(Notes on) Politics, Theory & Photography

Farewell

2014-09-24T00:00:00.000-05:00

I started this blog on September 24th 2005. That is just over 3700 posts ago. The intervening years have - in personal terms - alternated between the worst and the best of my life. And the blog, and especially you readers, has been helpful as I navigated all that. I have met many, many smart and kind people here virtually all virtually. I thank you all for dropping by. For the past year or so, however, I have found it increasingly difficult to devote time to this enterprise. So I have decided to stop altogether. I hope to keep writing about photography and politics elsewhere. But at the moment I'm on my way the store to pick up the moth balls.

THE END

Rick Lowe - Project Row Houses (aka MacArthur Fellow, 2014)

2014-09-17T21:15:00.003-05:00

Quite some time ago I posted here on a brilliant, inspiring public art project in Houston called Project Row Houses. The project is coordinated by a man named Rick Lowe who, today, was named a 2014 MacArthur Fellow.He is a member of a ridiculously impressive "class" of recipients. These fellowships typically go to immensely smart, dedicated people. But their real function, I think, is to remind us of the wonderfully rich intellectual and creative ecology here in the U.S.; that is a dimension of the society that we can easily overlook.

Local Event - UofR Roundtable Sponsired by Frederick Douglass Institute

2014-09-15T13:05:00.003-05:00

This ought to be a provocative event! Highly recommended. More information here.

Mark Your Calander

2014-09-15T12:29:00.001-05:00

PeoplesClimateMarch.org - NYC

Digest

2014-09-14T12:00:00.003-05:00

This morning 3AM Magazine published this provocative assessment by philosopher Alex Rosenberg of Paul Krugman's views on .... well, economics.

Of late, economists have been worrying about capitalism, democracy and threats the former poses to the latter. You can read Robert Schiller 's concerns here, Joseph Stiglitz's here and Dani Rodrik's here. All at Project Syndicate.

On a lighter, but no less pointed, note The Yes Men have a new movie out you can find a review here.

Apparently, not all politicians are craven knuckleheads. As evidence for the seemingly preposterous claim, here at The New Statesman is the text of a speech (on 'Freedom & the Left') that Lisa Nandy (Labour MP - Wigan) recently delivered.

Finally two recent pieces on jazz and its cultural resonance in the U.S.; neither is persuasive to me. But this is a hard subject to sort out .... first, this dire assessment at WaPo last weekend .... then this only modestly well-targeted reply at Jacobin.

40 Movies about photography every photographer should watch

2014-09-11T20:40:00.001-05:00

You can find the list here.

Coase, Reclining

2014-09-08T20:04:00.000-05:00

Nerd alert: I have a post at The Monkey Cage, a bog of political science research (broadly construed) that is hosted by The Washington Post. You can find it here. It is only nominally about the recently newsworthy conflicts between recliners and reclined upon among passengers on domestic U.S. flights. It is really about the willful mis-use of social science research by libertarians. In this case, Josh Barro, writing in The New York Times, invoked "the Coase theorem" to rationalize his personal boorishness. He did so in ways that more or less completely distort what Coase actually claims. And his claim is just a small scale instance of the sort of boorish, venal policies that libertarians often promote.

Torture Images ... in Court

2014-09-07T12:31:00.001-05:00

The punch line from this editorial at The New York Times last weekend regarding legal disputes over access to photos of personnel from the U.S. military (and, I suspect, our 'intelligence community') torturing detainees.

"Images of war are frequently appalling, and the safety of American citizens and soldiers is vitally important. But the greatest threat to that safety lies not in the photographs of horrific behavior; it lies in the fact of the behavior itself. The treatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere was a shameful episode in U.S. history."

Markets, Copyright, Photography

2014-09-06T14:33:00.005-05:00

As, I've noted here before, Vivian Maier's work is astonishing. And now it is being bound up in legal knots by a bunch of men who never met her. You can get details here at The New York Times. I suspect nothing good will come of this.

Lies White Men Tell About Black Men Shot Dead by the Police

2014-09-06T11:34:00.003-05:00

The Police Chief in Ferguson, Thomas Jackson, released to the press tapes of a supposed robbery that Michael Brown had allegedly perpetrated. Well the store owner didn't report any such event. And, it turns out, the Chief lied about having received FOI requests for the tape. No such requests are on record. Here is Chief Jackson:

And then there is the campaign, started by Chicago Firefighter Kevin O'Grady, to convict Brown on social media for putatively attacking the officer who shot him dead. There is the picture of a man, allegedly officer Darren Wilson, in a hospital bed seemingly badly beaten. Well, the man is the picture is not Darren Wilson. And, of course, there are eye-witness accounts suggesting that Brown never attacked Wilson at all. Here is Mr. O'Grady:

And, of course, there is the line of distortion, pursued by conservative blogger Charles Johnson (no relation!), suggesting that Brown was a thug with a ongoing record of serious criminal behavior - except that is false too. Here is Charles Johnson:

Let's set aside the inconvenient fact that even if all the allegations leveled by Jackson, O'Grady and Johnson were true, none is a capital offense. A young black man is dead. Senselessly. And white men have mounted concerted efforts to speak ill of him. Could any of this be blatant racism?

Passings ~ Roger Mayne (1929-2014)

2014-09-05T14:12:00.001-05:00

I missed this last spring, but The British Journal of Photography has noted the death of Roger Mayne.

The Coase "Theorem" in Real Life ...

2014-08-27T12:26:00.000-05:00

At The New York Times today, Josh Barro offers this good example of the temdency to mistake "models" for real life. (I will overlook the fact that the Coase Theorem is not one - meaning not a theorem.)

But let's embrace Barro's conceit. Two problems:

(1) The good Mr. Barro assumes well-defined property rights here. (actually, he mistakenly asserts that they are well defined.) As the reclined upon, I am not just "bothered" by his reclining. I arguably have purchased a property right to the space my lower extremities occupy. And his reclining infringes my property right. (Here I am just stating the converse of Barro's claim that he has a property right to the recline function.)

And (2) Coase assumes NO transaction costs, no "low" ones.

At this point I'd almost be willing to pay Barro to zip it! If you are going to pose as social science literate, please at least try to get things right.

Freedom to Assemble

2014-08-23T10:38:00.001-05:00

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Too often complaints about how government agencies violate the first amendment there is a narrow focus on 'free speech' to the exclusion of concern for the right to "peaceably ... assemble." I've said this here before. This report from the ACLU has that quality. It concludes: "Our words, our voices, and our pictures are the most devastating weapons of all to entrenched systems of injustice." What about our collective presence?

Throwing Like a Girl?

2014-08-21T22:01:00.000-05:00

I have been keeping this blog for quite a while. Very early on I posted this comment, noting the death of political theorist Iris Marion Young. I remarked at the time that the title of one of Iris's essays "Throwing Like a Girl" seemed to capture her personality quite well. I suspect that the cover photo for SI this week would have pleased Iris no end.

The Right to Take Photographs (Yet Another in a Recurring Series)

2014-08-21T09:35:00.001-05:00

I have posted here multiple times on this and related themes. But given the arrest of journalists in Ferguson and the general attitude of law enforcement regarding constitutionally protected rights, it is important to be clear about those rights. This post from the ACLU underscores the rights of citizens (professional photographers or not!) to make images in public places - including images of law enforcement performing their "duties." This is common knowledge that law enforcement likes to ignore.

James Foley

2014-08-19T20:40:00.001-05:00

The Gawker reports here that an American photojournalist, James Foley, has been executed (beheaded) by ISIS in response to recent U.S. military activities in Iraq.You can find another report here at The New York Times.

Local Event(s) @ Writers & Books: Diane Ravitch

2014-08-16T10:48:00.001-05:00

Writers and Books is running this reading group this fall, focusing on a recent book by education historian Diane Ravitch. An accomplished historian of education and vigorous critic of what currently passes for education reform in the U.S., Ravitch is extremely provocative in large part because she is relatively conservative and once was an advocate of many of the reforms she now objects to. Her change in mind came from actually looking at the evidence!

Digest

2014-08-14T20:47:00.002-05:00

(1) A reminder for the local officials in Ferguson, MO (and their repressive counterparts in all the other cities and towns like Ferguson): not just religion and speech, but peaceable assembly and petitioning for redress are constitutionally protected.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

(2) Here is a brief reflection from Raymond Geuss on his early book The Idea of Critical Theory.

(3) At The Nation symposium of short interventions on the importance of gender in thinking about political-economic inequality.

(4) A Project Syndicate essay by Dani Rodrik underscoring how insidious consensus among economists can be.

(5) Finally, this essay from The Atlantic on Jane Austin and Adam Smith ... no, they're not an item.

Censorship American Style

2014-08-13T14:40:00.002-05:00

So, this afternoon I am sitting on the floor playing with Esme and listening to The World Cafe on NPR. David Dye plays Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side" where the second verse goes like this:

"Candy came from out on the Island
In the back room she was everybody's darling
But she never lost her head
Even when she was giving [SILENCE]
She says, 'Hey, babe,
Take a walk on the wild side.'"

And I think "Are you kidding me? Are we supposed to not notice?" Did anyone else notice? I am sure that this slight of ear was taken in order to avoid transgressing this or that FCC regulation concerning naughty talk on the radio. In other words it was taken in order to keep the censors happy. Walk on the Wild Side Indeed!

Mathematics & Beauty

2014-08-13T11:11:00.002-05:00

As The Guardian reports Maryam Mirzakhani, an Iranian born mathematician now teaching at Stanford is the first woman to ever win the Fields Medal. This is a milestone for the discipline, obviously. But it is an opportunity to underscore a point Hilary Putnam makes in The Collapse of the Fact Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (Harvard UP, 2004), namely that, despite popular misconceptions, scientific inquiry is shot through with values and that the latter is not a homogenous category. Consider what Mirzakhani says in this 2008 interview:

"I don’t think that everyone should become a mathematician, but I do believe that many students don’t give mathematics a real chance. I did poorly in math for a couple of years in middle school; I was just not interested in thinking about it. I can see that without being excited mathematics can look pointless and cold. The beauty of mathematics only shows itself to more patient followers."

Beauty, of course, is an aesthetic value. And here Mirzakhani seems to be making it a central characteristic of mathematics and an animating reason for her intellectual pursuits.

Parchment Barriers

2014-08-12T13:55:00.000-05:00

This report from The Daily News is good news. However, I suspect the real problem is that the police already know what the memo lays out - namely, that citizens have a constitutionally protected right to photograph police operations so long as they do not interfere with those operations - but they simply do not give a hoot. Whether they ignore our rights blatantly or trump up reasons why the photographer is or might be interfering, the officers find ways to prevent images of their interactions with the public.

Libertarian Fantasy Indeed!

2014-08-11T11:44:00.000-05:00

Paul Krugman has written this column at The New York Times aiming to deflate this credulous story about the flourishing of libertarianism that appeared in the newspaper's magazine this past weekend.
He is, however, far too kind in at least one respect. It is not just that free markets can't solve all our problems. As Jack Knight and I have argued for many years* - we cannot rely on the various market mimicking decentralized solutions (Coasian bargaining, community, incentive compatible mechanisms, etc.) that libertarians peddle for much either. Why? The models that suggest otherwise tend to rely on incredibly restrictive assumptions. In some instances the underlying mechanism the models invoke operate a cross purposes. Conversely, as Tim Besley has recently argued**, the well known difficulties underscored by principle-agent models in no way sanction any wholesale reliance on decentralized solutions either. So, while Krugman makes his point on the basis of homely examples, there is good reason in theory to think his conclusions are quite general.
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* See our paper in APSR (2007) and the book length version The Priority of Democracy: Political Consequences of Pragmatism (Princeton, 2011).
** See Tim Besley. Principled Agents? The Political Economy of Good Government (Oxford 2007). I recommend reading the final couple of paragraphs first, then working through the book from the beginning.

Selling Sex

2014-08-10T20:57:00.003-05:00

A couple of pieces from The Economist - here and here - on how the internet is making prostitution safer and more profitable. Maybe. But even The Economist acknowledges that as many as 20% of prostitutes work the streets. So those women remain at high risk. And, of course, the question remains as to how women who do advertise and coordinate liaisons on line are pressed into service in the first place. Here is a bit of an antidote. A plausible market requires that participants are parametric - meaning that no one can influence the choices others make. So why people buy and sell sex, we surely don't have markets for sex now. It is unlikely that the internet will do much to change that.

War Photography - The Impact of Images?

2014-08-09T19:48:00.002-05:00

"It’s hard to calculate the consequences of a photograph’s absence. But sanitized images of warfare, The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf argues, make it “easier … to accept bloodless language” such as 1991 references to “surgical strikes” or modern-day terminology like “kinetic warfare.” The Vietnam War, in contrast, was notable for its catalog of chilling and iconic war photography. Some images, like Ron Haeberle’s pictures of the My Lai massacre, were initially kept from the public, but other violent images—Nick Ut’s scene of child napalm victims and Eddie Adams’s photo of a Vietcong man’s execution —won Pulitzer Prizes and had a tremendous impact on the outcome of the war."*

I can understand how the My Lai images could've impacted the prosecution of the war as evidence in or impetus to a legal proceeding. But I regularly here people say that the Ut and Adams images had a major impact on the prosecution of the war. How? I'd like to be persuaded. But I'd also like to have some way of justifying the claim. Did those images impact public opinion in a discernible way? Did they simply scare elected officials who thought they might lose their jobs for supporting (or not opposing) the war?

I happen to agree with Friedersdorf's claim about diffuse consequences for public discourse. But the more specific claim about the Vietnam images , while maybe plausible, seems under-supported. (note that the latter claim is empirical and causal.)

If we cannot cash out the claim that actual images have impact on politics, it is difficult - maybe impossible - to think how we can make the counter-factual case - namely that withholding images somehow has a specific impact.
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* This is a passage from this important piece at The Atlantic.

From Animal Rights to Animal Copyright? Sounds like Monkey Business to Me.

2014-08-06T21:21:00.000-05:00

At The Guardian we have this missive, an intervention in the ongoing debate over who, if anyone, holds, or even can hold, copyright to this image: