Club Troppo

"A degree from Harvard or Yale is not a pre-requisite for president", says talk show host Glenn Beck while Christine O’Donnell begins a campaign ad by disclosing "I didn’t go to Yale". If there’s one thing tea party champions agree on, it’s that a new elite has taken over America. It’s an elite that’s out of touch with ordinary Americans, and its claims to power rest on its supposedly superior intellect.

According to Harvard graduate Charles Murray, the tea party has a point. America’s new elite really is "isolated from mainstream America and ignorant about the lives of ordinary Americans." One thing Murray and the tea partiers agree about, is that America is run by an elite that sneers at the values of mainstream America and is leading the country to ruin. It’s the elite’s rejection of mainstream values, not their educational qualifications, that Murray and the tea partiers object to.

Some critics think it’s ironic that a Harvard graduate would sympathise with an assault on Ivy League elites. But as the National Review’s Jonah Goldberg explains, "Attacking the Ivy League is a very old, very recognizable shorthand in American political discourse." When critics like Beck, O’Donnell or Sarah Palin "denigrate Ivy League elitists," he writes , "they have a particular elite in mind."

While Murray’s attacks have always appeared cool and academic, the tea party is white hot with rage. What enrages the tea party supporters most is the sense that they’re being looked down on by people who think they’re smarter and more moral. It’s a feeling Glenn Beck expressed in one of his on-air rants:

(Continued)

Previously on this blog I’ve outlined a couple of themes of mine about Government 2.0.  In a comment on a draft APS Social Manifesto I elaborated on both things and so I thought I’d reproduce them here.

I think what you’re trying to do is worthwhile. However culture change is a difficult business. There’s not all that much difference between your manifesto, and the APSC guidelines and the declaration of open government. There are some concrete things in there which are a bit stronger and more directive (ie that access to social media should be actively promoted), but its feel is similar.

Essentially the conventions under which the public service operate are not at all easy to define and specify. What can a public servant say, and what can’t they say in public? Well that is always quite contested ground and people like Ken Henry adopt a fairly expansive view of the convention at times. Others like Terry Moran don’t.

Now it all has to be renegotiated and it’s only the beginning to issue new guidelines or even a ‘manifesto’. Then one must work through the cultural labour of things happening, those things being contested and then we find out how it plays out. In all this, those of us who value what Government 2.0 can bring to government will be hoping for expansive interpretations, but it’s simply not at all easy to specify in advance the nuances of the way these ideas will or even should be interpreted (except for making broad statements of what presumptions one might hope those making the judgements were making.)

I like this point in the draft manifesto: “support and encourage unstructured online conversations between members of the APS and other State/Territory jurisdictions.” In fact I’d like to see it go a little further. I would support a ‘principle of gregariousness’ or at least some major pushing of public servants towards a presumption that they can (and should) speak to others about their work with a view to communicating as much as would be prudent about what they’re doing, what issues and evidence would be helpful in doing their jobs.

As we argued in our report this:

• Increases the value of their skills to the community – by giving better community access to it;
• Helps to further develop those skills
• Helps inform decision making and public sector activity with a greater awareness of what is happening outside the service.

But even setting this out is sufficient to make it clear that, in doing so, judgement is required – which calls for a cultural labour of some magnitude.

Of interest also is this statement in the draft: “In the last century managerialism predominated In the 21st century the social organisation is assuming that position.”  My response to those claims are: (Continued)

It is a nice thing that when you ‘uninstall’ a program on Windows, if you want to keep all your information, your profile etc, uninstall uninstalls the program but leaves lots of details about your profile in shape. It is not a nice thing however if you don’t want this to happen. Then it’s a bad thing.  You’d think Microsoft would have some setting, hold down ‘ctrl’ or whatever which would enable you to instruct the uninstall program to obliterate all details of the program it can find other than ‘content’ which you’ve used the program to produce – like word files. Is there a way of doing this, and if not why not? Or am I just being unreasonable?

As I’ve mentioned previously, I usually participate on a Friday morning panel show on ABC Local Radio here in Darwin.  It’s called 3 Big Questions but it really includes 2 serious ones and a rather silly one to keep things entertaining.  Today’s silly question was a compound one:

Paul the psychic octopus has died in Germany, aged 2.

Do you believe animals can be psychic?

Skippy was deeply empathetic – but was he psychic?

Who is the most psychic animal you have ever known or heard of?

Should psychic animals be more involved in policy proscription – eg: (question addressed to a [psychic] kookaburra through a choice of three  pieces of meat on a plate) which of these three proposals for tax reform should we go with?

I responded by launching into a monologue about my great aunt Joy Cavill whose claims to fame included being the producer of the 1960s TV series Skippy the Bush Kangaroo; a psychic animal if ever there was one.  I’ll do a post about her one day soon (Joy not Skippy) because she’s much more interesting than I had previously realised.

However I also prepared some unused notes for an even sillier and fairly scatological rant about a psychic tapeworm.  It’s pretty juvenile but it seems a shame to waste it so I’ve expanded my notes into a semi-intelligible script.

(Continued)

Average size of equities trades plummets

A striking graph showing the effect of IT on finance – it’s becoming economic to parcel up financial bets into much smaller parcels. From the RBA’s Assessment of Clearing and Settlement Facilities in Australia (pdf).

I’ve posted on this a couple of times before – arguing that the populism of the left has gone missing and wondering why. This argues the same point in a different – shall we say ‘genre’. I agree with most of the first half of it, but thought it got a little complacent about its case towards the end. At least on the left I think you need balance. I’m hoping that with the tea party rampant up there in the US, the Republicans will run into that little law of politics.

WHAT OBAMA CAN LEARN FROM LADY GAGA (AND PROGRESSIVES FROM THE TEA PARTY), by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash

My name is Obama. But call me Icarus.

I soared on the wings of an angel. I was the biggest star the planet had ever seen, without having to go near a guitar. I was dancing on the moon, when suddenly, the moon gathered its bowels and dropped me like a turd back on earth.

Plop!

And here I sit, in my redecorated Oval Office, surrounded by all these clever Ph.D people, and by my pointillist-picture-perfect family, and I’m gobsmacked and paddywhacked and privately pissed and publicly petulant.

People scorn me. Left and right. They treat me like a dog.

After all I’ve done. What a record of legislation! How did I legislate? Let me count the bills.

On my 24th day in office, I whelped a $787 billion Recovery Act that included $78.61 billion of green energy stimulus, and cut the taxes of 95% of our taxpayers.

But I didn’t rest.

I squeezed out Healthcare Reform. That took a little longer. It was an almost stillborn breech baby, but today it is incubating and will start kicking about four years from now if the Republicans don’t starve it to death before then. Wonder of wonders, in its placenta can be found the detritus of the “pre-existing condition” scam. Unfortunately the baby is missing its genitals — the public option — but some industry deal snipped that one out of its genetic code.

Still, I didn’t rest.

Soon I begat Financial Reform that included a Consumer Financial Protection Agency birthed by Elizabeth Warren and now being midwifed by her.

And then, lest you forget, as most Americans have, I saved Detroit. Plus I shook down BP for $20 billion.

Those were my five biggies. Stimulus, health, finance, Detroit, BP shakedown. There’s a lot of little stuff too numerous to mention: my ban on torture, the student loan overhaul, our foreign rep restored, two okay Supreme Court ladies, etc.

But what happened? Where have all the voters gone? I feel like Sartre locked out of De Beauvoir’s bedroom because she’s banging the husband of the wife I banged, or their daughter, all because of some combination of nausea and misplaced ressentiment because our final philosophy agregationexam jury quibbled about whether they should give first place to me or to her, and then naturally confirmed her second-sex status.

Me, young and virile Barack Obama, locked out of the American bedroom? Can you imagine? Can you imagine that happening to the smartest guy in the room?

I can. Look at my approval ratings. Under 50%, to sleep with the fishes in the Seventh Circle of Consequences Unintended and Hopes Dashed on Pointy Rocks.

WTF? What happened?

Simple, Mr President. What happened was you.

You did it, Barack Hussein Obama. You baked the crap on which you gag. You ate the banana on whose peel you’re slipping.

Here’s what you did, you Hope Pope Dope, which I will describe to you in words of wackedoo woe with my balls on fire and my hair smoking Medusa snakes. In fact, I’m going to be stooping to the atavistic non-Latinate rhetoric of Henry Miller, Rabelais and Judd Apatow cock-joke movies … so you might mind-grip with feral clarity the global geography of your idiocy and my fury about same. Here’s what you wrought, in straight-up Anglo-Saxon:

After giving your base a great fuck as a candidate, you pulled out.

You entered the White House and slammed the door on your base. You handed over your personal stash of 13 million email addresses — your direct line to your fans — to the Democratic Party. As if you couldn’t be bothered with them anymore.

Your fans didn’t vote for the Democratic Party, pal. Independents didn’t vote for the Democratic Party, sonny. They voted for you, asshole. That coalition of youths Hispanics labor-union African-American progressives: the stars in their eyes blinked Obama-Obama-Obama.

You had a fan base inside-outside your Party, like the Tea Party stands inside-outside the GOP, which you could have used again and again — against Congress, against the GOP, even against your own party. An organized community all your own.

Between you and your fans there was a much stronger bond than a mere party-political bond. A mystical, sacred bond.

But you went all secular on them and pulled out. You acted as though your base never existed. You committed the greatest act of political coitus interruptus since JFK got himself shot.

Then you pointed your wind-dry erection at a rainbow. It was actually a shitstorm, but you saw opportunity where others saw an iceberg. You happen to be a donkey, but you thought you could get it on with an elephant. It was species overreach, dumbo. You insisted on looking for a hole somewhere in the GOP — your avowed and self-declared enemies — to stick your putz in.

They blocked your cock solid. You got nowhere. That hole was closed tighter than the jars in which they store the last smallpox viruses on earth in the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, and the Vector Research Center in Koltsovo, Siberia.

Then, instead of going back to your fans, you stuck your nose in your briefing books and acted like a monk and never looked up until you felt an uncomfortable feeling deep inside you, which turned out to be a huge GOP cock rammed up your butt powered by phalanxes of crazed Tea Party people.

Now you’re stuck between a cock and a hard place. You’re trapped in what the TV Puking Packs of Pundit Poseurs call an enthusiasm gap. That gap is a hole, the hole in which you cast your base like the dungeons in which Henry VIII cast wife after wife so he could go and ding-dong some other highborn floozy.

In your case, a whore called Washington.

Where does your enthusiasm come from? From your base, dummy. Nowhere else. You dumped your base and you dumped all enthusiasm for you. It’s that simple, idiot.

Now you’re complaining. Petulant phrases like “buck up” and “stop whining” and “inexcusable to stand on the side lines” are flowing like platelets from Caesar’s wounds.

The pity of it all is, it could have been so easy — if you were a little smarter, or maybe just a bit of a hypocrite.

Look how Karl Rove milked the Bush base, like twenty piglets sucking a fat sow dry. Came the 2004 election, what did Rove do? He and Bush raised a mighty hue and cry about gay marriage. And that old stand-by, the court-sanctioned whacking of human fetuses.

Now listen. Legal abortion will be with us forevermore, and gay marriage will spread from state to state like Sherman’s march across the South.

In short, these base-stroking moves by Herr Rove and Meister Bush were the shit of the bull. Totally. They’re like applying a phantom tongue made of chicken liver to a blind man’s wang and calling it fellatio.

But they worked. They made the base believe that Bush cared about them. It actually happens that Bush could give two shits in a rusty bucket about either gay marriage or abortion. But that’s not the point. The point was to bond with his base via hoops of steel. Ergo, in order to play patty-cake on that bond like a rhapsody singing heavenly choirs in the bosoms of his base, Bush strummed those two strings of anti-gay and anti-abortion BS harder than Kurt Cobain plucked his ax before he sucked a bullet.

That’s all it takes. Just a few pointless promises and a few empty gestures.

All you had to do, Mister President, was say this:

“Listen, folks, we got healthcare reform done. Thank you for sticking with me through the long ordeal of death panels and socialism. But we didn’t get the public option. Damn. Double damn. You’re disappointed. I’m disappointed. Never mind, next time. Don’t think for one moment I’m giving up. We didn’t have the votes for it, but if you keep voting for me, we’ll get there. The battle has just begun. When I’m re-elected, that’s my first priority. Let’s all pull together — the public option or bust!”

Firedoglake’s Jane Hamsher would’ve grown bangs for you over that. And it wouldn’t have cost you a dime or a vote; maybe a scowl from Liebermann.

(Of course, in the privacy of your handy backroom, you were free to share a wink and a nod with the healthcare industry and the hospital lobby.)

About jobs, jobs, jobs … well, you should’ve done this: started building out our infrastructure with government work programs, like FDR used the government to hire people. No one would’ve complained about big government if big government were giving them a goddam job.

But you didn’t do this, El Jerko, so you could’ve done the next best thing: coaxed a rhetorical lily from your mud, as follows:

“This is my monthly jobs report. We lost XX number of jobs and gained XX number of jobs, for an overall gain of XX. That’s XX times better than the GOP did under the previous administration. It’s also XX fewer jobs than we need to add to be out of this mess in three years time. That’s my goal. Three years. They actually dug us an eight-year-deep hole, but I’m aiming to get us out in three. So stick with me and my party. We’re climbing out of the Republican hole slowly but surely, and I won’t rest until every American who wants a job has one.”

And then, after Financial Reform got passed, you should have ladled on this base-kissing sauce:

“We got that through. Thank you for your support. But we couldn’t break up the banks and stop too-big-to-fail for all time. Didn’t have the votes for it. Damn. Double damn. Never mind, next time. When I’m re-elected, I’ll be watching Goldman Sachs and Citicorp like a hawk watching a momma rat giving birth to a feisty tasty squad of baby rats. If those banks start repeating their shitty moves, I’ll be on to them like that hawk, and I’ll launch peck-’em-into-pieces legislation that’ll separate their lending from their gambling and their bonuses from their pockets so far you’d need an intergalactic umbilical cord to connect them.”

(Of course, in the privacy of your handy backroom, you were free to share a wink and a nod with the banks.)

Throwing red meat to your base is the easiest thing on earth. Say it loud, say it all the time, and make sure it’s empty. They’ll lap it up. All they want is the emotional connection. That secret feeling between you and them that hey, you may whore like a tomcat all over town, but when push comes to shove, there’s only one place where true love rules your libido, and that’s in their little beating bleeding hearts. You’ve got to keep titivating your base, baby. What’s the skin off your nose, for chrissake? A little hypocrisy goes a long way. It’s the number one tool in any politician’s kit.

Just one crude example. (Sorry, we’re not doing subtle today.)

Say, what do candles and flowers have to do with fucking? Absolutely nothing. But chicks dig them, so guys who want to get laid, put up with having perfumed candles lit in the bedroom, and the place smelling like a geisha’s crotch, and your most surly pleb of a horny rube thinks nothing of thrusting a bunch of roses he bought at the Korean deli at the groin of his anointed, and cannily pre-tickling his beloved’s amoreuse-sodden fun button with earrings or some such trinket from Target.

A few trinkets, and your base would’ve followed you over a cliff like rodents mesmerized by the wily Pied Piper. Now you’re looking at your hand instead of a sugar ditch, because you scrimped on the blandishments. Your base got nary a rose nor a glass of white wine at a corner table. So no candles are being lit for you.

How could you be so dumb?

Instead of studying Bill Clinton’s history for clues about what to do if you get stuck with a Republican House, you should be studying Lady Gaga.

There’s a lady who knows the first thing about staying popular.

It’s not jobs, jobs, jobs.

It’s base, base, base. (Continued)

Welcome to Missing Link Friday — a quick tour of a few of the issues Australian bloggers have been following during the week. Will it become a regular feature? Let’s see. I’ll be running this alongside Ken Parish’s new reader-driven Missing Link where you get to share your favorite posts.

Open season on Annabel Crabb

On the internet, readers expect their news for free, says ABC Online’s Annabel Crabb. But the trouble is, good journalism is expensive to do. She also called for an end to the old media-new media wars, calling on bloggers not to knock journalists when they tried moving online.

Crabb had plenty more to say in her AN Smith lecture in journalism — 6,917 words worth — and it didn’t take long for the online knockers to emerge.

Long-time blogger Tim Dunlop declared that it was only journalists who worried about the "blog v journalism thing" these days. "Bloggers and other media consumers are over it. It is journalists who remain obsessed with the pissing contest." And to show how over it he was, he added:

many blogs and other online sites are superior to anything the mainstream media can throw up. What’s more, the people who run them are trusted more than journalists.

Mr Denmore is also unimpressed with the state of Australian journalism, remarking that it: "is in crisis not because the media’s classified advertising business model has been blow apart. It is in crisis because the product is simply not very good." And turning to Annabel Crabb he wrote:

Ms Crabbe [sic] clearly is a charming and likeable person and undoubtedly a talented sketch writer. But I am bemused that she seems to have risen at such a young age and with so little experience to become a kind of spokesperson for the future of media and journalism, particularly when what she has to say is so banal and superficial and ridden with the shallow vanity about their craft to which young journalists tend to succumb.

Of course not everyone is unhappy about the state of the media. In a post titled ‘Media whore that I am…‘ Catallaxy’s Sinclair Davidson mentioned that he scored this year’s Thought Leadership Media Star Award at RMIT. He thanked "all the editors who commission op-eds, and to the journalists who call me up to chat."

(Continued)

Over at Mr Denmore I commented on this post, which referred to an Annabelle Crabbe speech in which the the celebrated leaking of the federal budget in it’s entirety is named as part of the rich experience of journalism which we should be valuing. Forgive my self indulgence as I quote myself?.[fn1]

(Continued)

A few people have sent me requests to recommend them on Linkedin but I’ve not really known what to say – recommend to whom? But perhaps the secret source was flattery, which as Disraeli once said should be laid on with a trowel. Whatever it was, I got this overgenerous recommendation from Craig Thomler on my half-heartedly kept Linked In profile. It wasn’t something I’d asked him to do. But I liked it nevertheless.

Nick is an amazing operator and has done more to legitimise Government 2.0 in Australia than any other individual.

Through his leadership of the Gov 2.0 Taskforce Nick became one of the key drivers in establishing a whole-of-government Gov 20 framework for Australia. The blueprint the Taskforce created through its recommendations and sponsored projects will shape and guide Australian government internet usage for twenty years.

Well that’s nice – even if I prefer Nicholas (but that horse bolted long ago and wasn’t helped by the brief ascendancy of Nick Greiner two decades ago.)  Anyway this moved me to my own encomium for Craig, which raises an idea which is beyond simple praise of Craig’s efforts.

The Galileo of Government 2.0!

OK that sounds hyperbolic, but there’s method in my madness. The rise of openness in science occurred when both the producers and consumers of science (the scientists and princes of 17th century Europe respectively) realised that their need for openness was greater than their need for secrecy. The producers of science needed to demonstrate their prowess to find patrons, and the patrons needed openness to ensure themselves that the science peddled at them was robust. Open science emerged from this situation, but not without some difficult moments for its pioneers. Galileo suffered for the emergence of modern science, but the movement of which he was such a pioneer triumphed to humanity’s immense good fortune.

Craig suffered for his convictions in the early years of open government, but one of the things I’m proudest of about my chairmanship of the Government 2.0 Taskforce was that it gave me a platform on which I could start turning the tables. All I really needed to do was make it a little harder to stifle Craig’s great initiative. Once that was done the fact that so many of his achievements, and the achievements of teams of which he was a part were there for all to see on the net meant that, others could see for themselves the value of what he was doing. Like Galileo peddling his inventions and publishing his doctrines.

And once private and social incentives are both pointing the same way – and both pointing towards a better world then, though there will be inevitable setbacks, there will be no stopping that new, better world from emerging.

Not a bad effort that – being a significant part of making the world a little better.

Congratulations Craig.

Prompted by University of Queensland’s Graeme Turner,  Mark Bahnisch has a pair of posts over at Larvatus Prodeo asking rhetorically whether the Humanities at Australian universities are dying. As Turner puts it:

ONCE, the humanities were fundamental to the idea of the university. Now science is at the core of the research mission of the Australian university, and professional training at the core of its teaching mission.

The humanities fight for space in each of these domains as the recognition of their importance declines.

In research the humanities receives a fair whack of funding from governments but very little from the corporate sector.

In terms of teaching (undergraduate enrolments), however,  initial observation of DEEWR statistics doesn’t seem to bear out this pessimism, with 36,363 of 134,883 EFTSL (students) in 2009 falling under the “Society and Culture” category which includes the humanities and social sciences.  That’s around 25% and it grew by a modest but respectable 5.1% from the previous year.

However the picture looks significantly less healthy when you strip out vocational/professional disciplines like law and psychology, and positively terminal if you focus on regional and even smaller metropolitan universities.  Enrolments in the “soft” humanities and social sciences (English, history, political science, philosophy, religion, sociology, anthropology) are clearly under severe pressure.

The likely reasons are not hard to find.  In the wake of the Dawkins revolution when teachers’ colleges and CAEs were transformed into universities and universal HECS fees were introduced, and with universities increasingly reliant on full fee-paying international students to stay afloat in the face of declining federal funding (until very recently), it was inevitable that students’ enrolment decisions would be dominated by public perceptions of the likely immediate vocational payoff from “investment” in a university degree.  The soft humanities tend to do poorly on such perceptions.  Academic Kerryn Goldsworthy (PC) observed:

(Continued)