How Australian Values Are Changing

Nov 20, 2020 | Australian Values, Corruption, Democracy, Economic Values, Education, Legal, Lifestyle & Life, OzPol Values, Racism, Religious Values, Science Values, USPol, Values

How Australian Values Are Changing

Are Australian Values moving left or right?

 

The answer is YES – both. And, more worryingly, also a trajectory outside the known political universe towards the delusional realms of a poltical and social Fantasia. And even more upsettingly, otherwise ordinary-seeming people at the highest levels of government, commerce and public influence have become fierce advocates of “theories” that are palpably bullshit. 

Australians have had, for a long, long time, an enviable reputation for their crisp, fast and accurate bullshit detection. This skill seems to be fading away, particularly—and bizarrely—amongst white, middle class, middle-aged men.

Of course the majority of Australians have been taught from birth to believe in what is not true. Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy. Gods of whatever cloth or desert origin. They learn early to believe the lies and reassurances of those they most trust: parents, sunday school teachers and priests of any skyhook religion. They get over Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. 

Now we have a Prime Minister who speaks in tongues of a Sunday and on weekdays believes that to torture children in the name of right-wing political power is a show of compassion. And he is a close family friend of a grown, presumably otherwise intelligent, man who follows bizarre conspiracy theories; a man whose wife works, or has worked, in the PM’s office.

Why? Why do we allow ourselves to be fooled by preposterous, unsubstantiated claims?

Because in school we were never taught logic, logical fallacies, or critical thinking (unless we were lucky).

Most of us were never taught what science really is, or how it is actually done, or the importance of scepticism (no, not cynicism).

And hardly any of us have been taught (or wanted to learn about) statistics and what they do and don’t tell us.

And because those who want to sell to us have learnt how to convince us that we need their product, and if we don’t buy it our lives will be a misery. Those who want to sell to us include politicians, priests and other con artists. Of course.

Anyway

Apart from the boom in conspiratorial, Dark State, UFO, election-stealing bullshit, the left is edging further to the left and the right has dragged itself inexorably towards the far, neo-nazi, authoritarian right.

 

Law and Justice

Australians—according to the Potatocracy of Home Affairs—value the rule of law.

We should not confuse the Law with Justice.

You don’t go to the court to get justice. That is not what the court provides. It provides a legal finding.

The court provides a procedure based on legislation written by lawyers at the request of politicians and agreed to by a majority of parliamentarians. Justice is never, or only rarely, a consideration in the legislation. Judges and magistrates cannot make ‘just’ findings but only ‘legal’ findings. If the two happen to occur simultaneously it’s a coincidence.

Laws have a lot of words. Lots of numbers and letters, lots of sections and subsections and notes. Only lawyers understand these things and lawyers cost money.

Joe Bloggs is not really equipped to deal with all this to get a ‘just’ outcome. And most Joe Bloggses usually can’t afford the fancy lawyers. It’s true some Joe Bloggses in certain specific circumstances can be helped by less fancy, or less experienced, lawyers. So justice, when it is even possible, is often denied. So we may be equal in the law but not before the law in our access to it.

Which brings us to another phony claim about Australian Values:

 

Equal Opportunity

As if.

We love to say it. We love to believe it.

It’s just not true.

There’s a job going in a stockbroking firm. It’s entry level. The starting salary is pretty shit but the opportunities to climb the ladder are attractive. HSC is required.

Out of these three candidates which do you think is most likely to score the job?

1. David is mixed race of Aboriginal descent from La Perouse. He worked really hard and did well in his HSC at a state high school, especially in maths, English and IT. His family is well-known and highly respected in the community. They’re a fairly standard suburban family but aren’t well off and they don’t know anyone in the financial sector. David has wanted a job like this since he started high school.

2. Sarah is the daughter of refugees from Sudan, now Australian citizens. She was born in Australia. She topped her year and got excellent results in the HSC. Her family lives in a predominantly Muslim suburb. Her father knows the local bank manager. She wears a hijab outside the home.

3. Sebastian is the son of a senior executive at the Sydney CBD office of one of the major international audit companies. They live in a mansion at Palm Beach in northern Sydney. Andrew’s dad went to school with the CEO of the broking firm that has opened the job. Andrew scraped through the HSC. He doesn’t know much about money besides how to spend it. He doesn’t really know what he wants to do. He’d rather just sail and party but his mum insists he get a job and start doing something useful.

So who should get the job? Who do you think is most likely to get the job? And how long will he last?

 

Australians are Larrikins? Really?

This claim has been made since about forever. We love it. We love to believe it. It’s a legendary Australian value.

We like to think of ourselves as being larrikin-ish. And we would be, too.

It’s just that right now we’re a bit busy.

Stuffed into a stinking train on our way to another unutterably boring 9 to 5 day at our stupefying job where we do as we’re told because we’re afraid of losing our stupefying job because we need to pay the rent/mortgage.

And when we get home smelling of other passengers’ sweat we’re just a little too tired for larrikin-ising.

But, you know, sometimes we wear odd socks to work or a jokey tie. Will that do?

In any case larrikinism died with Henry Lawson in 1922.

 

The Split

It’s all pretty upsetting that the fissure between left and right (whatever they actually are) is growing. Both ends are informed by batshit conspiracy theories.

The Labor party is easing itself towards the hard right position being vacated by the now increasingly far right/alt-right Nationalist ‘Liberal’ Party.

The evangelical, rapture expecting, theocracy loving, democracy hating sand people built their temples there long ago.

The Greens still don’t really know what they’re doing, or how to do it, but lots of people are moving to conspiratorial fantasies to the left of them.

To be fair, the majority of Australian voters sit around almost exactly in the Centre and just vote for whatever party they and their parents always have.

The words that strike the most fear are Socialism and Fascism. We don’t have either in Australia. We do have authoritarianism and that’s where the LNP is going, especially with failed coup leader, The Racist Potato. But there are many further to the right than him.

We don’t have socialism. We’re don’t do Democratic Socialism. We find that scary and almost communist. But we are a Social Democracy, if not to the extent of the Scandinavian countries. Social Democracy is a policy system that includes:

“economic and social interventions to promote social justice within the framework of a liberal-democratic polity and a capitalist-oriented mixed economy. The protocols and norms used to accomplish this involve a commitment to representative and participatory democracy, measures for income redistribution, regulation of the economy in the general interest and social-welfare provisions.”

That’s why we are consistently amongst the top five of the world’s best countries.

This year, 2020, Australia is rated the third best country to live in after Norway and Switzerland.

Social democracy is why we have, for example, Medicare that means being sick won’t bankrupt us (unlike the US).

Social democracy is what’s at stake if Australia goes sincerely to the far right or the far left.

And if you want to see what a corrupt, authoritarian/oligarchical theft of democracy might look like, there’s one being attempted right now.

In the USA.

By their ‘President’.

If you want to see a historic major political party collapse like the explosive demolition of a skyscraper, that’s also happening right now.

Keep your eye on the Republicans . . .

. . . if you don’t want that to be the future of Australia and Australian Values . . .

 

Big Bang Time Free Willy

Sep 24, 2020 | Australian Values, Education, Religious Values, Science Values, Values

Big Bang Time Free Willy

Watch Time Disappear

 

When Sir Roger was a young man (yes), his university offered a soft course for the scientifically inquisitive but mathematically challenged called The History and Philosophy of Science.

Naturally this was universally and derogatorily referred to as “HissPiss”.

Sir Roger, therefore, as a Big Man On Campus, did not participate in this program but listened to his friends who did and has been fascinated by the discipline ever since.

And so he regularly shouts at the screen or the radio when philosophers tell him that there is no such thing as Free Will. Not because they are wrong but because their science is wrong.

They argue that everything in and about the Universe is predestined and that therefore nothing we think or do can change that. So much about this is wrong. Scientifically.

Their understanding of the universe is Newtonian with a scattering of late 19th century particle physics. Such as, for example that electrons are solid objects. Tiny, but solid. And that as solid objects they must behave as solid objects do. Those philosophers do please need to catch up.

Fundamental particles are not just objects. They’re energy which can manifest as either waves or particles but only when “collapsed” by an ‘observer’. Fundamental particles are not anywhere in particular (until observed) otherwise they are probabilities.

Until they are observed their range of probability is ‘anywhere in the universe’ regardless of the speed of light. 

Also, it is not possible to know simultaneously both the position and momentum of the particle.

All of this is about the uncertainty principle.

So how could you predict, say from today, how the universe was going to evolve? You would have to know where every fundamental particle in the entire universe was and where it was going and you would have to know that for all particles at the same precise instant. Which is not possible. And even if it was possible to gather, store and then compute the entire universe, you would need a computer that was many times the size of the actual universe itself.

And not only that but

  1. if your computer could assemble all of the data of the universe (impossible as that is) at a specific time, it would have to organise those data and then run them, and by the time that was done your computer would be seriously lagging behind what was actually happening
  2.  your computer cannot possibly catch up. It can’t run faster than the universe itself because the universe is running as fast as it’s possible to go
  3.  if you wanted to use a different universe with a significantly faster speed of light to help your computer catch up with this universe, you would have to take that universe into account since it’s now interacting with this one, which makes it even more difficult
  4. and in any case time is relative and is not the same in any two places.  

And we haven’t even talked about field energy and quantum vacuums where stuff materialises out of literally nothing. Or black holes which hide and effectively destroy information which it’s impossible to retrieve, which will screw up your total data collection exercise a bit.

So what’s left of this predetermination theory?

If they were right that everything that ever happens in the universe is inevitable and necessarily taking into account every single item in the universe:

  • down to the very tiniest size possible—the Plank Length: 1.616255(18)×10−35 metres
  • and the shortest possible time—Plank Time: 5.391247(60)×10−44 seconds
  • and without taking into account the question of whether fundamental constants, such as the speed of light, or the gravitational constant, might change over time, or vary across the universe,
  • and not taking into account, at all, Heisenberg‘s uncertainty principle which “implies that it is in general not possible to predict the value of a quantity with arbitrary certainty, even if all initial conditions are specified”
  • or considering that there are an estimated 10 80 electrons in the observable universe to be included in the data sweep

 then the entire actual presumably-infinite (and therefore obviously impossible to calculate) future of the universe must be encapsulated in Moment Zero of the Big Bang.

And if that is the case it has already happened at the beginning.

And if that’s the case there is no need for Time at all.

And if there is no time then there is no Space-Time.

And if that’s the case there is therefore no Universe.

But there is a Universe. 

QED

So . . . 

The Universe is probabilistic but not predictable because the uncertainties multiply exponentially.

Therefore nothing is predetermined except . . .

. . . except that an event is determined only and precisely at the exact Plank moment that it occurs and no earlier. 

You might want to say that an event was inevitable, but its inevitability is only manifested precisely at the exact moment after it occurred and no earlier. 

None of this is an argument for Free Will. Or to free Willy. It is only a rebuttal of the HissPiss argument.  

It is also a rebuttal of the dreadful, hateful, ignorant, particularly – but not exclusively – Calvinist doctrine of ‘predestination’ which has royally screwed and crippled (not only) western culture for 500 years. That psychotic, murderous bastard has a lot to answer for. He is probably undergoing eternal therapy with his therapist, Dr Lucifer. Hope so. 

Briefly, then, despite what Darth Vader said, Luke Skywalker did not have, and you do not have, any “destiny” apart from the one you choose, and cause, for yourself.  

 

And we haven’t even discussed Consciousness.

Another day.  

 

Coronavirus? Pandemic?

Aug 31, 2020 | Australian Values, Citizenship, Cultural Values, Democracy, Economic Values, Education, Global Warming, Lifestyle & Life, Love, New Normal, OzPol Values, Racism, Religious Values, Science Values, Values

Coronavirus? Pandemic?

What the Actual Fuck?

Has this been the worst ever social and economic disaster in our lifetimes? Or has it been the squealing brakes we needed, to curb our pre-pandemic headlong, tunnel-vision rush towards . . . well, where? . . . We were too busy to think about that.

And is it unprecedented? Or is it just one of the smaller, if not insignificant, health crises in roughly 300,000 years of the human story?

The answer is Yes. Or no. Or all of the above.

For some it hasn’t been so drastic; it’s even been interesting, a wake-up call, an eye-opening surprise, intimations of a new world waiting for us.

For others—millions, billions of people—this has been dreadful. Shocking. Crushing. Life was already tough enough and suddenly the little that they had has been locked down, or ripped away, or they are forced to endanger their own lives and others just to survive. And many have seen their businesses, their jobs, their weddings, and funerals, without warning, abruptly disappear into a ruthless black hole.

For some ‘luckier’ ones it has just been a horror show of seemingly interminable boredom doing the same bloody things, or nothing, day after day after blursday.

While some have clung to crosswords, jigsaw puzzles, binged on Netflix and blown the dust off childhood board games, many others have discovered TikTok or embraced Instagram and explored their latent talents and skills, joined online courses, or worked on projects they never had time for before. But even this can drain enthusiasm if what we also need is the stimulation of other humans physically close to us. 

People who already work from home, and are more used to it, might have escaped the worst of the trauma.

For introverts and people who enjoy their own company there is the added benefit that avoiding going out in public becomes a good deed.

 

What next?

What has roared up to surprise us is an incredible global treasure-trove and display of creativity and ingenuity that hadn’t displayed itself quite so publicly or broadly before. A lot of people are suddenly engrossed in something they love doing that has become more than a frivolous hobby.

We have discovered new ways of doing things and embraced new rules for living. There has been an extra flourishing of kindness and caring.

Many of us are longing for the time when this uncertainty is all over and everything returns to ‘normal’ – what the politicians are falling over each other to call “the other side of this” as if we’re going through a tunnel that doubles back on itself and we’ll pop out the other end into an unchanged world.

But it won’t work like that. We are already creating a new world with novel expectations. Many of us are praying that we never go back to that pre-2020 ‘normal’ because returning to those days would be to endorse the negatives and stress of that time, abandoning so much of value we are freshly learning. It would be like resigning to the hopelessness, like embracing our abuser.

What before we had considered ‘normal’ isn’t normal in the history of humanity, not in the history of science or technology, not even in the stagnant history of politics. What we called ‘normal’ before this time wasn’t ‘normal’ as recently as 20 or so years ago.

The world of 2020 is not at all the same as the world of 2000, and it is starkly different from the world of 1980. Millennials were born in the dark ages; many before the internet and smart phones which rule our lives today.

Everything is always changing in the subtle blink of a historical eye. It morphs subliminally as we watch but don’t notice. And it sneaks up on us so surreptitiously that it feels as if things have always been this way.

Except . . .

. . . except that this very recent jolt sits on top of centuries where the central pillar of human society hasn’t essentially changed – like an Easter Island statue, set in stone that goes literally deep underground.

This central pillar of modern society, in effectively all cultures, and all politics, is the gaslighting coercion and commodification of humans by the wealthy and powerful in relentless pursuit and protection of power and wealth.

While everything else is always changing, the underpinning fundamental principles of political philosophy change glacially. Most politicians and their parties almost anywhere in the world still wade up to their armpits through the foul morass of opportunist cronyism; still harvest the noxious sludge of the distant past; still, head down, trying to navigate, with stained, fading, tattered and obsolete maps, the quagmire of ancient myths of crumbled worlds millennia ago; still shadowing the spectral call of long-dead heroes, buried in dark ages, or in the more recent beige years of hopelessness and resignation imposed upon us for a quarter century by Ming the Grim; still desperate to claw up and restore a long-vanished, and fictitious, world of fairytale childhoods; still hawking concepts that decomposed centuries before they were born.

While the horse and buggy politics of early Australia – forever ago it seems – were often steeped in inequality, prejudice and discrimination, at least some few of those early federalists were people who had achieved something in their own right before they became members of Parliament, people of principle who had a sense of service, social conscience, ethics and fairness and worked for the good of the country. They fought for the People, for a basic wage, fair working hours, a national broadcaster, and an equitable health service. And if they were found breaking the rules they resigned.

It has not lately been like this. As you know.

What Parliament really looks like on a normal day. Where are all the dedicated people (paid by Australians to do a job) who really care and are working hard for the welfare of the Australian people?

‘Normal’ in the 21st century has been the seats of Parliament, on both sides, filled (when they are filled) with the polished arses of chancers, grifters, opportunists and carpetbaggers; arrogant, self-impressed, self-congratulatory, amoral branch-stacking careerist apparatchiks without principles, conscience, or ethics; with limited experience, no understanding of the complexity of the real world, empty of any sense of service (or what ‘service’ even means), oozing with greed for power and money, uninterested in the good of the country and its people, willing to lie and cheat in order merely to “win” and enrich their mates. And amongst them are more than the country’s share of racists, fruitcakes, conspiracists, conspirators and clowns.

As American Professor Heather Cox Richardson puts it:

 [Politicians] create their own reality for the end that they will be able to continue to stay in power, come hell or high water [and] will do anything it takes — anything it takes — to make sure that this [US] government continues to be responsible only to a very, very small elite in society.”

  

So winning at some dick-measuring game, the game of “staying in power” for the sake only of staying in power—without regard to the actual issues and potentially destructive outcomes of the game, or of the effects on the country, its people, or their future—this is what politicians all around the world think and have long thought is ‘normal’ and ‘appropriate’. Of course it is despicable and we all despise them for it.

 

 

‘Normal’ before 2020 was good in many ways but it was never a perfect time, was never good enough and often it was contemptible. Our greatest challenge—Global Warming, far greater than this pandemic—has not been seriously addressed, at least not by our global “leaders”. Inequality, prejudice and discrimination have not dissolved. Political cruelty is rife. Those who struggle are scorned as weak. Unemployment is cast as a moral  issue, portraying the almost universally unwillingly unemployed as bludgers, when the fact is it is an economic issue linked to inflation and party politics.

  

“ The best political weapon is the weapon of terror. Cruelty commands respect. Men may hate us.
But, we don’t ask for their love; only for their fear.”
― Heinrich Himmler

If we settle again for the political and economic slop and mush we know it has been, all our suffering and our admirable communal discipline and sacrifice through 2020 will have been for nothing.

 If we ignore the gift of this pandemic, if we fail to take personal ownership of our society, and the quality of our lives, that will be a choice we have collectively made and we will each own the responsibility for it.

 Too much about the CoVid world has changed for us to want to reboot the past; but a ‘new normal’ will not be an improvement unless we keep reminding ourselves of what we have been taught here and the visions of the future we are all already imagining.

We have had the opportunity to take a stark, honest look at the way we have actually been living. In the gift of this frozen moment we have seen through the deception of the cultural illusions and delusions we’ve been wrapped in for so long. Our suspended lives are an opportunity to choose who and how we really want to be, and what is truly possible in life.

The power ‘elite’ will try to convince us to return to a past they already royally buggered up (in the case of many priests, literally) . We know we can’t trust them. In a private wine-glazed moment they would admit that lying to us is in the core of their craft. We can’t live into a new future by relying on them, or anything they say, when everything they think they ‘know’, or want us to believe, was dredged up from the fossilised past. 

 

Imagining the future

 

Human society has always been organic, even (or perhaps especially) when faced with the horrors of despotism. It is always the mass of the people who take on the big challenges and decide the big corrections. And it is always when the people are tired and shrink in fear that the great possibilities are stolen from us.

We have already imagined so many ways a new normal might look and feel and how it might work. It is this envisioned, projected future, our combined belief that it is possible, our expectation of it, that will generate the new future, with a firm intention that it is beautiful, free and healthy.

And exciting.

We’ve been given the opportunity to learn to recognise, in the cold, calm, quiet light of this suddenly suspended time, the levers and pulleys of the flimsy fantasy machine of the systems we have permitted to command the quality, the colours, the contents, the contours, and the meanings of our lives.

Now is an opportunity to learn to deeply appreciate life itself, the actual miracle of being alive, the right to enjoy it fully, in an impossibly unlikely and (as far as we are yet aware) otherwise lifeless universe. It is an opportunity to appreciate being; not just having; not just doing; and not just going somewhere.

Until now, in our urgent rush toward the void, we haven’t really had time to grasp that we’re not actually going anywhere anyway. Full of stress, anxiety and fear, we’ve been sprinting towards . . . what though? . . . winning at life?

There’s no payoff at the end, no trophy, no pat on our deathbed head. We don’t get a certificate for making it to the end (unless we score a telegram from the queen).

If we’re always in a hurry to get to the end we rush past all the amazing things that truly enrich life because we’re too busy to notice them and don’t have time for them on the way to nowhere.

 

“What will be left of all the fearing and wanting associated with your problematic life situation that every day takes up most of your attention?

A dash, one or two inches long, between the date of birth and date of death on your gravestone.”
~  Eckhart Tolle 

What will be left?  Yes, in that brief dash will be the fear, all the hatred and all the good we failed to do. But also in that simple hyphen will be all the good we did do, the love we gave, our positive influence, the lessons we learnt and taught, how we lifted others up, the difference we made in the world, how we helped to protect the world, improve the world, create new ideas for the world.
The money we made and the stuff we owned will not be engraved in stone.

What will be left of value in the living world?  Our kindness, our wisdom, the love we shared and received, the joy we gave to others and the joy we found for ourselves. These things will continue on, in the eternal present.

 

We don’t win at life; we win IN life.

 

 

The whole of life is in

each moment of life itself

What if we were to spend our infinitely precious time, here and now, appreciating the juicy, exciting, amazing, exuberant, cornucopia of the present.

What if we play in it, experience it, embrace it, grasp and suck and swallow it, in the present. And what if we do all that with feral enthusiasm? Or in meditative stillness? Luxuriously bathe in it?

Right now.

Yes we can sit with our back to this moment nostalgically yearning for the past, but the past is just a sketchy memory we experience in the Present. We can enjoy good memories and be grateful for them.

In the Present.

We can understand that whatever our bad memories, they are not real, they’re just imperfect recollections.

In the Present.

We can thank them for the learning and smooth their pillow. They have no real claws. They can’t hurt us in the present without our permission.

 

Yes we can scream forward with our head in the future trying to reach it before it arrives.

Or we can savour the joy and the miracle of right now.

Because the future, inexorably and without our help, will come in its own time. In the present we can enjoy the possibilities of the future. And when it arrives we can appreciate its reality.

We’ll recognise the future when it comes.

It will be called “The Present”. 

“It is our suffering that brings us together.”
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed 

Many things have emerged during this lockdown, some of them upsetting; but also good has emerged because of our shared experience.

There has been an increase in generosity, a stronger sense of local and global community. Complete strangers wave to each other, chat to each other, form more intimate relationships. We see it in people from all over the world joining together in creative activities. Remotely making music, performing plays.

Even dressing up to put out the bins has created an international community of over a million people. Community is the core to being human. We are social animals. We need each other. We are incomplete without others. That’s hard-wired. We need connection whether we’re introverts or extroverts.

We need that real, warm sense of personal connection and belonging to a community.

Homework’ Takes On A New Meaning

In 2020 we’ve discovered — or rediscovered from the cottage industries of the pre-Industrial era — that employees can work perfectly well from home and be productive and collaborative without being micro-managed.

One of Sir Roger’s acquaintances reckons the data show an increase in productivity of 25% among those working from home. We can continue to do this. And it’s scalable.

This has benefits for both workers and companies.

Workers have found that they can put in the same or more hours from home but don’t need to spend hours and money travelling to and from work. And that means they have more time at home spending more time with family and more time doing the personal things they never seemed to have time for before.

In many cases companies won’t need enormous elaborate premises with expensive leases to accommodate the workforce that they have. They won’t need to be in the centre of the city, Costs can go down and salaries can go up without a loss of profit.

 

We spend most of our lives first being trained to be compliant and docile and then bringing those gifts to a job which is, for most of us, not wholly satisfying; not the job we chose but the one we could get; not really who we are; learning to pretend to be the person we are expected to be; all for rewards which are never quite enough.

Just in order to survive.

For what?

 

For that awful realisation, as we get older, that we wasted most of our lives wrapped in a blanket to protect ourselves from dangers that never happened.

How do you know that your job is not everything you could wish for and you are wasting your precious time?

  • Do you look forward to Friday?
  • Do you call Wednesday “hump day”? 
  • How quickly would you leave your job if you won the lottery?
  • Would you stay in your job (and put up with the boss) if you didn’t need the money?
  • What would you do if you didn’t need your job?

What are we thinking?  

Despite our unremarkable, humble neighbourhood, we are extraordinary.

We are entities with minds the size of the universe (literally).
We are the universe. We are the universe conscious of itself—probably for the first time in its 13.7 billion years.
We extraordinary beings, full of thoughts, emotions, imagination, stories, creativity, wonder, are the only beings aware of their mortality and the mortality of the universe itself.
Yet we willingly surrender our too brief and finite lives, our gifts, our dreams, the miracle of our minds.
We surrender to a dispassionate, fabricated system; to an artificial and deeply dysfunctional construct called ‘the economy’; and most of us to a suffocating story of compliance and conformity and the safe, orthodox, mediocre life. Religion has a lot to answer for, for this, because . . .

The immense majority

of human biographies
are a gray transit between

domestic spasm and oblivion.
George Steiner

What can we do?

This pandemic has given us time to become more aware of the environments where we live and the people who live there. It is giving us time to be more aware of, and to think about, what society and community really mean.

It is also an opportunity to see how we have overlooked the breadth, the depth and the vitality of community, and why; and to draw out the forensic UV torch to reveal the blood on the walls; to unveil the fictitious story, to reveal the witchcraft, to expose the illusion, to unmask the conspiracy, and instead to see the reality. To grow into a way of living and of really experiencing and exploring our real lives, with other real lives, freely, richly and autonomously.

It is an opportunity that we can all share.

How exactly it will look and how it will be achieved we can’t know. Not yet.

What we can know is that any outcome hauled out of the grave of the recently passed world will inescapably mean inviting the undead to inhabit, and inhibit, the future.

But if it’s drawn from the future that we are already imagining, that will be something new and better.

In the meantime we can reach out in our lives to others. Value others – and not just humans – as fellow creatures. Make a joyful difference to their lives. Value our own lives fully, for everything they are, be grateful, and find joy in our own lives.

Oliver Sacks and “Soul Murder”

May 21, 2016 | Australian Values, Border Security, Capital Punishment, Citizenship, Cultural Values, Democracy, Education, Immigration, Legal, Lifestyle & Life, Media Values, OzPol Values, Racism, Religious Values, Values

Oliver Sacks and “Soul Murder”

 After:  Oliver Sacks  by Luigi Novi  9.13.09

. . . the arms that long for love

  Sir Roger was listening to the ABC Science Show today. It was Robyn Williams’ homage to Oliver Sacks (Awakenings, The Man Who Thought His Wife Was a Hat, Seeing Voices, Uncle Tungsten etc. etc. etc.) and was jolly-well enjoying it immensely. The sun was shining into the conservatory, the hounds had been exercised, the ice was clinking cheerfully in the Glenfiddich, all was right with the world … when suddenly his Lordship was shaken by these words:

 Listen to the complete ABC Science Show feature on Oliver Sacks

In the show, Sacks recalled his early (wartime) childhood experience after being evacuated to the country from London during the blitz.

He called it “soul murder”.

Sir Roger’s glass slid from his hand and he watched it slowly fall, like an overcranked silent film, to be dashed on the Italian tiles of the conservatory floor.

The idea of murdering a child’s soul – what would that mean? To thrust a knife into the heart of the spirit of playfulness and enthusiasm and joy, to cut off the hands that grasp so eagerly for learning, to amputate the arms that long for love, to sever the legs that long to walk tall, to blind the imagination and every dream, and to gut the body of hope.

To replace it all with what — an interminable desert of dust and ash and despair, and the nightmare of blank nothingness.

Repairing to the Library Sir Roger blew the dust off an article about “soul murder” by Leonard Shengold who said:

“ Soul murder is the term I have used for the apparently willful abuse and neglect of children by adults that are of sufficient intensity and frequency to be traumatic. By that I mean that the children’s subsequent emotional development has been profoundly and predominantly negatively affected.”

The mind of the master of Migently Estate flashed into flame, like ancient nitrocellulose film in a poorly maintained projector on a hot day, with the thought that the treatment of asylum seekers by successive Australian governments, and particularly their Prime Ministers and Ministers, their bureaucracies and bureaucrats, and their profit-driven corporate contractors, matches the description of “soul murder”.

Especially — though not only — when it is perpetrated against children for whom as a society we are collectively responsible. And more damningly, as a Culture — which we so pridefully contrast with others we call barbaric, backward, primitive, knuckle-dragging, inhumane – we are deeply shamed.

And so Sir Roger slumped into the rattan and pondered to whom, on Shengold’s definition, the term “soul murderer” might be applied. Who had publicly and wilfully perpetrated, advertised and perhaps boasted of abuse against children who are, after all, in the broad sense in Australia’s care (you know, to discourage people from getting on boats and to break the people smugglers’ “business model”)?

And, he mused, those would include Dutton, Morrison, Turnbull, Abbott, Rudd, Gillard, Howard, Keating, Evans, Bowen, Ruddock, Vanstone.

Who else?

All those who voted in parliament for them and their policies.

All those facilitators, such as bureaucrats and others, who were ‘just doing their jobs’. Heartlessly. 

And all those who are complicit because they voted to put those people in parliament.

And he shouted to the cat, “You can say ‘not in my name‘ as much and as loudly as you bloody well like, but actually it is in your name and you are not absolved unless you do something about it. It is in your name if you vote for either of the major parties party.”

“And that’s all right, puss,” he said quietly, “as long as you are clear and okay with yourself that that is who you are: someone who is okay with the murder of children’s souls.”

Men and Whitlam of Australia

Oct 21, 2014 | Arts, Australian Values, Citizenship, Cultural Values, Democracy, Economic Values, Education, Fame, Indigenous, Legal, Lifestyle & Life, Love, Media Values, OzPol Values, Science Values, Values

Men and Whitlam of Australia

On Your Knees

 

Men and Whitlam of Australia . . . 

“ T he decision we will make on December 2 is a choice between the past and the future, between the habits and fears of the past and the demands and opportunities of the future. There are moments in history when the whole fate and future of nations can be decided by a single decision. For Australia, this is such a time.

 

“We will abolish conscription forthwith.

 

“We will abolish fees at universities and colleges of advanced education.

 

“We want to give a new life and a new meaning in this new nation to the touchstone of modern democracy

— to liberty, equality, fraternity.”

Yes, sadly

It’s time.

Now is the time to say goodbye.

Now is the time to yield a sigh.

Now is the time to wend our way-eee,

Until we meet again

Some sunny day

Time to bid farewell to a fading myth of the socialist left that no-one under 40 has ever heard of: old plinth-bound, red-taped Goth the Whittler whose soul, vision and legacy are chained and frozen in stone within the walls of the Wiblam Edifice, protected by the Hooded Brethren of the Whitlam Industry (UWS) Inc.

His name was “Goth”, now a legal personage, a mere trademark, hijacked by a “controlled entity”  bearing the name of the once terrifying but now sadly faded and hardly remembered mythical hero of long ago.

His time, comrade, was a time of social earthquake, of cultural lightning and of political tempest whose like we shall not see again.

Heralded by fiery comets, bare-chested and thumping did he unchain the creativity of the nation’s sleeping Beast.

With the life-giving elixir of freedom did he quench the crumbling leaves of its dreams.

And “Liberté, Egalité! Fraternité!” was his battle cry. To those who awoke it was as if St Crispin himself were there amongst them.

And the Beast was roused! It shook off the dust of the dead, Mingsian years and romped and played for joy.

But the Beast grew and grew and its liberator, though mighty, was no match for the Beast which became a monster and destroyed him.

The largest stars shine brightest and briefest and explode with shocking spectacle. And are gone.

Their glowing supernova remnants linger for a time but fade and are forgotten.

As Oscar Wilde almost wrote of the Star Child,

“ Yet ruled he not long, so great had been his suffering, and so bitter the fire of his testing, for after the space of three years he was destroyed. And those who came after him ruled evilly.”

And they still do, and today they promise to rule more evilly than ever before.

If there is one thing Sir Roger despises it is people who are so far up themselves they can look through the back of their own eye sockets, and who then insist that everyone else take them seriously. Such are the rulers of our day, the Mad Rabbit, Jolly Joe Porker, the Cormorant and the Death Stare.

Yet still a few remember the torpid days of The Beige Oppression and The Monochrome Society during the reign of Ming the Dreadful and his inept successors. And these few who remember know and cherish the bright and cheerful contrast of The Sir Gough Rainbow.

Sir Roger since 1972 has found in every new day a new excitement, a new challenge, a creative opportunity to influence his world for the better and to make it a better, more loving and more humane place – much the way that Gough inspired us all to do and be.

And everyone now has the constitutional right, the moral duty and the precious freedom to do so.

 

So now to Gruff the farter, Gog the sun and Goth the gruff old goat.

Gough be with you.

But wait! This just in:

 

TONY BURKE:

The late Cardinal Clancy used to often relate about his conversation with Gough when Gough had inquired as to whether or not St Mary’s Cathedral might be available for a funeral, which surprised Cardinal Clancy given that he was not expecting Gough to convert to Catholicism.

Gough explained: no, no, no, it wasn’t for the Catholic funeral — it was because he wanted to be buried in the crypt, claiming that he was willing to pay but would only require it for three days.

Is there yet hope?

 

A Moron in a Hurry – Part 3

Aug 19, 2013 | Australian Values, Cultural Values, Democracy, Education, Fame, Freedom of Speech, Legal, Lifestyle & Life, Media Values, OzPol Values, Values

A Moron in a Hurry – Part 3

 

Or Worse – a Catholic Priest

 

Previously on Moron in a Hurry :

 

Sir Roger, strapped to the rack by the Madam Intimidatrix of the Hooded Brethren of the Gruff Wiblam Edifice, shouted that “Freedom is a state of mind”, wondering where he’d heard it before — was it Walter Mosley? Or was it Corporate Avenger? —  whereupon his bonds evaporated and the spirit of Wiblam was upon him and possessed his tongue. His eyes flashed and his balls grew large. He spoke of his astonishment. He spoke of facts and moral truths, of the Law and its unhappy servants, of dog warmers, mouse mats and g-strings.

Sir Roger now invoked the enchanted phrase “It’s Time” and the wizards who possess it. And he e-spake these words unto the Hooded Brethren:

 

Ownership of the phrase

Gough Whitlam did not own the phrase in the commercial sense.

 

At the time that the phrase gained popularity he did not personally pay for the slogan, nor the campaign as far as one is aware. Intellectual property typically belongs to the person who creates it, or to the legal entity which commissions the work.

 

The campaign was created in 1972 by McCann Erickson who were commissioned by the Labor Party.

 

Ironically enough “It’s Time” might be seen by a sharp-eyed lawyer on the make as an appropriation of Menzies’ 1949 slogan, “It’s Time for a Change”. Would the Liberal Party have had a case for trademark infringement or for passing off? I suppose Menzies ought to have had greater foresight and trademarked the phrase.

 

Despite the slogan having a certain association with Whitlam and with images of Whitlam during the 1972 campaign (as it does also with numerous now-faded TV personalities) – again, it was The Australian Labor Party that campaigned under the slogan, not just Gough.

 

It was the Labor slogan, not the Whitlam slogan.

 

More than this, a majority of Australian electors adopted the slogan as their own, voted Labor in 1972 and won. We won.

 

It was a time of excitement and hope and anticipation. The Labor victory changed Australia overnight and so Australians who voted Labor then felt “it’s time” was their time.

 

And they still do.

 

Gough was Sir Roger’s hero too, as he told David Attenborough one day (or was it the other way around?) and he even managed to touch the hem of Gough’s garment once, before Gough imperiously brushed him off.

 

Yes, the Institute may have a legal right to the term but it cannot honestly assert moral ownership of the phrase which belongs to the Australian people, or at least those who are ancient enough to remember those heady days 41 years ago.

 

The appropriation (or acquisition) of the phrase by the Whitlam Institute seems in Sir Roger’s personal view opportunistic and merely commercial and any assertion of moral ownership groundless.

 

You have expressed a view that universities have not been “politicised”.

 

Are you serious? Where have you been? And even if you were right what is not debatable is that they have certainly become highly commercialised, which is perhaps worse, especially from the point of view of the values which Gough always represented.

 

Which is why we are having this conversation.

 

“We want to give a new life and a new meaning in this new nation to the touchstone of modern democracy — to liberty, equality, fraternity.”

– Gough Whitlam, ALP Policy Speech, 13 November 1972

 

Sir Roger is in his way a student of the Enlightenment which led directly to liberté, egalité, fraternité and la Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen. And it would in Sir Roger’s view be a travesty and an insult to Whitlam’s legacy if lawyers on his behalf were to trample all over what he actually stood for, what he held so dear, what he really meant to us and which he so successfully shared as his vision for this country, for its people and their democracy – just because it was “the law”.

 

 

Genericisation 

One is clear that the Institute is in proud possession of carefully guarded forms saying that it owns a Trade Mark. Those pieces of paper give the Institute a legal stick.

 

People, however, use these two words together in all sorts of contexts all the time. People have appropriated the term as their own ever since 1972. It is used everywhere by all sorts of people.

One could understand if the whole purpose of this exercise by The Magnificent Whitlam Institute may be to run a campaign to avoid genericisation by asserting its trademark. And such a campaign might focus on the easier targets.

 

But it was probably already too late for that as early as 1972.

 

Your pieces of legal paper if taken literally would mean people may conceivably inadvertently infringe your trademark privately or in public using those words.

 

The idea that the Institute has a right to be the only “legal person” to use those words together in all the Classes you have trademarked is a nonsense, a mockery, an impossibility.

 

Any attempt the Institute might make to assert its trademark on a large scale would be in danger of discovery that it is a generic term and you might risk losing the trademark protection in any case.

 

To be clear, your trademarks do not discriminate or allow discretion.

 

They make it an infringement to use the two words together in any and all of the contexts which are covered.

 

You are honour bound to pursue all perceived infringements as you have Values Australia. Anything else would be unethical.

 

A newspaper headline, for example, or a recorded political speech could be construed to fall under the trademark jurisdiction.

 

You could conceivably pull a teacher out of a classroom for writing those words on the whiteboard at the start of a class, “branding” the lesson.

 

You could conceivably take IBM (for argument’s sake) to court because the office girl created signs for a change management seminar she had decided to call “IT’S TIME”. You would be entitled to make a claim if you felt like it. In fact, since you have done it here, you are bound to do it there, and to seek out every possible instance where it might occur.

 

You can see the total absurdity. (Or perhaps you can’t. That would be sad.)

 

And yet you were not satisfied with one set of absurdities in 2004. You went out and bought four more in 2011.

.

Freedom of speech

What is worse is that the right of a person to freedom of speech in a political context was derived from Sections 7 and 24 of the Australian Constitution by the High Court in 1992 and 1994 and in particular in Lange v Australian Broadcasting Corporation (1997).

 

Even the Immigration Department on its website assures potential citizens that there are “five fundamental freedoms”.

 

Number one on their list is “freedom of speech”.

“Australians are free, within the bounds of the law, to say or write what we think privately or publicly, about the government, or about any topic. We do not censor the media and may criticise the government without fear of arrest.”

 

One doesn’t wish to make too much of this but after all it is the website of an Australian Government department. It has been there for many years. It must have legal, if not legislative, standing because a person would be entitled to rely on this advice to inform his actions. If it does not have force then it is misrepresentation and a person could claim damages.

A case might be made that restricting the use of “it’s time” in the political context, trademark notwithstanding, is a restriction on or infringement of that implied right.

 

I don’t suppose you want to test that and Sir Roger does not have the means.

 

 

On a more personal note. 

Sir Roger was offended that “you”, or whoever actually wrote the letter, employed that formal and threatening presumption-of-guilt language which seems to the clean-living and unwary to accuse one of all manner of the vilest of premeditated and vicious crimes and to suggest that the recipient is the lowest bastard in the world if not a baby-eater – or worse, a catholic priest – when you could as easily have written,

 

“Dear Sir, you may not have realised that [blah blah etc. etc.] and though your intentions may have been honourable, we would like you to not do that any more, please. We’d rather not, for both our sakes, have to ask you again if you don’t mind. Let’s know if you object. Kind regards Helen (via Allison).”

 

Sir Roger finds that writing to decent, good, generous Australians in the arrogant way you have is offensive and frankly obscene.

 

Not everyone (thank god) is a lawyer and understands that legalese is “just the bullying way we do things around here” and that you were “just doing your job; nothing personal”.

 

He does, though, feel for you.

 

Much as you might have desperately wished you could write an understanding and thoughtful letter, you simply cannot. Your hands and pens and mind are chained to the books, the desk and the formula, to the form guides you learnt while articled, and to the form letter in which you or your office girl customised the fill-in-the-blank spaces.

 

For you there is only one way to write such a letter and you have no choice but to do it that way.

 

In this most free of countries lawyers, of all people, have no professional freedom. In your heart you might wish you could change the world for the better, the way you dreamed in the idealistic glow of youth so long ago, when you watched Boston Legal – or perhaps Perry Mason?

 

But the law, as you know, and perhaps discovered to your dismay (or delight, who knows?) is not about truth or justice; it is only about the law.

 

For all one knows you may have strong morals yourself but in your profession morality is irrelevant, except for morality which is legislated. And in that you have no say, whether you agree with it or not.

 

And so instead of doing what is right you must do what is legal, perhaps sitting in a room lined with soul-sucking books doing unutterably tedious, endlessly repetitive and eye-wateringly trivial things like pumping out form letters to the wicked.

 

Sir Roger is full of regret for any existential struggle you might have, any desire you might have to fashion meaningfulness amongst the professional restraints.

 

Meanwhile, Sir Roger is unfettered by such constraints. Every day is a new excitement and a new challenge and a creative opportunity to influence his world for the better and to make it a better, more loving and more humane place – much the way Gough inspired us to do and be.

 

And one has the constitutional right and freedom to do so.

 

 

In our next and final instalment, Sir Roger:

 

  • makes shocking revelations of high-profile naughtiness,
  • gets up-close-and-personal
  • and even more up-close-and-personal with the, after all, non-intimidating one,
  • asks the question he often asks himself, and knows she does:
     “How would this look on the front page of the herald?”
  • and drops a political bombshell!