Author Archive for Mercurius

An ethics of free speech, from the Bible to Spider-Man

Published
by
Mercurius
4 months, 3 weeks ago
in Ethics, Language, Law and Media
. 53 Comments

I’d like to propose a corollary to Godwin’s law: As an internet thread gets longer, the probability of someone invoking free speech to prop up an otherwise unsustainable argument approaches 1.

Free speech is a tricky beast: it’s one of the most precious aspects of our civilisation, and yet, in many practical day-to-day situations it can turn out to be worthless, contributing nothing but misinformation, spreading rumour and insinuation, and damaging ourselves and others.

In discussion, the “free speech” card is sometimes played in earnest by sensitive souls who misinterpret honest rebuttal or refutation as an attempt to silence them. It is at other times used dishonestly to distract from paucity of evidence or logical flaws in the accuser’s position - attack being considered the best form of defence.

If we look at speech in the blogosphere, newsprint and on TV, we see that it is all free. But how much of it is ethical?

Continue reading ‘An ethics of free speech, from the Bible to Spider-Man’

If you’re Liberal and you know it, bash a teacher

Published
by
Mercurius
4 months, 3 weeks ago
in Education and Government
. 90 Comments

When I first sat down to write a reply to Nelson’ Budget reply on education, I felt like one of the judges in the first round of So You Think You Can Offer a Cogent Critique of the Education System. The Marcia in me wants to pat earnest Dr Nelson on the head. The Dicko in me is forced to send him home to learn the words, and the music, and how to dance.

To be honest, I’ve sometimes enjoyed the laid-back, anecdotal style of Brendan Nelson’s testifyin’. Journalists call it “homespun”. Ain’t that sweet?

Well, the education section of the Budget reply speech crossed the line from homespun into fabricated. It was a grab-bag of myths and plausible-sounding but incorrect assertions that go straight for parents’ worry-glands and bypass the brain.

Continue reading ‘If you’re Liberal and you know it, bash a teacher’

Post-parliamentary daze

Published
by
Mercurius
4 months, 3 weeks ago
in Howardia and Politics
. 13 Comments

Well, the rumour-mill is off and chugging again that Alexander Downer is about to quit, and some have drawn a similar inference about Peter Costello from his antics in a Budget-day interview.

At times like this, one could almost - almost - regret that the ALP turned away from Communism. Just think, it would be off to the salt mines now for Dolly and Tip!

But seriously, what will the former triumvirate of Howard, Costello and Downer do with their long retirements?

Continue reading ‘Post-parliamentary daze’

Would judicial activism have saved the Howard government?

Published
by
Mercurius
5 months ago
in Government, History, Industrial Relations, Law and Politics
. 12 Comments

While I’m quite a fan of allohistory, I rarely engage in it because (a) I’m not very good at it and (b) it’s rather self-indulgent. But like most indulgences, it’s a bit of harmless fun and it won’t make you go blind.

So here goes: This letter in today’s Oz alerted me to the intriguing possibility that a bit of judicial activism by the High Court over WorkChoices might have been enough to save the Howard government from electoral oblivion.

While the High Court’s 2006 judgement on WorkChoices makes an unassailable case for the legal correctness of upholding the legislation, let’s pretend things were different. If the High Court judges had gone all activist and concocted a convoluted Constitutional argument to strike down WorkChoices, then the result of the 2007 election might have been very different.
Continue reading ‘Would judicial activism have saved the Howard government?’

Culture War II: blitzkrieg

Published
by
Mercurius
5 months, 2 weeks ago
in Culture, Media and Politics
. 23 Comments

In Friday’s SMH, Peter Hartcher gave a sanguine appraisal of the Rudd government’s symbolic actions since winning the election, and concluded that Rudd has been “a keen student” of Howard in the effective political use of symbolism.

I find this statement unsatisfactory, as the two seem to have studied completely different tactical playbooks. While Howard engaged in culture war of the trench variety, Rudd is clearly a proponent of blitzkrieg.

Continue reading ‘Culture War II: blitzkrieg’

Visual vernacular

Published
by
Mercurius
5 months, 2 weeks ago
in Levity, Photography and Politics
. 24 Comments

Since a dull suit standing behind a microphone means “politician” or possibly “businessperson” in our cultural code, the following recent photographs strike me as interesting:

Would any semioticians (or comedians) care to have a crack at what is going on with the image factory here?

(BTW, images of Dr “Monkey Bars” Nelson seem to have been sanitised from the intertubes. If anyone can find a copy, feel free to file it here. Otherwise, you’ll just have to use your imagination: picture an opposition leader hanging off monkey bars, armpit stains and all…)

Continue reading ‘Visual vernacular’

The Intervention will be televised (but not financed)

Published
by
Mercurius
5 months, 3 weeks ago
in Government, Health, Indigenous and Politics
. 57 Comments

The Oz carries this intriguing report about the upcoming Federal Budget which suggests the previous government did not have any funding allocated for the NT Intervention beyond 1 July this year.

Which reason do you think best explains why Howard and Brough didn’t organise any forward estimates from Treasury?

  • Hubris - They assumed that a problem which took decades to develop could be sorted out by the boys in khaki in about 6 months.
  • Incompetence - They just forgot.
  • Laziness - Couldn’t be bothered. After all, it’s only public money.
  • Rashness - Everything was arranged too hastily to make a proper plan (Eek! it’s been under our noses for years! Quick, no time to waste, it’s an emergency!)
  • Cynicism -The plan was conceived after the Budget, so we’ll let Treasury doze and draw up some estimates once we’ve counted how many votes this brings in.
  • Complacency - They assumed they’d win the election and could write it into this year’s Budget themselves?
  • Disingenuousness - They assumed they’d lose the ‘07 election and left it as a Budget landmine for the incoming ALP? (Which it most certainly is - a $600 million landmine according to the report.)

So after all the posturing and bluster, after all the accusations from blowhards that anybody who questioned the Intervention is a supporter of child-rape, we learn that the “architects” of the “plan” didn’t set aside the provisions to actually carry it out.

What great economic managers. What great defenders of the little children. They fully deserved to lose their seats. As will Macklin and co. if they cock this one up.

The second Agincourt Award nomination

Published
by
Mercurius
5 months, 4 weeks ago
in Levity and Media
. 24 Comments

OK, admittedly this is an easy target, but Piers Akerman deserves a special honorary nomination for the Agincourt Award for the Longest Bow in Journalism (honorary because nobody would mistake him for a journalist).

To attempt to summarise the piece that earned the nomination would only rob you, dear reader, of the surreal delights of attempting to discern the unifying theme in this meditation that draws together these disparate events and blames them all on (boo! hiss!):

“years of politically correct indoctrination from Left-leaning social engineers particularly in the media, legal and teaching professions, which have left many gravely dysfunctional people in their wake”:

  1. The Merrylands machete-gang attacks.
  2. Indigenous grog problems, which are Gough Whitlam’s fault.
  3. A US transsexual who got some media coverage, apparently.
  4. A WA Senator-elect who is in a relationship with a transsexual.
  5. The 60 minutes story of the father-daughter incest couple.
  6. Some problem with the ABC’s coverage of 10th anniversary of the MUA waterfront dispute.
  7. Dawkins reforms.
  8. The Stolen Generation.

That’s right LPers, it’s all your fault that John Deaves screwed his daughter.

Based on Piers’ impressively broad source material, it seems that since nobody in Canberra will take his calls any more, he just occupies his time channel-surfing and reading the more lurid sections of USA Today.

But we shouldn’t be too hasty to dismiss Piers’ thesis here. He may have tapped some deeper zeitgeist, along with the wild-eyed and disheveled man who regaled my subway car between 42nd and 86th street this week, making essentially the same points as Akerman did in this tract.

The piece stands as a stark warning of what can happen to one’s faculties during a bibulous decline into soapbox raving. You have been warned.

Perhaps Piers can now go gently into retirement with one more trophy – an Agincourt Award – to adorn his cabinet?

**UPDATE** Agincourt Award nominations are open to all-comers. If you spot a candidate in your travels, please bring the article to the attention of LP Admins and it too can join the finalists!

When caption writers attack

Published
by
Mercurius
6 months, 1 week ago
in Australiana and Levity
. 20 Comments

While I’m sure the PM’s press secretary would be thrilled with the New York Post‘s extensive three-column coverage of Rudd’s visit to New York on page 17 (bottom, centre) last Sunday, they may be a little startled at the caption writer’s none-too-subtle moniker:

rudd2.jpg

Was this a flamboyant gesture to balance the gender ledger of Rudd’s New York nightlife - an attempt to settle old Scores perhaps?

No, sadly, the Rainbow Room isn’t nearly as much fun as it sounds, but is of course the stalwart dining institution atop the Rockefeller Centre.

At the weekend it was the scene of the 60th anniversary dinner of the American Australian Association which, the Murdoch-owned paper was quick to remind us, was founded in part by old pa Keith. (The Post is the local Terrorgraph equivalent, also owned by Rupert.)

A rather fascinating confluence of media, history and international politics, if you could look past the shrimp and lamb that graced the dinner tables.

But I much prefer the caption writer’s take on the night - don’t you?

Finnishing first

Published
by
Mercurius
7 months ago
in Education
. 76 Comments

Education metrics geeks would be well aware that Finland routinely comes at or near the top of international test batteries such as PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) as well as in annual OECD reports.

So it’s worth noting this summary list of features of the Finnish education system which appeared in The Providence Journal, written by former UCLA researcher and 28-year high school English teacher Walter Gardner.

Who said the following are incompatible with a world-beating education system?:

  • Education seen as an end in itself, not as a pathway to employment
  • Total spending is $5000 US dollars spent per student per year
  • Average class sizes of 25-30
  • School starts at age 7
  • National curriculum
  • Teachers design their own lesson plans (compatible with the national curriculum), instead of delivering centrally-planned scripted lessons
  • Before the equivalent of year 10, there is standardised national testing of only a 10% representative sample of each age group to check basic skills
  • No published school league tables or rankings
  • No ‘gifted and talented’ classes
  • Strong teacher union
  • Teacher pay is no more than that of neighbouring countries

Continue reading ‘Finnishing first’

If you have to say it…

Published
by
Mercurius
7 months, 1 week ago
in Foreign policy and Media
. 16 Comments

…then it probably isn’t true, right?

I don’t know what else could explain this monograph which appears alongside Greg Sheridan’s columns at The Oz:

Greg Sheridan is the most influential foreign affairs commentator in Australia.

Technically this is true. I suppose the marketing people jazzed it up from the first draft - ‘Greg Sheridan is the only foreign affairs commentator in Australia.’

But that shouldn’t deter us from pondering Mr Sheridan’s influence behind Australia’s signing of Kyoto, the dismantling of the Pacific Solution, the impending Iraq withdrawal and our recognition of Kosovo.

Perhaps Mr Sheridan’s influence can best be seen at work in the timing and venue of the former foreign minister’s luncheon appointments.

Nevertheless, the future looks bleak for Mr Sheridan’s influence. As I depart for San Francisco in two days’ time, he stands to lose fully 20% of his readership.

In the months to come, I hope to bring LP readers some up-close views of US education policies. So, until my next missive from across the Pacific, may I bid you farewell from the nicest, gentlest, most sweet-tempered education commentator in the Southern Hemisphere.

NSW curls up its toesies and dies

Published
by
Mercurius
7 months, 3 weeks ago
in Government and Transport
. 76 Comments

As a proud soon to be ex-Sydneysider, this is the hardest column I will ever write.

Queensland is now officially ahead of NSW, specifically when it comes to transport, specifically when it comes to ticketing. Like some surly middle child, we are now reduced to accepting Queensland’s hand-me-downs.

NSW is now running out of:

- Buses
- Ferries
- Trains
- Water
- Electricity
- Hospital Beds
- Did I miss anything? Continue reading ‘NSW curls up its toesies and dies’

The True Story of the education revolution

Published
by
Mercurius
7 months, 4 weeks ago
in Education
. 54 Comments

Republished with permission from Online Opinion

“Revolution, revolution … there has already been one.?
Lu Xun, The True Story of Ah Q, 1921-22. (trans.)

The great Chinese satirist and social critic Lu Xun knew a thing or two about revolutions.

Lu Xun wrote that line when the newly-awakened nation of China had thrown off the dynastic Emperors barely a decade before. As his characters smashed clay tablets proclaiming “Long Live the Emperor?, Lu Xun offered a darkly prescient vision of the cataclysmic revolutionary violence that would again convulse his nation a generation hence.

That is why this quote, delivered by a weeping nun sheltering from the rampage, is in my view the lynch-pin of Lu Xun’s legacy to us. His warning is stark - that revolutions have a tendency to roll you back round to where you started, and that things get broken along the way.

That is why I fervently hope that the latest revolutionary, our Prime Minister Lu Kewen, has read Lu Xun. If so, then perhaps he coined the term “education revolution? as an ironic homage to Lu Xun’s prophetic warning. If not, then I fear we are in for a bumpy ride. Continue reading ‘The True Story of the education revolution’

Announcing the Agincourt Award for the Longest Bow

Published
by
Mercurius
8 months ago
in History, International, Levity, Media, Relationships and Sexuality
. 90 Comments

Gentle readers, I beseech you to consider the following five seemingly unrelated phenomena:

  1. The Ishmael Beah alleged sort-of hoax (or is it?)
  2. The fourth estate’s duty to be skeptical and seek the truth
  3. Margaret Mead’s 1920s anthropological research in the South Pacific
  4. The ‘sexual revolution’ of the Baby Boomers
  5. The conservative moral imperative to bring pregnant women back to the kitchen, which is their rightful place in the natural order of the universe where they belong, which is true, and which everybody knows and secretly believes to be true if only they would search their hearts and admit it. We also secretly know that homosexuality is unnatural, that sex is dirty and shameful and wrong and should only be between a man and woman for the purpose of procreation and you know you’d all be much happier if you just did it with the lights off in the missionary position.

If you think these things have nothing to do with each other, well, you’d be right.

But that didn’t stop Simon Caterson from making an heroic effort to draw them all together in this marvellous piece of post-facto sophistry that has earnt him the first nomination in LP’s inaugural Agincourt Awards for the Longest Bow in Journalism.

Continue reading ‘Announcing the Agincourt Award for the Longest Bow’

Beer, cigs up!

Published
by
Mercurius
8 months, 1 week ago
in Economics
. 35 Comments

Rejoice! Although this SMH headline is worded more politely, it harks back to a gentler, nylon-clad era, when suburban newspapers would shriek at the iniquity of Winnie Reds rising to over 75 cents a pack.

So dear readers, here is your false-dichotomy debating topic of the day:

So-called ’sin taxes’ on certain legal substances are an appropriate way of recovering the cost of preventable diseases and other social costs associated with these substances. In fact, they’re such a good idea, we should extend them to carbon, jet travel, coffee-drinking, meat, tofu, breathing and anything else that isn’t nailed down. And nails too.

-or-

‘Sin-taxes’ are an unacceptable form of nanny-state coercion and in effect a regressive tax upon low income earners who are subjected to middle-class morality everytime they pay more for the only simple pleasures they can afford, while the law-makers enjoy tax-privileged junkets and resort holidays…

Discuss.

(Name-calling will be subjected to a non-deductible swear-jar levy.)