The statute books not always a reliable guide

One of the interesting things in the story out of Egypt today about a bunch of men being acquitted after being arrested on national TV for being at a bathhouse is this:

Five of them - the owner of the bathhouse and four staff members - were tried for facilitating "parties of debauchery, orgies among male homosexuals" in exchange for money. The 21 others were charged with practising debauchery and "indecent public acts".

It is not illegal to be homosexual or engage in homosexual acts in Egypt. But the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA) says the charge of "debauchery" is often used to crack down on homosexual activity in the country.

The charge is more often used in cases involving prostitution, but Egyptian legislation - specifically Law 10 of 1961, On the Combat of Prostitution - mentions "prostitution" and "debauchery" together.

The Collins English Dictionary defines the world as "an instance of extreme dissipation"; other descriptions relate to "sensual pleasures".

Homosexuality remains a social and religious taboo within Egypt. However, the country is not the only place where, while not illegal, it is punished or discouraged using other laws.

Goes to show that it's not always a simple matter of seeing what's on the books to know how laws are used in a country.

I also saw at the end of the LA Times report on the matter:

Other often-ostracized groups have been targeted as well; on Saturday, an Egyptian court sentenced a 21-year-old man to three years in prison after he declared on Facebook that he was an atheist.

 And this in a country where the President just got kudos for calling on Islam to reform itself.  He's got his work cut out.

Even more reason to not see a movie

I missed this lengthy commentary at the New York Review of Books in December which is an even stronger attack on The Imitation Game for inaccuracy than the one I had previously linked to.

It sounds to me very much like what happened with the Anthony Hopkins version of Shadowlands - the bones of a true life story but with the details changed enough "for dramatic purposes" that the movie ends up not being all that true to the spirit of the characters it portrays.

Tolstoy re-visited

Somewhere on the net tonight I saw brief mention of Tolstoy having had a venereal disease as a young man, and thought to myself "did I know that before?"  Googling around, I stumbled across a lengthy extract from Paul Johnson's Intellectuals, which I read around 20 years ago, and indeed, it did have a full chapter on the many - and I mean many - character flaws of Leo, including the bit about VD. 

Intellectuals remains the most amusingly appalling book about character flaws of the famous that I have ever read.  Even though I am clearly forgetting the details, I remember how much I liked it at the time.  Of course, later it came out that Johnson had engaged in a lengthy marital sexual indiscretion himself, which would not have been quite so hypocritical if he hadn't spent so much time in his columns criticising the British Royal family for not sucking it up and foregoing extra marital relationships as an example to the nation.

Anyway, back to Tolstoy.  Another website (PBS, so the tone is slightly less scurrilous) talks at length about Tolstoy's life-long, um, neuroticism? about women and sex.   It seems he would, in modern parlance, probably be classified as a sex addict, but seemingly spent his entire life not only   intellectually disgusted with it, but also blame shifting onto women. 

It's a wonder his wife went ahead with the wedding at all:

Leo Tolstoy waited until he was 34 years old to marry, but once he had settled on 17-year-old Sofia Behrs, "Sonya," as his bride, he saw that events moved very quickly. At his insistence, but a single week elapsed between his proposal and their wedding on September 23, 1862 -- and in the course of that week Tolstoy asked, really required, his fiancée to read the intimate diaries he had kept for much of his life.

Sonya, the middle daughter of the Tsar's court physician, had grown up in the sheltered, innocent circumstances typical of girls of her class and time, and she had scant knowledge of men, including the man she had agreed to marry, beyond mild flirtation and adolescent fantasy. But now, days before her wedding, she found herself plunged into the sexual autobiography of a vigorous man in early middle age -- page after unsparing page recounting his initiation by a whore when he was 14, the string of impulsive, guilt-ridden erotic adventures with parlor maids, gypsies, and married women, the repeated bouts with venereal disease, and finally, and most recently, the deeply satisfying love affair with a peasant woman, with whom he had fathered a son just a few months before proposing to Sonya.

"I don't think I ever recovered from the shock of reading the diaries when I was engaged to him," Sonya wrote nearly 30 years later. "I can still remember the agonizing pangs of jealousy, the horror of that first appalling experience of male depravity."

 This episode apparently features in fictional form in Anna Karenina.

The article gives a short chronicle of how their marriage deteriorated (and yes, I had remembered that it developed into a high conflict relationship - I wonder if that is made clear enough in that recent movie about the end of his life?).  But this detail shows his incredible insensitivity:

In Sonya's eyes the ultimate affront was "Kreutzer Sonata," a story Tolstoy wrote in 1889 about a man driven by hatred, jealousy, and sexual disgust to murder his wife. Aside from the murder, it was an exact transcription of his feelings about her and the state of their marriage. At the heart of "Kreutzer Sonata" is a savage indictment of marriage as "legalized prostitution," of women as vengeful sirens bent on seducing and controlling men, and of human sexuality itself. For Sonya it was as if Tolstoy had hauled her naked onto a vast public stage and proceeded to sermonize about her moral and physical hideousness. And on top of everything, after railing against the act of love as "perfidious" and piglike, he continued to force himself on her sexually. To her, it was a betrayal worse than adultery. 

I really think he should have spent more time looking into her eyes.   (Ha.)
 

Causation very hard to believe

Circumcision doubles autism risk, study claims - Telegraph

There must be a hundred different ways to confirm or (much more likely) debunk the question of whether they have found anything indicating causation here, given the widely varying populations of males with and without a foreskin around the world.  Must be lots of researchers doing up grant applications on the topic as I write.

Falling in love made easy

To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This - NYTimes.com

I had not heard of this study before, indicating a way to make a couple fall in love (or, at least, push them strongly in that direction?):

“Actually, psychologists have tried making people fall in love,” I said, remembering Dr. Aron’s study. “It’s fascinating. I’ve always wanted to try it.”

I first read about the study when I was in the midst of a breakup. Each time I thought of leaving, my heart overruled my brain. I felt stuck.  So, like a good academic, I turned to science, hoping there was a way to love smarter.

I explained the study to my university acquaintance. A heterosexual man and woman enter the lab through separate doors. They sit face to face and answer a series of increasingly personal questions. Then they stare silently into each other’s eyes for four minutes. The most tantalizing detail: Six months later, two participants were married. They invited the entire lab to the ceremony.

Interesting.  I wonder if there is some connection with mutual eye staring as a common occurrence during or after sex?

More about free speech in France

I've been reading up about the anti-Semitic comedian Dieudonne M'bala M'Bala at the New York Times, the New Republic and Wikipedia.

While convicted many times for anti-Semitism, and facing currently legally questionable bans on performing his shows, he apparently remains popular with the young, male Muslim population, as well as the National Front.   He ridicules the Holocaust, encourages disbelief that it happened, and is a 9/11 "truther". 

At a time when Jews have good reason to feel an increasing threat to their safety in that country, the example of this comedian perfectly illustrates the double edged sword of free speech, the subject of yesterday's post.  From a free speech purist's point of view, I suppose it may be argued that the laws that have been used against him have not succeeded in silencing him, and in fact may well have made him a martyr in the eyes of his fans, so why keep such laws anyway?  On the other hand, who can say what size following may he have developed if there had never been any attempts at legal hinderance to his views being expressed?

In any case, we can say as follows:  both the anti-Semitic comedian and the religion (including Islam) ridiculing magazine have been the subject of legal actions under French laws that do affect free speech.  Neither of them were actually silenced by the legal actions.  (The action against Charlie Hebdo was not successful.)   We can therefore say that the country has had both of their contributions to the "marketplace of ideas".

The problem is that in this marketplace, the ideas and facts we want all Muslims in France to believe are not spreading to enough of them fast enough.    

Update:   And here, from an Atlantic article by David Frum, is a list of the poisonous ideas far too many French Muslims have (including the anti-Semiticism promoted by Dieudonne):

A pair of Pew surveys in the mid-2000s, for example, found that substantial minorities of Muslims in every European country surveyed did not rule out violence against civilian targets perceived as anti-Islamic. Two-thirds of French Muslims said the use of violence in such a case was never justified, which is reassuring, but one-third felt that it was sometimes or rarely justified. Significant numbers—including an outright majority in Britain—refused to acknowledge that Arabs had carried out the 9/11 terror attacks. A plurality of French Muslims (46 percent) and a crushing majority of British Muslims (81 percent) considered themselves Muslims first, identifying with their respective European nations only to a secondary extent....

A survey of French Muslims in 2014 found a community seething with anti-Semitism. Sixty-seven percent said “yes” when asked whether Jews had too much power over France’s economy. Sixty-one percent believed Jews had too much power in France’s media. Forty-four percent endorsed the idea of a global Zionist conspiracy of the kind described by the Holocaust-denying French Muslim comedian Dieudonne. Thirteen percent agreed that Jews were responsible for the 2008 financial crisis.

Tackling blasphemy

In Defense of Blasphemy - The Daily Beast

Michael Tomasky here makes a well reasoned case for the world's governments to get serious about removing (rarely used) blasphemy laws from their own legislation, and then to put pressure on those countries where it's use really is a major issue.

From the Pew Research article that he links to:

Nine of the 50 countries in the Asia-Pacific region (18%) had blasphemy laws in 2012, and in Europe such laws were found in seven out of 45 nations (16%). In November 2012, the Dutch parliament dissolved its blasphemy law, which was drafted in the 1930s and had not been used for half a century.

In the Americas, 11 out of 35 countries (31%) had blasphemy laws, including the Bahamas, where the publication or sale of blasphemous material can be punished with up to two years imprisonment. The U.S. does not have any federal blasphemy laws, but as of 2012, several U.S. states – including Massachusetts and Michigan – still had anti-blasphemy laws on the books. However, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution would almost certainly prevent the enforcement of any such law.

In South America, Peru’s federal law does not formally prohibit blasphemy, but local government authorities have enforced penalties for it. In October 2012, a district mayor in Lima closed a public art exhibit that featured a naked statue of Christ after religious groups condemned it as blasphemy. According to the U.S. State Department’s International Religious Freedom Report, representatives of the local art community “expressed concern over censorship and freedom of speech” after the incident.

Blasphemy laws are least common in sub-Saharan Africa (three of 48 countries), according to 2012 data. In April of 2012, anti-slavery activists in Mauritania were charged and imprisoned for blasphemy after publicly burning religious texts to denounce what the activists viewed as support for slavery in Islamic commentary and jurisprudence.

 

Riding the stream

British Airways Boeing 777 approaches supersonic speed

Well, good to get away from Islamism for a moment, and read about the way a strong jet stream speeds up some flights.  Didn't know they sort of deliberately use it.

Not helpful, Rupert

As tweeted a short time ago:

Rupert Murdoch @rupertmurdoch · 47m47 minutes ago

Maybe most Moslems peaceful, but until they recognize and destroy their growing jihadist cancer they must be held responsible.

0 replies .405 retweets198 favourites

What if the free speech competition of ideas results in the better ideas losing?

It's completely understandable that pro free speech sentiment should be running sky high as a result of the bloodshed in Paris this week, but, perhaps once things have cooled down a bit, it will be time to consider some points that are not being much considered in the current atmosphere.

First, the almost trite, but nonetheless highly relevant, point that free speech is a two edged sword.  It allows bogus claims of current or historical fact, gossip, rumour and all sorts of poisonous attitudes and ideology to have an audience and influence.   The argument for free speech is that the good and true needs its own outlet to overcome the bad and false, and that, eventually at least, the better and true ideas will win.   But what guarantee do we have this process really works out for the best, or at least, is working fast enough in the modern world?

Surely, this is extremely relevant to the matter of the current state of Islam.

There has been some commentary from the pro-free speech side in the last couple of days that Western political correctness actually encourages radicals in Islam (and, perhaps, simple anti-Western sentiment in the Muslims more generally) by demanding self censorship from legitimate challenge to some of its ideas.

Well, in some limited respect I can see grounds for that complaint.  For example, I think some of the politically correct "hands off" approach to female genital "circumcision" is very ill considered; although, perhaps that's not the best example, as it is more of a cultural-regional thing that a particularly Muslim one.  Perhaps the case of actual laws forbidding insulting depictions of Mohammed is a good case, as is exampled by this story out of Ireland a couple of days ago.  But to be honest, I am not sure how many Western countries do have such a law anyway.  (Although, I did, by co-incidence, note just before the Paris events this week that British law has genuinely gone too far in making generic offensiveness a matter of criminality.)

But looking at the bigger picture, do the free speech advocates really think that if every bit of legal or (so called) self imposed "censorship" was removed that it would make any great practical difference to the state of Islam across the world?

It seems to me that there is a good argument to be made that the poisonous and false ideas which are distressingly highly influential in much of Islamic society (including those within the West) - the disbelief in the Holocaust; the beliefs that death for apostasy is a reasonable thing, that blasphemy should be punished by jail or worse, that the IS fighters are taking part in a great "end times" conflict - actually benefit from the fact that the internet and modern communications generally has given free speech a wider and more unfettered reach than it has ever had.  

This is why I think that the sort of reaction of "if only more in the West ridiculed Islam, the better things would be"  is shallow idealism.   What evidence is there that it would help win the competition of ideas?  Why should it?

 Let's be practical here:  if you are actually engaged in a life or death war time struggle with another nation (the West against Nazi Germany, for example) ridicule has a propaganda value but it is done with a clear, short term, end point in sight (the defeat of the other regime).     But no one in their right mind thinks the West is going to militarily wipe out all Islamic regimes with views we find quite medieval.  Modern trade relationships in fact mean that showing some respect to Islamic countries is in your economic self interest.

In any event, calling the desire to not cause offence on religious grounds "self censorship" is unjustified politicisation of matters relating to mere decency and respect.  Sure, the Right typically complains that the media feels a free hand to ridicule Catholicism or Christianity but won't treat Islam in the same way.   But if one feels that some attacks on one religion are in poor taste, I am not sure how insisting they attack another in the same way is meant to make amends for the former.  In the current situation, provided you accept that being religious and not being happy with ridicule of your religion does not of itself make you an extremist (as all people should), I think there are perfectly legitimate and well reasoned cases to be made on both sides of the question of whether mainstream media should re-print the French cartoons - and actually, I think either decision should be respected as a matter of editorial conscience and ethical arguments that led to no black and white conclusion.    

I also see that the argument has been put that Islam does not need "reformation", and that, if anything, the Wahhabi movement was its Reformation and was a regressive rather than progressive change.  What it needs is for the Enlightenment to reach it. 

This is a valid enough argument, and it is relevant to the theme of this post.   Unless you're talking about some of the really undeveloped Islam backwaters (rural Afghanistan) or countries which really do have effective free speech control over the internet and airwaves (Saudi Arabia, perhaps?) you surely can't argue that Enlightenment ideas are not already out there to be seen and understood by Muslims.

Isn't what's happening that in the marketplace for ideas, the ideas and values we want all Muslims to adopt are not winning out.  Or not winning out fast enough.   Not that there is a crisis in global free speech.

This is why I am not convinced by this column from Frank Furedi at Spiked, who notes that in education, both Britain and France has been accused of not challenging in the classroom Muslim student's disbelief of the Holocaust, or other ideologically driven views of history.   Well, OK, that may be true, but at the core of that problem is that the students have already come to school with set beliefs that they have inherited from their parents, mosque, and/or the internet, and such home bred beliefs and biases can be incredibly hard to dislodge.     And in the case of France, the free speech that allows Charlie Hebdo to draw rude cartoons of Mohammed has not made any difference to that problem.

Furedi seems to admit as much in his final paragraph:

The chain of events that led to the massacre in Paris may well have been sparked off by a classroom discussion in the banlieus of Paris or Marseilles. Some pupils were no doubt certain that the Holocaust was a myth. And the defensive way their teachers dealt with their points would only have strengthened their conviction, itself informed by their older peers at home. Throughout their teenage years, their alienation from French society would have gained in force. They then encountered radical Islam, a medium to express their alienation, and the rest is history.

He also adds as his final sentence:

But if Europe wakes up, this won’t necessarily be the future.

What he leaves unsaid is what Europe is meant to do, once it does "wake up", about the cultural segregation that he cites as being at the core of the problem.

I don't have clear suggestions either.  All I am arguing is that the true issue is what's happening in the competition of ideas and the dissemination of what is true historical fact, and that making a bit of a fetish out of freedom to ridicule is putting the emphasis in the wrong place.

Updates:

On re-reading this post, I realised I had not emphasised enough the role of the internet in enabling radicalism, rumour and false claims of all types to spread quickly and have influence. It has sped up the process enormously compared to what was previously possible with books, pamphlets or even broadcast media, given its 24 hour availability, instantaneous publishing, and the echo chamber effect where people with the craziest ideas can find a support network of the likeminded agreeing with and supporting them.  

Its exact role is going to be inherently hard to study or prove, but I have mentioned before that I suspect  that the political success of the climate change denial movement is virtually a creation of internet.  It is hard to imagine it maintaining the grip it has for so long without it.

Whether or not this will prove true of Islamic radicalising material is hard to say.

The issue of free speech and the internet is therefore particularly vexed, with free speech advocates routinely deriding (with rare exception) any suggestion whatsoever of government interference with content.    I am also curious as to what they think about hack attacks if they are well motivated.   It will be interesting to see if anything comes of the threatened hacking of Islamic extremists.   I would find it hard to be concerned if renegade hackers achieved things of value which Western governments consider they cannot.

Oh - and just after typing this, I have found a post from the University of Pennsylvania which makes the exact same point.  It proposes using a deliberate public-private campaign of messaging on digital media to oppose extremism.   Sounds good - except for the question of how to get it to be viewed by the people who need to see such content.   (The example of climate change denialism is again relevant - the fact that there is a huge resource of good scientific material on the internet to rebut their specific claims has actually had little effect on those who are ideologically committed to their view.  They simply dismiss such sites and will not read them.)

With respect to the competition for ideas generally, I think Mohammed El-leissey made some good points in his recent article at the Drum.   He notes that Western media pays little attention to the idealogical war being fought within Islam itself, and I was surprised to learn that Iraq has a satirical "sitcom" on TV about Islamic State.  (You should go view the separate story about that which appeared in October 2014.) 

While accepting this, it doesn't really go to the larger point that people like Bill Maher have been making (although in his case, with some exaggeration) - that across the globe, there is much to be concerned about regarding the apparent attitudes of Muslims, and the question is how to get "Enlightenment values" more widespread.

Kind of a depressing read

Blacklist proposed for fossil fuels : Nature News & Comment

Summing it up

I think the reaction to the Paris terrorism has been pretty encouraging, actually.   The Parisians themselves have been dignified and very impressive.  To a large extent, it has unified the Right and Left in revulsion.

Sure, more broadly, on both sides of politics, there will always be someone who makes silly and inappropriate statements, but I think the fact that this was an attack on a Lefty publication in a Left leaning country has meant that there has been actually next to nothing of the excuse making sometimes seen from the soft Left.   Waleed Aly wisely avoids any contextualizing about it, except to the extent of pointing out that, in Australia at least, anyone's risk of being a victim of terrorism is still vanishingly small.  This is a valid enough point, and perhaps even a needed response to the more extreme "We are at War!" commentary that comes from some.   Still, imagining that there are even a few hundred men in your country who are willing to commit extreme acts of terrorism for purely ideological reasons is not encouraging.

Which brings me to the point:  yes, we've all know for quite a while now extreme or radical Islamism is not compatible with Western values; there is actually no new news in that - the question is how to deal with it, especially in your own country.

And here it seems to me no one has complete answers.   Certainly, some are more useless than others, and  here's roughly how I see it:

*  strong conservatives mutter about ending all Muslim immigration and refuse to believe that moderate Islam exists at all.  Always prepared to see the end of the West as being just around the corner due to what is still a small minority of their population, most of which is not radical; they always want to leap to exaggerate a (claimed) weakness of  most citizen's attachment to Western values.   From such unrealistic premises, you can't expect useful contribution at all. 

*  the libertarian Right are the most obsessed with privacy and most opposed to increased surveillance by security services.  They are also most obsessed with free speech, to such a degree that it seems some think that not causing offence to moderate Muslims is harmful to the cause of de-radicalising the radicalised - a position I find hard to fathom.  They exaggerate the effect of something like s18C RDA, acting as if its existence is the greatest crisis to free discussion ever, despite the fact that it doesn't even address religious discrimination (although some State legislation does) and no one can go to jail for breaching it.    Some also have a silly "open borders" idea, in which they (oddly) come close to the Greens soft and impractical position on this.   And let's not mention their nutty obsession with guns, and how they think arming everyone helps a society be safer.   All in all, they (both libertarians and the Greens) are therefore all over the shop, and have no great practical contribution to make.

*  the soft Left:  can spend too much time on contextualising and fretting how it really is our own fault for not being nice enough to men before they become radicals, and while they do have some suggestions for better social integration (more sports clubs for young Muslim men, I heard this morning) but they all sound rather whimpy and well intentioned but hardly convincing.

*  the "hard" Left:   well, not sure that it really exists anywhere apart from a few corners of Europe, although many on the Right put virtually the whole of France in that category.   But really, if you consider the ban on face coverings as one of the most interventionist ways of seeking to get better cultural integration of  Muslims that has been attempted anywhere, those on the Right should at least be congratulating the country on the attempt.   (I guess that whether it's an idea that appeals more to the Left due to it being a legislative attempt at social manipulation that they tend to like, or to the conservative Right, which just wants to make life as difficult for Muslims as they can, is hard to say.)   Of course, it's not clear that its working, but hey, what is?

In any event, as I say, no one has all the answers.   Reasonable surveillance powers for our intelligence services make sense;  effective gun control and potential weapon checks and balances (such as the controls on potential bomb making ingredients) make sense;  as does active action against radical leaders encouraging killing, of course;  continued engagement with moderate Islamic leaders makes sense.

But ultimately, radicalism within Islam probably has to burn itself out within Islam, and its unclear how much the rest of us can do to assist that ideological (and actual) war.

Update:  it has occurred to me, I should probably say that the conservative Right takes a too strongly one-eyed view always in favour of whatever Israel does, and the hard Left - and sometimes the soft Left too - can be too one-eyed in favour of Palestine.

Before anyone gets too carried away with accusing any on the Left of "appeasement" of Islamism...

...have a read of some of the extraordinarily inane political point scoring attempted in American Right wing media sources in light of the attack.

I also note that David Leyonhjelm could not resist the temptation to (indirectly, via re-tweet) re-publish his "if only more people had guns for self protection" line.  That's pretty offensive, in my books:

Of particular interest at the moment

Reforming Islam: Where change comes from | The Economist

Decent analysis, but light on suggestions for solutions

Europe’s confused debate about Islam and terrorism: Europeans are both too Islamophobic and too timid about facing the roots of Islamic fundamentalism.
Well, not just "light".  Actually non-existent. 

Free speech where it's genuinely an issue

Is it right to jail someone for being offensive on Facebook or Twitter? | Law | The Guardian

The article may be from mid 2014, but it really is quite surprising to read about the law in the UK, and how "offensiveness" in on line communications there has led to jail terms (and, no doubt, hideous legal expenses to those who have escaped conviction.)

Once again, I will make the observation that Australia seems to often manage to strike the happy medium between the two extremes one sees between the US on the one hand, and Britain or other parts of Europe on the other.

And it is pretty puzzling that Britain manages to exist without serious internal debate about this issue, especially when in other respects it has a very retrograde social approach to matters such soft porn in newspapers.  I mean, why are those who want any form of offensiveness on line illegal not prominent in seeking to have Rupert Murdoch stop using soft porn as offensive to women?    Or, I guess, is it the case that the page 3 girl is seen there by some as the last bastion of "free speech", or some such guff?   It's a very mixed up country, it seems...

Cater goes "frightbat"

Long March with bra-burning Bill | The Australian

I just got around to reading Nick Cater's column from yesterday, in which he gets all worked up about Bill Shorten and one line about women he used in November.   In the course of his column, Cater adopts the immature "frightbat" terminology invented by Tim Blair.

I find this all very strange.   Immaturity in politics used to be the province of the young Left.  (And indeed, it's still to be found there - it always will, while ever young people are generally more idealist than pragmatic in their early political views.)

But with this bunch of nutty Right wannabe culture warriors (all climate change deniers, by no coincidence at all) who want to try to provoke fights over matters where the great majority of the public and governments have become centrists anyway, you see so many of them openly showing rude immaturity.

Yet they are not of tender years themselves.  In fact, they skew heavily to white, male and over 50.  Or being Judith Sloan.

Strange, very strange. 

A set of grooming observations

*  My favourite deodorant is now made in South Africa and seems to me to not be as good as it used to be.

* I was given after shave balm from L'Occitane as a Christmas gift, and I note that it has "wild juniper" in it.  It does remind me of gin a little bit.  It's nice.

*  At Daiso, the cheap Japanese style "dollar" store, I bought a metal dental pick several months ago.  It certainly does help with that problem which is not uncommon - the formation of "scale" behind the lower front teeth, regardless of how routinely the area is brushed.  I once asked a dentist why it forms there in particular, and the answer is to do with the close proximity to salivary glands and the fact that saliva contains calcium and other ions.   Here, from the internet, I see confirmation of this:

Calculus formation is related to the fact that saliva is saturated with respect to calcium and phosphate ions. Precipitation of these elements leads to mineralization of dental plaque giving rise to calculus. The crystals in calculus include hydroxyapatite, brushite, and whitlockite, all of which have different proportions of calcium and phosphate in combination with other ions, such as magnesium, zinc, fluoride, and carbonate.

The cheapo dental pick I am using does seem very pointy, though, and I do worry that if it is not used cautiously enough, I may damage real tooth enamel.  So far so good, though.

Addiction considered

What Heroin Addiction Tells Us About Changing Bad Habits : Shots - Health News : NPR

I remember Theodore Dalrymple citing the American soldiers returning from Vietnam who successfully kicked the heroin habit as a reason to not overly pander to heroin addicts who claim an inability to get off methadone.  (My post about this is here.)

Well, this NPR article puts more flesh on the bones of the Vietnam vet story, and makes the point that researchers think it is the change of environment that makes all the difference.

This makes some sense, and also suggests a reason why urban addicts who are stuck in their domestic environment may well find it harder than returning soldiers to kick drug habits.

It also suggests why remote aboriginal communities with drugs problems look so hopeless.

Not decanting babies any time soon

The High-Tech Future of the Uterus - The Atlantic

Quite a good article here on the remarkable medical advances with respect to the uterus, as well as looking at past ideas (artificial wombs, or "in-vitro gestation") that no longer look viable.

This section is particularly interesting:

Since Liu’s mouse experiments, the medical community has more or less abandoned in-vitro gestation. The past decade saw a renaissance in transplant technology, and advances in the burgeoning field of human prenatal epigenetics have rendered gestation outside a mother’s body a less plausible concept. Scientists are learning more about the interplay between fetal
development and the mother’s whole body—not just her uterus.


“The fetus gets an advantage by developing within a maternal body,” says Janet DiPietro, associate dean for research at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. DiPietro oversees the Johns Hopkins Fetal-Development Project, a 20-year endeavor that tracks how
physiological aspects of the maternal-fetal bond shape development. DiPietro told me that everything from a mother’s circadian rhythms to her posture sends cues to the growing fetus.

“The maternal voice is heard very well, which probably sensitizes the baby to the sounds of their own language. Amniotic fluid develops the odor of certain foods that women eat, and so there’s a notion that cultural likes and dislikes are transmitted to the fetus via the amniotic fluid,” she says, “So the maternal context provides an environment that goes far beyond the direct circulatory-system connection.”

DiPietro explains that in the future, an artificial-uterus transplant is “far, far more likely” than in-vitro gestation, in part because the placenta, which grows from the uterus after implantation, is “one of the most enigmatic organs that we have.” Scientists can’t understand it, let alone construct it from scratch. The complex interplay between the placenta—which grows from the fetus’s own cells—and the mother’s blood flow, immune system, and circulating oxygen has been so poorly researched that Alan Guttmacher, director of the National Institute of
Child Health and Human Development, recently called it “the least-understood human organ.” But with a bioengineered uterus, the assumption is that if you get the uterus right, a placenta,
amazingly, will grow on its own once the transplant recipient becomes pregnant.

The other half speaks

Robert Webb: Peep Show has taught me we need to let women be idiots, too

David Mitchell, who I think has been the funniest man on British TV for quite a few years now, has worked a lot with Robert Webb, but I have never seen the latter writing or saying anything alone.  Well, that's now been corrected by the above article in The Independent.

Like Mitchell, it's very easy to mentally hear his voice in his writing.

As for Peep Show, which has been on for years but I have only been intermittently watching it for 18 months or so, it really is one of the pretty extreme examples of the cringe inducing comedies of embarrassment that Britain seems to specialise in (nearly to the exclusion of all other sitcom styles, as far as I can tell.) 

It is something of a guilty pleasure - the language is far too unnecessarily vulgar too often; some of the actions of some of the characters are just a bit too appalling to feel real; and you can start to feel a kind of claustrophobia from spending even 30 minutes with such hopeless losers.  But for all of that, it can be intermittently very funny.  I think both Mitchell and Webb are very good comedic actors; I just wish the material they were working with in the show was not always so relentlessly bleak about their character and prospects....

Can someone explain to me how this makes sense?

I see that Judith Sloan continues her charm offensive [deep, deep sarcasm there]  at Catallaxy by calling Piketty's Capital in the Twenty First Century "unreadable sludge"; laughs about how it is probably not fully read by most people who buy it (yeah, so by that standard Stephen Hawking's career is worthless too, I guess); and refers to her Australian column where she discusses the book  a little bit more.

Unsurprisingly, she's enamoured of McCloskey's critique of the book, which she explains as follows:

Her central criticism of the book is that Picketty does not include human capital when he discusses (and measures) the accumulation of capital over the several hundred years.
“The only reason to exclude human capital from capital appears to be to force the conclusion Piketty wants to achieve, that inequality has increased, or will, or might, or is to be feared”, she writes. “If human capital is included, the workers themselves now in the correct accounting own most of the nation’s capital and ­Piketty’s drama from 1848 falls to the ground”.

Now, I had read McCloshey's lengthy (and passive aggressive) review of the book at Catallaxy, and didn't understand that point at the time.

I still don't understand it.

OK, so let's Google what "human capital" means, and I take it that it means human education and skills.  

So what?   Going back a century or two, and by comparison, I'm sure the total world "human capital" has increased massively.   Widespread literacy would surely account for a huge slab of it.

But how the hell does some attempt at accounting for that supposed to offset the increasing disparity in actual wealth that Piketty argues is happening and likely to continue to intensify if corrective measures aren't put in place? 

Are we supposed to feel consoled that the poor at the start of the 21st century may well have a high school diploma, whereas 100 years ago they may have only had finished primary school?  Does an unemployed person with a degree somehow experience poverty less because of their degree?   [In fact, they will likely have an un-serviced debt that the unemployed high school graduate won't - no?]

Now, I can understand the argument that poverty today being not what it used to be - all but the poorest of the poor in the West at least have a refrigerator and TV now,  for example - is a reason not to fret so much about rising inequality, but that is nothing to do with "human capital" as far as I can tell. And I don't agree with the argument anyway - just in case you were wondering.

If someone can explain the logic or common sense in what Sloan finds convincing, please let me know.

About the last cold Chicago winter

From the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society:

The winter of 2013/2014 had unusual weather in many parts of the world. Here we analyse the cold extremes that were widely reported in North America and the lack of cold extremes in western Europe. We perform a statistical analysis of cold extremes at two representative stations in these areas: Chicago, Illinois and De Bilt, the Netherlands. This shows that the lowest minimum temperature of the winter was not very unusual in Chicago, even in the current warmer climate. Around 1950 it would have been completely normal. The same holds for multi-day cold periods. Only the whole winter temperature was unusual, with a return time larger than 25 years. In the Netherlands the opposite holds: the absence of any cold waves was highly unusual even now, and would have been extremely improbable half-way through the previous century. These results are representative of other stations in the regions. The difference is due to the skewness of the temperature distribution. In both locations, cold extremes are more likely than equally large warm extremes in winter. Severe cold outbreaks and cold winters, like the winter of 2013/2014 in the Great Lakes area, are therefore not evidence against global warming: they will keep on occurring, even if they become less frequent. The absence of cold weather as observed in the Netherlands is a strong signal of a warming trend, as this would have been statistically extremely improbable in the 1950s.

Capsule summary: The winter of 2013/2014 was notable in central North America for its persistent cold, the cold waves were not unusual. The absence of cold waves in Europe was statistically more extreme.

Catching up with Kruggers

Paul Krugman has been writing good stuff recently, including his one on Reaganolatory; how the anti-Keynesians keep making claims about inflation and Keynesianism that are wrong; his nominated most important chart of 2014 (although it's not that easy to understand that one);  and the interview in which he discusses some science fiction-y ideas as well as economics.

From that last link, I liked this discussion about whether super AI is really a threat, or not:

Ezra Klein: But let’s assume it does emerge. A lot of smart people right now seem terrified by it. You've got Elon Musk tweeting, "Hope we're not just the biological boot loader for digital superintelligence. Unfortunately, that is increasingly probable." Google's Larry Page is reading Nick Bostrom’s new book Superintelligence. I wonder, reading this stuff, whether people are overestimating the value of analytical intelligence. It’s just never been my experience that the higher you go up the IQ scale, the better people are at achieving their goals.

Our intelligence is really lashed to a lot of things that aren’t about intelligence, like endless generations of social competition in the evolutionary fight for the best mates. I don’t even know how to think about what a genuinely new, artifical intelligence would believe is important and what it would find interesting. It often seems to me that one of the reasons people get so afraid of AI is you have people who themselves are really bought into intelligence as being the most important of all traits and they underestimate importance of other motivations and aptitudes. But it seems as likely as not that a superintelligence would be completely hopeless at anything beyond the analysis of really abstract intellectual problems.

Paul Krugman: Yeah, or one thing we might find out if we produce something that is vastly analytically superior is it ends up going all solipsistic and spending all its time solving extremely difficult and pointless math problems. We just don't know. I feel like I was suckered again into getting all excited about self-driving cars, and so on, and now I hear it's actually a lot further from really happening that we thought. Producing artificial intelligence that can cope with the real world is still a much harder problem than people realize.

Speaking of movies...

Just before Christmas, I found in a remainder store a book by Australian director Bruce Beresford "Josh Hartnett DEFINITELY wants to do this.."  [Subtitle - True Stories From A Life in the Screen Trade.]

Published in 2007, it's simply his diary notes from 2003 to 2005, when he seemed to be caught in a period of "development hell" on several projects.   Ironically, the only movie he actually directs in this period is one which went straight to DVD in the US, despite its big name stars (John Cusack and Morgan Freeman).  (He really did not want to do it at all, but it's the one he ends up committed to.)

I have a vague recollection of reading some reviews of the book at the time it came out, but I'm glad I stumble across it.  It's a really fascinating, amusing, almost disturbing, insight into this bizarre business.


You have to wonder how anything good ever manages to get out of such a horrendous system, which really does seems extraordinarily full of chronic liars, exaggerators, the intensely libidinous, vanity filled stars, and producers who delegate artistic decision making to mere college graduates.  About the only thing he doesn't seem to mention is recreational drug taking in the industry - perhaps that really is a bit 1970's - 80's now.

I'm not all that fussed with Beresford's own output, which ranges wildly in style ("Adventures of Barry Mackenzie", "Puberty Blues" - yuck - "Breaker Morant" - pretty good -  "Tender Mercies" - haven't seen it, and "Driving Miss Daisy" - way over-rated -  to name a few) but he's had such a long career on all continents that his extremely frank comments on the industry  sound very convincing.   He also, surprisingly, is apparently regarded by some as right wing.  (Well, he certainly is a long term friend of conservative-ish Barry Humphries, but it seems clear he is left sympathetic, just not as invested in it as many on the Left in the arts are.  He is also sensible and dismissive of those on the Left who do things like semi defend the Castro - or worse - communist regimes.)

Amongst other snippets from the book:

* an American producer asked him to change the name "Singapore" in war drama Paradise Road because it "sounded silly." 
* Harrison Ford did not say a word to him - just a few grunts - during a lunchtime meeting.  (I had heard that one before.)
*  Makes the observation that a director barely has to know what he is doing, but if the technicians around him do, a film will still be made.
*  Directors have to have a medical examination - often a few - to satisfy the insurers before they are hired for a movie these days.
*  Recently retired Australian movie critic Evan Williams had 3 (or 4?) daughters who all got caught up in an Indian cult.

Perhaps the thing best illustrated by the book is the line by  famous screenwriter William Goldman that in Hollywood "nobody knows anything."   I mean, Beresford himself admits he's made totally wrong calls on movies which turned out to be smash hits.  He also spends a lot of effort during the period of the diaries trying to get made his own adaptation of a historical Australian novel I certainly have never heard about and which ends with the central character going insane.  Don't see much box office potential in that, myself...

On the other hand, a lot of what he says does strike a cord of common sense.

What he doesn't address is the one thing I still puzzle about - how the move to digital technology in both filming and projection has (apparently) completely failed to made movie making a cheaper, quicker, more economical business.

 It's clear that anyone who manages to get their screenplay made into a film with significant exposure to the market is extraordinarily lucky.   Which, like the hundreds of budding actors each year who never get beyond being wait-persons in LA restaurants, is a little depressing.

Still, a surprising enjoyable read.

Animation reviews

I've seen 3 animated films over the last week or two, and here are my thoughts on each:

*  Big Hero 6:   a very pleasing and exciting mashup of Marvel movie style action (which, to my mind, plays better in animation than with real life actors on obviously CGI filled screens) and revenge themes; Pixar style superb animation; and eye moistening Disney style (when they get it right) emotionalism.   

To elaborate a bit further:  the action sequences reminded me a bit of The Incredibles - it may be completely unrealistic, but with animation, you can avoid worrying about that but just be pleased by the visual excitement.  (Contrast some of the ridiculously big falls that characters are meant to walk or run away from in some big budget live action films these days.) 

The animated world it's set in is delightful and (as I read in someone's review) like an upbeat version of the setting of Blade Runner.  And the emotionalism - I think they get it just right. 

Both my kids said immediately after it finished that they wanted to see it again - not such a common reaction these days - and that speaks for itself.

*  Penguins of Madagascar:  sure, there are laughs to be had from some of the funniest support characters from the Madagascar movies; but really, with the villain being an evil octopus that manages to pass itself off as human (happens all the time), the movie is too obviously pitched at too young an audience.  

Somewhat disappointing for this reason.  Sure keeps a lot of Indian animators in work, though.

[I see that the less than expected box office has renewed discussion of whether Dreamworks animation is - sorta - in trouble.   They do have a fair bit of trouble with story strength, if you ask me.]

*  The Wind Rises:   finally caught up with Miyazake's semi-historical film about the famous (in Japan) lead designer of the Zero fighter.

Lavishly animated in the very pleasing Miyazake painterly style, I found it always engaging, and continually raising the question "I wonder how accurate that part of the story is?"

I see from articles like this one that it is more accurate in tone than in many details, and sort of merges two sources (one fictional) together.  I don't think it matters much, as the fairly extensive dream sequences make it clear that the details are often coming from the mind of Miyazake.

I find the narrative in his films often starts petering out in interest in the last third, but this one really was good to the end.   This makes it one of his strongest films, and well worth seeing.

As always, if your DVD or Blu-ray copy has a press conference with Miyazake as a special feature, do try to watch it.  He's again a cranky about certain questions, but it makes him pretty endearing.  (For example, he's really unhappy about being asked persistently about crying when seeing the completed movie.)

Yay for Free Will

Although it appears that Daniel Dennett has been making this argument for some years now, I haven't followed him closely.

In any event, the way he explains his position regarding free will in this interview extract that recently appeared on Salon is, in my opinion, very convincing.

It's good to see a professional philosopher type explaining well a line of argument that, I always felt  during idle showertime thoughts on the topic, made a lot of common sense.  Here are some key sections:

NW: The classic description of the problem is this: ‘If we can explain every action through a series of causal precedents, there is no space for free will.’ What’s wrong with that description?

DD: It’s completely wrong. There’s plenty of space for free will: determinism and free will are not incompatible at all.

The problem is that philosophers have a very simplistic idea of causation. They think that if you give the lowest-level atomic explanation, then you have given a complete account of the causation: that’s all the causation there is. In fact, that isn’t even causation in an interesting sense.

NW: How is that simplistic? After all , at the level of billiard balls on a table, one ball hits another one and it causes the second one to move. Neither ball has any choice about whether it moved; their paths were determined physically.

DD: The problem with that is that it ignores all of the higher-level forms of causation which are just as real and just as important. Suppose you had a complete atom-by-atom history of every giraffe that ever lived, and every giraffe ancestor that ever lived. You wouldn’t have an answer to the question of why they have long necks. There is indeed a causal explanation, but it’s lost in those details. You have to go to a different level in order to explain why the giraffe developed its long neck. That’s the notion of causation that matters for free will.
 ....

 NW: So that’s an evolutionary hypothesis about giraffes’ necks. H ow does it shed any light on the free will debate?

DD: If I want to know why you pulled the trigger, I won’t learn that by having an atom-by-atom account of what went on in your brain. I’d have to go to a higher level: I’d have to go to the intentional stance in psychology Here’s a very simple analogy: you’ve got a hand calculator and you put in a number, and it gives the answer 3.333333E. Why did it do that? Well, if you tap in ten divided by three, and the answer is an infinite continuing decimal, the calculator gives an ‘E’.

Now, if you want to understand which cases this will happen to, don’t examine each and every individual transistor: use arithmetic. Arithmetic tells you which set of cases will give you an ‘E’. Don’t think that you can answer that question by electronics. That’s the wrong level. The same is true with playing computer chess. Why did the computer move its bishop? Because otherwise its queen would have been captured. That’s the level at which you answer that question.

Happy New Year, possums

Guess what?  Possums have returned to the under-the-balcony hidey spot after a full year's absence.

Have I mentioned this story here before?  In December 2013, we had a contractor come in to replace a retaining wall in the back yard, and this involved laying down a concrete base.  He put the (inherently loud) concrete mixer - you know, this type of thing:

- in the front yard, close to the balcony, within a few metres of the spot where we would often find and feed a possum or two in the daytime.

Clearly, possums hate loud mechanic devices in close proximity, and they disappeared from that spot, although we still hear them walking on the roof and making that awful call some nights.

But lo and behold, a furry tail was spotted out the window of 31 December, and here is what we found:

and:

Close observers of my possum pics over the years may note that the mother possum here is not the one who used to regularly feature:  she had a distinctive notch out of her right ear.  So this may be a new generation of possums, but its nice that they do return - eventually.  And they still like to be fed.

Christmas Greetings

Not sure how Christmas-y that really is, but there sure is a lot to look at

Update:  for the person who asked in comments, the painting is Salvador Dali's Madonna of Port Lligat, which is discussed at Wikipedia here.  It gets a lengthier analysis at this site.  

The remaining mystery of "what does"

Income management doesn't work, so let's look at what does

So some research has reported that income management for aborigines in the Northern Territory is not really working.  But, as many people in comments after this piece say, the author does not address what does work, other than in the type of general platitudes that are always floating around these issues. 

Don't panic

The world is not falling apart: The trend lines reveal an increasingly peaceful period in history.

Steven Pinker sets out to prove that the world is not, despite current impressions, going to rack and ruin with violence.  He does a pretty good job, too.

As for Tony Abbott's "Merry Christmas" warning that terrorism was "likely" - I'm not sure that anyone believes anything he says about anything anyway.   Certainly, historically, it seems Islamic terrorists have chosen never to stage massive attacks during the Christmas season.  But now that I Google the topic, I see that the UK and US media gave some coverage at the start of December to concerns that al-Qaida was planning airline attacks before Christmas.  I don't recall reading that in the Australian media, which is odd, seeing Rupert has developed a large Islamic bee in his bonnet. 

Hey, I seem to have strayed somewhat from the cheery tone that I was aiming for.  Oh well, there's probably an asteroid with Canberra's name on it that Abbott's cuts to science means won't be detected, anyway.

And for the astute observer of this blog, perhaps you can tell from my Marvin-tinged tone, as well as the title, that I recently found that the BCC TV version of Hitchhikers Guide is on Youtube.  You can thank me later.

Cartoonist makes good

Probably it's because I wish I had talent with a pen, but this story of a young guy taking a risk and succeeding in (what I assume is) a very competitive field was really pleasing to watch on 7.30 recently.  

Bad advice, and a nice graphic

Hey, I haven't derided Senator Leyonhjelm for at least 4 hours, so it's time to do so again.  A sign of good politician is that he has a good sense of from whom to take advice.  Leyonhjelm doesn't display that talent:

Leyonhjelm, a self-described “libertarian”, is being advised Max Rheese – the former long-serving executive director of the Australian Environment Foundation – a spin off of the ultra-conservative think-tank, the Institute of Public Affairs.
The AEF describes itself as an “environmental NGO”, but it disputes the science of climate change. And it hates wind energy, urging all its supporters to attend the anti-wind rallies held last year in Canberra, which were hosted by conservative shock jock Alan Jones, the man who elicited the “wind farms are utterly offensive” comments from Treasurer Joe Hockey.
For a taste of what this environmental group thinks about climate science, see this speech in 2010 by then chairman Alex Stuart. One quote: “There is no link between man-made trace greenhouse gases and scenarios of climate catastrophe.” He labels such theories as “catastrophist” and are aimed at “reining in mankind.”

While we're on the topic of global warming, he's a nice graphic from Greg Laden:

But as Senator Leyonhjelm would say:

Good, detailed article on Antarctic sea ice

RealClimate: Clarity on Antarctic sea ice.

Of course, the people who most need educating on this probably won't read it.  

More about a book I didn't care for

My Brother Jack at 50 – the novel of a man whose whole life led up to it | Books | The Guardian

I recently mentioned this book in my post about David Malouf's Johnno.  It was a high school English assigned novel, if I recall correctly, and I didn't much care for it.  (I think the version produced for high school in the 1970's had one or two rude bits excised.) 

Nonetheless, it is somewhat interesting to read about the background of the author, and I didn't recall that the book was only published in 1964.  George Johnston and his wife had moved to the Greek island of Hydra in the 1950's, but certainly did not have a great life despite the book's success:

The wind-whipped Hydra winters are harsh, however. Johnston and Clift had
little money, often living on credit from local shopkeepers. By the time My Brother Jack was published, their marriage was deeply strained; tuberculosis and subsequent medical treatment had rendered Johnston impotent and infidelity was a constant undercurrent of their
relationship. Johnston left Hydra in 1964, a physical shadow of the strapping man who’d departed Australia in 1951. Despite his reputation as a journalist, and the moderate success he’d enjoyed as a novelist, MyBrother Jack was his make or break moment.

He knew that he didn’t have many writing years left. But the success, Johnston’s due, did finally come with the publication of My Brother Jack.

The Johnston-Clifts settled in Mosman, Sydney. Both continued to drink heavily, Clift especially so, although she managed to produce a popular newspaper column while Johnston wrote his famous sequel. This time he wrote no less evocatively about island life in Greece in Clean
Straw for Nothing, in the same way he’d conjured suburban Melbourne from Greece in My Brother Jack.

Clift died of a barbiturate overdose at 45 in 1969, just as Clean Straw for Nothing was about to be published and before it, too, won the Miles Franklin Award.

Johnston died a year later, at 58, before he could finish the third instalment of the Meredith trilogy, A Cartload of Clay. It was published posthumously in 1971.

The postscript was no happier. Shane Johnston committed suicide in 1974. In 1988 Johnston’s daughter by his first marriage, Gae, died of a drug overdose. Then Martin Johnston, an acclaimed poet, died of alcoholism at 42 in 1990. Only Hydra-born Jason Johnston survives.

Self defence

David Leyonhjelm's fall back position from every person being able to carry a pistol will help reduce gun violence (yeah, well, he's still in mourning about not being pat his guns for comfort) is that Australian should at least be able to carry items for self defence.

In this regard, the Wikipedia article on pepper spray is interesting.  I see that it has long been controversial in the States for its likely contribution to scores of deaths, and on the international scene, it is has very variable regulation.  It's not at all uncommon for it to be banned entirely, while other countries may allow it under licence, or for use only in protection against animals.

Tasers are of course controversial for their potential lethality too.  Wikipedia indicates that they are illegal for the public to have just about everywhere, except the Czech republic, and of course, many parts of the United States.

As for knives:  well, they can do a pretty good job at mass killing too, and I am not surprised that they are regulated and that police have concerns about certain groups having one in their possession.  I'm not entirely sure how one regulates so that the police can take one off a bunch of drunken youths in a nightclub area, but leave it with the young woman coming home from the office who thinks it will be useful in self defence.

And really, the dubious utility of allowing people to arm themselves is the big problem for all self defence.   First, the chances of involvement with violent crime for most people, in the course of a lifetime, in a country like Australia, is very very small. Worrying about being armed against attack in a normal day is, I would say, a touch paranoid for nearly all men.  (It's less so for women who are out at night, unfortunately, but statistically I would be sure the reality is far different from the perception.)  But for those who do have exposure to danger,  there is no certainty at all that having a non lethal form of self defence is going to be accessible or useful in the event of attack. 

And, of course, the number of cases in which self defence items are successfully deployed has to be considered in light of the number of times criminals may successful use them aggressively for their own purposes.  And that certainly happens with non lethal items as well as with guns - see these articles from the States in 1995 and just this year about the criminal use of pepper spray, for example.

In the big picture of what's better for society overall, I think most Australians are comfortable with what's illegal from a potential weapon point of view. 

Update:  even nice old Canada can have criminal problems with  pepper spray - where it appears popular for protection against bears - as appears from this report from earlier this year.  There are some surprising figures:

 CALGARY – Police say there’s an alarming increase in the use of pepper spray by local criminals.
In 2011, police recorded 88 incidents where pepper spray was used. A year later that number almost doubled to 161. Then, in 2013 there were 147 incident in the first nine months, which suggests an upward trend
The latest pepper spray incident was during a robbery at the Bay location at Market Mall on Wednesday.