Phoning It In

Wednesday, 12 February 2003

Despite my best intentions, my personal musings on whether a war on Iraq will be a just war have stalled, so today's installment on the issue of right intention has been held up. There are a lot of events to catch up on, particularly with the prolific posting that's been going on in the Blogmos lately so it may take a few days, especially as I have to spend a lot of time right now writing this sort of thing:

$s =~ s/\s+/ /g;

In the meantime, here are a few interesting bits of reading from other sites.

Tom Frame, Anglican Bishop to the Australian Defence Force applies the just war doctrine to the war on Iraq in yesterday's Oz. Strangely, he comes to the opposite conclusion to the one I'm increasingly drawn to: maybe as I get further through the series I'll come to agree with him.

From Slacktivist via Pedantry a former US president comments on the war powers of the US presidency.

From Life Sciences Network via Bizarre Science the latest weapon in the war of words on genetic modification: celebrity scientist gossip. When I read stuff like this I have to forcefully remind myself that I'm an agnostic on the basic science of genetic modification, give or take Barry Commoner's arguments which are "refuted" here.

And over at you-know-where, you-know-who has accumulated a great deal of reliable anecdotal evidence for his latest "bike-shed" theory of the possible origins of youthful leftism.

Throwaway Ideas No. 1 and 2

Monday, 10 February 2003

It's been a while since I've dropped in to Dissecting Leftism, John Ray's continuing inquiry into the psychological and social origins of the virulent social disease of Leftism. Apparently, he's had a fair bit of correspondence on this subject, with several like-witted readers e-mailing their own theories of the origins of Leftism, ranging from family environment to, most recently, the assertion that it's easier for a young man to get a root out of a left-wing woman.

This sort of thing invites speculation on the social and psychological origins of conservatism, especially during bouts of insomnia. During last night's, I started to wonder about the childhood influences which might guide the (allegedly normal) progression from a soft-headed, sentimental (and possibly libidinous) attachment to left-wing beliefs in early adulthood to a more conservative, libertarian senility. I think the key is in those incidents one sometimes sees in the supermarket where a toddler throws a tantrum when mum tells the check-out operator that she doesn't want the Kinder Surprise that junior has surreptitiously slipped into the supermarket trolley.

To put it bluntly, the more successful you were as a child in getting your way through obnoxious behaviour, the more likely you are in later life to adopt an unconditional belief that the protection of your personal freedom of action is the most important political value, and to resent to the point of moral outrage any government limitation on your ability to get your way through similar obnoxiousness. The more often your parents rewarded bad behaviour by giving you what you wanted, the more likely it is that you will be attracted to a political ideology which asserts your right to be rewarded for bad behaviour.

There is an easily foreseen objection to this theory: there are bound to be conservatives out there who will maintain, very sincerely, that their childhood was nothing like that described. For these critics I have but two words: selective memory. Some younger conservatives might resort to checking their recollections of a well-behaved childhood with their parents but these (especially rusted-on Randroids) should bear in mind that their parents' testimony that they were pretty normal kids should be taken with a grain of salt, given that their failure to instil a proper sense of community in their spawn is strong evidence of parental ineptitude.

This theory of the childhood origins of rightism has at least as much to reccommend it as psycho-social theories of the origins of leftism: it is equally rigorous, has the same solid basis in fact and makes exactly the same contribution to intelligent political debate. The only fault I can find with this post is that it's 49 days too early.

More on "l33t gm haxors?"

Friday, 7 February 2003

The downside of having a comments facility is that you often discover that no-one is anywhere near being half as interested in your current hobby-horse as you are. The upside is that occasionally someone drops in and leaves a comment which leads you to another interesting blog. Here are a couple: firstly (and long overdue) Boynton, for those times when all the heavy political stuff is too hard to take. Secondly, Scott Martens' Pedantry. Scott has provided a long comment on my l33t gm haxors? post, with a link to this interesting bucketing of the bad science involved in genetic engineering. He's also covered the topic, in more depth than I, in this blog. It's tempting to skip the social commentary and start in on the science - on the other hand there's no reason why I shouldn't do both occasionally.

l33t gm haxors?

Friday, 7 February 2003

How do you convince people that genetic modification (GM) is a good thing? Richard Dawkins evidently believes that you do it by telling them that the opponents of GM are luddites who don't get it but that their children probably will. Genes, he says, are just like software subroutines so, although there are a lot of Luddites whose gut hostility to GM is based on ignorance, their children, who understand computer software much better than their parents, will easily recognise the resemblance and welcome it.

Dawkins develops his argument with the analogy of a rocket guidance system developed by lifting sub-routines from (say) a financial spreadsheet program. If the rocket guidance system needs a sub-routine that calculates square roots and the financial package has one, why not just lift it from the latter and paste it into the former? A square root is a square root is a square root after all. Dawkins admits that this analogy is a little unfair: suppose the routine to be lifted comes close to doing what the guidance system requires, but isn't quite right. All we need do then is to tweak the routine a little. And we can do the same with genes.

At this point, experienced computer programmers might note that Dawkins' doesn't understand computer programming as well as he understands genetics.

It's unlikely that a rocket guidance system would be written in the casual way that he suggests. However, a lot of other software has been. Especially on the Internet. If you're building a reel kewl website for the Nar-Nar-Goon Chapter of the Satanic Knights of Death Metal and Quake Arena with a message board and other kewl stuff, there are plenty of places where you can find free CGI stuff. In a few months, when the site goes irretrievably pear-shaped, it won't be your fault: it will be the fault of the idiot who wrote the form to E-Mail script and those bastards in the Perl newsgroup who keep saying "RTFM" when you ask how to fix it.

My generation isn't without fault here either: many of us have wreaked havoc on corporate IT budgets with the help of certain Windows based programming tools, encouraged by the attitude that professionalism means being paid a lot of money and wearing a suit to work.

Considering this, Dawkins' casual assurance that GM isn't very different to computer programming is more a case for Luddism, rather than a case against. I doubt that he is seriously suggesting that GM is going to be applied as carelessly and ineptly as the creation of the website of the N-N-GCSKDMQA but, if he is, I'm with the Luddites.

Technical Problems

Thursday, 6 February 2003

I agree with Ken. Haloscan is sucking harder than a Dyson today, so it's pretty much comment at your own risk. At the slight risk of a rapid influx of derogatory e-mail, use the "Contact the Crew" link instead. That at least is reliable, although I may not be when it comes to responding (sometimes I forget these things).

Update (Friday, 7 February): Haloscan appears to be back on line, give or take one or two lost comments.

The Whackiest Little Constitutional Monarchy in the West

Wednesday, 5 February 2003

(Part 2 of my "just war" series. Part 1 is here).

Before I start on the issue of proper authority in this personal inquiry into whether a war on Iraq would be a just war it's important to state an important reservation about this criterion. It can be best expressed by posing the question, do the people of Iraq have the "proper authority" to engage in a civil war to overthrow Saddam Hussein? This is quite separate from the question of whether they have just cause (to which the answer is an unqualified yes): the question is concerned very specifically with the conduct of politics (in this case by revolutionary means) and who is entitled to make the decision to take a nation, or group of nations, to war. In the case of a civil war or insurrection, there is an obvious problem if we define "proper authority" so narrowly as to rule out revolution when it is the only means to get rid of an oppressive government. We cannot avoid the difficulties this presents by making an arbitrary distinction between the hypothetical Iraqi revolution and a declaration of war between states: if proper authority is an issue in the first case, it remains in issue in the second.

So it's tempting to dispense with considering whether a war on Iraq is "properly authorised" or at least put it into the too hard basket to be considered at some indeterminate future date. This temptation is especially strong now that Parliament is sitting and there has been some opportunity for the issues to be debated there: any question of "proper authority" in the Australian context appears to be moot in the current circumstances. But here I'm getting ahead of myself. First we need to be clear on what questions we'll be addressing under the head of proper authority.

There are only two: one is the question of whether the US and its allies can be considered to be acting with proper authority if they act without UN sanction, the other is whether the Australian government can be considered to have acted with proper authority in its actions in support of the US so far. On the first question, 76% of the Australian public says no, but to rely on the opinion polling is to make a lazy argument or not to make an argument at all. At issue is where the proper authority resides if it does not reside in the UN. And does it reside in the UN in the first place?

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The US position on the UN (and eo ipso John Howard's position) is that the UN's authority in this issue, and on future issues of world politics, will be compromised, possibly fatally, if the Security Council does not come up with a resolution which satisfies "our" requirement for firm action to deal with disarming Saddam Hussein. The UN is in a lose-lose situation: if the Security Council does not deliver a resolution which satisfies the US, its authority is compromised. If it does deliver such a resolution its independence is compromised in the eyes of other states. In either case, US and Australian policy and conduct has made it clear that the UN's authority depends on it doing the right thing. So proper authority has been transferred somewhere else the most likely location being 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Leaving aside the mystery of who has proper authority to disarm rogue states (fundamentally this question is now unanswerable), let's move to the issue of domestic decision making. Much of what I originally intended to say on this subject has been overtaken by events in Parliament but there's still a lot that remains relevant with an effort to bring it up to date.

In the case of the US, it's clear that George Bush does have the proper authority to take his nation to war, if that is what is required to achieve the US' strategic objectives in Iraq. He has been authorised to exercise the President's war powers by the US Congress (unless my memory of the Congressional debate on the subject is a confabulation). There is a stark contrast here with the way John Howard has pursued his policy on Iraq and the way that policy has been put into effect.

John Howard is not a President: he is a Prime Minister. Unlike George Bush, who exercises executive power by right of his office, John Howard does so firstly with the agreement of Cabinet and secondly by consent of Parliament. In practical terms, the consent of Parliament belongs to whoever has the majority in the House of Representatives however this should not distract us from the constitutional and political basis of Prime Ministerial authority. John Howard was not elected Prime Minister by the electorate, the Liberal party was elected into Government with John Howard as their leader. Although it has become a commonplace of Australian politics that elections have become a presidential style contest between the leaders of the two major parties it would be muddle-headed to believe that the office of Prime Minister is equivalent to the office of US President. From John Howard's behaviour on the issue of Iraq one could be forgiven for concluding that he has become a little muddle-headed.

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Howard's political strategy on Iraq is to insist that in taking us to war he will be doing the right thing and attempt to draw public opinion along with him. Public opinion, as usual, means the opinion polls and possibly the Sydney talk-back radio audiences. I don't need Ken Parish to tell me that the Australian Constitution makes no provision for any authority - executive, legislative or judicial - to be vested in the Morgan Gallup Polls or Saulwick Age Poll organisations or in Sydney radio station 2UE. As Ken has noted in Declaring War the power to declare war is vested in the executive through section 61 of the Constitution which transfers the royal prerogative to the executive and section 68 which makes the Governor-General commander in chief of the armed forces. Ken has also covered Australia's history of involvement in war, starting with World War 1. From the point of view of democratic process, it's a poor record: two wars entered by default (both World Wars) as a consequence of England declaring war and a number of police actions (such as the Korean war) entered without a formal declaration of war at all. What Australia lacks, in political practice, is experience in conducting Parliamentary debate on the decision to deploy military forces.

When there is bipartisan support for the deployment - as happened in the first Gulf War in 1991 and in the deployment of troops to East Timor, this may not be seen as a serious issue. It may be seen as a case of Parliament rubber-stamping an executive decision. However even then, oppositions might have valid concerns about the manner in which a deployment (or to use the current vogue term "pre-deployment") is carried out. Responding to Bob Hawke's announcement in Parliament of his government's decision to send ships of the RAN to the Persian Gulf, then opposition leader John Hewson said:

... we have been concerned at some of the processes whereby the Government has determined its response to this crisis. The Opposition believes that the prospects for building a national consensus on this decision would have been enhanced if the Government had seen fit to consult the Opposition on it. The Government has not consulted the Opposition once on Australia's response since the crisis arose; nor has the Prime Minister been in touch with me informally. I regret that this has been the case because I believe that it makes it more difficult to build on this issue the bipartisanship which the Opposition wants to promote. [my emphasis]

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As a naive democrat, I believe there is more at stake here than building bipartisan or broad public support for government-determined military action. The fundamental question is that of the relationship between the citizen and government. When Parliament is divided on an issue as important as the use of military force and when public opinion is reluctant to see it used it is crucial that every effort be made to arrive at a decision which will be accepted as a legitimate exercise of government authority. This is not achieved by a back-door pre-deployment followed by a round of the spin-doctors: it is achieved by a resolution of Parliament.

If the 1999 Republic referendum had not left us as a "constitutional monarchy" this situation would be bizarre. Howard's way of taking us towards a possible war relies either on the arbitrary exercise of the royal prerogative transferred to the Executive under Section 61 of the Constitution or the command in chief of the armed forces under Section 68. It may be an impeccably conservative approach but it is not a democratic one - and no amount of pulling us along after the event will make up for that. We have been presented with the paradox of a democratically elected government acting in the manner of an absolute monarch, in a country where the role of the monarch is generally considered symbolic and ceremonial. L'Etat c'est le Premier Ministre.

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Confusion Reigns

Wednesday, 5 February 2003

After checking out the Oz today, I can't resist taking time out from writing episode 2 of my just war series to comment on today's article by my favourite hero-columnist. It begins thus:

FORGET Iraq for a moment. Australia would not commit troops to a war just because the UN told us to. We would decide the case for war ourselves. Come back to Iraq. The logic is strangely different. The Australian's Newspoll yesterday revealed that most Australians will blindly defer to the UN. Seventy-five per cent agree that Saddam Hussein is hiding weapons of mass destruction. Sixty-five per cent say he is a threat to global security. We all know that Hussein is in violation of UN Security Council resolutions. Hans Blix told us last week. Yet 76 per cent of Australians don't support a war without UN approval.

Got that? Australia wouldn't commit troops to a war because the UN told us to - we'd decide the case for ourselves. As we are doing with Iraq, where the debate is (in part) over whether we should go as allies of the US or wait for the UN to sanction military action against Iraq. I'm not sure, but I get the impression that the author thinks that the UN security council might dob us in for a nasty bit of peacekeeping that none of the other nations in the world playground are willing to touch. If that happened, apparently most Australians would (grudgingly) accept that we have to take on the job because it came from the UN, although there might be a bit of whinging along the lines of "How come New Zealand never gets picked to do this shit?" How do we know this? Because 76 per cent of Australians don't support going off to do our global yard duty without UN approval. More, perhaps, a case of "Why should we do this shit if no-one else wants it done?"

There's a lot in the middle about the history and charter of the UN, and Robert Menzies' recognition in 1950 that it was basically a flawed body. You can read that for yourselves - I'm going to cut to the chase:

The UN has a useful role in humanitarian work, peacekeeping (once others have created a peace to keep) and providing a forum to exchange views. But it can't guarantee world peace. The UN's prevarication over Iraq shows how it can hardly become more than its members permit. Yet still most Australians defer to the UN. Go figure.

Tough call, isn't it? My guess is that those 76 per cent of Australians aren't rapt in the idea of unilateral action against Iraq on the basis of a questionable justification. Are they deferring to the UN or unwilling to defer completely to the US? Maybe this is the way we choose to maintain our belief that we live in an independent nation.

Recent Reading

Wednesday, 5 February 2003

Candide by Voltaire and Rasselas by Doc Johnson. The latter is in a second-hand "Everyman's Library" edition with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto and William Beckford's (who?) Vathek (what?) Candide's main virtue is that (on a first reading at least) it's very funny. Rasselas' major virtue is that (on any reading) it's short. On the principle that a good book will be as much a pleasure to read on the second and subsequent readings as the first, I suppose that makes Rasselas the better work.

Another Meddlesome Priest

Tuesday, 4 February 2003 (Day 53 - last day of counting)

Archbishop George Pell is not an Anglican (he belongs to that other church), so it's understandable that he might choose to ignore hero-columnist Janet Albrechtsen's call to Australia's Anglican clergy to revive the centuries old just war doctrine. Here's what he has to say in today's Australian. He's applied the centuries old tradition of just war theory (he dates it back to the 5th Century pre-Anglican St Augustine) and come to the conclusion that

... the public evidence is as yet insufficient to justify going to war, especially without the backing of the UN Security Council.

Questionable Timing

Friday, January 31 2003 (Day 49)

Now that I've posted the overlong "Long Overdue War Blog", I have to go back into the real world for the weekend. So please don't any expect any wait-I-can-explains or that's-not-what-I-meants before then, on any subject.

A Long Overdue War Blog

Friday, January 31 2003 (Day 49)

I've been doing less blogging over the past week for two reasons: the slow lifting of the Trotsky employment drought (as soon as the El Nino effect which has blighted my personal life lifts as well things will be just tickety-boo) and a general depression over the coming war with Iraq. Like many, I'm hoping that Saddam Hussein might see sense and take the exile option but it's much more likely that I'll actually have reason to open that pack of condoms that I bought last year before they run out of use-by.

In her article Parsons should give war a chance in Wednesday's Oz, hero-columnist Janet Albrechtsen called on the Anglican Church to retrieve the "centuries-old just war doctrine". Over the past couple of days I've been trying to put some shape into my inchoate tangle of ideas on the impending war using the tools of just war theory (which may have been what Janet had in mind - it's a little hard to tell).

For those who can't be bothered following the link, modern just war theory is generally considered to originate with Thomas Aquinas, the famous pre-Anglican author of Summa Theologica. Just war theory concerns itself with two major issues: when one has the right to go to war (the jus ad bellum in the technical jargon) and how a war should be conducted if it is to be considered just (jus in bellum). As the war hasn't started yet, I'm only going to concern myself with the jus ad bellum for now. Aquinas' requirements are:

... having just cause, being declared by a proper authority, possessing right intention, having a reasonable chance of success, and the end being proportional to the means used

When I started writing on this issue, I intended to do a single post but, I've discovered that there's a lot more ground to be covered so it looks like the Tugboat History of Australia will be on the backburner for a while. The reference books have to go back to the local library anyway, before I cop an overdue books fine.

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Let's start with the issue of just cause.

The possibility of a war with Iraq has been around since George Bush's 2002 State of the Union Address where he named Iraq as one of the three members of the "axis of evil":

States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic.

We will work closely with our coalition to deny terrorists and their state sponsors the materials, technology, and expertise to make and deliver weapons of mass destruction. We will develop and deploy effective missile defenses to protect America and our allies from sudden attack. (Applause.) And all nations should know: America will do what is necessary to ensure our nation's security.

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In May 2002 we got the "Bush Doctrine" of pre-emptive self defence against rogue states with weapons of mass destruction. Latterly the additional justification of liberating the Iraqi people from the oppression of Saddam Hussein has been thrown into the mix but, when we examine the most recent reasons given for supporting war on Iraq we discover that we're back to dealing with a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction - more precisely, stocks of chemical and biological agents and the missiles to deliver them. In his 2003 State of the Union Address, George Bush put it this way:

The world has waited 12 years for Iraq to disarm. America will not accept a serious and mounting threat to our country, and our friends and our allies. The United States will ask the U.N. Security Council to convene on February the 5th to consider the facts of Iraq's ongoing defiance of the world. Secretary of State Powell will present information and intelligence about Iraqi's legal -- Iraq's illegal weapons programs, its attempt to hide those weapons from inspectors, and its links to terrorist groups.

We will consult. But let there be no misunderstanding: If Saddam Hussein does not fully disarm, for the safety of our people and for the peace of the world, we will lead a coalition to disarm him.

In an interview with Kerry O'Brien on the 7.30 report, John Howard put it this way:

If Iraq gets away with this, if Iraq stares us all down, she will certainly not abandon her weapons then, she'd build on them and potentially use them and worst still other countries, other rogue states, will be emboldened to do exactly the same thing.

And in this article in the Wall Street Journal, Tony Blair and others put it this way:

The Iraqi regime and its weapons of mass destruction represent a clear threat to world security. This danger has been explicitly recognized by the U.N. All of us are bound by Security Council Resolution 1441, which was adopted unanimously. We Europeans have since reiterated our backing for Resolution 1441, our wish to pursue the U.N. route, and our support for the Security Council at the Prague NATO Summit and the Copenhagen European Council.

In doing so, we sent a clear, firm and unequivocal message that we would rid the world of the danger posed by Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. We must remain united in insisting that his regime be disarmed.

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The common objective in all three statements is to remove a threat to world peace by disarming Saddam Hussein. John Howard adds the additional justification that this will deter other potential rogue states but this is secondary. Equally secondary to the main justification of war on Iraq is the liberation of the Iraqi people. This is not offered as the casus bellus but as an anciliary benefit. The case of Iraq is not like the UN backed interventions in Bosnia, Rwanda and East Timor: we won't be going to war to protect the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein. On the contrary a decision to go to war will inevitably involve sacrificing some of the Iraqi population for geopolitical purposes and, only incidentally, the removal of an oppressive government. It's rather like deciding to kill your psychotic gun-toting neighbour on the general principle that he's a threat to public safety then rationalising your decision with the excuse that once he's dead he won't be able to abuse his wife and kids any more. A wrongful act isn't justified by the unintended benefits it confers on third parties: to claim the liberation of the Iraqi people as the just cause for the war requires that we act with that specific intent, not that the liberation occurs as a secondary effect of a war fought for geopolitical purposes.

Ending Saddam's war on his own people is a just cause but that isn't the reason we're being offered as justification for this war. I don't think it's the basis on which it's being planned either. That's one of the reasons I'm not sold on it but I'm never going to be sold on war: war isn't something you sell, soap is. If we do go to war with Iraq for the reasons offered so far we may end up doing a good thing very badly and for all the wrong reasons.

Postscript: having seen Ken Parish's latest post "Reprising Iraq argument" (broken permalink) I suppose I'll be lumped in with the hand-wringing Pontius Pilates of the Left who want to monopolise the moral high ground. All I have to say on that score is that being knee-deep in shit may be a little more comfortable than being balls-deep in shit but the smell isn't any better.

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Movable Bloggers

Friday, January 31 2003 (Day 49)

Ken Parish has moved his blog and renamed it Troppo Armadillo. Today he has a very well-reasoned post on mandatory life sentences for murder. Gary Sauer-Thompson has defected from Blogger to moveable type and now has a site design to match the quality of his writing (those who dislike his writing will probably disagree with me there). I'm not moving yet, but I am considering changing the motto of this blog to something a little more punchy.

Random Thoughts

Thursday, 30 January 2003 (Day 48)

Any decision that is too important to be left to a politician is too important to be left to the people who voted for him.

The normal alternative to mutual respect is mutual contempt.

The Birth of an Australian Tradition

Thursday, 30 January 2003 (Day 48)

(Part 3 of the increasingly irrelevant Tugboat History of Australia. Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here).

One of the enduring legends of Australian history is the tradition of mateship. According to the orthodox account, mateship originated with the first settlers, especially the convict members of the population and their natural antipathy to the officers and men of the New South Wales Corps. So it is disappointing that Manning Clark (admittedly a dubious source) does not provide confirmation of this view. It's sad to read Clark's accounts of how so many members of the then convict mainstream of Australian society, faced with either the lash or the gallows, were so eager to lag on their mates in the mistaken belief that this might buy them clemency. On the other hand, the frequency with which offenders faced punishment remarking that it "was a fair cop guv' and ain't I a mug for falling in with the wrong lot" shows that the tradition of copping it sweet does originate with the convicts.

One Australian tradition we can confidently say traces back to the early days is the tradition of the rort. The first rort originated with Grose's well-intended grants of land and trade rights to the officers of the New South Wales Corps which was extended by Paterson, Grose's temporary successor. It established the pattern for its many successors, such as the rorter's insistence that the primary purpose of the rort was the public good rather than private gain. So, in the matter of trade, the public good was served by the restraint of the officers in setting mark-ups on the price of rum at between 150% and 1900% rather than at the more extortionate levels that would be charged by ship's masters whose rapacity was not restrained by a gentleman's code of honour.

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By the time of John Hunter's arrival in September 1795, the rort was taking a heavy toll on the economic life of the new nation, despite the restraint of the officers. Many looked to the god-bothering Hunter to solve the problem but, from the first, Hunter was outmatched. If mateship was significantly absent from the convict population it flourished among the rorters. Hunter rapidly found himself in conflict with the foremost among them Lieutenant John MacArthur. MacArthur had all the advantages in the struggle: the somewhat naïve Hunter, believing that right was on his side, was too apt to believe that justice would prevail. MacArthur, more realistically, put his trust in his mates.

In 1796, MacArthur, in the prevailing spirit of public service, made a number of suggestions to Hunter for the administration of the government commissary at Paramatta which Hunter rejected. The conflict between MacArthur and Hunter deepened when Hunter started to protect Richard Atkins (who was not a mate) from MacArthur’s attacks on his reputation. This was a clear signal to MacArthur that Hunter was not going to be a mate and he responded with a number of attacks on Hunter’s character and governorship, including a letter to the Duke of Portland, lambasting Hunter’s poor administration and failure to prevent the moral decline of the colony. Hunter was shocked and stunned.

Hunter brought Bennilong back to nascent Australia with him as another demonstration to the natives of the benefits of English civilization. Bennilong proved to be as useful in this capacity as the public floggings previously staged for the edification of the natives. He eventually declined into alcoholism, derided by settlers and natives alike. Relations with the natives continued their decline.

In 1799 Hunter ordered the arrest of 5 men for the murder of 2 aboriginal boys: in their defence, the men pleaded necessary vengeance on a “treacherous, evil-minded, bloodthirsty set of men” (Clark). Nonetheless they were found guilty, but rather than passing sentence straight away, Hunter appealed to England for guidance. By the time it came, Hunter was gone: the continuing exchange of correspondence between Hunter and Portland and Hunter’s detractors in the colony (such as lefty cleric Thomas Fyshe Palmer) and such of their mates in England who could be trusted to pass the word on to Portland ended with Hunter’s recall in 1800. It was a clear demonstration of the importance of having a good mate or two to look after you.

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Curious

Thursday, 23 January 2003 (Day 41)

The first time I learnt about experimental economics was back in the days when I was vainly striving to turn myself into some kind of economist. The prescribed text for second year microeconomics was Heilbroner's Hirshleifer's Price Theory and Applications. The first micro lecture for the year was interesting. The lecturer was a new arrival and was taking over the course for the first time. He hadn't had any say in the selection of the text and apologised for the fact that it was so bad. As it was too late for the text to be changed, with it being listed in the faculty handbook and all, the best he could do was to assure us that there would be a new text the following year. As I struggled with Heilbroner Hirshleifer, I at least had the consolation of knowing that other students who came after me would be spared the same struggle.

In most of the book's chapters there were those little coloured boxes where authors of texts like to present interesting information which is outside the main argument of the chapter, but nonetheless relevant. Heilbroner Hirshleifer had an especial penchant for presenting animal behaviour studies which supported the economic theory he was presenting. There was a remarkable amount of it, drawn either from laboratory work using the techniques of the famous psychologist B F Skinner or material drawn from zoologists' field studies of animal behaviour. The classic experiment in this field at the time was a study of microeconomic consumer price theory, using Skinner's rats and stats experimental methods: in more mainstream economic texts it was treated fairly dismissively, but not in Heilbroner Hirshleifer. I was inspired to pull the economics journal where the article first appeared and read it. It was the most woeful scientific article I've ever come across, at least from the point of view of someone educated in the biological sciences. If it ever appears on-line I might indulge myself in the luxury of fisking it but don't hold your breath.

Reading this article, with all its deficiencies, led me to develop an interest in their other publications most of which I managed to track down. One was a study of wage theory, using (much to my surprise) the same experimental set up that was used for the study of consumer price theory. It's amazing the insights you can get into human nature by putting rats into confined spaces where they receive a reward for pressing buttons.

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Equally amazing are some of the insights you can get into human social behaviour, by putting people into artificial situations and observing their behaviour. The classic examples of this approach are two experiments in social psychology from the US. In one, the subjects were told by the researchers that they were participating in an experiment on human learning. A rigged draw was conducted to divide the experimental subjects into instructors and students. The students (who were all actors) were to be trained in some simple task using the technique of negative reinforcement: each time a mistake was made the instructor was to administer an electric shock. The more mistakes the higher the voltage. None of this was real: what was being tested was just how far people would go in obeying authority or exercising power over someone else. The second experiment involved setting up a simulated prison in the basement of a campus building: it had to be stopped after 24 hours because the warders were getting a little too enthusiastic and the prisoners a little too oppressed.

Neither of these experiments would get past a university ethics committee these days: they're used, in the teaching of research ethics, as classic examples of what not to do (at least they are according to my social researcher pals). But that hasn't stopped this idea being used by television producers - it's the whole basis of reality TV shows, such as the egregious Temptation Island which pretty convincingly demonstrated that when you take people out of their normal social environment, with the unrecognised supports and constraints which make their relationship work, most men will start thinking with their dicks and most women will start thinking with the female equivalent. Especially if they have the encouragement of a sleazy presenter showing them carefully selected video footage intended to convey the impression that their partner's brain has already flown south into their underwear.

All of which makes me skeptically curious about this article (link via John Ray) based on an experimental study with results which suggest that people will accept impoverishment themselves if they are given the chance to impoverish others. Here's the first paragraph:

The countless individuals who are at the receiving end of irrational malice from their lessers will agree with me that an experiment conducted at the Universities of Warwick and Oxford was more of a confirmation than an investigation of human nature. [my emphasis]

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...

From this auspicious beginning, the very comely Ilana Mercer launches into an attack on income tax as an expression of this desire of the socially inferior to tear down their betters. After a brief resume of the experimental protocol (participants were given random amounts of cash: by sacrificing a little of their own, they were able to purchase the "right" to force someone else to sacrifice theirs). In her final paragraph, Mercer proposes her idea of a fair solution to the tax problem:

... the least toxic tax is probably a poll or head tax, where all are taxed equally. Let the poor set the rate. This will sever the blood supply to the metastasizing state like nothing else.

Less for the "federal Frankenstein" is also less with which it can facilitate human wickedness.

Of course there's something resembling argument in the middle but as the resemblance is purely accidental I hope you'll excuse me if I ignore it.

What I'm curious about is the experimental study itself and if anyone can provide information on it I'd appreciate it if you'd drop a comment or an e-mail. I'm also interested in whether anyone has studied the opposite hypothesis: that most people might be prepared to accept others getting richer as long as they genuinely stand to get richer themselves in the process. No, that's a stupid idea - forget I brought it up.

Afterthought: Mercer's home page has this quote from Proudhon:

Liberty is the mother, not daughter, of order

I wonder if she knows that he's also the "Property is theft" guy.

- *** -

No Bag Limit

Wednesday, 22 January 2003 (Day 40)

Today brings the welcome return of hero-columnist Janet Albrechtesen to the opinion pages of the Australian, with a piece on John Howard, the feminist hero. Here's the first paragraph:

ANOTHER black armband unravels. Long depicted as the Antichrist on women's issues, John Howard has once again proved to be the quiet achiever on behalf of women.

There's plenty more where that came from, so it looks like this year's Janetism season is off to a fine start.

Fool for Love?

Tuesday, 21 January 2003 (Day 39)

Living in Melbourne, I haven't been personally affected by the Canberra fires and offhand I can't think of anyone in Canberra that I dislike intensely enough to wish their homes had burnt down. Even if there were, there's something a little tacky in finding that sort of consolation in major catastrophes and people tend to be unimpressed when you make such sentiments public (link via Tim Dunlop).

So I spent this morning trolling the news sites looking for something else to write about and, two days behind the times, I found this report from the Sunday Herald Sun at News.com. It's about Jack Thomas, the Al-Qaeda "suspect" and loser who was arrested recently in Pakistan. Thomas has been helping the Pakistani authorities with their enquiries: under Pakistani law he can be held without trial for up to a year so he may be doing so for some time yet.

The report provides a lot of background on Thomas that's been missing from most of the coverage so far, including the fact that he was arrested while boarding a plane for Melbourne. Once there no doubt he planned to give our lads in trenchcoats the slip once again just as he did when he left Australia in 2001. According to family friends, he first converted to Islam for much the same reason that some people convert to Catholicism: so that the love of his life would consent to marry him. Perhaps now he is feeling that this was about as wise as it would be to make scurrilous allegations about the character and behaviour of dingoes while camped at Uluru.

Today's good news, for Thomas anyway, is that the Australian High Commission in Pakistan has been granted consular access to Thomas so he might not end taking the magical mystery tour to Guantanamo Bay, unlike Mamdouh Habib. This isn't going to please anybody who believes that this is the best place for Australian converts to Islam but I say stuff 'em: it's the only way to make a good straw man.

Opinion Piece of the Day

Monday, 20 January 2003 (Day 38)

Jocelynne Scutt reveals the most offensive aspect of our most recent sad day for cricket in today's Australian. Much against my will (it's going to cost me my new position in the Ozblogistan Thought Police), I'm forced to say that this is a sad day for commentary.

A Brief Note on the Blog Roll

Sunday, 19 January 2003 (Day 37)

I've made a few overdue additions to the Blog Roll: Rob Schaap's blogorrhoea, William Burrough's Baboon (where I am described, quite gratifyingly, as "an unassuming assassin of the neo-comfortable") and, by way of penance for past sins, (The very real) mieka von samorzewski. The inevitable link to Aussie Blogs is also there too albeit in a form which is not quite the official Aussie Blogs HTML.

More on Dynamism

Sunday, 19 January 2003 (Day 37)

Here are a couple of new ideas for you: I'd like to claim that they're totally original but humility and intellectual rigour dictate otherwise. Change is the only constant or, if you prefer a more metaphorical expression, you cannot step into the same river twice. The future is inevitable, so we might as well learn to get along with it. Don't worry, it's not the historically inevitable crisis of capitalism and the ensuing dictatorship of the proletariat that's inevitable: that future clearly hasn't happened and we can safely say that it has been indefinitely postponed. The future is definitely a capitalist, free market future and probably democratic as well, and it's already here. Or it will be once those boring stasists have been pushed aside and the way is open for the full flowering of the dynamist vision.

As I indicated that I might, I'm revisiting Virginia Postrel's The Future and Its Enemies. On reflection, I think that the least fatuous thing to be said about this tomelet is that the title would more properly read Virginia Postrel's Preferred Future and Its Enemies (that's a dangerous petard to leave lying around and no doubt I shall be hoist by it in due course). As Postrel herself admits:

There is in fact no single future; "the" future encompasses the many microfutures of individuals and their associations. It includes all the things we learn about ourselves and the world, all the incremental improvements we discover, all our new ideas, and all the new ways we express and recombine them. As a system, the future is natural, out of anyone's control, though it is driven by the artificial: by individual attempts ... to fashion realms of personal control.

Anyone read A J Ayer on Marx? Ayer notes that just because a particular future is historically inevitable, it does not follow that it is morally right and suggests that faced with an inevitable but morally appalling future, the best thing to do might be to oppose it. By the way, this comes from a philosopher who believed that voting for the (British) Labour Party was something that was worthwhile although he wasn't able to give a logically positivist justification of why this was so. Postrel manages to go one better than Marx:

The dynamist camp has the opposite problem [to the stasist camp], and the opposite strength. Although fewer in number, dynamists permit many visions and accept competing dreams. To work together, they do not have to agree on what the future should look like. Their "central organizing principle" is not a specific outcome but an open-ended process. A dynamic future tolerates diversity, evolves through trial and error, and contains a rich ecology of human choices. Dynamists are the party of life.

Well, that's alright then, but you begin to wonder why it should be necessary to write a book about it: especially a polemical work which argues that the technocratic left and the reactionary right should leave the future the hell alone. Still, Postrel's statement of the dynamist position, means that I can, in good conscience, declare myself a dynamist even if in working out my own version of an acceptable dynamist future I end up with a preferred microfuture which requires political and social measures which are diametrically opposed to those supported by other dynamists. As long as I'm in the party of life, rather than the other party, I can't see that it really matters.

This Week's Reading and Other Matters

Sunday, 19 January 2003 (Day 37)

This week the Potemkin is moored in the outer suburbs of Melbourne, where I'm baby-sitting a dog. She's a Jack Russell Terrier - the archetypal small nervous dog. This week's Age colour supplement has a profile of Jeffrey Masson, author of The Truth About Dogs, who has been roundly criticised for wildly anthropomorhising and sentimentalising evolution's most successful grovellers. In any event, I'm keeping an eye open for any signs of dominance behaviour: It's hard to think of anything sillier than letting a Jack Russell think that it can run your life.

I have a couple of books here to fill in the idle hours - Manning Clark of course (another chapter or two and I might be ready for the next installment of the Tugboat History of Australia) and one other, where the author poses this question (among others):

How is it then that we have fallen into taking seriously someone like the economist Milton Friedman who walks about equating, in a silly, indeed an immature manner, democracy with capitalism?

Apart from that the bookshelves are full of old "boys' books" from the 1960s, full of stories in the Magnet and Boy's Own Paper tradition where no dialogue is complete without at least one ejaculation, you know the sort of thing:

"You filthy Hun!" ejaculated Biggles.

Of course word order is critical here, otherwise the literary effect can be spoiled by an unintended double meaning which is quite ludicrous. Especially if Biggles happens to be giving his joystick the usual heavy workout.

Around the blogging traps, I notice that Scott Wickstein has blogged on Virginia Postrel's The Future and Its Enemies in Left vs Right, or Statist vs Dynamist? If this is a sign of movement in the BlogGeist, I'm weeks in front, for once, but not entirely averse to revisiting this topic. But first I have a small, nervous and slightly overweight dog to walk.

Counting the Days

Thursday, 16 January 2003 (Day 34)

According to my quick calculations, it's now 34 days since the Howard Government pulled the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Legislation Amendment (Terrorism) Bill 2002 because Parliament wouldn't pass the bill in its original form. I've decided to adopt a new dateline (as above), to keep track of the number of days that have passed since this event without a major terrorist attack within Australia. I'm hopeful that I won't have to reset it to zero before Parliament resumes.

A Word from the Pot

Wednesday, 15 January 2003

Jack Thomas shot to prominence yesterday, 11 days after he was arrested by police in Pakistan. He's already caught the attention of Tim Blair, who speculates on what sort of loser Thomas will turn out to be, and Wogblog, where this article by Daryl Melham gets a serve.

Now clearly the subbies at the Daily Telegraph, Tim and the Wog are privy to facts that I haven't been able to get hold of: get past the Tele's headline "AUSSIE TRAINED WITH AL-QAEDA", and you'll find the word "alleged" occurs throughout the report. Granted, allegations from the Pakistani police have to be given more weight than allegations from the New South Wales Vice Squad, but at this stage, they're just allegations: not proven fact. Thomas hasn't even been charged with anything yet: he's just been helping the Pakistani police with their enquiries. For 11 days. It wasn't until last Thursday (5 days after he was arrested) that the Government learnt that he was in custody.

The wog's gripe with Daryl Melham is that Melham thinks the Government should do more than just wash its hands of Thomas, David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib (Habib's circuitous journey to Guantanamo Bay is described here). According to the Wog, insisting that, as Australian citizens, Hicks, Habib and Thomas are entitled to consular representation and a little more effort from the Government to protect their rights is

So stupid. Guys who end up giving themselves names like "Jihad", or go a-fighting in Afghanistan, or live comfortably in Oz with their families but do not mind leaving wife and kids behind to go back and forth over the borders of Afghanistan and Pakistan, at a profoundly lousy time in those nations' histories, are not common criminals.

Uncommon criminals is what these folks are.

Very uncommon criminals who can be convicted of a crime by the press and public opinion, without the inconvenience of a trial.

Like it or not, Hicks, Habib and Thomas are Australian citizens and whether the government likes it or not, it has obligations to all of its citizens, not just the ones it approves of. It has a duty to respect all of our rights, not just the ones we need to retain to preserve the belief that we are more civilised than our enemies. As a famous Australian once remarked, you can't cherry-pick the Australian way of life. That goes for governments as well as immigrants.

More Broken News

Wednesday, 15 January 2003

Man dies from mishandling cock.

Now, this is a heirloom.

New Blog

Monday, 13 January 2002

To my renewed embarassment meika von samorzewski has started a blog. One of meika's links is to this piece on dumb blondes which I would be pleased to have written myself. As I didn't I shall have to be content with the nit-picking observation that meika has overlooked the famous Wella Effect which accounts for the rarity of dumb brunettes.

Draggy Bits of Australian History: 1788 to 1795

Monday, 13 January 2002

[This post is the second part of the relaxed and comfortable Tugboat History of Australia (thanks to Gareth Parker for the title). The first part is here. It's another multi-part post, so feel free to add comments wherever you feel they will be most relevant].

The past is like a foreign country: between the highspots and major landmarks there's a lot of sometimes picturesque, but mostly boring, countryside to cover dozing uncomfortably in a cramped seat on a tourist bus. To cover this terrain the hero-historian may be forced to resort to the resources of his local library. There I found Volume I of Manning Clark's A History of Australia, which I'll be using to get through the years from 1788 to 1806, when not a lot happened, give or take the odd spot of malnutrition and debauchery.

I admit that Clark is probably not the most reliable source: he's known to have been one of those lefty "fellow traveller" types that BA Santamaria used to excoriate in his weekly sermon on Channel 9, Point of View, during the 60s and 70s and there were allegations that he was awarded the Order of Lenin. So we shall have to take much of Clark's description of the early years of the new nation of Australia (or New South Wales as it was called then) with a grain of salt. Sea salt obviously, as rock salt may be a little suspect under the circumstances.

From 1788 to 1792 the growing nation was governed by Arthur Phillip, a Keatingesque visionary who believed his mission was to lay a foundation for a prosperous free society. In this he was at odds with the convict mainstream, but like Keating he had the support of the nation's intellectual elite, the officers of the garrison. To be fair to Phillip the convicts' notion of relaxation and comfort was some distance from our modern notion: despite the efforts of the Rev Richard Johnson, they remained largely untouched by the pneuma of the Graeco-Christian tradition and preferred the Secular Humanist theft ethic to the the much more productive Calvinist work ethic. Any notion that comfort and relaxation were the evening rewards of a day's hard work, rather than a natural right, was alien to them.

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It is hardly surprising then that the new nation did not prosper as it should under Phillip. Due to bureaucratic bungling in the purchase of supplies for the First Fleet, the agricultural tools provided for the first settlers were totally unsuited to the environment. Government farms were set up to provide food for the first citizens of Australia but there were, unsurprisingly, numerous crop failures and petty malfeasances which impeded efficient food production. Relations with the natives were strained and not improved by Phillip's attempts to demonstrate the clear superiority of European culture and British justice: despite being invited to two public floggings, the native pre-Australians remained unimpressed. However as many of the natives were carried off by a smallpox epidemic in 1789, the issue of race relations was a relatively minor problem.

Faced with numerous difficulties, Phillip realised early that the nation building enterprise was doomed from the outset, unless an aspirational class could be encouraged to develop. He therefore wrote to Lord Sydney in 1788, proposing that free settlers be allowed to emigrate to the new settlement. This suggestion was, quite wisely, adopted, however the parlous situation was not relieved until Phillip returned to England in December 1792 and Major Francis Grose took over as Acting Governor. On his departure, Phillip took with him two natives Bennilong and Yem-mer-ra-wan-nie and two unnamed convicts who, according to Clark had "conducted themselves to his satisfaction", although it would be unwise to read too much into this statement.

Grose realised that the growing economic demands of the new nation could not be met by a Soviet style command economy based on the government farms and moved to outsource food production. Since land was plentiful, Grose made land grants to the officers of the garrison and the more respectable free settlers. He also encouraged the development of a free market economy by allowing the officers to engage in trade, buying up the cargoes of incoming vessels for resale to settlers and convicts.

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These years saw some significant arrivals: John MacArthur in 1789, Samuel Marsden in 1794 and the Irish. Transportation of Irish convicts began in Cork in 1791. As the (unofficial) relaxed and comfortable preamble to the Australian Constitution says:

The Australian nation is woven together of people from many ancestries and arrivals. ... In every generation immigrants have brought great enrichment to our nation's life.

Of course that enrichment has not always been initially welcome and so it was with the Irish, whose Catholicism was regarded with suspicion by the, largely Protestant, educated elite of the new nation. However, the Protestant work ethic was as alien to them as it was to the rest of the convict mainstream, and there is plenty of evidence that in this case, the new arrivals had little difficulty assimilating.

February 1794 saw the transportation of the first Lefties to Australia, with four of the five "Scottish Martyrs": Thomas Muir, the Reverend Thomas Fyshe Palmer, Maurice Margarot and William Skirving. The fifth, Joseph Gerrald was transported the following year. Their removal to Port jackson may have benefited the social order in England but whether their influence would be beneficial for Australia remains to be seen.

Grose resigned as Acting Governor in May 1794 and returned to England in December of that year, leaving Captain Paterson in temporary charge of the settlement under the title of Administrator. He was replaced in September 1795 by John Hunter of whom I shall have more to say in the next installment. Right now it's time to find a convenient roadhouse where the passengers can stretch their legs while the bus driver takes a much-needed leak.

- *** -

End of Week Blog

Friday, 10 January 2003

With two blog-free days coming up - although I'll be working on new posts, they're unlikely to go up before Monday - I'm just going to note a couple of interesting news items from yesterday.

The first is that Britain has joined the world's roster of alert but not alarmed nations with the discovery of a home laboratory producing ricin, one of the world's deadliest posions:

While it is 6000 times more toxic than cyanide, ricin is not an effective poison for mass weapons because it has been proved to kill people only when injected or ingested rather than just being sprayed into the open air.

The most famous victim of ricin poisoning was

Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov, who was killed on a London street in 1978 by Bulgarian government agents who apparently jabbed him in the leg with a poison-tipped umbrella.

Prime Minister Tony Blair appealed for people to be (you guessed it) "alert but not alarmed". No doubt the British police are now on the look-out for suspicious umbrella-wielding islamic types.

The Pacific island nation of Nauru is in the middle of a political crisis with the ousting of President Rene Harris after losing a no-confidence vote in the Nauruan parliament. The Australian Government maintains that this has nothing to do with Mr harris' decision to accept thousands of asylum seekers who were originally bound for Australia. They're probably right: Nauru is a caring compassionate nation, much like Australia and there's no reason to suppose that asylum seekers would be any less welcome in Nauru than they are here.

And now, since Gareth Parker at least has noted that the relaxed and comfortable Tugboat History of Australia is going to be a series, it's time to get off-line for a couple of days and work up the next installment. Thanks Gareth. And there's still that John Howard piece that I sort of promised Ken Parish to research.

Bunk is History

Wednesday, 8 January 2002

One of the issues that has arisen in the dispute over hero-historian Keith Windschuttle's assault on the orthodox account of Australian history as a continuing massacre, is the need for a history which emphasises nation-building. Such a history would not be a bad thing: a relaxed, comfortable history may be just what an alert but not alarmed nation needs. It has one other major recommendation: just as Sellars and Yeatman (authors of 1066 And All That) were able to declare an end to English history once the US assumed the mantle of "top nation", Australia's history of nation building has its own logical end, sometime in the 1980s with the widespread acceptance of the idea that the best use for a nation is to get rid of the archaic bits that interfere with the operation of the free market and either sell off or rent out the rest.

Such a history shouldn't be too difficult to write, either. Most of the basic facts are available on the web in one form or another, easily found through the web scholar's favourite tool, the Google search. For the rest, the hero-historian can call on the same intellectual resources as the hero-columnists and hero-bloggers who will argue the truth of his (or her) account of history against the deliberate falsehoods of his more "scholarly" adversaries. So I see no reason why I shouldn't undertake the important task of filling this cultural vacuum, however presumptuous it may seem.

Key Events in Australian History: the Sailing of the First Fleet

May 13, 1787: First Fleet sets sail from Portsmouth.

July 1, 1787: Convict George Michael [no relation] on The Prince of Wales, former pickpocket and amateur accordionist, begins composition of a new ballad to commemorate the voyage, under the working title Tooralie, Ooralie, Addity.

July 3, 1787: After complaints from fellow convicts and members of the ship's crew, Michael's accordion is confiscated and thrown overboard.

July 7, 1787: Midshipman David Beckham [no relation], of The Prince of Wales, reports the possible theft of his comb which he alleges was in the pocket of his pea-jacket when he went below to inspect the convict quarters.

July 8, 1787: After a search of The Prince of Wales' convict quarters, Midshipman Beckham's comb is found in the possession of George Michael, along with several sheets of tissue paper which were not itemised in the ship's manifest.

July 9, 1787: Convict Michael sentenced to 20 lashes at the ship's mashead, sentence to be carried out on the following day.

July 10, 1787: After receiving 20 lashes at the ship's masthead, Convict Michael sentenced to 10 more after calling the officers of The Prince of Wales "a bunch of bleeding philistines". The sentence is carried out immediately.

26 January, 1788: Fleet arrives at Port Jackson. Convict Michael is among the first convicts put ashore, to rousing cheers from his fellow convicts and the ship's crew of The Prince of Wales.

27 January, 1788: At the direction of Captain Arthur Phillip, Master-at-Arms William Hague [no relation] of the Royal Marines makes the following speech to the assembled convicts of the First Fleet:

Right you lazy buggers, there's supposed to be a nation here in 200 years and it's your job to build it. So get off your lazy arses and get cracking.

The great task of building the Australian nation was officially begun.

A Random Thought

Monday, 6 January 2002

Preaching to the choir may not be very effective but it's preferable to pleading with the firing squad.

A Short Enforced Absence

Saturday, 4 January 2002

Zeppo Bakunin has graciously lent me some time on his PC to catch up with blog stuff that I've missed over the past few days, due to problems I've been having with connecting from home (line quality basically). If anyone's E-Mailed me over the past couple of days and is wondering why I haven't responded, that's the basic reason: I haven't started disliking anybody any more than I may already do. Normal service should be resumed some time Monday.

Like a few other Oz bloggers, I've made a visit to the political compass site (Andrea Bell has a link). I came out -6.38 on the Economic Left/Right scale and -6.51 on the Authoritarian/Libertarian scale - I think that makes me redder than Ken Livingston. More worrying is the question of where I might have been if I'd taken the test in my youth, since the general consensus is that we get more conservative as we grow older. Somewhere out in the white space below the lower left corner, I suppose. What's really worrying is that I got this result even after I disagreed with the obvious lefty platitudes in the quiz, like the "think globally, act locally" question. Maybe I should have agreed with a few more of the obvious conservative platitudes to get to a more respectably centrist position.

Yes, We Now Do Bulk E-Mail (Apparently)

Saturday, 4 January 2002

A moment of idle self-googling (alright, it was a blatant attempt at ego-gratification by trying to turn up even more new links to this site), turned up this page of bulk e-mail hosters and providers. Visit the main page and you'll discover that this is not spam (or SPAM as it's consistently misspelt by the site operators, in violation of the Hormel trade-mark).

There's probably little that I can do about this and I'm not sure that I want to. The idea that somewhere in the world someone has just received an offer of mail order Viagra from Gummo Trotsky at Tug Boat Potemkin isn't without a certain appealing absurdity. Of course I may change my mind if I become a target for the anti-spammers: when the humourless set out in hot pursuit of the opportunistic there can be hell to pay. Right now though, I'm more concerned about where the ship's archives have pissed off to for the second time in about as many months.

Keith & Jacques & Glen & Jack

Tuesday, 31 December 2002

Glen Milne finished his year at The Australian yesterday with this op-ed piece on the coming review of the National Museum of Australia (NMA). When I first read the reports of the review in The Age, which referred to the review as an inquiry into excessive "political correctness", I was a little skeptical, but according to Milne too, the committee's brief means "that the committee would be justified in going to questions of ideological balance."

Milne's report relies very heavily on an address by Keith Windschuttle to a conference at the NMA in December 2001. Milne gives this summary of the museum's problems and their source:

The Australians who wander into the museum to gawk at Azaria Chamberlain's torn nightie and share a Christmas Cornetto with the children would probably be amazed to know that what they're looking at is now the centre of a fierce dispute that goes back to the establishment of postmodern philosophy under the French deconstructionist, Jacques Derrida. But what might sound remote is also intensely political. And all politics is local. What this debate represents is a battle for the hearts and minds of middle Australia. The way they view their history will affect they way they vote.

What has now been joined at the NMA is a fight for ownership of the past in the sure knowledge that whichever side of politics owns the past will also own the future.

Derrida's theory rests on the claim that the British empirical method of establishing facts and recording them is inadequate because such history is polluted by existing class values. Therefore, says, Derrida, history should be revitalised using contemporary values. Within Derrida's world view, "facts" in the old sense cease to exist.

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It's a frightening picture: thousands of innocent Cornetto gobbling middle Australians, unaware that behind the popular spectacle of Azaria's torn nightie lurks the evil menace of postmodern deconstructionism. Instead of a National Museum of which we can all be proud - we are one, and that's it, thank you very much - we have an ideological travesty, designed to seduce middle Australia with a view of history concocted according to the formula of the evil French mastermind Jacques Derrida.

There are two difficulties I have with Milne's account of the struggle over the ideological bias of the National Museum. The first is with his characterisation of middle Australia, the second with his representation of Derrida's philosophy.

It would be easy to be misled by the sneering tone of Milne's description of some museum visitors as "The Australians who wander into the museum to gawk at Azaria Chamberlain's torn nightie and share a Christmas Cornetto with the children" and conclude that Milne is something of an intellectual snob, who believes that the sort of people who want go into a museum to see Azaria Chamberlain's torn nightie with an ice-cream grubbied kid or two in tow simply have no business being there. But clearly this is not the case: Milne's remark is aimed at the debased spectacle of Azaria's nightie, which is not befitting a proper museum.

Nor should we be misled by Milne's assertion that the intellectual battle over postmodernism is a battle for the hearts and minds of middle Australia, which will be won by the side which gets to shape their view of history. As a TV journalist and newspaper columnist it is inconceivable that Milne would believe that middle Australians will be largely passive specators in this dispute, content to let the big intellects slug it out, then passively accept the view of history that is presented to them by the winners, whether it is in the history books or in the galleries of the NMA. Milne is not stupid so there is no reason to conclude that he believes the people are stupid, whatever the textual evidence may suggest.

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The problem I have with Milne's summary of the theories of Jacques Derrida is more substantial: it's not just a matter of a few unfortunate lapses in style. I admit that it is nearly 20 years since I studied Derrida's theories, so my memory may be faulty and I'm certainly not up to date with Derrida's latest work. However my memory of reading Writing and Difference and Of Grammatology, plus what was said of Derrida's theory in lectures and tutorials simply doesn't match Milne's summary.

If memory serves, Derrida makes a lot out of Western philosophy's habit of creating binary oppositions in which one term is privileged over the other: Essence and Existence, for example. This usually results in a lot of argument about which is more important: should Essence open the door for Existence, or is it the other way around? In Of Grammatology he doesn't concern himself directly with this most enduring of philosophical dualities (philosophers have been tossing it around in one form or another since the Pre-Socratics), but some more apparently ordinary ones: language and speech (or for Saussurians langue and parole) and speech and writing. He also writes a lot about supplementation and the supplement, an idea which he has a lot of complicated fun with. The text he uses as the springboard for this discussion is Jean Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, in particular a passage where Rousseau uses the word "supplement" as a euphemism for masturbation.

You could easily get a joke out of this, to the effect that Of Grammatology is a big book about wanking, written by a French wanker, for a lot of other wankers. If that's your idea of satirical humour, you're welcome to it. It doesn't in any way detract from the main point of my quick snap-shot of Derrida's work: there's sod all about the British empirical method or class values in it. Whatever his virtues as a journalist and columnist, when it comes to Jacques Derrida, Glen Milne doesn't know Jack Shit.

There's still a lot to be said on Milne's article: it's one of those irritating pieces that is so damn wrong, you wonder where to begin and just how long to go on. However, now that the National Museum's presentation of history has been put on the culture wars agenda, along with the Windschuttle vs Reynolds et al stoush, its another subject I can come back to later. And later. And later.

- *** -

Update: the comments threads for the first two parts of this post are well worth reading.

My Predictions for 2003

Monday, December 30 2002

With only a day or two to go before the New Year, it's probably time for bloggers everywhere to start thinking about their predictions for 2003 (if they haven't already done so). Here are mine: I hoped to have twelve (one for each month) but fell a little short. Only by seven, but a miss is as good as a mile in the prediction business.

1. A major manufacturer of women's shoes will arouse controversy (and a few other things) with a promotional campaign of billboard advertisements featuring photographs which suggest impending cunnilingus or recently completed triolage.

2. The return of the ABC's Media Watch with new presenter Piers Akerman will signal the end of the left-wing hegemony in ABC News and Current Affairs.

3. In line with government policy on raising terrorism awareness, Minister for Family and Community Services, Senator Amanda Vanstone and Attorney-General Daryl Williams will jointly announce the government's new Community Espionage Program which will be run along these lines. I won't get a consultancy fee for coming up with the idea.

4. A few English "society madams" will make discrete attempts to recruit some of Australia's better women cricketers to service the whims of a growing clientele of upper crust English masochists whose preferred form of humiliation is to be clean bowled or hit for six by an Australian cricketer.

5. After an extensive review which takes into account the need for an efficient mechanism for ensuring the free flow of water between different sectors of the rural economy, Murray Darling irrigation water will be listed on the Sydney Futures Exchange. This will inevitably described by someone, somewhere (and probably a member of the National Party at that) as floating the Australian water.

Fiskatelle

Monday, 30 December 2002

(With heartfelt apologies to Ray Davies and Kinks fans everywhere).

I went to the local library yesterday. It was a good place to get out of the heat, with the added benefit of plenty of reading material, some of which I was allowed to take home.

One tomelet will be going back to the library as soon as possible, before I'm tempted to use it for the sort of amateur studies of book ballistics which pretty much wrecked my copy of F F Armeste's Truth etc. It's one thing to destroy your own books but quite another to destroy those that belong to the community or merely, as I found in one of the books I brought home, cut out a favourite illustration to paste in your scrapbook.

Irritating as the tomelet is, I did find one curiously inspiring passage which I've posted below, followed by the curious fruits of the inspiration.

... A craving for the Dreaming funds the passion that is our life energy. It drives. We seek it here, we seek it there ...

The only cure,
For our despair.
It will make or break us so we've got to have the Truth,
Yes it's the one and only long-lost Western Dreaming.

As we endure,
Our daily grind,
With heavy hearts,
And empty minds.
Every day we're falling for more mindless fads and trends,
We need the one and only long-lost Western Dreaming.

Oh yes we do.
[Oh yes we do].
Oh yes we do.
[Oh yes we do].
Our lives are filled with emptiness and yearning,
But when we're struck by holy inspiration's blinding light
We'll find the one and only long-lost Western Dreaming.

Coiffeuses sans Frontieres

Saturday, 28 December 2002

In a provocative post, Bernard Slattery asks who really makes a difference: idiots who write letters to editors, idiots who dress up as Santa Claus to rob toll booths, idiotarians who create inflated conspiracy theories, or wonderful people who take stock of what they have, no matter how humble, and use it to improve people's lives. People like Debbie Rodriguez a hairdresser from Holland Michigan, who is raising money for a non-profit beauty salon in Afghanistan. The salon is to be called the Hope Salon, and it is being set up as a training venture to assist Afghani women to reclaim their right to look beautiful, a right that was cruelly denied under the Taliban regime. Ms Rodriguez needs a total of $200,000 in goods and cash for her venture and has so far raised about $40,000, mainly in the form of beauty products.

It's the sort of story that really ought to warm the cockles of your heart, especially after they've been chilled by the examples of human idiocy Bernard cites. I've been struggling valiantly for two hours now but I still can't get my cockles much above the temperature of liquid nitrogen. This is despite the fact that the story of Ms Rodriguez quest to bring beauty back to Afghanistan is only superficially silly and underneath is the story of a good, honest woman bringing some brightness back into the lives of previously oppressed women, not to mention a little colour back onto their cheeks. Ms Rodriguez work is as important in its own way as the continuing effort to clear the countryside of Afghanistan of the large quantities of undetonated mines and other munitions, any one of which could give you a terminal bad hair day.

This report from the UN Agency IRIN gives a pretty good summary of progress so far. Here's an excerpt:

Mine clearance was in progress in the central regions of Afghanistan, where more than 920 de-miners from various implementing agencies were also carrying out awareness and survey work, he [Richard Kelly, of the Mine Action Programme for Afghanistan] said. In the western regions, including the historic city of Herat, more than 200 de-miners were busy with mine clearance, awareness and surveys, while 150 de-miners were waiting to go in after they obtained security clearance for road travel.

By my addition that's 1270 de-miners, quietly getting on with the job of clearing the country's soil of undetonated high explosive. If I knew who they were I'd finish this post by naming them all. I think the cockles have warmed up to the melting point of dry ice.

Broken News

Friday, 27 December 2002 (7:44 pm)

From The Age Breaking News page.

Raelians claim the birth of the first cloned human being: a girl, who was delivered on Thursday (presumably December 26th) by Caesarian section. As the cloning program was carried out in more or less complete secrecy there's no independent scientific confirmation that this is the immaculate conception claimed. Am I the only one who detects an indecent air of haste about the scheduling of the delivery?

Cntrlnx 2 tx l33t bljrz: after a successful trial in Adelaide, Canberra and Bathurst, Centrelink is extending a trial scheme where jobseekers are reminded of appointments by SMS messages on their mobile phones. The trial has been extended to Southport, Queensland and will be evaluated to see if the scheme should be introduced nationally. 

More Bilge

Friday, 27 December 2002

Apart from a brewing internal brawl at Australia's National Museum, there's little to pick up on in today's news, so I'm taking this opportunity to post the second draft of The Pro-Bilge Manifesto. I'm hopeful that this draft will take the manifesto a lot of the way towards a final version because, frankly, the joke is already wearing thin and won't bear another repetition. In a blatant attempt to pitch the manifesto at an international market, I've eliminated specific references to Australia and Australians.

The Pro-Bilge Manifesto

(Alternative Titles: The Bilge Manifesto, The Bilgist Manifesto)

We, the undersigned, as free citizens of a nation with a nominal tradition of free speech, declare that:

1. It is the right of every author to write bilge.

2. It is the right of any newspaper or magazine to publish a wide variety of bilge in order to attract as wide a readership as possible.

3. Similarly it is the right of every television channel and radio station to broadcast bilge for identical commercial reasons.

4. It is the right of every book publisher to publish bilge for exactly the same reasons.

5. In relation to the right to publish bilge we accept that this is a commercial imperative and a legitimate way of doing business in a free market economy.

6. It is the right of every citizen to read, listen to, or watch the bilge of their choice, without interference or hindrance from others.

7. We recognise that the practice of pissing in the bilge to lend weight to our complaints about the stink is an egregious self-indulgence.

8. We accept that the production of a large quantity of bilge is an unavoidable consequence of the exercise of free speech and that the preservation of public morals through the prevention of writing is properly the business of government appointed professional censors, not amateurs like us.

Mindful of these principles we hereby renounce amateur attempts to suppress bilge and swear to defend to a point which is as close to death as we find personally congenial our right to continue the production of bilge. This we swear by the dirt on our keyboards and the hairy grunge that gets stuck to those rollers inside our mouses. It shall not have gathered in vain.

An Evening at the Bolshoi

Monday, 23 December 2002

Bargarz wonders what I will have to say of this report that Harpo Marx was a communist for the FBI. Well, not quite: in 1933, Harpo was asked by the US Ambassador to Moscow to carry some "diplomatic mail" home in his socks and evidently J Edgar Hoover (well known for his satiric cross-dressing party turns as "Mrs Beatrice Banal", doyen of Washington society) learned of Harpo's service to his country:

One letter from the FBI archives, signed by Hoover in 1949, congratulates Harpo on his "loyal past services" to his country.

Hoover hoped they might meet in the near future, saying: "There may be ways that you can help your country again."

Loyal as Harpo's service may have been in ferrying his country's official correspondence around in his socks, I suspect it pales into insignificance beside that of the unsung hero who had the thankless task of dealing with the correspondence when it arrived at its destination (assuming that the state of Harpo's socks after his travels was anything like the state of the Trotsky socks after a long day in the wheelhouse). I hope that the "diplomatic mail" didn't take the form of one of those "microdot" things that are usually concealed in a book as the fifth full stop on page 135, because the thought of some hapless State Department employee having to subject Harpo's dirty laundry to a thorough microscopic examination before clearing it to go to the laundry is not a pleasant one.

Until we see the actual documents we can only speculate on what future services Hoover thought Harpo could provide for his country: perhaps he was just looking for a few pointers on physical comedy to sharpen up his Beatrice Banal act.

To close this post, thanks to Bargarz for his seasonal gift of the opportunity for a little comic invention. I hope that you consider the gift adequately repaid. And a Merry Christmas to you too mate.

Update: Much as I would like to remove the struck through passage, I'm stuck with it now and it's probably too late for this feeble protestation that no sarcasm was intended. D'Oh!

Bah Humbug Blog

Monday, 23 December 2002

I'm going to make one last try at getting this Christmas blog thing more or less right, before heading off for the family homestead where Christmas will be celebrated with a pork roast cooked in the Weber barbecue out in the back yard. On the way I might squeeze in a personal commemoration of childhood's Boxing Day lunches by slipping a Plumrose tinned ham into the Salvation Army collection box at Safeway (Plumrose seem to be the only company left producing those oval tins of the better quality stuff). The pork roast, by the way, isn't an annual fixture: some years when the hunting's been good we tuck in to good piece of her Majesty's venison, provided by my brother-in-law who is both a responsible gun owner and a responsible fishing-rod owner, among other things.

On a purely administrative note, I've decided to make a few additions to the blog roll, before I retire it in its present form. I'm not sure what the new form will be: I'll deal with that after Christmas. In the meantime, to stop John Howard getting lonely as the only intentional humourist I've added James Russell's Hot Buttered Death to this category. Simon Crean has been relegated to the Accidental Humour category for the foreseeeable future and I've made a few additions to the serious category. The whole classification system is eccentric to the point of self-indulgence, which is why it's up for revision in the new year, but I thought I'd try to wring a last bit of value out of it before I replace it with something more wildly eccentric and self-indulgent.

One corrigendum is slightly overdue, for anyone who decides to browse the archives: in the post Just Don't Fire the Thing please read "Andorra" for "Liechtenstein", "France" for "Austria", "Spain" for "Switzerland" and "Krupps" for "Krupps" throughout. I finally tracked down the book (George Thayer's The War Business) where the story originally appeared as a short footnote. I have tried to correct the original post accordingly, but this is Blogger after all.

So with one final, token "Bah Humbug!", it's time to go off and enjoy the keeping of Christmas as it is done in the Trotsky clan. One thing I won't be worrying about, and that's self-indulgent Canucks who think it's a good idea to put up billboards decrying the whole tradition. They don't contribute anything to a reasoned consideration of how Christmas should be kept but that debate is pretty well over for this year. It's time to get on with the serious business of enjoying ourselves for a few days.