Swaledale under snow

Last Sunday morning. Blissfully peaceful.

Quote of the Day

”I read part of it the whole way through.”

• Sam Goldwyn on being asked whether he had read a particular book.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Lark in the Morning | Cillian Vallely (Uileann pipes) and Alan Murray (Guitar)

Link

Wonderful rendition of a lovely tune.

Long Read of the Day

Learning from machine learning

The world is a black box full of extreme specificity: it might be predictable but that doesn’t mean it is understandable.

Fascinating essay by David Weinberger, which tries to address one of my complaints about the “crippled epistemology” of machine learning — i.e. that it finds only correlations, whereas true understanding requires a theory of causal connections.

Here’s the core of the matter:

As we grow more and more reliant on machine learning models (MLMs) such as DeepMetab that we cannot understand, we could start to tell ourselves either of two narratives:

The first narrative says that inexplicability is a drawback we often must put up with in order to gain the useful, probabilistic output that MLMs generate.

The second says that the inexplicability is not a drawback but a truth: MLMs work because they’re better at reading the world than we are: they result from the statistical interrelating of more and finer-detailed data than other systems can manage, without having to worry about explaining itself to us humans. Every time a concerned citizen or regulator cries out in understandable despair: ‘We don’t know how machine learning works!’, we hear that these models do indeed work.

If machine learning models work by dispensing with understandable rules, principles, laws and generalisations that explain complexity by simplifying it, then in the cry ‘It works!’ we detect beneath the Harmony of the Spheres the clacking and grating of all the motes and particulars asserting themselves in their interdependence as the Real. The success of our technology is teaching us that the world is the real black box.

It’s a really interesting piece, beautifully written. And it contains a rather good general explanation of the technology. But it ignores the purposes to which most machine-learning algorithms are currently put — namely not to further human understanding but to achieve the commercial goals of the companies that dominate the technology.

Thanks to Seb Schmoller for reminding me of it.

Martin Wolf on the twilight of democracy in America

Today, the transformation of the democratic republic into an autocracy has advanced. By 2024, it might be irreversible. If this does indeed happen, it will change almost everything in the world.

Nobody has outlined the danger more compellingly than Robert Kagan. His argument can be reduced to two main elements. First, the Republican party is defined not by ideology, but by its loyalty to Trump. Second, the amateurish “stop the steal” movement of the last election has now morphed into a well-advanced project. One part of this project is to remove officials who stopped Trump’s effort to reverse the results in 2020. But its main aim is to shift responsibility for deciding electoral outcomes to Republican-controlled legislatures.

Thus, health permitting, Trump will be the next Republican candidate. He will be backed by a party that is now his tool. Most important, in the words of David Frum, erstwhile speechwriter for George W Bush, “what the United States did not have before 2020 was a large national movement willing to justify mob violence to claim political power. Now it does.” It does so because its members believe their opponents are not “real” Americans. A liberal democracy cannot long endure if a major party believes defeat is illegitimate and must be rendered impossible.

From the Financial Times, 28 September.

Chart of the Day

Entrenched dominance of the top five

The top five holdings in the S&P500 now make up 23.5% of the entire index. The firms of the Exponential Age are cementing their leadership. A point to note is that two years ago, one could argue the S&P500 was no more concentrated than in previous highs. But that is clearly no longer the case.

My commonplace booklet

• An explication of R.B. Kitaj’s painting ‘The Wedding’ Link

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Quote of the Day

”Horse sense is the good judgement that keeps horses from betting on people”.

• W.C. Fields

And, as we say in Ireland, he never spoke a truer word.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Felix Mendelssohn | Rondo Capriccioso, Op. 14 | Jan Lisiecki

Link

Long Read of the Day

Shortage nation: why the UK is braced for a grim Christmas

By Tim Harford, written at the beginning of last month.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. After last year’s pandemic-related shortages of masks and toilet paper and spaghetti subsided, supply chains were supposed to adapt. At first, the numbers suggested that the economy was adjusting — the UK’s second lockdown did far less economic damage than the first. We were getting through this; there was no reason to expect another winter of discontent. (It should be acknowledged that the original, in 1978-79, was rather different: a lorry drivers’ strike, a refuse collectors’ strike and even a gravediggers’ strike filled the front pages and put pressure on James Callaghan’s government. That winter has been a bruise on British politics ever since.)

So why do Britain’s shortages seem worse than ever? Is there anything we can do to ease the problem, in the UK and around the world? And — whisper it — is there a chance that all this chaos might just make us stronger?

The Popularity of E-Bikes Isn’t Slowing Down

Even the New York Times has discovered that the biggest-selling EVs have only two wheels.

There is a joke told in transit circles about people who ride electric bicycles: How do you know if someone has an e-bike? They’ll tell you. The idea, of course, is that users of the battery-powered two-wheelers tend to be proselytizers for the technology.

Yep. My wife and I bought two e-bikes nearly five years ago, and they’re among the best pieces of technology we’ve ever owned. We live about 3.5 miles from our respective places of work, and in the past we mostly used a car to do the commute. When the roads were clear that was a five-minute ride. But, given that in pre-pandemic times tens of thousands of cars tried to get into Cambridge every morning, that journey could often take up to an hour (and in one memorable case took 90 minutes).

So in the end, we saw sense and bought the bikes.

They have been transformative devices. For one thing, the journey now takes the same time every day!. For another, they’ve been good for our health. The ones we bought are power-assisted — you can switch on the motor if you need a boost, but for much of the time they are just a pair of ordinary — albeit rather heavy — bikes.

At the beginning we noticed slight disdain from ‘real’ cyclists who regarded us as engaging in what travel agents call “cycling for softies”. But when Covid came and we went into lockdown, things changed.

The weight of the bikes suddenly became a feature rather than a bug (as a programmer would put it). We live in the countryside and were therefore lucky enough to be able to cycle every day for exercise during lockdowns. So we took to travelling with the power off. This had the expected effect of making us fitter, because we had to work harder. But it also had the unanticipated effect of vastly increasing battery range. With our pre-pandemic cycling pattern the nominal range was about 25 miles . But when using the bikes just for exercise — and therefore severely limiting the amount of power-assist requested — the effective range quadrupled.

Electric cars are great, but they’re nothing like as good for the environment — or their owners’ health — as e-bikes. And they don’t wean us off cars.

How’s that for a bit of “proselytizing”?

What happens when you take cars off city streets

Fascinating before-and-after pictures from David Zetland’s blog

Omicron updates

Tweets

(via Seb Schmoller)

What we should learn from the variant

From Quartz:

The emergence of the omicron variant has led several nations to ban flights from countries in southern Africa. The knee-jerk response punishes places hard-hit by the pandemic and fails to address the real issue: If more people in poor countries were vaccinated, it would be more difficult for covid-19 to mutate and spread. Rich countries should stop hoarding vaccines. A small group of countries—the US, UK, EU, Canada, and Japan—have bought 60% of the world’s vaccines, and between a third to half are stockpiled rather than used. South Africa shouldn’t be punished for being transparent. The country’s prompt efforts to sequence and identify the new omicron variant allowed the world to react quickly—but the travel ban risks sending the wrong message on sharing data.

Noah Smith’s summing up:

Basically, the age when we could expect to stop the virus with non-pharmaceutical interventions — lockdowns, social distancing, masks, test-and-trace — is long, long over. Not only has popular appetite for this strategy waned to almost nothing, but new variants are so contagious that these strategies just aren’t sufficient to stamp out the virus. Every country except China is transitioning to a “live with Covid” strategy (and China is hurting itself by trying to maintain its “zero Covid” policy). So while you should still wear a mask, and while some cities may do some limited business closures, we should assume that distancing measures will not be our first line of defense against Omicron.

Vaccines will be our first line of defense. In the short term this means getting a booster shot of the existing vaccine, in order to restore antibody levels in time for the Omicron wave.

My commonplace booklet

• “When civilisation ends, a Xenix box will be running a long-forgotten job somewhere.” Lovely story in The Register about how our world is kept going by 50-year-old software that only boomer hackers still understand. For me, it sparks reflections about Chris Alexander’s A Pattern Language and the need for software systems to be ‘habitable’ in the long term, just like houses. And of course there’s the salutary fact that Cobol is still an integral component of some (perhaps many) banking systems.

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Scotland viewed from the English border last Saturday morning

Quote of the Day

Thanks to Alina Utrata for spotting it.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Randy Newman & Friends | “I Love L.A.” | 2013 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony

Link

Long Read of the Day

Is Society Coming Apart?

A Guardian Long Read by the historian Jill Lepore on how the 1950s ideas of sociologist Robert Nisbet have continually been repurposed to find explanations of, and putative solutions for) the tearing and fragility of the social fabric that constituted ‘society’. Despite Thatcher and Reagan’s best efforts, she argues, there is and has always been such a thing as society. The question is not whether it exists, but what shape it must take in a post-pandemic world

Liberalism didn’t kill society. And conservatism didn’t kill society. Because society isn’t dead. But it is pallid and fretful, like a shut-in staring all day long at nothing but a screen, mistaking a mirror for a window. Inside, online, there is no society, only the simulation of it. But, outside, on the grass and the pavement, in the woods and on the streets, in playgrounds and schoolyards and ballparks, in council flats and shops and pubs and agricultural fairs and libraries and union halls, society hums along, if not with the deafening thrum of a steam-driven machine, then with the hand-oiled, creaking clatter of an antwacky wooden loom.

Omicron and magical thinking

Ever since Covid arrived what’s been astonishing is the apparent inability of democratic societies to understand the scale of the challenge. This inability is a combination of

1. Ignorance — which is understandable; few people know much about epidemiology, exponential growth, genetic sequencing, vaccines, the nature of scientific knowledge and research, probability and risk, etc.
2. What now we can only call wilful blindness – not wanting to notice or acknowledge what you don’t wish to see — which in this case is that our world has been profoundly changed by the pandemic.
3. The power of magical thinking – the belief that one’s ideas, thoughts, desires can influence the course of events in the material world. Because we passionately want Christmas to be ‘normal’ we believe that it can be normal, even if circumstances conspire against that.
4. The power of the electoral cycle in democratic politics and the jostling for post-pandemic preferment among political elites.
5. Psychological exhaustion of the kind that people must have experienced in 1914-18 and 1939-45.

There are doubtless other factors at work too (including perhaps boredom) which prevent many people from coming to grips with the reality — which is that for as long as the virus exists anywhere, this is going to go on. The Omicron variant is just the latest actor in what will be a long saga.

Sigh.

My Commonplace booklet

How to keep social media from ruling your day.

Helpful blog post by Quentin.

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Seen in a Yorkshire window

A window in Swaledale yesterday morning.

Quote of the Day

“For the past 40 years we have been programming computers; for the next 40 we will be training them.”

• Chris Bishop, head of Microsoft Research in the UK, commenting on the significance of machine learning in today’s Long Read.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Redemption Song | Arranged and played by the astonishing Kanneh-Mason family.

Link

Long Read of the Day

 How AI is reinventing what computers are

Insightful piece in Tech Review by Will Douglas Heaven. The usual caveat — for ‘AI’ read machine learning — applies, but otherwise it’s spot on.

Computers haven’t changed much in 40 or 50 years. They’re smaller and faster, but they’re still boxes with processors that run instructions from humans. AI changes that on at least three fronts: how computers are made, how they’re programmed, and how they’re used. Ultimately, it will change what they are for.

“The core of computing is changing from number-crunching to decision-­making,” says Pradeep Dubey, director of the parallel computing lab at Intel. Or, as MIT CSAIL director Daniela Rus puts it, AI is freeing computers from their boxes…

Read on

Facebook isn’t the most toxic tech company

Yesterday’s Observer column:

If you were compiling a list of the most toxic tech companies, Facebook – strangely – would not come out on top. First place belongs to NSO, an outfit of which most people have probably never heard. Wikipedia tells us that “NSO Group is an Israeli technology firm primarily known for its proprietary spyware Pegasus, which is capable of remote zero-click surveillance of smartphones”.

Pause for a moment on that phrase: “remote zero-click surveillance of smartphones”. Most smartphone users assume that the ability of a hacker to penetrate their device relies upon the user doing something careless or naive – clicking on a weblink, or opening an attachment. And in most cases they would be right in that assumption. But Pegasus can get in without the user doing anything untoward. And once in, it turns everything on the device into an open book for whoever deployed the malware.

That makes it remarkable enough. But the other noteworthy thing about it is that it can infect Apple iPhones…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

Robert Caro’s writing schedule

All the successful writers I know have one simple rule: write every day, no matter what. But the biographer Robert Caro — who at the beginning of his career wrote a landmark biography of the planner Robert Moses and after that has devoted the rest of his life to a truly monumental life of Lyndon Johnson — takes this rule to sublime lengths. He seems to regard a day in which he wrote less than a thousand words as a failure.

Source

Early in the lockdown last year I bought and enjoyed Caro’s account of his working methods — Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing. It’s not for the faint-hearted, frivolous or occasional scribbler. Biography, it seems, is hard labour.

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Quote of the Day

“People are allowed to shout when they are drunk. That is not being disorderly.”

• A Clerkenwell Magistrate in the good old days

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Scott Joplin | The Entertainer (1902)

Link

Lovely tune but played too quickly for my taste: sounds as though the pianist had a train to catch and had to get the piece out of the way before he left. If you’d like a nice (and more leisurely) guitar version, try this this!

Long Read of the Day

 The algorithmic public sphere and democracy

By Aniek van den Brandt

A useful essay on the the problematic consequences of the shift from human gatekeepers of the public sphere to algorithmic ones. Useful reading for anyone who hasn’t hitherto been steeped in this stuff. It’s a 12-minute read.

My commonplace booklet

Making a LEGO car that can climb obstacles.

This is lovely — and instructive!

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The wild Atlantic way

The view from Muckros Head in Co Donegal looking across to Slieve League. It’s one of our favourite places — and one of the most infuriating things about the pandemic is that we haven’t we haven’t been able to go there since 2020. It was taken the other day by John Darch who is one of the best landscape photographers I know.

Quote of the Day

“Life is like playing a solo on the violin, and learning the instrument as you go along.”

• Samuel Butler

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Eric Bogle | The Band Played Waltzing Matilda

Link

This takes a few moments to get going, but stick with it. It’s one of the most moving anti-war songs I’ve heard. And the guitar accompaniment is lovely. Military glory is a sunset suffused with blood.

Long Read of the Day

 The neoliberal era is ending. What comes next?

This is long (took me 22 minutes) but IMHO worth it. Rutger Bregman is a radical Dutch journalist who is interested in ideas and the long view and is temperamentally an optimist about human nature. (Which makes him a very unusual journalist!)

More Faith, Less Sex?

The Institute for Family Studies is wondering why are so many unmarried young adults not having sex?

My guess is that faith doesn’t have all that much to do with it; it’s probably more a product of demographic and social change.

Some of this rise in sexlessness is driven by the broad social trend of increasingly delayed marriage. Married people are more likely to be sexually active than unmarried people: in 2021, only about 5% of ever-married people under 35 reported no sex in the past year, versus about 29% of the never-married. As a result, declining marriage tends to reduce sexual activity as married people make up a shrinking share of the population of people under 35. And indeed, in the General Social Survey data, the never-married share of under-35s rose from just over 50% in the early 1990s, to 60-75% over the last decade.

Here’s a gloomy thought: I wonder if climate crisis has anything to do with it? After all, if the worst-case scenarios about climate change are accurate, who’d want to bring an innocent kid into such a world?

My commonplace booklet

A new party game: “Republican or Not?”

Lovely 5-minute Saturday Night Live video.

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Quote of the Day

“There is no villainy to which education cannot reconcile us.”

• Anthony Trollope.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Eels | Can’t Help Falling in Love | Albert Hall (Live)

Link

Nice take on a very old song.

Long Read of the Day

Merve Emre on annotating Virginia Woolf

Lovely long interview by Leah Price of Merve Emre, the Oxford academic who’s done an annotated edition of one of my favourite books — Mrs Dalloway. In a way, it’s the best kind of interview, i.e. a conversation between two equals who are interested in the same thing. Here’s for instance, is one of Leah’s interventions:

I especially love the parallel that seems to be implicit in what you’re saying, between your decision to transcribe the text with your own hands—your own fingers—rather than outsourcing that work. And in the first line of the novel, Mrs. Dalloway says she’ll buy the flowers herself: the novel opens with the mistress of the house deciding not to delegate to servants a kind of work that is both aesthetic and manual. So, one direction in which we might take that is your argument about the value of different kinds—or, rather, different combinations—of scholarly labor.

Do read the whole thing. And while you’re at it, re-read Mrs Dalloway and then watch The Hours with that wonderful soundtrack by Philip Glass.

Nobel laureates aren’t interested in coming to Johnson’s world-beating Britain.

Now, why could that be?

From New Scientist…

Not a single scientist has applied to a UK government visa scheme for Nobel prize laureates and other award winners since its launch six months ago, _New Scientist _can reveal. The scheme has come under criticism from scientists and has been described as “a joke”.

In May, the government launched a fast-track visa route for award-winners in the fields of science, engineering, the humanities and medicine who want to work in the UK. This prestigious prize route makes it easier for some academics to apply for a Global Talent visa – it requires only one application, with no need to meet conditions such as a grant from the UK Research and Innovation funding body or a job offer at a UK organisation.

I particularly enjoyed this quote from Andre Geim of the University of Manchester:

“Chances that a single Nobel or Turing laureate would move to the UK to work are zero for the next decade or so. The scheme itself is a joke – it cannot be discussed seriously. The government thinks if you pump up UK science with a verbal diarrhea of optimism – it can somehow become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Footnote: Geim won a Nobel prize in 2010 for his work on graphene.

Link (via Charles Arthur)

COP26 and the neoliberal cop-out

Ideology is what determines how you think when you don’t know you’re thinking. For over half a century, the ideology that has infected the minds of democratic ruling elites everywhere is a kind of economic solutionism which sees the answer to almost every problem as more competition and the imposition of marketised logic (backed up by state aid when the ideas don’t work).

Watching the farce of COP26 I became increasingly irritated by the emphasis given to Mark Kearney and his $100 trillion wheeze to solve the problem.

Turns out, I was not the only one. Here’s the philosopher of technology, Fabio Tollon, writing on this latest outbreak of magical thinking:

So what, in concrete terms, was the suggested route out of the crisis proposed at COP26? Perfectly in line with the pervasive neoliberal logic rotting the brains of most policy makers, the private sector was touted as a band aid for the burning building that is our planet.

We still seem to (somehow) be stuck at the point of acknowledging (scientifically) that we are in the grips of a crisis but lacking the (political) coordination required to enact the radical action that the situation demands. The purported private sector “solution” would be one in which massive investment firms, such as BlackRock, direct trillions of dollars into low-income economies to accelerate their transitions away from fossil fuels. This will only happen, however, if the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund come in to “derisk” these “investments”. How the same neoliberal solution can be proffered at every crisis since the 1990s is beyond comprehension.

Nor the reference to “derisking”, which is code for getting taxpayers to pick up the downsides while corporations pocket the profits.

Reminds one of Einstein’s definition of insanity: repeatedly doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome each time.

My Commonplace booklet

Helpful advice from Quartz for anyone joining the post-Zoom ‘Great Resignation’ movement:

How to write a resignation letter:

1. Start by succinctly stating that you have accepted another position, and are resigning.
2. In a sentence or two, express your gratitude for the opportunities and experience the organization has provided you.
3. Close by stating the final date you’ll be on the job, and offer to help transition your duties and responsibilities to your replacement.

Just happened on a masterful piece by Robert Darnton about commonplace books in a 2000 issue of the New York Review of Books, sadly behind the paywall, but here is the link anyway.

Mellow fruitfulness

Our amazing crab-apple tree. Year after year it produces this abundance. You can make crab-apple jelly from the fruit, but it’s a finicky business, so we generally leave the fruit on the tree and when the weather gets really cold the birds pick it clean.

Reconsidering Tony Blair

Yesterday’s piece on Blair prompted a few interesting emails, for which many thanks. I was particularly struck by something Charles Arthur (Whom God Preserve) wrote:

Blair’s success did owe something, in retrospect, to John Major, who despite having mortars lobbed at him by the IRA while having a Cabinet meeting in Downing St did actually open up clandestine negotiations with them, which then made Blair’s job (well, Mo Mowlam’s job) at least a little easier.

None of which tempers my admiration for Blair – but until it was all pointed out to me (for it’s quite an improbably timeline to get from elected to GFA in one year) I didn’t think Major had achieved anything at all, apart from being a Spitting Image puppet.

Yep. I’ve always felt that Major was a much-underestimated figure. I met him once, when I was given the task (by my university) of introducing him to the World Wide Web. He struck me as one of the few normal people in politics — an impression that was confirmed when, on the day he was ejected from office, he went calmly to The Oval to watch cricket.

My friend and mentor, the late David Williams, once told me a nice story about Major, whom he met when he David was Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University and Major was Chancellor of the Exchequer. Major had done his homework. When the two were introduced at lunch, he said that he understood that the Cambridge Vice-Chancellor had a specially-reserved rack for his bicycle outside his office. He hoped, he said, that this had been logged in his tax return as a “benefit in kind”. David, who was a distinguished legal scholar as well as a QC, pointed out that it had no commercial value and was therefore exempt.

Quote of the Day

“I don’t mind what the opposition say of me, so long as they don’t tell the truth about me; but when they descend to telling the truth about me, I consider that that is taking an unfair advantage.”

• Mark Twain

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

What Sweeter Music | John Rutter | Choir of King’s College Cambridge | 2008

Link

For Hap and CD, who will be in Cambridge today.

Long Read of the Day

As I watch the slow, and I fear inexorable, decay of the American republic, I’m struck by a memory of something I read way back in the Summer of 2016. At the time we were on holiday in Provence (which is where we used to be every summer in pre-pandemic times), and one day I read a remarkable piece of reportage by Dave Eggars which made me sit up and think: Jesus! Trump could make it to the presidency!.

The piece was a gripping account of a day Eggars had spent at a Trump rally in California on June 1st in which he “spoke to and overheard dozens of the rally’s attendees, not as a journalist but as one ticketholder to another”.

I was dressed in jeans, workboots and wore a Nascar hat – and found every last one of the attendees to be genial, polite and, with a few notable exceptions, their opinions to be within the realm of reasonable. The rally was as peaceful and patriotic as a Fourth of July picnic.

And yet I came away with a host of new questions and concerns. Among them: why is it that the song Trump’s campaign uses to mark his arrival and departure is Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer?” Is it more troubling, or less troubling, knowing that no one in the audience really cares what he says? And could it be that because Trump’s supporters are not all drawn from the lunatic fringe, but in fact represent a broad cross-section of regular people, and far more women than would seem possible or rational, that he could actually win?

The passage in the piece that really struck home was this one:

Yes, they were generally white, but there were also African-Americans and plenty of Latinos. A startling number of Asian-Americans, Pacific Islanders and South Asian-Americans. There were the expected Harley-Davidson riders in black vests, but there were also a remarkable number of people with disabilities. There were families, professional types, veterans and one Filipino-American navy officer in full dress whites. It was not the homogeneous sea of angry white men that one might have expected. Instead, it appeared to be a skewed but not wholly unrepresentative cross-section of the people of northern California.

After reading that, I found myself distressed by the thought that, yes, Trump could indeed win and spent a couple of days trying to write an essay that would make sense of that thought. Then, remembering that I was supposed to be on holiday, I looked up Nate Silver’s tracking of the opinion-poll data in the New York Times, noted the derisory probability he attached to Trump’s chances of victory, and went for a swim in the pool.

But, as we know, Eggars — with his writer’s finely-tuned antenna — was on the money, and Silver wasn’t.

This is all by way of explaining why I’ve been struck by an analogous piece of reportage by David Brooks. Its title is “The Terrifying Future of the American Right”, and it’s the most illuminating thing I’ve read in ages about what’s happening on the right-wing of US politics.

The piece is an account of his thoughts on attending the National Conservatism Conference in Florida. When he arrived, he reported, he confessed to being

a little concerned I’d get heckled in the hallways, or be subjected to the verbal abuse I occasionally get from Trump supporters. Judging by their rhetoric, after all, these are the fire-breathers, the hard-liners, the intellectual sharp edge of the American right.

But everyone was charming! I hung around the bar watching football each night, saw old conservative friends, and met lots of new ones, and I enjoyed them all. This is the intellectual wing of the emerging right.

Brooks listened while his old friend Rod Dreher of The American Conservative argued that, because the left controls the commanding heights of the culture and the economy, the only institution the right has a shot at influencing is the state. In these circumstances the right has to use state power to promote its values. “We need to quit being satisfied with owning the libs, and save our country,” Dreher said. “We need to unapologetically embrace the use of state power.”

This is where Viktor Orbán comes in. It was Dreher who prompted Carlson’s controversial trip to Hungary last summer, and Hungarians were a strong presence at the National Conservatism Conference. Orbán, in Dreher’s view, understands the civilizational stakes of the culture war; he has, for instance, used the power of the state to limit how much transgenderism can be taught to children in schools. “Our team talks incessantly about how horrible wokeness is,” Dreher said at the conference. “Orbán actually does something about it.”

This, says Brooks, is national conservatism pursued to its logical conclusion: using state power to break up and humble the big corporations and to push back against coastal cultural values.

The culture war merges with the economic-class war—and a new right emerges in which an intellectual cadre, the national conservatives, rallies the proletarian masses against the cultural/corporate elites. All your grandparents’ political categories get scrambled along the way.

Perhaps you can see why I found this illuminating. But I might have got it wrong. See what you make of it.

My commonplace booklet

Nice piece by Tayo Bero pointing out that students at Harvard, a famous hedge fund with a nice university attached, apparently aren’t that smart after all. A whopping 43% of its white students weren’t admitted on merit. It’s basically “affirmative action for the rich and privileged”.

In reality, 43% of Harvard’s white students are either recruited athletes, legacy students, on the dean’s interest list (meaning their parents have donated to the school) or children of faculty and staff (students admitted based on these criteria are referred to as ‘ALDCs’, which stands for ‘athletes’, ‘legacies’, ‘dean’s interest list’ and ‘children’ of Harvard employees). The kicker? Roughly three-quarters of these applicants would have been rejected if it weren’t for having rich or Harvard-connected parents or being an athlete.

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Autumnal footpath

Seen on my cycle trip on Saturday morning.

Quote of the Day

”Writing is an integral part of the process of understanding.”

• Hannah Arendt

E.M. Forster (whose 90th birthday party I attended when I was a student) once said that there are two kinds of writers: those who know what they think, and write it; and those who find out what they think by trying to write it. I belong to the latter category, but I have a few friends who belong to the first — and of course I secretly resent their talent!

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Vivaldi | Four seasons | Spring

Link

Played by like you’ve never heard it before by Alexandr Hrustevich in Vilnius in 2013.

I’ve always thought of the accordion as a clumsy, ponderous instrument. In the hands of Sharon Sharon and musicians like Hrustevich it’s definitely not that.

Thanks to Ross Anderson for spotting it.

Long Read of the Day

Is there still time to rein in the tech giants?

Long piece (3,000 words) by me in yesterday’s Observer:

When historians look back on this period, one of the things that they will find remarkable is that for a quarter of a century, the governments of western democracies slept peacefully while some of the most powerful (and profitable) corporations in history emerged and grew, without let or hindrance, at exponential speeds.

They will wonder at how a small number of these organisations, which came to be called “tech giants” (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft), acquired, and began to wield, extraordinary powers. They logged and tracked everything we did online – every email, tweet, blog, photograph and social media post we sent, every “like” we registered, every website we visited, every Google search we made, every product we ordered online, every place we visited, which groups we belonged to and who our closest friends were.

And that was just for starters. Two of these companies even invented a new variant of extractive capitalism. Whereas the standard form appropriated and plundered the Earth’s natural resources, this new “surveillance capitalism” appropriated human resources in the shape of comprehensive records of users’ behaviour, which were algorithmically translated into detailed profiles that could be sold to others. And while the activities of extractive capitalism came ultimately to threaten the planet, those of its surveillance counterpart have turned into a threat to our democracy…

Read on

Tony Blair reconsidered

I’ve been watching the re-run of the BBC documentary series on the history of New Labour (now on the BBC iPlayer, which means normally accessible only to people in the UK) and finding it gripping. It’s partly because it’s an opportunity to re-visit stories that I thought I knew — but now with the 20/20 vision of hindsight realise that I hadn’t known the half of it.

The second episode was particularly gripping. It open with the night of the 1997 election and New Labour’s landslide victory. And then it recounts how Blair and Brown set about governing.

Two things stood out. The first was how assured they were — especially given that none of them had ever served in government. The film shows Gordon Brown arriving at the Treasury, being greeted by the assembled staff and then meeting in his new office with the most senior officials, led by (Sir) Terry Burns.

The officials were clearly expecting a tea-and-biscuits getting-to-know-you sort of meeting. Instead, Brown says to Burns (the Permanent Secretary) that he has a draft letter with him, addressed to the Governor of the Bank of England, informing him that from now on the Bank would be responsible for setting interest Rates! Talk about hitting the ground running.

The other remarkable thing was that Blair came into office determined to sort out Northern Ireland. The senior officials were stunned by this level of ambition. How much did the Prime Minister know about NI asked the Cabinet Secretary. Blair replied primly that his mother was an Irish protestant. The Cabinet Office officials clearly thought that this idea of his was Mission Impossible. They didn’t twig at first that he was deadly serious, and the film did a brilliant job of conveying how determined he was to get a deal between the warring tribes.

And dammit, on Good Friday 1998 he got it. It was a stupendous achievement.

I found the episode both inspiring and depressing.

Inspiring because it showed what good democratic leadership can do in the UK when backed by a big Parliamentary majority.

Depressing because it highlighted the shambles to which the governance of contemporary Britain has been reduced. And what is particularly galling is having to watch the callous indifference of the Brexit crowd to safeguarding the Good Friday agreement. Entrusting such a delicate task to Johnson & Co is like giving a delicate clock to a monkey.

As a child, I lived in Donegal (in the Republic) and we occasionally visited Derry — just across the border — and once or twice went to Belfast, which I remember as a grimy, forbidding place. Then, a few years ago, I was unexpectedly invited to do a long interview on BBC Northern Ireland.

My wife and I flew to Belfast the night before, checked into a nice hotel in the City Centre and then went out in search of a restaurant for dinner. Sitting in a pleasant bistro, surrounded by people having a peaceful Friday night out in what now looked like a modern city, I fell to think that this was all Tony Blair’s doing. And if he had not dragged the country into the Iraq war, he would be remembered as one of the great prime ministers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

But that’s a pointless counter-factual. As Enoch Powell famously observed: all political careers end in failure.

The view from Westminster

Lovely cartoon by Dominic McKenzie in the Observer. It’s a good way of explaining why Johnson’s “Levelling Up” fantasies are doomed. We used to think that France was the most centralised state in the world. In fact, compared to the UK, France is now relatively decentralised.

Commonplace booklet

Headlines in the New York Times.