The Free trade deal with the US has been settled.

Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, in Santiago, Chile for the APEC meeting, said Australia had agreed to what he said were some minor changes at the request of the US.

But that won’t affect the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, he said.

And if you believe that, I have a very profitable and mutually advantageous deal with a Nigerian bank manager in which you might be interested/

Over at Crooked Timber, Kieran Healy complains that

When you’re a Sociologist like me, and your field has no credibility, people just assume you’re stupid and don’t bother sending you their Final and Completely True Theory of X in the first place. On the other hand, it does invite people to assume the answer to any problem you are studying is simply obvious common sense.

But sociology is a victim of its own success here. All of the big insights of sociology, from its beginnings in the 19th century up to 1950s work like that of Erving Goffman are indeed common sense, not because they were already known, but because they have been incorporated into the intellectual baggage of everyone in Western societies, educated or not. No one, for example, would be accused of talking academic jargon if they raised the problem of “peer group pressure” at their local school, or made a reference to ‘social status’.
Read More »

Expat Aussie physicist has sent me this personal view of the Ukrainian Presidential election. Well worth reading

‘I’m back in the USSR,
You don’t know how lucky you are boy…’

What exactly did Paul McCartney mean by that second line? The question ran through my head with a mixture of excitement and awe as I located Mykola’s wave and smile amongst the rainbow of babushka scarves on the platform at Kyiv Vokzal. A multitude of peaked caps were balanced precariously on the blond crew-cuts of rosy-cheeked teenage soldiers greeting girlfriends and mothers in the dim autumn evening. It was a relief to see Mykola’s familiar face after 24 hours on the Berlin-Kiev ‘express’. Through the train window the rural scenery presented the country as incredibly poor. Groups of farm workers digging potatoes by hand and antiquated soviet machinery were sparsely scattered between vast forests and the odd pollution belching industrial centre. A rude 2am awakening by a self important Ukrainian border guard, and subsequent mild interrogation, was smoothed over by my well ordered paperwork and an official letter of invitation from Mykola’s Professor at the Taras Shevchenko University to attend a physics conference.
Read More »

Supporters of both sides in the war in Iraq, and particularly those who are or were associated with the left, have described it as a “war of liberation”. Here, for example, is John Pilger and here is Norman Geras. Presumably Geras and Pilger each think the other is wrong.

The obvious position for an opponent of the war is that both are wrong. On reflection though, I think that Geras and Pilger are both right.
Read More »

Tony Parkinson raises an important issue as to whether the principle of not bombing civilian targets can survive conflicts like that in Fallujah. But in rightly condemning the tactics of the insurgents, he makes absurd claims on behalf of the Americans, who are already violating this principle on a massive scale. Estimates of civilian fatalities, mostly arising from American bombing range from a minimum of 15 000 (these are deaths credibly reported in news media) to 100 000 (based on a recent population survey). In this context, something like this is just absurd

The Americans, in conjunction with Iraqi officials, have steadily built up networks of informers in the Sunni cities. They have trained small, mobile units to set up sophisticated aerial and ground surveillance, and have been studying extensively the counter-terrorism methods used by the British and Israelis in urban settings. Here is perhaps where comparisons with, say, Grozny, begin to falter.

Far from having sophisticated networks of informers, the Americans have consistently shown that they lack even basic knowledge about the insurgents, even in places like Baghdad which are more or less under their control. They don’t know who the insurgents are or what their objectives might be, let alone where to find them. They had no idea how many were in Fallujah, or whether the (unidentified except for Zarqawi) leaders had stayed or fled.

Yet in the leadup to the Fallujah assault, the Americans mounted nightly bombing raids, supposedly on targets precisely identified by intelligence in a city to which they had had no access for months. The targets included restaurants and many private homes. It’s obvious that the claims about intelligence were lies, used to justify a major breach of international law. The Americans were bombing to wear down the resistance of the locals, hitting any target that might possibly have an insurgent connection, regardless of civilian casualties. There is only one word for the practice of using bombs, aimed at civilian targets, to terrify your enemies into submission.

If Parkinson had really been concerned about the principle of excluding civilian targets, he would have opposed the war from the outset, or at least from the point, some months ago when the Americans started using air raids in an occupied country, a clear breach of all the relevant laws and conventions.

With Fallujah being pounded to bits, jihadi and insurgent attacks everywhere and a state of emergency, this may seem like a bad time to discuss the Iraqi elections, but there’s no reason to suppose that there’s going to be a better one.

In the Washington Post, Marina Ottaway develops concerns I’ve expressed previously about the possibility that the Iraqi election will degenerate into a Yes-No vote on a unified slate of candidates with a predetermined sharing of the spoils (thanks to Jack Strocchi for the link). Apparently the US Embassy/shadow government is backing this idea. It seems unbelievable that anyone on the US side could see this as a good idea (of course, it makes great sense for Allawi who would be wiped out in a competitive election), but this kind of thing has been the pattern at every previous stage of the occupation

Queen Victoria by Lytton Strachey. The dustjacket quotes a contemporary as saying that Strachey’s Victoria will become the Victoria, displacing the earlier myth, and this is indeed correct. I was watching an ABC documentary a week or so ago, and it could have been taken directly from Strachey.
Read More »

In the aftermath of the elections, it doesn’t look as if anyone in government will be calling on me for frank and fearless advice[1] any time soon. So this seems like a good time to get my records in order. My piece on time management elicited some follow-up discussion along these lines, notably here, with followup here . For those who are looking for moderately constructive routine activities in the wake of recent catastrophes, here are some (not very organised) thoughts.
Read More »

According to numerous reports, Yasser Arafat is near death. I don’t wish him ill, but I hope that, should he recover, he will not return as Palestinian President or in any other active political role. With the break between Sharon and the expansionist settlers over the Gaza withdrawal approaching the critical point, a new Palestinian leadership that can distance itself from the failures and crimes of the past, is exactly what is needed if there is to be a chance of a successful resolution. Of course, there’s no guarantee that this is what will happen – chaos or Hamas could easily emerge to replace Arafat.

Most of the post-election discussion I’ve seen has focused on the impact of religion, and quite a few commentators have suggested that the Democrats need to shift their policies to appeal more to religiously-motivated voters. This approach would entail some fairly substantial compromises in the search for marginal votes.

If we’re the mood for pragmatic populism, there’s a policy option that might well have delivered the Democrats the election, without the risk of fracturing the Democratic base as an appeal to the religious right would have done. That option is protectionism, of the kind espoused during the campaign by Gephardt[1]. Gephardt had his electoral problems, but I think he could have carried Ohio and his home state of Missouri, as well as having a good chance in West Virginia and even Indiana. He might have lost some coastal states but overall he would have had a better chance of a majority in both the popular vote and the electoral college.
Read More »