She’s kinda right and kinda not.

You can’t actually lose silence, only shut it out, displace it with noise.  Nor can you generate silence or even define it.  It’s just there, like zero, as Hazanavicius notes, not nothing – it must be something since it’s the subject of this discussion – yet not something either, as that would contradict its nothingness.

Our modern malaise is about our struggle with this irony and the implication that what matters most cannot be defined or understood.  After a long, bloodied search, we’re miffed at the apparent absurdity of the Silence of existence, a life without complete, ultimate answers. The noise and busyness is our way of coping, though of course it only ends up making it worse.

There is nothing new here, merely more unreasoned frustration at not being able to compel others to do the right thing.

The reaction to corporate greed/stupidity is based on either the same compromising love of money – I hate Wall Street because I am worse off materially – or a demand for morality.  A campaign founded on the first is not going to work for obvious reasons, while history tells us one motivated by the latter, while well intentioned, is nonetheless futile, eventually becoming counter-productive.

When is America going to get a grip?  It was once great, because its self-belief trumped vain notions of earthly justice.  Then again, perhaps it was a facade all along and now things are tough the Land of Freedom cravenly resorts to political saviors and regulators to rescue itself from itself.

Those who don’t like News Ltd media need a reason to impose their will, so they come up with the fact that Murdoch controls 70 per cent of metropolitan newspapers.

So what. There are plenty of other sources of content.

In economics, assessing market domination first requires one to define “the market”.

The market for information and opinion is vast, near endless. The internet gives access to numerous media sources, blogs and forums. There are several 24 hour TV news services. I don’t have to read The Australian or Daily Telegraph to be informed.

Yes, the quality of the information varies and there is a trend towards different media running the same story. But this doesn’t limit the potential for diversity.

The fact that it’s difficult for an independent to get elected to parliament is not a sufficient reason to change the system in an attempt to end the domination of the two major parties.

The true force behind the media inquiry is a large section of ALP/Green voters can’t stand that large numbers of Australians actual read New Ltd papers and listen to radio personalities such as Alan Jones. It’s not about media diversity, it’s about control.

A proper inquiry would dismantle the media diversity straw man, leaving thousands without something to whine and complain about.

I can also suggest this from James Fallows of The Atlantic. It highlights the self-deception regarding our fight against Terrorism. We say 9/11 didn’t change anything and that “these people will not take away our values”, yet it’s very clear at airports and on flights that this is not the case.

Western values are about doing what it right regardless of the cost, including the loss of life. We aren’t free of fear and there is no courage in what we do. Which is fine – the fear of death is fairly common and understandable – but we should at least be brave enough to admit this.

After a decade of transitioning to genuine commercial negotiation, it seems all parties, perhaps even the regulator, are loathed to return to heavy-handed regulation. Sure, there’s plenty of posturing. Users complain about market power, the take-it-or-leave attitude of airport owners, but no-one has forced the issue by enlisting the help of government.

As the Commission wryly observes, so many regulatory triggers, so few shots fired.

This civilised win-win begs obvious questions not asked by the Commission. How was it achieved and why isn’t it the norm?

Policy wonks often concede regulation is inherently difficult. Consider the range of “acceptable” rates of return. There’s no agreement on the fixed components, the premium above the risk-free rate or dividend imputation, let alone the degree of undiversifiable asset risk.

It’s assumed this stuff is hard, when in reality it’s impossible, the equivalent of counting to infinity.

The airline sector, though it may not realise it, has hit upon this truth and the profound ruse that comes with it: regulation is only of value if never enforced.

Addressing market power requires quantitative analysis. While price, service level and investment benchmarks can paint a picture, such information cannot prove anything of consequence.

Capitalism works because knowledge is intrinsically contingent. By the time the dimensions of “commercial” or “efficient” have been pinned down, they’re dated, effectively meaningless. Frightening as it is true, there are no formal solutions in the market place, only choices.

Demanding an airport demonstrate the reasonableness of its charges is therefore prone to set off a damaging quest for what cannot be grasped.

The testimony of a regulated entity will necessarily have qualitative elements. This subjective gap, however, is seized upon by narrow-minded self-interests as proof of nefarious intent. The regulator, unable to verify things either way, feels obliged to step in and do the impossible, thus taking everyone further from the truth, intensifying the frustration and greatly increasing the prospect the regulator will end up indirectly responsible for industry performance.

This bizarre yet common outcome stems from an amusing, Dr Strangelove-type dilemma.

The fundamental, nose-despite-your-face flaw with regulation has to be denied at all cost, since acknowledging it would give greedy, untrustworthy capitalists the upper hand. It’s presumed – and this cannot be questioned either – admitting the truth would only enhance the likelihood of wickedness.

Paralysed by the circularity of such cynicism, coupled with a comforting belief government has the answers and the drama can be avoided, regulation inevitably becomes much more than a threat. Once the shooting starts, the parties bunker down.

The irrationality of Mutual Assured Destruction is not contained to economic regulation or nuclear weapons.

Trends in global atmosphere are just as unknowable as the market. Like stock market predictions, weather forecasts – long and short – are necessary but insufficient, something to be used but never relied upon. Data are always capable of being manipulated to fit any prejudice.

The Government has failed in the carbon tax debate by allowing the narrative to dwell on the climate change science and not the impossibility of a definitive solution.

Leaders, whether in politics or business, are able to help rescue those who succumb to a deterministic view of reality, that soul-destroying belief that doubt can be eliminated by greater transparency and smarter technology, by embodying one of life’s great ironies, one confirmed by free market theory: it’s only after accepting there are no solutions that you’re able to fathom what has to be done.

The Federal Opposition’s fear campaign cannot be countered with more analysis or ridicule of sceptics. Abbott and cohorts are a test, one failed by Kevin Rudd and the Liberal Party, who should be pitied for their inability to rise above the politics of uncertainty.

Julia Gillard, like much of big business, is not trusted, but this cannot be changed and the debilitating conflict ended if she’s affected by fear herself, since it’s fear, the desperate need for answers and control, that keeps us from the truth and its relieving irony.

Big, bad airport owners would do well to reflect upon all this. While it’s great they’ve achieved a light-handed result, the framework remains defective. It only takes one major user to break rank and down the rabbit hole you all go.

To be effective, policy, whether for airport services or climate change, must formally recognise its founding ironies.

An edited version of this article was published in The Australian Financial Review on 7 September 2011, with the title “Flying by the seat of their pants”.

What is recognized is the importance of honesty and impartiality, even amidst agonising grief and anger.

Prime Minister Stoltenberg told his bewildered kin that the savagery of Anders Breivik would bring “more democracy, more openness, and more humanity.” The relaxed, peaceful Norwegian way of life would triumph.

Similar sentiments were voiced after 9/11. Terror would not win out. Our freedom couldn’t be taken, which is true, of course. Rather, Western nations have sacrificed it for the vain promise of a risk-free existence, the quintessential must-have accessory.

I get the regulatory precautions, but let’s please not fool ourselves into believing they’re virtuous or that we had no choice but to impose them. Deplorable violence shouldn’t affect how society operates but it does, just as some marry for financial security while professing love, only to then blame others for the wretchedness that comes from yielding to your fears.

Witness the hurried, guilty rage should it be inferred a suicide bomber or mass murderer may have some insight to offer.

I refuse to debate an extremist sympathizer! How could you possibly take their side?

As Stanley Fish courageously pointed out in The New York Times shortly after 9/11, accounting for human behaviour, however appalling, doesn’t amount to condoning it.

Breivik’s grievances are not unwarranted. We’ve been at this freedom caper for some time, yet the striving and progress hasn’t been liberating. “The maladies of affluence,” writes Clive Hamilton in The Freedom Paradox, “such as drug dependence, obesity, loneliness, and psychological disorders ranging from depression, anxiety and compulsive behaviours to a widespread but ill-defined anomie, suggests that the psychological wellbeing of citizens in rich countries is in decline.”

Western civilization is on the slide and those at the helm have no clue on how to arrest the momentum. Well-worn economic and social policy levers are increasingly ineffective, if not counter-productive. Mandated multiculturalism in Europe and elsewhere has become a basis for discord, not unity.

And we didn’t need ten futile years in the war of terror to confirm there’s no foolproof pre-emptive response to carefully planned, wilful aggression.

The only sensible comeback, confides Fish, is to “invoke the particular lived values that unite us.” Clichéd mantras – I have seen the face of evil, these are irrational madmen – are inaccurate and unhelpful, as one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. Cease arguing over the truth, complaining how others fall short of your values, and take responsibility for what is right by acting it out, unconditionally.

This is Postmodernism writ large.

If there’s no formal truth, there can be no official good or evil, right or wrong, no line between us and them. While this has undoubtedly eviscerated literalistic forms of traditional meaning and identity, it’s also brought Man to the edge of glory, to the West’s defining ideal of a common humanity. By undermining the idolatrous misconception that a higher authority – divine or secular – can save us, Postmodernism compels each and every individual to take personal responsibility for rising above the petty demands of this material world.

This unfulfilled challenge is both unavoidable and rational.

If a knockdown remedy for our woes exists, and Fish is wrong to claim there “can be no independent standard for determining which of many rival interpretations of an event is the true one”, then free will is worthless, since all that’s required of us is mindless adherence to a specified moral code.

If Fish is right, and life cannot be reduced to a state of mechanized certainty, because the truth cannot be contained within a system of human thought and language, its essential mystery grasped in the heart alone, then the only genuine moral authority available to us lies within, as Kant and others surmised.

For centuries, joyless religious leaders abused the truth about the truth, capitalizing on its metaphysical element to simultaneously needle and allay our deepest existential fears. Man is alone, racked with doubt, forever ignorant of God’s grand plan.

Well kind of. Actually, there’s a legion of haughty men who do appreciate what’s required. These esoteric rules and rituals guarantee redemption. Mission Accomplished!

Having cast off a corrupting faithlessness in Man’s capacity to be good without fear or favour, contemporary Western societies still find themselves subject to the same shameful temporizing and manipulative paternalism that the Enlightenment sought to free us from. Democracy may have supplanted the church, but love of power over truth continues to flourish.

At the Tucson memorial in January, Barack Obama quoted scripture to remind mourners that because “terrible things happen for reasons that defy human understanding” it’s vital we “guard against simple explanations” for the shootings.

Feeble stuff. Either the actions of Loughner, al-Qaida, McVeigh, Breivik can be understood, in simple or complex terms, and prevented, or they can’t. End of story.

Instead of hammering home how the egotistical wish to “pose some order on the chaos and make sense out of that which seems senseless” fundamentally conflicts with the radical message in the Book of Job, the President, unable to trust America with unsparing realism, hedged his bets, thus prolonging our confused and damaging epistemological quest.

As Hayek warned upon accepting his Nobel Prize for Economics, “If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible.”

What Breivik did was inconceivable, which was partly his point, why he felt it was “gruesome but necessary.” The more desperate our need for life to go to plan, the more heinous the crime required to shock us from our self-important, need-to-know stupor. Astonishing brutality from a seemingly normal citizen is a terrible reminder that control and certainty are beyond us. It also represents the ultimate test of unconditional belief in ourselves and others.

A “solution” to the carnage, a decade on from 9/11? Be brave enough to admit there isn’t one and embrace absolute scepticism as our decisive, unifying non-ideology, the unsettling source of true peace and happiness.

http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=12578

His recent New York Times article, The Vigorous Virtues, rightly argues the Republicans have a case when it comes to American decline. According to Rick Perry, the task is to make the government “inconsequential” in people’s lives, to pare back the state to revive personal responsibility and initiative.

“America became great, they explain, because its citizens possessed certain vigorous virtues: self-reliance, personal responsibility, industriousness and a passion for freedom,” says Brooks.

“But, over the years, government has grown and undermined these virtues.”

This is wrong, the objectifying dangerously misleading, a source of confusion. Governments aren’t virtuous, just as corporations aren’t corrupt, nor markets ruthless. These are attributes of individuals, alone.

As such, politicians can neither promote, in the end, or undermine what truly matters to us – hence the founding American principle of government only ever assisting with “the pursuit of happiness”. It can’t take us all the way, just support and encourage individuals to be virtuous, hopeful, moral. Free will and personal responsibility are ultimately immutable.

What’s really required from Government, regardless of its colour, is a willingness to confirm this inconvenient truth through the actions of its leaders. Size doesn’t matter. What matters is whether its key individuals live and breathe its own “inconsequentialness”.

Democrats fundamentally struggle to accept this philosophy. Republicans, on the other hand, sprout the rhetoric but can’t follow through. Rick Perry, for instance, fancies himself as anything but inconsequential. Ironically, Barack Obama does.

Like all professional sport, rugby league is a showcase of talent, an expression of human ability at both the individual and team level, under competitive conditions. David Gallop and the NRL have done a great job in creating a competition that delivers on this measure of performance.

While talent and skill are essential, league is also loved for its display of masculinity, strength and raw aggression. You can’t have one without the other. A good portion of any highlights reel is made up of “big hits”, some of which cause physical damage. The State of Origin is a world-class spectacle, the envy of other Australian codes, because the players are willing to do whatever it takes, to put their bodies on the line for their mates and home state. To protect the epic vibe of these clashes, the refereeing typically overlooks higher levels of violence (which of course raises the question of why the same standard is not applied to all games).

Men and boys enjoy combat, and always will. It doesn’t mean we can’t also be civilized. Males need to experience situations were “nothing matters” if they are to mature, overcome their fears and deal properly with their emotions and impulses. Sure, the notion that “boys will be boys” can and is often taken advantage of, but this doesn’t justify responses we all know won’t work. You can’t regulate for what is ulitmately a personal responsibility.

The NRL has succumb to the PC dogma that is slowly but surely eating away at Western civilization.

As a society, we’ve become ridiculously risk averse, unable to cope with the fact that life is not ordered or perfectly safe. Our modern lives are overwhelmingly shaped by the utterly flawed belief that the kind of world we want can be magically engineered by threats and more and more rules that deny who we are.

We all intuitively know that a fine or suspension is not going to fix anything. Brawls are going to happen. Two pumped up competitors take a few swings; their team-mates come charging in like good team-mates should. So what! Seriously, do we really need to make it such a drama?

It’s not the media’s fault. It pressures the NRL which then caves in to “community expectations” that the players be punished and that it confirm “there is no room for this in the game”. Punished for what? Being a man? For not conforming to the rules? For expressing something real that can’t be controlled?

What’s brining the code into disrepute is it’s two-faced treatment of players, and indirectly the public. Get out there, play with passion, bash them up but don’t step over the line, don’t remind society of our primal origins. Don’t scare them with too much animal. If you do, well, you know, we’ll have to chastise you and impose fines even though we understand it won’t change anything. It’s about being seen to be doing something. You know the score!

Des Hasler, Glenn Stewart and others sense this duplicity, are supremely frustrated by it, but don’t quite know what to do about it.

A big part of the NRL brand is the shared experience of what we are losing as a community. There’s now a risk this will be lost from the game, as delusional and disrespectful administrators attempt to control what can’t be controlled. It’s possible to modernize rugby league without giving up what was good about the “old days”. Take a stand David Gallop, back your players and stop kowtowing to political correctness.

Christopher Hitchens, applying his usual wit and wordpower in a recent Slate article, points out the “sheer wickedness and stupidity” of some of Perry’s claims, like the Bible is inerrant and that those who do not “accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior would be going to hell”.

Hitchens is unhappy about his half-affected convictions, the way he wriggles between absolutism and something less. One moment the Bible is literally correct; at other times just a guide. Perry “tells us that he is a ‘firm believer’ in the ‘intelligent design’ formulation that is creationism’s latest rhetorical disguise, adding that the ‘design’ could be biblical or could have involved something more complex, but is attributable to the same divine author in any event.”

I’m surprised Hitchens doesn’t go for the jugular here by posing an obvious line of questioning.

How is it possible for a hard-line Christian to successfully lead a secularised nation to the promised land if they believe the Bible to be inerrant and morally sufficient? Why waste time and effort on representative government and its tortured processes, if you already have in hand a divine statute containing the requisite answers? Is democracy just a means to theocracy, the Constitution subservient to the Bible?

Extremists who despise America may be insular and misanthropic, but at least they’re internally consistent in rejecting liberal democracy for a political system based on what they believe to be superior God-given laws.

On any reasoned account, Perry is either confused, lying about his conservative orientation or intends to foist his religious orthodoxy upon the American people from within the White House. Perhaps all three.

Many of those pushing the successful legal challenge were concerned to “protect” asylum seekers – adults and children – from an unsafe, violent and oppressive world. We have a moral responsibility to intervene.

The vast majority of these same people, however, are likely to be against any military involvement designed to make countries like Afghanistan safer and more democratic places. Some of this sentiment stems from a belief that Western nations should not interfere and that the over-reaching is costly and futile, if not counter-productive. Let’s get things right at home, help our citizens feel safe and secure, before we go about saving the rest of the world and imposing democracy on others.

Yet when it comes to the asylum issue, there’s a flip-flop. Suddenly, Australia can save the day. Afghans and others don’t have an ultimate responsibility to sort out their own back yard, just as Western nations have done over centuries and centuries. Intervention is a solution after all.

Using guns to protect a community is misguided hubris; while using the law to protect people is humanitarian!