You'd Better not Shout ...

Tuesday, 3 December 2002

As an avowed Scroogist I doubt that anyone will be surprised that I disagree with Angela Shanahan's op-ed piece in the Oz. Angela joins Prime Minister John Howard et al in decrying the politically correct thought police who intend to deprive kiddies in about 50 Australian child-care centres and kindies of their natural birthright of a visit from Santa (or to be more precise, someone's dad dressed up in traditional Santa kit, including the obligatory pillow stuffed into the red trousers) and a nice singalong around the nativity scene (preferably hand built, with cotton wool sheep and lambs with blackened pipe-cleaners for legs - although these days pipe cleaners are probably hard to come by so maybe they have to make do with black plastic twist ties. It's another sad example of how social and technological progress has destroyed traditional crafts). According to Angela:

The message that Christmas-deprived children get is that they are allowed to have a party and sing songs, but they are not allowed to sing about the birth of the baby or the fun of celebrating it.

The idea of having a party and singing songs without the central message of the nativity does sound a little gloomy but kids are generally considered to be pretty resilient - at least when we're trying to calm our misgivings about the neighbour's fairly strict application of the biblical maxim "spare the rod and spoil the child" - so I'm fairly sure that most of them will get over the undeniable trauma of a Christmas party without the Christmas message. Australian adults have been coping with this for years.

While we're on this subject, I doubt that we'll get through the holiday season without at least one of those pious little suggestions that we might all temper our hoop-la over the annual shopping spree with a little though for the "less fortunate among us" for whom Santa's little helpers usually turn up dressed in Salvation Army uniforms. I sometimes suspect that there are a lot of people who believe that Christmas would be better if we left this seasonal tradition out. Especially this year, when:

we all have to contend with terrorism that is the absolute anathema of Australian values of inclusion, harmony and multiculturalism

Which no doubt makes it essential that we all get behind Christmas and show those nasty terrorists that nothing they can do is going to make us abandon our sacred tradition of offering sincere thanks to those senile distant rellies who have given us yet another year's supply of socks that stopped being big enough when we were twelve years old. After all, it's the thought that counts. Even if the thinking is being done by someone who has totally lost the plot.

Responsible Reporting

Tuesday, 3 December 2002

News Limited's main site is downplaying unspecified reports of a secret training camp for islamic extremists in "remote forests outside Melbourne". This is highly responsible behaviour in the current climate of generalised uncertainty when we are enjoined to be "alert but not alarmed". The last thing we need is casual panic-mongering based on the claims of "well-placed intelligence sources" and other nebulous sources. Anyone who is interested in reading the original report will find it here, at the web-site of that eminently responsible journal of public record, the Melbourne Hun.

In Hiding

Tuesday, 3 December 2002

I've just learned that my friend with the obnoxious neighbour has checked into casualty with a few broken bones and contusions. The official story is that he tripped and fell down an embankment while walking the dog. I'm a little skeptical of this explanation as he doesn't even have a dog.

As soon as it gets dark, I'm going to slip out to the supermarket and stock up on packet soups and frozen dinners. As long as I stay fairly quiet and keep the electricity consumption to a minimum I should be able to avoid "falling down an embankment" or "walking into a doorpost" myself over the next couple of days. I may not be able to do too much blogging, as the light from the monitor showing through the blinds might be a dead giveaway that I'm actually home.

Regression of The Mean

Monday, 2 December 2002

I came across a newish term today, while I was browsing those regions of the blogosphere inhabited by people who believe in the scientific truth of Mr Sax Rohmer's classification of the human race into 3 basic types: wily orientals, such as the fiendish Doctor Fu Manchu and his devious daughter the lovely (and slightly oversexed) Fah Lo Suee; slightly less intelligent, but nonetheless decent whites, such as Nayland Smith, Doctor Petrie and Shan Renfrew; and the rest of the human race whose intelligence, in general, is inversely propotional to their degree of skin pigmentation. The (newish) term is Regression to the Mean and I say newish, because in my chequered academic career I did study a year of statistics (did pretty well too, if I say so myself) so I may have come across it before, even if all I remember of the section on correlation and linear regression these days is my lecturer's frequent reminders that correlation is not causation.

John Ray of Dissecting Leftism, offers this statistical artifact as an explanation for poor academic performance by black students as reported in the New York Times and commented on by Razib at Gene Expression. Dr Ray obviously knows his statistics, so I think that his suggestion that the observation of generalised poor academic performance in american black students is a merely an accidental quirk of statistics, rather than an indicator of underlying genetic differences in IQ, has some merit.

Time to Stop Pussy-Footing Around

Monday, 2 December 2002

There's been a lot of umbrage at Prime Minister John Howard's statement that he would consider pre-emptive action to deal with a potential terrorist threat to Australia. Speaking on Channel Nine, Mr Howard said:

It stands to reason that if you believed that somebody was going to launch an attack against your country either of a conventional kind or a terrorist kind and you had a capacity to stop it and there was no alternative other than to use that capacity, then of course you would have to use it

Predictably, there's been a chorus of condemnation from a number of our so-called neighbours, saying that the PM should perhaps show a little more consideration for their national sovereignty and international law. Most of this stuff can be safely ignored: these states don't have our long experience with western style democracy and a lot of the governments making these statements are obviously a little behind hand in coming to terms with their responsibilities to their citizens. Maybe when Indonesian citizens are under threat, the Indonesian government might change their tune and see the benefits of having Kopassus ready to deal with the threat of terrorists based in other countries. Of course we will insist that they have the courtesy to at least inform us first, before they undertake anti-terrorist operations on Australian soil.

Our Foreign Minister clearly understands the nuances of the situation, commenting:

If people misinterpret what the Prime Minister has said well then you know they have to live with the consequences of their misinterpretation

So there's clearly no question of the Prime Minister's remarks being in any way intemperate. If the political leaders of other countries insist on wilfully misunderstanding his essentially moderate position, that's their problem, not ours.

I wasn't watching Channel 9 on Sunday as it happens - I had to go and help a friend out with some trouble he's been having with his next-door neighbour. Well, more precisely, his next-door neighbour's brother-in-law, who apparently goes round there every Sunday afternoon to drink himself into that belligerent state that some people seem to think is not merely a normal social state of drunkenness, but positively desirable. My friend has been convinced for weeks that this guy is a danger to him (my friend) and everyone else, but will the police deal with the problem? Of course not: as usual it's left to the ordinary citizen to deal with the potential criminal behaviour of the misfits in our society. Anyway, we gave the bugger a good dose of pre-emptive medicine and I don't think my friend will be having any more trouble from that quarter.

The Big Wash-Up

Monday, 2 December 2002

The time has finally arrived for my pontificating post-mortem on the result of Saturday's Victorian State Election.

Saturday's result shows that the Liberal Party to reshape itself as a modern, responsible, democratic conservative party, in much the same way that Labor has grudgingly recognising the need to abandon the socialist dream and reshape itself as a modern, responsible, socially democratic party. It's time that the Liberal party recognised that while slogans like "We stand for choice, Labor stands for the closed shop." (to paraphrase a remark of Ted Baillieu's on Saturday Night) may have instant appeal with the party faithful, elections are not won in the lounges of the Melbourne Club, any more than they are won in the public bar of the John Curtin Hotel. Tony Abbott may be respected as Federal Minister for Workplace Relations and even liked in some quarters, but the people of Victoria have made it pretty clear that they don't want him as State Premier. Kicking the rusty old union can is no longer a ticket to instant electoral victory.

There's been some predictable scape-goating of Robert Dean since Saturday and no doubt we're in for more. It's also been said that Mr Doyle wasn't really given a fair chance to establish himself as leader: a less complimentary way to put it was that he didn't have enough lead time to the election to establish his public image as a basically decent fellow, rather than the ambitious, self-serving career politician who rolled Dennis Napthine. Robert Dean deserves his fair share of credit for Saturday's result but the Dean affair did not occur in isolation. Mr Doyle's attempts to recover from the situation on the weekend of the Liberal campaign launch by spinning it as "yesterday's news" did little to salvage the Liberal's chances. If anything it did the opposite, reinforcing the powerful symbolism of the Dean affair.

Afterword: I've just taken a look at Glenn Milne's article in the Oz. I love this bit:

... they [Victorian Electors] did not have the time or energy to put his Government under hard scrutiny. Nor were they prepared to assess Doyle with any degree of enthusiasm.

As usual, it's a case of the electorate being too dumb, or too lazy, to weigh the issues up properly. Of course, as someone who forgot that on Saturday I would be voting in the Legislative Council as well, I'm in no position to refute this view.

The Big Day, Later Still

Saturday, 30 November 2002 8:00 PM

As usual, election night has turned into a social event and I'm blogging this from a friend's place, where we're watching the impeccably left-leaning ABC television coverage of the election results. At the last count the results were:

Primary votes:

ALP: 48.3%
Liberal: 34.5%
Nationals: 4.2%
Other: 13.1%

Two Party Preferred:

ALP: 58.3% (up 8.1%)
Liberal: 41.7%

Legislative Assembly Seats Won:

ALP: 58
Liberal: 16
Nationals: 7
Other: 2

I'm hopeful that the two others are independents and not Christian Democrats, members of the CEC or someone equally noxious. On the results so far, it looks like the last problem the Liberal Party is likely to have is with resentful backbenchers fuming over their exclusion from the shadow cabinet.

Update: It's 9:18 PM and the ABC's Anthony Green has just announced that Labor looks set to win a majority in the upper house too. I'm not sure how reliable the prediction is: his leftie computer program appears to be giving a little trouble at the moment.

The Big Day, A Little Later

Saturday, 30 November 2002

I'm back from the polling booth and a little embarassed to report that the ballot paper for the Victorian Legislative Council is pink, while the Legislative Assembly paper is white. This creates a bit of a problem with my previous post on the election: should I do a Mike Moore and delete it or is there a better way to deal with the faux pas. Right now I'm more inclined to emulate my intellectual heroine Janet Albrechtsen and declare very firmly that if the facts don't support my opinions then the facts have some serious explaining to do. So there. I plan to write to the Victorian Electoral Commission demanding an explanation of this disgraceful affair, just as soon as I've done that Google search so that I can at least protect myself from making a greater fool of myself than I already have.

The party advertising around the booth was interesting. The Liberal Party have hung up banners with the memorable slogan (well it is if you repeat it to yourself at least three times - I really should have taken a pen and paper to write it down):

Vote for your local Liberal candidate to keep Labor under control.

This approach was roundly criticised by some senior Victorian Liberals earlier in the week as sending the wrong message - and it does. It sounds a lot like a desperate party making a last ditch effort to salvage defeat from the slavering jaws of humiliation. I wasn't impressed by the Labor message either:

Bracks. Listens, Acts.

It's much pithier but to my cynical ears that word "Acts" makes it sound like we're in for 3 years of a Reagan style premiership where form is more important than substance. Of course there are some who will say that this is what we've already got and I'm not going to disagree with them.

No doubt both of these slogans have been passed by those modern arbiters of good taste and sound political opinion, the focus groups so no doubt they reflect the aspirations of the people, or at least that small segment of it that is prepared to cop fifty dollars in the kitty for an hour of free association on such matters of weight as what do you want in a panty liner. I have to admit that I was never any good at focus groups, so perhaps the only reason I'm underwhelmed by the way the democratic process is being run these days is a deep seated resentment of those who know how to get themselves repeat invitations from the market researchers.

And however much my error on the subject of the Legislative Council might compromise any claims I might make that I can provide objective and informed commentary on this issue, I'll probably do the election post-mortem anyway. I'll only be following well established and well respected precedents in doing so.

At Last, the Big Day

Saturday, 30 November 2002

It's polling day here in Victoria, and soon I'll be off to the local primary school to perform my civic duty of defacing my ballot paper. Of course I shall only be defacing the one ballot paper, for the Legislative Assembly, the Victorian Parliament's lower house. In all the times that I have voted at state elections, I can't remember once being given two ballot papers so I have no idea what the Legislative Council's ballot paper looks like. We all know (if only vaguely) that there is some minimum property holding which is required to be eligible to vote for the Legislative Council and some time today I plan to do a Google search to find out why I am not considered a fit and proper person to vote in upper house elections.

Once the voting's out of the way, I might start work on my election post-mortem blog: I've already got a good idea of what I want to write and like any of the great op-ed writers in our papers, the only real use I have for any facts that might emerge in the counting of the votes is to confirm my existing opinions on what went wrong for the Liberal Party. I've already got my hypotheses, which I know are completely correct, it's just a matter of waiting for the data to confirm them. If the data doesn't turn out quite right, well I can always result to a little creative analysis and exclude any embarassing outliers and exceptions. That is the way it's done if you're writing for our national newspaper isn't it? While I'm only a humble blogger, I think it's a good idea sometimes to remember that there are well established standards for public commentary and that emulating the world best practice established elsewhere is a good way to improve my own meagre commentary.

You'd Better not Cry ...

Friday, 29 November 2002

James Russell of Hot Buttered Death links to this article which shows the widespread bi-partisan support for Santa. Maybe we should amend the constitution to make him our permanent head of state. And John Howard has already written his letter to Santa.

In my E-mail today, the 50% of my regular correspondents who lives in Adelaide, Darren, told me a little of his own childhood experience with Santa:

Y'know, I had a very similar experience with my parents and I never did quite understand why they felt it necessary to make up stories about leaving food for some fat old man from the North Pole. I think at age 4 or 5 I had decided there was something strange about a fat man being able to get into our house without our knowing.

If anything, the political correctness is that one must believe in Santa - you are not allowd to tell your children that Santa doesn't exist (because they may tell other kids) and you are *certainly* not allowed to tell kids that Santa is a figment of an advertising executive's imagination.

I think he's got a point on the political correctness thing. But then I'm cynical enough to believe that the Soldier Settler scheme was an exercise in social engineering.

You'd Better not Pout ...

Friday, 29 November 2002

Parental Advisory: this post includes information which may shatter your children's precious illusions.

Prime Minister John Howard has kicked off the Christmas season , by sending a seasonal message to the slaves of political correctness who wish to ban, or replace Santa, in childcare centre and primary school Christmas celebrations with something more to their taste, such as a clown in the traditional red nose and fright wig get-up, rather than a pretend sot with a false beard in the traditional red suit. Speaking of this move by several kindergartens and child care centres:

Mr Howard said the move was ridiculous and said believing in Santa was one of the wonderful things about childhood.

"I do believe in Santa," he told Melbourne radio 3AW.

"I'm no longer a child but I believed in Santa when I was a kid ... so therefore I believe in Santa."

"That (the ban) is absolutely ridiculous and can I say that any childcare centre, any kindergarten, that does that is being foolishly slavish to political correctness."

There certainly is something wonderful about believing in Santa as a child and the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. It's a good way to turn working class kids into lefties, if nothing else. For some reason, working class kids only ever get visits from the really stingy Tooth Fairies, the crappiest eggs in the Easter Bunny's basket and the cheapest toys in Santa's voluminous sack. I have a memory (I hope it's a memory and not a confabulation) of asking my mother once why this was (at least in relation to Santa) and she told me that actually, the stuff that Santa brought was paid for by my parents. This sounded a little weird to me and the following year my grandmother was allowed to let me in on the truth, which was a lot more acceptable, in my view, than the previous explanation for the fact that some kids got ponies for Christmas and I got the Meccano number 3 set, which was that they had been better behaved than I throughout the preceding year. It's no wonder the rich get so far up themselves, when we think it's just a piece of harmless whimsy to promote this sort of thinking.

So I don't have any problem with the idea of kindergartens and child-care centres replacing Santa. Some kindergartens and centres have probably been getting by without him for years anyway - for example the Jewish ones. Although I suppose if they're going to avoid charges of political correctness, they might have to adopt him like the rest of us idiots. And a big Bah Humbug to everyone.

My Favourite Misconceptions About Evolution

Thursday, 28 November 2002

There's a debate going on at the moment (or at least there was this morning) in one of John Quiggin's comment threads about Janet Albrechtsen's article in yesterday's Oz. It's gotten into the the area of the relationship between IQ and social status (always a good topic for controversy) and the relationship of 'Darwinian thought' to politics. I think it might be useful to clear up a few misconceptions about evolution, even if in the end, they turn out to be my own.

As I said in the comments thread, the theory of evolution isn't exactly rocket science, but it's not entirely simple either. Most of the difficulties arise from carelessness in the way evolution is described as a process, plus a few confusions that arise from the use of intentional language (the kind we use to speak about people and their motivations) and misinterpretation of the phrase "survival of the fittest". Once again, blogger limitations have required that I post this as a two parter.

Evolution is purposive.
We may as well get this one out of the way first up, because it's the biggest and most of the others in some way are derived from it. On this view, human beings and other organisms are the way they are because this is the way nature "intended" them to be. Wrong: this is the way we turned out to be. Evolution is a natural process: it's no more purposive than a tile falling off your roof. It's just something that happens.

Evolution is benign benevolent.
Closely related to the first misconception is the Panglossian view that evolution is, in the long run, beneficial because it creates organisms that are fitted to their environment. Wrong: evolution happens because some individuals in any population are less fitted to their environment than others and die before they reproduce. Change the environment and the balance of adaptive advantage may change, favouring those who were formerly the less fitted of the population. Or no individuals may be sufficiently adapted to the new conditions to survive and reproduce and the species becomes extinct.

Every trait of an individual is in some way adaptive.
Pretty Well Wrong: evolution is messy - it depends on genetic variations in the population which for all intents and purposes can be treated as random. A lot of stuff gets "left in" organisms because while it doesn't do any good, it doesn't do any harm either, at least in terms of the evolutionary game, which is to live long enough to reproduce. This is why we have wisdom teeth, those veins around the anus that turn into haemorrhoids in later life and (sometimes) heritable genetic diseases. They don't make a difference in evolutionary terms because they're not usually enough to kill you before you have kids.

Evolution is driven by competition between individuals to be the fittest.
Half wrong: looking at the social behaviour of humans and other animals we can see patterns of competition and co-operation between individuals. For example, within the wolf pack, wolves compete for the positions of alpha male and alpha female because these members of the pack have the mating privileges. On the other hand, wolves co-operate when they hunt. In the human pack, we compete for status in various ways but we have well developed forms of social co-operation as well. Evolutionary fitness is rarely as simple as light moths get eaten, dark moths don't or aggressive tigers live, cowardly tigers die.

So there's the eminently fiskable Gummo Trotsky take on evolution. I hope it goes some way towards explaining my beef with explanations of social phenomena, such as income and class differences, in terms of biology: even if it's via the indirect route of correlations between income and IQ. To complete the picture we need to take a look at IQ testing and statistical correlation. I'm saving that for later.

Preparing for the Last Election

Thursday, 28 November 2002

The Federal ALP has released its border protection strategy. Announcing Labor's plans for an expanded coatguard on AM yesterday, Simon Crean, The NSW Right's current knife-rack-in-waiting said (repeatedly) that Australia's border protection required "a cop on the beat".

It's an unfortunate turn of phrase: it conjures up images of hundreds of CG Plods, up to their balls in the East Timor Sea, trying to fend off people smugglers, drug traffickers and trepang poachers with their trusty truncheons. Or maybe that's just me - and you too, now that you've read that last sentence. Demonstrating their usual talent for stating the blindingly obvious:

The Federal Government has hit back at the Opposition's plans, accusing it of recycling its failed coastguard policy from the last election.

Defence experts are lukewarm too, most believing that keeping our new coastguard in Speedos and waterproof whistles might divert resources from the budgets of other defence agencies, such as the navy, which as we all know from yesterday needs some extra readies to upgrade the Collins class submarines to a more state-of-the-art obsolescence.

Meanwhile, on the domestic policy front ... Well that's the problem really isn't it? Does the federal ALP have any domestic policies, apart from Mark Latham's grand design to return Australia to the glory days of Arthur Calwell?

Coming soon, to Your City

Wednesday, 27 November 2002

I'm not really a religious person, but after finding this I might get down on bended knees and say "Thank you God for the Pacific Ocean."

Scientific Fundamentalism?

Wednesday, 27 November 2002

After roughly a month of regular blogging, with the web-surfing it frequently entails, I've concluded that there is such a thing as scientific fundamentalism which is every bit as bad as the religious variety. The basic credo of this belief is that science deals with facts, not consensus or personal opinion, and that every scientific question must be determined exclusively by the facts (or at least the facts as the author asserts them to be).

The whole thing is based on a simplistic and slightly dodgy view of science and a romanticised scientific history which is presented in terms of great heroes of the intellect, such as Copernicus, Newton and then Einstein sweeping away the discredited misconceptions of the past and replacing them with something closer to the truth. And, so we are told or encouraged to assume, this is exactly the way scientists behave today. They are lofty, idealistic (and slightly eccentric) figures, whose main passion in life is to find the Truth about the real world - or at least some small part of it in their preferred research specialisation.

The trouble starts when science gets entangled - as it frequently does - in matters of politics and public policy. Then we start to see the ugly facets of scientific fundamentalism, such as:

• The elusive slide from the premise "the facts don't support your case" to the conclusion "the facts show that you are wrong".



• Arguments that conservationist or precautionary policy proposals are "anti-scientific" or "anti-progress", because the current known facts don't support the proposed policy. This argument has been used in the past to oppose a ban on the use of CFCs (nobody could know for sure that they damaged the ozone layer), controls on pesticide use (nobody could know for sure that they caused damage to predators higher up the food chain than the insects they were supposed to kill) and for all I know to support the use of antibiotics as a growth promoter in animal husbandry. The long-term results have been pretty crappy in each case.



• Selective application of scientific principles. Just as the religious fundamentalist is careful in his reading of holy writ to select the passages which support his view, the scientific fundamentalist is quite happy to insist upon scientific propriety when it suits his case and abandon it completely when it does not. This behaviour does have a name, one that is generally avoided in polite society.

Finally, if you're expecting a punchline, this time there isn't one.

The Price of What?

Wednesday, 27 November 2002

Janet Albrechtsen blogs in the Oz today on the dangers of Australian political life and culture becoming too Europeanised. Janet warns:

AUSTRALIA'S tendency to swoon over European-style sophistication requires constant vigilance.

Personally, I think this fight is lost: the Gaggia replaced the Massey Ferguson as our main technological icon years ago. As for the rest of the article, where Janet belabours the collectively dumb who want to tear down the individually talented, I really can't be bothered. It's one of those false dichotomies where the gap between the two extremes is so wide you could drive a truck through it. Or a Massey Fergusson tractor, come to think of it.

Just Don't Fire the Thing

Wednesday, 27 November 2002

It's funny where the mind goes when you wake up to ABC news in the morning. Listening to a report that the Navy's Collins class submarines are causing another political ruckus - this time over the fact that re-equipping them to take new, heavier US manufactured torpedoes is going to cost an additional $200 million dollars over the $250 million budgeted to buy the torpedoes - reminded me of a little story I read in a footnote in a book on the international arms trade. Like my copy of Hymns Ancient and Modern it's somewhere in storage, so I can't look it up to give you the citation details. For all you know I could be making this all up and I'll have to ask you to take the veracity of this story on trust. It's certainly absurd enough to be true.

It seems that around the turn of the 20th century in the late 19th century, the tiny European country of Liechtenstein Andorra decided to upgrade their defence capabilities, as we say nowadays. To this end they bought a new cannon for their artillery corps from the German armament manufacturers, Krupps. It was a damn fine state of the art cannon and the artillery corps were no doubt very pleased with it. Unfortunately, they were never able to actually do any training with live rounds: the cannon's range was greater than the length of the country from one end to the other, and any test firing would have amounted to an act of war against either Austria France or Switzerland Spain, depending on where the shell landed. The history of defence spending is full of these little curiosities.

Update: I tracked down the book: it's called The War Business by George Thayer. As you can see, this resulted in a few necessary corrections.

No Keith, It's Just Growing Old

Tuesday, 26 November 2002

Ken Parish has blogged on this profile of Keith Windschuttle, author of a refutationist history of white settlement in Australia. I was particularly taken with Keith's remark that:

In the '70s I was a Marxist, in the '80s I was a social democrat and in the '90s I'm a conservative: it's called growing up.

It's fairly common to hear this sort of remark from committed conservatives who used to be committed leftists in their youth. For some reason, the progression from doctrinaire Marxism to an equally doctrinaire Toryism is always depicted as a normal process of personal maturation, with the implication that those who haven't made this intellectual journey by the time they reach middle age are probably suffering from arrested development.

It's certainly true that personal values, tastes and opinions can change over a lifetime: for example, ABC Radio, which in my youth played the sort of boring old fart music my parents liked, now plays the sort of boring old fart music that I like, which in some cases, is the same boring old fart music my parents liked thirty years ago. And listening to radio talk back, I often hear callers of approximately my generation expressing opinions which, if expressed by their parents in the 1960s, would probably have sent them into paroxysms of adolescent rebellion.

So I can understand how Keith Windschuttle has come to revise his opinions on many issues as he has aged: but I'm not sure that he should congratulate himself on growing up. To exchange one set of intellectual foes for another, without a little opening of the mind in the interim can hardly be called maturation.

Intercepted Mail (Part 1)

Tuesday, 26 November 2002

This is a longer post than I usually make, so I'm resorting to the workaround of posting it in two parts, to fit within blogger limitations.

Prime Minister John Howard has responded to Brian Deegan in this open letter in today's Oz. It's a thoughtful considered response, so I shall attempt to abandon my customary flippancy in commenting on the letter.

After expressing his sympathy for Mr Deegan, Mr Howard gives his explanation of the Bali bombings:

He died at the hands of a murderous group of Islamic fanatics who despise the liberal democratic, open life of Western nations, such as Australia. He died because there are people in the world who believe that indiscriminate violent murder is a justifiable political instrument.

Later he goes on to say:

You are right in saying that boys of your son's age are always the ones to go to war. It has sadly ever been thus. That is why peaceful resolution of differences should always be sought.

Ignoring terrorism, however, will not make it disappear.

History is strewn with examples of countries not taking a stand on something in the hope that the problem would go away, only to find that, at an infinitely greater cost, that challenge must ultimately be confronted.

The favourite historical example of this sort of thing is the rise of Nazi Germany and the Second World War. And this is where I'm getting a little uncomfortable with the parallels, because there are some obvious contrasts as well.