Elliott Hall's Blog, page 11
March 26, 2011
The Victorian Wire
A long-forgotten serial by Horatio Bucklesby Ogden is unearthed:
If at any time besides its treatment of Templeton The Wire flirts with caricature, it does so in the character of Omar Little. Yet no one would ever reduce such a monumental culmination of literary tradition, satire, and basic human desire for mythos as Omar Little by defining him as mere caricature. Little is not Dickensian. Nor is he a character in the style of Thackeray, Eliot, Trollope, or any of the most famous serialists. If he must be compared to characters in the Victorian times, he most closely resembles a creation of a Brontë; he could have come from Wuthering Heights.
Personally, I'm a bigger fan of his serials about the then brand new Metropolitan Detective Department.
March 25, 2011
Deja Vu, all over again
If Libya is giving you Iraq flashbacks, Stephen Walt has your back:
The only important intellectual difference between neoconservatives and liberal interventionists is that the former have disdain for international institutions (which they see as constraints on U.S. power), and the latter see them as a useful way to legitimate American dominance. Both groups extol the virtues of democracy, both groups believe that U.S. power — and especially its military power — can be a highly effective tool of statecraft. Both groups are deeply alarmed at the prospect that WMD might be in the hands of anybody but the United States and its closest allies, and both groups think it is America's right and responsibility to fix lots of problems all over the world. Both groups consistently over-estimate how easy it will be to do this, however, which is why each has a propensity to get us involved in conflicts where our vital interests are not engaged and that end up costing a lot more than they initially expect.
So if you're baffled by how Mr. "Change You Can Believe In" morphed into Mr. "More of the Same," you shouldn't really be surprised. George Bush left in disgrace and Barack Obama took his place, but he brought with him a group of foreign policy advisors whose basic world views were not that different from the people they were replacing. I'm not saying their attitudes were identical, but the similarities are probably more important than the areas of disagreement. Most of the U.S. foreign policy establishment has become addicted to empire, it seems, and it doesn't really matter which party happens to be occupying Pennsylvania Avenue.
I'm sure I wasn't the only one who realized how many issues were basically off the table at the last election. The Iraq invasion? Both major parties were in all the way. It's darkly hilarious when Cameron and Osborne accuse Labour of being asleep at the switch when it came to regulation (they were) when the Tories kept saying they weren't de-regulating enough. That was how the financial crisis, the biggest failure of neo-liberal ideas since the great depression, brought in a government even more committed to those ideas than the last one.
It is this consensus that threatens democracy in America (and to a lesser extent, here) far more than any of the petty tyrants we're told to be afraid of. The added dimension in America is the gigantic national security state that now answers effectively to no one. It makes politicians company men/women no matter what letter is in front of their names. That's why torture may have been outlawed, but will not be punished, guantanamo remains open, and men are still being held indefinitely without trial. There is a consensus in American elite that the country must run the world; the points of disagreement are all around when/where to throw their weight around.
Well, at least no one is talking about weapons of mass destruction:
There is no perfect formula for military intervention. It must be used sparingly — not in Bahrain or Yemen, even though we condemn the violence against protesters in both countries. Libya is a specific case: Muammar el-Qaddafi is erratic, widely reviled, armed with mustard gas and has a history of supporting terrorism. If he is allowed to crush the opposition, it would chill pro-democracy movements across the Arab world.
Oh crap.
March 23, 2011
Wednesday Exposition
March Madness: Democrats versus Dictators – FP. Cameron started in a pretty easy bracket here. Who's going to lose to a 75 year-old leader with mob ties under indictment for underage sex?
Religion may become extinct in nine nations – BBC.
We live in a dystopia built by the 1980s – Matt Taibbi He's right about the 80s being full of anti-regulatory propaganda, but Ghostbusters? It's not their fault Peck was a prick.
Rules of Misbehaviour – Washington Monthly
The problem of Libya intervention, in dialogue form. – D-Squared
And, a dancing robot io9 claims will give you nightmares:
I just think it's horribly sad, but I can't say why.
March 22, 2011
Heroism
Brian van der Brug, Los Angeles Times
For a change, here is a happy story from Japan:
Akaiwa said he was at work a few miles away when the tsunami hit, and he rushed back to find his neighborhood inundated with up to 10 feet of water. Not willing to wait until the government or any international organization did, or did not, arrive to rescue his wife of two decades — whom he had met while they were surfing in a local bay — Akaiwa got hold of some scuba gear. He then hit the water, wended his way through the debris and underwater hazards and managed to reach his house, from which he dragged his wife to safety.
That on its own is pretty amazing. Akaiwa wasn't done:
With his mother still unaccounted for several days later, Akaiwa stewed with frustration as he watched the water recede by only a foot or two. He repeatedly searched for her at City Hall and nearby evacuation centers.
Finally, on Tuesday, he waded through neck-deep water, searching the neighborhood where she'd last been seen. He found her, he said, on the second floor of a flooded house where she'd been waiting for help for four days.
Too often we only hear the word hero in relation to people being shot or blown up.
March 18, 2011
March 16, 2011
Price Fixing
This is just bizarre:
On Tuesday 1 March, several publishing offices in Europe were raided by inspectors from the European Commission.
…
The background to these raids is the agency model many big publishers have adopted to sell ebooks. Under this model, instead of selling the ebooks wholesale and allowing the retailer to set the price they charge the customers, the publisher itself sets the price of the ebooks and the retailer takes a commission. The potential problem with this arrangement is that it could, according to the EU commission statement explaining the raids, "violate EU anti-trust rules that prohibit cartels and other restrictive business practices".
If publishers are forming a cartel around price that's one thing, but what does that have to do with the Agency Model? It's how every app on the app store is sold, and I don't see them kicking down anyone's doors over that.
I disagree with Sam Jordinson that this is a return the net book agreement. In order for a cartel to work, it has to be able to restrict supply. That is precisely what publishers are now unable to do in the age of the eBook. Before eBooks you could still self-publish, but you really needed a known publisher in order to have any chance of being stocked in bookstores. The same thing went for music, and the industry used that leverage to fix CD prices.
With Kindle and iBooks, people have been publishing books themselves, in the exact same forum that Random House and Hodder use. Jordison accidentally makes this point himself, by pointing out that people are selling eBooks for £0.99 on Kindle.
What makes this even more strange is that price fixing was already going on:
Until the agency model was imposed, Amazon had been setting a $9.99 (£6) standard price for new bestsellers in the US and discounting the Kindle editions of some of last autumn's UK bestsellers by as much as 72%. Amazon, the ebook pioneer that makes the Kindle reading platform, unsurprisingly dislikes the agency model. The OFT said it had received "significant" complaints but did not name the sources.
I honestly do not understand how Amazon imposing a single, uniform price on all bestsellers isn't price-fixing, but publishers deciding what to charge for their books is. The extra skullduggery is the OFT complaints, which people expect was Amazon dropping a dime on some troublesome publishers. It's no surprise they don't like the Agency Model: it would prevent them from doing things like deeply discounting bestsellers. Amazon was basically forcing publishers to lower prices on its bestselling books in order to gain market share for the Kindle.
I don't know who's going to come out ahead in court, but it's safe to say no one will emerge covered in glory.
