The Science of Nitpicking (2)

(Introducing BS-95 and BS-99)

Last Wednesday, in the first post in this series, I introduced a simple test of whether an op-ed article was a complete piece of bullshit. Basically, if , starting at the beginning of the article, you come across five bullshit statements or arguments in a row you can write the article off as complete bullshit with the statistician's much beloved 95% confidence. Seven in a row takes you to 99% confidence.

Over the past few days I've been looking to try this test out on a promising candidate and, via EP in a comment at Larvatus Prodeo, I got onto Pamela Bone's impassioned piece in Monday's Age. The opening paragraph looked promising:

Feminist debate here - what little of it there is - seems to be mainly about whether Big Brother is empowering to or patronising of young women. Many of the same young women would rather die (metaphorically speaking) than own the title of feminist.

What are the claims made in this paragraph?

• There's not a lot of feminist debate here;


• The debate that there is seems to be mainly about Big Brother


• Many young women don't want to be identified as feminists.

That's three candidates for the status of bullshit claim packed into two sentences. If you want to go to the implied subtext - that feminism in Australia has vanished up its own bum and hence, become irrelevant to the next generation of should-be-feminists, you have five claims which might all possibly be bullshit, plus the questionable argumentative technique of letting the sub-text do all the work.

So, you could be 95% confident that this article is complete bullshit if you could demonstrate that:

• There's a lot more feminist debate around than Pamela Bone has noticed;


• Very little of it is in fact about Big Brother


• At least as many young women are willing to identify as feminists as those who don't;


• Feminism hasn't vanished up its own bum;


• Feminism is still relevant, here and now.

Unfortunately, that demands a little more knowledge of the current state of feminism in Australia than I can claim. So, although I'm inclined to count the three explicit claims of the first paragraph as bullshit, it's necessary to read on a little before I can claim the five in a row I need before I'm entitled to dismiss it out of hand and move on to more informative reading.

In other places women are dying, literally, for the feminist cause. Did Western feminists in the 1970s - so silent these days! - think they had it hard? They had to put up with scorn and ridicule from the media and hostility from conservatives who said they were out to destroy the family. But no one, so far as I can remember, was murdered.

A few examples, of many, of what women in some countries are up against: in northern Afghanistan in May, three women workers at a microcredit organisation (which gives loans to women to start up small businesses) were stoned to death by warlords; in India, a woman social worker in Madhya Pradesh state had her hands chopped off by a man furious because she was counselling villagers against child marriage.

Well, that pretty much buggered things up; after a neat little segue in the second paragraph, we get some reported fact, and the simple "five specious claims in a row" test is out the window.

It's for situations such as this that I've devised the BS-95/BS-99 scoring system. It works like this:

• Count all the questionable assertions of fact, possible errors of argument etc in the article;


• Nitpick away at them and count all the errors;


• Consult the BS-95/BS-99 scoring table (Table 1) to determine how confident you can be that the article is complete bullshit.

Table 1: BS-95 and BS-99

No. of Questionable Assertions/Inferences	BS-95	BS-99
5	5	-
6	5	6
7	6	7
8	7	8
9	7	8
10	8	9
11	8	9
12	9	10
13	9	11
14	10	11
15	11	12
16	11	13
17	12	13
18	12	14
19	13	14
20	14	15
25	17	18
30	19	21
35	22	25
40	25	27
45	28	30
50	31	33

It's probably appropriate to slip in a few words here on the BS-95/BS-99 table. It's the product of a couple of hours of futzing around with a spreadsheet of cumulative binomial probabilities. Assuming that any claim I question has at most a 50% probability of being true (the nominally unbiased position), I calculated the probabilities that, in an article with five substantive claims I could refute at least one of them, at least two and so on. BS-95 represents the number of claims you need to refute to be 95% certain that you're reading (or have just read) a piece of complete bullshit. BS-99 represents the number of refuted claims which entitles you to claim 99% certainty. It's in the nature of the test that you can't claim 100% certainty and that's the way it should be. So there.

As you can see from the table, there's no point trying for a BS-95 if you have fewer than 5 questionable claims to deal with and BS-99 doesn't work below 6. Now let's see if we can apply BS-95 to Pamela Bone's article. A promising place to start is here:

A YouGov poll published in London's Daily Telegraph last month found that 32 per cent of British Muslims believed that "Western society is decadent and immoral and that Muslims should seek to bring it to an end". But men were far more likely than women to say this.

Here's the question that was actually put to the poll respondents:

Which of these views comes closest to your own?

• Western society is decadent and immoral,and Muslims should seek to bring it to an end, if necessary by violence 1%


• Western society is decadent and immoral,and Muslims should seek to bring it to an end, but only by NON-VIOLENT means 31%


• Western society may not be perfect,but Muslims should live with it and not seek to bring it to an end 56%


• Don't know 11%

So, Bone's claim that 32% of British Muslims want to bring decadent, immoral Western society to an end appears to be supported by the poll results: as long as you're prepared to lump the 31% who believe that this should happen by non-violent means in with the much smaller number (1% or roughly five and a quarter respondents out of a total of 526 (unweighted) or 527 (weighted). It's possible that this little detail got lost at the subbies' desk but the end result is patently inaccurate and misleading in a rather alarmist way. Are men "far more likely than women" to hold this view? On that score, the YouGov report (PDF) of the poll results is silent. All we have to go on is the Daily Telegraph report:

Among those who hold this view, almost all go on to say that Muslims should only seek to bring about change by non-violent means but one per cent, about 16,000 individuals, declare themselves willing, possibly even eager, to embrace violence.

Yet again, far more men than women and far more young people than their elders evince this kind of hostility towards the world around them.

You might wonder how 1% of a 527 respondent polling sample can have 16,000 members. The answer is simple; in his report of the poll results the Telegraph's Anthony King is freely projecting the percentages to the Muslim population as a whole. It's a pretty sloppy article, and worthy of a BS-95 check in its own right. Back to Bone, in The Age:

As well, the proportion of Muslim men who said they felt no loyalty to Britain (18 per cent) was more than three times higher than the proportion of women who said the same.

Once again, here are the poll questions:

Turning now to wider issues,how loyal do you think most Muslims living in Britain feel towards Britain?

• Very loyal 28%


• Fairly loyal 48%


• Not very loyal 10%


• Not at all loyal 8%


• Don't know 6%

How loyal would you say you personally feel towards Britain?

• Very loyal 46%


• Fairly loyal 33%


• Not very loyal 6%


• Not at all loyal 10%


• Don't know 4%

[emphasis added]

Here's the Telegraph report:

... YouGov asked respondents how loyal they feel towards Britain. As the figures ... show, the great majority say they feel "very loyal" (46 per cent) or "fairly loyal" (33 per cent) but nearly one British Muslim in five, 18 per cent, feels little loyalty towards this country or none at all.

If these findings are accurate, and they probably are, well over 100,000 British Muslims feel no loyalty whatsoever towards this country.

The proportion of men who say they feel no loyalty to Britain is more than three times the proportion of women saying the same.

Whoa, Hold on there! Where did that 18% total of people who feel little or no loyalty come from? In the second question, where respondents are asked about their own loyalties, as distinct from assessing the loyalty of others there are 6% of respondents who are not very loyal and 10% who are not loyal at all; that's a total of 16% over the two categories, not 18%. The 18% figure appears to come from adding up the not very loyal/not at all loyal percentages for the previous question where respondents weren't asked about their own feelings of loyalty, but how loyal they reckoned everyone else was. It's like conducting a poll on stupidity and inferring that most people think they are stupid, based on their responses to a question something like this:

Which of these views comes closet to your own:

• Most people are stupid;


• A lot of people are stupid;


• Some people are stupid;


• Few people are stupid;


• Don't know.

Note too, that in the Telegraph report, there's no mention of how many Muslim men say that they feel no loyalty to Britain. But somehow, when it gets to Bone's turn in this little game of Chinese whispers, we have a definite figure: it's that wandering 18% again.

Now, the results so far:

Claim: 32% of British Muslims want to bring decadent, immoral Western society

Misrepresentation. Firstly, it's 32 percent of the poll respondents and extrapolation to the general population of British Muslims has to be approached with caution. It ignores the distinction between respondents who want it done peacefully and the much smaller number who are prepared to contemplate violent means. Verdict: bullshit. Count it towards the BS-95 score.

Claim: men were far more likely than women to want this.

Questionable, but not refuted on the available information. So it can't be counted towards the BS-95 score.

Claim: 18% of Muslim men said they felt no loyalty to Britain.
On the available information, this is bullshit, so we count it towards the BS-95 score.

Claim: That 18% of men was more than 3 times as high as the percentage of women who felt no loyalty to Britain.

Questionable, but not refuted on the available information. So it can't be counted towards the BS-95 score.

Blimey, this is getting to be a long piece isn't it? And we haven't even got the count of all questionable assertions and arguments in yet. So much for the idea of coming up with a quick, simple way to rate the bullshit content of an op-ed piece. On the other hand, I may have inadvertently stumbled on a scrupulously thorough and fair way to do it. It's bloody tedious, though. Right now, I think I'll take a break and come back to this after I've had time for some sleep.

Update (Thursday, 11 August): Anthony King, referred to above as "the Telegraph's Anthony King is professor of government at Essex University.

After reviewing the spreadsheet of binomial probabilities from which I derived the BS-95 and BS-99 scores, I've decided that Table 1 needs to be revised. A lot.

I'm getting well and truly sick and tired of putting in so much bloody time on what started out as not much more than a half-arsed throwaway idea.

Blaming St Anselm

I started out last Thursday morning the proud owner of two second-hand, out-of-warranty and out-of-date PCs, thinking that, with a little work, I could I could up-grunt the less obsolete of the two so that it would remain more or less serviceable until the next time I'm offered an out-of-warranty PC with bugger all resale value which I might as well have. 24 hours later I was down to one half-working PC and the realisation that it probably hadn't been a good idea to begin the job thinking "Well, this might not be a good day for making major life decisions or writing thoughful, analytical posts for the blog, but I'm probably up to a few hours of tinkering around with a Phillips' Head screwdriver."

Things started out promisingly enough. Thursday afternoon I opened up the more clapped out of the two PCs, unplugged the hard-drive and slid it into the drive bay of the new box. I then put the bay back in the box, did a bit of work with the Phillips head to secure it and transferred the cables from the existing hard drive to the newly installed one. This is pretty much the same procedure I used when I got the older machine to replace a completely dead one.

I plugged in the monitor, keyboard and mouse and turned on the power. Boot, boot, boot: up came the award BIOS, found the hard-drive and there was the GRUB boot loader telling me I had a choice of booting up Fedora Core 2 and bugger all else and if I didn't make up my mind which one within ten seconds it was going to be Fedora, like it or not. I hit the enter key, and there was some more boot, boot, boot right up to the "Checking for new hardware" message. A couple of bits of hardware had gone missing - a modem and the video card - so I discarded those and let Fedora pick up on the new stuff, like the new video card it had to deal with. All very smooth and cool, just like last time. Then it was back to the last of the boot, boot, boot.

Which all went fine, right up to the point where the PC tried to load the X-Windows GUI, couldn't find the monitor and reverted to text mode, which it was handling without any problems at all. No big drama, thinks I. Had this happen before, got it sorted in a lot less time than it took Zeppo Bakunin when he gave it a try with a Windows hard-drive because the hard-drive on his newly bought second-hand desparation clunker was completely useless. Now where are those mental notes I made on how to sort this? Uh-oh, looks like they found their way into the old cerebral round file. Oops.

No big problem; I had a command line, I could use "man" to find the answer, couldn't I? "man X" I typed and paged quickly through the output to the "See Also" section; "XProjectTeam(7x), XStandards(7x) ..." Nup, nothing promising there. Dimly, I was starting to remember that last time I'd used some program called "xsetup" or "xconfig" or something like that to set up the GUI from the command line. "locate xsetup", I commanded. Nothing. "locate xconfig", I tried. Nothing there either. How about "locate xcfg". Again nothing, except the first stirrings of an ugly, slightly panicked realisation that things weren't going all that well. For the sake of my sanity, I needed to find someone to blame, and I needed to do it quickly.

And so to bed, where I lay in the half-dark running through a list of likely suspects in my head. Single mothers perhaps? Had their malign influence somehow bollixed my new PC? Could the evil spirit of single-motherhood have somehow crept out of its usual haunts in the stews of underclass land to lay its blight on my life, just as it lays its blight on the national economy and our entire social fabric? However appealing, that notion seemed a bit of a stretch. The root of the problem was probably to be found elsewhere.

Eventually, I wrenched my mind away from this profitless train of thought to something else; Mark Bahnisch's off-hand comment at Larvatus Prodeo that St Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of God

... [is] useful mainly for giving you an enormous headache in first year philosophy before you suddenly see how easy it is to refute.

There might be a post in this, I thought, once I have a working PC again and, by hook or by crook, I'd have one Friday. Even if it meant putting the Fedora hard-drive back in its old box, while I sorted the new one. Personally, I've never been convinced that refuting the ontological argument for the existence of God is quite the philosophical walkover that Mark's comment suggests. In addition, if someone trots it out in a discussion, they're unlikely to consider themselves refuted if all you have to say is something like "That's pretty much St Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of God and any first year philosophy student could tell you what's wrong with it." It invites the question "Can you tell me what's wrong with it?" And there you are, in deep discourse doo-doo because of course you could, back in the days when you were a first year student cutting your philosophical teeth on St Anselm, but you've forgotten precisely how that easy refutation went.

St Anselm's argument went something like this:

• God is the only perfect being we can imagine.


• If God did not exist then it would be possible to imagine a being who is more perfect than God: one who is in every respect like God except that she exists and God doesn't.


• That's pretty much a contradiction - we can't assert that God is the only perfect being imaginable and then go off imagining something more perfect so:


• God must exist.

It's pretty clear that something has gone wrong here but it's a bugger to put your finger on what it is. So much so that the ontological argument has been repeated a few times in the history of philosophy; Descartes trotted one out and Berkeley produced an entire metaphysics which purported to show that we needed God to keep an eye on the forests so that the trees could be confident that when they fell over, they really fell over. The ontological argument is an obstinate little bugger. You think you've got it refuted and it just picks itself up and crawls away to hide in the dark for a couple of centuries. It's a philosophical cockroach.

It doesn't help that explaining what's gone wrong usually requires a discussion of the principles of logic. You can refute St Anselm's argument, to the satisfaction of logicians at least, by trying to frame it in the languge of formal logic with all those upside down As and backward Es. But that's really only a preliminary step towards explaining the error in ordinary language. And if the argument is being advanced by someone who is logic-blind - the usual case - it's a complete waste of time. They'll invoke something like "higher rationality" or run the old "Well logicians only set up the rules that way for their own convenience" line.

Soothed by the contemplation of my own brilliance, I finally slept. Friday morning I was ready to resume work, thinking "Let's get this done so that I can get the St Anselm piece written. But if things aren't working by 11:30, I'll have to stop because there's that too long neglected little bit of unpleasant personal business to take care of this afternoon."

Half an hour later, the new PC was refusing to boot completely. Bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger! No point cursing the situation; it was time to swallow the little pride I had left and go to the fallback position: put the hard-drive back in the old box.

Once that was done, in went the connections for the monitor, keyboard and mouse and I hit the power switch, confident that within a few minutes I would have a working PC again. OK, so it was the one I wanted to replace but half a loaf is better than no bread or something. Boot, boot, boot, here's GRUB so hit the enter key to bring up Fedora Core 2. Beautiful. And here's the Award BIOS again because the Linux kernel just crashed. Boot, boot, boot and let's go round again a couple more times just to confirm that things are utterly and irredeemably stuffed.

So, things looked irredeemably stuffed, eh? Why not try booting from the installation CDs, I thought. We'll get that St Anselm piece written yet. I changed the BIOS settings, fed the installation CD into the machine and away we went; whatever was wrong, it was on the hard-drive. As soon as I figured out what it was, I could fix it. But right now I'd reached the time limit of 11:30 am, so figuring it out and fixing it would have to wait until later.

It's looking a lot like cut-to-the-chase time; obviously I now have a working PC again, or you wouldn't be reading this. The too long neglected bit of personal business got done and I actually got a couple of amusing moments out of it. And sometime in the next couple of days I may feel up to taking a look at the new PC to see whether it's true that, with a little help from St Anselm and the single mothers, it's been turned into a box o' junk.

Thanks, but No Thanks

Zeppo Bakunin just brought this little item to my attention. It's from the employment pages of The Age:

Are you a team player who enjoys working within a down to earth yet highly professional team? An opportunity now exists for a passionate customer service professional to join an Australian organisation infamous for their cutting edge designs & superior service ... With your highly developed communication skills you take pride in going that extra mile and being recognised for your commitment and hard work ...

It's easy to see that an organisation whose designs and service standards have made it infamous would be crying out for good customer service people, but I find it hard to imagine that they're going to attract anyone who's actually passionate about the job. Unless perhaps, there's a passionate customer service professional out there who's thinking that maybe it's time for a sea-change and reckons a good dose of complete disillusionment might be just the thing to push them along a bit.

The Science of Nitpicking (1)

One of the most tedious aspects of blogging is sorting through all the crap. You know how it goes; you're slogging your way through the news, features and op-ed pages of the mainstream media looking for something that might just possibly inspire you to write and, with each item you read, you find yourself stuck on the same question: is this complete crap, mostly crap with a couple of brilliant ideas thrown in or your actual intellectual paydirt? I've been looking for a way to make the sorting a little more efficient and I think I've finally come up with something workable.

In any piece of polemic you read, whether it's a blog post, an op-ed article, or a stodgy policy proposal in PDF format, you're going to encounter assertions and lines of argument which look a little dodgy. Identify these as you go and, in a spirit of fair-mindedness, assign each a 50% probability of being true (or acceptable, interesting or intriguing). Implicitly, each has a 50% probability of being some sort of crap such as a factual error, an oversimplification or complete nonsense.

Starting with the the first, assess each dodgy proposition for actual (rather than suspected) error and count the errors. You need to take the propositions in order for the test to have any semblance of validity*. If you find an uninterrupted sequence of five errors you can stop: there's a 95% probability that what you're reading is complete crap. 95% seems to be widely accepted in statistical circles as the minimum probability you have to achieve to claim a significant result. If you're feeling lucky you might try for a significance of 99%: for that you need to demonstrate a succession of seven errors of fact or argument. Table 1 (below) lists the actual probabilities; numbers buffs might find it marginally interesting.

Number of Successive Errors	Likelihood that the Article is Complete Bullshit
1	50%
2	75%
3	87.5%
4	93.8%
5	96.9%
6	98.4%
7	99.2%

One obvious deficiency of this test is that it only identifies one particular variety of crap artistry: the kind which produces a continuous stream of bullshit and fallacy entirely uninterrupted by fact or reason. If you want to quantify the crappiness of an piece where fact and bullshit are more freely intermingled, you'll need to apply another test, which I'll be working up for The Science of Nitpicking (2).

* I suppose I'd better mention somewhere, even if it's only in a footnote, that the whole basis of the test is that each of these checks is a Bernoulli trial, where a hit on the bullshit detector counts as a success. It's on that basis that the probabilities in Table 1 are calculated.

State of Nature

An Epic Saga of Life Before the Body Politic. Maybe.

The story so far: Lug wakes up to discover that her favourite goat - alright her only goat - has gone missing. She tracks the goat to the home of Ayra, who refuses to return it. She returns later that day with her friends Mog and Blig and one of the local wisemen, Lived-Longer-Than-Most-But-Not-Long-As-Some.

Episode 2: Something Wicked This Way Comes

Ayra sat inside his cave-of-sticks, beside the entrance. He was drinking from a gourd of goat's milk which he had obtained in the usual way after his argument with Lug about the goat. It was good to have the goat back again. It was good to have a cache of beer and nuts and berries in that hollow log in the forest too. Life might be better if he didn't so often find himself in so many disputes about the goat but, in a way, they were good too. As long as he got the goat back.

"Ayra! Want talk!" he heard; it was Lug, shouting to him outside the cave-of-sticks. He finished the milk and peered out through the entrance to the cave-of-sticks. On seeing Lug, Mog and Blig all holding their clubs in the right hand and bouncing it off the palms of their left hands he deemed it prudent to set aside the gourd and take up his own club before he emerged.

"What want?" he challenged, after he had risen to his feet.

"I give you beer for goat." Lug replied. "Now not got beer, not got goat. Mog give nuts for goat. Now Mog not got nuts, not got goat. Blig give you berries for goat. Now not got berries not got goat. You got beer, nuts, berries and still got goat. Something wrong. Lived-Longer-Than-Most-But-Not-Long-As-Some tell what right."

On hearing this, Lived-Longer-Than-Most-But-Not-Long-As-Some wished that she had made a better job of slipping away into the forest when she had seen Lug approaching her cave. If she wanted to become the next Lived-Longer-Than-Almost-Everyone, she would have to be very careful indeed.

"When you give Ayra beer for goat, Lug?" she asked.

"Yesterdays" Lug responded. Lived-Longer-Than-Most-But-Not-Long-As-Some put similar questions to Mog and Blig. After they answered, she thought a little and summarised:

"So yesterdays Ayra give Lug goat for beer and other yesterdays give Mog goat for nuts and other other yesterdays give Blig goat for berries. Looks wrong Ayra has goat today. Right if goat with Lug or Mog or Blig." She looked to Ayra for a response. Ayra offered his first defence:

"Not got beer, nuts, berries now."

"Got beer, nuts, berries all them yesterdays." Lived-Longer-Than-Most-But-Not-Long-As-Some responded, dismissing this argument. Ayra remained silent long enough that she felt it safe to continue, "Gave goat to get. Give to Blig first, so ..."

"Not give goat for all tomorrows." Ayra interrupted her. "Give Lug goat for some tomorrows get milk. Lug want goat for milk not goat for eat."

Lived-Longer-Than-Most-But-Not-Long-As-Some questioned Lug and the others on this. Each was forced to concede that they had, indeed, wanted the goat for its milk and not because they particularly liked goats.

"They got milk from goat. Not get nothing for beer, nuts, berries." Ayra concluded triumphantly.

"That big pile of mammoth turds." responded Lug tweaking her earlier invention, metaphor, to produce hyperbole, "Give beer for goat not give beer for milk. Not same."

"But got milk all same." Lived-Longer-Than-Most-But-Not-Long-As-Some mused. "Not get nothing for beer."

"Not got milk now." groused Lug.

"Not got beer now." countered Ayra.

"All shut up. Want think." ordered Lived-Longer-Than-Most-But-Not-Long-As-Some. The issue had become dangerously confused; whichever way she decided, someone would be aggrieved. She paced the clearing around the hut of sticks, weighing the factors she needed to consider to reach a sound decision: Lug, Mog and Blig had the numbers on Ayra and she herself was no longer quite so fleet of foot as she had been in younger days so she would need a good headstart on the loser of the dispute. She stood where she had a comfortable few yards on Ayra, with Lug and the others between him and herself and delivered her verdict:

"Lug say Ayra give goat for beer. Mog say Ayra give goat for nuts. Blig say Ayra give goat for berries. Ayra say give goat but not for all tomorrows. But Ayra give goat for beer and nuts and berries not say how long Lug keep goat or Mog keep goat or Blig keep goat.

Goat not Ayra's. Goat go Lug, Mog or Blig. Lug give Mog nuts, give Blig berries, Lug get goat. Mog give Lug beer, Blig berries Mog get goat. Blig give Lug beer, give Mog nuts, Blig get goat. That all. I go now."

Lived-Longer-Than-Most-But-Not-Long-As-Some turned away from the four of them and walked quickly away until she was out of sight. Then she ran. If things went to plan Lug, Mog and Blig would fall to bickering among themselves once they had dealt with Ayra. She wanted to be well away before they came looking for someone to sort out that argument. Let them take it to Lived-Longer-Than-Almost-Everyone.

Back at the cave-of-sticks, Ayra sidled towards the forest, keeping a wary eye on Lug, Mog and Blig. They in turn watched him, with expressions of open hostility. Ayra kept well away from the goat; Lived-Longer-Than-Most-But-Not-Long-As-Some had made it quite clear that it was no longer his. To approach it would invite a united attack from the three others who had started to realise that while their dispute with Ayra might be resolved they now had a quarrel of their own to sort out.

Ayra fled into the forest and took a circuitous route to the hollow log where he had his cache of beer, nuts and berries. he crawled into the dark interior and lay there, trembling with fear. Partly it was his normal fear of the fierce creatures of the forest but that was overlaid with a darker fear. He had seen the first signs of something very bad today, something which was, he told himself "Worse than polecat. Worse than fox. Worse even than lion."

Next: The Stand-Off at The Cave-Of-Sticks

21st Century Photogenic Poet-Warrior T-Shirt Guy

Goodbye Assassins, it seems from now on
The gentlefolks' aortas will gush without me.
The last chance to get stained with blood
I let go by.
Ever more often I answer ancient calls
And watch the mountains turn green ...

Lost brothers, time puts us to the proof.
Shoot the heads of the world without me!
Insane mates. The century’s ravens.
The world travels a narrow path,
Without strength or belief, a target or a bullet.
The papers ooze the age lymph;
Confused the devils get married ...

Goodbye, assassins, the boundaries between
The worlds are trampled
Instead of the heart, a hornet drones in vain.
History turned its back on us.
What should one shoot at?
Like an octopus, the age hides its vertebra,
And the winter approaches
With white drifts.

From the wistful Goodbye Assassins by Radovan Karadzic. You can find more of Karadzic's poetry here.

It's always good to find someone who wants to do the simple things properly.

Under Renovation

In response to repeated hints that pretty much "whooshed" me ("whoosh" being the sound of an idea going over your head), I've turned on the RSS feed. I've noticed a few other things that need a bit of sprucage so it's time to hang out that sign that says:

"We are currently undertaking renovations. We apologise for any temporary inconvenience this may cause you."

State of Nature

An Epic Saga of Life Before the Body Politic. Maybe.
Episode 1: Ayra Gets Lug's Goat

The first rays of the morning sun struck through the cave entrance onto Lug's face, waking her. She looked around cautiously, assessing the new day. Obviously, she was still alive; that was a good start. No great beast loomed in the cave entrace, ready to strike her down and tear out her throat as soon as she moved; that was good too. Cautiously, she stood up and moved towards the opening. So far her day was turning out well.

Lug's first tasks for the day were to feed, water and milk her goat. She walked down the hillside to the crude goat-pen she had built to confine the goat and protect it, somewhat, from the great beasts of the forest. When she reached the pen, the goat was gone. Lug checked the ground for tracks and found the imprint of goat hooves and human footprints leading away to the south. "Goat taken," she thought. But who had taken it?

The tracks led her to the fringe of the forest, where Ayra had his cave-of-sticks; a hut of fallen branches bound together with braided ropes of dried reeds and liana. It was a rickety structure but Ayra was happy to call it home. It was the only cave-of-sticks in the world; the product of his own hard work but also (and this is much, much more important) the product of his mind too.

Lug's goat was tethered to a stake driven into the ground near the entrance to the cave-of-sticks. Lug started to untie the rope from the stake; the goat bleated and Ayra rushed out of the hut, club in hand.

"My goat!" Ayra shouted, "You leave her here!"

"My goat!" countered Lug, "I give you beer for her yesterdays." Actually, it had been the best part of what we would call a week but in Lug's era temporal concepts were still a little rudimentary.

Ayra sneered. "Look in cave-of-sticks," he said, "You find beer, you take goat."

Lug searched the cave-of-sticks. There was no beer there, of course, so she left wishing that she had thought to bring her own club. She set off back to her cave to fetch it and on the way back met her friend Mog. She told Mog how Lug had taken her goat.

"Ayra done that before," Mog told her. "Gave me goat for nuts, took it away again. Said same thing too. No not same thing 'cause was nuts not beer. Said I could have goat back if I find any nuts in his hut."

"Ayra is ..." Lug began, then paused, stumped by the problem of expressing a simple concept beyond her primitive, pre-social-contract vocabulary.

"... big turd." Lug finished, a little lamely by modern standards.

"Lug not look like turd. Smell like one sometimes." Mog responded, unaware that Lug had just invented metaphor. This would lead to trouble tomorrows.

Further along the track, they met Blig. He too, had traded with Ayra for the goat yesterdays but "not same thing 'cause was berries not nuts, berries not beer."

"Ayra is ..." Lug began. Once again she was stumped by the absence of a key concept from her intellectual framework, "... big arsehole!"

"Lug arsehole same as mine. Same as yours." Mog responded as oblivious as before. Blig said nothing but his mind was already playing with the possibilities of Mog's new figure of speech.

"All get clubs!" cried Lug. "Meet here. Get Lived-Longer-Than-Most-But-Not-Long-As-Some! Fix Ayra good."

They each went their separate ways and got their clubs. It was Lug, as their leader for now, who went to fetch Lived-Longer-Than-Most-But-Not-Long-As-Some. (The story of how Lived-Longer-Than-Most-But-Not-Long-As-Some earned his name in an era when life was generally "nasty, poore, brutish and short" might be worth telling on another occasion, were it not so blindingly obvious.)

Once they had all gathered with their clubs, Lug, Mog, Blig and Lived-Longer-Than-Most-But-Not-Long-As-Some went to pay Ayra a visit.

Next: Something Wicked This Way Comes (the Judgement of Lived-Longer-Than-Most-But-Not-Long-As-Some and what came of it).

Social Cohesion in the 14th Century

It's not just the poor we have always with us:

tell me, Lord, if you please, by what right or title does a villein eat beef? ... And goose, of which they have plenty? And this troubles God. God suffers from it and I too. For they are a sorry lot, these villeins who eat fat goose! Should they eat fish? Rather let them eat thistles and briars, thorns and straw and hay on Sunday and peapods on weekdays.

They should keep watch without sleep and have trouble always; that is how villeins should live. Yet each day they are full and drunk on the best wines, and in fine clothes. the great expenditures of villeins come at a high cost, for it is this that destroys and ruins the world. It is they who spoil the common welfare.

From the villein comes all unhappiness. Should they eat meat? Rather should they chew grass on the heath with the horned cattle and go naked on all fours ..."

(From Le Despit au Vilain, cited in A Distant Mirror by Barbara W Tuchman. Tuchman notes:

[This tale was] addressed to an upper-class audience. Was this what they wanted to hear, or was it a satire of their attitude?)

Succubus Interruptus

(A dream)

I'm in a strange part of town, unsure of how I got there, but I more or less know know the way home. I set out, with a vague inkling that getting there isn't going to be easy. I'm walking beside a busy highway - if I turn right at the next street, I can walk to a tram terminus and catch the tram home. It's still going to be a long trip.

For some reason, I walk past the turn but this isn't a problem; I can take the next right, walk one block then right again will bring me to the tram terminus. Or so I think. When I take the next right I find my way blocked by a kerbside pool-room. The pool tables don't just block the pavement, they're all the way across the street. There's far too little room to walk between them. All the pool players are big burly guys with tattoos and sleeveless denim or leather jackets.

Soon I find myself hemmed in between two of the pool tables one to my left the other to my right and two players - before me and behind me - both intent on taking their shots. Both of them want to shoot from right where I'm standing so we end up in a little jostling match. Neither seems willing to yield; not to let me pass nor to allow the other player to take his shot first. Finally I discover that what I thought was a pool cue pressing against my back is in fact, the back of a bar chair and the player blocking my way forward finishes his shot. I move on.

The street is no longer a street, the pavement no longer a pavement; instead I'm walking along a winding pathway through a covered arcade or conservatory. The path wanders through beds of reeds or something similar. Someone has left a lot of plastic grocery bags along the path. Each bag has a tuft of celery sticking out of the top. They cover the full width of the path for several yards, so it is impossible to get past them without trampling them. Everyone in front of me is trampling the bags so I see no reason not to do likewise.

Music is playing; the tempo di marcia from the last movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. As I walk, I tap the point of my unbrella on the floor in time with the music. The effect would be much more pleasing if the heels of my carpet slippers didn't flap every time I take a step. The floor has several levels, connected by stairs and ramps.

I walk down a short flight of stairs onto a section of the floor with highly polished, elaborate parquetry. In front of me there's a woman dancing to the music; it's no longer Beethoven, the music has been changing continually as I walk. She's dancing along a line at right angles to my path; I have to get past her to get home. By the time I reach her she's singing a Noel Coward song I don't recognise, with words I can't make out, but nonetheless it must be Noel Coward because she's singing it with a prissy Noel Coward English accent. We collide.

I tell her I'm sorry and move on; ahead of me I can see a high glass window at the end of the arcade and through it, the front of a church. it's a tall building, with ornate multi-coloured brickwork. I think about taking a look inside the church when I get out of the arcade. The architecture looks interesting. I feel a touch on my left arm; the dancing woman is beside me. We leave the arcade together.

We talk; she wants to come back to my place but she wouldn't be able to stay much after midnight. For some reason she's acquired an American accent. I suggest we could go to her place instead. "You are a fast worker," she remarks.

For some reason, she wants to see my driver's licence before she'll take me back to her place. I tell her I don't have a driver's licence; will a passport do? It will. I take my passport out of my shoulder bag - it must have replaced the umbrella - and show it to her. Once she's satisfied that she knows my identity, we move on.

Before we can go to her place, she has to drop into work for a little while. She works in a hospital ward which we get to, in efficient dream fashion, by walking straight in off the street. My penis is uncomfortably engorged. I look down to check that it isn't poking out of the top of my trousers - it's reached a size well beyond its waking life dimensions, which are by no means inadequate but, instead, comfortably above average without being too freakish.

She has a few things to finish up before we move on to her place. She peaks to a colleague while I sit on an empty bed and try to think erection damping thoughts. I'm glad I'm not naked.

I wake up to discover that I'm lying on the couch, in a slightly overheated lounge-room. I'm glad that Zeppo Bakunin is over at his parents' place so that I'm alone in the house. I'm also a little relieved that the dream stopped where it did because I'm wearing my last clean pair of pants and there won't be time to get to the laundromat before that appointment I have tomorrow morning.

(Intellectual) Snob of the Week

HEATHER EWART: ... Initially, the Hawke Government thought it had public support [for the Australia Card], but an outcry from civil libertarians and others galvanised widespread community reaction against the card.

SUSAN RYAN: It was like a bushfire rampaging over the public debate. It went from apparent public acceptance to hysterical opposition in a very short space of time. I myself, in public life, never experienced such ferocious opposition to any proposed government measure. It was out of control. You couldn't deal with it by rational argument.

...

We couldn't win it politically. At a town hall in Launceston somebody got up and said the real program was that the Government was going to have the mark of the devil, 666, lasered on to the foreheads of Australians or even on to the wrists of new born babies, and the person who said that didn't appear to be a rat bag and the other people in the town hall didn't appear to be rat bags and they all cheered him.

HEATHER EWART: So the former ministers offer John Howard this advice.

NEAL BLEWITT: I think if the Government wants to argue its value as a security weapon, that case has to be made and I'm certain the people are willing to listen to that.

SUSAN RYAN: On the other hand, I think those very deep-seated fears that were whipped up back at the end of 1987 could be whipped up again and probably would be. [my emphasis]

7.30 Report, Monday July 18.

It's a little frustrating the way that a statement that strikes you as smug and self-satisfied when you see see and hear it spoken comes out so sanitised in the transcript. And it's possible that the smugness and self-satisfaction I detected in the statement I've emphasised was an artefact, a product of my mood when I was watching the report and the montage of interview clips that preceded it.

All the same, Ryan's characterisation of the opposition to the Australia Card as a rampaging bushfire of hysteria beyond the control of rational argument makes her a so much of a shoe-in for "Snob of the Week" that it's hardly worth waiting until Friday to declare her this week's winner. Will someone else pip her at the post on Friday? Will there be a next week's winner? Well folks, that's what comments threads are for.

Meanwhile, in another universe of discourse entirely:

"There!" says Mr. Lancaster. He rolls back the platform. He dusts himself off. He rises. "It’s a perfect Origins Bomb, if I do say so myself."

"Perfection is for God alone," corrects Mrs. Lancaster.

"Oh, Mrs. Lancaster," says Mr. Lancaster, beeping her nose. "You do keep me honest."

"What’s it do?" Iphigenia asks.

"It’s a way to prove Creationism right for once and for all," says Mr. Lancaster. "When I push this button—-"

Here he indicates a large red button labeled "Emergency Proof of Creationism."

"—-everything in the universe that is older than ten thousand years old, and every human who evolved from lower life forms, blows up!"

(link via Crooked Timber)

An Open Letter

To Mr Robert Mugabe, President of Zimbabwe
On behalf of Sam, an Australian Blogger

Dear Mr Mugabe,

Sam would dearly like to live in a society where he can say what he will
without fear of contradiction or criticism and occasionally kick the shit
out of those who do not meet his standards of good citizenship.

Could you please, please, PLEASE, let him have Zimbabwe once you're
finished with it.

Yours Faithfully,

Gummo Trotsky.

PS: If you decide Sam's not up to it, there are plenty of other Aussies who'd be glad to take it off your hands.

Another Cheezy Bid for Something Resembling Literary Imortality

In the comments to Barista's post on last Friday's blogger get together, "Radiant with Anonymity" ej asks:

What is the poetically correct name for group of bloggers?

I was going to put a comment up with a couple of suggestions but technical problems got in the way. After a little, insomnia addled reflection, I've decided to have a crack at emulating Richard Dawkin's proud achievement of getting a new word (meme) into the OED: with a bit of luck, and some blogospheric assistance, I might just crack it. So just as we can speak of a murder of crows, an exaltation of larks or a disputation of baristers, I suggest that we adopt "rantwittering" (pronounced rant-wittering not ran-twittering) as the collective term for bloggers. Try it out loud - "A rant-wittering of bloggers" - doesn't it just roll off the tongue?

Incidentally, if you're talking about a collection of RWDB bloggers, there's a more specific collective noun: it's a fulmination of RWDBs. How you pronounce the RWDB part is entirely up to you.

With that out of the way, it's time to tidy up the house a bit. The dog-sitting ends tomorrow so I'll be saying goodbye to insomnia in Melbourne's Outer Leafies and hello to anomie and alienation in her Not Quite Inner Nondescripts tomorrow afternoon. Did anyone watch Insomnia on Channel Seven last night? Such a happy ending; the poor bloke finally got some rest.

Meanwhile, in another universe of discourse entirely ...

Idiot-Savant Watch

At the moment I'm having trouble deciding whether Peter Beattie is a telegenic idiot-savant or just a telegenic idiot. He was interviewed on The Insiders yesterday. He had a few things to say on the subject of the proposal of a National ID Card. From the government's point of view, it's now appropriate to put this idea back on the political agenda because:

• Knowing that everyone in the country is actually who they say they are will help keep us safe from terrorism;


• It's not Bob Hawke's idea any more;


• It's not about tax collection. Yet.

Beattie is in favour of the idea too, for a number of reasons:

• It's the way the world is going;


• It will help prevent a repetition of the Cornelia Rau farce;


• It will help prevent terrorism;


• It will help prevent identity theft;


• As far as he's concerned it's about commonsense, national security (I'm not sure whether he omitted the "and" or he's asserting some claim that, the way thins are these days, commonsense is national security and vice versa. It's somewhere between even money and six to four on that it's the latter.

In fact, if Beattie gets his druthers, it won't be just a National ID card:

One of the things we discussed Barrie at a recent COAG meeting was a national smart card. Now most States are looking at it, we are. By smart card I mean, I'd love to have a card which means that I can use it to access EFTPOS, ATM. I can use it for credit, to pay for a train, bus, ferry the whole lot. Now if you can have one card to do that - that removes a lot of the cumbersome problems people have managing their finances.

And Beattie is concerned about the problem of identity theft? As I understand it, identity theft works something like this at present:

You nick someone's bank statement, gas bill and a few other such documents from their mail - enough to establish 100 points of identification essentially. Then you bugger off to a bank and apply for a credit card in their name, run up a shit load of debt and stake out a new mail box.

Here's how identity theft would work with a National Smart card:

You pick the pocket or snatch the purse of a passing stranger in the street. You toss everything but their National Smart Card, which you take to some geek who's prepared to hack it for something like 10% of the take.

Maybe I should drop the "savant" part after all.

Postscript: despite my best efforts to derail it, there's a serious discussion of the National ID card going on at Larvatus Prodeo.

Fair Game Theorist

According to Don Arthur at Troppo Armadillo, Peter Saunders of the Centre for Independent Studies (not to be confused with Peter Saunders, Director of the Social Policy Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, who is no relation):

... likes to think of society as a game of Monopoly -- if one of the players succeeds in driving the others in bankruptcy there's no problem so long as everyone obeys the rules ...

The linked article has the provocative title "What is Fair About a 'Fair Go'?" It begins:

An egalitarian, a meritocrat and a classical liberal once sat down to play the board game, Monopoly. All agreed at the outset that it would be fair to give each player the same amount of cash with which to play.

As the game progresses, the players - well, the egalitarian and the meritocrat at least - start behaving badly. The egalitarian is miffed because he's ended up with Old Kent Road instead of Mayfair and demands a redistribution of property and monies to restore fairness to the game. The meritocrat is peeved because the fall of the dice is not properly rewarding skilful, serious play. The classical liberal responds to these infantile outbursts with a patient sigh and explains:

We have all played by the rules. Nobody has cheated, and nobody has stolen anybody else's money or title deeds. Nobody pre-ordained the present distribution of money and property—it is the aggregated outcome of each individual's free and uncoerced actions and decisions. How, then, can this distribution be considered unfair? What would be unfair is if we agreed by a majority vote to take money or property from the most successful player to share it out among the other two, or to give more to the player deemed most deserving. If we were to do that, we would undermine the principle that the same rules must apply to all players. The best player would then probably go elsewhere, and our game sooner or later would collapse into bickering and chaos.

This is by far the best piece of dialogue Saunders' gives to any of the characters in his little fable but, while it reveals where Saunders' sympathies lie in this contest between three notions of fairness, it doesn't help the situation any. The players eventualy go their separate ways, after the meritocrat and the egalitarian have both indulged in further displays of bad temper. The story ends on this curious note:

The liberal picked up the dice, bade the other two farewell, and went off in search of a game of Snakes and Ladders.

For a while, this had me wondering why the classical liberal took the dice and nothing else. Presumably they were his, which leaves you wondering who owned the rest of the Monopoly set - one assumes that it was the meritocrat. And were they really able to get the game started without a big argument about who got the top hat token, who got the little dog, and who got stuck with that wheel dingus with the factory chimney poking out the top? And what gave the classical liberal the idea that it is even remotely possible to play a game of Monopoly that doesn't collapse into bickering and chaos?

What follows - the meat of the article - is a three paragraph examination of the importance of fairness, or rather 'fairness' in a society followed by a potted history of the evolution of the Australian notion of a 'fair go'. Then we get back to the point of the fable: the three different, and competing principles of fairness to be found in our culture:

The egalitarian definition of fairness focuses on the final distribution of resources. Anything that flattens out the distribution of income and wealth is fair; anything that makes it less equal is unfair. A less than equal distribution can only be justified if it can be demonstrated that no other pattern of distribution could make the worst-off people any better off (as in Rawls's 'difference principle').

Against this, a meritocratic definition of fairness focuses on the principle of 'just deserts'. Unequal outcomes are fair provided everybody has had a chance to compete on an equal basis. In particular, fairness requires that the most hard-working and talented people should reap the highest rewards (meritocracy rewards 'ability plus effort'), and this will only happen if there are no major obstacles blocking the achievement of meritorious individuals from the least advantaged backgrounds.

In contrast with both of these, the classical liberal conception of fairness denies the relevance of any distributional principle, whether egalitarian or meritocratic. Fairness simply requires an open system governed by the rule of law; it is judged by procedures, not outcomes. People must be free to accumulate assets and to transfer them as they see fit. Provided these rules are followed, the result is 'fair' (even if talented people go unrecognised or lazy people are favoured by luck or by birth).
These three principles of fairness are logically incompatible with one another. [my emphasis]

Saunders' claim that these three definitions of fairness are logically incompatible is a bold one and deserves examination, if only because when someone tells you that three statements (however semantically complex) are logically incompatible then there's one damn statement too many. This can be illustrated with the help of some simple examples.

Consider these three assertions:

Socrates is a man.
Socrates is a cat.
Socrates is a dog.

You might be tempted to describe these as logically incompatible on the grounds that Socrates cannot be at once a man, a cat and a dog. Wrong; all three can be quite logically compatible if all three are false and Socrates is, in fact, a horse. At worst, Saunders' three definitions of fairness are merely incompatible and only by Saunders' assertion. They are logically compatible if, for example, Saunders has advanced three definitions of fairness, two of which he knows (somehow) to be false and one which he wrongly believes to be true. Being right about two commonly held beliefs being wrong and wrong about your own beliefs on the subject of those beliefs being right is an interesting little cognitive feat but by no means inconceivable.

Alternativley, all three definitions of fairness might be logically compatible and true, like the following three statements:

Socrates has a beard.
Socrates is smelly.
Socrates roots nanny goats.

These are all logically compatible and possibly true if Socrates is, in fact, a billy goat. They amount to partial descriptions of Socrates just as Saunders' three "logically incompatible" definitions of fairness might be accepted as partial definitions of what we mean by fairness in social settings a little more complex than your typical game of Monopoly.

Following on, Saunders says a little later:

The incompatibility of these three principles of fairness complicates any attempt to unravel what Australians mean when they express their support for a 'fair go.'

I think this statement overreaches the mark a little too - it may be difficult for Peter Saunders to unravel what Australians mean by a 'fair go' but that's only because he's set himself up to fail with a false dichotomy and a half - a false sesquidichotomy if you will.

Why Did I Bother?

I didn't actually watch Channel Nine's This Is Your Life on Thursday; I video taped it while I watched something else. Now that I've taken a look at the tape, I'm glad that I had the sense to give myself the option of fast forwarding through the boring bits or most of the boring bits. Essentially This Is Your Life (TIYL) is an hour long boring bit, based on an inherently boring concept. It's a sort of premature funeral service, with Mike Munro as celebrant presenting a highly sanitised pre-mortem eulogy with the help of friends, family and sundry associates of the dearly undeparted.

Munro surprised Hanson on-stage at the Star City Showroom where she was appearing as a guest star in the show Todd McKenney Live a cabaret performance starring, of all people, Todd McKenney. Hanson was wearing a sequined evening gown in Margaret Thatcher blue. It was something of an eyesore but I must admit that it did complement her looks.

Back in the studio, Mike started in on her birth and early life. In the lounge room I hit the fast forward button to get to the part where, as Channel Nine's promos for the show had it, she "turned Australian politics on its head". This came a good fifteen minutes into the show. Munro described how, faced with the problem of caring for four young children, Pauline had bought a fish and chip shop in Ipswich and:

... working twelve hour days, seven days a week you begin to gain a real insight into the feelings and everyday gripes of the locals and its now that your outlook not only broadens but dramatically changes. And coming up Pauline Hanson becomes the most talked about politician in the country. But first this message:

"This message" was from Alan Jones:

Well hello Pauline, I hope you have a wonderful night and I'm sure many Australians remember you as someone who just tried to tell the truth and you saw things as you'd experienced them and that stirred one or two people in the world of politics up a little, after all a housewife and a woman working in a fish shop wasn't meant to have all of these views. You didn't conform with the traditional mode of things but Australians warmed to you because I think, and I found you, and listeners found you, always willing to say it as you saw it.

As this warm encomium was delivered to camera, rather than as an on-air read, I think it's safe to assume that it came from Jones' heart. Not that it really matters and, when you think about it, it probably doesn't.

Once the ads were over, the program got down to Hanson's entry into Australian politics and the way she turned it on its head. First there was her letter to the Queensland Times on the subject of Aboriginal deaths in custody and Robert Tickner's misplaced sympathy for aboriginal prisoners. This was perhaps the first occasion on which she demonstrated her newly broadened and dramatically changed outlook. This appears to be the web's favourite bit:

I don't feel responsible for the treatment of Aboriginal people in the past because I had no say, but my concern is for now and the future. How can we expect this race to help themselves when government shower them with money, facilities and opportunities that only these people can obtain no matter how minute the indigenous blood is that flow through their veins, and this is what is causing racism.

This was followed by some excerpts of Hanson's maiden speech, where she articulated to the whole nationsome of those feelings and gripes she had picked up working in her fish and chip shop:

I am fed up with being told, `This is our land.' Well, where the hell do I go? I was born here, and so were my parents and children.

I and most Australians want our immigration policy radically reviewed and that of multiculturalism abolished. I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians. Between 1984 and 1995, 40 per cent of all migrants coming into this country were of Asian origin. They have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate.

Immigration must be halted in the short term so that our dole queues are not added to by, in many cases, unskilled migrants not fluent in the English language. This would be one positive step to rescue many young and older Australians from a predicament which has become a national disgrace and crisis.

The thing that struck me most as I was re-reading this tirade was not so much the racism of the piece, but its self-absorption: it's all me, me, me! I'm fed up with this, I want that, I believe the other. I guess that's what it means to "say it as you see it".

We also got footage of Pauline being honest and forthright in a conversation with three young aboriginals, Pauline vs Charles Perkins on daytime TV and that "Please Explain" moment before Munro launched into a potted history of the decline of One Nation, brought down by a combination of collusion between the Liberal Party and the ALP on preferences, internal division and the nastiness of Tony Abbott. Pauline goes to prison, she gets a supportive letter from Nellie Dargan, a ten year old aboriginal girl, she gets out of prison again. She goes on Dancing With The Stars and, despite having two left feet, she gets all the way to the finals on the votes of the viewing audience. Now she's working on her autobiography, a showbiz career and a new relationship that you may have read about in one of Kerry Packer's magazines for women.

Once the "where is she now" stuff was out of the way, they wheeled in Nellie Dargan and she and Pauline sang a duet; one chorus of that "We are one but we are many" song. Then it was time for Mike to sum up the career of this remarkable woman:

Pauline, it is impossible to overestimate the extent to which you personally shook the political establishment. There's no doubt about it and there's no doubt that you are an honest and forthright woman and no matter what political persuasion people might have, they have to admit that you've always had the courage of your convictions. You certainly led the Liberal Party and the Labor Party on a merry old dance.

The show finished with Pauline and Todd McKenney performing Fever. Neither made a convincing show of singing the song. There was a bit of a dance interlude (allegedly the rhumba) during the bridge. The dancing was every bit as convincing as the singing; the whole performance appeared to be pitched at the vicarious embarassment buffs in the audience. Hanson's performance didn't demonstrate any surprising talent that we'd never seen before and McKenney's had me wondering how, exactly, he had managed to score the lead part in The Boy From Oz. Apparently he's since lost it to Hugh Jackman, for the next Australian production, but, I've read, he's glad for Hugh and not the tiniest bit miffed about it. Really. According to the Sydney Star Observer the show is, or was, supposed to tour the Gold Coast and then come down to Melbourne. With the best will in the world I can't help hoping that the comprehensive bucketing it's had from the critics will have put paid to that notion.

Memorabilium

Lost family heirloom turns up in Mexico.

What D'You Say?

So, the Government has decided to bring forward its advertising campaign on industrial relations reform to counter the "gross distortions being peddled by the ACTU in its current campaign against the Government's proposed workplace relations reforms. Mr Howard says that unlike the ACTU campaign the Government's campaign will be fact-based. I just want to take a couple of quick shots at the subject.

Firstly, Kevin Andrews' recent performance on the Government's proposal to allow workers to cash in their annual leave strikes me as a pretty good indication of what we can expect when it comes to the campaigns treatment of the facts on which it's based:

Mr Andrews has told ABC TV's The 7:30 Report that the Labor Government in Western Australia already allows workers to give up two weeks of their holidays in exchange for cash.
He has criticised Opposition Leader Kim Beazley for not being aware of what is going on in his home state.
Andrews' defence of the proposal conveniently omits a few facts that are reported here, among other places.

Secondly, John Howard has drawn an explicit parallel between opposition to industrial relations reform and previous opposition to the introduction of the GST. So I'm expecting the TV ads, when they finally appear to look something like this:

MUSIC: an ambiguous fragmented electric guitar riff which seems to be struggling to find a theme under:

LONG SHOT (extremely underlit, almost monochrome): a factory floor seen from above. The workers walk about the factory and work with jerky robotic motions.

The camera pans and zooms in to:

MEDIUM SHOT: An individual worker, strapped into an elaborate stainless steel exoskeleton thingy which restricts his freedom of movement, forcing him to move robotically. The lighting level increases and we start to see colour.

MUSIC (the guitar riff resolves into a theme, lyrics open): I, I will be king ...

MEDIUM SHOT: The stainless steel exoskeleton thingy disintegrates, releasing the worker ...

MUSIC: And you, you will be queen ...

Cut to MEDIUM SHOT: A female worker is released from her exoskeleton thingy.
Follow this with a montage of more more workers being released from the restrictive exoskeletons.

MUSIC: Though nothing will drive them away
We can beat them, just for one day
We can be heroes, just for one day
MUSIC cuts to:
We can be heroes, for ever and ever
We can be heroes, What d'you say?
Yes, we can be heroes, for ever and ever
We can be heroes, What d'you say?

Zoom out and pan to LONG SHOT (same framing as opening shot): the factory is now well lit and brightly coloured, the workers move about freely.

VOICE OVER: Workplace reform. Be a hero.

Fade to Black, Commonwealth logo and authorisation details.

OK, So Maybe I'm Addicted

I caught up with the repeat of Media Watch last night. Keeping up with Media Watch is another of those things I've let slide since I decided to go on hiatus, give or take the occasional guest post on any site that would have me. Despite the encouraging response to my most recent guest post chez boynton, the idea of a return to regular blogging still attracts me about as much as the idea of taking a leak while standing in the middle of a shoal of hungry candiru fish. It's occurred to me that you could get quite a good horror film out of the candiru fish. But that's incidental.

The Media Watch report that tempted me to interrupt my spell of blogging long-service-leave-with-a-view-to-actual-retirement (or possibly long-service-leave-with-a-view-to-seeking-opportunities-elsewhere) was about that little show put on by the Australian Agency for Sprinkling Pink Powder on the Pavement to Prevent Elephant Attacks, more commonly known as ASIO or the Trenchcoat Brigade. The one where ASIO and the Federal Police actually raided the Melbourne homes of some alleged terrorists who were, according to allegedly reliable (but presumably official) anonymous sources, allegedly planning a series of alleged terrorist attacks on a range of targets in Melbourne and Sydney. That "alleged terrorist attacks" solecism isn't really mine, by the way; I picked it up off the television news.

In this past week of near insomnia, I've had several ideas for ASIO related posts. Perhaps the best was the one on how to plan and carry out an "alleged terrorist attack" in under five minutes. I got quite a way with that one before I realised that firstly, it might be irresponsible to publish such instructions and secondly that, improbable as it may sound, you might actually get jailed for it. That's something of a pity, because it would make a great parlour game.

For those who are too lazy to follow the link, the emphasis of the Media Watch report was on the provisions of the ASIO Act which prohibit someone who is, or has been, the subject of an ASIO questioning warrant from telling anyone about the warrant, other than certain prescribed persons (Section 34VAA)

On Media Watch, Liz Jackson mischievously suggested that AFP Commisssioner BK might have inadvertently breached this prohibition when he told a TV Reporter that:

Any charges will be determined after we look at the evidence that's as a result of the search warrant and also as a result of interviews that have been taking place.

Interestingly, there appears to be nothing in the Act to prevent me from telling you that I have recently been the subject of an ASIO questioning warrant. Normally, I'd leave it to you, the reader, to work out why, but in this case it may be prudent to spell it out; it's bullshit. The Act seems to leave it much open slather for bullshit artists who want to big note themselves by making up stories about how they were taken into custody by ASIO for a spot of "Have you now, or have you ever been, an international terrorist mastermind?" That's not something I'd do myself, of course. And, however amusing I might find the idea in theory, I think it would be extremely imprudent to tell a call centre operative that I don't have time for the short 100 question survey on nasal hair removal products because I'll be tied up for the next few days assisting the prescribed authority with a matter of national security. That's not the only potentially amusing but extemely imprudent idea involving call centre operators and national security that I've had over the past week or two but I'm definitely not telling you the other one.

Postscript (1): number one on the list of The Top Ten More Things I'm Not Missing would have to be sitting in the typing chair staring at the bookshelves for the best part of fifteen minutes wondering how to shoehorn some brilliant idea into a post. Like the one about "What would happen if ASIO raided the "Big Brother" house and took one of the housemates off for questioning? How would the producers explain that one?" Sometimes you just can't make it happen.

Postscript (2): Channel Nine's This is Your Life is doing Pauline Hanson tonight. At least that's what I've inferred from the promos. For that, it might be worth getting back in with the candiru fish again.

This Time, It's Official

Gone for Good.

Well, that's short, sharp, to the point, and up to the usual standards of accuracy around here. But it is time I took an extended and official break from blogging.

I admit the timing's crap, for two reasons. Anyone who's feeling a little bummed out at Chris Sheil's recent departure from the 'sphere has just been handed another bummer. It's not exactly the best way to respond to all the encouragement and compliments I got on Thursday night from them as attended the meet up at the Golden Terrace Restaurant. It's way overdue.

Sorry folks, but the ideas just aren't coming. It's that simple. Looking back over the posts of the past few months, and looking back on the writing of them, I've come to the conclusion that I've been trying too hard. The horse I've been flogging might not be quite dead, but it's certainly in a critical condition. To put it another way, no-one's going to be fooled by nailing the parrot to the perch – especially not me.

By way of passing on wisdom to other bloggers, I'll restrict myself to two simple apposite rules:

• Don't force it.



• Know when to stop.

Disabling comments doesn't seem to be an option with Haloscan so I've banned you all instead. Or tried to. We'll soon know if this last petty act of censorship and suppression of free speech has worked.

I'll probably update this post later, with links to the all-time greats; you know penis-gourds, possum-packers, libertarians at yum-cha, drunken bankers ...

Penultimately, the fact that this post has been the easiest one I've had to write in a long time ought to tell you a lot about why I'm off.

Finally, and most important, a big apology to David Tiley, Nabakov, Boynton and Helen from Cast Iron Balcony who are among those who came up with encouragement and compliments.

ve been going through the archives to locate a selection of better than mediocre posts from the past. Perhaps it's my personal bias, but there appear to be a few more than I thought, so this could take a little while to finish.

Here's the first batch from 2002:

Penis Gourds

Spy for the Dole

Modern Wage Theory

Slavery and Double Effect

The Courage of a Modern President

Walking Through Wills

Coiffeuses sans Frontieres

2003

The Tug Boat History of Australia

• The Arrival of the First Fleet.


• Draggy Bits of Australian History: 1788 to 1795


• The Birth of an Australian Tradition

Gummo Does Just War Theory

• Long Overdue War Blog


• The Whackiest Little Constitutional Monarchy in the West


• When Meaning Well Is Not Quite Enough

Gummo's Adventures on the Public Transport System

• Strangers on a Train


• Something Pleasant, for a Change

The Secret Origin of “Colostomy Lugs”

Phil's Amnesty Badge Speaks Out

Santoro Watch

Double Backflip With a One and a Half Twist

Palliative Care for Cats

Repeat Offender

Can Libertarians Do Yum-Cha?

There's No Damn Bird in the All Green Hand

Appalling People I've Known

Grandma Trotsky's Mandolin

Well, It Seemed Like a Good Idea At the Time

The Annotated Henry Reynolds

From the sizes blow (and other poetic gems)

Socrates

2004

Culture Crimes

If You're Happy and You Know It, You're Probably Wrong

Drunken Banker Week

Chris Sheil is taking an indefinite break from blogging. His last post is up at Back Pages.

I've little to add to what Ken Parish and Tim Dunlop have already said.

Curiosities

At 2.9 million light years from the Earth, the Andromeda Galaxy is the most distant astronomical object visible to the named eye. According to one discredited but still popular theory of the origins of life on Earth, it probably shouldn't be visible at all.

Similarly, the Large Cloud of Magellan isn't due to become visible for approximately 170,000 years. Assuming, of course, that the apocalypse doesn't intervene in the meantime.

A Middle-Class Hero is Something to Be

Today's Age reports:

Government action could cut the flow of millions of dollars of unionists' money into ALP coffers, sparking fears in the party of a financial calamity.

The Labor Party could face a financial crisis as the Federal Government considers banning trade unions from funding the party without their members' consent.

Workplace Relations Minister Kevin Andrews has told The Age the Government could force unions to let members vote on political expenditure.

Andrews justifies the proposal thus:

Mr Andrews said unionists should know where their money was going.

He acknowledged that the question of how the ALP was funded was not a matter for the Government, but said he received regular complaints from unionists unhappy about their money being handed over to a party.

"I've had many people raise this issue and I tell them that as a general principle, people... ought to have a say in where it is going," he said.

Various union and ALP heavies are variously pissed-off or shit-scared by the idea which seems to fly in the face of the Stainless Steel Weasel's statement (on the 7.30 Report) that:

I want industrial relations change in this country not to satisfy some ideological drive of mine, but because I think it's good for the country, it delivers productivity and higher wages and more jobs and greater growth in the Australian economy. [my emphasis]

On the face of it, Andrews' proposal appears to have as little to do with delivering higher productivity as the introduction of “voluntary student unionism” (VSU) has to do with improving the efficiency, competitiveness and worldsbestpracticiness of Australia's higher education sector. I'm well out of student politics these days, so I'll leave the VSU issue to the young 'uns even though the recent Pandagate affair which exploded across the blogosphere does suggest that Brendan Nelson may have a point when it comes to using students' fees to fund student politicians.

I think it best to accept the sincerity of John Howard's statement that the government's industrial relations agenda is not ideologically driven; after all he's an honourable man who certainly didn't become a liar in the last two years. No doubt whatever regulatory regime the government imposes on trade union funding of political parties will be matched by equivalent restrictions on peak employer bodies.

Afterword: The Australian Electoral Commission now has a handy on line report generator for those who're curious about where our political parties are getting the money from.

Pompous Prelate Pontificates Preposterously

Yesterday must have been a slow opinion day at Fairfax; it's the only explanation I can think of for the appearance of that silly article by Australia's own prince of the church, George Pell.

As The Age notes, at the end of the article, it is in fact

an edited extract from his address to the annual dinner of the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty.

This gala shindig took place in Grand Rapids, Michigan on October 12th. No doubt Prince George's remarks over the brandy and cigars went down a little better with the assembled members of the institute than they have with Ken Parish and a few others.

While Ken makes some interesting and very salient points in his rebuttal of Pell's fact-neutral, logic-neutral arguments, it seems to me that he's been a little misled by the dislocation of the article from its original time and place. Pell made the speech to a coterie of American god-botherers in the lead up to the US presidential election. His remarks on liberal, or as George prefers secular democracy, would have obvious relevance in that context. Whether they are relevant here is another matter.

As we all know, and have known since 1999, Australia is not a democracy in any way shape or form; it's a constitutional monarchy. Whatever deficiencies there might be in Australian public life, they're not the deficiencies of a “secular democracy”, except coincidentally. And unlike a secular democracy, a constitutional monarchy has, in the persons of the monarch and royal family, a continuing demonstration of “the transcendent dignity of the human person”.

This is why I haven't been moved to a state of decadent panic by Pell's piece. True, Australia has pornography and abortion, marriage breakdowns, IVF and stem cell research – all things which, according to George define secular democracy and disfigure democracy (there's no point arguing with George's position here; by the time he gets to this point in his argument it's become completely reason-neutral and possibly sanity-neutral as well). But in 1999 we decided that for the foreseeable future we were going to stay a constitutional monarchy. So I can't see much point in worrying about the alleged evils of secular democracy until something resembling secular democracy is actually on the cards in this country.

So, if Pell's argument is irrelevant in the Australian context, is it at all relevant to the US? Well, he manages to sound one timely, if inadvertent, warning:

The recrudescence of intolerant religion is not a problem that secular democracy can resolve, but rather a problem that it tends to engender.

Now there's a petard if ever I saw one.

Read it. Weep.

Cultivating Inconvenience

I'm waiting for a break in the weather so that I can go and buy a Saturday Age. It needs to be a good long break, because I'll have to walk about half a kilometre to the nearest newsagent, instead of the three doors down the street to the corner convenience store.

You might think it perverse to wait for a break in the rain so that I can walk half a kilometre just to buy The Age but there's a principle involved. I've been mulling over Tony Abbott's latest comments on abortion, particularly the bit about women being railroaded into abortions by “the culture of convenience”.

When I first read it, I thought the idea of people being railroaded by a culture of convenience sounded a little oxymoronic (with the first two syllables optional) but, on a little reflection, I've decided there might be something in it. And, as I'd be no more willing to have an abortion than I would to have my balls cut off, the idea of contributing, even in a small way, to a situation where others might feel compelled to have an abortion is pretty repugnant. So I've decided that from now on I won't be having any part of any “culture of convenience”. And I'll be taking a longer walk to get my Saturday paper.

It's not all self-sacrifice, though; I'll get some healthy exercise out of the trip and while I'm up at the newsagent's I can check out some of the magazines. Now I think about it, I might as well pack up my dirty clothes and take them to the laundromat while I'm out. I can read the paper while they're washing.

Item 35643

Like Scott Wickstein in the comments to this post at Troppo Armadillo I so wasn't going to get into the debate on Tony Abbott's recent posturings on abortion. I especially wasn't going to go anywhere near Abbott's claim that Australia currently has an “epidemic” of abortions with 100,000 abortions performed a year. No way known was I interested in checking his figures to see how accurate they were.

I absolutely refused to waste any time googling up the Health Insurance Commission to get figures on the number of abortions funded by Medicare. No way was I going to use the HIC's online report generator to extract data for the years 1994 to 2003. So I can't tell you that the average number of Medicare funded abortions each year between 1994 and 2003 was about 25,000 short of Abbott's figure.

Not only that, but I steadfastly refused to do any data analysis, not even the sort of cursory data analysis you can do with the statistical functions of a standard spreadsheet program. So I'm absolutely not going to claim that the trend, if any, has been for the annual number of abortions to decline slightly.

It's just a bunch of pointless facts that are totally irrelevant to Abbott's position. So why should anyone give a rat's arse?

Pop Quiz

In a fine demonstration of rhetorical overkill, George W Bush recently described John Kerry as:

... the wrong man for the wrong job at the wrong time.

This raises an interesting question. Is George W Bush:

A. The right man for the wrong job at the wrong time?

B. The wrong man for the right job at the wrong time?

C.The wrong man for the wrong job at the right time?

D.The right man for the right job at the wrong time?

E. The right man for the wrong job at the right time?

F. The wrong man for the right job at the right time?

G. All of the above?

H. None of the above?

Local News

Hairy-legged rider flashes on path

A MAN on a bicycle exposed himself to a woman in Brunswick.

...

Detective Senior Constable Tony Moussa said the man was wearing a helmet and blue parachute material shorts, in his late 30s and described as having big thighs, dark hairy legs and possibly southern European ...

A COBURG man was stabbed when an alleged property dispute turned ugly on October 15.

...

The man was taken to the Austin hospital and treated for a stab wound to the back and head injuries, while his wife was hit on the head with an iron bar...

Police Beat, Moreland Leader 25 October 2004

Bird Song

Mellifluous my eye. There was nothing mellifluous about the inane twittering and chirping that broke out at four o'clock this morning just when the Monica Seles/Kim Clijsters fantasy was starting to dissolve into something resembling sleep. With the possible exception of crow calls, it's difficult to capture bird-song verbatim but the gist of it went something like this:

“Any chicky-babes, out there for a hot stud with his own tree?”

“Shut up loser! Over here babes! The tree's not the only thing that's bigger over here!”

“Who're you calling 'loser'? You don't watch it, I'll come over and give you a face full of beak, shit-head!”

“Go on, try it. I'll rip your hackles out and shove them where the sun doesn't shine.”

“You and whose convocation?”

And so it went. Isn't nature faaaarkin' wonderful?

Innocence Lost

He lay atop her,bracing himself with knees and elbows so that his full weight would not descend on her. her legs surrounded him; her thighs clamped tight against his hips; her hand slipped between their bodies, seized him, guided him into her. She began to thrust her pelvis up and down. He caught the rhythm of it shortly, and matched her thrusts with thrusts of his own.

So this is sex, he thought.

he wondered how a woman felt about having something long and hard pushed into her body like that. Evidently they enjoyed it; Lilith was gasping and trembling in what seemed like delight. But it struck him as an odd thing to covet. And was pushing yourself into a woman all that thrilling? Was this what the poetry was about, was this what men had fought duels over and renounced kingdoms for?

After awhile [sic] he said 'How will we know when it's over?'

From Tower of Glass by Robert Silverberg.

Qu(ot)e?

... I believe and I think most Australians believe that John Howard is an honourable person.

Certainly he hasn't become a liar in the last two years.

Michael Kroger on Lateline

5 Seconds Short

This appeared on the Letters page in this morning's Age. I'd be very pleased if my recollection of events allowed me to claim it as one of mine, but even if my recollection of events were along those lines, I'd come unstuck on the documentary evidence, like the signature on the letter.

All you didn't want to know, in under 51 seconds

At the Senate committee meeting on Wednesday, Liberal Senator George Brandis put it to former federal public servant Michael Scrafton that a second phone call that had lasted only 51 seconds could not have been long enough to cover all the matters Mr Scrafton thought he recalled saying to the PM in it (The Age, 2/9). Mr Scrafton agreed this might be so.

This has been used to raise doubts about the reliability of Mr Scrafton's recall. But neither Senator Brandis nor Mr Scrafton is an expert in timing dialogue; television drama writers are. The following is the script of a hypothetical phone call that might have taken place between the PM and Mr Scrafton:

PM: John Howard again, Mike.

MS: Yes, Prime Minister.

PM: Hope you're not in the middle of dinner?

MS: That's all right.

PM: Just want to get this quite clear. You're sure the video is totally inconclusive?

MS: That's right.

PM: There's no doubt about that?

MS: No.

PM: What about the photos? You can see children in the water. Couldn't they have been thrown in? That's what we've . . . Reith's been out there telling everyone.

MS: The photos were taken when the boat was sinking. Days after . . .

PM: But we were advised by Defence . . .

MS: Well, that's not their view any more. The minister knows that. I told Miles (Jordana) that weeks ago. (Silence from PM.) In fact, no one in Defence that I know of believes that children were thrown overboard at all.

PM: I see. Thanks, Mike.

MS: Prime Minister.

This has been professionally timed on a stopwatch at approximately 46 seconds.

Bill Garner (100 hours of TV drama writing and editing credits), St Kilda

The Talented Mr Howard's Game

Jonathon Trelawney: I know that I should thank you because I wouldn't be alive now if you hadn't helped me but I can't say it. I can't say ... thank you. I know I don't know anything about you. Who are you?

Tom Ripley: I'm a creation. I'm a gifted improviser. I lack your conscience and when I was young that troubled me. It no longer does. I don't worry about being caught because I don't believe anyone is watching ...

Ripley's Game

KERRY O'BRIEN: ... In Mike Scrafton, you have a former senior Defence official who says he made clear to you at at the time that no children were thrown overboard.

He is backed up by two senior Defence officers, a serving major-general and Navy commander and also another senior Defence official.

They say he told them all at the time that you knew that you had been told that no children had been thrown overboard and yet you continued to tell Australian voters the opposite.

What do their accounts and recollections say about your honesty?

JOHN HOWARD: Well, they're not direct evidence.

There are only two people had that conversation and I dispute his recollection.

This is all known.

People know that I dispute that recollection and I continue to dispute it, but there is really nothing I can add to that and my recollection is consistent with the recollections of my staff, but in the end, people will make a judgment about that.

I don't seek to denigrate Mr Scrafton.

I'm sure he believes what he is saying.

I am simply saying my recall is different and I'm also saying that what people remember about that issue is that we stopped the boats.

We were very strong on border protection and the Labor Party was weak.

7.30 Report (my emphasis)