Icy leaf

Sometimes, frost is beautiful.

Quote of the Day

”There is such a thing as ostentations humility, and it is all over Twitter. It won’t save your reputation that you yourself don’t tweet the twee stuff. You’ll be tainted by association on a platform where 812,000 people follow someone pretending to be the Downing Street cat. What is worse, you might join them over time.”

• Janan Ganesh, “The real reason to get off Twitter”, Financial Times, 12/13 November, 2022.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Liam O’Flynn | Newfoundland | performed at the Ateneul Roman, Bucharest in 2011

Link

I’ve always loved this. It’s the 10th movement in The Brendan Voyage, Shaun Davey’s first major orchestral suite, composed for uilleann pipes played by Liam O’Flynn. It depicts Tim Severin’s adventure in reconstructing Saint Brendan’s 6th century Atlantic crossing to America in a 36-foot, two-masted boat built of Irish ash and oak, hand-lashed together with nearly two miles (3 km) of leather thong, wrapped with 49 traditionally tanned ox hides, and sealed with wool grease. The voyage ended on June 26, 1977 when Severin and his crew reached Peckford Island, Newfoundland. Hence the title of the movement.

Long Read of the Day

 Nostalgia for decline in deconvergent Britain

This is the less-than-compelling headline on a compelling analysis by the historian Adam Tooze of the real extent of the UK’s decline. And although Brexit obviously figures in the story, it really only plays a walk-on part in the longer narrative.

We need to talk about the state of Britain, the situation is dire. But the evocation of earlier debates about decline, debates which stretch back to the 1950s and beyond, is not just beside the point. It distracts from alarming novelty of the current situation. If you don’t engage with the data, the incoherence and repetitive structure of those earlier debates about decline, can seem to justify a relativistic or downright apologetic stance. Ding-dong exchanges between Brexiteers and Remainers have not helped to clarify the situation. Whilst Brexiteers chase the vanishing dream of “global Britain”, the national economic collapse that, according to “Project Fear”, was supposed to follow Brexit, never arrived either. That is not to say that the economic impact of Brexit will not be severe. The latest predictions are nasty. See for instance the CER. But the Brexit effects have not yet been fully felt.

More importantly for our purposes, the shock of 2016 cannot by itself explain what really ought to alarm us, namely the astonishing stagnation in productivity and real incomes that now stretches back over more than a decade. This stagnation, and this is the essential point, does not fall into the pattern familiar since the 1950s, of stop-start, of repeated currency crises and of more or less disappointing cycles of growth. Though it takes place at a high level of average income, the current stagnation is unlike anything in the last quarter millenium. The prospect of future damage from Brexit, only renders the outlook more bleak. In light of the UK’s situation and its likely future prospects, to indulge in the familiar back and forth between declinism and anti-declinism is to indulge in escapist nostalgia.

This is not a story about the last 20 or 30 years, btw. It’s about 120 years of decline. Here’s one of the charts that tells the story of the rate of growth of productivity in the UK — I.e. of the economic factor which ultimately determines how well the economy is doing.

On the more recent past, just after I put that chart in, I came on a striking quote from an essay in The Economist:

“Britain seems trapped in a doom loop of superannuated governments which, after a term or two of charismatic leadership and reformist vim, wind up bereft of talent, sinking in their own mistakes and wracked by backbench rebellions; in office but barely in power. Eventually routed at the polls, it then takes the guilty parties several parliamentary terms to recover. In opposition, both Labour and the Tories have determinedly learned the wrong lessons from defeat before alighting on the right ones. In a system with two big parties, for either to lose its mind is dangerous. For both to do so at once—as happened when, amid recent Tory convulsions, Labour was led by Jeremy Corbyn, a hard-left throwback—is a calamity.”

Something is afoot with copyright this Public Domain Day

Sunday’s Observer column…

Here’s a reason to be cheerful this morning: it’s Public Domain Day, ie the day on which a new batch of hitherto copyrighted works comes out of copyright and enters the US public domain – the zone that consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. For those readers who do not reside in the US, there is perhaps another reason for celebrating today, because copyright terms are longer in the US than they are in other parts of the world, including the EU and the UK. And therein lies a story about intellectual property laws and the power of political lobbying in a so-called liberal democracy…

Do read the whole piece.

Can Elon Musk’s Tesla Really Last?

Following the vertiginous drop in its share price, Paul Krugman, Nobel laureate and NYT columnist, is sceptical. The column seems to be behind the paywall, but this is the gist:

I’m not talking about how great Teslas are or aren’t right now; I’m not a car enthusiast (I should have one of those bumper stickers that say, “My other car is also junk”), so I can’t judge. But the lesson from Apple and Microsoft is that to be extremely profitable in the long run a tech company needs to establish a market position that holds up even when the time comes, as it always does, that people aren’t all that excited about its products.

So what would make that happen for Tesla? You could imagine a world in which dedicated Tesla hookups were the only widely available charging stations, or in which Teslas were the only electric cars mechanics knew how to fix. But with major auto manufacturers moving into the electric vehicle business, the possibility of such a world has already vanished. In fact, I’d argue that the Inflation Reduction Act, with its strong incentives for electrification, will actually hurt Tesla. Why? Because it will quickly make electric cars so common that Teslas no longer seem special.

He’s right. Tesla’s just an automobile company that was first off the block in the EV business — and had the nous to realise that its USP would be that it also had its own charging infrastructure available only to those who owned its cars.

The recent drop in Tesla’s share price signals that the stock market has finally recognised that it’s just another car company. Which is progress of a sort.

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A winter seascape

I love this picture by John Darch (Whom God Preserve) taken the other day on the beach at Ballybunion in Kerry. It’s a beach I knew well as a child, because my father (a keen golfer) was a member of the golf club there and the rest of the family sometimes decamped to the beach while he and his three regular playing partners tackled the fairways, rough, bunkers and greens of what the great Tom Watson (who won five British Opens) once called “the best golf course in the world”.

Later on, members of the club commissioned this plaque in his honour.

Quote of the Day

”I think this is what’s wrong with our political system. It’s organized to get people elected, then the people we elect do the work of big companies. And their work is to squeeze every bit of value they can out of the natural and intellectual resources of the world, and keep it for themselves. If they can kill something that’s worth $100 to reap $1 of value from the corpse, they see that as good business. That’s the approach that has got our species into the climate change corner we’re in. If you burn everything all you’ll have left to breathe are smoking corpses. That’s where we are in everything humans do. That’s why we feel a void for ourselves, collectively. We blame the government, but we’re the ones who believe the lies. We know they’re lying but we believe them anyway.

• Dave Winer, as part of a blog post explaining why he was so disappointed by Obama’s Presidency, despite having supported him in every way he could.

Seemed like an appropriate quotation to start the year.

Musical alternative to the radio news of the Day

Mozart | 12 Variations on Ah, vous dirai-je, maman KV 265 | Clara Haskil

Link

Such a show-off, that Mozart kid. The piece reminds me of the film Amadeus and Peter Shaffer’s portrayal of him as “the John McEnroe of music” (as some critic put it.)

Long Read of the Day

 Greta Thunberg ends year with one of the greatest tweets in history

Lovely piece by Rebecca Solnit on the connection between machismo, misogyny and hostility to climate action.

On 27 December, former kickboxer, professional misogynist and online entrepreneur Andrew Tate, 36, sent a boastfully hostile tweet to climate activist Greta Thunberg, 19, about his sports car collection. “Please provide your email address so I can send a complete list of my car collection and their respective enormous emissions,” he wrote. He was probably hoping to enhance his status by mocking her climate commitment. Instead, she burned the macho guy to a crisp in nine words.

Cars are routinely tokens of virility and status for men, and the image accompanying his tweet of him pumping gas into one of his vehicles, coupled with his claims about their “enormous emissions”, had unsolicited dick pic energy. Thunberg seemed aware of that when she replied: “yes, please do enlighten me. email me at smalldickenergy@getalife.com.”

Her reply gained traction to quickly become one of the top 10 tweets of all time…

Read on. It’s a great story.

Books, etc.

As an experiment, we’re reading E.M.Forster’s novels and then watching the movies that have been based on them. We started with Room with a View, and then moved on to Howards End. A Passage to India is obviously the next on the list, but Christmas intervened, so that one is for 2023.

It’s been an interesting journey. First of all, it’s nice to re-engage with the books and to observe Forster’s writerly strengths and foibles; but most importantly to appreciate their significance in the era when they were first published. On that last criterion, he comes out of it well, tackling issues (sexism, imperialism, misogyny, class, sexuality) that were mostly taboo in his time.

It’s also interesting to see how screenwriters and directors like the Merchant Ivory team take a story one has come to know well and tell it in a different medium. Sometimes the book does it better; sometimes vice versa. And occasionally the film has to fill in gaps that the novelist has glossed over. In Howard’s End, for example Leonard Bast’s heart disease is not mentioned in the novel until after his violent death, whereas Merchant Ivory go to some lengths to set it up in the film.

I have a soft spot for Forster because — in one of those serendipitous accidents that shape a life — I attended his 90th birthday party. I was there because one of the first things my late wife Carol and I did when we arrived in Cambridge in 1968 was to join the Cambridge Humanists, of which he was then the Patron. The society decided to celebrate his birthday in his rooms in King’s and all members were invited. And there he was, in a wheelchair, but very much present. What struck me was how small and modest he looked: there was nothing of the ‘great man of literature’ about him. Which was reassuring but also slightly disappointing to an impressionable lad like me.

The event was hosted by Francis Crick, who six years earlier had (with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins) won the Nobel prize for the discovery of the molecular structure of DNA.

As you can imagine, it was a heady experience for a scholarship boy (and an engineering student) who had just arrived from Ireland. Afterwards I read several of Forster’s novels followed by Aspects of E.M. Forster, a nice collection of essays by friends of his which had been given to me by John Fenton (also a member of the Cambridge Humanists). I’ve just re-read it with renewed pleasure, and re-learned things from it (such as how Forster had wound up as a Fellow of King’s) that I had forgotten.

But the book of Forster’s that I liked best was his collection of essays, Two Cheers for Democracy which somehow better evoked the quiet, undemonstrative, uncharismatic liberal I had seen on his birthday.

I’ve always liked his adage that “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” And Two Cheers is full of evocations of that quiet, undemonstrative, liberal temperament of his. Think of, “I do not believe in Belief… Lord, I disbelieve — help thou my unbelief.” Or, “Think before you speak is criticism’s motto; speak before you think creation’s.” Or, “The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.”

My one quibble with Forster is that he was wrong about Joyce’s Ulysses, which — in Chapter 6 of Aspects of the Novel — he described as

a dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud, an inverted Victorianism, an attempt to make crossness and dirt succeed where sweetness and light failed, a simplification of the human character in the Interests of Hell.

But then even Virginia Woolf got Ulysses wrong, so Forster was in good company.

My commonplace booklet

For the Brexiteer in your life

God Save Private Eye!

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