Another landslide on the way?

John Quiggin22 Comments

The polls are predicting another landslide win for Labor in Queensland, and Centrebet is even more emphatic, with Labor as 50/1 on favorites (they’ll pay out 1.02 for a Labor win, on a dollar bet). I have mixed feelings on this.

On the one hand, the Beattie government could certainly do with a shake. On the other hand, while a massive majority has resulted in a fair degree of arrogance, the response to a narrow majority may be poll-driven populism. And on the third hand (stretching the metaphor a bit), a lot of the government’s best members are in very marginal seats. For example, I think my local member Ronan Lee is very good, but it’s unbelievable that he’s managed to win Indooropilly twice – it’s nothing down at the local shops to find more BMWs than Holdens in the car park.

In any case, the outcome looks clear, so I hope the soon-to-be-reelected government will take the signs of discontent seriously and get on with investing in physical and social infrastructure.

The Oz blows it again on global warming

John Quiggin122 Comments

The Australian continues its deplorable coverage of global warming, in this editorial which contains more errors and misleading claims than it is possible to count, following on from an equally bad news story at the weekend.

The factual basis of the story is that the IPCC has confirmed the reality of anthropogenic global warming, tightening the error bounds around its earlier estimate of a 3 degree warming by 2100. Obviously, when you tighten error bounds, you raise the minimum estimate, but the Australian manages to mention this once in passing in its news story and not at all in its editorial.

The rest of the editorial contains allusions to all the denialist claptrap the Oz has been pushing for years now: claims that climate change is really natural (the IPCC confirms that the change we are observing is anthropogenic), suggestions that the report refutes the ‘hockey stick’ (it confirms it, even more strongly than the 2001) report, misleading references to the Medieval Warm period and so on.

At least, having publicly relied on the IPCC, the Oz might stop publishing the conspiracy-theory opinion pieces suggesting that the whole thing is a hoax.

The Australian’s coverage of this issue has been a disgrace. As a paper, it cannot be taken seriously on any scientific issue.

Farewell to Earth Sanctuaries

John Quiggin20 Comments

The remaining shareholders of Earth Sanctuaries Limited, among whom I’m one, have been advised that the company is to be wound up, having been delisted. ESL, which was floated with high hopes (a little too late to catch the dotcom boom, unfortunately) was Australia’s most substantial attempt at private-sector biodiversity conservation. I suspect though, that most of the investors knew that, in all probability, they were making a donation rather than an investment (at least there’s a capital loss to offset against any more succcesful investments!). Still, there were some interesting ideas that could be useful if governments ever get around to creating price incentives for biodiversity preservation (this could include allowing the sale of animals, or at least offering to purchase them).

The big selling point of ESL for me was its founder John Wamsley and his idea of fencing reserves then eradicating all the feral pests before reintroducing native species. Wamsley is definitely one of the awkward squad, but often you have to make yourself awkward to get things done.

More from Harry Clarke at Kalimna, Jason Soon at Catallaxy and Nicholas Gruen at Troppo

Condolence

John Quiggin10 Comments

I haven’t yet posted on the Queensland election campaign, and just as I was thinking about it I heard the tragic news that Lawrence Springborg has had to withdraw from the campaign due to sudden death of his wife’s father. I’d like to express my sympathy to Mr Springborg and his family, which I’m sure will be shared by readers.

Pessimism

John Quiggin10 Comments

This NYT piece by Adam Cohen starts with the observation that Americans are feeling pessimistic about the war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina and so on, then jumps to a recent work on philosophical pessimism by Joshua Dienstag, whose basic argument is summarised in this sample chapter. As Cohen says, pessimism in this sense is not a gloomy disposition, but a worldview that “simply doubts the most basic liberal principle: that applying human reasoning to the world’s problems will have a positive effect.’ Cohen concludes “Part of Mr. Bush’s legacy may well be that he robbed America of its optimism “.

But if optimism holds that applying reasoned analysis will have a positive effect, the experience of the Bush Administration merely illustrates the point that the converse is also true.
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5-star

John Quiggin1 Comment

I happened to notice that the iTunes music store was selling a new album by Paris Hilton, which had a two-star rating. This seemed like an interesting mean value, so I thought I’d see how it was derived, and took a look at some of the comments. The modal response was a one-star rating, often accompanied by a demand that iTunes introduce fractional, zero or negative stars to its system.

On the other hand, some listeners made a convincing case for five stars. For example, one headed Genius. pure and simple reads

By subverting modern pop music and turning every soul crushing cliche in modern music to tap-like ’11’ proportions, Paris has created 3:57 of towering avant garde… An almost coma-inducing tour de force, which ranks with Lou Reed’s ‘Meta Machine Music’ in the unlistenable stakes. Bravo, Maestro!

Even on the limited free sample available from iTunes, I think this rave review is warranted.

The apparent deceptiveness of the world

John Quiggin9 Comments

Googling around in connection with my review of Unspeak, I came across an old LanguageLog post on The apparent deceptiveness of the world, which cites the paradoxical statement

Appearances are not deceptive; it only seems as if they are.

and invites Brian Weatherson (who’s now one of the crew at Crooked Timber) to analyse it, saying

Clearly, if this is true, then it has to be false, and if false, it must be true. Yet it is not a standard liar-paradox sentence like as in classic liar sentences like This statement is false, or Everything I tell you is a lie, including this. It does not mention truth or falsity, or refer to itself. It is a metaphysical claim, as far as I can see. It speaks not about language or truth but about the nature of reality. It says (contrary to the old proverb) that reality does not present itself in a way that deceives our senses, and any perception we may have to the contrary is incorrect.

I think we can extract a coherent claim with the aid of Hamlet’s observation “For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”. I’d read the statement as saying something like “First appearances are not deceptive; it’s thinking about them that leads you astray”. While this is obviously false as a general statement, I think direct perceptions are usually closer to the mark than the results of the kinds of analysis (Freudianism, large parts of Marxism, a lot of public choice theory) that purports to strip away surface appearances and reveal the underlying truth.