Thursday, December 09, 2004
The new MTV
There was a time when success in the music industry depended on getting your video aired on MTV. From the 1980s onwards, platinum success depended on that kind of exposure, seen most spectacularly in 1991, when MTV put Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on Buzz Bin rotation and unleashed grunge – a genre that had been around for more than a half a decade, languishing in local live circuits.
Well, move over MTV, gaming’s here. The new ticket to success for musicians is to get their songs included on the soundtrack of video games. Jose Antonio Vargas writes in the Washington Post of how the new hip-hop kid in town, the Game (real name – Jayceon Taylor), is trying onto the soundtrack of Madden NFL 2005, a follow-up to last year’s best-selling game, Madden NFL 2004.
Vargas writes, “The competition to get onto the game's soundtrack – a lineup of thumping, furious, go-play-ball songs – is fierce. Last year record labels sent more than 2,500 songs to vie for the game's 21 tracks, which included Hoobastank's ‘Same Direction,’ New Found Glory's ‘This Disaster’ and Yung Wun's ‘Yung Wun Anthem’.”
And it isn’t just new artists who need to get that break. “For artists as established as Green Day, whose 'American Idiot' has just been nominated for a Grammy as record of the year, winning a spot on Madden NFL's soundtrack is like having a 20-second commercial on ‘Monday Night Football’ or ‘Desperate Housewives’,” writes Vargas. “For an up-and-comer such as the Game, it's an even bigger deal, the kind of break that gives instant celebrity. For both, it's a new route to an old audience, as sure a bet as any when it comes to grabbing a prized demographic: 18-to-34-year-old males, 75 percent of whom play video games.”
Well, move over MTV, gaming’s here. The new ticket to success for musicians is to get their songs included on the soundtrack of video games. Jose Antonio Vargas writes in the Washington Post of how the new hip-hop kid in town, the Game (real name – Jayceon Taylor), is trying onto the soundtrack of Madden NFL 2005, a follow-up to last year’s best-selling game, Madden NFL 2004.
Vargas writes, “The competition to get onto the game's soundtrack – a lineup of thumping, furious, go-play-ball songs – is fierce. Last year record labels sent more than 2,500 songs to vie for the game's 21 tracks, which included Hoobastank's ‘Same Direction,’ New Found Glory's ‘This Disaster’ and Yung Wun's ‘Yung Wun Anthem’.”
And it isn’t just new artists who need to get that break. “For artists as established as Green Day, whose 'American Idiot' has just been nominated for a Grammy as record of the year, winning a spot on Madden NFL's soundtrack is like having a 20-second commercial on ‘Monday Night Football’ or ‘Desperate Housewives’,” writes Vargas. “For an up-and-comer such as the Game, it's an even bigger deal, the kind of break that gives instant celebrity. For both, it's a new route to an old audience, as sure a bet as any when it comes to grabbing a prized demographic: 18-to-34-year-old males, 75 percent of whom play video games.”
Fooling cockroaches, calming chickens
A team of scientists at a university in Brussels have created an artificial cockroach, in order to study “collective intelligence”. John Schwartz reports in the New York Times that “[t]he researchers have found a chemical blend that smells roachish enough for the impostors to trick real roaches into believing they are part of the group, and even to modify group behavior by getting the roaches to follow them from dark to light places.
“The researchers say they are also making progress with chickens, which exhibit a destructive ‘panic behavior’ that might be calmed with poultrybots.”
“The researchers say they are also making progress with chickens, which exhibit a destructive ‘panic behavior’ that might be calmed with poultrybots.”
Lashing out at the media
Big Brother is watching you, and you are watching Big Brother. That is because, according to Robert Kaplan, Big Brother is the media. In an essay titled “The Media and Medievalism”, in Policy Review, he writes:
Terrorism would be toothless without the media? I was rather befuddled at that. Rather than explain that bit, Kaplan goes on to explain why the media is so powerful. “[T]he media have authentic political power – terrifically magnified by technology – without the bureaucratic accountability that often accompanies it, so that they are never culpable for what they advocate,” he says. “Presidents, even if voters ignore their blunders, are at least responsible to history; journalists rarely are. This freedom is key to their irresponsible power.”
Later, Kaplan writes, “If what used to be known as the Communist International has any rough contemporary equivalent, it is the global media.”
This is not an unusual strain of thought. In the left, particularly, the media (like “corporations”) is often characterised in this manner, as if it were one entity that spoke with one voice. But that is not the case. In the Communist International, power was centralised, but the voice of the media is dispersed and decentralised, and getting more so by the day. Sources of information have grown, audiences have been fragmented, and the media speaks in a myriad different voices. And even when one particular voice is louder than the other, as happened recently when most of the mainstream publications in the USA endorsed John Kerry, people don’t necessarily listen.
Kaplan goes off on various tangents in his piece, many of them arguable. At one point he writes, “Our preoccupation with promoting democracy is slightly misplaced. Freer, more historically liberal societies are emerging anyway. Even in the Middle East, the new generation of leaders will not have the luxury to rule as autocratically as the passing one.” By which he means, I presume, that had the US not invaded Iraq, a freer, more historically liberal society would emerge anyway, and Saddam and his psychopathic progeny would "not have the luxury to rule as autocratically"? Fat chance.
But who’ll listen to me? I’m only a journalist.
As this is an age in which we are bombarded by messages that tell us what to buy and what to think, when one dissects the real elements of power — who has it and, more important during a time of rapid change, who increasingly has it — one is left to conclude bleakly: Ours is not an age of democracy, or an age of terrorism, but an age of mass media, without which the current strain of terrorism would be toothless in any case.
Terrorism would be toothless without the media? I was rather befuddled at that. Rather than explain that bit, Kaplan goes on to explain why the media is so powerful. “[T]he media have authentic political power – terrifically magnified by technology – without the bureaucratic accountability that often accompanies it, so that they are never culpable for what they advocate,” he says. “Presidents, even if voters ignore their blunders, are at least responsible to history; journalists rarely are. This freedom is key to their irresponsible power.”
Later, Kaplan writes, “If what used to be known as the Communist International has any rough contemporary equivalent, it is the global media.”
This is not an unusual strain of thought. In the left, particularly, the media (like “corporations”) is often characterised in this manner, as if it were one entity that spoke with one voice. But that is not the case. In the Communist International, power was centralised, but the voice of the media is dispersed and decentralised, and getting more so by the day. Sources of information have grown, audiences have been fragmented, and the media speaks in a myriad different voices. And even when one particular voice is louder than the other, as happened recently when most of the mainstream publications in the USA endorsed John Kerry, people don’t necessarily listen.
Kaplan goes off on various tangents in his piece, many of them arguable. At one point he writes, “Our preoccupation with promoting democracy is slightly misplaced. Freer, more historically liberal societies are emerging anyway. Even in the Middle East, the new generation of leaders will not have the luxury to rule as autocratically as the passing one.” By which he means, I presume, that had the US not invaded Iraq, a freer, more historically liberal society would emerge anyway, and Saddam and his psychopathic progeny would "not have the luxury to rule as autocratically"? Fat chance.
But who’ll listen to me? I’m only a journalist.
Chess and ping-pong in Iraq
From “This is their civil war” by Charles Krauthammer in the Guardian:
Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan looks on the “Bright Side” in the New Republic. He writes:
Should the elections be postponed till the situation is more stable, and perhaps till more of the Sunnis are won over? Mario Mancuso argues against it in the Weekly Standard. He writes:
Mancuso serves up a succinct summation of the task ahead. “Our fundamental challenge in Iraq,” he writes, “is that we have to play chess (keep our strategic interests in mind) and ping-pong (respond to daily events) at the same time.”
In 1864, 11 of the 36 states did not participate in the American presidential election. Was Lincoln's election therefore illegitimate?
In 1868, three years after the security situation had, shall we say, stabilised, three states (and not insignificant ones: Texas, Virginia and Mississippi) did not participate in the election. Was Grant's election illegitimate?
There has been much talk that if the Iraqi election is held and some Sunni Arab provinces (perhaps three of the 18) do not participate, the election will be illegitimate. Nonsense. The election should be held. It should be open to everyone. If Iraq's Sunni Arabs - barely 20% of the population - decide that they cannot abide giving up their 80 years of minority rule, which ended with 30 years of Saddam Hussein's atrocious tyranny, then tough luck. They forfeit their chance to shape and to participate in the new Iraq.
Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan looks on the “Bright Side” in the New Republic. He writes:
The coalition has learned a critical tactic in neo-imperial governance: divide and rule. From the Romans to the Brits, it has long been a useful strategy. By working with the grain of Iraqi ethnic tension, specifically the pent-up hostility of Kurds and Shia toward the Sunnis, who for decades ran the country, the United States has been able to gain leverage against the largely Sunni insurgency. So as Sunni Falluja was pummeled, the Shia were quiet and Kurdish troops actually took part in the operation.
Should the elections be postponed till the situation is more stable, and perhaps till more of the Sunnis are won over? Mario Mancuso argues against it in the Weekly Standard. He writes:
As a matter of principle, delaying the elections would reward the brutal campaign of violence that has beheaded innocents, targeted Iraqi civilians (including children lining-up for candy), and sought to bury a promising Iraqi future before its birth. In practice, it would encourage more violence and demoralize innocent, fence-sitting Iraqis (including certain political elites) who would like to believe in a better future, but fear the thugs who run the illegal checkpoint down the street today. It would also feed conspiracy theories about American intentions in Iraq, and do nothing to satisfy those Sunni clerics who have pledged to boycott any Iraqi election while there are foreign troops on Iraqi soil.
Mancuso serves up a succinct summation of the task ahead. “Our fundamental challenge in Iraq,” he writes, “is that we have to play chess (keep our strategic interests in mind) and ping-pong (respond to daily events) at the same time.”
No label
A number of people emailed me after my post yesterday on liberals and conservatives (“Are you Tragic or Utopian?”), exclaiming that labels didn’t matter, and that they did not wish to be labelled as either liberal or conservative. On that subject, here’s Keith Burgess-Jackson on “The Importance of Labels”.
Clinton quotes Mao
Collin Levey writes in Tech Central Station, with relish, of how Bill Clinton’s memoir, My Life, is being madly pirated all over Asia. (Someone tried to sell me a copy at a traffic signal at Worli a few hours ago, for Rs 175 – apprx. US$ 3.) But what delights Levey is not the piracy itself, but the manner in which it is being done.
“[T]he chronic misspellings, cheap materials and smudgy ink that mark the knock-offs commonly found in Asia are the least of the problem,” he writes. “Mr. Clinton's carefully chosen words have been murdered by additions and deletions wholly out of keeping with the original. Copies available in China have Mr. Clinton serially quoting Mao and extolling the feng shui of his hometown in Arkansas.”
So why does this give Levey any pleasure? Because it is “so redolent of the policies Mr. Clinton himself has supported in another arena of great demand and Western prices. That is, knockoff drugs to fight AIDS.”
Clinton’s Presidential Foundation, says Levey, is “a leading supporter of the use of knock-off pills, produced without permission or supervision by generics manufacturers in countries that do not recognize international patent rights. The companies, most notably Cipla and Ranbaxy in India, have long been favorites of the AIDS activist community because they pilfer technologies developed at huge cost by large Western research-based drugs firms.”
Clinton, thus, is “getting a taste of his own medicine”. The analogy breaks down, in my view, at one point. The transgressions of international patent rights that Clinton’s foundation is encouraging are for the purpose of saving lives, and the more this piracy succeeds, the more lives will be saved. Clinton’s foundation does not actually make any money from this (though Cipla and Ranbaxy do). The pirate publishers who are ripping off Clinton, on the other hand, are not exactly saving any lives.
I quite agree with Levey that intellectual property rights must be protected, but that needs to be done in a realistic manner. As a kid and a teenager, growing up here (in India) in the 1980s and ‘90s, I was a regular customer of pirated music. The reason for that was simple: all the music I enjoyed listening to, from much of Van Morrison’s catalogue to the Allman Brothers Band to REM to Television was not available here. The only way I could get hold of all the music that I loved, which was such a big part of my life then, was to get pirated copies of it, or to record it off friends. If the music I wanted was available in the market at a reasonable price, I would have no compunctions buying legit copies. (Luckily, things have changed here due to the liberalisation of the ‘90s.)
Levey, in his piece, points out that “more than 90% of students [in China] see no problem with buying the grey market versions [of textbooks]”. And why should they? If the pirated textbooks weren’t there, they would have no access at all to that learning. Patricia Schroeder, the president of the Association of American Publishers, was quoted by the Chronicle as saying, "Countries say to us: 'We really want education for our kids. You people [in the United States] are rich. Why do you want to stop us from copying textbooks?'"
Third-world pirates, it must be understood, often function in a vacuum. They fulfil a need that no one else is satisfying. If copyright and patent holders balk at this, there is only one way to stop it – to fulfil that need themselves. And they cannot do this by pricing their goods at the same price as they do in the developed world, for no one will be able to afford them. Just as American employers pay their staff differently according to their location, using different standards of living as a justification, they must also price products differently. This is already the case with many products here – books are marked down, in absolute terms, for the Indian market, though not enough.
This is not a moral issue, but a practical one – if producers do not follow differential pricing, they will never be able to stop third-world pirates. And if they do, they will benefit from a market they weren’t tapping earlier, or were tapping ineffectively.
And Clinton won’t be quoting Mao any more.
“[T]he chronic misspellings, cheap materials and smudgy ink that mark the knock-offs commonly found in Asia are the least of the problem,” he writes. “Mr. Clinton's carefully chosen words have been murdered by additions and deletions wholly out of keeping with the original. Copies available in China have Mr. Clinton serially quoting Mao and extolling the feng shui of his hometown in Arkansas.”
So why does this give Levey any pleasure? Because it is “so redolent of the policies Mr. Clinton himself has supported in another arena of great demand and Western prices. That is, knockoff drugs to fight AIDS.”
Clinton’s Presidential Foundation, says Levey, is “a leading supporter of the use of knock-off pills, produced without permission or supervision by generics manufacturers in countries that do not recognize international patent rights. The companies, most notably Cipla and Ranbaxy in India, have long been favorites of the AIDS activist community because they pilfer technologies developed at huge cost by large Western research-based drugs firms.”
Clinton, thus, is “getting a taste of his own medicine”. The analogy breaks down, in my view, at one point. The transgressions of international patent rights that Clinton’s foundation is encouraging are for the purpose of saving lives, and the more this piracy succeeds, the more lives will be saved. Clinton’s foundation does not actually make any money from this (though Cipla and Ranbaxy do). The pirate publishers who are ripping off Clinton, on the other hand, are not exactly saving any lives.
I quite agree with Levey that intellectual property rights must be protected, but that needs to be done in a realistic manner. As a kid and a teenager, growing up here (in India) in the 1980s and ‘90s, I was a regular customer of pirated music. The reason for that was simple: all the music I enjoyed listening to, from much of Van Morrison’s catalogue to the Allman Brothers Band to REM to Television was not available here. The only way I could get hold of all the music that I loved, which was such a big part of my life then, was to get pirated copies of it, or to record it off friends. If the music I wanted was available in the market at a reasonable price, I would have no compunctions buying legit copies. (Luckily, things have changed here due to the liberalisation of the ‘90s.)
Levey, in his piece, points out that “more than 90% of students [in China] see no problem with buying the grey market versions [of textbooks]”. And why should they? If the pirated textbooks weren’t there, they would have no access at all to that learning. Patricia Schroeder, the president of the Association of American Publishers, was quoted by the Chronicle as saying, "Countries say to us: 'We really want education for our kids. You people [in the United States] are rich. Why do you want to stop us from copying textbooks?'"
Third-world pirates, it must be understood, often function in a vacuum. They fulfil a need that no one else is satisfying. If copyright and patent holders balk at this, there is only one way to stop it – to fulfil that need themselves. And they cannot do this by pricing their goods at the same price as they do in the developed world, for no one will be able to afford them. Just as American employers pay their staff differently according to their location, using different standards of living as a justification, they must also price products differently. This is already the case with many products here – books are marked down, in absolute terms, for the Indian market, though not enough.
This is not a moral issue, but a practical one – if producers do not follow differential pricing, they will never be able to stop third-world pirates. And if they do, they will benefit from a market they weren’t tapping earlier, or were tapping ineffectively.
And Clinton won’t be quoting Mao any more.
Here’s the cheese. Where’s the cow?
The Associated Press reports on a recent survey of 2000 moviegoers, with the question posed to all of them being: “What are your top three cheesiest moments in film?" The winner: "I'm the king of the world!" from Titanic. Here’s the list. My choice would be No. 6, there’s enough cheese there to shoot a hundred family portraits.
Wednesday, December 08, 2004
Why CEO pay continues to rise and rise
A century ago, JP Morgan said that the pay of the top worker in a company should not exceed that of the average production worker by more than 10 times. In America, in 1980, that differential was 40 times. By 1990, it had moved to 85 times. Today, it is more than 400. Even after the dotcom bubble burst, wiping out around US$8 trillion in shareholder value, and lay-offs spread through corporate America, CEO pay continued to rise. Why was this so?
The reason for this is what social scientists call the “Lake Wobegon Effect” (after the Garrison Keillor novel, Lake Wobegon Days, about a town where all the children are above average). Here’s how it works in the context of CEO pay:
When a vacancy comes up for a top post, the compensation committee, set up by the board to determine how much the CEO should be paid, asks its pay consultant to come up with an appropriate figure. The pay consultant cites a figure which is the average pay for that post. The compensation committee, because it has to act under the premise that its candidate is above average, has to pay above that figure. And as it does so, the industry average rises, ensuring that the pay consultant will cite a higher figure next time. The average, thus, is a watermark that continues rising regardless of the state of the economy or the stock market. And the self-sustaining feedback loop moves faster as the turnover of CEOs rises, as it has been doing in the last few years.
Thus, CEO pay functions in an entirely different sphere from the economy, and has virtually nothing to do with how a company may be doing or how the rest of management gets paid. You might think that this could be arrested if strong boards, with high standards of corporate governance, put their feet down and pay only what they deems reasonable. But this would only work if it happened across the board, simultaneously, and that is hardly likely. Also, as this Guardian report by Polly Toynbee indicates, non-executive board member’s renumerations have also been zooming madly in recent times, on a self-sustaining feedback loop of their own.
I am a fervent supporter of capitalism, free markets and globalisation. Such spiralling and disjointed CEO pay undermines capitalism, though, just as America’s farm tariffs, for example, undermine their rhetoric on free trade. No system works without checks and balances – as Toynbee sums it up, “Capitalism is the only system that works - but it only works when properly regulated by a benign state. And that must include controlling dysfunctional pay distortions at the top and bottom that corrupt society and demolish the government's hopes for social justice.”
The reason for this is what social scientists call the “Lake Wobegon Effect” (after the Garrison Keillor novel, Lake Wobegon Days, about a town where all the children are above average). Here’s how it works in the context of CEO pay:
When a vacancy comes up for a top post, the compensation committee, set up by the board to determine how much the CEO should be paid, asks its pay consultant to come up with an appropriate figure. The pay consultant cites a figure which is the average pay for that post. The compensation committee, because it has to act under the premise that its candidate is above average, has to pay above that figure. And as it does so, the industry average rises, ensuring that the pay consultant will cite a higher figure next time. The average, thus, is a watermark that continues rising regardless of the state of the economy or the stock market. And the self-sustaining feedback loop moves faster as the turnover of CEOs rises, as it has been doing in the last few years.
Thus, CEO pay functions in an entirely different sphere from the economy, and has virtually nothing to do with how a company may be doing or how the rest of management gets paid. You might think that this could be arrested if strong boards, with high standards of corporate governance, put their feet down and pay only what they deems reasonable. But this would only work if it happened across the board, simultaneously, and that is hardly likely. Also, as this Guardian report by Polly Toynbee indicates, non-executive board member’s renumerations have also been zooming madly in recent times, on a self-sustaining feedback loop of their own.
I am a fervent supporter of capitalism, free markets and globalisation. Such spiralling and disjointed CEO pay undermines capitalism, though, just as America’s farm tariffs, for example, undermine their rhetoric on free trade. No system works without checks and balances – as Toynbee sums it up, “Capitalism is the only system that works - but it only works when properly regulated by a benign state. And that must include controlling dysfunctional pay distortions at the top and bottom that corrupt society and demolish the government's hopes for social justice.”
Stressed about stress
You’re losing years when you’re under stress. Michael Lemonick of Time magazine, in an article titled “The Ravages of Stress”, writes about a new study that shows how “long-term, unrelenting stress on mothers can damage the DNA of their immune-system cells in a way that may speed up the aging process.” (Most of the subjects of the study were mothers who underwent regular stress because of looking after chronically ill kids, but the results are relevant to anyone.)
After correcting for factors other than stress, the scientists examined the peripheral blood mononuclear cells of the ladies, part of their immune system. They found that in the women who experienced the highest stress levels, “the cells had shorter telomeres — bits of DNA that cap the ends of chromosomes. In lab experiments, scientists have shown that telomeres get a bit smaller every time a cell divides, and that when telomeres are worn out, cells can't divide anymore and ultimately die. In humans, older people tend to have shorter telomeres — and by this measure, the most stressed women in the study had cells that looked 10 years older than their chronological age.”
Lemonick continues:
Stress affects not just ageing but also memory. Robert Sapolsky writes in the Scientific American Mind that “a little stress sharpens memory. But after prolonged stress, the mental picture isn’t pretty.” It’s a wonderful piece, adapted from his book Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, but the link I gave you has just a preview, and the full article isn’t available online. Bummer. Never mind, forget about it
After correcting for factors other than stress, the scientists examined the peripheral blood mononuclear cells of the ladies, part of their immune system. They found that in the women who experienced the highest stress levels, “the cells had shorter telomeres — bits of DNA that cap the ends of chromosomes. In lab experiments, scientists have shown that telomeres get a bit smaller every time a cell divides, and that when telomeres are worn out, cells can't divide anymore and ultimately die. In humans, older people tend to have shorter telomeres — and by this measure, the most stressed women in the study had cells that looked 10 years older than their chronological age.”
Lemonick continues:
The most stressed women also had lower levels of telomerase, an enzyme that repairs damaged telomeres. Again, reduced telomerase isn't necessarily the key to premature aging, but people with a rare genetic condition that reduces their telomerase production tend to show outward signs of premature aging and often die young of heart disease and weakened infection resistance.
Finally, the stressed women's cells had higher levels of free radicals, a type of highly reactive molecule that can damage DNA. One might argue that women whose children were born with those disorders already had something wrong with their DNA and that stress wasn't the cause. But that wouldn't explain another crucial fact: the degree of cellular damage was highest in women who had been caring for a disabled child the longest.
Stress affects not just ageing but also memory. Robert Sapolsky writes in the Scientific American Mind that “a little stress sharpens memory. But after prolonged stress, the mental picture isn’t pretty.” It’s a wonderful piece, adapted from his book Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, but the link I gave you has just a preview, and the full article isn’t available online. Bummer. Never mind, forget about it
Eating away the hours
My sleep patterns are irregular, and I’m putting on too much weight. I don’t get as much shut-eye as I should, and I get the urge to bite into something every couple of hours. Do my sleep and my hunger (and being over-weight) have a causal relationship? Scientific American reports that a new study has found that “Sleep Deprivation [is] Tied to Shifts in Hunger Hormones”. The findings:
The study was carried out by the Public Library of Science: Medicine, a peer-reviewed medical journal that is, refreshingly, available online for free. Read the full report here.
I need to go get some sleep now. Wait, did you hear that fridge? It just called out my name!
[P]eople who consistently slept less than five hours a night had significant differences in the hormones leptin and ghrelin as compared with people who slept an average of eight hours a night. Leptin is produced by fat cells. Low levels of it are a signal of starvation and a need for a bigger appetite. Ghrelin, meanwhile, is produced by the stomach and is an appetite stimulant--the more ghrelin you have, the more you want to eat. The study subjects suffering a lack of sleep had 16 percent less leptin and nearly 15 percent more ghrelin than those who were well rested did. "In Western societies, where chronic sleep restriction is common and food is widely available, changes in appetite regulatory hormones with sleep curtailment may contribute to obesity," the team reports.
The study was carried out by the Public Library of Science: Medicine, a peer-reviewed medical journal that is, refreshingly, available online for free. Read the full report here.
I need to go get some sleep now. Wait, did you hear that fridge? It just called out my name!
The immigration couch
What is an acceptable price to pay to live the American Dream? For some Central American women it’s sex, writes Mary Jordan in the Washington Post.
Promoting crime
Instapundit links to a couple of pieces about the alarming rate of burglaries in Britain, especially “hot burglaries”, which take place when the resident is at home. Dave Kopel points out two reasons why “hot” burglaries are far more prevalent in Britain than in the US. One of them, of course, is that guns are legal in America. He writes:
Mark Steyn, in an opinion piece in the Daily Telegraph, writes:
There is no columnist I enjoy reading, and agree with, more than Steyn, but I take issue with his first line here. Surely a better measure of “a society’s health” would be not how you can insulate yourself from its underclass, but the nature and extent of the underclass itself. And there, too, Britain’s welfare state has been a failure. No one writes on that subject better than Theodore Dalrymple, and here’s one of his finest essays: “The Frivolity of Evil”.
[W]hen an American burglar strikes at an occupied residence, his chance of being shot is about equal to his chance of being sent to prison. According to a study by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there are about half a million incidents every year in which an American burglar is scared away by a victim with a firearm.
Putting aside the issue of guns, the British homeowners are still at a terrible disadvantage. For example, if 300 pounds of what the British call a “yob” (or what Americans call “white trash”) kicks down a woman’s front door, and begins pummeling her with his fists, her only hope might be to fight back with a kitchen knife. In America, the woman’s use of the knife would be plainly legal. In Britain, the woman would be presumed to have illegally escalated the confrontation (the yob was just using his fists, and she escalated by using a deadly weapon). The government could put her on trial for attempted murder, and she would have to prove to the jury that she responded “proportionately” to the attack.
Mark Steyn, in an opinion piece in the Daily Telegraph, writes:
One of the key measures of a society's health is how easily you can insulate yourself from its underclass. In America, unless one resides in a very small number of problematic inner-city quarters or wishes to make a career in the drug trade, one will live a life blessedly untouched by crime. In Britain, alas, it's the peculiar genius of Home Office policy to have turned the entire country into one big, rundown, inner-city, no-go slum estate, extending from prosperous suburbs to leafy villages, even unto Upper Cheyne Row.
There is no columnist I enjoy reading, and agree with, more than Steyn, but I take issue with his first line here. Surely a better measure of “a society’s health” would be not how you can insulate yourself from its underclass, but the nature and extent of the underclass itself. And there, too, Britain’s welfare state has been a failure. No one writes on that subject better than Theodore Dalrymple, and here’s one of his finest essays: “The Frivolity of Evil”.
Are you Tragic or Utopian?
“One of the curious things about political opinions is how often the same people line up on opposite sides of different issues,” begins Thomas Sowell’s book, A Conflict of Visions. What causes such sharp and well-defined faultlines between liberals and conservatives? It is a common question, and I was reminded of it moments ago by a post on a libertarian blog, The Examined Life. Its author postulated that conservatives believe in “the fallibility of humans”, and all their attitudes flow accordingly.
Sowell’s argument was a more sophisticated version of this, and was summed up beautifully by Steven Pinker in his brilliant book, The Blank Slate. Sowell had argued that there were two “visions” of nature, which he called the Constrained Vision and Unconstrained Vision, and Pinker called the Tragic Vision and the Utopian Vision. Pinker wrote:
Needless to say, conservatives believe in the Tragic Vision while liberals believe in the Utopian Vision. Pinker says that these beliefs are hard-wired in us, “not … because attitudes are synthesised directly from DNA but because they come naturally to people with different temperaments”. He continues, “When it comes to attitudes that are heritable, people react more quickly and emotionally, are less likely to change their minds, and are more attracted to like-minded people.”
Isn’t that true?
Sowell’s argument was a more sophisticated version of this, and was summed up beautifully by Steven Pinker in his brilliant book, The Blank Slate. Sowell had argued that there were two “visions” of nature, which he called the Constrained Vision and Unconstrained Vision, and Pinker called the Tragic Vision and the Utopian Vision. Pinker wrote:
In the Tragic Vision, humans are inherently limited in knowledge, wisdom and virtue, and all social arrangements must acknowledge those limits. “Mortal things suit mortals best,” wrote Pindar; “from the crooked timber of humanity no truly straight thing can be made,” wrote Kant. The Tragic Vision is associated with Hobbes, Burke, Smith, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, the jurist Oliver Wendall Holmes Jr., the economists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, the philosophers Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper, and the legal scholar Richard Posner.
In the Utopian Vision, psychological limitations are artifacts that come from our social arrangements, and we should not allow them to restrict our gaze from what is possible in a better world. Its creed might be “Some people see things as they are and ask ‘why?’; I dream things that never were and ask ‘why not?’” The quotation is often attributed to the icon of 1960s liberalism, Robert F Kennedy, but it was originally penned by the Fabian socialist George Bernard Shaw (who also wrote, “There is nothing that can be changed more completely than human nature when the job is taken in hand early enough”). The Utopian Vision is also associated with Rousseau, Godwin, Condorcet, Thomas Paine, the jurist Earl Warren, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, and to a lesser extent the political philosopher Ronald Dworkin. [Emphasis in the original.]
Needless to say, conservatives believe in the Tragic Vision while liberals believe in the Utopian Vision. Pinker says that these beliefs are hard-wired in us, “not … because attitudes are synthesised directly from DNA but because they come naturally to people with different temperaments”. He continues, “When it comes to attitudes that are heritable, people react more quickly and emotionally, are less likely to change their minds, and are more attracted to like-minded people.”
Isn’t that true?
Tuesday, December 07, 2004
Are you bored?
Arnold Schoenberg was, and look what happened. Stuart Buck tells us how boredom is driving down educational standards.
Cheeseburger by the sea
The Herald Sun reports that “dozens of seats on the world's most luxurious cruise liner have collapsed under the weight of obese American passengers.”
The story quotes “an unnamed former member of the ship's crew” as saying, “We do have many large passengers on the QM2 [the ship]. Most of the passengers are American. And we do have 10 restaurants on the ship, so if they are big when they get on, they tend to be bigger when they get off."
The story quotes “an unnamed former member of the ship's crew” as saying, “We do have many large passengers on the QM2 [the ship]. Most of the passengers are American. And we do have 10 restaurants on the ship, so if they are big when they get on, they tend to be bigger when they get off."
Can Islam and democracy go together?
Ian Buruma contemplates just this question in an excellent essay in the New York Times.
Pirates and ships
In the days when there were pirates on the high seas, no one spoke of banning ships. Yet, so much of the debate around P2P networks centres around piracy, mainly of music, that one would think that was all P2P networks were built for. But they aren’t. As the Economist puts it (subscription link):
“[T]his ideal system already exists,” the Economist informs us, “in the form of P2P file-sharing networks such as eDonkey and KaZaA.” Yet, because P2P networks have mainly been in the news for music piracy, the entertainment industry has run a relentless campaign to ban them, and a lot of people think of P2P networks and music pirates as synonymous.
“Musicians Sing Different Tune on File Sharing”, says the Washington Post, speaking about a new report that indicates that most artists are quite ok with P2P networks. This is not contradictory with the stand that the likes of Lars Ullrich have taken in the past against P2P networks like Napster. Ulrich has never spoken out against P2P networks in principle, only on the piracy that takes place on those networks, a distinction he understands, but one that many in the music business do not.
The report itself is fairly lucid. The findings are summarised thus:
A couple of the reports of the findings are a bit muddled though, and confuse ships with pirates. The New York Times reports, “artists are divided but on the whole not deeply concerned about online file-sharing. Only about half thought that sharing unauthorized copies of music and movies online should be illegal, for instance.” For instance? “Online file-sharing” and “sharing unauthorised copies of music” are not synonymous, and “only about half” contradicts “on the whole”. Don’t believe the news reports that indicate that artists are quite happy to give away the fruits of their hard work for free – Read the report for yourself.
On a related note, here's a nice review of a book that argues for restrictions of copyrights: Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity.
Imagine an ideal global information-storage system. It would have to be huge, capable of delivering any one of millions of files, some of them of enormous size, to anywhere in the world within moments. It would have to be self-configuring and self-healing, rather than centrally controlled, to ensure there was no single point of failure. And it would have to be secure, capable of supporting millions of users, while resisting constant assault both from physical attacks on its infrastructure and from malicious software circulated within the network.
“[T]his ideal system already exists,” the Economist informs us, “in the form of P2P file-sharing networks such as eDonkey and KaZaA.” Yet, because P2P networks have mainly been in the news for music piracy, the entertainment industry has run a relentless campaign to ban them, and a lot of people think of P2P networks and music pirates as synonymous.
“Musicians Sing Different Tune on File Sharing”, says the Washington Post, speaking about a new report that indicates that most artists are quite ok with P2P networks. This is not contradictory with the stand that the likes of Lars Ullrich have taken in the past against P2P networks like Napster. Ulrich has never spoken out against P2P networks in principle, only on the piracy that takes place on those networks, a distinction he understands, but one that many in the music business do not.
The report itself is fairly lucid. The findings are summarised thus:
Artists and musicians on all points of the spectrum from superstars to starving singers have embraced the internet as a tool to improve how they make, market, and sell their creative works. They use the internet to gain inspiration, build community with fans and fellow artists, and pursue new commercial activity.
Artists and musicians believe that unauthorized peer-to-peer file-sharing of copyrighted works should be illegal. However, the vast majority do not see online filesharing as a big threat to creative industries.
A couple of the reports of the findings are a bit muddled though, and confuse ships with pirates. The New York Times reports, “artists are divided but on the whole not deeply concerned about online file-sharing. Only about half thought that sharing unauthorized copies of music and movies online should be illegal, for instance.” For instance? “Online file-sharing” and “sharing unauthorised copies of music” are not synonymous, and “only about half” contradicts “on the whole”. Don’t believe the news reports that indicate that artists are quite happy to give away the fruits of their hard work for free – Read the report for yourself.
On a related note, here's a nice review of a book that argues for restrictions of copyrights: Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity.
"The only naked creatures ... "
“The only naked creatures were the 3m bats streaming from the mouth of a cave and spectacularly blackening the sunset sky as the climax of his video Memory Bucket.” So says the Guardian about Jeremy Deller’s Turner Prize winning entry, in a piece headlined “Turner prize shock: out of four serious competitors, the best artist wins”.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)