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The Kyoto Protocol comes into effect today. A total of 141 industrialised nations have ratified the protocol and are therefore legally bound by it.

The Kyoto Protocol has always been clouded in controversy. Of primary concern (to me anyway) is that even its proponents accept that the reduction in the average global temperature in 2100 will be 0.15°C lower than where it would have been – and that’s only if everything goes according to plan (I think that figure was relevant only if all members of the treaty had ratified the Protocol, and all members met their obligations). I believe the projected increase in temperature over the period to 2100 is in the range of about 1.5°C-6.0°C, so 0.15°C is extremely small compared to the margin of error in temperature increase predictions. Given this, is it really worth the expense? Kyoto was always about politics, not about science. For the other side of the climate change story, visit EnviroTruth.org.

Having said that, hopefully the Kyoto Protocol will be a springboard to bigger and better things. For a start it ought to provide the impetus for spending on "clean technologies" research, which should have implications far beyond the Kyoto Protocol.

I still hold out hope for a more inclusive, far-reaching, economically and scientifically sound agreement to tackle climate change. Perhaps Tony Blair can use Britain’s presidency of the G8 to develop such a framework.

Britain: forward, not back. So states The Labour Party slogan for the upcoming election in the UK. I’ve added some punctuation to make it read okay in text, but I still have a problem with it. Surely the opposite of "forward" is "backward". Otherwise it ought to read Britain: front, not back, which I don’t think has any point at all. The Sunday Times also points out that the slogan may have been lifted from an episode of The Simpsons, in which a cartoon Bill Clinton makes his twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom speech. They might have done a little better.

Yesterday was a day of knee-jerk reactions, misunderstandings and jumping to false conclusions on my part. Some might know to what I allude, and the faster it is forgotten, the better. However, it seems that others may be guilty of perpetrating a similar crime against me. Maybe "crime" is a bit strong, okay, a lot too strong, but you know what I mean.

First, let me say that while I will not be pulling a Rob Schneider in this article, I do wish to respond to a certain critic. My response begins with agreement on certain points. I agree with the Indolence Log, when it says that I could have gone further with my definition of Patriotism. As a reminder, I said that patriotism could be defined as the love of one’s country, region or culture. In the Indolence Log, Anthony says:

Personally, I’d go further, and say that it’s also the love of one’s family, one’s friends and one’s neighbours. It’s also an expression of happiness and acceptance of the environment you find yourself in – that you think the rivers, and the climate and the mountains and the sights are wonderful and don’t want to change them or lose them; that you’re grateful for the homes and businesses and society your parents and their parents have created and built up.

I would have to totally agree. To me the word "culture" encapsulates some of this. After all, particular cultures, and I would argue most cultures, are tightly bound to the environment in which they have evolved. On this point, I think Anthony and I are in complete agreement, and any disagreement can be put down to semantics.

However, I think I have been misrepresented in Anthony’s piece where he assumes that my article was written in an anti-capitalist spirit. This could not be further from the truth. The article embraces capitalism, and suggests a regulatory mechanism that is not government imposed. That is, it proposes a type of market that is even freer than the one we are used to today. My position on capitalism and free markets is, by and large, very much toward the right. I suspect that some of the articles in The Thin Line have led its readers to believe that I must be a proponent of protectionism and collectivism because I am opposed to John Howard and George W. Bush. A careful perusal of The Thin Line should reveal that my disputes with those leaders relate to their views on issues such as Iraq and refugees. I am also convinced, maybe incorrectly, but convinced nevertheless, that those leaders knowingly misled us on the issue of WMDs in Iraq. Given this, I find it my duty to oppose them. In general, I do not oppose their economic policies. It might come as a shock to some that I have been known to vote Liberal, though in which election(s) I will not say.

I have, in the past, agitated against large corporations, but this is not the same as agitating against the market economy per se. I still see large corporations as a threat to creativity and diversity (so do many others, which is one of the reasons we have antitrust laws).

Going back to the heart of the issue, the reason I propose patriotism as a method to regulate corporations is not because I disagree with free markets. It is quite the opposite. I think, in a truly free market, there still needs to be a factor that resists the unfettered growth of corporations. Instead of government regulation and intervention, I proposed patriotism, because it seems likely to create smaller companies that serve smaller markets and to protect the particular cultural diversities catered to by those markets. Thus, it could help to minimise antitrust cases where the government is forced to step in. But why oppose the unfettered growth of corporations? I oppose any institution, be it a government, a corporation or an entire economy, in which there is a disproportionately large concentration of power. In the case of corporations and economies, and under the premise of free trade and therefore globalisation, such power can steam-roller the cultures of countries with less powerful corporations and weaker economies. The idea is to have culture, and thus the services and products with which the culture is identified, firmly entwined in the market. We live in a capitalist world, so our cultures need to gain a strong foothold in that world so that they can survive. I believe patriotism can help with that.

Finally, Anthony makes the assertion that America, possibly because of capitalism, is a far more diverse place than Australia. I’m not sure whether I agree with this or not; I may well do, but it doesn’t matter because it is completely orthogonal to the debate. Capitalism, with or without the aid of patriotism, may well help to create more diversity. But of primary concern, I believe, is the protection of those things that make Australia (or any other country or culture) different from other countries. I don’t want to see the cultures of the world disappear, and that includes the American culture. Furthermore, in this discussion there is an inherent difference between product diversity provided by the market and cultural diversity. Without a critical mass of love for a country or culture, that culture is doomed to die in a free market society. The reason for this is simple economics. Without some retarding factor such as patriotism, the bigger fish will win because it can create better economies of scale, thereby producing products more efficiently and cheaply than the smaller fish. Patriotism helps to ensure the presence of discerning consumers who form and preserve niche markets, and make it economically viable to produce goods that might otherwise have been squeezed out of the wider market.

This is not about being anti-capitalist or isolationist; rather it is about being pro-diversity where at least some of that diversity is tied to existing cultures.

In celebration of my impending thesis submission and just because we want to, Karen and I are off to France next month for a few weeks. We’re also going to the Netherlands for a little while to imbibe their culture. Well actually, Karen’s got this notion of bringing back some of those blue and white tiles from Delft, but I won’t be carrying them! :) We’re visiting Andry this weekend to get his opinion on the most important things to see in France.

I discovered something very interesting when booking flights online – at least when booking flights through Singapore Airlines’ web site. We’ll be flying into Paris, and then departing from Amsterdam. For this particular scenario, we were able to save $600 between us by booking two separate one-way flights rather than by building a multi-city itinerary. We’re on exactly the same flights that we would have been on had we booked using the multi-city itinerary builder. I called Singapore Airlines to find out why this was the case, but they couldn’t give me an answer other than to assure me that booking the one-way flights was a perfectly valid option. We’re not complaining!

With respect to my thesis, I finished writing a couple of days after Christmas. It’s already been proof read twice by Jaga and by me, so we’re definitely almost there. Give it another couple of weeks while I wait on a few more proof readers to provide me with feedback, and for me to then address their suggestions.

Last Saturday Karen and I headed up to the Sunshine Coast hinterland for lunch at Gardner’s Falls and to browse the craft shops on the main strip at Montville. It was extremely hot, but otherwise a lovely day.

There are more photos from Gardner’s Falls here.

Attribution (citation) conventions and etiquette are well established in most written media. However, attribution etiquette seems to be far more relaxed – and sometimes non-existent – in the Blogosphere. David Starkoff, for instance, has complained in the past (perhaps somewhat jokingly) about the non-attribution of ideas originating in his blog that have later resurfaced in other parts of the Blogosphere. David himself could surely never be accused of non-attribution because his Inchoate blog probably has the highest concentration of links per sentence of any weblog I read.

One of the problems with blog attribution is deciding who to attribute. I may read a blog article that links to an idea in another blog. Do I attribute the conduit or the originator or both? What do you do in the case where a blog entry links to a non-blog resource? Do you acknowledge the referring blog entry (i.e. does it deserve some kudos/Google juice?), or do you just link directly to the non-blog resource?

The problem is exacerbated if one or more links in the chain are out-of-band; that is, outside the realm of the Blogosphere (e.g. e-mail or face-to-face conversation). I’m not sure that there is a solution to the problem (if it is a problem).

My own feeling is that the conduit and the originator ought to be linked in blog articles. On the one hand, this preserves the information trail and the social network, and on the other it allows readers to quickly jump to the originating source or the resource in question.

Some fans of classic cinema might appreciate this commercial (requires Quicktime plugin) for the Volkswagen Golf GTI, while other fans might be horrified. I like it!

I’m still reading through The Commanding Heights. The pages have been turning over a little faster for the past few days. It’s been a fascinating read so far. Anyway, I came across this little passage in Chapter 9:

Perhaps nothing so much brought home the distance he [Mario Vargas Llosa] had traveled as when he encountered his old friend Gabriel García Márquez one evening at a theater in Mexico City. García Márquez had never abandoned Fidel Castro, and he was strongly critical of Vargas Llosa’s repudiation of the left. They got into an argument, and Vargas Llosa ended up knocking García Márquez out, which is something that one hardly ever gets to do to the subject of one’s doctoral dissertation.

This year’s Australia Day got me thinking about patriotism and the role it plays in the modern world. I have often believed patriotism to be one of the greatest scourges afflicting the globe. The kind of patriotism that promotes self-righteousness and a closed view of the world exudes the most pungent of odours – an odour that causes offence wherever it blows. Yet, I have come to the uncomfortable conclusion that patriotism plays an important positive role in the world today. Patriotism, it seems, is the guardian of cultural diversity.

Patriotism – in its wider connotation – is the love of one’s country, region or culture. It might be that the patriots among us act as a retarding force to the march of monopolistic cultures – those cultures backed by strong economies, which can spread throughout the world on the platform of globalisation. In other words, I am making the observation that, all else equal, the ability of a culture to devour other cultures – or conversely, the ability of a culture to protect itself from the influences of other cultures – is in direct proportion to the economic standing of the nation from which the culture originates. But why ought cultural diversity be protected? Why is it important?

Cultural diversity is of fundamental importance for aesthetic and economic reasons. In aesthetic terms, the disappearance of cultures means the loss of musical styles, stories, languages and cuisine. Everything becomes bland and unappealing. Different cultures find alternative solutions to the same problems. Diversity breeds creativity. There is a mountain of useful knowledge built up by all the cultures of the world. But of greatest relevance to the world as we know it is the role that diversity plays in the market economy.

Capitalism, many economists argue, works because we are all different. We each have something unique to offer, and we each have varying wants and needs. On some level, it is fear of uniformity and conformity that drove many nations away from communism and toward capitalism. But ironically, it is capitalism and the free market economy that is threatening to swallow our multifarious cultures and replacing them with a McDonald’s or Starbucks on every corner.

This kind of culture erosion threatens to undermine the very law that makes free trade worthwhile on a global scale: comparative advantage. Comparative advantage harnesses the fact that countries and regions are different. As these differences are eroded and as cultures disappear, comparative advantage has an increasingly smaller set of activities over which to operate. The demand for niche products and services declines, and so to do the specialised skills involved in the production of specific commodities. Uniformity encroaches, and there is a danger that, as they develop, countries will tend toward the same specialisations and efficiencies, thereby nullifying the law of comparative advantage. Perhaps this is a wild over-statement of the potential effect of culture erosion, but at the very least, the disappearance of cultures subtracts from the number of activities in which a country could have a comparative advantage.

What can be done about this in the absence of tariffs and subsidies? Modern (neo-classical) economics emphasises local decisions (self-interest) and a decentralised command-structure. It advocates small government and minimal intervention. As Adam Smith argued, resources will find their way to where they are used most efficiently by way of the so called "invisible hand". In such a decentralised system, what prevents nations being overrun with the ways and cultures of economically superior nations and regions? I argue that patriotism works as a natural, invisible, decentralised, non-legislative regulatory mechanism, which simultaneously upholds cultural diversity and national identities, and delivers variety to the global marketplace.

Capitalism is driven by the consumer. What consumers demand, capitalism will deliver. Thus, it follows that a large dose of patriotism, as foul tasting as it has seemed to me in the past, might be the best safeguard against the uniformity that globalisation and mega-corporations bring with them. Patriotism helps to shape demand for particular products and services. The level of influence patriotism exerts over demand for a product is directly proportional to the ferocity and extent to which it is practised within a nation or region.

Patriotism has the capacity to inject diversity into the marketplace. It can create demand for diverse consumables, and it can also protect the unique skills procured over the centuries by people in remote parts of the world. If capitalism proceeds in the absence of patriotism, we are condemning ourselves to a world of uniformity; a world in which the culture of the economically predominant nation consumes all in its path.

Patriotism does not preclude the celebration of foreign cultures, nor does it fly in the face of multiculturalism. What it does is ensure that cultures and languages live on. It protects against culture erosion, which could be a major side effect of globalisation. What I am talking about is not the caustic brand of patriotism practised by nations in the past and by some nations today as a result of a superiority complex. Rather I am advocating a pride in one’s nation and culture. Patriotism does not have to imply that one nation or culture is better than another; it can merely be the acceptance that, while we are all human, we are different and those differences are what make the world an amazing place. Therefore, as individuals and as nations, we ought to be proud of our heritage and the things that make us unique. Further, we have a duty to continue the traditions of our ancestors because it may serve a purpose in the future. Thus, aside from any intrinsic value associated with different cultures, there may be a real practical or economic benefit gained from them. The promotion of patriotism by nations and its practise by individuals can help to preserve cultural diversity in our world.

Capitalism is no good to us if it does not serve us; that is, any economic system must deliver the quality of life, the special products and services that are unique to particular regions of the world. If it cannot do this, it does not have a place in our world. Patriotism, then, could be the element that ensures that capitalism does not erode the world’s distinctive cultures.

Patriotism may not be as pungent as I once thought.