“Philosophy on the campaign trail” plus 3 more

Philosophy on the campaign trail
Philosophy Lite: The best years of our lives
Steam-age philosophy can take a nation a very long way
Possum Philosophy: Is NASCAR killing the proverbial goose?

Posted: 14 Aug 2010 12:26 AM PDT

14 August 2010

Listen Now - 2010-08-14 |Download Audio - 14082010

Tony Abbott has been admiring cows at the Brisbane Show, Julia Gillard has, it's said, been patronising Mark Latham by brushing him down the front, but is there anything ideological happening in this election? This week, we go in search of political philosophy and ask whether the world we live in - not just Australia, but the whole of the West - is any longer a world in which political elites can articulate the issues and meet the challenges of the age.

Transcript available Monday 16 August

Guests

Guy Rundle
Writer
Commentator-at-large, Crikey
Former editor, Arena magazine
London
United Kingdom

Publications

Title: Down to the Crossroads: On the Trail of the 2008 US Presidential
Author: Guy Rundle
Publisher: Penguin Books (2008)

Title: The Opportunist: John Howard and the Triumph of Reaction (Quarterly Essay)
Author: Guy Rundle
Publisher: Black Inc 2001

Presenter

Alan Saunders

Producer

Kyla Slaven

Sound Engineer

Charlie McCune

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Philosophy Lite: The best years of our lives

Posted: 13 Aug 2010 01:41 PM PDT

Originally published August 13, 2010 at midnight, updated August 13, 2010 at midnight

By Raymond Smith

If you were to stop and think back on your life, what times would you designate as the best years of your life? For some it would be when the kids were teenagers, remembering the great family times. I remember fondly those trips to Yosemite, Yellowstone and the Colorado mining camps; the canoe trips, the picnics, the hikes and the campfires.

And now, I am in the twilight years of life. Yet who's to say that the best years may not still lie ahead? Cicero (106-43 B.C.) said that old age is the crown of life, but that was when the aged person was honored for the knowledge and insight he had acquired. Could we not today share some of our wisdom with the young?

How do you define those best years? Do they pertain to financial success, fun times, spiritual growth, gaining knowledge and understanding, travel or adventure?

America is becoming a "gray" nation. Because of developments in medicine and therapy, citizens are living much longer than a century ago. Even for those who are invalids or in poor health, the later years can offer opportunities for mental growth and some forms of service - letter writing, for example.

Many retirees find that there are dozens of opportunities for serving their fellow man. Volunteerism can be a rewarding part of retirement - here are a few options: hospital and nursing home visitation, hospital and hospice volunteering, Salvation Army, Habitat for Humanity, joining a service club, being a disaster volunteer, providing transportation, Mid-Coast Family Services, National Park Service, Christ's Kitchen, food bank, animal shelter, homeless shelter. Retirement is a great time to get involved in politics. Be a museum docent, serve with the Victoria Botanical Garden or deliver meals on wheels. Check with the Chamber of Commerce for a listing of clubs and organizations in Victoria.

Believe it or not, retirement can be a time to donate money to charitable causes or political organizations. One doesn't have to be a rich philanthropist to donate to some worthy causes. Many successful businessmen find satisfaction in giving away their accumulated wealth. Take, for example, Andrew Carnegie, Warren Buffet and Bill Gates.

In those latter years, consider yourself a philosopher. Remember, a philosopher is a lover of truth, and there are many truths still waiting to be discovered. Life is a serious business, and what you discover may be shared with others.

Are there regrets in the advanced years? Yes, I'm sure everyone would have done some things differently. Yet the positives outweigh the negatives. In the retirement years: We take time to smell the roses; we ponder more seriously the realities of life. We have a greater appreciation of God and His provisions for us. Unfortunately, when some people go into retirement, they find disappointment and boredom. Man was made to be creative and productive and sitting around watching TV just doesn't fit the bill. Make those latter years really count.

Raymond F. Smith is a deacon at Fellowship Bible Church in Victoria and President of Strong Families of Victoria

Steam-age philosophy can take a nation a very long way

Posted: 13 Aug 2010 09:23 PM PDT

It's a good thing Tony Abbott wasn't about when plans were afoot to build the Sydney Harbour Bridge or we'd be stuck with a one lane carriageway and ''Stop and Go men'' on either side.

Or, imagine the debate in 1907 when the newly formed Commonwealth of Australia decided to lay a copper wire telephone trunk line between Sydney and Melbourne.

''Look, ah, Kerry, I'm, ah, no tech head but I reckon tin cans and string backed up by, ah, smoke signals would be much cheaper.''

While it's easy to lampoon the Coalition leader's attitude towards the upgrade of our telecommunications system, his approach to public investment merely reflects the huge swing in sentiment that has swept the globe since federation.

Back then, there were just 33,000 telephones across the nation and it took until 1935 for the network to be extended to Perth and finally Tasmania, all at enormous expense.

It was an era when engineers dominated, when grandiose plans were dreamt up and turned into reality and when the costs were simply borne by the taxpayer in the quest for nation building.

These days, economists and accountants rule. Everything has to be costed. Stringent financial tests are applied in a thousand different ways. Discounted cash-flow models, net present value, return on capital invested and replacement cost models are plugged into every major policy and project.

And when it comes to infrastructure, and what once were termed essential services, governments largely have abrogated responsibility to the private sector.

Power generation and distribution, transport, telecommunications, banking and to a lesser extent health all have been palmed off to private interests which have a much keener eye on efficiency and service.

For anyone old enough to recall the agony of dealing with the arcane bureaucracy of the Postmaster-General's Department or Telecom Australia, the switch to private ownership and management has been a blessing, or mostly a blessing when it comes to Telstra.

But there's a niggling concern. What if all our modern financial tests had been applied back at the turn of last century, when a sparsely populated nation was separated by vast distances and rugged terrain?

Had the bean counters run the numbers then, it's unlikely we would have had a telephone system at all and road and rail networks most likely would have been deemed unviable.

For there is one factor that all our modern tests ignore; the social return on capital invested. It is ignored for the very good reason that it is almost impossible to quantify.

But without that rail system, Australia would never have become one of the world's great rural exporters. That telephone system helped the nation overcome the vast distances between production and port, connected us to the rest of the world and was crucial in attracting foreign investment and boosting exports.

Those outlays were enormous in current terms. But they delivered dividends far beyond the scope of any accountant's imagination.

Social return on equity requires almost a quantum leap of financial faith, a Field of Dreams kind of philosophy; build it and they will come.

Of course, the dangers of wholesale adoption of that kind of thinking are obvious. Imagine if we had a megalomaniac prime minister, from Queensland for example, addicted to big spending programs and obsessed with leaving a legacy of national monuments.

In the past two years, the pendulum of infrastructure development and ownership, particularly in the West, has begun to swing back towards public involvement, a trend driven mostly by desperation.

In the US and Europe, governments now own everything from major banks to automobile manufacturers. And in Australia, there has been an acceptance that our national infrastructure has not kept pace with the economy, particularly during the early part of the resources boom.

According to the conventional wisdom, the free market is the most efficient means of allocating scarce resources. So private enterprise is far better equipped to make investment decisions than government.

That generally holds true. But private investment requires a return on equity over a fairly tight time period and certainly would not include benefits that may accrue to the community or the nation as a whole.

The upgrade of our telecommunications system is a classic example. Under Sol Trujillo, Telstra used its monopoly position to thwart the Howard and Rudd governments' attempts to improve broadband services.

For Telstra, the numbers just didn't stack up, particularly given the huge, though declining, returns it was extracting from the ancient copper network.

Both John Howard and Kevin Rudd proposed government intervention in the telecommunications industry. So does Tony Abbott. The difference is not just the scale of the project ($7 billion as opposed to $43 billion), but also in the changes to the competitive framework.

Under the Gillard proposal, Telstra no longer will have monopoly powers it can abuse. It will be a pure retailing company, competing on an equal footing with every other company.

Within the telecommunications industry, there is almost universal approval of the Gillard move to a full fibre optic network. Even Telstra has agreed to hand over its customers and its hardware to the NBN.

Telstra's competitors argue that if you are going to build a new national network, it is better to build the thing properly from the outset. Trying to upgrade it in 20 years' time will involve huge duplication costs.

The Opposition Leader may have demonstrated a spectacular lack of knowledge of exactly what kind of telecommunications system he was proposing.

He also may not consider the potential long-term economic benefits to the nation. But his single-minded devotion to the enormous costs involved in the project at least has one major benefit. It will focus the minds of those whose task it is to roll out the network to make sure it is achieved with utmost efficiency. For as we know, federal governments are not great when it comes to service delivery.

Possum Philosophy: Is NASCAR killing the proverbial goose?

Posted: 13 Aug 2010 12:35 PM PDT

By Stephanie Porter-Nichols
Published: August 13, 2010

By ROBERT "ROCKY" CAHILL/Columnist

On Saturday, Aug. 21, the Bristol Motor Speedway will host its NASCAR Sprint Cup night race for the 32nd time. This race is quite an event and is or at least has been considered the hardest ticket to obtain in NASCAR racing. The waiting list for tickets to the night race is considered one of the longest in all sports.
For most of its history, the night race has been an automatic sellout. A running joke among race fans was that your best bet to get a ticket was for a relative who already had one to pass away and leave it to you in his will. It is also told as the truth that a female race fan once demanded the husband's race tickets as part of their divorce settlement.
Ah but times have changed. This year tickets are still available, though they might sell out by the race. Still, there is no guarantee the streak will continue. Race officials blame the economy, and they may be right, partially. After all, a ticket for the night race in 1978 probably cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $25 to $35, while this was a fairly expensive ticket in 1970s, it wasn't so high that it was a deal-breaker. Today the very least expensive seat I was able to find on the tracks website was $109. From there tickets range upward, and depending on the package one chooses, can run as high as $220 and that doesn't include the fancy suites and boxes.
No doubt the economy plays a part, but it is not the sole problem. As my buddy Bristol said to me recently, "Yeah, the economy may have some small effect, but it's not the real problem. We didn't have a pot to (well you know the old saying) in, but we always managed to scrounge up the money for a race ticket." I had to agree, the most I ever paid for a ticket was about $8, but I was luckier than a lot of folks: I seldom paid for a ticket. My aunt Alice Smith was an executive at WCYB-TV, and she would often give me five or six tickets. The track would give the station bunches of free ones for employees, trying to garner free publicity. I always shared the bounty with my friends.
NASCAR, in my opinion, is on the verge of killing the proverbial goose that laid the golden egg. In an effort to attract more sponsor dollars, its leaders are forgetting their core fan-base.
I have been a car guy almost from birth. My Mom said I inherited this mental illness from my Dad. Part of being a car person, at least in the Southeastern U S, is being a racing fan, especially NASCAR racing. I remember when races were carried on the radio with only very rare events being televised. Back then, Dad was a BBQ chef extraordinaire. Yes, I know all males seem to believe they are wonderful BBQ chefs, but few are and Dad was among the best.
Almost every Sunday during the spring and summer, there would be a race, and Dad would be grilling. He would have me turn on the radio in the car and roll down the window so he and I could listen to it. We would also have a radio playing in the house so we didn't miss anything when inside either. My sister would fuss about having to hear the race. (Seems strange that she is now probably the biggest race fan in the family.)
In those days fans pulled for their favorite brand of car as well as the drivers. The drivers then were regular blue-collar guys who drove on Sunday, then spent the rest of the week working on their cars in small shops where the driver might just be the head mechanic as well. Some even had to hold down regular jobs to earn enough to keep racing.
But they were one of us, working-class folks who raced for the love of it. Sure, some of them managed to make a living at it, some even made a really good living, but still they were folks just like their fans. The kind of folks you might run into at the grocery store or at Wednesday night prayer meeting at your church (not Sundays, they raced then).
"They have gotten away from their core-fan base, the Southern working class fans. We used to go to pull for the cars [I was always a Ford-Mercury fan, while Bristol has always been a Chevy guy.]. Now you can't tell what brand of car it is without looking at the sticker on the front. It has become a generic sport. They have pulled several races from the Southern tracks and are giving them to the mid-west and northern tracks that are all these cookie-cutter mile-and-a-half long tracks that look and drive exactly the same. Sure, there are fans there, but they are not the dedicated old-school fans that will work overtime and scrounge all the extra cash they can to get to go to a race and pull for their favorite car brand," Bristol said.
He continued, "And they are all cookie-cutter drivers too. They are all young, polished guys who are millionaires and more into public relations than racing. You don't see any Dale Earnhardts or Cale Yarboroughs or the Allisons (Bobby and Donnie). Guys like Curtis Turner and even Wendell Scott would laugh today's drivers off the track. They all look and act the same; if you switched their name tags on their uniforms you wouldn't know the difference. And a lot of the fans have become cookie-cutter fans too. Lots of them are at a race, especially the Bristol night race, because it's the place to be. They're there to be seen not to watch a race."
I have to agree. As Bristol pointed out to me if you see a section of seats that are filled with people all wearing the same driver's number on their cap or their T-shirt, they are corporate folks. They're there because the company they work for has given them free tickets, and they are expected to be there to provide photo ops for the television cameramen. Sure some are there for the racing, but some are there because they consider it part of their job.
I guess part of this is sour grapes. I liked the old racing, where the fans pulled for the cars that looked like the ones they actually drove. And in truth, they were not that much different. And I liked the old-time drivers, the Richard Pettys, the Curtis Turners, the Junior Johnsons, the Harry Gants and the Cale Yarboroughs. I even liked Dale Sr. I better rephrase that; I respected him. He was a race fan's driver who would do anything and everything to win a race. I liked the fact that drivers would actually talk to fans, and it didn't cost you $5 or $10 to get their autographs.
At Bristol, after the race, they would open the gates in the stands and let the crowd walk down to pit road and talk with the drivers. I remember Tiny Lund, a huge man who became one of my favorites. After a race, my buddies and I were in the pits once and one of his decals was coming off the car. I started peeling it off when Tiny's booming voice roared out, "Hey boy, quit that." It scared me half to death. But he grinned, reached into his tool box and handed us a few. He told us they were hard to put on and he would rather give us new ones. I pulled for him in every race he ran after that. Today, if you managed to get that close to a driver, his private security guards would rush him away while more would march you right off the track, maybe even to jail.
Today's drivers are expected to be passionate only about their sponsor's products. If they have a little confrontation on the track or pit road, they get scolded by the NASCAR officials (the same ones that have almost ruined racing for me). I liked that fact that the drivers were human just like their fans. If they got mad, they showed it. They might even swap a lick or two, both on and off the track. But it only showed that they were serious about their sport. They wanted to win for winning's sake as much as anything.
Maybe it is just that Bristol and I are showing our age, but we'd both swap today's racing for the kind we used to love, any time, any place. I bet the old fan base would too. And I hope eventually this may dawn on the NASCAR officials as well.

A freelance journalist, Robert "Rocky" Cahill writes regularly for the News & Messenger. His Possum Philosophy column appears in each Saturday edition.

Philosophy

Saturday, August 14, 2010