At least I got a response

When I was a teacher I early recognised that getting a response was what I wanted. I am not interested in the regurgitation of my ideas (as right as I believe them to be) but at least a response shows I have hit a target. Nothing worse than blank looks and polite nothings.
So I was pleased that there were three responses to the letter in the Advertiser!!

It does serve me right

My pompous letter in the paper below, has elicited a number of comments from my fan club. But I also got one congratulatory phone call from a 'supporter' who assured me there was evil afoot and did I want information about how the Greens were spreading evil through the Parliament, and that Bob Brown (Greens leader) was not only an atheist but also a homo!
I did try to say that the point of my letter was that people should be allowed their opinions, and they should not deny me the right to mine. This obviously went over her head, she just wanted to shoot the lot of them!
Sadly, I think I prefer the atheistic intolerance I was decrying to the sort of bigotry that many of my fellow-believers seem intent on inflicting.
I didn't feel like arguing the point!

Atheists can be pretty dumb!

I don't decry anyone's right to be an atheist what I often find extraordinary is their critique of the "religious" as being narrow and bigoted when they often appear to be incredibly prejudiced against the faintest whiff of faith. Hence a letter I penned to the Advertiser yesterday

I never failed to be amazed by the contradictory nature of the comments of the many dogmatic atheists who declare all religious belief to be irrational, without any substantial analysis or argument. Their comments are so often based on sweeping generalisations such as "the religious ....can't distinguish between reality and fantasy" and "the world would be better off without them" (The Advertiser 29th October).

When we start declaring who we would be better off without we are in the realm of something quite sinister.

They would seem to know little of the disciplines of theology and textual criticism. If they did they would realise that religious thinkers are meticulous in their scrutiny of discipline, argument and theory and are not in the least inclined to live in the world of fantasy. They are at the very least trying to recognise that the world is complex and profound, it is spiritual as well as material.

In a world where universal tolerance is a declared value, it seems the atheists' dogma (and I use that term advisedly) is that we should tolerate everything except religion. Doesn't seem particularly rational to me

Barracking for Barack.

I imagine that Barack just has to be careful not to put his foot in his mouth for the next fortnight

When the world is in meltdown

This weekend is taken up with our annual Diocesan Meeting or Synod. The Eucharist last night seemed only moderately well-attended both by clergy and laity. We seem to have forgotten about the opportunity to invite community and other church leaders, the liturgy was very clergy dominated and even (as far as I could tell) those laity who were allowed to administer Communion were trainee priests.
The Bishop's address was dry, and he looked tired...poor man
The agenda is dominated by formality with only (it would seem) a slight departure into the controversial to discuss GAFCON (so called Global Anglican Futures Conference...a body that declares itself to be the new fount of orthodoxy).
The Bishop did press us about water issues, and the global financial crisis, but where were the community leaders to hear it?
It will all be over tomorrow evening. PTL!

I quite like gambling as fun

I like the idea of gambling as fun, the trouble is that it easily degenerates into something nasty.
It was interesting to watch Peter Newell at the National Press Club yesterday trying to justify Clubs Australia's massive ongoing investment in poker machines. As a media professional he handled himself competently and dealt with tricky questions by not answering them or by answering another question altogether.
Controversial amongst his answers was the proposed '6 Point Plan' which includes a strategy to allow family members to dob problem gamblers in. This would seem to be fraught with difficulty, and even in SA where this has had some limited testing the results have been woefully small (less than 15 people in two years).
I feel sorry for the community clubs, they are not the real villains I suspect. Casinos and other totally dedicated gambling venues are a different thing altogether; hotels who have totally redesigned their operations around cheap drinks and food designed to lure the gambler in; are these ethical.
Tim Costello asked Newell "What level of revenue is it ethical for venues to make from problem gamblers?" He had the good sense to not answer it, it is a wife-beating question. It is also like asking a publican how much money they can ethically take from alcoholics and other problem drinkers! Or supermarkets how much chocolate they can ethically sell to the obese.
In a State where a person was shot this week because they were dealt a 'lucky hand' at cards, which someone didn't like, we can indeed see that gambling is fraught with high emotions and distortions

What education might be for?

My contribution to the wit of the 20th century was "Anglicans like to be told what to do so that they can go ahead and not do it"
I try to not tell people what to do (some would laugh) and this worries some people. We work the education system in such a way that we get good at discerning what bring the teacher's or authority figure's approval, so when we are deliberately not told it can be alarming.
Janet Albrechtsen, the rightist commentator, writing in The Australian this week reminds us that education should be about teaching kids to sift what they are taught so that they can detect the teacher's bias. This is not dissimilar to my own goal, (rather unusual for me to agree with Ms Albrechtsen). I don't want people to believe what I believe, I want them to respoect what I believe but to make up their own minds.
The ongoing grammar debate might have something of this. The trouble is that people want to be told what to do....how easy it is to just assume that there is a set of rules. This is the great flaw, grammar is much more fluid than that.
The rules by and large are not absolute, the only given is that you need to be understood. So accurate spelling is probably more important than meticulous sentence structure.
But if I write that chocolate pudding is deeeelishus, you probably know what I mean.
We make absolute rules...no prepositions at the end of sentences....which don't make the slightest biut of difference (and it is now widely regarded that this rule is more breached than kept).
What about split infinitives? Most people don't have a clue about this ...and although each year ay Synod we used to count up their number, I would like to also contend that this rule is more subtle than it is often given credit for....(did you even notice that I split the infinitive in that last sentence?) viz: to also contend has a slightly different meaning from 'I would like also to contend' or 'to contend also'...'to anxiously deny' (don't you think dear reader) is different from 'to deny anxiously' or 'anxiously to deny'.
The point? People shoudl be being taught to think not to regurgitate!!

Grammar (iii)

During my fairly limited language education, I am rather glad that I had a good grasp of grammar as a result of being at school in the 50s and 60s.

For my sins I have been formally exposed to the teaching of French, German, New Testament Greek, Biblical Hebrew and I have had cause to try and teach myself a little bit of Italian, Latin and Bahasa Indonesia.

It would seem to be fairly apparent that just to get into language you have to understand how you name things (nouns); how they act (verbs); and how they might be qualified (adjectives and adverbs); you probably need to know who owns what (possessives and genitives); and have some idea about what time it is (tense).

This is a fairly significant syllabus, even if it is fairly minimal.

I am not so convinced that you need to understand about gerunds, adverbial participles, the future perfect, and other ephemera...you do need to know about how to find out about this stuff...but hours of classroom time, that should also be involved in encouraging the appreciation of literature, developing the ability to evaluate written and spoken language...should not be being wasted (now that phrase/clause is a grammatical nightmare!) on rote learning only.

Grammar (ii)

I asked the question in the last post about how you could teach a language without the grammatical super-structure. The answer of course is ... the same way we teach swimming.... by immersion.
There are plenty of humble folk who have little or no education whose livelihoods depend on speaking a language other than their native tongue. The modestly educated street merchants of an island such as our near neighbour (no, not Tasmania) Bali seem to do quite well. Most ordinary folk in that place have limited education, and many have good command of not just English but also Bahasa Malaysia, and even Japanese.
Not all,but many.
Occupying soldiers pick up working language, though often with awful mispronunciations like danke schön...we have Elvis to thank for Danke Shane! I suspect... which makes every person who has ever learned German shudder (see here) but by and large they don't read novels or poetry!
What you are doomed to experience if your knowledge of grammar is non-existent is the continuing risk of being misunderstood, and the likelihood that you will get stuck at a very elementary level.

The Prose and Konns of Grammar (i)

I will try not to make any grammatical mistakes in this post, but these days my fingers rather do what they want!
I have mixed feelings about the current focus on the reintroduction of intensive grammar into the curriculum.
First, as a former teacher of English, I am conscious of the fact that much of what is said is true about kids not having a clue about grammar. This may not matter much, as long as the common or plain meaning is clear.
I became quite obsessive about the apostrophe, but I think now (if signwriting is anything to go by) that is a lost cause. The rule now seems to be .... if in doubt put an apostrophe in just in case!
What about things like this quickly gleaned from the web:
Ladie's Restroom; Christian's Love Sarah Palin;Your invited; You're car; Your fat!...well its/it's a never ending list. Sometimes meaning is ambiguous but not usually life threateningly so.
Second,I know ( and was talking about this to someone of the same age the other day) at least half of our English time in First and Second Year Grammar School (year 7,8,9) was spent 'parsing' sentences. We used to rule up columns like the modern day spreadsheets and parse "The cat sat on the mat"
Subject: The Cat, verb: sat (past tense) Predicate: on the mat
This could be more complex the predicate could be understood to be in the accusative case, there was a preposition 'on' which governed the accusative...
The point of my conversation of days ago was that never....and I mean NEVER...since I was 14 have I had cause to parse a sentence.
Even those people who never really got parsing, apparently manage to communicate quite well.
Third, though, my principle reservation is about the teaching of LOTE (Languages other than English).
How on earth do you begin to teach a language if you can't have a super-structure?
I shall blog on this later.....

Where does it go?

I must admit the thought crossed my mind yesterday about what the effect of all these bail outs is and who they will advantage.

Since, it seems to me, the rich are the ones who are best able to withstand the ravages of the crashes, they are also the ones who are able to buy up all the cheap stocks and shares.

So if the ACME Trading Company dropped from $5 to $1 and then Mr Ichg bought 500,000 shares and then they bounced back to $1.50 (well below the original price but a cool 50% better than the purchase price) by my reckoning he made an easy $250K possibly overnight.

Of course Mr and Mrs Joe Average would never even be able to purchase anything like $10,000 worth of shares to get a modest $5000 overnight profit.

So who does the bail out help.

As someone said to me a few days ago...where did all this money go, and who has it now...tell them to give it back.

My answer is that this money never existed in the first place (credit), but it sure ain't in the pockets of the poor.

The presumption of it

This fine young man coralled me on Saturday and asked for the hand of my daughter. (I assured him that biblical tadition insisted that eh had to marry the eldest daughter first but he demurred, and I let him get away with it.
He romanced the second born on a day when, in our family, it did not seem auspicious to so do. She is a wonderful person, and he is lucky to have her [but I am her father]. He also is (in my opinion) a wonderful young man. On a day when things were really tough in our family it was seen by some to be inappropriate but I rather interpret it as an act of courage and conviction and I am glad that this might be the character of their relationship

good, better, best

Ruth Gledhill has a naughty article with a little web poll...Who is the better Christian? McCain, Obama, Palin or Biden
I have mused before (here) about the inadequacy of phone in and online polls since they are uncontrolled exercises and there is no way of stopping interested parties from trying to skew the results, and when we neutralise them by making them into percentages they all look the same (50% of 2500 is 1250, but 50% of 12 is 6...there is a lot of difference between over 1000 people who bother to ring in and a handful... you know lies, lies and damn statistics)
So the issue might not be...are the results meaningful? But is the question meaningful?
I indeed rankled, because there is much in Christian teaching that goes against this sort of religious self-promotion (you know the first shall be last), and some of Ruth's commentators rightly asked what does better mean. The usual suspects immediately jump on to the pro-life issues, but I want to hear what they say about caring for the poor and the broken, about the sick and the enslaved...it seems to me that there is more of Jesus' teaching about this than about anything else.
Of course it is an amusing bit of fluff!

Q & A

Couldn't help but think that Thursday night's Q & A was pretty good sort of stuff. So I was surprised when the delighted Tony Jones announced this was the last for the year. I suppose it is October.

Peter Costello,. Nicola Roxon, the bombastic Mr Marr and Ms Kernot and the curious Tom Zwister sparked pretty well together.

If you can, and haven't, then you can watch the video here

I am really glad this program has worked, it brings a new dimension to political chit chat which is less serious and yet more animated (reminds us of the good ole days of Latham and Pyne on Lateline or Pyne and Schacht on Matt and Dave... before Pyne started taking himself too seriously and became a little tedious)

Does it really matter?

The big question about Sarah Palin is does it really matter who is the Vice President of the USA. Of course it does, as the memory of Lyndon Johnson will remind us, because when if the President dies then the VP becomes the President. And, however well you think she might or might not perform she would also be the Commander in Chief, and the one who would push any nuclear weapon button.
One of the great strengths about the American system is that it allows for a 'character' to be in the fairly innocuous post of VP, without too much of a worry that it will actually effect good government. Which is fine as long the VP doesn't become the Prez
What I think is interesting is that despite the fact that she was no doubt brought in to add a sense of the modern to the McCain campaign, to be seen as both young, energetic and (of course) a woman; she also exposes the one thing about McCain that the electorate is nervous about, and that is that he is an old man.
The talk about Palin is not... why shouldn't we have such a different VP?.... but what happen if the old man dies. Polling has it that up to one third of the electorate is troubled by this.
Now, I think that old people should not be discounted just because they are old ( I am fast becoming onesuch myself) but my work every day informs me that after 70 two things can happen.
One is that mature people can function really well, and can bring a tempered stability, wisdom and insight which is often lacking in the 30 and 40 year olds. But I also know that it is a mistake to assume that age brings wisdom automatically, I can think of at least two cases where 'elders' in our own community just became more and more idiotic.
The Second factor is, that despite our desire to the contrary, there is nevertheless an inevitability that the chance of people undergoing rapid decline in, say, any given six month period is obviously much greater. That is, we can be fine one month and by Christmas be out of it. We can go on for years and then suddenly undergo a decline whioch may at first be denied, or take a litttle while to pin down...may the world be protected from a declining leader who has the authority to crash the world economy, invade countries or blow the whole show up.

To Crash or not to Crash

It's alarming, I'm sure you will agree. Trying to arrange some financial stuff today, I asked a financial cogniscento ( as it was a she she is probably a cogniscenta) just what difference the present debacle would make to our proposed plans...she shrugged and said "Anyone's guess!". I suppose that's the best anyone can hope for.

What I hope is, that when all this is over, and we (no doubt ) witness a huge intervention in economic policy by the largest capitalist government in the world....that people will stop saying "The free market will find its own level!!" As if somehow there is such a thing as 'free market'.

Politicians and people are right to be sceptical about what is being proposed here, unregulated intervention to prop up the wealth of the wealthiest. This may be what needs to happen so that those of us further down the chain, who rely on the 'trickle down' effect to function ourselveswill not perish also.

But I rather hope that the expression 'trickle down' (which always rather reminds me of an unfortunate potty-training accident) will disappear too.

I wonder what Milton Friedman would be saying about all this if he were alive today.