled into the Mystic Timbers roller coaster and enjoyed getting hoisted 109 feet in the air and whipped around at over 50 mph.

Afterward, she looked down at her phone. The lock screen was lined with missed calls and voice mails from an emergency dispatcher asking if she was OK.

During the ride, Apple’s new car-crash detection triggered and automatically dialled 911. The call to the Warren County Communications Center featured an automated voice message from Ms. White’s iPhone: “The owner of this iPhone was in a severe car crash and is not responding to their phone.”

The message is repeated seven times during the call. As the phone made the call and played the automated message, it also picked up background audio from the scene—in this case cheers, music and other amusement-park sounds.

According to the 911 report, a team was sent to the ride but didn’t locate an emergency. When Ms. White realized what happened—ironically, when in line for the bumper cars—she called back the number to tell them she was OK.

Thanks to Charles Arthur for spotting it.

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Autumn leaves

Seen on a walk the other day.

Quote of the Day

”Competition brings out the best in products and the worst in people.”

• David Sarnoff

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J.S. Bach | Concerto for two violins in D minor BWV 1043 | Sato and Deans | Netherlands Bach Society

Link

Long Read of the Day

A Dose of Rational Optimism

That’s the title of Zachary Carter’s review in Dissent of Brad DeLong’s magisterial  Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century, which I’m currently reading — and learning a lot in the process. Carter describes it as “a rise-and-fall epic” but thinks that “it is better at depicting the rise than explaining the fall”. I’m not far enough in to know whether that’s a fair judgement, but since I loved his book on Keynes and Keynesianism, which came out during the lockdown, I’m taking his review seriously.

This is how it opens:

Humanity, the Berkeley economist argues, spent nearly the entirety of its history condemned to poverty by an insufficient supply of calories and a chronically excessive birth rate. But in the “long twentieth century”—the period between 1870 and 2010—an almost miraculous transformation took place: more and more people lived longer, healthier, more prosperous lives than ever before. Arenas of intellect and creative expression that were once accessible only to the most privileged of elites became the common experiences of mass cultures. Humans did not find utopia, DeLong argues, but we stumbled in its general direction.

In the grim morass that has followed the financial crisis of 2008, it is refreshing to receive a dose of rational optimism—however tempered—from a serious intellectual examining our place in the grand scheme of history. DeLong does not avert his readers’ eyes from the brutalities of imperial conquest, genocide, and revolution gone awry, which define the political milieu of the era under his microscope. But his narrative is fundamentally hopeful: people can accomplish amazing things on a colossal scale. Not that long ago, we did so all the time.

This perspective is refreshing precisely because everyone, DeLong included, knows that something has gone terribly wrong…

Worth your time.

My commonplace booklet

The TINY cheap EV you (might) actually want!

Who said the bubble-car was dead? Nice video.

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On reflection…

Seen in the lake on a walk yesterday afternoon.

Quote of the Day

”The world is not a solid continent of facts sprinkled by a few lakes of uncertainties, but a vast ocean of uncertainties speckled by a few islands of calibrated and stabilised forms.”

• Bruno Latour

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Duke Ellington | Across the Tracks Blues

Link

Magical (IMHO)

Long Read of the Day

Audiobooks: Every Minute Counts

Absolutely fascinating blog post from Public Books explaining why audio books are a strangely interesting product (or should I say ‘service’?) I don’t use them, but I have friends who do. And there are lots of interesting observations in the post, which is why I thought it would make an admirable Long Read, but not a Long Listen!

Bruno Latour RIP

One of the most interesting thinkers of our era has died. I knew him only slightly — through a mutual friend, the eminent Dutch philosopher Gerard de Vries — but admired him greatly; indeed, tbh, I was slightly in awe of him, and always sat up when the occasional email from him arrived in my inbox.

Gerard knew Latour long before he was cool, and after he had retired from his Chair at the University of Amsterdam he wrote a magnificent introduction to his friend’s work. Given the scope of that work, it was quite an achievement to encompass it in a single volume, and I was so impressed by it that we invited the author — and his subject — to come to a public launch of the book in CRASSH, the Cambridge research institute in which our Centre for Technology and Democracy is based.

The event was a sellout, and in the end we had to arrange a live relay to several other rooms in the building to cope with the crowd. The only other speaker I can remember having such a powerful magnetic impact was Noam Chomsky many moons ago.

Among other things, Bruno was a formidable multitasker, with a baffling capacity to do several difficult things simultaneously: attending a seminar, for example, while writing a paper on his laptop — and yet suddenly asking a pertinent question to a speaker who had foolishly assumed that his mind was elsewhere. In that sense, he was reminiscent of Norbert Wiener, who used to have a similarly discombobulating effect on seminar speakers at Harvard in the 1940s.

Stuart Jeffries wrote a nice obituary of Bruno in yesterday’s Guardian. “His big idea,” Jeffreys writes,

developed in more than 20 books, theatrical performances and art installations, as well as his 2013 Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh, entitled Facing Gaia, was not that difficult to grasp. We should realise we are not the selfish individuals predicted by neo-liberal economic theory, but social beings living interdependently with other organic life, and that, like his favourite insects, we must productively recycle our waste and consume little.

His ideas were profoundly influenced by the Gaia theory of the maverick British scientist James Lovelock, wherein the Earth is a self-regulating organism. Latour’s sense was that it is the critical zone, rather than the whole of our planet, that should be the object of human concern and care, in order to reverse the despoiling impact of what he and others called the Anthropocene, the epoch in which humanity has become tantamount to a geological force and presided over the sixth mass extinction event.

He was a life-enhancing thinker and a very nice man. May he rest in peace.

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The most glorious Main Street in the world

The Grand Canal, Venice. Not quite as Canaletto saw it. Still…

Looking forward to being there again next year.

Quote of the Day

”In America, journalism is apt to be regarded as an extension of history: in Britain as an extension of conversation.”

• Anthony Sampson, in The Anatomy of Britain Today. ‘Today’ was 1965.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

David Lindsey | Starting All Over Again | Reggae USA

Link

Lovely.

Long Read of the Day

 Ninety Years Ago, This Book Tried to Warn Us

A striking NYT column by Pamela Paul on Lion Feuchtwanger’s 1933 novel The Oppermanns.

The novel reads like a five-alarm fire because it was written that way, over a mere nine months, and published shortly after Hitler became chancellor, only lightly fictionalizing events as they occurred in real time. In “Buddenbrooks” fashion, the story follows the declining fortunes and trials of a family, the German Jewish Oppermanns, prosperous merchants and professionals, as they scramble to hold on while fascism takes hold of their country. It’s a book that fairly trembles with foreboding and almost aches with sorrow.

The essay continues with a list of the tragically mistaken assumptions Feuchtwanger took on in 1933 that continue to threaten democracies today. Worth reading just for that list.

Tech firms: EU laws to avoid bad AI will limit their ‘innovation’. Spot on!

Yesterday’s Observer column:

The new liability bill, says MIT’s Technology Review journal, “would give people and companies the right to sue for damages after being harmed by an AI system. The goal is to hold developers, producers and users of the technologies accountable and require them to explain how their AI systems were built and trained. Tech companies that fail to follow the rules risk EU-wide class actions.”

Right on cue, up pops the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), the lobbying outfit that represents tech companies in Brussels. Its letter to the two European commissioners responsible for the two acts immediately raises the concern that imposing strict liability on tech firms “would be disproportionate and ill-suited to the properties of software”. And, of course, it could have “a chilling effect” on “innovation”.

Ah yes. That would be the same innovation that led to the Cambridge Analytica scandal and Russian online meddling in 2016’s US presidential election and UK Brexit referendum and enabled the livestreaming of mass shootings. The same innovation behind the recommendation engines that radicalised extremists and directed “10 depression pins you might like” to a troubled teenager who subsequently ended her own life…

Do read the whole thing

Twitter Will Tame Elon Musk, Not the Other Way Around

Jack Shafer’s Politico column. My response: Oh Yeah? But Jack’s argument is that “the expert bloviator isn’t about to run a $44 billion purchase into the ground”.

Assuming Elon Musk and Twitter can iron out their legal differences in the next couple of days, he will take ownership of Twitter very soon. Will he wreck it by turning it into a disinformation playground, as some critics fear, based on his vow to lift the permanent ban on Donald Trump’s account? Or will he transform it into something that rivals the other triumphs in his portfolio, Tesla and SpaceX?

Knowing Musk, he could possibly do both, constructing a sewer that poisons you with lies and hate while making it an essential part of consumers’ lives. But you’ve really got to doubt that. Nobody, not even Elon Musk on his most perverse day, would buy a property for $44 billion — 20 percent of his net worth, by the way — and then rebuild it as the world’s largest sewage treatment facility. All the fretting about the “harm” Musk might cause as Twitter’s owner is misplaced: It will be in his financial interests to make Twitter as wholesome and welcoming a place as Starbucks, even if he changes the way the site works…

We’ll see. Full marks for trying, though, Jack.

My commonplace booklet

”We Have To Make It Big Enough For All Of Us!”

Lovely story from a lovely blog

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Chateau Naughton 2022

We have an amazing elderly vine which runs the entire front of the house. And every year, without fail, it produces a rich harvest of grapes, which we eat and make delicious grape juice from. One year, long ago, I toyed wit

h the idea of learning to make wine from them, but having done the research, assessed the expenditure on kit and the steepness of the learning curve I decided that it would be cheaper and easier to go out and buy a few bottles of Chateau Lafite! And ever since, I’ve been content to be a mere fruit-juice manufacturer.

Quote of the Day

”Take most people, they’re crazy about cars. I’d rather have a goddam horse. A horse is at least human, for God’s sake.”

• J.D. Salinger, in The Catcher in the Rye, 1951.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Die Zauberflöte, ’O Isis und Osiris’ | Kurt Moll

Link

One of my favourite arias.

Long Read of the Day

 The Thorny Problem of Keeping the Internet’s Time

Fascinating New Yorker essay by Nate Hopper on the genius who, many years ago, created the arcane software system that synchronises the network’s clocks. The question for now: who will keep the system running?

Many thanks to James Miller for alerting me to it.

Dave Winer and Doc Quixote

Dave Winer and Doc Searls are two of the Elders of the Net. Among many other achievements they both played a role in composing the Cluetrain Manifesto. They are also old friends, so sometimes it’s nice to be able to eavesdrop on their conversations. Dave had a nice blog post about such an exchange the other day.

I had a longish phone talk with Doc Searls a couple of days ago. Then he wrote a post about a series of photos he took over 17 years, on airplanes approaching LAX, of a famous horse track as it changed over the years, and eventually was torn down and a football stadium was built in its place.

I’ve known Doc for a long time, and I’ve seen at least two sides of the man. On one side is Doc Quixote who is ranting about windmills. He’s great with words so he comes up with memorable ways of expressing the ideas. And Doc is the most affable person I’ve ever known, so they love him as he rants at them. And the things Doc rants about are what we need to do now to start to be free. In other words he’s right. But as we’ve grown old as friends I’m pretty certain that Doc will not live to see his ideas become reality. And nor will I, for my dream. I spent great time, energy and money, over many years to create the writing and programming environment I wanted to use and I wanted my peers to use, so we could work together to create species-saving communication tools, and just beauty — nothing wrong with that.

My commonplace booklet

Andrew Curry on the damage inflicted on roads by different kinds of vehicle.

This from yesterday’s edition of his Substack blog.

When I wrote about cars on Saturday, I underestimated the impact of the weight of a vehicle on the road surface. It’s the fourth power of the weight, not the cube. Memo to self: don’t write quickly late in the evening, even when sober, since your memory plays tricks on you.

Harry Rutter at Bath University kindly put me right, even sending me a spreadsheet comparing the impact of a bicycle with a Ford Focus and with a truck. The green cells show the ratio of damage between each of the pairs of vehicles…

If you’re interested, follow the link to see the table. It’s sobering. And also confirms that the most ecologically-responsible form of transport is the bicycle, closely followed by the electric bike!

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The stones of Ruskin

For forty years I’ve had an ambition to visit Brantwood, John Ruskin’s house on the shores of Coniston Water, and a couple of weeks ago I achieved it!

Brantwood is big but not grand, and exceedingly interesting because of what it reveals about its owner. I’ve been interested in Ruskin ever since I made my first visit to Venice and read his Stones of Venice, but I hadn’t appreciated what a polymath he was, how wide his interests were and what a powerful influence he was on Victorian life and thought.

The house is set in a 250-acre estate which is threaded with paths designed by Ruskin to make different kinds of botanical and topographic points. We walked the path that circles the estate and leads up to the crag at the top with its sensational views of the lake below and the ‘Old Man’ peak that looms above it. All in all, a wonderful day out. Highly recommended.

The odd thing about the ‘Lake District’

As regular readers know, I recently had an enjoyable holiday in the Lake District, where we rented a house on the nice (i.e. quiet) side of Windermere. But I made the mistake on the blog of referring to “Lake Windermere” — which prompted a nice rebuke from James Cridland (‘mere’ means ‘lake’ so ‘Lake Windermere’ is a tautology), and a dish of humble pie for me.

But it also prompted other nice messages. Quentin, for instance, wrote that,

Enjoyed your comment about Lakes this morning; I remember now (but had forgotten) learning as a child that there is only one lake in the Lake District: Bassenthwaite. All of the others are meres, waters, tarns…

And it prompted a nice story from Keith Devlin:

“When we were first living in Lancaster in the late 1970s, we had 3-story, Edwardian, terraced house, and took an overseas visitor to the top floor to see the view. “You can see The Lakes from here,” I said as we entered the room. The visitor paused, and said, “All I can see are mountains.”

Which indeed was the case.

Quote of the Day

”England still stands outside Europe. Europe’s voiceless tremors do not reach her. Europe is apart, and England is not of her flesh and body.”

• John Maynard Keynes in The Economic Consequences of the Peace

Keynes was writing in 1919. Nothing much changes.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Xavier Boderiou | Uilleann Pipes | The Plains Of Boyle (Hornpipe)

Link

Brief, but lovely.

Long Read of the Day

A concrete vision of the liberal democratic future

If we want a better future, then we need to have an idea of what we would want it to be like. This long, long essay by Noah Smith

It seems that the essay was prompted by watching an interview with, of all people, Peter Thiel — Silicon Valley’s idea of an intellectual.

The other day, I saw a very interesting interview segment with the investor and conservative political activist Peter Thiel. In it, he says that the future has to be a tangible thing in order for people to embrace it, and that — as things stand right now — the only tangible futures that have been put forward are Chinese techno-totalitarianism, Islamism, and West Europe style environmentalism.

Smith doesn’t pretend to have all the answers.

Key pieces of the liberal democratic future vision remain to be filled in, and doing so will be a difficult and fraught process. Not everyone will be happy with the result, either. But it’s something we need to do, or we will leave the future to the people with darker, more dramatic visions that are sure to lead to nowhere good.

I agree, which is why I liked the essay. Hope you do too.

Lest we forget

I came on this tweet by Seb Schmoller yesterday.

The thread is here. It was Seb who first alerted me to Stolpersteine. Since then, whenever I’ve come on them in European cities, I pause to read and try to imagine what they mean. Seb’s thread includes a photograph of those outside the house where his grandparents lived.

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How not to run a country

This week’s Economist cover

Quote of the Day

”Neurosis has an absolute genius for malingering. There is no illness that it cannot counterfeit perfectly.”

• Marcel Proust, 1922

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Keith Jarrett | Over the Rainbow (Tokyo 1984)

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Ark Head

I don’t know about you but I feel increasingly like the guy in the cartoon — except that my concern there’s something terribly wrong with our world, not just the Internet. The difficulty is that remedying any of the wicked problems that beset us lies way above my — or your — pay grade, and perhaps above anyone’s pay grade. And yet nobody writes about this, possibly because nobody wants to admit that we are locked in incompetent systems — ones that can’t fix themselves.

All of which is by way of explaining why I thought this little essay by Venkatash Rao is so interesting. He sees the same enervating dilemma, but has an interesting take on our primary coping mechanism — the (Noah’s) Ark mentality.

We increasingly respond practically to the world without even attempting to make sense of it.

One mental model for this condition is what I call ark head, as in Noah’s Ark. We’ve given up on the prospect of actually solving or managing most of the snowballing global problems and crises we’re hurtling towards. Or even meaningfully comprehending the gestalt. We’ve accepted that some large fraction of those problems will go unsolved and unmanaged, and result in a drastic but unevenly distributed reduction in quality of life for most of humanity over the next few decades. We’ve concluded that the rational response is to restrict our concerns to a small subset of local reality–an ark–and compete for a shrinking set of resources with others doing the same. We’re content to find and inhabit just one zone of positivity, large enough for ourselves and some friends. We cross our fingers and hope our little ark is outside the fallout radius of the next unmanaged crisis, whether it is a nuclear attack, aliens landing, a big hurricane, or (here in California), a big wildfire or earthquake.

We’ve concluded the flood cannot be stopped, and we’re building arks to retreat to…

Marvellous, thoughtful piece.

Putin’s latest frightening gambit lies at the bottom of the ocean

Yesterday’s Observer column:

The strange thing about Putin’s assault on Ukraine was that he clearly hadn’t consulted Valery Gerasimov, the guy who in 2013 had radically reconfigured Russian military doctrine at his behest (and is now chief of the Russian armed forces). Gerasimov’s big idea was that warfare in a networked age should combine the traditional kinetic stuff with political, economic, informational, humanitarian and other non-military activities. This would mean, for example, that before firing a shot, you should first use social media and other network tools to misinform, confuse, polarise and demoralise the population of your adversary. In that way, democratic regimes would find it more difficult to motivate their citizens for combat.

Putin’s invasion in February ran directly counter to this doctrine; perhaps Gerasimov was not part of the inner circle of trusted cronies on whom Putin initially relied. Instead the assault was a 1940s-style blitzkrieg, except in Technicolor rather than black and white. And it hasn’t worked. So as he returns to the drawing board, it’s conceivable that the Russian leader has, finally, been talking to Gerasimov. If that’s the case, then their conversations will have rapidly turned to topics such as deniability, asymmetric warfare and identifying the critical weaknesses of their western adversaries.

Which in turn means that they will be thinking less about pipelines and much more about the undersea fibre-optic cables that now constitute the nervous system of our networked world. ..

Read on

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Britain’s new economic policy

Yours for only £21.24. Note the co-authors.

The Washington Post observed yesterday that the book

argues that Britain had become a “bloated state” with “high taxes” and “excessive regulation” and that only by taking an aggressively free-market, libertarian stance would shake the country into powerful economic growth. In this view, Britain looks particularly terrible when compared with fast-growing Asian economies.

“Whereas Indian children aspire to be doctors or businessmen, the British are more interested in football and pop music,” the book wrote.

The authors of Britannia Unchained were, at the time, accused of chasing headlines. But as the Financial Times noted this week, Kwarteng’s other work on economic history shows an embedded distrust of financial markets and bankers that is newly relevant.

His doctoral thesis — focused on the less-than-headline-grabbing topic of William III’s decision to reissue England’s coinage in 1695-96 — argued that “the interest of the goldsmith and banker was anything but inimical to the wider good of the nation.”

Few would argue against the idea that Britain’s economy needs some sort of shake-up. The economy has slumped since the financial crash of 14 years ago, with a mean growth rate of just 1 percent for the years since compared with 2.7 percent between 1948 and 2008.

Kwarteng’s mini-budget appears to be creating a kind of supply-side economics shock therapy for Britain. The inspiration may come from America and, in particular, the U.S. counterpart to the British chancellor’s idol, Margaret Thatcher: President Reagan, who was said to be “starving the beast” when cutting back on state funding by diminishing government income.

My friend the social historian David Vincent (Whom God Preserve) noticed that the two serious actors in this drama — the Chancellor and the Governor of the Bank of England — both wrote PhD dissertations in economic history as graduate students at Cambridge. He also pointed me to Amelia Gentleman’s review of Kwarteng’s rather good book on the British Empire, about which he seems commendably detached — possibly because his family hails from a former colony of said empire and are therefore inoculated against the Imperial Afterglow Syndrome that afflicts Boris Johnson & Co.

Kwarteng’s sharpest criticism of empire, writes Gentleman,

is of the “anarchic individualism” that ran through it. “The reliance on individual administrators to conceive and execute policy with very little strategic direction from London often led to contradictory and self-defeating policies, which in turn brought disaster to millions,” he writes. There are moments where you wonder if the criticism of the inconsistent, haphazard way that Britain’s imperial rule was imposed might equally be applied to the Conservative party’s reshuffle-heavy rule of the UK over the last decade.

You do indeed wonder.

Quote of the Day

”Malcolm Muggeridge, a garden gnome expelled from Eden, has come to rest as a gargoyle brooding over a derelict cathedral.”

• Kenneth Tynan

It’s quite an acute observation about St Mugg, who ended his days as a devout Catholic. But he was right about Stalin’s Russia, when he was a journalist in Moscow in the 1930s and many lefties and British intellectuals were unwilling to criticise Uncle Joe.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Il mio tesoro | Don Giovanni | John Dickie

Link

One of my favourite arias. James Joyce’s friend John McCormack used to sing it beautifully.

Long Read of the Day

Project Fear 3.0 – or the gatekeepers and the Tories

Fine blog post by Adam Tooze, who is as pissed off as I am about the current liberal astonishment at the depths to which Truss & Co will stoop. What did these commentators expect from such people? They are doing exactly what they said they would do — shrinking the state until — as a famous US reactionary once put it — they could drown it in a bucket.

Tooze is on song about this. Sample:

The important point is that in diagnosing your enemy the point is not to correct their behavior. The point is to defeat them.

You are engaged not in a pedagogic exercise, but in reconnaissance. The point is to expose who they are and what they are up to. The point is to help those of us who are opposed to them to be clearer in our judgements and tactics.

It is quite a different thing to write about the Truss government and the mess it is making as though you imagine that your criticism will make a difference, as though the aim of the game is persuasion and improvement. What I wonder do all these highly esteemed sources of economic expertise imagine their exchanges with Downing Street to be about? Who do they think they are talking to? Who, in fact, would imagine sitting down with these people to talk at all? How could you keep a straight face?

This a government of Tory hardliners trying to define the third iteration of post-Brexit Tory identity – May, Johnson, Truss. This is a government that thinks nothing of putting the Northern Irish agreement in play. When they gave away 45 billion to those on top incomes, they were under no illusions. They knew what they were doing. They know it will increase inequality. No harm in that as far as Truss is concerned. Will this drive interest rates up? Of course it will. They appear to relish that too.

So what, given who Truss, Kwarteng et al are, what is the purpose of the drumbeat of opprobrium?

Do read the whole thing.

Erratum

The Karl Popper quotation in yesterday’s edition included a ridiculous typo. It should have read:

”The belief that one can start with pure observations alone, without anything in the nature of a theory, is absurd.”

Thanks to Andrew Arends for tactfully pointing it out. And apologies to any Popperians out there who were annoyed by it.

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