Stop cheering for politicians

At the risk of cementing my place as a curmudgeon, the National Conventions of the US political parties always struck me as thoroughly bizarre. This is an entirely bipartisan feeling - they're a freakshow.

My overwhelming feeling, whenever it shows the crowd shots, is: who are all these people? Don't they have anything better to do do?

To the Australian mindset, there is something quite unseemly about turning up to cheer for politicians, especially in these degraded times. There is a reason that these events don't take place in Australia. They simply wouldn't pass the laugh test. If you built it, no one would come. This includes people who voted for the candidate.

Let the parties sort out their own tawdry affairs in private, and then we'll vote for whichever of the two repulses us less, if we're minded to do so. (In Australia, you legally have no choice on that last point)

If there is one advantage to living in a democratic age, you at least have the freedom to have open contempt for one's notional leaders without running afoul of les majeste laws or the like. This is fortunate, because the system tends to produce leaders richly deserving of the contempt that you're licensed to have.

Why throw that away for this bunch of clowns? Why act like a subject voluntarily for someone whom it is unworthy to be subjected to? Honestly, if you could actually pick a single person to be ruled by, no questions asked, would either of these two candidates be among the top 1000 people you'd pick? The top 10,000?

The rather visceral reaction I have to political conventions is, I will freely admit, a mostly aesthetic response. It seems like obvious pandering and boob bait for bubbas. Sometimes, some of the relevant applause lines strike home to me. Sometimes, they say things that seem true, and even important or compelling.

But even then, not far beneath the surface is the feeling I have during the few times I've had the misfortune to watch romantic comedies. When watching the sad bits, I sometimes feel brief pangs of sadness. But they quickly get followed by a sense of resentment of the fact that my emotions are being manipulated here, for other people's benefit, and in a crude and obvious manner.

Doubt not that this is happening to you. Even if you honestly think it's a good idea to vote for this candidate. In fact, especially if you honestly think it's a good idea to vote for this candidate.

Now, it is possible that these are generally new and interesting times, and genuinely new and uniquely worthy leaders. A lot of people on the right are really excited about Donald Trump. Maybe they're right to be thrilled.

I would caution you with the following though.

If you're honest with yourself, and remember what you felt at the time, did you not feel at least some similar excitement at Mitt Romney's speech? At John Bloody McCain? When you look back now, are you not embarrassed to have supported these shameless, self-promoting fools? One is a Democrat-lite, and the other took the 'Invade the World / Invite the World' idea so strongly that he probably would have started a war with Russia over the sinkhole that is Ukraine.

If you're a Democrat, for an equivalent test, try and summon up now the same enthusiasm for John Kerry that you had in 2004. It simply cannot be done.

With the passage of time, the raw tribalism goes away, and the sheer mediocrity of the candidates offered in democratic elections becomes strikingly clear.

So if you (like me for sure in 2008, and me to some extent still in 2012) felt some excitement at the time for those clowns, you should feel a little chastened. You might reflect that perhaps, indeed, I am one of the rubes after all, or at least am not wholly immune from rube-like tendencies. Perhaps I just like cheering for my team, and this is what I'm actually feeling right now. Perhaps most of what strikes me as absurd about the other party's convention applies equally strongly to my own.

In related news, November cannot come fast enough.

Of the Personal and Statistical

The current Syrian refugee crisis in Europe is a tragedy.

Should that sentence strike regular readers as a little trite, bear with me. I mean it in the classical sense that the Greeks thought of tragedy.

It is calamitous, deplorable, cathartic. It is a sorrowful tale of human misery stemming from root causes of human folly and flaws. It is a tale whose outcome the audience knows in advance, as they have seen the story many times before. It could have been prevented, perhaps, but we all knew it wasn't going to be.

The modern bastardisation of the concept of tragedy is that of a simple morality play, where good and evil are clearly delineated ahead of time. In the Disney-fied version, the upshot of all the sorrow is the lesson that Something Must Be Done.

I feel much has been lost by the Disney-fication of drama. We can no longer see the sadness of tradeoffs, of characters who are simultaneously victims and authors of their own misfortune, of the inevitability of human suffering.

So what, then, is the ultimate tragedy on display in this case?

It is this:

Individually, any one person is the undeserving and unfortunate victim of their broken society.

Collectively, all the people in a society are the reason that the society is broken in the first place.

Now, my instincts regarding public policy lean strongly towards emphasising the general, statistical formulation over the particular, personal formulation. The formulation as written may seem to suggest the primacy of the second statement over the first.

But do not misunderstand me here. It would not be a tragedy if it had such a simple resolution as that. Both parts are true. Try just reversing the order of the two statements to get a different feeling. The most common statement about the general and the specific has a very different connotation about which should be preferred. It is attributed, perhaps apocryphally but understandably, to the great monster - one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.

The specific of the Syrian refugee exodus you have almost certainly seen by now. It is heartbreaking, and does not need any particular explanation:



Oof. The sheer sorrow hits you like a punch in the guts.

People's second thoughts after seeing this photo will vary wildly. You may be furious at the policies that let this happen. You may be suspicious of your emotions being manipulated here. You may wonder about what should be done in response. This is the intellectual question - what you make of it all.

But before that, I am almost certain your first thoughts, like mine, were of sadness and despair. Imagine if that were your child.

Humans are endowed with two great traits - empathy and reasoning. Those without empathy are sociopaths and monsters. Those without reasoning are dangerous imbeciles and fools.

Empathy yearns to try to end this senseless suffering by those in the middle of this war by granting them refuge. This is attempting to ward off the Scylla of heartless cynicism, and the gleeful egg-breaking-in-the-pursuit-of-omelettes that characterised the worst tyrants of the 20th century.

But what, then is the Charybdis? What gets ignored if we do not think about the general proposition?

Reasoning wants to know why Syria is the way it is, and what consequences will flow from possible responses to the current war.

What tends to get seldom emphasised in the face of such grief above is the heuristic I always associate with John Derbyshire (though I can't remember exactly where he wrote it) - that the more migrants you bring in from country X, the more your own country will resemble country X.

Several things are notable about this proposition.

One, it is extremely straightforward.

Two, it does not depend on one particular theory of development, and holds for many socially acceptable theories. If you think that poverty is driven by childhood nutrition, the result still holds, as long as the current adults are already impacted by malnutrition from years past. If you think that current ethnic conflict has its roots in colonial history, the result still holds, as long as the hatreds do not disappear upon touching foreign soil. As long as the trait is observable in citizens and fixed in the short term, then the Derbyshire result holds at least in the short term.

Third, it is completely outside the Overton Window of acceptable opinion.

But is it true? You will have to decide that for yourself. The general result is always uncertain and contingent in a way that the emotional result is not. You have to dig a little deeper to find out. Why is Syria the way it is? And how much of that will be replicated if there is extensive Syrian immigration to a western country, such as from a refugee resettlement program? Hard to say, precisely. But here's something to ponder, from Australia in 2012:

A forum discussion on SBS TV's Insight program looking at the uprising in Syria further exposed the divide amongst Syrian Australians over the conflict....

The main sectarian divide in Australia's Syrian community, though, is between the two main Islamic sects, Shi'a and Sunni....

In February, a group of men stormed the Syrian embassy in Canberra, smashing up the ground floor.

Three staff members were there at the time but no one was hurt.

Just days later, there was a shooting in Sydney apparently linked to the Syrian conflict.

The injured man, Ali Ibrahim, was an Alawi, like Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad.

After expressing pro-Assad views on Facebook, he was shot three times in the legs on the doorstep of his home.

His father, Jamel el-Ali, believed it was a warning from the anti-Assad camp.

It doesn't punch you in the guts in quite the same manner, does it?

But to the thinking person, rather than the feeling person, alarm bells are ringing. Australia did not used to be a country where embassies were stormed and people were shot for expressing political views in public forums. At the moment, this is at a small scale. But how many Syrians can one admit before this is no longer the case? If you bring all of Syria into your country, will you not have simply replicated Syria somewhere else?

This is all well and good, the particularist responds, but how many dead children are you willing to see washed up on a beach in order to forestall this speculative possibility?

It's a good question.

To get a flavor for the generalist argument, it is sometimes necessary to examine it in contexts that do not raise immediate emotional responses. Such as, for instance, the late Roman Empire's decision to allow in hundreds of thousands of Goths. Steve Sailer has a great summary of Edward Gibbon's take on the consequences of that here.

I suspect that the particularist temptation is to wave this away as a largely abstract and irrelevant example. It doesn't resonate emotionally, that's for sure.

But the human catastrophe that resulted from the destruction of the Western Roman Empire was a tragedy that affected Europe for the next thousand years.

If you're waving that away, which one of us is sounding like Stalin now?

The Charybdis, in other words, is that you become so focused on the emotional response to a single death that you forget to think about the long-term consequences of your actions, and end up causing many more deaths.

To my mind, the starting point of the answer, is to shut up and multiply.

This isn't about your feelings. A human life, with all its joys and all its pains, adding up over the course of decades, is worth far more than your brain's feelings of comfort or discomfort with a plan. Does computing the expected utility feel too cold-blooded for your taste? Well, that feeling isn't even a feather in the scales, when a life is at stake. Just shut up and multiply.

Whether a policy makes you feel good is less important than its ultimate consequences. Of course, this then comes back to your view of why the third world is the third world. This is why 'shut up and multiply' is only the start of the answer, not the end of it.

It would be ideal if the policy formulation that saved the most lives in the long run also made you feel emotionally good in the short run.

But what if the two aims are at odds? Are you willing to look clear-eyed on the photos of dead children and still see the lives that you think you're saving by not doing anything? Will you waver? Should you waver?

Uneasy rests the head that wears the crown.

The Various Ironies of Gough Whitlam

Former Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam died recently, at age 98. Predictable hagiographies followed, with cringe-inducing link titles like 'Gough Whitlam a Martyr and a Hero'. This causes right-thinking people to be torn between the polite and worthy tradition of not speaking ill of the recently-deceased, and a mildly grating feeling that the hagiographers write the narratives when this happens. Obituaries are hard to do well, that's for sure, and most don't even really try.

Say whatever else you will about Gough Whitlam, but he was a transformative Prime Minister. Unfortunately, the balance of this transformation was decidedly negative. To his credit, Whitlam enacted some truly good policies, most notably getting rid of the draft, and cutting tarriffs. He also brought in some others that were probably inevitable, like no-fault divorce and recognition of China. He also had some disastrous ones. The Racial Discrimination Act was probably his most poisonous legacy, most recently in the news for being part of the trashing of free speech in the prosecution of Andrew Bolt. Getting rid of university fees almost certainly contributed to the permanent underfunding and subsequent underperformance of Australian universities to this day. He also cut off Rhodesia (leading it to the brilliant sunlit uplands it's in today), and rewarded the buffoonish Lionel Murphy for his bizarre raids on ASIO offices (which tarnished Australia's reputation as a serious state in intelligence matters) by appointing him to the High Court (where he was predictably and comically awful).

But the big irony of the Whitlam years involves the Liberal Party. They struggled so mightily to unseat him, including blocking the funding of government to provoke a constitutional crisis. Blocking supply, I might add, was something that the Libs attract an oddly small amount of criticism for, given its role in the whole affair. Whitlam was famously dismissed by Governor-General John Kerr (who became the boogie-man to the Labor party faithful ever since). Whitlam was also then subsequently voted out by a huge margin in the ensuing elections (a fact that Whitlam fans never seem to discuss very much, since it doesn't fit the narrative very well).

So the Liberals finally won their big victory over Whitlam! And what was their big reward?

Eight years of Malcolm Bloody Fraser, the most disappointing Liberal Prime Minister ever, and one of the worst overall (giving Gough a red hot go for that title).

If the election is between Fraser and Whitlam, honestly, why even bother? It's like the David Cameron v Gordon Brown election - as Simon and Garfunkel said, every way you look at it, you lose.

Thankfully, conservatives eventually had something to cheer for when Fraser was kicked out and Australia finally got some sensible and important economic reforms, coming from... Labor Prime Ministers Bob Hawke and Paul Keating! The former was excellent, the latter was pretty decent too (and superb as Hawke's treasurer). Ex-post, is there a single member of the Liberal Party today (excluding the braindead and the hyper-partisan) who, if sent back in time to 1983 but knowing what they do now, would actually vote for Fraser over Hawke?

And yet Whitlam is the 'hero and the martyr'. Hawke plays second fiddle in Labor Party folklore, despite being excellent in ways that were of mostly bipartisan benefit (floating the dollar, cutting inflation, and other instances of important micro-economic reform).

Yeah, I don't get it either.

Time for Malcolm Fraser to repent

"And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs--and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety,"

-George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London 

From a certain progressive standpoint, Zimbabwe, it seems, has at last gone to the dogs.

The Rhodesians would have told you that the dogs arrived years ago, and the rest of the changes were merely being more open about the kennel-like aspects of state.

Of course, this doesn't mean that things can't get worse. When it comes to forecasting the fortunes of countries, as in stockmarkets, picking exactly when the bottom has been reached is a very perilous business. It is always dangerous with basket-case countries to assume that things can't get any worse, because truly awful leaders seem to be uncannily persistent in finding a way. If Zimbabwe is remembered for anything, perhaps it will be for that.

So let's focus on a more stripped-down prediction - that installing Robert Mugabe was a mistake that everyone involved ought to feel intensely ashamed about.

Surely that's been pretty obvious for at least 25 years, right?

Ha! Sometimes it takes a while for things to get so bad that they break through the cognitive dissonance of those that helped create the disaster.

Just ask former Prime Minister of Australia Malcolm Fraser.

In one of the more disgraceful episodes of a mostly worthless (at best) Prime Ministership, Fraser was heavily involved in getting Robert Mugabe installed. As Hal G.P. Colebatch recounts:

Fraser's 1987 biographer Philip Ayres wrote: "The centrality of Fraser's part in the process leading to Zimbabwe's independence is indisputable. All the major African figures involved affirm it."

Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere said he considered Fraser's role "crucial in many parts", and Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda (whose own achievements included making his country a one-party state) called it "vital".

Mugabe is quoted by Ayres: "I got enchanted by (Fraser), we became friends, personal friends ... He's really motivated by a liberal philosophy."

Fraser's role also attracted tributes from Australian diplomats. Duncan Campbell, a former deputy secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, has claimed that Fraser was a "principal architect" of the agreement that installed Mugabe and that "he was largely responsible for pressing Margaret Thatcher to accept it".

Former Australian diplomat and Commonwealth specialist Tony Kevin has also claimed that Fraser "challenged Margaret Thatcher's efforts to stage-manage a moderate political solution".

In an interview in 2000, Fraser showed that he appeared to have learned absolutely nothing from the process. This was just after Mugabe had passed a law allowing white farming assets to be taken without compensation.

JOHN HIGHFIELD: Mr Fraser, what do you make of these goings on in Zimbabwe? After all it was in the late 1970s that you and your friend, Kenneth Kowunda [phonetic], persuaded Mrs Thatcher to come across to your view and give Zimbabwe independence.

MALCOLM FRASER: I find it very hard to understand the disintegration that has, in fact, occurred because I really did believe, and I think many people who knew what was happening in the country believed, that President Mugabe started very well. I can remember speaking with Dennis Norman who was a white farmer in Mugabe's first government, and he spoke very highly of him and spoke very highly of his policies at that time.

...
I'm - you know, what has gone wrong in the last several years I find it very difficult to pin-point, except that economic policies have not worked. He's tried to defy, I think, the international moves of the marketplace which would have reduced investment in Zimbabwe and therefore reduced employment opportunities for Zimbabweans.

By 2000, it had been clear for quite a while that Zimbabawe had been disgracefully managed on a purely economic basis for a long time. When Mugabe was installed, Zimbabwe's GDP per capita of $916 (in current US dollars). By 2000,  its GDP had declined by over 40%, to $535. Have a look at the graph below of the subsequent growth of some nearby countries that were poorer than Zimbabwe in 1980 and see what you think of Fraser's claim that Mugabe 'started very well'. Try putting in Botswana as well (slightly richer in 1980) and the comparison becomes even more dismal, as it towers over Zimbabwe. The most optimistic description is that things hadn't yet gone to hell as late as 1982. Heckuva job, Malcolm and Robbie!

But in some sense, this isn't really the striking point about the Fraser response.

The first bizarre part is Fraser's contemptible obfuscation of referring to a policy of forced, uncompensated confiscation of white farm assets as merely 'economic policy'. Nothing racial here, no siree! See no race, hear no race. Why is that? Why the absurd euphemisms?

The second bizarre part is that, 20 years later, Fraser still finds the events mysterious. Do you think this might be related to the first point, you worthless old fool?

Fraser has to skate around the racism of the Mugabe regime, because given the economic catastrophe that befell the country, this is the only advantage that the initial Mugabe boosters can claim over Smith. Sure, we replaced a system that was lifting Zimbabwe out of poverty with a brutal and corrupt regime that terrorises its citizens. But hey, at least it's not racist, like Smith!

Of course, Smith's racism was mostly of a disparate impact variety. Rhodesia was not South Africa, and the practical restrictions on blacks were far less than under Apartheid. The 1961 constitution had property and education requirements for voting rights, but made no explicit racial prohibitions (although later voting systems did). The outcome was heavily skewed towards whites, obviously, and this was almost certainly the intended effect. But if you think that having a property requirement for voting means that a system is not meaningfully democratic, then Britain in World War I was just another undemocratic oligarchy fighting against other equally undemocratic oligarchies. You also wouldn't want to praise the US founding fathers too highly.

When Hal Colebatch caned Fraser in 2008 for his shameful role in getting Mugabe installed, Fraser's response was pathetic. You will scour in vain for any description by Fraser of racism in anything Mugabe did. You will also scour in vain for any coherent explanation of what exactly was wrong with the Smith regime, except that Smith personally was a real meanie who didn't let Mugabe, who was already fighting a civil war to overthrow the government, visit his young son when he was sick, and when he ultimately died. By all means, let's then give the country to a man who at the time was already famous for running an organisation that cut the noses and lips off blacks who opposed him. Have a look, Malcolm! Have a look, if you can stomach it, and tell me again what a terrible man Ian Smith was.

In the mean time, Fraser clings to a cock-and-bull story that the real issue with Mugabe was when his wife died, and that's when it all went to hell. Great theory! Completely untestable in terms of its main aspects of course. But what about the implication - that nobody could have seen this coming, as the start was so excellent. Seems plausible, no? Except that Smith pretty accurately did predict what was going to happen. Malcolm Fraser continues to express his surprise. Smith expressed no surprise at all. Sadness, yes, but not surprise.

How about, just for a change, you consider the possibility that you got completely suckered by Mugabe, that his moderate image was all a con for your benefit, and that millions of people suffered enormously because of your gullibility. You got played, you silly old fool. You are the muppet in this story, the mark, the rube. 35 years later you still can't see that. Gee, I picked the cup that I'm super sure had the pea under it! And somehow I still lost money, it just doesn't make sense!

So now, let us return to the story I linked at the start. Exactly where have things gotten to recently?

In the harshest official policy on race and land reform in a country that has been close to bankruptcy, the 90-year old autocrat said Wednesday that whites may no longer own any land in Zimbabwe. 

Let us pause and reflect on Malcolm Fraser's shame. We have known for almost 30 years that Fraser bequeathed to Zimbabwe economic and social catastrophe. We have already known of the thousands brutally killed and tortured in Mugabe's prison of a country. We have already known of the increasing hostility towards the dwindling number of remaining whites, even when it was entirely self-defeating from an economic point of view. We have known that Mugabe has long since stopped holding any semblance of free and fair democratic elections, another frequent criticism of Smith.

But finally, we have reached the nadir, from the progressive point of view - at long last, we now have a regime that is actually more racist than Ian Smith's. Smith never imposed any restrictions this draconian on blacks. The fig leaf, absurd though it was all along, is finally stripped away. There is nothing left, absolutely nothing, to recommend this regime over the one it replaced.

Malcolm Fraser never had to face the consequences of his actions. He will live out his days in comfort and peace in a stable and prosperous first world country. The same cannot be said of the citizens of Zimbabwe, both white and black, who had to live with the regime Fraser helped install.

The Crocodile Tears Of Refugee Advocates

Look at these preening poseurs, parading their ostentatious compassion like a badge of their moral purity:

Thousands of people have held candlelight vigils around Australia for slain asylum seeker Reza Berati, who died in violence at the Manus Island detention centre last Monday.

If your only knowledge of this story came from the ABC article, you would probably fail  to make much sense of the bizarre euphemism that Mr Berati 'died in violence' at the detention centre. In fact, he died as part of a riot started by other asylum seekers. The vigil-holders seem to display a curious lack of concern with finding and bringing to justice those that started the riots which led to Mr Berati's death. But they would, wouldn't they?

How you view this kind of tragedy depends in part upon how much responsibility you think should be attributed to the government for the indirect but perhaps predictable consequences of its policies, notwithstanding that the proximate cause of the tragedy is with the victims themselves.

The left, perhaps not unreasonably, wants to hold the government accountable for reasonably foreseeable consequences of its actions. It's not obvious that this is always the right way to evaluate government policy, but very well, let's take that path.

The biggest murderer of boat people in Australia by this reasoning is Kevin Rudd. By a long shot. The greatest savior was John Howard. As I've written about on multiple occasions. Let's look at my favorite picture on the subject:



Care to see an updated version, where things are plotted in terms of flows and not levels, in order to make it even more plain? From La Wik:



Correlation doesn't equal causation and all that. But it certainly seems like something very stark changed when Kevin Rudd started parading his compassion for asylum seekers by greatly relaxing the conditions they were held under. If you have another theory, do feel free to describe it in the comments.

The entirely predictable result of this fiasco was the following: 46,000 asylum seekers trying to come to Australia, and over 1100 drowning along the way.

What's it going to be, you worthless candle-holding popinjays? How come these guys never get a mention? It's not like they just went missing in the middle of the ocean. They were drowning by the dozens in front of the TV cameras on Christmas Island. How much concern did that elicit then?

Is it your contention that people don't respond to incentives at all? Or that this was all unpredictable, like a lightning strike? Unfortunately for the latter theory, there were plenty of people, myself included, describing this process quite early on. The fact that you didn't predict it doesn't make it unpredictable.

Here's Australia's most worthless politician, Green's Senator Sarah Hanson-Young describing whether she'd accept any responsibility for the drowning deaths of 200 people when a boat sank off Java:

"Of course not. Tragedies happen, accidents happen."

Would the same logic be equally compelling to you if advanced now by the Abbott government?

You'll forgive me, Ms Young and other candle-light twerps, for being unmoved by your sudden and very narrowly circumscribed concern for the welfare of asylum seekers. I've been saying for several years that the thousands of drowning deaths were needless and horrible consequences of bad government policy. Where the hell were you? When the buck stopped with your guy, and not the other guy, did the deaths somehow bother you less?

Kevin Rudd scrapped the Pacific Solution around February 8th, 2008. Tony Abbott instituted Operation Sovereign Borders on the 18th of September 2013. That's approximately 2047 days in total that Labor Policy governed how asylum seekers were treated.

Since these clowns don't seem to be so good at maths, let me spell it out as plainly as I can: under Labor Policy, one asylum seeker was drowning on average roughly every two days.

By contrast, what's the situation now?

Scott Morrison says there have been no boats for 64 days, the longest stretch since August in 2008

Congratulations to Immigration Minister Scott Morrison! Thanks to your courageous decision to do what's right, not necessarily what feels good, 32-odd people are alive today who wouldn't have been if your policies hadn't been in place. One, very sadly, is dead.

If you don't think that tradeoff is worth making, then @#$% you and your fake compassion.

Australia as a Triumph of Reversion to the Mean

Not many people really understand the idea of reversion to the mean in the context of genetics. If it’s discussed at all, it’s usually in terms of the rich smart guy having an idiot son who ruins the family business. But there’s more to it than that.

The first part you need to realise is that it’s often unhelpful to think of your genes as a deterministic set of instructions that will be replicated over and over in your children unless mutations.

Instead, one crude metaphorical way to think of the process of Mendelian Inheritance is that your genetic outcomes are the process of a random variable that is drawn from the joint distribution of your mother’s family and your father’s family. Combined, you can think of this as your family genetic distribution.

Your particular genes contain information both about you (i.e. the one particular realization of that variable) and the overall distribution of traits in your family (the possible range of other realizations of you and your siblings). When you have children, each child is a realization of the joint distribution of your family traits and your husband or wife’s family traits. If you have enough children, you’ll start to see the outlines of the whole distribution of possible traits – ranges of height, ranges of facial features, ranges of hair colors, etc.

So what this means is that when it comes to whether your children will be smart, the question is not just whether you and your wife are smart. The question is whether you and your wife come from families that are generally smart. If you and your wife are both smarter than the rest of your families, unfortunately your children will probably be less smart than either of you. They’ll be closer to the average of the joint distributions, whereas you two are closer to your respective maximums.

So what’s this got to do with Australia?

Australia was a society settled from the dregs of British society. Not the absolute dregs, mind you – it didn’t take too much to get the gallows in those days, but mid-level crime like larceny or burglary might get you transported. But it’s fair to say that the convicts getting transported were likely below average for Britain at the time, like most convicts in most societies.

Suppose you take a cross-section of people from the lower end of the genetic distribution and put them in an environment with British laws and institutions. What happens next?

 The crucial part is that we’ve got people who are probably below their familial averages. But these cases get the benefit of mean reversion – if you’re dumber or more aggressively antisocial than your family average, your children will be on average smarter and less anti-social than you.

Run this forward a few generations, and you’re basically back to where you started. The convict starting point still lingers a little in terms of anti-authoritarian cultural attitudes, but that’s about it. You can take the dregs of society, but the next generation won’t be the same dregs. Thankfully. Mean reversion taketh away, but mean reversion giveth as well. So while the British who were sending convicts to Australia probably thought they were going to create a permanent colony of antisocial idiots, what they actually ended up creating was Britain #2, but with much better weather. The joke’s on them, really.

The practical punch line, of course, is that if you’re worried about how your children might turn out, pay close attention to the extended family, not just your partner. A son or daughter who’s not too bright but who has lots of doctors and lawyers and scientists in the family is still a pretty good bet.

Things that make me feel patriotic

I was in an English-themed pub on Friday night (in the US of A), watching the Australian Rules Football Grand Final. I don't know why, but it seems to be a regular trend that random sporting events in the US, of whatever sort, are screened by British pubs, usually with British proprietors (this guy was from Liverpool).

As those of you who watched know, it was a great game (I'm a Dockers man, so I didn't really care about the result, but it's rare to see such a close finish). The crowd was quite Aussie-heavy, and it was enormous fun to be reminded of the subtle cultural differences between Australia and the US. Things started well when some player had been knocked down after failing to prevent a goal, and some guy yelled 'Get up, you wuss!'.

Anyway, what warmed my heart greatly was that at some point, the camera flashed to a picture of Julia Gillard, the Australian Prime Minister, in the crowd. At least three quarters of the room booed loudly.

What a refreshing change from the bogus choreographed boosterism and cheering of the US national conventions! Julia Gillard is deeply unpopular, but the irritation went deeper than that (and I suspect that the fraction of the room booing was considerably larger than the fraction that would have voted for Tony Abbott at the last election) Indeed, I'm quite confident that if you'd been in that room in previous years, the response would have been very similar for Kevin Rudd, John Howard, Paul Keating or any other Prime Minister.

Australians tend to regard their politicians with a mixture of suspicion and contempt. This holds almost equally for the ones they vote for and the ones they don't. And this seems to me to be a far healthier attitude for a free citizenry to have towards the people that want to rule over them.

I remember when Barack Obama got elected in 2008, and they had the huge victory celebration in Chicago. Such a spectacle would be inconceivable in Australia - the whole idea simply wouldn't pass the laugh test. I'm meant to spend my night turning up to cheer for a politician? If you held it, nobody would turn up.

When politicians turn up at non-political events of national enjoyment, such as the AFL Grand Final, Australins tend to resent the intrusion. The whole 'man (or woman) of the people' nonsense is recognised for the contrived and artificial performance that it is. Meanwhile, the whole vibe given off is of a monarch enjoying the privilege of swanning into prime seats at major sporting events by virtue of their position.

And none of this needed to be explained to anybody in the room. This healthy disrespect of government authority was entirely spontaneous and widespread.

In a free country, elected officials may get your vote, but they ought not get your cheerful subservience. The message, which politicians everywhere need to be reminded of, is clear: we tolerate your presence out of a conviction that voting is superior to dictatorship, but we do so reluctantly and grudgingly. Do not mistake this for a desire to be ruled.

Australia's Free Speech Disgrace

In Australia, the Labor Government and Greens have been unhappy with the press coverage they've been receiving in various newspapers, mainly those owned by Rupert Murdoch.

Fair enough, you might say, on a number of grounds.

The government has done a dismal job of running the country, passing ruinous mining and carbon taxes, harassing businesses with excessive labor regulation, and generally doing their damndest to choke off the economic success story that is modern Australia

Meanwhile, they've received fawning coverage from other papers, notably the Sydney Morning Herald and Age. Not to mention the taxpayer funded ABC, whose reporters opinions range from 'left of centre' to 'crush the bourgeois capitalist pigs!'

And in the marketplace of ideas, News Corp papers compete for scarce advertising dollars and reader eyeballs. If they're unfair or too biased, then other papers will step into the breach. Perhaps Murdoch papers succeed because they air viewpoints that are of interest to readers, or are just more entertaining.

In addition, Australia already has an intrusive self-regulatory body, which does things like forcing opinion piece writers phrases like 'illegal entrants' to be changed to 'irregular entrants' without their knowledge or consent.

But that's not enough for the Labor government - apparently fawning political coverage is their right as the government, and those naughty newspaper editors aren't falling into line.

As a result, they conducted an inquiry into setting up a government regulatory body of media outlets, both print and online. The results are in.

Let's listen to the hilariously self-serving summary from censorious d***head, The Honorable Ray Finkelstein, QC. From page 8:

I therefore recommend that a new body, a News Media Council, be established to set
journalistic standards for the news media in consultation with the industry, and handle
complaints made by the public when those standards are breached. Those standards will likely be substantially the same as those that presently apply and which all profess to embrace.

Got that? The things you were doing before voluntarily will now be mandatory! But since the standard will "likely be substantially the same" (that's a guarantee you can take to the bank), and "all profess to embrace" the current rules, what's the difference?

Except, you know, the difference between a volunteer army and conscription, or the difference between going on a diet and being chained to a treadmill, or the difference between working on a cotton farm and being a plantation slave.

The 'voluntary' bit is kind of important in the sphere of human liberty.

And what role will the government have in all of this? Page 9:

The News Media Council should have secure funding from government and its decisions made binding, but beyond that government should have no role. The establishment of a council is not about increasing the power of government or about imposing some form of censorship. It is about making the news media more accountable to those covered in the news, and to the public generally.  

Oh, well that's a relief! At best,  it will be a court that makes up its own laws. In middle case scenario, it will be a puppet of whoever is in power. At worst, it will be another permanent bastion of the left, deciding what constitutes appropriate speech in Australia.

Nothing to worry about there!

Who will be regulated? From page 295:

If a publisher distributes more than 3000 copies of print per issue or a news internet site has a minimum of 15,000 hits per annum it should be subject to the jurisdiction of the News Media Council, but not otherwise. 

Paging Doctor Evil! We need a payment of one million dollars!

Let's put this in perspective. This site is read by nobody. Really, it's true. And yet it gets a couple of thousand hits a month. Some of these are spam sites. Some of them are links to images. Doesn't matter - this website will be under the jurisdiction of these clowns.

If I'm regulated, everyone is regulated. And with the Australian courts absurd view that writing anything anywhere on the planet makes you subject to Australian defamation law, who knows how many sites they'll be trying to regulate.

An important change to the status quo is that, in appropriate cases, the News Media Council should have power to require a news media outlet to publish an apology, correction or retraction, or afford a person a right to reply. This is in line with the ideals contained in existing ethical codes but in practice often difficult to obtain. 

I would delete every trace of this blog and eat the contempt of court order before I would publish anything at the demand of the Australian government. I would set up a thousand mirror sites before I would remove one word at the request of the News Media Council.

Why do we need to do this anyway?

These proposals are made at a time when polls consistently reveal low levels of trust in the media, when there is declining newspaper circulation, and when there are frequent controversies about media performance.

Have you looked at the approval rating of the current government recently? Have you looked at the approval rating of lefty academics that would populate such a council? Have you looked at the approval rating of speech-censoring government suck-ups like the Honorable Ray Finkelstein, QC? Give me Rupert Murdoch any day.

Do you think that right-wing speech disliked by the government is more likely to get censored? Andrew Bolt makes a great case that it will - when citing examples of biased coverage, what does he turn to but ... News Limited Coverage of global warming! Nothing about unbalanced coverage in favor of the global warming position in The Age (let alone the ABC).

And why, pray tell, is that a problem?

The Honorable Ray Finkelstein, QC, would do well to take heed of Ken at Popehat's "Chicago Manual of Style For Censorious Dipshits". As Ken notes:

The obligatory “we believe in freedom of expression” paragraph in the standard defend-our-censorship communique is simply embarrassing. That’s why the Chicago Manual of Style For Censorious Dipshits (“CMSCD”) recommends eschewing it and launching straight into the meat of your uninformed and conclusory stomping on First Amendment law.

Back to Finkelstein, sure enough first we get the fig leaf...:

It is worth pausing at this point to affirm that there is nothing wrong with newspapers having an opinion and advocating a position, even mounting a campaign. Those are the natural and generally expected functions of newspapers....

and then the inevitable 'but shut up and say things I like':

However, to have an opinion and campaign for it is one thing; reporting is another, and in news reporting it is expected by the public, as well as by professional journalists, that the coverage will be fair and accurate.
.
Nonetheless, there is a widely-held public view that, despite industry-developed codes of practice that state this, the reporting of news is not fair, accurate and balanced.

I reserve my right to make my reporting exactly as unfair and unbalanced as my heart desires, and not one whit less. Whether what I write about the world is "fair and balanced" is absolutely none of the business of the Australian Government, and only a tyrant would think otherwise.

I have a long-running dispute with Papa Holmes about the appropriateness of swearing on this site. So it takes a large amount of self-control to limit my remarks to these:

Ray Finkelstein, your snivelling and disgusting appeal for for government censorship over the Australian press makes you unworthy of the common law traditions of liberty bequeathed to you by men much better than yourself. Your views on government censorship of papers should make you far more at home in countries that do believe in this kind of censorship, such as China, Cuba, or North Korea.

Everything Old is New Again!

Australia's former Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, was booted out as PM during his first term by Julia Gillard. Now that she got elected (by the three independents that chose Labor in this hung parliament), Rudd has been angling to return the favour to Gillard. She'd gotten sick of this, and was threatening to sack him. Rudd beat her to the punch, and resigned in Washington. Now Rudd is  former Foreign Affairs Minister, and leadership questions keep arising.

I guess we can at least enjoy this as farce - as long as the Chinese keep buying Australian resources, this makes it less likely that value-destroying legislation will be passed.

Tim Blair lays on the mockery, while Andrew Bolt rounds up the reactions of the commentariat.

As Henry Kissinger reputedly said about the Iran-Iraq war - it's a shame they can't both lose.