1) New Zealand sauvignon blancs are a lot fruitier than Australian ones.

2) Walking home from the bottle shop I was overtaken by a bunch of youthful 'Mexicans' off to a party for the end of Movember at Luna Park. Struck me that Movember, as a thing to do in November, is worthier than Nanowrimo.

3) In the late morning there was a drizzle of rain that set off those wonderful earth odours. Later on, when I walked over to the shopping centre, I was hit, in the middle of the median strip, by a strong smell of lemon-scented gums.

4) I stocked up (not that I needed to) on whodunnits and Australian fiction at the 3 for 2 stand in Borders. You can get Miles Franklin winners at the 3 for 2 stand :(

5) Finally replaced my Swiss Army knife - lost somewhere on the way back from Adelaide in May. This one is the first I've had that is made not by Victorinox, but by Wenger. It has some features that seem better than the Victorinox one - notably a more sturdy spring in the scissors - although in all other respects it is the same. I have had a Swiss Army knife, and carried it everywhere, pretty much continuously for the last 25 years - this is my third - and I've long considered it the most useful purchase I've ever made.

6) Speaking of Wenger, he really has to rethink how he puts a team together. Last night was unbearable. Arsenal had well over half the possession and the BBC commentator was raving about their play in the second half, but they couldn't score (except for the other side in the case of Vermaelen) and F...g Chelsea got 3. He very publicly told them that now was the moment they had to step up, and they didn't. They already know how to play football, now they need to learn how to kill. On Wednesday night they have to play Man City in the League Cup. The form of the latter has not been great recently (not since the Adebayor misbehaviour at Eastlands), but this match is also at Eastlands and Adebayor will be there.

7) The good news from the middle of the night was Barca's victory over the Royal Madrilenos.

8) Joe Hockey is being put forward and possibly is putting himself forward as a leader who can unify the Liberal Party. That's what they said about Brendan Nelson and Malcolm Turnbull before they were elected. You can't unify a party that has an excitable minority hell-bent on self-destruction. They are filibustering in the Senate at this moment. Hockey is my local member. He is a rugger bugger with an interest in politics. The idea of Joe Hockey as prime minister is only slightly less hilarious than the idea of Tony Abbott as PM. Nelson, bad as he was, and Turnbull, arrogant as he is, at least have grey matter inside their skulls.

A book about Israeli apartheid.

My new year resolution this year was something I thought feasible - i.e. read 25 books. Today I finished the 13th, so I'm halfway and it isn't quite yet the middle of the year.

There may well be other things I'd like to achieve, but I didn't make any resolutions. For example, I've wanted to quit smoking for years, but I've learned not to make resolutions about it. This year, I might have succeeded since I've only smoked a handful of cigarettes (on 3 separate occasions) in the last 10 weeks. Success may depend on remaining fairly anti-social.

Exercise is a problem. Last weekend I did none because it rained continuously. If I was English, this wouldn't matter as I'd go out anyway. When I lived in England I learned that if you stayed indoors on account of the weather, you'd never go out at all. Back in Oz I seem to have forgotten the lesson. Yesterday was sunny, but I stayed home and read my book. Ha ha! Today it rained all day again, so I stayed home and read my book!!! Luckily this weekend is a long weekend (for the birthday of the English Queen), so I have one more chance to get out of doors.

I spent the weekend in Melbourne. Had an all day meeting at LaTrobe on Friday. Out in the bush.

Friday night my friends and I went to a meeting of Sisters in Crime at a pub in South Melbourne (Bells in Moray St). The speakers were all really interesting: Dorothy Johnston from Canberra, Alison Goodman from Melbourne and Liz Somebody also from Melbourne (I wish I could remember her name because I'm really quite interested to read her book!). I've heard of Dorothy before, though not read her stuff, because she was in a group of writers in Canberra that an old friend of mine belonged to way back. The book (Eden) she was talking about starts off with a male politician who is found dead in a brothel wearing a dress. He wasn't murdered, but somebody else was and the story is really about money and influence. I read it on the plane coming home and in bed last night (couldn't finish it on the plane because I got talking to my neighbour - a nice woman who is making a film about Sidney Nolan).

Liz's book is a murder mystery set at an academic conference on school stories and written in the style of school stories. Since I was brought up on school stories, I found her talk interesting. Alison's is something to do with the genetics of reproduction and contract killing. They read bits out of their books and talked about what started them off on the particular story. They were all very different. It was fascinating and fun. And of course they had books for sale at the back of the room and I have come home with a small stack of murder mysteries (including one by a man). Apparently there is a chapter of Sisters in Crime in Sydney, so I might try going to some of their meetings.

On Saturday afternoon I went to see the Mediaeval Imagination exhibition at the State Library with another friend. That was a collection of illuminated manuscripts - starting with something from 8th century Northumbria and ending with a printed page of the Gutenburg Bible. Most of the books were, I realised, really picture books with just a few words on each page. The idea seems to have been that you read the words and mulled them over while contemplating the gorgeously coloured and finely detailed illustrations. They were quite stunning. I really liked the small section of more secular books - including a "Pythagorean theory of music" and the 15th century principles of brain surgery (luckily in Latin or I might have puked). Then we had coffee at Fiorentinos and went back to my friend's place for dinner. It was a really good catching up session since I haven't seen her for a couple of years and in her life a lot has happened.

On Sunday we went for a walk on St Kilda foreshore and had lunch in Fitzroy St.

I had a look back to see if I made any resolutions that I didn't keep. I didn't make any to not keep. That's good. Instead I railed about the death penalty (re hanging of Saddam) and discussed legalized prostitution (re the five murdered women in England). So I remember now why I bought that book about legalized prostitution that I didn't get around to reading until almost a year later. Funny (not), that we began 2007 with murdered women and we're ending it with another murdered woman.

Something else I mentioned around New Year last year was my desire for LJ to add an edit comments function. They did!

Since I began cataloguing my books on LibraryThing.com I put a note on when I read them. I read 12 books this year, plus I'm part way through three (one of which is Guns, Germs and Steel that I've basically lost interest in). This is a poor record, although it's an improvement on 2006. Most of the books I read are not for work, though a few are (mostly I read papers for work), and I noticed that I never read books (or anything much) when I'm teaching. I have no teaching next year, so I'm setting a target of 25 books in 2008. Not much to some of you, but a lot for me! It seems like the type of NY resolution that I might be able to stick to, whereas others, like doing more exercise or tidying up the junk pile that is my flat, seem less realistic (from long experience).

The reason I'm not teaching is that my admin job has just become full-time (by university fiat). I'm hoping I can keep it down to the 35 hours a week that this is meant to imply, in which case I'll be able to do some research and read some books as well as hang about on LJ!

I bought a new laptop today. The main criterion was weight, so I ended up with 1.86 kg of Toshiba. There was one at 0.9 kg, but you have to hang so many accessories off it that it wasn't really worth the extra expense. Plus the heavier one has XP already loaded and I didn't really want Vista. Unlike my old one, which weighs 3.6 kg, I hope it won't be too heavy to be genuinely mobile. While searching around on the web I found that the vast majority of laptops weigh upwards of 3.5 kg and some are as much as 6 kg. What's the point? Seems they're designed for strapping young guys and the nerd industry needs a bit more gender sensitivity. Since the new screen is quite small (12"), I'll probably keep using the old one as a desktop until it collapses.

I've read a hundred pages or thereabouts of Guns, Germs and Steel. What has struck me so far about it is that Adam Smith wrote something very similar 250 years ago. The question is the same - what causes the wealth of some nations to exceed that of others - and so is the approach, a kind of environmental determinism. Not only that, but some of the mistakes are the same too. For example, the reason Australian Aborigines remained in the stone age is, according to Diamond, that shortly after their arrival they killed off all the megafauna and so lacked the kind of animals that could be domesticated. Smith also argued that domestic animals came from wild stock, but actually, as far as we know, they were specifically bred for the purpose. So the question remains, why didn't Australian Aborigines breed domestic animals from kangaroos and emus? And why didn't native Americans domesticate the bison when they did domesticate horses? Actually Diamond doesn't answer the question of why some societies made the transition to pastoralism and agriculture from hunting and gathering. Smith did have an answer which was population growth and scarcity of resources. Basically he argued that when things are scarce you have to innovate, if you have what you need then you don't need to innovate. (He didn't quite put it that way - he thought it was a 'natural human propensity' to domesticate animals/start agriculture in the face of resource scarcity.) Diamond says that some native Americans engaged in agriculture, but they didn't have animal draught power to till heavier soils, so it never spread. But at some stage they got horses (via the Spanish?), and yet they used these only for hunting and warfare. Why? I'm not going to find out from this book. Not sure whether it's worth continuing. Any tips?

He also has basically the same argument as Smith that agriculture, because it produces food surplus to the requirements of the farming population, gave rise to the state. I'm expecting to see any minute that the division of labour is limited by the extent of the market - there are already hints to that effect.

Tanya Reinhart, The Road Map to Nowhere, Verso, 2006.

I read this book pretty quickly - given that I don't have a lot of time to read. Tanya Reinhart is emeritus professor of linguistics and comparative literature at Tel Aviv University. The book covers the period from about 2002 to mid-2006 (before invasion of Lebanon). Her sources are mainly the Israeli press, particularly Ha'aretz and Yedion Aharonot (including some of her own articles for the latter), with occasional bits from the UK and US media. That's why it's a quick read, though not necessarily an easy one; i.e., it is narrative rather than analytical. The story is a pretty simple one: the Israeli regime has, since the early 1970s, consistently and unswervingly applied its plan to annex permanently at least 40% of the West Bank into Israel. In this ambition it completely disregards Israeli public opinion on the need for peace - and is able to do so because the regime in Israel is dominated by the military. Since Sharon came to power the plan has been enhanced in order to create 4 large open-air prisons for the Palestinian population on the remaining 60% of the territory (since the book was written this has been reduced to 54%)

In case you were in any doubt about this, here's a map of the Sharon government's plan for Palestinian "cantonments" in the West Bank, drawn up in 2002. What the Israeli government wants, but not necessarily what it'll get. Reinhart reproduces a slightly different map, but it says the same thing:

If this map is fully implemented, and the four Palestinian enclaves are surrounded by a wall, the situation in the West Bank will be precisely as it was in Gaza prior to the summer 2005 evacuation: a system of prisons, studded with Israeli settlements, isolated from the world, and controlled both from the outside and from the inside by the Israeli army. (p. 164)

She goes on to say that, while no Israeli government would ever evacuate settlements of its own free will, in the event that they are forced to as, she argues, they were in the case of Gaza, they can still control the prisons from outside the walls.

If you read this book, or indeed anything that documents the day to day realities on the ground in the Israel-Palestine conflict, you will be left in no doubt that what is going on in the West Bank is a deliberate process of ethnic cleansing. For the most part it is carried out by a policy of economic strangulation (as, for example, in the case of Qalqilya and other Palestinian towns and villages that have been cut off from their agricultural lands). This policy will also apply, as it already has in Gaza, to areas where Palestinians are permitted to remain - Israel aims for total control over Palestinian access to food and other resources - in order to prevent development and to encourage either depression and passivity or departure for another country. Military force is, as we know, also used - even against the few Israeli citizens who have bravely opposed the criminal policies of their state. Peaceful Palestinian/Israeli demonstrations are met with brutality. Reinhart documents collaboration between Fatah and the Israeli military in repressing Palestinian grassroots resistance - at least prior to the Hamas election victory.

In the final chapter Reinhart attempts to end with more optimism, by describing the demonstrations that have occasionally succeeded in procuring small changes in the route of the Apartheid Wall (it cannot, with any conscience, be described as a security fence because that is not its purpose). At Budrus, which lies very close to the 1967 Green Line, a small section of the wall was moved onto the line instead of cutting the village off from its livelihood. But at Mas'ha, where people were supposed to be able to access their land via gates in the wall that were never opened, an Israeli demonstrator was deliberately knee-capped by an Israeli sniper and so on... dead or similarly injured Palestinians are too numerous to count. I don't know what has happened to the Wall construction process: the last available map showing completed sections dates from February 2005. More recent maps only show the projected route.

I think some of the details of Reinhart's interpretation are open to question, but the general drift is not. In the history of western colonialism, Israel ranks up there with Leopold's Congo.

Mary Lucille Sullivan, Making Sex Work: A failed experiment with legalised prostitution, Spinifex, Melbourne, 2007

I bought this book after I read about Sullivan's work in the context of newspaper reporting of the Ipswich murders. I had totally lost touch with the debate about legalised prostitution since some time in the 1980s when prostitutes' collectives started to emerge in both Australia and Thailand (which I used to visit quite often back then). This seemed a very positive development at the time since it was very much focused on human rights issues, and then I didn't pay too much attention when the collectives began demanding legalisation of the 'profession' - rights at work seemed like the way to go and, moreover, I naively assumed that it would end the extensive police corruption linked to the industry.

What Sullivan does in the first part of the book is, somewhat tediously, to trace the history of legalisation in the state of Victoria.

It started out as a push by local residents' groups, basically aimed at separating 'decent' women from the 'whores' - get them off the streets in our suburb and into regulated brothels corralled into certain areas. Much of the initial legalisation was framed in terms of town planning issues.

Pretty soon the Prostitutes' Collective of Victoria (PCV) became involved, advocating the idea of prostitution as work, like any other work - hence the title of the book. They were supported by many feminists at the time (people Sullivan annoyingly labels as 'socialist feminists' as distinct from 'radical feminists' - it seems that she is unable to name anyone without adding some variety of feminism to their title - e.g. 'feminist psychologist'). Labelling aside, however, she makes an interesting point. Those who favoured legalisation framed their arguments in terms of choice - prostitution as a 'lifestyle choice', an expression of female sexuality - while those who opposed it framed their arguments in terms of prostitution as a form of violence against women. Sullivan adopts the latter position, though it isn't until chapter 6 that you find any argument for it. The pro-choice argument, on the other hand, fitted very nicely with the dominant free market philosophy of the last two or three decades.

The PCV, in its case for legalisation, intially argued for exit strategies. (Sullivan frequently cites a survey showing that 64% of prostituted women wanted to get out of it.) Thus, while arguing for women's right to choose prostitution as a career, the PCV also acknowledged that for the majority of prostituted women it wasn't really a choice. The PCV postion was adopted, but since legalisation no government money whatsoever has been spent on developing exit strategies.

The AIDS epidemic brought major changes as the PCV shifted its strategy from promoting rights at work to promoting itself as a provider of sexual health services. Eventually they drove themselves out of business as the Victorian Health Department took over that role. But in the process of this development, the PCV found itself promoting the industry, rather than the interests of the workers. Nowadays the workers are not heard from, while industry advertising dominates.

Another development arising from AIDS was the formation of an alliance with the gay community. Sullivan claims, without tendering much evidence, that gay male prostitution is very different from female prostitution. But the PCV got into the grip of queer theory and began to see 'different' sexual practices as revolutionary. In the process she says they totally lost sight of their feminist origins.

Once legalised, the industry began to promote itself and expand aggressively. The business interests formed an alliance with other parts of the 'adult' industry - table dancing, pornography, BDSM clubs, sex toys, etc - via the Eros Foundation which became its principal lobby group nationwide. Several amendments to the legislation were required, all resulting in increasing normalisation of the industry. One brothel listed on the stock exchange (and has done very well). They run an annual Sexpo, which advertises itself as information on health and safe sexual practices, but these are in fact confined to the fringe, while the real business is promoting and selling sexual servicing of men by women.

An important result of all this lobbying was the recognition of prostitution as a 'therapeutic service'. Among other things, carers of disabled people have a "legal obligations to assist people with disabilities to follow the sexual lifestyle of their choice, including non-heterosexual lifestyles". It means that if a disabled man can't find a girlfriend he is entitled to use the services of a prostitute. We have certainly travelled a vast distance in the past two decades. As Sullivan comments, the issue of sexuality has been "unwittingly" narrowed down to "a fundamentalist belief in the male biological imperative for sexual release."

The main rationale for this 'therapeutic service' is that men who cannot find sexual release will turn violent. So legalised prostitution is supposed to reduce the level of sexual assault. This in itself is problematic because it says basically that there will be a class of women (prostitutes) who will rescue 'decent' women from sexual assault. Sullivan argues that this has not happened because the rate of sexual assault rises in line with population growth.

After legalisation, illegal prostitution began to increase as well. Legal brothels were used to launder profits from the illegal side and from drugs. Since growth of the industry required growth in the supply of prostitutes, trafficking in women became a major problem for the first time. More amendments were needed to clarify the meaning of 'prostitution' due to the boom in table dancing and other related venues. In an otherwise depressing book, there was at least a chuckle in imagining the debates in the Victorian state parliament (discussions of clothed and unclothed 'groin area', etc).

By about page 200 we are starting to see the rationale for Sullivan's assertion that legalised prostitution is part of a wider societal discrimination against women. She cites evidence from psychologists that prostitution is 'multitraumatic'. Women working in strip clubs are particularly prone to "dissociative and other psychiatric symptoms". Occupational health and safety manuals in fact recommend dissociation as a coping strategy. Other OHS strategies promoted include self-defence techniques against rape, developing skills of negotiation to defuse and de-escalate dangerous situations, using 'intuition' to distinguish between rapists and other clients, etc. The women, rather than the clients, are also allocated primary responsibility for public health issues like the spread of STDs, even though a proportion of these men refuse to use condoms and often threaten violence when asked to do so. It is the women who have to be inspected and treated, not the customers. Sullivan paints a picture of a workplace characterised by frequent assault and rape, portrayed as OHS issues when outside this industry they are considered crimes. While the industry portrays 'bookings' as freely negotiated contracts between client and service provider, the reality is that the client has all the power.

While I think there's obviously some validity to these arguments, I do think she is a bit disingenuous. She cites the survey mentioned above showing that 64% of prostituted women would like to get out, as well as evidence that there is no difference in this regard between women in legal brothels, on the street or in strip clubs, and she clearly links this evidence to the incidence of trauma. I have read elsewhere, however, that the main reason for wanting to get out is the social stigma attached to prostitution, rather than health and safety issues. There are clearly many women who either don't mind or actually like the work itself and I think it is a bit rich to suggest that all of these must be suffering psychiatric symptoms. Sullivan makes much of women being forced into prostitution for 'economic reasons', but, hello?, that is the case with all jobs. I'd like to know if the supply of prostitutes goes up when unemployment rises and vice versa - in other words, is it really the job of last resort? She also doesn't discuss the issue of pay - although she does refer to one young woman who destroyed her health by working to save 50,000 dollars in 6 months! Like coalminers, who face the threat of death daily, do prostitutes earn above average money? The lack of data is frustrating as generally is the lack of argumentation about positions opposed to her own.

The most convincing aspects of her argument are related to how the industry affects the status of women generally. A key point is that "normalisation of such work as 'sex work' is a direct contradiction to the right of women to workplace equality as well as feminists' struggle to desexualise the work environment." Here she cites a study of pub culture and the interaction of female bar staff and male customers and how long it has taken to 'desexualise' this culture (I had many female friends in my student days who worked as 'barmaids', so I know all about the crap they had to put up with just because they were pouring drinks.) Nowadays the Liquor Trades Union, which led the drive to desexualise bar work, is renamed the Liquor Trades and Hospitality Union and also covers lap dancers. While flight attendants, bar staff, waiters, etc, have fought long and often successful battles against sexual harassment and abuse at work, Sullivan argues that because of its explicitly sexual and gender-specific nature, the servicing of men by women, "the introduction of tabletop dancers into the hospitality industry must be viewed as a backlash against... workplace equality."

I also think that the way in which the industry and the political establishment promote the biological determinism of men's 'entitlement' to sex is quite pernicious and I wish Sullivan would have devoted more attention to it. The Swedish government has explicitly accepted the notion that prostitution is an expression of sexual violence against women and has criminalised the customers.and the brothels, while completely decriminalising the women. Others have only criminalised buying the services of trafficked women (Finland, Philippines), or have not completely decriminalised the women (Korea). There is some evidence that the industry has gone into decline in Sweden, but the source is the government official responsible for monitoring the program. I'd like to see something more independent: if the entire argument for legalisation and normalisation of the industry is based on this notion of a biological male need, some more solid evidence against it ought to be included.

I've recently gone back to cataloguing. My most popular book so far is Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel, which I'm afraid remains 'to read' pile. Next is Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which I have read and then Macchiavelli's The Prince.

They have a 'zeitgeist' page which, inter alia, lists the 50 top-rated authors (the one with the most stars, not the one with the most books which is, of course, JK Rowling). I've heard of only one of these and his name is Ludwig van Beethoven. Wha???

Carpentaria: a novel, by Alexis Wright

I purchased this for my holiday reading, even though I already have dozens of unread books, because it won the Miles Franklin this year and it seemed to fit the Lake Mungo theme. Ms Wright is a Waanyi person originating from the Gulf of Carpentaria region and the story is that of the family of Normal Phantom, an elder of the Western Pricklebush, living in a town camp on the edge of the brilliantly named town of Desperance. It has just about everything: family feuds, racial politics, tribal politics, Dreaming (lots of it), tragedy, farce, love, friendship, religion. The language is fantastic and poetic, lifting you off the ground and then bringing you down suddenly with a slap of vernacular or a load of plastic bags emanating from Uptown. At first the story seems like a series of sketches - Normal, his wife Mrs Angel Day, Mozzie Fishman the charismatic preacher, Elias Smith who walked out of the sea, Will Phantom the estranged son. I was happy to read a chapter at a time and wonder if it was going anywhere at all. Then about half way through all the threads start coming together and I couldn't put it down. I sat up reading until 4 this morning getting through the last 300 pages.

Even though it is a work of fiction, I learned a few things. For the first time I have got a hook on the meaning of Dreaming. Europeans tend to treat it as an analogue of Genesis - a mythical explanation of how the world came about. But Aborigines argue that there is no distinct Dreamtime; all of life is a continuous Dreaming, although it stops when you lose contact with your Country. Dreaming is simply an understanding of how the world works and how you live within it, before and, possibly, after death. New ideas (e.g. Christianity, or parts thereof) and objects can be absorbed into it without altering its fundamentals. In this story it works brilliantly (and absorbingly) in the aid of survival - only those who become separated from it are lost. Whether any of this particular Dreaming is real or not, Wright is firmly in the Aboriginal tradition of passing on the knowledge through storytelling. She just does it in a way that brings that knowledge into conflict with the whitefella's "scientify" way of knowing. The dénouement is more wishful than seems to be justified by the history of this conflict so far.

I sometimes manage to listen to the book reading on Radio National after the 11 pm news. I once heard a fragment of Kate Grenville's The Secret River that made me go out and buy the book, and quite a few fragments of The Life of Pi which didn't. During the last two weeks I managed to get almost the whole of Mark Haddon's book ( I only started listening on account of the quote from Sherlock Holmes that is the title). The story is a piece of fluff, but interesting because the narrator is a 15 year-old who suffers from Asperger's Syndrome. This makes him very logical, but entirely devoid of intuition, so he constantly misinterprets what's happening. Thus, when he discovers that his father has murdered a dog, he deduces that his father will also murder him. Sometimes, it's funny. In his small suburban world he counts cars by colour - more red cars = good day, more yellow ones = bad day. But when he goes to London there are too many cars and he becomes confused. Curious indeed. I found the borderline between 'normal' and 'not normal' quite fascinating.

This week we're onto Peter Corris' Diary of Fletcher Christian. So far it seems promising.

Another sleepless night. This time I read a detective story, Don't Look Back. I liked it and will try her again. I need to start doing more exercise though, so I can sleep better.

I couldn't sleep last night so I finished the book. I think he stretches the genetics a bit far in what they have to do. The unique existence of 'mind' in the human species gives us an ability to come up with imaginary schemes of things that other animals apparently don't have. So I wasn't especially persuaded by the idea that religion is a 'by-product' of some genetically determined feature that is functional to survival. The most convincing argument against this genetic coding for religion argument is Dawkins' own argument of the movable Zeitgeist. I think the desire to explain what we do not comprehend is perfectly sufficient. Once you've invented something that appears to explain the existence of the cosmos, other stuff like morality, consolation and inspiration follow easily, though not all of the latter are inevitable in equal doses (hence the ability of some to laugh at the 'quaint' religious ideas of others). Since we are social animals, the extent to which I think religion may be a genetic by-product is in the sense that we have a sense of who belongs to our community and who doesn't. Religion creates insiders and outsiders. Evolution makes us all insiders (all in the same boat), which can be a disturbing condition if you're trying to work out how to relate to other people.

Theology is an intellectual tradition that, in the era of science, appears insane and, for that very reason, is on the retreat - either rationalizing itself out of existence (new, personal, definitions of god that have adapted to scientific understanding) or simply being abandoned. Nonetheless, it is a powerful tradition in the sense that religious belief is accorded greater respect than, say, political ideologies. Nationalism is also a very powerful tradition - at least in the last 3 centuries. In fact we can cherry pick our community according to the situation we're in (which outsiders we feel alienated from and which insiders we feel we can rely on). We can be patriots one day and sub-national religious communities despising the theologies of our compatriots the next. I would guess that the advance in religious zealotry currently being experienced in some societies is closely related to the dysfunctionality of those societies, a way of responding to both real and imagined external threats. The sense of not wanting to feel alone in the face of these threats can also be overcome by expansion of the community (e.g. francophonie, pan-islamism. capitalism, communism).

The chapter on the Bible, of which I was compelled to read very carefully selected excerpts as a child, would have been quite hilarious if, contrary to Dawkins' assertion, it wasn't actually used as a moral guide by some people. He cites a study of 1000 Israeli children who all basically thought that genocide was not only acceptable, but a good thing in the case of Joshua's extermination of the people of Jericho (Midians?). The experiment was repeated using a Chinese example, and the children condemned the genocide. However, religion is not the only ideology that leads people to generate reasons for creating mayhem against fellow boat people. Nor, in the modern era, is it necessarily the most important (other than in a few currently spectacular cases). However, as Dawkins points out, nobody has ever started a war in the name of atheism (absence of belief).

I finished the draft of a paper today. Still need to do some tidying up - at my usual rate it'll take another week! But I've promised myself to try to get it done earlier.

I'm currently reading Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. It is highly amusing, but would be more interesting if there was more in it that was actually new. Basically, it does nothing to lessen my wonderment that anyone can take any sort of religion seriously. (To be fair it isn't his aim to solve this conundrum.)

The biggest discovery so far from reading this book is that Dawkins is also the author of The Selfish Gene. I have always refused to read that book, on the assumption that it must've been written by some crazed anthropomorphic pop-evolutionist. The title alone seems to negate the very notion of random selection. Anyone out there think differently?

Let's get this much straight anyway: there is not a 50:50 chance that a god (any god) exists, there is an overwhelming probability that it doesn't. Agnosticism is a cop out.

Through a Glass Darkly is the second book I finished in 2007. Normally, I would not bother to review a whodunnit, but Donna Leon's books are also travel guides to Venice (I'm not sure, but I think she lives in Padua which is not far away). All the women I know also love her sleuth, Guido Brunetti - which is probably because he's a man written by a woman. Our Guido (our guide?) is a model detective in a police force surrounded by and impermeated by a kind of decadent corruption of 'old' wealth, stupidity, stoic poverty, careerists from Rome or Sicily and the mysterious and beautiful Signorina Elettra, secretary to his boss, with her magical powers of obtaining information by the back door (and to whom he is obviously attracted, but one is not sure whether it's her unapproachability or his natural consideration for his wife that keeps their relationship on a collegial footing). Guido is not terribly bright - he doesn't spot clues until the author is ready - but on the other hand he is very intuitive because he spots a crime well before it happens. The latter facility in particular, enables him to wander about the city during working hours tasting the local cuisine, the wine and the coffee while interviewing potential suspects and witnessses, dropping in on the odd museum or church to admire the aritfacts, visiting various palazzi, studying the characteristics of the Venetians and generally plotting a crime that he could solve until, hey presto!, the crime happens and (guess what!) he solves it. If the plot is a bit too far-fetched, Venice offers fabulous opportunities, so who cares. This particular murder happens in a glass fornace on Murano (remember the opening scene of Joseph Losey's Don Giovanni?), a place for a good murder if ever there was one. And this book opens with a quote from Mozart's opera - the one at the end where the Don discovers the flames of Hell.) Perhaps I'm prejudiced against cops, but even in Venice it's hard to imagine one as cultured as Guido (whose bedtime reading is Gibbon).

Guido's wife, by the way, is an academic (like Leon), but in the stories she mainly cooks (adding to the culinary tour). In one of the books, however, she was in a demonstration and got arrested - which caused domestic tension. It's clear that Leon's objective is not only to draw our attention to the wonders of Venetian culture, but to make a plea for its preservation against the march of modernity (speficially the petrochemical complex at Marghera which, according to her, dumps toxic waste into the lagoon).

I finished this book earlier in the week, but my internet connection has been down until now.

Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers is a bit of a tour de force. I'm sure there will be scientists who quibble with it, but I do happen to think that academics should try to communicate their findings to the masses and if the cost is over-simplification here and there, so be it. I'm particularly impressed at how complex the earth's climate system is, but he manages to explain it all without losing me too frequently! He argues that in recent years we have passed through at least one, probably two, 'magic gates' in 1976 and 1998 when there were more or less permanent changes in the global climate - brought about by a large rise in surface temperature of the western tropical Pacific Ocean, We now probably have permanent El Nino-like conditions. Moreover, because the ocean is a major carbon sink and releases carbon far more slowly than land, we are currently experiencing the consequences of changes that occurred 30 years ago. Yet, in the last 30 years our carbon emissions have increased dramatically. He also runs through the likely consequences of melting ice caps, loss of the Amazon forests, rising sea levels, etc, sorting out which hold the greater immediate and long-term dangers. Fascinating and scary reading.

The most important theme of the book is that human civilization has itself been propelled by the climate - that it is only due to the 'long summer' of the past 10,000 years that we've been able to develop agriculture to a sufficient level of sophistication to be able to support huge non-agricultural populations and all the trappings of urban life. For the previous 50,000 years or whatever it is since homo sapiens emerged, we had to battle relatively frequent climate changes. People - and other species - were constantly on the move either to take advantage of warming or to avoid encroaching ice (already there are measurable migrations of plant and animal species towards higher latitudes). Now that we are into an age of anthropogenic climate change, if we carry on with 'business as usual' most (perhaps all) of civilization as we know it is doomed.

One of his supporting arguments is Darfur. The desertification of the Sahel region over the past 30 years has not been caused by too many people over-exploiting the resources of a marginal rainfall area as so many people have been led to think. It was caused by climate change, specifically the warming of the Indian Ocean which led to the failure of the monsoon rains in the Sahel. Why, he asks, has this recent research finding (published in Science in 2003) received so little publicity? The answer is that the developed West is directly responsible for the disaster - Africans suffer diminishing resources because we have been pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The war in Darfur is not caused by religion or an evil Sudanese regime, it is an elementary struggle between cattle herders who, having run out of suitable pasture, have encroached upon agricultural land. There will be more Darfurs if climate change isn't stopped.

The book reminds me a bit of the Club of Rome book (forgot title) that was published in the 1960s. That made me sceptical of doomsday scenarios like this one - even if, like the earlier book, Flannery offers ways out that involve major action now that probably won't happen. Anyway, I do agree that there's no technological fix - whatever happens it will be the result of political changes.

Antony Loewenstein, My Israel Question, Melbourne University Press, 2006. Written by a 'young' (to me this means anybody under 50 and I could find no further details) Australian Jewish journalist, it is recommended by John Pilger which, hopefully, will not put you off. I plucked it off the shelves at Sydney airport because (a) it deals with my current obsession and (b) it is authored by a Jew - obviously one of the 'self-hating' variety, though I wanted to see what a non-Israeli Jew can think in spite of the bags full of hate mail and personal rejection he has the courage to ignore.

It is a really excellent book and I recommend it to everyone. Having been written by a journalist, it focuses fairly heavily on things with which the mass media are obsessed: (1) the mass media; (2) the politicians and (3) the influence of lobby groups - in this case the Zionist lobby. Nevertheless, it has a good coverage of the place of Zionism within Jewish ideology and the relatively recent tendency to equate Jewishness with Zionism and, particularly, with the state of Israel. This tendency is particularly strong in America and has perhaps more to do with American foreign policy interests than with the interests of world Jewry. In fact Loewenstein argues that the the US' uncritical support for right-wing Israeli regimes since 1967 is more likely to destroy Israel in the long run than to save it (the book was written before Israel's historic defeat of this past month).

He is convincing, not so much on the abiltiy of the Zionist lobby to influence foreign policy, but on its ability, when foreign policy is on its side, to suppress debate. He is also very convincing on the theme that runs through the book: Judaeism is not the same as Zionism and Zionism is not the same as Israeli state policy. On the first part of this sequence of inequalities there is a nice quote at the top of chapter 8: "There is no Jewish lobby. If there were, what would it lobby for? Jewishness? Chopped liver? The wearing of hats in the age of air-conditioning?" (Mark Dapin in Good Weekend, 27 November 2004). But there is certainly a Zionist lobby and, these days, this is an Israeli lobby. Today, he argues, the Zionist lobby is much more influential in Australia and the US than it is in Britain or France - largely because in the former two countries money buys influence more readily than (Jewish) public opinion. Where lobbies are more accountable, they are less extreme. Palestinian lobbies have less influence for the same, but converse, reason.

I was 19 at the time of the 1967 war (and absorbed in Vietnam, not Palestine) and didn't realize how it changed US policy in the Middle East. The present change in the balance of power in that region with the rise of Hezbollah and other popular movements will undoubtedly lead to a 'New Middle East' that never figured in Condoleezza Rice's imagination. But since the US has never attached particular importance to democratic regimes (other than for propaganda purposes), it is not hard to see a future shift in US policy that could lead to Israel's isolation - after all it is not very difficult to portray Israel as deeply undemocratic compared to, say, Iran. Israel's current advantage may rely a bit too heavily for its own good on Western racism, not to mention Western finance - without which its population might well be reduced to something closer to Palestinian standards of living. The Stanley Fischers of this world can easily resume their place in the American ruling class.

I'm wandering far from Loewenstein's argument here, but the drift is the same - namely, that if Israel continues to refuse to negotiate a settlement with meaningful concessions to the Palestinians, it is not likely to survive in the long run.

I finished reading this book by Barbara Freese. It has taken a long time because I didn't read it enthusiastically, even though I was really only skim reading. Let's see now, there are three important countries in the world, Britain, the USA and China. Britain developed coal mining first, then the US and then China. Without coal no industrial revolution. Yup! But coal is bad for us. It's dirty and produces a lot of CO2. Yup again! I did learn one or two new things and found some data I can use in class - on Manchester in the mid-19th century; it made your modern third world slum look something like Club Med. But it's not really a "human history". There's some of that in the first part of the book, but it's more about the commodity than the people.  An example: Freese points out the special nature of mining communities in the north of England, but I learned more about them through living in Britain during the 1984 strike than from this book (and that's not a great deal). Her chapter about the decline of coal mining in Britain is more about the higher level politics than about the people.

I made very good headway last night. In fact I probably would have finished the book except that I was interrupted at about 12.45 by the cheering that went up around the neighbourhood. Actually there's a pub about half a kilometre away and there must've been a huge crowd there. So anyway I had to stop reading and listen to the last 8 minutes of Japan v. Australia. A very satisfying result.

I appears that, from the AQ point of view, Huntingdon's Clash of Civilizations is correct. This is a war of Islam against the Crusaders (OBL says about Bush: 'he used the word'). There is more interesting stuff about religion. I had no idea that God is Dead (the death of god marks the beginning of religion, or faith). The meaning of this is that Mohammed was the last of the prophets - these being people to whom to god spoke directly. Mohammed, therefore, has god's final word and the rest of us can only rely on this last prophet in order to know what we have to do. All the other prophets are part of Islam anyway, so only when everybody subscribes to Islam will god's word be fully observed around the world. The main point is that this war is a 'metaphysical' war which attempts to re-constitute "the Middle East or Arab world by narratives other than those of nation or region as distinct demographic and geographical entitities characterized by collective political or economic cultures" (p. 74). In other words, it is an "effort to define the terms of global social relations outside the language of state and citizenship" (p.76), i.e., in terms of religion.

Note that this analysis only applies to the monotheistic world - AQ is not interested in Buddhism, Hinduism, etc. - demonstrating again that AQ's ideology is a direct reflection of the 'West'. Devji also describes this war as a 'sociable' war: "After every battle among them, the bonds linking Christians, Muslims and Jews become stronger, because they exclude every other enemy as well as every other interlocutor" (p 83).

Devji has some very interesting things to say about the part of the globe that we call the Middle East. The most obvious point is that Arab, Arabic language and Islam are by no means coterminous with each other or that region - which is itself a Western category, possibly based on the location of the so-called 'Holy Land' or perhaps oil. He also points to the cosmopolitan nature of the cities in the region - not only the sacred sites, but the commerce of the area have long attracted immigrants from all over. "Juan Cole, for instance, points out that it was Indian money and pilgrims during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that made Najaf and Karbala the most important sites of pilgrimage and religious authority for Shiites around the world" (p. 66). The Bin Laden family comes from Aden (in Yemen) which was for long a prosperous trading port on the Indian Ocean. OBL's father moved to Saudi Arabia in search of better opportunities when Aden went into decline. The cosmopolitanism of the cities (Jerusalem, Mecca, Dubai, etc) comes about because, while the majority of the population may be non-Arab, they cannot become citizens or have rights of permanent residence - even the natives are not citizens, but subjects - therefore "all relations among these populations tend to be cosmopolitan instead of national" (p. 72). Indeed, their relations are the relations of the global market place. It is no accident then, that the global jihad emerged from such cosmopolitan enclaves, with all their mobility and lack of attachment to the politics of local needs and interests.

This absence of attachment to location also explains the jihad as "a series of global effects" that is more the product of the media than any lineage of Islamic authority. For example, one very popular theory in Saudi Arabia that held the US government responsible for the destruction of the WTC, had as its evidence a piece of dialogue from the movie The Long Kiss Goodnight! There is another astounding description (p. 91) of the James Bond-like behaviour of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed after a bombing in the Philippines in 1994. Having immersed themselves in Hollywood fantasy, they use the media to create new images of Islam and the jihad which mirror the images of terror and devastation produced in Hollywood. It is, after all, only through the global media that the jihad becomes universal - otherwise it would be just a local murder or a local battle. Martyrdom itself "achieves meaning only by being witnessed in the mass media" (p. 94). It creates a global community because it is collectively witnessed in mass media. I'm reminded of Marshall McLuhan's 1960s work: "the medium is the message".

The act of witnessing also places responsibility upon the witness:

"... responsibility here does not depend on a knowledge of some truth, so that like the citizen who breaks the law without knowing it, the American who supports an anti-Muslim government without knowing it is held responsible for his actions. Rather than depending upon the knowledge of truth as an intellectual or epistemological entity, therefore, such responsibility depends upon an ethical choice made available only by the media's representation of martyrdom. In other words media images of the jihad, no matter how distorted or deceptive, force its audience of Americans and others into an ethical choice to support either its Muslim victims or their infidel oppressors - and all who make this choice are held responsible for it, having become participants in the jihad irrespective of their knowledge about its truth. The very spectacle of martyrdom imposes certain responsibilities upon its witnesses, and not the notion of some objective truth that might be found hidden behind it..." (pp. 100-101)

Thus AQ has no qualms about killing 'innocents'. There are no such people. However, ignorant we are and however little influence we have over our political leaders, we are all ethically responsible. This is a nice little straightjacket isn't it? Moreover, in our 'sociable' war, the anti-jihad makes the same demands: Bush says "you are either with us or against us" and makes the same appeal to metaphysics - we are either for or against an emotion called 'terror', while terror inflicted by 'our' side is no moral dilemma for 'us' either. Dead Palestinian children are responsible for their own deaths!

On a more optimistic note, Devji argues that, given its purely ethical character, the jihad could easily transform itself into a peaceful movement. "Violence... may be a necessarily short-term impact of the new Islam that is today best represented by the jihad. Among the long-term features of this new Islam are its fragmentation, democratization and individualism..." (p. 132). What the jihad does is to illustrate the limitations and failings of traditional (local) politics, which are goal-oriented and full of compromise, and the transformation of politics itself into a series of fragmented, democratic and purely ethical movements (such as environmentalism, anti-globalization, etc).

I would add that the violence of this jihad is very likely a response to the violence and repressiveness of local politics that lead to the humiliation of the Muslim individual of which OBL speaks much. In that sense, there is a clear linkage between the local and the global, so that the importance of local politics is not obviated. And I wonder what he means by 'short-term'. The separation of church and state and the rise of individualism in the West took a couple of centuries.

One more chapter and then I'm done. I'm disappointed at the lack of comments so far. Are you all waiting for the grand finale?