Mount Migently Manifesto

Dec 22, 2012 | Arts, Australian Values, Citizenship, Cultural Values, Democracy, Economic Values, Education, Immigration, Indigenous, Legal, Lifestyle & Life, Love, Media Values, OzPol Values, Racism, Religious Values, Science Values, Values

Mount Migently Manifesto

 Australian Values

 

Australian values have lately been enthusiastically asserted by some Australians and Sir Roger has been much impressed – in much the same way a washed-up prize fighter feels the repeated impressions of his opponents’ fists in his guts.

These assertions of “Australian values” tend to be energetically debated:

in Melbourne with French and Indian visitors to Australia on trains, buses and trams,

in university college meetings in Sydney,

in the halls, offices and party rooms of Parliament House in Canberra

and particularly on commercial radio breakfast programs everywhere. 

Sir Roger was reeling from the onslaught and disheartened by the proponents’ ignorance, illogic, idiocy and illiteracy; by their fear, spite, narrow-minded prejudice, stupidity and frankly pre-agricultural social views. 

Someone had omitted to convey to them that for their brain to operate as advertised it is necessary to update the database regularly and to calibrate it with reality. 

Someone had omitted to explain to them that the texts on which their ethics are based and with which they (selectively) justify much of their self-righteous bombast are not actually sacred but were all simple rulebooks written thousands of years ago to enable the social control of brutal sand tribes, to suit their primitive times and conditions, calm their existential terrors, alleviate their ontological horrors, excuse their ignorance and justify their brutality. 

Someone had failed to explain to them that the foundation myths, the stories of Australia on which they hang their narrative of Australian culture, are just that. Myths. It never happened, Bruce.

It’s just like when your girlfriend lied to you – you weren’t the first. 

Dismayed by the galloping erosion of the humane, generous, fair and tolerant values of his Australia Sir Roger therefore repaired to the mountain top seeking counsel and wisdom from the winds,  the silence and the intelligences of the cosmos. 

Sir Roger was generously granted that counsel and has returned from the mountain top bearing enlightenment. 

Over the next few days and weeks he will share with his world these insights into the best of human and Australian values. 

 

 

Malcolm Turnbull: Next Prime Minister?

Dec 7, 2012 | Australian Values, Border Security, Cultural Values, Democracy, Economic Values, Global Warming, Immigration, OzPol Values, Science Values, Terrorism, Values

Malcolm Turnbull: Next Prime Minister?

 

Backing into the limelight


Sir Roger believes Malcolm Turnbull could easily be the next Prime Minister of Australia.
What do you think? Here’s why:

1) The coalition and the right wing media will bring too much pressure on Julia Gillard about the Slater and Gordon quagmire – either facts or compelling implications – so that either she can’t stay, or she becomes too much of a liability to the party’s electoral success, vacating the PM-ship by choice or force.

2) Rudd will decline to nominate for leadership of the party, so he will be drafted and oh so very reluctantly accept (as someone described T. E. Lawrence, “always backing into the limelight”).

3) With Rudd at the helm again, Abbott, who already is hugely disliked (and an immature fool), barely tolerated as “at least not Gillard”, will preside over disastrous poll results (because Rudd will easily usurp his role as “at least not Gillard”).

4) Abbott will be unceremoniously dumped and Turnbull, who is hugely liked, will replace him. Christopher (Politics Beats Values) Whine, by the way, will immediately explain that while he couldn’t say so he always hated Abbott, thought he was the wrong man for the job, and preferred Turnbull.

5) People are already angry at Labor which in most policies is indistinguishable from the coalition; indistinguishable even from those of the war criminal  John Howard. People are looking for an alternative but they are a bit fond of action on global warming and humane treatment of refugees, both of which might just conceivably be revived under Rudd.

6) Nevertheless Turnbull is better liked than Rudd and, promising to pursue good, moral and humane policies and good real Australian values, will win the next federal election in a landslide.

7) The Greens and Independents will disappear from the Reps – mostly because people are so bloody … we’ll stop there.

 

Why the Long Face?

Sep 27, 2012 | Australian Values, Democracy, Economic Values, Media Values, OzPol Values, Values

Why the Long Face?

Joining the Elite

How do you think Australia’s economy is going, compared to the rest of the world?
Sir Roger wonders because some rainbow-lovers say it’s magnificent and some shrill hurricane chasers say we’re going to hell in a handbasket and doom is upon us.

Sir Roger had his servan staff do some forensic research. They discovered that only the following 11 countries (i.e. the top roughly 6%) have AAA ratings with stable or positive outlooks with all three “big” ratings agencies (Fitch, Moody’s, Standard and Poors):

Australia
Canada
Denmark
Finland
Norway
Singapore
Sweden
Switzerland
Germany
Luxembourg
Netherlands

This is nice…isn’t it? That’s an elite group! Even the UK and US aren’t in it.

Shouldn’t we be grateful and count our blessings, even celebrate?

So if we are doing so well, if the economy is so excellent and apparently we’ve really “never had it so good”, why are so many people (all right I mean Jolly Joe and Tony the Tool and all the Liberal Premiers) trying to convince us how badly the economy is being managed, how tough life is, how bad we feel, and how much we’re all struggling?

Remember it’s been 5 years now and they can no longer lay the wreaths at Costello’s door. Maybe they hope no-one will actually look at the facts.

Or did Sir Roger miss something?

You’re aware that a AAA rating is only about the money and in a “two-tiered economy” that may not mean a lot to the people on the lower tier (not being Andrew, Gina or Clive). But there is another list called the UN Human Development Index. It rates countries for Life Expectancy/Health, Education and Standard of Living.

Here are the top few countries (corrected for “inequality”):

Norway
Australia
Sweden
Netherlands
Iceland
Ireland
Germany
Denmark
Switzerland
Slovenia
Finland
Canada
New Zealand would be in the top ten (it is #5 in the uncorrected index)

So surely it can’t get much better than this? I mean, if we’re miserable and pessimistic and afraid of the future in this environment, when would we EVER be happy and appreciative and optimistic?

Sir Roger thinks it’s not the facts that are at play but the clash of perceptual “frames” being manufactured by each side, the optimists and pessimists, that is directing the narrative and the perception of how well we’re doing.

What do you think?

 

 

 

 

Émile Zola

Jun 14, 2012 | Australian Values, Cultural Values, Democracy, Legal, Media Values, OzPol Values, Racism, Religious Values, Science Values, Values

Émile Zola

 

“ It is a crime to lie to the public ”

 

So in the Cimitière Montmartre Sir Roger found one of his heroes.

Émile Zola

That is to say, he found the memorial. He (Zola that is) is interred at the Panthéon.

Why a hero? Amongst his many writings Émile Zola wrote this, which is as relevant today in our political discourse and climate as it was on the cusp of the 20ième siècle, almost exactly — and only — 50 years before Sir Roger’s birth:

“ Ah, what a cesspool of folly and foolishness, what preposterous fantasies, what corrupt police tactics, what inquisitorial, tyrannical practices! What petty whims of a few higher-ups trampling the nation under their boots, ramming back down their throats the people’s cries for truth and justice, with the travesty of state security as a pretext.

 

It is a crime that those people who wish to see a generous France take her place as leader of all the free and just nations are being accused of fomenting turmoil in the country, denounced by the very plotters who are conniving so shamelessly to foist this miscarriage of justice on the entire world. It is a crime to lie to the public, to twist public opinion to insane lengths in the service of the vilest death-dealing machinations. It is a crime to poison the minds of the meek and the humble, to stoke the passions of reactionism and intolerance, by appealing to that odious anti-Semitism that, unchecked, will destroy the freedom-loving France of the Rights of Man. It is a crime to exploit patriotism in the service of hatred, and it is, finally, a crime to ensconce the sword as the modern god, whereas all science is toiling to achieve the coming era of truth and justice.

 

Truth and justice, so ardently longed for! How terrible it is to see them trampled, unrecognized and ignored!
[ … ]
I said it before and I repeat it now: when truth is buried underground, it grows and it builds up so much force that the day it explodes it blasts everything with it. We shall see whether we have been setting ourselves up for the most resounding of disasters, yet to come.

Just insert, for example, Abbott, or Howard, or Liberal Party, or Hockey, or Jones, or Bolt; strike out anti-semitism and replace it with asylum seekers, or global warming, or in earlier days Iraq, wherever they seem appropriate to you.

The French, Sir Roger is convinced, are serious about and cherish and are vigilant about their hard-won democracy, their Rights of Man, their “liberté, égalité, fraternité”.

Do Australians, in contrast, tend to think “she’ll be right”?

Will she?

On War: Notes For My Son

May 27, 2012 | Arts, Australian Values, Capital Punishment, Corruption, Democracy, OzPol Values, Values, War

On War: Notes For My Son

 

…and for yours, and for all of us.

 

Sir Roger is currently in the land of the poppy (the other one) but not near Flanders fields. Yet there are poppies here in the South of France and the whiff of war and bloody conflict is inescapably, faintly, background to all.

And so it was a cold and brassy wind which blew through Sir Roger’s eye sockets and resonated in his skull and rattled the bones of his skeleton when Les recited this poem, perhaps the angriest, truest, most biting and chilling verse of war Sir Roger has ever heard.

  

Notes for My Son

~  Alex Comfort

Remember when you hear them beginning to say Freedom
Look carefully – see who it is that they want you to butcher.

Remember, when you say that the old trick would not have
fooled you for a moment
That every time it is the trick which seems new.

Remember that you will have to put in irons
Your better nature, if it will desert to them.

Remember, remember their faces–watch them carefully:
For every step you take is on somebody’s body.

And every cherry you plant for them is a gibbet
And every furrow you turn for them is a grave

Remember, the smell of burning will not sicken you
If they persuade you that it will thaw the world

Beware. The blood of a child does not smell so bitter
If you have shed it with a high moral purpose.

So that because the woodcutter disobeyed
they will not burn her today or any day

So that for lack of a joiner’s obedience
The crucifixion will not now take place

So that when they come to sell you their bloody corruption
You will gather the spit of your chest
And plant it in their faces.

  

Afghanistan Photos

Apr 19, 2012 | Australian Values, Corruption, Cultural Values, Democracy, Media Values, OzPol Values, USPol, Values, War

Afghanistan Photos

Bad Apples?

or Bad Apple Tree?

 

When will they get it? Or do they get it and try to hide the truth about the Afghanistan photos before anyone notices they’ve got it?
First the disclaimer: To gloatingly photograph yourself with a slain enemy (whether self-slaughtered or not) is obscene.

But then, if the entire situation is obscene . . .  ?

The American political-military establishment — not to mention the Australian and the European/NATO war departments — once again insists that “this is not us”, “this behavior does not reflect our values.”

“This is not who we are,” says Leon Panetta.

“[The Afghanistan photos] don’t in anyway represent the principles and values that are the basis for our mission in Afghanistan,” says Anders Fogh Rasmussen who also said this was “an isolated event.”

Yes, it’s the case of the ‘bad apples.’

The question is, how did these apples pop fully formed – armed and in uniform – into existence? Was it by a miracle of birth, more miraculous than immaculate conception — because apparently they had neither father nor mother nor even country or past?

Of course not. These “bad apples” carry the social DNA of their apple tree: their country, their nation, their society, the situation they have been shoe-horned into by a military establishment that is more concerned with the politics of the game and the public perception of the state of the game than with the human realities of the way war inflicts itself on cannon-fodder.

And the Generals and diplomats¹ think they can sweep the results of their ugly game under the carpet by disclaiming all knowledge and responsibility – while, of course, those who carry the most obscenity and culpability, those who have most truly lost their moral compass, are the ones who initiate, or who endorse, or who neatly fold up their moral sensibility in a shroud and place it carefully out of sight and hearing, in a hole in a dark and hidden corner of their mind.

BUT THAT’S NOT ALL.

What a difference in attitude by the American military/political conglomerate compared to its response to Julian Assange!

With Assange and Bradley Manning the biggest beef was that they had put Americans “in harm’s way”. But we know that they scrupulously had not. As far as we know not a single hair on an American head has been put out of place as a result of the Wikileaks release.

In contrast, the release of the photos by the LA Times is almost certain to cause yet more aggression against Americans and their allies, not just by the Taliban but by others worldwide.

Not that the LA Times should not have shared what it knew — that is in a way its sacred duty.

But that no-one in political/military circles in the US has sworn by hook or by crook to get LA Times staff for publishing the Afghanistan photos, offered their opinion that someone should kill them by contract or “accident”, which numerous high-profile Americans (and a Canadian…oh, and the Alaskan) did about Assange, well, the difference is stark and striking and, frankly, rank hypocrisy and jingoism.

Is Sir Roger the only one to notice this?

 

 

¹So plain the advantages of machination
It constitutes a moral obligation,
And honest wolves who think upon’t with loathing
Feel bound to don the sheep’s deceptive clothing.
So prospers still the diplomatic art,
And Satan bows, with hand upon his heart.
– R.S.K.

Diplomacy: The patriotic art of lying for one’s country.
~  The Devil’s Dictionary