Sunday Roast

Aug 17, 2008 | Australian Values, Cultural Values, Lifestyle & Life, Religious Values, Values

Sunday Roast

Godly Thoughts for Sunday

“ 

And now, today, we grieve for four young men [US Marines murdered in El Salvador] taken from us too soon. And we receive them in death as they were on the last night of their lives, together and following a radiant light — following it toward heaven, toward home. And if we reach — or when we reach — heaven’s scenes, we truly will find it guarded by…

…wait for it…

…we truly will find it guarded by United States marines.
– [President Ronald Reagan, June 22, 1985]

So that’s something to look forward to.

“ I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do.

When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”
– [Stephen Roberts]

 

“ I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian God may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them.

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more often likely to be foolish than sensible.”

– [Bertrand Russell]

 

“ We have just enough religion to make us hate but not enough religion to make us love one another”
– [Jonathan Swift]

 

“ When I think of all the harm the Bible has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it.”

– [Oscar Wilde]

Keelty Must Go At Last

Jul 30, 2008 | Australian Values, Corruption, Democracy, Immigration, OzPol Values, Values

Keelty Must Go At Last

 

Howard’s last ditch: a failure called Keelty 

 

We wish to note the news this week that:

“ ASIO has revealed it “consistently” advised the Howard government it had no evidence connecting Mohamed Haneef to a British terrorist plot, days before the government stripped the Indian doctor of his visa.

In a damning submission to the Clarke inquiry into the handling of the case, the head of the country’s main intelligence agency said it told the government there were no grounds to believe Dr Haneef was linked to, or even knew about, the botched June car bombings. It raises questions about the actions of the then immigration minister, Kevin Andrews, who cancelled the doctor’s visa, and of the Australian Federal Police Commissioner, Mick Keelty, who has declared there were grounds to treat Dr Haneef as a security risk.

This was on top of similar advice to the AFP nearly three weeks ago:

“ The Queensland Police Service says it told Australia Federal Police (AFP) officers last year there was not enough evidence to charge Dr Mohamed Haneef with supporting a terrorist organisation.

There is now no doubt at all, if there ever was any, that the Haneef affair was Howard’s last ditch attempt at a Tampa Overboard for the 2007 election, aided and abetted by his lapdog, AFP Commissioner Keelty, and the Joke, Kevin Andrews.

More recently,

“ A senior counter-terrorism officer with the Australian Federal Police…testified that police were directed to charge “as many suspects as possible” with terrorism offences in order to test the new anti-terrorism laws introduced in 2003…”At the time we were directed, we were informed, to lay as many charges under the new terrorist legislation against as many suspects as possible because we wanted to use the new legislation,” Mr Lam Paktsun testified.

An AFP spokesperson was asked whether the ASIO statement made Keelty’s position untenable.

The answer is ‘Yes’.

As we said here last November,

“ can there any longer possibly be any question that the appalling, scandal-ridden, utterly discredited and totally compromised Keelty is irredeemably politicised – in fact has offered himself up to the political game by his own choice?

“It’s time for Mick Keelty to resign. Or be sacked…Keelty has to go because of how he thinks about the law…He has to go because everything points to his being utterly politicised and his making decisions on political, not legal, grounds as directed by his [then] masters, the Howard ministry.”

Keelty made, cleverly he probably thought, a Faustian pact with the Devil of Realpolitik. Now he’s been caught out yet again and so we say, yet again:

“Do the decent thing at long last, Mick.”

Oh, no, you bloody don’t!

Jun 11, 2008 | Australian Values, Democracy, Media Values, Religious Values, Terrorism, USPol, Values, War

Oh, no, you bloody don’t!

I’m just a soul whose intentions are good
Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood

“ President Bush has admitted to The Times that his gun-slinging rhetoric made the world believe that he was a “guy really anxious for war” in Iraq.
In an exclusive interview, he expressed regret at the bitter divisions over the war and said that he was troubled about how his country had been misunderstood. “I think that in retrospect I could have used a different tone, a different rhetoric.”

As we picked our chin off the floor we thought, “What an utterly lame and sleazy attempt this really is to rewrite history in the name of clawing back some sort of presidential legacy from the catastrophic horrors he has inflicted on the world and even on his own people through his proud ignorance and astonishing immaturity.”

Actually, we didn’t think that. We don’t talk to ourself like that. I mean, you don’t, do you. It was more like “What the fucking fuck?!” But it’s what we meant.

As SFGate‘s Edward M. Gomez, a former U.S. diplomat and staff reporter at TIME, put it, “Now he tells us.”

“ Phrases such as “bring them on” or “dead or alive”, he said, “indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace”.
He said that he found it very painful “to put youngsters in harm’s way”.
He added: “I try to meet with as many of the families as I can. And I have an obligation to comfort and console as best as I possibly can. I also have an obligation to make sure that those lives were not lost in vain.”

Well, Mr Bush, (pardon us) FUCK YOU!

It wasn’t your rhetoric that showed you were a “guy really anxious for war”.

It was how you were, ah, really anxious for war.

It was how you rushed in.

It was how you deliberately ignored, manufactured and distorted intelligence.

It was how you had quite a few people killed. Over a million on the high but credible side and, certainly, considerably over 100,000 on the very most conservative realistic estimates. All innocent. Largely mothers and children.

People don’t think you are not a man of peace because of something you said, Mr Bush. People know you are not a man of peace because you started a war and killed a lot of people.

People know you are not a man of peace because you started a war on your very own, on the flimsiest and most transparent of excuses and against international laws and conventions, against a country that had not attacked yours and could not. As you and all those around you knew.

You will not get away with this slimy, slippery, dishonest, hollow, inauthentic, typically infantile attempt to avoid responsibility for the global horrors you have created with your own hands; horrors which include the devastated lives of the mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and cousins and aunts and uncles of the more than 4,000 soldiers whose lives were wiped out because you were anxious for war; horrors that include the destroyed futures and minds of the tens or hundreds of thousands of Iraq veterans who are physical and mental casualties of your headlong and bloodthirsty rush into a synthetic conflict, and that include the families of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have died, and the more than two million Iraqis who have been forced to flee Iraq or who are internally displaced.

And the release and explosion of sectarian violence in Iraq which was caused by your stupidity and your lust for war.

So please don’t ask for forgiveness.

Don’t claim to have been misunderstood.

The rest of the world will not let you get away with it. Surely your own countrymen will not, either.

You claim to be troubled about how your country has been misunderstood.

Mr Bush, your country is not misunderstood. Not really. The world knows that many Americans are confused about how all this happened, how the country attracts so much hatred.

But we can tell them that it’s not them, it’s you.

The world knows that your country includes warmongers like yourself, anti-democratic ideologues whom you support, ignorant stupid people like yourself, religious nuts who think god talks to them and tells them what they ought to do – and some even worse than yourself.

And yet the world also knows that your country still nurtures a people who are extraordinarily generous.

The world knows that, despite your efforts to silence and sideline them, your country still is home to more than its fair share of the most humane souls, the greatest, wisest minds, the most creative thinkers and talented doers, and some of the most energetic, enterprising, adventurous, life-loving and courageous people on the planet.

You are not one of them.

Dulce et decorum est

May 18, 2008 | Arts, Australian Values, Cultural Values, Democracy, OzPol Values, Values, War

Dulce et decorum est

 

(Hint: No it’s not)

Watched The Einstein Factor this evening and the second contestant’s subject was the life and poetry of Wilfred Owen (more or less).

One of the poems mentioned — which of course it had to be — was Dulce et Decorum Est. Everyone – most of them very well-educated and perhaps even erudite – pronounced it “DOOLL-chay et d’-CORum est”.

Which is fair enough, but I think it is wrong, at least in the context of the poem itself.

Way back in the….well, more than a couple of minutes ago….I was sitting in an English tute at UNE. Wilfred Owen’s poetry – and this poem in particular – was the topic.

The tutor asked if anyone knew how the title was properly pronounced. I remember because this smarmy new chap, who was the only person I ever knew who had done Latin for the Leaving Certificate, showed the rest of us up by casually giving the correct answer. It wasn’t that he knew, exactly; it was his attitude of “well, of course, I thought everyone knew that, don’t they? (And by the way amn’t I clever?).” 

Anyway, his pronunciation was something like: “DOOLchet DECKerest”.

Our tutor nodded sagely, with an approving smile at the cleverboy, so I have no doubt it is correct. But why would it be different from the “normal” pronunciation? Is it for the scansion of the lines? Is it because accepted Latin pronunciation began changing sometime around the early 1900s? cf. Mr Chips’s joke about vicissim:

Headmaster to Chips: “This question of Latin pronunciation, for instance–I think I told you years ago that I wanted the new style used throughout the School. The other masters obeyed me; you prefer to stick to your old methods, and the result is simply chaos and inefficiency.”

At last Chips had something tangible that he could tackle. “Oh, that!” he answered, scornfully. “Well, I–umph–I admit that I don’t agree with the new pronunciation. I never did. Umph–a lot of nonsense, in my opinion. Making boys say ‘Kickero’ at school when–umph–for the rest of their lives they’ll say ‘Cicero’–if they ever–umph–say it at all. And instead of ‘vicissim’–God bless my soul–you’d make them say, ‘We kiss ‘im’! Umph–umph!” And he chuckled momentarily, forgetting that he was in Ralston’s study and not in his own friendly form room.

So this has been bugging me for hours. I haven’t found anything about it, any guidance on it, on the intertubes.

That is why I throw myself at your mercy, dearest and most appreciated blog-lurker. Please, if you know, tell me if I have come anywhere close to this special pronunciation. Tell me, if I am wrong, why I would have this memory? Or tell me that I am really stupid and old and losing it. I can take it [just don’t all rush in at once…].

 Just by the way, Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori means, more or less, “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country”. Owen did not, you can imagine, subscribe to this view. Yet the same idea is still trotted out by such as George Bush (who are fairly confident that they are not about to be called upon to die for their country, either sweetly or fittingly) with terms like “sacrifice” and “honor” as some sort of justification for deaths in pointless, cynical wars.

My favorite Owen poem is Mental Cases. It’s about what we now call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. There’s so much of it about these days¹…..

[….]

These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished.

Memory fingers in their hair of murders,

Multitudinous murders they once witnessed.

Wading sloughs of flesh these helpless wander,

Treading blood from lungs that had loved laughter.

[….]

etc…….

¹UPDATE: Some 300,000 of the 1.6 million US soldiers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, depression or both, an independent study showed last month.

Drugs are Bad

May 11, 2008 | Australian Values, Cultural Values, Economic Values, Lifestyle & Life, OzPol Values, Values

Drugs are Bad

 M’Kay?

 I mean, some drugs are bad. Just bad. 
Some drugs are good, like medicine.

Some drugs, well, they’re legal even if they kill you, like cigarettes, or, like alcohol, kill other people you run into. But drugs drugs are just B-A-D. Inherently. In and of themselves. Drugs are morally bad. M’Kay?

After all, drugs cause crime. Drugs cause illness. Drugs cause violence and even death – by overdoses and suicides. Drugs cause the breakup of families and relationships.

Drugs cost the economy billions of dollars a year and strain the health care and welfare systems to breaking point.
Actually, to be more precise, illegal drugs cost the economy billions of dollars a year and strain the health care and welfare systems to breaking point.

So how come drugs like heroin and cocaine cause so much crime and devastation? Do drugs really make good people evil?
Consider that the real cause of all of the crime, illness, destroyed relationships and death is the fact that the drugs are illegal.
The reason drug addicts steal and burglarise is that the drugs cost so much that to buy them they have to obtain the money for them illegally.

The reason for the illness is that the drug addicts are spending all of their money on drugs and not on nutritious food or health care.

The reason for the destroyed relationships is that financial worries, illness and preoccupation with obtaining the drugs compound to make proper relationships virtually impossible.

The reason that people die from overdoses is that because there is so much money in the drugs, dealers can make even more by “cutting” them. They can be cut several times between the original importer and the end user, with a variety of substances. Sometimes the drugs are cut with caustic chemicals. In any case, addicts can’t know how pure the drug is that they are using. When they take their normal dose of a sample that they are unaware is unusually pure, it can kill them.

Why do addicts commit suicide? At least one of the reasons must be that they feel hopelessly trapped in the squalor of a desperate downward spiral from which they can see no possible escape.

Does all this make sense? Well, we know of at least one person who was (is?) a heroin addict. When we heard about her she had a high-flying corporate job at boardroom level. Together, she and her husband were very well off indeed. She had two daughters at an exclusive private school. She was on the school council. And she took her heroin hit every morning before leaving for work. No-one was ever the wiser and it never interfered with her performance at work.

Why didn’t she, too, descend into the hell that other junkies do? The answer is, she could afford the drug. On her income the cost was no big deal at all. She could afford to make sure that the drugs she bought were of consistent quality.

And, anecdotally, she is only one of thousands of similarly effective, perfectly functional heroin addicts in Australia, many of whom are said to be Canberra public servants.

So why are the drugs so expensive? First: because they are illegal; second because there is a strong demand. (To some extent their illegality drives demand; the thrill of the naughtiness, at least in the early experimental stage, can have appeal for rebellious young people.)

The illegality drives up the price. Law enforcement measures make the production and transport of the drugs more and more difficult. Concealment becomes more and more expensive, and the inducements for the producers and couriers need to be big enough for them to be willing to take the risks of death or imprisonment. This pushes up the street price which pushes up the crime statistics. The better the cartels become at hiding their trade, the more the enforcement agencies have to lift their abilities to detect and intercept it. The better the agencies get, the higher the risk and so the higher the price. The better the agencies get, the more limited the supply and so the higher the price.

All of this because “Drugs are bad, M’Kay?” Morally bad. As an article of faith.

Illegal drugs constitute an industry which depends entirely on their illegality. It is in the interests of the drug criminals that drugs are illegal because that is how and why they make such enormous amounts of money.

But it is not a one-sided industry. It is equally in the interests of the enforcement agencies that the drugs be illegal. Their operations have exploded in size in recent decades. Vast empires, both governmental and private, have been built which employ enormous numbers of people all over the world and infuse huge amounts of money into both large and small countries. This money is used to bribe and control tinpot dictatorships and timorous democracies. The war on drugs is used, particularly by the US government, to leverage compliant trade deals throughout the world.

You will not find a drug baron calling for the relaxation of drug laws. In fact they are more likely to be clandestinely buying influence in the corridors of power to tighten the laws. Nor are you going to find their adversaries, the anti-drug czars, expressing an interest in loosening their own powers or reducing the size of their empires.

And of course the amount of money involved leads to breathtaking levels of corruption of both private and government officials, which naturally compromises the quality of governance where it matters most.

For players on both sides it is “a nice little earner”… at the expense of poor people all over the world; stupid poor people in the West, desperate poor people in the third world.

But there is a very nasty side to the illegal drug trade.

In Colombia the cocaine trade funds the FARC guerilla movement’s terror and kidnapping operations. The best way to cripple the FARC would in fact be to decriminalise cocaine worldwide.

In Afghanistan the worldwide illegality of heroin, with its huge market, is what is fuelling and funding the Taliban, resistance to democracy and ultimately world-wide Islamist terrorism. The value of the illicit poppy crops makes it worth the warlords’ resisting the ISAF in Afghanistan. It is in part what leads to the killing of Australian and other nations’ soldiers.

Decriminalising heroin would starve the trade of oxygen.

We are not holding our breath. But any trade depends on supply and demand.

What about demand? This is the truly hard question, the really confronting question.
No trade can survive without demand. The illicit drug trade could never survive if the drugs were merely expensive. People have to want them and want them bad.

So what is it about our society and our culture that so many people so desperately want whatever they get from these drugs?
Don’t know. It probably has something to do with alienation, dehumanisation of our societies and our economic systems.
Perhaps Erich Fromm¹ has a clue:

Could it be that the middle-class life of prosperity, while satisfying our material needs leaves us with a feeling of intense boredom, and that suicide and alcoholism are pathological ways to escape from this boredom. Could it be that…[this is] a drastic illustration for the truth of the statement that “man lives not by bread alone,” and that…modern civilization fails to satisfy profound needs in man?
[ … ]
It is the conflict between two principles of value: that between the world of things, and their amassment, and the world of life and its productivity.
[ … ]
Science, business, politics, have lost all foundations and proportions which make sense humanly. We live in figures and abstractions; since nothing is concrete, nothing is real…Man has been thrown out from any definite place whence he can overlook and manage his life and the life of society. He is driven faster and faster by the forces which originally were created by him. In this wild whirl he thinks, figures, busy with abstractions, more and more remote from concrete life.
[ … ]
… automatons, who follow without force, who are guided without leaders, who make machines which act like men and produce men who act like machines; men, whose reason deteriorates while their intelligence rises, thus creating the dangerous situation of equipping man with the greatest material power without the wisdom to use it.

Whatever, it is not a question that will ever be addressed politically. It is not a question we as a society want to ask, let alone answer, because it would require such adjustment, such effort, such an acceptance of responsibility, such reassessment of who we are that there is no political or social will to address it. Especially when we have our eyes firmly fixed on “the plasma”, or whatever must-keep-up status bauble comes next. And so we will have more of the same and worse.

And we will continue to slump back into the comfort of our self-serving myths.

And we will continue to blame and punish and contemn the poor, stupid, desperate victims, even though in our refusal to abandon our righteousness, in our refusal to see things as they are, and in our refusal to tackle the real questions, we make ourselves the true and self-inflicted victims. 

M’Kay?

¹Erich Fromm, The Sane Society

Expertology

May 5, 2008 | Australian Values, Democracy, Humour, Media Values, OzPol Values, Religious Values, USPol, Values, War

Expertology

 

How the Experts Won the Iraq War in Weeks Rather Than Years

 

The newest Bill Moyers Journal episode includes an interview with Victor Navasky and Christopher Cerf, whose new book MISSION ACCOMPLISHED! OR HOW WE WON THE WAR IN IRAQ looks back at what the experts told us would happen in Iraq. It’s quite funny except it’s all true.
You can watch it here:

 

What the experts said:

DONALD RUMSFELD:
“It could last, you know, six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.”
CHENEY:
”I think it’ll go relatively quickly…weeks rather than months.”
PAUL WOLFOWITZ:
“We can say with reasonable confidence that the notion of hundreds of thousands of American troops is way off the mark…We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon.

WILLIAM KRISTOL: “The first two battles of this new era are now over. The battles of Afghanistan and Iraq have been won decisively and honorably.”

RICHARD PERLE:  The war, “…ended quickly with few civilian casualties and with little damage to Iraq’s cities, towns or infrastructure…it ended… without the quagmire [the war’s critics] predicted…relax and enjoy it.”
MONA CHARON: “the man who slept through many classes at Yale and partied the nights away stands revealed as a profound and great leader who will reshape the world for the better. The United States is lucky once again.”
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: “The only people who think this wasn’t a victory are Upper West Side liberals and a few people here in Washington.”
WILLIAM KRISTOL:”I think there’s been a certain amount of frankly.. pop sociology in America…that…the Shia can’t get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There’s almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq’s always been very secular.”

Here’s an excerpt from the interview with Navasky and Cerf:

VICTOR NAVASKY: Well, at every stage, there was someone who proclaimed that it was over. And– when this book came out, we were told isn’t it a shame that it’s coming out now, because the country has reached a turning point with the surge. And based on our research at the Institute of Expertology … we were sympathetic to the point of view that we’ve reached a turning point. Because, as we show in the book, in 2003, we were told by the President of the United States that we’ve reached a turning point. And then, in 2004, we were told we had reached a turning point.
And then, in 2005, we were told by Donald Rumsfeld we have reached a turning point. And then– So every year, three or four times, we seem to have reached a turning point. So that’s one of the ways that we have triumphed.

 

BILL MOYERS: So how do you decide who is an expert? What makes an expert?

 

CHRISTOPHER CERF: Well, I think if you are in the government – this is one of the problems we have in the country – you are, by definition, an expert. In fact, you’re unpatriotic if you disagree with someone in the government. And your expertise, if you had any before, becomes suspect.

 

BILL MOYERS: But these experts also included scholars, pundits, columnists.

 

VICTOR NAVASKY: People are believed to be experts who proclaim their expertise. Some of them do it directly. Others do it by using jargon, by parading the number of articles they’ve published, by their titles, and by their uniforms. And then, people who have positions of status and power, whether in the press, who are supposed to be adversaries of the establishment. Or, you know, the heads of departments – great departments of government – are assumed to know what they’re talking about. So anyone who is presumed to know what he is talking about, we, at the Institute of Expertology are ready to say, as an expert, but you have to trust us – they don’t.

But who are their favourite “experts”?

VICTOR NAVASKY: I have a favorite expert and a friend. And Chris, I’m sure, has his. But my favorite quote – he’s my favorite expert. But it’s a quote by Paul Wolfowitz, who, you know, came from the academic community, and then had this very important career in the Defense Department, et cetera.
And he says, at one point, “I think foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq.”