‘I’m Sir Roger and I’m Fucked’

‘I’m Sir Roger and I’m Fucked’

 

This is not for you

 

Really. We just want to acknowledge ourselves privately but publicly (it makes sense to us, anyway). It’s not meant to be onanistically self-congratulatory, except in the sense that we have achieved some things and we want to record them.
So this is a stocktake for posterity, if you like, that marks a moment, a milestone.

Yes, ValuesAustralia is two years old. This is our 712th post. Singlehanded, eh, Clubtroppo, Larvatus Prodeo, RoadtoSurfdom etc. etc.? That’s almost one a day. (There used to be a billboard for One A Day vitamin pills at the corner of Victoria Rd and Rowntree Street at Blackwattle Bay in Sydney. There was a picture of a man and a woman. The woman was saying, “I’m Jenny and I give John One A Day.” Soon a graffiti artist had added, “I’m John and I’m fucked!”)

And, yes, we’re just about fucked, ourselves. We’ve got a rotator cuff from all the typing and mouse clicking, especially during October and November last year.

(We went to the radiologist. “What seems to be the problem?” “I’ve got a sore shoulder.” “Hmm…we’ll do an ultrasound and an x-ray…… Hmm…. Hmmmmmm, our expert analysis of the ultrasound and x-ray indicates you have a sore shoulder. You’ll have to stop using it for a while.” “Thanks….What?)

We’ve never paid for any advertising. We’ve never submitted ValuesAustralia to any search engine. Nevertheless, we got ourselves listed on Google within 24 hours of launching the site. We tried to register the site with dmoz.org (The Open Source Directory) – as you do – but it wasn’t taking orders, and by the time it came back on line months later, ValuesAustralia was already magically listed!

We’ve been #1 for “Australian Values” on Google, Yahoo, Live and Ask most of the time for more than a year and a half. We’re #12 for “values” on Google worldwide, out of 314,000,000 results and on google.com.au we’re #2 for “values” out of 307,000,000. We’re #1 on google worldwide and Australia for “Australian political values” out of about 400,000 results.

Our Google Page Rank is 4 (used to be 5 but they changed the algorithm) which is respectable but we’d prefer a 5 or a 6.

We’ve had over 300,000 aggregate visitors and more than 75,000 spam messages (thank you, Akismet).

Earlier this year we were consistently getting more than 1000 visitors a day – over 30,000 a month, which is okay, although nothing like the big guys.

We’ve made friends all over the world and especially in Australia. We are in the top 1% of websites worldwide. We are popular in Saudi Arabia – amongst the top 42,000 favourite sites for Saudis. (That worries us just a bit…Say hullo to Al for us…) We appreciate our readers and those who choose to comment from time to time. We thought a scarcity of comments was a Bad Thing, a Failure, but we noticed that one of the most popular, most entertaining bloggers we know of, Whatever It Is, I’m Against It, doesn’t get heaps, either – a few, but not tens like Possum or hundreds and thousands like William the PollBludger.

In May 2007 ValuesAustralia was picked up by the “Stay In Touch” column at the Sydney Morning Herald, accusing us of “rhetoric”.

One of Sir Roger’s posts was selected by ClubTroppo and On Line Opinion in January 2008 as one of the top 40 posts in Australia for 2007. We’re very proud of that.

But it’s a post we made early in 2007 that we are still most proud of. Ken Parish at ClubTroppo called it

“quite possibly the best piece of passionate, angry polemic I’ve ever read, certainly on a blog. ‘Roger Migently’ is roused to extraordinary heights of eloquence… ”

Yes, Troppo has been good to us and we mourn the passing of Missing Link and Ken’s prolonged work-induced(?) absence. We were also congratulated by Richard Neville (HomePageDaily) and Steven Poole whose Unspeak blog is our benchmark for economy, clarity, style and wit.

We have enjoyed the journey so far and we have no intention at this stage of stopping, although we have slowed down (work, you know).

Bobbo the Clown

Our favourite person in the world, of course, is the clown, Bob Correll (above), Deputy Secretary of DIC, OPM, because he wrote us the letter which inspired our outburst. As we discovered he was (and appears still to be) the person who had taken over departmental responsibility for “Borders, Compliance, Detention and Technology”, or in other words, perhaps, for keeping innocent kiddies locked up in the desert, deporting Australian citizens, supporting the failed state of Nauru, making the lives of genuine refugees a misery, doing it to please the Minister, and all at the touch of a computer key. Previously he had been the driving force behind developing and implementing Job Network, or “how to design exquisite, personalised punishment for people who are already struggling with the stress of being unemployed”. Godluvvya, Bob! How’s the Volvo? How’s the kids? How do you sleep at night?

One of the most satisfying things is how we always beat the Immigration Department on Google.

Our second favourite person is Mick Keelty, just for being such a hopeless buffoon and continually making appalling stuff-ups for us to make fun of. G’bye, Mick.

Anyway, just for the record.

(And a special “hi!” to Lang!)

Pedants r Us

Pedants r Us

 

What on earth is going on?

 

Is it all over, after all? Have the barbarians claimed victory?

 

First:

Sir Roger listens to ABC Radio A LOT.

One evening, or early morning, he was listening to an interview with an author by a respected ABC presenter. Now, you would think that a bookish person might be a, little…erudite, you know. Just a little. And the presenter expressed her feeling about a particular passage or idea in this book.

She described it as POIG-NANT.

This, of course, is incorrect. Simply incorrect. The correct anglicised pronunciation is POIN-YANT.

‘So what,’ you might say.

The thing is that if the presenter gets something as simple as that wrong, on what grounds can you respect anything else she says? It would be okay for Joe the Baker or the medical technologist or whatever, but the presenter is in her position because she is somewhat learned and something of an expert.

Who is the ABC employing these days? What standards are they accepting?

Secondly, and more jarringly:

Hindsight last Sunday was the NSW History Council Lecture.

The speaker was Professor Joy Damousi, Professor of History at the University of Melbourne.

This is someone who certainly effects to be knowledgeable and whose job description when she applied would have included a requirement for erudition at a very high level.

Prof. Damousi was talking about elocution, the development of Australian speech and the influence on the Australian accent of reading aloud.

One of the favourite things to read aloud, she opined, was Longfellow’s “Hiathawa”.

Yes.

High-ATH-awa.

You won’t find many results for that in Google.

You will, though, find many results for “Hiawatha”, a poem from which Sir Roger’s father used to recite sections from memory.

If Prof Damousi had ever read “Hiawatha” she would never have been able to pronounce the word the way she did.

It just doesn’t scan. The stresses are the wong syllables.

So she, an academic, referenced a literary work of which she appears to be actually ignorant.

But wait, there’s more:

She referred to GBS’s famous play “Pygnaliom“. And she referred to the “candescence” of someone’s voice. Should it perhaps have been the “cadence”?

Or “traits”: is it trates or trays? We know what we think.

Perhaps she was just really nervous; not used, as a lecturer, previously, to standing up in a large room in front of hundreds of people.

If this is typical of her academic standards – and she would have been at her best for a seriously formal lecture being broadcast by the ABC – and if this is the standard of a top-level academic at one of the three most respected Australian universities, what hope is there? (We have to say that we have searched the lecture online a number of times since to locate the exact point where Damousi said :”Hiathawa”, without success. We have no doubt personally that we didn’t make it up and wonder whether it has been edited out. However, if we imagined it, we apologise. We didn’t make up “candescence” and “Pygnaliom”, though.)

Anyway, here, to calm the mind with sweetness is a brief excerpt from The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

Homeward now went Hiawatha;
Pleasant was the landscape round him,
Pleasant was the air above him,
For the bitterness of anger
Had departed wholly from him,
From his brain the thought of vengeance,
From his heart the burning fever.

Only once his pace he slackened,
Only once he paused or halted,
Paused to purchase heads of arrows
Of the ancient Arrow-maker,
In the land of the Dacotahs,
Where the Falls of Minnehaha
Flash and gleam among the oak-trees,
Laugh and leap into the valley.

There the ancient Arrow-maker
Made his arrow-heads of sandstone,
Arrow-heads of chalcedony,
Arrow-heads of flint and jasper,
Smoothed and sharpened at the edges,
Hard and polished, keen and costly.

With him dwelt his dark-eyed daughter,
Wayward as the Minnehaha,
With her moods of shade and sunshine,
Eyes that smiled and frowned alternate,
Feet as rapid as the river,
Tresses flowing like the water,
And as musical a laughter:
And he named her from the river,
From the water-fall he named her,
Minnehaha, Laughing Water.

Sunday Roast

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]

Dulce et decorum est

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

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

Not a Civil Society Just Yet

Not a Civil Society Just Yet

 

 

We have a new hero at Values Australia (no, not Manning Clark).
His name is Julian Burnside QC. Not that we didn’t respect him before and agree with him and all like that. But, well…see it’s like this:

We got an mp3 player, for the train or whatever, and to fill it up we scoured ABC Radio National for podcasts.

Science Show, All in the Mind, Philosopher’s Zone, By Design, Ockham’s Razor.

You know the stuff. And of course there’s Big Ideas.

So we downloaded a likely lump about a Manning Clark Lecture:

“Citizens’ rights and the rule of law in a civil society: not just yet”.

It was by Julian Burnside, on the 10th of March this year.

Thought it might be a bit dry but we were so wrong about that!.

We were astonished.

He covers everything we had been trying to say but with such authority and knowledge. So we recommend you have a listen, too.

In his lecture he covered the Sorry statement and the appalling case of an aboriginal man called Bruce Trevorrow.

In the end we were far more inclined to agree with Burnside that some sort of compensation for the stolen generations is appropriate, rather than just the more nebulous idea of an improvement of aborigines’ lot, generally, over time.

“ In the first sitting of the new parliament, the Government said ‘sorry’ to the stolen generations. It seemed almost too good to be true: the apology so many had waited so long to hear. And it was astonishing and uplifting to hear some of the noblest and most dignified sentiments ever uttered in that place on the hill.
[ … ]
The apology was significant not only for marking a significant step in the process of reconciling ourselves with our past: it cast a new light on the former government. It set a new tone. And I think it reminded us of something we had lost: a sense of decency.

 

Most of the worst aspects of the Howard years can be explained by the lack of decency which infected their approach to government:

 

they could not acknowledge the wrong that was done to the stolen generations;

 

they failed to help David Hicks when it was a moral imperative – they waited until his rescue became a political imperative;

they never quite understood the wickedness of imprisoning children who were fleeing persecution;

they abandoned ministerial responsibility;

they attacked the courts scandalously but unblushing;

they argued for the right to detain innocent people for life;

they introduced laws which prevent fair trials;

they bribed the impoverished Republic of Nauru to warehouse refugees for us.

It seemed that they did not understand just how badly they were behaving, or perhaps they just did not care.

He also spoke about the rule of law, incommunicado detention, control orders and preventative detention, the right of the State (and its secret agencies) to withhold evidence, civil rights, erosion of rights, a Bill of Rights and more.

His lecture went further than the ABC podcast includes. Nevertheless the podcast is excellent.

Here’s a transcript of part of his speech which is on the podcast:

“ In 2005 further anti-terror legislation was introduced. The Commonwealth Criminal Code was amended to provide that a member of the Federal Police may apply for a preventative detention order in relation to a person. A preventative detention order will result in a person being jailed for up to 14 days in circumstances where they have not been charged with, much less convicted of, any offence. The order is obtained in the absence of the person concerned, and authorises that the person be taken into custody. When the person is taken into custody, they must not be told the evidence on which the order was obtained.

Thus, a preventative detention order can be made not only without a trial of any sort, but in circumstances where the subject of the order will not be allowed to know the evidence which was used to secure the order, even after the event.

We believe that few Australians are aware of just how far John Howard and his morally-neutered hired guns like Ruddock, Andrews, Vanstone and Mick Keelty went, in the name of “security” to tear down their legal rights and liberties.

Australians generally, we think, are unclear how little of what they believe they have they really have left. Perhaps, as Burnside suggests, they don’t want to know, as long as they’re doing all right and it’s not affecting them. But of course it does affect them and it will.

Habeas corpus is dead and stinking not only in the US but now here in Australia as well. Dwight D. Eisenhower must be rolling in his grave over what John Yoo and Alberto Gonzalez, with Dick Cheney and George Bush and the supine American Senate, did to habeas corpus in the US:

Here are Ike’s Remarks Upon Receiving the America’s Democratic Legacy Award at B’nai B’rith:

“ Why are we proud?

We are proud, first of all, because from the beginning of this Nation, a man can walk upright, no matter who he is, or who she is. He can walk upright and meet his friend – or his enemy; and he does not fear that because that enemy may be in a position of great power that he can be suddenly thrown in jail to rot there without charges and with no recourse to justice. We have the habeas corpus Act, and we respect it.”

With this lecture Julian Burnside — for standing up and saying what is so — has for us moved from “respected” to “hero”.

Here is the recording  of Burnside’s Manning Clark Lecture from ABC’s Big Ideas: