Fallacy Number Four

I guess I have spent enough time on my high horse writing about what's wrong with the world; now it is time for a mea culpa; what's wrong with me? I suspect it may be Koestler's fallacy number four.

Notwithstanding the fact that the gutting of the higher education system and the mandatory detention of asylum seekers began on Keating's watch, they have been enthusiastically continued by the Howard government. And I think both things are very bad.

I am in favour of an increase in the Medicare levy. I love Medicare. I hate private health insurance. It is elitist and inequitable. I am a refugee from the American health care system.

I am in favour of a reallocation of government funds from private to public schools. I love public schools. I think they are the institution that does the most to build up a decent society. I hate private schools. They are divisive and inequitable. I think Malik Fahd and the other King's School do an equally bad job of educating young people to live in a pluralistic democracy.

One reason I am a vegetarian is because I think raising sheep and cattle has comprehensively destroyed Australia's flora and fauna. I think the prices we pay for water and petrol are much too low and should be increased to reflect their true environmental cost.

Yet, I was not annoyed at the weekend's election results. I was gleeful. This is not just because I really do support trade liberalisation, stoning adulterers, and the Pax Americana. I think I have fallen prey to the anti-anti fallacy. I am an anti-anti-Howardist. Whatever the merits of their case, I cannot stand to be on the same side as Phillip Adams and Alan Ramsey, and the rest of the anti-Howard legion. Their hyperbole is so ludicrous, their hatred so vitriolic, that I cannot help being for whatever it is they are against.

Fallacy number four also has a bearing on my position on the war in Iraq. If the vociferous spokespeople for non-intervention had not so obviously been the 'usual suspects', if they had not so openly been kneejerk anti-Americans being anti-American, if they had not so often been Marxists defending a fellow Marxist, or the elected representatives of states run like businesses defending their business interests; if the 'left' contribution to the debate had been even as sensible and nuanced as Dick Cheney's contribution on the 'right'; if someone had logically argued some reasonable alternative plan, I would have been more sensible and nuanced myself.

'No Blood for Oil'? 'Bush = Hitler'? 'Fuck War'? I would rather chew off my own leg than associate with the people who would march under such slogans. I am indulging in the fourth fallacy.

There may have been some alternative that did not necessitate war, that did not continue to deny Iraqi civilians food and medicine, that did not just let Saddam thumb his nose at all those UN resolutions. Maybe there wasn't. Maybe we do live in the best of all possible worlds and the current situation is the best we could reasonably hope for at this stage. But I confess I did not spend much time looking for such an alternative, in my instinctive revulsion to the puerile rubbish the 'usual suspects' sprayed at the three leaders of the Anglosphere.