In other words, Murdoch, right wing politicians, climate change denialists, rapture fans, and the usual anti-science brigade, are lying. As usual. Whether the lies are out of malice or habit is a moot point.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jan/08/police-contradict-claims-spread-online-exaggerating-arsons-role-in-australian-bushfires

Craig Kelly perfectly demonstrates that the LNP has a problem with women and science in just four words.

But he is punching up accidentally.

#NotAWeatherGirl #AusPol

Some people can look at the 2008 Garnaut Climate Change Review, in 2020, in hindsight, and still not have 20/20 hindsight.

From the report – “Recent projections of fire weather (Lucase et al. 2007) suggest that fire seasons will start earlier, and slightly later, and generally be more intense. This effect increases over time, but should be direct observable by 2020.”

More information:

• How a climate change study from 12 years ago warned of this horror bushfire season
  • https://www.sbs.com.au/news/how-a-climate-change-study-from-12-years-ago-warned-of-this-horror-bushfire-season
• Archived website of the Garnaut Review at the National Library of Australia
  • https://webarchive.nla.gov.au/awa/20190510002336/https://www.garnautreview.org.au/

If you read the gospels cover to cover you realize what Jesus meant by “neighbor”. Certainly not the Canaanites living in the same cities, as he explicitly likened them to dogs (considered unclean animals), rejected the notion his message related to them (Matthew 15, Mark 7). Combine that with the long rejection by those who actually knew Jesus of Saul-Paul’s push for market penetration of the sect into the non-Jewish population, and you can see that “neighbor” was restricted to Jews (which included Samaritans).

Matthew 15:24 “But he answered and said, I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” (KJV)

(After a few verses of pretending the Canaanite woman did not exist, ruder even than “talk to the hand”)

For context: Matthew 15

22 A gentile woman came to him begging him to help her sick child. 23 Jesus studiously ignored her. The disciples said “Can you send her away? she won’t listen to us telling her to bugger off.” 24 Jesus said “Not talking to her – my mission is only for Jews.” 25 Then the women fell at his feet and begged again. 26 He answered “People don’t take food for family and give it to dirty dogs.”

Yeah – Jesus doesn’t give a damn about even a sick kid – if the kid is not Jewish. (Guess that explains all those altar boys left to rot by God)

You will find the same metaphor of non-Jews as dogs, unclean animals, (not as bad as pigs, but a similar notion) in Mark 7 – it is not an “accident” by a scribe in Matthew.

How nasty is the dog reference?

Dogs were barely tolerated in ancient Judaism and the Talmud, except for control of vermin like rats. They were symbols of prostitution and the demonic, so unlike most animals, could not be used in sacrifice. They had to be kept chained. It was not until the middle ages that things started to get a little more relaxed. Even now, as a percentage of pets kept in households in the USA, dogs are far rarer in Jewish households (and Muslim households) than the general population.

So all those white Neo-Nazi Christians? Bit stupid thinking Jesus might love them. But spot on thinking Jesus would approve of their racism.

THE ONLY THING YOU NEED FOR THE AUSTRALIAN BEACH
[IMAGE OF INHALER USED BY ASHTMATICS]
Because with all the smoke, nobody needs insect repellent or sunscreen
(Copyleft Dave Bath 2019)
Keywords: Australian Bushfires; Climate Change

The Sydney Harbour Bridge actually takes up most of this picture – but you need to look carefully to see through the haze

The world’s richest woman, mining magnate Rinehart, has made it plain she wants to make Fairfax (The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, as well as numerous popular radio stations) more mining-friendly, more anti-scientific-consensus, and I suspect, more against the opinion of independent economists when it comes to policy in general.

• No more can informed debate dismiss as ridiculous what was previously almost held as "conspiracy theory" the notion that Big Money will seek to control the press to control debate, and policy.
   
• She has certainly increased the feelings progressives have to a decent media sector that, at least as a whole sector, is theoretically important to a liberal democracy.
   
• She cannot trash the brand, and profitability, while avoiding the wrath of corporate regulators, without a complete takeover.  This will at least raise the price of fairfax shares during a takeover, putting money in the pockets of people who have been supporting better journalism, and more likely to contribute to society with it than Gina ever would!
   
• Her claims that moving to the right editorially is the fix to Fairfax’s woes is rendered ridiculous when the centrist Fairfax, just in Melbourne, sells more newspapers, at least 25% more, than the pro-plutocrat Murdoch "The Australian" does across the entire nation.  She is either stupid, or a liar, or both – and proof not everyone, especially with inherited wealth, should be listened to.
   
• If she does destroy what existing investors see as their most valuable asset and product differentiator – relatively independent journalism – then most readers will move their habits online to the likes of ABC Drum for their daily dose of analysis, opinion, and "letters to the editor".
   
• The timing, with Murdoch on the nose with criminal investigations in England for privacy violations and improper political interference, could not have been more likely to inflame progressives.
   
• By bringing forward the rationalization in size of the print edition, moving many classifieds to the net, less trees will be killed, and the latte sippers will have more room on their tables in cafes!

While progressives may be angry at Gina in the short term, it may be the pigs, the "one percent", the "five percent", those against evidence-based policy, that will be angrier with her in the long term.  That’s not guaranteed, but it is a possibility, a possibility the arrogance of Big Money is naturally too stupid to consider.

Notes/See-Also:

• "Go ahead Gina, build another content company", Alan Kohler, takes a wider view of things, and in places, against the "common wisdom". (Business Spectator, 2012-06-19)
  

  Gina Rinehart has absolutely nothing to contribute to the transformation of the company into a profitable digital publisher and is not interested in it anyway, …
  &nbsp:
  the combination of print and digital publishing simply does not work. They are completely different products with different uses, and the construction and operation of them require totally different ways of thinking.

   

• "In defence of independent media", Malcolm Fraser, former PM, once-bogeyman of the left, now the only publically-active elder statesman in the country, (Business Spectator, 2012-06-19)
  

  Media should not be under the direct control of special interest groups whether they belong to this country or to other countries. That is why we need diversity of media ownership. That is why I stood on the back of a truck with Gough Whitlam overlooking Fitzroy Gardens long years ago, to try and prevent the Fairfax empire falling into foreign hands. A foreign owner has interests that are not ours. A mining magnate has specific industry interests that are not necessary those of Australia.

• This review was first published, with minor edits, as a guest post over at skepticlawyer.com.au.  On republishing "at home" I’ll being adding a few other links about the book, and to other places, as time permits.  I would like to thank my far-from-lefty friends over at skepticlawyer for their invitation.  There will be more comments over there, as it’s a blog with far greater readership.

"Left Turn", with the secondary title "Political essays for the New Left", edited (I’d say "assembled") by Antony Lowenstein and Jeff Sparrow, is a series of essays from a range of lefties with different perspectives and concerns, each essentially a single issue, with some "doubling up".  The introduction and back-cover blurb acknowledge the despair of many of the left, and offer the promise of suggestions for a way for the left to make a difference again.

It’s a book of bits, disparate opinions, varying styles, and varying quality.  That makes it tricky to review – like a food critic trying to give a concise impression of a "bring-a-plate" dinner, nothing consistent, apart from in this case, needing to say "Hang on … there was no dessert … where is my dessert?" 

If there is something striking about the book for me, it was what is missing.

Reading the book feels like being in a slightly too-small room full of ardent lefties, all wired on lattes, tongues loosened with chardonnay, everybody talking at once.  Aaaah … memories of times before I met my grandson’s grandmother, when Big Mal Fraser was the Big Bad … the nods or wry smiles at good points, the rolled eyes at stating-the-bleeding-obvious and the lowered slowly-shaking head at clangers.

If you are much younger than I am, you might instead feel you are reading a "Best of Larvatus Prodeo" – for better and worse.

The "bring-a-plate" dinner has some tasty bits.  Some morsels come with a nice dipping-sauce of self-criticism.  There are few, not quite enough, meaty bits of common-sense suggestions.

Then there are the bits where something wasn’t trimmed properly before cooking, the bits you bite on, then wonder whether you risk gagging on it, or whether it is possible, in a polite way, to reach into the back of your mouth with your fingers, grab the horrible gristly bit, and put it on the side of the plate – where, sadly, everybody can see what was served up.

"Capitalism is, after all, inextricably linked to the contemporary concept of ‘being a slut’."
– Jacinta Woodhead – Sexiness and Sexism

Oh dear. Where’d that come from? Now … nobody brought any napkins to wipe my fingers after disentangling that from my uvula.  If by capitalism you mean Adam Smith capitalism, then I am confused – but then, Marx and Engels missed predicting the inevitability of that inextricable linkage too, so I guess I can forgive myself.

This is one problem that comes from the left talking to itself, expecting not to be pulled up by other lefties when making statements that are "out there" as if they are self-evident, needing no justification.  I guess there is a karaoke machine at the bring-a-plate dinner, with everybody getting up, expecting that really bum notes won’t be commented on among friends – yet … it’s not a private party … there are righties wandering past the doors, scrunching their faces in pain while laughing at the bits horribly off key.  This is not the way to help yourself to be taken seriously when you are complaining about not being taken seriously.

One thing the book does correctly, I imagine due to the editors, is minimize use of the term capitalism, with "neoliberalism" named again and again as the "Big Bad".

This thing done correctly, however, points to what I see as the flaw in the book, the "where was dessert?" moment: there is a place between the left and neoliberals, not a small place, not terra nullius, but with many good thinkers, wanting, like many lefties, decent humane outcomes, evidenced-based policy development, better discourse in the parliament and the press, and just as depressed about how things are going.

The "missing dessert" problem is made worse when the book discusses the way the media and politics now operate, what I see (but not much discussed in the book) as the way anti-intellectualism is pandered to because it avoids the need to deal with evidence when developing policy.  The flawed processes, the social conservatism, the absence of Jefferson’s informed and active citizenry is just as troubling to "decent righties", who would make such good and necessary allies, are not mentioned, and certainly, there is no reaching out to the progressive right, no suggestion of this being a way forward.

SNIPPETS

Perhaps given the bittiness of the book, a few bits, albeit possibly out of context, are useful.  Given this review is hosted by women, it’s probably appropriate to select bits written by women, and mainly on women’s issues.

Sexism

"Indeed, abortion still falls under the Crimes Act in every Australian state and territory, save Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory.  …  This illicitness fits nicely with the conservative worldview – and the importance of the nuclear family.  That’s perhaps why, despite the gains from sexual liberation being subsumed by neoliberalism, women’s reproductive rights are the one area the marketplace hasn’t claimed.  The market may very well hold all other aspects of women’s bodies in its grasp, but social conservatism still reigns over abortion, self-abortion, and reproductive products.  "
– Jacinta Woodhead – Sexiness and Sexism

Reasonable observations, some facts, and a justifiable interpretation.  The book contains enough such bits to be worth reading, if you are into political essays.

"Feminism needs a program that … stops focussing on debates about semantics and pornography, and, instead, returns to collective action with broader tangible goals.  …  [long dot dot dot to next page]  …  Maybe a contemporary feminist movement should concentrate on the right to free abortion-on-demand, without the doctor’s or the court’s permission."
– Jacinta Woodhead – Sexiness and Sexism

Good – some self-criticism, and a sensible enough suggestion about what to do, perhaps a bit bleeding obvious, but worth saying nonetheless, especially for those on the left hung up about semantics,  … but … no mention of the natural allies in the progressive right who want those same tangible outcomes.

Media

There are two essays on the media, one by Antony Lowenstein, the other by Wendy Bacon.  These, along with the introduction, are perhaps the strongest parts of the book, perhaps because they focus on the systemic problems that block progress on every other part of the "lefty" agenda, and have fewer "gristly bits" that will make decent righties gag.  There are criticism of journalists as mere stenographers passing on information, of the media not always conspiring against good policy and debate, merely being a bit gutless in order to get the favor of politicians, the privilege of an exclusive or a leak.

"Progressive media needs to reclaim the democratic philosophical underpinnings of journalism … a scientific approach to the testing of evidence, which does not preclude an interpretive point of view … the ‘claim of humanity’ to the principles of journalism.  The claim states that journalists’ primary claim is to truthful, independent informing of a global public humanity."
– Wendy Bacon – A Voice for the Voiceless

Again, this is something decent righties want too – journalists doing what they are supposed to do in order to justify the privileged position of journalists in a democracy.  But … no mention of the natural allies.

I was surprised, given the obvious problem of public disengagement, and indeed general antipathy to thinking, that I couldn’t find (maybe I reading too quickly) discussion of the success of The Jon Stewart Show as part of the way forward, throwing bricks at screwups regardless of which "side" is responsible for the screwup.

WHO CAN GET SOMETHING FROM THE BOOK

"Left Turn" is useful to lefties, and the most useful is the self-criticism, perhaps best done in "The Toxicity of Smugness" by Christos Tsiolkas.  We need more of this.

The book has many good "factoids" useful for dropping into other conversations, pointing to failures in how our society operates, although the flaws are already obvious to lefties (and quite a few decent righties) and not uncommonly provided, if not put together to form a "message", in the mainstream media.

There will be the righties who read it, and go "I told you so" at the self-criticisms, look at the bits of sloganeering and roll their eyes and perhaps have greater reason to dismiss lefties in general.  Still, the wry giggles are giggles, and laughter is good medicine.

Maybe some of the decent righty readers will see a snippet, and say to themselves, "well, yes, that’s a good point, and I am worried about that too."  Every little bit of that helps, but I doubt it is "friendly" enough to decent righties in general tone to encourage acceptance of all the points that could be accepted.

The indecent righties, however, will enjoy the book no end, find every single "gristly bit", put on a great show of gagging, and make the left look sillier than it deserves to be.  Of course, the indecent righties won’t point out the biggest flaw of the book, the "missing dessert" problem – oh, no – can’t have the decent folk of the right and left joining forces and spoiling the fun the hypocrites are having!

THE BOOK THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN

If the problem facing the left is being considered irrelevant by the mainstream, if we need to make an impact again, make progress, then we need to have as much in our arsenal as possible.

So we should be aware of our natural allies among decent righties.  We need to be able to criticize neoliberalism, and the failures of the financial market, with arguments that are valid, and more likely to get the attention of the unthinking mob, including the aspirationalists who assume anything labelling itself as capitalist is good, anything smacking of intellectualism bad.

We need to use the weapons the decent right provides for us.  The Economist magazine, well-informed and a devout believer in free markets, warned for years about an impending financial meltdown and a housing bubble – their prognostications and criticisms of bailouts are surely useful, cannot be dismissed by the lumpenproletariat as the rantings of the smug lefty intellectual elite.  Similar weapons are available from The Adam Smith institute, pointing out that the advantages of the flexibility of free markets and competition are lost when there is a political system that allows existing commercial players to get politicians to institutionalize moral hazard, make it difficult for new players or constructively disruptive products to compete – something as harmful, if not more so, than the state intruding in markets openly and for openly-discussed reasons.

It would surprise many that The Economist is very much for climate change action, because effective climate change actions, not the symbolic ones proposed by many governments are necessary anyway, good for business in a world of finite resources.

The cream on the missing dessert is the mutual respect, the strength through dialectic that comes from engaging with the decent righties, who are part of the intellectual elite, share a large part of the progressive agenda particularly where the underlying democratic processes are concerned.  Jefferson’s informed and active citizenry essential for a functioning democracy is highly desired by the left, but Jefferson wasn’t a lefty.  Edmund Burke’s arguments against British militarism and lack of due process for prisoners during the American Revolution, with so many parallels to the militarism of the USA today and the excesses of Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay, would fit right in with the lefty agenda – but Edmund Burke called himself a Conservative, and even John Howard (hypocritically, and he knew it), claimed there is Burkean Conservatism running in the blood of the Liberal Party.

Being more specific, and practical, Keynes and Hayek were on very good terms, admired the work of each other, while admitting disagreements.

The book that could have been would have used progressive righty arguments as well, and ideally, got some progressive righties as contributors – right and left not selling out or softening, but keeping each other honest, both fighting on their own high grounds against the common foes.

Are there big systemic problems that lefties would acknowledge as big systemic problems?  Do we have, as Barry Jones puts it, the most highly qualified yet least educated cohort in history?  Do we have politicians on all sides who no longer represent the people but are the puppets of faceless men in the back rooms of the party machines?  Do we have regulatory and legislative capture, news-cycle political agenda for soundbites, rather than evidence-based policy development and the demand for it?

Would those same problems be recognized as systemic, preventing movement on important specific issues, by progressive righties?

The book that could have been would not be titled "Left Turn", but engaged all those influenced by Enlightenment values, it would have been called "Fall In, Forward March".

Notes / See Also:

• Christos Tsiolkas: The Toxicity of Smugness in The Adelaide Review, one of the essays included in Left Turn.
• You’re not all that. You’re really not. – (SL at Skepticlawyer 2012-06-01) on the Tsiolkas Essay

Scientific American has an interesting article "Losing Your Religion: Analytic Thinking Can Undermine Belief" (2012-04-26) – which seems pretty obvious, but the experiments looked at how analytical training attacks the cancer of religious thinking at the level of the individual.
 

This is trickier than tracking it at the level of a society, but I think the results would hold at the group level, with lower sky-fairy fandom the result of a better education system.
 

While forcing people to actually think about statements of sky fairies, by presenting the questions in a difficult-to-read typeface, or even, just getting them to think about thinking in general, by showing them either Rodin’s "The Thinker" versus a generic statue (in this case, a classical Greek discus thrower), made mild believers answer as mild unbelievers.
 

In the "Big Picture" then, an education system that makes people more analytical and reflective, surely part of what a humane education system should be doing (rather than a system designed to churn out good little economic production units), should make people less religious.
 

Despite higher retention rates at all levels, religiosity, either by looking at attendence at more charismatic churches, or by the increasing power of the "right wing" even in "thinking" churches like the Anglicans, or even by the decrease since about 1990 in the Australian Census of those saying "no religion", religiosity is increasing.
 

This strongly suggests that our educational systems, even though having increasing contact time with students, is producing a society less capable of analytical thought, and/or less exposed to thinking about thinking.
 

Who benefits from a population that is less analytical, less capable of asking awkward questions?  Not just the religious sector, but the major political parties and commercial interests will be able to sway voters more easily, using the Dark Arts of propaganda and advertising rather than facts or reason to take advantage of the citizenry.
 

Why would the politicians, with the real constituents donors, and who like being able to make back-room deals to determine policy rather than rely on evidence and an informed citizenry, want the general voter to be able to think?
 

So don’t expect the education systems to produce a smarter population any time soon, and expect susceptibility to dogma and propaganda, either political, economic or religious, to keep rising.
 

Still … the research points to a useful indicator of what our education systems are actually doing.  Pity that indicator is heading in the wrong direction faster and faster.

See Also:

• Homepage of Ara Norenzayan, one of the paper’s authors.
• Hompage of Will Gervais, the other author
• Supporting online material for Gervais, W. M. & Norenzayan, A. (2012). Analytic Thinking Promotes Religious Disbelief. Science, 336, 493-496.
• Creating Consilience (chapter on evolution of religiosity by Norenzayan and Gervais in a more general text)
• "Is rationality the enemy of religion?</a?" ("Muse" blog at "Nature" 2012-04-26) takes a critical look at the experiments, and suggests caution to my comments above: "The problem is that it is nearly impossible to devise any investigation of ‘religious belief’ per se, because it takes so many forms and rarely consists of a coherent and consistent set of principles, even in a particular individual. It is like trying to study what makes people ‘artistic’ or ‘nice’."

"Valuable advice on investment advisors" (Tim Harford, 2012-04-28) points to a neat double-blind experiment, sending portfolios with common biases and some stupidities to financial advisors to see what would be advised.
 

The financial advisors demanded control of at least part of the portfolios first, then dispensed advice that maximized trades, and thus maximized revenue to the advisor – in some cases, blatantly against the interest of the consumer.
 

No surprises there, unless you believe the fairy story that competition between financial advisors will weed out the bad ones, and the Invisible Hand works miracles.
 

To my mind, the financial sector as a whole operates this way, treating nations as a whole, and the public, as prey.   They push for maximal activity rather than production, advise governments either through &quot;expert&quot; advise to governments directly, or through the media, peddling their poison to the credulous public.
 

The financiers hunt in packs, convincing the sheep that the wolves have ovine interests at heart, that the scraps and blood unswallowed by the wolves, and the wolves’ droppings, fertilize the ground so more grass grows for the sheep to eat.
 

In economies as a whole, the finance sector pushes the line that increasing trading is good, rather than making prudent decisions that could stand the test of time – even if by time I mean 6 months.&nbsp;  The trading increases without any increased benefit to society – finance sector profits as a percentage of corporate profits increasing manyfold without any proportional increase in human well-being.

The sheep are hurt by the Global Financial Crisis, and the wolves are stronger than ever – and push for ever less regulation over more trades.

The infamous 1925 "Scopes Monkey Trial" pitched Tennessee against a teacher who dared to cover Darwin and evolution in class.

The governor of Tennessee has allowed the passage of the ‘monkey bill’, giving public-school teachers licence to teach alternatives to those mainstream scientific theories often attacked by religious and political conservatives.

The licence to teach non-science in science classes, nominally to help students analyze controversy, combined with the way school policy in many parts of the US are subject to the bigotry of parents, is a recipe for gutting real science in schools, teaching dogma.

The little-mentioned effect is via textbooks – what sort of general Year-Whatever Science Textbook would prostitute itself to the standards these states want?  That’s a rhetorical question.  Only worthless ones, and there is every reason to believe that the rest of the textbook on non-controversial subjects would be about as worthy as the worthless bits.

Oh well, bad textbooks, anti-science indoctrination, the populace gets dumbed down, the religious zealots get even more power – and we end up with the politicians appealing to the dumbest people on the planet having control of the majority of nuclear weapons on the planet.

The dumbest with the fingers on the button of the biggest weapons?  That can’t be good!

Will this affect Australia?

Indirectly it will.  We are the bum-boy of the US for foreign adventures, the morons here will be encouraged to push our politicians for improper emphasis on ideas regardless of the weight of evidence, and we have a habit of following the US down every stupid path when all the evidence points to doing things the way of the Northern Europeans. (Remember the joke "Most Germans own a second property – it’s called Greece" – well – do we follow German and Nordic social/economic policy, or the US with it’s triple deficit?).

The energized Sky Fairy Fan Clubs in the US and here in Oz will doubtless push for even more dogma-based policy – and even avowed atheist PMs like Gillard (not that her vows mean anything) won’t stand up to the intellectually impoverished pressure the morons are currently putting on policy (including same-sex relationship issues).

What happened to science, and economics, when a dogmatic church had it’s way with Galileo and his uncomfortable truths about moons of planets and a heliocentric solar system?  It went north, where religion was not granted the same weight by society.

It will get worse in the US, and worse here.

This kind of nonsense legislation would have been thought fit only for satire half a century ago.

Stop laughing, this is serious.

Cardinal George Pell, not my favorite person all all (linkefest below), raised quite a few hackles with comments on the recent Q&A show (transcript here)- and unusually I can see some merit in those statement, on the allegorical nature of Genesis, and the cultural/intellectual inferiority of Jewish nations compared to others in similar times and geographies.

Of course, I do question his agenda, and have quibbles – this is Pell after all!

Jewish Inferiority

Pell labelled Jews "intellectually inferior" – an ambiguous statement, and his apology clarifies (or alters) his statement on TV.  His comment about morally inferior is pretty unambigious.

If Pell did mean culturally inferior, the culture intellectually inferior, then he is absolutely correct.

After all, if doing the "What have the Romans ever done for us" sketch from Monty Python, substituting Jews for Romans, what would he have?  One item – it is the culture which inflicted Abrahamism on the world … the millenia of wars, crusades, fundamentalists and hate … including George Pell himself.

The over-praised King David et al were nothing but the East Med version of the Taliban, violent religious oafs in the hills fighting the culturally literate Phoenicians (such as the Philistines) down on the coast, Philistines who were busy inventing our alphabet (the Greeks grabbed Phoenician letters, and rotated them 90 degrees, and the rest is history, written down).

Abrahamism was an "the particular sky fairy who prefers our tribe and helps us commit genocide and war crimes". The oft-criticized "sword verses" of the Koran are as warm and gentle as fuzzy bunnies compared to the celebrated (yes!) stories in Exodus and Joshua.  Wipe out all the Canaanites when Joshua invaded?" And their, kids, their wives, their cattle, their goats … that’s all good, a wonderful victory, to the Abrahamists.

If being happy about a genocide (whether or not it happens) of the Canaanites, but not happy about the actions of Hitler, isn’t morally inferior, total bigotry, what is?

The same attitude keeps resurfacing with Abrahamism, despite the "softening" to a universal rather than tribal god during the Babylonian exile, exposed to Zoroastrianism.  Oooh, those evil Babylonians, making the exiles a little more tolerant to others!

We get the crusades, we get the bigotry of Pell, we get the violence of Islamist terrorists, we get millenia, at least since the time of Constantine, of Abrahamic "you are subhuman" to people of different color, creed, gender or sexual orientation – oh – and of course, all the Abrahamist nutters who are anti-science.

Oh well, the attitude of Jews to "He who must not be named" does have resonance with a far-less vicious supernatural being familar to all Harry Potter fans.

Compared to the Romans, Greeks, Persians, Egyptians, Babylonians, Sumerians, Phoenicians, … and so many other cultures in the region, what has Jewish culture ever down for us?

Genesis Is Myth

Pell comments on the Adam and Eve myth as a religious story rather than literal truth caused another storm, with a different group of extremists.

Anybody with at least half a brain knows that it’s myth, but does Pell have any choice given his other statements over the years justifying dogmatic bigotry?

There are two conflicting creation stories in Genesis, both can’t be correct, both cannot be literally true, and if Pell picks one over the other, he must give his reasons for that – a level of Biblical scholarship that would undermine the entire tome – the bigotry of Leviticus and the rantings of Paul.

But Pell knows his flock, the lambs-to-the-slaughter, and the other mob who cite biblical verses as authorization to be bigots, won’t have that scholarship.  No harm done to his agenda as far as he is concerned.

See Also:

• Q and A transcript of Pell’s comments (ABC, 2012-04-09)
  • Cultural Inferiority

    GEORGE PELL: Normally you go to a busy person because you know they’ll do it and so for some extraordinary reason God chose the Jews. They weren’t intellectually the equal of either the Egyptians or the…

    TONY JONES: Intellectually?

    GEORGE PELL: Intellectually, morally…

    TONY JONES: How can you know intellectually?GEORGE PELL: Because you see the fruits of their civilisation. Egypt was the great power for thousands of years before Christianity. Persia was a great power, Caldia. The poor – the little Jewish people, they were originally shepherds. They were stuck. They’re still stuck between these great powers.

    TONY JONES: But that’s not a reflection of your intellectual capacity, is it, whether or not you’re a shepherd?

    GEORGE PELL: Well, no it’s not but it is a recognition it is a reflection of your intellectual development, be it like many, many people are very, very clever and not highly intellectual but my point is…

  • On Genesis as Myth

    TONY JONES: So are you talking about a kind of Garden of Eden scenario with an actual Adam and Eve?

    GEORGE PELL: Well, Adam and Eve are terms – what do they mean: life and earth. It’s like every man. That’s a beautiful, sophisticated, mythological account. It’s not science but it’s there to tell us two or three things. First of all that God created the world and the universe. Secondly, that the key to the whole of universe, the really significant thing, are humans and, thirdly, it is a very sophisticated mythology to try to explain the evil and suffering in the world.

    TONY JONES: But it isn’t a literal truth. You shouldn’t see it in any way as being an historical or literal truth?

    GEORGE PELL: It’s certainly not a scientific truth and it’s a religious story told for religious purposes.

• "Cardinal Apologises for describing Jews as intellectually inferior" (The Age, 2012-04-13)
• "Adam and Eve? That’s just mythology says Pell" (The Australian, 2012-04-10).
• Other Posts on Pell
  • "Pell’s QuadRant essay is sooooo wrong" (2007-09-05)
  • "Pell’s comments could be welcomed by rationalists" (2008-07-15)
  • "Pell and NSW stem cell research”" (2007-06-06).
• "God the Interview – A Club Troppo Exclusive" (Club Troppo, 2012-04-12)

If this poll gets some traction, and Turnbull overtakes Gillard as preferred ALP leader, my idea avoids any charge of Turnbull being seen as an opportunistic traitor.

Seriously now, what else can the ALP do?  It’s got to be their best chance of getting rid of Gillard while not looking like a cynical desperate machine-driven coup to favor another Labor hack.

To be fair, it’s better structured than a typical yes/no "do crims get off too lightly" reader poll in a tabloid, but it is still dangerously simplistic.

At the end of the survey is a list of factors that might alter sentencing, things like whether the person was drunk, low IQ, impact on the victim…  This should have come first, before the section asking for judgements on case studies.  (Ask any teacher about well designed exams – you do the bits with individual elements first to get people warmed up, then give the questions that require all the elements to be integrated!)

The people putting the question together know the difference this arse-about structure makes … and how reticient people would be to go back umpteen web pages to moderate prior judgements after being prompted by a general principle.

Even then, the list of general principles was devoid of nuance, and some pretty basic elements were not there.

Sure, there was low IQ to moderate sentencing, but nothing about significant depressive episodes or financial stress.  Nothing to allow you to say "financial distress or depression or low IQ are reasonable reasons to lighten a sentence if it’s a theft not an assault; previous good character and being intoxicated/remorseful might moderate sentencing if you’ve put a brick through a window, but not a face."

Was there anything about penalties for theft being bumped up or down if the person was wealthy and didn’t need the money?  No.  Surprise!  They don’t want that meme to whip up popular opinion and appear in their report!

And now to the case studies themselves that came first, each giving a very brief account of events, the maximum sentence, a call for your notion of a sentence and non-parole period.

At first glance, one case study might have nuance – but the nuance is completely voided by the lack of similar cases with one variable changed.

There is no indication of current sentencing practice for similar cases – just the maximum for the worst instance of that offence and no indication of what the worst circumstances are.

Take the question about the Year 12 and 10 students, aged 18 and 15, sex occurring in the bedroom, after the boy had gone out to buy condoms as agreed between the kids.

Now, was the boy nearly 19 and the girl just 15, or the boy just 18 and the girl nearly 16?  It makes a difference.  Did they have a similar case studies with the age/genders the other way, or with two male students, or two female students?  Did they ask a similar case where there was no condom use, no special planning?

Especially these days, with so many 15 yo old girls sexually active, I’d want to know more about the relationship – how the one that was caught might have been gentler and more constructive than the many unreported that have one manipulative person, no real care, and the sex happens somewhere grubby.

Were there in each case a short list of the factors to allow you to indicate whether you considered them relevant?  No.

Oh… Yeah, nice chunking of the multiple choice sentences – almost as bad as "fine, 0-1 year, 1-2 year, 2-5 year, 5-25 year, life"  Would it have been that difficult to ask for a number of years?

A friend, a lawyer, got angry very early on – had to stop – saying she needed much more infortmation.  I had exactly the same feeling.

Oh, there is room for general comments on sentencing – but on the PDF for you to write on and email back, you could bare fit a tweet in that box!

And… no I’m looking at the "long survey" not the quickie! 

Now, it cannot be about impact on lives, as having your life savings taken by a white-collar criminal is just as damning.  It’s not about developing good guidelines as there is nothing in the case study design, taken together, that will allow any reliable teasing-apart of just what people consider important about particular crimes and their circumstances (likelyhood to re-offend, etc)  It’s not about getting any subtlety as otherwise there’d be more than a couple of lines for free-form comment, probably less than twitter’s 140 character limit and certainly less than a facebook status update of 400 characters … unless you wrote it with a microscope!

It’s for headlines, not reform, and not for long term safety.

This isn’t Ballieu’s Liberal Government unless he has been a wolf in sheep’s clothing all his life.  Is he actually in control?  If not, he should resign to prove his internal party enemies, the Abbott-loving extremists, are running the show.

Notes/See Also

• At the Victorian Department of Justice:
  • Survey as PDF
  • The Website: myviews.justice.vic.gov.au
• For information on the inadequacy of information and sentencing practice, see "Sentencing by plebescite" by LegalEagle at Skepticlawyer (2011-08-03) … and follow the links. LE, a lawyer teaching at Melb Uni, says
  

  If you look at the Sentencing Advisory Council website, you will see that a variety of research has been conducted which confirms this research.  Consequently, the general trend is this: people who have the information before the court think that judicial sentences are appropriate.  People who have a newspaper-style article with limited information are more likely to think that a sentence is inadequate.

• "Dodgy DOJ Survey designed to trick Victorians into calling for harsher sentencing" – Jeremy Sear at Anonymous Lefty (2011-08-29) – and thanks to LE at skepticlawyer for alerting me to Jeremy’s post.  Jeremy has correctly covered the politics and motives:
  

  Pleasing the Herald Sun, pleasing donors who build and run prisons, looking like you’re doing something about crime (that will, conveniently, probably get worse as you train minor offenders in prison to be more serious offenders, thereby prompting the building of more prisons, ad infinitum), enjoying the satisfaction of putting poor people behind bars.  I don’t know – I’ve never quite grasped why locking someone up is such a vicious pleasure for people not motivated wholly by revenge.

For one, the US dollar needs to be treated on its merits, devalued by the market rather than priced at a premium on the basis of nostalgia.

A default, then backdown of the Republicans so employees are paid, would through a low greenback and deserved loss of consumer confidence, might help muzzle consumerism first in the US and then across the world.

A generation-long technical depression is not incompatible with decent lives everywhere, if capital and production moves away from supplying the affluenza addiction and redirected to real human needs.

A population can be fed, housed, literate, and concentrate on human-heartedness more efficiently without skewing production to trinkets, without the extra floorspace for the wealthy to house those trinkets.

A long technical depression is not inconsistent with better lives, better provision of necessities – and politicians who can only manage a wasteful economy with GDP growth not merely illusory but counterproductive, are unfit for their positions as leaders.

This redirection is useful, no, necessary (if not sufficient) for managing the misery climate change will cause.

People fear economic adjustment to climate change, a percent or two cut on growth, without considering that it is possible for cuts to be targetted, indeed, cutting non-essentials more than the environment requirements permits an increase in economic activity in essential sectors.

A plummeting avoidance of trinkets, a redirection of reduced total economic activity to increase economic activity where it should have been concentrated anyway … if a US default can hasten this, then bring it on.

"Higher Height, Higher Ability: Judgment Confidence as a Function of Spatial Height Perception" (doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0022125) looks at self-perception of ability, and shows being higher (or even thinking you are up higher) makes you pump up estimates of your own judgement and abilities.

Based on grounded cognition theories, the current study showed that judgments about ability were regulated by the subjects’ perceptions of their spatial height. In Experiment 1, we found that after seeing the ground from a higher rather than lower floor, people had higher expectations about their performance on a knowledge test and assigned themselves higher rank positions in a peer comparison evaluation. In Experiment 2, we examined the boundary conditions of the spatial height effects and showed that it could still occur even if we employed photos rather than actual building floors to manipulate the perceptions of spatial heights.

So… it would be interesting to do followup studies on wage differentials, workplace attitudes (including friction, resentfulness, arrogance) from staff to senior management, and from senior management to staff, based on building layout.

What effect does this have on resistance of those on high to requests or suggestions from those on the ground floor, and what might this do to organizational efficiency?

Hell, in city blocks, adjusting for rent differences and wages, do voting intentions change?  Might this paper affect town planning for high-rise buildings, one party pushing it more than another, even pushing it more or less depending on how marginal a seat is?

No wonder Kirk never took any real notice of Scotty down in the engine saying "She canna handle any more o’ this Cap’n"!

Even fixing up the biased Christianity in our schools, replacing it merely with comparative religion and ethics classes: good, but not good enough.  We need to provide kids with the tools for consolation and strength, the classical personal philosophies of the likes of Marcus Aurelius.

It’s deprivation, deprivation bordering on abuse.

Over the last couple of years, contact with a few of old uni friends has been re-established – and a couple of them have been having a hard time.  Intelligent folk, decent, crap from the fates, from spouses, from family courts … and there is one bit of advice that seems to have done the most good – and started doing good almost straight away:

Seriously, check out wikipedia on "Meditations" and Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Emperor who wrote it, check out his wikiquotes, and remember this guy had the weight of the known world on his shoulders, and despite later (unprovable) diagnoses as suffering from depression, ruled pretty damn well, and his notes on how to view the world and the crap happening allowed him to rule well.  Have a browse, and if some of it rings true, get yourself the Penguin translation and open it at random – each paragraph stands on it’s own, so even if depression is hitting your cognition as you say, it’s in easy to digest bite-sized pieces.  Then come back to me if you want more of the Stoics and the Epicureans.

Well, usually within a day I’m getting emails that are "Wow!  Never knew this stuff – I mean, I’ve seen him as, you know, the good emperor in ‘Gladiator’, but …"

… and then will come a few quotes that have struck them, in their situations, as particularly apt and helpful – in a way the bible isn’t.  And every few days, for some time, the emails will contain the next quote that has made a difference.

Marcus doesn’t just say "turn the other cheek", he reminds himself how to differentiate between the person and the act, look at the extenuating circumstances such as ignorance making the next act not revenge but teaching, how important it is to focus on your own acts allowing self-respect and that nature has fitted you to endure the crap that comes.

• Say to yourself in the early morning: I shall meet today inquisitive, ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, uncharitable men. All these things have come upon them through ignorance of real good and ill.
   
• What’s bad for the hive can’t be good for the bee.
   
• We humans are made for each other, so either teach them or put up with them.
   
• Never esteem anything as of advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose your self-respect.
   
• Whatever the world may say or do, be like an emerald, and keep your color true.
   
• Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, sea-shores, and mountains; and thou too art wont to desire such things very much. But this is altogether a mark of the most common sort of men, for it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself. For nowhere either with more quiet or more freedom from trouble does a man retire than into his own soul.
   
• If thou art pained by any external thing, it is not this that disturbs thee, but thy own judgment about it. And it is in thy power to wipe out this judgment now.

I’ll get regular emails that include "Oh today I found this quote… and it’s really good for me now".

For centuries, Marcus Aurelius was considered an excellent book for the bedside table (in Victorian times, just next to the bible) to pick up at random, read a thought or two, and think about before lights out.  It was considered an excellent "consolation" for sensitive souls beset by troubles, which makes sense as it was written mostly by someone who’d love to have been a librarian, harming no-one, helping everyone, but was forced to go and fight the Germans who were giving lots of grief to the northern empire.  (A peaceful man forced to kill is tortured.)

And yet, while we have Christian proselytes in primary schools brainwashing young children with the least useful and least applicable aspects of Christianity, while our governments are pushing chaplains into schools where social workers and people with psych majors are needed, where the Commonwealth Ombudsman says there is no way to actually define when the bastards are proselytizing contrary to regulations, we give nothing to the intelligent kids, especially the "sciency" types, that they won’t reject because they are too smart, won’t reject because it has too little depth, won’t be able to use because it’s too removed from actual emotions.

The "crap that happens" is timeless, the tools to deal with it, with enough sophistication to avoid being simplistic, have been available since the high points of Greek and Roman civilization, the easiest entry point is Marcus Aurelius, who was not an academic, but, like so many people, a professional facing existential problems, a tough job, and pressures from all sides.

And if a kid, or adult, exhausts Marcus Aurelius, they can be pointed to Epicurus ("The wealth required by nature is limited and is easy to procure; but the wealth required by vain ideals extends to infinity."), and Epictetus ("First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do."), hell, let them work their way through all the Stoics.

Why would this be wrong?  Where would be the harm?  What is stopping this from happening?  Why do we deprive the best and brightest of our kids of the best and brightest consolations in western civilization?

This deprivation is almost as abusive as refusing to teach kids to read and write.

Notes:

• It should be noted that Epictetus is attributed as inspiration by Albert Ellis, the developer of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy, which is quite effective, proven even able, with appropriate work by the individual, to help schizophrenics manage the way they react to their hallucinations – something drugs cannot do, except perhaps in large enough doses to knock out thinking entirely.
   
• Gibbon‘s marvellous "Decline and Fall" (to my tastes, perhaps the most gorgeous prose with depth, detail and insight in the English language), describing the reigns of Antoninus (through most of which, Marcus Aurelius was pretty-much a partner rather than merely, from the death of Hadrian, the nominated successor:
  

  Antoninus diffused order and tranquility over the greatest part of the earth.  His reign is marked by the rare advantage of furnishing very few materials for history; which is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
   
  …
   
  But (Marcus Aurelius’) life was the noblest commentary on the precepts of Zeno.  He was severe to himself, indulgent to the imperfection of others, just and beneficent to all mankind.
   
  …
   
  The vast extent of the Roman empire was governed by absolute power, under the guidance of virtue and wisdom.  The armies were restrained by the firm but gentle hand of four successive emperors, whose characters and authority commanded involuntary respect.  The forms of the civil administration were carefully preserved by Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and the Antonines, who delighted in the image of liberty, and were pleased with considering themselves as the accountable ministers of the laws.  Such princes deserved the honour of restoring the republic, had the Romans of their days been capable of enjoying a rational freedom.
   
  …
   
  The mildness of Marcus, which the rigid discipline of the Stoics was unable to eradicate, formed, at the same time, the most amiable, and the only defective, part of his character.  His excellent understanding was often deceived by the unsuspecting goodness of his heart.  Artful men, who study the passions of princes and conceal their own, approached his person in the disguise of philosophic sanctity, and acquired riches and honours by affecting to despise them.

  If one’s only defect is to treat people too mildly, to have an unsuspecting goodness of heart, it is surely no vice: indeed, were all the world to have such a defect, it would be no defect at all, but the strongest foundation of that happiest world.
   

• Marcus Aurelius is the only Roman Emperor still on coins nearly 2000 years later, on the Italian Euro series along with Dante and Leonardo.

We in the left should acknowledge those on the right who are thinking logically, with decent motives, and help them clean up the fifth column of bastards and inflammatory voices within the right.  It will give us on the left a chance to have a proper debate where we’ll have to keep on our toes – be protagonists not antagonists.

But those on the right who choose not to reflect, choose to dismiss Breivik as unrelated to the rhetoric of right-wing pundits, are fair game for derision and exposure by the left.

The decent righties can be troubled and reflective.  We on the left need them, and need to help them reflect rather than attack the good with the bad, causing knee jerk defences, the debate about extremism turned merely into "two dogs barking"

Consider the predicament and honesty and basic decency of "Anonymous John" from Sweden, commenting on the sweep-Breivik-under-the-carpet post over at OzConservative – it’s something every lefty should read and reflect on to know what we should do next:

From John’s multiple comments to "More News on Breivik", OzConservative, 2011-07-24:

Personally I am deeply troubled that I have quite a lot ideologically in common with Breivik. Discussing what went wrong this friday is a serious challenge for the new radical right.

and

I do not have any coherent thoughts right now, so forgive the rambling.
 
Sharing ideological points with Breivik feels like making a political speech and getting applause from a bunch of thugs with swastikas tattooed on their foreheads.
 
We might share enemies, but if the options are a society degenerated into the islamic republic of Europe or being ruled by a bunch of mass murdering crypto-nazis I’m going with the slow descent into European irrelevancy.

There’s another example, again from Skepticlawyer, who, in a comment to her previously mentioned post, points to a good piece from the Adam Smith Institute, "Free Market Anti-Corporatism" (2011-07-25).  We lefties point to the corruption in markets, and we are absolutely right.  But… let’s help the decent righties who are actually trying to help society rather than themselves personally, aiming at utilitarianism, clean up the bastards who are a fifth column inside capitalism.  From the Free Market Anti-Corporatism piece mentioned – and it’s my bolding:

Too many people think that supporting free markets is the same as supporting existing businesses.  This is wrong.  Capitalism is a system of profit and loss, and the latter is crucially important for it to work.  I think this is Moore’s point.  Take his critique of the banking system:

…when the banks that look after our money take it away, lose it and then, because of government guarantee, are not punished themselves, something much worse happens.  It turns out – as the Left always claims – that a system purporting to advance the many has been perverted in order to enrich the few.

Politicians have an aversion to business loss, because losses are messy and, in the short term, disruptive to the economy.  But loss is crucial for capitalism to work.  Bailouts given to avoid losses now create a long-term moral hazard that will only encourage the recklessness that caused the last financial crisis.  There’s no better recipe for irresponsible behaviour than the knowledge that someone else will pay for your mistakes.
 
To favour a genuine free market is to be directly opposed to the interests of big businesses.  As a libertarian, I want a system where any firm, however big it is, can go bust, and where market entry is easy and cheap so new players can compete with the old ones.
 
Businesses that already exist don’t want this free system – they want protection from new entrants, to avoid being competed out of business. Businesses don’t want free markets, because in a free market, they’re vulnerable to competition.

Damn.  This little lefty me has to give a big clap to the invisible hand faithful.

Can you imagine if the free-market philosophical types got their way?  If we could show to all that the Laboral coalition are acting in a way that is anti-environment, anti-worker and anti-business all at the same time?  That they are prostituting themselves to bastards?

Can you imagine how much we lefties would have to shape up ourselves?  Avoid sloppy arguments?  Can you imagine the improvement in the dialectic and the policy outcomes?

Now, the worst of the right deserve to be attacked with all non-violent means available.  They are playing dirty.  We must support the "loyal opposition", the decent righties (conservative and libertarian) who play hard and fair.  Sure, we’ll fight with the good righties, we’ll cop and give unintended hockey sticks to the shins, the bruises from a clash going for a ball, the occasional cracked head – and there’ll be sincere apologies all around.  Nothing better than a good game played hard and fair by both sides.

But the other righties?  The hypocrites in it for the money as shock-jocks, the ones who bleat and twist the arms of politicians for their own gain knowing it is at the expense of the group?  They need to be exposed, their pants pulled down, in front of their duped victims in the general public, their pox-ridden pudenda for all to see, and all to shun.

But please read Skepticlawyer’s post and her comments which include a series of links to howlers – a rightie prepared to take to task the likes of rightie shock-jock Beck comparing the dead teenagers to Hilter Youth … (and you won’t find an article on Beck’s outrageous statement anywhere on news.com.au).  We on the left need the voice of the right to be people like Skepticlawyer, even though they’ll give us much tougher arguments to deal with and respond to.  This would be good for the true right, the true left, the general public.

So how about we make sure our targets on the right are the ones that need targetting.  How about we make it easy for the decent righties to muzzle the rabid dogs they’ve thought were loyal for too long?

Notes

Skepticlawyer is the name of the group blog, and Skepticlawyer is the screen-name of the founding author – a staunch libertarian, whereas the others are at different points on the political spectrum.  It’s my favorite place for civil discourse with protagonists of different views.  Play nice.

What’s bad for the hive can’t be good for the bee (Marcus Aurelius).

Find out what you are good at, and do Good with it.

(That’ll do Pig, that’ll do)

The research shows a relationship between average erect male member length and economic growth – an inverted U shape – with not-too-big, not-too-small, but just right (13.5 cm), leading to the best economic growth.

Imagine the spam: "Dear CEO – are you giving your stakeholders enough satisfaction?"  Imagine the econometric pages – we might get gory statistics on current accounts and budget balances per-cm as well as per-cap.

It’s not like it is only a minor effect:

Somewhat surprisingly, male organ was a stronger determinant of economic development than country’s political regime type at the Polity IV autocracy democracy spectrum.

The authors try to explore various reasons for this (including the male tendency to seek self-esteem in the wrong places, and they have interesting ties to gender equality, given the value women bring to the workplace:

First, could the size of male organ be non-linearly related to the value society put on women and thus aggravate economic development?  A brief observation of the data suggests that gender equality is less established at the extremes of the male organ distribution, namely in Asia and Africa.  This would be consistent with the nding that the the 1985 GDP and male organ experienced an inverted U-shaped relationship.  However, this does not reverberate well with the result that GDP growth between 1960 and 1985 and male organ are negatively associated.  Ignoring these contradictions it is also sensible to ask why penile length and gender equality would be even related in the rst place?

Of course, it’s econometrics, so there has to be some underlying maths, and something about competitive advantage of nations:

Third, in an evidently Freudian line of thought the notion of self-esteem might be at play.  In particular, male organ size s and income y could be considered factors in the aggregate ‘self-esteem production function’ f and hence affect utility u.  Assuming the following functional form and decreasing returns of self-esteem, namely u = f(y+s) and f'(.) > 0, f”(.) < 0, the ‘small male organ’ countries would gain more utility by expanding their economy than the ‘large male organ’ countries.  Actually the latter populations would simply exploit their nature-given, non-disposable groin-area endowments.

"non-dispoable groin-area endowments" – well non-disposable without medical intervention anyway – but it’s a bit of a m…, um, I was going to say… um, an awkward phrase to mix into economic conversations.  Oh well, that’d be nothing new.

However, on a more serious note, it is interesting to see self-esteem discussed as a driver of economic output – and of course, this would be independent of gender.  Do bosses make their employees less effective by belittling them or making them insecure?  Are executives and managers who are up-themselves and arrogant less effective than more reasonable folk.

The notion that self-esteem could be involved somewhere in the causal chain is useful – even if it does make bosses uncomfortable.

However, these findings entail one major caveat as they can only establish statistical correlations, not necessarily causalities. Hence to conclude that small male organs have driven GDP growth since 1960 is premature, however strong the correlation. Yet the results still suggest that if penile length is not the culprit, then some interplaying unobserved country or population characteristics could manifest itself in economic development. Be it as it may, any non-trivial statistical correlation with explanatory power of 15 to 20% should be taken seriously and warrants more elaborate research.

If this paper, by raising the importance of self-esteem in a workforce or the entire economy, leads to less workplace bullying, efforts by management to improve the self-esteem of workers, then the low-brow titallation and jokes (including of course, this post) will be a small price to pay.

See Also

• Hat tip: The Economist "Free Exchange" blog: Size Matters
   
• Male Organ and Economic Growth: Does Size Matter? – Helsinki Center for Economic Research Discussion Paper No 335, Tatu Westling, University of Helsinki, July 2011, ISSN 1795-0562. And yes, the paper is listed in with other papers with probably no smiles in them at all… titles like "Forecasting U.S. Macroeconomic and Financial Time Series with Noncausal and Causal AR Models: A Comparison" or "The role of city managers and external variables in explaining efficiency differences of Finnish municipalities".

I’d thought the label "madman" would be applied if the mass-murderer was white and non-moslem, if the mass-murderer was from the left or the right.

But, thinking about the effect of who was killed by Breivik, the gutting of the Norwegian lefty talent base, I think the likes of the Murdoch press would identify such politically-motivated terrorism as such, if and only if it was something like a (very hypothetical) watermelon mass-murderer, going into a Young Liberals annual general meeting and wiping out a similar proportion of talent.

If a red, a green, an atheist, or even a small-l-liberal worried about climate change, took out a similar percentage of conservative proselytes and propagandists – especially if wiping out a generation of them, it would not be portrayed as the work of a sole lunatic, it would be labelled by Bolt and Murdoch as the inevitable consequence of the ideology, and the tabloids and other conservative organs would be calling for latte-sippers to silenced, bugged by anti-terrorist squads, and removal of habeas corpus from all those who are left of Genghis Khan, who side with the vast majority of climate scientists, they’d want the Greens to be a proscribed terrorist organization, they might even push for scientific journals to be blocked by ISPs.

Can you imagine Tony Abbott at a press conference, asking questions indirectly of Bob Brown about whether he, as Greens Leader, accepted responsibility for a decimation of Young Liberals?  The Mad Monk would leap at the chance.

I don’t want to imagine what Bolt would write, but I can imagine the likes of Gerard Henderson, in measured tones, saying "It’s not surprising this happened, a fundemental precept of the environmental movement, adopted by many in the left, is that the world’s population and need for resources is at critical overload, and together with the left’s hatred for Tony Abbott especially and people who wait for more science on climate change, with people who want economic growth and the resource consumption required … well … it’s an effective way of getting what they want.  Even the left-wing press like The Age, and websites like GetUp must recognize the effect of their rhetoric on susceptible individuals, and adjust their reporting and propaganda accordingly."

Of course, I’m a watermelon, so while I think the tragedy in Norway was a terrorist act, perhaps one of the most effectively targetted bits of political violence in decades, I wouldn’t go so far as to say anyone who reads Hayek or Bolt should be considered suspect, that Hayek (useful if taken in context), that Bolt (bad, but should be ridiculed and shamed rather than banned), or even that the school of conservative will inevitably lead to the destruction of civilization..

But … what do you think the rightie media and the unprincipled politicians who make up most of the vocal right would do if the perpetration of a massive crime on their political allies by their political opponents took place?

I guess that’s the difference between the current leaders of the left versus those on the right who use and support the likes of Bolt.  The decent righties, and there are quite a few of them, would probably join the left, after consideration of the effects of Breivik’s actions, and label them terrorist, and label as terrorist the (extremely hypothetical) action by a greenie against the young libs.

Those who refuse to label Breivik as a terrorist, who refuse to recognize the impact of extremist righties, are probably hypocrites, would probably be happy to label left or environmental opponents as enemies of civilization given the least excuse.

Of course, it’s not the average righty who would be such a hypocrite – they just mightn’t want to think so hard about Breivik as a terrorist.  Let’s be clear – it’s time the good righties took charge and muzzled the rabid dogs among them.

And just as importantly, the left should not use the tragedy as a pretext to attack reasonable righties, to remove freedoms – merely ask, but ask strongly, that the rabid dogs should be muzzled, and that we can have a debate with the reasonable righties, not be forced to engage with the unreasonable ones.

Notes/See Also

• "Dummies Guide To Mass Murderers" (2011-07-24).
   
• "What turned Breivik into a gunman and/or bomber?" (2011-07-23)
   
• "Was the Norwegian atrocity strategic?" (2011-07-24)

It’s wiped a massive proportion of the talent the left has, talent about to enter real-world politics over the next decade.

It has gutted the left’s talent pool, effective for the next few generations: – the young talent so tragically removed would doubtless have had children and grandchildren of similar talents, of similar leftist leanings.

There are indications about the net that Breivik thought strategically.

There is scuttlebutt about the net that Anders Breivik proposed a long term plan to change Norwegian politics – a newspaper (he should have just called Rupert and he’d get that in 10 seconds), infiltration of NGOs, etc. CORRECTION: Not scuttlebutt, not confined by Norway, and with documents admitted correct by Breivik’s lawyer. See here.

This was not to instill terror, not (as some decent and intelligent righty friends have suggested) merely a means to get a pulpit in the courtroom, not merely to install terror, not revenge.

The youth camp had about 500 of the best and brightest.  Not a random collection of people, no non-political-combatants.  Breivik wiped out nearly 100 of them: that’s nearly 20%.

I have no doubts Breivik would have killed the lot of them if he could have.

Twenty percent?  Risk management disciplines define a 10% loss of income, budget, or resources, as "catastrophic".

If there was a similar double-decimation of targetted killings, for political purposes, it would come close to being labelled (albeit problematically) as genocide.

What Breivik as an individual did was not much different to what fascist parties mid-century did – trying to wipe out communism with targetted killings.

Imagine the effect of an individual with a machine gun or bomb at the annual conference of any political party, at a world conference of climatologists.

Imagine the effect on the stocks of a company if 20% of the best-and-brightest shareholders were taken out at their AGM.  Imagine if a cancer patient, family owning a lot of Woolworths shares, wiped out 20% of the most influential Coles stakeholders and executives.  The cancer patient’s family would have massively more valuable assets overnight, and would cash in.

Breiviks actions probably had more impact.

The strategic nature of Breivik’s plan demonstrates his insight.  Unless there is massive recruitment to the left, others will see Breivik’s action as extremely effective – and there will be more of the same, and not just from right-wing extremists.

The only possible means of nullifying the damage Breivik has done, and the ongoing damage of those who would use similar strategies, is for a population to rise up and become politically active, to become "radical moderates" at least, and preferably ardent lefties/greens.

Unfortunately, moderation correlates with political apathy or at least inertia, unwillingness to rise up.

I fear that Breivik has already achieved many of his goals.  I fear that his strategy will be followed by others.

See Also:

• The "not-a-lone-madman" but "leaderless resistance" model for Breivik is described here, and worth glancing quickly through, although I don’t subscribe to the notion of Breivik being the "perfect product" – that smacks at least a little of the same errors the right commits when slagging off lefties.
   
• Here is (apparently) a translation of some detailed correspondence from Breivik to the propaganda wing of his fellow-travellers (who may, or more likely not, have similar attitudes to violence).  It is worth reading to see the absence of typical "madness" that can be evident in such communications – he writes like a cold hard manager – albeit one with a surfeit of arrogance.
   
• I actually wrote this post trying to be less emotional than perhaps was warranted, and I did a bit better in a comment over at LP.
  

  Even if there was gloating about any red-faces of right-wing pundits (it’s unlikely they’ll actually feel their faces go red), the left should ponder just how many of the best-and-brightest of the left were pre-emptively removed from history, and the effect this could have on the quality of political debate over the next decades in Norway specifically, and western Europe in general. It is a massive loss not just in personal terms. not merely a horrible and undeserved shock to a peaceful nation – the difference to society these kids would have made is considerable, and that includes any influence the quality of political debate in Europe has on the quality of debate world-wide.

• Update: The Age in Norway’s Breivik planned carnage: lawyer (2011-07-24) reports the long time this was planned – long enough for any associates, extremist or not, to pick up anything that would mitigate, such as depression or schizophrenia:
  

  The internet document – part diary, part bomb-making manual and part political rant in which he details his Islamophobia – explains how he set up front mining and farming businesses to prepare the attacks for which he was arrested on Friday.

  "The reasoning for this decision is to create a credible cover in case I am arrested in regards to the purchase and smuggling of explosives or components to explosives – fertiliser," the tract says.

  Note he is only talking about having a credible legal cover in order to be able to execute his plans, NOT legal cover to excuse himself.  He won’t be pleading insanity, will he, however much the right-wing pundits would like this to be the public perception.