Ken Parish points out that my assessment of a vintage week in the blogosphere, omitted this very funny piece from Professor Bunyip on multiculturalism and polygamy.
As an aside, my support for liberalism does not extend to the point where people are expected to approve of (as opposed to tolerating) the religious beliefs of others. To modify the US maxim, “You go to your church, and I’ll go to the footy” seems like a pretty good basis for getting along, but I reserve the right to say “There is no god, and no-one is his/her/its prophet”.

The Professor doesn’t do so well with this attack on Ken Davidson for plagiarism. He writes:

A little later, Davidson’s thoughts are stolen from him in advance by Chomskyite William Blum.

DAVIDSON: The US will not even contemplate applying these rules to itself. In 1997, the US Senate passed the Chemical Weapons Convention Implementation Act. Section 307 stipulates that “The President may deny a request to inspect any facility in the United States in cases where the President determines that the inspection may pose a threat to the national security interest of the United States”.

BLUM: Iraq may well wonder at the high (double) standard set by Washington. Less than a year ago [1997], the U.S. Senate passed an act to implement the “Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on Their Destruction” (Short title: Chemical Weapons Convention)… Section 307, stipulates that “the President may deny a request to inspect any facility in the United States in cases where the President determines that the inspection may pose a threat to the national security interests of the United States.”

DAVIDSON: Section 303 of the act stipulates that “any objection by the President to an individual serving as an inspector . . . shall not be reviewable in any court”.

BLUM: Section 303 further states that “Any objection by the President to an individual serving as an inspector … shall not be reviewable in any court.”

As far as I can see, the only words in common are the name and text of the relevant act, and one occurrence of “stipulate”. Of course, the point that the US has been hypocritical in basing a case for war on the need to eliminate weapons of mass destruction while undermining international conventions to the same effect has been made before, including by me. And quite likely, Davidson got the text of the act from Blum either by Googling for it or from general reading. But this is just standard journalistic research.

In a blog, where space is free, it’s nice to have asides saying “thanks to X for this link”, and “Y,Z and many others have already written on this”. The same is true in spades in an academic article where the person you fail to mention will probably be the one who referees your article. But I can assure my fellow-professor that any opinion editor worth their salt would ruthlessly excise any such niceties from an Op-Ed piece with a 750-word limit.

Finally, I thought I would be the first to point out that “Stanley Gudgeon” is the son of the hero in Lennie Lower’s classic (1930) Australian comic novel, “Here’s Luck”, but Google has saved me from an accusation of plagiarising Tim Blair, who made the same observation months ago. I haven’t read Lower for years, but I’ll always remember his observation that “Chatswood is one of those places that are a stone’s throw from some other place”. Once again, Google leads to a longer extract. This leads me on to a yet further diversion, the suggestion, linked by Tim Dunlop that Google might start charging (though at this stage only for ‘extras’ like the news service). Heaven forfend! Anyway, I meant to make the point that for those interested in guessing at the Professor’s true identity, this choice of pseudonym might provide a clue.