Gavin Atkins’s post on ABC’s The Drum is the latest in a line of conservatives playing stupid numbers games to ‘prove’ that the ABC (or some other media organisation) has an inherent left-wing bias. In fact, all it demonstrates is that Atkins and his fellow cultural warriors do not have the faintest clue about the purpose of journalism.

Atkins read through every article published on The Drum website during the election campaign and scored each individual sentence as follows:

Each time a value-laden remark was made about Julia Gillard (or her campaign) that was positive or negative, it was noted as G+ or G-. For Tony Abbott, it was given the value A+ or A.

Yup, that’s it. It’s all very well to call this system moronic or pathetically simplistic, but why?

Because it assumes that everything Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott did during the election campaign was equally credible or unbelievable and that all critiques or praises published on The Drum were equally fair. This is demonstrably not the case.

For example, every time Tony Abbott claimed interest rates would always be lower under a Coalition government than under Labor, this was:

• Historically inaccurate, when referring to past governments
• Completely impossible to prove or disprove, when referring to future governments

In other words, it was complete bullshit.

But if an article in The Drum criticised this comment, Atkins would give it an A-, thus confirming in his mind that the ABC was full of socialists.

The Atkins system also makes no differentiation between an article that criticised Julia Gillard for proposing a citizens’ assembly to develop a new policy on climate change – a dumb idea – and one that bitched about the Prime Ministerial earlobes or dress sense. Both would get a G- under this scale.

Being critical of politicians’ stupid ideas is a journalist or commentator’s job. If an article simply reports what a politician said without any analysis or comparison to reality, that is bad journalism. So is an article that ridicules a politician’s personal attributes.

To demonstrate bias, Atkins would therefore need to show not only that The Drum criticised one side or another more, but also that those critiques were unfair or unjustified. Otherwise, his results could just as easily be explained by the fact that Tony Abbott said and did a lot more stupid things that were worthy of criticism.

The University of Queensland (UQ) surveyed more than 300 federal, state and local government politicians about their views on climate change. The headline figure: about 70 per cent believed in human-induced climate change and rated it one of the country’s most important challenges.

But when they broke this figure down by party affiliation, this is what emerged:

• 98% of Greens said the planet was warming because of human activity producing greenhouse gases
• 89% of Labor pollies agreed, along with
• 57% of non-aligned politicians and
• 38% of Liberal-Nationals.

This presents us with two complete WTFs.

1. As Jeff Sparrow points out, there must be one climate sceptic in the Greens.
2. Climate change scepticism moves almost entirely along party lines.

If there were a serious, legitimate scientific debate about climate change, this would not be the case.

There would be people from all partieswho would be convinced by either side of the argument. Of course, there would be some degree of bias along ideological grounds; Greens and Labor are traditionally more pro-environment while the Coalition tends to support business. But it could not possibly be so stark.

In reality, we have people automatically taking positions on a question of scientific debate based entirely on their political beliefs.

The only conclusion a thinking person can draw is that climate change scepticism is an entirely political movement, which has nothing to do with science and everything to do with ideology. It could not be more obvious.

In recent months, the issue of Australia’s population has become increasingly contentious. But those who advocate unpleasant measures to make our population more ‘sustainable’ are looking at the problem from entirely the wrong angle.

Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd wholeheartedly supported the idea of a ‘big Australia’, with a projected population of 36 million by 2050. As a means of differentiating herself from her predecessor, Prime Minister Julia Gillard said she wanted a “sustainable” population, although she has been unwilling to give a number.

In the current election campaign, the issue has devolved into a race to the bottom, with the Opposition claiming its population goals are even lower – thus more sustainable – than the Government’s.

At the same time, population-control viewpoints have been much more prominent in the media. Next week, the ABC will screen Dick Smith’s Population Puzzle, a documentary in which the entrepreneur will air his views on the potential dangers of Australian and global population growth.

Recently ABC News 24 interviewed Mark O’Connor, co-author of Overloading Australia, member of the Stable Population Party of Australia and a candidate for the Senate in the upcoming federal election. (Mark was also the celebrant at my wedding and I have a great deal of admiration for him.) Dick Smith bought a crateload of copies of Overloading Australia and posted them to all state and federal politicians and mayors around the country.

By limiting immigration, sustainable population activists aim to ensure Australia’s population will top out at around 26 million people. But even this may be too many; Professor Tim Flannery believes the long-term human carrying capacity of the Australian continent and Tasmania could be as low as 8 million people.

This notion of ‘carrying capacity’ – that we will simply run out of resources to sustain current levels of population growth – has been thoroughly discredited. Brendan O’Neill in Spiked provides an excellent summary.

Thomas Malthus was wrong in the early 19th century when he predicted “epidemics, pestilence and plagues” would “sweep off tens of thousands” if we didn’t get working-class birth rates under control.

Paul Ehrlich was wrong in the early 1970s when he predicted “hundreds of millions of people [would] starve to death” in India by 1980 or so.

Malthus and Ehrlich backed up their arguments with scientific-sounding factoids, but what actually drove their views was a deep hatred of other humans (those of lower class or darker skin, respectively) and a failure to grasp our species’ amazing ability to adapt and overcome problems.

This is why today’s green-tinged neo-Malthusians are wrong when they claim our current population growth is ecologically unsustainable, or can only occur at the expense of living standards. Despite the exponential growth of the world’s population, living standards are higher now than they have ever been in history.

They claim to eschew China-style coercive population control practices but fail to explain how education campaigns or handing out condoms could possibly achieve their goals, especially given the spread of anti-contraception religions across the developing world.

It is also a total failure of imagination to believe that even if we can’t solve all the potential problems of population growth with today’s technology, we will not find ways to do so in the future. History has shown, again and again, that we could and we did. There is no reason to believe we can not or will not in future.

As population grows, so do technology and society. We find ways to cope. We find alternatives to scarce resources. We come up with brilliant ways of feeding and housing ourselves and living with each other.

The fact is, we’re not doing those things well at the moment. We’re not developing renewable energy or building the infrastructure to cope with the pressures of population growth.

But to claim the answer to crowded trains or traffic jams or water shortages or even global warming is sealing off our borders or having fewer babies, rather than using all our intelligence and industriousness to fix the problems, smacks of a Luddite hatred of progress and a deep misanthropy.

Over the past year I’ve been having an ongoing argument with quite a few people who can’t understand why the Rudd-Gillard government has persisted with its internet filtering proposal since “everyone knows it’s a bad idea”.

I can’t argue with the ‘bad idea’ part, but the ‘everyone’ part is simply delusional. Yet many quite sensible people I speak to are genuinely bewildered that the filter is almost completely ignored by the mainstream media and barely registers on the radar of political debate.

(To be fair, the mainstream media’s reporting of internet censorship has been woeful and a prime example of what Jay Rosen calls “he said, she said journalism“, where a reporter simply records the opinions of opposing sides of an issue without subjecting their claims to any analysis. Most recently, on last night’s Q&A, Tony Jones only gave Small Business Minister Craig Emerson enough time to claim the government should filter all pornography that children shouldn’t see before shutting down the topic, preventing any debate.)

This is the kind of conversation I’m talking about:

renailemay: So let me get this straight. No #1 election issue on Twitter is the filter. And yet no questions from the floor during #ausvotes debate

vealmince: @renailemay Do you really not understand? Twitter is NOT the Australian public. It’s a tiny fraction of mostly like-minded people. #ausvotes

renailemay: @vealmince do you really not understand? Twitter is the Australian public. We live in Australia and we vote. Stop telling me I’m a minority

vealmince: @renailemay You and your 1000 mates. Either it’s not enough people, or you’re not organised enough to make a political difference.

Late last year, I argued that filter opponents were failing to cut through because they spent too much time agreeing with each other, debating nomenclature and deploying logic and sarcasm, rather than actual political lobbying, to sway the discussion in their favour.

But I think another factor at work is the inability of many in the twittersphere to see outside their small and mostly like-minded online social circle. This groupthink has led many online news outlets to publish polls finding that 95% or more of their readers were against an internet filter, unaware of or deliberately ignoring the massive selection bias inherent in asking that question to that audience.

The harsh reality is, even if everyone on Twitter thought and voted the same way, it would make no difference.

There are 13.9 million registered voters in Australia. There are 1.2 million Twitter accounts, of which no more than half could be active users who are eligible to vote. That makes 600,000 or about 4% of registered voters. It’s not a huge number, but 4% could gain a Senate seat, depending on how preferences fell, or swing the whole election.

Nice try. But of course, not all Twitter users would change their votes.

If Twitter is a representative sample of the Australian population (there are reasons to argue why it’s not), according to the latest polls, its users are split 50:50 on the two-party preferred vote. That means even if you could persuade every active Twitter user in Australia to vote for one party, it would only deliver a 2% swing.

But of course, you couldn’t get them all to vote the same way. Even though the filter is bad, some might argue that on the balance of all its policies, Labor is the less worse choice. Some of them might not care about the filter or, believe it or not, actually support it. (OMG, nowai!)

Still, a swing of less than 2% could be an election winner if Twitter users were disproportionately located in marginal seats such as western Sydney and the Brisbane suburbs. Whereas if a large number of Twitter users lived in safe seats, such as those in inner-city Melbourne and Sydney, even a 4% swing would make no difference.

Which do you think is more likely?

The impotent rage many Twits feel about the political-media establishment’s nonchalant treatment of the censorship issue is palpable. But it’s merely a symptom of the increasing influence of numbers men, marketing wonks and political strategists who use business intelligence technology to slice-and-dice, drill-down focus on winning a dozen or so marginal seats. If the issue that arouses your passion is not one that boils the blood of the residents of those seats, you’re irrelevant to the political process.

Viva democracy.

The trick with spam – and some malicious software – is convincing people to open an email, click on a link or something else they wouldn’t normally do. Social engineering, when done well, means getting inside people’s heads and understanding their desires, fears and vulnerabilities.

It’s not always done well.

For instance, lately I have been receiving emails, about one a day, along the following lines:

Hi
It`s Rosalyn again. Will you ever contact me?
I made those nude pictures especially for you.

Phew, state-of-the-art social engineering there! The next day it was Jessie, not Rosalyn, but the message was the same.

Since this approach clearly hasn’t worked with me, the spammers thought they’d try a different approach.

Hi
It`s Cleveland again. Will you ever contact me?

Genius!

At his closing address for the 2010 Sydney Writers’ Festival, Peter Carey said a lot of laudable things about the importance of reading and the value of good teachers. But underlying his speech was a severe, elitist disdain for ordinary people who, one guesses, do not read Peter Carey novels.

The cult of book readers

Carey started out by trying to butter up the audience. Who, he asked for a show of hands, had read a work of literature in the past week. Of course, most people in the audience had. He noted how unlikely it would be to get such a high proportion of ‘yes’ answers in any other room around the country. He later referred to it as a cult of literature readers.

He further pandered to the audience by throwing in a few titbits about environmental destruction and indigenous injustice and sundry causes likely to please middle-aged armchair socialists.

He went on to discuss the importance of people who can read works of literature and serious nonfiction – not just newspapers and cereal boxes – to making informed political decisions. (I would argue that the ability to think critically and analyse statements in context are more important, but I’d just be called a postmodernist tosser.) But at the same time, he noted with despair the incredible dumbing down of society.

Dumbing down

As evidence of this dumbing down, Carey played a series of vox pops taken outside a Sarah Palin book signing at a Borders bookstore in Columbus, Ohio. These booklovers were unable to discuss with any clarity what Palin’s policies were, or why they were so opposed to the evil Democrats.

As further evidence, he noted that one of the top-selling books in Australia was the Master Chef Cookbook and not, if there were any justice in the world, a Peter Carey novel. (OK, I added that last bit.)

But these were cheap shots that proved nothing.

There’s nothing easier than finding a place where dumb Americans congregate, pointing a camera at them and letting them talk, as the Chaser’s Charles Firth could tell you. And popular entertainment doesn’t need to be highbrow. Though to be fair, it should probably not be completely stupid. Carey made a nice analogy about junk news and junk entertainment being as bad for the mind and junk food was for the body.

This claim of dumbing down has been made for decades and has been refuted almost as often. Ten years ago, the Guardian examined the issue in great detail and found no evidence that people today were dumber than past generations. Au contraire.

Goodbye to privileged knowledge (and good riddance?)

Beneath these claims of dumbing down lie a profound discomfort with what is actually going on – a vast, unprecedented smartening up; billions of people who have access to information through books, newspapers, television and of course the internet. And the destruction of barriers to entry into the elite domains of privileged knowledge that novelists and academics like Carey inhabit and fight to maintain.

Everyone can read. And everyone can publish. A lot of it will be rubbish. But so what?

The world does not have a limited amount of cleverness to go around. Sarah Palin may be a more successful book writer (by number of books sold) than Peter Carey, but that doesn’t make Carey’s work any less intelligent or special for those who appreciate it.

And if the theory that ‘dumb’ books like the Harry Potter series are a gateway drug – they actually encourage people to read, and even to read real books – is true, there may even be more people around to enjoy Parrot and Olivier in America.

On last night’s Q&A, former NSW Premier Bob Carr said he believed the country’s state and territory governments were of diminishing importance. He predicted that within decades, the state governments would be reduced to a mere five portfolios, with the remainder of responsibilities taken up by federal or local governments.

Based on Bob’s track record, I suspect the five ministries he had in mind where:

1. Department of Corruption and Bribe-taking
2. Department of Under-investing in Infrastructure
3. Department of Selling Public Assets at Ridiculously Low Prices to Macquarie Bank
4. Department of Planning, the Environment and Overturning Any Regulations That Might Inconvenience Property Developers
5. Department of Spin, Hypocrisy and Emergency Services

Any other suggestions?

This week I started working full time at Editor Group as the Online Strategy Leader. This means I’ll be helping clients create meaningful and useful online content, build online communities, get their sites noticed by search engines and use social media effectively.

I know from experience that a lot of companies out there have websites, because you’ve got to have a website, but aren’t really sure what a website is for. They’ve got Twitter accounts or Facebook pages but might only use them for product announcements or marketing offers.

Hopefully with all the things I’ve learned from editing Nett and talking to online business owners for the past couple of years, I can help these companies understand how best to use all the online tools at their disposal.

In this marvellous post, Tim Phillips rails against the proliferation of meaningless filler words in media releases.

Vague non-words like significant and substantial look like they’re telling us something, but they aren’t. They’re useful for people who have a deadline but no clear idea what they’re writing about; or people who know the numbers, don’t want to tell us what they are, but want to waste our time anyway because that’s what they’re paid to do. Often they are paid by the word, so chucking in a “substantial” here and there is basically free money.

To demonstrate this, he searches through the Factiva database. He found the number of media releases containing words such as ‘significant’ and ‘unique’ has remained fairly constant since 2002. However, the number of media releases containing all four words – significant and substantial and meaningful and unique – has tripled.

Read the rest of this entry →

Shitkansen (n)

A slow or low-quality train. Portmanteau of ‘shit’ or ‘shitcan’ + ‘shinkansen’, Japanese high-speed train.

Earliest Googleable usage: December 2008.

Dennis Vranic Japan has Shinkansen, we have SHITkansen

Often used in reference to the Sydney-to-Newcastle train journey (eg, Aaron Hewett and Marcus Westbury).