Monthly Archives: June 2015

Scanty education and a vulgar turn of mind

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I’ve been reading up on Mill and came across this passage in a book written in 1954 by John Bowle, Politics and Opinion in the 19th Century. Here is is describing de Tocqueville’s views of the media in the United States, and I fear it is more general than just there and back then.

The journalists of the United States, he remarks, are generally in a humble position, with scanty education and a vulgar turn of mind. . . . “The characteristics of the American journalists consist in . . . a coarse appeal to the passions of the reader; he abandons principles to assail the character of individuals to track them into private life and disclose all their weaknesses and vices . . .” Nothing can be more deplorable. [Bowle 1954: 188]

My days of sitting on the phone with some journalist for upwards of an hour to explain something and then find it was completely garbled in the paper the next day are happily long gone. No one who has dealt with the press finds their views anything other than superficial, which is why they are almost invariably to the left. I also found this very acute about the nature of opinion within societies where you get to choose your own.

De Tocqueville concludes by a warning of the growing and immense power of the press in democratic states. It is second only to the political power of the people itself. Its influence is further extended by the peculiar American susceptibility to abstract ideas. Once they have taken up an opinion, ‘be it well or ill founded, nothing is more difficult than to eradicate if from their minds’. This tenacity is also apparent in England. The explanation is simple. When one is free to choose one’s opinions one clings to them. [ibid. – my bolding]

Watching politics in the United States really is depressing since it hinges on so many forms of inane belief. America is the worst-case scenario. We have it too, but such a mild version that I could only wish the Pacific was even wider than it is.

Adam Smith on Say’s Law

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The actual mechanism of exchange that is often mistaken for Say’s Law is the statement that demand is constituted by supply. Purchases are made with the money one has received from producing and selling. How odd that I had never noticed this in Adam Smith before where he writes exactly that. This is from the Introduction to Book II, “On the Nature, Accumulation, and Employment of Stock”:

When the division of labour has once been thoroughly introduced, the produce of a man’s own labour can supply but a very small part of his occasional wants. The far greater part of them are supplied by the produce of other men’s labour, which he purchases with the produce, or, what is the same thing, with the price of the produce of his own. But this purchase cannot be made till such time as the produce of his own labour has not only been completed, but sold.

Ah those two words, “but sold”. It’s not enough to produce something. Whatever one has produced must be then be converted into money before one can then buy something else: C-M-C’.

Smith also goes further in that same intro by discussing the role of the entrepreneur in finding value adding forms of work for employees who could not do so on their own. This is where Keynesian economics breaks down in the belief that a community can spend its money before it is earned. Perhaps an individual can, but not everyone together. In the passage below, the stock held by the employer would today basically consist of those lines of credit that allow employers to pay their workers before the goods they are producing find buyers. That stock must exist if individuals are to receive the goods they then purchase with their wages:

As the accumulation of stock is previously necessary for carrying on this great improvement in the productive powers of labour, so that accumulation naturally leads to this improvement. The person who employs his stock in maintaining labour, necessarily wishes to employ it in such a manner as to produce as great a quantity of work as possible. He endeavours, therefore, both to make among his workmen the most proper distribution of employment, and to furnish them with the best machines which he can either invent or afford to purchase. His abilities in both these respects are generally in proportion to the extent of his stock, or to the number of people whom it can employ. The quantity of industry, therefore, not only increases in every country with the increase of the stock which employs it, but, in consequence of that increase, the same quantity of industry produces a much greater quantity of work.

How much does any of this penetrate the conscious awareness of an economist today?

No apology to Richard Warman

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Material has never previously appeared here in which I made an allegation that Mr. Richard Warman had posted a bigoted attack on the internet against Senator Anne Cools. I therefore have no reason to retract it or apologize to Mr. Warman for it with or without reservation.

BTW who is Richard Warman?

Link here to Kathy Shaidle and here to Small Dead Animals. If this helps introduce you to their websites, all the better and you can thank Mr Warman for it.

What would Churchill have done?

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Either we are at war with an existential enemy or we are not. Either these things are a threat to our way of life or they are not. We are either so in command of the situation that it does not much matter what we do today or we are not. From how things look to me, we are on the losing side in a hundred years war that will end early in the next century. Any thoughts on what the name on the door of what we today call Westminster Abbey or Notre Dame will be on this day in 2115?

The 800th anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta will be commemorated on 15 June. On 18 June, we will also be commemorating the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. And also this year, on the 25th of October, we will be celebrating the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt. And do you know what they all had in common? Each was a contest using force of arms to determine an outcome.

Tell me this as well. If Winston Churchill were in the Abbot cabinet, would he side with the PM or with Turnbull over how to deal with dual citizens who take the side of the enemy? This is from Gerard Henderson today:

Here’s a news flash (without an exclamation mark). The so-called Islamic State, or ISIS, or ISIL or Daesh, is intent on establishing a caliphate run by Sunni Islamists throughout the world. Contrary to Vanstone’s opinion, there is no evidence that the leaders of Daesh have a cunning plan to reduce the democratic protections that prevail within democracies. Rather, they want to destroy democracies and autocracies alike and establish a theocracy.

There is a genuine debate in Australia and elsewhere as how to handle the Islamic State threat, at home and abroad. This extends all the way to the Abbott cabinet as was evident in leaks about the discussion among senior members of the Abbott government (the Prime Minister himself, Julie Bishop, Kevin Andrews, George Brandis, Peter Dutton, Barnaby Joyce, Christopher Pyne, Malcolm Turnbull) about the implications of terrorism on Australia’s citizenship laws.

As the Australian government’s discussion paper “Australian Citizenship — your right, your responsibility” makes clear, the Abbott government “intends to modernise the Australian Citizenship Act to enable the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection to take action in the national interest to revoke the Australian citizenship of dual citizens who engage in terrorism that betrays their allegiance to Australia”.

There appears to be a broad consensus among Coalition and Labor parliamentarians in support of the proposal that Australian dual citizens who fight with IS should have their citizenship revoked. This would extend the 1948 legislation which entails that dual citizens who fight with a country at war with Australia will lose their Australian citizenship.

The dispute on citizenship turns on the issue of whether the Minister for Immigration should be able, in the words of the discussion paper, “to revoke Australian citizenship where there are reasonable grounds to believe the person is able to become a national of another country under their laws and would not be made stateless”.

The Government has made a judgement call about how best to go about preserving our freedoms in the face of a barbaric and determined enemy that has made astonishing headway in the 14 years since 911. As Henderson says at the end of his article, “There comes a time when democratic rights have to yield to national security considerations.” Democratic government, whatever else it may be, is not a suicide pact. We will either defend this way of life or we will lose it. The Turnbulls of the world have so little political imagination that they cannot picture the world in any other way but the way it is. It is an extreme form of ignorance, who would rather lose in a dignified way than win even if we have to bomb Dresden into matchsticks.

The Management of Savagery

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A quite fascinating and eye-opening article in the paper this morning by Jennifer Oriel. Her title is, You can’t be a jihadist and a good citizen, but it was this that I had not heard before:

The recent revelation that Islamic State rose to power using a jihadist playbook has offered the world a blueprint of their battle plan. Written by Abu Bakr Naji (nom de guerre of former al-Qa’ida official Mohammad Hasan Khalil al-Hakim), The Management of Savagery exposes jihadism as the centrepiece of militant Islamist plans to destroy freedom from within legitimate nation states. It is a game changer for the Western approach to terrorism.

A revelation indeed. Why had I never heard of it? There really is such a book, with the full title, The Management of Savagery: The Most Critical Stage Through Which the Umma Will Pass. Oriel also writes that “the three-stage strategy of jihad mirrors the method Bolsheviks used to establish the world’s first totalitarian state, and Naji duly acknowledges communists as an inspiration for his masterplan.” In reality, this is a much older battle plan. Any pretence that this is a strategy picked up from communist practice of the last century is just one more bit of subterfuge among so many.

What you are looking at today is a re-run of the virtually unknown Mughal invasion of India, or at least unknown to us, who should do more to find out what we are dealing with. I knew nothing of it until I came across the story reading through Will and Ariel Durant’s eleven volumes on the history of civilisation (highly recommended, by the way). They begin with these words, from which they go on to show in complete detail just how sound their judgment is:

The Mohammedan Conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precarious thing, whose delicate complex of order and liberty, culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within. [My bolding]

It is a story being repeated in the midst of our own Western civilisation. It is being exactly repeated everywhere the Islamic State manages to find its way to power. I am not interested in debating theological issues. But I am very interested in protecting our way of life from marauders who undertake their invasions under a strategy that has been their way for more than a thousand years. If you read first Will and Ariel Durant and then turn to our newspapers of today, on those all too rare occasions when someone prints what is really happening, you will see everything that took place a thousand years ago taking place again, right now. Which is why this is important news from today:

The Islamic State has spread its tentacles beyond the borders of Syria and Iraq and has become a global terror movement whose ultimate aim was “universal dominion”.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott has opened a regional summit on terrorism with an urgent warning on the long term ambitions of the Islamic State, also known as ISIL, or Da’ish.

Addressing a room full of ministers and delegates from around the region, Mr Abbott said ISIL’s reach now extended well beyond the Syrian-Iraq conflict.

ISIL, Mr Abbott said, now had outposts in Libya, Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa, and was seeking to expand its violent ideology into South Asia and beyond.

“We have all seen on our screen the beheadings, the crucifixion, the mass executions and the sexual slavery that the Da’ish death cult has inflicted mostly on Muslims in the Middle East,” Mr Abbott said.

“That is what the death cult has in store for everyone if it has its way.”

Mr Abbott offered an implicit challenge to the view that ISIL’s success in Syria and its annexation of much of northern Iraq, rode on the back of long standing sectarian grievance between Sunni and Shia Muslims.

He said ISIL’s barbarity went beyond any “local grievance”.

“This is terrorism with global ambitions,” Mr Abbott said. “Da’ish is coming, if it can, for every person and for every government with a simple message: submit or die.”

The Prime Minister said IS’s declaration of a Caliphate last year was a “brazen claim to universal dominion”.

“You can’t negotiate with an entity like this, you can only fight it,” he said.

And for those who think we have damaged our relationship with Indonesia, there is this they need to dwell on along with so much else:

Indonesia has thanked Australia for hosting the summit and stressed the importance of nations working together to stop extremism, Brendan Nicholson writes.

“Indonesia views the Summit as an important event in our regional effort to combat terrorism and extremism,” a government spokesman told The Australian.

“We appreciate Australia’s initiative to host and bring together representatives of the region to better coordinate our efforts to counterterrorism, extremism and blunt extremists’ propaganda.”

This is really no longer an area for partisan difference. On this there needs to be the same sense of unity and purpose across the nation as there is between us and the Indonesians.

Why isn’t it being funded by the Libs?

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Here is a story that is in some ways easy to understand but not in others: Major networks, cable and streaming services reject Gillard biopic as too toxic for TV ratings.

Surely there is someone out there willing to sacrifice a few dollars on behalf of the country. The only condition if they are to get the money is that the film must be released a month or two before the next election. The whole story is even worse than you can imagine, the blacklisting of this film and all. As Tim Blair discusses:

Everything was looking good for Griffiths when plans for the biopic were announced in 2013. “I am thrilled to portray Australia’s first female prime minister and explore the private aspects of her remarkable term,” Griffiths said.

“I believe that the creative and intellectual capacity of the team involved will produce a stunning drama that will reframe this historic period in our cultural and political life.”

Alas, television networks and almost everybody else did not share Griffiths’s belief. The project was rejected by networks, cable broadcasters, digital streaming services and possibly even children’s puppet theatre workshops.

“They think the public were sick of the story and no one will watch this show,” moaned the telemovie’s executive producer Richard Keddie.

“The networks think people still hate Julia.”

Not to worry. I’d watch it for sure. It would be better than The Rocky Horror Show and then some.