Penalties

John Quiggin28 Comments

Due to ‘a series of unfortunate events’, and despite at least moderate effort on my part, I managed to see only one of the goals scored in Australia’s World Cup campaign as it happened, and this was of course, the Italian penalty that ended our chances. I don’t know enough about the rules to tell, and I don’t suppose Guus Hiddink is an unbiased authority, but this seemed to me to be a pretty soft foul (maybe others can give a better-informed view on this). Of course, all sorts of chance happenings, such as injuries, rain and so on affect the outcome of sporting events, so it’s silly to complain. Then again, if we didn’t get to complain, half the fun of sporting events would be lost.

Anyway, relative to either our past record or our population (divided as it is among four different football codes), this was an amazing achievement.

Weekend reflections

John Quiggin9 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.

Blog birthday

John Quiggin27 Comments

The 21st of June is the winter solstice and also this blog’s fourth birthday. More than 3000 posts and maybe 50 000 comments (I have more than 40 000 on record and thousands more were lost in the database disasters of 2002 and 2003) make this a pretty huge endeavour. No doubt, much of the content has been ephemeral or worse, but I think there are some substantial contributions. Thanks to everyone who’s helped to make this a success and encouraged me to keep going.

I’ll be marking the occasion by taking a bit of a break. Feel free to talk among yourselves (politely, please!)

Meanwhile, there’s loads of good stuff around the Australian blogosphere. Tim Dunlop and Tim Lambert are reliably readable, and there’s always Tim Blair if you fancy a change of pace.

My econoblogging colleagues, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh have hit the headlines with their study of births delayed to get the government’s baby bonus, but fame doesn’t seem to have swelled their heads. Then there’s the group blogs, Catallaxy, Larvatus Prodeo and Troppo. I’ve had some great interactions with all of them.

I got some interesting links from some recent posts, including this one on my review of Yochai Benkler, which leads to an interesting debate about Wikipedia, and Harry Clarke on whaling.

Finally, if you’re one of the handful of readers who’ve been around from the beginning might remember David Morgan, one of the pioneers of Australian plogging, and one of the first to quit, when he found fatherhood more exciting than typing. He was on the ABC quiz show The Einstein Factor last night and won (he previously made big money on Who Wants to be a Millionaire, I think). Interestingly, his blog is still live, though it hasn’t been updated for years.

Whaling

John Quiggin40 Comments

The votes at the International Whaling Commission look to be going in favour of whales and against the advocates of whaling, an outcome that owes a lot to the efforts of the Australian and NZ governments. Given that the issue is going to be debated again and again, it’s worth considering how well Australia’s anti-whaling position stands up to criticism. A relevant point is that we have not, for example, responded favorably to international campaigns against the culling of kangaroos (a point made by the Japanese delegate I saw on TV last night).

To start with, there seems to be little disagreement about the principle that endangered/vulnerable whale species (and other cetacean species) should not be hunted at all, and in this respect, whales aren’t treated any differently from other animals.

Let’s suppose, though, that some whale species aren’t endangered, or maybe that they will cease to be endangered some time in the future. Then, in general terms, the dispute is between people who want to protect whales because they like them, or want to help the whalewatching industry, (and maybe object to the way in which they are killed, but this is an issue that could be dealt with separately) and people who want to kill whales either to be eaten as a delicacy item or to keep the whaling industry going.

I don’t see that there’s any way of resolving this disagreement on the basis of generally shared principles; so within any given community it seems appropriate to resolve it on the basis of majority vote. So this would imply that if most Japanese support whaling in Japanese coastal waters, the Australian government shouldn’t try to prevent this through the IWC, although of course environmental groups should be free to criticise and campaign against the practice (exactly the same position applies with Australia’s kangaroo policy).

As regards international waters, I reach the same conclusion; there’s no first-principles way of resolving the dispute, so it should be decided by voting. In the absence of any general system of resolving such international disputes, the IWC is the relevant forum, and its voting rules (unsatisfactory as they may be) are the rules to go by. Since most Australians like whales and want to protect them, the Australian government is right to push this point of view, and to seek as much international support as it can.

Darfur Comments Challenge

John Quiggin2 Comments

Over at Larvatus Prodeo, Tigtog, Kim and Mark are running a comments challenge to raise funds for Darfur similar to the tsunami fundraiser held here last year (I got the idea from Michele Agnew who got it from somewhere else in the blogosphere). So go over and leave a comment. Obviously, the best sort of comment is one announcing a donation of your own, or joining the LPers in cash for comments.

Among the many other worthy causes, there’s still time to help with the Yogyakarta earthquake.

And while I’m on the topic, let’s hear it for Bill Gates, who’s taking a backseat at Microsoft in order to devote more time to giving his money away. There’s something to be said for billionaires; taken as a group they seem a lot more attractive than the merely rich.

Derbyshire’s war

John Quiggin84 Comments

Quite a few people have commented in John Derbyshire’s apology for supporting the war in Iraq.

I haven’t seen anyone deny Derbyshire’s suggestion regarding his National Review colleagues who still publicly support the war that

If wired up to a polygraph and asked the question: “Supposing you could wind the movie back to early 2003, would you still attack Iraq?� any affirmative answers would have those old needles a-jumping and a-skipping all over the graph paper.

but then I haven’t looked hard. I’d be interested if anyone can point to any examples [1].

My main interest, like that of many others is in Derbyshire’s reason for recanting his support. While he wanted a war with Iraq, his idea was that the US should drop a lot of bombs, demonstrate that it’s a power to be feared and then leave, without wasting time on futile projects like nation-building. As lots of commenters have pointed out, Derbyshire’s position is worse, in moral terms, than that of most of those who continue to support the war.

It does however, raise some important issues that go to the heart of the debate between supporters and opponents of the Iraq war and the debate over war and peace in general.

In the leadup to the Iraq war, many different arguments were presented for and against going to war, and many different predictions were made about the likely consequences of war. People supported war for a range of reasons, some of which were logically inconsistent, and the same was true of people who opposed war. Many people made many predictions, many of which turned out to be wrong. However, there is a fundamental asymmetry here.
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