Tim Blair puts the boot into a bizarre forthcoming book by John Carroll on The Meaning of September 11. Carroll has always trod the fine line between essentially reactionary cultural criticism in the manner of Carlyle and complete nonsense. It seems that he’s finally tipped over the edge.
My only query is: Does this kind of thing need Fisking? I think it would be more effective to reprint it uninterrupted, perhaps with added emphasis on the more flagrantly crazy bits.

Bush’s appeal to the United Nations has made the Iraq situation a good deal more predictable, in the sense that it’s now possible to set out a chain of events leading to a plausible peaceful outcome in the medium term, and then to consider the various possible deviations from that predicted chain.
Prediction 1: The Security Council will pass a new resolution, essentially repealing the ‘compromise’ resolutions of 1998 and 1999, which gave Saddam a basis for refusing access to presidential palaces etc, but, at least implicitly, requiring specific authorisation for further military action. My probability 0.8
Prediction 2: Saddam will protest vociferously, but will accept the new resolution. Once the inspectors are in Iraq, he will obstruct them as much as he dares, but not enough that they declare him to have breached his commitments. My (conditional) probability 0.9
Prediction 3: The British government will refuse to participate in military action unless the UN determines that Saddam has failed to comply. My (conditional) probability 0.9
Prediction 4: Bush will not go to war without Britain. My (conditional) probability 0.7
The probability of the complete chain of events, obtained my multiplying the probabilities of each of the elements is about 0.45. Since nearly all of the deviations lead to war, I’d say it is about an even-money bet at present.
The other important feature of this analysis is that, in my view, each prediction is based on the assumption that the key decision-makers will act in their own self-interest. If there is a war, it will be because ‘someone had blundered’.

Huts of the High Country by Klaus Hueneke. I’m up in the mountains with my family. We walked yesterday to Oldfield’s Hut near the NSW/ACT border, a perfect example of a mountain stockman’s hut – three rooms no less! I’ve visited a fair number of the mountain huts over the years, but they are gradually being lost to fire (both bushfires and carelessness have taken their toll, along with a few instances of deliberate vandalism).
Update: I’d hoped to follow up the walk in the North end of Kosciuszko with a ski trip in the South end for the Labor Day holiday, but was rained out. You can never count on anything with mountains, except that they’ll be there next time.

Miranda Devine asserts that it is time we made good manners all the rage and mentions the new fad for ‘civility’, being promoted by a variety of groups on the political right.

Might I suggest that civility begins at home. Devine herself is one of a group of right-wing print commentators (others are PP McGuinness and Piers Akerman) who routinely substitute abuse for argument. The same phenomenon is found, in even more marked terms, on radio and in the blogosphere. (For those with the patience to follow it, there was a long discussion of this in Ozblog circles recently. You can start here

More interestingly, this emphasis on civility contrasts markedly with derision of ‘political correctness’, understood to mean the substitution of approved euphemisms for accurate but hurtful descriptive terms (‘gravitationally challenged’ for ‘fat’ to take a standard, if apocryphal, example of the style). As far as I can see, the PC program demands an extension of civility to groups who were previously denied it. The problem is that new euphemisms wear out pretty fast unless they are accompanied by a change of attitudes. It’s much easier to substitute, say, ‘disabled’ for ‘crippled’, than to change the attitudes which are associated with those terms.

The well-known excesses of PC, and the obvious nastiness of many advocates of ‘civility’ can be summed up by saying that it’s all very well to talk the talk, but you also have to walk the walk. Civility is a highly desirable social quality, but it can only be sustained if it’s backed by genuine goodwill towards other members of the community. I can’t say I see much of this from Miranda Devine, or from other recent converts to the cause of civility.

Note: There’s more on this from Ken Parish

Those who enjoy the “Private Eye” style of diary may find some amusement in the blogging debuts of John Howard: P.M. and Simon Crean MP.

As well as satirical fun, ‘Simon’ raises a serious point that has also struck me. Despite lots of discussion about how Howard is bestriding the political scene like a colossus and Crean is failing to make an impact, most recent opinion polls suggests Labor would win an election held today. Labor is trailing on primary votes, but with the decline of One Nation and the Democrats, most of the third-party votes have gone to the Greens, whose preferences generally favor Labor very strongly. Of course, opinion polls aren’t election results, but the Federal scene contrasts sharply with the states, where incumbent Labor governments enjoy massive leads in the polls.

As Shaun Carney points out, the bursting of the housing bubble is likely to change everything. The Howard government has relied critically on low interest rates and affordable home ownership as a source of contrast with its Labor predecessors, and the housing boom can’t have hurt either Carr or Bracks. If the collapse is as bad as I expect, Howard will be in deep trouble. The impact on the Victorian and NSW governments, both closer to an election than Howard, is harder to predict, especially as the consequences of a housing downturn will take time to work themselves out.

Tim Dunlop gives some useful links on the relationship between inequality of outcomes and inequality of opportunity, a topic to which I plan to return

Paul Krugman proposes his economic plan for the US. As he says, it’s not rocket science. He plans to supplement expansionary monetary policy with $100 billion of short-term fiscal stimulus, offset by a scrapping of the long-term tax cuts proposed by Bush.

Given the increasingly alarming parallels with Japan though, it’s worth observing that Japan did much of this. The big problem has been the failure to tackle the corrupt and debt-laden financial system. I’d say the US needs something much the same – a sharp tightening of financial standards and some big bankruptcies among financial institutions – before there will be a sustained recovery.

Science fiction writer and right-wing commentator Jerry Pournelle has some interesting thoughts on the decline of the US labor market for less-skilled workers. He links to the NYT piece on the growth in disability benefits I flagged a couple of weeks ago in the Fin. I don’t share his IQ determinism, but this isn’t central to the argument. The case would be even stronger if ‘human capital’ (innate ability plus education & training) were used instead. (Thanks to Peter Lawrence for alerting me to this).

Liberal MP Julie Bishop backs the IMF push for a top marginal tax rate of 30 per cent. Actually, given the way these things work, it’s more likely to be an ambit claim from within the ‘official family’ (Treasury, Treasurer’s Office and RBA) than a suggestion originating from the IMF itself. Ken Parish has already put up a substantial critique, as well as proposing more work for me in the form of an estimate of the revenue cost (I’ll do it soon, I promise!).

There’s only one thing left to bug me. In my interview with Terry Lane on the National Interest, I said that the incentive case for lower tax rates was nonsense and that a stronger argument was that based on the claim that high tax rates promoted tax avoidance. Sure enough, this was the point Julie Bishop ran with. I don’t know if she was listening but, if so, she obviously missed my observation that New Zealand had tried a 30 per cent top marginal rate, found it did no good, and abandoned it.

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