It’s time for another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.
I’m going to switch on threaded comments. If it works you can try it out here. I’m not sure what will happen to older posts.
Also, I’ve tweaked the settings to show 100 comments at a time, and to begin at the beginning, rather than showing the last page first.
John Quiggin 
Testing
@John Quiggin
Testing threading
@John Quiggin
Is it working?
Test, non-threaded [top level]
@John Quiggin
Test, threaded [“reply” to post 1]
Test, threaded [“quote” on post one]
@Megan
That’d be a “no”.
@Collin Street
Testing again
@Collin Street
True. But it’s easy to follow the discussion!
Facebook introduced threading on Pages (but not Groups). It helps immensely. You have to drill in to see the replies to a given comment and so you can easily skip over side debates. They only thread down one level but that’s enough. Facebook pages now also have better anti spam measures and moderation methods. You can also hide unfortunate comments that you don’t wish to delete so only the commenter and their friends can see the comment. You might have reasons to avoid migrating to a Facebook page but it’s worth considering.
Here is an example of a Facebook page run a bit like a blog. 😉
https://www.facebook.com/DavidLeyonhjelmLiberalDemocrats
Looks like we are going to get another one of those politically motivated audits newly elected governments do to justify plans they already have [from brisbanetimes]:
No, sorry. My mistake:
@Megan
I’m merely joining in the test threading. I cannot see any difference so far.
IGR? Still waiting, Hockey.
The submarine competitive evaluation process is a staged tender process, apparently well-known: the Double Dutch Process. Well, why didn’t they just say so from the start?
Jugney, neither can I. As I said, I’ve lost the thread.
@jungney
Ha, ha.
Greek Australian Finance Minister for Syriza, Yanis Varoufakis, provides a wonderfully old fashioned humanist account of his Marxism at the Guardian:
http://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/feb/18/yanis-varoufakis-how-i-became-an-erratic-marxist
Moreover, from Varoufakis:
Which is what we are facing here in Australia: a deliberate plan to provoke an economic crisis, to send tens of thousands of workers in manufacturing, the public sector, agriculture … in any sector, onto the dole; to create the conditions for immiseration, racist rivalry and hatred that are now such a feature of life in the public realm in the UK. Abbott and the IPA’s project is for a programmatic destruction of all of those institutions, underpinned by a sense of the common weal, that hold our polity together. So far, we have responded like stunned mullets.
@jungney
just read it and was going to link it myself. Well worth the read. My favourite quote is “nothing succeeds in reproducing itself better than a false sense of entitlement”.
Jungey, just read it. Well worth the read. My favourite quote is “nothing succeeds in reproducing itself better than a false sense of entitlement”.
@plaasmatron
Yeah, an old fashioned political economist, one who writes about the economy as it is engaged and understood by people. Amazing. God, he even dares to mention false consciousness!
He also had a piece in the NYT.
He writes about “game theory” and the idea that when he says there are “red lines” that must not be crossed the 1% (my term, not his) just don’t get it:
“They” will probably try anything to crash Greece’s determination to defy them.
@jungney
but I guess the jury is still out on what he can actually acheive. He even talks himself about being corrupted by a “sense of self-satisfaction from being feted by the high and mighty”. Tsipras and he have made a pop-star tour of Europe, with no aims at compromise from any of the players involved. As Varoufakis points out, it is not a dynamic left that will arise from the ashes of a burnt Greek state, but an extreme right. The stakes are high, for Greece and for Europe. But if they can regain some pride from the implacable demands of the Troika then there may be some hope. As Krugman pointed out recently, it was the demands placed on Germany after the first world war that were (partly) responsible for getting Europe into such a big mess in the 30’s.
He had a piece in the NYT.
I tried to post a comment quoting from his 7th-10th paragraphs of that column.
If it ever makes it out of eternal moderation, I’ll be interested to find out what “bad” words sent it there.
Test
game bluff bluffing red
Test
colony
Ahhh,
Weirdly ironic: including the word “tyr@nny” in a comment will send you to eternal moderation.
He writes about “game theory” and the idea that when he says there are “red lines” that must not be crossed the 1% (my term, not his) just don’t get it:
“They” will probably try anything to crash Greece’s determination to defy them.
@plaasmatron
I’m recognizing an old fashioned humanism in his statements. I’ll back humanism any day over the opinions of experts. As an aside, I organized and was part of many May Day festivals and official marches in the auld blue collar cities. At the end of which, me and all of my mates (that includes any women I ever met in the trenches in the fight for freedom) always went to the Greek Mayday celebrations where, in contrast to the official trades unionism of Protestantism , there was music, booze and solidarity.
May those days be our future.
@Megan
Do you think “they” would go so far as to engineer a coup? It happened in the Ukraine, could it happen in the EU?
Jungney, I see a lot to like in the Greek attitude, especially compared to (my) Protestantism. But let’s remain secular here.
Joko has received PM Tony Abbott’s recent comments with seething resentment at having “threats” used against it as a means of diplomacy. This isn’t a good sign.
On a related note, I am sadly bemused to see so many of the previous conservative government, the ones who were in power at the time of the arrest of the Bali 9, have unconditionally rejected the death penalty—now, that is. Back in 2005, it was a different story.
@plaasmatron
A coup? Of course. Assassination maybe, if that’s what they think will do it. Extortion, blackmail, smears, lies, propaganda….they do all these things all the time.
Just today in our establishment media I read a piece attributed to a “source” saying that the Greek government was going to fold to the troika’s demands (more or less).
Enough of that talk and the people might rise up against Syriza. Problem solved.
The curious thing is not that these tactics are the stock in trade of the Empire, but that so many people still won’t believe it – despite all the obvious and proven facts.
@Donald Oats
What about the ALP/LNP duopoly line that the best way to save people from drowning is to send other people to languish indefinitely in concentration camps as a deterrence and a sign of strength showing that we are cracking down with zero tolerance?
It seems very hypocritical that we Australians want to lecture Indonesia about “getting tough”, “cracking down”, showing “zero tolerance” in order to create a “deterrence” when we have killed at least two INNOCENT men and they only want to execute two guilty ones.
If the ALP shills who are making me nauseous right now pretending to care about those two men put that effort into releasing all refugees from detention it would happen within a week.
But they don’t, because they don’t care about the innocent people WE kill.
Yesterday on The World Today, Professor Philip Alston who was the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions at the time the Bali Nine drug smugglers were convicted.says the Australian Government can take very little credit for the postponement of the executions.
Excerpt from the interview:
ELEANOR HALL: So it’s not only pressure from the Australians that forcing the Indonesians’ hands here?
PHILIP ALSTON: Fortunately not.
Australia’s own human rights record is so poor in recent years that it would be a not particularly credible interlocutor if it was on its own.
It’s been supported by the UN executor general, it’s been supported by the US Special Rapporteur, and a whole range of other countries whose nationals are also implicated.”
I’m a fan of Yanis Varoufarkis. He seems to be one of the few people with media access who has spoken truth to power regarding Greek debt. Given a choice between screwing the Greek taxpayer or screwing the lenders he instinctively sides with the former. Bravo. But he also does so in a manner that is designed to minimise division. He talks of what is good for Europeans not what is good for Greeks alone. He is very quick to point out the dangers of Nazis and xenophobia. And he seems willing to embrace privatisation if the price is right and the structural benefits stack up. I could quibble with several of his policy ideas but all up he is the circuit breaker that has been needed. I just hope that he is not too late and he can persuade the EU elite to pause and reconsider.
That said I think the critique of capitalism in his essay is laced with sophistry. He talks of capital wanting this and wanting that as if capital has any aspiration at all. And he mixes this with a discussion of alienation as if the system of capitalism was the only system to give rise to that phenomena. It is hard to point to any social order in history that has not involved some people, some of the time, feeling disconnected from their greater humanity and reduced to a sense that they are just a cog in a machine. It was certainly true in the communist systems inspired by Marx.
If Yanis gets his sense of humanity from a selective reading of Marx then so be it. It is not where I get mine but we all find our inspiration in different places. I can sense from his words, deeds and actions that Yanis is deeply concerned with the human condition and whether he gets that concern from Karl Marx, Adam Smith, Jesus Christ or Elton John is irrelevant so long as it is tempered by reason. And in his case it seems to be. Yanis Varoufakis is one of the politicians in the world today that gives me hope.
Terje,
That is so very post-modern of you to claim there is no difference between the concern for the human condition that is inspired by Karl Marx, Adam Smith, Jesus Christ and Elton John. Is there a rational reason that you have for this belief or is this also a value judgement that you can “sense”.
And while you are being rational, how do you go about “sensing” things? Can we all sense things equally? Is your sensing tempered by any rationality?
The US has decided in favour of David Hicks, and all charges against him are dropped, the sentence vacated. I think that means he was innocent. It doesn’t mean he was sensible. Nevertheless, it is unlikely to matter much to the conservative LNP who were in power during that whole sorry saga.
Again, I say it is breathtakingly hypocritical for all these ex-government neo-cons to be lining up and saying they deplore the death penalty (being applied to two Australians), and yet were belligerent in their unwillingness to offer any aid at all for Mamoud Habib and David Hicks. I’m glad they now admit the death penalty is morally wrong, but are they referring to themselves as “bleeding hearts”, in the same way they did to anyone opposing the death penalty *before* the Bali 9?
Sorry, guess today my cynicism is stuck at 11.
People can arrive at the same destination via different routes. Likewise people can arrive at the same conclusions via different thinking. It seems to me that Yanis is reminiscing on the beauty of the road that took him to where he now stands in his thinking. Some of my earliest thinking on economics was inspired by family members (now dead) who were communists. As such I am not too concerned that he likes the road that got him here or that he identifies with the Marxist label so long as he is promoting sensible ideas. And for the most part, in the areas that matter, he is.
To the point about post modernism I’d accept that most people inspired by Karl Marx are probably not at the same destination as most people inspired by Adam Smith. And in that case it probably does have a lot to do with the road they first embarked on. But just because something is true of the average case it does not mean it is true of the specific case. Yanis is a specific case.
To reiterate I think Yanis is wrong on several things. But on the issue of the moment for which he is currently responsible for managing (the Greek debt crisis) I think he is right.
@TerjeP
“People can arrive a the same destination via different routes”.
Now you are Zen Master, as well as a philosopher of science. 🙂
But really it isn’t important in the big scheme of things that need discussion what you personally think about the great men of history who thought about stuff and how the hell you can consider that Elton John is in the same category.
Did you know that it really isn’t that much of a benefit for us for you to present your ‘self’ here in the way that you do? I don’t think it benefits the image of libertarians as smarter than the average bear either but whatev…
But the Elton John thing, is that like comparing the Sistine Chapel to the stars I painted on the ceiling for my kids when they were young?
Julie – I wouldn’t see any loss of benefit if you discontinued commenting here. So the feeling is mutual.
@Donald Oats
Couldn’t agree more about both Habib and Hicks. One day someone in Egyptian intelligence will give us the name of the Australian consular ‘official’ who was present when Habib was tortured. As to Hicks, I just finished his account of his time in Guantanamo. If Hicks isn’t heartbroken about his country due to the way they let him be tortured for years then I can’t imagine how. Maybe it was the public support, and his dad and the rest of his family, who did not let go in despair.
But he sure has grounds for anger at the Australian establishment.
The following paragraphs are from Skeptical Science, LBJ’s climate warning 50 years ago, where they are discussing scientific findings since LBJ’s environmental report in 1965:
That final sentence is a kicker.
PS: Both ALP and LNP have/has refugee detention policies which are immoral. If we processed asylum seekers in transit countries, we could simply fly the successfully processed ones direct to Australia, negating the need for a risky boat journey. Unfortunately, we have possibly soiled our relationship with Indonesia, so for the time being this isn’t viable. Simply denying entry and sticking them in arbitrary detention is immoral though. In my opinion…opinions differ.
@TerjeP
From wiki-p on Marx’s theory of alienation:
To this day there’s nothing wrong with this analysis of the social relations of production under capitalism. Pointing out, as you do, that other systems of production produce alienation is irrelevant to Varoufakis’s argument. It is also a perfect example of a ‘tu quoque’ argument to suggest that because other systems of production and distribution also produce alienation then somehow what Varoufakis says about capitalism is invalid.
Unless you find that human misery created by the act of earning one’s daily bread is unavoidable and therefore tolerable? In which case you are no sort of humanist at all.
I don’t doubt that very many on the left are more than aware of the contradictions, in Marxist terms, of production in a socialist economy. One of my pathways to post-Marxism was via Miklos Haraszti’s (1977) ‘Worker In A Workers State’ in which he tested the actual conditions of factory work in Hungary against Marx’s critique of capitalism. He found little difference between the relations of production in Hungary or in a capitalist economy. Harry Braverman’s ‘Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century’ which searingly criticised the fragmentation of worker’s intellectual capital, ie, how to do a job beyond anything other than mundane and routine tasks, into the machinery of production itself. This process, which has finally almost entirely engulfed the white collar workforce as well as the working classes, is ongoing and at the core of precisely what Varoufakis is concerned about when he argues that capitalism has within itself the seeds of its own demise.
Wrong. It is only under the social order of industrial production, capitalist or otherwise, that people can be reduced to experiencing work as just a cog in a machine. You can’t extricate your understanding of the experience of work in capitalist economy sufficiently to avoid drawing a metaphor from it. In fact, you are so blinded by ideology that you cannot even see alternatives where they do exist let alone even imagine something other than what is. This failure obscures from your view numerous other non-capitalist types of relations of production which did or do not have the harrowing impact on the mind/body state of generation after generation of workers. Worker’s cooperatives is one instance. Human history abounds with others.
You persist in offering libertarianism as a way forward but the narrowness of your own knowledge and the limitations of your imagination prevent you from presenting the sort of informed as well as reasoned argument that might be persuasive.
It looks to me that you cannot comprehend what Varoufakis is on about when he criticizes the deadening effect on human ingenuity and energy imposed by deskilling and incompetent managerialism. This may be because you’ve never directly experienced them, or, if you have, you’ve managed to blithely tolerate them. However, the essence of the drudgery of industrial production, including white collar work which has been thoroughly proletarianised, will continue to have exactly the effect that Varoufakis describes because so many others than you actually experience the drudgery and rebel in the multitudes of ways that workers do rebel: as much indolence as possible under the circumstances; poor or shoddy work; using all sick leave annually whether it is needed or not; theft of all types of property; fleeing to the welfare state; worker’s compensation fraud; sabotage, which term derives from the habit of early industrial workers throwing their ‘sabot’ in the machinery in order to stop work; ‘clogging up the works’, the same thing except in North England; strikes, go slows, stoppages; hacking, the future of sabotage. To name just a few. Then there’s the rational responses of depression and indifference.
I suggest to you that any system of production that necessarily creates these responses among the very people upon whom the system relies, is abjectly irrational.
If you can’t understand that then you should stick to the safe depth of Elton John.
@Donald Oats
Abbott may very well have sent those two poor b*stards to their graves with his comments about Indonesia showing a little gratitude to Australia for all the tsunami aid. The poor numpty just does not understand that all those years under Dutch colonial rule create an instant anger in Indonesians every time some honky opens his mouth about them. I thought we had a diplomatic service to deal with idiots like Abbott. Apparently not. This is the reason that Carr turned up on the ABC last night saying that Abbott should definitely NOT raise sanctions as a response. Well, not if you wan to keep these sorry people alive, anyway.
@jungney
I don’t have any evidence, but I have been thinking that they really don’t want to keep these two guys alive – or at least don’t really care.
Every time one of our federal politicians or establishment media types mention the subject I wince, they’re almost begging Indonesia to get on with it.
I’ve been thinking about Chambers and Barlow. Once it’s all over they can shrug and get back to their own rhetoric about law and order, cracking down, getting tough, having zero tolerance etc..
@Megan
No, they don’t want at all to save these lives. It appears to me that there was some sort of deal…err…diplomatic understanding, between the Howard government and the Indonesians, facilitated, no, I should say lubricated, under the knowledgeable eye of the head of the AFP at the time, Mick Keelty, a Companion of the House of Slitherin’, to sacrifice a few w*g drug dealers in return for cooperation with the project of stemming the Indonesian military’s nice little earner of running refugees to Australia.
No business in Indonesia is conducted without the Javanese ruling castes, the military castes, the junta in waiting, taking their cut. So the Australian ruling castes, heavily represented in DFAT, took the deal. Strewth, why wouldn’t they? So much opportunity for business, for a seat at the table, a crack at West Papua, in deforestation, mining etc and so on.
Two w*g lives against that?
I have already arranged for a silent service with friends, for a communion of life, on the day when they are executed. In order to be amongst humans who know sorrow and regret, on the day, rather than put up with the isolation imposed on us by the idiot blather of the MSM, on the day.
it will be a TerjePud moment.
@jungney
The AFP knew exactly what the Bali 9 were up to and secretly told the Indonesian’s all about it, thereby ensuring the current outcome.
The AFP were also implicated in the Barlow & Chambers matter.
The AFP train an Indonesian death squad:
Now, if Abbott came out and publicly threatened to stop funding and training Indonesian death squads unless these two were spared….that would be interesting.
Ironman Varoufakis’s Revolutionary Plan for Europe
If you haven’t been following developments in the Greek-EU standoff, you’re really missing out. This might be the best story of the year. And what makes it so riveting, is that no one thought that little Greece could face off with the powerful leaders of the EU and make them blink. But that’s exactly what’s happened. On Monday, members of the Eurogroup met with Greece’s finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, to decide whether they would accept Greece’s terms for an extension of the current loan agreement. There were no real changes to the agreement. The only difference was semantics, that is, the loan would not be seen as a bailout but as “a transitional stage to a new contract for growth for Greece”. In other words, a bridge to a different program altogether.
In retrospect, Varoufakis’s strategy was pure genius, mainly because it knocked the EU finance ministers off balance and threw the process into turmoil. After all, how could they vote “thumbs down” on loan package that they had previously approved just because the language was slightly different? But if they voted “thumbs up”, then what?
…
… It was not a particularly proud moment for the European Union. But what’s even worse, is the subterfuge that preceded the meetings; that’s what cast doubt on the character of the people running EU negotiations. Here’s the scoop: About 15 minutes before the confab began, Varoufakis was given a draft communique outlining the provisions of the proposed loan extension. He was pleasantly surprised to find that the document met all his requirements and, so, he was prepared to sign it. Unfortunately, the document was switched shortly before the negotiations began with one that backtracked on all the crucial points.
I’m not making this up. The freaking Eurogroup tried to pull the old switcheroo on Varoufakis to get him to sign something that was different than the original. Can you believe it? And it’s only because Varoufakis studiously combed through the new memo that he was able to notice the discrepancy and jam on the brakes. As it happens, the final copy was just a rehash of the same agreement that Varoufakis has rejected from the onset. The only difference was the underhanded way the Eurogroup tried to slip it by him.
Now you tell me: Would you consider people who do something like that “trustworthy”?
Of course not. This is how people behave when they don’t care about integrity or credibility, when all that matters is winning. If the Eurogroup can trick the Greeks into signing something that’s different than what they think they’re signing; then tough luck for the Greeks. “Caveat emptor”. Buyer beware. The Eurogroup has no problem with that kind of shabby double-dealing. That’s just how they play the game.
But their trickery and bullying hasn’t worked, mainly because Varoufakis is too smart for them. …