verging_on_random

Rewriting history

It was grand to be alive in the 1950s. We were on the side of everything that was pure and good and righteous and on the other side were the Commies, who were evil and ignorant and intent on overthrowing us. A bit like the Terrorists, except there were a lot more Commies than Terrorists and they had The Bomb.

Commies did all sorts of Bad Things that we would never do. Like lock people up in preventive detention without a fair trial … ugh, the thought that anybody on Our Side would ever behave like that was an insult to our nation. And suppress dissent. Commies loved doing that, whereas we loved dissent. The more the better, cos our belief system was so superior it could withstand any challenge from silly borscht eating vodka drinking Coms.

One thing the Commos used to do was re-write history to suit their latest political position. Historical revisionism we called it. My how we laughed when they claimed they pretty much won the Second World War by themselves when we knew it was really President Eisenhower and General Montgomery. Straight out of that book 1984 it was. 1984 and Animal Farm … they were the books I grew up with. Allegories of how life was under the Commies.

Anyway I was thinking about that kind of stuff today when I read this:

Ever since World War II, when America rushed to Australia’s aid, the Australian public and its political leaders have valued the US alliance more than any other.

I felt like old Boxer the horse in Animal Farm when the pigs tell him that it’s not ‘four legs good, two legs bad’, it’s the other war around. Confused … wasn’t this somehow different to what I was told last time?

America rushed to Australia’s aid?

My parents’ generation, who actually fought the bloody Second World War, must be struck dumb with astonishment, if they’re still reading silly op-ed pieces.

America rushed to Australia’s aid?

Australia went to war in September, 1939. For more than two years, Australia fought alongside the other countries of the British Empire against Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, while America pursued an isolationist policy. The only thing it rushed to do was to make enormous fortunes selling war supplies to France and Great Britain.

The USA got dragged into the war in December, 1941, when Japan attacked it and Hitler declared war on it. To this day, it’s a moot point whether the USA would have entered the war against Germany if Hitler hadn’t made the decision for it. The Japanese attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbour, wrecked the American air defences in The Philippines preparatory to invading the place (successfully), and invaded the British colony of Malaya that was garrisoned in part by Australian troops. Thus Australia and America found themselves fighting on the same side - due to the actions of Germany and Japan. The notion that America had any objective of ‘aiding Australia’ is laughable. They were single-mindedly preoccupied with aiding themselves, as any nation would be that had just suffered two comprehensive military defeats.

America rushed to Australia’s aid?

What a load of revisionist bullshit. If it had suited America’s interests they would cheerfully have left us hung out to dry, just as they were prepared to let Poland and France and Norway and Denmark and Belgium and Greece and Great Britain be defeated by Hitler rather than join in defending them.

Never once that I can think of in its whole history has the USA gone to war as a selfless act of friendship for another nation. It’s one of the most militant countries in history and that war-like spirit is expressed in single-minded pursuit of its own imperial interests. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but let’s not misrepresent it as some kind of noble selfless purpose.

When Macarthur was driven out of The Philippines he came to Australia and tried to rule the place like a conquering generalissimo. It was a convenient base for him to use while he organised the American forces in the South Pacific for the inevitably successful counter-attack against Japan. After the first chaotic months, when it was clear that Japan had shot its bolt and presented no realistic further threat to the American homeland, Macarthur used this country in a completely opportunistic fashion. Determined to gather all the glory of defeating the Japanese for himself and his own country, he excluded Australian troops from his army of re-conquest. To its shame, the Australian Labor government of the day insisted that our soldiers be sent to fight some Japs, somewhere, anywhere, and they ended up in a pointless campaign in Borneo in 1945. They should have sat back and let Dugout Doug go to it.

Australian casualties in the Second World War were much lighter than in the First, despite our 1939 population being larger than it was in 1914. America fought the Pacific war pretty much by itself so it could dictate the terms of the peace, and Macarthur ruled Japan as an absolute dictator for five years after the war’s end.

Would we have had a rough Pacific war if the Americans hadn’t been involved? It’s a silly question. There wouldn’t have been a Pacific war if it hadn’t been for the USA. It was essentially a war between Japan and America in which we got involved because the Japanese wanted to secure their southern flank and it happened to have some British colonies that we were helping to guard. The first 12 months apart, far from needing ‘aid’, Australia spent much of the Pacific war with a comparatively large, well-trained army that couldn’t find anyone to fight.

And now these historical facts, which have been well-known for decades and reflect only the truth that modern nations go to war in their own selfish interests, not out of some quixotic sense of honour or looking after a little Aussie mate … these facts have been comprehensively revised as ‘America rushed to Australia’s aid’ … not just in this one piece I’ve quoted from today’s Herald, but you read this nonsense all the time, about how ‘grateful’ we should be to the USA for ’saving’ us.

Like I said, my parents’ generation would choke on their Iced Vovo biscuits. They sneered at the yanks (what happened to that good Aussie word, BTW?) for being late to the Second World War and even later to the First. I remember a great deal of bitterness at the way America stayed out of the fight until it was dragged in by Japan and then swaggered around boasting about how they’d had to pull the Brits out of the pooh yet again. The feeling was very much that if the yanks had had the balls to join in from the start in 1939, the war would have been over a lot quicker and been a lot less bloody.

You can argue whether that’s reasonable or not, and debate the wisdom of American foreign policy during the years between the two wars. But please spare us this drivel about America ‘rushing to the aid’ of Australia or anyone else. Just because they like to pretend they rescued the civilised world out of the goodness of their hearts it’s no reason to engage in revisionist history that would have made Joe Stalin blush.

I’m H-A-P-P-Y …..

This week I finally ended every connection with the caravan park where I’ve lived for the last 14 years. Until I moved away, I didn’t realise how much I hated living there.

For the last two years I’ve been trying to put a second-hand relocatable home on my site and build some extensions on it. The park’s owned by the local council, which is also the approval authority for new building works. Needless to say, it was like dealing with two separate, mutually antagonistic bureaucracies. I had to take the council to the Residential Tenancies Tribunal to get ‘in principle’ approval for my proposal, and that was before I’d even done any work.

Getting a builder was also a problem. IDK how builders are doing in your part of the world but up here they work 2-3 days a week and spend the rest of the time consulting their financial planners. If I had $100 for every builder who said “I’ll get back to you” I’d be a rich man. When I bothered to chase them up I’d usually get some version of “Hey I’m pretty committed ATM, call me next year”. In the best part of two years I only managed to get one definite quote, and that was from a bloke pulling the old builder’s trick of hinting that he didn’t want anything to do with my job but if I wanted to pay a $15000 premium over a rational price then he might be able to fit me in.

I could have handled one or the other of these challenges but tackling them both was too much. I’m not as young as I was. So I baled and managed to sell everything without losing too much money. Now I’m back in the rental market … and living in a terrific place. So my current mood is

One final thought … anybody who harbours romantic notions about Australians of Anglo-Saxon origin being decent caring compassionate human beings should go live in a Northern Rivers caravan park for a few years … it wasn’t a fluke that Pauline Hanson got 20% of the primary vote on the Tweed coast in 1998 you know.

Have the enviro-Nazis been emboldened?

One group in Australian politics has been consistently on the right track about environmental matters in general and global warming in particular for more than 30 years. When mainstream parties were ignoring the issue at best, or belittling it at worst, the Greens persisted in warning Australians that incremental environmental damage posed the most dangerous threat to human civilisation that has existed in recorded history, with the possible exception of thermonuclear war.

To their eternal shame, many people including the Liberal and National Parties held the Greens up to public ridicule. Labor tolerated them in return for their preferences and put shit on them behind their backs. Bob Brown was ‘The Green Queen’. Green activists were fanatics, loonies, out of touch with reality, on another planet … put it however you liked, the last thing anyone should have done was take them seriously.

Except that unfortunately they now seem to have been …. ummmmm …. right.

Actually they turned out to have a perceptive attitude to the nuclear thing too. Remember how the Greens back in the day wanted to get rid of nuclear weapons altogether? No exceptions, no trusting the USA to be the sole repository of virtue in a world prone to sin, no blind faith in non-proliferation treaties. Just … get … rid … of … them … all. If nobody had them, the global community would have an obvious and compelling interest in making sure that no country ever got them again.

Given recent developments, they seem to have been right about that too.

So have the mainstream parties learned anything from their miserable policy failures on the two issues that dwarf any others in their potential consequences for the human race? I mean forget ‘impact on your lifestyle’ and start thinking ‘impact on your prospects of staying alive’. Have mainstream politicians and media pundits had the ordinary decency and honesty to admit that they’ve been capital ‘W’ Wrong about nuclear weapons and environmental degradation and the Greens have been more or less Correct?

Hahahahahah as if.

Today the Greens called for Australia to stop exporting coal, as an obvious and effective way to begin reversing global warming. They didn’t mean close the mines tomorrow; they said exports should be phased out. No matter. Members of all mainstream political parties fell over each other in the rush to issue statements declaring absolute opposition to the whole idea. Absurd. Out of the question.

Coz they’re the loonie Greenies … what would they know about anything?

Hertzberg and the next election

I have a lot of fun applying management concepts and theories to politics. One of the problems that can arise from putting scholars in narrow academic disciplines is a tendency not to see the wood for the trees. As a mercenary-without-portfolio I like to think that sometimes I can take a multi-disciplinary perspective that might escape a few of my colleagues.

One example that came to me today is the relevance of motivation theory to voter behaviour. You’d be surprised at how little reliable data exists about why people vote in elections the way they do, even though political parties would pay a king’s ransom to get it. It’s just too hard to develop a research methodology that will provide useful data. The same problem afflicts management studies, where we still don’t really know how to make employees work hard. However, there are numerous motivation theories that are partially supported by empirical data. It occurred to me that in some respects, voters at elections might behave in a similar way to employees at work.

One of the most well-known motivation theorists is Frederick Hertzberg. He suggested that employees are affected by two different classes of motivating factors. In one category are the things that people only notice if they aren’t happy about them. Money falls into this category. If a worker doesn’t believe that s/he’s getting a fair wage, s/he will be de-motivated and work with less enthusiasm. But being satisfied with their wage won’t motivate an employee to try harder. Management can overcome this problem by offering even more money in return for greater effort but once the worker reaches the new, higher remuneration there’s no further motivating influence.

In other words, people aren’t motivated by what they’ve already got. They’re motivated by the opportunity to get something else they haven’t got yet.

Applying this to politics, it seems to me that Howard may no longer be able to influence voters by citing his economic record. Voters may have had it so good for so long that they no longer give politicians any credit for it at all. Economic growth and stability just are. When it comes to the next election, their interest will be on what the pollies can give them that they haven’t got yet.

If that’s right, Howard might be in trouble. The bag full of handouts that he’s relied on in the past mightn’t work any more. If people are so used to governments giving them tax cuts and new payments every year or two they might just take them for granted and go “Yeah yeah, we know we’ll get that from whoever we elect. What else you got?” And Howard’s mob don’t appear to have much else.

Labor, on the other hand, just might be able to win converts by appealing to the famous ‘hierarchy of needs’ proposed by another motivation theorist, Abraham Maslow. Maslow argued that people act to satisfy their goals in an ascending order - they wouldn’t worry about so-called ‘higher order’ needs until they had satisfied their ‘lower order’ needs. One of the most basic needs is security - the need to feel safe from personal harm. Arguably Howard’s mob have played on that need skilfully for years with the terrorism stuff but I don’t think that horse will run again. This time it might be Labor who presses the security need button by campaigning on global warming.

I can imagine a campaign in which a lot of people take economic well-being as a given - meaning WorkChoices won’t be the killer issue a lot of ALP supporters are counting on - and worry instead about threats to their health and security and even their kids’ lives from climate change. Such people will desert Howard in droves. If it turns out that way, we can maybe claim some modest insight from motivation theories that have stood the test of time.

Selective anguish

One British soldier was killed in 2003 in a so-called ‘friendly fire’ incident. It was a big news story here yesterday, an even bigger one in the UK.

Former defence minister Peter Kilfoyle accused the US military of a “cover-up” and said the airmen should be brought to justice.

“I think the pilots should be held to account, they would be under any other circumstances,” he said.

“If it was American soldiers that had been killed these American pilots would have been held to account but because of the international dimension they haven’t.

“I think it is a cover-up. There’s no doubt about it.”

Then again ‘if it was Iraqi civilians that had been killed’, the American pilots would not have rated even a mention.

I wonder how many Iraqis have been killed over the last three years because of pilot error, or intelligence error, or equipment malfunction, or just plain bad luck? Week after week we’ve seen pictures of bodies of women and children killed in air raids. I doubt that anybody holds a coronial inquiry into their deaths. No-one reviews in-flight videos to see if all due care was taken to make sure that the right people got blown away.

People in the Arab world must be aware of this repugnant double standard that values the lives of Coalition soldiers so much more highly than the lives of Iraqis. It is reinforced in news coverage every day, even in footage of the casual way soldiers kick in the doors of Iraqi homes. I wonder how often they say “Oh sorry, wrong house.”

And yet we still read the endless propaganda about how Muslims hate us because of our freedoms, or because in their eyes we’re degenerate, or because they’re maniacs on jihad. How about a much simpler explanation … they hate us cos we treat them like shit.

UPDATE: for a discussion of the use of air power in Iraq go here.

Aca-bloody-demics

New US ground commander in Iraq is a general with a PhD. Now he’s appointed to his staff an Australian colonel, David Kilcullen, who also has a PhD. What’s more, he’s got a few other senior officers with research higher degrees on his team.

This places the few remaining apologists for the occupation in something of a dilemma. General Patraeus has been widely acclaimed as the guy who’s gonna turn things around in Iraq coz he’s a rough tough counter-insurgency fighter who knows how to win. On the other hand, most of the same apologists hate universities like poison, because they’re nests of Leftie traitors.

I guess if Petraeus is successful they can bring him back home and make him Secretary for Education with a brief to clean the liberals out of American colleges. And if he fails … well they won’t have to look far for the reason, eh.

The Great Australian WTF?

I think I heard this correctly … it was on The 7.30 Report a few minutes ago, one of those stories they run every time the Reserve Bank Board meets to review interest rates. So I wasn’t really paying attention, but I’m sure I heard some frustrated would-be home-owner bemoan the injustice of these outrageous real estate prices and talk about how ‘The great Australian dream of a two storey home with a backyard and a swimming pool’ was now out of reach.

Excuse me? When did this become the Great Australian Dream, in the sense of something that ordinary people could legitimately aspire to? Something that you could justifiably feel you were entitled to as long as you worked hard and didn’t kill anybody? A two storey home with a backyard and a swimming pool. What about the home theatre, the three bathrooms and the walk-in wardrobe? I guess they go without saying.

I’m reminded of a story I read 10 or 12 years ago, some poor mum explaining how impossible it was to get by on $75,000 a year. Cos the kids wouldn’t settle for Lynx shoes you know, they had to have Nikes, and the family had only been able to go overseas on holidays once in a whole two years. Fair dinkum, if the Herald had set up a hotline I would have donated the $170 a week dole that I was on at the time.

Anyone remember who coined the phrase ‘Culture of Entitlement’? Smart person, whoever it was. Cut foreign aid I say … time enough to give money to foreigners when we can afford a decent standard of living for our ourselves.

Gated communities

There’s a curious article here about gated communities. The author’s against them.

He raises two main objections:

1. They’re environmentally unfriendly;
2. They create divisions within the community between rich and poor.

Maybe he’s got a point, but he doesn’t make it very well. He overlooks some pertinent alternative views and partially discredits his argument with some very dodgy ‘evidence’.

King argues that in the past,

… we didn’t exclude people from a “community” on the basis on how much money they had; that money inferred a new set of rights on an elite, like a South American country.

No disrespect to King (who to the best of my knowledge I have never met or read before) but that’s crap. 19th century Australia inherited the British class system and it was reflected in where people lived well into the 20th. The only way you got to live in Burns Rd Wahroonga or a thousand other exclusive places was to have money and lots of it. They didn’t need gates - the dogs would take care of any poverty-stricken trespassers. Poor people lived in suburbs like Camperdown  - a rich dude wouldn’t have lived there for a bet. Those cramped airless semi-detached boxes weren’t called ‘workingmen’s cottages’ for nothing, even if they do sell now for a million bucks apiece.

The rich/poor divide was even more obvious in country towns. Go to a place like Cessnock and you can still see where the workers lived, and then go see the owners’ grand residences out of town.

One of the biggest changes that has occurred in Australia over the last 50 years is that the majority of the population have comparatively huge (on a global scale) incomes. One result is that lots of people can afford a house in almost any suburb that you care to name (there are, of course, still small enclaves reserved for the super-wealthy, such as harbourside properties in Sydney). I suspect most people would regard this as a Good Thing. I used to, until I reflected on its implications for Australians’ relationships with the rest of the world, but that’s not relevant here. Let’s just say it’s a Good Thing for internal social cohesion.
Malcolm King shows how much he’s fudging his argument with this bit:

Let me introduce you to “Kenny” who has lived in the area for 40 years and paid his taxes and rates. He’s a bit rough around the edges but he’s a member of Rotary and always helps at the sausage sizzle for the Nippers lifesaving carnival. He likes fishing and a beer.

Unfortunately Mr and Mrs Kenny are not welcome at the gated community. The reason is - and I never thought I’d write this in the year 2007 - “they just ain’t our kind of people”. Ergo the gated community.

For one thing, it’s obviously fiction to write that these people ‘are not welcome at the gated community’, because it’s a long way from being built yet. I happen to live just up the road from Wooyung and the ‘locals’ comprise about 10 people (literally). The place is a big open empty space with a primitive caravan park near the beach. The nearest a ‘Nippers lifesaving carnival’ would ever have come to Wooyung is Kingscliff, about 40 km north, or Byron Bay, 25 km in the opposite direction.

I’m sure there’s a lot of valid objections that could be raised by people opposed to gated communities and coastal over-development, but ill-conceived arguments relying on fabricated ‘evidence’ don’t help their cause. On the contrary, they just give ammunition to the pro-development lobby in their efforts to discredit the ‘loonie Greenies’.

About those ‘moderate Muslims’ …

How often do you read comments by Australian politicians and pundits in the media bemoaning the silence of ‘moderate Muslims’? If the majority of Muslims disagree with the acts of the the extremists, they argue, how come they’re not out there saying so? The implication of course is that the majority of Muslims don’t disagree with the acts of the extremists.

So I thought this story was pretty impressive:

TONGI, Bangladesh (AP) — Some 3 million Muslims put aside their country’s violent struggle with political corruption and Islamic extremists and raised their hands in prayer for global peace at one of the world’s largest religious gatherings.

I won’t hold my breath waiting for Miranda Devine to  give it a mention.

Fight, flee or freeze?

Faced with a threat, we’re told that animals respond by either fighting or running away. The behaviour of the human animal can apparently be explained by the same instincts. I guess you can see that in the ‘war on terror’, where we either ‘stay the course’ and fight it or ‘cut and run’.

It’s harder to apply this theory to global warming, or climate change if you prefer. Flight isn’t an option unless you’re one of those lucky folks who get abducted by aliens. So the only available option seems to be to fight it but nobody seems too sure how to do that without making changes to our lifestyles that are literally unimaginable.

Fortunately animal behaviourists have come up with a third generic response to complement the traditional fight or flight: it’s ‘freeze’.

Animals freeze when fighting is out of the question and flight is impossible. Freezing occurs because the brain basically shuts down when it can’t deal with the data it’s receiving. It’s incapable of sending the body any meaningful instructions, so the body goes catatonic.

That seems a pretty good description of the response of the human race to evidence of global warming. Catatonia. Of course some people express their incapacity to deal with the threat by denying that it exists whereas others pretend they’re fighting it by coming up with futile initiatives like the Kyoto thingie. This leaves both parties lots of scope for endless bickering while the elephant in the room grows bigger and meaner by the day.

The chance to manage global warming in any kind of systematic way disappeared about 30 years ago. It would be nice one day to hear the trade unions and the major political parties and the captains of industry say “Gosh those loonie Greenies who we had so much fun mocking back in the 1970s turned out to be right after all, I guess we were the dumb retards” but I won’t hold my breath.

We now face a situation where political institutions are comprehensively incapable of responding to global warming. Take the strip of beach-side property where I used to live in Narrabeen/Collaroy, Sydney. It’s virtually certain that all those hundreds of millions of dollars worth of prime houses and home units will be washed away some time between now and 2100. It nearly happened in 1974 and ever since, various government bodies have made half-hearted efforts to put up options for consideration, yet they’re no closer to actually doing anything than they were 30 years ago.

In the mean time, people merrily knock down the existing houses and build brand new ones as if rising sea levels were a figment of Al Gore’s imagination. If the local council can’t even win the political fight to prohibit new building work in a place like that, what chance has a state or federal government got of doing anything serious about the big picture stuff?

Take air-conditioning as another example. Australians are suddenly in love with it. Twenty years ago it was almost unheard of for a private family home to have air-conditioning, nowadays it’s more the rule than the exception. Newspapers have full-page ads every week reminding us how cheap it is these days to whack reverse cycle ducts in every room of the house. Hell put a little one in the garden shed while you’re about it, why should Dad have to sweat while he does whatever he does all weekend?

Air-conditioners, as everyone knows, are the biggest contributor to the growth in demand for electricity, which means a new power station will soon have to be built. It will be a coal-fired station. Doing anything else would be electoral madness, because it would cause prices to go up and would also risk making supply more unreliable.

In a rational world the state government would simply refuse to build any more power stations and jack up the price of power to force demand down. Needless to say any such course of action would be seriously considered by either of the main parties for every bit of two seconds before being rejected out of hand. Quite rightly – the voters wouldn’t stand for it. They’ve chosen the ‘freeze’ option so they live in a fantasy world where you can fix global warming and keep using as much energy as you want.

In short, Australia’s political institutions are hopelessly unable to do anything constructive about the causes of climate change. But even if they were, it wouldn’t really help the global situation. That’s because there’s another problem that’s 1833723 times harder to resolve than the so-far-insuperable question of Narrabeen beachfront properties:

The Indians and Chinese and Indonesians and people in other developing countries want to live like us.

Bastards.

When John Howard says the Kyoto thingie is pointless without the participation of China and India he’s perfectly correct (he’s been a ‘denialist’ freezer until recently, now it looks like he’s become a ‘technology will fix it’ freezer). At the moment, the USA with about 300 million people contributes 25% of the world’s greenhouse gases. You don’t need to do the maths to the last decimal point to work out that once 2500 million Asians live like they do in the USA, the greenhouse gas problems that we have now will definitely seem like the good old days.

Politicians will still faff around as if they can do something sensible to overcome this dilemma but they’re in dream world. There’s no way you can tell the people of Asia to stop trying to increase their standard of living, there’s no way they can achieve their ambitions without frying the globe, and there’s no way countries like the USA and Australia can make drastic cuts to their living standards to try to promote an international strategy that has some remote hope of success.

So when it comes to global warming my form of freezing is called fatalism. Somewhere along the line the incompatible interests of the developing world and the developed world will cause such a cataclysm that the whole place will go up in flames. Or climate change will occur so rapidly that there’s a global panic, and authoritarian governments will take over and implement the changes that have to be made by brute force, destroying existing political institutions in the process. Or the yanks will send up the giant mirror they’ve been talking about and make the problem go away … or trigger a disastrous new ice age, who knows?

Whatever happens, it won’t be as the result of some international plan developed by civilised diplomatic discourse. The time for that expired looooong ago.