Why did America lose the Vietnam war?

 Oft said to be 20/20, history is a study in hindsight written by the victors. In today's highly polarized world even after 6 decades it is difficult to get an objective analysis of the Vietnam war. The common belief is that it was a war not worth fighting, that America had no business interfering with what was an internal matter for the Vietnamese, that the anti-war movement helped stop an immoral war.

I guess all wars are immoral, but fighting a war against military aggression is morally justifiable.

A recent Prager U video, Why did America fight the Vietnam War?, highlights some inconvenient truths about the war that are well worth noting.

• The war was a result of military aggression by the North supported by communist allies Russia and China
• In the Paris peace accords of 1973 the South and North had reached a settlement to establish two autonomous nations
• Defeat only occurred because America failed to back the South after the North broke its agreement and launched another military offensive.
• The consequences were the deaths and imprisonment of many thousands of South Vietnamese , displacement of hundreds of thousands, and probably led to the subsequent Cambodian genocide

This holds a sobering moral lesson for Americans with wars in Afghanistan and against Isis. The consequences of defeat or withdrawal are significant.

Whites are NOT the most racist people

Contrary to widespread media portrayal Whites are not the most racist, bigoted people in the world. Well it may be a surprise but it seems that objective analysis puts the common perception to a lie.

Here is a short video clip by Ajay Fayza presenting the case. You can also link to it at "Whites NOT the most racist people on Earth"

Again it seems our media are not presenting an accurate picture of Western democracies.
One of the sources for Fayza's comments is The most racist countries in the world. The article includes the following list of the 25 most racist countries.

#	Country	% Who don’t want neighbours of another race	% of people who witnessed racist behaviour
1	India	43.6	64.3
2	Lebanon	36.3	64.4
3	Bahrain	31.1	85.7
4	Libya	54.0	33.5
5	Egypt	N/A	39.7
6	Philippines	30.6	49.1
7	Kuwait	28.1	37.9
8	Palestine	44.0	32.0
9	South Africa	19.6	61.8
10	South Korea	29.6	36.5
11	Malaysia	31.3	34.4
12	Nigeria	21.0	42.5
13	Iraq	27.7	37.8
14	Kyrgyzstan	28.1	35.9
15	Ecuador	34.5	32.0
16	Algeria	19.8	41.0
17	Pakistan	14.5	48.8
18	Yemen	34.0	31.2
19	Hong Kong	18.8	40.4
20	Russia	17.0	38.5
21	Thailand	39.8	19.0
22	Cyprus	26.7	26.1
23	Turkey	33.8	19.1
24	Morocco	13.8	35.6
25	Japan	22.3	29.7

No, your eyes don't deceive you. The only predominantly 'White' country among them is Russia, at number 20.

Whitesplaining White privilege

What is White privilege? 

It seems collective "white Guilt' is widespread in America. The result no doubt of repeated claims by self named 'progressives'. But what is it? In this short video Horowitz tackles the concept of "White privilege" using interviews of the 'man in the street'. 

Condemned by their own words, they stand naked. 

Grapevine goes prime time...

Some months ago I added the "On the Grapevine' page for sharing links to articles and videos that I found interesting. As a dedicated skeptic I tend to be contrarian, always looking for the alternative view, especially when I feel an idea is being pushed too hard. So my selections tend to be this same contrarian approach, although not universally.

There is a lot of very compelling material around. Rather than post these to a separate page, that may or may not be seen, from now on I will simply post them on the main blog.  I think that will make them more readily available.
The " On the Grapevine page" will remain as is, for now.

Also, given my recent interest in Energy technologies I will be launching an "Energy Frontiers" page highlighting new developments in Energy Technology. We live in an exciting era for technological change, and energy breakthroughs will in all probability transform our daily life.

Prudent education funding gone-ski

I am sure I am not the only observer to be somewhat flummoxed by the new-direction 'Turn-bill' budget. My first reaction was rather stronger, but 'flummoxed' will do for now. I guess it will take some time to see where it leads, but for me it represents total capitulation on many long standing liberal values. While I appreciate the senate problem that has been used as justification for the illiberal measures, it does not explain the narratives used to justify these. Even if you wish to raise a levy on some banks, why the bank bashing? Liberals were once very proud of our world class banking system, so what has suddenly changed? Similarly the narrative surrounding the revised education policy is a total reversal of  what the LNP has been saying for some time.

Let's just look at education spending, now endearingly termed Gonski 2.0. While there is a potential political advantage in removing, or partially removing, a point of difference between ALP and LNP, it trashes the valid long standing LNP argument that increased education spending does not improve educational outcomes.

Across the world educational spending does not correlate with educational outcomes. (see Figure 1 below and the earlier post Education Spending scores an "F" giving some background.)

Figure 1: Educational Outcome vs Spending

At the same time despite significant increases in Education spending over the past decade Australia's education outcomes have deteriorated (see Inconvenient truths on Education spending ).

Given these inconvenient facts, how can any government justify increasing spending? Indeed, even if Australia had zero debt, and had money to burn, it would be a reckless politician who simply threw more money at a problem that has undoubtedly become worse despite more money.

What are the consequences?

By advocating the new Gonski 2.0 policy Turnbull and Scomo have; -

• conceded that ALP has been right all along to argue for Gonski and more spending
• trashed their own argument that more spending is not the way to improve outcomes
• contributed to increased spending when the country is running continuous deficits
• damaged LNP arguments for fiscal responsibility
• damaged their own credentials as responsible economic managers

At the same time the proposed 'adjustments' have already been labelled unfair and have ignited a war with the Catholic education sector.

This is a lose, lose, lose strategy.

What could they have done? 

Here are a few ideas for a start; - 

• Stick with the argument, and make the case that increased spending is NOT necessary for improved outcomes
• Focus on teacher education standards, that have been falling as rapidly as outcomes. Cause and effect?
• Focus on curricula that seem to dumb down the technical subjects to make them more inclusive. Perhaps a focus on the three R's would raise standards
• Look at encouraging some competitiveness between schools by allowing Principals to hire /fire and allocated salaries
• Ensure that payments to the states are contingent on each state's willingness to undertake the above reforms

The core principle underlying "Gonski" is that each child deserves the same level of contribution by State and Federal governments. This is hard to argue. Yet contrary to Labour, and now the Libs', interpretations this does not require additional spending, it just requires that current spending be adjusted to achieve that outcome. Of course it cannot be done at once, as any school suddenly losing spending would cry blue murder. It could however be a achieved by a series of incremental adjustments over some years. Over time the annual increases received by some schools would be lower than those of others. It would allow schools to gradually adjust to the 'fairer' distribution of public funding. No sudden changes, just incremental adjustments, and no cuts in absolute terms.

But even this incremental re-distribution is somewhat nuanced for today's "in" or "out" mentality, so for political reasons I would have avoided it, for now at least.

I guess this is one opportunity foregone for this year.  Given Turnbull and his team's unexpected abandonment of heretofore core LNP values, it seems sensible policy has been deferred for some time.

So we can all go and cry into our beers.