A close shave

John Quiggin18 Comments

The World’s Greatest Shave is coming up, and I’ve decided it’s time to put some skin in the game of appealing for charity. So, for the first time in 30 years, I’m going to shave my beard off. The big day is going to be Saturday 17 March. You can visit my profile here to sponsor me.

To encourage contributions, I’m offering an incentive. If I can raise $1000 from sponsorship, I’ll post a picture of the results here on the blog. Otherwise, you’ll just have to rely on your imagination. All proceeds go to the Leukemia Foundation.

Update 5pm Monday We’re already one-third of the way there, with contributions totalling $335:00. I’ll try to give regular updates

What can’t be cured must be endured

John Quiggin42 Comments

Responding to Peter Beinart’s apology for supporting the war (unimpressive by comparison with the Bjorn Staerk piece I linked recently, but at least expressing some willingness to look at the reasons he got it so wrong) Hilzoy makes an important point

I admire Peter Beinart’s willingness to think about what he got wrong, and why. But while I think that he’s right to say that we can’t be the country the Iraqis and South Africans wanted us to be — a country wise enough to liberate other countries by force — there’s another mistake lurking in the train of thought he describes. Namely:

It’s not just that we aren’t the country Beinart wanted to think we were; it’s that war is not the instrument he thought it was …

Violence is not a way of getting where you want to go, only more quickly. Its existence changes your destination. If you use it, you had better be prepared to find yourself in the kind of place it takes you to.

There’s something even more fundamental to the appeal of violence. People are often faced with an unjust situation, where there is no apparent way to put things right. The injustice can be political or economic, as with a dictatorship or an unfair allocation of wealth, or it can be something like an incurable disease striking a loved one.

In these circumstances, where rational thinking produces a counsel of despair, it’s natural to take the view that “you have to do something”. In the case of incurable illness, the response may be a search for “miracle cures”. In other contexts, it’s more likely to be a resort to violence. This response is evident, not only in overtly political contexts, but in a whole genre of Hollywood movies where the protagonist (usually, but not always, male) is “mad as hell, and not going to take it any more”, and in real-life events that inspire, or are inspired by, such movies.

Sometimes, violence or the threat of violence is indeed the only effective way to resist injustice, but mostly it’s a way of making a bad situation worse.

To sum up, Violence is not a way of getting what you can’t have

(Via Surfdom)

Read More »

Weekend reflections

John Quiggin20 Comments

Weekend Reflections is on again. Please comment on any topic of interest (civilised discussion and no coarse language, please). Feel free to put in contributions more lengthy than for the Monday Message Board or standard comments.

One up!

John QuigginLeave a comment

Just back from the Entertainment Centre, where the Brisbane Bullets scored a thrilling 3-point win over Melbourne in the first of the best-of-five Grand Final Series, making their record 21 wins in succession. This might be the year!

What went wrong ?

John Quiggin29 Comments

Looking back over the early history of the blogosphere, I checked the site of one of the early European “warbloggers”, Bjørn Staerk, and found this newly published and very impressive reflective piece. Not many people have the courage to look unflinchingly at their own mistakes, but Staerk does so. A short extract

When I look around me at the world we got, the world we created after 2001, that’s the question I keep coming back to: What went wrong? The question nags me all the more because I was part of it, swept along with all the currents that took us from the ruins of the World Trace center through the shameful years that followed. Iraq, the war on terror, the new European culture war.

This mirror of “What Went Wrong” wouldn’t be a story on the same scale, but it has the main theme in common. It would be about Westerners who had their reality bubble pricked by people from an alien culture, and spent the next couple of years stumbling about like idiots, unable to deal rationally with this new reality that had forced itself on them. Egging each other on, they predicted, interpreted, and labelled – and legislated and invaded. They saw clearly, through beautiful ideas. And they were wrong.

Who were these people? They were us.

As someone else would say, read the whole thing.

State of Ozplogistan

John Quiggin14 Comments

This post by Gary Sauer-Thompson on the decline of solo political blogging prompted me to take one of my periodic looks at the state of political blogging in Australia. I used the blogroll at Club Troppo, which is as close to a representative sample as I’ve seen, to get an idea of some trends. Comparisons are to my recollection which may be inaccurate

First up, there’s no doubt about the rise of group blogs. Although there are still plenty of individual bloggers (in fact the number is increasing, I think) group blogs are clearly much more important now than in the past. Most of the individuals who were blogging back in 2002 or 2003 have either given up or joined a group.*

The other striking feature of the Troppo list is the extent to which it’s dominated by the left and centre-left. Troppo uses the classifications Leftish, Centrist, Moderate Right and Right Wing Death Beast, but most of the Centrists could be counted on to prefer either Labor or the Greens to the Liberals or Nationals most of the time. I count 50 Leftish blogs, 24 Centrist, 10 Moderate Right and 16 RWDBs. What’s more, a large proportion of the latter two groups of bloggers have either shut down or shifted away from political topics. No doubt there have been some new entrants who haven’t been counted, but there are no obvious (to me) omissions of major political bloggers in the list (feel free to point out examples).

This is a complete reversal of the situation when I began blogging in 2002. At that time, the number of leftish Australian bloggers could probably be counted on the fingers of one hand (Rob Schaap, Rob Corr and Tim Dunlop are the only examples that come to mind, again feel free to remind me) while (IIRC) there were more active rightwing blogs than there are today, reflecting the upsurge in what used to be called “warblogging” that took place after the September 11 attacks. The obvious reason for the shift is the fact that, much more than general public discussion in Australia, blog debates have been focused on issues that have gone badly for the right, such as the Iraq war, global warming and the Bush Administration. A few bloggers have bitten the bullet and changed their views on these issues (for example, Ken Parish was a global warming sceptic until the evidence became overwhelming) but the more common response has been to close up shop.

A more recent development has been the adoption of blogs by the commercial media, who first ignored and then derided the whole thing. Even a year ago, the MSM was mostly keeping its distance, but now all the major newspaper sites I visit have blogs, and often lots of them. They’re guaranteed a big audience by their location on highly-trafficked sites, but they seem pretty mediocre taken as a group (MRD alert

Those are my thoughts. Comments, criticism and prognostications for the future are most welcome.

* I’ve had two bob each way on this, having joined the international group blog Crooked Timber a while back, but maintaining a solo identity for Australian stuff

Warwick McKibbin on climate change

John Quiggin11 Comments

Last night I went to hear Warwick McKibbin at the Brisbane Institute talking about climate change. It was a good presentation and Warwick made an effective analogy between the McKibbin-Wilcoxen plan for climate change which uses fixed prices in the short run and fixed quantities in the long run, and the bond market, where central banks set short-term interest rates but allow long-term rates to be set by the market.

One thing I hadn’t realised, though, is that the plan doesn’t allow for international trade in emissions permits, even in the long run. McKibbin sees this as an advantage, since there’s less of a reduction in sovereignty, but I see it as a big problem for two reasons. First, there’s an obvious efficiency loss in not allowing countries with low-cost offsets to trade with high-cost countries. Second, the biggest source of credits so far is China, the country that is going to need the most persuading to join an international agreement (contrary to Warwick, I’m confident the US will ratify Kyoto, perhaps extracting some concessions on timing and targets, as soon as Bush goes out, and that Australia will do so then, if not earlier). The possibility of gaining credits, combined with the threat of border taxes on exports from non-ratifying countries will be needed to overcome the obvious free-rider problems.

It doesn’t seem to me that the restriction to national markets is crucial, at least to the long-term part of the plan. A modified version that incorporated some form of international trade would be more appealing.

The fall and fall of the House of Sadr

John Quiggin13 Comments

One of the many useful services performed by Glenn Reynolds is his chronicling of the relentless decline of Moqtada al-Sadr. Some past instalments

The murders are the first sign of organised Iraqi opposition to Sadr’s presence a apr 29, 04

those who thought Sadr represented a mass movement among Iraqis were seriously mistaken. [May 5, 04]

ANOTHER BAD DAY for the increasingly irrelevant Sadr. [May 26, 04]

SADR’S DECLINE CONTINUES [Jun 17, 04]

Demonstrators shouted chants denouncing al-Sadr, including one that equated him with deposed dictator Saddam Hussein. [Sep 3, 04]

Bush has successfully mitigated the perils of having to grapple with two insurgencies simultaneously– through a nuanced combination of sophisticated counter-insurgency efforts and attendant political machinations contra Moktada al-Sadr. [Nov 1, 04]

And now:

Moqtada al-Sadr doesn’t like the surge. That he’s saying so from a secret location may explain why. . . .

I think it’s time for Glenn to let up on the guy. Hated, with no public support, isolated, irrelevant, outfoxed by the sophisticated Bush and now a lonely fugitive, surely by this time he’s too unimportant for a post.

Another bad day for delusionists*

John Quiggin122 Comments

With Al Gore winning the Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth and the CBC news “The Denial Machine” airing on Four Corners last night, it must be getting hard to hold on to the delusions that have been propagated so vigorously throughout the parallel universe created by Fox News and similar bodies. While it’s no news to anyone who reads blogs on the topic, the revelation that the “skepticism” propagated by our local delusionists was produced by recycled hacks for the tobacco industry, such as Fred Singer and Fred Seitz (I was mildly disappointed that Steve Milloy didn’t get a run) must have shaken a few more people awake.

“Happy Feet”, an Australian animated feature about penguins that has been attacked by the Fox News delusion machine because it refers to overfishing, also scored a gong. No doubt, Neil Cavuto would have preferred an award to the Astroturf exercise on penguins produced by DCI. It’s delusion all the way down with these guys.

* The problem of terminology has always been difficult. It’s obviously unreasonable to use terms like “skeptic” or “contrarian” to describe people who produce or swallow transparently fraudulent propaganda like that of Singer and Seitz because it happens to suit their preconceived ideological views or financial interest. On the other hand, there have been vigorous objections to “denialist”. So, I’m switching to “delusionists”, a term which covers:
(i) people who manufacture delusions for a living like those mentioned already and their local counterparts
(ii) people who prefer to accept ideologically convenient delusions rather than face the truth
(iii) people who have genuinely been deluded by this propaganda (not many of these left in Australia now).