Factions (repost from 2004)

John Quiggin3 Comments

Reading the comments thread, I notice a few themes that seemed familiar, and checking back I found this post from 2004, which seemed worth reprinting

Given that Labor obviously has to do something more than wait for the housing bubble to burst, one simple (but not easy!) organisational step would be to abolish factions. That is, membership of any organised factional grouping ought to be treated like membership of a rival political party, as grounds for automatic expulsion. Of course, it would be impossible to prevent informal or secret factions from operating, as they do in all parties. But, to my knowledge, the only major political party anywhere in the world with a faction system comparable to Labor’s is the notoriously corrupt Liberal Democratic Party in Japan, and even here PM Koizumi is largely independent of the factions.

There was a time (from the 1950s split to sometime in the 1980s) when the factional groupings corresponded to ideological divisions. But that has long since ceased to be true. It’s probably true that the average member of the Left faction is a little more likely to favor a ‘progressive’ line on social issues than the average member of the Right and Centre, but that’s about the strength of it. Each of the major factions is subdivided into smaller groups, often little more than extended families, with their retainers and servants.

Nowadays, the factions exist because they exist. No-one is willing to bell the cat. However, this is the kind of thing Latham could take on, and perhaps even win. It would certainly be more in his line than Simon Crean’s lame achievement of changing the union voting ratio from 60 to 50 per cent[1].

fn1. While I’m dreaming, I’d like an end to the formal link between the unions and the ALP. And a pony.

The invention of tradition

John Quiggin12 Comments

CP Snow once said that all ancient British traditions date to the second half of the 19th Century, and his only error was to limit this claim to Britain. The great majority of real traditions having been swept away or reduced to irrelevance with the rise of capitalism, the 19th century saw the rise of a whole set of new ones, which were then fixed in shape by the system of nation-states, each with their own newly-codified language and officially sanctioned history that took shape at the same time[1]

Via Barista and an interesting link on the theatrical origins of the ninja, I came to this great piece by Craig Colbeck on Karate and Modernity, a lot closer to my own interests than black-clad stage assassins. Although the jargon is a bit heavy going in places, there’s a pretty clear argument to show that the Okinawa karate tradition developed in the late C19 and was derived from China.

Living in the 21st century, and in Australia, I can’t say I’m too worried about the invention of tradition. Anything more than 100 years old is old enough for me.

OT PS: At my local shops at the weekend, I passed a woman (20s?) wearing a T-shirt that stated “Kickboxers are Nancy Boys”. I was struck by the rather antique slang (unless it’s come back in while I wasn’t paying attention), but also a bit bemused by the subtext. Worn by a man, the implication would presumably be one of aggressive bravado, but I don’t know what it means worn by a woman. And what about women kickboxers?

fn1, This process began a bit earlier in Britain and France and still hasn’t reached finality, but the crucial period, including German and Italian unification and the creation of the US in its current form, took place between 1850 and 1900.

Shame

John Quiggin53 Comments

This event, in which a prominent indigenous opera singer suffered a stroke at a Griffith University bus stop and was left semi-conscious and vomiting for hours on end by commuters and bus drivers alike, is a source of shame for Brisbane, and should be one for all Australians.

Obviously, despite being a well-dressed visitor to a university, Delmae Barton’s skin colour was enough to create the assumption that she was drunk. I don’t want to throw too many stones at the individuals involved: the fact that we live in a society where drunken black people are a fairly common sight is just as shameful as the episode itself. And I don’t have any easy answers. But it’s something for which all Australians need to take some responsibility.

Factions

John Quiggin47 Comments

Julia Gillard and Simon Crean have both had good things to say about factions in the ALP lately. As Gillard observes, it’s no longer factions but fractions.

This would be a good time for Gillard in particular to put her arguments into practice by proposing the dissolution of the Left faction in the Parliamentary party and, failing that, withdrawing from the group. It’s been at least a decade since the “Left” has had any distinct policy position, and unlike the Right, the faction doesn’t justify its existence by delivering the top jobs to its members. Far from providing effective opposition to the Right machine, the Left justifies the existence of the Right.

If, say, 40 per cent of the Parliamentary Party were independent of any faction, and agreed to vote against candidates generated by intra-party factions, it wouldn’t be hard to peel off enough members of the Right to bring the whole corrupt system to an end at the Parliamentary level. And if the Parliamentary leadership was anti-factional, their votes would control the National Executive and permit intervention to break the factions in the state branches.

No surprises here

John Quiggin31 Comments

It’s a while since I’ve done a full-length post on the AWB scandal, so I thought it might be time to see if anything surprising had emerged. Based on past experience, it seemed pretty clear that we could expect to find out that

1. Both Downer and Howard knew that the AWB was paying kickbacks to the Iraqi regime

2. This information was transmitted in a way that preserves deniability, so no conclusive proof will emerge

3. No government minister will resign

4. Endless hair-splitting defences of the government’s actions in this matter will emerge from those who have previously made a loud noise about Oil for Food.

The only surprise has been how thoroughly each of these has been confirmed.
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Plug

John Quiggin1 Comment

Occasional commenter “mick” has been in touch to advise me of a public lecture series to be held in Brisbane. The lecture series is entitled “BrisScience”, and will involve a number of excellent scientists giving lectures on their topics of interest for the general public. The website is here. All of the lectures are free, there is one talk a month, and they will all be held in the Judith Wright Center of Contemporary Arts in the Valley.

The first lecture is by John Mattick on “junk” DNA, which IIRC has been the subject of a very dubious intellectual property claim by an Australian entrepreneur. But the talk won’t be about IP, which should make it more interesting for about 99 per cent of the potential audience. John argues that the extra DNA is the opposite of junk: it may be ultimately responsible for the development of all life more complex than bacteria.

Blonde joke

John Quiggin33 Comments

The latest evolutionary psychology[1] theory to do the rounds is that blondeness evolved as a selection strategem for women trying to attract scarce mates in the harsh and male-scarce conditions of Ice Age Europe. According to this report in the Times, the theory has been formulated by an anthropologist, Peter Frost. His supporting argument is that blondeness is a signal of high levels of oestrogen. I suppose I should wait for the article which is supposed to come out in Evolution and Human Behaviour, but I can’t resist pointing to an obvious hole and an alternative explanation.

The obvious hole is that blond(e)ness is not a sex-linked characteristic. If light hair colour signals high oestrogen, blond men should have a lot of trouble attracting mates. Tempted as I am by this hypothesis, I can’t say I’ve seen any evidence to back it up.

The alternative explanation (not at all novel) is that fair hair arose in conjunction with pale skin, as a straightforward physical adaption to the move away from the tropics – less need for pigment, or maybe more need to absorb vitamin D.
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What I’ve been reading

John Quiggin15 Comments

The Feynmann processor: an introduction to quantum computation by Gerard Milburn. Like (I expect) most of us, I’ve never understood anything about quantum computation and have been vaguely suspicious that the whole project involves some kind of spurious informational free lunch. On the other hand, having read Feynmann’s excellent QED, I’m reasonably comfortable with the basic ideas of quantum electrodynamics (though I’ve never got on top of the nasty integrals required to actually work anything out). Feynmann’s discussion in terms of probabilty amplitudes steers clear of all that Heisenberg-style mysticism that seems to make the whole subject incomprehensible.

Anyway, this post by John Holbo at CT, and particularly this comment, led me to a Wikipedia article which made it clear how you quantum processing could yield impressive gains without any magical mumbo-jumbo, so I went on to look for more, and found this book in the library. It’s very easy going for a general reader, and makes things pretty clear, though I took a couple of readings to get the details straight.

As it happens, Gerard is at UQ and got a Federation Fellowship at the same time I did, so I’ll probably be pestering him for more info on all this.

Weekend reflections

John Quiggin28 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.