Catallaxy Files

From the front page of The New York Times, January 25, 2012:

Prince Fielder, a slugging first baseman, agreed to a nine-year, $214 million deal with the team his father, Cecil, played for in the 1990s

Also from the front page of The New York Times, January 25, 2012:

Mitt Romney and his wife, Ann, made $27 million in 2010.

I suppose, if you are a Democrat, this would also disqualify Prince Fielder from running for President of the United States.

What about serious global cooling?

David Archibald, polymath, makes a bold prediction that temperatures are about to dive sharply (in the decadal sense). He took the  forgotten correlation that as solar cycles lengthen and weaken, the world gets cooler. He refined it into a predictive tool, tested it and published in 2007. His paper has been expanded on recently by Prof Solheim in Norway, who predicts a 1.5°C drop in Central Norway over the next ten years.

It helps to remember that the predictions of scary warming are not based on  trends of observed temperatures over time, they are fabricated from the abuse of models. And given the degree of uncertainty about the mechanisms involved in warming and cooling (what was that about the science being settled?) there is nothing inherently implausible about a scenario of cooling.

The attack on Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott is front page news here on Drudge via The Daily Mail. Merely for the present as an outside observer, I must tell you my disgust is unbounded. We tend not to jail such people, but that is in the way of more fool us than anything.

My airplane book coming over was Saul Alinksky’s Rules for Radicals which I probably read when it was first released and no doubt at the time, thought he made a lot of sense. Well, I still think he makes a lot of sense. But now that I have joined the middle class and am no longer amongst the OWS crowd, I find his genius in the ability to stage various stunts, some of which work to “expose” “the estabilishment” and some of which do not, but all of which are driven towards a nihilistic destruction of our way of life.

So in Canberra yesterday. There are no positives to come out of this for anyone that I can see. But who is to say what value will ultimately be derived for those who attempt to assault our Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition, people whose good will for Aborignal people is exemplary and undoubted.

During the 1930s three men worked on the same problems in the methodology of the social sciences at the same time and they came up with practically the same solutions. Two of the three did the work as a recreational activity at the end of their busy working days. Karl Popper wrote his first book on the philosophy of science after teaching science and mathematics in school. The working title of the manuscript was “The Fundamental Problems of Epistemology”. With that book in press he turned to the problems of the social sciences. Not far away another public servant, Ludwig von Mises, spent his evenings writing a book on ”The Fundamental Problems of Political Economy”. On the other side of the world Talcott Parsons returned from postgraduate studies in London and Heidelberg and wrote “The Structure of Social Action” (1937).

Their combined efforts offered a framework for the study of economics and the other human sciences which could have:

1. Maintained sociology and economics as an integrated discipline.

2. Sponsored partnerships between economists and students of all social institutions  – law, politics, literature, religion and cultural studies at large.

3. Ensured that “high theory” and empirical studies inform, enrich  and correct each other.

4. Contributed to good public policy, especially by checking the results of increased regulation and intervention in the marketplace and the impact of the erosion of the “bourgeoise virtues”. This work could have commenced when the role of government was much smaller and less entrenched.

There was a window of opportunity for the these three leading figures in their respective  fields , plus their followers, to form a united front across the disciplines of sociology, economics and philosophy to promote the ideas that they shared and to debate the views that they did not share.

This did not happen.  The defective ideas which all three identified in the 1930s became embedded in the rapidly growing community of academics and researchers after the war.

Who dropped the ball?

We take somber note of the reality that in 1933 Europe contained the world’s largest Jewish community.  Until that time, Progressive Jews participated actively and productively in European society, adding much to the quality of life in science, art, music, medicine, law, teaching, commerce and many other fields.  In the ensuing 12 years, six million Jews were wiped out, and the people of the world — with many laudable exceptions — watched in silent assent.

A reminder from the World Union for Progressive Judaism.

Not entirely happy with the idea that the people of the world watched in silent assent. How many people of the world knew what was happening?

What are the lessons of the Holocaust?  Nowadays we know about dreadful crimes of religous persecution that happen in many places around the world, practically every day, but can we react more effectively than the world managed to do in the 1930s?

Democrats for Gingrich are pouring money and assistance into his campaign in Florida. Easily more beatable than Romney, there are now an ongoing supply of anti-Gingrich stories that outline his opposition to Reagan when Reagan was President to the various positions he has held on a range of issues that make him less Republican than Romney.

The push signals a growing belief among Democrats that they may have a real chance at helping to derail Romney, who has long been viewed as Obama’s most formidable GOP opponent but is reeling from a loss to Gingrich in South Carolina. Gingrich and Romney are locked in a tight race ahead of Tuesday’s Florida primary.

While unions and other groups commonly run political ads supporting their candidates in the general election, this is something different — an unusually direct intervention by one side into the other party’s primary race, political strategists said.

And with Senator Marco Rubio coming out to outline the assistance he received from Romney when it really mattered and his primary win over Charlie Crist was so uncertain, there is genuine evidence of which is the more conservative candidate of the two, and it isn’t Gingrich.

I also had the experience of watching Obama’s State of the Union speech in the company of many others. I found it hollow empty rhetoric but then everything Obama says seems to be hollow empty rhetoric. But this time others seemed to find the same as the audience just drifted off. You could see they wanted to believe but there was nothing there at all and eventually they gave up listening. With his audience down 12% compared with one year ago, there is real reason to think his hold has deserted him.

Update: In Texas in the middle of the night, not Melbourne in the middle of the evening. But here is Ann Coulter providing more of the same and is doing so when it means taking a different position from many in her natural constituency. A genuinely brave view who has much to lose by taking the strong position she has. Read the comments after the article to see just how out on a limb she is.

In a world where words have meaning, Mitt Romney is not the “moderate” in this race. He is the most conservative candidate still standing, with the possible exception of Rick Santorum, who is bad on illegal immigration. (Santorum voted in the Senate against even the voluntary use of E-Verify by employers, which means he doesn’t want to do anything about illegal immigration at all.)

Romney is “moderate” only in demeanor — which is just another word game. His positions are more conservative than Gingrich’s, but he doesn’t scare people like Gingrich does. Ronald Reagan and Jesse Helms were moderate in demeanor, too. No one would call them political moderates.

Romney is the most electable candidate not only because it will be nearly impossible for the media to demonize this self-made Mormon square, devoted to his wife and church, but precisely because he is the most conservative candidate.

Conservatism is an electable quality. Hotheaded arrogance is neither conservative nor attractive to voters.

A late addition, thanks to Peter Patton, a nice piece by  Peter Craven on being proud of our cultural achievements. It just shows how smart we can be in some areas while we have blind spots in other areas. Hence the importance of civil dialogue across party lines.

That commentary reminds me of a  beautiful paper written years ago bythe late Len Hume about the so-called cultural cringe. It first appeared in an academic journal, was reprinted as a pamphlet by CIS and I put it on line by arrangement with Hume’s widow.

Pete Craven mentioned Barry Humphries as one of our cultural treasures, there is a section about him in one of the Rathouse Revivalist issues with a picture by Kilmeny Niland and a report on the little-noticed encounter when Karl Popper met Barry Mackenzie.

Dumb research on “Australian racism“. Sorted out by Lorenzo Warby. 

In what is wrong with this “research” effort, the only question is where to begin. First, 102 people is a tiny sample. Second, agreeing that the White Australia Policy “saved Australia from many problems experienced by other countries” does not demonstrate racism. One can agree that monoculturalism has advantages without being racist. Moreover, a majority of flag-fliers did not agree with the statement. So, tagging an activity which a majority of those engaged in where found not to be racist as associated with racism is slander by correlation. (As is typical, the media reporting is worse than the actual study.)

Keith Windschuttle defends the Constitution from charges of racism.

Far from being a racist document, the Australian Constitution … puts all Australians on an equal footing, no matter when they or their ancestors arrived here. Indeed, it would be not only racially discriminatory but also socially divisive to endorse this report and give some Australians status and privileges not available to others simply because of their ancestry.

At the review of the Fair Work Act. Just don’t mention the war  productivity. And don’t involve the Productivity Commisssion!

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(HT: twitter)

I have a piece published on the ABC Drum website today (full transcript below the fold) making the case for the traditional mode of feminism, which emphasised the promotion of economic and social freedoms for women (and men) through the elimination of legislative obstacles, in response to a piece by a University of Sydney student writing a PhD thesis on Antonio Gramsci:

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