Ideology and tunnel vision

Ideology is what determines how you think even when you don’t know you’re thinking. It’s what makes some courses of action seem ‘obvious’ while others are, literally, unthinkable.

Since the 1970s, ruling elites in most western democracies have imbibed a particular ideology — neoliberalism. This is a particular way of viewing the world, a view that:

• Atomises people (“there is no such thing as society; there are only individual people and their families”, as Thatcher used to put it).
• Prioritises the interests of corporations over those of civil society.
• Undermines agencies of collective action like trade unions.
• Imposes market logic on everything — even when doing so is a catastrophic error, and
• Systematically undermines state capacity. When a British government faces a problem, its reflex response is not to see how public sector organisations might be harnessed to tackle it, but to outsource the work to corporations, even when they are manifestly incompetent or, on occasion, corrupt.

This comes to mind as the Truss administration tries to grapple with the soaring cost of heating one’s home this winter. The reflex strategy is to pay colossal subsidies to energy companies so that they will reduce the bills consumers pay. The end-result of this will be a massive boost to the already ballooning profits of these corporations.

But it is also an irrational, wasteful and iniquitous way of tackling the problem because, among other things, it amounts to a subsidy to well-off consumers while probably not doing enough to help poor households. A much more efficient and fairer way to help people through the energy crisis would be to subsidise average consumption, while leaving those who exceeded it to pay the market price for electricity, gas or oil.

In the UK at the moment, the average household consumes 3,731 kWh of electricity in a year. That comes to 10.23 kWh per day. So wouldn’t it be smarter — and fairer — to subsidise consumption up to that level, and let households which consume more face the market rate? And pay for the subsidy by a windfall tax on energy companies.

It won’t happen, of course, for the simple reason that it’s ‘unthinkable’.

Growl.

Quote of the Day

“When it’s 3 o’clock in New York, it’s still 1938 in London”.

• Bette Midler

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bob Dylan | Shelter from the Storm

Link

Wonderful song.

Long Read of the Day

The Monarchy, the Subaltern and the Public Sphere

Marvellous essay by Ethan Zuckerman, one of the wisest observers of the online world known to me. He’s currently developing a new course on “The Digital Public Sphere” for his lucky students at the University of Massachusetts. The new course — which I’d certainly want to attend if I were over there — is based on three principles:

1. Democracy requires a robust and healthy public sphere.
2. The public sphere includes at least three components: a way of knowing what’s going on in the world (news), a space for discussing public life, and whatever precursors allow individuals to participate in these discussions. For Habermas’s public sphere, those precursors included being male, wealthy, white, urban and literate… hence the need for Nancy Fraser’s recognition of subaltern counterpublics.
3. As technology and economic models change, all three of these components – the nature of news, discourse, and access – change as well.

The obvious change we’re all focussed on at the moment is the displacement of a broadcast public sphere by a highly participatory digital public sphere driven by social media. The consequence of this is a huge diversification of viewpoints expressed in the public sphere. The thing I liked about Ethan’s essay is the way he uses a recent controversy over criticism of the late Queen – to explore the nature and significance of the transition from a broadcast-dominated to a networked p public sphere.

Worth your time and attention.

My commonplace booklet

“Russian police arrest man for holding up blank sheet of paper”

My admiration for the barrister who was questioned by police for holding up a blank sheet of paper in Westminster the other day prompted Patrick O’Beirne to email that there was a precedent for this kind of protest — in Novosibirsk of all places!

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Acrobatics

Venice, 2017. I love this photograph because of the expressions on the faces of the children.

Quote of the Day

”The story of an empire dying from the poisonous fermentation of the fruits of its initial success.”

• Clive James on Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Hmmm… remind you of any other empires?

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mark Knopfler & Emmylou Harris | Our Shangri-La

Link

Long Read of the Day

’Things fall apart’: the apocalyptic appeal of ‘The Second Coming’

Very nice essay by Dorian Lynskey on the enduring fascination with Yeats’s poem The Second Coming.

Written in 1919 and published in 1920, “The Second Coming” has become perhaps the most plundered poem in the English language. At 164 words, it is short and memorable enough to be famous in toto but it has also been disassembled into its constituent parts by books, albums, movies, TV shows, comic books, computer games, political speeches and newspaper editorials. While many poems in Yeats’s corpus have contributed indelible lines to the storehouse of the cultural imagination (“no country for old men”; “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart”), “The Second Coming” consists of almost nothing but such lines. Someone reading it for the first time in 2020 might resemble the apocryphal theatregoer who complained that Hamlet was nothing but a bunch of quotations strung together. Whether or not it is Yeats’s greatest poem, it is by far his most useful. As Auden wrote in “In Memory of WB Yeats” (1939), “The words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living.”

The poem provides, says Lynskey, an opportunity to confront chaos and dread, rather than to escape it, which is perhaps why Fintan O’Toole has proposed the “Yeats Test”: “The more quotable Yeats seems to commentators and politicians, the worse things are.”

Great read, IMO

My commonplace booklet

Morisson’s Law of Holiday Busyness

A nice exposition on Quentin’s blog of a universal law that explains why one is always especially busy in the run up to going on holiday — and immediately upon one’s return. It explains why, sometimes, I have half-dreaded the thought of going away!

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Venice: the last mile

Quote of the Day

“Objects or practices are liberated for full symbolic and ritual use when no longer fettered by practical use. The spurs of Cavalry officers’ dress uniforms are more important for tradition’ when there are no horses, the umbrellas of Guards officers in civilian dress lose their significance when not carried tightly furled (that is, useless).”

• Eric Hobsbawm in The Invention of Tradition.

I kept thinking of this when watching the preposterous ceremonial charades surrounding the declaration of Charles as King. How many overweight, elderly white males in bejewelled and braided dresses does a country need? And how many of them need suspender belts to keep up those black tights? Also, I’ve just remembered that the new Queen Consort’s ex held the magnificent title of Silver Stick in Waiting. (I am not making this up.) Wonder what he did with his stick?

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Planxty | The Good Ship Kangaroo

Link

An old (1980) recording of one of my favourite songs by Planxty, the best traditional group of my lifetime. Comes with a nice explanation of the song’s origin.

Short Read of the Day

Defeat by Truth is Victory

Here is a touching sermon by the current President of Harvard, a hedge-fund with a nice university attached, to mark the beginning of the Fall semester.

Books, etc.

Cultural Amnesia

This is one of my favourite books — the result of a lifetime’s reading and note-taking by a great cultural critic. Clive was my predecessor-but-one as the Observer’s TV critic, and indeed was the writer who made television criticism into something that could be both insightful and readable. Like me — but with much more energy — he was an autodidact and this book represents a really touching attempt to read everyone worth reading before one dies, and then trying to communicate something of the essence of each. It consists of 106 short essays on writers, artists and thinkers — from Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, taking in Walter Benjamin, Camus, Miles Davis, Fellini, Freud, de Gaulle, Hazlitt, Hegel, the Manns (Thomas, Heinrich, Michael and Golo), Proust, Sartre, Trotsky, Waugh and Wittgenstein. There are some inclusions that initially raise eyebrows — for example Hitler. Why him? Because “one of the drawbacks of liberal democracy… is the freedom to forget what once threatened its existence”.

If I had a bookshelf in my bathroom, then this would be on it. Instead it sits in the study. And over the years, dipping in to it has been one of the joys of life. The first time I saw Wes Anderson’s film, The Grand Hotel Budapest, for example, I learned that it was partly inspired by the work of Stefan Zweig, about whom I had known precisely nothing. But Clive understood his significance. And now I do too.

What the Truth-Social flop says about Trump

Nice column by Jack Shafer, wondering why did only 3.9m of Trump’s 89m Twitter followers follow him to his personal Twitter-clone?

Trump’s deranged outrage style once contained real entertainment value — which explains why moderates and liberals followed him on Twitter even if they wouldn’t vote for him. But in his post-presidency and especially in the weeks following the Mar-a-Lago search and investigation, the show has gone stale. Vainly, he has sought to top himself by sharing QAnon-related material on Truth Social, denouncing the FBI like a madman trapped in a bunker, and calling for his reinstatement as the “rightful winner“ of the 2020 election. He’s become a carnival geek biting the heads off of snakes, which can be a fabulous show the first couple of times you see it, but after that, meh. Could today’s Trump devise enough fresh outrage to produce even a brief TikTok?

The interesting question — impossible to answer given the unreliability of US mainstream media’s coverage of politics — is whether Trump is really heading for the rocks.

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The Queen is the story, not the rudderless UK

The media circus round Buckingham Palace has to be seen to be believed. TV networks from all over the world. My son Pete (who lives in London) cycled to the Palace on Friday out of curiosity and sent me a short video which gives you some idea of the scene. The death of no other monarch on earth, he surmised, would have attracted that kind of attention.

He’s right. The Brexit crowd will doubtless interpret this level of attention as evidence for their conviction that the UK still really matters to the world. If so, it would be a be a serious misjudgement. The late Queen, not the UK, was the story – a head of state who played by the rules, even as they were being torn up by ‘her’ clueless Prime Ministers.

Apropos that… after the Queen had passed away the current clueless PM stood outside Downing Street and said that she had been “the very spirit of Great Britain”, clearly unaware that Elizabeth II had been queen of the whole United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Which made one wonder (a) what the DUP loyalists over in Belfast made of their exclusion, and (b) how Truss will handle the upcoming crisis over the Northern Ireland Protocol which her predecessor signed and was trying to break before he left office.

Quote of the day

“In 1864 a notice was pinned to the rails of Buckingham Palace in the manner of an advertisement: “these commanding premises to be let or sold, in consequence of the late occupant’s declining business”.

• David Cannadine in “The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the ‘Invention of Tradition’, 1820-1977”.

Long Read of the Day

The short unhappy life of Elizabeth Windsor

From Politico, the most interesting obituary I’ve read. It’s by ‘Otto English’ which is the pen name used by Andrew Scott, a writer and playwright based in London.

TL;DR summary: To provide the United Kingdom with the monarch she felt it needed, Queen Elizabeth II sacrificed an ordinary life and the other things most of us take for granted.

Worth your time.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Karl Jenkins | Benedictus | 2Cellos | Live, Zagreb

Link

Somehow, appropriate for this moment.

Tesla gave us tech on wheels, so how come it forgot to include the service centres?

Yesterday’s Observer column:

The first thing one learns when purchasing a Tesla, as this columnist did in December 2020, is that the neighbours immediately begin to hold one personally responsible for Elon Musk. The co-founder and now Supreme Leader of the company is, one finds, widely regarded by non-techies as a fruitcake with a bad Twitter habit, so it follows that anyone who buys one of his cars must be a devotee of the world’s richest nutter and therefore not properly earthed.

Interestingly, there was a time, not so very long ago, 2005 to be precise, that this view of Musk was held by sensible German men in suits, who laughed at the idea of this jerk building automobiles. Didn’t he know that making cars is hard and that BMW, Mercedes, Ford, General Motors, Volkswagen, Toyota and the rest had spent the best part of a century figuring out how to do it profitably at scale? Sure, he might be able to produce expensive toys for Silicon Valley types – but real cars?

The industry’s derisive scepticism reminds me of 2007, when Apple launched the iPhone…

Read on

Whatever happened to Rudi?

Interesting NYT piece by Andrew Kirtzman on the accelerating self-destruction of the hero of 9/11.

Rudy Giuliani led a terrified city through the deadliest attack in its history. As a reporter covering him from a few feet away that morning, I ran with him from the hurricane of ash and debris following the collapse of the World Trade Center’s North Tower, trekked a mile up a Manhattan avenue as he and his aides searched for safe harbor and watched his security detail break into a firehouse with a crowbar.

He gave orders to aides calmly and decisively, reassured a frightened police officer, shushed a cheering crowd and spoke to the world from a tiny office. Like countless others, I was grateful that someone had taken charge, undaunted by the madness of the situation.

These images often come to me when I try to reconcile that brilliant leader with the confused, widely ridiculed figure facing potential indictment for trying to subvert the 2020 election.

Mr. Giuliani is virtually alone at this desperate hour…

The thing that finally did for him, of course, was hooking up with Donald Trump. Sad but inevitable.

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Lest we forget

Three Stolpersteine — literally ’stumbling stones’ on the pavement outside an apartment block in Berlin, commemorating three people who had been taken from the house and murdered in Auschwitz and Chelmno. One finds these lovely memorials all over the place — and not only in German cities.

Quote of the Day

”The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts.”

• Paul Ehrlich

(And, this blogger adds, take photographs as you dismantle the device with which you intend to tinker.)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J.S. Bach | Erbarme Dich | St Matthew’s Passion | Jonathan Peter Kenny (Counter-tenor), Clare Salaman (Violin), Thangam Debonnaire (Cello).

Link

The clip is from a remarkable production directed by Jonathan Miller, who can be seen talking about it here in his usual mesmerising way.

Many thanks to Seb Schmoller for the link and the background.

Long Read of the Day

What does GPT-3 “know” about me?

Interesting article by Finnish journalist Melissa Heikkilä in MIT Technology Review reporting what she discovered when she started asking Large Language models like GPT-3 questions about herself — and others. Since these models are trained on troves of personal data hoovered from the internet she wondered what they knew about her.

If you’ve posted anything even remotely personal in English on the internet, chances are your data might be part of some of the world’s most popular LLMs.

Tech companies such as Google and OpenAI do not release information about the data sets that have been used to build their language models, but they inevitably include some sensitive personal information, such as addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses.

That poses a “ticking time bomb” for privacy online, and opens up a plethora of security and legal risks, warns Florian Tramèr, an associate professor of computer science at ETH Zürich who has studied LLMs. Meanwhile, efforts to improve the privacy of machine learning and regulate the technology are still in their infancy.

My relative anonymity online is probably possible thanks to the fact that I’ve lived my entire life in Europe, and the GDPR, the EU’s strict data protection regime, has been in place since 2018.

But when she started asking the models about relatively public figures, things got really interesting.

Do read it to find out.

Footnote: Out of idle curiosity I started asking OpenAI’s text-davinci-002 model questions about me. On the grounds that I have been a blogger forever and a newspaper columnist since the 1980s I figured the model would have some information about me. Turns out I was wrong.

Comments:

• I’m not a British journalist, though I live and work in Britain. I’m also an academic (a professor) but that didn’t figure in the model’s knowledge base.

• I do write for the Observer

• I have four children, not two, and one of them is named Pete

• I was not born in ‘Dublin, Ireland’ but in Mayo.

• I am not married to Emma Duncan

So a success rate of one out of five.

My commonplace booklet

The outsized power of small acts of kindness

I’ve always thought that generosity is a good default mode in life, but until I read this piece in Axios I didn’t know there was academic research to back that up.

The researchers conducted a series of experiments with different acts of kindness — such as offering someone a ride home or covering the cost of someone’s cup of coffee. In one experiment, study participants at an ice skating rink in Chicago on a cold winter day gave other skaters hot chocolate for free. Then both parties were asked to rate how much the gesture was worth. The givers consistently undervalued how much the hot cocoa meant to the recipients.

I’ve also noticed that people are inordinately grateful when you compliment them on something they’ve done well. A few years ago, a female colleague in a different department received a really big, prestigious research grant. So I wrote her a note congratulating her on the achievement. Later she told me that I was the ONLY person in the entire university who had written to her.

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In the shade

I love the way apartment dwellers in France make the best of things.

Quote of the Day

”If only I had known, I would have become a watchmaker.”

• Albert Einstein, reflecting on the atomic bomb.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Louis Armstrong | La vie en rose

Link

Magical.

Long Read of the Day

A website is a street corner

Wonderful, wise blog post by Ryan Broderick, triggered by the decision of Cloudfare, a service that provides protection for websites from denial-of-service attacks, to terminate its protection of Kiwi Farms, a toxic website. What this generally means is that a blocked site effectively disappears from the Web or fades into obscurity.

Every time this step is taken there are the usual rows about ‘free speech’ etc. And when Matthew Prince, Cloudfare’s well-meaning CEO, takes to his blog to provide agonised rationalisations for a particular exclusion decision he sometimes seems to muddy the water rather than clarify the issues.

Broderick’s blog post takes aim at a particular analogy suggested by Prince in his recent discussion of the issue.

Just as the telephone company doesn’t terminate your line if you say awful, racist, bigoted things, we have concluded in consultation with politicians, policy makers, and experts that turning off security services because we think what you publish is despicable is the wrong policy. To be clear, just because we did it in a limited set of cases before doesn’t mean we were right when we did. Or that we will ever do it again.

Sometimes analogies and metaphors are helpful in exploring an issue. Sometimes, as in this case, they’re not. But Broderick puts it better than I can, which is why he’s worth a read.

Thanks to Charles Arthur for alerting me to it.

My commonplace booklet

”The Beluga Restaurant, Marsascala Bay, will be closed today due to the official opening.”

• Advertisement, Times of Malta

(From French Widow in Every Room)

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Sunset over the Staithe

Brancaster, Friday evening.

Quote of the Day

As you get older, you don’t get wiser. You get irritable”

• Doris Lessing

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Kate & Anna McGarrigle | Hard times come again no more

Link

I know I’ve recommended this Stephen Foster song before, but George Wilkinson emailed to suggest this version, which I hadn’t heard before. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Long Read of the Day

The Mysterious Murder of Darya Dugina

If you are — like me — puzzled by the murder of the daughter on an obscure Russian political philosopher, then join the club.

But then I know little about Russia. Masha Gessen, in contrast, knows a lot, and this piece by her in the New Yorker explores some interesting conspiracy theories about whodunnit.

Darya Dugina, a twenty-nine-year-old Russian television commentator, was laid to rest at an undisclosed location in Moscow on August 23rd. Three days earlier, Dugina had attended a festival called Tradition, a daylong event that, this year, included a lecture by her father, the self-styled political philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, on the metaphysical dualism of historical thinking. The gathering concluded with a concert called “The Russian Cosmos.” Afterward, Darya Dugina drove away in a Toyota Land Cruiser. The car exploded, killing her. Aleksandr Dugin was apparently travelling in a different vehicle, and it seems likely that whoever killed Darya had meant to kill her better-known father. There has since been much speculation about the identity and motives of the killers, but little is known for certain. Still, some theories are better than others.

Western media accounts have portrayed Dugin as a sort of Putin whisperer, the brains behind the Kremlin’s ideology. He is not that, but his story tells a lot about recent Russian history and the current state of Russian society…

Chart of the Day

California roasting

Just a local manifestation of a cooking planet. No consolation to those without air-conditioning, though.

Source

Sauce for the goose…

Big news in the tech world in the last few days was the revelation that Nvidia, the outfit that makes the high-end processing chips that power a lot of AI (aka machine-learning) systems, has been barred from selling them to China.

The Chinese were incandescent about this step by the US. The Wall Street Journal reported its Ministry of Commerce declaring that “the U.S. move would damage the interests of both Chinese and American companies. The U.S. should treat enterprises of all countries fairly”.

This prompted a splendid rant from Ben Thompson, whose wonderful Stratchery newsletter is one of my daily treats.

China complaining that the U.S. should treat enterprises of all countries fairly is, while not surprising, one of the most absurd statements I have ever seen. Tech is the most obvious example: U.S. Internet companies have been blocked from China for going on a generation now, even as Chinese-owned companies like TikTok are allowed to take massive chunks out of the valuation and competitive position of U.S. companies like Meta. This is, to be sure, only the tip of the spear: I could talk about forced joint ventures in China that are glorified IP theft, a systemic refusal to abide by obligations under China’s WTO membership like equal access for banks and payment companies, or the fact that Chinese companies get to raise money in the U.S. with little or no oversight. But I’ll just stick to tech: China blatantly discriminates against U.S. companies, and even if you want to make the case this is smart — there is a case to be made! — it is, and always will be, infuriating to read cynical statements like this.

He also makes the point that, from a geopolitical standpoint, it makes strategic sense for the US to keep China from benefiting from its advanced technology because it provides an incentive for Xi Jinping & Co to play nice over Taiwan. While I have little sympathy for American hegemonic anxiety, I have no desire to live in a world dominated by the kind of regime now oppressing the Uighurs either.

My commonplace booklet

You are invite to visit our restaurant where you can eat the Middle East foods in an European ambulance”.

• Hotel Notice, Ankara

(From French Widow in Every Room)

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Mellow fruitfulness — sans mists

We went to North Norfolk at the weekend to walk and watch birds, as usual. But it turned out that our walks were less brisk than usual, because everywhere we went were hedgerows bursting with ripe blackberries. It was easily the best crop I can remember — which seems strange, given that we’re in a long period of drought.

Quote of the Day

”Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first one is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.”

• Bertrand Russell

I quote this all the time when people complain of being overworked. Most of them tend to be folks who do the second kind of work.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bach | Jesus bleibet meine Freude | Leipzig Thomanchor

Link

A reminder of those Internet-distributed performances that were such a delight in the first Covid lockdown in 2020.

Long Read of the Day

 The Economist Who Knows the Miracle Is Over

Very nice piece by Annie Lowrey on Brad DeLong and his longue durée history of capitalism,  Slouching Towards Utopia, which is coming out in the UK on September 15.

DeLong had begun working on this story in 1994. He had produced hundreds of thousands of words, then hundreds of thousands more, updating the text as academic economics and the world itself changed. He kept writing, for years, for decades, for so long that he ended up writing for roughly 5 percent of the time capitalism itself has existed. The problem wasn’t figuring out how the story started. The problem was knowing when it ended.

DeLong says that he originally thought the story would end in 1999 with the realisation of Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ vision.

But in time he concluded that

neoliberalism and social democracy would not be gently taking turns. In political terms, the future instead would be about the “return of something that Madeleine Albright called fascism, and who am I to tell her not to,” he said. And in economic terms, it would be about high inequality, low productivity, and slow growth. “We may have solved the problem of production,” DeLong told me. “We certainly have not solved the problem of distribution, or of utilizing our extraordinary, immense wealth to make us happy and good people.”

Many of us have been waiting for this book for a long time.

My commonplace booklet

”Ladies in shorts
and gentlemen with naked torsos
are invited to forbid themselves
to enter the church.

• Church Notice, French Pyrenees.

(From French Widow in Every Room)

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Anyone for cricket?

Seen on Brancaster beach on Friday.

Quote of the Day

“If work’s so great, why don’t the rich do it?”

• Groucho Marx

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Christine McVie | Songbird | Fleetwood Mac Rumours

Link

This was a favourite of my beloved Sue, who died at the end of August 20 years ago. I’m still ambushed every time I hear it.

Long Read of the Day

 Why the Tory project is bust

Perceptive essay from by playwright David Hare that was written in 2016. He starts with his early play, Knuckle:

Knuckle was a youthful pastiche of an American thriller, relocating the myth of the hard-boiled private eye incongruously into the home counties. Curly Delafield, a young arms dealer, returns to Guildford in order to try and find his sister Sarah who has disappeared. But in the process he finds himself freshly infuriated by the civilised hypocrisy of his father Patrick Delafield, a stockbroker of the old school. In the play father and son represent two contrasting strands in conservatism. Patrick, the father, is cultured, quiet and responsible. Curly, the son, is aggressive, buccaneering and loud. One of them sees the creation of wealth as a mature duty to be discharged for the benefit of the whole community, with the aim of perpetuating a way of life that has its own distinctive character and tradition. But the other character, based on various criminal or near-criminal racketeers who were beginning to play a more prominent role in British finance in the 1970s, sees such thinking as outdated. Curly’s own preference is to make as much money as he can in as many fields as he can and then to get out fast.

But then comes the punch that knocked me out.

The first thing to notice about my play is that it was written in 1973. Margaret Thatcher was not elected until six years later. So whatever the impact of her arrival at the end of decade, it would be wrong to say that she brought anything very new to a Tory schism that had been latent for years…

It’s a great, impassioned, prescient essay. Do give it your time.

(I’ve always thought that it was wrong to regard Thatcher and Ronald Reagan as prime movers of the neoliberal turn. I saw both of them as just cheerleaders for a wave that was already breaking. I still think this was true for Thatcher, but having read Gary Gerstle’s magnificent Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order I’ve come to think that Reagan really was a prime mover.)

How tech firms can penalise the innocent

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Here’s a hypothetical scenario. You’re the parent of a toddler, a little boy. His penis has become swollen because of an infection and it’s hurting him. You phone the GP’s surgery and eventually get through to the practice’s nurse. The nurse suggests you take a photograph of the affected area and email it so that she can consult one of the doctors.

So you get out your Samsung phone, take a couple of pictures and send them off. A short time later, the nurse phones to say that the GP has prescribed some antibiotics that you can pick up from the surgery’s pharmacy. You drive there, pick them up and in a few hours the swelling starts to reduce and your lad is perking up. Panic over.

Two days later, you find a message from Google on your phone. Your account has been disabled because of “harmful content” that was “a severe violation of Google’s policies and might be illegal”…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

Lovely blog post by Quentin (Whom God Preserve) about a misguided road sign he noticed in Hay-on-Wye.

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