US Election: Who's playing the race card?

Jon Stewart makes a very good point about US election coverage:

KEVIN07 - update

Thanks again to everyone who commented on my original KEVIN07 post. The newsfeeds are full of interesting points of view about the site:

For a start I think it's un-Australian to shorten Kevin Rudd's name to just Kevin. No, it needs to become the truly iconic Kev for him to have a real chance to win the election in 2007.

Anyway, back to the commentary:

Craig Sherborne at the Herald Sun points out the American elements in the site:

“Lashings of American-style red, white and blue, which are also Labor Party colours, create a bold backdrop for video links and a quick, simple manifesto for hot topics from job security to climate change.”

The Herald Sun also wonders where the KEVIN07 t-shirts are made:

“Kevin Rudd's "prototype" campaign T-shirts may have been made in the sweatshops of Asia.

A "Kevin07" T-shirt obtained by the Herald Sun had its label cut out.

A Labor spokesman could not rule out that it had been made overseas. ”

NineMSN have attracted hundreds of user comments about the KEVIN07 website. Most pointed was this one:

“Hypocrisy best describes this lastest stunt. Kevin Rudd is my local member and before he became opposition leader I sent an email for him to address some issues on my behalf...........I am still waiting for a reply!!!!!”

Finally, Lachlan Connor (independent for Victoria) gave us the following hacked image of Kev and his crew:


I'm looking forward to more good parody images coming out over the next week or so ... mind you being parodied and made fun of never did John Howard any harm, so it may all come good for Kev in the end.

KEVIN07 - are Labor out of their minds?

We've hit a new low in Australian political life with the launch of KEVIN07, the campaign website for Kevin Rudd - oh, and the Labor party. It is full of the mock enthusiasm so prevalent in American politics, and the similarities are made more obvious by the use of red, white and blue, the presence of bumper stickers, and the ability to buy KEVIN07 gear ...


In a blatant acknowledgement that they must fight the Liberals on personality alone, the site launch represents the rock-bottom for Australian politics - that is, until we have the Rudd girl battling the Howard girl online (like the yanks do with Obama girl vs Hilary girl). Mind you Kev looks like he's just swallowed a prune in this photo, so he probably needs some cheering up.


The buzz around the office is that this is likely to backfire. It is all too easy to parody and rip something like this off, not to mention the average Aussie's instinctive dislike of anyone so blatantly espousing American qualities and values.


We might like working with and cooperating with yanks, but that doesn't mean we want our politicians to become them!

The buzz in the blogosphere is that Labor has made a bold play, but might just have shot themselves in the foot with this one. I think the idea, using the web effectively, is a smart one - but the out and out cheesiness of the site backfires badly.

Sydney disaster data simply rehashed 2004 research

The NSW State government has been caught red-handed recycling their climate data. Apparently yesterday's 'exclusive' for the Daily Telegraph was simply the re-hash of a bunch of numbers from a 2004 report.

“Dr Preston said details specifically relating to Sydney had been extracted from the 2004 study and republished this week in what he described as "a brochure". Similar brochures, also based on the 2004 study, were being prepared for all NSW's water catchment areas. "There is no new research in this," he said.

Mr Iemma later acknowledged the data had been released in September 2004 by his predecessor, Bob Carr, and that the latest report was a "new cut" of Dr Preston's work.

"Well, this new cut looks at Sydney," he said. "This further analysis is confirmation that we don't need to be looking for the impact, it's here. Hence my call for a national summit and a national action plan."

The Opposition environment spokesman, Michael Richardson, called the report a "stunt" and said the Government should introduce stricter renewable energy targets.”

So this was just a publicity stunt that the Daily Telegraph fell for, and now their rival paper the Sydney Morning Herald has uncovered?

They put the boot into Premier Morris Iemma in a related story.

Climate change update

The classy science policy guys at the Prometheus blog ask what does "policy neutral" mean to the IPCC? They've got an interesting point of view on the slant that the IPCC's latest report will take, especially as the IPCC claims to be policy neutral:

“The past reaction to my comments on political advocacy by IPCC leadership has been mixed. Some who share the IPCC's advocated agenda see no problem in the IPCC leadership engaging in such advocacy. Who wouldn’t want such a group perceived as authoritative and legitimate on their side? (Similarly, I am sure neo-cons would welcome a CIA Director advocating action on Iran!) By contrast some opposed to the advocated agenda have seized upon the obvious inconsistency in the IPCC’s views on "neutrality" to try to impinge the credibility of the organization. From my perspective, while both of these perspectives are to be expected (and I am sure will make their views known in response), there is a third view that matters most -- and that is the question of the appropriate role of organized expertise in decision making, whether it is the CIA or IPCC. This last view is quite independent of (or it should be) what one thinks about the issues of climate policy.”

Margaret Wente at the Globe and Mail has written a great article that condenses much of the current climate change debate into a manageable summary; Climate change a 'questionable truth' is fantastically quotable due to the number of respected scientists she talks to, and the depth of their responses about climate change issues. Here are a few of the more interesting ones (emphasis mine):

“The very great uncertainty of long-term climate impacts is a point that often gets lost in the debate. The scenarios range from mild to severe, but it's the extreme ones that get the ink.”

and

“The climate debate focuses almost entirely on mitigation (how we can slow down global warming). But climate scientists and policy experts say that in the short term — our lifetimes — our most important insurance policy is adaptation. Nothing we do to cut emissions will reduce the risk from hurricanes or rising seas in the short term. But there are other ways to reduce the risk. We can build storm-surge defences, stop building in coastal areas and make sure we protect our fresh-water supplies from salination. We also can develop crops that will do well in hotter climates.

“Adaptation” is not a word that figures much in climate-change debates. Activists (and much of the general public) think it sounds lazy and defeatist. But the experts talk about adaptation all the time.

“Climate-change policy requires that both of these issues — adaptation and carbon reduction — be addressed simultaneously,” Yale's Prof. Mendelsohn says.”

Environmental campaigner Tim Flannery (and 2007 Australian of the Year) laments that scientists need more freedom to research Australian-specific climate change factors and to spend less time helping make industries such as coal 'clean'. The reality is that both are required, but he does bring up some interesting research:

“Over the past 50 years, forest clearing and industrialisation in Asia have produced a haze of tiny particles called aerosols that hang perpetually over the south Asian landmass. This haze cools the region, and in doing so alters the temperature and air pressure gradients across the Indian Ocean.

It is most likely these changes that have increased the tendency of monsoonal winds, and the rain they bring, to flow across Australia. So important is their impact that without these aerosols, some models show that global warming would cause northern Australia to become even drier and sunnier than it was in 1950.

Studies such as these underline the need for government policy to be underpinned by fundamental science. Unfortunately, this is not what we have seen in Australia over the past decade. Instead, scientists have been told to become more relevant to industry, and increasingly organisations such as the CSIRO have been reorganised to work with partners such as the coal industry. This has left us in a dangerous position, flying partially blind into a rapidly changing future.

Australians need to be sure we are making the right decisions on climate change. Aerosols last only weeks or days in the atmosphere, and if Asia cleans up its industry and air (there are signs that this is already happening), northern Australia's rainfall may decline precipitously.”

Great. So now we don't want our neighbours to stop polluting their air ... clearly whether the world addresses climate change (or not) adaptation will be required.

Neville Nichols from Monash University, an IPCC contributor, is brought in on Australia's current dry spell (emphasis added):

“Nicholls says while the consensus of most climate scientists is that it is possible that man-made climate change may be at least contributing to the present dry period, it is certainly not its root cause. He sees a real danger in the public being swept up in the belief that the drought has been caused by climate change.

"I think there is this feeling in the community linking this drought to climate change, and the great worry with that is that when it does rain they will think all that stuff about climate change is rubbish," he says. "We are experiencing this really intense one-year drought which probably has almost nothing to do with climate change, it just seems like it's a natural thing, and there is the possibility that the longer-term drought that we've had might just be natural variability, but the problem is (that) as far as anything in science is certain, we're definitely getting warmer temperatures because of the enhanced greenhouse effect."

Nicholls's dollar-each-way observations are typical of those closest to the debate and most qualified to comment.

They have left a vacuum in the public debate that has been filled by commentators less constrained by the science.

...

High-profile environmental commentators such as Tim Flannery have done plenty to fuel this populist thinking. His engaging blend of genuine science with hand-picked factoids and a dose of fear has long since blamed the drought on climate change, warning of rising food prices and referring to the erroneous claim at the water summit last year by South Australian Premier Mike Rann that this is a one-in-1000-year drought.”

The Australia Institute have presented a report about possible nuclear reactor sites, which they point out is “one of the most politically contentious aspects of the nuclear debate.” Unsurprisingly, given their left-wing position, they chose to focus on this aspect in their report, emphasising people's fears:

“Report author Andrew Macintosh said the fact that nuclear energy attracted moderate levels of support at a general level but fierce opposition from local communities when concrete proposals were put forward suggested the presence of the not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) phenomenon.

...

Greens senator Kerry Nettle said the report unsurprisingly showed that populations close to the suggested sites did not want nuclear power plants.

"Instead of talking about 25 possible nuclear power plants, the prime minister should be looking for another 25 sites for major wind power stations and another 25 solar power stations," she said.”

Unfortunately we are unlikely to get anyone to want wind stations or solar power sites next door to them either ... so why does this study invalidate the pursuit of nuclear energy as a viable alternate energy source? I wonder how long it takes before some enterprising local council works out that the impact on jobs, industry and local living conditions of a nuclear power plant far outweighs the potential and theoretical downsides? All I know is that if I move up to the Central Coast I would far rather have the local coal power plant shutdown and a smaller footprint (physical and environmental) nuclear plant take its place.

The NSW State Government has asked the CSIRO to reflect on the potential impacts to Sydney of global warming, and it appears that devastation is expected unless we adapt:

“The CSIRO report warned that the city must work out how to adapt quickly, with the impacts of human-caused global warming now apparently inevitable.”

It's a shame that Narrabeen is one of the suburbs they say will be most damaged - but in reality much of it is built on sandbar anyway, and in 'normal' years you can expect big storms to wash over much of it.

In summary, climate change alarmists are getting shriller, Australian State and Federal governments are still using 'independent' reports to fight their political battles, and real policy approaches to adapt to and minimise the effects of climate change are still nowhere in sight. The next Federal and NSW State elections will be very interesting - if things continue as they are we can expect more gradual policy changes, if either government changes then we might see a much faster move in either direction.

Humour the secret of their success?

NEWS.com.au reports that the Australian Treasurer, Peter Costello, had a bit of fun at the expense of former Midnight Oil frontman, one-time environmental activist and now Labor MP, Peter Garrett. Costello misappropriated some classic pro-Aboriginal rights lines to chastise the Australian Labor Party (ALP) for raking in Commonwealth dollars for the rental of one of their buildings (i.e. they funded their political campaigns by renting a property to the government at a "very generous rent"). Here's the Treasurer in action:


At around the same time Senator Bob Brown was attacking Peter Garrett in the senate, saying that he has sold out the environment since joining the ALP. Brown's never been one to ignore controversy, and often gets confused, but this is a classic case of poor loser syndrome, especially given Labor's pro-global warming policies. NEWS.com.au's Don Woolford put it like this:

“So the market-driven Liberals can have harmless, foolish fun and the warm and fuzzy Greens can hate. It seems upside down.”

Perhaps that's one reason why the Liberals are managing to hang on in Federal parliament.

The End is Nigh! (of global warming alarmism)

Christopher Monckton is writing a series of articles for the UK's Daily Telegraph on climate change. His first rejects completely the Stern Report:

“Last week, Gordon Brown and his chief economist both said global warming was the worst "market failure" ever. That loaded soundbite suggests that the "climate-change" scare is less about saving the planet than, in Jacques Chirac's chilling phrase, "creating world government". This week and next, I'll reveal how politicians, scientists and bureaucrats contrived a threat of Biblical floods, droughts, plagues, and extinctions worthier of St John the Divine than of science.

Sir Nicholas Stern's report on the economics of climate change, which was published last week, says that the debate is over. It isn't. There are more greenhouse gases in the air than there were, so the world should warm a bit, but that's as far as the "consensus" goes. After the recent hysteria, you may not find the truth easy to believe. So you can find all my references and detailed calculations here.

...

The large, full-colour "hockey-stick" was the key graph in the UN's 2001 report, and the only one to appear six times. The Canadian Government copied it to every household. Four years passed before a leading scientific journal would publish the truth about the graph. Did the UN or the Canadian government apologise? Of course not. The UN still uses the graph in its publications.


Even after the "hockey stick" graph was exposed, scientific papers apparently confirming its abolition of the medieval warm period appeared. The US Senate asked independent statisticians to investigate. They found that the graph was meretricious, and that known associates of the scientists who had compiled it had written many of the papers supporting its conclusion.”

As mentioned above, he backs his article with a comprehensive 40-page PDF document with calculations, references and discussions.

Climate Audit applauds this first article:

“The article is here and the background information (or at least the first part) is given here in pdf format. The backgrounder in particular is a pretty good overview of the current state of the science, such as it is, and covers the salient points from MM03, MM05GRL and MM05EE pretty well.

There are some slips of the keyboard in the backgrounder, so perhaps someone would like to e-mail Chris about them, or mention them in the comments.”

They also point out that it seems Mike Hulme, doesn't like the Stern report's alarmist language, which is strange seeing as his research centre contributed to it:

“To state that climate change will be "catastrophic" hides a cascade of value-laden assumptions which do not emerge from empirical or theoretical science.

Is any amount of climate change catastrophic? Catastrophic for whom, for where, and by when? What index is being used to measure the catastrophe?

The language of fear and terror operates as an ever-weakening vehicle for effective communication or inducement for behavioural change.”

From this blog on climate science research comes a set of interesting questions about climate science, followed by a pertinent dismissal of the UN's IPCC reports:

“These are important scientific questions which have either been poorly, or not at all, examined in climate assessments such as the IPCC and CCSP reports. Clearly, we need to move beyond such assessments that are written by individuals who are mostly evaluating their own research. Policymakers are poorly served by this inbred assessment framework by the scientific community.”

The more I read about this issue, the more it sounds like group-think taken to the extreme.

Stern Report = Political BS

It seems the Stern report is really just a political stunt:

“The Stern review is not about climate change but about economic, technological and trade advantage. Its perpetrators seek power through climate scaremongering. The review's release was carefully timed to closely precede this month's US congressional elections and the Nairobi climate conference. Beyond these events, we can expect another burst of alarmist hallelujahs to accompany the launch of IPCC's assessment report in February.

Though it will be lionised for a while yet, the Stern review is destined to join Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb and think tank the Club of Rome's manifesto, Limits to Growth, in the pantheon of big banana scares that proved to be unfounded. It is part of the last hurrah for those warmaholics who inhabit a world of virtual climate reality that exists only inside flawed computer models.”

Bjorn Lomberg also has a go at the Stern report:

“Unfortunately, this claim falls apart when one reads the 700-page tome. Despite using many good references, the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change is selective and its conclusion flawed. Its fear-mongering arguments have been sensationalised, which is ultimately only likely to make the world worse off.

...

The review is also one-sided, focusing almost exclusively on carbon-emission cuts as the solution to the problem of climate change. Stern sees increasing hurricane damage in the US as a powerful argument for carbon controls. However, hurricane damage is increasing predominantly because there are more people with more goods to be damaged, settling in more risky habitats. Even if global warming does significantly increase the power of hurricanes, it is estimated that 95 per cent to 98 per cent of the increased damage will be due to demographics. The review acknowledges that simple initiatives such as bracing and securing roof trusses and walls can cheaply reduce damage by more than 80 per cent; yet its policy recommendations on expensive carbon reductions promise to cut the damage by 1 per cent to 2per cent at best. That is a bad deal.

Stern is also selective, often seeming to cherry-pick statistics to fit an argument. This is demonstrated most clearly in the review's examination of the social damage costs of CO2, essentially the environmental cost of emitting each extra tonne of CO2. The most well-recognised climate economist in the world is probably Yale University's William Nordhaus, whose "approach is perhaps closest in spirit to ours", according to the Stern review. Nordhaus finds that the social cost of CO2 is $2.50 per tonne. Stern, however, uses a figure of $85 per tonne. Picking a rate even higher than the official British estimates - which have been criticised for being over the top - speaks volumes. ”

A Challenge to Journalists Who Cover Global Warming

Personally, I think we should all use more sustainable, healthier and environmentally sensitive power sources. In fact nuclear fission is currently my hands down winner for offering large amoutns of power, reasonably efficiently but still without harming the environment too much (and yes, you need to be careful of the waste products, but isn't that true of coal-burning powerplants too?).

However, I find myself sceptical when the someone claims that the relatively recent changes in climate are expressly due to human effects on the environment - not that these haven't been real - just that their actual net effect is not really well understood. It seems that I am not alone, as Senator James Inhofe, Chairman of the US Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee, has come out and laid down A Challenge to Journalists Who Cover Global Warming.

Inhofe particularly took aim at Al Gore's recent movie:

“Here is a sampling of some of the errors and misrepresentations made by Gore in An Inconvenient Truth:

• He promoted the now-debunked “hockey stick” temperature chart in an attempt to prove man’s overwhelming impact on the climate.
• He attempted to minimize the significance of the Medieval Warm period and the Little Ice Age.
• He insisted on a link between increased hurricane activity and global warming that most scientists believe does not exist.
• He asserted that today’s Arctic is experiencing unprecedented warmth while ignoring that temperatures in the 1930s were as warm or warmer.
• He claimed the Antarctic was warming and losing ice but failed to note that is true only of a small region and the vast bulk has been cooling and gaining ice.
• He hyped unfounded fears that Greenland’s ice is in danger of disappearing.
• He erroneously claimed that the ice cap on Mt. Kilimanjaro is disappearing due to global warming, even while the region cools and researchers blame the ice loss on local land-use practices.
• He made assertions of a massive future sea-level rise that is way outside any supposed scientific “consensus” and is not supported in even the most alarmist literature.
• He incorrectly implied that a Peruvian glacier’s retreat is due to global warming, while ignoring the fact that the region has been cooling since the 1930s and other glaciers in South America are advancing.
• He blamed global warming for water loss in Africa’s Lake Chad, despite NASA scientists’ concluding that local population and grazing factors are the more likely culprits.
• He inaccurately claimed polar bears are drowning in significant numbers due to melting ice when in fact they are thriving.
• He failed to inform viewers that the 48 scientists who accused President Bush of distorting science were part of a political advocacy group set up to support Democrat presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004”

Inhofe's sample of press clippings from the last 100 years is also very revealing as it shows the press going back and forth between global warming and cooling - and each time maximising the outrageous claims, and ignoring contrary evidence.

I think this reveals a basic human truth, when confronted with environmental cycles that take place on timescales well beyond a human's lifespan, people tend to overreact and misjudge the effect this will have on their personal lives. It's like finding out that the Earth swings into and out of Ice Ages - and then immediately worrying about every drop in temperature that we feel day-by-day.

The real issue here is that some business people have found a way to use the current hype over global warming to push for government legislation to change the current business regulatory environment. Whether this will help or harm the environment, no one knows, however you can bet that these people have a very good idea how it will help them make money and harm their competitors.

Revealing the myth of party factions

It turns out that Australian political party factions have become free from values, Daleks pursuing world domination for its own sake, at least that is an insider's opinion:

“Factions have become executive placement agencies, competitors or (more usually) joint venturers that case recruits for jobs in exchange for loyalty and the lure of parliamentary preferment. The people so placed become patrons themselves, in a cycle of values-free renewal. When a party is in power, all is hunky dory. Out of power it has nothing much to sustain it beyond the prospect of winning next time. Incumbency is everything.

The crisis of federal Labor is the crisis of the state Liberals, is the crisis of the British Conservatives. It is a crisis of belief and values. That is why the outright imbecilic gets spoken by men who know better: arrest 200 young people of Middle Eastern appearance without cause; make "Australian values" a part of a visa for entry. The outlandish is probable when your policy is based on guesswork, market research and a requirement for clearance only by those who are the inner group of the political class.

These factional Daleks of the senator's evocative description, the machine men who are values-free, will not offer counsel to restrain stupidity. Robert Ray has gone as far as an insider can to warn that the worst people in the menageries are in charge of the show. Kim Beazley has responded by defending those whom Ray named.

That response was as certain as the sun rising this morning: the continuing leadership of Kim Beazley depends utterly on the Daleks.”

Refuse terror - choose life!

From Bruce Schneier's Crypto-Gram newsletter comes some good advice.

“I'd like everyone to take a deep breath and listen for a minute.

The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets, or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics. The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.

And we're doing exactly what the terrorists want. ”

When terrorists can affect an election result, when they stop a holiday destination from attracting tourists, when we'd rather stay at home than travel abroard, when we look askance at people of "middle-eastern" descent ... then they have won a small victory. Let us remember, they are not soldiers, fighting for a specific state, they are terrorists, they cannot win our land - but they can batter our spirit, poison our hearts and spread the cancer of their evil philosophy.


Some commentators seem to acknowledge this, but want to not look at taking preventative measures - personally I think we need to walk the fine line between adapting to the new tactical security landscape, and refusing to be affected by terrorism. What does Bruce say?

“But our job is to remain steadfast in the face of terror, to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to not panic every time two Muslims stand together checking their watches. There are approximately 1 billion Muslims in the world, a large percentage of them not Arab, and about 320 million Arabs in the Middle East, the overwhelming majority of them not terrorists. Our job is to think critically and rationally, and to ignore the cacophony of other interests trying to use terrorism to advance political careers or increase a television show's viewership.

The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to recognize that terrorism is just one of the risks we face, and not a particularly common one at that. And our job is to fight those politicians who use fear as an excuse to take away our liberties and promote security theater that wastes money and doesn't make us any safer.”

We've certainly seen enough "security theatre" in the Australian political landscape. Personally I believe in the government's words a bit more than the opposition - if only because they are expected to back them up with action. I think that Prime Minister John Howard does an interesting job of portraying the image of a steadfast, unworried leader - yet he is accused of promoting fear and division within Australia. That might be politics warring with personality - but I find my own reaction is somewhat similar. I want to remain unmoved, yet I find myself questioning why certain issues were either ignored, or swept under the carpet in years gone by - decisions that seem now to be foolhardy.

V for Vendetta

Top of the head rating: 4/5

We watched the wonderful V for Vendetta last night. It was a great film, with enough going on to keep us rivetted to it, despite the Phantom of the Opera overtones of an masked hero living in the underground.

It was nice to see a film that treated it's audience as intelligent people, that did not over-explain, or at the other extreme oversalts with handwaved plot points or coincidences. There are, of course, some unexpected issues. V appears to be wealthy, but no reason is given for that (except perhaps theft), he is exceptionally gifted in combat (again no reason), and at the end seems to have some Matrix-like speed (a Wachowski brothers movie of course ...). V is entitled to be mysterious, because he is the center of the plot, the epitome of the mystery being unravelled. It seems fitting that as he says he does not believe in coincidence, he is surrounded by them. Also, we come into the story well at the end - you eventually realise that this is the culmination of over a decade's hard work.

The actors do a fine job within the weirdness of this future vision. Hugo Weaving's voice beautifully conveys emotion even when his face is unseen, and Natalie Portman is believable as a bystander pulled into the plot - although her British accent is atrocious in the first few scenes (I was sure she was meant to be playing a Yank stuck in Britain). The rest of the cast play their parts well, although only Stephen Rea is really stretched by his role. Roger Allam deserves special mention for his too-brief egotistical ravings as the "Voice of London". In fact the words of the screenplay are beautifully selected, and add the texture to the monochromatic fascist background of dystopian Britain. For example, this piece by V shows a nice self-mocking turn of phrase:

“Voilà! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a bygone vexation stands vivified, and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition. The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so let me simply add that it's my very good honor to meet you and you may call me V.”

So is it perfect? Frankly no, it took a third of the movie for me to realise that "St Mary's" is the name of the disease central to the plot, and not just a location. Most of the characters seem a bit too cardboard cutout, and in a fascist state, men with guns rarely hesitate to shoot mobs of rebels - even if unarmed.

it is however well worth seeing, and whilst some people have identified modern American neo-conservatives with the Norsefire fascists in the film, I think that a more certain view is that government is intended to be for the people, and any government that forgets that is on the slippery slope to fascism.

Citizen vs Tribesman

America's ABC has an interesting article on Why We Will Never See Democracy in the Middle East. Steven Pressfield says the key is the longstanding conflict between the mindset of 'citizen' and 'tribesman'.

“What exactly is the tribal mind-set? It derives from that most ancient of social organizations, whose virtues are obedience, fidelity, warrior pride, respect for ancestors, hostility to outsiders and willingness to lay down one's life for the cause/faith/group. The tribe's ideal leader is closer to Tony Soprano than to FDR and its social mores are more like those of Geronimo's Apaches than the city council of Scarsdale or Shepherd's Bush.”

He makes a particular point about how the citizen takes part in war, but the tribesman takes revenge:

“The tribesman does not operate by a body of civil law but by a code of honor. If he receives a wrong, he does not seek redress. He wants revenge. The taking of revenge is a virtue in tribal eyes, called badal in the Pathan code of nangwali. A man who does not take revenge is not a man. Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and the sectarian militias of Iraq are not in the war business, they are in the revenge business. The revenge-seeker cannot be negotiated with because his intent is bound up with honor. It is an absolute.”

If true, then that places the War on Terrorism not within the religious grounds of Christianity vs Islam, nor within the political arena of Democracy vs Theocracy, but on the more philosophical grounds of State vs Tribe - or from the terrorists' view, of personal revenge.

I think that there is clear example of citizens winning this war once before ... Australia's ABC aired an interesting documentary last night called Carthage: The Roman Holocaust that looked at how Carthage was copied, and eventually surpassed, by Rome. The point made was that Rome took the advanced culture, agriculture and trading routes of the Carthaginians and added an extra element - the cult of the Republic. Suddenly people who were once Roman enemies, came to see themselves as Roman citizens, and part of what their ancestors once fought. Historian Richard Miles points to the baths, the theatre and the temple as the tools Rome used to bind newly conquered peoples to the idea of citizenship.

Carthaginian Veterans
Is there a lesson in this for our conflict with the tribesmen of the Middle East, or closer to home, the Solomon Islands?

via Chaos Manor's RSS feed

Photos from Lebanon: Propaganda or Journalism?

During the War in Lebanon, we were given a nightly bombardment of shocking images of the toll taken on the Lebanese people. This continued during the day as the press ran with disturbing photos of the dead and dying, and the aftermath of war. Some small mention was made of the photoshopped smoke clouds that Reuters' bought from one of their contract photographers, Hajj.

But at the same time, alternative media outlets like Zombietime and Little Green Footballs have been unearthing some shocking irregularities in the War in Lebanon images that Reuters, AP and other newswire services have been shopping around. The LA Times picked up on this two weeks ago:

““”There's more, and it's worth your time to take a look. That's one of the undeniable strengths of the Internet and of the blogosphere, and the fact that it is being employed to help keep journalism honest ultimately is to everybody's benefit.

What the major news organizations ought to be doing is to make their own analysis of the images coming out of Lebanon and if, as seems more than likely, they find widespread malfeasance, some hard questions need to be asked about why it occurred. Some of it may stem from the urge every photographer feels to make a photo perfect. Some of it probably flows from a simple economic imperative — a freelancer who produces dramatic images gets picked up more and paid more. Moreover, the obscenely anti-Israeli tenor of most of the European and world press means there's an eager market for pictures of dead Lebanese babies.”

At least Andrew Bolt is making a fair bit of noise on his blog (and here) about the Australian press' silence on their being taken in by the Hezbollah ambulance hoax.

Reuters has addressed some of these issues on their blog, but by and large they have only concerned themselves with photos that are blatantly and undeniably false. Their corrections page mentions that Hajj was posting straight to the Global News desk and not via a photo editor - a practice they claim to have tightened up on, but that does not address the root cause of many of these issues - which is that Hezbollah is blatantly manipulating the media - and getting away with it!

Finally, some fun has been poked at those who have accepted the fake images:

Political Islam

In reading Wikipedia tonight I found myself learning about the difference between Islamist and Islamic. Basically the former is a political movement holding that Islam is not just the ideal religion but also the ideal political system for governing the state. Most Muslims are NOT Islamist, but Islamic.

Having said that, there is also an interesting online website called NO to Political Islam Petition, which attracts signatures as a way of showing disagreement with the Islamist principles. If you are Muslim then I invite you to do so, if not, then you might want to visit them and see what they are about anyway.

For some reason the world seems a brighter place for knowing this - although I feel foolish for not having done the research myself after 9/11.

UPDATE: The International Crisis Group has an interesting article called Islamism, Violence and Reform that points out that Islamism is not a unified movement, especially amongst Sunni supporters of it. Again, worthwhile reading.

Management and mismanagement of diversity

Here is something worth reading Management and mismanagement of diversity
The case of ethnic conflict and state-building in the Arab World.

The piece's conclusion is below:
"In conclusion, the way out of the present dilemmas of all Arab states, but especially those with marked ethnic diversity, is a triangular formula of civil society, democracy, and federalism. This strength would be further enhanced by regional peace and economic cooperation. In the mid 1990s, all the ingredients are present. It only needs political imagination and the political will of new leadership to skilfully engineer those ingredients together into a harmonious regional mosaic."

Well that sure looks like what the coalition has tried to kickstart with their ousting of Saddam's regime.