There’s currently an excellent (and quite balanced) opinion piece by Adele Horin at the Sydney Morning Herald that is quite critical of Australia’s funding of elite sports:

But how much public money is a gold medal worth? In Beijing, each gold medal has cost Australia at least $50 million, says Kevin Norton, a professor of exercise science at the University of South Australia. Or, to put it another way, $12 million came out of the public purse for each medal of any colour. Now we’re told these sums are a pittance compared with what is needed to maintain our ranking in London.

[...]

So it would be a brave politician to resist the calls for more sport funding. But brave they should be. Stephanie Rice made us all proud, but that fleeting feeling came with a $150 million price tag. Politicians may consider that a price worth paying for her three gold medals. It bought sport-mad Australians a lot of pleasure, and that can translate into votes.

I’ll be up-front and admit to watching a small amount of the Olympic coverage—if our public funds are being depleted by this empty nationalism, we may as well get some small enjoyment from it.

But with a crumbling health system and a public education system that desperately needs more attention, not to mention a lack of funding in science and technology—you know, stuff that actually has practical, beneficial applications—we are still happy to blow up to $50 million dollars on just one Olympic gold medal. How can anyone justify this with a straight face?

Between this and the fact that the current host nation is a blatant violator of human rights, are these Olympic Games anything but a complete farce?

Those wacky Chinese can’t keep themselves from opening fire on Tibetan protesters, even while the eyes of the world are on them during this delightfully shambolic Olympic Games:

Chinese troops fired on Tibetan protesters this week and 400 people have been killed since unrest erupted in March, the Dalai Lama was quoted as saying in an interview published on Thursday.

The exiled Tibetan spiritual leader denied a comment attributed to him by Le Monde newspaper that 140 people had died on Monday when the Chinese security forces opened fire. But his office said there were casualties.

“The Chinese army again fired on a crowd on Monday August 18, in the Kham region in eastern Tibet,” said the Nobel Peace prize winner who is on a 12 day visit to France.

Zzzzz…

Let’s get back to discussing faked opening ceremonies and under-aged gymnasts!

I had another crack at the Political Compass today. I hadn’t taken the test in quite some time, so I was curious to see exactly where I fell within their 2D spectrum and if there was any change.

Here’s my result: Libertarian Left. No real change there.

But let’s be a bit more nuanced: in regards to social policy, I’m squarely in the libertarian camp (-5.23), but economically-speaking, I’m only marginally left-of-centre (-1.50). This fits my own intuition: I’m too centrist to be obviously left- or right-wing, but still clearly politically-defined in other ways.

Now, here’s the real shocker: according to their assessment of the 2007 Australian general election, I’m closest to the Greens, who were the only party in the same quadrant. The Greens are just a bit further left and much more moderately libertarian, but… Oh dear. I’ve always seen them as left-wing radicals using environmentalism to push an economic agenda and, well, maybe I should rethink things.

Anyway, take a look at Kevin Rudd’s ALP versus John Howard’s Liberals in the same graph. Truly, Rudd is Howard Lite—not that I dislike Rudd, but all those lefty uni students whose political memories reach back to 2003 (if you’re lucky) will surely be feeling like they won the consolation prize in the next year or so.

I personally realise that politics is the art of compromise and so appreciate Rudd’s efforts to bring things back more towards the centre after Howard’s rightward drift. In the current political climate, anything too far towards social liberalism is just a no-go, so people like Rudd and Barack Obama seem refreshingly moderate and sensible when contrasted with radicals like George W. Bush and, in his later years, Howard.

Take a look at the graph for the U.S. primaries, then examine the world’s current political landscape. Really, anything other than the authoritarian right is very, very unusual.

So that’s where we’re at: if you want to survive, politically, you need to simultaneously court (or at least not alienate) the authoritarian right (represented by the Christian right more often than not), then differentiate yourself by the degrees to which you’re authoritarian and right-wing. So, if by February next year we have a Rudd leadership in Australia and an Obama administration in the U.S., I’ll be very happy indeed. It’s the best we can do at this point.

Edit: I just want to add that, on the social axis, I’m closest to the Dalai Lama, and on the economic axis I’m closest to Pope Benedict XVI. I find that strangely appropriate, given my previous post…

George W. Bush isn’t Hitler; the latter at least managed to be a captivating public speaker—Bush doesn’t even have that much going for him.

Bush is the sort of person who is convinced he’s right despite the facts, not because of them. If need be, fabricate evidence to support your position because, after all, you’re right, and if the real evidence were in your possession, it’d obviously support your case anyway. This is Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness” in action.

So now we find out this:

Bush allegedly ordered the CIA to forge a handwritten letter from the head of Iraq’s intelligence service to Saddam Hussein that purported to link the Iraqi dictator to the ringleader of the hijackers who toppled the Twin Towers on 9/11, according to news accounts of Suskind’s new book, The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism. Such use of an intelligence service to influence domestic political debate could be an impeachable offense, Suskind writes.

The full post is here—watch the videos on that page at the least.

The most frustrating thing is the stubborn insistence by some people that Bush & co. did what they thought was best, blah blah blah. So? Many people commit evil acts while believing they’re doing good. I’m sure the 9/11 hijackers were certain of their righteousness as they murdered thousands of people, too. How is Bush any better?