I haven’t yet got a copy of Windschuttle’s book, but this paper at the Sydney Line contains the guts of his accusations against Ryan. Having just looked at Ryan’s book, I can confirm that Windschuttle has, as she says, run the last sentence of one para into the next, then taken the footnotes of one para as referring to a sentence in another. At the very least, Windschuttle is guilty of the same sloppy treatment of sources that constitutes his main gripe against Ryan and others.

To make matters worse, Windschuttle then truncates the para, omitting a direct quote from Robertson (the leader of the roving parties hunting the Aborigines) that states that the Aborigines saw themselves as engaged in a national war against white invaders. This is directly contrary to Windschuttle’s key thesis and if the quote were fabricated, he would presumably have pounced on it. Instead, he ignores it, which seems to be his standard practice when dealing with evidence from the other side that he can’t refute.

I think it’s pretty clear that Windschuttle’s book is little more than a full-length version of the kind of “Fisking” we’ve all (most of us, anyway) come to be tired of in the blogosphere, in which the work of opponents is searched for trivial errors and opportunities for cheap point-scoring, while anything inconveniently hard to refute is clipped. But Windschuttle is not just a blogger letting off steam. He’s making a serious accusation of academic fraud and he has the backing of many leading participants in the policy debate. When making such serious accusations, you can’t get away with bloglike sloppiness. Both Windschuttle and his backers should be called to account.

On the other hand, Ryan’s response doesn’t fully resolve the issues. It’s still unclear, for example, what basis she has for her claim that the roving parties killed 60 Aborigines. Hopefully, she will restate her current position and the evidence she has for it. The fact that Windschuttle’s work is sloppy and dishonest doesn’t remove the need for clear attention to evidence.

PS: Here’s a profile of Henry Reynolds. What I like about Reynolds is that he is genuinely seeking the truth and is not embarrassed to say so. This contrasts favorably both with the pomo mush coming from many on the left and with Windschuttle, who is vehemently anti-pomo in theory but a proponent of both extreme relativism and socially constructed reality in practice.

PPS: Gary Sauer-Thompson has more, including some useful contributions from Cathie Clements, the Mistake Creek historian whose work was used (without attribution and via a secondary source) by Windschuttle.

One of the problems of being pretty much monolingual is that it’s hard to find out what is happening in a lot of interesting parts of the world. I have enough French to struggle through Le Monde (the more popular French papers are too idiomatic for me) but that’s about it. It was great to come across bertramonline, an English language blog with from Denmark. It’s great to have a Scandinavian, broadly social-democratic perspective on world events, but what I value even more is commentary on what’s happening in Denmark, including translations of Danish sources I would never even find. Here, for example, is a piece from a Danish newspaper on the sinecured travels of our old friend, Bjorn Lomborg.

Rippy the Aggregator is not a blog, but a summary of recent updates to Australian plogs, using the magic of RSS (it’s all explained there). This service is being setup by Tom Vogelgesang and currently covers me, Tim Dunlop, Scott Wickstein and (I think) Rob Corr. A bit of a left bias, so all you right-wing technophobes should get in and set up your feeds. It’s easy in Blogger Pro and I think also in Movable Type.

I’ll add these to the blogroll when I get time and energy.

Reader Mark Chambers has sent me this note on a new blogging project, which reminds me of an idea I had years ago, to republish, one day at a time, a newspaper from, say, 50 years ago.

On Jan 1 this year a new blog was set up which will be posting each day a new daily entry from Samuel Pepys’ Diary. The site is here.

I’m pretty sure you would have heard of Pepys, but just in case, he wrote what is widely regarded as the greatest personal journal in the English language. The years he covered – 1660 to 1669 – covered some of the great events of the 17th century: the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy, the Black Death of 1665, and the Great Fire of London in 1666. Over this time Pepys grew into a well respected civil servant in the English Naval Office. As well as being of historic interest, he was extremely honest in writing about himself – the reader gets a warts and all insight into Pepys’ personality.

This sounds fascinating. It would be great for someone to do this with Boswell’s journals as well.

I’m back in beautiful Brisbane, and ready to resume normal blogging. First cab off the rank is the Monday Message Board where you get to have your say, without the time and expense of running your own blog. Suggested topic: The relative merits of Australian cities (non-Australian readers are welcome to comment on any interesting local rivalries and so on).

As always, feel free to comment on any topic – civilised discussion and no coarse language please.

CalPundit reveals himself as one of the many lefty fans of Robert Heinlein. I’ll out myself too and confess that Starman Jones (#4 on Kevin’s list) was my absolute favorite book when I was 14 – I read it so many times I could recite whole pages from memory. I liked quite a few of Heinlein’s other books, but I could never take his heavy stuff (Starship Troopers and so on) seriously after reading Harry Harrison’s Bill the Galactic Hero.

Link via Electrolite

Exhibit A in Keith Windschuttle’s case that Australian Aboriginal history has been ‘fabricated’ has been the famous Ryan footnotes. In a wide variety of contexts, including this piece in the Oz , Windschuttle has claimed that historian Lyndall Ryan presented three footnotes to back up a claim about killings of Aborigines by roving parties but that none of these footnotes actually included any mention of Aborigines being killed. Until now Ryan hasn’t replied, except with a piece of pomo stuff about multiple truths, so it seemed reasonable to assume that Windschuttle had caught her out badly. But her reply in the Letters column of Saturday’s Oz suggests that it is Windschuttle who is in trouble:

In The Weekend Australian (28/12/02), Bernard Lane repeated Keith Windschuttle’s false claim that none of the references in a footnote in a passage in my book The Aboriginal Tasmanians (1996) support my conclusion that: “Between November 1828 and November 1830 the roving parties captured about 20 Aborigines and killed about 60.”

If Bernard Lane had read this sentence himself on page 102 of my book, he would have found that Windschuttle, in quoting it on page 151 in his own book, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, had detached the sentence from its original paragraph and attached it to the next. In manipulating my text, Windschuttle has made the footnote appear dishonest.

This failure by Bernard Lane to check my text, has led him to repeat Windschuttle’s serious breach of academic scholarship.
The footnote that Windschuttle claims that I have used falsely comes at the end of the previous paragraph in my book. It contains references to the discussion in that paragraph about the formation of government and settler roving parties, their relations with the military parties and their potential to create conflict with the Aborigines. The last sentence in that paragraph contains my estimate about the number of Aborigines killed and captured by these parties. This is based on my wide reading and careful analysis of the sources available at the time I wrote the book.

I don’t have a copy of either book at hand, and Windschuttle will presumably reply, so it’s a bit early to rush to judgement. But if Ryan is right, this is fatal for Windschuttle’s credibility. After all, this is not only his biggest single point, but represents the core of his research strategy, which is based on checking footnotes to show that the ‘black armband’ school has misrepresented the primary sources. All this ought to be very embarrassing for his cheer squad, which includes quite a few bloggers, but on past form I suspect the majority of this crowd will not even blush.

I’ll be reading Monday’s Oz with more than usual interest – presumably this is one controversy that should be easy to resolve.

Link via Rob Corr

Update 06/01/03 Nothing from Windschuttle yet. Instead there’s another nail in the coffin from Bain Attwood (link via Tim Dunlop, who has more on this. Also, while I was on my travels there was a letter from Cathy Clement the main historian of the Mistake Creek massacre, complaining about Windschuttle’s misuse of her work and failure to acknowledge it properly. She didn’t use the “P” word, perhaps on legal advice, but Windschuttle’s claims to uphold standards of scholarship are looking weaker every day. As I pointed out a while ago, just listening to Windschuttle on the radio I picked up a series of misrepresentations and errors.

(Thanks to Chris Owen for clearing up my persistent confusion between Mistake Creek and Forrest River. For future reference, the primary Forrest River Massacre historian is Neville Green. )

I’m back in beautiful Brisbane, and the newlyweds are off on their honeymoon. It was an excellent holiday and a wonderful wedding.

More to the point for readers of this blog, I have a broadband connection again and I’m getting over the blogging blues noted by quite a number of others in recent weeks. So normal blogging should resume shortly.

Slate’s Saddamometer giving a US estimate of the likelihood of war has been drifting downwards for a few days, but remains at 68 per cent, near its all-time high.

Meanwhile, numerous British sources have carried reports quoting “a senior cabinet minister” saying that the odds had shifted to 60-40 against action, compared to 60-40 in favour before Christmas. Downing Street (that is, Blair’s office) has dismissed the reports, but they point up the difficulties Blair is facing.

Downing St is quoted as saying “nothing has changed” but, quite obviously, something has changed. Hundreds of inspections have been undertaken and nothing has been found. Despite some recent grumpiness, the Iraqis have opened all the Presidential palaces that were the sticking point last time and have supplied lists of scientists as demanded. The US has, it is reported, started giving its intelligence reports to the UN inspectors, but it doesn’t seem to have been of any use. None of this is conclusive proof that Iraq has no weapons. At the very least, though, it proves that the dossiers on which Blair relied so conspicuously, were worthless.

The next big event comes with Blix’s reports to the UN Security Council, Barring some unexpected shocks, they will say that nothing has been discovered, that the Iraqis have complied with the inspection regime but that the declaration made on December 7 remains inadequate. He may well make an explicit request for more time to continue inspections. The assumption in Washington is that the persistence of the December 7 ‘material breach’ will be enough for war.

But it seems increasingly unlikely that the UNSC will agree. This poses a nasty problem for Blair. He wouldn’t be too worried if a UNSC resolution authorising armed force were vetoed by France or Russia. But it will be very hard for him to sell a war carried out without at least majority support in the UNSC and in a situation where the only obvious case for immediate action is based on American war planning.

Without either Britain or the UNSC, any plan for war would be in massive disarray. A British pullout would almost certainly create a massive attack of nerves in Kuwait and Qatar. Neither government has yet agreed to the use of its bases for an invasion, although it’s pretty clear they would go along with a UNSC-backed war.

Of course, there are still some possible surprises. UNMOVIC could discover a cache of nerve gas or, equally damning, a locked gate with an armed guard. On the other hand, Saddam could upset Bush’s applecart by supplying some documents proving that (some) weapons had been destroyed. Neither seems very likely in the next week, but the second looks more likely than the first.

Now that the New Year hangovers have worn off, quite a few of my regular commentators have returned. There are particularly good comments threads for the posts on political correctness and ‘mirror-image’ Marxism. These posts have also attracted quite a few links, both favorable and otherwise. So to any new visitors coming via a link to these posts or just surfing in, I want to invite your comments (civilised discussion and no coarse language, please). As I’ve said many times, I think this blog has some of the best comment threads in blogdom, and new participants are always welcome.

A while ago, I raised the idea of reposting old articles since a lot of new readers would not have seen them, and very few people seem to dig through archives. I got the idea from Nathan Bierma, but it seems we were both beaten to the punch by magazines of the dotcom bubble era, such as the Industry Standard. Desperate for some editorial material to separate their bloated ad pages, they regularly reprinted old stuff, using just the defence I have mentioned.

Anyway, here’s my first repost, a discussion of the economic concept of efficiency. Comments much appreciated.

Replying to Jason Soon, Tim Dunlop puts his finger on one of the more embarrassing secrets of economics. Although we use the term ‘efficiency’ all the time, we don’t really have a consistent and rigorous definition of what it means for an economic policy to improve efficiency. A typical welfare economics textbook will define an economic situation as Pareto-efficient if there is no other situation that would constitute a Pareto-improvement, that is, make some people better off and no-one worse off. This doesn’t just require technical efficiency in production. It’s also necessary that there be no unexploited gains from trade (often called allocative efficiency)

So a Pareto-improvement would be an improvement in efficiency. But policies that naturally produce Pareto-improvements are as scarce as hen’s teeth. So when economists talk about improvements in efficiency, they are usually talking about one of the following possibilities (neither of which is generally defined in a rigorous fashion)

(a) If the gainers from the policies felt like it, they could fully compensate the losers while remaining better off themselves
(b) If the government chose it could tax the gainers, still leaving them better off, and use the proceeds to fully compensate the losers
Cases like (a) are common, but, in the absence of an outbreak of altruism among the beneficiaries of efficiency-oriented policies, don’t tell us much about the impact of policy changes on the welfare of society as a whole. If a policy change makes all 20 million Australians (but one) $100 poorer and James Packer $2.1 billion richer, it’s not helpful to know he could pay us back and keep $100 000 for himself if he chose.

Cases like (b) are more relevant, but the required analysis to show that a policy satisfies this condition is generally difficult and rarely done.