Archive for the ‘Blog’ Category
Tuesday, January 24th, 2012
Every time I pass Abbey Road I see a crowd of tourists sitting around or posing like the Fab Four on this crossing. This very understated photograph has made the place sacred. It was shot on 8th August 1969 by Iain Macmillan standing on a ladder. He used a Hasselblad with a 50mm lens – ie wide in medium format – and he had time to take six shots, all based on sketches by Paul McCartney. The crossing is now Grade II listed. But for the four figures marching away from the recording studio, the scene is banal and the photography unremarkable yet it is globally recognisable, even The Simpsons have appeared in this pose – Homer being John and Bart Paul, which is odd, surely he should be Ringo. I suppose its success lies in the questions it poses – What are they doing? What does it mean? – combined with the obviously real and reachable locality. Perhaps the tourists think by going there they will meet the Beatles or are somehow touching them. It could only be done once and, though it has nothing of the quality of Fox Talbot’s masterpiece, it is almost equally important as a comment on what photography can do. The crowds look as though they will be there forever.
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Sunday, January 22nd, 2012
This is William Henry Fox Talbot’s Nelson’s Column under Construction, Trafalgar Square, April 1844. It is a photograph that has haunted me for some time. The Met’s commentary says it ‘marks the beginning of a new, photographic way of seeing’ which, I think, is right. The composition is strange and unbalanced, containing St Martin-in-the-Fields, the raffish Morley’s Hotel and the column itself, startlingly cropped, in an uneasy spatial relationship. This is not just about getting everything in because, if that had been the intention, then the top of the column would have been included. Perhaps, as the Met people say, it’s about ‘a fascinating intersection of the religious and secular, the historic and present-day’. But that sounds just too curatorish and falls far short of the eerie feeling I get from the picture. This, I now think, springs from the fact that the square is deserted, a fact made more poignant by the billboards which nobody is reading. This could be a post-apocalyptic vision in which the scaffolding signals not work but abandonment. And that, combined with the soft, misty effects produced by Fox Talbot’s camera and paper, turns the whole thing into a troubling dream, if not a full blooded nightmare. Or, I suppose, it is just very early in the morning and the city is still sleeping. It remains a dream, but a more benign one. Either way, it’s a great photograph, a moment of discovery, beyond which, almost 170 years later, few snappers have progressed.
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Saturday, January 21st, 2012
David Cameron was three, almost four, when a Milton Friedman essay appeared in the New York Times headlined ‘The Social Responsibility Of Business Is to Increase Its Profits’. George Osborne was not yet born. That, in a nutshell, is why they still don’t get it and probably never will. They have spent their entire lives basking in and profiting from an economy defined by the legacy of that essay. Friedman was not wrong to say what he did. Like many others, he saw the competitive threats to the United States and he wished to free companies from the burdens placed on them by the social concerns of the postwar world. He argued that, socially, companies were, in effect, amoral; their job was to make profits, create wealth and obey the law. All other concerns were left to the private consciences of individuals. So, from 1970 onwards, one form of capitalism was replaced by another.
If you don’t understand this, you will talk, as Cameron did, of people losing their faith in free market capitalism. The implication is that free market capitalism is a stable and well-defined entity. But postwar-capitalism was utterly different from post-Friedman capitalism. And they, in turn, were quite different from eighteenth century capitalism. Certainly, they all shared a belief in private enterprise, but they all had entirely different view of the way it should function an what part it should play. This is not about a crass distinction between right and left or Hayek and Keynes, it is about the fundamental truth that capitalism engenders change and instability. Invariably it will go wrong because of free riders, cheats and monopolists and will have to be corrected. Which is where we are now.
Neither Cameron nor Osborne sees this because they think the system they have know actually IS capitalism. So, they just come up with little political games, like this week’s scapegoating of Fred Goodwin. Well, he’s obviously a premiership prat who didn’t understand finance and probably should be in prison, but he’s a symptom not a cause. It is a disgrace to use him as a distraction because you want to divert attention from the fact that the City is already busy incubating the next crash with its bonuses and its dud maths. If it works, the middle and working classes are in for another decade of economic stagnation, while the oligarchs steal or lose their money.
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Thursday, January 19th, 2012
Tyler Cowen leads me to this. Apparently it is not so hard for multicellular life forms to get started. It took only sixty days for single yeast cells ‘to evolve into many-celled clusters that behaved as individuals. The clusters even developed a primitive division of labour, with some cells dying so that others could grow and reproduce.’ Cowen correctly observes that, exciting as this may sound, it is bad news for humans. The reason is the Fermi Paradox - basically if there are lots of alien civilisations, why is there no evidence in the form of, for example, von Neumann probes? One response was that there are not lots of aliens because it is an uphill struggle to get complex life started. In other words, as Cowen puts it, the filter is in the past. We made it past the choke point – single-celled creatures – where life tends to stall. But, if this is not the choke point, as this paper seems to show, then the filter must be in the future. Something about technologically advanced civilisations leads to self-destruction which is the real reason why there are no alien probes around. Here’s another observation about Fermi which probably doesn’t add much.
Anyway, if yeast can make it past the choke point…. well, it’s a pretty big story but don’t make any long term plans.
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Tuesday, January 17th, 2012
Yesterday Stephen Pollard tweeted ‘Five more sleeps until #Borgen’ and Christine Burns confidently predicted ‘that, within five years, all British TV will be in Danish, with subtitles.’ The Killing seems to have started this Danemania and now we have Borgen, a political drama about Denmark’s first (fictional) woman Prime Minister, the character being, I discover, ‘inspired by Tony Blair’. (This must make her the first person, factual or fictional, ever to have been ‘inspired’ by the old corkscrew; impressed maybe, inspired no.) Anyway, okay, The Killing was very good, Borgen is good and much much better than the West Wing. I am the only person in the country who couldn’t get on with The West Wing – all that super-smart dialogue, those horrible ‘staffers’, that saintly president with his soppy wife and the political emptiness that lay behind it all. It also did terrible damage, Westminster is now infested by young SpAds and wonks who think they are in the show. Borgen – the name refers to the palace housing the three houses of parliament – is better because it feels real and the characters are much less boring and much more sympathetic. Nevertheless, it will make people think twice about going into politics, partly because it seems pointlessly hard work and partly because you seem to get much less sex.
But what’s really interesting is Denmark. The two series of The Killing established the place as poorly lit and suicidally depressed, both positive attributes in my book. Borgen is brighter, but it still seems to suggest that there’s something wrong with Denmark and it’s not just Danish Blue, a horrible, horrible cheese. One thing that is wrong is that, uniquely in the world, the Danish have problems with Greenland – this was a superbly educational episode – but the big thing is that it is a very small country with only 5.5 million people. Smallness is everywhere in Borgen from the City Hall politics to the casual way the Prime Minister strolls around in public, unmobbed and protected only by two very offhand security guards. There is also smallness in the issues discussed, even when it’s terrorism and Afghanistan. The perverse effect of this smallness is that is makes the place seem autonomous and the story important on its own terms. You can’t do this with big or medium-sized countries because either the stories become global or they hover uncertainly in some ill-defined space between the global and the local. But, in Borgen, Denmark becomes a political doll’s house where everything has its own internal logic. This is exciting but also consoling, like looking through the wrong end of a telescope.
Scandinavia, as Euan Ferguson notes, has always attracted the British middle class, either on stylistic or sexual grounds. But we seem to have discovered a new charm – not the clean-lined, sexually liberated society of the past, but, rather, a cold and difficult place neatly contained within a harmless and rather loveable bubble, a snowstorm paperweight.
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Friday, January 13th, 2012
I basically despise gambling. I hate the sight of betting shops in the High Street, of Ray Winstone’s giant head goading the lads to have a flutter on the match, of fruit machines, casinos, lottery tickets, anything to do with making people lose their grip on the iron law of probability – that they are very unlikely to win anything and, in the long run, they are effectively certain to lose. Gambling makes everything tacky, even the supposedly glamorous casino in Monte Carlo is pretty much a dump. As Terence Blacker has observed, Britain has done more to encourage gambling in recent years than any other country which is one reason why everything on these islands has got tackier. The cause of this gambling boom is, of course, the National Lottery, once they let that in, they couldn’t keep all these other scumbags out so here we are with Bet Fred, Paddy Power and Ray Winstone’s giant head. And, of course, don’t get me started on the City which basically slid trillions of our dollars and millions of our jobs across the green baize and lost.
What the City got away with was concealment of the fact that debt is gambling. To borrow money is to gamble on the belief that the future will be like the present, that interest rates and your income will be more or less in the same ball park as they are now. Of course, the one thing the future cannot ever be like is the present but, I suppose, within reason, you have to play that game from time to time. What you mustn’t do is play it all the time which is, effectively, what these payday loan companies are encouraging us to do. They charge interest rates – a ‘representative APR’ on the Wonga site is 4214% – so high that it is more or less inevitable that people will find themselves borrowing more to pay off the loans. It is hard to imagine how any decent person works for such a transparently damaging business. There is, in fact, an admirable campaign called ‘End Legal Loan Sharks’.
What the City got away with was concealment of the fact that debt is gambling
But then debt is the way we do things now. It seems clear that there is not enough money in the world to pay off all the loans and we have, therefore, put the entire planet in the position of taking the most gigantic punt on the future being more or less like the present. Even funnier is that fact that the big plan to get out of this it to boost the housing market by getting people to borrow more at interest rates close to zero so the lenders can destroy their little moment of freeholding fun in the sun when rates move back to more normal levels. But probably we will just inflate our way out of the whole thing and reduce a few million pensioners to penury, that’s the sort of collateral damage nobody cares about.
Anyway, I’m glad I got that off my chest before the weekend.
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Tuesday, January 10th, 2012
This morning I idly tweeted that ‘atheism gets more like the Tea Party every day’ and linked to the of The Reason Rally, ‘the largest gathering of the secular movement in world history’. Responses ranged from ‘bollocks’ and ‘what a load of cobblers’ to the slightly more reasonable ‘What? For holding an event?’ and Theists hold gatherings too, you know. Some attend them every Sunday.’ Perhaps the most relevant were the sarcasm of Steven Nash – ‘Oh those crazy atheist extremists! How dare they try and force rationalism, science and reason on the rest of us!’ – and this from John Furlong – ‘Atheism is a concept, not a movement’.
It’s not much of a concept – it exists solely as a negation – but Furlong is right to say it is not a movement. Or rather it shouldn’t be, but, of course, it now is. Militant atheists – henceforth know as the Dawks – do seem to believe that they should ‘force rationalism…’ on the rest of us. The Dawks do this on the basis that religion is a particularly harmful human habit. Since communism, the bloodiest belief system in human history, was militantly atheist and very much a product of the ‘rationalist’ Enlightenment, I find this argument hard to follow. Perhaps it is belief itself that is under fire, but, since we don’t know everything and cannot predict the future, we couldn’t function without beliefs of some kind or another, so, again, the argument becomes unfollowable.
since we don’t know everything and cannot predict the future, we couldn’t function without beliefs of some kind or another
I think the problem is a confusion in the minds of the Dawks over the words ‘atheism’ and ‘secularism’. Atheism is the conviction that God does not exist and may legitimately be advanced as an argument. As a cause, however, it has become intolerant and as much of an absurdity as anything advanced by theists – hence my comparison with the Tea Party. The Dawks are at their most absurd – and cultish – when they claim their belief is a sure sign of high intelligence, calling themselves The Brights, a label derived from Dawkins himself. The point is that atheism is emphatically not the same as secularism which I take to be the belief that liberal society should not be organised according to specifically religious principles. It is perfectly possible, therefore, to be a religious secularist – Christ, for example, was when he said ‘Render unto Caesar’.
I can see that being a Dawk makes more sense in America where religion can become oppressive, specially when candidates like Rick Santorum are circling, but, even there I find the idea futile and irrational. Religious oppressors – Christianists as Andrew Sullivan calls them – are being blasphemous in Christ’s own terms and they should be dealt with as such.
For the record, I, because I don’t know everything, am an agnostic. What could be more ‘rational’ than that?
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Friday, January 6th, 2012
Stories were swapped, gossip traded, but there were always boundaries, lines which were never crossed. We all knew the rules.
This is Richard Littlejohn in the Mail reacting to the Filkin report on relations between the police and the press. It’s a fine piece of writing and true; I have been there and done that, though not so often with the police. Littlejohn is right to want the good times back when ‘we all knew the rules’. But, as he probably knows, this is unrealistic. The world he describes may be no more nor less corrupt than the one in which we now live, but it was founded on a different principle – that of trust. There was a shared ethos. The principle on we we are now founded is accountability or transparency. Everything must now be logged and recorded and defections from this ethos must be reported, Diane Abbott being one faintly absurd case. Obviously the trust world is better, it implicitly acknowledges the complexity of human affairs and assumes that humans rather than bureaucracies are better placed to regulate them. But that world has now all but gone and trust has been replaced by accountability. The primary cause is computer technology which has made so many passing remarks public, recorded so many unflattering pictures and created vast databases of information on individuals. It has raised the possibility of universal and perpetual accountability and made human affairs more machine-like. Filkin had no choice but to say what she said and Littlejohn had no choice either.
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Thursday, January 5th, 2012
One of the thousands of wonderful moments in Frasier, the greatest sitcom of all, is when our hero asks his brother, Niles, ‘Do you ever have an unexpressed thought?’ There is a moment’s pause before suddenly feline Niles responds, ‘I’m having one now.’
So, Diane Abbott, do you ever have an unexpressed thought? Or, more specifically, do you ever have an untweeted thought? Was it a lonely impulse of delight (Yeats, do pay attention) that drove you to this tumult in the twittersphere? Face it, Diane, you’re trending for the worst possible reason – you emitted a blatantly racist tweet – ‘White people love playing “divide & rule”. We should not play their game’. Who are these wicked white people? I don’t play divide and rule, do you? If I did, would it be because I am white? Do black people never dabble in d & r? And, anyway, WTF! Do you seriously judge people’s moral status by the colour of their skin? That is what we call racism, that is what everybody calls racism. Well not George Galloway.
Diane Abbott has been my friend for 25 years, he said, perhaps the most massively unhelpful thing Galloway could ever say about anybody, only the obtuse would think her a ‘racist‘.
Well, actually, I don’t think she’s a racist. Her tweets around this subject are mere mindless ideologuery, dangerous in itself but not quite as nasty as racism. What I do think is that she should be on twittercide watch. My first thought was that she was being deliberately provocative, my second – probably correct – thought was that she had tweeted impulsively and thus became one of the many sad victims of the new phenomenon of twittercide.
So, Diane Abbott, do you ever have an unexpressed thought? Or, more specifically, do you ever have an untweeted thought?
There was another case in the papers today. Simon Holt did the internet equivalent of throwing himself off Beachy Head when he emitted a tweet – Oh and by the way, I want your hot body tonight babe. xxxxx – intended for his wife but which, of course, went to all his followers. In fact, twittercide is not a rare phenomenon, confined to marginal politicians and horse racing commentators, millions of such cases happen daily. Scan the ‘feeds’ of young twitterers and you will see the bizarre spectacle of people making themselves unemployable for life. No boss would take on such illiterate, foul-mouthed, vindictive, empty-headed creatures.
The problem is that, while tweeting to their followers, twitterers forget they are also visible to the entire world. Like to many other internet activities, the form lures you into a false sense of intimacy. Abbott plainly thought she was swopping ideological nonsense with a fellow ideologue, only to find herself, hours later, being hounded out of town for exactly the crime she so savagely condemns in others.
I suspect there’s a neuroscientific aspect to all this. The neurological walls that divide public from private utterance are crumbling. Our brains are being hollowed out. At this rate there will be no unexpressed thoughts and all the sustaining complexity of the human world will drain away to be replaced by a featureless, babbling simplicity. But you’ll now have to buy my book to find out what I mean.
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Thursday, January 5th, 2012
Clay Shirky has many gifts, cogent prose is not one of them. Great Gapper tweeted plaintively about this piece, ‘Maybe I’m being slow but I don’t really understand what he’s saying’, a sentiment with which, at first reading, I wholeheartedly agreed (except for the ‘maybe I’m being slow’). On second reading, however, I did manage to detect a point which is, I think, as follows. News cannot finance itself on the internet by traditional means because people now access news in bits rather than bundles (like newspapers); as a result, serious news, which, in bundles, was always a minority interested supported by assorted trivia, will have to seek new forms of funding. Shirky concludes:
When the politically engaged readers are also the only paying readers, however, their opinion will come matter more, and in ways that will sometimes contradict the advertisers’ desires for anodyne coverage.
It will take time for the economic weight of those users to affect the organizational form of the paper, but slowly slowly, form follows funding. For the moment at least, the most promising experiment in user support means forgoing mass in favor of passion; this may be the year where we see how papers figure out how to reward the people most committed to their long-term survival.
‘Politically engaged’ is misleading; there are many serious readers – the best of them, in fact – not placeable in that depressing category, but one sees what he means. The idea that the only possible future for news is way upmarket of where it is now is not original – I made it myself some years ago – but does need restating. The reasoning is simple and twofold: the internet does a much better job of being downmarket than the mainstream media and serious readers are loyal ones who will pay. It is important that Shirky, perhaps the most influential internet thinker, has arrived, however circuitously, at the same conclusion. He is an important player in the corridors of media power. There is a race on to save serious topical writing and the sooner we win the better.
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