There are not enough 'progressive' voters in this country to form a government. This is not a fact that will go away no matter how much the the 'progressive' voters call those who vote against them things like 'brainless, spineless, selfish, blinkered'.
Chances are there will never be enough 'progressive' voters to form a government under our present system. These 'progressive' voters do not have very many children, and they are also losing control of the education system, so they are not maintaining their numbers. The only way 'progressive' voters could form a government would be if compulsory preferential voting was scrapped and we went to a hyper-American system where only the most extremist fanatics bothered to vote.
We recently moved out of Laurie Ferguson's seat of Reid, one of the safest Labor seats in the country. This is one of those seats where there was a swing of about 3% to the coalition in the weekend's election. Reid is one of those seats where people have to keep voting Labor in order for there ever to be another government that is to Phillip Adams' liking.
*Hardly anyone in Reid reads Phillip Adams. Hardly anyone in Reid reads the Sydney Morning Herald. My letters to the editor and your letters to the editor will not be read by the voters of Reid.
*A 'mean and tricky' government, in the experience of many of the people of Reid, would mean having to bribe an official to have your telephone installed, or having your neighbour dragged off by the secret police in the middle of the night. Little Johnny does not rate on the 'mean and tricky' scale.
*People in Reid care about the environment as long as it will not cost jobs. Tasmanian old growth forests and the Kyoto Protocol do not rate there.
*Most of the anti-war posters I saw at the station when I got on the train in the morning had been torn down by the evening. The people in Reid were not solidly against the war. Being anti-war does not rate there.
*At my son's public school, he was one of the few children in the 'non-religious' segment in Tuesday morning scripture classes. I'm sure a lot of the others in that group were actually from some religion, since most of them were of east asian ancestry, and there was no buddhist scripture teacher. My guess is that very few six year olds in Reid are not nominally religious. Being socially conservative is probably a safe bet in Reid.
*People in Reid care about interest rates, and about jobs, only because they are not DINKs with a shitload of money. They are not any more or less selfish than voters in Greenway. The economy definitely rates in Reid.
I don't know why the coalition couldn't win Reid. It is just Labor's good luck that people there habitually vote for them. The federal Labor party is certainly not doing much to hold on to it.
Wednesday, October 13, 2004
Saturday, October 02, 2004
The Twilight of the Novel
"It hardly needs pointing out that that at this moment the prestige of the novel is extremely low ... the novel is likely, if the best literary brains cannot be induced to return to it, to survive in some perfunctory, despised and hopelessly degenerate form, like modern tomb-stones, or the Punch and Judy show."
Only twenty-nine days to National Novel Writing Month! I will resist any cheap shots about writing a novel about a frustrated Nanowrimo novelist who bitches endlessly about wordcounts on his weblog. Oops. I guess my powers of resistance are at a low ebb. I have caught the Nanowrimo bug, thanks to the endless enthusiasm of the Great Androoo (thanks again!), and cannot be dissuaded from writing another one. I posted the first one two months ago, and so far it has been read by... my Mum. She liked it. So it must be alright, I guess. I don't think it is perfunctory and hopelessly degenerate. It doesn't have any abortionists in it and never mentions John Kerry. In fact, it doesn't mention any Americans at all. It isn't a propaganda vehicle for my outlandish opinions and it isn't written in baroquely florid unending sentences. In fact, it has hardly any adverbs. You should read it. Please read it. If you exist...
A close relative has suggested that I chose the time and place for my next Nanowrimo novel by rolling dice. I think this is a good idea, and will do so on November 1st. For time, I thought about constructing some sort of function to give a greater likelihood at times when there were more people around, but couldn't figure out an elegant way to achieve this. So I am thinking of using the Jewish calendar, which starts with the theoretical date of the creation of the world. I am not yet sure whether to roll 1-5765 or 1-9999. I plan to roll longitude (E or W, 1-180) and then latitude (N or S, sin-1(0-1), to avoid stacking the deck in favour of the poles). Hmmm. It seems like I have capitulated entirely to the blogging medium, and have ended up writing about the mind-numbingly dull minutiae of my life again.
The quote I found in a Salman Rushdie essay. It is George Orwell, writing in 1936.
Only twenty-nine days to National Novel Writing Month! I will resist any cheap shots about writing a novel about a frustrated Nanowrimo novelist who bitches endlessly about wordcounts on his weblog. Oops. I guess my powers of resistance are at a low ebb. I have caught the Nanowrimo bug, thanks to the endless enthusiasm of the Great Androoo (thanks again!), and cannot be dissuaded from writing another one. I posted the first one two months ago, and so far it has been read by... my Mum. She liked it. So it must be alright, I guess. I don't think it is perfunctory and hopelessly degenerate. It doesn't have any abortionists in it and never mentions John Kerry. In fact, it doesn't mention any Americans at all. It isn't a propaganda vehicle for my outlandish opinions and it isn't written in baroquely florid unending sentences. In fact, it has hardly any adverbs. You should read it. Please read it. If you exist...
A close relative has suggested that I chose the time and place for my next Nanowrimo novel by rolling dice. I think this is a good idea, and will do so on November 1st. For time, I thought about constructing some sort of function to give a greater likelihood at times when there were more people around, but couldn't figure out an elegant way to achieve this. So I am thinking of using the Jewish calendar, which starts with the theoretical date of the creation of the world. I am not yet sure whether to roll 1-5765 or 1-9999. I plan to roll longitude (E or W, 1-180) and then latitude (N or S, sin-1(0-1), to avoid stacking the deck in favour of the poles). Hmmm. It seems like I have capitulated entirely to the blogging medium, and have ended up writing about the mind-numbingly dull minutiae of my life again.
The quote I found in a Salman Rushdie essay. It is George Orwell, writing in 1936.
The Only Problem
“I am absolutely alone in my essential ethical position, and therefore useless.”
- Lord Acton
There is only ever one problem in life, and that is, ‘what do we do next?’ Two things are necessary to answer this question. Firstly, we need to know how doing whatever we do next is likely to affect the universe. This will affect the options open to us for future action, and hence our probability of obtaining whatever ultimate effect on the universe we desire. Secondly, we need to have some consistent idea of what ultimate effect we desire. The first things we need- to help us in assigning probabilities- are reason, science, and a knowledge of history. The second thing is a set of absolute moral axioms, like the principles of Euclid, from which a moral law can be built.
The problem with our society today (and probably with all societies everywhere at all times) is that for the most part those who have science have a narrow science, and no faith; and those who have faith have a fossilized faith, or a nebulous faith, and no science. So we bumble along.
Some of the most intelligent, reasonable, scientific people I have known have been absolute blackguards and fiends; among the wisest words of moral instruction I ever heard were uttered by a man who believed the world was 6000 years old, that the Gospel arrived in Australia in 1958, and that 99.99% of the world’s population was predestined to eternal suffering. I have noticed that those who do have science or religion are more optimistic than those who neither; and that those who have both are often so unreasonably cheerful that they shake the foundations of our society with each step they take. They know where they are aimed, and how to get there, and their one sorrow (yet what a great sorrow, what a tremendous burden) is that they cannot by any effort of will or imagination bring the rest of humanity along with them.
I guess I am, with my customary cosmic arrogance, claiming a place for myself at that near-empty intersection of these two sets; people who have a workable understanding of reason and science, and people who have a grasp of the eternal moral law, or tao. Though since humility has to be an integral part of the latter, I guess I can’t be claiming a place for myself. Which means that I am, with a yet deeper level of cosmic arrogance…
And with this cosmic arrogance, I will briefly pontificate on what is wrong with how we provide ourselves with these two essentials for determining what to do next.
“Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. Everything else is poetry, imagination.”
- Max Planck
What is wrong with scientific education?
It is too narrow. Every scientist has a sense of the amazing potentialities of their own science, the problems being overcome in their own narrow area of science, yet they do not know what problems are being overcome in the narrow specialty next door. They do not know how to fit what they know into an overall picture of the universe. In the overall picture of the universe we have figured out, you cannot feel lost; you can only feel wonder. You know ‘where you are’; you know ‘what you are doing.’
A scientific education that ignores history is also too narrow, because history teaches us the limitations of human nature, and discourages us from advocating ridiculous experiments in social engineering. One thing history teaches us is that scientists who lift their noses from the bench are very likely to advocate ridiculous experiments in social engineering.
“Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity.”
- Lord Acton
What is wrong with moral education?
It is too narrow. Our culture labours under a false dichotomy between ‘obeying the rules’ and ‘making up your own rules’. This is a byproduct of thousands of years of Judaeo-Christo-Islamic civilization, where moral axioms were ramified into a bewildering tangle of laws, which were then codified and fossilized, in the Talmud, in canon law, in the Hadith, in the voluminous writings of the Baha’i prophets. We could conceive only obedience to the rules, or disobedience. Both ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ religion in the west is flawed, for we can conceive of modernizing religion only in terms of a loosening of restrictions, which in practice means bowing down before the most ephemeral fashions of the century we live in.
Between order and chaos lies complexity, and complexity means life.
Between ‘obeying the rules’ and ‘making up the rules’ lies ‘figuring out the rules’, and this means internalizing that set of inviolable moral axioms that can be discerned in the analects of Confucius, in the sagas of the Vikings, in the prophet Isaiah, and seeing how they unfold into a set of limit conditions proscribing the actions lawful to us in each situation.
Now I must go out and pay my library fines, in obedience to the moral law…
- Lord Acton
There is only ever one problem in life, and that is, ‘what do we do next?’ Two things are necessary to answer this question. Firstly, we need to know how doing whatever we do next is likely to affect the universe. This will affect the options open to us for future action, and hence our probability of obtaining whatever ultimate effect on the universe we desire. Secondly, we need to have some consistent idea of what ultimate effect we desire. The first things we need- to help us in assigning probabilities- are reason, science, and a knowledge of history. The second thing is a set of absolute moral axioms, like the principles of Euclid, from which a moral law can be built.
The problem with our society today (and probably with all societies everywhere at all times) is that for the most part those who have science have a narrow science, and no faith; and those who have faith have a fossilized faith, or a nebulous faith, and no science. So we bumble along.
Some of the most intelligent, reasonable, scientific people I have known have been absolute blackguards and fiends; among the wisest words of moral instruction I ever heard were uttered by a man who believed the world was 6000 years old, that the Gospel arrived in Australia in 1958, and that 99.99% of the world’s population was predestined to eternal suffering. I have noticed that those who do have science or religion are more optimistic than those who neither; and that those who have both are often so unreasonably cheerful that they shake the foundations of our society with each step they take. They know where they are aimed, and how to get there, and their one sorrow (yet what a great sorrow, what a tremendous burden) is that they cannot by any effort of will or imagination bring the rest of humanity along with them.
I guess I am, with my customary cosmic arrogance, claiming a place for myself at that near-empty intersection of these two sets; people who have a workable understanding of reason and science, and people who have a grasp of the eternal moral law, or tao. Though since humility has to be an integral part of the latter, I guess I can’t be claiming a place for myself. Which means that I am, with a yet deeper level of cosmic arrogance…
And with this cosmic arrogance, I will briefly pontificate on what is wrong with how we provide ourselves with these two essentials for determining what to do next.
“Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. Everything else is poetry, imagination.”
- Max Planck
What is wrong with scientific education?
It is too narrow. Every scientist has a sense of the amazing potentialities of their own science, the problems being overcome in their own narrow area of science, yet they do not know what problems are being overcome in the narrow specialty next door. They do not know how to fit what they know into an overall picture of the universe. In the overall picture of the universe we have figured out, you cannot feel lost; you can only feel wonder. You know ‘where you are’; you know ‘what you are doing.’
A scientific education that ignores history is also too narrow, because history teaches us the limitations of human nature, and discourages us from advocating ridiculous experiments in social engineering. One thing history teaches us is that scientists who lift their noses from the bench are very likely to advocate ridiculous experiments in social engineering.
“Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity.”
- Lord Acton
What is wrong with moral education?
It is too narrow. Our culture labours under a false dichotomy between ‘obeying the rules’ and ‘making up your own rules’. This is a byproduct of thousands of years of Judaeo-Christo-Islamic civilization, where moral axioms were ramified into a bewildering tangle of laws, which were then codified and fossilized, in the Talmud, in canon law, in the Hadith, in the voluminous writings of the Baha’i prophets. We could conceive only obedience to the rules, or disobedience. Both ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ religion in the west is flawed, for we can conceive of modernizing religion only in terms of a loosening of restrictions, which in practice means bowing down before the most ephemeral fashions of the century we live in.
Between order and chaos lies complexity, and complexity means life.
Between ‘obeying the rules’ and ‘making up the rules’ lies ‘figuring out the rules’, and this means internalizing that set of inviolable moral axioms that can be discerned in the analects of Confucius, in the sagas of the Vikings, in the prophet Isaiah, and seeing how they unfold into a set of limit conditions proscribing the actions lawful to us in each situation.
Now I must go out and pay my library fines, in obedience to the moral law…
Wednesday, September 29, 2004
The Policy that dare not speak its name?
Here is a task for you, gentle reader- if you exist; I think young Dave has stopped dropping by after I wandered off for so long. See if you can find any mention of abortion on the website of this political party that has been called, in this hyperbole-enriched time, 'Australia's Taliban'.
I couldn't.
Has the industrial scale disposal of surplus human beings really become so mainstream in our society that a party that is designed to appeal to social conservatives has to soft-pedal its opposition to abortion? Or don't they care? I guess I shall be voting for Fred Nile again, despite his wrong-headedness on Islam and homosexuality...
I couldn't.
Has the industrial scale disposal of surplus human beings really become so mainstream in our society that a party that is designed to appeal to social conservatives has to soft-pedal its opposition to abortion? Or don't they care? I guess I shall be voting for Fred Nile again, despite his wrong-headedness on Islam and homosexuality...
Tuesday, September 28, 2004
Too Easy
Gosh. I have missed the Beslan catastrophe, for which I had thought of something breathtakingly inflammatory to say. I have missed the anniversary of Paul Hill's execution, on September 3rd, for which I had something planned. And I have missed the anniversary of September 11th, which I think was about a week later. Oh well. Not topical enough.
One thing I will say, briefly, that I thought of this morning, for the benefit of those inclined to see meteorological portents, is that the dates of the Florida hurricanes neatly bracket said anniversary of Paul Hill's judicial murder. And that the whole point of the 2000 election fiasco was that Florida did vote Democrat. It is just too easy to make up stuff like that.
Another thing it is easy to make up are comparisons along the lines of 'If America was Iraq, what would it be like?. If America had been like Iraq, what would it have been like?
Well, Jimmy Carter would have been president for almost thirty years, and only Democratic party members could get decent jobs. 95% of this governing class would be white southerners. They could just take cars, houses, and women that took their fancy. There would have been a systematic effort to settle decent white southerners in districts that had too many black people. These inconvenient black people would have been brutalised in ethnic cleansing campaigns using poison gas, with more than a million killed during Jimmy's reign. Four million Americans would have died in a futile war with Mexico that also killed three million Mexicans and flattened every city within 100 km of the border. America would have invaded British Columbia for no reason and looted everything that was not nailed down, killing hundreds of thousands in a mindless orgy of rape and torture. America would have lobbed missiles at Afghanistan and Sudan. Oops, they did that in real life. Let's say America would have lobbed missiles at Venezuela and France. America would have paid billions of dollars to English extremist groups for killing thousands of French civlians. The Everglades would have been drained. Yellowstone and Yosemite would have been clear-felled. Every catholic family would have at least one member who had been killed in the big uprising of '91. The catholic bishops would be dead or in exile. After the liberation of British Columbia- in which let's say another million and a half Americans were killed- crippling economic sanctions would have been imposed on America by the rest of the world, driving a hundred million people into conditions of chronic malnutrition and resulting in the needless deaths of 15 million american children. That's 9/11 every day for the full thirteen years.
Like I said, too easy. I don't think the situation in Iraq at the moment is good. I don't think the situation anywhere is good. Everything anywhere is only ever relatively good or bad, in comparison to how things could be. I think, unreservedly, that the situation in Iraq now is better than the situation in Iraq then.
One thing I will say, briefly, that I thought of this morning, for the benefit of those inclined to see meteorological portents, is that the dates of the Florida hurricanes neatly bracket said anniversary of Paul Hill's judicial murder. And that the whole point of the 2000 election fiasco was that Florida did vote Democrat. It is just too easy to make up stuff like that.
Another thing it is easy to make up are comparisons along the lines of 'If America was Iraq, what would it be like?. If America had been like Iraq, what would it have been like?
Well, Jimmy Carter would have been president for almost thirty years, and only Democratic party members could get decent jobs. 95% of this governing class would be white southerners. They could just take cars, houses, and women that took their fancy. There would have been a systematic effort to settle decent white southerners in districts that had too many black people. These inconvenient black people would have been brutalised in ethnic cleansing campaigns using poison gas, with more than a million killed during Jimmy's reign. Four million Americans would have died in a futile war with Mexico that also killed three million Mexicans and flattened every city within 100 km of the border. America would have invaded British Columbia for no reason and looted everything that was not nailed down, killing hundreds of thousands in a mindless orgy of rape and torture. America would have lobbed missiles at Afghanistan and Sudan. Oops, they did that in real life. Let's say America would have lobbed missiles at Venezuela and France. America would have paid billions of dollars to English extremist groups for killing thousands of French civlians. The Everglades would have been drained. Yellowstone and Yosemite would have been clear-felled. Every catholic family would have at least one member who had been killed in the big uprising of '91. The catholic bishops would be dead or in exile. After the liberation of British Columbia- in which let's say another million and a half Americans were killed- crippling economic sanctions would have been imposed on America by the rest of the world, driving a hundred million people into conditions of chronic malnutrition and resulting in the needless deaths of 15 million american children. That's 9/11 every day for the full thirteen years.
Like I said, too easy. I don't think the situation in Iraq at the moment is good. I don't think the situation anywhere is good. Everything anywhere is only ever relatively good or bad, in comparison to how things could be. I think, unreservedly, that the situation in Iraq now is better than the situation in Iraq then.
Tuesday, August 31, 2004
Gopher, Everett?
Just haven't felt sufficiently upset about anything to write lately. Disappointing, I know. I am now waiting eagerly for October 9/November 2 to pass so I can start asking people for odds on the bet I alluded to earlier: 'That President Kerry will invade Iran or Syria in his first term.' And the possible corollary: 'That Prime Minister Latham will provide troops.'
In the mind-numbingly dull minutiae department, I have started going to church again. I am two for three for the last three weekends...
In the mind-numbingly dull minutiae department, I have started going to church again. I am two for three for the last three weekends...
Sunday, August 22, 2004
FAQs
Isn't 'The Pike' a complete piss-take of Damien Broderick's 'The Spike'?
Yup.
Why do you call Sydney 'Devil Bunny City'?
(1) Thomas Townshend, Earl of Sydney, was known to his friends as 'Devil Bunny'.
(2) Pandaemonium (the capital of Satan in Paradise Lost)has acquired a new connotation over the years, Babylon would be unfair since Little Baghdad is my favourite part of Sydney, and any of the Cities of the Plain would sound homophobic, when that isn't my intention at all.
Is Tony Blair really a genetically modified salamander?
As is well known, the urodeles have the largest genomes of all vertebrates. Until recently, the reasons for this peculiarity were unknown. However, Capek and Voss (Genetics, 164(2):735-746 (2003)) have demonstrated that the unexpressed portions of the salamander genome code for a completely different morphology, a morphology which bears startling similarities to Tony Blair! Under appropriate conditions, the 'normal' promoters which lead to the expression of the regular salamander genes could be turned off, and alternative promoters activated to express the 'Tony Blair' genes. While the true story of Tony Blair's origins remains classified, it is probable that the erratic genius Wolfgang Clam was aware of the potentialities of the salamander genome by the mid-1980s, and generated both Tony Blair and his human cover identity before his descent into madness and evil.
Yup.
Why do you call Sydney 'Devil Bunny City'?
(1) Thomas Townshend, Earl of Sydney, was known to his friends as 'Devil Bunny'.
(2) Pandaemonium (the capital of Satan in Paradise Lost)has acquired a new connotation over the years, Babylon would be unfair since Little Baghdad is my favourite part of Sydney, and any of the Cities of the Plain would sound homophobic, when that isn't my intention at all.
Is Tony Blair really a genetically modified salamander?
As is well known, the urodeles have the largest genomes of all vertebrates. Until recently, the reasons for this peculiarity were unknown. However, Capek and Voss (Genetics, 164(2):735-746 (2003)) have demonstrated that the unexpressed portions of the salamander genome code for a completely different morphology, a morphology which bears startling similarities to Tony Blair! Under appropriate conditions, the 'normal' promoters which lead to the expression of the regular salamander genes could be turned off, and alternative promoters activated to express the 'Tony Blair' genes. While the true story of Tony Blair's origins remains classified, it is probable that the erratic genius Wolfgang Clam was aware of the potentialities of the salamander genome by the mid-1980s, and generated both Tony Blair and his human cover identity before his descent into madness and evil.
Saturday, August 21, 2004
Mindnumbingly-Dull Minutiae, Part Two
Okay, I am going to stay trivial this time. One thing I have noticed these blogs are useful for is talking about what books the blogger has read, or what movies the blogger has seen, to demonstrate how intellectual and/or hip they are. So that seems like a good place to start.
I have been reading Umberto Eco's 'The Search for a Perfect Language'- well, skimming really, to undercut my intellectual pretensions at the outset- which is about historical attempts to either create a perfect language or recreate the one given by God to Adam. One of the things I didn't know is that there was a long mediaeval tradition that there was diversity in language before the Tower of Babel, based on Genesis 10, and apparently somewhere in the Paradiso Adam gives Dante a little lecture about how the language he originally spoke in the Garden of Eden was different from the language spoken just before the flood.
Anyway, reading this has reminded me of my own efforts to create a new language, broken off about a year ago. I am not organised enough, or quite cosmically arrogant enough, to attempt a perfectly rational invented language, but envision my creation as the decayed remnant of such a project. The key idea of my language is the existence of several hundred valid answers to what we would call yes/no questions; the continuum between 'defintiely yes' and 'definitely no' is split into seven levels, and separate words exist to specify on what grounds the speaker is basing their answer. In the mooted screenplay for The Pike, (of which a tiny tiny bit has been written) the Monks are going to speak in this language, with english subtitles. It is also the lingua franca in this story.
Saw 'Love Actually' last night. I wonder why I haven't felt an urge to write anything about Tony Blair. He's catholic, isn't he? And he presides over a country where abortion is legal to 25 weeks. When children have survived being born at 22 weeks. Yet I've never accused him of worshipping evil Carthaginian Gods. I guess it is just a case of my priorities being determined by the media- they don't report what Tony thinks about abortion, so I can continue to be entranced by his Hugh-Grant-like grin and his genetically-modified salamander mind-control powers.
I have been reading Umberto Eco's 'The Search for a Perfect Language'- well, skimming really, to undercut my intellectual pretensions at the outset- which is about historical attempts to either create a perfect language or recreate the one given by God to Adam. One of the things I didn't know is that there was a long mediaeval tradition that there was diversity in language before the Tower of Babel, based on Genesis 10, and apparently somewhere in the Paradiso Adam gives Dante a little lecture about how the language he originally spoke in the Garden of Eden was different from the language spoken just before the flood.
Anyway, reading this has reminded me of my own efforts to create a new language, broken off about a year ago. I am not organised enough, or quite cosmically arrogant enough, to attempt a perfectly rational invented language, but envision my creation as the decayed remnant of such a project. The key idea of my language is the existence of several hundred valid answers to what we would call yes/no questions; the continuum between 'defintiely yes' and 'definitely no' is split into seven levels, and separate words exist to specify on what grounds the speaker is basing their answer. In the mooted screenplay for The Pike, (of which a tiny tiny bit has been written) the Monks are going to speak in this language, with english subtitles. It is also the lingua franca in this story.
Saw 'Love Actually' last night. I wonder why I haven't felt an urge to write anything about Tony Blair. He's catholic, isn't he? And he presides over a country where abortion is legal to 25 weeks. When children have survived being born at 22 weeks. Yet I've never accused him of worshipping evil Carthaginian Gods. I guess it is just a case of my priorities being determined by the media- they don't report what Tony thinks about abortion, so I can continue to be entranced by his Hugh-Grant-like grin and his genetically-modified salamander mind-control powers.
Thursday, August 19, 2004
Mindnumbingly-Dull Minutiae, Part One
...I have decided to postpone the first installment of the mindnumbingly-dull minutiae of my life, having not realised that Justice Breyer, who delivered the majority opinion in Wossname vs. Cathcart, is actually Jewish. So I feel obligated to dig into my archives and present my (unpublished) letters to the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald in defense of the Jewish state.
And a short uninteresting one:
6/8/2001, 'Moir Cartoon August 6th'
[This showed a guy throwing rocks, labelled 'terrorist', facing a helicopter gunship, labelled 'hero'].
What Alan Moir's cartoon doesn't show is that the helicopter gunship is firing over the head of the stone thrower, over the head of the Molotov cocktail thrower behind the stone thrower, over the head of the sniper behind the Molotov cocktail thrower, at the men organising the bombing of public places to randomly kill civilians. I wish you accepted attachments so I could show the faces of some of the teenage girls killed in the bombing these men called "a legitimate act" and "a successful blow against the Zionist enemy".
3/4/2002, 'Freedom for Silesia'
In the late 1940s, twelve million Germans were driven off their ancestral lands by the brutal regime of Stalin. Today, their descendants continue to live in squalid refugee camps, while the Slav occupiers refuse to recognise the U.N. resolutions calling for immediate withdrawal from the occupied territories of Prussia, Silesia, East Pomerania, and the Sudetenland, and respond disproportionately with collective punishment when German freedom-fighters nobly blow up Slav buses and restaurants. Our family has not given up the dream of returning to my great-grandfather's house in Breslau, and our leaders assure us that apparent compromise with the Slavs is only a stepping stone to the liberation of all Greater Germany...
Oops, I think I may have us confused with the other lot who launched a genocidal war against the Jews. The ones who didn't quite pull it off. Sorry...
And a short uninteresting one:
3/10/2002, 'Please Bump Him Upstairs'Could you please give Doug Anderson a regular column for his anti-US and anti-ISrael diatribes and hand the TV guide over to someone less overtly political?
Wednesday, August 18, 2004
The Reich Stuff
The Supreme Court of the Reich today overturned Reichzkanzler Bäumlein’s ban on the controversial ‘Einschuss’ method of social hygiene. ‘The best interests of the Party and the State are preserved when the broadest possible range of options is preserved for each community in the Fatherland to become Judenrein,’ pronounced Judge Breyer. ‘The ban is a gross infringement on the rights of the German people.’ The Einschuss technique, popular in occupied territories where ammunition is scarce, involves wiring Jews and other undesirables into a bundle, shooting the entire bundle with a single bullet, and throwing it into a body of water...
If the policies of the Republican and Democratic parties on abortion were reversed, I would be ‘all the way with JFK’, even if his Swift boat buddies swore black and blue that he used to get his jollies by napalming orphanages. I would support anyone running against Bush on a stronger anti-choice platform. I would support the Reverend Ian Paisley. I would support Moqtada al-Sadr. I would support Aleister Crowley, self-styled Beast of the Apocalypse (yes, he was pro-life too, even though he was also pro-human sacrifice). I guess I am that narrowly-based a single-issue voter.
Not that my purely nominal support is worth anything, as I am not registered to vote in the Old Country. I suppose I ought to shut up and write about the mind-numbingly dull minutiae of my life instead…
If the policies of the Republican and Democratic parties on abortion were reversed, I would be ‘all the way with JFK’, even if his Swift boat buddies swore black and blue that he used to get his jollies by napalming orphanages. I would support anyone running against Bush on a stronger anti-choice platform. I would support the Reverend Ian Paisley. I would support Moqtada al-Sadr. I would support Aleister Crowley, self-styled Beast of the Apocalypse (yes, he was pro-life too, even though he was also pro-human sacrifice). I guess I am that narrowly-based a single-issue voter.
Not that my purely nominal support is worth anything, as I am not registered to vote in the Old Country. I suppose I ought to shut up and write about the mind-numbingly dull minutiae of my life instead…
Tuesday, August 17, 2004
Think Globally - Act Unilaterally
Yesterday I read something in the newspaper- on actual paper, so I can't put a link to it here, which is a freedom I forfeited for the freedom of reading during outside on a bench in the sun- different from anything I had read before. It was something I don't think would have been written before a few years ago by anyone except Barry Goldwater or one of the Barry Goldwater clones that Pinochet used to keep in that cave in the Andes. It wasn't written by anyone who I recognised as belonging to a neoconservative cabal. I had a vague impression they were actually some kind of career diplomat. The general tone of the article didn't seem to be particularly right wing. The piece was about the Darfur crisis, and what I read was something like this: "A government that cannot guarantee the human rights of its people forfeits its right to non-interference in its internal affairs." Amen.
It was just put in there, unapologetically, without any effort to justify the statement. "A government that cannot guarantee the human rights of its people forfeits its right to non-interference in its internal affairs."
That is, to me, the Bush doctrine. It is also the Clinton doctrine- Clinton ordered the military into action more times than any other peacetime US President, always for humanitarian sorts of things. But what this doctrine needs is a sense of proportion; you cannot let Mr. Murdoch and Mr. Moore determine your priorities. It needs a sense of what can realistically be done, and also what is worth doing. I am sure a multinational force along the Green Line in Israel/Palestine would do some good; I am sure a few hundred Scandinavian peacekeepers in Bourke and Walgett would do some good; but I am not sure that is the best way the world should be spending its resources. At the other end of the scale, this doctrine so innocently expressed by this fellow whose name I have forgotten runs into one enormous problem. Two words: Middle Kingdom.
But leaving that aside for now. World government may or not be a good thing, but there is only one entity in the world today that can be considered an embryonic world government, and that is the United States. It is far less corrupt and far, far more powerful than the United Nations; it has a powerful motivating and unifying ideology that is exportable and adaptable, unlike the European Union or China. The best chance for peace in our time is American hegemony.
(The next bit I wrote at the beginning of last year, and now I find that the final paragraph scares me, which must mean I am becoming more mellow. Ahem:)
This is what the United States is waking up to realise: For the first time in history, a democracy has a free hand to remake the world.
At Valmy, the revolutionary army of the French sent a shudder through all the crowned heads of Europe, and the long war against the people began. The spirit of the 18th Century Revolutions was stilled by two-hundred years of obscene but necessary realpolitik, cooperation with every kind of dictator and thug to fight greater evils, but can now rise again. It is the duty of every democracy to export revolution.
We do not understand, in the bloodless republics and pale constitutional monarchies that form the rest of the West, what the United States is: it is not a collection of people whose ancestors happened to live in a particular place, but a nation founded and sustained by a ideology more human than any product of the satanic 20th century. That ideology is not necessarily english-speaking, it is not necessarily Christian, it is not necessarily rich. The 22nd century United States may well be none of these things. This is the core of the ideology: “We hold these truths to be self evident; that all men are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
If you believe that sentence, you will not stop at Kabul. You will not stop at Baghdad. You will not stop at Teheran or Ramallah or Damascus or Pyongyang. You will take advantage of this sweet-spot in history, this transient moment before we once again have ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’, to engineer a regime change in the renegade mainland provinces of China. You will fight until all government not “of the people, for the people, by the people” has vanished from the face of the Earth.
It was just put in there, unapologetically, without any effort to justify the statement. "A government that cannot guarantee the human rights of its people forfeits its right to non-interference in its internal affairs."
That is, to me, the Bush doctrine. It is also the Clinton doctrine- Clinton ordered the military into action more times than any other peacetime US President, always for humanitarian sorts of things. But what this doctrine needs is a sense of proportion; you cannot let Mr. Murdoch and Mr. Moore determine your priorities. It needs a sense of what can realistically be done, and also what is worth doing. I am sure a multinational force along the Green Line in Israel/Palestine would do some good; I am sure a few hundred Scandinavian peacekeepers in Bourke and Walgett would do some good; but I am not sure that is the best way the world should be spending its resources. At the other end of the scale, this doctrine so innocently expressed by this fellow whose name I have forgotten runs into one enormous problem. Two words: Middle Kingdom.
But leaving that aside for now. World government may or not be a good thing, but there is only one entity in the world today that can be considered an embryonic world government, and that is the United States. It is far less corrupt and far, far more powerful than the United Nations; it has a powerful motivating and unifying ideology that is exportable and adaptable, unlike the European Union or China. The best chance for peace in our time is American hegemony.
(The next bit I wrote at the beginning of last year, and now I find that the final paragraph scares me, which must mean I am becoming more mellow. Ahem:)
This is what the United States is waking up to realise: For the first time in history, a democracy has a free hand to remake the world.
At Valmy, the revolutionary army of the French sent a shudder through all the crowned heads of Europe, and the long war against the people began. The spirit of the 18th Century Revolutions was stilled by two-hundred years of obscene but necessary realpolitik, cooperation with every kind of dictator and thug to fight greater evils, but can now rise again. It is the duty of every democracy to export revolution.
We do not understand, in the bloodless republics and pale constitutional monarchies that form the rest of the West, what the United States is: it is not a collection of people whose ancestors happened to live in a particular place, but a nation founded and sustained by a ideology more human than any product of the satanic 20th century. That ideology is not necessarily english-speaking, it is not necessarily Christian, it is not necessarily rich. The 22nd century United States may well be none of these things. This is the core of the ideology: “We hold these truths to be self evident; that all men are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
If you believe that sentence, you will not stop at Kabul. You will not stop at Baghdad. You will not stop at Teheran or Ramallah or Damascus or Pyongyang. You will take advantage of this sweet-spot in history, this transient moment before we once again have ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’, to engineer a regime change in the renegade mainland provinces of China. You will fight until all government not “of the people, for the people, by the people” has vanished from the face of the Earth.
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