The Problems of “Privilege”: Lessons from the French Revolution – Quillette.
Interesting comparison. Interesting conclusion: this discussion occurs when the privileged class (in this case, white males, in the French Revolutionary precedent, noblemen) has less power than it did.
The Trump Administration’s Power Over a Pregnant Girl https://nyti.ms/2zpcI1g
This is a truly disgusting abuse of Federal power. The apparatus of government has been coopted by lunatic ideologues. This is the flip side of government mandated eugenics.
Shouldn’t need to be reminded, but there we are.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/10/the-aclu-should-keep-representing-deplorables/
Two things:
Ian sent me this: https://gizmodo.com/us-homeland-security-will-start-collecting-social-media-1818777094. DHS says they’ve been doing this for a while, just thought they should get it clear on the record.
And, the new guy in the Senate: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/09/the-muted-gop-response-to-roy-moores-anti-muslim-prejudice/541461/. I assumed he’d be completely ineffective, a crazy hand-grenade that wouldn’t be able to do anything in the Senate except go off at a tangent.
Wrong again.
It’s my birthday today. I wasn’t feeling particularly celebratory: I’m going to NZ in a couple of weeks to visit my parents and try to arrange a rest home for Dad, so I’m wading through pamphlets, websites and forms; Mum said he’s practically catatonic most of the time, and he’s become totally paranoid; I’ve got to put the gutters back up before the rains become constant; people are waiting on me for things at work; and this morning Shelley found out that her Mum has gone into hospice and stopped eating. She’s been worrying all day and making plans to go to MT.
But we had tickets to see a musician tonight at DjangoFest, Eric Vanderbilt-Mathews, a guy that I’ve known since he was in middle school, one of the best musicians I know, so we roused ourselves and went out. In the reception area, I kept running into people wishing me a happy birthday, people I wouldn’t have expected to know I had a birthday. We took our seats, and in a few minutes one of the staff came around with an envelope to “Robert Marsanyi in seat C5”. I opened it, and it was a birthday card with every scrap of space signed by people in the audience: friends, people I knew, people I didn’t know, masses of people. I brightened up, and settled in to listen to a truly beautiful set.
Eric put together an unusual quartet: acoustic guitar, piano, bass, winds. In a lot of situations, the piano and guitar would be fighting, but as the set unfolded it made sense. The tunes were selected from Django, bop, originals. The pianist, a monster player with a light touch, played a traditional bop role, interjecting with complex harmonies with the occasional stride, and he also doubled as a secondary melody instrument in the role of a trumpet or second saxophone. The guitarist played traditional Django-style rhythm and soloed in the same style. Monk with a rhythm guitar carrying the beat. Django with bop rhythmic interjections. A Dolphy tune over the Django guitar, with piano and saxophone both starting their soli from the same phrase. The bass player held it all together, and Eric floated over the top.
So, in a good mood at the end of the set. At which point, I hear Eric’s Dad call out over the audience applause “Happy Birthday, Robert!”
Chris Guillebeau writes:
What If All Your Work Disappeared At the End of the Day? : The Art of Non-Conformity.
No comments section, so I thought I’d respond here: what he describes in his blog post is why I was a musician. The attraction of music and other performance art for me was precisely the ephemeral nature of the work. You perform it for a group of people, it goes up into the air and disappears, and just leaves some sort of impression that might last anywhere from a few minutes to the rest of someone’s life. Recorded music, on the other hand, is really a whole different art form, revolving around permanent artifacts that can be revisited, like painting, literature (the analogy might be to conversation) or (especially) photography.
When I wrote music, I started with the distinction between recorded music and performed music. Quite different ways to work.
2008 or so: Iran, declaring itself the enemy of the US is building a nuclear weapons capability. The US administration under Obama gathers a coalition of like-minded nations and imposes sanctions, then offers negotiation with the opposing government. A deal is hammered out over years, with the result that Iran stops building its offensive weaponry.
Candidate Donald Trump and the Republican Party declare that the deal is terrible for the US. Trump swears to rip it up and start over when he’s president, because he’s famously good at negotiating deals.
2017: North Korea, declaring itself the enemy of the US is building a nuclear weapons capability. The US administration under President Trump resorts to yelling at the North Koreans and whining that other states (China) haven’t done their utmost. Tension rises. No negotiations under way.
What happened to the Great Negotiator?
The idea of an economy posited on recognition is not new, but I found an interesting description of a precedent: scientific research. In Chapter 8 of “The wisdom of crowds”, James Surowiecki described the publication of the first issue of the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions, wherein the editor worked to persuade scientists to forgo sole ownership of ideas hatched in secret in exchange for recognition amongst one’s peers. This was a radical change from the way discovery and invention had been carried out in the Middle Ages, where it was confined “to a secretive exclusive few”. He makes the point that this was possible because of the near-zero-cost nature of replication of scientific knowledge. Unlike physical things of the time, copies of knowledge were effectively cost-free.
As many have noticed, lots of things are becoming cost-free to replicate. So what has worked so well for science could well work for other fields, and that’s what we see in, for example, the open-source software world where people work for reputation. The missing element which is just starting to happen is the institutional support that recognizes the ultimate commercial value in such work. Large companies are seeing the value in reusing chunks of other people’s work, and in releasing chunks of their own employee’s labors to the public domain, often simply in exchange for attribution.
As more and more human artifacts become amenable to zero-cost replication, the idea of the reputation economy becomes more relevant.
Ian pointed out that congestion pricing unfairly advantages the wealthy. But what if the money were used to benefit those who couldn’t afford the toll? For example, by paying for better public transit?