In the Crypt last Sunday

Sunday 30 April. The place was the Crypt of St Patrick’s Church in Grosvenor Street Sydney and the event was the launch of a book by James Franklin on Catholic values. Jim is a lecturer in mathematics at the Uni of NSW and he is probably best known as a leading champion of the late David Stove. He is also the author of a good humoured and informative book on the history of philosophy teaching in Australia. And last year he won a Eureka Prize awarded by the Catholic University for his contribution to ethical thinking.

The map does not show Laing Park which is on the other side of Grosvenor Street. The afternoon started well with the sight of a couple walking a cat on a lead in the park. Unusual, though not quite as unlikely as the lady who was walking a ferret in a tiny harness in a park in Kiribilli recently.

On the steps of the church, peering in, the tall, angular figure of David Armstrong, sometime Challis Professor of philosophy at Sydney. Has a leading agnostic and Australian materialist (The Materialist Theory of Mind) seen the light? No, he is just a friend of Jim Franklin.

Realizing that the crypt is most likely accessed from the side of the church rather than the front steps, we locate the gate that leads into a charming courtyard area.

The world's most ridiculous states

The latest issue of Foreign Policy has an article ranking the world’s most failed states. But how about a list of the world’s most ridiculous states? Regrettably, most of our Pacific neighbours would be candidates, but with the announcement of their new Cabinet the Solomon Islands makes an audacious bid for the top spot.

After all, who could be in a better position to be Police Minister than someone in jail for rioting, Charles Dausabea? At least nobody can claim he does not have first hand experience of policing, albeit on the wrong side of the law. And who better to be Tourism Minister than someone who has helped scare them all away, one of Dausebea’s fellow rioters, Nelson Ne?

Further nominations for the world’s most ridiculous state are welcome in comments.

Open Forum

Fire away …

Bird is the Word

Prolific commenter Graeme Bird (aka GMB) now has his own blog. Drop in at A Better World: Graeme Bird For High Office to discover what stinks in Pootown, grapple with the philosophical significance of cow manure, and get the low down on Joe Cambria’s sexual orientation.

What the critics say about Mr Bird:

"This guy eats minds for breakfast. Fortunately for the rest of us, he started with his own first." Nabakov

"It’s true, I have a generously proportioned bottom. However unlike Mr Bird, I don’t use it to do my thinking." Zoe

"Welcome to blogsville, arsehole" Anna Winter

Review of Adam Smith: and the pursuit of perfect liberty by James Buchan

Cross posted from Club Troppo: Andrew Norton asked me to write a review of the above mentioned book for the fine journal he edits – Policy Magazine and here is what I’ve come up with. Comments appreciated.

Review of Adam Smith and the pursuit of perfect liberty by James Buchan

Writing the biography of a great intellectual figure poses particular challenges. Focusing on the life should illuminate rather than distract from explicating the subject’s thought. But sometimes the subject presents particular difficulties.

For instance situating Oscar Wilde’s plays within his life adds immeasurably to their power. Lady Windermere is warned by someone she does not realise is actually her mother that she is “on the brink of ruin . . on the brink of a hideous precipice”. This might be melodrama. But for at least some of us, knowing Wilde was presaging the catastrophe of his later disgrace makes the hair stand up on the back of the neck. Knowing Wilde’s passions makes his paradoxes look less like facile jokes, and more like disguised depth charges.

Then again, as Wilde said, he put his talent into his work and his genius into his life. The problem for James Buchan, the latest biographer of Adam Smith is that Smith got things round the other way. He put his genius into his work. But his life? Well, though like any life there moments which touch us – raised as a sickly child by his mother, his father having died before he was born the great love of Smith’s life was his mother – we must speculate about their impact. For there is little else to go on.

Still glides the stream

A program on Wordsworth this evening revealed that he wrote “still glides the stream” in one of his lake poems, so Streeton was outed as a copycat when he called one of his daubs “Still glides the stream and shall forever glide”.

Google reveals that the phrase has been worked over repeatedly, for example Flora Thompson, of Lark Rise to Candleford wrote a book of the same name.

People who are interested in the muddy creek that trickles through Melbourne will be pleased to find that there is a book on the ecology of the lower Yarra called – you guessed it “Still glides the stream”.

And don’t miss Nancy Cato’s “All the rivers run: still glides the stream”.

Philadelphia Gordon is an artist, a riverboat skipper, a beautiful and independent woman. Orphaned by a shipwreck, Philadelphia grows up on the banks of her beloved Murray River, seemingly destined for a conventional life. But tragedy leads her first to a successful career as a painter, then to marriage to the dashing captain of the paddle-steamer that bears her name. This epic novel, set against the panoramic countryside and winding rivers of Australia, is her story, as powerful and unforgettable as its heroine.

German Catholics don't find Humour in Pogo-Pope

Another attack on the freedom to criticize religions and religious figures.

According to a report in today’s SMH, the Catholic Church in Germany is launching legal action to stop MTV showing the animated series Popetown.

The TV series “depicts the pontiff as a rotund 77-year-old, obsessed with his pogo-stick and surrounded by toys. ” and “The workings of the Vatican are portrayed like an office, with the Pope as boss and his cardinals as scheming managers.”

Online but Off-the-planet Opinion

I get the sense that Noel Preston might doubt that people take him seriously. On his website biography it notes that “he was promoted on merit to the position of Associate Professor at QUT where from 1997 to 1999 he was Director of the Centre for the Study of Ethics” (emphasis added). If you read his recent piece posted on Online Opinion you’ll see why we need reassuring that Preston could indeed be appointed to an academic position on “merit”:

At the outset of this new millennium, as citizens of a global village, or as bio-components of this planetary organism, Gaia, our generation of homo sapiens, can reflect more accurately than our predecessors on the story of life, the magnificence of spaceship Earth and the wonder of the universe. … Until recently, life on Earth flourished, but in my lifetime the level of damage done to a system that has been almost five billion years in the making gives us cause to reconsider the most important ethical question: how ought we live with the Earth?

My sensitivity to this question has been enriched as I have aged. Conversations with my wife, Coralie, whose interest in astronomy and bird-watching along with a deep commitment to eco-feminism, have enriched my understanding. Times of serious illness have generated the potent insight that my individual and embodied self is but part of a greater whole. …Healing times in rainforests, at the beach or with the humpback whales, together with reading an emerging body of literature around environmental ethics and eco-spirituality have expanded my worldview and theology. ….

And I thought Clive Hamilton’s midlife crisis had dire intellectual results.

Prodos goes to Parliament?

Just a short news item to draw to people’s attention to – long time Internet personality Prodos is standing for Liberal preselection in Richmond:

WITH his long hair, eccentric dress and personality to match Prodos Marinakis is not the average Liberal Party member.

A communist many years ago, Mr Marinakis says he is now a staunch capitalist. So much so that he has nominated for Liberal Party preselection.

But his bid to contest the safe Labor seat of Richmond at the November state election has hit a hurdle. Some within his own party feel he could be “a loose cannon” …

“Prodos is exactly what the party needs and the members will be really unhappy if he misses out on preselection,” one said. “Even though there is no way we can win Richmond, they won’t endorse him because they are afraid of what he might say.”

The Liberal Party did not return calls yesterday.

Mr Marinakis declined to comment on his preselection, saying it was against party rules. He said his focus was to “help get rid of the Bracks Government”.

Mr Marinakis said he was pro-abortion, supported the principle of gay marriage and thought global warming was a “falsehood”.

The part-time busker, internet radio host and fairytale author is unapologetic about his political past. “I am proud to have been a communist, but I am now supportive of my party and capitalism,” he said

Personally I think it would be good of the Liberal party to have a few principled albeit eccentric shit-stirrers who are not cut from the usual cloth of blue rinse bores and careerists representing it. And it would be a shame if the Liberal establishment is stonewalling him if he has the support of his local branch.

Update: More on the Liberal establishment’s attempts to smear Prodos here

Vote Buying

Ahhh, vote buying; the timeless love of the politician. I’d like to say it is a cheap trick, although the latest insanity from the Senate Republican leadership is anything but cheap. The plan is to offer $100US “rebates” to 100 million taxpayers to “compensate” for high petrol prices. As I’m sure Dan Quayle learnt in a humiliating manner, you know it’s going to be expensive when a “back of envelope” calculation gives you an error message on the calculator… So – a ten billion dollar proposal; that’s very impressive. Especially when one hears that singles earning less than $146,000US, and couples earning less than $219,000US will be eligible. In a country where the average annual wage is approximately $40,000 it’s good to hear its narrowly targeted at the needy and not just a broad slab of the voting public. ..

I’m all for tax-cuts, whatever the form; given the total inability of Australian governments to do anything useful with my money, why wouldn’t I be? If they are going to – in Ross Gittens memorable phrase about Howard’s baby bonus – “piss it up the wall”, they might as well give my money back to me so I can, quite literally, go to the pub and “piss it up the wall”.

And in that spirit, here’s my challenge. Given that the NSW Labour Government is soon to be flush with cash from the sale of Snowy Hydroelectric, and that there is an election in the not too distant future…. What “needy” portions of the population (i.e. the entire population of marginal electorates) are going to develop a sudden “need” for cash, immediately before the election? My guess is that the elderly are suddenly going to find the cost of transport a real difficulty, and will be in dire “need” of some cash.

I thought a constituent quote in the NY Times about the $100US rebate was rather apt (although I am not optimistic about the answer to the latter question being “no”):

“Do you think we are prostitutes? Do you think you can buy us?”