|
|||||
|
April 12th, 2006 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
 The excellent Tim Blair notes a Telegraph article reporting that
I have no doubt many hours were spent workshopping that one. April 12th, 2006 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
The First Test between Bangladesh and Australia is going right down to the wire, and the final day’s play tomorrow will see a very tight finish. There is a good chance that Bangladesh might pull off one of the biggest upsets in Test cricket history. Australia need 95 runs to win, with only two established batsmen left, and six wickets in hand. In truth, Australia are fortunate to even be in the game at all, because they were comprehensively outplayed in the first two days of this Test match. Needless to say, this state of affairs has caused plenty of amusement for English cricket fans and other wicked folk. But regardless of the result, this match has been, to use a cliche, good for the game. It comes as the editor of Wisden Cricketer’s Almanack has released his latest offering in which he takes a small minded view of the game and denounces the ‘globalisation’ of cricket. The way in which Bangladesh were rushed into playing Test cricket was misguided and done for the wrong reasons, but the game is slowly but surely taking a foothold in the country, in terms of playing success. That is good for cricket. It is even more good for Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries in the world. Bangladesh is famous for being poor, having lots of disasters, and not much else. When the Champions Trophy one-day International cricket tournament was held in Dacca in 1998, one observer said to a shocked editor of Wisden Cricketer’s Almanack that the event was the most positive event in the country’s history since Independence. With the football World Cup two months away, there may well be quite a bit of tut-tutting in the media about how sport and nationalism are a dreadful combination. And there is something to that. However, I think that sport and national pride, which is something else entirely, is a positive thing. No matter what actually happens tomorrow, the future of Bangladesh cricket looks bright, and I think that is a wonderful thing. April 12th, 2006 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
It has been a relatively quiet year so far in Australian politics, with the main story being an investigation into a scandal involving the Australian Wheat Board, which was accused of paying huge bribes for wheat contracts to Saddam Hussain’s Iraq. The political controversy relates to what the government knew about it and what it did about it. It seems that the government did not know very much about it, and did absolutely nothing about it. The Cole Enquiry that has been formed to investigate this matter and Prime Minister John Howard will testify tomorrow. I have generally taken the view that the enquiries have been a political circus and conducted for partisan reasons, so I’ve not followed it very closely. Other people have taken a greater interest, and have come to different conclusions. However I still feel that this matter is more a case of cock-up rather then conspiracy. I got thinking about the case from a different angle though, about the bribes. The fact that bribes needed to be paid at all for a straightforward commercial transaction is a shocking indictment of the regulatory stranglehold Saddam Hussein and the UN had placed on Iraq. This is small beer compared to the literal stranglehold that the tyrant kept his people under. But bribery is a natural part of things in so many parts of the world, in various and many degrees. It is by no means restricted to ‘third world’ countries either. But it occurred to me that the more you need to bribe agents of the state to get anything done, the worse the control the state has over the economy, and is a passable indicator of real, as opposed to nominal, economic freedom in a society. April 12th, 2006 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
Chronicling the poison spreading through the British system is a bizarre alienating experience. One feels like one of HP Lovecraft’s narrators. The horror is unnamable; we lack the words to describe what is happpening; but horror it is. The independent souls of individuals and institutions are being inexorably, ineluctably, supplanted by something dark and destructive, mirroring and subordinate to the great evil beneath Whitehall. Look here, if you dare. You may wish to comment on that site. Jim Murphy MP offers up a chorus in The Times’ Public Agenda section:
No word of the incantation has discernable meaning. But the effect on this reader was to make him feel suddenly icy, hollowed-out; and the floor beneath him appeared to heave and writhe with snakes. April 12th, 2006 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
Zeyad, one of our favorite Iraqi bloggers needs to raise money to attend CUNY’s School of Journalism. If you have enjoyed his postings, consider giving him a hand. April 12th, 2006 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
Patrick Porter, a recent reinforcment for Oxblog, noted the other day that writing history is not as easy as it looks. He was referring to the recent practices of US historians, writing about US social practices of the past that have political implications for today. Cynics have long known that ‘history is written by the winners’, but the 20th century showed that history could be used and abused to fight political battles that are in dispute. Unlike more traditional readers, I myself have no objection to writers of history using their works to advance an agenda, so long as they are upfront about what that agenda is. Much value can be gained by looking at an old question with the different view that a blatently political or social agenda can provide, regardless of whether or not I agree with that agenda. As a blogger writing for Samizdata.net, it should be obvious that I do have an agenda of my own- the advancement of liberty and against statist values. Given the nature of this blog, that hardly requries disclosure on every post. The benefits of this are obvious- the reader knows exactly what the intellectual meta-context I am operating from, and can read into what I write to take from my writing what they will. I think that is far more honest then pretending an objectivity that I can not in all honesty claim. I was moved to remark on this subject not by any historical event, but by a series of historical novels, Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series. For those that are not familiar with these six novels, Colleen McCullogh has novellised the fall of the Republic of Rome and the rise of Julius Caesar, based on the best historical information that she possesses, and uses her writer’s talent to ‘fill in the gaps’. While not to everyone’s taste, I have enjoyed the series and they have sparked in me a great deal of curiousity about classical history. However, I must raise the objection that McCullogh seems far too partisan towards Julius Caesar then seems to be reasonable. At times in the later novels, one is left wondering if this is not hagiography. What is the agenda here? Or is it just that with my libertarian meta-context, I have too much objection to someone who was ‘Dictator’? April 11th, 2006 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
Borders finally got around to responding to me… with the same form letter as I have seen elsewhere:
I have responded:
Yes, it is indeed their right to be cowards. It is likewise my right to call them on it. April 11th, 2006 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
More official exhortation from the British state. This a poster on the underground.  Quite an interesting case, I think, because it isn’t the standard minatory approach: Do X as the Y agency demands, or get a big fine. This has the superficially laudable object of preventing children from bullying one another. You may think (I do) that it ought to be unnecessary to urge people to protect children against bullies, and that this is not a suitable topic for state propaganda – that most adults could be counted on to intervene as a matter of ordinary humanity. But that reckons without the passivity and inanition fostered by 60 years of welfarism, and 30 years or so of ‘child protection’ doctrine under which speaking roughly to a little boy (let alone touching him), makes one the wickedest of criminals. You might have to work on people these days to get them to do something. But plainly that isn’t the object of the exercise here. This ad doesn’t encourage people to stop bullying. For all the empty vapourings about ‘active citizenship’ (See here for an example of the Government propaganda on that topic that is churned out by notionally independent organisations), nothing may undermine the dependency culture. What this campaign is for is to get people to report incidents they think might be bullying to the authorities. There is a website and a subsidised telephone line for you to do so. It is obviously impossible that this could help the unfortunate smaller boy. One has to conclude that isn’t really the point. The point is to get members of the public to adopt official attitudes, and engrain them by providing a mechanism to rehearse, to act out, concern. It is for to prove you are a compliant member of society by watching others carefully and reporting deviant behaviour. The state will deal with the problem, however minor, however fleeting, however apparently amenable to personal decision. I don’t think that this is a deliberate, explicit project. I think it is a natural outcome of the cultural assumptions of those who commission such ads. We are not just supposed to love the surveillance camera, but to identify with it. The ideal citizen is a passive tool that reports back as requested; that fits in with the total bureaucracy’s demand for record. For those of us – left and right – who still hold to the western liberal tradition of individual moral responsibility, this is a sickening, vertiginous conception of social life. The life of ants, not human beings. For those who are broadly conservative communitarians – right and left – who would like embedded institutions, direct relationships and personal responsibilities to dominate, likewise. The possibility that we may – all taken together – be in the minority should be a source of terror. Secure beneath the watching eyes? Not in the slightest, me. April 11th, 2006 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
Many moral questions are tricky, requiring complex theories and difficult judgements… but many more moral issues are really very simple when you look at them clearly. Manditory mass medication is one of those simple issues. I am as keen as anyone else to not see epidemics of infectious disease and in the case of such, I take the view that it is rather like why you have states to fight against foreign armies: a collective threat to everyone can sometimes only be faced by a government acting collectively. However very few things fall into this category, but infectious disease is one which indeed does – a collective threat that can only be defeated collectively. So yes, I am all for property rights but that does not include having a malarial breeding swamp on your property next to mine or infecting everyone’s water supply with some nasty bug. Birth defects on the other hand, are not a ‘collective threat’ and so taking folic acid to avoid certain birth defects is the responsibility of anyone who does things likely to get them pregnant. So when Max Pemperton writes an article in the Telegraph opposing government plans to force bakers to add folic acid to bread, you would think I would be supportive of him, right? Well no. In his article Folic acid is not the best thing since sliced bread he goes into a great song and dance about the pros and cons to various groups in the population of adding folic acid and whilst he does talk about civil liberties, he is mostly just making a utilitarian argument of net-benefit. He ends with saying “It’s certainly a complex moral dilemma”… and that completely fogs the issue. No, it is actually a very simply moral dilemma: does anyone have the right to alter my body chemistry to benefit other people when my body chemistry poses no threat to anyone else (unlike if I have smallpox, for example). The question (does the state have this right?) and the answer (no) are not complex at all. If women want to avoid neural tube defects in their children, they should take folic acid. Making me take it as well will not help and is none of anyone elses damn business. Few things are as impermanent as medical theories of ‘what is best’, so the utilitarian argument is utterly irrelevant. As it happens I take folic acid pills for a medical condition so I have nothing against the stuff myself but that does not change the fact the state has NO moral right to medicate me in such a way and anyone who trusts the state to pick ‘what is best’ for your health and make it a force backed law really needs to take a look at the state’s history of screw-ups and ask themselves is this is an institution which should have the right to mess with your personal body chemistry. April 10th, 2006 | 61 comments - (Comments are closed)
Australia’s flagship national broadsheet, The Australian, published an article today sporting the title Cut to the bone: working poor on the rise. To illustrate this terrible phenomenon, the Oz article provides the example of Vicki and Terry Rawiri, who
And even then they could barely afford the gruel, you might surmise. Well – not really. This pitiable couple
Your heart bleeds, no? The sacrifices abject poverty forces one to make! Leaving aside the horrors of working hard to pay off one’s mortgage quickly, the article goes on to quote a survey filled with anecdotal evidence of the plight of Australia’s poor; how they cannot afford to drive registered cars, thus risking the law’s wrath in unlicenced wrecks, how they can only find $20 to go to the movies if it comes out of the food budget. Well, here’s some anecdotal evidence that I have gathered in my travels – I once worked at a very large and very busy liquor store in an especially low socio-economic suburb in Perth. The poor may not be able to drive a registered car or spend $20 on a movie, but rest assured that a large chunk of them generally have quite a lot of money to spend on alcohol. Putting that aside, the tough luck stories of a few are not borne out by hard economic data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics pertaining to the poor in the aggregate:
April 10th, 2006 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
Matt Welch has written a farewell lament in Reason on what he describes as the demise of warblogging. He harks back to the explosion of the grassroots media after 9/11 when many Americans found that their assumptions about the Middle East and terrorism were turned upside down. From this development, he defined the warblogger as a writer who transcended old partisan divides due to the defining event of a terrorist threat to the homeland.
Now, Welch has acquired a new job on the Los Angeles Times, and argues that the political blogging movement has reinforced partisan politics rather than bridging this supposed gap. Yet, the developments that Welch cites to bolster his thesis are disparate and amenable to alternative interpretation. He argues that the “current-events bloggers” have taken a strident approach to particular issues within the Culture War:
His other examples are the inability of the blogosphere to create a permanent alternative to the mainstream media, like the Pyjamas website and the use of bloggers to galvanise activist support, especially within the Democratic Party. Welch does also emphasize that weblogs are now far more useful for the dissemination of knowledge and the procurement of differing viewpoints on particular issues. But he still views the development of warblogging as a lost opportunity:
To which the answer is: if you just look at blogs from the political perspective, it will appear more partisan, as activists have established and learned how to use these tools to their advantage. More importantly, many of those who blog on current events have strong and individual voices ranging over a wide spectrum of subjects. Warblogging did not run into the sands or fade away. After a while, bloggers preferred to jaw-jaw on more than just war. April 9th, 2006 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
|
   |
||||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||