Quick Shots - 02/Jul/2016

It's Freakin' Election Day

For a long campaign, it sure creeps up on you when you're doing your best to ignore it.
The pollsters are calling it 50-50 which usually means they don't know what they're talking about and there's about to be a massive swing. Or maybe they're right. Short theALP winning, it would actually be kind of fun to see if we get a hung parliament. Yes, that re-run would be fun too, and well deserved. See if Malcolm Turnbull can stick to his guns and say he won't form an extended coalition with the cross bench seats.

With 27% of those polled saying they haven't decided but they're likely to vote for  minor party, this is anybody's guess as to which way it will swing, let alone prognosticate by how much. Truly, there is no justice when it comes to elections so I'm just going to sit back and watch the carnage unfold. 2013 sucked so much I'm sort of possessed by schadenfreude. Secretly, I wish they all suffer - but they can't because somebody has to win.

Grunwald

I am researching the battle of Grunwald. It's the second last major engagement in the Crusades, and has the dubious distinction of pitting the Teutonic Knights against a coalition of Polish knights, Lithuanian light cavalry and some Tartars. The Poles were presumably Catholic at this point in time, and the Lithuanians were recent converts as well so, it was a kind of all-Catholic slugfest. As Crusade battles go, it is one of the less edifying moments. There is no Saladin or Richard the Lion Heart. Instead the leading characters are decidedly petty and perhaps a little personality disordered.  This is not a grand moment in the history of Crusades; it's more a lingering footnote, a cul de sac in history given that the Teutonic order, Lithuania and Poland all edged back from being big players after this battle.

The Teutonic Knights aren't exactly great protagonists. If anything they have the air of a psychotic cult, hellbent on conquering lands. A sort of an early version of the SS to come. Perhaps the SS even modelled themselves after the naked fanaticism and over-the-top brutality. If Crusade stories are told from the 'christian' side with the blessings of the Pope, then these would be your protagonists. It's kind of strange because the northern reaches of Central Europe don't exactly lend themselves to the Crusade project of taking and obtaining Jerusalem. But I guess heathens are everywhere if you look hard enough. The through the lens of religious fanaticism.

If of course you look at this battle from the point of view of the Poles and Lithuanians, this is the great defence of their motherland from the psycho cult Teutonic Knights. The reason I'm looking into this at all is because the battle of Grunwald represents the high watermark of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The Lithuanians see this as their moment in history. They may be right.

The battle of Grunwald took place in 1410. The nuts and bolts of it aside, basically the Poles lured the Teutonic Knights into a battlefield of their choosing. The Lithuanians attacked first with their light cavalry and they were beaten back badly. They eventually regrouped to re-join the fray. By that point the Polish Knights had beaten the Teutonic Knights back to their lines. The Teutonic Knights eventually lost their leader and were routed.

The way the Lithuanians see it, they carried the day with their daring strategy of leaving the battlefield and then coming back. Something they allegedly learned in an earlier war. The way the Poles see it, the Lithuanians turned and fled, only to come back at the end so as not to be complete losers. As you can see , it's hard to draw a completely positive picture of the Lithuanian contribution to the battle. As for the Teutonic Knights, they never really recovered after this loss.

After the battle of Grunwald, there was the battle of Varna in 1444, followed by the fall of Constantinople in 1453. After the fall of Constantinople, the crusaders lost a vital way point on the way tot he Levant. Instead of sending more troops to the Levant, Europe then spent a good deal of time fending off the advancing Turks.
I won't go into the historic irony of the Turks now wanting to join the EU.

Speaking of which...

The Brexit Call We Don't See

I was chatting online with Somebody who voted for 'leave'. He's an educated guy; not necessarily a conservative; and not like some rabid xenophobe. His position was that the Euro project itself was in most part faulty, and therefore doomed to fail. Not only was Brussels faulty as a political organ, the entire Euro project had too many contradictions even before the GFC. Since the GFC, the Euro Zone has been - according to him - patching over the glaring problems, the most problematic of which is Greece and its debt problem. On a plain ledger, if Germany runs a surplus and Greece runs a deficit, Greece has to pay back Germany even though Greece really hasn't the means to do so. If Germany runs a surplus, it effectively constricts growth not just in Germany but also right across the Euro Zone. Yet there is no recourse for Greece or for that matter any other country.

According to him, Germany makes a lot of money exporting stuff it makes at a cheaper price that if they were doing it with Deutsche Marks. Gemran exports are competitive because the Euro currency depresses the price of Germany's exports - This depression of price happens because the entire Euro averages out all the productivity of its member states. Thus Germany clearly benefits from Greece being much less productive. Yet Germany is extra reluctant to share its spoils from this interaction. Why should Greece stick around to be punished by Germany at both ends of the ledger? And if that's the case, what other states are losing out?

He figures the UK is similarly losing out to France and Germany; which is a claim I don't quite get. He argues the Euro project is a house on fire and Brexit is merely the UK getting out of the burning building first. The Scots are crazy for wanting to run back into the burning building. It makes some kind of internal sense. It's not like the handling of Greece made the EU look good or accepting compromise.

The View From The Couch - 20/Jul/2014

The Politicians We Get Are From Those On Offer

Who would run? Why would you run? Who would back you? These are the kinds of questions that might cross the aspiring politician. I'm not one of them, so I can watch people run and fail with a certain amount of objective distance but ultimately that's hurting me. It hurts me because I'm letting somebody with not the right tools to do the job, and on this blog you'd know for a fact that I'm pretty harsh with politicians. The higher the office, the harder I kick.

Democracy is a funny thing. In America, the most watched kid in high school is not the smartest kid, not the best looking kid, but the most popular kid. Being smart and good looking but not popular (heh, Irony alert!) I always found this American fixation on popularity particularly strange - but it stands to reason.If you're not popular, you can't win election, and only by winning elections can you access power, popularity as a character trait then is the highway to power. So all these people running for office, at least in America would be all these kids who once upon a time were the most popular kids in their year and there's no reason for them to have been the smartest. And so even there America at least gets the politicians it deserves. It explains a lot.

In Australia it is a bit murkier as to what makes a person a good candidate in the eyes of the two great parties or for that matter the lesser parties. The process of preselection in various seats is opaque, and every documented account of how people are chosen is filled with intangible processes and thoughts that defy explanation. My local member - one Craig Laundy of the Liberal Party who looks like a gerbil - must have made some deal with some entity in the party to be the candidate. And so far, he's just okay. Not terrible, not good, not anything in particular - a perfectly fungible replacement level MP. That Jaymes Diaz guy who went from gaffe to gaffe came from the sort of party room machinations that gave us Pauline Hanson a a Liberal or Eddie Obeid as a State ALP candidate. The point being if you asked (and expected) the parties to pick smart people to run, you still get candidates like Diaz, Hanson, Obeid, Craig Thomson, Peter Slipper, and so on.

Given politics i a kind of necessary evil, it is a good thing we're forced to think about it seriously in Australia. In countries where they don't have compulsory voting, the track record for democracy in many places is even worse. As Winston Churchill said, it's the least worst option.

In that light, I want to just bring your attention to this article.

“What you say – always – is that you want to make a difference. You believe your experience qualifies you to serve. These circumlocutions are the etiquette of democracy, the ritual salute … [people] want to hear you say that you are in it for them.”

And how many times have you heard the pledge. To make a difference. To build the economy. To fight for education. And do you ever really believe it? Or do you suspect politicians are in it for themselves, far more than they are for you?

“It’s worth considering,” Ignatieff goes on, “that such dissembling may have its uses. The pretence may begin as a piece of hypocrisy and end up becoming a politician’s second nature. From pretending to serve, you may surprise yourself by actually doing so.” But the biggest challenge is to pull off the confidence trick. "You have to invent yourself for public consumption."

And therein lies the asymmetry. Politicians do not get rewarded for candour or honesty; their first step is to commence from the hypocritical position to tell the audience what it wants to hear. If the audience is dumb and ignorant, these things are going to be a lot worse than you expect. This is exactly how democracy ends up offering the seeming, willing, willful idiots we get on election day. We can talk reform all we like, but unless the electorate smartens up a lot more, we're always going to get the kind of politicians we want to throw off the top of a cliff.

but then, that would be why they're cutting education. They ant to make it a lot harder for the populace to smarten up.

The Looting Says A Lot

I know it's a war zone but the utter lack of respect shown by the East Ukrainian rebels around the MH17 crash site is pretty staggering. It sort of shows the crassness of the people on the ground near the crash site.

I keep getting told by Tomas how awful the Russians were when they occupied Lithuania. The stories are colourful (in a really bad way) and grim. I have discounted the awfulness because they were testimonials from the wronged, because they had reasons to paint them as badly as they could, and Russia under Stalin probably had very few luxuries of thought for people to behave better in occupied territories. Yet, when I see these reports of looting, I can't help but think of those stories and consider the likelihood that these Russians in East Ukraine are not so far away removed from the brutes who occupied East Europe. They are as socially backward as you can imagine. What they're doing out there looting is like something out of history books that tell you about early medieval peasants and serfs under the Tsars. It's disgraceful in this day and age. I'm sorry but it's culturally repugnant and there's no valid excuse for them to be this way.

I really hope we don't end up sending any troops into East Ukraine to fight these people. It really would be a waste of perfectly good ammo.