This regular feature is back again. The idea is that, over the weekend, you should post your thoughts in a more leisurely fashion than in ordinary comments or the Monday Message Board.
Month: July 2005
Water, again
My piece on water in last week’s Fin (over the fold) got a couple of interesting responses. Before talking about that, thanks as usual to everyone who help me sort out my thoughts and particularly to Jason Soon at Catallaxy who noticed the interesting difference of views between Costello and Howard on the issue of urban-rural water trade.
One response was a letter from Gary Nairn, Howard’s Parliamentary Secretary, backing away a bit from the comments I quoted and criticised here and in the Fin piece. This was interesting, as I don’t often get ministerial responses to Fin pieces, and my criticism was pretty moderate. I suspect it was not so much the criticism of Howard as the praise of Costello that elicited this.
Also a writer from Canberra argued that, rather than buying water from Murray irrigators (the ultimate recipients of flows from Tantangara) Canberra should simply take more out of Googong Dam and leave less for the Murrumbidgee irrigators downstream. I’ll need to look up the relevant agreements to see who is supposed to own this water. Independent of who pays, though, there’s the argument as to whether extra water for Canberra is better sourced from the Murray or from the Murrumbidgee. I’ll need to look at this again.
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Unexplained spam
Comment spam seems to be resurgent at present, disappointingly since the nofollow tag ought to make it pointless. I deleted a whole bunch of the usual stuff today, at least the fraction that got through the Textdrive outer defences and my moderation rules. But there were a few I couldn’t make much sense of, like this one
I can’t work out what gives here. The spurious poster links back to msn.com, presumably not the source of this spam. Can anyone explain this to me.
Back in Brisbane
After a month in which I seem to have been travelling more often than not, and cold almost constantly, I’m settled back in Brisbane, enjoying, as Tex Morton put it[1] “our beautiful climate! Where we never see ice or snow!” I was talking to a taxi-driver who mentioned that he’d been attracted to Queensland by this song, also a favourite in my household.
fn1. Or, more precisely, pinched it, from Pappy O’Daniel
Pledgebank
Via Chris Bertram at CT, here’s a novel way of overcoming free-rider problems. You can promise to do something socially desirable, conditional on a certain number of other people doing the same thing. This pledge asks you to give one per cent of your income to charity.
Asleep on the job
I’m not a huge fan of scandals, and I haven’t followed the Plame spy scandal very closely. Still, anyone who reads blogs has known for at least a week that Karl Rove, Bush’s closest advisor, leaked the name of Valerie Plame, a covert CIA operative, as part of a political vendetta against her husband, Joseph Wilson. Bush has presumably known this for many months, the media similarly have known for a long time, and so on. This is a serious offence, at a minimum requiring Rove’s resignation. Yet the average American, reliant on the mass media knows nothing about it, and, as noted at Obsidian Wings there seems to have been no interest in finding out about it.
The NYT has finally woken up to the story, but what took them so long?
If I thought this meant that US journalists were going to give up covering scandal and focus on serious issues, I’d be cheering them on, but there’s no indication of this. Instead, as with the Downing Street memos, the Washington press seems to have been cowed into silence by the Bush machine.
A pleasant surprise
While I was in Adelaide for the Festival of Ideas, the Advertiser ran a piece I wrote on blogs and wikis, aimed at a general audience (it’s over the fold). I was going out for breakfast the next day, and the guy behind the counter said “Don’t you write for the Advertiser?”. It turned out he’d read my piece which ran with a small picture of me from the News Limited archives, used as a dinkus.
What was particularly nice about this was that they used quite an old (that is, young) photo, so it seems age is not wearying me too much.
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Monday message board
As usual on Monday, you are invited to post your thoughts on any topic. Civilised discussion and no coarse language, please.
Festival of Ideas
I’ve been at the Festival of Ideas in Adelaide and I’m very impressed, both by the quality of the speakers and presentations and by the turnout. Quite a few of the events I’ve attended have been full houses, with lots of people being turned away. That’s with four events going in parallel, two of them in large (Elder and Bonython) halls. Among people I haven’t heard of previously, I’ve been particularly impressed by P Sainath and Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf.
It’s also great to meet people like Jack Mundey whom I’ve admired for many years, but never met in person.
Brisbane has a similar event next March, at which I’ll be speaking.
I’m talking today on Blogs and Wikis in the Art Gallery Auditorium at 1:45 and then as a late ring-in for the final session “What is to be done?” at 5pm in the Elder Hall.
Class of ’05
The New Republic has a gloomy but, I think, accurate piece by Spencer Ackerman, focusing on
the disturbing prospect that future attacks against the West will be carried out by those who have gained a wealth of experience fighting U.S. forces in Iraq’s western, Sunni-dominated Anbar province–the premier location for on-the-job terrorist training on the planet. The CIA calls this the “class of ’05 problem.” Such future attacks may very well make yesterday’s carnage seem amateurish in scale.
At this point, I think there’s very little chance that we [in Australia and elsewhere] will escape the attentions of the Class of ’05 indefinitely, whatever policy decisions are taken now with respect to Iraq.
I think the best option is to announce, and adhere to, a timetable for withdrawal of US? Coalition troops from Iraq, and hope that the Iraqis can reach some sort of solution among themselves. But the inevitable short-term consequence of that is that Anbar and other places will be a fairly safe haven for foreign jihadists, until they become more of a liability than an asset for the Sunni nationalists who still appear to dominate the insurgency. The hope is that they won’t get many new recruits, in the absence of US forces to fight.
The alternative is for the US to “stay the course”, and fight the jihadists in Iraq. So far, any successes on this front have been more than offset by the boost to Al Qaeda recruiting provided by the US occupation, and by the stimulus to the domestic insurgency created in part by the mere fact of foreign occupation, and in part by civilian casualties, arbitrary arrests and detention and so on. There’s no reason to think that holding on longer will make things any better – even if the insurgency winds down eventually, the Class of 05 will just disperse aroudn the world.
Either way, there’s every reason to expect more and worse terror attacks. We will endure them, as we must, and we will pursue and bring to justice those responsible. But we have created a rod for own backs in Anbar, as the Russians did in Afghanistan.
John Quiggin 