Tony Judt illustrating the centrality of coffee as a metaphor (or maybe synecdoche) for civilisation. (thanks to Glenn Condell for the link)
Follow-up on the tsunami appeal
I’ve now received confirmation from everyone who pledged money to the tsunami appeal with a total of $2455. As I mentioned, the generosity of the cosponsors meant that the appeal raised more than twice as much as I had planned to give myself, while using only half of the money I’d allocated. I gave the rest to the UNICEF Darfur appeal.I plan another appeal on similar lines when I think the time is appropriate.
In the meantime, if you’d like to help a needy (and excellent) blogger, Gary Farber would be a worthy recipient. The topic of prioritising aid is bound to come up, so I’ll address it briefly. Most of us, even the relatively generous, give so little of our incomes in charity that the real alternative is an item of personal consumption rather than an alternative charitable object. The same is true for national governments.
My sincere thanks again to everyone who helped with this and especially to those who dug deep into their pockets.
Lessig on text and image
As I mentioned, earlier this week, I attended a Creative Commons conference at QUT in Brisbane, including the launch of the Creative Commons licence for Australia. The main speaker was Larry Lessig, who gave two papers and joined a panel discussion as well. Lessig is a great speaker with really effective presentations, a point on which I hope to post more later. There was a lot of food for thought, and I’ll start with the opening presentations
In this talk, the central idea was remix, taking bits and pieces from the existing culture and recombining them to produce something new. My summary of the core argument
- text is the past, video and audio are the future
- the set of rights surrounding text has always allowed for a lot of remix, including direct copying for fair use, parody and so on
- because of digital rights management technology and strong IP, the current trend is to suppress remix for video and audio, thereby depriving our culture of one of its historic sources of validity
Copenhagen review
Today’s Fin ReView section (subscription only) runs my review of Bjorn Lomborg’s new book. Regular readers won’t be surprised to find a lot of criticisms of the Copenhagen Consensus project that produced the book. But I found a fair bit to praise as well. The review, pretty lengthy, is over the fold. Comments appreciated.
Read More »
Weekend reflections
This regular feature is back. The idea is that, over the weekend, you should post your thoughts in a more leisurely fashion than in ordinary comments or the Monday Message Board.
Please post your thoughts on any topic, at whatever length seems appropriate to you. Civilised discussion and no coarse language, please.
Meanwhile, just across the border (crossposted at CT)
Iranians are stocking up on candy and flowers with which to bestrew invading US troops, according to Thomas Friedman who says “many young people apparently hunger for Mr. Bush to remove their despotic leaders, the way he did in Iraq.”. His evidence for this proposition is the following
n Oxford student who had just returned from research in Iran told me that young Iranians were “loving anything their government hates,” such as Mr. Bush, “and hating anything their government loves.” Tehran is festooned in “Down With America” graffiti, the student said, but when he tried to take pictures of it, the Iranian students he was with urged him not to. They said it was just put there by their government and was not how most Iranians felt.
Iran, he said, is the ultimate “red state.”
Oddly enough, when I last visited America, I met plenty of people who “love anything their government hates,” and assured me that the kind of thing I saw on Fox was not really the way most Americans felt. They didn’t feel able to confess to me that they were longing for the arrival of a Franco-German liberation army, but no doubt if I’d had the benefit of an Oxford education, I would have been able to detect their eagerness for an invasion, civil war and so on.
Weekend reflections
This regular feature is back. The idea is that, over the weekend, you should post your thoughts in a more leisurely fashion than in ordinary comments or the Monday Message Board.
Please post your thoughts on any topic, at whatever length seems appropriate to you. Civilised discussion and no coarse language, please.
New layout
Reader Nick Caldwell kindly took the trouble to supply me with an alternative layout for the blog, which I’m now testing. Unfortunately, I haven’t got the header working yet, but hopefully I can fix that soon. In the meantime, I’ll ask for comments from readers on any of
(i) The changes to the layout of the main post section
(ii) Readability problems created or resolved
(iii) Links column on left rather than right
(iv) Anything else
Update Thanks to all who’ve commented, favourably and otherwise. Some further points
1. I plead guilty to asking for more red in Nick’s original design, resulting in the terrible puce/mushroom you see now. My color intuition is woeful, I’m afraid. If anyone can suggest a better colour scheme that I can easily implement, please do so. In the meantime, I plan to go back to Nick’s original.
2. I’ve now managed to get the links to the header working, and Nick has supplied more CSS which implements Textile footnotes properly. Great!
3. I’m still not happy with the sidebar, but I definitely like the changes in the main body.
Iraq: just about time to go
The latest terrorist bombings in Iraq came closer than usual to home for Australia, with two soldiers suffering (reportedly) minor injuries in an attack on the Australian embassy[1], while 20 more innocent Iraqis were killed, adding to the tens of thousands already killed by both/all sides in this terrible war.
It’s pretty clear by now that Iraq has descended into something approaching full-scale civil war and that, as is usually the case in civil wars, the presence of foreign troops is only making things worse. But rather than arguing about this, it might be better to put it to the test. This NYT Op-ed piece by three researchers from the Center for Strategic and International Studies suggests a referendum on US withdrawal to be held soon after the forthcoming elections. They make a pretty good case that it would be hard for the insurgents to justify disrupting such a referendum, or for nationalists like Sadr to justify a boycott.
I expect such a referendum would lead to a majority vote for withdrawal. But a majority the other way would certainly be an improvement on the current situation. The only really bad outcome would be the case where the Kurds voted solidly for keeping US troops, reversing a majority vote the other way among Arab Iraqis.
fn1. Despite this event, Australia has suffered far less direct loss in Iraq than many nations who were far less deeply involved in the decision to go to war.
Creative Commons
I’ve spent most of the last couple of days at the QUT Creative Commons Conference, with Larry Lessig as the main speaker and featuring the launch of the Australian version of the Creative Commons license. I’ve got enough out of this for weeks of blogging. For the moment though I’ll just mention that there were some very interesting sessions on intellectual property rights in massively multiplayer games like Everquest. This got me thinking that, purely for research purposes, I should give one of these games a try. Fortunately, sanity returned in time. If I need another addiction to combine with blogging, I’ll go for something safe and sensible, like crack cocaine.
John Quiggin 