Tag Archives: tony abbott

Politics by shockjockery

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by Media, politics • Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

The horrible lot (Bachmann, Perry, Cain and the rest) seeking the Republican nomination in the states, and the equally horrible lot trying to overthrow the government by bombast in Australia, have more in common with radio shock jocks than with the politicians of the past like Eisenhower and Kennedy, Menzies and Whitlam. It is politics by empty slogans, meaningless stunts, abuse of dissenters, invented “facts”, ideology. It is appeals to nationalism, religion, exceptionalism, xenophobia, class warfare, misogyny, racism, anti-environmentalism, and delusions of future riches.

It is a personal style characterised by aggression, refusal (and inability) to discuss issues, nastiness, lack of knowledge, bullying, stubborn repetition of a “fact” disproved, take no prisoners rhetoric, and a supreme confidence in one’s own self-worth.

Both shock jocks and these politicians of the new age are there to get people angry every morning and stay angry all day, and to consequently build audience share/voter numbers. If/when they are successful in doing this their competitors/political rivals will be obliged to push their own shockjockery to even lower levels, down down where the voters/listeners occur in numbers.

They could be called on their behaviour by other media outlets, more civilised politicians, intelligent members of the community, but they rarely are, perhaps because people are aware of the following they are generating, and scared that the wrath of those followers will be turned on them (for example climate scientists most recently).

There will be tears before bedtime I’m afraid. We have a number of examples of countries that have followed this spiral to the bottom. Takes a long time to recover.

That’s Entertainment

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by Media, politics • Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Long long ago, as the oldest of my Watermelon friends may just remember, there used to be talent competitions in community and media. At Eisteddfords performers performed, judges judged, winners grinned, losers were praised and encouraged, audiences applauded loudly in appreciation.

Then the geniuses who produce tv programs decided this was all wrong. In the same way as they changed motor sport broadcasts from reporting winners to reporting crashes, they changed talent shows from having the winners being the entertainment to having the losers providing it.

In order to do this the losers would be increasingly humiliated, disparaged, brought into public contempt, driven to despair, driven, if at all possible, to tears, a human car crash. As long as every possible human emotion could be wrung from the losers, the actual “winners” of a competition were essentially irrelevant.

As time has gone by networks have competed against each other to make the humiliation of losers more extreme and more protracted in each successive show. The public demand for such spectacles is, it seems, as strong now as when the Roman public were given opportunity, thumbs up or down, to decide on life and death in the arena. Not so much circuses that marked entertainment, and decline, of the Roman Empire, but loser shows.

And so it is with us, as ritual psychological disembowelling becomes the standard tv entertainment in all “reality” and “talent” shows that fill broadcast hours on all networks.

But that left all the political stuff that the networks had some kind of public obligation to report. People would, after all, probably want to know who was going to govern them after an election. But it was all so boring, like an old-fashioned Eisteddford. Grinning winners about to form government, losers with stiff upper lips ready to form a “loyal opposition”. “Loyal Opposition” indeed, what sort of television did that make?

Hard to stump tv executives for long. If politics wouldn’t come to reality tv, then reality tv would have to come to politics, or, more exactly be brought into politics. And so it began.

Began with the destabilisation of an existing leader. Unflattering photos, odd pieces of film, some past “scandal” uncovered, carefully edited bits of an interview played again and again. Then we might find a disgruntled and very junior member of the party to make a criticism, anonymously of course, and describe this as “voices”. A former leader may be called on to prove they are still relevant by voicing an opinion, pretending to inside knowledge they no longer have. Opposing politicians may be asked for their objective views on the leadership of the other party.

Then in stage two we go into full scale rumour creation, where two people having coffee are photographed through a long range lens in sinister fashion; where an innocent glance is scrutinised by “body language experts”; where some policy debate (a good thing, right?) is turned into a signal of raging dissent and rebellion. Phoney opinion polls are sought and presented in the most damaging light possible. “Numbers” are said to be counted. Soon all this has an effect. The party decides the instability created by the media has to stop (believing that firm action will end it, ha ha) and there is a change of leadership. The media will milk this for all it is worth, close up images of tears on faces (family gathered around, hopefully also with tears), interviews where questions are asked not for answers but for emotional response, families of defeated leaders followed to school or shops hoping for angry reactions.

And then suddenly all that good television is over. Time to start again, and the whole cycle is repeated with new leader, the political party discovering, belatedly, that changing leader doesn’t stop instability (a media creation in fact), the instability having nothing to do with who the actual leader is, but merely being the signal for the media to begin a new round of destabilisation. Sometimes, and this is a bonus, the media may decide to bring a former expelled contestant (sorry, leader) back into the Big Brother (sorry, Parliament) House, and the twist will be that they may be able to gain full reinstatement, deposing the one who deposed them. Human emotion in spades. Hours, days, weeks of good television.

Neither the contestants (sorry politicians) themselves, nor the viewing audience (sorry, voters) have any more control over this process than the contestants and viewers of Survivor or Greatest Race or Beauty and the Geek or the X Factor. All are puppets, manipulated at the whims of directors and producers.

A lot of contestants and politicians, will be damaged mentally and professionally in the process, and democracy itself is the Biggest Loser. But Hey.

That’s Entertainment.

You may say I’m a dreamer

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by Climate Change, Media, politics • Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Imagine how different the last four years would have been if the mainstream media had enthusiastically supported the idea of providing a massive increase in school infrastructure, and a big boost to insulating homes to reduce energy costs? If they had got behind the programs, explained their purposes, published anecdotes about happy customers. Imagine if they had explained the seriousness of the GFC in simple terms and the reasons for providing a stimulus. Imagine if they had ignored the phony “protests” of the mining billionaires and explained to the public the reasons for the mining tax and its benefits.

Imagine how different the last year would have been if the mainstream media had got behind the idea of putting a price on carbon. Explained to the public in a series of documentaries, morning shows, talkback radio, the reality of global warming, the measures beginning around the world, the urgency, the need for us to play a part, the benefits of doing so. Imagine if they had promoted the health benefits of plain packaging of cigarettes and the tax on alcopops. Imagine if they had gone into bat against the self-interest of the clubs, and explained the damage of problem gambling and examined the situation in WA. Imagine if they had seriously hammered the cattle industry on animal cruelty and the need to halt exports until resolved.

Imagine if they had been positive about the great breakthrough that having a female prime minister represented. Imagine if they had written positive stories about her rise from humble beginnings and her intelligence, hard work, charm, warmth. Her ability to work with colleagues and independents, the enormous raft of legislation that has been passed in spite of the opposition tactics against a minority government.

Imagine if they had been positive about how well the Labor-Green coalition was working, and compared it to Liberal-National coalitions of the past. Imagine if they had run positive stories about the independents Windsor and Oakeshott and Wilkie, praised their strength of character and independence of mind under great pressure.

Imagine if they had ignored most or all of the foolish publicity stunts by Tony Abbott. If they had seriously examined the policies being pushed by the opposition. Imagine if they had paid attention to the unprecedented damage that opposition tactics were doing to our parliamentary democracy. Imagine if they had turned the spotlight on Tony Abbott Action Man and found out what kind of a person he really is. And the rest of his front bench.

Wonder why they didn’t do any of those things.

Wonder why they did precisely the opposite.

Let us all rejoice, rejoice

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by Atheism • Tags: , , , , ,

Did you see that some Christian school in Australia had rewritten the second verse of the national anthem to include a whole lot of stuff about some god or other? Look I know national anthems are crap. “our home is girt by sea”? Sounds like something Monty Python might write. And grown up people singing about a “gracious queen”. Dunno about America. They seem to have several different national anthems all of which have to be sung while clutching heart. Can’t remember anything about 183 of the other 184 anthems – they all appear to be identical. No, the only decent one is that of France (of course) – perhaps we could all take turns borrowing it.

Still, humble as it may be, our anthem, though a poor thing, is our own, and I don’t want christians messing with it as part of their brain washing (sorry, schooling, don’t know what got into me there) program. A thin edge of the wedge if ever I saw one.

Consider America. One day a sane, rational sort of country, civilised, creative, making movies, going to moon, that sort of thing. Then some idiot decided to add “in god we trust” to the coinage (rather like Germans adding “god with us” to army belt buckles). Next thing you know you have prayers in schools, ten commandments in courthouses, presidential candidates outdoing each other in carrying the biggest bible, evangelists taking over the armed forces, 99% of the people believing the world is 10,000 years old, and Rick Perry.

But I have a solution. The British have a law that no one can sing any verse about the gracious queen except the first (the rest consisting of all kinds of embarrassing rubbish about the sun never setting on lesser breeds without the law). So, we just pass the same law. No one can remember our second verse anyway (god knows where the christians found it), and blocking it would save all those excruciating scenes of footballers opening and closing mouths silently looking like those clown heads in a sideshow.

There, problem solved. If they complain threaten to change our anthem to the one about sheep stealing. Bit hard to get god into that one. Unless it’s the holy ghost who may be heard down by the billabong …

I really don’t want Jim Wallace as PM. Or some failed seminary student.

Odds on

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by Media, politics • Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

There is a curious political narrative (I could write a book on curious political narratives) beloved not just of journalists but of political commentators, supposedly a much more serious breed of political observer. A discussion will be under way about, say, leadership questions, or the date of next election, or the winner of a bye-election, or the winner of a general election. Opinion polls will be perused, entrails of goats examined, ghosts of former prime ministers interviewed, oracles appealed to, pundits given the chance to endlessly punditify, with hindsight, on past political events.

At the end of all that, baffled and frustrated by the inability of commentators to do even such a simple thing as foretell the future, the compere/presenter/personality will speak in the tones of Socrates settling an argument among his students on the meaning of life. “What do the bookies say? They always know. What are the bookmaker’s odds on a [xxxx] win?”

Around the table, or on the comfortable lounge chairs, the faces of the assembled pundits will light up. “Ah yes” one will remark, with the air of someone discovering a great truth for the first time in history, “the bookies always know because they are responding to people putting real money on the outcome”. The others will nod wisely, one or two repeating the words “real money” with satisfaction.

It is always at this point that I am faced with a choice between running screaming from the room, hands over my ears to avoid hearing any more of this nonsense, or throwing a convenient house brick right through the tv screen. Which occasions another thought – if psychics and evangelists and faith healers and all the other charlatans can cure people through the tv by speaking into a microphone and looking at a camera 1000km from the target audience, then presumably I can have an effect on them by either cursing at or kicking the television set in my front room? Must try it – would be nice to see them cowering back on stage, or running around clutching their goolies in pain. Politicians and pundits too.

But I digress. The reason this “Let’s ask the bookies, real money” narrative is bullshit is that the people who are betting the “real money” are people who would bet on two flies crawling up a wall to use an old observation. The gamblers have no information you and I (or indeed the pundits) don’t have. They are making their bets on the stuff they read (perhaps) or watch on tv. They (and the bookies) have no special insights, no skills, no ability to predict the future, they are just betting money. Gambling. In the sense that their bets are equivalent to a poll, it is a very inaccurate poll, being an uncontrolled sample of a particular segment of the population.

But, I hear you say, bookies don’t go broke, so the odds that they post must represent something accurate. No. They make their money from racing and (more recently) football, cricket and other sporting events. They set the odds there initially on a record – number of previous wins, at a particular speed, on these tracks, against this opposition and so on. The gamblers (the smart ones anyway) are laying their bets on the same information. Favourites generally win, so do bookies.

No such information is available on political contests. So opinion polls represent a much more accurate assessment of likely outcomes, and political commentators a much more accurate assessment than bookies. Opinion polls because they are (or should be, it ain’t necessarily so) based on carefully taken and analysed samples. But political commentators? Well, you should always listen to them because, unlike your average punter, there is real money involved. The pundits, either directly or indirectly, and the media outlets and think tanks they represent, all have a big financial stake in ensuring that right wing governments are elected over and over again to infinity. That if, by some fluke of history, an even nominally left of centre government does happen to get elected they will be destroyed within one term or less. Big money involved for interested parties in lower taxes, access to markets, unions smashed, infrastructure availability, no regulation, business subsidies, no gambling or packaging restrictions, financial policies, under the right government (the Right government). So when the pundits speak they are indulging in self-fulfilling prophecy. By predicting a particular result they will help make it happen. A bit like a crooked bookmaker really, nobbling the favourite, or knowing people who do.

An honest bookmaker may or may not have the odds right on the next election. The pundits know that the fix is in. Listen to them. If you have backed a different horse might as well tear up your tickets now. Or fight back.

Care of the North Pole

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by Climate Change • Tags: , , , , ,

When you were young did you send letters to Santa care of the North Pole? Do your children? Your grandchildren? Grand old tradition isn’t it, a bit of our cultural history, but it is going to be hard to keep it going more than a few years. “How can Santa live at the North Pole when there is no ice there in the Summer? He would drown.” Heading that way inexorably and fast. About to break another record for least Summer ice, even lower than 2007, down and down it goes. An alien watching from one of those new planets we keep discovering would be stunned that a massive ice cap could be disappearing in a few decades, might wipe the lens of his telescope thinking there was something mucky on it.

This is crazy stuff. We have been behaving like a bunch of workmen holding spades. “Wanna start Fred?” “After you Tom” “Nah, Bob first” “I’m not starting until Jim does” and so on. Eventually Charlie sighs, leans forward and digs the first spadeful of dirt out. “Oh, that’s how you do it” “Well, if he’s digging I’ll join in” “Ok, many hands make light work”. That’s really what putting a price on carbon in Australia is about – one small spadeful for a man, one giant leap for mankind. And it is a small step, couldn’t be smaller. Painless too. A few big companies will pay a price on the CO2 they produce. Will look for ways to decrease the price they pay and increase their profits – their competitors will be. If they pass on the cost you might have to pay a tiny amount more on some goods – you’ll get more back in compensation. If you reduce your use of high CO2 goods you’ll make even more profit. That’s it. In spite of what you might have heard you won’t be paying “carbon tax”, you will be making money through the various compensation mechanisms, sort of like Santa Claus bringing little presents. No tax. So what that small group of protesters was on about the other day I don’t know, got me beat. Or were they holding signs up saying “No thanks, don’t want money”? “Go away Santa Claus”? Might have missed them.

Look there are people with a vested interest in this. We have to reduce fossil fuel use over the coming years. No question about it. If you are a fossil fuel producer this is certainly not a case of all your christmases coming at once. On the contrary, you don’t have too many christmases left. Time you diversified your business interests. Stop frightening people into thinking they’re going to be taxed. Stop getting Tony Abbott to do your dirty work for you in trying to block this tiny first move – you live on this planet too.

And I bet your grandchildren will want to write to Santa at the North Pole. What are you going to tell them? “Oh that’s just history”? or “Yes, we had to give Santa a bit of a hand there, his feet were getting wet, fixed now though. Have you got an envelope?”

You give me fever

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by Media, politics • Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

When you have a fever your perception of the world gets distorted, your brain cells manipulated by virus and high temperature to see all kinds of things that are not there.

Chemotherapy is similar. After you have it you are left not knowing what changes to your body are the result of the illness, which are the result of the treatment, which are just ordinary everyday ailments that you normally would have ignored.

The media is having the effect of fever or vencristin on the body politic. Reading, seeing, hearing the news now I have no idea whether the events being described are real or fake, meaningful or meaningless, deserving of outrage or approbation. Video and photographic images may (or may not) be faked; descriptions of events true or false; reporters may (or more likely may not) be anywhere near the scene they are apparently describing; both witnesses and reporters may (or may not) have a vested interest (or an ideological purpose) in presenting a story in a certain way; politicians and soldiers and economists may be telling the truth or lying.

Bodies may or may not have been buried, shots may or may not have been fired, money may or may not have been stolen, people may or may not be terrorists or freedom fighters, heroes or villains. Conversely the Earth is warming, the poor are getting poorer, religion is damaging society, taxes are too low, science is essential to society, in spite of narratives that pretend these things are debatable.

The media were once meant to fling open the curtains of the sick room, let the light in, diagnose the symptoms of society, treat ills. Now they bring new and virulent diseases, raise temperatures, manipulate our brains, create illusions, prevent us perceiving the real world.

How do we cure that?

Eyes … Left

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by politics • Tags: , , , , , ,

It is one of my many half-remembered things (there are also things I remember well, and some I don’t remember at all). A movie, or a book perhaps, a squad of soldiers disguised in enemy uniform. Were they British commandos in German uniforms in occupied France? Americans in Japanese uniforms in the Pacific? A Hornblower crew in the garb of the Frenchies? Never mind.

All I can really remember is that at some point things go wrong, the enemy identify them as imposters, and they are trapped with backs to the wall, last cartridges in the breach, drum playing. The Sergeant, Captain, Lootenant, whoever, says bravely “To hell with this men, if we must die here we will die in our own uniforms”. There is a cheer, the men strip off the outer disguise, revealing their true colours beneath, and set about to do or die, inspired by their gallant leader and their glorious uniforms. Did they win? Of course they did, though I can’t be certain of the fate of the little drummer boy.

Well, you can see where this is going – the Australian Labor Party, American Democratic Party, and British Labour Party have all spent many years, behind enemy lines, wearing the uniform of their opponents so as to remain undetected and occasionally win elections as pseudoneoconservatives.

But in Australia at least the ruse is discovered, and the enemy of all three raiding parties, the Murdoch Press Gang, is closing in, guns blazing, backing our intrepid infiltrators into a dead end alley, blocked off, as we speak, by a great big tank.

So time for Julia Gillard to make the patriotic speech, fling off the uniform of the oppressors and vow to die, one for all and all for one, in the thin red line of true believers, band of brothers and sisters, the socialist army of Australia. Would they escape the trap? Possibly not, but at least they would die with their clogs on, remembering who they really were, what they were fighting for.

Wouldn’t work in America or Britain, there the “progressives” would fling off the disguise only to find an identical conservative uniform underneath (Obama is clearly a conservative in the disguise of a conservative). Wouldn’t save them from the final massacre, wouldn’t make sense of the sacrifice.

But just a slim chance, still, that in Australia Gillard’s Gang hasn’t been behind enemy lines so long that they have forgotten who they are, forgotten what their own uniform looks like.

Come on Julia, make the speech “once more unto the breach”.

Rare Earth

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by Economics, Environment • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Don’t know if you saw the report about “rare earths” a group of, obviously, rare minerals now apparently essential for all sorts of electronic goods and military purposes. China has pretty much cornered the market on them and other countries are trying to find other sources so as to have a competitive market. Trouble is they are hard to find, and are in low concentrations so you need to dig out huge volumes of soil/rock and process it, and there are waste products notably radioactive ones which need to be somehow disposed of. Now given all that you would think our government would get scientists on to finding alternatives to rare earths, but no, some Australian mining companies are gearing up to find and mine the stuff and to hell with the damage they cause. Money to be made.

This approach of getting stuff you can’t eat from underground, while wrecking the land above that can produce food, is already in operation with the fight over coal seam gas extraction. Tony Abbott got himself into trouble the other day, wavering between appeasing his own party’s supporters the miners, or the National’s supporters in the farmers. He finished up satisfying neither. But given the lack of really good deep rich soils in Australia, the proposition that we should wreck some of the best in southern Qld and northern NSW, extracting gas in a process that pollutes soil and water supplies and will add to greenhouse gas production when burnt, seems, politely, insane.

On the other hand we can actually improve our farming land. Starting in the 1930s when Louis Bromfield discovered the benefits of minimum tillage and retaining humus in the damaged farming soils of America, the benefits of such an approach are rediscovered every few years. But in recent years an added incentive, if one was needed, for retaining and building organic content, is the idea that such practices can help in removing CO2 from the air and “fixing it”. The government and Greens have just passed a bill (opposed by the Coalition) in which farmers will be paid a price per tonne of carbon sequestered in the soil. At the time of writing I don’t have the details of the bill and while it is a win-win situation for farmers and the environment, the price will need to be high enough to not only encourage farmers to build carbon levels in soil, but to maintain those practices over decades. In addition, for it to have any significant impact on carbon dioxide in the atmosphere the areas needed will be huge (say a million hectares or more). So it isn’t any kind of “answer” to climate change but every little helps, and being paid to build soil organic matter seems like a good deal to me.

Anyway, it’s certainly better than digging huge open cut mines and spreading thorium, or injecting stuff into coal seams and polluting the water table.

Mark Twain said “Buy land, they’re not making it anymore” or, more importantly, I say, “take care of your farming land, they certainly aren’t making any more of that.”

Steeped in religion

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by Atheism • Tags: , , , , , ,

As regular readers will know I got an iPad to give me something to do during treatment sessions and recovery periods. As a result I have done quite a lot of browsing on Amazon for ebooks. Something seemed odd about the range of non-fiction titles available, but for a while I couldn’t figure out what it was.

Then it came to me – religion. This American site with its emphasis on American books and American customers has a non-fiction list saturated with religion. Of 479,000 non-fiction titles 71,000 (15%) are “religion & spirituality” far more than any other category except history (73,000). This strikes me as a hugely disproportionate number – almost one book in every six. In an Australian bookshop the equivalent section would be tiny, and I guess the same would be true of Europe.

The other notable characteristic is indicated by the inclusion of this out-pouring of religion in the non-fiction section. These are titles (and don’t tell me I can’t judge a book by its title) that don’t treat religion in the way a civilised country does, a somewhat embarrassed tentative offering on a topic potential readers know is nutty and esoteric, but as if this is a fully fledged alternative universe where the bible is literally true, people live their lives by its rules, prayer works, and little boys (in a current best-selling title) visit a real heaven and come back to report. When Sarah Palin or Michelle Bachmann talk about teaching both creationism and evolution in schools they are really reflecting a more general view that there is a religious world alongside a real world and that both are almost equally valid (the religious one being preferred) and that children need to learn both.

This is the scum floating on the surface, the bubbles emerging from the unhealthy depths, of a society in trouble. A society in which all except one of the contenders for Republican nomination for President are vying to see who can be the most fervent about teaching creationism in schools. A country where the ten commandments are appearing on walls, crosses in yards. A country where not only could an atheist never be president, but where increasingly only a rabid evangelical could be. A country whose armed forces, frighteningly, are increasingly subjected to fundamentalist religious indoctrination relating to “holy wars”.

In a fully-fledged theocracy (Afghanistan, say, under Taliban rule) I doubt that any non-religious books are available at all. In an effective theocracy (Spain at the time of the Inquisition) there will be a list of forbidden books which can not be read and must be destroyed. In a fully secular and civilised society few religious books would be wanted or available (I imagine, deliciously, religious books being sold, like cigarettes are about to be, in plain wrappers from under the counter).

We could then compile an index of the proportion of religious books for sale in a society ranging from effectively zero in a secular country to 100% in a theocracy. What proportion was sold in a country would be an indicator have how far along the road it had gone towards theocratic rule. On the evidence of America the danger point is somewhere around 16%. I wonder where Australia is up to, and which way the index is moving?