Monthly Archives: December 2006

An exclusive institution

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Helen Mirren as QEII

We went to see The Queen yesterday. The film is about our queen who lives her whole life in sacred sites and in lives lived before her. The ugly part is the public/private/conservative controversy that hurls the British monarchy around. It has me thinking though while I’m reading this

I am the ideal audience and very susceptible to beautiful labels and so predictably I came out of the film totally committed to the monarchy and the value it puts on privacy and conservation.

At one point Queen Elzabeth announces, “My grandmother, Queen Victoria” and the weight of tradition thumps home (to me the ideal audience, by now well and truly standing in the shoes of Her Majesty).   I can’t help thinking that in the same measure as commoners play at being royal so royal plays at being common. Or is common in the case of Diana.

The present Queen has shown very little inclination to become in the least bit common, in every sense. Getting back to inaccessibility and the hoo ha surrounding the royal collection, difficult to view, difficult to borrow, the public not permitted to traipse willy nilly through royal houses and grounds even while they pay for their upkeep. But what if the royal doors are thrown open on the royal mysteries, what if us commoners ( not me though) loot, plunder and dissolve a thousand years of ‘unbroken royal line’ mystique that resonates so much more satisfyingly than Andy pandy’s upstairs?

The part of me that was happy to imagine what upstairs at Andy Pandy’s house was like and is titillated by the set of Rear Window is satisfied to know without inspecting that the Royal family is going about its business of holding a thousand years of tradition intact. With our current Queen I can rest assured the spirit of the past will be preserved and I don’t care how dark and dusty it gets.

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Attack of the Killer Mall Rats: Is Sydney becoming a ‘behavioural sink’?

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Big business lobbyists and greedy foreigners are turning Sydney into an overcrowded hell hole, says Clive Hamilton. In Saturday’s Sydney Morning Herald Hamilton draws on John Calhoun’s famous rat experiments to argue that Sydney risks becoming a ‘behavioural sink‘ — a city plagued by aggression, social withdrawal and substance abuse.

Back in the 1950s Calhoun wanted to test Thomas Malthus’ theory that "vice and misery impose the ultimate natural limit on the growth of populations." He was particularly interested in vice. In an early experiment Calhoun confined a population of wild rats in a quarter-acre enclosure. With food, shelter and protection from disease and predators, the only real limit on population growth was the rats’ own behaviour. When the population finally stabilised at 150 it wasn’t because of a decline in the birth rate or rising adult mortality — it was due to a breakdown in maternal behaviour. The babies were dying.

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Hayek Shrugged

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Ayn Rand despised Friedrich Hayek. In a letter to Rose Wilder Lane she described him as "an example of our most pernicious enemy". At Thoughts on Freedom, Andrew Russell takes issue with some of my earlier comments on the Rand/Hayek dispute. In the comments thread Daniel Barnes joins the debate.

So why did Rand despise Hayek? I think Daniel gets it right — she believed that Hayek was guilty of compromising on moral principles. For Rand this kind of compromise was unforgivable. As the hero of Atlas Shrugged says; "In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win" (p 965).

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The Australian Chess Championship – watch it like you were there!

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I took Alexander (my son) to the Australian Chess Championships being held in Canberra the other day. There on the top boards were four Grandmasters playing (I think Australia only has two – and both were there – Ian Rogers and Darryl Johansen.)

Now I wouldn’t be telling Troppodillians about this because I know (sob, sob) that very few are interested in it. But what took my eye, and why I’m telling Troppodillians about it is that attached to the top four boards were clever little wires leading back to a computer. Your Troppo correspondent could tell immediately that something was up!

And so it was. The internet was spreading its tendrils yet further into our lives. As each player played his (yes his – so far only men have made it onto the top four boards – though there are a couple of women in the event) move, a microchip inside the piece he moved told the board, which then told the cable attached to the board, which then told the computer to which it was attached, when then told the internet.

So literally as the player makes a move on any of the top boards, you can see it here. I guess it’s all obvious, but I wouldn’t have expected it for Australian games (which are not exactly leading the world). But there you go, it’s not expensive to do, so they’re doing it!

Call for helpful suggestions

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Earlier this week I downloaded Mozilla Firefox and started using it as my default browser.   However its inbuilt version of Google is much more primitive than the Google Toolbar I’ve been  accustomed to using with Internet Explorer.   Accordingly I tried to install the new Google Toolbar for Mozilla Firefox (beta version).   Unfortunately I wasn’t able to complete the installation, and it now crashes Mozilla every time I try to open it!   Moreover I don’t know how to remove the Google Toolbar (Mozilla version) because it doesn’t appear in the uninstall list under Control Panel, presumably because the installation wasn’t completed.   I tried uninstalling and re-installing Mozilla, but the incompletely-installed Google Toolbar is still there  and still crashes Mozilla every time I try to open it (it also attempts to open multiple instances of Mozilla for some reason).

Does anyone have any hints on how to fix this problem?   I’ve now downloaded Internet  Explorer 7, which of course  enables me to keep using the  the fully featured Google toolbar to which  I’m accustomed. But IE7 seems to have a very primitive and user-unfriendly version of tabbed browsing (the main Mozilla feature I really liked).   As far as I can work out, although you can choose to  open Favourites in either a separate window or separate tab by right clicking, unlike Mozilla you don’t get that option when opening ordinary hyperlinks in a page.   Is there something I’m missing?    

Ancient VW Beetle confounds modern faith based science

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Some weeks ago, Tim Blair, in his ongoing quest to ridicule Global Warming out of existence, decided to take a swipe at influential UK columnist George Monbiot. If you don’t know of Mr. Monbiot he appears to be a very impressive fellow. He has led a very exciting life,   having received a United Nations award from Nelson Mandela, something which Mr. Blair is yet to achieve, and having been  pronounced clinically dead, something which Mr. Blair is also yet to achieve.

George Monbiot had originally said this of fast motor cars:

There is a direct relationship between an engine’s performance and the amount of greenhouse gases it produces: the faster the car, the quicker it cooks the planet.

Mr Blair, motor enthusiast that he is, took issue with this and claimed that Mr. Monbiout was an idiot because as all petrol heads know:

A 40-year-old VW Beetle produces far more pollutants per kilometre than a modern Ferrari. Monbiot is an idiot.

This claim struck me as very odd indeed since, like myself,   Mr. Blair is a known fan of cultural stereotyping,   and no practitioner of that delightful sport would be unaware of the German stereotype for engineering efficiency, and the Italians’ contrasting reputation for flash and crash.       Could Mr. Blair be wrong?   It was time to do some investigation.

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Summer reading

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Amartya Sen’s Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (Allen Lane/Penguin) was a short treat. Here is one orphan paragraph, rounded for interim finish by the sentence that immediately follows (p. 175):

The illusion of singular identity, which serves the violent purpose of those orchestrating confrontations, is skillfully cultivated and fomented by the commanders of persecution and carnage. It is not remarkable that generalizing the illusion of unique identity, exploitable for the purpose of confrontation, would appeal to those who are in the business of fomenting violence, and there is no mystery to the fact that such reductionism is sought. But there is a big question about why the cultivation of singularity is so successful, given the extraordinary na¯vet© of that thesis in a world of obviously plural affiliations. To see a person exclusively in terms of only one of his or her many identities is, of course, a deeply crude intellectual move, and yet, judging from its effectiveness, the cultivated delusion of singularity is evidently easy enough to champion and promote. The advocacy of unique identity for a violent purpose takes the form of separating out one identity group – directly linked to the violent purpose at hand – for special focus, and it proceeds from there to eclipse the relevance of other associations and affiliations through selective emphasis and incitement. The martial art of fostering violence draws on some basic instincts and uses them to crowd out the freedom to think and the possibility of composing reason.

Did you, perchance, also come across something worth reading?

Elsewhere: Gummo, on a parallel line, in a sort of caught and bowled way.

Intellectual Property: What is it good for?

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I know that Nicholas is a big fan of schemes like Creative Commons (mostly because he emails me about it every now and then), but I’ve often felt that property is a useful thing to have.

However it’s one thing to have private property in easily defined concrete things – like land or chattels – another thing to define private property in semi-abstract objects.

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