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.