One impression I often had was of a gulf between the political activity on the ground and that in the media, almost as if the two contests were happening in different countries – the pays réel and the pays virtuel – or even that the contest was one between the canvassers and the opinionators. Maybe…
Read More Four waves of mobilization – Election introspection, 2If politics is theatre, one of the defining features of the form is the presence of the on-stage critics – the media, or more specifically, the big name opinion leaders. They would like to imagine themselves as a Greek chorus commenting on the drama, but if they are, they’re a Greek chorus composed of unreliable…
Read More The failure of the on-stage criticIs there any point trying to make consumers save the world? One of the most important debates of our time is whether we should approach climate change as a primarily individualistic or collective problem. Individualistic approaches include things like cap-and-trade at the consumer level, carbon taxes imposed on the final consumer (like VAT), shouting at…
Read More Coal, the Manski bounds, and the correct choice of MilibandsChris Dillow complains that too many journalists treat politics as theatre. This reminded me of a book. I recently found my copy of J.G. Ballard’s A User’s Guide to the Millennium, his collected essays and criticism, after moving churned it up to the top of my library. A major theme of these writings, especially the…
Read More Politics as theatre? More!Chris Dillow discusses why management jobs seem immune to automation despite all the excitement about AI. The problem, I think, is that the current state-of-the-art is very poorly suited to making strategic decisions, for reasons that are inherent in the way it works, and in the nature of the decisions themselves. So we’re training our…
Read More Machine learning and bubblesSo we’re all doing the Iran war scare thing again. Where are the US Navy’s aircraft carriers? As always, there is a useful summary here. Whatever John Bolton may say, Abraham Lincoln didn’t deploy last week. In fact she sailed from Norfolk, Virginia on the 1st of April. She had to sail around this time…
Read More A check-in on USN carriersAnnoyingly, Adam Elkus is going to delete this thread. increasingly thinking that the best or only justification at this point for people that aren’t techies learning about computer programs is understanding the way in which the social world is being flattened into categories that computers can understand. — QWRhbSBFbGt1cw== (@Aelkus) April 22, 2019 I…
Read More Flattening computers into social categorisersSo, the Huawei oversight report is out and it’s apparently terribly scary. If you’re interested in the content rather than the mood-music there’s a good key points summary here, and if you’re the kind of person who reads this blog, the report itself is here. The point I would like to make, though, is that…
Read More If we could only get the same oversight of Facebook we have of Huawei UKIf you’re looking for some TV that speaks to typical TYR preoccupations, 54 Hours might be it. This BBC/WDR coproduction retells the utterly berserk story of the 1988 hostage-taking in Gladbeck, West Germany, and successive police forces’ Keystonesque efforts to end it. I liked how it was recognizably a film noir without using any of…
Read More TV recommendation: 54 HoursSomething I’ve been following with morbid curiosity is the way American press (well, TV really) keeps freaking the fuck out over the fact Alexandra Osario-Cortez is not incredibly rich and has to do things like not move to Washington until the Congressional payroll department gets around to paying her. The first time was maybe a…
Read More American Politicians: Rich