Dummy Spits of the Week

Tuesday, 4 March 2003

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading and Other Matters

Wednesday, 26 February 2003

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

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

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

Dummy Spits of the Week

Monday, 24 February 2003

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

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

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

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

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

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

Raising the Potemkin

Friday, 21 February 2003

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

A Short Memoir

Thursday, 20 February 2003

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

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

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

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

...

...

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

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

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

-***-

Lost & Found

Monday, 17 February 2003

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

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

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

Just Another Slip of the Tongue

Monday, 17 February 2003

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

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

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

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

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

Rubbery Figures

Friday, 14 February 2003

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Meaning Well Is Not Quite Enough

Thursday, 13 February 2003

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

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

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

...

...

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

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

1. Freeing the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein.

2. Demonstrating our support for the US Alliance.

3. Disarming Iraq/Saddam Hussein.

4. Deterring future rogue states.

5. Prime Ministerial hubris or arse-licking or

6. Prime Ministerial clarity of vision and moral purpose.

Note: 5 and 6 are mutually exclusive.

...

...

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

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

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

- *** -

Bernie's Missing Link

Thursday, 13 February 2003

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

What's he got under that robe?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Phoning It In

Wednesday, 12 February 2003

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Throwaway Ideas No. 1 and 2

Monday, 10 February 2003

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

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

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

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

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

More on "l33t gm haxors?"

Friday, 7 February 2003

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

l33t gm haxors?

Friday, 7 February 2003

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

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

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

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

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

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

Technical Problems

Thursday, 6 February 2003

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

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

The Whackiest Little Constitutional Monarchy in the West

Wednesday, 5 February 2003

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

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

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

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

...

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Confusion Reigns

Wednesday, 5 February 2003

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recent Reading

Wednesday, 5 February 2003

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

Another Meddlesome Priest

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

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

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

Questionable Timing

Friday, January 31 2003 (Day 49)

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

A Long Overdue War Blog

Friday, January 31 2003 (Day 49)

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

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

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

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

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

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Let's start with the issue of just cause.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Movable Bloggers

Friday, January 31 2003 (Day 49)

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

Random Thoughts

Thursday, 30 January 2003 (Day 48)

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

The normal alternative to mutual respect is mutual contempt.

The Birth of an Australian Tradition

Thursday, 30 January 2003 (Day 48)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Curious

Thursday, 23 January 2003 (Day 41)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Liberty is the mother, not daughter, of order

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

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No Bag Limit

Wednesday, 22 January 2003 (Day 40)

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

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

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

Fool for Love?

Tuesday, 21 January 2003 (Day 39)

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

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

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

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

Opinion Piece of the Day

Monday, 20 January 2003 (Day 38)

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

A Brief Note on the Blog Roll

Sunday, 19 January 2003 (Day 37)

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

More on Dynamism

Sunday, 19 January 2003 (Day 37)

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Week's Reading and Other Matters

Sunday, 19 January 2003 (Day 37)

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

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

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

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

"You filthy Hun!" ejaculated Biggles.

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

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

Counting the Days

Thursday, 16 January 2003 (Day 34)

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

A Word from the Pot

Wednesday, 15 January 2003

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

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

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

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

Uncommon criminals is what these folks are.

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

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

More Broken News

Wednesday, 15 January 2003

Man dies from mishandling cock.

Now, this is a heirloom.

New Blog

Monday, 13 January 2002

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

Draggy Bits of Australian History: 1788 to 1795

Monday, 13 January 2002

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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End of Week Blog

Friday, 10 January 2003

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

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

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

The most famous victim of ricin poisoning was

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

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

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

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

Bunk is History

Wednesday, 8 January 2002

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Random Thought

Monday, 6 January 2002

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