Club Troppo

Put it up to eleven: "The entire media is shouting ALL the time because they’re worried that if they pull back on their Tube Screamers their highly compressed copy won’t be heard over all the other sources of distraction", says Mr Denmore.

We reject your demand for demands: The Occupy movement’s lack of demands is a strength, writes Tad Tietze. And at the Brookings Institution, Elisabeth Jacobs agrees: "Occupy Wall Street’s lack of explicit demands is smart movement politics for the time being, advantageous for the movement itself and for savvy politicians alike. For a month-old movement with solid popular support, OWS’s demand-free stance makes good sense."

Presidential hopeful Rick Perry has policies… but he can’t remember what they are.

The right-wing hive-mind? At Larvatus Prodeo, commenter Rob wonders about the flood of comments on issues like climate change and refugees. They "have a consistent right wing bias ie the commentators are consistently right wing through and through but yet seemingly they will only let their views be known on about 3 or 4 topics." Something "very planned is obviously going on", says Rob.

A vast right-wing conspiracy? "In the United States of America there is evidence that the right have to hire people to pretend to be right-wing commenters in order to keep up with the genuine enthusiasm and activism of the left in on-line media." Blue Milk (see also: Craigslist ad for right-wing commenters draws suspicion and a few giggles, National Post).

Immigration Restrictions as Affirmative Action: "Conservatives usually think that ‘oppressed minorities’ should spend a lot less time complaining about unfair treatment and a lot more time improving their skills and work ethic. Fair point, but the same holds for native-born Americans who complain that immigrants are taking their jobs." Bryan Caplan at Econlog.

McRib arbitrage: American econo-bloggers are fascinated by the comings and goings of McDonald’s McRib sandwich. It starts with this post by Willy Staley at the Awl. Matthew Yglesias and Alex Tabarrok join in.

I cam across this post in my morning Google reader perusal:

A ballot measure that StateImpact Ohio (a creation of local public media and NPR) describes as “a referendum on a constitutional amendment…aimed at keeping the national health care reform law from taking [e]ffect” won in all 88 counties in Ohio. In 81 of the counties, it won by a margin of at least 20 percentage points. Statewide, it won by 32 points (66 to 34 percent).

Ohio is a northern swing State not a so-called “Red State” so you’d have to regard this vote as a significant measure of the apparent unpopularity of Obamacare.  I can’t help asking why?  I’m not au fait with the details of Obamacare, but in general terms I thought it was not all that dissimilar (at least in philosophy) to Australia’s Medicare system i.e. universal health care cover.  Why then the almost diametrically opposed outcomes in terms of public support?  Australia’s Medicare system was so popular after introduction that the Coalition was forced to reverse its initial opposition to it and has promised ever since to retain it.

Are Americans so radically different from Australians?  Or is Obamacare a radically different or badly flawed initiative?  I simply don’t know enough about it to have an opinion, so I’m rather hoping some more erudite Troppo readers can advise.

BTW Despite rumblings and an application before the US Supreme Court, it doesn’t look very likely that Obamacare will be held unconstitutional.

One of the less significant but more entertaining aspects of yesterday’s parliamentary antics surrounding passage of the carbon price legislation was Nationals Senator Ron Boswell’s sledge of former colleague Tony Windsor:

Nationals Senator Ron Boswell branded Mr Windsor “the greatest sell-out since Judas Iscariot” yesterday after the Government’s carbon tax bills were passed by the Senate.

Mr Windsor has told ABC Radio’s AM that he is not worried by the jibe.

“I don’t give a grain of salt [to] anything he’s said,” he said.

“He’s been a lap dog for the Liberals for many years. He just plays short-term politics. I take absolutely no notice of anything Ron Boswell says, and wish him well in retirement.”

It isn’t immediately obvious to me who Boswell reckons Windsor is betraying or why we should see it as having biblical proportions, but leaving that aside … I can immediately summon up several manifestly bigger betrayals:

1. Sonny Bill selling out the Canterbury Bulldogs helped by that self-important wanker Anthony Mundine;
2. Mark Thompson selling out the Cats for the Bombers.  Mind you he was a Bomber originally, but spending the entire season hypocritically trying to convince Gary Ablett that he’d be a traitorous dog if he took Gold Coast’s money and decamped northwards makes it a Big League Betrayal;
3. Ross Lyon stabbing St Kilda, his own management and Mark Harvey simultaneously by suddenly shifting to Freo;
4. Des Hasler’s selling out Manly, moving to the Bulldogs from 2013 but trying to stay on at the Sea Eagles for long enough to rape and pillage their playing list.  I’ve always been a bit mystified about how a sanctimonious tosser like Thomas Keneally, almost certainly Australia’s second most overrated author of all time and pipped at the post only by Patrick White, could have engaged with a good bloke like Hasler for long enough to write his biography.  I was beginning to think I might have misjudged old Tom, but it looks like I misjudged Des instead.  I don’t object to his doing the best for himself financially, especially if there was strife on the Sea Eagles Board, but there are ethical and unethical ways of going about it, as Chad Bennett says:

If Hasler had been significantly affected by the fractured board at Manly to the point he could no longer continue at the club, then so be it. Walk away.

But don’t try and keep your fingers in two pies at once, Des.

It’s unmanageable, underhanded and most importantly, unprofessional.

The latest psychology bestseller The Folly of Fools is on the triumph of deceit. It looks quite interesting. Anyway, it looked a bit too focused on the bestseller formula – which is often the book of the article formula for me to want to read it all. But I’ve downloaded my Kindle sample and will see how it goes. In the interim I hunted down a few reviews. And an interview at Salon here. The author had a blinding flash of insight.

Working on parent-offspring conflict, I suddenly had this flash of insight: “Ah! If self-deception improves your ability to deceive others, then you would have a strong selective force to get it into your consciousness.”

Well, on inspection it may not have been blinding, but we have it on the author’s authority that it was an insight.

In any event it struck me that it was an inversion of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. In that book, as the child grows conscience begins as an H.L. Mencken conscience. H.L. Mencken said that conscience is that little voice inside us that tells us that someone might be watching. But over time the child internalises the idea and comes to acquire an impartial spectator, a ‘man within the breast’ whose approbation he craves. I had my own insight which is that the new bestselling insight is the inverse of Smith’s insight about how good can come from internalising things. Smiths’ insight is an insight into humans as rhetorical creatures (Smith’s first academic job was as a teacher of rhetoric and belles lettres). Alas this insight is less visible to us now than it was to him.

Then rhetoric was the study of communication and persuasion. Today it is rhetoric as in ‘mere’ rhetoric.

The rift which occured between the view of rhetoric as a central aspect of intellectual endeavour and our own conception of rhetoric as essentially cosmetic is captured comically in this passage by Howell.

The chasm which yawned between the elocutionists, on the one hand , and the traditional or new rhetoricians of the eighteenth century [Smith was one of the finest of the new rhetoricians.], was very wide. . . . Its width at its greatest extent . . . can be suggested by a comparison of the intellectual level of the first sentence of Aristotle’s Rhetoric with that of the first sentence of an American elocutionary textbook of the late nineteenth century. Both of these works were intended for mature students. Said Aristotle: “Rhetoric is the counterpart of dialectic.” Said the elocutionary textbook: “Always inhale through the nostrils.”

Howell, W.S., Eighteenth Century British Logic and Rhetoric, New Jersey, 1971, p. 713-4.

I usually disagree with recently reborn RWDB blogger Professor Bunyip, and his potshots at this week’s principal witnesses in the Finkelstein Press Inquiry aren’t exceptional in that regard.  But I have to confess (not for the first time) to taking a certain guilty pleasure at the Bunyip’s elegant line in toxic splenetic bias. Yesterday’s attack on Martin Hirst was a reasonable example of the genre but today’s spray at Stephen Mayne, Robert Manne, Eric Beecher and law academic Adrienne Stone is a true classic of the genre:

So they are the main voices likely to dominate the witness box – an old Trot, a short wanker, a tall wanker, a rent-seeker and an academic who supports freedom of speech except she doesn’t.

Interestingly it seems cartoonist Peter Nicholson shares a not dissimilar view, although I can’t work out whether the Fourth Horseman is meant to be Hirst or Stone.  More likely the hourglass suggests it’s neither, but rather the spectre of print media  doomed by time and technology irrespective of the efforts of Manne, Mayne et al.  I’m not convinced he’s correct but it’s a great cartoon. I especially love the portrayal of Ray Finkelstein, who I briefed years ago in a commercial dispute and who at the time was a dead ringer for Woody Allen in both appearance and manner. Nicholson seems to think he’s acquired a rather more ecclesiastical gravitas in the meantime.

I assume that the serious point Professor Bunyip is trying to make (apart from gratuitously paying out on people he doesn’t like) is that regulation of print media is dangerous and not to be countenanced under any circumstances or to any extent.  This is a view not only held by those on the hard right.  The ABC’s Jonathan Holmes, for example, has a similar opinion.  Personally, I acknowledge the democratic dangers but I don’t think it’s beyond our wit or wisdom to devise an appropriate solution.
(Continued)

Cathy Wilkerson was ironing bed sheets when the floor collapsed under her feet. A bomb had detonated in the subbasement of her parent’s Greenwich Village townhouse. Cathy and another woman walked away but their friends Teddy Gold, Terry Robbins and Diane Oughton were dead.

It was March 1970 and the young people caught in the explosion were members of an American anti-war and anti-racism organisation. Outraged by the war in Vietnam, by poverty, racism and the oppression of women, they had made a decision to fight for social justice. And that’s why Terry Robbins was in the subbasement stuffing dynamite and nails into water pipes. The bomb was meant for trainee army officers, their wives and dates at a social function at nearby Fort Dix, New Jersey. It exploded by accident. In her book Flying Close to the Sun, Wilkerson explains why the group chose Fort Dix:

… to train to be an officer meant that you were playing a leadership role in the US military strategy. These young men had an education; they had a responsibility to acknowledge the human consequences of their work. As such, we thought they were fair game.

The trainee officers were more fortunate than Anders Breivik’s victims on the island of Utøya. When Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt heard about the explosions and shootings in Norway, he immediately assumed the attackers were Muslim. "Terrorists attack Oslo", he titled a post on his blog. But when news came in that the killer was a tall, blond Norwegian, he added an update: "No, a single madman". But there was no evidence that Anders Breivik was mentally ill and 1,516 pages worth of evidence that his murderous rampage was deliberate and politically motivated. Time magazine’s William Boston describes the sprawling cut-and-paste manifesto he released over internet as "a template for right-wing terrorism".

(Continued)

Just in case you didn’t notice it, there’s been a crevice that’s opened up on Tony Abbott’s long road to the Lodge.   A crevice that in just a few days has opened up to bloody great yawning credibility gap.

It was just last week, in the wake of  the Qantas fiasco, and the critisims from old stagers that he was being weak kneed on IR that Mr Abbott’s blokey swagger and chin jutting suddenly started to look phoney.    A more convincing performer would have leavened the posturing with a bit of pensive self-reflection, But for Mr. Abbott it’s pop out the chin, grit teeth to get those jaw muscled looking pumped, and adopt the pose of determined leadership.

Problem is that Mr. Abbott’s posing pouch is no longer ample enough to cover up the hideous truth.  The country’s rooted if he gets his hands on it.

Sober and respected business commentators are calling Mr. Abbott guilty of a gross failure of economic credibility,  and big-nob political journos who write for the Murdoch press are saying he’s gone feral, with outlandish ill-considered opinions on the Mining Tax, the European bail-out and a knee-jerk response on Qantas.

George Megalogenis says that ”the fundamental weakness of Tony Abbot is that he’ll say anything to get his face on TV” [12:12].

Whether you’re in the Laurie Oakes camp and you reckon Abbott’s  lashing out at everything like a shark in a feeding frenzy, or whether like me (and probably George) you think the whole thing’s a  B-Grade act, by a B-Grade actor who’s learned his trade from Chuck Norris films – one things for sure – people will start to twig to Mr. Abbots fatal flaw -and maybe – just maybe – Labor is in with a shot.

Interestingly Mr Megalogenis, thinks that the best strategy for Labour in these circumstances is to lose the next election.

If I were Labour I’d be prepared to take a loss in the next election knowing that their turn will come pretty quickly if they cede power to a political party that is not interested in the big ideas. [18.36]

The theory, I assume, being that if Mr. Abbott gets in then we’ll really get a taste of how much of a disaster a Prime Minister can be, and in our repentance we’ll push the reset button on Australian politics.

I think there might be something in that – Perhaps it calls for a Labor campaign under the slogan “We hope you get the government you deserve”.  But on second thoughts that sounds bitter and lacking the compassion that hopefully is still somewhere in the DNA – so perhaps a campaign based on the style of community awareness campaigns.  A simple direct message to the good people of Australia  ”We are handing over the controls to your new pilot. please fasten your seat-belt and assume the brace position – there may not be time for last drinks”.

“Forecasting Private Consumption: Survey-Based Indicators vs. Google Trends”, SIMEON VOSEN* AND TORSTEN SCHMIDT, RWI, Essen, Germany

ABSTRACT

In this study we introduce a new indicator for private consumption based on search query time series provided by Google Trends. The indicator is based on factors extracted from consumption-related search categories of the Google Trends application Insights for Search. The forecasting performance of the new indicator is assessed relative to the two most common survey-based indicators: the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index and the Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index. The results show that in almost all conducted in-sample and out-of-sample forecasting experiments the Google indicator outperforms the survey-based indicators. This suggests that incorporating information from Google Trends may offer significant benefits to forecasters of private consumption.

Journal of Forecasting, 30, 565–578 (2011)

On the suggestion, some time ago, of Ian Marsh, I finally caught up with the New Democracy Foundation a few weeks ago. Not surprisingly we got on well.  I’ve always been keen on things like consensus conferences – which bring the deliberation of a jury to wider social and political issues.  And when we were debating the republic and the evils of Pauline Hanson I proposed as an antidote to the latter, a third house of parliament chosen by lot. I liked the proposal that Gillard put up to a the the last election for climate change to go to such a body, but it was done in such a way and in such circumstances that it got buried under the media’s and the electorate’s (justified) cynicism about it.

Anyway, I’ve recently been thinking about how such institutions could improve our politics. If the ALP had the courage of its convictions, if, as a relatively conscientious government it comprehended the ease with which the Opposition has been able to divide and conquer the electorate with one scare campaign after another, it would realise that developing such institutions would be in its own long term interest.

In any event, pondering these things an idea occured to me. Sometimes people lament what the party system has done to us – with elected representatives not being able to vote issues on their merits.  In fact this is as it should be – or arguably so. They’re supposed to be representatives after all, so they’re supposed to be publicly accountable for the way they vote, and, given how much community consent is channelled through political parties, they need to be publicly accountable to the party they represent.

Still, wouldn’t it be interesting to know how they would vote if they had a secret ballot? Of course that would be inconsistent with representative democracy.  We need to know how they are voting or all sorts of strange things could occur – like parties placing ‘moles’ inside their opponents’ parties. In fact the members of parliament do have a secret ballet (or if they dont’ now, they did once) in electing the titular heads of the chambers, the Speaker of the House and President of the Senate. And at some stage a public vote would have put in a Liberal as President of the Senate, but in fact the votes when counted supported the Labor candidate. I think it was Justin O’Byrne but the date (1974) seems wrong. Perhaps someone can enlighten us. In any event the ALP candidate was a better candidate than his opponent and one Liberal crossed the floor – or perhaps I should say snuck across the floor – in the secret ballot that was held.

So the thought experiment is this. We can keep going with the current system, but we could also require Parliamentarians to post secret ballots as well – which could be expedited very easily over the net. It would place a bit more pressure on the parties to avoid acting too cynically as they would be shown as supporting policies that do not have the support of the majority of Parliamentarians when some choose to vote according to their consciences.  Of course I’m not really suggesting it could ever happen.  But it might be good if it did. It would also be more fun!

My post at CDU Law and Business Online.