The collapse of the Dutch Government and the implosion of the xenophobic Pim Fortuyn List is welcome news, though cautious evaluation of future prospects is needed.
Update I dashed this off very quickly, and didn’t take the time to point out that I was referring to the Pim Fortuyn List political party, and not to the late Pim Fortuyn himself, as “xenophobic”. Quite a few people in the comments thread picked me up on this. Fortuyn was a complex character, certainly not a right-winger in the mould of Le Pen or Haider, but in my view, politically irresponsible. (I shouldn’t have to spell out that this does not in any way mitigate the guilt of his assassin, but I will spell it out anyway). The PFL was a very mixed bag, including some people like Fortuyn himself and some very nasty types indeed, but its overall political position was, as far as I can see, the standard anti-immigration agenda pushed by Hanson, Haider et al.
I’m glad the PFL is (apparently) gone. The crucial question now is whether the official conservative parties will repent of the deal they made, and repudiate the racist right (as, for example, Bush and Chirac have done) or make a play to pick up the votes that are now floating, as happened in Australia. Whatever the short-term benefits of the latter strategy, I am convinced it will prove disastrous in the long run for the countries and parties that pursue it.

Ken Parish has now debugged his site, removing some nasty code that was serving up popunder ads without his knowledge. The problems were exacerbated by an apparently unrelated Blogger failure. Bloggers who want to maintain alertness should read his account here.

Paul Krugman and I think alike a lot. In this piece on Bali (one of relatively few useful Op-Ed pieces on the bombings in the US press) he looks at the proposed war on Iraq in the light of a metaphor commonly used to describe economists.

Meanwhile, plans to invade Iraq proceed. The administration has offered many different explanations, some of them mutually contradictory, for its determination to occupy Baghdad. I think it’s like the man who looks for his keys on the sidewalk, even though he dropped them in a nearby alley, because he can see better under the streetlight. These guys want to fight a conventional war; since Al Qaeda won’t oblige, they’ll attack someone else who will. And watching from the alley, the terrorists are pleased.

I prefer another metaphor. “To a man who has only a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. For the last decade, Americans have been told that their armed forces are more powerful than the rest of the world put together, that they are the only superpower and so on. Although S11 shook this faith in some ways, the aftermath reinforced it in others. Bin Laden imagined himself safe in his caves in Afghanistan, backed by the Taliban fighters who had beaten the Red Army and the Northern Alliance. Within a few months, the Taliban had been destroyed and bin Laden himself was either a fugitive hidden in a cellar somewhere or (more likely I think) a corpse buried under tons of earth. In the whole process, the American casualties could be numbered on the fingers of two hands.
What is more natural, then, than to want to repeat this success? But the fragments of Al Qaeda have learned the lesson of Afghanistan. They are hiding in cities around the world and behind the skirts of people like Abu Bakar Bashir, who defy the authorities to produce the evidence of their guilt. Carrier battle groups and predator drones are of no use against this kind of enemy. So attention is focused on Saddam Hussein who is at least a plausible nail to be hit with the hammer of US military superiority.
It’s taken me a while to reach this analysis. I’ve never been satisfied with the idea that the US push for war on Saddam is ‘about’ oil, or imperialism or Bush family vendettas but I haven’t been sure what it is about. Now I think I understand it. I still think the advocates of war with Iraq are wrong, but this is the kind of error everyone is prone to, and one which I hope may be amenable to reasonable argument.

Anti-spammer wins court case

Microsoft Pulls Ad After Web Flap

This is an amusing story and a good example of the weblog community at work. The geeks at Slashdot caught Microsoft faking a riposte to Apple’s “Switch” ads.

BTW, when I last wrote on this topic, I received from the Bitchin’ Monaro Guide some very amusing parodies of the Apple ads, unfortunately not suitable for publication on this (so far) G-rated site. I imagine those interested could get the parodies if they asked.

Just before the Bali bombings, I posted a piece on US use of ‘military contractors’ (mercenaries in plain language) and threw in what seemed like an academic aside on the implications for the International Criminal Court. Responding in the comments thread and then on his blog, Bargarz raised the suggestion that terrorists such as Hamas could commit their crimes with impunity as far as the ICC is concerned.
This question is suddenly one of real relevance to Australia. If the Indonesian legal system fails to bring the Bali bombers to justice, as seems all too likely, could accused suspects be tried before the ICC?
Based on this article by Geoffrey Hills I conclude that the answer is, provisionally, “Yes”. Like Bargarz, Hills is a critic of the ICC, but his complaint is that the jurisdiction of the court is too broad, covering ‘crimes against humanity’ as well as traditional war crimes. This is the opposite of the criticism made by Bargarz. It seems clear that the Bali bombing fits the ICC criteria regarding the nature of the crimes covered by the Court’s jurisdication.
The other question is whether crimes committed in Indonesia, by Indonesians or others, are covered. According to this link supplied by Bargarz, Indonesia has not signed or ratified the treaty. I am not clear as to whether this would protect the perpetrators. The US which has signed, but not ratified, and has sought to revoke its signature, clearly does not think that this is sufficient to protect its nationals from prosecution, since it is trying to negotiate bilateral treaties with as many other countries as possible to exempt is nationals.
I’d be interested to from Ken Parish, Kim Weatherall and any other legal bloggers on this issue. In particular, I’d like to know whether, if Indonesia ratifies some time in the future, the jurisdiction of the ICC covers crimes like the Bali bombing, committed after the Treaty came into effect but before Indonesia became a party. I’d also like to know whether there is any way suspects could be tried in Australian courts.

I missed this interesting sidelight to the Nobel prizes, but my wife pointed it out to me.
Vernon Smith is putting his share of the prizemoney back into research

As if to prove his point [that people are innately co-operative], Mr Smith, in a crass display of economic irrationality, has announced he would not keep his share of the $US1.07 million prize money.
Irrational, but perhaps not totally unselfish: the money is to go into research, which as Mr Smith mischievously remarked, is a way of giving it back to himself.

The NYT report on Bali includes the information that:

The Laskar Jihad, the most prominent face of militant Islam in Indonesia, said it had disbanded and would withdraw its militia forces from the Moluccas islands where they have fought in a vicious conflict with indigenous Christians.

Further detail is given later in the article:

The leader of Indonesia’s high profile militant group Laskar Jihad said his organization had disbanded.
Jafar Umar Thalib denied the move was linked to the Bali bombings. He said the group made the decision to close and bring home its fighters from the Moluccas islands on October 7, days before the Bali explosions.

Nevertheless, Laskar Jihad is struggling. Thalib is currently on trial for inciting violence, and there are reports his group, which analysts say is sponsored by segments of the armed forces, is now running short of cash.

If correct, this report is good news on a number of fronts. Laskar Jihad was the other obvious suspect after Jemaah Islamiyah. Even if this group wasn’t responsible for Bali it has committed hundreds, if not thousands, of murders in Ambon and elsewhere. And, given all the criticism of the Indonesian government, much of it justified, the fact that they’ve apparently been able to beat a group with notoriously powerful military sponsors (or perhaps to scare those sponsors into pulling out) is an encouraging sign.

It’s been hard to think about much other than the horror of the bombings for the last few days. But, as citizens of other countries under similar attack have learned, we can’t let the terrorists dominate our lives, even if there are inevitable changes. For the foreseeable future, we’re going to have to live our normal lives while maintaining a heightened state of alert, whatever that turns out to mean in practice.
Some good news today is that the Indonesian police have detained two suspects in Bali and that Howard has named Jemaah Islamiyah as the perpetrators. Hopefully the Bali arrests will lead to convictions and there will be enough evidence to tie Jemaah Islamiyah to the bombings or Al Qaeda or both.

CSL, the company accused of a secret plan to sell blood products overseas was privatised by the Labor government in the early 1990s. The sale looked profitable on the surface but was sweetened by an incredibly lucrative contract for the processing of blood donated by Australians to the Red Cross. This cash cow has been used to finance a range of biotech ventures that, until recently, were pushing CSL’s share price up to the stratosphere.

The deal has given rise to a string of subsequent scandals, not surprisingly when you read something like this:

The proposal to sell products made from donated blood to foreign bidders was revealed in a candid address to an international conference by the head of CSL, Dr Brian McNamee, in which he said: “The reality is the Red Cross is a franchise and is a retailer.”

As Clive Hamilton and I showed in a paper available here, this was one of the worst privatisations ever undertaken by an Australian government. In view of the latest scandal, it’s a prime candidate for renationalisation.