It’s been a quiet week on the poll front, and indeed it’s worth noting that polling generally is thinner on the ground than it used to be – the once weekly Essential Research series went fortnightly at the start of the year, neither Sky News nor Seven has been treating us to federal ReachTEL polls like they used to, and even the Fairfax-Ipsos poll has pared back its sample sizes in recent times from 1400 to 1200. I suspect we won’t be getting the normally-fortnightly Newspoll on Sunday night either, as these are usually timed to coincide with the resumption of parliament, for which we will have to wait another week. I can at least relate the following:
• The Guardian has results from a ReachTEL poll of Wentworth conducted for independent candidate Licia Heath, conducted last Thursday from a sample of 727. After exclusion of the 5.6% undecided the results are Dave Sharma (Liberal) 43.0%; Tim Murray (Labor) 20.7%; Kerryn Phelps (independent) 17.9%; Licia Heath (independent) 10.0% and Dominic Wy Kanak (Greens) 6.6%. The poll also comes with a 51-49 Liberal-versus-Labor two-party result, but this a) assumes Tim Murray would not be overtaken by Kerryn Phelps after allocation of preferences, and b) credits Labor with over three-quarters of independent and minor party preferences, which seems highly implausible. The poll also reportedly finds “as many as 52% of people said high-profile independent candidate Kerryn Phelps’ decision to preference the Liberals made it less likely they would give her their vote”, but this would seem to be a complex issue given Phelps’s flip-flop on the subject.
• The Guardian also has results of polling by ReachTEL for the Australian Education Union on the federal goverment’s funding deal for Catholic and independent schools, conducted last Thursday from a sample of 1261 respondents in Corangamite, Dunkley, Forde, Capricornia, Flynn, Gilmore, Robertson and Banks. The report dwells too much on what the small sub-sample of undecided voters thought, but it does at least relate that 38.6% of all respondents said the deal made them less likely to vote Liberal.
• Back to Wentworth, I had a paywalled article on the subject in Crikey, and took part in a mostly Wentworth-related podcast yesterday with Ben Raue of The Tally Room, along with Georgia Tkachuk of Collins Gartrell, which you can access below.
Sprocket_ @ #999 Saturday, October 6th, 2018 – 7:56 pm
cursed image
Steve777 @ #1000 Saturday, October 6th, 2018 – 5:58 pm
Then you would have missed this:
WWP: “But there is a much lower civil legal standard, and then you have standards that apply to drawing normal conclusions as humans. By that standard both first two victims are clearly telling the truth and he did it. And yes to reach that conclusion I use evidence that would be inadmissible, but we have it, it would be stupid not to do it.”
There isn’t any legal standard to be found in modern Western countries by which “both first two victims are clearly telling the truth and he did it.”
Anyway, your argument – which I’ve heard others make – is that somehow, because Kavanaugh is not being criminally tried – all the normal rules of evidence need not apply and completely uncorroborated testimony, as long as it is delivered convincingly enough, should be taken as gospel truth. “We should believe the survivors” and all that.
Forgive me for not buying it. And it wouldn’t take much to persuade me that Kavanaugh has a case to answer: just someone to come forward and say “I was at the party, and I saw both Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh there.” Or even someone to whom Blasey Ford told her story at the time of the alleged event.
‘Late Riser says:
Saturday, October 6, 2018 at 7:51 pm
Boerwar @ #965 Saturday, October 6th, 2018 – 7:08 pm
Late Riser
Which one are you?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrzMhU_4m-g
Let’s see how Ford ends up.’
If she sinks she is innocent. If she floats she is a witch.
Mob justice works like mob justice.
Also off topic, but another Jaapie has been selected in the Australian team for the first test against Pakistan in Dubai
“Marnus has been playing quite a bit of cricket on the A tour and he is in really good form and he deserves his chance.
“He’s been fantastic around the group, he brings a lot of energy, he is a bit of a triple threat, he is great in the field, he bowls really handy leg spin which I think will surprise some people and he is a really skilful, talented batsmen.
“He’s a really good player of spin.”
Born in South Africa, Labuschagne spoke Afrikaans and had to learn English when he moved to Australia at the age of 10.
He has a batting average is 34 in first class matches but has got better every season since making his debut in 2015-16.
Australian XI in batting order:
U Khawaja
A Finch
S Marsh
M Marsh
T Head
M Labuschagne
T Paine
M Starc
N Lyon
P Siddle
J Holland
Perjury is enough to disqualify Kavanaugh, without the possibility that he is or was a serial sex pest or a rapist. The Republicans know that and they don’t care.
Nicholas
Don’t be put off the group take on this site, the faux outrage, the superciliousness of some.
‘Puffytmd says:
Saturday, October 6, 2018 at 7:53 pm
Boerwar,
My understanding is that racehorses are not allowed to be put into pet food. Blood and bone for the garden maybe. ‘
Uh huh. The system is not good enough to keep track of them.
Boerwar @ #1004 Saturday, October 6th, 2018 – 8:02 pm
Of course. But I’m not sure what your point is. My point is she did a heroic thing. I expect she knows about mob justice. She may now be trapped by it.
Not sure if this has been posted already, but Fairfax have done a quarterly aggregate of Ipsos polling covering the last 2 months of Turnbull and the first month of Scotty from the Shire – sample size is 3601 and net 2PP result is ALP53/LNP47 with 19 seats flipping.
https://www.afr.com/news/poll-points-to-19seat-hit-for-coalition-wa-worsens-20181004-h1697b
LR
My point is that mob justice is no substitute for the real thing.
WWP: “Then you have the second woman, in a room with 10 or more others with him in the room, 6 or more of whom were actually contacted REFUSED TO DENY it happened. The rest avoided being contacted. You only needed one to say ‘nah it was Eric’ and no one did. Extraordinarily odd that, unless he did it.”
I can’t find any reference to these 6 or 10 or whatever number of people. Do you have a link?
All I can find is story about a former roommate of Kavanaugh’s who says that the guy used to drink a lot more than he claimed.
The Labuschange family history is interesting. If any of them are still on farms in South Africa,the family history is about to take a turn for the worse:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labuschagne
Boerwar, I think we’re looking at the same elephant.
@Nicholas
1) Be less misogynist. The current Federal government dog whistles about political correctness /men’s rights / how trying to get more women into physics is “hurting our boys”. I am a physicist (for those who are not regulars on this blog) and we noticed at work, soon after the election of Tony Abbott, how the culture among young physicists changed. The boys would say really inappropriate things, tell dumb blonde jokes and worse. The girls just went away, and so far they have not come back. Over time, I have produced quantitive reports on the careers progress of women in physics, and I was gobsmacked to see how easily and how far we could go back. A very prominent Australian physicist reminded me about a year ago that “progress can be always be reversed”.
2) So, assuming the current Federal Govt will not last forever, once we get rid of the throw backs to the 1950s, the Federal Govt should keep encouraging excellent initiatives like the Athena Swan project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athena_SWAN) and its Australian incarnation – SAGE. Money has been put towards this, and I have seen the very real difference Athena Swan has made in my own Astrophysics community.
3) Everyone should take a deep breath and understand that getting more women into all sorts of careers will mean that we will have gender equity, but that women and men will have a similar personality profile. In any field of perceived high endeavour – a psychiatrist once said to me that astrophysicists and neurosurgeons topped the list – we will have as many woman sociopaths as male sociopaths. However, they will be different in their sociopathy, and as the central limits theorem tells us, mix a lot of things up, and you will “revert to the mean”, or WTTE. So, we also need LGBTI people, people from all social classes, and people from culturally diverse backgrounds to be part of our university communities / Arts councils / Corporate Boards / etc.
4) Stop using anecdotal evidence and be aware of our own propensities to be taken in by groupthink. My son works in the finance industry (but despite that he really is a decent person). However, I was recently explaining that there was good solid empirical evidence for the fact that Australian companies who had more woman on the board returned better profits to shareholders. He then said, but we now know that is not true, look at that AMP woman – I cannot remember her name right now. I think his ear is still ringing from my response, but he was just parroting what he had heard in his work circle.
Roger Miller: “Perjury is enough to disqualify Kavanaugh, without the possibility that he is or was a serial sex pest or a rapist. ”
Does this “perjury” amount to anything more than some old friends of his saying he used to drink a fair bit more than he claimed?
‘Late Riser says:
Saturday, October 6, 2018 at 8:15 pm
Boerwar, I think we’re looking at the same elephant.’
We are if we are talking about mob justice in relation to both Kavanaugh and Ford.
Worst Australian XI ever.
We’d have been embarrassed to sent that lot out during WSC.
@Kay Jay
Glad you enjoyed my post! Physics as a blood sport is amusing. Also, thanks for reminding me about the carry-on movies. I just loved these, and should watch them all again!
Also, I am hours behind in the thread!
mb
No it relates to the lies he told at his previous hearings that have now been exposed.
“Forgive me for not buying it”
Nah, I can’t think of one good reason you can’t understand it is pretty f*cking simple, he isn’t on trial he is after a privilege few who actually deserve it get. If you can’t understand the evidence and choose to love this guy, well it says bucket loads about you, and every molecule is bad.
Boerwar, yes. Mob-rule is inherently unfair and you’re calling it out. I’m thinking about Ford. I expect that K will emerge OK but not F. Going in K had a lot to gain and lose. F had nothing to gain and much to lose. That’s why I think she is heroic.
EDIT: deleted the word *come*
The question is not whether Kavanaugh should go to jail. The question is should he join the 9/325,000,000 Americans on Supreme Court. It’s not the same thing.
Or the 9 in hundreds or thousands who might be qualified.
@Dio
I have certainly heard all this before, and have wondered about this. The IQ problem is interesting, but I would guess that the wider distribution in male IQs is more a product of nurture rather than nature. Time will tell. My observation is that not-so-bright boys are given a lot of leeway, and excused from normal duties because they are not so bright. Girls / women are not excused insect a way, and so by being pushed into doing domestic tasks, whether capable or not, their brains are forced to develop more than men boys with the same IQ.
As for some men do better on IQ tests – high end of the Gaussian distribution – this could easily be cultural.
Thank you, Douglas. It is an interesting discussion.
It would be good to remove the sexist blokey culture from male-dominated occupations.
As long as you keep this in mind you can’t go wrong 😉
@Dio
To add to the above comment, there can be nurture effects to account for males understanding some types of physics more easily than females.
Take projectile motion – essentially the thing that Newton used to work out his universal theory of gravitation. Throw a ball, gravity pulls it back to earth, and it follows a parabolic path until it returns to earth. Throw it fast enough, and by the time gravity attracts it back to earth, the surface of the earth has curved away. So it keeps falling, but never hits the earth, if you throw it fast enough. These days we call them satellites.
So, now in the 21st century I have friends doing research on physics education. Projectile motion is one of those things where our first year physics students have to shrug off Aristotelian thinking and become Newtonians.
My colleagues look at the difference between the results for males and females on first year physics exam questions on projectile motion. It depends on how the question is asked. If you draw a diagram, showing the projectile motion, then ask a few questions, the guys do really well, but the girls do not. On the other hand, if you describe the projectile motion in words, and ask the students to draw a diagram, then the girls do as well as the boys.
So my colleagues started thinking that meant boys played more sport – rugby, AFL, soccer, cricket, hockey, basketball, and controlled for this. It turned out that girls play just as many sports involving projectile motion as boys. As well as the above sports which are all played by girls, we can add netball. So, there was no obvious cause for the difference in understanding projectile motion here.
In the end, there was only one very significant difference they could think of.
I would really appreciate it if the Bludgertariat could give me their guesses on why the difference in understanding projectile motion between males and females as described above is.
My physics education friends would be interested know your answers. They, and I have ideas, but this is still a very open question.
poroti:
That’s incredibly cynical. And I have to admit, somewhat surprising coming from you.
I was good at Physics and unteachably incompetent in all sports whether or not they involved projectiles. I can calculate a trajectory but throw like a girl…
(hide)
My political compass score
-8.88 on the right to left axis (i.e. very left)
-7.74 on the authoritarian to anarchist axis (i.e. very anarchist)
https://www.politicalcompass.org/yourpoliticalcompass?ec=-8.88&soc=-7.74
Boerwar @ #1010 Saturday, October 6th, 2018 – 8:12 pm
Except it’s not mob justice to tell someone that they don’t get to have a lifetime job because the interview has raised valid concerns about their character, judgement, and temperament. Nobody is being convicted of a crime. Nobody is being sent to jail, thrown into a river, or otherwise sanctioned by the state.
Flunking a job interview because you’re unsuitable for the role is not a punishment. It’s the default outcome for most applicants. For jobs that don’t come with lifetime tenure, even.
Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing wasn’t a trial. It was a job interview. The rules of evidence aren’t applicable. The question is, is he a suitable person to be an Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court?
Kavanaugh committed perjury during the Senate hearings. That alone should disqualify him from the Supreme Court. It could even lead to his possible removal if a future administration wants to pursue the issue.
That said, from what I understand of the shortlist given to Trump, Kavanaugh was probably the most moderate.
Flunking a job interview because you’re unsuitable for the role is not a punishment.
Exactly. There must be lots of conservative judges who don’t have credible concerns about serious criminal behaviour in their past. If Kavanaugh had been accused of having smoked a joint (and inhaled), drank while underage or generally acted like a dickhead when he was young, no worries, but what we have here are credible accusations by credible accusers that go way beyond youthful hi jinx.
The fact the people believe Kavanaugh and dismiss a woman who alleged he sexually assaulted her underlines again why there are still many many women who are reluctant to complain about what men have done to them.
Sad.
Or let me put it another way. Who here would employ someone they know lied multiple times during the job interview? Especially when there are plenty of other candidates with equally good CVs.
-5.63 economic left/right
-7.13 social libertarian/authoritarian
Gee, WeWantPaul, I’d sure love to have you – with all your intuitive, cutting-edge, forensic sleuthing skills – on my jury, if I was ever chatged with anything.
Just kidding.
If a first-year physics student has spent nearly two decades standing while urinating, they have spent thousands of minutes observing parabolic curves (the urine stream moving through the air). A first-year physics student who did all of her life’s urinating while sitting down has not seen as many parabolic curves in her lifetime. Perhaps this means that male first-year physics students have unconsciously grasped the concept of projectile in motion to a greater degree than female first-year physics students.
A male teacher I had at high school and was in his class for all 5 years was accused of having a sexual relationship with a girl who I also knew well. Subsequent to our graduation the allegations came out and he killed himself and the school and government paid significant compensation to the woman.
I have no personal knowledge of the aforementioned alleged wrongdoing and never heard any rumours of such. He was a very good teacher and was well liked by most.
He also maintained relationships/associations/aquaintances with students which as an adult I look back and think we’re imprudently familiar/close.
My sister, who was also taught by him for several years and is now a parole officer doubts the truth of the allegations. She said the problem dealing with paedophiles is that in their own minds they’ve done nothing wrong and that killing themselves after an allegation is made is inconsistent with their behavior.
steve777:
[‘There must be lots of conservative judges who don’t have credible concerns about serious criminal behaviour in their past.’]
Ipso facto only conseravative judges have skeletons.
Please!
Confessions @ #1025 Saturday, October 6th, 2018 – 9:03 pm
I have noticed a recent trend that way.
Nicholas
I once read a service station attendant who observed that the difference between men and women is that women don’t shake the hose before returning it to the bowswer ‘…they don’t understand the principle involved..’
I did know staff who were having affairs with students – but I found out after the event, and no complaints were made by the students involved.
I have just finished watching Real Time (thank you ‘fess 🙂 ) and the most salient point made by the panel about the Kavanaugh confirmation hearing was that, due to the hullabaloo over the sexual assault, arguably more important matters, such as his judicial record, were overlooked. Then Dr Ford and her accusations were trashed anyway, so kind of, what was the point of it in the end? Or, it was not the game changer the Democrats were hoping for and, in fact, it had the perverse effect of riling up, up till that point, disinterested Republican voters.
Adrian and Zoomster provide an inaccurate view of what happens in schools regarding allegations of abuse by teachers. Both say they have observed very few allegations being made over many years of their experience.
Unfortunately their impressions are quite wrong.
Offending teachers maintain secrecy for obvious reasons. Student victims maintain secrecy because of fear and privacy. Investigating authorities maintain secrecy to protect victims’ privacy and to maintain the integrity of investigations.
The NSW Dept of Ed has since 1996 maintained a very large investigation unit specifically to combat such behaviour by teachers. The unit does not suffer from a lack of referrals.
Cotmomma – The Kavanaugh saga will rile up the Republican base until he is approved, when they will lose interest again. After that, it will be ALL downhill for the repugs.
So, according to some posters, the Kavanaugh hearing was nothing more than a “job interview.” Well, I don’t know about anyone else, but I have never experienced a job interview in which an accuser suddenly appears to claim that I committed a serious crime 36 years ago.
And I keep reading that Kavanaugh “lied multiple times” during his testimony. I have searched the internet for articles about this. Most of them refer to his confessions that he liked to drink and sometimes drank too much and then contrast them with statements by some of his peers which allegedly indicate that he like beer even more than he said and drank not just “too much” but “much too much.” This approach sets the bar for “lying” at a pretty low level IMO.
It is also true that Kavanaugh was a bit evasive when asked if he had ever blacked out when drunk. I don’t really see how else he could have responded, as the direction this line of questioning was heading was bleeding obvious: ie, confess that you blacked out even once, and the implication will be that you must have committed the alleged acts on Ms Blasey Ford while you were “blacked out”.
At the end of the day, the FBI looked into Kavanaugh’s past and didn’t find any third party corroboration of the claims of his accusers. Over the past few days, articles keep appearing with headlines along the lines of “witness comes forward to corroborate Blasey Ford’s story.” When you read the latest of these articles, you discover that said witness is someone to whom she told her story in 2016.
A pretty low standard for “corroboration”, to go along with the low standard for “lying” or “perjury” and the low standard of proof for alleged crimes from 36 years ago.
“Job interview” my a__e. The whole process is nothing more than a kangaroo court IMO. The impact on Kavanaugh’s poor wife and daughters doesn’t bear thinking about. And I feel sorry for Blasey Ford too: she’s just another pawn in the game.
Finished work last year for a woman who was impregnated as a 15 year old by the PE teacher.
She had the baby but was made to leave the school. He stayed on at the same school for 35 years.
Pleasingly he is now selling his house.
Antonbruckner11 @ #1042 Saturday, October 6th, 2018 – 9:57 pm
Don’t write them off too quick:
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/10/05/trump-hannity-gingrich-midterms-876184
c@t: “and, in fact, it had the perverse effect of riling up, up till that point, disinterested Republican voters”
Yep, I’ve been making this point for a while.
I’m starting to suspect that some leading Democrats would rather focus on staying in Washington and trying to turn the FBI and other institutions of government against Trump and his friends than to go out and get their hands dirty in a bit of old-fashioned election campaigning. And it’s backfiring on them.