Mark's blog
lolqueen
But, slightly more seriously, are you serious? I know the old dear drove a truck during the War, but that was, after all, a War. Moreover, I can’t see how monarchy can really be compatible with the normative expectation for young women to make their own way in the world - although I suppose Kate is a commoner after all. But then, one would have thought that if she were going to be joining the royal family, she should bally well stop acting like a commoner.
Weekend NSW ALP Fatsos
Clearly I was not the only one who found the idea of John della Bosca on a bicycle farcical:
And kudos to the SMH for finding this photograph to illustrate an otherwise rather banal story about David Campbell’s junket to the US. I do think that the taxpayers shouldn’t be paying for some unspecified fatso’s coffee on a weekend trip to MOMA, but the trip does seem to accord with the general norms of public service. If anything, it just adds to my already-entrenched opinion that the states are a waste of money and should be abolished.
What do you think Davo’s eating here? Looks like a blin to me (meaning the caviar is presumably already seeping down his gullet), although I’m sure he didn’t get where he is passing up the odd humble pikelet either.
loltories
At the risk of elevating the level of political discourse around here, I just wanted to post this retort to Joe “the People’s Tory” Hockey’s criticism of changes to the Medicare levy:
Pest control
It’s being reported that a species of aquarium fish may be swimming feral around Newcastle, and may thus be the latest pernicious weed species inflicted by man on Australian ecosystems.
When will we learn? Never, judging by this article, to wit:
The department’s acting manager of aquatic biosecurity, Bill Bardsley, said that if the fish had spread to the dam it might be too late to control its numbers.
“This does highlight the need for ongoing public education, which we already do a considerable amount of,” he said.
“If you have a fish and you want to get rid of it, the right thing to do is to dispose of it humanely or give it to a fish shop or pass it on to a friend because you never know the damage they could do if released.”
Sure, but if you let people have these fish at home, sooner or later they’re going to get into the wild, because no amount of education will ensure that no one ever releases one. Just as we in Australia are not afflicted of the American madness of letting people have automatic firearms on the understanding that they don’t misuse them, similarly we shouldn’t be letting people be keeping potentially devastating species as domestic pets. I fail to see that people have a fundamental right to keep exotic fish.
The Arrogance of Incumbency
I’m struck by how much the NSW state Labor government resemble not the new federal Labor government but the old Howard regime. The arrogance of incumbency, populist social conservatism and neoliberal fundamentalism all remind me of that old administration. The particular thing that puts me in mind of the Howard government though is their new use of public funds for a political advertising campaign, which itself is a beat-up. Howard was the master of this, and action has rightly been promised at a federal level to stop it happening in the future.
The advertising campaign I’m referring to is one hyping the state government’s new plans to put in a metro link to the North-West from Sydney CBD. The fact of the matter is that not one thing has yet been done to actually build this link, that the Labor state government has a long history of announcing public infrastructure projects and then shelving them, and that it in fact shelved a more comprehensive plan to build a new full-scale CityRail link in favour of this plan.
Announcing and advertising infrastructure is a lot easier than building it. Fortunately, I don’t believe (as a materialist) that it can have anything like the same effect.
Clearly, the Iemma government is reviled in NSW. People in this state are well aware of the slippage of their quality of life in recent years, and the crucial link of this slippage to the lack of government action on metropolitan transport. Which is to say that, outrageous though it is, I think this campaign will be about as electorally successful as Howard’s WorkChoices advertising spree.
Earth Hour 2: Insignificance Doubled
“Please take a bow, Sydney
Last night Mother Earth hosted a candlelight supper for a few million close friends.”
coos the unbelievably smug smh.com.au
To begin something of a tradition, I would like to call readers’ attention to this before-and-after ‘Earth Hour’ shot released by the originator of ‘Earth Hour’, the Sydney Morning Turd Herald:
While the campaign has clearly been 100% successful in getting large public buildings to dim their ultimately pointless floodlighting, it does not seem to have been able to persuade them to dim any of their other lighting, and it does not seem to have persuaded any of the North Shore Harbourside dwellers who really ought to be Earth Hour’s bread and butter (the idea was dreamt up over a Mosman back fence, after all). Indeed, the lack of interest in Earth Hour this year was crushing compared to last year when, as I argued then, hardly anyone observed it anyway.
Earth Hour is a media fiction from start to finish, although kudos to the SMH this year for not photoshopping the evidence as it did last time. Its only really enthusiastic backer seems to be the NSW state government, which is surely the worst endorsement imaginable, given that under Morris Iemma the state government as embarked on a course of environmental assault worthy of Cyril Sneer.
Update: the Harold is now trumpeting a 5% national reduction in power consumption as the net gain from ‘Earth Hour’.
Paul Bird from the National Electricity Market Management Company told ABC Radio the impact of last night’s Earth Hour event was the equivalent of two large power stations (or 1000 mega-watts) being temporarily shut down.
This may be so, but since two large power stations were not actually temporarily shut down, there wasn’t actually any decrease in carbon dioxide output, was there? Indeed, as Andrew Leigh points out (thanks to Emmeline in the comments to this post for pointing that out), the carbon dioxide output of the insipid candles purchased for the occasion means that ‘Earth Hour’ actually increases CO2 output.
we is in ur streetz
This is really a perfect time for the Tibetan nationalists to come out in open rebellion, because the Olympics means that the Chinese state either will not be able to crack down as brutally as it has in the past, or, if it does, that unprecendented attention will come to bear. If a Yangoon-style crackdown is forthcoming in Lhasa, liberal/democratic governments will have no choice but to boycott the Olympics (I would have thought). This would set a very interesting precedent. The Western boycott of the Moscow Olympics by the West was on the basis of the alleged Soviet invasion of Afghanistan not the domestic human rights situation, and the retaliatory boycott of the LA Olympics by the Eastern Bloc was on the basis that the US was not a safe place for communist athletes. This would then be the first human rights boycott at the Olympics.
For Chinese dissidents at this juncture, there is an unprecedented possiblity of getting away with the kind of action that might otherwise be met simply with deadly force, and in the case that it is met with such force, would have multiplied effects to what it otherwise would, forcing Western countries to take a concrete stance on the issue, embarassing the Chinese government and getting Western governments reluctantly involved in Chinese domestic issues. Such an involvement would set an uncomfortable precedent for Western government of concern for human rights and for the treatment of oppressed nations, the latter being particularly important because of the existence of national minorities within Western state borders whose national aspirations are circumscribed.
On federal economic interventions under today's neoliberalism
Every time I blog about economics it gets torn apart, but I can’t seem to help myself.
It strikes me that the policies being pursued to deal with the economic tumult descending upon us by the authorities in the US and Australia are rather sad, a sad reflection on the paucity of controls on the economy under neoliberalism.
The US is rather clearer. The economy is tanking, so both the Fed and the government are doing all they can to leverage it within the constraints of neoliberalism. The Fed drastically cuts interest rates – basically the only thing it can do. Given that the problem is one of people having too much debt, this is both a good and a bad thing to do: good insofar as it takes the pressure off the indebted, but bad insofar as it encourages people to take on even more debt. The government is cutting taxes. This is a bad move insofar as it plunges the nation into even more insane levels of debt to pay for the float. Essentially, the question here is whether the crazy levels of public and private debts in the US are sustainable. For some reason it seems to be widely held that, though unprecedented, they are. I take the view that the economy is teetering on the edge of a precipice - while it doesn’t have to fall over the edge, over a long enough time span something’s bound to happen that will topple it. The US still has an ace in its hand though, viz. the nice fat war that is basically an economic cure-all, should it be possible to amp it up further. We haven’t yet found out how far this strategy can go, but we will. None of the serious US presidential candidates are willing to “take military action off the table”, and as such the wonderful economic and political panacea of aggressive war remains likely to characterise US public policy for the foreseeable future.
The Australian case is somewhat more opaque. Though the ASX has followed the trajectory of the US markets, the RBA sees no sign of recession, but is on the contrary worried about the Australian economy ‘overheating’ because of the rise of inflation. Here is where I’m going to really get in over my head, but it seems to me that this is a shocking misdiagnosis, and that inflationary pressure is not caused by overheating at all. The Aussie economy has been going gangbusters for years, with very low unemployment and high rates of growth, without inflationary pressure mounting – why is it only ‘overheating’ now? The answer is that it’s not. Rather certain extraordinary factors unconnected to economic growth are causing price inflation. The primary one is the price of petrol. This affects the price of almost everything in Australian shops. The drought has also had a big impact, though one assumes that will be abating to some extent now. The other thing is rental price inflation. House price inflation might be a factor too, but I don’t think it is, inasmuch as it didn’t cause inflationary pressure to speak of when Sydney house prices were going through the roof earlier in the decade. Rather, in Sydney at least, the decline in attractiveness of house-buying in outer suburban areas, which is in no small measure a symptom of rising petrol costs, has caused a decline in profitability of outer suburban housebuilding, hence a rise in pressure on rental housing. Even this is probably not decisive, however: what’s really piling on the inflationary pressure here is precisely the high interest rates themselves. Since much rental housing is owned by mortgage holders, higher interest rates drives them to push up rents. Moreover, the high interest rates also put the squeeze on owner-occupiers.
On these fronts, inflation driven by rising consumer prices in consumables and housing, increasing interest rates really doesn’t help. The only thing that could help here is serious state action (e.g. introducing rent controls, creating new public housing, introducing price controls on petrol, creating new public transportation, investing in rail infrastructure for shipping goods). This is the case in the US too (where there is only one possible state action allowable in the conjunction of neoconservatism and neoliberalism in US public policy, namely a military build-up and expenditure). The Rudd government’s only action thus far is to try to constrain government spending. Since I don’t believe that Australian government spending is part of the problem, I can’t see how it can be part of the solution. I regard as at least plausible the arguments of the University of Newcastle’s Centre of Full Employment and Equity that running a public surplus means privatising debt (notwithstanding that in the US both the government and the populace are running up debts like there’s no tomorrow).
"Gay plague claims more victims" quoth headline-writer at Fairfax
Not really, but why should my headlines about Fairfax cleave to a higher standard of accuracy than their own?
I accept I might be being a bit over-sensitive to cast this SMH story as homophobic (unlike with the grossly homophobic Sun Herald story a while back), but it’s at best hyperbolic sensationalism.
First, we had the claim that an HIV-positive man “may have” infected 250 people (currently on news.com.au, but I swear to God that smh.com.au also ran a nearly identical headline yesteray). No-one could reasonably make this extrapolation from the facts, which were that the police were going to talk to every person that the HIV-positive man had been in phone contact with, and that was 250 people. No-one has sex with everyone they speak to on the phone for a month. Seriously. The thing that should be clear from that figure is that there’s no way that the man in question infected that many people, i.e. that whatever the number of infected people is, it’s got to be less than that.
Today we have “Police search for victims of HIV prostitute”. Victims? VICTIMS? Are you fucking kidding me? People who have unsafe sex with a prostitute are victims? Seriously, if you have sex with a prostitute, you might want to use protection. I think that’s kind of a no-brainer. I don’t care of s/he says s/he’s a virgin. You know, this goes for people who aren’t prostitutes either. Having unsafe sex with anyone at all ever carries a degree of risk. Yes, if they lead you to believe they’re safe when they know they’re rife with disease, you might be able to claim you’re their victim, but not if they’re a prostitute. If someone has a financial incentive to pretend that s/he doesn’t have a disease you don’t assume they’re telling the truth. More to the point, if someone you don’t know is willing to have unsafe sex with you, then s/he is probably willing to have unsafe sex with other people, hence it doesn’t matter what his/her last STD tests said.
The Sun Herald and the Gay Menace
Can anyone say “moral panic”?
HUNDREDS of straight men are being raped in the city and eastern suburbs every year, many after having their drinks spiked.
Health experts have warned that men can be just as much of a target for sexual predators as women, although most men were not aware of the threat that lurked every time they went to the pub.
That’s right punters, EVERY TIME YOU GO TO THE PUB, poofters are lurking around the corner looking to drug you and take your anal virginity. It’s a wonder there isn’t more awareness of this problem considering it’s so prevalent.
Obviously, male-on-male rape happens and isn’t funny, although the problem of homosexuals who rape straight men is a considerably less serious problem than that of straight men who rape women. Men ‘can’ be just as much a target for sexual predators as women, but they aren’t actually now, are they?
The figure the article opens with, “hundreds of straight men are being raped in the city and eastern suburbs every year” (and note, it doesn’t specify how many of those are drink-spikings, just “many”) is 95% dubious. It seems to be based on taking a figure of 44 sexual assaults on men last year, and then multiplying that by “up to 95%” – which of course would give us a figure of up to almost a thousand. The only thing we have about drink-spiking is that “drug-assisted sexual assaults” are “relatively common” among the 44. Common relative to what, one wonders. Do we have any numbers on this? Has it happened five times? Was it perpetrated by people the men knew? Were the victims or perpetrators straight or gay? ARE STRAIGHT MEN REALLY BEING MENACED BY LEGIONS OF DIRTY GAYS WITH ROHYPNOL AT ALL? I love the invocation of the city and eastern suburbs as well, by the way. We all know who hangs out there, right?
Seriously, could Fairfax do something about the Sun Herald already? I genuinely don’t see why we need it given the existence of the Sunday Telegraph.