The Winter Palace, and after (crossposted at CT)

John Quiggin71 Comments

Now seems as good a time as any to mark the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution of 1905. This upsurge of revolt against Czarism was the occasion of some of the most tragic and inspiring scenes in the revolutionary drama: the “Bloody Sunday” march to the Winter Palace, Trotsky’s leadership of the St. Petersburg Soviet and the Potemkin mutiny. The revolution seemed likely to prove successful when the government agreed to a parliamentary constitution (October 17 in the Julian calendar), but once the threat was over, the autocracy reasserted itself, and the Duma was reduced to a talking shop. Less than 10 years later, the Czarists took Russia into the Great War, leading directly to nearly two million deaths and indirectly to many more.

The lesson drawn by many was that peaceful reform was hopeless: this inevitably pushed the most determined revolutionaries, Lenin and the Bolsheviks to the fore, and for much of the 20th century, they appeared to many to have history on their side. After 100 years, however, it is as clear as any historical fact can be that Bolshevism (or, perhaps more accurately, Leninism) has been a complete and catastrophic failure.
Read More »

Doors opening and closing

John Quiggin

Last night I had the great idea of using Blogpulse trend to look at what had happened to the influence of NY Times columnists since the introduction of Times Select. But these days, it’s difficult to have a really original idea (or maybe just easier to verify unoriginality), and it turns out that Kos beat me to this one a couple of days ago. Anyway I’ve done the work, so here are the results for the last six months on
krugman or “frank rich” or “tom friedman” or “bob herbert” or “david brooks”
200510151619220Poylk5U729O49Uf2Twj

The month or so since Times Select came in isn’t unprecedentedly low (there was a similar low patch in June), but blog interest in the NYT certainly appears to have fallen off, as you would expect. And at least some of the recent posts are the tail of the discussion about TS itself, visible as a spike in mid-September.

Meanwhile, AOL has abandoned its decade-old attempt to create a walled garden of pay-only content (and therefore gets a much-coveted link from this blog).

Rationality repost

John Quiggin20 Comments

Discussion of game theory inevitably brings up the question of whether game theory relies on an assumption of rational behavior, and, if so, whether this is a weakness or a strength. Rather than respond, I thought I’d dig up this old post from my long-abandoned (but still planned-to-be-revived-one-day) Word for Wednesday series.

Shorter JQ: the word ‘rational’ has no meaning that cannot better be conveyed by some alternative term. Avoid it.
Read More »

Web 2.1

John Quiggin2 Comments

Those who follow buzzwords will have seen lots of references lately to Web 2.0. This is the new collaborative interweb, symbolised by the transition from (more-or-less static) personal websites to blogging (other examples are Flickr, Wikipedia and so on).

I’ve always wanted to coin a buzzword of my own, so my idea was Web 2.1. Being the .1 version, this would actually work. Links wouldn’t rot, spammers would be automagically repelled, comments wouldn’t vanish into some ethereal sub-realm of the database and so on.

But, of course, I was too slow. A month ago, this would have been an original idea, but Google already shows 65000 hits for “Web 2.1”, and a fair few of the first 100 are playing variants on the same riff. Here’s a link from Ozplogger Trevor Cook

Anonymous comment safe

John Quiggin28 Comments

I just received the report of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters Inquiry into the Conduct of the 2004 Federal Election and Matters Related Thereto. Uniquely in my long experience of making submissions to such committees, all my main arguments were accepted, and embodied in recommendations of a report, with no dissent[1]. My main concern was to protect bloggers from being required to give their names and addresses and those of commenters. I argued that only paid advertisements should be subject to this requirement, and the committee agreed.

My post and submission here
A supplementary submission here
The Committee report here

Update I failed to recognise William Bowe, also quoted in the report as fellow-blogger The Poll Bludger. Well done! He has some comments on the Committee’s proposals for electoral reform here. See also Oz Politics and the Aussie WordPress blog.

fn1. There were as usual, majority and minority reports, with disagreements on topics like compulsory voting and four year terms, of which more I hope. But there was no disagreement on the issues raised in my submission.

Earthquake appeals

John Quiggin2 Comments

There are now plenty of opportunities to help those affected by the earthquake in Pakistan. You can donate to the Oxfam appeal here, for example. I’m not going to run a special appeal this time, but if anyone wants to give suggestions for future activities of this kind that would be great. In the meantime, please give generously.