Christopher Pearson, more squawking, angels on a pin and Ockham's Razor

(Above: bring me the head of Malcolm Turnbull).

Sadly ordinary loonacy has been overwhelmed by the squawking of Liberal loons about the current leadership crisis, and the mobs doing their best to replicate the peasantry during the worst days of the French revolution, but there's a compensation.

The dancing on the heads of pins is a remarkable, wondrous sight to see.

Here's the tirelessly obtuse Christopher Pearson at work in Malcolm's sensible solution is WWJD ... what would John do?

... Turnbull is transfixed by the prospect of giving the government the trigger for a double dissolution on his emissions trading legislation if the Coalition doesn't allow the bill to pass immediately. Viewing the electorate at large through the prism of his eastern Sydney seat of Wentworth, as is his wont, he's convinced the Liberals would lose another 20 seats at an early election and that he would have to preside over his party's annihilation.

It's a judgment call that tells us a lot about his relative inexperience as a politician. The 20 extra seats loss scenario was plausible six months ago, but the politics have changed. Not many of his senior colleagues now believe that Kevin Rudd is keen to call an early election. Public sentiment on the dangers of global warming has shifted in the past two years.

Here's David Uren in the very same paper on the very same day under the header Liberals facing election rout:

The Coalition could lose at least 20 of its metropolitan seats, including those of its leader, Malcolm Turnbull, Treasury spokesman Joe Hockey and climate change critics Kevin Andrews and Andrew Robb, according to an analysis of Newspoll results ...

... According to the Newspoll analysis, support for the government's emissions trading scheme legislation is overwhelming among Coalition voters in metropolitan areas. Newspoll shows that 63 per cent of Coalition voters in the cities believe the government's bill should be passed, while only 28 per cent think it should be opposed.

If one in 10 of those voters changed sides because of a Coalition decision to block action on climate change, it would cost the Liberal Party the 20 metropolitan seats that it holds with margins of less than 6.5 per cent.

These findings are consistent with the Liberal Party's internal research in marginal seats, which shows that between 75 and 80 per cent of swinging voters favour action on climate change.

Senior party officials say the research shows a triumph by climate change sceptics would be "the death of the party".

Newspoll chief executive Martin O'Shannessy says the most worrying finding for the Coalition is that its voters aged 18 to 34 favour the government's legislation by a margin of almost five to one. The Newspoll survey, taken in mid-September, showed that 75 per cent of Coalition voters in this age group backed the bill, while only 17 per cent were opposed.

Well you might think this shows up Pearson's relative inexperience as a political commentator, but we just report in a fair and balanced way, and you decide.

The rest of Pearson's column is more of standard, typical guff from a commentariat columnist now attempting to sound rational on the matter of climate policy, having spent the past few years boxing the ears of anyone who dared assert that the science of global warming was more than a religion designed to secure sinecures for scientists in well paid jobs, probably flying black helicopters for the United Nations.

Well the geese have got their wish, but did they understand they were wishing for a maddened rabble on a stampede through the desert to find the nearest waterhole and slake their thirst? Which seems to have got harder these days, not that we're attributing a one-off effect like the shortage of thirst-slaking waterholes to the general impact of climate change.

Pearson side steps down nostalgia lane to the time when he wrote speeches for John Howard. That leads to one amusing moment when he refers to Malcolm Turnbull "having inherited John Howard's party" which leads to the obvious question - Brendan who? - but it also leads to a great deal of navel-gazing, self-indulgent, self-important tedium, which we can safely pass over.

But it does raise the question as to when the Liberal party will forget about John Howard and tackle the tasks at hand. Like it or not, little Johnny is gone, now long gone, but the shadow he casts over the minds of the enfeebled, like Pearson, is truly startling to behold.

As we've observed elsewhere, if the Liberals were to follow the unctuous advice of Pearson, and Malcolm were to do what John would do, they'd have proposed implementing the ETS John Howard took to the electorate in the last election as part of the party platform, by the year 2012, which of course is when the world will end, so it wouldn't have mattered much, but staved off the fears of the mug punters. Unless of course that was just a piece of non-core blather in the style perfected by Howard, offered up so it could be disregarded down the track.

Who knows, and who cares. Loon pond is almost collapsing under the weight of collective loonacy, as the commentariat loons are distracted by speculating on the Liberal party leadership, and so forget the joys of real loonacy on rich subjects farther afield than politics.

Well as a healthy corrective, we mentioned angels dancing on the head of a pin, so why not get Thomas Aquinas's views on how many angels you might decently find or fit on a pin:

Q. 52, a. 3 - "Whether Several Angels Can Be At The Same Time In the Same Place? There are not two angels in the same place. The reason for this is because it is impossible for two complete causes to be immediately the causes of one and the same thing. This is evident in every class of causes. For there is one proximate form of one thing, and there is one proximate mover, although there may be several remote movers. Nor can it be objected that several individuals may row a boat, since no one of them is a perfect mover, because no one man's strength is sufficient for moving the boat; the fact is rather that all together are as one mover, in so far as their united powers all combine in producing the one movement. Hence, since the angel is said to be in one place by the fact that his power touches the place immediately by way of a perfect container, as was said (Q. 52, a. 1) there can be but one angel in one place." (here for Scholasticism).

There, that's sorted. There can be only one angel in the same place at the same time, and the question is will it be Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull or jolly Joe Hockey? Will god intervene and promote his faithful servant Abbott, or the theologically unsound Joe Hockey, demolished by Pearson only a week ago as little more than a hell-deserving heretic of the mawkish sentimental 'why can't we all just love each other and get along' Christian kind. (At odds with the gospel according to Joe)? Yep, with jolly Joe, you get a nice guy, a weak theologian, and a clone of Malcolm Turnbull whom the hard men will hope to have dancing on their puppet strings. Poor Joe.

Give it to Abbott, and let's have some fun. Sure Australia might go to hell in a handbasket, but we're heading there anyway, so the Pellist and Jensenist heresies assure us. So let's have some fun on the way.

Who knows who'll get the gong, which master chef will reign supreme, but if god fails to intervene, it will be a serious blow against her ongoing interest in the business of decent government for Australia.

Now here's a poem for all those commentariat columnists still dancing away on the head of their chosen pin:

William of Occam, oh where have you been?
"I've been out dancing on the head of a pin."
What do you conclude, now your task is complete?
"It's fine for the angels, but hard on the feet."
—Sara Kreindler (here)

And while we're at it, here's a bonus poem in celebration of the cutting and slashing of Liberal party policies to the point of stumblebum incoherence:

"Simplex sigillum veri"
Cut causes, be merry
Slash 'em and dock 'em'
Said William of Ockham
Wiping his razor
On the sleeve of his blazer.
—Anonymous, The Times Literary
Supplement, June 18, 1981.

By the way, if you click on the previous link, you'll also get a nice little bit on William of Ockham, but to save you the trouble, you can also click here.

And if you google (or bing, I don't mind if you worship in the temple of the satanists) the name, you might also end up at Ockham's Razor, Robyn Williams' science show for the ABC, here.

You see, from Christopher Pearson to angels on a pin to a radio program which makes for quietly pleasant and informative listening on a Sunday. Thank the lord for the intertubes ...

(Below: some angels on a pin).