Beaucoup de Beauchamp

John Quiggin4 Comments

A bunch of rightwing blogs are getting excited yet again about Scott Beauchamp. For those who haven’t followed the story, Beauchamp is a US soldier in Iraq who wrote some pieces for The New Republic which, among other things, described bad behaviour by US troops, such as deliberately running over stray dogs or taunting a woman disfigured by burns. The pro-war lobby has worn out dozens of keyboards seeking to discredit Beauchamp, his story and the very possibility of running over dogs in an armoured vehicle. Now it appears the US Army has denied Beauchamp’s claims. (To reiterate, I don’t care about or intend to debate, the details of this case).

Some might suggest that the truth or falsity of these stories doesn’t matter much in the light of this. or this or this or this, to list just a few of the disasters have taken place while the wingnutosphere has been defending the US Army’s commitment to animal welfare.

But that would miss the point. What matters, in the world of rightwing postmodernism, is not reality but the way the media reports it. One discredited memo is enough to turn George W. Bush from a scrimshank who used his family connections to line up a cushy billet to avoid war service, and then shirked even that, into a war hero.

So, lets stick to media criticism. Not long after Beauchamp’s piece ran in a single magazine of modest circulation, all the major MSM outlets ran a story by well known critics of the war, Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack whose intrepid journey through recently pacified parts of Iraq had convinced them that the surge was working. Here, for example, is their piece in the NY Times.
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How big a slump?

John Quiggin12 Comments

With the Oz stock market falling nearly 5 per cent on Thursday, and down nearly 15 per cent in the last few weeks, it’s a good time whether this will have real effects beyond the value of our superannuation. The immediate starting point of the current disruptions was evidence that defaults on US mortgage markets were worse than expected. An obvious question is whether this underlying shock is large enough to have substantial effects in itself, or whether the problem is mainly one of liquidity and confidence.
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Tipping point for teleconferencing ?

John Quiggin19 Comments

Matthew Warren[1] has an interesting piece on the possibility that teleconferencing will displace air travel as a result of pressure to reduce CO2 emissions. I’ve been enthusiastic about this possibility for a while, with the idea that easy access to video telephony through Skype, iChat and similar will lead naturally to the kinds of innovations, both technological and cultural, needed to make teleconferencing a viable alternative.

This is one of those tipping point things (BTW, this term has itself reached a tipping point, to the extent that it has been banned in our household along with “mantra”, “smoke and mirrors” and others) discussed by economists under the category “network externalities”. If we’re going to make use of these things we need to be connected to lots of other people. One of my projects for the next year or so is to establish a wide range of videolinks. This also includes videoblogging (vlogging). All I need is a bit of free time to get things going, which probably means nothing will happen much before 2020.

fn1. Not someone I’ve liked much, but this shows he can do good work if he wants to.

Delusionist diehards

John Quiggin77 Comments

Between the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, the on-air demolition of Martin Durkin and, most significantly, John Howard’s self-proclaimed conversion from ‘sceptic’ to ‘realist’ on climate change, I had the impression that delusionism was finally a spent force within the government. It was known that a couple of senior ministers, most notably Ian MacFarlane and Nick Minchin, remained unconvinced, but they seemed willing to keep quiet most of the time. Even the commentariat seemed to be cautiously backing away.

The report of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Science and Innovation suggests all this was premature. Four of the six government members of the committee (Dennis Jensen Jackie Kelly, Danna Vale and David Tollner) signed a dissenting report denying that human activities are disturbing the climate in dangerous ways, and describing those who accept the mainstream view as “fanatics�. If this is the view of government members who have chosen to serve on a committee devoted to science, one can only guess at how widespread such ideas are within the government.

I plan a piece for Thursday’s Fin looking at all this. Of course, I’m not going to bother with silly talking points about climate change on Triton. The real question here is how such beliefs can maintain a hold, long after the corporate push behind them has evaporated and at a time when they are so obviously a political albatross for the Howard government and for the political right as a whole. The right (at least in Australia and the US) has entered the kind of self-reinforcing pattern of disconnection from reality that long characterised the Marxist left.

Update This report has really hit the big time, making it into the Washington Post. Too much blog comment to list everything, but don’t miss Trevor Cook.

Downtime

John Quiggin1 Comment

The blog was pretty much out of action over the weekend owing to problems with my antispam software. I’ve fixed the worst of them, but I’ll need to do a bit more, so posting may be light. If there’s anyone reading who’d like to act as technical support for me, I’m very much open to offers.

DDT as a repellent

John Quiggin6 Comments

I got an email today from Phillip Coticelli at Africa Fighting Malaria pointing to a study by Donald Roberts (PDF), showing that DDT has a repellent effect in addition to its toxicity. The key finding is that that three out of five DDT-resistant Aedes aegypti mosquitoes avoid huts sprayed with DDT. Roberts argues that this is a reason for preferring DDT to alternative pesticides such as dieldrin. A few points about this are worth making
* First, it’s good to see AFM acknowledging the fact of pesticide resistance, which primarily accounts for the abandonment of large-scale attempts to eradicate malaria-carrying mosquitoes with pesticides. The libel put out by people like Steven Milloy and AFM founder Roger Bate[1], in which it is suggested that the failure of the eradication program was due to a mythical ban on DDT imposed at the behest of environmentalists, who callously caused millions of deaths, depends critically on ignoring resistance.
* Second, although the study is new, the claim is not. Roberts has been arguing the importance of repellent and irritant effects for a long time. And while the reporting of this study suggests that these benefits are unique to DDT, other work by Roberts has found that permethrin and deltamethrin are just as effective in this respect.

How does this relate to the general debate over the use of hut spraying as a strategy to fight malaria?
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Sherman on war

John Quiggin14 Comments

Not so long ago, in a discussion on Iraq the question came up of what various people would have predicted at the outset of the US Civil War. It seemed to me that all with the possible exception of Sherman, would have grossly underestimated the length and bloodiness of the war, and that all would have predicted easy victory for their side. Of course, rather than speculate, I should have checked Wikipedia. Fortunately, William Tecumseh Sherman was the featured article yesterday, and includes Sherman’s judgement.

You people of the South don’t know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don’t know what you’re talking about. War is a terrible thing!

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