The Unfair Society

Is Fair Worth Fighting For?

After writing about this business of Christian Porter, I got to be thinking about what was disturbing me so much about the press conference. On the one hand if we are being fair to the person who accused the Attorney General, we have to be fair towards her and ask the questions. On the other hand if we're living in a society with due process, the manner in which we ask the question should have a bit more epistemological precision than a heated presser to get towards justified, true, belief on the matter. It would be unfair to everybody in society if we judged guilt on rumour and innuendo. 

Which got me thinking, I guess I'm a sucker for this notion of 'fair'. 

I saw a number of people going off on social media today saying Porter was merely denying it like Bart Simpson - "I didn't do it, you didn't see me do it, you can't prove anything" - which, to be fair is true as well, but if his denials are not sufficient from making your negative judgements, then doesn't that mean this really needs to go to court? 

If you were being accused rightly or wrongly, you'd want your day in court instead of just a presser. Yet because the would-be plaintiff is dead, there can't be a court date. It is entirely unfair to be judged on the letter. That's Porter's point. Thus fairness seemed to be one of the nodes on which this process was buckling.

This brings about the next question:

Do We Live In A Fair Society?

We value fairness in Australia. Everyday Australia's journalists describe our society as egalitarian. This is probably not quite right. I can say that it used to be egalitarian but years and years of Coalition rule has ensured a lot of privileges have been baked in as advantages for wealthy people. Going back 30 years to the year Paul Keating ousted Bob Hawke from the Prime Minister's office, there have been 11 years of ALP rule and the rest belong to the Coalition. They won a lot over the years, some times in the most dodgy manner (which I won't bother going into here) and the ALP for its part has found numerous ways to hobble itself over the years. And each time the ALP hobbled itself, that was an opportunity lost. 

Fairness has been slipping in the socio-economic sense for 3 decades. We are far less equal now than we were in 1991. Year after year we find economic inequality has risen and that the gap with the indigenous community has not closed. Opportunities are less, the economy is far less diverse, and labour conditions are more precarious for far more people. It turned out this way because successive governments have been undertaking the Neo-liberal social experiment where governments no longer look to achieve full employment, they try and cut taxes instead and hope private enterprise pulls it weight. It has not. 

A simple analysis of GDP spread tells a simple picture of unequal spread of wealth. It was pointed out by an academic to me that 8% of Australia's GDP is derived from the surrounding blocks of Wynyard and Town Hall stations in Sydney. Melbourne similarly has 2 stations that provide a similar amount, and Brisbane has one that provides about 5. If you add it up, 1/5 of Australia's GDP rests on 5 suburbs out of all the suburbs in this wide country. This skewering is partly the result of public infrastructure policy (or absence thereof) but also an expression of the unequal opportunities present in our society. 

There are whole swathes of the country physically cut off from the opportunities that are available in concentrated spots in the middle of these urban centres. Australia's unemployed numbers 700,000 and upwards. In any given week there are job listings that number about 200,000, most of which are closely tied to these GDP engine sites. In any given week there are 500,000 people who need a job, are actively looking and cannot get the economic opportunity to better themselves as per the conservative Liberal National Party prescription for self-betterment. There's no rhetorical device to cover over the plain fact that the Coalition government can't even deliver on its own stated policy. It just can't work the way they say it does, thanks to the tyranny of distance. We live in a country that if you live in the wrong place, your odds at success get very long.

So no, we do not live in a society that is in any way fair; we have a government that has made it its stated policy to keep it unfair; and unfairness is celebrated by this ruling party at just about every turn. 

Therefore, it has to be asked how is it fair that the Attorney General of the party of unfairness, presiding over a government that enacts policies to bolster enduring unfairness, that spreads the unfairness and celebrates the unfairness it creates and sustains, complain when he is not being treated fairly? Can Christian Porter really complain about all this being unfair? What has fairness got to do with his party, his government, his life experience of wealth and privilege and his pursuit of said unfairness over his entire political career? 

What, fair? Christian Porter wants fairness? Due process? Who is he trying to kid? We don't get fairness from him or his government, why should that old expectation for egalitarian, democratic fairness still stand? He's getting exactly what's coming to him exactly because of the many many actions of his life apart from his possible rape that put him in a position to look like a rape suspect. It's extraordinary in some ways that a man's life in the law and politics has led him to being utterly unbelievable when he himself is accused of a heinous crime - but that's all on him. 

You Know What's Weird About The Date?

January of 1988. 

I keep looking at the date of the alleged rape and keep thinking it's peculiar. What is peculiar about it is that it's roughly the time of Australia celebrating its Bicentenary. I remember the event. On Australia Day that year I was down in Blues Point Park with my friends to see the fireworks which, for the first time were mounted from the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Then they announced they would become incorporated into New Year Celebrations and the rest is history. The jingle went "Celebration of a Nation, lend us a hand," so we spent the year making jokes about hand jobs. It's hard to forget. It was typically a Hawke-Keating kind of Green-and-Gold Australia looking fo an identity to hang its celebrations upon, and much less the Southern-Cross-and-Union-Jack kind of Australiana preferred by John Howard.

All the same Australia Day remains hotly contested, with Porter's own party doing the defending of the day of invasion for the indigenous people of Australia. It's the ultimate day of unfairness that his party insists we keep as the day to celebrate our nation-hood. I'm pretty sure Christian Porter is also one of those guys who don't think we should move the date. It seems incredibly emblematic that around the time of the most unfair moment being celebrated was when the alleged events took place. 

And he wants fairness. Let that sink in. 

A Bit of Kafka, A Bit of Kant

I guess a part of me is still wedded to fairness. If one were to give Porter the benefit of the doubt, then it must be harrowing to wake up one day and be accused of a heinous crime 33 years ago when you were a teen. It's like something straight out of Kafka (or Philip K Dick). Like Kafka's 'The Trial', the allegation sticks, but he can't get to a courtroom to challenge his accuser or clear his name. Or maybe it is more like 'The Metamorphosis' where he woke up one day as a beetle (I have often wanted to wake up one day as a Beatle but that is another story). Instead of a beetle, Porter has woken up to find he is an alleged rapist.

It doesn't end well for Josef K. or Gregor Samsa the protagonists in Kafka's stories. It's hard to imagine this ends well for Christian Porter. He might not like it but his only shot at clearing his name is the independent inquiry being tossed around.

Immanuel Kant made a point in his book 'Critique of Pure Reason' that there are any number of things in the universe one could discuss but because of the way we are constructed, there is no way of knowing. For instance we cannot know if there is an afterlife because we can't die and come back. So any discussion of the afterlife cannot be sensibly made because nobody knows what they're talking about. Similarly, if we're careful about what we can know and what we can't know, the range of subjects we can discuss sensibly becomes self evident (or words to that effect, it's been a decade since I read the big fat turgid book). When applied to the situation of Christian Porter, it becomes self evident we can't talk about this case in any sensible way, given the circumstances. 

People are going to try anyway because it's their job to commentate, but keep in mind what Kant had to say about the limits of what we can know and whether sensible judgements can be made. They can have the independent inquiry but they might come up with bupkis. Is this fair? Is this fair on the woman? Is any of it fair? Like I said, I'm a sucker for fairness, but we're talking about a guy who tried to make fairness obsolete, asking for fairness. By all means have the independent inquiry but I can hear Kafka and Kant laughing from the grave. 

Whatever the outcome, it sucks to be you, Christian Porter. But it's no worse than the life of the disadvantaged in this country - a disadvantage your career was spent in trying to sustain.

Christian Porter's Spot of Bother

 How Awkward Was That, Shtraya?

That was a really uncomfortable press conference. I can't recall a press conference that was more awkward than that one including the one where Bill Clinton wagged his finger and told us he "did not have sex with that woman". And we know how that one turned out. Christian Porter's press conference was much more drawn out and filled with bewilderment and pointed, accusatory questions. 

You can see parts of it for yourself here.

All of it is here.

It's pretty gruelling to watch.

I Hate Christian Porter But...

It goes without saying but by dint of him being on the infernal side of politics, I don't like Christian Porter. I don't much like the smug smirk and condescension that he usually throws around, and as for this notion that he might be a future Prime Minister, well, if Scomo can be our PM a monkey's ass can do it too. When we all started playing the game of"who-is-the-rapist-minister?" his name was the slam dunk favourite. And your name doesn't become the front-runner in those stakes if you weren't some kind of entitled fuckwit that invites that judgement - more on that later.

I really can't stand the guy; but I have to say that I'm inclined to believe him based on that interview. We might quibble with the way he played politics at the edge by bringing up allegations against Bill Shorten some years ago, and implied that the press were part of the public lynch mob. I mean, come on, if it were the other way around you know he would be using the press to drum up the very same lynch mob. So the pleading for politics didn't really elicit my sympathy. 

What did get my attention was the scenario. It was January 1988. He and 3 other students were in Sydney for a debating competition. He as 17, she was 16 when the alleged rape took place. And it took 32+ years for this to surface as a case. Keeping in mind the man was in the Western Australian state government Assembly since 2008. The woman accusing him of the rape committed suicide late lats year, having battled mental illness. They're the facts as presented to us. 

Look, I'll be honest with you - Porter didn't look like a guy who got found out for a transgression from years ago. He looked like he was bewildered that the rumour mill had found him as the target of a wild allegation. Believe me, there are not that many people who would love to see him go down more than me, but I couldn't bring myself to think he was the perpetrator as described, based on how he presented himself at the presser. 

People are going to believe the accuser and that's fair enough. I was on their side right up to the point I sat through that miserable, nerve-shattering press conference. 

Maybe In The Confirmation Bias Wheelhouse?

If we were to nominate one cabinet minister out of Scomo's veritable lineup of misery-makers, Porter fits the bill like no other. Most of the prominent men in Scomo's cabinet look like Incels. Porter alone looks like he can play the player and maybe get laid in a way that is beyond say Greg Hunt, Josh Frydenberg or Peter Dutton. If you had to pull a name out of that bunch as the likely culprit, Porter would have been at the top of a lot of people's lists, not just mine. 

He's the obvious person to think the worst of, and just maybe there's a problem in that. Just because we think he's the odds-on favourite to be the one to do it, doesn't mean he did it. As much as I would like to believe out of malice and schadenfreude that Porter was the likeliest to be a teen rapist, that doesn't mean he was a teen rapist. It's not a matter to be left to conjecture or random judgments of character. Belief alone isn't going to get you anywhere meaningful. This isn't some joke about figuring out who farted in the lift. It's as grave an allegation as grave allegations come. 

Worse still, we're not going to get to the bottom of this because the accuser is now deceased. No court case can be brought, no investigation can really be completed. The people calling for an independent inquiry are on principle correct to do so, but in light of the circumstances it is doubtful meaningful answers can be gained. And by meaningful, I mean those that stand up to some kind of epistemological interrogation, with conclusions that are justified and true.  

As it is, it's left in the world of he-said, she-said. The allegations are just going to sit in the half-light of social media and mainstream media without ever seeing the inside of a court. If anything the press conference drew the line under the need for presumption innocence especially in such murky circumstances. 

Making Sense of The Bits That We Were Told

Porter had the look of a man who wanted to say "look, I am an arsehole and you can think me a tremendous, awful, entitled, arsehole but I am not that arsehole." 

It reminded me of the Nixon adage "let the bastard deny it". Or the fart joke "He who denied it supplied it." If you're out in front of the press denying something, you look guilty any way. Which is to say, that right there is the court of public opinion running wild, independent of any real court or rule of law. It's not that I don't believe the allegation or that I believe Porter is a more reliable human being than the accuser or any of that. No. None of that. It's just that right up to seeing the press conference, I was smugly convinced he was the rapist and he should go down regardless of the circumstances. 

What I discovered in the process of watching his press conference was that I got squeamish. I realised I would much rather this whole business went through courts and got litigated and contested by eminent, studied, venerable lawyers. Except it can't because the accuser is dead. This stuff of journalists hurling loaded questions - the "when did you stop beating your wife?" variety of questions, did not make me feel any closer to the truth or a just outcome. And Porter looked just as frustrated as we were in that what he was being asked to do was to prove a negative in a court of public opinion and anything less should mean his job and career. He's certainly correct to see it that way. 

In turn, I had to ask myself am I happy being a juror in a kangaroo court? You know me, I hate jury duty even in real life. Sure I'd love to see him gone, but he'd only be replaced by the next entitled jerk-off Tory, so what would be the point of a gratuitous send-off in real world terms? Meanwhile Porter can't even name his accuser in the press conference defending his name. A wag pointed out even his surname rhyming with daughter is going to kill him at the next election: "would you trust your daughter with Christian Porter?" It's a circus of malice and innuendo.

This is so murky and awful that if the ALP ran with it against the Coalition, they too would suffer a tremendous blow to their own prestige and integrity. They would never be able to argue anything from principle in Parliament again. That's how toxic this scandal has become. It's one thing for this sorry government to cover up the Brittany Higgins rape. That's terrible enough and the government deserves to be castigated. Yet I thoroughly understand the government's perplexed aporia about this allegation. I guess that's why they sent him out to face the press today. 

  

 

There's No Money

There's Never Any Money

Some time after those terrible fires, it got to rebuilding, and affected people went looking around for reconstruction/support money from the government. At the time, announcements were made that there was 2 billion dollars to go around but months later it was found out that there was no such fund as announced. People found it impossible to navigate the bureaucracy to be heard by the Federal Government. Arguably, the Federal Government put in wear plugs and sat in the maze in order to make it inaccessible A little like Major Major Major Major in Catch-22 when he says he will only take meetings when he is not in his office.  

People affected by the fires went into the winter of 2020 with the pandemic going, without having rebuilt anything. It should have been a bigger scandal but of course this Covid-19 pandemic has been such a monster of sorts it ate up all the airspace for the message to get out. 

I kind of imagine that Scomo, having been snubbed pretty hard in his attempt to PR and Spin his way out of the deep ditch he had dug himself, decided these people would get punished through the power of bureaucracy. The ABC was reporting people still living in tents in the middle of winter. This is a terrible state of affairs. 

All of which got me thinking that we do terrible things to one another. I didn't vote in this terrible government but somebody did, and those people knew full well what kind of crackpot policies would be put into place or left to die through inaction and omission. And now that people in the south end of the continent were facing this terrible plight, there were people in Queensland who were quite smug that they got the government for which they had hoped. The absence of empathy is psychopathic. It's a horrible thought, really when part of the populace abandons another to depredation and neglect. We used to be better than this. Really, we were, once upon a long time ago. 

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That Time When...

...Scomo Went To Hawaii

It's been well over a year and a part of me finds it still way too hard to forgive Scomo's abandonment of his country to go on a family holiday during the worst fire season in recorded history. The country was ablaze, he was on vacation - because it had been arranged with his family months ago, allegedly - and whole communities had been burnt to the ground.

It was a bit like FDR going on a vacation to the Bahamas the week after WWII landed on his desk. Except, FDR did no such thing, and here was our Prime Minister sipping Pina Coladas by the sea in Hawaii. I mean, come on. How do you spin that, you PR hack Scomo? 

After which he kind of hid behind his kids and took his lumps in the press and looked like yesterday's burnt toast util of course another disaster came along in the form of the COVID-19 pandemic. Then, he was quick off the mark to do things.  You sort of wonder if he would have been as quick had he not had to eat so much humble pie over the bushfire response and his holiday to Hawaii. 

His Prime Ministerial performance has picked up somewhat since then, probably because he finally connected in his head that what he does in his office matters to everybody in the country. All I can say is let us hope he gets voted out as soon as possible.

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No News on Facebook (For Australia)

"No News For You Australia!"

Nobody thought it would happen, they said - but it did. On Thursday morning, Facebook pulled all the news feeds from its services in Australia. A lot of other services were taken out in the big purge, but most importantly, Facebook thumbed its nose at the Federal Government with its gun-to-the-head legislation. 

Since then there has been much scuttlebutt about what this means, and some of it is just hilarious. 

The move was made in response to the government’s media bargaining code, which is designed to force it and Google to pay publishers for news content.

Facebook executives - in consultation with founder Mark Zuckerberg, vice- president of global partnerships, business and corporate development Marne Levine and head of global news partnerships Campbell Brown - were weighing up what to do for weeks.

The tech platform made its intentions to remove news content from its main platform clear last September, after a draft form of the media bargaining code was made public.

Even Simon Milner, Facebook’s director of policy for the Asia-Pacific region, wasn’t sure if Facebook would follow through with the threat when he fronted up at a parliamentary inquiry in late January. In fact nobody was certain until the eleventh hour, when the Facebook’s most senior executives saw the final bill to be debated in parliament and decided to pull the trigger.

Under the direction of Zuckerberg, the company’s founder, major shareholder and most powerful figure, the company pushed through tweaks to its algorithm to restrict news content for Australians.

What's sidesplittingly funny is that the government thought this was a shock move. Since then we've heard admonitions from Josh Frydenberg that somehow this would reflect badly on Facebook, and Greg Hunt telling us that without the news Facebook will be filled with fake news and misinformation. 

The joke is the government was going to rely on Facebook to get its word out about the COVID-19 vaccination programme - starting next Monday - and suddenly that channel had disappeared. You can't make this stuff up. And so they took to the airwaves on old media to wag their index fingers, telling Facebook its reputation would suffer, the news needed to go back on, and Facebook had to go negotiate these contracts with Seven West and Nine-Fairfax and the Truly-Evil-News-Corporation. 

I mean, I'm no fan of Zuckerberg but come on - a five year old can figure out if he doesn't want to do something, he can just say no. And if he had to give up 4% of his Australian business, so be it. 

Ryan Stokes of Seven West Media wants Facebook to put the new back on, and pay Seven West like Google acquiesced. 

“Their decision to ban legitimate news and information … makes them seem more like a publisher than than just a digital platform,” he told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

“I think the government’s commitment to pushing the code through and legislation through is a really important position and being resolute in that and not responding to these types of interim steps and decisions, I think is really important. And then I think it’s going to be up to Facebook. And frankly, I think it’s in their interest to get the information back on their platform, because that’s what their users want.”

You gotta laugh. Ryan Stokes sounds like he just missed out on a multi-million dollar deal with Facebook who simply declined and walked away. What a loser. 

Let's face it, the laws were written to target Facebook sharing news. If Facebook does not share the news, it's not breaking the planned law. The government looks stupid for passing a law against something that is not happening. It can't then demand Facebook break the law so it can un-break the law by signing a deal it doesn't want to sign. It's easier not to infringe the law and not pay the fine.  Everybody understands Facebook was put in the situation by the Australian government. Nobody thinks worse of Facebook than they already do by any of this. 

It's just too funny. 

Why Are You On Facebook Anyway?

It's worth pondering for a moment. There was a time when the news wasn't on Facebook and dare I say it was better then. The intrusion of news made the Facebook experience a lot more convoluted. It's not like Facebook is without its faults. The rise of trump and Trumpism, the proliferation of Flat-Earth-Anti-Vaxx-Committed Stupid can be squarely put upon Facebook. Yet a lot of that came about because Facebook allowed itself to be a conduit of all news and views.  

The reason I am these is because my friends who live in distant places are there. I guess I could call them on the phone instead, but there is something useful about quickly conveying a thought through Facebook. And that's it. If I never get to see an article from Politico or Rolling Stone or the Sydney Morning Herald or ABC..net.au through Facebook, I couldn't really care less. 

Does Facebook have a responsibility to carry the news? Surely not. 

Does Facebook need to carry the news, from the user's point of view? No. 

Is Facebook worse as an experience without the news? Not at all. 

So I think most people will stay on, The commentary saying this would drive people away fro Facebook and that some other platform will take over, are premature. Surely they have not seen what has happened with Parker in the wake of the US elections, the Capitol Insurrection, the banning of Trump and the avowed move to Parler made by many Trumpty-Dumb-pties. It's hard to find an alternative to Facebook that everybody can agree.

About Fires and Emergencies Services Getting Blocked

By the way, the panel on Q&A looked really stupid. 

It's a bit rich that the government that presided over the worst bush fires in the history of modern Australia can complain that people can't access news regarding Fires and Emergencies through Facebook. The government came out swinging like Little-leaguers on red cordial saying Facebook shouldn't switch off emergency services but when you think about it, it's not Facebook's internet. Facebook didn't switch off the internet for those services. They just decided not to carry that social responsibility ion it makes them liable to the proposed laws. The Communication Minister arguing like Facebook made those services inaccessible makes him look like a moron. 

The sites complaining that Facebook doesn't carry them any more are right to complain but at no point did the government make it official that Facebook should be the place where messages like that should be pushed out. It was the free and unfettered market that decided that. The government should take responsibility that it has intervened in the market and there were unforeseen outcomes because of that intervention.  

In some weird way I'd like to see talks break down so much that Google and Facebook both leave Australia and we all get to see what the hell the landscape looks like then. I'd imagine it would be pretty fun and wild. 

Who Do You Hate More?

What all this comes down to for the consumer is no just who do they hold responsible, but also who do they blame for the perceived disruption. I already don't like Zuck, I don't like Facebook even though I'm there. I don't like Scomo and his moron-minion Josh-boi, I don't like the Coalition, but I live here in Australia. People say I can't remove Zuck from FB and that's an issue, but I can't seem to vote out Scomo any more than I can vote out Zuck. 

So it really comes down to who do you hate more? I've realised I hate Scomo and Josh just a little bit more than I hate Zuck-the Fuck. I think we all learned something through this experience, and that is what I have learned. I hate odious idiots far more than I hate odious smart-alecs.

The politicians are trying to posture that they have the high ground. There is no high ground at the bottom of a hole you dug. It's entirely laughable. 

Justice For Lewis

A Year Later I'm Still Upset

Some things are just too awful to let pass. That's how I feel about the mega-fires that visited our land in the summer of 2019-2020. Combined with the unpreparedness, the wilful ignorance of the Federal Government, runaway heatwaves, under-investment in infrastructure for dealing with mega-fires, and you had a catastrophic failure of leadership that manifested as a total, unmitigated disaster. 

And it's one thing if idiot Queenslanders voted for Clive Palmer's mob as a 'hedge' and found themselves with this terrifyingly incompetent government were the ones getting burned out of their houses. Instead it was innocent wildlife was getting hurt and killed in these fires. You can blame the idiot humans who voted for the idiot government, but the wildlife is blame-free - and yet they bore the burnt of the consequence.

I'm not some Animal Liberationist nut job - but even I can see how disproportionately the piling up of bad decisions and their horrible consequences are falling upon those without the power to withstand it, or change it, move away from it, or voice their concerns. 

When you see footage of people rescuing wildlife amid the chaos and turmoil of the fires, you have to ask yourself, how exactly did we get to this point? When will the comeuppance visit themselves upon those who are ostensibly responsible for this land, the idiot politicians? Why do the animals have to lose their dwellings for the idiot politicians' bad decisions? Why can't the idiot politicians lose their houses and family and habitat? 

There's really no justice on that account. There ought to be. I'll leave it at that. 

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Civilisation, Culture, and Defiance Part 3

This Stuff Is Everywhere

If you want to get a better understanding of how widespread this simple problem is, you only have to look at points of conflict around the globe. When people are insisting on preservation of their culture, there is always much defiance against what is considered 'civilised'. Sometimes we don't say it out loud, but whenever you hear of somebody complaining about other people's cultural practices being 'barbaric', you can be fairly certain that what that person is pushing is civilisation as a universal value. 

Don't get me wrong - I like civilisation. Yet I can see how that falls on deaf ears to those who are wedded to their culture. It's do-or-die time when civilisation comes knocking and tells you to surrender your cultural practices. If your thing is bagging a bunch of baby seals and clubbing them or keeping mink in cages and then skinning them for fur coats, the civilised world is going to come at you hard. And you will be saying ""but this practice is deep and old in my culture. All the same, civilisation won't have a bar of it. 

So, don't get me wrong, I do have sympathy for the cultural practices of the peoples of this planet - but I do draw the line at marching with Nazi flags or Confederate flags and retrograde monsters trying to sneak through racism and anti-semitism as something acceptable. If you can't tell you're on the side of assholes-in-history and act accordingly, then you don't get much sympathy from me. 

The reality is everybody picks and chooses their moment to side with civilisation and then culture. People act according to their interests in a very Machiavellian way. It's the kind of sad wisdom that comes from having seen too much. A young person ought to get used to that and learn not to judge too harshly. 

On Why Whaling Is A Terrible Battleground

Here's an example of the defiant cultural shibboleth that just won't die. 

There used to be a lot of countries that used to do commercial whaling. Then, in the 1980s, there was a sea change of public opinion about whether people really should be doing this stuff any more. The process of civilisation had arrived to a rather brutal 19th century kind of industry. The International Whaling Commission which used to decide which countries were allowed to catch how many tonnes of whale, suddenly grew this higher consciousness and decided that all commercial whaling should be banned. And so commercial whaling came to an official end. 

As we know there are a number of holdout nations - Japan, Norway, Iceland, and Russia.  Of the 4 countries, Japan was perhaps the most vocal about its desire to re-commence commercial whaling. At the core of its defiant attitude towards the prevailing winds of banning all commercial whaling was a belief that whaling is a cultural practice in Japan. When we pick a little bit at Norway and Iceland's commitment towards whale hunting, you hit a similar kind of bedrock belief that catching whale for food was, and should remain a part of their lives. If you talk to them, they don't see why you living in some country that has anything and everything in your supermarkets, gets to tell them what they can and cannot eat. 

As I pointed out in the previous entry, the cultural argument is implicitly bolstered with defiance precisely because that's how culture works - by being defiant. Over the years, the Anglophone nations have spent considerable rhetorical energy in a bid to stop Japan (and to a lesser extent Norway and Iceland) from their commercial whaling. Most of the time, those attempts fell on deaf ears, and it only resulted in ever more occasions for the Japanese whaling fleet to go sailing the open seas. 

Even the ICJ case which deemed the scientific whaling was actually commercial whaling in disguise resulted in Japan withdrawing from the IWC. Japan declared her whaling fleet would not go whaling in the Southern Oceans near the antarctic. Instead the fleet would whale within Japan's territorial waters. The point is, they're not going to stop because in their paradigm, it is in their culture to go whaling, and we know this by the very ferocity of the defiance. Maybe the gentle hand of civilisation will come to the Japanese eventually, but right now, the world has spent 40 years making it a matter of culture. It didn't set out to do so, but that's kind of where it has ended up. 

Why The Cultural Argument Isn't Always Great

This leads me to the next point. Mounting a defence over an action or practice based on culture is actually widespread. The "we do 'X' because it is our custom to do so" has tremendous sway all over the globe. If the cultural practice argument comes from an indigenous person, we the civilised colonisers are inclined to back right off from whatever is triggering their defiance. Most of the time, we play it cool and try not to invoke the defiance of the cultural defenders. It's the polite thing to do, it's the right thing to do. 

I have a friend Roddy who is half Samoan and he once said to me "mate, the cultural argument is not so good, eh? Like Samoans used to eat people as their culture. You can't really be saying to other people that it's okay to eat people because it's part of your culture. Some things are just wrong. Eating people is wrong".

Like I said before, the process of being Civilised demands we draw some firm lines somewhere. 

On Why Civilisation Can Be Bad Too

As Australia Day/Invasion Day rolled around again this year, and the debates get more strident every year. On the one side is the default/conservative position that the arrival of the white colonisers is worthy of celebration. Set against that is the indigenous voice that says it was a horrible invasion, an undeclared, unwarranted act of war followed by genocide. As history goes, so goes the narrative, and with the narrative go all the judgments so in many ways the rancour has to do with the representation of historic events. 

If you're not white like me, and therefore not of the demographic that claims kinship with the first fleet colonists, it's a little more abstract. Historically speaking, we don't get to come to Australia without the events of 1788 onwards. The problem with Australia is that the civilisation that came hand in hand with colonialism totally washed over the continent like a tidal wave. It did a lot of damage and washed away lives. There is nothing but the defiance of indigenous people to offer up resistance to this civilisation. 

The civilisation that has covered itself all over Australia is at once optimistic and exploitative. Whether it is Macarthur and his flock of merinos, or the gold rush, or the deep mines we have cut into the land, the process of civilisation as has transpired in Australia is brutally efficient at exploitation of natural resources and brooks no dissent; all of this was/is in exchange for ever more material wealth. Yet we find so much hope in the material wealth we can exploit from this land. This process is so much so, the best way to understand the Australian economy is as a quarry, shearing shed, and abattoir. 

Culture does not really come into Australian life much. I think it might be a land of philistines. Sydney is never going to be like New York. Melbourne is never going to be like London. Brisbane is always going to be a provincial, parochial, country town. As for the other capital cities of Australia, the less said the better. Australia is the land where Toynbee's Civilisation has smashed David Graeber's Culture. In Australia, culture lost, still loses everyday, and will keep losing out to the process of civilisation - getting beaten up, pretty much like a punching bag. 

And it is against this monolithic wonder that is modern civilisation with no real concern for culture, that the Indigenous people are defiantly raising their flag. If you don't have some sympathy for that, you have no heart, and most likely you are one of the many philistines. For the record, that is not a good thing. 

Civilisation, Culture, and Defiance Part 2

Why Civilisation? Why Culture? (What to Make of 70 Million Votes for Trump)

David Graeber had a few more interesting thing to say about this discussion about culture. The concept of Civilisation came from French academics. The notion of Culture was floated by the Germans pretty much in defiance of the French notion of Civilisation. These abstractions are merely extensions of an articulated value statement according to Graeber. Civilisation is a sociologist's conception of how people organise themselves. Culture is of course more of an anthropological concept of what people do and how they conceive of themselves in groups. They may not be in opposition just because Arnold Toynbee sets up a rather interesting binary distinction. 

However, the reason why I have been thinking about this extensively is because I want to understand the how and why and wherefore a group of people might become Trump supporters and have wildly inaccurate information about the world swimming in their brains and perhaps even commit to the kind of drastic action that sees them storming Capitol Hill. It's not good enough to just say those people are conspiracy theorists or nut jobs or they're all personality disordered (although once suspects this to be the case). On some level, these self-proclaimed patriots convinced themselves that Trump was right, the election was being stolen by Joe Biden and the Democrats, and if only Mike Pence would listen to Trump and declare Donald Trump the winner, they would get the outcome they wanted.  

Ordinary people find all of this bizarre, laughable and more than a little disturbing. And yet, there we had it; a kind of American version of the Beer Hall Putsch had taken place and managed invade the Capitol. It was a stupid attempt at a coup, but it was an attempt all the same. The alarming part of it was that it was done by professed patriots who also took with them Nazi and Confederate paraphernalia. It's hard to fathom how they get around their own cognitive dissonance, but they sure made a fist of storming the Capitol. 

It begs the question how? How can the building belonging to the legislative body of one of the most advanced civilisations be overrun by people seemingly devoid of logic or reasoning, but fuelled on confect rage? 

The clue is in their defiance. 

Fools On The Hill

I mean it only takes second to think about it - if somebody else was anything other than white-male-and-heterosexual, what exactly is the problem for America? If they had the same rights as one enjoys in America, how is that a problem? How is that even a cause? Blatant injustices where people perish at the hands of an overzealous police - that's an issue. Somebody feeling upset their candidate lost an election? How is that even remotely a cause enough to march on the Capital and storm Capitol Hill? 

Why would they get so hot under the collar? 

If you listen to what the Trump supporters had to say, it was that they were trying to defy history. From their point of view, a Joe Biden victory had to be the product of voter fraud, and that winning back America meant defying the stated election outcome. Nevermind that the election was undertaken with a good deal of scrutiny and fairness and technology to boot. Those are the hallmarks of Civilisation, but these Trump supporters were proponents of Culture. 

Their list of their grievances extended to feminism, political correctness, immigration and immigrants, the fear of having their guns taken away, secularism and the slighting of fervent Christian beliefs, separation of Church and State, abortion, welfare, and having to wear a mask during a pandemic. They believed the QAnon conspiracy theory which held that Donald Trump was fighting a 'deep state' run by a cabal of paedophiles which included prominent democrats scubas the Clintons. It was all a heady mix of internet bullshit and rumour and innuendo. Yet defiantly, they were patriots, ready to break the law to save the United States America. These were nominally Republican supporters. Lincoln wept. Teddy Roosevelt spun in his grave. Heck, even George W Bush thought it wasn't okay. 

Capital Exchange

If this were a minority that was minuscule, then there might be a way to manage it. The fact that there are 70 million voters who voted for Donald Trump in 2020 suggests a lot of people are walking around with this defiant mindset about just about everything that is demonised by progressive politics. Yet their defiance is there to push back at the tide of enlightenment and progress. If things progress, these people feel like they would give up too much in exchange for that progress. If your are on the side of capital, the enlightenment seems bold and beautiful. If you are not, then you feel threatened. And so the rhetoric of these Trump supporters always swings towards a sense of victimhood, even though there is no real sign that they are anything close to being a victim of any sort. 

As the QAnon fervour dies down in the wake of the inauguration, it seems rather odd that it was even a thing. There are a lot of losers in the economic stakes in middle America. It's not surprising that they would find hope in strange places such as a conspiracy theory. If the reality of stagnant real wages dating back to 1980 was something that needed addressing, they perhaps should have been reading 'Das Capital' and 'The Communist Manifesto' for a proper historic understanding of their true plight as lumpenproletariat. Instead their own defiance lends them to imagining other forms of identities which on the whole are entirely misplaced. The embrace of Neo-Nazism - which is no different to embrace of Nazism together with the symbols of the Confederacy strongly indicates xenophobia seems to have been the motivation.

Is Republicanism really going to continue being hand in glove with these kinds of odious ideologies? We asked that back in 2015-2016 and the logical answer seemed to be no; and yet through the very desire for defiance has meant that the Republicans would rather embrace this losing side of the argument than redraw their own positioning. Each time it probably got argued that their base was a particular kind of identity which would not abide a shift from rank racism, hypocritical piety, and a devout support for the regime that punishes the coloured through the police. Now that Trump has been chased off into the sunset and some sanity has returned, with QAnon being found to have been a figment fo some internet fantasy, maybe the Republicans can re-start a proper examination of how they came to be hostage to such toxic morons. They would be well advised that the defiant ones are the problem. The ones who mount a cultural defence of the indefensible, are the very ones that need expulsion. 

Culture, as Graeber pointed out, is not their friend either. 

I want to report one more thing from history. There was a politician called Kaishu Katsu who was instrumental in negotiating the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate. You can imagine there was much heady argument and a battalion of die hards willing to die for the cause and take what became Tokyo with them in a sea of fire. Katsu noted in his memoirs "it is impassioned patriots who bring about the downfall of a country". 

Civilisation, Culture, and Defiance - Part 1

A Little Something About Culture

In the time I wasn't blogging, I spent a lot of time just surfing YouTube. One of the things I came across was David Graeber giving a short talk about what 'culture' actually is, and how culture might not be your friend, so to speak. Graeber's talk hones in fast on saying culture is defiance. He gives some anthropological anecdotes that delineate the notion that culture comes from the desire to differentiate one's own group from another set of people, with a good deal of defiance. 

Up to that moment I saw the video, I was operating under an older consideration which I got from Arnold Toynbee whereby Toynbee said habits, memes, methods and objects that allow themselves to be transported across peoples is the essence of civilisation. Things that do not lend themselves to be transported across peoples, is culture. That's pretty abstract, but the example I like giving is this: you can experience sushi anywhere because serving  raw fish on rice with vinegar is something that has traveled all over the globe. If you live in any Australian metropolitan area, there is some place that serves up sushi. If you're not Japanese, this is perfectly fine - the food being served is sushi, well enough. 

However, if you are Japanese, then this food being served is far from the proper cultural practice of what sushi is, and how it should be served. A proper cultural experience of sushi is if you had it served to you by a Japanese chef in Tsukiji, Tokyo, right near where the fish markets used to be. It will cost you a  pretty penny, around a thousand dollars for two people - and you have to settle the account in cash. In other words, it has to have the right time, place, people, materials, and atmosphere. The entire practice cannot be transported, and so we can see sushi properly served, is a deeply cultural practice. And Japanese people will tell you with defiance, you can't take that experience out to some shopping centre in say, Chatswood, NSW, Australia and call it proper sushi. What you get in Chatswood is some blonde girl working her summer job, serving up sushi made by a machine in plastic containers! (gasp, horror) It's sushi, Jim, but not as the cultured Japanese know it. As experiences go it ain't bad, but the connoisseur of culture says it's an ersatz experience, tainted by the wrong place, people and ingredients. 

And that, in a nutshell is Graeber's point. If you look around the globe, all kinds of people are doing things in the name of culture, and most of the time, it's in defiance of the other. "That's not real tequila", "That's not real salami", "That's not how you sew a quilt" and so on and on it goes. Quite often, 'the other' being defied is the Hegemony of Western civilisation which brings technology, the flattening of social hierarchies, reification of values, and porn. The people who bang on the most about their culture or some sovereignty derived from culture are the people who stand to lose the most social power within their society should the process of civilisation further erode their social status within those societies. 

So in short, Toynbee says Civilisation is what goes around the world and Culture is what stays put. Graeber says Culture stays put because it's an act of defiance. Graeber says a lot more in the video but for today's point, that's the salient bit. 

What's Wrong With Civilisation Then?

Now, here's the bad news. There is plenty wrong with civilisation as we experience it today. The process of civilisation is such that it destroys entire eco-systems in order to exist. There is something manic about the power of civilisation to travel the globe and deliver things on demand, disregarding its costs. 

Yet when I rhetorically ask, "what's wrong with civilisation?" I'm not going to talk about those sorts of issues.  I want to talk more about the reaction of people who encounter it, without having invited it. 

Civilisation historically arrived with colonisers. This is not limited to the European expansion into the world starting with Columbus, but also Rome into Gaul, Germania and Britain. That process is the entire point of 'Heart of Darkness' by Joseph Conrad. Everywhere people went with better technology enabled them to outcompete the local population for survival. We may even look at colonialism and the spread of technological civilisation as effectively interchangeable. But it brings about carnage. 

This plays out in a funny way in a place like Australia. On the one hand you have white settlement in Australia backed up by the tremendous technological gap between the British settlers and the indigenous people leading to the defiance we see with indigenous people denouncing Australia Day. Yet you have certain parts of the old White Australian community wanting to join Pauline Hanson's defiance against Asians (in the 90s) and Muslims (this side of 9/11). Australia's ratbag knee-jerk crypto-fascist-right are defying the predominant progressivism, citing a largely imaginary 'Australian culture' which is somehow sacrosanct. It's only sacrosanct because without it, their identity might go up in a puff of smoke. 

Civilisation is a process that chips away at your current state of being. Civilisation makes you ponder things about the future where culture would ask you to ponder the past and history. Civilisation asks you to consider changing your ways whereas culture asks you to preserve the old ways. To stand with civilisation, in a sense is inherent to the global process where local cultures get swallowed up by the tidal wave of capitalism - the process whereby the woodland park gets turned into a carpark, or a lookout over a landscape gets a tourist centre and a kiosk that sells tourists a variety of generic food you would never wish to critique. As civilisation washes out culture from our lives, gone are discernment, and aesthetic judgments. Civilisation isn't all good for everybody - it can't be all good for everybody - exactly because it is tied into global capitalism as it was once tied in implicitly with colonialism.  

What's Right With Civilisation Then?

That said, it is worth considering what good civilisation is in terms of what it brings about. When you look at progressive causes, a lot of them are to do with equality. Equality is about fairness a lot of the time. Whether that is emancipation of women or recognition of LGBTQ rights, it has a decidedly civilising edge to the simple fact that we make accommodations for fairness. The angry right that snarls at the mere thought of political correctness and censoring freedom of speech and hating on science, to any kind of critical revision of history, basically strikes a pose of defiance agains these simple moves towards progress. 

This kind of defiance as cultural credo is at times gently persuasive but more recently we have entered a time when the extreme rhetoric of both sides has obscured the middle ground, right under the incessant footwork of the culture wars. Thus it is quite fitting that David Graeber argued 'Culture' is not your friend. The defiance inherent to cultural positions keeps us from improving a civilised, technological society. 

If we can all evolve our consciousness just a little bit, and leave behind notions created in feudal times or the dark ages, maybe we can bring about a true egalitarian utopia without killing the planet or killing lots of people. That's the promise of civilisation. Of course, whether we can actualise it is another story. 

All the same I'm writing all this down because I want people to consider who they are and what they hold to with defiance and why. Perhaps they are not as important as a better future. Maybe we all have to realise Culture is not our friend, and find a way forwards with civilisation. 

End of An Era For Stupid?

As The Time of Trump Draws Near The End

When it gets right down to it, I'm a sore loser. It didn't seem to matter no matter how much I offered up my opinions and pontificating over here. It was just howling into the wind. The world was stupid enough to be persuaded by the Murdoch papers and TV to vote Tony Abbott and Boris Johnson and Donald Trump into power, solely to give tax cuts for the rich and hold off doing anything about Global Warming, what is the damn point of writing a word more about any of this? Have we not crashed into the Twilight of Civilisation? 

Not only did progressives not win, they could not stave off the onslaught of Stupid that ensued those losses. The English speaking world led by the USA, UK and Australia collectively lost its common sense and went with the worst kind of idiotic rhetoric as substitute for substantive policy. How is one to discuss what ensued those losses with any kind of sense?

So I stopped writing here. Why expend the energy? I can't beat Rupert Murdoch and his mighty minions of mendacity. Besides which, was it really my job to care? After all I have no kids. There is no generation I have to worry about. My friends with kids worry about the future, sure. I have had the odd luxury of not having to worry about that. In one sense, the stupidity that transpired because of those losses affected me less than it did my friends and their families. 

Yet it has been a terrible. 7 years of Liberal Party rule in Australia, 6 years of Brexit politics in the UK, and 5 years of Donald Trump politics has put a huge dent in the credibility of the English speaking world. Nations that would look to the democratic leadership of Washington DC and London got an eyeful of miserable, partisan, anti-intellectual, pseudo-scientific brouhaha that passed for politics in these three countries - all of which share the intoxicating poison of stupidity that is the Murdoch press. 

And so in the days following the Putsch upon Capitol Hill by pro-Trump idiots, we are left in the odd position of waiting to see if this horrible period in history will come to a close, at least in America. Will the Republicans finally wake up in the Senate as to just how untenable Trumpism has been for the GOP? Or will they aid and abet the worst President of all time, one last time? Brexit finally limped over the line in late December so as bad as the outcome is, that little drama has come to the end of its run. All that is left is living with the consequences. As for Australia, there is a good deal of time left before the next election. I don't know if the ALP will ever gets act together in time to oust Scomo and his squad of awful human beings. Also offers me little confidence. It appears that Bill Shorten's loss in 2019 was a spectacularly bad election to lose for the ALP, let alone Australia - but that is all a rant for another day.

If anything, the 2010s were a disappointing decade. It didn't really even have any form. People just scrapped for a living thanks to the GFC, and then it was done.  

The Dying of People

In the intervening years I did not write here, I found some of my friends began dropping like flies. Death is always somewhat surprising, even though you come to realise that you have walked into the age group where death is not so surprising. Plenty of people have died at ages younger than what I am today. I feel a far cry from the person that started blogging back in 2003. And people really do die. I'm deeply saddened by the passing of Geoff Murphy, Brian Burgess, and Michael Jacob. They're all of a certain generation, and they all passed away during the years I did not write here. 

I lost a friend to liver cancer; and I've lost one to COVID-19. If you spend your 30 year adult life drinking a lot, dying of liver cancer is unsurprising. If you are a touring musician in the USA, and Donald Trump is your president, then it is unsurprising that you contract COVID-19 and die. Some famous people have died form COVID-19. Countless animals perished in the mega fires of 2019. Death is all around us. death brought about by stupidity of others, is surprisingly common. 

Death is a thing, in case you were lulled into not thinking about it as a factor in one's decision making. 

Ambivalence Grows

The other thing I want to report from my self-imposed exile from writing on this blog, is that I've become even more ambivalent about how I feel about many things. One becomes less certain as one piles the age on to one's being. One becomes more discerning, but one also becomes less decisive. 

It's also a little disturbing when you read back stuff written by people who died at an age younger than you are right now. This is one of those things that happen. You get perspective on your own life and existence in a  way that you just can't buy into the framework of thought and ideology that is invested in a book. I used to think Soseki Natsume was a giant of literature. He died at age 49 and suddenly when you re-read his work as somebody older, you get this weird cognitive dissonance that maybe you really could rhetorically beat up on the literary giant if he only were around today - hey, I even have a cat these days Mr Natsume! 

Same with Jack Kerouac who died at 47. F Scott Fitzgerald at 44. Jane Austen, 41. Raymond Radiguet, 20. Or the notion that for all his entire, massive, output, everything Frank Zappa ever did was as a person younger than you are today. Ditto Glenn Gould who died at 50. It's all a little unsettling - and this adds to this ambivalence. Everything looks like it has 10 sides to the argument, and it's exhausting.  

So What Are You Gonna Do, Art Neuro?

I'm going to pop in more often this year. Stay tuned. 

Screams of Burning Koalas

 Can't Express Fully How Angry I Still Am

Suffice to say the accounts of what happened last summer in Australia were harrowing as they were bewildering. Harrowing because so many lives were lost, not just humans but much wildlife as well. Some put th e figures at 1 billion. It might have been conservative. It was also bewildering because the Australian government's preparation and response to the Firesign general were all too slow, inadequate and mostly laughable if the tragedy unfolding weren't so dire. 

Mallacoota on New Years Eve sounded like Hell had landed and started dancing on everybody's heads. 

People spent the night in the waters off the pier, up to their necks in the waves as they watched the sky glow red and black embers fell and they could hear screams of burning koalas from the burning tree tops. It's not way to bring in the new year. People talk about how bad 2020 was in relation to the COVID-19 but make no mistake, from Day 1, it was a crap year. 

So yeah, I guess I had to write a song about that. One year on, I'm still livid at the Global Warming Denialism of this Federal Government. I mean yes if we changed out of fossil fuels, it would be a hit the GDP and the wallet of people like Gina and Twiggy Forrest. But honestly, they can wear that pay cut - and they won't exactly starve or lose their houses. Seriously, what price our planet? 

Come join the fun!

Gladys The Koala Killer

Amongst Other Terrible Things She Does

Our Premier, the Hon. Premier Gladys Berejiklian is an odd duck, even in the ranks of female politicians who toil in the ranks of conservatives. She must be good at whatever it is politicians do to get ahead of the pack because let's face it, she's got the weird woggy surname, and a visage that is most unlike that of say a TV breakfast host intros country. She seems to be nice on some level, compassionate, even. You wouldn't want to be the guy wagging a finger at her telling her her policies stink, lest people think you're the bully. 

And yet her policies make you want to turn to eco-terrorism. She would countenance the building of these terrible tollways, and chopping down native forests, or putting a coal mine in the middle of a water catchment. Above all, she would name a policy that seems friendly towards the preservation of Koalas but is in fact incentivises for more environmental destruction, not less. It's crazy stuff. And somehow the voting public does not bat a mascara-ed eyelash. We keep going with this insane party in charge, with Gladys at the helm. 

Because of all that, she has earned the moniker, Gladys the Koala Killer. Is it fair? More than plenty! We live in terrible times. She is contributing her part to that terror. 

Thus it seemed appropriate to at least discuss this by writing a song about her being Gladys, the Koala Killer, destroyer of trees, water tables, and the pristine environment of our bushland, amongst other horrible deeds.  

Come join the fun!

Lucky Country

Also, The Dumb-Luck Country

I don't want to badmouth my own country but a year on from the massive bushfires, there are days where you just draw a deep sigh.  

When one reflects on everything that happened in Australian politics in the last decade, you're left with a profound sense of lost time. It's all time that could have been spent on doing things better - certainly better than the internecine party-politic-infighting that was a feature of the decade. If the ALP burnt itself out on the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd imbroglio, the Liberal Party regaled with no less than a Turnbull-Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison turn of leadership spills. 6 Prime Minsters in the decade shows the country was in political strife, most over the issue of Climate Change. 

Needless to say the decade was punctuated by an exclamation mark in the massive bushfires last summer and still there is no indication the culture wars over Global Warming has come to an end. There were many villains in the story, but if there was one traitor to this country that deserves special mention, it must be Andrew Robb who sold out this country from his position in government and now receives a fat salary from our burgeoning enemy China. 

All that said, our country lurches on without a policy or apology. just bumbling around trying to find a fig leaf to put over the glaringly obvious absence of a credible climate policy. Again, I won't go into the idiocy of the situation we find ourselves, but it has to beside that making the future precarious through the misapplication of partisan politics is the height of stupidity. As such, it is inescapable to understand that the government we have is a execrable mess. 

So, what exactly is this luckiness we credit ourselves when we must live with such stupidity that undercuts that luck? 

Come join the fun!

This Is The Shit You Voted For

I Hope You're Pleased As Punch

It's weird that this comes out the week after the US elections but, it wasn't planned that way. It's a happy coincidence - and honestly, I'm okay with Biden winning. If anything the shit referred to in the song is more in line with the 4 year misrule of the Trump Administration which ignored all the warnings about Climate Change. Indeed, I'm really talking about the 2019 Australian election where the Morrison Government was returned, only to promptly ignore expert warnings about the drought and the catastrophic summer weather that led to the massive fires up and down the east coast. 

I mean, what were people thinking really? In the olden days I would've come on tooth's blog and vented but of course nobody is persuaded by some blog telling them they are fuckheads for voting in a conservative government that doesn't believe in Global Warming. Instead, they pretty much need to lose their farms and houses to 40m tall walls of fire roaming the landscape, burning everything to the ground. 

As such the only thing left for me is to write a song about it and stick it out there, commemorating the abject stupidity of the electorate that opted to return this miserable, intellectually stunted, execrable government to office. For indeed they are shit and this is what they voted for. It's a sobering feeling every election to find that at least 48% of your fellow countrymen are willing to burn the planet to make a buck and think that is the most important thing, followed by cutting deficits (or some other piece of economic nonsense). It's amazing how they win more often than not and give us the shit we need not ought to have had.

Come Join the Fun

Fuck You Adani

 We're Not Kidding, Fuck You Adani

There's really no need explain this one. 

The planet's headed deeper into climate crisis and there's the Adani mine going ahead in Queensland. They're doing all kinds of shady things and they will stoop to anything to silence those who are opposed to this catastrophic mine going ahead. 

Honestly, there's really no symptom of the evil of crony capitalism in this world than the people who make excuses for this mine to go ahead. It makes no economic sense, the company gets subsidies it doesn't deserve and there's no discernible good in digging up more coal to be burnt. The best form of carbon sequestration is not to dig up the stuff to be burnt at all. 

Hence the need for this song. Seriously, fuck these people.

Come Join the Fun