Another Self-Indulgent Post About Statistics

The ever fascinating David Horowitz of Front Page appears to have spawned another interesting political project. It's a grass roots campaign for the adoption of an Academic Bill of Rights. Like any effective grass-roots campaign, it's being fought on two fronts; through lobbying of legislators and on-the-ground activism and research by conservative students under the banner of Students for Academic Freedom (SAF). SAF has already put in the hard yards at 32 Elite US Universities and Colleges, producing this damning report on the dominance of lefty-liberalism at these institutions. US students who suspect that their own college or university is similarly tainted with academic bias can find handy tips on how to confirm their suspicions here.

The research protocol is an eminently simple, practical one. First, you make a list of the names of all the faculty and administrative staff of your institution. If possible, you should get a full list of names and home addresses, as this will make it easier to accurately identify individual staff members when you get to the second stage of the process, which is to trot down to wherever your State or county keeps its voter registration records and check the political affiliations of the people on your list. It's possible of course, that your identifying data may be inadequate when you cross-check against the official records; here's how you deal with that problem:

The person being investigated is “Andrew Jones,” and there is no address available.
If your result is one “Andrew Jones,” this is conclusive. Record the party.
If your result is two people named “Andrew Jones” this is not conclusive. Record as TM – too many positive hits.
If your result is “Andrew L. Jones”: this is conclusive. Record the party.
If your results are “Andrew L. Jones” and “Andrew N. Jones”: not conclusive. Record as TM – too many positive hits.
If your results are “Andrew Jones” and “Andrew L. Jones”: still not conclusive. Record as TM – too many positive hits.

It would be disingenuous of me to suggest that there is a simpler solution to this problem, which is to approach "Andrew Jones" (or "Andrew L. Jones") and ask him to his face what his political party affiliations are. After all, he might just ask why you want to know and, if you were foolish enough to tell him what you were about, might form an unfairly low opinion of your character based on the ridiculous prejudice that checking the political affiliations of college and university professors in this way is a bit of a sneaking, underhanded business. Better by far to accept the possibility of a few false positives and get on with the research.

Another interesting omission, which bears on the reported results of the 32 campus survey, is a simple test you really need to perform before you can say, with any authority at all, that the political affilaitions of the staff at your college or university are out of whack with those of the general community. That, of course, is to tally up all the political affiliations recorded in the county or state records, to find out how many registered Democrats (i.e. leftists) and Republicans (i.e. sensible conservatives) there are in the general population.

If this is too tedious, you could at least take a sample, by checking several random pages from the listings. It seems to me that anyone who is prepared to take the trouble to do all the other tedious data gathering reccommended in the SAF protocol ought to have the motivation to take this extra step as well. Its omission is troubling, although it may explain why the summary report on the 32 elite campuses makes no mention of any statistical test which may have been applied to determine whether the academic bias identified at these institutions was genuine, or consistent with random variations in the population. But this is mere nitpicking; the parlous state of the US academic community is well known to people of sense, so it would be unreasonable to insist on too high a standard of proof.

Irregular Verbs

I was just about ready to chuck blogging in this week; I spent too much time over the weekend writing witty first paragraphs of pieces that didn't go anywhere. One piece, on dinner party etiquette, got a whole six paragraphs before I decided the whole thing was pointless, at least forthe time being. And the only great Australian Bungle to win more than one vote from the readership was the building of the Harold Holt Memorial Swimming Centre. So I guess that makes it our greatest Australian bungle ever; we're the world leaders in memorialising dead Prime Ministers in slightly tacky ways. In time perhaps we can expect the William Snedden Memorial Massage Parlour and the Malcolm Fraser Memorial Dry Cleaners.

If my own powers of comic invention have flagged a little this week, the world of politics and the press have taken up the slack admirably and I was pleased to learn today (two or three days after the event), that a little jobby whose flight path I started tracking in June has finally hit the fan. In the time it has taken to hit the Mistral, NASA could have had another Voyager probe half-way to Jupiter.

Under the headline Hailed a hero for blowing our trust in Sydney's Daily Telly, Piers Akerman puts the current furore over Bolt's reporting of Wilkie's work in the proper perspective, with the help of one of those Yes Minister irregular verbs:

Carlton and others who have placed the garrulous former analyst on a pedestal and awarded him the whistle-blower appellation like to ignore the reality that Wilkie became a media tart in early April when he contacted The Bulletin's Laurie Oakes and began briefing him for a television program.

...

If, however, Andrew Bolt did obtain a leaked classified document, it surely puts him in the junior Bernstein and Woodward category.

Repeat after Piers: we are respected journalists and commentators, you are a trusted source, he is a media tart and a threat to national security.

Meanwhile, Kevin Rudd doesn't share Piers awe at Bolt's scoop; in Parliament he was after Alexander Downer, looking for an explanation. You can find the rest of the news on this that's fit to Google here.

Postscript: in the interests of historical accuracy, I suppose I should mention that William Snedden wasn't ever a Prime Minister. But he did go out like Flynn.

You too Can Be a Hero Columnist

Thanks to regular reader and commenter dj, for prompting me to get off my bum on Monday and head down to the local newsagent where I was able to grab the last remaining copy of the rainforest edition of The Australian. On page 18, The Oz's school reporter, Sascha Hutchinson, offers some helpful hints for winners of the Caltex All Rounder competition who would like to try their hand at writing an oped [sic] piece for publication in The Oz.

Most of the helpful hints come from working professionals, of the high calibre to be found in the pages of The Oz, such as Janet Albrechtsen. Since the contest's theme is based on an idea from one of Janet's own columns, that "Free speech includes the right to say the wrong - or unpopular - thing", it shouldn't be surprising that a good deal of the helpful advice comes from Janet herself. Here it all is in one lump:

The oped pieces I enjoy reading most are ones that spark debate. The author knows ehat he or she wants to say, knows how to say it well and leaves the reader with a message ...

It is like having a great conversation with someone - except [it's] on the page. You nod in agreement or you shake your head madly in dissent. This is what an oped writer tries to elicit - and clean crisp language and simple sentences beat big words and convoluted sentences any day ...

Whether your style is funny or formal, strident or soft, the arguments and evidence for your opinion need to be there.

If you're expecting that the rest of this post will be looking at Janet's most recent column, to see how well she puts precept into practice, you're right on the money. Here's Janet's conversation starter:

SEPTEMBER 11 stands as a testament to the two sides of humanity – the evil of those who perpetrated the terrorist attacks and the innate goodness, bravery and compassion of others forced to confront them. Unfortunately, human nature being what it is, the freedom to remember is too quickly transformed into a licence to forget.

I'm sure you'll agree that if someone opened up with that line at a dinner party, or over a cup of flat white at the local coffee shop, your ears would prick up and you would think to yourself "Wow! I'm in the presence of a great conversationalist. This might turn out so dreary after all." Sadly, you'd be disappointed by Janet's next six paragraphs, after hearing her long exposition of the views of "one of Australia's most distinguished historians, Geoffrey Blainey", you might start to suspect you were in the presence of either a name-dropping parvenu or one of those tedious, lazy people who are content to agree with whatever they have just read, in Quadrant say, and pass it off as their own opinion.

IN the next five paragraphs, Janet turns elsewhere - to The Economist, a 1999 BBC poll, an on-line search of Dymock's catalogue - to find the "arguments and evidence" for the opinion she has borrowed shares with Blainey. She finds alarming confirmation of her Blainey's views in the fact that books "favorable to Marx" (according to The Economist) appear at a much more frequent rate than books favorable to Adam Smith. She notes:

A search of titles in the University of Sydney's library brings up twice as many on Marx as on Smith. Is this to warn students off Marxism and communism? Unlikely. More likely that prosperity and complacency have lulled us into forgetting evil.

Well, it might be a little short on argument and evidence, but at least the crisp clean language and simple sentences are there. To finish, it's back to Blainey, with a few insights from Janet into the thinking behind the great man's writing [I wonder how Blainey feels about op-ed writers' habit of opening up his head to drop a few of their own ideas in]:

Blainey's is a sober assessment from someone devoted to teaching and explaining history. He admits that we do not necessarily learn from history.

"But I would like to think we did," he adds, knowing he is probably being more hopeful about human nature than history warrants. His prediction is prescient given tomorrow's second anniversary of September 11. For those who have never experienced the evils of communism, September 11 is our reminder of the two sides of humanity. Recalling humanity's capacity for evil is one way of protecting ourselves from it in the future.

I'm not sure what the connection between September 11 and communism is - no doubt this will emerge in due course, and we can expect the "islamo-fascist" tag to be replaced by "islamo-communist". Life would be a lot easier if people would just keep their spectres straight.

IQ, Truth and Logic

It seems that at least one member of the right is in a bit of a panic over IQ. That intelligence is mostly hereditary and that science has established this as fact, has been routinely asserted by various social conservatives for over a century. To them, ideology must win, not evidence. They have developed many standard strategies to attempt to discredit experimental findings that challenge their position and their responses to the latest such study, reported by Rick Weiss in the Washington Post has provided another opportunity for them to put them into practice. The study was conducted by Eric Turkheimer, a psychologist at the University of Virginia with several colleagues.

The Misanthropyst got in quickly, with a heartfelt plea on behalf of People for the Ethical Treatment of Data:

Here's an example of having your cake and eating it, too - the unfortunate data must have been screaming in pain at the abuse it was put through to achieve these politically correct conclusions:

Back-to-school pop quiz: Why do poor children, and especially black poor children, score lower on average than their middle-class and white counterparts on IQ tests and other measures of cognitive performance?...

...Now a groundbreaking study of the interaction among genes, environment and IQ finds that the influence of genes on intelligence is dependent on class. Genes do explain the vast majority of IQ differences among children in wealthier families, the new work shows. But environmental factors -- not genetic deficits -- explain IQ differences among poor minorities...

Following on, Ozblogistan's very own John Ray is also skeptical about the study and has done his own analysis of the study. He begins with a well worn standard: misconstrue the study's conclusion, to make it appear as absurd as possible:

... It claims that heredity is the main factor in determining white IQ but is NOT the main factor in determing black IQ! So are blacks a different species from whites, then? That would seem to be the conclusion if we took the study seriously.

Ray presumably bases this caricature on this paragraph from Weiss' report of the

Now a groundbreaking study of the interaction among genes, environment and IQ finds that the influence of genes on intelligence is dependent on class. Genes do explain the vast majority of IQ differences among children in wealthier families, the new work shows. But environmental factors - not genetic deficits - explain IQ differences among poor minorities.

Ray goes on to challenge the study's methodology, despite the fact that:

Full publication of the study has not been done as yet but from what we know so far it seems that what they found was in fact much simpler than that.

This leads on to a passage I find delightfully ironic: a discussion of statistical theory that leads to the conclusion that the finding was a statistical artifact, similar to regression to the mean. In this case, the artifact in question is the "restriction of range effect" which Ray describes thus:

... if you take ANY group and select out a subset that is relatively homogeneous with regard to some variable, differences in that variable will tend to have less importance in explaining other differences. Since socioeconomic status and race are substantially correlated with heritable IQ, that is precisely what these researchers have done: Selected a group that is relatively homogeneous in genetic inheritance for IQ and then said: "Hey! Differences in genetic inheritance are not so important here!" [my emphasis]

Just as I did after reading Ray's use of regression to the mean to argue that, over time, you could expect blacks to breed children dumber than their parents, I did a quick Google for the restriction of range effect. There's a brief explanation here. In general, it agrees with Ray's description of the effect, however it is worth noting that, like regression to the mean, the restriction of range effect occurs as an artefact when calculating correlation co-efficients for correlation of two variables. If you calculate a correlation coefficient over a whole data set, then select a sub-range of the set, you will find a much lower correlation. Ray's major argument against the validity of the study is that this is what the researchers have done. How he can reach this conclusion without having seen the full report of the study eludes me.

Ray's insistence that socioeconomic status and race are substantially correlated with heritable IQ seem to me to ignore the standard warning, given by most lecturers in statistics when introducing the subject of correlation for the first time: correlation is not causation. I'll repeat that: correlation is not causation. And, for the third and final time: correlation is not causation.

There's a standard example used to illustrate this point; you'll find it all over the internet with a bit of imaginative Googling. It's the strong correlation between monthly sales of ice-cream and the rate of deaths by drowning. The two correlate very strongly but it's pretty obvious that there's no causal relation between the two. Something else - something very obvious - is going on here.

The case of the correlations between IQ and socioeconomic status and IQ and race are similar; they give no grounds for concluding that IQ determines social position or vice versa. All you can say, in the absence of other evidence, is that the two correlate and ain't that interesting. The race-IQ-status correlation is often interpreted as indicating that race determines IQ which determines social status, but it would be equally valid, on the basis of the correlation alone to assert that IQ determines both race and social status or that status determines IQ and race or ... There are a few too many permutations to enumerate fully.

Ray's position (stated at the beginning of his post) is that IQ is mainly hereditary, which leads to the logical error of circular argument. He introduces into his argument, as a bald assertion, the very conclusion he is trying to establish; that is that IQ determines socioeconomic status and not vice versa. Stripped of the statistical theory window dressing, Ray's argument is:

I: If IQ is hereditary then the new study is wrong.
II: IQ is hereditary.
III: The new study is wrong.

This is an eminently logical classic syllogism (modus ponens) but the conclusion does not follow if either of the two premises is false. Ray's minor premise is in fact the very assumption that the new study challenges, so he is on very thin ice in asserting its truth as a refutation of the study's findings. An equally logical argument is the following modus tollens:

I: If IQ is hereditary the the new study is wrong.
II: The new study is not wrong.
III: IQ is not hereditary.

The only conclusion that logic can reach in this situation is that either IQ is hereditary or the new study is wrong. Which leaves us right where we started. Weiss' report, although admirably detailed and clear doesn't give us enough information to determine this question. The only way to demonstrate that the study reported by Weiss is wrong, or flawed, is to look at the study design, methods, data and data analysis and assess whether they support the conclusions reached.

I may be a little rusty on this - it's over twenty years since I got my scientist's licence and I've never used it professionally, but unless the scientific method has changed radically over the past two decades, I'm pretty confident that if you want to show that a scientist has conducted a flawed experiment, that's how you do it.

None of this has prevented Ray's post from receiving approbation elsewhere: here, here and here, where "That Bitch" offers some unintentionally ironic advice:

No matter what your political or social leanings are, I challenge you to take a look at your favorite set of statistics. Go digging for the devil in the details, and find out whether or not your "statistics" are nothing more than someone elses warped view being presented as "The Truth." I think that 99% of the time, you'll be unpleasantly surprised.

Dan at Tubagooba has also offered a little seriously intended advice, suggesting that John Ray might take a look at Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasurement of Man. Offering reading suggestions for John Ray to ignore is one of those blogospheric rites of passage; Dan is now up there with Rob Schaap to name just one blogger who has completed this initiation.

Update: As if I needed reminding of the futility of this kind of post, John Ray has taken the opportunity to revise Update: As a further reminder of the futility of posts such as these, John ray has taken the opportunity to summarise his critique of the Turkheimer et al survey here:

I showed that IF IQ is generally hereditary and related to race and class, [then] you would still get the survey results reported -- so therefore the survey results reported do not upset the claim that IQ is generally hereditary and related to race and class!

Give or take an unstated premise, this is an impeccable piece of logical reasoning, whose conclusion follows with the same rigor as the conclusion (III) of the following syllogism.

I If Gummo Trotsky doesn't understand simple "if ... then" logic then he shouldn't argue with John Ray.
II Gummo Trotsky shouldn't argue with John Ray.
III Gummo Trotsky doesn't understand simple "if ... then" logic.

And Now For The Bottom Ten

Recently, Scott Wickstein called on Oz Bloggers to

nominate 10 Australians that you think had the biggest impact on our country in the 20th century.

I think enough time has elapsed that I can decently propose a follow-up without stealing Scott's thunder. A listing of the ten least influential Australians of the twentieth century is out of the question; no-one knows who they were. Instead I'm going to call for your nominations of the 10 greatest bungles in Australian history, from the First Settlers to the present day. Feel free to name the guilty parties as well.

Like Scott, I'm going to withold my list until results are in, firstly because I don't want to prejudice the results with premature suggestions of my own, and secondly because I can't be buggered doing the research right now. My one stipulation is that naming the event and those responsible isn't enough to get a guernsey in the final aggregated list; each nominee needs at least a short justification to get in. Results Monday week.

Update: Rob Schaap has an extensive list of candidates up at his blog.

Here's a thought provoking piece from Bernard Slattery

Grandma Trotsky's Mandolin

Until a few years ago I used to think that I grew up in an ordinary neighbourhood and that my family and I were ordinary people. I lost this illusion quite by accident.

It was on the last of three overseas trips I took with my ex. The first was to New Zealand which really only counts as overseas because it's separated from the Australian mainland and, unlike Tasmania, you need to get a passport before you go there. As we all know, New Zealand has produced our best Australian actors, film directors and films or, at least, the ones who win Oscars.

Our second overseas trip included a visit to Manchester, the city where I was born. The ex was there to visit, and consult with, a Mancunian academic she had met at a conference. They had similar research interests. I was there to do that silly emigrant thing of revisiting your roots. For some reason it's considered am important rite of passage to go back to that secret place that only you and around fifty other neighbourhood kids knew about, and discover that Tesco's have built a supermarket over it.

The ex's visit with her Mancunian colleague, Steve, was cancelled the day we arrived; his wife went into hospital to deliver a baby. We had known that this was possible; the Manchester visit was slipped in as an opportunistic stopover between New York and Nice. Steve did insist that he would take us out for dinner the first night he could make a chance. When the night came he suggested that we go down to "Curry Mile" for an Indian meal and arranged a time to pick us up at our hotel.

We'd already discovered Curry Mile for ourselves. It was a stretch of street a few bus-stops away from our hotel, with Indian restaurants on both sides. In Manchester, as in most of England, if you're looking for an affordable meal, you either go to one of those roadhouse cafes where everything - including the desserts - comes with spam, or you go to an Indian restaurant. We went to Curry Mile on the first night of our hotel stay, after the hostess told us they didn't do dinners, "only breakfast for the guests and lunches, love. The 'Happy Chef' up the road might be open or you can try Curry Mile if you like Indian."

We liked the idea of a second visit to Curry Mile, with the benefit of Steve's local knowledge. The only other restaurant we'd found in Manchester was a rather pricey, and totally inauthentic, Italian place, which would have been pushed to give Pasta Plus any competition.

Steve's route to the restaurant was a circuitous one, which included a quick tour of Manchester's city centre, the Manchester Ship Canal and other local landmarks. Steve provided an informative historical commentary on each of the locations we visited. It was obvious that if he paid us a return visit to Melbourne, I would be hard put to match it, especially when it came down to putting dates to major events associated with the landmarks. Steve was very proud of his home town.

Thanks to our previous visit to Curry Mile, I wasn't fazed by the Mancunian accents of the staff at the restaurant Steve had chosen. It wasn't the same one we'd visited ourselves, it was a little more up-market. Besides that, I was glad not to go back to the place where I'd nearly made an ass of myself when the waiter, of very obviously Indian descent, saw me reading the drinks list and asked "Would'st like a lager wi' y'r curry, then?"

Naturally enough, the fact that I had lived in Manchester until I was ten came up in the conversation. I asked Steve what had happened to Belle Vue, the amusement park Dad and Mam had taken us kids to a couple of times. Both visits were at Christmas for the circus and the fireworks display which followed it. I'd seen buses with Belle Vue as their destination, but the park wasn't shown on my map of Manchester and Districts. Long demolished and built over with houses, Steve told me.

Steve asked whereabouts in Manchester I'd lived; when I answered, he said, with typical Mancunian tact: "So, you're from the slums then." I was shocked and hurt. Obviously it showed, because there was one of those awkward silences before Steve picked up the brick he had inadvertently dropped by remarking "I can understand why your parents decided to go to Australia." And, probably for the first time in my life, I really started to understand it myself.

If my parents hadn't taken the ten pound assisted passage, I would have found out much earlier that I was growing up in a slum. This may have proved character building but I think the resulting character would be even less likeable than the one I've acquired through living the soft life here in Australia. I wasn't privy to any of the discussions between my parents and our adult relatives over their decision to emigrate, but I find it difficult to imagine that anyone urged them to stay on the grounds that growing up in the arse end of Manchester would be character building for us Trotsky kids. My parents saw an opportunity to make a better life for us all and, very sensibly, took it.

The afternoon of the last Saturday before we set off for London, where we would catch our aeroplane to the Land Down Under, Dad took my brother and sister to the local park, for one last chance to play in the playground there, and to feed the ducks. He took along his Russian 8mm camera to get some footage for his home movie collection. I couldn't go; I had finally caught the chicken pox that someone them had brought home from school the week before so I spent the afternoon with Grandma Trotsky instead. I can't remember if she asked me to "Give us a tune on't piano lad," but I suspect she may have. It might be a long time, if ever, before she got another chance.

I'm not sure where the piano came from; I haven't heard another like it since, except perhaps on an old recording of Meade Lux Lewis playing Honky-Tonk Steam Train Blues. It's a lot better than my barrel-house version of Greensleeves ever was. The piano was an upright, of course; there was no room in Grandma Trotsky's kitchen for a Steinway grand.

The kitchen was where she and Granddad Trotsky spent most of their time at home; the front parlour was the best room, reserved for family special occasions and watching television after six o'clock. There was no point turning on the television before then; all you could get was two channels of test pattern.

Their kitchen was also their bathroom; when either of them wanted to take a bath, they used a tin bath which was stored, if memory serves, in a small cellar-come-larder off the kitchen. There was a kitchen table where Grandma would prepare their meals (or ours, when us kids were eating with them) and serve them once they were prepared. The table was also where she taught me to play patience (Klondike and Clock) and where she taught us all the game of Monopoly, using a very old set with wooden houses and hotels. Tucked between the kitchen table and the wall was Granddad Trotsky's billiard table. It had no legs; it was designed to sit on top of another table. I never saw it used; there simply wasn't enough room to wield a cue properly.

Grandma Trotsky had a lot of character building experiences in her life and occasionally she would give us a glimpse of them. Most of these glimpses I didn't understand at the time.

My early childhood was haunted by my father's older brother. When the Trotsky clan got together at Christmas, relatives would frequently remark on how much I resembled him. When I asked who he was, my mother told me that he was my father's brother who had died in the war. That closed the subject without doing anything to satisfy my curiosity.

Once, I succeeded in pestering Grandma Trotsky into showing me his medals - medals were a big deal at school and all the boys liked to boast about the medals Dad had won in World War II, or Granddad had won in World War I. As well as showing me the medals, she showed me a photograph of his grave. The grave was in France and I don't think she had ever been able to visit it; her only sight of it was in the photograph she was sent by the War Office.

There were actually five or six graves in the photograph, each with a standard headstone bearing RAF insignia. One headstone for each member of the crew of the Lancaster bomber on which my uncle had been tail-gunner. He was a sergeant in the RAF; all tail-gunners were. Many years after Grandma Trotsky showed me the photograph, I met someone at University whose father had served in RAF ground crew during World War II. He told me how Lancasters would sometimes come back from a mission with the tail gun turret so badly shot up that the only way to dispose of the tail-gunner's remains was to hose them out.

It was Grandma Trotsky herself who first told me the story of her mandolin; at the time I didn't know what a mandolin was. She told it to me when I had just started piano lessons, to encourage me to persist with the five finger exercises and scales which you have to master before you're ready to take on even the simplest melody.

The story is a very plain, simple one: when she was a girl, she had a mandolin and her father would often come home from work and say: "Gi' us a tune on your mandolin, lass."

So she would play her mandolin for her father to make him happy. It made her happy too; she smiled at the memory, every time she told the story. Her smile was more or less a permanent feature; she had smiled so often in her life that it was thoroughly worn in. Her face didn't lend itself to severity.

It wasn't until after she died that I started to piece together a more complete version of the story of Grandma Trotsky's mandolin but there are still a lot of details missing such as what became of the mandolin between the time she was a girl playing tunes for her father and the time she was telling her grandchildren the story of how much she loved playing her mandolin and how much her father loved hearing her play too.

The first hints were general remarks about how she'd had a hard life and a hard time with her father. I learnt that his route home from work usually included a stop at local for a coupl'o' pints before he went on home for his tea. How he would react if it were not ready when he got there. There were the hints about the severity of parental discipline in my grandparents' time and the use of the buckle end of the belt when serious punishment was merited. From a sparse collection of such small clues, I picked up an inkling of why she mighttreasure the memory of playing the mandolin for her father so much.

But it is no more than an inkling and, for now, I'm going to leave it at that, even if it is tempting to confabulate a little and slip in a few reminiscences about the cardboard box my parents started their married lives in. That particular Monty Python sketch is one of my favourites. It's one of my dad's too; I think it might be the only Monty Python sketch he actually likes. It shouldn't be too hard to work out why he does.

And the Search Requests Keep Bringing Them In

No matter how tragic you might be, you're still someone's idea of Mr Right.

His mother might not agree.

Another lover of the classics.

Anyone care to try the steamed haggis in Black Bean Sauce?

Looking for a good time Down Under.

This might rate well as a sequel to The Love Boat ...

... but this definitely wouldn't.

Drivel Pundit of Dumb

Arthur Figgis: Well I feel very keenly that the idiot is a part of the old village system, and as such has a vital role to play in a modern rural society, because you see ... ooh ar ooh ar before the crops go gey are in the medley crun and the birds slides nightly on the oor ar ... Ooh ar thankee, Vicar ... There is this very real need in society for someone whom almost anyone can look down on and ridicule. And this is the role that ... ooh ar naggy gamly rangle tandie oogly noogle Goblie oog ... Thank you, Mrs Thompson... this is the role that I and members of my family have fulfilled in this village for the past four hundred years... [my emphasis]

From Monty Python's Flying Circus, The Attila the Hun Show

I think it's about time to extend a warm, Tug Boat Potemkin welcome to Ozblogistan's very own Arthur Figgis, whose writing, both on his blog and in the comments threads of other bloggers, is as incisive as his chosen cognomen is modest. Ooh aar, bogle wumpy.

Blog Challenge

Someone left a copy of The Hun on the tram I caught home from the trivia quiz last night. With no better reading material on hand, I decided to dip into the comics pages, then succumbed to the temptation to check out whether accidental humorist Andrew Bolt had written anything new. I wasn't disappointed.

In his latest column, Andrew once more takes up the cudgels on behalf of impressionable young minds. This time the object of his ire is the Pixar Film Finding Nemo, in particular:

the too-easy, no-pain, nature-worshipping New Age-ism being pushed by this hit animation.

There's plenty more where that came from, including enough coverage of the film's major plot points to ensure that Bolt's readers won't be unpleasantly shocked, or even surprised, by the way the story unfolds when they take their own rug-rats along to see this insidious little piece of greenie/vegetarian agitprop.

Here's the challenge: check out Bolt's article and write a plot synopsis for a responsible version of Finding Nemo which avoids the errors Bolt identifies in his article:

For many viewers, these messages in Finding Nemo -- that humans are vile but nature noble, that killing is always wrong, that eating meat is mean, and that parents should ease up with the rules -- will seem very true, or at least harmless.

Harmless? How harmless is it for children to be taught a morality that is so impractical or shallow that it soon becomes a game of pretend?

You might, for example, decide that barramundi, tuna or dolphins would be more appropriate villains for the film than sharks. Where you go with the narrative is up to you, as long as you send the right messages about parental responsibility, filial obedience and the need to face up to life's hard choices. I can't offer a valuable prize, or even cumulative points in one of those on-line writing challenges so all there is in it for you is a bit of fun and the kudos of a link from Tug Boat Potemkin. And we all know what that's worth.

Afterthought: if I were still doing "Snob of the Week", this article of Bolt's would be a shoo-in.

Time for a Little Gander Sauce

I see that last week's dummy spit in the general direction of The Hun's only on-line columnist didn't escape the notice of John Ray, who remarked:

The Tugboat Potemkin has once again emitted a few angry sparks from its aging Leftist chimney in the form of a great huff over the fact that Andrew Bolt mentioned the psychiatric problems of a children’s book author. Frankly, if I had a child that was being given books to read that were written by a mentally disturbed person, I would want to know about it. Impressionable minds and all that. The Tugboat may stand for censorship of relevant information in the name of political correctness but I think the right to know trumps that every time. As a libertarian, I am against ALL censorship.

I'm not sure how one can be against all censorship on libertarian grounds and maintain that parents have a right to screen their children's choice of books on the grounds of "Impressionable minds and all that." It must be one of those distinctions between public policy and private (or familial) conduct that libertarians rely on whenever their beliefs lead to an obvious contradiction between precept and practice.

Still, credit where credit is due; perhaps if the school librarians at my various schools had paid more attention to the disorderly lives many writers lead, the young Gummo Trotsky would not have had his mind twisted by reading books written by an avowed Fabian and freethinker, an openly homosexual Irishman, a declasse English radical of dubious sexual conduct, a sexual pervert with a fondness for a good spanking or an alleged paedophile whose hobbies included taking nude photographs of pre-pubescent girls.

Update: Geoff Honnor takes issue with my description of Oscar Wilde as "openly homosexual" in the comments thread. He's probably right.

Update Too: John Ray has posted a brief retort here. But nothing at his PC Watch site about Bolt's recent bucketing of Finding Nemo for its political agenda. Odd isn't it?

Bread on the Water or Pearls Before ...

Wayne Wood of Troppo Armadillo has posted an extended, thoughtful and thought-provoking piece under the title Fathers and Sons. Reading it prompted disturbing recollections of Trotsky family history, and Trotsky family legends such as that of Grandma Trotsky's mandolin, which played a similar role in her family life to that of David's Lyre in another context.

However, Wayne's post is sui generis and in this case imitation would merely be the sincerest form of imitation. So for now, I'll leave the big life issues to him and stick with the fluff for a couple of weeks. Or at least a few days, anyway.

This Looks Like It Could Take A While

Responding to Scott Wickstein's call for bloggers to nominate the 10 most influential Australians of the Twentieth Century, Jack Strocchi has posted his list of the 10 greatest Australians, with the tag my un-docile decile. I have no idea how big a decile of all Australians who lived during the twentieth century would be, but I'm sure it's a few orders of magnitude more than the mere ten Jack lists. Off-hand two million seems a reasonable guesstimate, leaving Jack with only 1,999,990 more to get through.

There's no doubt that Jack has begun the most ambitious series in the history of Australian blogging: if he keeps posting ten names a day, it will take the best part of six centuries to get through them all. Could this be the beginning of a Strocchi family tradition?

And Now For Something Completely Different ... Etymology Wars!

As if the History Wars weren't enough, Gregory Melleuish of the University of Wollongong has opened a new front, taking Stuart MacIntyre to task for a failure of etymological correctness:

Now, as he extends his ambitions to control the past of the historical profession in this country, one must ask: Just how reliable and accurate is [MacIntyre's] history.

For starters, he gets the origin of the word history wrong. He says that it comes from the Greek word meaning to know. Actually, to know in Greek is gignosco, hence cognisant (via Latin) and gnostic in English. Historie in Greek means research or inquiry. Perhaps while the rest of us engage in inquiry, Macintyre, like a true gnostic, just knows.

Chris Sheil dismisses this as a nitpick. Chris' opinion isn't shared by Bernard Slattery; in Bernard's eyes this is pretty clear evidence

that above all Macintyre is a dill who can't accurately define the word for his chosen trade.

Thanks to the availability of the Macquarie Dictionary on-line, it's an easy task to shed a little heat on this issue with perhaps more than a little accompanying light. First, let's look at the Macquarie definition of history:

noun 1. the branch of knowledge dealing with past events. 2. the record of past events, especially in connection with the human race ... [Middle English, from Latin, from Greek: a learning or knowing by inquiry]

And here's gnosis:

noun a knowledge of spiritual things; mystical knowledge. [New Latin, from Greek: knowledge]

I'd suggest that anyone with a bit of nous will now be cognisant that both "history" and "gnosis" originate from Greek words for knowledge (or learning) albeit of different forms. As does "epistemology". "Science" on the other hand, is a more modern word, its antecedents tracing back through Old French to a Latin word for knowledge (but not the only one apparently - there's also the Latin root which gave us "cognisance" to consider).

To wrap this post up, I grabbed a hard copy of The MacQuarie Concise Thesaurus, where I found the following list of words related to "KNOWLEDGE":

n cognition (Obs.), enlightenment, illumination, information, ken, knowingness, light, science, technology, wisdom ... See also UNDERSTANDING

By the way, I'd be interested to know a little more about this section of Melleuish's article, where he dishes up the dirt on Manning Clark:

Clark wrote in his first historical work that the "minority who refuse to conform [to "progressive" forces] . . . must be compelled to conform . . . This may mean imprisonment or exile, or at least a prohibition on their right to express their opinions in public in either speech or writing." He appears never to have renounced that passage.

I don't recall reading anything like this in Clark's History of Australia (although I have a fair idea where I might find it if I went back to my local library and picked up Volume 1). I'm wondering if it's anything like John Maynard Keynes' proposal that the British Government bury jars containing five-pound notes in various locations and issue the unemployed with spades so that they could go dig them up, thus generating an improvement in economic activity.

Get Out of There Rover!

I don't usually post jokes on my blog; of all the jokes that I've ever heard, there are only about two or three that I still find funny. A comment by Bargarz here reminded me of this one about a young man who is invited to dinner with his girlfriend's family.

During the soup course, the new boyfriend suffers the embarassment of Abu Hassan, hero of one of the tales from the Thousand and One Nights. His girlfriend's father (Dad) looks under the table, where the family dog is lurking, and says "Get out of there Rover!" The new boyfriend is doubly relieved: his social blunder has been blamed on the dog so there is no need for him to slink out to the stables and ride off into the night to spend the next ten years in self-imposed exile.

Instead, he takes Dad's order to the dog as a licence to relieve himself ad libidem; twice more during the main course he gives Dad reason to look under the table and say "Get out of there Rover!" Finally, when he lets rip during dessert, Dad says "For Gawd's sake Rover, get out of there, before the bastard shits on you!"

Flame Warriors

It looks like another flame war has erupted at Troppo. Once again, it's over Keith Windschuttle and Tasmanian history. There's at least one Artful Dodger involved (with more than a hint of netiquette nazism) and a couple of tireless rebutters. Doubtless, as this over-lively discussion continues, other archetypes, such as the Ideologue, will manifest themselves until someone manages to perform the office of peacemaker.

Colostomy Ear Redux

Andrew Bolt has a lot to say about Pauline Hanson's jail sentence in yesterday's Melbourne Hun. He begins:

JUDGE Patsy Wolfe seems to have done more harm than good in jailing Pauline Hanson for three years.

In sentencing Hanson for electoral fraud last week, the Queensland District Court Chief Judge declared: "Those crimes affected the confidence of people in the electoral process."

Really? Given the widespread revulsion against the imprisonment of One Nation's founder, I'd say "the confidence of people in the electoral process" has been damaged far more by what Wolfe has done. [original emphasis]

After I got over the initial gob-smacking impact of this opening, I thought I might suggest to Ken Parish, that he send Bolt a friendly e-mail, explaining the separation of powers under the Westminster system, or at least the difference between the electoral process and the judicial process. On reflection, I decided that it wasn't a good idea; I'm sure Ken can find much more productive uses for his time. It wouldn't be fair to Ken to ask him to put his patience at risk in that way.

Bolt goes on to describe the public outcry that the martyrdom of Pauline has generated:

More than 8000 Herald Sun readers have rung our Voteline to protest. And the letters of other furious readers explain why, denouncing Hanson's sentence as "crazy", "a travesty", part of a "witchhunt", "absurd" and an attempt to shut Hanson up by "the powers that be".

Which naturally has the powers that be running for cover:

The politicians, particularly those who fought Hanson hardest, have scurried for shelter. None want to be linked to any imagined plot to hound Hanson out of politics and into prison.

The Labor Premier of New South Wales, Bob Carr, said it would have been "more humane and more applicable" to make Hanson do community service, instead of three years in jail.

Well, perhaps not all of them:

"This is not a politically driven decision, it's a legal decision," Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer tried to assure angry voters.

Reasonable bloke that he is, Andrew is prepared to concede Alex this point:

HE'S right, of course. The judge - and jury - handled this case strictly in accordance with the law.

Hanson and One Nation co-founder David Ettridge have been found by three different Queensland courts to have lied - or recklessly told untruths - in registering their party in that state.

Don't worry; that vague hissing noise you're hearing right now isn't tinnitus. It's the sound of Bolt's razor sharp intellect gliding down the middle of a long hair.

Under Queensland's laws, One Nation had to give the electoral commissioner a list of 500 party members in order to be registered there as a party, given it had no MP in state parliament to give it automatic party status. Instead, Hanson and Ettridge in 1997 gave a list of 1000 members of the Pauline Hanson Support Movement -- not members of the party itself, as Ettridge was filmed explaining.

In fact, One Nation's only real members were Hanson, Ettridge and David Oldfield (who was not charged). This was to stop anyone -- particularly the far-Right nutters circling them -- from stacking the membership of their vulnerable young party and hijacking it.

It seems to me that the word "other" went missing somewhere in that sentence but, as Andrew's notions of rationality are no doubt as idiosyncratic as his understanding of our political system and his understanding of the nature of lying, it's probably best to move on:

As Judge Wolfe said: "Any advantage received for (Hanson and Ettridge) was not suggested to be any benefit for you financially. The benefit was you continued to control the allocation of electoral funding and how the party was run."

What's coming next is another breathtakingly original Bolt insight, this time into the nature of political morality itself:

Still, however pure Hanson and Ettridge's motives were, the jury in this case was right to find them guilty of electoral fraud. ...

Which leads Andrew to a question that will probably haunt Ken Parish's nightmares for months to come:

... But while the two broke the letter of the law, did they break its spirit?

We have laws insisting a registered party have 500 members -- or a sitting MP -- so we stop crackpots and nuisances from sneaking on to the ballot paper and confusing us with grand-sounding parties made up of no one but them, their dog and a crooked rule book.

Or perhaps no-one but them, their dog and a filing cabinet full of signed but undated unconditional resignations from the Party.

Indeed, prosecutor Brendan Campbell claimed that through their fraud, Hanson and Ettridge registered One Nation and gave it "a falsely claimed respectability".

Well, he would say that wouldn't he, but Andrew isn't having a bar of it:

Pardon? One Nation never had respectability -- or not with our political and media class -- and did brilliantly despite that. Or because of it.

No party has been so vilified. None have had their supporters so regularly threatened, spat on, abused and even punched. No party leader has been so viciously caricatured as a racist and a moron. Yet there's no doubt that in 1997, when Hanson registered her party in Queensland, that she had genuine support and deserved, morally at least, a place on the ballot paper for the coming state election.

She herself had already been elected to federal Parliament, which had allowed her to register One Nation, legally, as a national party, with the same party set-up and the same party constitution. Her support movement could name 1000 paying members in Queensland, and the polls showed many thousands of voters backed her, no matter how dumb her ideas or internally authoritarian her party.

IF Queensland's law was meant to stop such a party from offering itself to the voters, then not only is the law an ass, it's a dangerously undemocratic one. [my emphasis]

This is Andrew at his most nuanced - Pauline Hanson may be dumb, but she's no moron. And once again there appears to be a missing word: "elite".

As it turned out, Hanson's One Nation went on to win a huge 23 per cent of the votes in the 1998 Queensland election, and nearly a million more in the federal election later that year.

The courts may insist One Nation was illegitimate, but many voters showed emphatically they disagreed.

If One Nation had been banned from standing in the state election, these people would have been robbed of the chance to vote for the party that most clearly spoke for them, whether a judge likes it or not.

Of course we can assume that most of the jury quite liked Pauline, on a personal level, and every juror no doubt felt heartbroken at having to bring in a guilty verdict against her. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of them don't end up needing trauma counselling as a result of Judge Wolfe's sentence.

How badly so many One Nation voters wanted that choice, after watching Labor and the Liberals agree not to disagree on so many issues -- whether on immigration, multiculturalism or the death of country towns. Or, ironically given Hanson's troubles, on tougher sentences.

Hanson, for all her sins, forced the big parties to stop treating these voters like mushrooms, and that has to have restored the "confidence of people in the electoral process".

Sins Andrew? Back here you were telling us how pure she was. Never mind, let's get to the sorry ending of the Hanson tragedy:

BUT she's been crushed since by her blunders and by legal action. She's already had to repay the $500,000 of public money her party got for winning 23 per cent of the vote in the 1998 Queensland election, while being falsely registered. And now this: three years' jail.

More of Bolt's nuanced approach: she's no moron, just dumb enough to make a few blunders.

To protect us from what? From having a ramshackle yet popular new party stand in an election, to the rage of those grown fat and complacent? Thanks, but that's more protection than I want. More protection than we need, if we want to encourage new parties, new voices, new ideas.

I just wish he'd make up his mind.

Yes, Hanson lied, but, heavens, she's been punished enough -- so much, that it's "affected the confidence of people in the electoral process". Let her go.

Ken, I know it's a big ask, but I've reconsidered on that suggestion I was going to make. Maybe when you can fin a free moment ...

Afterword: although I've occasionally been accused elsewhere of "fisking" a major columnist or writer, I'm pretty sure that this is the first time I've produced a full-blown example of the genre. It was fun, in a tedious sort of way.

The Ten Most Influential Australians of the Twentieth Century?

In what must surely be the most blatant troll for linkage in the shortish history of Ozblogistan (at least until the next one), Scott Wickstein has called on Australian bloggers to nominate their list of the ten most influential Australians of the Twentieth Century. It makes you wish that you'd thought of it first, doesn't it? Rob Schaap has already posted his list, as has Sam Ward. I've decided that I might as well put in a few minutes on a list of my own; as this is Scott's idea, there's a much better chance that I'll get a link from Scott out of it than I stood with my last attempt. Especially if I drop him an advisory e-mail.

In any case, here's my personal, off the top of my head, list of the ten mos influential Australians of the Twentieth Century (I've decided that it's probably best not to put too much thought into this exercise, otherwise it might take the rest of the year). Following precedents set elsewhere, they're in no particular order.

Mr Justice HB Higgins of the Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration: It was Higgins who delivered the 1907 Harvester Judgement which established the "basic wage" and the now rather moribund system of National Wage cases, the annual ritual in which Australia's trade union movement would appear before the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission once a year to argue that Australian workers could no longer afford to live without a pay increase, the nation's employers, through their peak bodies would argue that hundreds of businesses would be ruined if the requested pay rise was granted and the Government would turn up to toss in their two cents, usually on the side of the employers, arguing that a wage increase of the size sought by the unions would devastate the national economy and roon the country.

DR HV Evatt: With my name, you could hardly expect me to ignore the man who defended the Communist Party of Australia's right to exist in the High Court now, could you? But seriously, Evatt's High Court challenge to Pig Iron Bob's Communist Party Dissolution Act was a bloody important event in Australian politics. So was his subsequent campaign for a "No" vote in the Referendum of September 1951 in which the Menzies Government sought the power to ban the Communist Party. Alteration Although Evatt is revered these days as a Labor Party saint, worthy to sit at the right hand of Chifley, it's worth remembering that his contemporaries and colleagues had supported the passage of the Act and were pretty pissed off with his defence of the Reds and their right to continue hiding behind the nation's chamber pots. It cost them a bloody election.

Barry Humphries: No list of the twentieth century's most influential Australians would be complete without its foremost Australian elitist. Although Humphries did not invent the cultural cringe, through his stage creations such as Edna (later Dame Edna) Everidge and Sir Les Paterson (Australian Minister for Culture) Humphries did much to popularise the view, both here and overseas, that Australia was very much a cultural backwater with a population largely consisting of vulgar housewives with too much fondness for showy floral arrangements and drunken buffoons with delusional aspirations to "Kulcha". Paradoxically, Humphries also gave us the ocker (who later degenerated into the yobbo (sorry Sam)), through his comic strip The Adventures of Barry Mackenzie, which first appeared in the pages of Private Eye.

Through most of the late twentieth century, Humphries was on a nice little earner in London, pandering to English snobbery by depicting his compatriots as barbarians and fools, with the occasional triumphant homecoming where he would do quite nicely out of mulcting middle-class theatre audiences who were happy to pay premium prices for the privilege of joining mass rituals of self-abasement and humiliation under the mistaken belief that this was satire. Humphries' visits to this country have become mercifully infrequent over the years as he has found more lucrative overseas markets to peddle his tired and outdated stereotypes of the suburban Melbourne of his precociously early middle age; in other words his late teens and early twenties.

Ma Trotsky, who has a mother's keen eye for children who have outgrown their footwear has never been impressed by him.

Barry Dickins: Who once appeared on an ABC television chat show with Barry Humphries. The show's host was that other overrated expatriate, Clive James. Dickins was subjected to a good ten minutes of patronising remarks from both Clive and his partial namesake, on the need to go overseas to broaden his intellectual and cultural horizons. One result of Dickin's appearance was a very bemused piece in The Age. The other is his listing here as a representative of all the writers and performers who came after Humphries who, for whatever reason, didn't swan off to the Old Dart to make a quick quid by sucking up to the middle classes and intellectual elite of the Mother Country, but stuck it out here instead.

John Grey Gorton and Sir William McMahon: As we now know, it was Gorton's casting vote in a Liberal Party leadership spill which made William McMahon Prime Minister. I'm not sure which of the two should be given most credit for Gough Whitlam's eventual electoral victory in 1972; while McMahon was obviously the public architect of Whitlam's win, Gorton must be considered McMahon's eminence grise.

Sir Phillip Lynch: Lynch's most famous, and significant, contribution to Australian politics was a remark he made as head of the Fraser Government's Expenditure Review Committee or Razor Gang: "There'll be a few less pigs swilling at the public trough." Thanks to this remark, and Lynch's malicious enthusiasm for cutting deadwood and greenwood alike, the overriding need to cut public expenditure became one of the new sacred cows of Australian political life.

Sir Garfield Barwick: whose major achievements in a long and distinguished career as a jurist were, firstly, persuading a pompous sot that he had the right under the constitution to sack an elected government and secondly, persuading a majority of his colleagues that it there were good legal grounds to exempt companies and trusts whose records had been lost in maritime accidents from taxation.

Senator Vince Gair: the first Australian politician to be offered, and accept, the Dublin option.

Evan Whitton: he edited the now defunct National Times during much of its existence. He fostered a lot of journalistic careers; the names Patrick Cook and David Marr spring to mind immediately.

Now that I've got started, it's pretty obvious that ten spots is not enough - sadly, Justice Jim Staples misses out on a guernsey (unless I bump someone else), likewise John Friedrich, talk-back shock-jock pioneer Derryn Hinch, former Age editor Greg Perkin, Dr Frank Knopfelmacher, Bob Santamaria, Doug "When you see a head kick it" Anthony, Sinkers, Kerry Armstrong, Dame Leonie Kramer, Joh and Flo Bjelke-Buffoon, that bloke who wrote the Saba commercials, Michael Kroger and a few of his former adversaries in student politics who would doubtless prefer to have their present obscurity preserved, the entire membership of the H J Nicholls Society ...

Cheap Shots Backfire

Commenting on the Family Court's most recent "shameful decision", that is, an order that five children from a family of asylum seekers shoud be released from detention, Bernard Slattery asks:

What on earth is the Family Court doing separating children from their parents? Haven't they heard of the Stolen Generations?

If he'd waited until this morning, he might have heard this report on the ABC's AM and spared himself a little embarassment. At the end of an interview with Tanya Nolan, Dale West, the director of Centacare (the agency looking after the children), said:

The Family Court, as I would understand it, has only jurisdiction at this stage, pending the High Court appeal, to release the children, not to release their parents. Now, the unique thing about this particular case for us is that the parents were absolutely adamant that they preferred their children to be free here in Australia, out of detention, than to be with their parents in detention. [my emphasis]

Bernard's post prompted Gareth Parker to pose a question of his own:

Kids stolen: have we learned nothing?

I'd suggest that anyone else thinking of taking a potshot at the Family Court along these lines had better check that their gun is clean and in good working order first. I've heard that powder burns on the face can be very painful.

A job for the boys?