It’s time for the Monday Message Board, where readers are invited to post their thoughts on any topic (civilised discussion and no coarse language, please). There will be plenty of posts from me on the election, and plenty of room for discussion, so I’d encourage Message Board comments on other issues.
Author: John Quiggin
Fox merges with the Onion
Following the Kerry manicure “parody” a day or two ago (see Josh Marshall for more details), Fox News has apparently become a fully-fledged subsidiary of The Onion. A story by “Jane Roh”[1] I read recently include a straight reference to “Communists for Kerry” and an interview with “Bush supporter Hugh G. Monument, VII”. You can read some quotes from the original, which I failed to save, at News Hounds. When I returned to the story about an hour later, it had been changed without acknowledgement, and the lead in to this part referred to “pranksters”.
Looking over the rest of the Fox site, it’s not clear which bits are intended as hoaxes, to be changed later, and which, if any, as straight news. For example there’s this story headed Scalia: Orgies Ought to Be Encouraged . The long-running gag in which Fox attempts to manufacture a scandal out of the UN Oil-for-Food program, based on documents supplied by Ahmed Chalabi, also gets a run.
If I could be bothered, I’d archive the current versions of all these stories for comparison with the versions appearing tomorrow. But I’ll leave this task to readers.
fn1. I have no idea whether this is a real person’s name, or some sort of humorous allusion to “Roe vs Wade”
Shortening odds on Labor
I notice that Labor has firmed quite a bit at Centrebet, coming in from 3.30 to 2.55 in the past week or so. This is good news for Labor supporters, but not, I think, such good news for the view that betting markets outpredict polls and pundits. Throughout the election, the polls and pundits, while leaning to a Liberal victory have generally presented the view that this is going to be a close race. Until now, the betting markets have treated a Liberal win as a foregone conclusion.
I’d argue that the most efficient test of claims about the informational efficiency of betting markets for political events would be to test the prediction that movements in polls should follow movements in betting odds (since we know that election-day polls give reasonably good predictions of actual outcomes). For this election at least, the opposite seems to be true – the betting markets have moved into line with the polls.
Blog awareness
While I was thinking about the role of blogs, I came across an observation (which I can’t locate again), that many Internet users may read blogs from time to time but don’t distinguish them from other kinds of websites. This was certainly true for me – it was only after I started blogging that I realised that kausfiles and Brad DeLong’s Semi Daily Journal, which I had visited quite a few times, were blogs and (at least in Brad’s case) part of a much larger blogosphere.
The experience of reading these sites is different for me as a result. I wonder if others have had similar experiences? And I’d be interested to hear about the relationship, if any, between the way in which people find their way around the Internet and the way that they use and interpret the sites they visit. For example, does a site reached through a portal appear different from the same site found through Google?
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Meanwhile, across the Tasman
It seems as if the dying days of a political party inevitably generate this kind of moment. The ACT (Association of Consumers and Taxpayers) Party is the last remnant of the NZ Labour Party’s diversion into radical free-market reform, and is heavily backed by the NZ Business Roundtable, run for many years by Roger Kerr[1]. Finding that few voters want to hear about radical free-market reform any more, ACT shifted its ground to law-and-order populism and race-baiting a few years back, and just managed to maintain a presence in Parliament.
But then the main opposition National Party elected Don Brash as his leader. At the helm of the NZ Reserve Bank, Brash presided over some disastrous monetary policy failures, most notably the Monetary Conditions Index, but still seemed like a decent person. But then he resigned and (very improperly in my view) promptly ran for Parliament for the National Party (as a List MP, he didn’t actually run, but was effectively appointed). He made little progress until his Pauline Hanson moment – the Orewa speech attacking Maori native title rights.
As with Pauline, Brash got an instant surge of popularity which he backed up with law-and-order stuff to the point where the Nationals led Labour in opinion polls for some months. But, also as with Pauline, it didn’t last, and Labour is now back in front.
Meanwhile, though, Brash managed to steal ACT’s remaining <raison d’etre . With the Nationals playing the race card, and pushing a hard line on law and order, there’s no reason to vote for ACT, and the party is now in its death spiral. It’s at this point that the kind of incident that would be a mild embarrassment for a successful political party assumes the dimensions of a fatal blow. This story, involving Kerr pursuing an ACT MP looks like the last straw for ACT and perhaps also for NZBR[2]. Good riddance.
fn1. Disclosure: I’ve had occasional run-ins with Kerr, and he’s always struck me as a thoroughly nasty person. So I’m naturally inclined to view him as the bad actor in this story.
fn2. Both parties have issued MRD denials
How big is the blogosphere ?
And why should we care? I’ll leave this question for later and take a look at some numbers
There have been quite a few attempts to measure the growth of blogging. As this site devoted to the topic notes, Technorati passed its 4 millionth blog a week ago. Both Blogger and Livejournal claim over 1.5 million users, and a broadly similar estimate can be obtained if we take this Pew Study from 2003 and make the reasonable assumption that numbers are doubling annually.
But these are almost certainly overestimates.
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They should ask for their money back
Antoine Clarke at Libertarian Samizdata writes
I get paid to write the occasional article about environment issues. One story which intrigues me is the often repeated claim that “Half of all living bird and mammal species will be gone within 200 or 300 years”. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is the source of much of this garbage.
Because half of all the world’s mammal species are supposedly in Australia, this equates to five species of mammal becoming extinct every year, or one mammal extinction every 2.4 months.
I don’t suppose I need to tell Australian readers that this claim is nonsense. The Bio-diversity Audit Project (word file) estimates 331 species: 305 indigenous and 26 exotic species. The FAO estimates the total number of mammal species in the world at over 4000. That is, Australia has about 7 per cent of the world’s mammal species. It took me all of ten minutes to get these numbers using Google, but Clarke apparently couldn’t be bothered.
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A distorting mirror
We’ve all heard about the US embassy in Baghdad, with its thousands of employees, advisers in every department, and capacity to instantly countermand any decision made by the Allawi government. But until now, I’d never given much thought to its opposite number, the Iraqi embassy in Washington. It turns out to be a kind of funhouse mirror image, as indicated in this story in the Washington Post which discusses Allawi’s tour and the ghostwriting of his speech
The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and British Foreign Service officials also helped Allawi with the text and delivery of his remarks, said administration officials who were involved. The State Department and officials elsewhere in the government took the lead in booking Allawi’s interviews. Administration officials said that the Iraqi Embassy in Washington consists of just a few officials and has only a dial-up Internet connection, so was incapable of preparing for the high-profile tour.
One might think that with the IMF and World Bank located in Washington, not to mention the US Congress, the Iraqi government might feel the need for a more substantial presence, and that a few million of the billions of dollars supposedly allocated to reconstruction might have been used to establish it, if only for PR purposes. But obviously these institutions negotiate directly with the US Administration. Why talk to the monkey when the organ-grinder is right next door?
Bomb us, it’s OK
Rising to my challenge of a consistent approach to unilateral pre-emption, Alexander Downer has stated that the Indonesians would be justified in bombing Australia if they thought a terrorist group was located in Australia (thanks to Jack Strocchi for this link).
It would be “absolutely” understandable if the Indonesian air force bombed the Kimberleys believing terrorists who threatened Indonesia were located there, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer has said.
Defending the Government’s doctrine of last resort, pre-emptive military strikes against terrorists, Mr Downer said he would expect Indonesia to do the same if the situation were reversed. “Absolutely, by the way, absolutely,” Mr Downer told Darwin radio station Top-FM.
“If the Indonesians rang us up and said there’s a terrorist group in the Kimberleys who are planning to launch an attack on Kupang, and we said: ‘Well, we don’t really care, that’s your problem, pal, and we’re not going to do anything about it,’ and they sent an F-16 over and bombed the terrorist group, you could understand that.
It’s fortunate that this doctrine wasn’t put forward in the 1990s, when Fretilin, described by the Indonesian government as a terrorist group, operated openly in Australia.
Some good news
The Russian Cabinet has agreed to submit the Kyoto protocol to Parliament for ratification. It is probable, though not certain, that the Russian Parliament will approve it, though it’s not clear how soon. Russian ratification would bring the treaty into force.
Australia and the US are now the only significant holdouts. Promises by Bush and Howard to produce an alternative, more effective policy have come to nothing. It’s time for us to join the rest of the world on this one. Howard could win himself a bit of credit by changing his position here.
