Suppose you were a juror at a murder trial. In his opening address, the defence lawyer says, "My client is not guilty of this crime. Certainly he pulled the trigger on a gun he knew to be working properly, loaded, chambered, and off safety. Yes, the gun was pointing directly at the victim at point blank range, but my client did not kill this man. The bullet did. In fact, it wasn't even the bullet, but rather a hole opening in the victim's head allowing his brains to dribble out onto the carpet. It is this hole-in-the-head who is the real perpetrator here, as such, the hole should be on trial."
This argument is of course completely nonsensical. If a person knows that effect Z will very very likely succeed cause A, and then proceeds with A, that person is morally responsible for Z, irrespective of how many other letters in the alphabet are involved in between. Why am I using this first blog entry to lecture on a simple and non-controversial point of basic morality?
Well, if the reader grows tired of hypothetical and abstract examples of this concept consider this. Suppose there was a country with vast uranium reserves, and a conviction that they should only be used for peaceful purposes. Let's for the sake of argument call this country "Australia." Suppose further there was another country with very limited reserves, and both an active nuclear weapons program, and a civil nuclear power program. Let us call this country "India." Now suppose India had publicly stated, on many occasions, that they would like to devote all of their domestic reserves to bomb making and rely on imported uranium for their civil program, in effect using the extra material to displace more of their original into military applications. Economists by the way, call this well studied process of resource displacement fungibility. Enter Australia's foreign minister (let's call him "Dame Edna"). Dame Edna says that Australia has decided to sell its uranium to India, on the condition that not one Australian atom becomes part of an Indian bomb, or even becomes involved in fission reactors on military warships. I assume that Dame Edna is aware of fungibility, and is not an idiot (actually not a foregone conclusion), but his justification of the new policy makes as much sense as the defence lawyer's "not guilty" plea. Any way you look at it, Australia is now actively supplying India with uranium for bombs.
Now, helping India acquire weapons of mass destruction is perhaps a defensible position. After all, India is a stable, liberal democracy, which has never been caught proliferating. It has justifiable concerns about its nuclear armed neighbor and semi-enemy Pakistan. Perhaps we should be having a debate about preferentially arming our good friends against our not-so-good friends, with weapons so terrible neither side dares to use them. I, like many before me, believe there is a reason this doctrine had the acronym MAD, but at least there is an argument to be made. What isn't acceptable however is the debate poisoning bile that passes for politics in this country, where our leaders try to convince us that 2 and 2 isn't 4, just because they add then subtract a 3 in the middle of the calculation.
38 comments:
I have part of the Fevi Stik glue stick ad in my head now. But it's not just because you talked about India, it's also because I have a glue stick on my desk.
Wow, I finally got an irrelevant Dave post! I really feel like I'm coming of age as a blogger.
I got Alanis Morissette "Thank U" in my head. That was also because Dave has a glue stick on his desk.
Alanis Morisette has some good songs. I don't know why her music is so unpopular amongst people I know. "Head Over Feet" is really good.
Also, who came up with such a boring definition of 'fungibility'? If something is fungible, it should be soft and squishy. I could funge it with my thumb and forefinger.
Economists could have used all sorts of words to describe this particular property of certain goods, and instead they wasted an awesome group of consonants and vowels.
How bout getting off of these time wasting blog sites?
How bout me getting stuck into uni for once?
Thank you Dav-id, Thank you Ne-eta, Thank you, thank you gen Y!
Thank you internet, Thank you Morisette, Thank you Pro-cras-tin-a-tion
Sam, you're a card.
Dave, I agree. I own Jagged Little Pill and it's one of the ones that I like but am ashamed to admit. Sure, some of the songs are a bit whiny, but the music's good, and she does not even come close, whinienesswise, to Avril Lavigne or Evanescence.
Although I resent the second line. (That's directed at Sam, otherwise it wouldn't make sense.)
Sam, you blog tyrant, you deleted your comment and then replaced it 40 minutes later with one that was slightly different.
I wonder. If my entire post had been about the artistic merits of Alanis Morisette, would it have attracted the same level of controversy? Or would it have descended into some irrelevant ravings about Australia's role in allowing non-signatories to the NPT to acquire the Bomb? I suppose that as the blogger, there is only one way to find out. Tune in tomorrow!
PS Why do you resent the second line? I actually don't understand.
Dave I am the law, I am the Party, I am Big Blogger! It is not true that I deleted anything, it never existed. At 12:10 it existed, at 12:50 It had always been slightly different! Its called doublethink mate, get with the program.
And, indeed, there aren't traces left of comment deletions like there are at MYBLOGISAGOODBLOG.
Even if there were, could you trust me enough to believe there HAD been a comment deleted? By the way, how do you get that trace mark to appear? Also, I note that you begin your comment with a preposition. But aren't you the kind of person who carps on about that kind of shit not being proper English?
How do you carp on about something? I thought carp was a fish?
I resent the second line because I don't HAVE any uni to get stuck into, and as soon as I do I will, thank you very much!
For the record, your blog entry was very topical and made a good point. Perhaps we feel that no more needs to be said. Perhaps we feel that any serious conversation which you're a part of, no matter how important you think the discussion is, will soon degrade into some sort of nonsense, so we may as well get a head start.
I also like how you've turned on the Big Brother-style comment moderation. What happened to freedom of speech?
I most certainly do not object to sentences with conjunctions. I also like them at the end of sentences. Grammar nazis don't like this. They're annoying and ignorant, but.
I don't know enough about Blogger to answer your other question.
Some guy on Radio National made your point to Fran Kelly this morning.
It took seventeen comments of stupid but someone finally addressed the India issue.
At the risk of killing a thread on Avril Lavigne or whatever the fuck I actually do think that this India thing is a big issue and, surprise surprise, I disagree with what the government is doing.
Get rid of the fucking comment moderation you fucking fuck fuck.
Put on the damn password thing instead!
Chris: It's no good just saying that you disagree with the government on this issue. :) There are some very different ways to disagree with them (some, for instance, would be happy with selling uranium to China but not to India, because the latter isn't part of the NPT).
I have no problem with selling uranium to India. They're a pretty good country.
They are a pretty good country who stand a pretty good chance of having a limited nuclear exchange with Pakistan sometime over the next 50 years. This exchange will be limited only because neither side possesses many bombs yet. By giving India uranium to make them (which we should all admit is happening) we are worsening the outcome of such a (not so unlikely) conflict. If this happened, the last few bombs to fall would be Australia's fault.
On the question of whether we should sell uranium to China, I think the nature of their semi-fascist dictatorship more than cancels out any points they get for signing a treaty. This is particularly true when you consider their threat of atomic holocaust to Taiwan should it ever overtly declare independence, and the extension to that country by the United States of a retaliatory "Nuclear Umbrella."
It would be a mistake to believe the cold war could have only one outcome, the world got lucky, that's all. As global incomes rise, every tin pot dictatorship can afford the $20 US billion it takes to start a nuclear program, and Australia must acknowledge the role it plays in worsening the situation by flooding the world market with highly fungible uranium. I understand the economic imperative but let's not pretend that our resources aren't being used to sharpen the sword of Damacles.
I believe I can and did limit my disagreement to the very vague.
Sam filled in the blanks. What he said.
Pakistan is the rogue state out of India and Pakistan. They're the country who might end up being ruled by a maniac. They should know that they'll lose a nuclear war with India.
But wouldn't you rather that neither of them had nuclear weapons?
It's not as if we have to help one of them with their nuclear programme (yes it is a word firefox!) so it might as well be India.
But wouldn't you rather that neither of them had nuclear weapons?
Sure. But Pakistan has nuclear weapons (with help from China? At least we're all agreed here that the NPT isn't worth debating.), and they will continue to build their arsenal regardless of what Australia does.
Given this, and the obvious point that India is a much better and trustworthy country than Pakistan (India hasn't sold its nuclear technology to North Korea, for instance), we should be doing what we can to make sure that Pakistan doesn't ever use its nuclear capability. The way Australia can do this is to supply India with uranium.
The extreme opposite alternative is that Pakistan (a bad, unstable country) ends up with a bigger nuclear arsenal than India and feels that it would win a nuclear war with India.
Until the West finds itself able to stop the trade of nuclear technology and materials between bad countries, the best bet is to help good countries.
Dave, both India and Pakistan would lose a nuclear war with each other. Pakistan has 35-95 nuclear devices to India's 70-120. Deploying even half of their respective totals (even the lower estimates) would destroy both modern states as we know them today and kill as many people as World War two. Yes, I agree that we don't want to give material to Pakistan (a known proliferator), but by giving India a strategic advantage we encourage an arms race, which threatens to overwhelm diplomatic efforts to keep the situation under control.
At least we're all agreed here that the NPT isn't worth debating. Yes that's true. So why are we undermining its relevance by rewarding non-signatories?
That is a good point, there are enough nuclear weapons in the world to create hundreds of life destroying nuclear winters.
Why anyone would ever need to make more than one is entirely beyond me.
kill as many people as World War two.
I'm not sure if this is the result of an actual estimate or if you're just guessing it to illustrate for effect. But if a war between India and Pakistan killed as many people as WWII did, you'd still have over a billion people left in India and Pakistan combined.
I don't know how to leave a link on this thing but follow
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/12/061211090729.htm
to get a study of the consequence sof a regional nuclear war. Yes, the subcontinent would still have a lot people, but without Islamabad, Karachi, Lahore Dehli, Chennai, Bombay, Calcutta, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Ahmedabad, the modern states of India and Pakistan would cease to exist. I think that even if both countries merely lost their capitals it would be touch and go. More to the point, whatever the numbers, ten's of millions of dead is something to be avoided. The CIA believes that the Kashmir conflict is the most likely nuclear "flashpoint" at the moment, and adding fuel to fire is not a good idea.
How dare you bring Dame Edna's name into ill repute by comparing him to our most loathesome and pig-like foreign minister.
Otherwise, like your blog sam, very much.
Oh by the way, Anita was right, it's harp on about something, not carp on. Carp is, indeed, a fish.
While "harp on" is correct, "carp on" is reasonably common (about ten times less frequent than "harp on", if my Googling is accurate). It probably comes from two factors:
1. It's pretty close to 'harp';
2. One of the meanings of 'carp' is "To talk querulously, censoriously, or captiously; to find fault, cavil" (OED).
UsingEnglish.com has the word "carp" as a synonym for "criticise." Perhaps "harp on" is the properly recognized phrasal verb but I don't think what I said is too much of a leap. Thanks for visiting the blog!
I wouls have thought that it was a typo for "crap on". Just my opinion.
Haven't you heard the expression "carping from the sidelines"?
17 Comments of stupid, a brief and shining swerve on topic, and now back to the stupid......
On the Big Blogger thing, is myblogisafairblog doublespeak, Sam?
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