Great talk at Trinity College, Dublin last April. Worth making an “appointment to view”.
Ice
Harrying Harry
“What’s next?” asks Glen Newey on the LRB blog after the Sun publishes pics of Prince Harry in the nude.
The Prince of Wales in Photoshopped congress with a polo mare? Princess Anne on the can? This blogger is hardly one to shield the royals from the blastments of the public sphere. It’s not exactly what John Stuart Mill had in mind in Chapter 2 of On Liberty. There is the argument that the Sun is to liberty what cowpats are to fillet steak, an unavoidable byproduct, however unpalatable, of something there’s good reason to promote (vegetarians may substitute a different analogy). But, of course, you don’t just get the pat itself – you get its producer trying to pass it off as something wholesome. On the subject of plausible half-truths and their exposure, recall Geoffrey Robertson’s immortal observation that Rupert Murdoch is a great Australian in more or less the same sense that Attila was a great Hun.
Lovely blog post. Worth reading in full.
Apple’s Big Patent Win: implications
Interesting WSJ piece by Mike Isaac about Apple’s victory over Samsung.
If there’s one takeaway from Apple’s massive win over Samsung in the most-watched patent trial of the year, it’s this: If you copy our stuff, we’ll go after you.
That’s the message delivered alongside the verdict on Friday afternoon, in which the jury found Samsung guilty of infringing upon six out of the seven Apple patents in question. The result? More than $1 billion in damages awarded to Apple (or $1,049,343,540 if you want to get nitpicky about it), and of course, bragging rights in what has been Apple’s longstanding claim that Samsung devices were “slavishly copies” of Apple’s iPhone and iPad.
And now that Apple’s day in court has validated most of its patents and claims, the technology giant is armed to the teeth with enough ammo to go after any and every OEM out there.
The obvious implication is that Android OEMs need to be careful (as Charles Arthur points out). A less obvious one is that this might be good news for makers of Windows phones, on the grounds that they are less vulnerable to IP attacks from Apple than Android OEMs. Hmmm…
Ultimately, this patent verdict is bad news for everybody except Apple — as Dan Gillmor points out in his Guardian column. And it confirms the extent to which the patent system is broken.
Nailing Congressman Ryan
Lovely dissection of Paul Ryan by Leon Wieseltier.
Then there is the matter of Ryan’s intellectualism. His promoters have made much of it. “He’s a guy who, unlike 98 percent of members of Congress, can sit in a conference or around the dinner table with six or ten people from think tanks and magazines and more than hold his own in a discussion,” said William Kristol, thereby establishing the definition of the intellectual as a person who knows how to talk to William Kristol. A close look at Ryan’s writings, however, shows an intellectual style that is amateurish and parochial. His thought is just a package. The distinction between an analysis and a manifesto is lost on him. He gets his big ideas second-hand, from ideological feeders: when he cites John Locke, it is John Locke that he found in Michael Novak (who erroneously believes that strawberries appear in the philosopher’s account of the creation of property by the mixing of labor with nature). Irving Kristol and Charles Murray are Ryan’s other authorities; and of course Rand, who was a graphomaniacal demagogue with the answers to all of life’s questions. His picture of the New Deal and the Depression is taken from—where else?—Amity Shlaes. When Ryan cites Tocqueville, it is as “Alexis-Charles-Henri Clerel de Tocqueville,” and when he cites Sorel it is as “Georges Eugene Sorèl,” which is the Wikipedia usage (except for the misplaced accent, which is Ryan’s contribution). When he cites Sorel, he seems unaware that he is appealing to a thinker who admired Lenin and Mussolini and advocated the use of violence by striking unions. (Scott Walker has no greater enemy than Georges Sorel.) Similarly, Ryan cites an encomium to the United States by “Alexandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn” without any apparent awareness that three years later the Russian writer issued a virulent denunciation of America and its “decadence.”
A bargain?
Cover Art: an exegesis
I don’t know who does the covers for the Economist but s/he is a genius.
Consider this one on the issue of August 11-17, 2012.
It shows the German Chancellor pondering a question that must be on every Eurocrat’s mind, but one that nobody dares to speak about: whether to ditch the Euro, and if so how to do it. I’m willing to bet that every Finance Ministry in Europe has a bulging secret file on the subject.
What’s fascinating about the picture is the amount of narrative detail it contains. Here it is close up.
Note the detail. First of all, the ‘strictly confidential’ Cabinet file (though it’s in a Whitehall-style red leather binder; I suspect the German Chancellery favours dark green leather.)
Next to her left arm is an envelope containing the airline tickets to the various capitals that need to be visited bearing the bad news. And the post-it note revealing the increasingly desperate calls from Mario Draghi, the Chairman of the European Central Bank.
And then on the other side, the black coffee and whiskey needed to fortify her for the awful decision she will eventually have to make.
Not many magazine covers can stand this kind of exegesis. I hope that the Economist plans one day to have an exhibition of its best work. Some of us would pay good money for a signed copy of a cover like this.
Cut here
So is Harvard proud of Fergie?
Lovely evisceration by James Fallows of Niall Ferguson’s ludicrous attack on Obama.
Three years ago, I got crosswise of Niall Ferguson when I noted his remark that President Obama reminded him of Felix the Cat. Like Obama, Ferguson observed, “Felix was not only black. He was also very, very lucky.” A little earlier I had a testy on-stage exchange with him about the United States and China. He said that U.S. budget deficits would lead to the certain collapse of the U.S.-China relationship, since China would cut off further credit to the spendthrift Yanks. I said that might sound like a neat theory but reflected no awareness of actual Chinese incentives and behavior, and that the showdown he considered “inevitable” in fact would not occur. As it has not.
Again, anyone can be wrong, and I often have been. But scholars are supposed to be different from mere pamphleteers and journalists. We give the judgments of academics — like those of doctors, scientists, renowned jurists, etc. — extra weight because we assume that scholars have considered evidence, precedent, and probabilities more carefully before offering conclusions. Think: E.O. Wilson on ants and ecological patterns.
The big claims and conclusions Ferguson has offered in recent years, with the extra authority of his academic standing, have been attention-getting and mostly wrong. Joe Weisenthal of Business Insider has an analysis here (and please also see this from Noah Smith). For instance:
– U.S. budget deficits were going to lead to a US-China breakup. They didn’t.
– U.S. budget deficits were going to drive bond rates sky high. The opposite has occurred.
– U.S. budget deficits would make us like Greece. They have not.
– A year ago, Ferguson warned that we were on the verge of a damaging new round of inflation. We were not.
You can say these things if you’re a talk-show host or a combatant on some cable-news gabfest. To me this is not what the tradition of Veritas and the search for scholarly enlightenment is supposed to exemplify. Seriously, I wonder if one of Ferguson’s students will have the panache to turn in a similar paper to see how it fares.
Spot on. I can’t understand why anyone takes Ferguson seriously. Like many an historian before him, he has become a media whore. As Daniel Pat Moynihan famously observed, everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not to his own facts. If Ferguson were a Fox News commentator then nobody would turn a hair. But — as Fallows observes — he’s trading on the credibility derived from occupying a Chair at a major university. If I were a Harvard academic I’d say he has now got to the point where he is bringing the university into disrepute.
After the election
Wonderful spoof by Michael Kinsley.
Paul Ryan laughed. He stood naked on top of the vice president’s desk in the Senate chamber, scanning the crowd of sniveling politicians below him.
He flexed his muscles, the result of hours spent in the House gymnasium. Look at these pathetic specimens, he thought. Not one of them could do a one-armed pushup if his life depended on it. Not one was worthy of so much as co-sponsoring one of Ryan’s bills. Every single one of them had been elected by appealing to the average citizen in his (or her — Ryan snorted at the thought) district. It occurred to him, and not for the first time, that of all the men and women in this room, only he, Paul Ryan, had been selected for his current office by the president himself.
The president. Ryan’s mind wandered as he thought about the only man who stood between him and absolute power. Mitt Romney was a weakling, he thought — and not for the first time. He’s a man whose views can change. The thought filled Ryan with disgust. His own views were as solid as granite. They were the views of the only clear-thinking woman he had ever met: Ayn Rand.
Ryan thought back on the humiliating “job interview” he had allowed himself to be subjected to before being chosen as Romney’s vice president. Did he have any pregnant, unmarried daughters? Could he see Russia from his living room window?
Worst of all was the probing of his attitude about federal programs such as Medicare and Social Security. His attitude? His attitude was that all of these programs were for pathetic losers. Romney had agreed with him, but said they should keep this opinion under their hats. Ryan had obliged, only long enough to make it through the election. And he despised himself for this. But he did it, and it worked, and the Romney-Ryan team was elected. And now he kept nothing under his hat.
In fact, he didn’t have a hat, or any other article of clothing. Clothing was for weaklings.