Snob of the Week

And the Second Nominee Is ...

Monday, 7 April 2003

Christopher Pearson's piece "Left misconstrues its right" is this week's second contender for Snob of the Week because of the deep vein of intellectual snobbery running through the article from beginning to end.

Pearson starts of with a quick resume of how those insidious reds came out from under the beds in the seventies and eighties and re-invented the Marxist agenda as a "Broad Left" agenda for social reform within progressive movements such as feminism, gay liberation, green "fundamentalism" and "the Australian version of Black Power". Thanks to the naivete of other members of these movements, the Marxist agenda became standard left-wing dogma:

To varying degrees they [the commies] were also able to colonise the the social movements and embed in them what might, for convenience sake, be called "a broad Left agenda".

It is most insidious when absorbed uncritically, almost unconsciously, in a form of cultural osmosis.

Pearson then segues, using an idiocy-by-association argument involving the appearance of "Madam Saddam and her Weapons of Mass Seduction" at Sydney's Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, into a sustained attack on Senator Bob Brown for his continued opposition to the war on Iraq. Pearson argues that Brown and other gays should be supporting war on Saddam Hussein because, as well as everything else that is nasty about the Ba'athist regime, it isn't exactly friendly to homosexuals, or sodomites as they are known in that part of the world. He finishes:

By March 31 he [Bob Brown] had stooped to the most shameful of rhetorical tricks, insinuating an element of moral equivalence between Hussein and those trying to disarm and dispatch him. "The terrorism of war is not unilateral," he said.

The depressing thing is that Brown and much of his constituency are too morally obtuse to understand why that proposition is so deeply offensive.

These two paragraphs carry an implicit claim that Pearson has the moral acuity that Brown and his supporters lack (blinded as they are by the "Broad Left" agenda they have unwittingly absorbed through too long an association with those perfidious Marxists who have really been running the "progressive" social agenda all these years). Pearson's snobbery is a little more insidious than the more overt variety shown in Alison Crosweller's bravura entry, but I find his article is still worthy of consideration for this week's award.

Snob of the Week

And the First Nominee Is ...

Monday, 7 April 2003

There really is a cultural divide between the inner cities and the outer suburbs (or inner country if you get outer suburban enough), at least when it comes to restaurants. The average trendy inner city restaurant is basically a portion-control purgatory, where lost souls in search of gastronomic salvation toy listlessly with a few morsels of beef, glazed with a so-called jus that has been simmering on the back of the kitchen stove long enough to qualify as a genuine biohazard, accompanied by a julienne of carrots, parsnips and celery - the last included I suspect to promote dental hygeine by making the whole meal "self-flossing". Out on the city fringes, value for money at a restaurant still means a good slap-up feed. As it should.

The Weekend Australian's restaurant critic, Alison Crosweller obviously hasn't been getting out of the city centres enough. Here's how her review of Eleonore's Restaurant in Saturday's Review section starts:

Maybe I have a warped imagination. Or perhaps I am just ignorant. But when my salmon arrives, I am dumbfounbded. The menu is detailed enough. I ordered shiitake scaled fillet of salmon with an oyster and pancetta tart on a bed of pureed spinach and red wine glaze.

The dish sitting in front of me looks nothing like I pictured. The salmon, which I imagined to be the centrepiece, is well hidden by mushroom scales and spinach. When I get to the tart I am even more surprised to find several oysters hiding under the pancetta. The tart itself is almost a meal rather than a delicate accompaniment.

The restaurant is named after a woman

... who was reputed to be a refined and sophisticated host.

I wish I could say the same for our hosts on this night. We're still removing our coats as the server reeels off pre-dinner drink options - beer, spirits or perhaps champagne.

The regulars aren't much chop either - basically they're rich-raff:

Across the room from us sits a table of six, three couples who are Chateau Yering's target clientele. It might be extremely rude to listen in on other people's conversations, but when the women at the table are speaking at the top of their voices, talking about "Mumsy" and the "brand-new Audi I got for Christmas ", it's hard to tune out. it goes without saying that in the winter some of Melbourne's more upwardly mobile types feel quite at home landing the helicopter on the back lawn for lunch before heading towards Mt Buller to ski.

There's really nothing I can add except it's a very fine entry and one which will be difficult to top.

Dummy Spit Snob of the Week

Friday, 4 April 2003

Despite a determined, some might say desperate, search through this week's op-ed pages, Phillip Adams is the unchallenged winner of the inaugural Snob of the Week award. To make matters worse, it looks like I gave up on Dummy Spit of the Week too soon. Janet Albrechtsen's Truth the loser in race to gag media is the best example of the genre seen so far this year:

Daily anti-war protests show up how free speech is feast or famine, depending on your politics. Today, students and anti-war protesters ... promise to spill on to streets in cities across Australia, a repeat of last week's protests. They gorge on a smorgasbord of free speech. Good for them. It's part of the rough and tumble of civilised society.

Yet in other quarters a spectre hangs over free speech. Here regular warnings from speech commissars warn us to mind what we say lest we offend Australian Muslims. Here the right not to be offended trumps the right to free speech.

The enemy of free speech on Wednesday was former Liberal Senator Chris Puplick, president of the NSW Anti-Discrimination Board. In his report Race for the Headlines:

Puplick tried to shame The Australian for investigating refugee claims by Ali Bakhtiyari, pushed on to the refugee stage by activist groups hoping to embarrass the Howard Government. He tried to shame those in the media who exposed a strong racial element behind a series of brutal gang rapes of Australian girls in Sydney by Muslim boys. [My emphasis]

In the interest of balance, here's a little of what chapter 3 of the report says about Janet:

There are also examples of journalists who blatantly name race and religion as the cause of criminal behaviour. In July 2002, Janet Albrechtsen wrote a column in The Australian that stated:

French and Danish experts say perpetrators of gang rape flounder between their parents’ Islamic values and ociety’s more liberal democratic values, falling back on the most basic pack mentality of violence and self gratification. [my emphasis again]

You probably remember the rest of the story (including the part about how Janet slipped the word "Islamic" in on her own initiative) from seeing it on Media Watch. But let's give Janet the penultimate word:

Airing offensive views is the best hope of showing them up if they are wrong. And sometimes even offensive opinions might be right. Imagine that.

That sometimes goes for other people's opinions of our writing. Unless you're a hero-columnist of course.

Corrigendum

Friday, 4 April 2003

In a comment to my post Some Meta-Comments on WOMD (unreliable permalink), derrida derider has provided more accurate historical information on the use of chemical weapons in the Great War, and by Italy in Abyssinia in the 1930s.

Word of the Day: Latte

Friday, 4 April 2003

I think we can forego the Macquarie Dictionary link on this one - we all know what latte is. It's what the out of touch inner city elites drink to wash down their lunch-time foccaccias or croques-monsieur while their less pretentious suburban cousins are happy to settle for a cappucino and a toasted sanger.

If this item from yesterday's Age is any indication, there's a lot of people in the out-of-touch inner city elite. And the numbers are growing. According to a survey by BIS Shrapnel, latte consumption grew by 50% over two years with 225 million dollars worth of lattes sold last year. Assuming that the retail price of a cafe latte is $2.50, that's a total of 90 million cafe lattes.

This may look like an alarming figure: 90 million is a lot of cups of under-frothed cappucino. So I think it would be responsible to put these consumption figures into perspective, to scotch any media scare campaigns on the effects this noxious beverage is having on public health and morals before they get started.

If we asume that most latte use is so-called "social use", restricted to a quick shot in the morning while reading the papers on office time or a lunchtime pick-me-up 90 million cups of the leftist's favourite cuppa can be consumed by only 346,154 out-of-touch inner city elitist types. If we assume latte drinking is a once-a-day seven days a week habit, the figure comes down to 246,575. That's a fairly small proportion of the population, so the risk that the Australian mainstream will be washed away in a flood of over-sweetened caffeinated bilge is very small. At least in the short term.

In the longer term, the picture may be a little less rosy. Extrapolating a 50% growth rate over the next ten years gives the following figures for the numbers of latte drinkers in the population:

2003	246,575
2004	369,863
2005	554,794
2006	832,191
2007	1,248,286
2008	1,872,429
2009	2,808,643
2010	4,212,965
2011	6,319,448
2012	9,479,171

As well as the obvious political problems which will inevitably arise when 9 million Australians have lost touch with mainstream opinion there are some difficult planning issues: where the bloody hell will we build the sidewalk cafes these wankers will inevitably demand as their "right"?

And the First Nominee is ...

Monday, 31 March 2003

I spent the week-end with the rainforest editions of The Age and The Australian. Besides reading up on the New South Wales Right of the Anglican Church (apparently they're a lot like the Sydney Diocese of the Australian Labor Party) in The Age's Good Weekend colour supplement, I was looking for likely contenders for the new "Snob of the Week" spot. I found this disappointing effort in The Weekend Australian Magazine:

Extraordinary that a couple of women could go and see a much discussed film about [Virginia} Woolf, sit all the way through it and not have the foggiest idea, after all that, who the hell she was. And you suspect this may be the case with the overwhelming majority of those seeing The Hours. Yet they'll know everything it's possible to know and far more than you need to know about Nicole [Kidman] and her marital vicissitudes - and all about her prosthetic nose.

You won't find this on-line: instead, you'll find a much better article about religious fundamentalism, from the same author.

Still, there's no way out of it - thanks to his article in the print edition of The Weekend Australian, Phillip Adams is the current front-runner for Snob of the Week. I'm starting to go off this idea.

Dummy Spit of the Week

Friday, 28 March 2003

In spite of the Yob's attempt to scoop me this week, Tim Dunlop didn't even come close to winning. it was a fine try Tim, but you need to do more work on your distance.

The Member for Bennelong has been getting a fair bit of attention elsewhere in Ozblogistan for telling UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to pull his head in. Although I had hopes that the man who gave us such fine moments of parliamentary rhetoric as "I did not mislead the Australian people Mr Speaker, I did not!" might be a qualifier this week, I've only seen written reports of his remarks and, since delivery is everything in a good dummy spit, I'm forced to look elsewhere for contenders.

Hero-columnist Janet Albrechtsen came close on Wednesday with an article on the Melbourne legal firm of Slater and Gordon. I was particularly impressed with the opening paragraphs of Janet's column, which reminded me very much of a short story by Saki. Urban legend buffs might want to keep an eye on this one. But, vapidity doesn't make for a good dummy spit either, so sadly, Janet doesn't even score an honourable mention.

This week's prize winner is Andrew Bolt of The Melbourne Hun for this fine piece of op-ed apoplexy. In his usual style, Bolt demonstrates his inability to cope with the notion that there are actually people benighted enough to hold opinions different from his own. It helps to show why, in the paper's print edition, Bolt is usually shown in three-quarter profile: it hides the colostomy bag hanging out of one of his ears.

This will probably be the last "Dummy Spit of the Week" for a while, at least at this blog. I've decided to experiment with a few alternatives, so next Friday, I'll be trying out "Snob of the Week". Once again, nominations (from the realms of blogging, op-ed, politics or whatever) are always welcome.

Berk on Burke

Thursday, 27 March 2003

Edmund Burke's Address to the Electors of Bristol has been on my mind a bit recently. Any idea, however silly, that isn't about the war is a welcome relief at the moment. I first started thinking about Burke's address after reading Trollope's Doctor Thorne which includes a lengthy description of the conduct of an election in the Borough of Barchester. For me, this cast Burke's remarks to his recalcitrant electors in an entirely new light.

Burke's address is supposed to enunciate a principled conservative position on the relationship between voters and their representatives: I've yet to find the "central passage" where Burke clearly enunciates this principle - I keep getting bogged down in Burke's carping remarks about the various accusations that have been brought against him. Having read Trollope's account of an election held several years after Burke's death - a period which saw at least one act of Parliament aimed at electoral reform - I think that there are good grounds for believing that part of Burke's sense of grievance with his electors was that he wasn't getting value for money. Over the years, Burke would have spent a lot of money securing the votes of the Bristol electors and, in some cases, he probably knew how much an elector's vote had cost him down to the last penny. Or, at the very least, someone would be able to tell him.

These days we do things differently - votes are bought by providing schools, hospitals and bowling clubs out of the public purse. This may not be an improvement: public works budgets may be to politics what soap-on-a-rope and horny-as-a-rhino boxer shorts are to Christmas. If nothing else, a return to more straightforward forms of vote-buying would be more economically efficient than trying to win the votes of the many by providing expensive public facilities which, in practice, will only be used by a few. There are probably plenty of voters out there who would rather have an extra few bucks in the kitty on election day than a share in a new gym for the local high school which they don't send their kids to anyway.

The other problem with our modern forms of vote buying is that public works send no clear price signal to either voters or to politicians. A return to simpler forms of electioneering would eliminate this inefficiency. In fact, if some of the institutions which have arisen since Burke's time - such as futures exchanges -were brought into play, it would be possible to arrive at a system which sent very clear price signals to both electors and their representatives at all times. If the member for Bennelong wished to check his standing with his local electorate, he would only need to check closing prices for Bennelong votes on the Sydney Futures exchange. As market price signals are always reliable, much of the needless ambiguity and error associated with opinion polling would be eliminated.

I have a nagging feeling that there's something wrong with this post, but I can't quite put my finger on what it is.

Sprung! (with apologies to James Russell).

Her Way

Wednesday, 26 March 2003

This has (rightly) been overlooked, with the focus on the war, but last Thursday Pauline Hanson got together with country & western singer Brian Letton and producer Tommy Tycho to record a plea for the peoples of the world to "sort of live in peace and harmony". The song she chose to record was Wonderful World, the old Louis Armstrong classic. I was tempted to do a rewrite, more in keeping with the Hanson vision, but there's not much there to work with. All the same, I'd be interested to hear if this section got any re-working:

The colors of the rainbow so pretty in the sky
Are also on the faces of people going by
I see friends shaking hands saying how do you do
They're really saying I love you.

Another Boring Little Trip Into My Past

Wednesday, 26 March 2003

Back in my days as a career bureaucrat, I played a small, but pivotal, role in a newsworthy industrial dispute. I started the bloody thing. Yes, it is typical isn't it?

It all started with a couple of electrical contractors who were installing wiring for a new computer system. They had removed a few tiles from the false ceiling and were busy hauling cable through the roof space. In the process they disturbed some very suspicious looking fibrous mineral stuff that had been lying on top of the ceiling tiles. It was insulation material that had fallen there form the underside of the floor above. It looked a lot like asbestos.

I spent a good part of that morning on the telephone - I do remember that much, although the content of most of the calls is lost a bit foggy. There was one to the state branch office of my union, of course. And several others to any analytical chemistry laboratories I could find in the yellow pages, on the off-chance that one of them might take on a spot of quick chemical analysis on a Friday afternoon. I found a laboratory close enough for one of "the members" to drive a sample of the suspect material over at lunch-time, with a preliminary report to be provided that afternoon. I also spent a lot of time that Friday in heated discussion with my office manager and other union delegates in the building. No one wanted to know basically.

...

...
The results that I got back from my chemist (at around 4.00 pm) were a bit ambiguous: the sample we had sent had the chemical composition of asbestos and some physical tests produced results consistent with it being asbestos. That was all he was prepared to say: it was definitely a mineral fibre and most likely to be asbestos, but his tests weren't conclusive. There weren't in his opinion, too many other things it was likely to be but he couldn't say that in a responsible scientific report. By this time the situation, and the discussion about it had become very heated indeed. In other departments that were in the building, union meetings were being held where representatives of other unions were passing on advice from their state offices that I was possibly just scare mongering.

In the end I reached a compromise position with my manager: any staff from our office who wanted it would get temporary redeployment to another office, pending the results of a more thorough analysis, by a government laboratory, of the evil grey shit that had ruined my Friday. I put my name on the list of those to be re-deployed (it was a solidarity thing, more than anything else), and went home for a fraught weekend. As the buiding's IS activist had helpfully informed me, I had put my personal credibility on the line: if the results of the official analysis went against me I would be shown up as, well, a scare monger. On the other hand, if the results confirmed what I believed from the my chemist's report I would be personally vindicated as a bona fide working-class hero. I was also worried about the bill for the chemist's analysis: I'd told him to bill it to me, so I might be out of pocket for the better part of $200. This was back in the days when Australia still had a currency worthy of the name. If nothing else, it shows how quickly the political can become very personal. As it has in much of the debate on the war.

It wasn't until the next Tuesday that the final results came in from the government lab - the stuff really was asbestos, amosite asbestos to be precise. Not, thankfully, the blue stuff of Wittenoom fame. So, for what little it was worth, I was personally vindicated and the union agreed to pay the lab bill. It's occurred to me while I've been writing this post, that there's been time since the dispute took place for me to receive the ultimate vindication: someone who worked in that building may finally have come down with an asbestos related illness. If so, I don't want to know about it.

- *** -

Cheap Shot with Quote

Wedneday, 26 March 2003

There's been a fair bit of comment from bloggers and others about the performance of the media in reporting this war. A lot of people hold the opinion that, once again, the media are letting the side down by reporting facts that our governments would rather not let us know. For example, the BBC had the temerity to show Dubya having his hair and make-up fixed up on camera before he was actually scheduled to go to air. Most of those taking this position are standing in a cheap shot free fire zone - I'm sure that the Iraqi government is having no trouble keeping their media outlets in line. Of course, if the liberation of Iraq succeeds, future Iraqi governments will have to contend with media organisations and journalists who will be every bit as badly behaved when it comes to demonstrating knee-jerk support for the government in power as their western counterparts. Call me naive, but I thought that, in part at least, this is what we are fighting for.

There's a claim being made, mostly implicitly, that the sort of critical media coverage and commentary we are sometimes getting plays into Saddam's hands. It allows Saddam to use our Western liberal-democratic values to weaken our resolve to impose those western liberal-democratic values on rogue states. There's a topic for a much longer post in that issue, but for now, I'll just finish with this quote from Tony Blair, aired yesterday on the ABC's AM:

There are of course difficulties that have arisen, tragedies and accidents and we grieve for the lives lost. That is in the nature of war and it is in the nature of today's instant, live reporting of war, that people see the pain and the blood in vivid and shocking terms. [my emphasis].

Some Meta-Comments on WOMD

Monday, 24 March 2003

Ken Parish has an interesting post up Through a glass slightly less darkly, which is attracting a fair bit of comment, some on the subject of Saddam Hussein's weapons of you know what, and when they are likely to be used. As we know that we're talking principally about chemical weapons (such as VX gas) and biological weapons (such as bacillus anthracis) - the nukes seem to have been dropped off the agenda. I'm prepared to say, with a little confidence and a lot of hope that they won't be used.

I'm basing this prediction on the assumption that, while Saddam is basically a crazy bugger who is prepared to kill his own population to get his political way, he's not a completely stupid bugger who's prepared to risk killing most of his own army on the slim chance that it might win him the war. The only weapons of etc in his arsenal that are of any account on the battle field are the chemical weapons - biological weapons aren't an effective tactical weapon - by the time your enemy has come down with a bad case of anthrax, he's still had time to shoot the shit out of quite a few of your own troops. he's also had time to figure out that, as he may basically be dead anyway, he might as well make the best of the little time he has remaining to do just that.

As far as I know, the only chemical weapon that was ever employed on the battle field was phosgene gas in World War I. Its use was quickly abandoned: all it took was a wind shift for the stuff to start killing your own troops, rather than the other side's. If (as Cassandra remarks) "Even in the pre TV age, and with armies from societies where dissent was irrelevant, it was military stupidity to risk harming those willing to accept you as a liberator," it's a more obvious military stupidity to risk harming those who are fighting on your side.

The obvious question is, given that chemical and biological weapons are basically useless as weapons of war, why did Saddam set so much store by acquiring them? One obvious answer, borne out by history, is to terrorise his own population. The other, outward looking, reason is deterrence. On this score, John Howard's prediction (?) that a war on Iraq would send a message to other "rogue states" may been borne out: if Iraq is liberated (or conquered, depending on your political bias) without Saddam resorting to the use of chemical weapons, these weapons will be discredited as effective deterrents to enemy attack. I wouldn't be too triumphant about this: as Rob Schaap has remarked the whole exercise may just reinforce the conventional wisdom, known to serious players of regional conflict since the 1960s, that, really, you have to have nukes.

Riding on the Coat-Tails of the Famous

Sunday, 23 March 2003

On March 10, John Quiggin posted on his appearance in Technorati's list of the Top 50 Interesting Newcomers. I got a mention in John's post and, as a bonus, a listing at Technorati. Today it's been Robb Corr's turn to carry me to wider prominence - he's listed at number 41. I suspect that, in part, this is due to his decision to ban "Cassandra" from his comments thread and the resulting furore. In my opinion, if Rob wishes to slam the door in the face of an unwelcome visitor, I have absolutely no problem with that. Freedom of speech includes the freedom to call someone an annoying little twat with the usual accompanying suggestions for their future movements and conduct.

Leadership

Sunday, 23 March 2003

Now that some of the mental clutter has been cleared up, there's space for a more considered post on Lieutenant Colonel Tim Collins' address to his troops. This post is suggested by James Russell's post here, where he remarks on the contrast between Collins' sober speech and the rhetoric of our political leaders. On balance, I'm not surprised that the most considered speech that I've read on the Iraq war should come from a professional soldier: they are, after all, the best placed to know and understand war. There are some lessons in it for our politicians and the rest of us. I hope I'm up to bringing [some of] them out.

First of all, I'm assuming that Collins didn't address his men in the wretched "Listen with Mother" tone that both John Howard and Simon Crean adopted in their recent addresses to the nation. It's difficult to imagine these remarks being delivered in the tones of a doting parent reading a child's favourite bed-time story:

It is my foremost intention to bring every single one of you out alive but there may be people among us who will not see the end of this campaign.

We will put them in their sleeping bags and send them back. There will be no time for sorrow.

These are the sort of words that you address to mature adults who face serious risk and know that they face serious risk. Although there are obvious differences between Collins' situation and that of Howard & Crean when they addressed us on this war both speeches could have benefited if we had been addressed not as worried children refusing to go to sleep without the lights on but as citizens of a democracy. Collins' respected his men enough to address them as soldiers: it's long past time that we received similar respect from our politicians.

You might notice something missing from this section of Collins' address: he makes no mention of his own responsibilities beyond stating his intention to bring every single one of them out alive. Does he ask them to trust him? Only by implication. Does he demand that they respect his willingness to accept the burden of command? Only by stating his clear intention to carry out his responsibilities.

...

...

Later in his address, Collins says:

It is a big step to take another human life. It is not to be done lightly.

I know of men who have taken life needlessly in other conflicts, I can assure you they live with the mark of Cain upon them.

If someone surrenders to you then remember they have that right in international law and ensure that one day they go home to their family.

and later, this:

If you harm the regiment or its history by over enthusiasm in killing or in cowardice, know it is your family who will suffer.

You will be shunned unless your conduct is of the highest for your deeds will follow you down through history. We will bring shame on neither our uniform or our nation.

This is very much in keeping with Collins' general tone: apparently he doesn't assume that all his men have to do to liberate Iraq is just to kick seven shades of shit out of any Iraqi who gets in their way. It's this that I found most heartening in the address: the fact that, although this war was set in train by bellicose jackasses like Donald Rumsfeld, its conduct is in the hands of men like Collins who are prepared to treat the enemy as more than a few eggs that need to be broken so that we can get on with cooking up the new global omelette.

- *** -

Filling the Skip (2)

Saturday, 22 March 2002

Another grab-bag of ideas that I haven't found much use for.

Why does the opening sequence of David Puttnam's Chariots of Fire remind me of the opening sequence of Leni Reifenstahl's Olympia? Why did Commodus' return to Rome in Gladiator remind me of Triumph of the Will? Why do certain sequences in the first Star Wars trilogy do the same? Why does the final shot of the film version of Ayne Rand's The Fountainhead remind me of Russian "Social Realist" art? Where can I get hold of a copy of Jude Suss, so I can make a comparison of the protrayal of Suss with the depiction of various ethnic groups in Hollywood actioners?

Now that I've finally seen Steven Spielberg's AI, I'm looking forward to the release of the Critic's cut which will, I hope, spare us the last 20 minutes of the film where Spielberg completely bottled out. There are better ways to end a film than thrashing out a heavy-metal power riff on the audience's heartstrings. Next time, Steve, just smash the fucking camera.

On John Howard's Address to the Nation: typical of our PM to be the last leader in the Coalition of the Willing (as distinct from the somewhat larger Coalition of Approving Rubberneckers) to pick up on the idea that it's easier to make a cogent moral case for the war if you're willing to make a clear distinction between a country and the regime which you're trying to remove from it. In fact, his frequent references to Iraq made it quite clear that he still hadn't got it at all.

Further remark on Crean and the increased threat of terrorism: I forgot to introduce [that paragraph by saying] that it's the worst form of scare-mongering. Now I'm stuck with saying that it's the worst form of scare-mongering too, which doesn't say much for my priorities. This is what a lapse of attention can cost you.

Why do so many people get confused between bad ideas that work for them and good ideas? Why do so many dismiss ideas that are really quite simple but difficult to understand as too complex? Why do they resent anyone who understands either better than they?

And, believe it or not, there's even more of this shit to come.

Filling the Skip (1)

Saturday, 22 March 2002

Here are a few, more or less offensive, ideas to get this weekend's intellectual housecleaning started. First some trite "memes" that I'm heartily sick of. Starting with the word "meme" - what's wrong with the word "idea"?

The World changed [irrevocably] on September 11. It didn't. What changed was western perceptions of the world: for most of the world's population, life on the edge of starvation, dying slowly of AIDS and all the rest of what passes for normal life went on pretty much as usual. Crediting Osama Bin Laden and the Bali bombers with changing the world is giving too much credit to the idea that the most effective way to achieve political change is with high explosive. There are already too many people who believe this - why encourage others to join them?

History repeats itself. It doesn't. We repeat history, mostly by ignoring the events in our national and personal histories that don't fit with our preferred vision of ourselves as basically decent people. We are (for the most part at least) basically decent people, but let's not kid ourselves that we're perfect - or that our enemies (whoever they happen to be at the moment) are so much worse than us that our own faults don't really matter.

Voice(s) of reason. I know that this is convenient shorthand for "People who are intelligent enough to agree with me" but, all the same, I'd rather hear it spelled out. That way we all know where we stand.

Simon Crean should shut the hell up about the increased danger of terrorist attacks on Australians flowing from our involvement in the war in Iraq. Unless he's planning to roll over and play dead on the Government's ASIO Bill, he's pretty much painted himself into a corner from which he (at least) won't be able to mount a credible case against the Bill when it's finally debated in Parliament.

It's probably too much to hope that next time someone wants to make a moral case for war on a brutal and barbaric regime by giving us examples of the imaginitive new ways the regime has found to torture its enemies, that they will put in the hard yards and actually tell us what forms of torture they are prepared to consider humane and civilised. Would Saddam Hussein's regime have been acceptable if his thugs had restricted themselves to forcing parents to watch while their kids were thumped around with the Baghdad Yellow Pages? Thought not.

More garbage posts to come.

Hard Rubbish Collection

Friday, 21 March 2003

When I first read the Yobbo's comment on this post, my first inclination was to zip over to Haloscan and ban him for irritating and unconscionable earnestness. He may be relieved to know that he he's been given a reprieve, largely because he's inspired me to make my own, highly subjective, list of phrases and other uses of language that I've found objectionable (on the other hand it's more likely that he won't give a shit). While I'm at it, I've decided that I might as well do some intellectual housekeeping over the weekend and throw out a few other ideas that I've had kicking around for a while. Mainly they're topics I've been thinking about posting on but for one reason or another haven't managed to get anything down on hard disk. Once they're out of the way, I can get on with other things. Anyone who wants to pick one or two of them up and run away with them is welcome to do so.

In the meantime, here are some interesting items from other Oz bloggers. Bargarz found this article from BBC News inspiring. It is. It's also reassuring to think that the troops will be treating the enemy with more respect than the Pringles munching victory monkeys who are no doubt busily recycling those old jokes about Italian courage into "new" jokes about Iraqi courage even as I write.

Ken Parish finds reassurance from an unlikely source - some remarks of Donald Rumsfeld. And, via John Quiggin, there's Geoff Kitney on Question Time from the SMH.

Less interesting have been the various attempts by more stridently pro-war bloggers to maintain the fiction that Australians are, finally, solidly behind this war. For the [record], Monday's Newspoll found 68% of Australians still opposed a war without UN sanction. Today's Morgan Gallup Poll shows that there is now a slight majority of Australians, [a little over 50%], in favour of US action in Iraq, but the position on Australia's involvement is more evenly divided and less favourable: 46.5% for and 48.5% against. The fact that the war has been a walkover so far has probably helped shift opinion. Expect things to change if it gets nasty.

Finally, a special cheerio to the opportunistic Bible-toting arsehole who popped around, totally uninvited, this morning to offer some friendly advice on coping with the state of the world. Don't bother calling again. If the day comes that I decide to get evangelised, I'll be moving to Sydney, where they know how to do it properly.

Quote

Friday, 21 March 2003

Machiavelli's rules for the nobles of Renaissance Italy are still relevant to the twentieth century managers, just as Newton's laws of gravity will always retain their validity.

Auren Uris, 101 of the Greatest Ideas in Management, cited in Graeme Davison's The Use and Abuse of Australian History (footnote 17 to chapter 12 (p 233)). By way of comment I'll just add five words: Einstein's Theory of General Relativity.

Baghdad Blues

Thursday, 20 March 2003

I've spent most of today in a state approaching mental paralysis. It's been coming on since Monday. There are too many topics to blog on today. The biggest of course is that the war in Iraq is finally underway and there have been plenty of events since noon (Melbourne time) that invite comment that I'm not yet ready to write. Most of that comment has already been provided, in part at least, elsewhere. My list of candidate blog topics started with George Bush's letter to the US Congress, providing his justifications for going to war. Tim Dunlop tips a much-deserved bucket on it here. Gary Sauer-Thompson has anticipated my post on John Howard's total failure to convince the majority of the Australian people that this war is right. Right now, my belief is that expecting us to trust in the moral convictions of a chronic liar and self-righteous humbug finally turned out to be too much of an ask.

James Russell asks:

Now that the warbloggers have pretty much got the war they were looking for, what will they write about?

He'll find one answer at Tim Blair's site: it's not too different to blogging the Melbourne Formula One Grand Prix as it happens.

Another topic that I won't be writing much about today is John Howard's address to the nation. I caught a part of it on radio: Howard's attempts at a soothing tone reminded me of an old BBC radio show called "Listen with Mother" which the presenter always began with the words "Are you sitting comfortably? Good, then I shall begin." I was also reminded of Sir William MacMahon, unsung architect of Gough Whitlam's 1972 election victory - all that was missing was Macmahon's querulous tremolo.

Finally, there's the Federal Government's decision to reintroduce its ASIO Bill to Parliament today. The debate on the Bill should be interesting to say the least: Simon Crean has said that our involvement in the war on Iraq increases the risk of terrorist attack on Australians: in his address John Howard said it will make no appreciable difference in the short term and in the long run will make us safer from terrorism. I might come back to this one tomorrow. On the other hand, I could wait till next Friday: I think we'll be seeing some excellent dummy spits over the next week or so.

Dummy Spit of the Week

Wednesday, 19 March 2003

OK, so this item was supposed to appear on Monday, making it two days overdue. It's not exactly as if any of you bastards were any help - I gave you the opportunity for some serious reader interaction by nominating likely dummy spits and what do I get? A tediously earnest discussion of whether the Wog is a snob or not. Not good enough people.

First, an honourable mention to the Dean of the Anglican Diocese of Sydney, Dr Philip Jensen. Inspired in part by the example of a Hindu student who, despite Jensen's offer to show him that Hinduism is wrong without attacking Hinduism, continued in his false religion due to family and tribal pressure, Dr Jensen mounted to the last bastion of free speech in Australia, the pulpit of Sydney Cathedral and took the sword of the Spirit to the benighted secularists. Verily did he smite them hip and thigh and they were vanquished in the sight of the Lord. Demonstrating commendable endurance and flexibility of mind, Jensen followed up with some interesting comments in an interview on ABC Radio's PM the following day:

The Bible says that he [Christ] did die. Now, I was not saying which of these was right, or which was wrong, but I was saying that you can't get rid of the category of right or wrong in this area, because they both can't be right.

JO MAZZOCCHI: Can you understand, though, how your comments could be interpreted as being quite insulting to other religions?

PHILLIP JENSEN: No, because I'm saying that Christians could be wrong. It may be that Jesus did not die, and is Islam is right.

I look forward to a future sermon from Dr Jensen where he develops the other leg of his argument: the consequences for the Sydney Diocese if Christians are wrong and Islam is right.

This week's winner comes from the world of international diplomacy. Well done France, for adapting the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive self-defence to create the Chirac doctrine of the pre-emptive security council veto.

Nominations are again open for the next Dummy Spit of the Week, which I have decided to move to the end of the week for obvious reasons. Nominations close Friday 28 March, assuming that you lot are prepared to pull your socks up and lift your game. Otherwise, you'll just have a lot of gallows humour to put up with. This is your last chance gentle readers: don't blow it.

She Agrees With Them and I Agree With ...

Wednesday, 19 March 2003

If you passed over this post by Ken Parish yesterday, you might have missed this article in the Australian, where a group of international lawyers argue that an attack on Iraq is legal. Ken has expressed doubts about their argument, basically on the grounds that whatever they are talking about, it's not law as he understands the term.

I almost found myself in agreement with Ken, at least on his point that whatever a UN Security Council resolution might be it isn't international law. But today, once again in the Australian, I found this heroic article which puts the legal case for war with a great deal of force and originality. So, faced with a choice between the opinion of a sometimes opinionated Australian legal academic at a minor commercial college, who doesn't appear to be forward thinking enough to recognise that the way of the future in legal education is combined degrees in Physical Education and Law and the opinion of my favourite hero-columnist, I know which way I'm going to decide. I'm probably going to cop some stick for saying that. It's unfortunate that Haloscan has fallen over yet again because Ken will just have to dish it out on his own blog rather than doing it here.

Update: No, Haloscan is back again.

R*d* W**ds

Wednesday, 19 March 2003

This morning, a client asked whether we could provide an obscenity filter for a chat forum. You know, one of those software routines that detects typos in words like spit, duck and count and renders the results as @#%! or something similar. This isn't a difficult programming task but it does raise some interesting issues.

From a technical point of view, there's not much to an obscenity filter - all it has to do is search text input for specific sequences of characters and replace them with whatever sequence of dingbats you're using to indicate that the user has entered a dysphemism. In Perl, for example, you can do the job with a single line of code:

$nice_text =~ s/$nasty_word/\@\#\%\!/gi

The interesting part is identifying all the possible values of the variable $nasty_word. Sticking with the example of Perl code, do you use a constant regular expression, hard-coded into your script or do you use an external data file, where users can add new obscenities as they identify them? If you take the first approach, you're stuck with breaking the first rule of polite programming, which is never include offensive material in your source code. If you take the second, you're going to end up with an external text file or database table of obscene epithets which, if your organisation is infested with Mrs Grundy types, will have to be kept a closely guarded (and undocumented) secret within the IT department, lest someone get the wrong idea about the general character of the technical staff.

In the end, writing a successful obscenity filter boils down to human and organisational factors: you need programmers who are able to swear like an old matelot with Korsokov's syndrome. And with imagination. Otherwise, the filter is going to produce output which includes strings like mother@#%!er, or the somewhat ambiguous @#%!-licker which is either Mark Latham's favourite synonym for Prime Minister or something other than Mark Latham's favourite synonym for Prime Minister.

I suspect that somewhere in the English speaking world there's a programmer who has written the ultimate obscenity filtering routine. Of course, we'll never see it in commercial use - I don't think you'll have any trouble working out why.

Lighting the Powder Train

Tuesday, 18 March 2003

So care needs to be taken when employing military force: the powder train can run very quickly and in the most unexpected directions. (Nigel Bagnall, The Punic Wars)

Here's how a people who are free to be proud of their country and heritage, free to realise themselves as individuals, and free to pursue their hopes and ideals, who value excellence as well as fairness and independence as dearly as mateship, go to war.

At 6.00 am your Prime Minister gets a telephone call from the President of the world's only remaining superpower with the long anticipated formal request for a little more involvement in the coming conflict than a mere "pre-deployment". In between finishing the call and heading into a cabinet meeting, your PM drops in to the ABC to give an interview about the phone call. Throughout, he valiantly maintains the fiction that the decision is not a foregone conclusion:

I indicated that Cabinet would meet again this morning, and Cabinet is meeting again this morning, at 8:30, to formally consider that request. We did, of course, talk in some detail about the whole issue last night and when Cabinet has taken a decision, that decision will be immediately communicated to the United States and of course to our military forces.

After the cabinet meeting, the PM briefs all Government MPs on the Cabinet decision then announces the decision publicly.

The Government strongly believes that the decision it's taken is right, it is legal, it is directed towards the protection of the Australian national interest, and [I] ask the Australian community to support it.

He also announces that Parliament will debate the issue this afternoon: once again, well after the critical decisions have been taken. In doing so, he is acting in accordance with the constitution and the precedent set by Mr R J Hawke when Mr Hawke involved Australia in the first Gulf War.

Doesn't it make you glad you live under a democratic and federal system of government which exists under law to preserve and protect all Australians in an equal dignity which may never be infringed by prejudice or fashion or ideology nor invoked against achievement?

What Goes Around ...

Wednesday, 12 March 2003

Andrew Wilkie's resignation from the Office of National Assessments has come in for a lot of comment in the blogosphere today, with Tim Dunlop, Gareth Parker and Gary Sauer-Thompsom all witing considered pieces on the subject.

The government has been playing down the significance of Mr Wilkie's resignation. One of the claims being made is that Mr Wilkie was not very well-placed to comment on Government policy on Iraq as he did not have access to all the intelligence that is regularly reported to the Prime Minister. This is pretty much the exact opposite of the Prime Minister's story on "A Certain Maritime Incident" - back then, it was the bureaucrats and political minders (and possibly a certain ex-member of Parliament) who knew more than the PM and didn't bother to tell him. It's good to see that the Government has learnt something in the interim.

Update (Thursday, 20 March 2003): it's taken a while but I've finally achieved a major milestone: the first ice-pick joke in a comments thread. Congratulations, "Cassandra", on a pithy piece of original wit. I'm sure that as soon as I identify the non sequitur you refer to, I'll feel cut to the quick.

Future Trends in Civil Law

Tuesday, 11 March 2003

Trial by combat made a return in New Zealand last week, when the CEOs of two telecommunications companies agreed to settle a legal dispute with a best out of three arm wrestling match. If this trend catches on, it's very likely that students seeking entry to law degree courses in future will need to have very good results in secondary school physical education - a return to the old standard of mens sano in corpore sano.

A Dark Secret of Leftism

Tuesday, 11 March 2003

Unless you're one of those weirdos who likes delving through second hand book-stores searching out crackpot books, it's unlikely that you will have heard of the Rev Montague Summers, author of this passage:

Immediately upon the receipt of the Bull, Summis desiderantes affectibus, in 1485, Fr Henry Kramer commenced his crusade against witches at Innsbruck, but he was opposed on certain technical grounds by the Bishop of Brixen, nor was Duke Sigismund so ready to help the inquisitors with the civil arm. In fact the prosecutions were, if not actually directed, at least largely controlled by the episcopal authority; nor did the ordinary courts, as is so often supposed, invariably carry out the full sentence of the Holy Office. Not so very many years later the civil power took full cognizance of any charges of witchcraft, and it was then that far more blood was spilled and far more fires blazed than ever in the days when Kramer and Sprenger were directing the trials. It should be borne in mind too that frequent disturbances conspiracies of anarchists and nascent Bolshevism showed that the district was rotten to the core, and the severities of Kramer and Sprenger were by no means so unwarranted as is generally supposed. [My emphasis]

It's from the Rev Summers 1928 introduction to the Malleus Maleficarum of Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger and will no doubt be ridiculed by those who believe that the roots of leftism are in the 18th century Enlightment and the French Revolution. Still, I'm sure that there's someone out there who will seize on the Rev Summers' link between anarchism, Bolshevism and witchcraft as further evidence that leftists are basically evil, regardless of their protestations of good intent. If so, they can find it on-line here. This section, on 15th century feminism should prove especially fascinating.

Dummy Spit of the Week

Sunday, 9 March 2003

I had intended to leave this till Tuesday (I'm taking tomorrow off, blogwise) to allow time for more nominations. Instead, after a brief tour of Ozblogistan, I've decided to bring it forward a day in the interests of timeliness.

As I don't have any candidates from the op-ed and political worlds, this week's Dummy spit award is going to a blogger. Aaron Oakley gets an honourable mention for this post bitching about the fact that Margo Kingston has been ignoring him for the past two months. James Russell also gets an honourable mention for this complaint that John Quiggin overlooked his on-line quiz where he asks readers just what price they are prepared to pay for peace.

But the clear winner, by several long-winded lengths, is the Wog for this attack on the snobbery of Phillip Adams and Tim Dunlop. In it, the wog also provides a list of the things he likes:

... Opera, art, architeture, industrial design, chess, European history, restraurants, horse racing, museums, reading, public radio, ABC - I can handle all of it, cos I like it. But then we add country music, comics, car design, Tony Roma's Deep Fried Mozzarella Sticks, porn, that F1 racing game at the TimeZone etc etc.

Allow me to paraphrase the Wog's post.

Phillip Adams is bad because he is a snob. Tim Dunlop is bad because he is a snob. I am not a snob. I like "culture" stuff but I like common people stuff too. That makes me better than a snob. Because I am better than a snob I am better than either Phillip Adams or Tim Dunlop.

Now that sounds like snobbery to me.

Nominations are now open for the next "Dummy Spit of the Week".

Legal Challenge

Saturday, 8 March 2003

At the moment, it's personally annoying that John Quiggin's blog is proving such a source of inspiration. Anyway, I was thinking about this post and I'm wondering, with so many of the alleged child dumpers now in the country, whether there's any possibility that they could take action under our defamation laws on the whole "Children overboard" lie. Not all of the allegations and comments on the affair were made under the protection of Parliamentary privilege - I'd say, offhand that anything said on either Tonsils' or the other fellows talk-back shows would be fair game for an action, if there was basis in law to bring one. Over to you, legal bloggers.

Update (Sunday, 9 March): Oops, silly me. I meant to canvas the possibility of a class action for defamation.

Update Too (Tuesday, 11 March): not a snowball in hell's chance of such an action winning according to Ken Parish. There goes my John Gresham style legal thriller, all three paragraphs of the first chapter of it. Bugger!

Bullshit Tactics (and How to Use Them) Part 2

Saturday, 8 March 2003

Today's bullshit tactic is:

2. Maintaining that, because major libertarian reform is at present politically impossible, it is nonsensical to explore and evaluate the desirability of such reform. Libertarianism is unrealistic.

In my view, this is an imprecise description which covers two distinct possible situations:

A: Your libertarian interlocutor is wittering on about how much better off everyone would be after a program of complete, radical libertarian reform.

B: An argument is being made for a significant, but specific reform in which libertarian principles are being invoked to justify the repeal of laws which "unnessarily" restrict personal liberty: perhaps a liberty which your interlocutor wants herself.

In the first case, the best bullshit tactic is to ask how your libertarian proposes to achieve the program of reform which will lead to the libertarian utopia. This is a significant challenge as she cannot, as a rule, appeal to the usual fantasy of devout Marxists, that it will happen as an historically inevitable and natural result of the collapse of capitalism. But, like a devout Marxist, she is living in cloud-cuckoo land. Point this out tactfully and courteously and don't forget to make the comparison with Marxist fantasies about life after the revolution.

In the second case, you face a more arduous task: you have to show, by careful application of the techniques you should have picked up from reading The Euthyphro and a little argument of your own, that the extension of her own personal liberty will result in a loss of liberty for a lot of other people. For example, if allowing more people to own guns results in more fatal shootings, the "right" of gun ownership is exercised at the expense of the total loss of liberty for everyone who gets shot as a result of easing restrictions on gun ownership (there is no liberty in the grave). You can't always sustain this line of attack successfully: there are going to be times when using it will put you on the wrong side of the argument. No one person or political philosophy can be right all the time. It's much more common to be persistently wrong through unrepentant pig-headedness.

Call for Nominations

Saturday, 8 March 2003

Reading this post at John Quiggin's blog reminded me that I'm stuck for a "Dummy Spit of the Week" to start next week's blogging. I'd like to keep it as a more or less regular feature (at least for the next few weeks), so if anyone can remember any likelty candidates from the last weeks events in politics, please post a comment (preferably with a link, of course).

By the way, John's bloody lucky to be getting mentioned in this context after this post on the strange silence that has descended on his little corner of Ozplogistan, where yours truly doesn't rate a mention as one of the bloggers who have been "busy and interesting" this week - evidently, nothing I've written since Tuesday has been up to scratch. I wouldn't have mentioned Mr John Bloody Smart-Arse Quiggin at all if he weren't consistently one of my own top 5 referrers. Still, Tim Dunlop remains way out in front by miles, which says something about the relative good taste of his readers compared to sodding Quiggin's.

Sharp As Blu-Tack™

Friday, 7 March 2003

I found this article by Boris Johnson (Bojo to his fans) through the site of a certain self-styled "journalist, commentator and oppressor". It's about Iraq. In it Boris explains the rationale for the war in Iraq in terms one of his characters could understand:

You know how it is when you are a teenager, and you have a hot date with a chick on, say, Friday. It has taken a lot of guts to organise, and you feel sure that, if you play your cards right, it could be your lucky night. Like the world at the end of the Cold War, you are in a state of pleasurable excitement, not unmixed with anxiety. And then round about Tuesday of that week, you notice something worrying. Somewhere on your left cheek - roundabout the place where Iraq is on the globe - something begins to throb. There is no getting away from it. The thing is a zit.

Boris canvases how you might deal with this problem, and arrives at the conclusion that, if you're really serious about getting your end away, you'll just have to put aside your worries about collateral dermatological damage, bite the bullet and squeeze the damn thing. And the global community has to do the same with Saddam Hussein: he's a zit that has to be squeezed.

This just leaves two questions:

What's the geopolitical equivalent of getting your end away on Friday night?

How come the Eton and Balliol educated Mr Johnson has never heard of Clearasil™?

Update (Saturday, March 8): in the comments thread, dj provides an alternative, folk remedy for facial suppurations. It's not hard to see where this discussion is going to go.

Bullshit Tactics (and How to Use Them)

Thursday, 6 March 2003

I found a list of "Bullshit Tactics Used Against Libertarians" at the Australian Libertarian Society site yesterday. Most of them are pretty good so I decided the list would be a good basis for a series on how to really piss off the libertarian in your life. There are 14 tactics in all - we'll just have to see how far I can get through the list before I get bored and move on to something else. Here's number one:

1. Pointing out that there are gray areas between voluntary and coercive action, and pretending that the existence of gray areas destroys the distinction and, hence, the very idea of liberty. Libertarianism is illusory.

This is obviously inadequate, and needs a little fine tuning. I suggest you begin by reading the Euthyphro from The Last Days of Socrates, to get an idea of how a master would handle things. Then, rather than pointing out those grey areas, just put this simple question: "Just what do you mean by liberty?" Don't take "Oh come on that's obvious" for an answer: insist on a definition.

If you get something like "Freedom from tyranny", you're on an easy winner - just follow up with "OK what's tyranny?" If you can't lead your libertarian adversary into a circular argument, you're just not trying hard enough. On the other hand, beware of asking the question "What are the responsibilities of consciousness?" You're very likely to get a long lecture on the importance of recognising that a straight line is a straight line and not, say, a parabola with the equation f(x) = 0x² + bx + c.

Your goal, by the way, is not to show that "Libertarianism is illusory": it's to show that your adversaries idea of libertarianism is naive because it relies on an unquestioned and ill-defined conception of liberty. If you're dealing with someone who has a more developed notion of liberty, from reading John Stuart Mill's essay On Liberty for example, you may have to put in a lot more work to reach the point where your exasperated libertarian says the magic words "You're full of shit!" I think we'll save that for the advanced course.

Welcome Light Relief?

Wednesday, 5 March 2003

With all that's happening in the world at the moment I felt desperate for a little humorous reading last night, so I resorted to my Penguin Classics copy of Dante's Inferno, translated by Dorothy L Sayers, noted medievalist and author of several books of detective fiction including "The Nine Tailors, a fascinating novel about campanology."

Dotty's translation of Dante's immortal work is notable for two things: her truly appalling terza rima and her equally appalling explanatory notes, which make up the bulk of the text. I've been told by friends that the subsequent volumes of The Divine Comedy are also worth reading (if only to get the whole of Dante's allegory rather than just the sordid first third) but the idea of ploughing through another two volumes of questionable rhymes and didactic endnotes that belabour the patently bleeding obvious doesn't appeal. Except for one thing - quite unintentionally, Dotty gives us fascinating glimpses into the psychology of a Cultural Conservative with two Ps and a silent Q. Here for example, is the conclusion of her description of Dante's Universe (which is basically your standard medieval geocentric, or Ptolemaic universe, with the planets mounted on transparent spheres revolving around a fixed Earth):

The Ptolemaic universe is the universe we recognise, as we recognise a photograph or picture of the house in which we live. It is inferior to the Copernican in that its mathematics, even when corrected by modern knowledge, would be too complicated for ready calculation; but it is superior as a description of what the heavens have to show us, because it is a direct transcript of the observed phenomena.

Reading this passage, with its nostalgia for a simpler world where eternity was only a few thousand miles away, beyond the sphere of the Fixed Stars, you can understand why CP Snow got grumpy about the "two cultures". It's not merely that Sayers is woefully ignorant of the science, or even the history which resulted in the Ptolemaic view being replaced by the Copernican view. It's that she prefers to be ignorant and seems, at some level, to prefer that the rest of us were ignorant too, happily living in a glittering snow-dome cosmos with God on the outside peering in through the Primum Mobile. It reminds me of certain contemporary cultural conservatives who wring their hands over what we have lost in the inevitable cultural decline that followed the disbanding of the Doobie Brothers. There's something seriously weird about people who are nostalgic for times and places outside their own experience.

Today's Strikes

Wednesday, 5 March 2003

Angry loggers have backed down from their threat to disrupt this weekend's Grand Prix, contenting themselves with leaving 100 timber trucks parked around Victoria's Parliament House. That's a bitter blow for those of us who hoped to see a Mack prime mover take the chequered flag this year.

Victoria's screws are also taking industrial action, over the possibility that one of their number might face criminal charges for discharging his firearm at an escaping prisoner. The prisoner, Garry Whyte, 39, a remand prisoner, was attempting to escape from St Vincent's Hospital in Melbourne. According to a screw's union spokesman on ABC local radio this morning, the fact that criminal charges have been laid against a screw who exercised the authority given to him by Parliament to discharge his firearm to prevent an escape creates uncertainty for other screws. Until they receive a clear indication that they still have authority to discharge their firearms at escaping prisoners the screws won't be carrying firearms or undertaking escort duties where they might be tempted to discharge their firearms in the wrong belief that they have been authorised to do so by government regulation when in fact they might still be liable for the results of a discharging of firearms under criminal law. Got that? If not, keep an eye on this page for the next couple of days: they might put the audio of Jon Faine's interview with Julian Kenelly up. It's worth a listen if you have a robust sense of humour.

Word of The Day: Homonym

Wednesday, 5 March 2003

Which, according to my usual source, the Macquarie Dictionary means

a word like another in sound and often in spelling, but different in meaning, as meat and meet.

Or say, John Howard and great Australian Prime Minister. What brought it to mind was a report on AM this morning where the reporter kept talking about a small West Australian town called "New Nausea". Right now, New Nausea has a monastery and will soon be getting a European Space Agency tracking station. I'm waiting for the transcript so that I can get the correct spelling.

Dummy Spits of the Week

Tuesday, 4 March 2003

Time to brush the carpet fluff off the Trotsky dummy and resume blogging after a weekend of fear and loathing somewhere near Syracuse (that's the ancient city in Sicily, rather than any contemporary US namesake). The big dummy spit in Oz politics was produced by ACT Treasurer Ted Quinlan who, according to the ABC's AM, was one of four signatories to a letter to Federal Stealth Treasurer Peter Costello saying that there was no way that mr Graeme Samuel was acceptable as the new chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. Why? Because

... Graeme Samuel has not only a pedigree at the big end of town, but he also has the image of a pedigree at the big end of town, and both those things I think mitigate against it being an appropriate appointment.

Mr Quinlan also expressed his hope that Mr Costello would display more maturity than himself and that the ACT would not lose Commonwealth funding as a result of this ... principled stand.

But the soft patter of silicon rubber hitting the carpet was loudest from Washington this week. On Saturday, Whitehouse spokesman Ari Fleischer dismissed Iraq's decision to destroy its Al-Samoud missiles as

... propaganda, wrapped in a lie, inside a falsehood.

Fleischer continued this dismissive line in his press briefing of 3 March: as far as the Bush administration is concerned it's too little, too late. The optimist in me wants to believe that this is a case of the US government talking tough to get the result it wants (Saddam disarmed) but the pessimist doubts it. Still, I'm determined to look on the bright side - as soon as I can scrape a few thousand dollars together I'm investing in Brie futures. They're bound to go up once this whole thing is settled, one way or the other.

Reading and Other Matters

Wednesday, 26 February 2003

I picked up a shitload of books from the Moreland Library on Sunday: The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould (what I really want to be reading right now on this subject is Race In Mind: Race, IQ, and other Racisms by Alexander Alland junior which, I gather on the basis of a short review in The Age, continues the ongoing task of refuting the Sax-Rohmerist theory of the racial distribution of human intelligence. I've also got Trollope's Doctor Thorne and Framley Parsonage for "light reading" and a copy of Nigel Bagnall's The Punic Wars which I bought a couple of years ago to get through.

As if that weren't enough, I received The Diviner's Son by Gary Crew in the mail today. I won it by singing the chorus to Ruby Tuesday on one of those late night quizzes on the ABC. With a reccomended retail price of $14.95, it works out to 83 days of my 18 cents a day that I just got back. That's one in the eye for all you anti-Auntie whingers out there.

Best of all, we've just picked up some work! A $20,000 contract to build a new web-site, which should get the company back on the right side of the fine line between solvency and impending bankruptcy and perhaps allow it to pay some wages - or at least I might get a small "back-rent" bonus out of it, which ought to get the real estate agents off my back.

Dummy Spits of the Week

Monday, 24 February 2003

(This post is slightly overdue - let's all just pretend that I wrote it last Friday).

Federal Health Minister Kay Patterson decided not to attend a national conference of Health Ministers last week because, to cite various explanations offered by Senator Patterson herself, it was an exercise in grandstanding by the State Labor Governments in the lead-up to the New South Wales state election and she didn't want to be "hi-jacked" by the States (who organised the conference). As a result, Senator Patterson didn't get to hear the various submissions made to the conference by health professionals and administrators on the current state of the public health system: a fact that the Senator regretted but, as those sneaky State health ministers didn't bother to tell her that they were holding a conference on health spending with real doctors, it's not her fault that she denied herself this opportunity to hear some expert opinion on her portfolio responsibilities. If the impending war on Iraq weren't occupying so much attention, Senator Patterson's brilliant own goal might have got more notice than it has.

All the same, there's probably room for someone on the Government side of federal politics to take Senator Patterson in hand and give her a few pointers on dealing with hostile State ministers. Stealth Treasurer Peter Costello would be ideal for this job - you may recall the calming effect his charm had on New South Wales State Treasurer Michael Egan. Mr Costello briefly departed from his usual ground-hugging political flight path last week to comment on another burning political issue, the Liberal Party presidency. Mr Costello expressed some pique at the fact that current President Shane Stone did not seek his (Costello's) opinion before deciding to run for another term, saying:

I think that somebody who wanted to engage in wide consultation would have spoken to me about it, yes. But obviously, that's a question of the style and the degree to which they want to engage in consultation.

So, I think the more consultation the better, and I think it would've been advisable to consult in relation to this. But it's something that he must take into account in relation to his management of the organisation.

But really, for this one, you should listen to the audio. I swear, if you listen carefully, you can actually hear his lip quiver.

Raising the Potemkin

Friday, 21 February 2003

I was a bit anxious when I visited the Potemkin today, and found instead a Blogger page telling me that my trusty old tub was scuttled. A quick visit to the Blogger main site was sufficient to raise her from the bottom of the harbour. So, if you've just discovered that your own blog is cactus, just do what I did - go to Blogger and publish it again. It's a pain in the bum isn't it?

A Short Memoir

Thursday, 20 February 2003

At the risk of writing an egotistical post about how wonderful I am, I'm going to tell you about something that happened to me a couple of years ago. It's a memory that keeps bubbling up to the surface when I think about the Iraq situation. It happened one Sunday afternoon while I was travelling home from Melbourne on the train.

For those who have never travelled on a Melbourne train, you need to know something about the rolling stock. Each carriage has a communicating door at either end which allows you, if you want, to walk through to the next carriage. Between the carriages there is an open platform, with a safety chain either side, at about waist height for the average adult human being. A sign over the door informs you that the platform between the carriages is for communication only and that you shouldn't ride on it. Nonetheless, from time to time people do.

It wasn't a crowded carriage - I'd say that there were no more than twenty people in it including, at the end furthest from me, three young boys. At a guess, I'd say the youngest was about seven, the oldest around ten or eleven. As soon as the train entered the tunnels of Melbourne's underground loop, they slipped through the connecting door and all three of them stood crowed on the "inter-carriage platform". This didn't strike me as particularly safe, so I was very relieved when they came back inside the carriage at the next station.

As the journey went on, a pattern developed: after the train left a station they went out into the gap between carriages and came back inside as the train approached the next station. And I became increasingly anxious: the youngest of the three was quite short enough to slip under the safety chains if he lost his footing, either due to an unexpected motion of the train or a little over-boistrous horseplay. As they became more self-assured about being out there, I realised that I was looking at an accident waiting to happen. I started to become angry too: there were others in the carriage who should have been able to see what I was seeing, and they were much closer than me to the problem. Why the hell wasn't anyone doing anything?

...

...

That question answers itself: if I thought something needed to be done, it was up to me to do it. I decided that the next time the boys were safely back in the carriage, I would give them a telling off calculated to nail their arses to their seats. Why did I decide to wait? Because I thought (rightly or wrongly) that this was the best way to deal with the problem: I didn't want to do something to precipitate the very accident I was trying to prevent. it wasn't a comfortable position to place oneself in, knowing that while you were holding back on acting something quite appalling could happen any second. But the boys did, eventually get back inside the carriage safely and, ignoring the nagging little voice which was telling me that everyone else was going to think I was an officious prick, I walked the length of the carriage and delivered a blistering dose of sarcasm, starting with the statement that they were taking a bloody stupid risk and that I didn't want to be three hours late getting home because one of them had fallen under the train and got himself killed. They indulged in a little indirect cheek - repeating what I had said to each other in a derisive tone but they were entitled to that. In any case I got what I wanted: they stayed inside the carriage where they were safe.

So I walked back to my seat at the other end of the carriage, past all the other adults who were with me in that railway carriage, all of them conveying, through shaking heads and sidelong disapproving glances, their judgement that I was an officious prick. I found the whole thing a little upsetting but, when I talked it over with various friends, they all said that I had done the "right thing". Of course their judgement on this point may have been coloured by the fact that, as leftists, they might have been a little too willing to accept the idea that it was OK to tell people off for their own good.

Obviously, I wouldn't find myself thinking about this in relation to Iraq if, at some level I didn't think it was relevant. To some readers the relevance will be obvious: I acted decisively in a situation in which I saw a danger but no-one else was prepared to act. But to me there is as much relevance in those agonised minutes while I waited, knowing that the worst might happen, because to act too soon, and ineptly, might cause the very thing I wanted to prevent.

-***-

Lost & Found

Monday, 17 February 2003

I've just noticed that Gary-Sauer Thompson mentions my witterings on just war theory in his post Just war theory is out of date?, where he takes the philosophical stick to Christopher Pearson's article on the subject in Saturday's Oz. The series has slipped off the front page today so here are links to the first three articles, bloggings or whatever they're called.

Part 1: A Long Overdue War Blog
Part 2: The Whackiest Little Constitutional Monarchy in the West
Part 3: When Meaning Well Is Not Quite Enough

Postscript: Gary also has a few things to say on the PM's 60 Minutes interview in Authoritarian Logic.

Just Another Slip of the Tongue

Monday, 17 February 2003

I don't usually watch Channel 9's Sixty Minutes - the picture quality on my AM/FM clock radio isn't really up to it - so I missed the broadcast of Charles Wooley's interview with Prime Minister John Howard last night. This part of the interview raised a bit of furore on our ABC this morning ("our" as in devotees of over-produced BBC adaptations of second-rate Victorian novelists and anyone well to the left of Mark Latham, of course. The rest of you have three commercial stations to choose from, so quit bitching. And don't give me that crap about paying for it through your taxes: where the hell do you think commercial TV advertising revenue ultimately comes from? There's something to think about next time you're wondering why it's costing so much at the bloody supermarket these days). Sorry about that rantlet - back to the interview:

CHARLES WOOLEY: Sure, but, for a leader of a democracy to go against the perceived tide of public opinion is still a considerable thing to do and it is true, to use the kind of vernacular that you use, "the mob don't like it".

JOHN HOWARD: Well, I don't think the mob, to use that vernacular, has really made up its mind on this issue and it can't really make up its mind until we know what all the alternatives are. Clearly, most people would like the general approval of the UN in some form. I don't know what the … [My emphasis]

I've emphasised the grab that the ABC used. As I said, there's been much furore and the eminently fair-minded Jon Faine had to inform a couple of talk-back callers (who naturally objected to the Prime Minister's apparent reference to mainstream Australia as "the mob") that Mr Howard was simply adopting the words used by his interviewer. Fair-minded lefty that I sometimes try to be, I more or less agreed with him, until I read the transcript this morning.

Granted, the main topic of the interview was Iraq but, even so, I think it might have been better if the PM had repudiated the vernacular that Wooley put in his mouth. It wouldn't take much, just a prefatory remark like: "Well Charles, I don't think I'd call the people of Australia a mob. I don't think they've really made up their minds ..." That's all it would have taken for the Prime Minister of this country to demonstrate that, unlike Charles Wooley, he actually respects the intelligence of ordinary Australians. Is this too much to ask of a man who is so proud of defending mainstream values against out-of-touch elite opinion and political correctness?

Rubbery Figures

Friday, 14 February 2003

I've just got back from the Peace Rally in Melbourne. I phoned a friend who watched it on the news and she gave me these estimates of the attendance figures:

Channel 10: 10 - 15,000.
Channel 7: 15 - 20,000.
Channel 2: 100,000.

The only comment I'll make on the numbers is that well before I started walking anywhere (I was on the corner of Swanston and Little Lonsdale, counting the Spartacists) the head of the march already looked like it had reached Flinders Street. When I got to Bourke Street, I stopped and let it go past for a while: it still took up the whole of Swanston Street and I was told by a passing stranger that the tail still stretched to the John Curtin Hotel. That's a lot of people, way above what the commercial stations are estimating.

Still, the only reliable estimate I can offer is for the number of Sparts: by my count there were 4, 3 to carry the banner and one selling The Spartacist. Their banner took my personal prize for the most stupid slogan of the day. It was really more of a manifesto printed on cheap fabric and read:

Australian Military get out of Persian Gulf, East Timor: Hands off Indonesia. Defend Iraq Against UN/US/Australian Imperialist Attack.

I wonder if they realise why so many people were giving them such a wide berth.

When Meaning Well Is Not Quite Enough

Thursday, 13 February 2003

(Part 3 of "Gummo Trotsky on Just War Theory". See also: Part 1, Part 2.)

The general thrust of the requirement for right intention is that we go to war for the sake of justice itself rather than national self-interest. This immediately invites a narrow reading of the criterion which excludes any justification which is "tainted" by considerations of national interest: this is often the implicit basis of the "It's all about oil" argument. To consider the issue of right intention in such a narrow way ignores the possibility that the national interest may coincide with the cause of justice without compromising it. It also makes the unrealistic assumption that ethical action is impossible without absolute purity of ethical intent. The challenge is to recognise, given that most human actions proceed from a variety of motivations, whether the ethical intent is the dominant consideration. In the political debate around war on Iraq a lot of effort has been put into rallying support for the war on the basis that, in the long run, it will liberate the Iraqi people which is an ethical purpose. However, if the dominant intent is something else, this argument in favour of war deserves to be rejected until its proponents can come up with a credible case that this is our major goal and that we can achieve it without an unacceptable level of "collateral damage", assuming that there is such a thing as an acceptable level of "collateral damage" and that this can be defined.

The issue is further complicated by the existence of motivations which do taint right intention: in the case of war these include hatred, blood-thirst, the desire for revenge or the goal of instilling fear in one's enemies. These are all, recognisably the taints of terrorism and anyone who advocates war on any of these grounds is, quite simply, a terrorist. In saying this I am transgressing against the normal code of civility which would require that I use such weasel words as "no better than" or "no different to" and so on but there is little point in attempting to make this assertion palatable to those who may think themselves, or their favourite politicians, on the wrong end of it: to advocate the use of atrocity and fear as rightful means for achieving political goals is to advocate terrorism. It should be possible to state this position without every reader leaping to the conclusion that I am accusing George Bush, Tony Blair, John Howard et al of being terrorists but no doubt there is someone out there who will make this intuitive leap.

...

...

The last preliminary consideration I want to raise on the issue of right intention is the importance of intention not only as a justification for action but as a guide in determining how we act. The goal of disarming Iraq and the goal of disarming Saddam Hussein are subtly but decisively different in this respect. In the first case, we make no clear distinction between the government of a nation and the nation itself and run the risk that we will choose means which are imprecisely directed: Iraq as the enemy is as much its people as its government. In the second case, we make it clear that the government of Iraq is the enemy and open the possibility of more discriminating forms of action which treat the people of Iraq less casually than as people who might, regretably, get killed because they stand in the way of our goal. Most of the pro-war rhetoric has been disappointing to me because often the words "Iraq" and "saddam Hussein" have been used interchangeably, as if they were one and the same thing. When these statements come from government, it doesn't inspire confidence that the actions taken will be (to anticipate a little) proportionate to the objectives of the war.

A judgement on whether we will be taking part in a war on Iraq with right intent requires that we identify our intent. Timothy Garton Ash offered a catalogue of the various motives for war in this article in the Guardian (link via ken Parish and Tim Dunlop). Here's a similar (but probably incomplete) catalogue of Australian motivations, based on what has been said by politicians and commentators:

1. Freeing the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein.

2. Demonstrating our support for the US Alliance.

3. Disarming Iraq/Saddam Hussein.

4. Deterring future rogue states.

5. Prime Ministerial hubris or arse-licking or

6. Prime Ministerial clarity of vision and moral purpose.

Note: 5 and 6 are mutually exclusive.

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...

Unlike Garton Ash, I'm not going to attempt to ascribe percentage weightings to these, except for the first which, after Alexander Downer's comments of February 11, 2003 can be confidently weighted at 0%: Australia's official reasons for going to war with Iraq have nothing to do with the welfare of the Iraqi people. US government thinking on the issue is different: there is some commitment there to the idea that a war must be followed by an effort to rebuild Iraq as a nation (link via Tim Dunlop again). This raises an interesting question: can we continue to use the liberation and democratisation of Iraq as a justification for Australian involvement in the war, when we have made it clear that we are going to be leaving this to others? Perhaps we can justify this on the basis of an international division of labour, with Australia in the international riot squad, leaving "wussy" nations (like the French and Germans) to form the international ambulance service who come in to tend to the injured once order is restored.

When it comes to motives 5 and 6, I doubt that anyone will be surprised if I say that I'm more inclined to explain the conduct of our Prime Minister in terms of number 5: This is the man who weaseled out of accusations that he misled the Australian public in the Children overboard affair on the spurious grounds that he was merely passing on the untruths that were told to him, the man who was such an ambiguous friend to Bill Heffernan - first, in effect standing aside while Heffernan defamed Justice Michael Kirby under cover of parliamentary privilege then left him hanging out to dry when Heffernan's allegations were proved baseless and most recently has found himself contradicted by none other than George Bush on the subject of Australia's pre-commitment to war in Iraq. While it is possible that on this issue he has rediscovered an ability to hold and act on moral convictions his past conduct doesn't inspire confidence on this point.

In the end, I'm unable to reach a conclusion on whether Australian involvement in a war with Iraq will have right intention: there is too much on both sides of the question to reach a definite conclusion.

- *** -

Bernie's Missing Link

Thursday, 13 February 2003

Bernard Slattery is mickle irritated over Annabel Crabbe's House on the Hill column in yesterday's Age. Thanks to that technological marvel, the Google Advanced Search facility, I'm able to present the full text of the item that has got Bernard's goat.

What's he got under that robe?

Lefties who lost their breakfast over the appointment of Dyson Heydon to the High Court vacancy left by Mary Gaudron can prepare to lose it again.

The gossip at yesterday's High Court blast to welcome Justice Heydon was that he is planning to take on right-wing commentator Janet Albrechtsen as his associate next year.

Albrechtsen, a lawyer and opinion-haver who has been published extensively in The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian Financial Review and lately in The Australian, was at the ceremony yesterday and would admit only that "negotiations" were under way.

But she'd certainly have a cool reception in some corners of the High Court tea-room.

"Is the High Court inviting terrorists to Australia?" Albrechtsen wrote in December last year, in a piece that further accused Chief Justice Murray Gleeson, Justice Michael Kirby and Justice Mary Gaudron of having "trouble differentiating terrorists from refugees".

Presciently, she urged the Government on November 6 last year not to appoint another "hero-judge" such as Lionel Murphy or Michael Kirby.

(One would assume the rider "so Dyson Heydon gets the gig so I can have a job" was not even implicitly attached.)

Anyway, if the job comes through, it will cause havoc among the anti-Albrechtsen forces, not least Labor's Mark Latham, who has unleashed Project Vocabulary upon the unfortunate columnist, using privilege to savage her variously as a "filthy hypocrite" and a "skanky ho' who will die in a ditch to defend the Liberal Party".

It's going to be a sad day for me if Janet does become a hero-associate to a High Court judge: where am I going to find a hero-columnist who is remotely her equal?