by William Burroughs Baboon on Thu Jun 16th, 12:22am
It’s been one the few morsels of genuinely good news out of Iraq in a while. The freeing of Alan Woods will strike a chord in Australia which has tended to turn off from news emanating from Iraq for some time now.
Daily reports of heavy casualties in atrocious acts of war, resistance, terrorism and crime cease to make an impression.
And all this occurring in a country where Australian forces fought a war. Our troops may not have left, yet. But our hearts have. Few have the stomach to see through what they so blithely allowed this government to enrol us in two short years back.
Sheikh al-Hilali’s role in the hostage release will be spitefully disparaged at the usual places, but judging from Alexander Downer’s endorsement of al-Hilalis’ actions, it seems to have been a tremendous feat of co-operation and determination by the Australian authorities and the Mufti.
Alan Wood’s family have been all class as well. They refused to yield to histrionics and name calling and their exceptional strength has paid off. Their prompt and clear-sighted adoption of the tactic of engagement with the kidnappers may be a text-book case.
Negotiation has been the key. It should never be off the table. And it never is, despite what some of the more excitable members of the tribe may think.
Comment [6] David Tiley, Steve Edwards, Guy, dariuskan
by William Burroughs Baboon on Mon Jun 13th, 9:52am
I love it when service is rewarded. True loyal foot soldiers are hard to find these days. Ever since JS Mill wrote On Liberty, many of us have inherited a degraded notion of duty. We believe that we can pick and choose the times when we will faithfully follow. We have the decadent notion that our opinion is the final arbiter in disputes of conscience.
But not Bill Farmer. And today he is rewarded with an Order of Australia for his adherence to a medieval order of subservience.
Sailing Close to the Wind doesn’t agree and is scandalised that Farmer has been gonged.
Sweets for Vanstone’s boys
Pell, Immigration secretary recognised in honours list
The skull beneath DIMIA’s skin
Award for immigration bureau chief
Labor calling for Vanstone’s head
Comment [3] Sarah, Mark Bahnisch, Rowen
by William Burroughs Baboon on Sat Jun 11th, 11:42pm
Mark Bahnisch continues his Against series by attacking natural science’s relevance to human society by writing off natural science’s methodology as reductionist, ie that it ignores complexity to build simple-minded models based on, for example, evolutionary genetics. He makes his case using a very slickly put and convincing analogy wherein he derides mainstream economics for putting the cart before the horse. He characterises economics as being such a degraded science that it is only able to tell us how people should behave rather than shining much light on how we really do go about the pursuit of our daily bread. No arguments there.
Bio-sciences, by turn he says, is reductionist because it limits knowledge of its object to a chain of causation defined by natural law. Far too conveniently, he thinks, and says that it is the sociobiologists who are the true heirs of theism.
They deify certainty.
Bent upon excluding the influence of society, bio-scientists look for mechanically determined factors such as gene inheritance and neurobiology to explain sexual orientation, gender roles and racial difference.
For mine, Mark is hiding his agenda. He uses worst case characterisations of sociobiology to fend off any claims the hard science may have on the human studies. Why does he do this? “The problem with regularities and patterns in human behaviour, is identifying them by itself rarely explains anything …
The key word here is explains. This is the loaded term which frightens the horses. If genetics finds a gene for exclusive same sex preference then the cultural sociologist thinks that the amoral lab geeks are claiming to explain the queer politics. Perhaps the better to lock up gays.
If an anthropologist from Utah posits that the reason for high IQ amongst the Ashkenazi is natural selection for an intelligence enhancing deformation in the brain, then it’s because he may be under the spell of a dangerous form of eugenics and thinks he can explain why some people are more intelligent than others. Perhaps the better to justify a two-tiered society.
Mark is afraid that if he admits that there is a big brown bear in the room, it might eat him up, but the big brown bear is potentially dangerous and will eat us up whether we notice him or not.
Genetics stands to become a hugely lucrative science. Therefore it will burgeon and every hypothesis under the sun will be tested. Declining to accept the measurability of intelligence for example because it is a cultural construct only, will not stop the psychologists who measure IQ like doctors take blood-pressure. Intelligence may be a construct, but the test results are not. As long as they correlate with other observations then psychologists will use them.
Queer is a construct. And can only be understood in sociological terms. Exclusive same sex preference may not be a construct, any more than hair colour is.
While it is easy to imagine dangerous applications arising out of knowing which gene or which biological structure in the brain correlates with exclusive same sex preference, nonetheless the investigation will proceed. If nothing is found, so be it. If a correlation is found that persists across multiple studies, then after the initial headlines, the subject will disappear into the archives of science as long as the political conditions for tolerance are in place. If the politics is not right, then with or without biological explanations, some will suffer for their sexual identity, biological or otherwise.
Science is neutral by definition. Only if somebody adopts the hardline post-modernist position that we are incapable of doing science or that science itself is just another illusory category, can we deny this.
Of course all scientists, on the other hand, are most definitely not neutral. They, like all of us, have their axes to grind. They are blinded by their personal and cultural biases. Fortunately science as a cooperative endevour cannot be monopolised by any one political ideology. The language of science is universal. Scientific method is actually very simple.
Understanding the implications both political and ethical of scientific results however is not simple.
In the meanwhile, sociology should be embracing the findings of natural science. The task of social science, being much the harder, cannot afford to ignore the building blocks of the unit, ie homo sapiens, that make up their subject of inquiry. With problems facing humanity of the scale we see in the environment and in international relations, between slowly colliding cultures and due to the scarcity of resources for a still gowing human population, the effective and succesful work of sociology is paramount. The field must allow explanations and models to percolate up from the basic level of hard science, if it is to assure itself that it is not indeed studying its own imagined constructs.
Social science needs a greater understanding of psychology, evolution, and biology. Otherwise it risks drowning in a morass of
competing narratives that depend for survival not on concordance with any external reality but on the intellectual dominance of their respective proponents.
Comment [16] wbb, Jason Soon, Mark Bahnisch, Cameron Riley
by William Burroughs Baboon on Fri Jun 10th, 4:39pm
Xymphora now has a comments facility.
It’s the sort of site that is either CIA disinfo, or else is at the top of their RSS reader list.
I’d not comment there for quids. Unless you really want a file to show the grand-children one day.
Comment [4] wbb, Glenn Condell
by William Burroughs Baboon on Fri Jun 10th, 1:23pm
A Vietnam court has sentenced a 46-year-old Australian of Vietnamese origin to death by firing squad for attempting to send heroin stuffed in loudspeakers to Australia, state-run Voice of Vietnam radio said on Friday.
Mai Cong Thanh, the second Australian sentenced to death in Vietnam this year for heroin trafficking, was sentenced by the Ho Chi Minh City People’s Court on Thursday, the radio said. The Age
Good old Vietnam. Keeping the faith in the War on Drugs. When will Australia bring its laws into line with world’s best practice?
Comment [8] David Tiley, Geoff, Francis Xavier Holden, wbb, the saintly alan greenspan
by William Burroughs Baboon on Fri Jun 10th, 12:34pm
In December 2002, Carmen Lawrence quit the shadow ministry over the ALP opposition’s policy on asylum-seekers.
This was not the first time a principled stand had been taken by an ALP member over disagreement with official policy. Darryl Melham resigned over ALP treatment of Aboriginal land rights in 2000.
Tim Dunlop hopes that Howard doesn’t seduce the Liberal detention rebels back into the fold.
I reckon Petro’s got the principles and the guts to die in a ditch for this. He’s been at it for a long time now. If he doesn’t make something of it now, then he’ll be a huge disappointment.
The worst that can happen to him, is that he’ll be re-elected in Kooyong in a couple of years time as an independent.
The upside is that he’ll go into the history books as the bloke who restored Australia’s reputation as a decent country.
Mark Thomson
has all the links and is watching closely the progress of this episode.
Comment [9] ej, Jason Soon, wbb, Steve Edwards
by William Burroughs Baboon on Thu Jun 9th, 12:15am
I’d post a comment at Mark’s Against Biological Determinism but I can’t get a word in edgeways. I can’t even get the page to load completely. It’s set some sort of land-speed record for reaching 100 comments.
Apparently Ashkenazi Jews are a very smart bunch, and if you read the first few pages of comments you’ll wonder what ethnicity Jason Soon and Mark Bahnisch might share as their comments are posted by timestamp quicker than I can actually read them tonight.
Was all fired up for this one, had even dug up some juicy E O Wilson quotes to dazzle with (I’d not attribute them of course), but suddenly find myself more interested in why I seem to be the only blogger with a job, children and a sinkload of dishes, and hence cannot devote the best part of my day to the cut and thrust. By the time I’d read as far into the commentary as my computer judged healthy, I’d been struck down by my particular family’s genetic attribute. Lassitude.
Jason Soon: I detect a residue of theism in some of Kim’s objections.
Mark Bahnisch: “What’s your justification for regarding any argument that holds there are differences between humans and animals as “theism”? Please also explain to me the evils of theism.
I won’t pretend that it all boils down to this, but I suspect that there is a “metaphysical substrate” underpinning much of the disagreement. So motivations are indeed important, Mark. So I think you win the debate – but only as you’ve cleverly framed it.
I was hoping that if we framed it so that radioactive topics such as human sexuality and race were off-limits, then we might make some progress towards concilience between the scientists and the structuralists, but I realise now that we’d only plunge into the real abyss that separates us all on this one.
And that is in no way meant to be dismissive. I can’t defend my world view. I just have it.
Ok, so I’m the one defeated by the task.
Comment [19] Ira, Irant, Nabakov, wbb, Mark Bahnisch, Jason Soon
by William Burroughs Baboon on Wed Jun 8th, 12:41am
There’s been a fairly tart exchange of views, as all good discussions should be, at Larvatus Prodeo on the tension between the social sciences and the biological sciences.
As the thread runs its course, and yet I find myself still mightily fascinated by the topic, I thought I’d pop back here, avail myself of the facilities and hector myself with my own opinions. A recipe for tears though it may be.
The conversation was sparked by an intemperate claim by somebody that science had nailed down the evolutionary advantage that explained the variance in human sexuality. But of course it hasn’t. Yet.
So, anyway, having got people’s dander up the dispute segued into the core issue of whether or not there is such a thing as scientific knowledge independent of culture, place and time. The truth is philosophically speaking we cannot answer this, but that doesn’t stop any of us from adopting trenchant views on one side or the other.
My own position is that as we are clever primates who have been forged by and survived the fires of the bitterly brutal process of natural selection, we are entitled to take full stock of our species’ achievement and to erect a scientific horror-show cum hall of fame that showcases the unimaginably long pathway that has brought us to where we are today.
Others prefer that that particular apple is better left on the tree. And some fear that we will become imprisoned by our biological inheritance and they refer darkly and unfairly to various dangerous forms of determinism and the actual historical misuses that some human science has been put to.
Yet others deny even the possibility of culturally independent knowledge. They see scientists as imprisoned by their culturally determined mechanistic world view.
The scientists, for their part, I think, see the post-structuralists and the post-modernists and the extreme cultural relativists as defeated by the immensity of the undertaking.
Comment [3] Mark Bahnisch, Irant
by William Burroughs Baboon on Sun Jun 5th, 11:53pm
One of the lies in the Africa debate is that aid does not work. This is a lie rather than a proposition because of the simple fact that nobody knows if aid works in Africa.
And until aid to Africa is tried we won’t know. In 2002 according to the World Bank, aid to Africa was 12 billion dollars.
This is such a paltry sum that no meaningful conclusions can be drawn about the effectiveness of its application.
Bob Geldof et al are again going to try to do something about Africa. Live Aid in 1983 proved that emergency relief, while a moral imperative, does not provide a lasting solution.
This time they are not going to raise any money, as they realise that it is both futile and that it also can be counter-productive in that it leaves people with the feeling that they have made a meaningful contribution and hence can move on. Meanwhile the problem remains.
In July the G8 meets in Scotland. In July Live 8 will attempt to influence the outcome of that meeting. Live 8 will use the power of popular culture to galvanise large numbers of people, as was shown in 1983, but this time in an attempt to directly force political change. Not through argument and submission, but through a Ghandian application of numbers.
The orthodox political class will resent this dilettantism and will swap op-eds with each other on the jejeune and hideously untheoretical exuberance of the masses. They may even try to smear the process by claiming that Live 8 will be counter-productive in some way.
The retort available to anyone wanting to defend the right of ordinary people in a Live 8 type strategy to do more than vote once every few years, is that you can’t be counter-productive when there is nothing productive to be counter to.
The problem of Africa is ongoing and long-standing. If the arch-capitalists with their free-trade mantra or the neo-cons with their mumbo-jumbo about the power of democracy were to have a shred of credibility, then we should have seen some evidence of the success of their methods by now.
The power elite and economic elite do not have any answers for Africa. Live 8 will attempt to demand that instead of lip-service and hyperlinks to the hopelessly theoretical formulations of Nobel Prize winning economists, the rich world gives real aid, real market access and real cancellation of the debt to Africa.
It’s a longshot, but when that many kids are dying in their own puke, then it’s impossible to deny that it should at least be tried.
Comment [73] Fyodor, wbb, Steve Edwards, Nabakov, the saintly alan greenspan, Zorro, dariuskan, dj, Guy
by William Burroughs Baboon on Sat Jun 4th, 12:10pm
Henry Kissinger, former US secretary of state, yesterday warned that the global battle for control of energy resources could become the modern equivalent of the 19th century “great game” – the conflict between the UK and Tsarist Russia for supremacy in central Asia. Financial Times
If we replace “could become” with “has been for some considerable time”, then we finally get a frank acknowledgement of the real meaning of the Global War on Terror. Ok, it’s not revelatory truth, but it is unusual for somebody who was once close to the centre of power in the USA.
Seems fairly certain he no longer feels too much obliged by old loyalties.
The alternative theory is that Kissinger has been convinced during his attendance at the latest Bildberger meeting that the oil crisis is real, and that this is just him showing off and framing the question in his own language, that of the pursuit and maintenance of raw power.
So why half of the Australian population is apparently still content to ignore the evidence that we invaded Iraq to be better placed for strategic control of oil, I’ll never know.
Comment [4] ej, wbb, Nabakov, the saintly alan greenspan
by William Burroughs Baboon on Sat Jun 4th, 12:52am
Those who thought that the USA invasion and military occupation of Iraq and its 25 million people was a good idea need to account for the fact that 12,000 Iraqis have died in the last 18 months during the “insurgency” aka war.
Iraq is now a mess that cannot be undone. But next time the USA tells us that it really must invade another country for various vague but urgent sounding reasons, more of us must learn to be a little more skeptical and a whole lot less naive. People need to learn that geo-strategic imperatives drive the foreign policy of powerful nations. Neo-con fantasies do not.
And that any and all wars produce lots and lots of dead. That is why there is a saying that war is bad. You do not enter into war unless it is forced upon you.
Comment [1] Tiny Tyrant
by William Burroughs Baboon on Fri Jun 3rd, 1:45pm
Mark Bahnisch writes that an Alabaman politician is trying to get books by homosexuals removed from schools.
This is obviously just one of those crazy things, and nowt will come of it, but it does allow me to raise the topic of where does homophobia come from. Xenophobia we can all understand. It’s hard wiring into our deepest neuro-circuitry is an evolutionary adaptation that while harmful today, can easily be understood to have been useful in the genetic success story that we are today.1
But as homosexuality is another evolutionary adaptation that helped our early genetic ancestors in the main game of child rearing by increasing the carer-child ratio to a level more likely to meet the approval of modern administrators of child-care facilities, why is it that today homophobia is rampant?
You’d imagine that if homophobia was as widespread in our early days when a heavy blow to the back of the skull was the equivalent of our High Court, that gays would have been quickly deselected from our DNA. But they haven’t been. Male homosexuals continue to make up around 8% of the population across cultures.
I think we in this culture can blame the church. The church got into gay-bashing very early on. The sacred screeds hop into homosexuals with all that stuff about abominations etc. But then where in turn did this early homophobia come from. In Ancient Greece homosexuality was the done thing. When did this social meme, because it is not an evolutionary adaptation2, arise?
A soon to be published book written by Robert H. Allen may provide some answers. Apparently he blames Pythagoras, or at least the Romans for taking up Pythagoras’s notions.
The Classical Origins of Modern Homophobia
1. E. O. Wilson is credited/excoriated today for mainstreaming such understanding.
2. The advantages conferred upon society by having a normal and unrepressed quota of homosexuals is still extant today. While no longer an evolutionary advantage, the analogous advantage in our post-evolutionary existence is that gays, unburdened by the crushing weight of child rearing responsibilities, are able to contribute more than their share in terms of productive work, especially the imaginitive and creative work such as science, in which it has been argued they excel.
Comment [8] Mark Bahnisch, wbb, Geoff, Steve Edwards
by William Burroughs Baboon on Wed Jun 1st, 12:31am
Nice to see1 that another little band of future terrorists are forming in a far off part of the world. In Nigeria, the Ogoni are being robbed blind by their government as Shell and other oil giants ship the black stuff to all ports North.
The Ogoni tried to stand up for themselves back a few years and had their number reduced. This time they are converting to Islam and lead by Al Haji Asari Dokubo they are now talking tough. They don’t seem to have much to lose. Their moderates voices may be or are about to be side-lined.
We know this story2. But we don’t pay attention. Then one morning it will fill four or five pages of our morning newspaper. There will be pictures. Our brow will furrow. What should we be done about this, we’ll say.
1. Foreign Correspondent. (Will be repeated – four times – on Thursday on ABC2.)
2. Some background
Comment [10] Nabakov, dj, wbb, David Tiley, the saintly alan greenspan
by William Burroughs Baboon on Wed Jun 1st, 12:07am
The case that the media circus has played on our xenophobia has now become the dominant concern re Corby. (Although I’ve no doubt that there are plenty of Indonesians who’d have great sympathy for Corby too.)
There has arisen palpable tension between those who want to preserve correct international etiquette above all, and those who prefer to disregard any short-term ethnic sensitivities and deal with the substantive problem in isolation.
The former thus concentrate on the commercial media’s crass presentation and the resulting xenophobic response. The latter, perhaps rashly given the reality of the former’s fears, promote the Corby case in order to attack inhumane anti-drug laws regardless of jurisdiction.
My position was staked out well before the hysteria went critical. It boils down to a repugnance for the tribe sacrificing the few in the name of protecting the many who, however, happen to be in very large part complicit in the “substance abuse” problem. I didn’t even mention Corby’s name in that first post, as my position didn’t hinge on her story.
Now that the attention on the current episode has turned insane, I propose to follow Andrew Bartlett’s advice from here on in.
Comment [0]
by William Burroughs Baboon on Mon May 30th, 11:41pm
Every time I look at Google News there seems to be another story about a bomb attack against a queue of Iraqi policemen or soldiers waiting for their wages, for new boots or for something else so vital that it requires men made of flesh and bones to stand around like ducks by a pond.
I don’t know who’s running Iraq at the moment, but the incompetency is breath-taking.
The country is at war and yet the official insistence that all is good news seems to require men offer up their lives to prove that something wonderful has been accomplished.
Comment [0]
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