There is all the difference in the world between saying “Mistakes were made” and saying “I made mistakes”. Bush has no problems with the first but is never going to think, let alone say, the second, ever.
The distinguishing mark of a mistake is that someone gets fired for it. When that happens in the Bush administration – and if it does, beware of flying pigs – we can start talking about contrition.
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| Chris Borthwick, Managing Editor Health Promotion Journal of Australia Send response to journal:
| Norman Fairclough's book New Labour, New Language? deals with the watering down of political discourse. Jeff Aronson's review of the book unfortunately perpetuates an example of its own. Aronson says ".."weasel words" [are]... used (most famously by Theodore Roosevelt, criticising President Woodrow Wilson) to describe rhetoric that sounds as if it has substance but is actually empty of specific meaning, or is at best ambiguous and vague." No: Roosevelt was more precise. He wasn't naming the rhetoric in general, he was pinning down the particular words in the sentence that carried it. What he said was "When a weasel sucks eggs the meat is sucked out of the egg. If you use a "weasel word" after another there is nothing left of the other." Empty or vague rhetoric is not in itself made up of weasel words; that only happens when you nominate a firm action or decision or stand and then add a few carefully chosen saving words that deprive the action of any specificity. To say "I am against prejudice" is simply vague rhetoric; to say "We will act against prejudice" may sound precise but be ambigious; to say that "My government pledges to introduce a bill outlawing prejudice at the first appropriate opportunity" is a firm commitment with one weasel word, appropriate, to suck the content out. I think it is a distinction worth preserving. | |||
I’m not complaining – Australia’s airforce is basically a large BEWARE OF THE DOG sign, and it would be silly to spend much money on it – but I do think the National Trust should be consulted before any final decisions are taken.
In the Age Tony Parkinson says that it’s taken ten years to sort out Milosevic in Bosnia and we should be patient about Iraq. Sorry, wrong comparison; wrong dictator, wrong timescale. What we’ve done in Iraq is a lot more as if we’d invaded Yugoslavia in 1975 to get rid of Tito, made Milosevic prime minister, and kicked off the Balkan wars fifteen years early. We’re not intervening to stop ethnic violence; we started it. The ethnic cleansing is something we still have to look forward to. And if we get out from under it in thirty years we can count ourselves lucky.
I know there's something in the John Howard Suckup Act that says we have to have Tony Parkinson, but do we have to have quite so much of him?
John Quiggin says today:
The rigidity of party discipline in Australia is almost unique in the democratic world....
Historically, we owe this to the Labor party. In its early days as a third party, it exacted measures in the interests of the working class by swinging its support between the dominant free trade and protectionist parties. This strategy could work effectively only if Labor members followed the party line, regardless of their own views on the issues in question. When Labor became one of the two dominant parties, the tradition of Caucus solidarity continued, reinforced by the bitter experience of desertions and splits.
The Split of the 1950s added another wrinkle, as the rival groups within the party formed organised factions, which imposed their own solidarity rules. These factions still survive, though the ideological divisions between them have mostly disappeared. They are now little more than cliques, with subfactions named for the leaders who command their votes.
When the Liberal party was formed under Sir Robert Menzies, it was a point of pride to say, that, unlike the Labor party, dictated to by “36 faceless men” in the party conference, Liberal MPs were free to make up their own minds and follow their own consciences. They did not do so very often, but the distinction was a real one as late as the 1980s. The Liberals have now adopted Labor’s view on solidarity....
Political commentators in the mass media have aided and abetted the entire process. Even critical discussion of party policy by backbenchers, a normal part of the political process a couple of decades ago, is now regarded as evidence of a fatal loss of control by the leadership, or dismissed as the activity of ‘loose cannons’. The cliché ‘disunity is death’ is treated as if it were a statement of the obvious, but it would be far more accurate to say ‘disunity is life’. Politics is about disagreement and debate, and there can be no real debate when participants on both sides are required to stay ‘on message’ at all times.
Rigid party discipline might have made sense in the past, when the two parties viewed themselves as representing radically different interests and values.... But nowadays, the disagreements are, in most cases, manufactured, and party policies are changed routinely at the whim of the leadership. The measures to which MPs are expected to give their loyal support often contradict the platform on which they were elected.
The House of Representatives has long since ceased to play any useful role in the process of debating and formulating public policy.....
Until July 1, the Senate played a balancing role, and Senate committees provided scrutiny of government legislation, often leading to significant improvements. Now, unless some other Coalition Senators decide to start earning their salaries, the entire burden rests on the shoulders of Barnaby Joyce, apparently the only member of the government who regards Menzies as more than a name for ritual invocation.
The problem isn’t just on the government side. Labor should take advantage of its enforced trip to the sidelines and scrap the factional system once and for all, as a first step towards getting rid of Caucus solidarity. Rigid party discipline may have been a good idea a century ago, but today it does nothing but harm to Australian democracy.
Chris Says:If we’re sending more troops into
An article in the Age seems to be skipping over something a little quickly. Mark Coultan’s article reports -- in a one-liner -- that an academic study has found that 28% of combat soldiers deployed to
The article itself, by the way, is Hoge, C.W.,
Deborah Cameron comments that the Japanese imperial family claims an unbroken line dating back 2600 years. Well, of course they do; they’re here, and if the line had been broken they wouldn’t be. Transmission in the direct father-son line is something else again, lasting an average of three generations, and if that had lasted 2600 years that would be impressive – but it hasn’t. And as for the descent from the sun goddess, the average emperor having had more than two children and 104 generations having passed since Amaterasu that means that she has approximately ten million trillion trillion descendants, which, allowing for overlaps, means that the entire population of the world is in much the same position. Roll on the republic.
"If Troy still mattered to the Greeks whom Alexander led, it was more as the centre of a murderous game of hide-and-seek than as a memorial of the heroic past. The story was a strange one. Because the Thessalian hero
R. Lane Fox, Alexander the Great
Hugh White’s call in the Age to allow Pacific islanders to work in Australia under short-term visas is a good idea, but it doesn’t go far enough. We should offer them dual citizenship in Australia, a move that would boost the economies of what might otherwise be failed states, dispel Mr. Costello’s nightmares about our aging population, and create a state with fishing and mineral rights over an eight of the world’s surface.
Hugh White’s call in the Age to allow Pacific islanders to work in
John Howard seems to have succeeded in defining down the concept of ministerial responsibility to the point where the only way Amanda Vanstone could be removed is if she pulled out a dirty syringe and tried to rob a petrol station. And the Australian public wouldn’t vote Howard out unless he drove the getaway car into a tree while hyped on crystal meth. And the most depressing thing of all is that I wouldn’t count on even those benchmarks holding up longer than six months.
So Maxwell Smart, Agent 86, has finally gone on to that great Control headquarters in the sky. I think it would be appropriate for participants in the forthcoming Terror Summit to begin proceedings by standing with one shoe pressed to their ear for a moment’s silence.
So Kim Beazley is “satisfied” with the Scott Parkin deportation. Faced with a choice between Tweedlejohn and Tweedlebea, I must confess I feel in the mood for a bit of spirited protest myself.
Tony Parkinson’s acrobatics in defence of George Bush deserve a 10 for degree of difficulty but only 3 for execution. What, he asks plaintively, is the performance benchmark in cases of natural disaster? Well, leaving out
To say that George Bush couldn’t raffle a chook in a pub is not to say nearly enough. If he ever got the job we’d expect to see the pub in rubble, all the patrons down with salmonella poisoning, and Halliburton in the corner counting their beer money.
This Sunday a commemoration of the 90th anniversary of the charge at the Nek, one of the most outstanding fuckups of a pretty fucked Gallipoli campaign. The battle honours of the Victorian Light Horse regiments, including grandfather’s 8th, are to be laid up at the Shrine.
Grey day with occasional outbreaks of umbrella. Probably a lovely day in Gallipoli, this time of year.
Lots of Army – soldiers, officers, colourbearers. Apparently the 4th/19th Prince of Wales’s (how did that little poon get in there? Why doesn’t he stick to the prestige jam market?) Light Horse is the successor in title to, among others, the 8th, which was dissolved in the 1920s. Lots of marching and attenhuts.
Service starts with an invocation to almighty and gracious god. We atheists grump quietly. Then a reading from the bible – even worse. “In you, O Lord my God, have I trusted, let my enemies not triumph over me.” Well, ninety years too late for that one.
Blessed are the peacemakers. Ninety-one years too late.
Then a talk by a colonel of some sort who says that they do things very differently now, not attrition but manoeuvre, and basically that you shouldn’t let the Nek dissuade you from joining up.
And then the cream of the crop, one of the triumphs of western music; the Army hymn “Soldiers of Australia”, sung to the tune of Waltzing Matilda;
Soldiers of
Under the badge of the Rising Sun
Giving thanks for our country, our families and freedom
Let hearts and voices arise as one.
God of salvation, pride of our nation
You give us strength to follow your ways
With the cross raised so high (oog) shining bright across our southern skies
We’ll serve
And who would have thought of setting Binyon to WM? Next verse:
Soldiers of
They grow not old as we grow old
At the setting of the sun and also in the mo-o-orning
We shall remember her deeds so bold..
God of salvation, pride of our nation
You give us strength to follow your ways
With the cross raised so high (double oog) shining bright across our southern skies
We’ll serve
Repeat chorus. An almost unequalled combination of immetricality, meretriciousness, and mediocrity. See if Cath wants to learn to sing it.
We pray that the offering of their lives may not have been in vain. Sorry, 90 years too late for that, too.
Light horse prayer. Lord’s prayer (Anglican version). Onward Christian soldiers. A theme seems to be emerging.
Laying of wreaths. Ode to the fallen, this time not to Waltzing Matilda. Last post.
Benediction.
The band starts up the national anthem. About halfway through the first verse the audience realise they’re supposed to be joining in.
For those that dwell across the seas We’ve boundless plains to share. Sorry, ten years too late for that one....
And then me, Manu, Rohini, Jan, Sally and little Chris go off for yum cha at
I write a letter to the Age;
My grandfather was one of the rare survivors of the charge at the Nek, and on Sunday I was among the descendants of Light Horsemen at the Shrine of Remembrance to commemorate the 90th anniversary of that disaster. The tragedy of Gallipoli isn’t just a nostalgic family heirloom, of course -- it’s a saga out of Homer where all who fought were united by their courage and endurance under overwhelming but meaningless trials. Because of that, I’d have to say that I would have been happier if some Turks had been asked to join us there, if only because the Turkish troops had made that same astoundingly brave and appallingly stupid charge across that same narrow ridge a month earlier in the other direction, losing even more men than we did, and deserve a share in whatever glory is going.
Similarly, I don’t know that it was appropriate to sing ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’. Grandfather was a good Presbyterian, but he fought alongside Jewish troopers and Indian Moslem artillerymen and certainly didn’t see himself as any kind of crusader. If I’d been a Moslem contemplating joining the armed forces, I can’t say I would have been encouraged. Now, more than ever, the Australian army has to avoid incorporating exclusionary religious rituals into its vital regimental pride.
Rather too soft, but I don’t want to be blackballed by the Light Horse Association.
On the 7.30 Report last night Alexander Downer said about David Hicks “he's facing… very serious charges, including a charge of attempted murder and conspiracy to commit war crimes [but] If he were to be returned to Australia the advice we have is that he would be released because we wouldn't be able to take any action against him under our anti-terrorism legislation…”
Is it really true that
Dear Mark,
Having finally and belatedly had a look at the Schiavo autopsy report, I should do you the courtesy of passing on my view that the press (and you following them) seems to have overinterpreted it grossly. What it actually says is exactly what was said by the doctors consulted before the event - you can't prove PVS on autopsy.
"5. Was Ms Schiavo in a ... PVS..?
PVS is a clinical diagnosis arrived at through physical examination of living patients. Postmortem correlations to PVS with reported pathological findings have been reported in the literature, but the findings vary with the etiology of the adverse neurological event."
More specifically, Throgmartin (lovely name - right up there with Throttlebottom) points out in the body that while there are pathology reports on people who have been diagnosed as being in PVS "there are no similarly published neuropathologic findings specific to the minimally conscious state' - and that pathology therefore can say at a pinch that a presentation is consistent with PVS but can't at all say that it's not also compatible with MCS (and, a fortiori, locked-in syndrome or recovered-from-PVS state).
He's specifically saying that he can't make a judgement on whether TS was conscious. Massive cerebral atrophy, yes; brain weight small (though bear in mind that that's after two week's dehydration) yes; but that doesn't determine consciousness. To say, as a number of commentators did, that she could never recover is either trivially true or deeply ambiguous, depending on where one's meaning lies on the continuum from 'recover consciousness', to 'recover to the status quo ante'.
Throgmartin does say that occipital lobe damage indicates cortical blindness, and to cover that in any detail I'd have to do rather more lit searching. On the basis of a quick run through medline I'm not absolutely positive that CB can be diagnosed on autopsy with absolute confidence, but I won't die in the last ditch on that one.
Anyway, I wouldn't like you to think that silence meant I'd slunk away.
Arithmetic on the Frontier
A great and glorious thing it is
To learn, for seven years or so,
The Lord knows what of that and this,
Ere reckoned fit to face the foe--
The flying bullet down the Pass,
That whistles clear: "All flesh is grass."
Three hundred pounds per annum spent
On making brain and body meeter
For all the murderous intent
Comprised in "villainous saltpetre!"
And after--ask the Yusufzaies
What comes of all our 'ologies.
A scrimmage in a Border Station--
A canter down some dark defile--
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail--
The Crammer's boast, the Squadron's pride,
Shot like a rabbit in a ride!
No proposition Euclid wrote,
No formulae the text-books know,
Will turn the bullet from your coat,
Or ward the tulwar's downward blow
Strike hard who cares--shoot straight who can--
The odds are on the cheaper man.
One sword-knot stolen from the camp
Will pay for all the school expenses
Of any Kurrum Valley scamp
Who knows no word of moods and tenses,
But, being blessed with perfect sight,
Picks off our messmates left and right.
With home-bred hordes the hillsides teem,
The troop-ships bring us one by one,
At vast expense of time and steam,
To slay Afridis where they run.
Nor may men destroy the hair of their beards, and unnaturally change the form of a man. For the law says: "Ye shall not mar your beards."22 For God the Creator has made this decent for women, but has determined that it is unsuitable for men. But if thou do these things to please men, in contradiction to the law, thou wilt be abominable with God, who created thee after His own image. If, therefore, thou wilt be acceptable to God, abstain from all those things which He hates, and do none of those things that are unpleasing to Him.
And although it is written, "Ye shall not mar the figure of your beard,"66 he plucks out his beard, and dresses his hair; and does he now study to please any one who displeases God?
In today's Age (28/02/05) there's an article by the Chair of the Judicial Conference of Australia making a strong case that there’s a danger that untenured judges may be influenced into siding with the Government by threats to their reappointment or promotion. If anything, it’s too strong. Judges aren’t the only groups that the Government wants to whip in to line. Looking only at the same issue of the paper you can see the same issues being raised in relation to diplomats, defence chiefs, ABC Board members, and Treasury staff. We want all these groups, and many others, to be robustly independent, but we can’t make all their offices into feudal tenures. It isn’t a judicial issue, it’s a political and societal issue, and we would be better served if the lawyers would join in to resolve it at that level rather than calling for their own individual exemptions.
Hostages escaping)
Hey, stop. (shooting two times)
Feathers flew like a turkey!
Well, they shouldn't have run.
"One of my big problems with The Alienist was the anachronistic "signaling" to the modern reader.
Someone who rides in a horse-drawn carriage over cobblestone streets all the time would not have an internal monlogue that went into great detail about it feels to ride a horse-drawn carriage over cobblestone streets.
When I am in the back of taxi driving under sodium-vapor lights, my internal monologue doesn't go into great detail about sodium-vapor lights."
People are giving Peter Costello rather too much credit for the word “sorry”.
Apologies come in a number of strengths.
It’s a pity I’m such a nice person
“I’m sorry I wasn’t told”
“I’m sorry I trusted the wrong people.”
It’s a pity everyone else is so thin-skinned
“I’m sorry if I was misunderstood.”
“I’m sorry if anyone was offended.”
It’s a pity the world is the way it is
“I’m sorry it was necessary.”
“I’m sorry it happened” (tsunamis happen; stuffups are somebody’s fault)
The only form of apology that involves any element of sacrifice of image is the one you never hear –
It’s a pity I did the wrong thing
“I’m sorry I made a mistake.”
Let’s wait for that one before becoming overwhelmed by his nobility.
HOUSTON (Reuters) - A Texas woman has been indicted for criminally negligent homicide for causing her husband's death by giving him a sherry enema, a police detective said on Wednesday.
Tammy Jean Warner, 42, gave Michael Warner two large bottles of sherry on May 21, which raised his blood alcohol level to 0.47 percent, or nearly six times the level considered legally drunk in Texas, police detective Robert Turner in Lake Jackson, Texas, told the Houston Chronicle.
"We're not talking about little bottles here," Turner said. "These were at least 1.5-liter bottles."
Warner, 58, was said to have an alcohol problem and received the wine enema because a throat ailment left him unable to drink the sherry, Turner told the newspaper.
Modern Language Association
“Was I too hearty. Did he think me bold?
Should I have said, ‘like hell,’ and not ‘like fun’?
Does my mustache not make me look too old?
(He wants a man whose graduate work is done.)
Nebraska Wesleyan is probably cold,
I’d rather get down south of
He didn’t seem to like that joke I told;
Jeez, he’s a solemn-looking son of a gun!”
Thus the young savant ponders at his ease,
Knitting the critical brow, and on the belly
Twirling the scholarly thumb, while Ph.D's
Deal with the manuscripts of Machiavelli,
The intervocalic 'X in Portuguese,
And the unfaithfulness of Harriet Shelley.
A Salute to the Modern Language Association, Convening in the Hotel Pennsylvania
The Modern Language Association
Meets in the Hotel Pennsylvania
And the: suave greeters in consternation
Hark to the guests indulging their mania
For papers on “Adalbert Stifter as the Spokesman of Middle-Class Conservatism,”
And “The American Revolution in the Gazette de Leyde and the Affaires de l’Angleterre et de I’Amerique,”
And "Emerson and the Conflict Between Platonic and Kantian Idealism,”
And “Dialektgeographie and Textkritik,”
And “Vestris and Macready: Nineteenth-Century Management at the Parting of the Ways,”
And “Pharyngeal Changes in Vowel and Consonant Articulation,”
And "More Light. on Moliere’s Theater in 1672-73 from Le Registre d'Hubert, Archives of the Comedie Francaise,”
And “Diderot’s Theory of Imitation.”
May culture’s glossolalia, clinging
In Exhibit Rooms and Parlor A,
Sober awhile the tempestuous singing
Of fraternal conventions, untimely gay;
May your influence quell, like a panacea,
A business assembly’s financial fevers,
With the faint, sweet memory of "Observaciones sobre la aspiration de H en Andalucia,"
And "The Stimmsprung (Voice Leap) of Sievers.”
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Consider, though, the effect of senatorial independence in America, where the party system is comparatively weak, candidates raise their own election funds, and cross-party votes are the norm; the effect is to make every senator worth bribing individually, leading to a precipitous decline in standards. In Australia you have to buy an entire party or nothing, which at least provides a minimum cutoff.
The deeper problem is that Australian public political theory—the ideals that politiicans appeal to when talking to the public – hasn’t moved beyond 1760. We haven’t really accepted the full implications of the party system.
Australians are encouraged to think that MPs vote their consciences, which by a happy coincidence agree with the party line; any MP saying “I don’t believe in this motion, but I’m going to vote for it anyway’ is doomed.
And I don’t believe any political system can operate on the basis that everybody in the house follows their conscience at every point without tradeoffs – “You vote for mine and I’ll vote for yours” – that are under that public theory immoral.
In theory, wider debate and more independence in votes aren’t necessarily connected – that was what cabinet secrecy and cabinet solidarity were supposed to ensure.
However, wider public debate is virtually impossible under this theory because it necessarily involves some people—those on the losing side – having to vote in the House against the position they put earlier in the party room, and thus being reproached for toadying, hypocrisy, cowardice, etc.
As I remember my Bagehot, the primary function of the House isn't to set policy, it's to serve as an electoral college for the executive - like the American electoral college, except that they're allowed to change their minds between elections. Though if we haven't caught up with the 1760s I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that we haven't caught up with the 1860s.