Delaying the Economic Apocalypse

Delaying the Economic Apocalypse

 

Who ultimately pays?

 

Sir Roger is not an economist. He is (therefore) not a marxist. Nevertheless he has long been confused and at the same time fascinated by the doctrine of endless economic growth and has wondered from where and how, in our system, the profit can endlessly come. Who, ultimately, pays?

Here are two items that help to understand these questions.

The first is an animated version of an RSA talk in April this year, “The Crises of Capitalism: Is it time to look beyond Capitalism towards a new social order that would allow us to live within a system that would be responsible, just and humane?”  by Professor David Harvey¹.

 

 

The second is a 2010 Deakin Lecture broadcast on the ABC’s Big Ideas program on Sunday. “Prosperity Without Growth?” by Professor Tim Jackson²

You can listen to the whole talk here, or on the ABC’s Big Ideas page, or download the podcast from their page. 

 

 

ABC’s notes: 

“So much of the analysis of how we respond to climate change assumes that economic growth and emissions reduction are compatible goals. But is this wishful thinking? To question maximising economic growth as an organising principle of society seems close to economic heresy. But is there any evidence that we can de-link consumption and economic growth from emissions growth? Must we re-think the very notion of growth and what it means to be genuinely prosperous?”

 

¹ Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). A leading social theorist of international standing, he received his PhD in Geography from University of Cambridge in 1961. Widely influential, he is among the top 20 most cited authors in the humanities. In addition, he is the world’s most cited academic geographer … and the author of many books and essays that have been prominent in the development of modern geography as a discipline. His work has contributed greatly to broad social and political debate, most recently he has been credited with helping to bring back social class and Marxist methods as serious methodological tools in the critique of global capitalism, particularly in its neoliberal form.”

 ² Professor of Sustainable Development in the Centre for Environmental Strategy (CES) at the University of Surrey Economics and Commissioner UK Sustainable Development Commission.

  

Why NOT Benny Condoms?

Why NOT Benny Condoms?

 

Okay, it can’t be avoided.

 

Sir Roger wrote this in a fit a few weeks ago and he was in a variety of minds as to whether he ought to publish it. Was it intemperate? Of course. It was Sir Roger. Anything else? Was it wrong? Sir Roger, on reviewing it, has determined that he does not resile from its sentiments and so directs its publication. Here then is his response to the

Foreign Office Pope Flap …

Someone at the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office made what appears to be a joke memo about what the Pope could do when he visits Britain and before he gets arrested.

The FCO is wishing it had a hole to jump into. The Government doesn’t know where to look. The poor author of the memo has been “assigned to other duties”. And the “Vatican” is effecting to be deeply mortified by the “insult”.

Really?

The true obscenity is that while many of the suggestions are, in an enlightened world, actually rational and reasonable, they are characterised by the FCO as “far-fetched”. Commentators are calling them “astonishing”, “foolish”, “clearly ill-judged, naive and disrespectful”. A Catholic Bishop says, “This is appalling”, “outlandish” and “outrageous”.

So what were the abominations that the poor little 20-something Oxbridge Foreign Office boy proposed?

[ Be careful. You may go to hell just for reading this list.]

It includes:

Launch ‘Benedict’ condoms

• Review vatican attitude to condom use

• Bless a civil partnership

• Reverse policy on women bishops

• Ordain a woman

• Open an abortion ward

• Training course for all bishops on child abuse allegations

• Announce sacking of dodgy bishops

• Vatican sponsorship of AIDS clinics

• Launch helpline for abused children

So all of these things are done by other religions and/or secular groups in advanced 21st Century society around the world. Done by grown-ups, by rational, thoughtful people, by mature, socially-concerned human beings dealing with actual problems in the real world.

Nevertheless, the “Vatican” (whatever that is a metaphor for) is not part of 21st Century society. nor is it any of those other things. It is anchored in 6000 year-old anxieties of desert tribal culture, was hijacked into a militaristic system by a mad emperor in the 4th Century who appropriated it to his imperial service and decided its beliefs, and for millennia has been so wrapped in archaic, cannibalistic, irrelevant ritual that it has lost even the vaguest connection to the “true” orgins of the cult.

If Christ were to return today it is the Catholic Church which would most vehemently be clamouring for his murder – because he would threaten to collapse their cosy, now entirely temporal, globally-tentacled, fear-mongering, parasitic apparatus, emasculate their power structure and reduce the fraudulent façade of their unctuous piety to rubble.

What the “Vatican” is doing now, must do and always does do is to desperately try to prop up the flimsy cardboard and canvas of the awful illusion they call their “authority”; patch it, stitch it, retouch it. And scream obscenities at – and, as they have so frequently done, kill – those who too clearly see their fakery and their flagrant lies and refuse to pretend it is real.

The more the church screams injustice and victimhood the more you know they are lying and afraid and protecting their livelihood whatever the cost to the real people in the world.

Because that is the problem; the catholic church through its pope is literally – and I mean literally – responsible for the deaths of millions in Africa, millions who are dying right now.

The catholic church is harming lives around the world. It is causing endless misery on a daily and hourly basis with its so-called “beliefs”. The pope’s “beliefs” are not merely irrational, illogical, deeply stupid and pathologically detached from reality; they are caustic, toxic, savage and inhumane. They are putrid, repugnant and rotten. They are fundamentally anti-life.

The catholic church for at least 1700 years has been, in its deepest nature, dishonest and utterly debauched. The establishment — which supposedly honours a simple, plain man who blessed the poor and the downtrodden — smells like a brothel and is painted up like a cheap, toothless harlot. (Metaphorically.) It remains debauched, like a syphilis-ridden hag, because those who have attached themselves like crabs into its stinking knickers don’t understand that they cannot continue to get away with what their predecessors have done for so very, very long.

 

Here endeth the lesson.

 

 

Millennial Jubilation

Millennial Jubilation

 

 1,000

 

 

Today, Sir Roger celebrates his 1,000th post in 1277 days – or exactly 3½ years – since the inaugural, ungainly, embarrassing post – Minister von Rock Opens Australian Refujesus Exhibition – on 15 October 2006. Since then he has improved marginally, been mentioned in the Press and on numerous websites, and been included in the top 40 blog posts for 2007 at On Line Opinion.

He’s been #1 on Google for over three years and, better than that, he’s consistently beaten out the #2, his arch enemy immi.gov.

He won the Australian election, unseating the sitting Prime Minister in the process, and caused a landslide in the US Presidential elections. Perhaps more importantly he got rid of Mick Keelty.

He’s been congratulated by some of the people he most respects including Richard Neville, Stephen Poole and Club Troppo collectively.

He’s been threatened with the big government stick of the Crimes Act by silly old Immigration Dept clown, Bob Correll, and survived. In fact possibly Sir Roger’s proudest moment was his reply to Bob and the response that received, especially from Ken Parish who Sir Roger likes to think still had his marbles when he 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.”

Ah, the olden, golden days …

Sir Roger has attracted 127,838 spam comments, some of which he has celebrated. (Sorry, 127,839 127,840 127,841 127,842 . . . . )

And it all happened because Howard and Beazley were in a race to the bottom to hijack Australian values from the people who really own them.
Us.
And the giant Sir Roger was roused to fight.

 

So Sir Roger has waited a few days since Post #999, hoping for inspiration befitting the global significance of this occasion, wishing once again to elevate himself to the heights of grandiloquence of which he was once capable.

And then, you know, he realised that self-aggrandisement was out of place.

Instead, his deeply-felt gratitude, especially to his readers, yearns for expression.

It is simple, open, soul-bearing transparency that is called for.

And so he has chosen to mark this special moment in an understated way with a simple yet gloriously compelling message which quietly expresses his beliefs. This is the sauce of Sir Roger’s strength, his balm and succor:

Produced by TheThinkingAtheist.com

 

 

May the Sauce be with you and may His Noodly Appendage be upon you and guide you safely through pirate-infested waters.

RAmen!

 

Lolcats With a Vengeance

Lolcats With a Vengeance

Sir Roger is despondent

 

After all the hard work of so many people Australian politics is looking like Howard Lite, iSuck 2.0 déjà vu all over again. Boat people – “Aaaaarrrggghh! Foreigners! Tough on Queue-jumpers [but not on the causes of queue-jumpers]”.

“Let’s pretend to be doing something about climate change. We have to do something. We have to do something. I know! Let’s play tiddlywinks! That’s “something”. Hey, youse guys, the world is going to burn to a cinder unless we do something about it! So what we’re doing is, we’re playing tiddlywinks. If you don’t play tiddlywinks too, the world is going to burn to a cinder.”

“Okay, well, um … wait on … we don’t believe in tiddlywinks but we’ll play if Johnno and Wayne don’t have to play but you promise they will win.”

“But if Johnno and Wayne don’t play the world will burn to a crisp! No-one will win!”

“Okay, well…well…well get fuckin’ stuffed then! Let the world burn for all we fuckin’ care! … Fuckin’ lower class upstarts! Fuckin’ fairy eggheads!”

Palestine.
Israel.
Obama (what a fucking disappointment).
Russia.
Burma.
Sri Lanka.
China,
Tibet.

Fucking arrogant, corrupt and criminally-incompetent Indonesian politicians, bureaucrats, police and judges.

Walls everywhere.
Hatred.
Religious madmen in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Somalia.

And the United States, which is terminally fucked in the collective head.

Democracy movements being crushed everywhere.

Freedoms, rights and privacy being shredded even – especially – by the good old Brits, eh, what?

Stupid global refusal to listen, based on creaking, long-ago-discredited, Industrial-Revolution-era social-political-religious theories that date back – even in their most recent versions – more than 200 years in the West, and on 4000-year-old, crazy, murderous, hate-filled, tribalist, racist, desert-engendered cruel religious fantasies in the rest of the world.

The hopes of “peace and love” from the last five decades crumbling like the naïve hallucinations they so pitiably were.

Young people who will “look after” things in a few years unable to think or care about anything but how some fake and shallow, talentless celebrity flashed her cunt, and what eyeshadow to wear …

And the people who actually care. the people with answers, who could possibly do something about it all, are sneered at and ridiculed.

It’s enough to make you want to just give up and forget it all and look at some funny cat video.

 

Richard Glover Lacks Sense of Humour About Atheists

Richard Glover Lacks Sense of Humour About Atheists

Brilliant French comedy: St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of French Protestants by Catholics,  1572  /  François Dubois

Hahahahahaha!

 

Yesterday on Richard Glover’s Drive (ABC local radio, Sydney), according to sources, Glover — who has built his considerable celebrity on unfunny puns and predictable punchlines — testily exhorted atheists to “get a sense of humour”.

How true!

Your Common or Lesser Spotted Godbotherer is such a hoot, after all.

Who can forget the hilarity of the Spanish Inquisition? Or the Taliban’s side-splitting public executions of women in the Kabul soccer stadium? Or al Qaeda’s laugh-a-minute comedy, 9/11 , with its follow-ups, World’s Craziest Suicide Bombings Parts I, II, III … (N) … directed by Allahu Akbar?

George W. Bush’s Iraq War II, of course, was a comedic tour de force in the grand tradition of The Great Crusades: Episodes I to IX.

And that girl being stoned to death for “adultery” should have been caught on Somalia’s Funniest Home Videos! (After all, the girl being merely whipped for leaving home without a male escort made it onto Paki-Standup-TV, didn’t she?)

Yes, the religious are so much more relaxed and chilled out and ready to laugh.

 

 

The Mohammedans, for example, were significantly more giggle-ready when they saw those atheistic Danish cartoons than any of your straight-laced, po-faced atheists would ever be if confronted with a satirical image of their own atheist god, Charles Darwin.

Chuckling behind his bushy pantomime beard, Groucho Marx eyebrows and silly dress-up turban, Ayatollah Khomeini was virtually doubled-over with mirth as he delivered his sidesplitting fatwa on Salman Rushdie.

Thanks, Richard, for the depth of your wisdom, for your fair and balanced advice, and for not letting your personal opinion get in the way of your deadpan public pontifications.

And for being a real chucklehead we can look up to. 

 

 

 

Heads They Win, Tails You Lose

Heads They Win, Tails You Lose

Whom the gods wish to destroy they first send mad — Euripides

 

In 2007  we pleaded

 … tell me that America isn’t completely barmy, batty, berserk, bonkers, cracked, crazed, cuckoo, crazy, demented, deranged, dippy, flipped out, fruity, haywire, insane, loony, lunatic, mad, maniacal, manic, mental, nuts, nutty, out of their minds, potty, psycho, screw loose, screwy, unbalanced, unglued, unhinged, unzipped and whacko.

It is truer today than it was then.

As Glenn Greenwald says this week at Salon,

“ There’s little question that when people look back at this period in American history, it will be difficult to comprehend what happened in the Bush era — and especially how we blithely started a devastating war over complete fiction, while simultaneously instituting a criminal torture regime and breaking whatever laws we wanted. But far more remarkable still will be the fact that, other than a handful of low-level sacrificial lambs, those responsible — both in politics and the establishment media — not only suffered no consequences, but continued to wield exactly the same power, with exactly the same level of pompous self-regard, as they did before all of that happened. Looking back several decades or more from now, who will possibly be able to understand how that happened: the almost perfect inverse relationship between one’s culpability and the price they paid for what they unleashed?

He’s talking about the amazing revelations this week by Tom Ridge, the first head of the US Department of Homeland Security, that he had been pressured for political reasons to raise the terror threat level just before the 2004 elections.

“ [Ridge] wasn’t keen on writing a tell-all. But in ‘The Test of Our Times: America Under Siege…and How We Can Be Safe Again’, out September 1, Ridge says he wants to shake “public complacency” over security. And to do that, well, he needs to tell all. Especially about the infighting he saw that frustrated his attempts to build a smooth-running department. Among the headlines promoted by publisher Thomas Dunne Books: Ridge was never invited to sit in on National Security Council meetings; was “blindsided” by the FBI in morning Oval Office meetings because the agency withheld critical information from him; found his urgings to block Michael Brown from being named head of the emergency agency blamed for the Hurricane Katrina disaster ignored; and was pushed to raise the security alert on the eve of President Bush’s re-election, something he saw as politically motivated and worth resigning over.

What is extraordinary but not surprising is that those on the US right, now told categorically that they were wrong when they said the government wouldn’t do something like that and that the left were loony conspiracy theorists, take a position something like, “Yes but we were right to be wrong and the left were wrong to be right because, you know, we respected Our President but the left were just Bush Haters.”

Greenwald addressed this craziness in his Salon column this week

“ Ambinder’s belief that there is nothing other than blind “Bush hatred” that could have justified such a belief — and his accompanying self-defense that journalists like him had no way of knowing any of this — is patently false. [A] 2006 Time column by Josh Marshall … details the ample empirical evidence suggesting that “that the Bush Administration orchestrates its terror alerts and arrests to goose the GOP’s poll numbers.”

And [t]here is an exhaustive and lengthy (17 minutes) segment from Keith Olbermann early last year that “weaves from each revelation of an intelligence failure or a Democratic political victory to an almost immediate orange alert or ‘new threat’ from al Qaeda.”

Olbermann’s conclusion after examining all the evidence: “what we were told about terror, and not told, for security reasons, has overlapped considerably with what we were told about terror, and not told, for political reasons” (Olbermann had been raising the same suspicion for many years).

The reason journalists such as Ambinder saw no such evidence wasn’t because it didn’t exist. It existed in abundance; you had to suffer from some form of moral, intellectual or emotional blindness not to see it. It’s because they didn’t want to see it, because — as Ambinder said — they trusted the Bush administration as good and decent people who might err but would never do anything truly dishonest.

It’s because only loser Leftist ideologues distrusted Bush officials and the overriding goal of establishment journalists is to prove that they are not like them, that they’re much more serious and responsible and thus would never attribute bad motives to government leaders such as those who ran the Bush administration.

Putting Greenwald’s piece together with the insanity and ignorance of the US health insurance debate it is quite clear that the US is in mental, moral and political free fall. It is thrashing and flailing about for something to hold onto, not knowing where it is going. And it is going into a very dark pit.