High Windows

Dismaying news from Indonesia

2012-01-20T21:05:00.000+11:00

Often held up as one of the most liberal Islamic nations, (which, in fact, it is) Indonesia has made the terrible and dismaying decision to arrest a 31 year old man who wrote on his Facebook page that God did not exist. I don't yet know if there's anything I can do to help Alexander Aan, who has been charged with blasphemy, but if I can help in some small way I will.

Indonesia has some curious religious laws. Each citizen must identify with one of six religions -- Islam, Catholicism, Protestantism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Confucianism -- and have their faith printed on their government issued I.D. card. Not only this, but the Indonesian constitution apparently states that the country believes in one god. There are, of course, certain kinds of Buddhism which are atheistic, but whether these particular sects are welcome in Indonesia I couldn't say. And Hindus believe in many gods, as many as thousands in some cases. But Alexander was, the reports say, a Muslim as recently as 2008, and so I suspect that the real issue here is not his atheism per se, but his apostasy. In Indonesia -- a country which faces seemingly endless ethnic and religious conflicts -- to leave your faith is never simply a private act, but one which might upset the 'harmonious' nature of Indonesian society. Much like in Malaysia, Indonesia's elites prefer to govern their country as if it consisted not of individuals but of six large, religious groups, each one entirely separate from the other. People such as Alexander Aan, who dare to act as individuals and think for themselves, who refuse to belong to any one of the six religions, are considered dangerous and, if need be, can be sacrificed for the common good. It is a terrible injustice. Let's hope Alexander is freed from jail very soon.

Half Moon Bay, Victoria, Australia

2012-01-08T00:05:00.000+11:00

I only just found out this place existed. It's home to an abundance of sea life and the wreck of the Cerberus.

The Hitch dies

2011-12-16T17:22:00.000+11:00

Goodbye Christopher, and thank you.

Geelong, or Sleepy Hollow

2011-12-15T17:57:00.000+11:00

I have a feeling this Geelong trip will be the last of my journeys to Victorian country towns. After Bendigo and Ballarat I've had continuously diminishing returns. I've seen the supposed best of the state and felt no desire to remain in those places for more than a day. Well, no one would pretend that Geelong was an exciting city. It's chief attraction, surely, is its close proximity to Melbourne. Still, the city has an attractive foreshore and a decent art gallery, which is where I spent the early afternoon. The Geelong Art Gallery had an exhibition of works by Nicholas Chevalier, a Swiss born artist who travelled to Australia in the 1860s and painted landscapes, and it was this that I came to see. At first Chevalier reproduced European landscapes in an Australian setting, but after some years he began to portray Australia, its particular light, flora and land formations, in a more accurate, authentic manner. It was Chevalier who first popularised the Australian landscape in art, a subject previously ignored by European-born artists, many of whom appeared to have ceaselessly pined for their homelands.

When I arrived at the gallery I stood in a line behind some old people who were unable to decide exactly which novelties and souvenirs they wanted to purchase. After they were done I approached the counter, where a young woman gave me a puzzled look and asked – rather cautiously I thought – why I was standing there. I told her I wanted a ticket to the Nicholas Chevalier exhibition. She replied that there was no need to line up, no tickets, and that entry was by gold coin donation. I felt slightly stupid to have stood there for so long.

The exhibition itself was a pleasant diversion, but after a while it began to bore me. I think European art galleries have ruined the Australian experience for me. Anyway, I soon left the gallery and walked around the streets of Geelong almost at random. The streets are wide, and lined with innumerable 19^th century buildings, a handful a Edwardian remains, and even a couple of brutalist government offices. The poor public transport means the city is choked with cars; walking seemed the best option. I visited the foreshore and had lunch and a beer, then, unsure of what to do, I took the train back to Melbourne. Once on the train I began a conversation with a young Somali woman who had moved to Australia to be with her husband, a man she had met in Kenya. She was on an excursion to Geelong with some fellow English language students from a local private college. Learning English, she told me, was exciting for her because she had only been at school for two years in her childhood, before war made formalised learning impossible. Later we talked about the vast nature of the Australian continent. She asked if Geelong was still in the state of Victoria, and whether Adelaide was much further down the train line. About another 13 hours, I told her. She was, she said, born in Mogadishu, but had grown up in relatively peaceful Kenya. She told me the best thing about Australia was not having to be afraid all the time – especially not having to be afraid of the police. It took her a few months, she said, to get used to the idea that a policeman was someone you could trust to help you. In Kenya, she said, when you saw the police you ran away as quickly as you could.

What I saw at Seymour

2011-12-01T01:16:00.005+11:00

The people of Seymour are nothing if not honest. I absentmindedly left my wallet at the Terminus Hotel, a grand old building just over the road from the Seymour railway station, and was pleased to later find that it had been handed into bar staff. I suppose that if you have to lose your wallet, a small country town is probably the best place to do so if you ever want to see it again. Well, I was somewhat embarrassed to have to return and pick it up, but at least I got it back.

I don't really know why I went to Seymour, a town of about 6,000 people an hour and a half's drive north-east of Melbourne. I had no reason to go. Perhaps I went because I had never been to that part of the state. What I found was that state's north-east looks pretty much like it does everywhere else. This shouldn't have surprised me; when I've travelled by plane I've often looked down at the ground and wondered when this kind of landscape will come to an end and be replaced by something else. It usually takes a long, long time.

As the trip to Seymour is a long one, I managed to read Fitzgerald's first edition of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in its entirety. Had I wished to, I think I could have managed to read the fifth edition -- the other I own -- as well. As I passed through bushland and farmland I read such verses as:

'Tis all a chequerboard of nights and days
Where destiny for men with pieces plays

Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays
And one by one back in the closet lays

There was a door to which I found no key
There was a veil past which I could not see

Some little talk awhile of Me and Thee

There seemed – and then no talk of Thee and Me

Why, all the Saints and Sages who discuss'd

Of the Two Worlds so learnedly, are thrust

Like foolish Prophets forth; their Words to Scorn

Are scatter'd, and their Mouths are stopt with Dust.

Oh, come with old Khayyam, and leave the Wise

To talk; one thing is certain, that Life flies;

One thing is certain, and the Rest is Lies;

The Flower that once has blown for ever dies.

As I was half way through Omar's poem it began to rain. Usually this would not have been a problem but, as it so happened, this train leaked. Or rather, the window next to my seat leaked, and leaked quite a lot. This seemed like an inauspicious way to begin my journey. Still, when I arrived in Seymour I decided I would follow my usual ritual in such places, and head first for a cafe, then an art gallery and finally a pub. Unfortunately, I made some regrettable choices. Had I gone to the gallery first I would have caught it while it was open, but I spent some time in a strange little cafe and then walking all around the township. So I missed seeing the gallery, but I did spent quite a long time in the town itself. I can't say it was the most exciting place I've visited. Unlike the other country towns I've visited recently, Seymour has never been particularly wealthy. The goldfields are an hour's drive to the West. Mark Twain never visited Seymour.

The people of Seymour like to say 'fuck' a lot. They use the word in as many different ways as you can imagine. The old and young use it alike, as do the drunk and the sober. They say 'fuck' in pubs and on trains, and in cafes and on the phone. They say it all the time. In Seymour, at least, 'fuck' and its derivatives have overtaken 'bloody' as the adjective (and perhaps the noun and verb) of choice.

While I waited at Seymour station for my train home to arrive, I could see a large rat scurrying in the shadows beside the platform, dashing from bush to bush. That evening the air was cool and felt very clean. Had I stayed longer, and had the night been clear, I imagine I would have been able to see the milky way and all the stars.

Visiting Ballarat

2011-11-21T23:22:00.005+11:00

Travelling on Victorian country trains (V/line) is always vastly more pleasant than travelling on their metropolitan counterparts. But it isn't only a matter of more comfortable seating and better behaved passengers. Rather than have trench-coated ticket inspectors and armed guards the country trains have old fashioned conductors dressed in shorts and knee-high socks, who, if you do not possess a ticket, will gladly sell you one. Everything about the country trains is old fashioned: when I bought my ticket, the man wrote it out for me, and then handed me a carbon copy, much as he would have done decades ago. Altogether, while this may be considered terribly dated, it feels far more civilised and normal than using the new Melbourne Metro ticketing system, "Myki", which is similar to those used in London and Hong Kong.

I was taking the V/line train today to view an exhibition of Australian art at the Art Gallery of Ballarat, the largest inland town in Victoria. Ballarat, like Bendigo and Castlemaine, grew to prominence during the Goldrush of the 1880s, and like those two towns the riches it produced during those years are reflected in its magnificent 19th century architecture. But before the train could snake its way along the tracks to Ballarat, we had to pass through several nondescript towns of little significance. Among them was Bacchus March, the hometown of Peter Carey. There was very little to see. The land immediately around is flat and brown and only in the distance looms something more inspiring, the great diving ranges, tree covered mountains which stretch into New South Wales. And so we passed through Bacchus Marsh. If you stopped to look around and consider the place, how it might have shaped Carey's fiction, you would probably find yourself at a loss. This is not a place you'd expect a major writer to come from. The only thing you'd learn, were you to visit the town, is the probable reason why Peter Carey lives in New York these days.

Whenever I travel by train through the countryside, or over it by aeroplane, I find myself somewhat startled by the extraordinary amount of empty land. Most of this land, with the exception of that which lies in the tropical far north, becomes dry and parched in the summer, and the grasses which cover the plains and hills go a sort of brownish colour. The summer the skies are unfailingly wide and blue and the sun is bright, white and extremely hot. Much of my train trip was spent looking out the window at these endless fields, some of them populated with the skeletal remains of trees destroyed in the severe decade long drought which only recently came to an end.

And so, finally, and after a great deal of travel, I made it to the Ballarat Art Gallery. The exhibition was reasonably good and contained a fine selection of works by major Australian painters, but for some reason I now remember little of it. I recall seeing paintings by Sidney Nolan, Russell Drysdale, Arthur Streeton, William Dobell, Margeret Olley and Brett Whiteley. There were several John Brack paintings. One was captioned "No subject matter was too banal for John Brack". This was probably true. Leaving the exhibition I walked around the remainder of the building. A group of rowdy schoolkids were being taken on a tour. I took a picture of a bizarre old painting by Thomas Flintoff of Henry F. Stone and his Durham Ox. Then, following the afternoon tea that came with the price of my ticket, I left the gallery altogether and began my walk around the town.

Ballarat looks much as it did, I'm sure, 100 years ago, but at the same time there is nothing quaint or museum like about it. Mark Twain visited the town during his world tour and was impressed by its grandeur, something the local business don't want anyone to forget. I wandered into one of the town's grandest hotels and found, upon entry, a list of various famous people who had stayed there, Mark Twain's name prominently among them. And the tourist brochures all contain quotes from The Great American about the town, in which he praises the remarkable manner in which it shot to fame in the 1880s.

It was surprisingly difficult to find a drink in Ballarat on a Monday. The Peter Lalor Hotel was, disappointingly, closed, and in the end I was forced to buy a beer at an "Irish" pub called "Irish Murphy's". The place had an unpleasant vibe, and I drank my Ballarat Bitter (the boring local brew) quickly before leaving and returning to the train station, a great white monster of a building, far grander than it ever needed to be, with tall Ionic columns and "BALLARAT" emblazoned on the front. It's almost a wonder Mark Twain, who visited in 1891, didn't mistake it for a Roman temple.

My trip to Castlemaine

2011-11-10T20:12:00.005+11:00

I spent the day in the town of Castlemaine, a few hours by train from Melbourne, a place in which I had thought I might feel at home. My grandfather on my mother's side was born in Castlemaine, though I understand that the family soon moved to nearby Bendigo, a larger town I myself visited about a year ago, on a sunny Autumn day. I enjoyed my time in Bendigo a great deal. The Victorian architecture, built during the goldrush, is still a remarkable sight, and the town itself has a strangely European feel. By contrast, Castlemaine's architecture is Georgian in style; the gold ran out quickly and few impressive buildings were completed after about 1880. One exception is the Castlemaine art gallery, an art deco building completed in 1931, which stands just outside of the main street. The gallery, which I visited today, holds an impressive selection of Australian paintings, including works by E. Phillips Fox and Rupert Bunny among others. There wasn't anything there approaching genius, but the gallery was well worth visiting all the same. Down some stairs was a museum of local history which, so the woman at the counter told me, few people knew about. Downstairs I found a curious mixture of clothing, old photographs, crockery, stuffed animals and other items, much of which appeared almost randomly assembled. I walked around, completely alone except for a maintenance worker who was hammering away at something unseen.

Following my visit to the gallery I had afternoon tea at the local tea rooms. The tea rooms were just as you imagine; lace curtains, little chairs and tables, and a woman behind the counter in her 60s who, I couldn't help but think, must have somehow always been this age and was never young. It was impossible to imagine that as recently as 1980 she would have been in her 30s. The woman welcomed me inside, and then quickly told me she was all out of salad. I ordered the Devonshire tea. I was the only customer, and I wondered whether, despite what she had said about the salad, I was in fact the only customer the tea house had seen that day. It certainly seemed possible. I drank my tea and ate my scones in silence, while the woman busied herself in the kitchen, sweeping the tiny space over and over.

Castlemaine did not appear, to me at least, to be a particularly friendly place. There was a curious dearth of young people, and the older ones appeared, or so I thought, to look at me with some slight suspicion. One old man whistled loudly at me, and then pointed down the main street. When I approached him he didn't speak, but merely let out a short laugh. Perhaps he was insane. Well, after walking around the town for an hour or so I decided to leave. With my train not due for another half an hour, I decided to have a drink in the nearby railway hotel. The barman greeted me in a friendly fashion, and I bought a pint of the local brew, a rather tasteless, though reasonably refreshing, lager. We spoke about the large storm which had caused some damage through various parts of the state. Castlemaine had been spared, the barman told me. But the he proceeded to show me a picture of the hotel taken about a year ago, when the area had been badly affected by floods. The picture showed the hotel's proprietor, an older, white bearded man, sitting nonchalantly outside his establishment while the waters rose to more than a metres height in the street in front of him.

On my way home three American backpackers sat behind me on the train. For a little while I listened to their conversation, presuming that I might hear another outsider's opinion of the town we have both visited. At first they talked of little other than their personal lives, and spoke nothing of Castlemaine or of their travels throughout the goldfields, or indeed, Australia itself. Instead, they spoke of their poor job prospects in the U.S. and how, despite "doing all the rights things", they still had little chance of finding a decent job upon graduation. The last I heard they were talking about how Australians made fun of their accents, even though "they're the ones who sound weird. And what about when they say 'easy as'!? Easy as what? Pie?"

Let the skies fall

2011-11-03T13:33:00.002+11:00

Glenn Greenwald on the why the media don't want to talk about torture:

In this world, it is perfectly fine to say that a president is inept or even somewhat corrupt. A titillating, tawdry sex scandal, such as the Bill Clinton brouhaha, can be fun, even desirable as a way of keeping entertainment levels high. Such revelations are all just part of the political cycle. But to acknowledge that our highest political officials are felons (which is what people are, by definition, who break our laws) or war criminals (which is what people are, by definition, who violate the laws of war) is to threaten the system of power, and that is unthinkable. Above all else, media figures are desperate to maintain the current power structure, as it is their role within it that provides them with prominence, wealth, and self-esteem. Their prime mandate then becomes protecting and defending Washington, which means attacking anyone who would dare suggest that the government has been criminal at its core.

There is a political discussion show on Australian TV called "The Insiders". The "insiders" are all journalists. Perfect, huh? You won't hear any discussion about what makes for good policy, but you'll hear a whole lot of ridiculous political gossip. Today's high profile journalists live off the political system and, though they might seem to, will never really attack it.

Octopus's Garden

2011-10-31T10:36:00.001+11:00

This is the most interesting article I've ever read about the octopus.

An excerpt:

Three-fifths of an octopus’s neurons are not in the brain; they’re in its arms.
“It is as if each arm has a mind of its own,” says Peter Godfrey-Smith, a diver, professor of philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and an admirer of octopuses. For example, researchers who cut off an octopus’s arm (which the octopus can regrow) discovered that not only does the arm crawl away on its own, but if the arm meets a food item, it seizes it—and tries to pass it to where the mouth would be if the arm were still connected to its body.

Three words for the Australian government

2011-10-30T23:20:00.000+11:00

Nationalise Qantas International!

The Cup

2011-10-30T22:50:00.007+11:00

Melbourne Cup day approaches. It's Tuesday, and naturally a public holiday, which means that Monday is itself a de facto public holiday. And so, thanks to the great race we in Melbourne have a 4 day weekend.

This year it appears that, once again, a European horse is going to win. My (possibly ill informed) tip is Lucas Cranach. I don't know if he was named after Cranach the Elder or the Younger. What I do know is that he isn't carrying the weight that the favourite and previous winner, Americain, will be carrying (this is a handicap race), and that he has a solid track record. But, well, maybe I just like the idea of a horse called Lucas Cranach winning the cup.

An overlooked creature

2011-10-27T22:26:00.001+11:00

I have written about moths a few times on my blog over the years. They seem to be an unfairly maligned creature, or at the very least sometimes overlooked. Some people even appear to be afraid of them for some reason. (Then again, the people of Point Pleasant, West Virginia might beg to differ. Their town is, after all, home to Mothman!)

This evening I found this large moth on the ceiling, and before putting it outside, I took a few pictures.

We did but see her passing by...

2011-10-27T14:54:00.002+11:00

My best picture of Elizabeth II, and it's still terrible!

I don't really know why I went out to see the Queen -- Australia's Queen -- in Melbourne yesterday. I had a feeling it would be worth seeing, not so much because Elizabeth II is a particularly interesting person, but because I thought the crowds might, for some reason, by worth observing. I also had nothing better to do, the University semester having just ended!

Many thousands of people lined the streets to see the Queen and Prince Phillip. Many thousands. I could hardly believe how many people there were, and their enthusiasm. Teenagers were ditching school to see her. Middle aged women were fainting! Seven had to be treated by paramedics, all over the age of 45. For her own part, the Queen did nothing but smile, wave and accept flowers from well wishers. Maybe that's all it takes to make it in this world; a vacant smile. Who knows? All I know is that Australia won't be a republic any time soon.

A mysterious work

2011-10-23T22:07:00.004+11:00

It's getting late here in Melbourne but it's still remarkably hot out, and a warm wind is blowing from the north-east, bringing humid air from the northern states down to our usually dry city. Often on warm evenings like this I find myself wanting to listen to Shostakovich, possibly because his music makes me think of the cold Russian winters he must have experienced, but also because I find something mysterious about these evenings which is matched by certain aspects of his music.

Above I have embedded the Borodin Quartet performing the 4th movement of his final, and 15th, Quartet. A mysterious work.

Orwell on revenge

2011-10-22T22:04:00.001+11:00

From Orwell's 1945 essay, "Revenge is sour":

It is absurd to blame any German or Austrian Jew for getting his own back on the Nazis. Heaven knows what scores this particular man may have had to wipe out; very likely his whole family had been murdered; and after all, even a wanton kick to a prisoner is a very tiny thing compared with the outrages committed by the Hitler régime. But what this scene, and much else that I saw in Germany, brought home to me was that the whole idea of revenge and punishment is a childish daydream. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.

Who would not have jumped for joy, in 1940, at the thought of seeing S.S. officers kicked and humiliated? But when the thing becomes possible, it is merely pathetic and disgusting. It is said that when Mussolini's corpse was exhibited in public, an old woman drew a revolver and fired five shots into it, exclaiming, 'Those are for my five sons!' It is the kind of story that the newspapers make up, but it might be true. I wonder how much satisfaction she got out of those five shots, which, doubtless, she had dreamed years earlier of firing. The condition of her being able to get close enough to Mussolini to shoot at him was that he should be a corpse.

More here

Crossfire

2011-10-22T15:20:00.005+11:00

Gaddafi, they say, was killed by crossfire. Like when someone holds a gun to your head and pulls the trigger, I assume. That kind of crossfire.

There was surely a better way.

Echidna

2011-10-14T13:51:00.000+11:00

A rare sight in my part of Melbourne:

Kore with red hair

2011-10-08T12:52:00.003+11:00

From what I've noticed, there aren't too many Greek people with red hair. Why, then, did the ancient Greeks choose to paint the hair of Kore red? I don't think I've seen another colour used.

That, by the way, is a plaster cast in the Melbourne University Ian Potter gallery.

The most dangerous place for a woman in Victoria...

2011-08-31T00:27:00.000+10:00

...is in her own home. Melbourne was just the other day named the most liveable city in the world (whatever that means) by the Economist Intelligence Unit, but for a lot of women living here life isn't particularly pleasant. For some reason, while most other forms of criminal activity decreased, domestic violence has increased remarkably over the past few years:

Statistics released yesterday show crimes against the person, such as assault and rape committed by a relative of the victim, rose 25 per cent to 12,350, or about two per 1000 Victorians in 2010-11.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/big-jump-in-family-violence-reports-20110830-1jk76.html#ixzz1WWQnCv85

Stranger danger is overrated.

Perry's policies

2011-08-30T19:22:00.005+10:00

From MSNBC:

Texas Gov. Rick Perry offered the broad outlines of his foreign policy philosophy at an annual gathering of veterans Monday, telling attendees that he opposes "military adventurism" while also advocating for "taking the fight to the enemy" and decrying indecision by "multi-lateral debating societies" at times of international crisis.
"We must renew our commitment to taking the fight to the enemy wherever they are, before they strike at home. I do not believe that America should fall subject to a foreign policy of military adventurism," he said at the annual convention of Veterans of Foreign Wars in San Antonio. "We should only risk shedding American blood and spending American treasure when our vital interests are threatened."

That's his philosophy? Honestly, his statements could mean absolutely anything. Nothing the man said amounts to anything like a "policy". Does Perry think the intervention in Libya was "military adventurism", or does he think "multi-lateral debating societies" prevented swift action against Gadaffi? Does he favour pulling out of Afghanistan or "taking the fight" to America's enemies there for several more years? I wonder if anyone will ever have the chance to ask Perry these questions. Probably not.

A Rebours

2011-08-28T23:39:00.003+10:00

I'm considering buying J.K. Huysman's novel A Rebours, or Against Nature, for a friend of mine, but as I haven't read it I'm not sure it's the right choice. Does anyone recommend it?

About Huysmans, The Catholic Encyclopedia says,

Never did a man have clearer power of vision and never did one take more pleasure in looking and in seeing. One may therefore understand the torture that he felt when during the last days of his life he was afflicted with an affection of the eyes and it became necessary to sew his eyelids shut. In his piety he believed that these eyes, with which he had seen so many beautiful things and through which he had received so much pleasure, were taken from him by way of enforcing penitence.

Gadaffi's women

2011-08-28T20:31:00.000+10:00

The Libyan dictator had all female bodyguards. It'll be very interesting to hear their stories.

Borges' 112th birthday

2011-08-24T12:43:00.003+10:00

Google honours Jorge Luis Borges.

Great friends

2011-08-19T16:03:00.002+10:00

Let's hope this isn't a sign of things to come!

Putting people in prison isn't always a good idea

2011-08-18T22:44:00.002+10:00

From the ACLU:

In the last decade, New York drastically reduced its prison population and at the same time experienced a huge drop in crime. Indiana, on the other hand, drastically increased its prison population — and consequently the burden to taxpayers — while seeing a much smaller drop in crime than the national average.

If putting huge numbers of people in prison makes a society safer, then Russia and the United States ought to be home to the safest societies in the world.

Adam Serwer here writes about the diminishing returns of mass incarceration in the United States. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

The Great Failure

2011-08-18T12:29:00.001+10:00

The simple fact is that globalisation has not only hit the unskilled hard but has also proved a bonanza for the global super-rich. They have been able to invest in new and highly profitable projects in emerging economies. Meanwhile, as Warren Buffett argued this week, they have been able to convince their home governments to cut tax rates on profits and high incomes in the name of global tax competition. Tax havens have proliferated even as the politicians have occasionally railed against them. In the end the poor are doubly hit, first by global market forces, then by the ability of the rich to park money at low taxes in hideaways around the world.

~ Jeffrey Sachs, "The Great Failure of Globalisation".

Sachs makes a whole lot of great points in his article. It's very much worth reading.

The idiots gather

2011-08-18T00:01:00.001+10:00

I never cared much about the issue of gay marriage until I saw the sort of people who spent their time opposing it. Then I realised it was a cause worth supporting. Yesterday a collection of the least intelligent and most eccentric members of Australian parliament attended a bizarre meeting and fund raising event for the anti-gay marriage cause. An American crackpot, Rebecca Hagelin, was the keynote speaker, and she informed the crowd of like-minded individuals that there was "no greater evil" than homosexuality. ~~Nationals, Independant, Australia Party,~~ Queensland Party member Bob Katter auctioned off his hat for the cause, and said that the idea of two men getting married was ludicrous. (I think Bob Katter is ridiculous but I don't want to ban him from getting married.) But the most stupid statement made during the meeting came from National Party senator Barnaby Joyce, who claimed that gay marriage would endanger his daughters. "We know that the best protection for those girls is that they get themselves into a secure relationship with a loving husband, and I want that to happen for them" he said, adding "I don't want any legislator to take that right away from me." What the hell does that even mean? What "right" is he talking about?

I wonder how many people who live in countries which recognise same-sex marriage actually feel that their own heterosexual marriages have been undermined as a result. None, surely.

Corporate morality

2011-08-17T11:50:00.004+10:00

While everyone worries about the immoral behaviour of the poorest people in the UK, their lack of patriotism, community spirit and so on, let's not forget that the behaviour of corporations and the people who run them (and as Mitt Romney says, "corporations are people too") is little better. For example, Qantas, the famous Australian airline, is planning to sack around 1000 Aussie workers in an effort "expand" into Asia. In other words, the company is moving to where labor is cheap. They don't care about their workers, or Australia, or any community beyond their shareholders. All they're interested in is making money. Well, naturally, you might say. But maybe these attitudes have filtered down to the so-called underclass. And if more companies move off-shore, maybe we'll see riots here, one day, too.

The same coin

2011-08-09T20:29:00.010+10:00

Just about the only story people are talking about here in Australia is the rioting in the UK. We're all shocked and disturbed, being very fond (and much more so than many English people might realise) of the old dart. Most of us have friends and loved ones in England, or have spent time over there, or both. And so I've spent some of today trying to understand what is behind the rioting.

People tend to get very ideological at times like these. Either you call the rioters mindless hoodlums, rage against against the scourge of multiculturalism, and demand the army come out on the streets with guns blazing, or you make excuses and blame society or the government for driving young people to violence. Neither explanation is satisfactory. The rioters aren't nihilists, as some have charged. They believe in something. That's the problem: they believe rioting is in their self interest. And maybe, to some degree, it is, if only in the very short term.

But let's think about the people at the other end of society, the super-wealthy. What do the leaders of the UK's richest corporations believe in? No, they're not nihilists either. But do you think they believe in anything other than markets and maximising profits for shareholders? Do you think they care about 'society', or England, or human decency, a great deal more than the rioters do? Though the two groups -- the ultra rich and the rioters -- seem at first opposed to one another, they share much of the same ideology. For, as Michael White put it in The Guardian, "At bottom these were not riots for social justice, but for Nike shoes".

Celebrity bake-off, top end style

2011-07-27T18:51:00.001+10:00

The winner of the celebrity bake-off at the Dawin show was a cake backed by Nigel Scullion, the deputy leader of the Northern Territory's National party. According to its creator, it depicts a friendly crocodile taking Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard for a pleasant swim in its water hole. Others may interpret its meaning differently.

Quick, come see, there goes Robert E. Lee

2011-07-27T15:19:00.003+10:00

Here's an article on a topic I've wondered about for some time now: the inexplicable popularity of Robert E. Lee, the man who devoted “his best efforts to the destruction of the United States government”, yet remains admired by Presidents and Americans from North and South alike. I'm guessing Lee doesn't have too many black admirers, despite his supposedly wonderful personal qualities.

The tragedy of Nauru

2011-07-19T23:24:00.003+10:00

For various reasons, mostly involving asylum seeker detention centres, Australians are quite familiar with Nauru, a tiny island nation in the Pacific. Nauru is a basket case these days, but when the island was exporting phosphate in the 70s and 80s things were vastly different. Thirty years ago the people of Nauru enjoyed a very high standard of living, so much so that the government of Nauru chose to flaunt its wealth by purchasing a prominent block of land in Melbourne and building a 52 story building on it, Nauru House. Later, when the phosphate ran out, the skyscraper had to be sold. Few nations have squandered their natural resources in such spectacular fashion.

The President of Nauru has an opinion piece in the New York Times. He has a warning:

Phosphate mining, first by foreign companies and later our own, cleared the lush tropical rainforest that once covered our island’s interior, scarring the land and leaving only a thin strip of coastline for us to live on. The legacy of exploitation left us with few economic alternatives and one of the highest unemployment rates in the world, and led previous governments to make unwise investments that ultimately squandered our country’s savings.

I am not looking for sympathy, but rather warning you what can happen when a country runs out of options. The world is headed down a similar path with the relentless burning of coal and oil, which is altering the planet’s climate, melting ice caps, making oceans more acidic and edging us ever closer to a day when no one will be able to take clean water, fertile soil or abundant food for granted.

Climate change also threatens the very existence of many countries in the Pacific, where the sea level is projected to rise three feet or more by the end of the century. Already, Nauru’s coast, the only habitable area, is steadily eroding, and communities in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands have been forced to flee their homes to escape record tides. The low-lying nations of Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Marshall Islands may vanish entirely within our grandchildren’s lifetimes.

Australians who fret about our supposed illegal immigration problem ought to remember that, should Nauru sink below the sea, its entire population might well be heading our way.

Nothing human is strange to me

2011-07-18T23:29:00.000+10:00

Having said that, I can't understand why anyone would want to wear bees. Why on earth would anyone want to do this?

Algae

2011-07-17T19:49:00.001+10:00

Overnight, the algae bloomed in a nearby lake. I think the park staff have been trying to treat it. I took a picture of the interesting patterns it made on the water.

A lack of respect

2011-07-16T04:59:00.002+10:00

Every time I see our PM giggling I cringe, and I say that as something of a supporter. Especially when it's more than obvious that her laughter is not of a genuine kind, but a type of defence mechanism. Just the other day, as Age columnist Shaun Carney points out, Gillard was filmed giggling and stroking the arm of a woman who was calling her a contemptible liar. Why didn't the PM hold her ground and defend herself, rather than make silly and ingratiating gestures than made her appear, depending on your point of view, either condescending or too weak and submissive to defend herself? It was shocking to see our Prime Minister being heckled, called a liar and a fraud to her face, and essentially laughed at while meeting the public at a Brisbane shopping centre this week. But what was most disturbing was not the anger and contempt of the public, but Gillard's ridiculous and weak response to it. As Carney himself says,

I have never seen a prime minister who commands as little respect from large sections of the public and the media as Gillard, and that includes Sir William McMahon.

There is sexism behind some of the disrespect for Gillard and also a malicious agenda among parts of the media; elements of Rupert Murdoch's News Ltd clearly want to destroy her and most commercial radio shock jocks treat her with contempt because that's how they hold their audiences.

But not all of this disrespect has been visited upon her.

Carney points out that Gillard's decision to appear on comedy shows and allow herself to be mocked, when she should be out explaining her environmental policy to the public, further erodes both her personal authority and public trust in her office.

If her fundamental problem with the public is trust - that is, doubt among voters about her gravity and her capability - how could it possibly be helpful for her to take part in a panel show that is built around making gentle fun of the news?

On Sunday night, she gave a televised address to the nation on her carbon policy in which she pressed her credentials as a serious leader. Why undo that work a couple of nights later by playing for laughs? It is not what the public wants from a prime minister, certainly not this prime minister.

In any case, the moment when a charm offensive might have worked has long passed. Even in serious interviews on news shows she tries to shrug off difficult or inane questions by laughing or smiling when she should be serious and firm. Every time she laughs in public she erodes her stature and the standing of the government.

Gillard conducts Canberra press conferences like your favourite grade 3 teacher, even using the occasional nickname for journalists. Surely the penny has dropped: they are not her friends, nor do they care for her government - far from it.

The only explanation I can think of for Gillard's silly behaviour is that she fears that by appearing bold and authoritative she will be undermining her femininity, thereby making voters -- and particularly male voters -- feel uncomfortable. If this is true she's entirely mistaken.

Big things

2011-07-15T23:01:00.003+10:00

Australia has its fair share of big things, including two big pineapples in Queensland, one of which I've visited. There's also a big banana, a giant worm (which I've visited on a couple of occasions), several big cows around the place (two of which I've seen), a big sheep, a giant pheasant (I've also been here a few times), a big clam and, somewhere, a big lobster. But when it comes it kitsch, we cannot outdo the Americans. This is the country of Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons after all, and the land of road trips and roadside attractions. It seems to me that the U.S. is filled with monuments built by eccentrics with crazy dreams. Carhenge is a perfect example. I can't imagine anyone building this sort of thing anywhere else. In Europe I imagine people would complain about it being in bad taste. And in Australia we just don't dream that big, I'm afraid.

And then there's Bernard Coffindaffer, an American who spent more than three million dollars building "crosses of mercy" across the U.S. and the world, after he had a vision of God. He built more than 1800 trios of crosses before the money ran out and he died, his fortune spent, in 1993. It's a story both touching and bizarre.

I'm not sure when the craze for building big, crass, colourful and cheerful things began, but The Big Duck of Flanders, built in 1921, must be an early one.

My favourite Murdoch paper

2011-07-12T19:24:00.001+10:00

There is one truly indispensable Murdoch paper. No, not The Times or the Wall Street Journal. It's the NT News. The NT News, which is sold throughout Australia's Northern Territory, contains two kinds of stories; stories about crocodiles and stories about UFO's. Every day there's a new croc story, often featuring a bikini clad tourist standing next to a crocodile. Here's today's story: "Monster croc shock!"

But can we trust a Murdoch paper to tell the truth about Brutus, the giant crocodile? I've already heard that the story about him losing his leg to a shark is false.

Such, such were the joys

2011-07-10T13:32:00.003+10:00

Currently the Murdoch owned Melbourne Herald-Sun is campaigning on behalf of school bullies, running a series of articles which say that school children need to 'fight back' against bullies at their schools, and stop winging about being attacked. Today there's even a poll attached to this story: "Do schoolkids need to harden up and fight back against bullies?" This is especially interesting to me, because I seem to recall the junior school principal quoted as saying that bullying isn't a big deal and schoolchildren need to 'toughen up', as a teacher at my high school. Now it appears he's the principal of the junior school.

When I was at this school there were several violent bullying incidents. In the 1990s one boy repeatedly bashed another so badly he was left with brain damage. The school was successfully sued for $200,000 by the boy who was beaten. There were many other incidents. I remember the appalling bullying of a girl in my class, which went on for nearly an entire year. Another boy was assaulted daily, and had his locker smashed in and his books destroyed while teachers looked on. There was an assault on a very good friend on mine, which left him with lasting physical damage. These were serious incidents, and in at least one case, the school was found to be negligent.

Naturally, the Herald-Sun being a Murdoch paper, there is an editorial praising and defending bullying.

Escape

2011-07-09T12:09:00.002+10:00

Have you ever watched the British lifestyle programme "Escape to the country"? Couples who've grown tired of the city are taken to a bunch of different houses for sale in the countryside, and then asked to decide which one they like best. I've become strangely addicted to it recently. I've even devised a drinking game to play while watching it.

You have a drink every time one of the following is mentioned:

"Ticks all the boxes"
"The 'wow' factor"
"Light and airy" (Or more specifically, "lighten dairy")
"...and it's so close to the pub!"
" I love the beams"
"That's a good sized room" (but only if the room is, in fact, tiny)
"That's a lovely view" (Once again, only if the view is of a boring, flat, muddy field in the middle of nowhere)
"Period features"
"Oh look, an AGA!" (I'd never even heard of this kind of oven before I watched this show.)

Of course, if you played along like this you'd be hopelessly drunk within the first ten minutes.

Now, an Aussie version of the show would replace the excitement over the AGA with excitement over a barbeque, and funny little houses with tiny rooms everywhere, and an annexe which you can't quite stand up in, with massive McMansions towering over everything around them. I can just hear it now, "mate, I'm not sure about this place. It's only got six bedrooms, four bathrooms and three entertainment rooms. I'm mean that's OK if it's just the two of us, but if we decide to have kids..."

Murdoch and the politicians

2011-07-07T21:32:00.000+10:00

If the News of the World phone hacking scandal makes politicians feel uneasy or embarrassed to be seen with Rupert Murdoch, than at least one good thing will have come from it. What politician or party would wish to be the recipient of this man's support?

A Bodhisattva from Afghanistan

2011-07-04T23:41:00.004+10:00

I spent today looking at artworks by Klimt, Loos and Schiele at the excellent Vienna: Art and design exhibition at the NGV in Melbourne. I enjoyed it so much I think I'll have to go again. After that I visited the Asian section of the museum, where I took a special interest in this Greek influenced sculpture from Afghanistan. Here's a Bodhisattva from the famous archaeological site Hadda, Afghanistan.

This work, like the sculptures in Ancient Greece, was originally painted in bright colours. An Afghanistan that produces works of beauty such as this is unimaginable now. And we find it difficult to imagine Ancient Greek sculpture in its original polychrome form.

Nobody called Dionysus "guv'nor" in Ancient Greece

2011-07-01T12:48:00.002+10:00

Because my grasp of Ancient Greek doesn't go far beyond their alphabet, I read Aristophanes in translation. Now, I have a few good translations of Aristophanes, but the majority I've come across are pretty awful. The worst offenders are the ones which turn his slaves into Cockneys. Is this not totally bizarre? What have the people of London's East End got to do with Ancient Greek slaves? There's also something vaguely distasteful about it. I have a version of The Frogs in which Xanthius sometimes refers to his master, the god Dionysus, as "guv'nor".

Maybe somebody can suggest a good modern translation of Aristophanes' plays.

More, or less, than meets the eye?

2011-06-30T22:07:00.002+10:00

If you want to read about great films today, then you should probably go here. I'm going to blog about the first Transformers movie.

The other day I read an old article at Slate about how great the original Transformers movie was, how it remains, in every respect, superior to the awful modern part live action part CGI Michael Bay franchise. With this I agree. In fact, when I first watched the original animated Transformers I considered it the greatest thing I had ever seen. I should point out here that I was about seven when I saw Transformers.

One of the more curious aspects of Transformers is the casting of Orson Wells as Unicron. Orson Wells was a large man in his later years, but even so it seemed cruel to cast him as the voice of a planet eating robot. Wells no doubt had a large appetite, but not even he could have eaten an entire planet! This reminds me that I once heard it said that, in the months before he died, Elvis ate as much as an Indian (though apparently not an African) elephant each day. But I digress...

I have no idea what the plot of Transformers was, but I don't think this really matters. The shocking, even powerful thing about Transformers was that several of the characters died, including the great leader of the Autobots, (I can hardly believe I'm writing this) Optimus Prime. I'd never seen cartoon heroes die before. I don't think I believed such a thing could happen. This seemed a bold, even brave act by the film-makers. But as John Swansburg reports, "all of this bloodshed had a specific purpose—to move toys. In the commentary track on the 20th-anniversary edition of the movie, Flint Dille, one of the writers, explains he was instructed to eliminate much of the existing product line to make room for the new characters Hasbro was planning to sell me. I already owned Optimus Prime, after all."

So it turns out that there was more to the Transformers movie than met the eye, after all.

Homage to a government

2011-06-29T18:57:00.003+10:00

Here's a couple of phrases we won't be hearing again: "A war of necessity". "We will not abandon Afghanistan again". This necessary war has suddenly become unnecessary, and the notion that the biggest mistake the West made was to abandon Afghanistan after the Soviet pull-out no longer seems convincing. Not to policy makers, anyway.

The tragedy of the Afghanistan war is that we made real allies within that country, made promises to them that we would bring freedom and democracy to their country, and were believed. These allies we now betray. America and its coalition partners are going to abandon our Afghan friends to the Taliban, to Pakistan, to Iran, and to the wannabe dictator Hamid Karzai, the election stealing paranoiac the U.S. mistakenly installed as President. These are the groups who will shape Afghanistan in the future, not one of them a friend of freedom.

I don't say this because I believe the war in Afghanistan can be won, or that we should continue fighting there indefinitely. I have never had great enthusiasm for this conflict. In fact I always believed -- as eccentric is it might sound -- that the Iraq intervention was a more necessary one and the one which had the greater chance of success. I also recognise that, in certain cases, we cannot speak of right and wrong, but only of doing the least worst thing under the circumstances. But when one considers the likely fate of Afghanistan's women and girl children should the Taliban return to power, then it is impossible to contemplate that country's future without horror. And so we bring our soldiers home, and the places they guarded, or kept orderly, must guard themselves, and keep themselves orderly. And this is all right.

Bowerbirds

2011-06-03T20:46:00.000+10:00

Male Satin Bowerbird. These birds like to collect blue objects. I saw one of the males dancing for a female, growling and grunting with a blue object -- possibly a pen lid -- in his beak. But try as he might, the female didn't seem all that excited. Oh well. Maybe he needs to try a different colour.

Ban the live trade

2011-05-31T19:30:00.002+10:00

Last night the ABC programme Four Corners aired disturbing footage of Australian cattle being abused in Indonesia: victims of the cruel and unnecessary live export trade. Subsequently, the Australian government has called for an "inquiry" into the issue, and has suspended the live trade to the eleven abattoirs featured on the ABC.

There will, no doubt, be some who will say that the trade in live animals must continue. After all, hundreds will lose their livelihoods if the trade is stopped. I can't say I particularly care. If you make your money by sending animals to Indonesian abattoirs, places in which animals are known to be tortured (there is no other word -- I've seen the footage and it goes beyond mere negligence) then you do not deserve consideration. Those who have knowingly involved themselves in this disgraceful enterprise, in fact, deserve nothing more than to lose their jobs. Ban the trade.

The Second Defenestration of Prague

2011-05-23T14:35:00.000+10:00

On this day in 1618 Vilém Slavata and Jaroslav Martinic were thrown from the windows of the Prague Castle. They survived. The incident was no doubt a bad thing, but without it we would never have had the thirty years war...

Trial by combat

2011-05-06T15:02:00.002+10:00

Reading King Lear again has made me think about trial by combat. This form of justice was, I'm sure you'll agree, an especially poor one. While looking into its history I found this article about an incident in 2002, when a 60 year old mechanic challenged the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) to trial by combat:

Leon Humphreys remained adamant yesterday that his right to fight a champion nominated by the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) was still valid under European human rights legislation. He said it would have been a "reasonable" way to settle the matter.

Magistrates sitting at Bury St Edmunds on Friday had disagreed and instead of accepting his offer to take on a clerk from Swansea with "samurai swords, Ghurka knives or heavy hammers", fined him £200 with £100 costs. Humphreys, an unemployed mechanic, was taken to court after refusing to pay the original £25 fixed penalty for failing to notify the DVLA that his Suzuki motorcycle was off the road.

After entering a not guilty plea, he threw down his unconventional challenge. Humphreys, from Bury St Edmunds, said: "I was willing to fight a champion put up by the DVLA, but it would have been a fight to the death."

The New York Times and torture

2011-05-05T19:28:00.006+10:00

The New York Times has been pretty weak on the issue of torture, at least when the torturers are Americans or American allies. Perhaps making the mistake of trying to appear "objective", the paper tried to present both sides of the argument when what was really needed was a powerful denunciation of the practice.Today's Times editorial is a better effort. It's good to see the New York Times finally call waterboarding and other "harsh interrogation" techniques what they really are:

There is no final answer to whether any of the prisoners tortured in President George W. Bush’s illegal camps gave up information that eventually proved useful in finding Bin Laden. A detailed account in The Times on Wednesday by Scott Shane and Charlie Savage concluded that torture “played a small role at most” in the years and years of painstaking intelligence and detective work that led a Navy Seals team to Bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan.

That squares with the frequent testimony over the past decade from many other interrogators and officials. They have said repeatedly, and said again this week, that the best information came from prisoners who were not tortured. The Times article said Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times, fed false information to his captors during torture.Even if it were true that some tidbit was blurted out by a prisoner while being tormented by C.I.A. interrogators, that does not remotely justify Mr. Bush’s decision to violate the law and any acceptable moral standard.

This was not the “ticking time bomb” scenario that Bush-era officials often invoked to rationalize abusive interrogations. If, as Representative Peter King, the Long Island Republican, said, information from abused prisoners “directly led” to the redoubt, why didn’t the Bush administration follow that trail years ago?

There are many arguments against torture. It is immoral and illegal and counterproductive. The Bush administration’s abuses — and ends justify the means arguments — did huge damage to this country’s standing and gave its enemies succor and comfort. If that isn’t enough, there is also the pragmatic argument that most experienced interrogators think that the same information, or better, can be obtained through legal and humane means.

These right wing torture apologists -- Cheney, Rumsfeld, Yoo -- are entirely self-serving in their arguments. The interrogation methods they insist were instrumental in bringing Osama bin Laden to justice were not only barbaric but entirely useless, and quite possibly counter-productive. Now they seek to capitalise on Osama's death in order to rehabilitate themselves. They must not be allowed to win this argument and claim credit for something they had nothing to do with. The first step is for the media to stop asking the wrong questions. Rather than have the debate the apologists want the public to have, and discuss whether useful information was gained as a result of waterboarding, journalists should question those who authorised the torture of prisoners, confront them with the laws they have broken, and insist that those who have broken the law should be prosecuted for their crimes.

Rising up in Syria

2011-04-23T09:54:00.001+10:00

73 protesters killed in Syria, and this after the National Emergency laws were lifted. Syrians have lost their fear of the dictator, and Bashar al-Assad has, as a result, begun making war on his own countrymen.

But notice there are no calls for Assad to leave Syria, not from Washington, London or Paris. I don't understand why Washington, in particular, has been so soft for so long on Assad, a man who is a close ally of Iran and a corrupting influence on Lebanon. It's as if they've got it into their heads that Assad is a reformer, and so ignore all evidence to the contrary. Well, they may not be able to ignore Assad any longer.

The soul of soulless conditions

2011-04-23T01:24:00.002+10:00

When I was at school we would always sing, at Easter time, Isaac Watts' hymn "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross". I have never forgotten the words, which made a great impression on me at the time. The third verse, I often found, especially moved me,

See from His head, His hands, His feet,
Sorrow and love flow mingled down!
Did e’er such love and sorrow meet,
Or thorns compose so rich a crown?

This was much better, I always thought, than the irritating "Jesus Christ is risen today" with it's constant repetitions of "Alleluia". I can't remember any of the other hymns we'd sing at Easter time now, but I'm sure there were others. These hymns were, I'm sure, my introduction to poetry. They might not be good poetry, but never before had I been confronted with such powerful words and images, or the notion that words could be used for more than conveying information.

At the moment there is a debate going on over the role of religion in Victorian schools. For the most part I agree with those who argue that we ought to keep Christianity out of schools. But I'm not willing to make an issue of it. Perhaps I secretly want it to remain part of school life. Australia is not America. People here don't even pretend to go to church. It's likely that without some kind of introduction to the topic at school, a significant portion of young people would end up entirely ignorant of the contents of the Bible. Of course, to teach the Bible as fact to schoolchildren would be idiotic and reprehensible. But to not teach Christianity at all would be to refuse schoolchildren access to so much beauty and poetry, and so much that is, or was, good in our culture.

No place for a cat

2011-04-22T12:47:00.001+10:00

As far as places you find cats go, this is one of the more unusual.

Salman says what Dylan won't

2011-04-21T00:28:00.000+10:00

I would have liked Bob Dylan, who played here in Melbourne last night, (I saw him on a previous tour and that was enough to make me decide not to see him this time) to have spoken out against the imprisonment of Ai Weiwei. Dylan had a perfect chance to say something about it during his Chinese tour. Of course, he remained silent. Disappointing, but not surprising. Salman Rushdie, on the other hand, can be relied upon to stand up for artistic freedom:

The lives of artists are more fragile than their creations. The poet Ovid was exiled by Augustus to a little hell-hole on the Black Sea called Tomis, but his poetry has outlasted the Roman Empire. Osip Mandelstam died in a Stalinist work camp, but his poetry has outlived the Soviet Union. Federico García Lorca was killed by the thugs of Spain’s Generalissimo Francisco Franco, but his poetry has survived that tyrannical regime.

We can perhaps bet on art to win over tyrants. It is the world’s artists, particularly those courageous enough to stand up against authoritarianism, for whom we need to be concerned, and for whose safety we must fight.
...
When artists venture into politics the risks to reputation and integrity are ever-present. But outside the free world, where criticism of power is at best difficult and at worst all but impossible, creative figures like Mr. Ai and his colleagues are often the only ones with the courage to speak truth against the lies of tyrants. We needed the samizdat truth-tellers to reveal the ugliness of the Soviet Union. Today the government of China has become the world’s greatest threat to freedom of speech, and so we need Ai Weiwei, Liao Yiwu and Liu Xiaobo.

Inherently evil

2011-04-08T12:31:00.006+10:00

One of the most commented upon stories in Melbourne yesterday was that of the "brutal murder" (as the Herald-Sun put it) of a black swan in Moonee Ponds. Of course, animals are kept in cruel conditions in farms everywhere, hunted and killed and eaten every day, so it might seem strange that the killing of a swan should become newsworthy. But the story of the killing is compelling, as The Age reports:

The female swan was swimming on the Queens Lake Park about 3.40pm when it was pelted with rocks in an attack the RSPCA has described as "abhorrent" and sparked fury online.
A group of passers-by who heard the distressed swan squawking and flapping its wings came to the bird’s aid and discovered it had a large gash to the top of its head. It lost consciousness and died about 20 minutes later.
The swan was nesting at the time and its partner was yesterday keeping a vigil at the nest, however wildlife authorities say they are concerned about the cygnets' survival.

The four teenagers who allegedly committed the act were swiftly identified and arrested, and will now face court.

To destroy something beautiful, graceful and gentle is inherently evil and would, in all times and all places, appal most people. This, I think, explains why there is so much public anger and interest in the story, and why the papers are describing the killing much as they would the murder of a human being.

Strange times in Oz

2011-04-07T22:52:00.006+10:00

Strange times. Our unemployment rate is 4.9% and getting lower, the economy is "booming" (always that word!), our dollar is highly valued, we have few social problems (outside of Aboriginal areas, of course, but this tragedy is easily ignored) and, despite the national obsession with the issue, no problem with illegal immigration. Yet our government is in deep trouble.

While the country is doing well, the government has a few problems, not least their inability to take credit for the good times in which we live. Strangely, they also seem unwilling to take any credit, though they thoroughly deserve much of it. But there is an air of incompetence which follows Labor around, and from which they seem unable to extricate themselves. They panicked and sacked Kevin Rudd as leader when he, inevitably, began to lose his popularity, but stupidly allowed him to stay on as foreign minister, a position from which he has sabotaged his own party whenever it has suited him to do so. They failed to explain their super-profits tax on the ridiculously profitable mining industry, just as they have failed to convince voters that we need serious action on climate change. They somehow managed to introduce an immigration policy which frightened away the foreign students our universities rely upon, and an asylum seeker policy which was inadvertently crueller and less efficient than the previous government's. Labor cannot win a single argument, and even when given a mandate by the electorate, they consistently fail to deliver the changes they promise.

There is a feeling that we are, for the first time in decades, poorly governed. Certainly, Julia Gillard is one of the least impressive leaders Australia has produced (and that's saying something!) Yet it isn't so much her voice and accent that makes her hard to take seriously, but her inability to control ex-PM Kevin Rudd. Rudd makes fools of his colleagues, makes up Australia's foreign policy without consulting the PM, and appears to answer to no one. But despite it all, Rudd is more popular with the public (though certainly not his colleagues!) than Gillard, and many would like to see him return as PM.

All of this is really very unfortunate, as Labor have, for the most part, done a good job of governing our country through extremely difficult times. Rather than receive credit for this, it seems they will be thrown out in favour of Tony Abbott's deeply conservative Liberal Party, who have nothing to offer other than moronic slogans, "Stop the boats", "Great big tax", "Ju-liar".

Extreme and potentially dangerous

2011-04-07T12:26:00.005+10:00

One of the problems with American newspapers is their insistence on being "objective" and "even-handed". Objectivity and even-handedness may sound like things that could only ever be good, but they have their downsides. For example, when confronted with Republican Paul Ryan's budget proposal, journalists are forced into describing it in such terms as "brave", "courageous", "serious", "intelligent", rather than saying exactly what it is, extreme, cruel and dangerous. Perhaps Americans are just grateful that, at last, someone in Washington has acknowledged that the United States can no longer be both a low taxing and a high spending nation. But the Republican plan is so extreme, so crazy and so unfair, that to describe it as "serious" and "brave" seems to me beside the point.

The first thing the Republicans want to do is lower taxes. In particular, they wish to cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans by 10%, and cut the company tax by the same amount, leaving both at 25%. I cannot see the logic in this. To reduce government revenue at a time in which the United States is deep in debt seems to me an act of insanity. And the idea that cutting taxes will always stimulate growth has been proven false. For decades successive administrations have lowered taxes, and the economy of the United States has only grown weaker. But cutting taxes on the super-wealthy is merely extreme, ideological and stupid. The budget's attack on the rights of the poor is cruel and dangerous. In effect, the budget requires the poor to pay for the mistakes of the rich. Social security will almost cease to exist, at least for those under 55. Medicare, Medicaid and the food stamp programme will be all but annihilated. The rich receive a tax cut, the poor have the little they receive taken away from them. That this is cruel and unfair should be obvious. But it is also dangerous because it will entrench poverty, make social mobility impossible and create a large, unhappy and potentially angry underclass.

As of today, the wealthiest 1% of Americans possess a quarter of their nations wealth. As Joseph E. Stiglitz writes in Vanity Fair, this is something they may come to regret:

Alexis de Tocqueville once described what he saw as a chief part of the peculiar genius of American society—something he called “self-interest properly understood.” The last two words were the key. Everyone possesses self-interest in a narrow sense: I want what’s good for me right now! Self-interest “properly understood” is different. It means appreciating that paying attention to everyone else’s self-interest—in other words, the common welfare—is in fact a precondition for one’s own ultimate well-being. Tocqueville was not suggesting that there was anything noble or idealistic about this outlook—in fact, he was suggesting the opposite. It was a mark of American pragmatism. Those canny Americans understood a basic fact: looking out for the other guy isn’t just good for the soul—it’s good for business.

The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.

The least worst option

2011-04-03T22:56:00.010+10:00

A few days ago I was mocking David Brooks for writing about his burger baseline. Well, the other day he summed up the nature of American involvement in the Libyan conflict in an impressively succinct manner. The official American position on the conflict, which Brooks says he opposes, is that coalition attacks on Gaddafi's forces are designed merely to protect Libyan civilians, not bring about regime change in Libya. The administration's actual position, which Brooks supports, is that the airstrikes should break Gaddafi's resolve and squeeze his regime until it fractures and falls apart. I don't doubt this is accurate, and while the deception is unfortunate, in order to have their actions sanctioned by the UN coalition members were forced to describe their efforts in this somewhat deceiving way.

At this point in time the war doesn't seem to be going very well for Libya's rebels. It may be that they lack the numbers, firepower and expertise needed to take Tripoli and defeat Gaddafi. In that case, unless Gaddafi's regime does indeed crumble under the pressure the coalition is applying to it, the war will end in either a defeat for the rebels or, more likely, a stalemate in which the country is divided in two. If this occurs then Libya will have become a kind of Iraq for liberals, complete with a no-fly-zone, a mad dictator and a whole lot of 'unfinished business'. But despite all this I support western involvement in the conflict. Intervention was, by far, the least worst option. A free and democratic Libya looks like a distant prospect at the moment, but had Gaddafi been allowed to commit massacres in Benghazi and the other free cities it would have been an impossibility.

"My baseline of a normal burger had shifted"

2011-03-31T11:22:00.001+11:00

The New York Times is about to implement a pay wall. This is the sort of thing we shall soon miss out on:

I was just at a McDonald’s and guiltily ordered a Quarter Pounder With Cheese. I remember when these sandwiches were first introduced and they looked huge at the time. A quarter pound of meat on one sandwich seemed gargantuan. But when my burger arrived and I opened the box, the thing looked puny. That’s because all the other sandwiches on the menu were things like double quarter pounders. My baseline of a normal burger had shifted.

David Brooks

(To be fair, I kind of like David Brooks.)

"He was a thug to begin with"

2011-03-27T00:12:00.005+11:00

Having been convinced -- though perhaps I needed little convincing -- that I should return to writing here, I thought I would begin again by writing about Syria.

There was a time, several years ago now, when it was believed that Syria's new President, Bashar al-Assad, would abandon his father's repressive techniques and cult of personality, and liberalise Syria's political system and economy. To be fair, the personality cult his father established was not entirely transferred to Bashar. But a personality cult requires a personality, and Bashar is one of the least personable human beings on the planet. Unfortunately, the violent repression and illiberalism of the Hafez al-Assad regime has continued under his son. And this is perhaps one reason why the protesters have not been satisfied with promises of reform, and have continued to put themselves at tremendous physical risk in their quest for freedom; they've heard these promises before and aren't silly enough to fall for them twice.

Recently, two experts on Syria appeared on the PBS Newshour, liberal democracy activist Ammar Abdulhamid and former U.S. ambassador to Syria, Theodore Kattouf. They had the following exchange:

AMMAR ABDULHAMID: To be honest with you, to us, Bashar al-Assad was a thug to begin with, and he is a thug now. He was a thug then. He is a thug now. He's a Fredo Corleone who mushroomed into Sonny Corleone. But the idea of reform, the idea of him being -- suddenly finding some kind of reform impulses is impossible right now...

THEODORE KATTOUF: I thought he was Michael.

AMMAR ABDULHAMID: He was never Michael.(LAUGHTER)

   AMMAR ABDULHAMID: He was never Michael. Michael tried to reform.
   And I think this is -- this is exactly what people wanted...

   THEODORE KATTOUF: We are going to have a disagreement about that.

JEFFREY BROWN: That's the one disagreement you have is over which Corleone.

THEODORE KATTOUF: Exactly.

This is perfectly right. Bashar is a gangster, and part of a criminal family. And the "Fredo Corleone to Sonny Corleone" part, especially, couldn't be more correct. Bashar is something of the idiot son who wasn't meant to succeeded his father, and only did because his older brother "Basil" was killed in a car accident. And as Ammar Abduhamid says, it's difficult to imagine Bashar initiating the sort of reforms that will satisfy the protesters. Equally, it's all too easy to imagine him slaughtering thousands of people in an effort to remain President. And for an amoral gangster like Bashar, killing on that scale is a perfectly acceptable option.

Last post

2011-03-17T21:31:00.000+11:00

It's unlikely I'll use this blog again. Thanks for reading.

I think that by retaining one's childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and - to return to my first instance - toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable, and that by preaching the doctrine that nothing is to be admired except steel and concrete, one merely makes it a little surer that human beings will have no outlet for their surplus energy except in hatred and leader worship.

At any rate, spring is here, even in London N.1, and they can't stop you enjoying it. This is a satisfying reflection. How many a time have I stood watching the toads mating, or a pair of hares having a boxing match in the young corn, and thought of all the important persons who as you are not actually ill, hungry, frightened or immured in a prison or a holiday camp, spring is still spring. The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.

George Orwell ~ Some Thoughts on the Common Toad (1946)

Kasparov and the "Bobby Fischer Defense"

2011-02-18T14:14:00.003+11:00

I suppose the title of this review was inevitable, dealing as it does with a biography of a chess genius who went insane. Embedded in the Kasparov's review of Frank Brady's "Endgame: Bobby Fischer’s Remarkable Rise and Fall—from America’s Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness", is a remarkable picture of Fischer himself, taken by Harry Benson, at a hot spring in Iceland in 1972. Fischer is wrapped in a towel which resembles, in its pattern, a chess board. He looks like he's standing on another planet, which makes sense for a man who ended up living on another plane of existence to the rest of us, so paranoid did he become.

Solidarity

2011-02-13T02:23:00.000+11:00

If all Egyptians are as nice as the ones I met at today's rally in Melbourne, the country is going to have a bright future.

He should have left

2011-02-11T11:44:00.007+11:00

Mubarak's refusal to leave is bad news. If he had gone last night, and the state of emergency had been simultaneously lifted, a space of six months might have been created in which secular, democratic and free institutions might have been able to take shape. Having decided to hang on until September's elections, Mubarak has made it impossible for secular and moderate political groups -- pretty much anyone other than the Muslim Brotherhood -- to organise and gather support among Egyptians.

I saw an interview with a Muslim Brotherhood leader on TV last night. Speaking via satellite from London, Kamal El Helbawy said that once in power his group would not necessarily implement stoning as a punishment for adultery:

TONY JONES: A quick question: you mentioned adultery, and of course the punishment under Sharia law for adultery is stoning to death. Could you imagine that happening in Egypt?

KAMAL EL-HELBAWY: Not always this is the case, but for example if you have - if you are going in the street and there is a red light, you can't go ahead, you will make disasters. So this is a red light that should not be trespassed and it is not necessarily to capital punishment.

But the ruler has its power to make it less punishment according the seriousness of the crime committed. And, by the way, adultery - in the Ten Commandments, adultery is also prohibited.

By remaining in power, Mubarak is engineering a situation in which only the Muslim Brotherhood might be organised enough to run successful candidates at September's elections. And once in power, God only knows what kind of Egypt will emerge. (Of course, this assumes that there will be free elections, and that Mubarak, Suleiman, or their whoever ends up leading their party, doesn't either convince the Egyptian military to begin a crackdown on protesters, or simply steal the next election.)

Update:

Mubarak has, as you've no doubt heard, resigned. I wonder if he'll now leave for Saudi Arabia. I had planned on going to the day of solidarity with Egyptians rally today. I'm not sure how the news will affect the rally. Obviously, this is only the beginning of the fight for freedom in Egypt.

Disturbing news from Egypt

2011-02-03T00:58:00.001+11:00

The dying Egyptian regime, in its last gasp, has sent supporters onto the streets of Cairo to attack protesters and journalists. As we stand by, helpless, let's think for a while about the sort of depravity we've been tolerating in the name of stability. Have we helped the 'peace process' by giving Mubarak our support and our money? Has any good come of it at all? Is there anything more overrated than 'stability'? Not as far as I can see. Now the Americans have finally decided to cut Mubarak loose. Well, good. Better late than never. Perhaps even the Israeli right will one day come to see that a free Egypt is not their enemy. One can hope so.

Tonight a massive storm is bearing down on northern Queensland. My thoughts are with everyone up there, especially those I know, but also with the Egyptian protesters, who are facing a different force, one perhaps equally destructive and far more malevolent.

Seize the moment

2011-01-29T14:55:00.002+11:00

Friends of mine who've been to Egypt have spoken of the frightened tones in which local people speak of Mubarak. But today, if the mass protests are anything to go by, Egyptians no longer feel afraid of their leader, and whatever fears they had have now been replaced by rage and determination. This being so, surely now is the time for Mr Obama to forcefully call for Mubarak to bow to the will of the people and -- at the very least -- announce that elections will take place shortly. Obama might deny the Egyptian government any more money until elections are held or Mubarak is gone. Yes, such actions are risky, and might bring the Muslim Brotherhood into power, but is the alternative any better?

Sooner or later the military might well turn on Mubarak, and then he'll have to join Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Saudi Arabian exile. Everyone knows the Egyptians hate him. His overthrow is inevitable. So why not take the side of the Egyptian people now when they could do with American help? The alternative is to make an enemy of the next Egyptian government, which may well be one chosen by the Egyptian people.

Thomas More at Hotel Windsor

2011-01-24T12:36:00.000+11:00

Photo from www.thecollectormm.com.au

Yesterday I had afternoon tea (courtesy of friends, who showed me more generosity than I could have possibly deserved) in the Grand Ballroom of the Windsor Hotel, Melbourne. Quite possibly I ate too many cakes and scones. Well, who could resist the dessert buffet they brought in, following the traditional afternoon tea, complete with flowing chocolate fountain? Several of the guests were so impressed with the fountain that they began circling around it, taking pictures on their mobile phones. One or two even insisted that the staff take their picture in front it. This seemed like a bit much, especially when the ballroom itself had so much to offer.

The Ballroom is a richly decorated space -- well, you can see for yourself in the above picture -- but one detail which interested me was the stained glass windows at either end. Depicted in these windows were, among others, Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth I and, so it appeared to me, Sir Thomas More. The author of Utopia was shown in profile, much in the manner of Holbein's portrait, which the Melbourne artist presumably based his work upon. So there was More, glaring disapprovingly at the room from his corner, while the rest of us stuffed ourselves with more rich food and drink than we needed.

Coincidently, this morning I learned, courtesy of this article in the New York Times, that in 2006 a Norwich artist "took white paint and fine brushes" and painted the whole of More's Utopia on the brick facade of an old electricity plant. Truly, More was a man for all seasons.

Grant Gee and Sebald

2011-01-22T18:37:00.003+11:00

Somewhere, unless I gave it away, I have a copy of Grant Gee's film about Radiohead, "Meeting people is easy", which follows the band's world tour of 1998. The film shows Thom Yorke doing a lot of moping about and complaining. Yorke, from what I remember, especially seemed to dislike the praise he was getting in the papers at the time, which he felt was undeserved and somewhat comically described as "a headfuck". "Meeting people is easy" is one of the better rock documentaries, and an interesting and memorable film in its own right, and this makes me all the more interested in Grant Gee's new project, "Patience (After Sebald)" a film inspired by Sebald's "The Rings of Saturn".

Via the Vertigo blog I found this page about the film and its coming premiere, as well as the podcast of an interview with Grant Gee, in which he talks about the film.

The magic of water

2011-01-17T00:57:00.000+11:00

Water sculptures by Shinichi Murayama.

Revolution in Tunsia

2011-01-15T12:25:00.002+11:00

The news should be on the front page of every paper around the world -- an Arab people rising up against a brutal autocrat and removing him from power. Isn't this what we've all been waiting for? Yet the Tunisian revolution has barely made the news in this country.

At the moment nobody has any idea what kind of regime will emerge from the chaos, but there is no reason to think that the next Tunisian government will be friendly towards the West. In particular, Tunisians appear to dislike the United States and France, two countries which maintained good relations with their oppressor, President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Perhaps this is the reason, along with the sudden and unexpected nature of the revolution, that Barack Obama has had strikingly little to say about Tunisia in recent days. If he starts trumpeting the glories of democracy he will be seen as a hypocrite, but if he stays silent it will be taken as a sign that the U.S. doesn't care about the Tunisian people. Some will say the best course of action is to remain silent and let the Tunisians handle things. Others say the U.S. should be actively promoting democracy in Tunisia. The thing we all ought to remember is that the Tunisians themselves aren't yet calling for a democratic, secular, pro-freedom government. They're angry about government corruption and the state of their economy, and appear to want a new government which will address these issues. This means that whatever course of action the U.S. takes, the next regime in Tunisia may not take a shape entirely pleasing to the West.

Memories of Salman Taseer

2011-01-14T23:05:00.002+11:00

Tariq Ali, a person I don't particularly like, here shares some of his memories of the late Salman Taseer. In particular I liked the story he tells about a protest rally he, Taseer and another friend had organised in 1958:

"the three of us had organised a demonstration at the US Consulate after reading that an African-American called Jimmy Wilson had been sentenced to death for stealing a dollar. On that occasion Salman, seeing that not many people had turned up, found some street urchins to swell our ranks. We had to stop and explain to them why their chant of ‘Death to Jimmy Wilson’ was wrong. Money changed hands before they were brought into line."

For the record Jimmy Wilson, at least according to Wikipedia, was not executed for the crime of stealing $1.95. His sentence was commuted to life and he was paroled in 1973. A paper on the story can be found here.

Down on our luck

2011-01-14T22:50:00.001+11:00

Frederick McCubbin's painting, "Down on his luck", illustrates the national mood. But things are looking up. The floods are receding, missing people are being found alive, and Australia finally won a game of cricket. Well, that's if you consider the 20/20 game cricket.

The blame game

2011-01-11T23:11:00.004+11:00

The shootings in Tucson have been blamed on Sarah Palin and the Tea Party, or are said to be the result of the extreme and violent language Americans increasingly use in political discussions. Maybe all this hatred and vitriol had something to do with it, but I struggle to see how Republicans can be blamed for the shootings. Jared Loughner represented no one but himself and never claimed to be serving a particular cause. There is no evidence that the outrageous rantings of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh or any other right-wing loudmouth inspired him to commit this crime. His reasons were personal. Now, for the first time in his life Loughner is being taken seriously. So rather than blame Sarah Palin and co. for a crime they had little to do with, more attention might be paid to Arizona's complete lack of serious gun control laws, which surely contributed more to creating this disaster than anything Sarah Palin tweeted.

Jared Loughner was an evil nutcase who should not have been allowed anywhere near a semi-automatic pistol. But Arizona's politicians -- Gabrielle Giffords included -- opted to remove any barriers which might have prevented him from obtaining such a powerful weapon. Of course, there are some who say that had everyone else at the Tucson grocery store been armed, Loughner would not have been able shoot so many people. The idea, I suppose, is that if everyone is always pointing a gun at one another, nobody is going to shoot first. I don't know about you, but this doesn't seem like such a good idea to me.

As old as religion

2011-01-08T16:43:00.000+11:00

One of the reasons I haven't blogged lately is stories like this one, which I find extremely depressing. I had the idea that I wouldn't write again until I had something to write about the arts, but other things (including a brief trip to Queensland) got in the way of that. In the meantime I've been thinking a lot about the assassination of Salman Taseer, and what it means for Pakistan and the world.

It appears now that an extreme minority can, through acts of violence, intimidate the majority into doing what they wish. This isn't something that is only happening in Pakistan either -- something similar is occurring in Israel, tragically -- but that's where it's most visible. Pakistan's liberals and moderates are being silenced, even though half of Pakistan probably shares their views. But how can liberals, afraid of dying, beat an enemy that isn't only willing to die, but actively seeks death?

Some people say that everybody wants freedom, but that's wishful thinking. Sometimes people want freedom, but sometimes what they really want is someone to tell them how to think. Especially, I think, people sometimes want someone to tell them everything they need to know about the world, why it's such an awful place, and what to do about it. Sometimes people want to march around in uniforms and stamp on human faces. And killing blasphemers is as old as religion.

The Eighth Amendment and Bradley Manning

2010-12-24T23:41:00.001+11:00

As I understand it, the Eighth Amendment to the American Constitution does not, in fact, give any examples of what these cruel and unusual punishments are which it expressibly prohibits. In many ways, this has proven to be a wise move. Standards of decency change over time, and mostly for the better. But at the moment standards appear to be slipping. I say this because few people seem to be concerned by Bradley Manning's cruel treatment.

The nature of Manning's imprisonment may not be torture as we usually think of it, but to keep this man -- who has not been convicted of any crime -- in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, and to prevent him from reading newspapers and watching international news, seems both cruel and unusual. But today, perhaps, such things are acceptable.

Keith Jarrett vs Tatiana Nikolaeva

2010-12-21T00:16:00.001+11:00

Shostakovich's Preludes and Fugues are among my favourites of his works. Prelude and Fugue number 22 in G minor is, I think, one of the most mysterious pieces of music he ever wrote, alongside the "nocturne" in his 15th String Quartet. I think of it as expressing a kind of terrible melancholy, albeit in a remarkably restrained manner.

There are a few versions of the Preludes and Fugues out there, but the one I like best is by Keith Jarrett. His playing might, at times, come across as being almost expressionless, but he more than any other performer allows Shostakovich's music to speak for itself.

Here is a link to Jarrett's recording of the 22nd Prelude and Fugue, and here's a link to an equally wonderful Tatiana Nikolaeva version. Nikolaeva was, from memory, the one for whom Shostakovich wrote the 24 Preludes and Fugues, and the dedicatee.

The "war" on Christmas

2010-12-18T23:19:00.004+11:00

Yesterday someone was telling me that there was something like a war going on against Christmas. "Some people", she said, "don't celebrate Christmas and don't want us to either". I had a feeling I knew who these "people" were.

Some people really do feel like there's a war against them at this time, but it's not the Christmas addicts who are under siege. I'm pretty neutral about the holiday and feel content to let the Christians (and those who just really like buying stuff) do what they will with it, but my sympathies are with those who truly are under siege at this time of the year: those who are separated -- whether by distance or death -- from the ones they love, or who are otherwise alone, or those who feel humiliated and ashamed because they can't afford to buy presents for their family, and those who feel otherwise oppressed by the relentless and enforced good cheer of the season. For a lot of people this is the worst time of the year.

... and just for the hell of it, here's a giant inflatable Santa I saw the other night:

Goodbye, Captain Beefheart

2010-12-18T22:11:00.000+11:00

Trout Mask Replica is one of my favourites. Here's a classic song from that bizarre, unforgettable record: My Human Gets Me Blues.

The World of Peter Hitchens

2010-12-16T11:01:00.002+11:00

Every now and then I read a few Peter Hitchens articles. They're always highly entertaining, as Peter Hitchens seems to believe that England is falling apart, that all young people are cannabis smoking violent criminals, and immigrants are ruining everything for everyone. Recently he described his views on what should be done with cannabis users. He begins by saying that those who claim he has an extreme position are liars. He doesn't want to throw every person who tries cannabis straight into jail, rather, he has invented a system to deal with offenders:

First conviction - Warning that subsequent use will lead to immediate imprisonment. Second conviction - Immediate imprisonment (briefly, but under harsh and austere conditions). Third conviction - immediate imprisonment (same conditions, longer period). Etc.

"Harsh and austere conditions"? Exactly what does he mean by this? Anyway, P. Hitchens then continues:

A few months of this policy, effectively applied, and the use of cannabis would drop very sharply, I think. The number of people in prison for this offence would inevitably rise during the initial months, but, once it became clear that the law meant what it said, would rapidly reduce. Lawbreaking is almost invariably a rational calculation of odds, costs and benefits. Most lawbreakers are highly rational, as is demonstrated by their excellent knowledge of their legal rights on arrest.

I don't find this line of argument entirely persuasive. If anything, Peter Hitchens isn't going far enough. Mao "cured" China of its opium addiction by telling Chinese to stop using the stuff or die. As you might imagine, most Chinese found this argument persuasive. But this might be going a little too far, even for Peter Hitchens.

Sidney Nolan's Ned Kelly

2010-12-10T22:04:00.002+11:00

Sidney Nolan's Ned Kelly
Originally uploaded by N G M

In Sidney Nolan's series of Ned Kelly paintings Kelly is never represented as a real person, but rather as an amalgamation of metal and muscle. Not an armour wearing bushranger, Nolan's Kelly *is* his armour. This is Ned Kelly as icon and hero.

I've never shared in the enthusiasm many feel for the murderous Irishman, but even I feel unaccountably drawn to images of Kelly. I have visited his armour from time to time, displayed publicly at the State Library in Melbourne. The last time I was visited there were schoolchildren being taught all about Kelly and his gang. They seemed enthralled.

What to be done with him?

2010-12-08T17:08:00.008+11:00

The Wikileaks scandal has just exploded in Australia. A bit late you say? Well, suddenly we've all realised that this Julian Assange is an Aussie, and that our government is, to an extent, responsible for his welfare. This changes everything.

I don't have any problem with the stated aim of Wikileaks, which is to support whistleblowers and make their information freely available. This is admirable; where there is criminal activity and corruption the public has a right to know about it. But apart from a few instances where there is information of public interest (Mrs. Clinton ordering diplomats to act as spies; American meddling in Spain's legal system) the latests leaks consist mostly of material that should probably have remained private. Having said that, there is little that is surprising in any of these leaks. Western diplomats appear to say in private much of what their respective leaders say in public. Meanwhile diplomats across the less free world often privately pursue policies which contradict the statements and directives made by their respective leaders. Again, this is hardly surprising.

But the Wikileaks are not designed to embarrass the Saudis. Assange wants to embarrass the United States and, if possible, bring down Hillary Clinton. Naturally, the Americans want to see him jailed. Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee say they want him dead. And this is where things get complicated for Australia.

Assange is an Australian citizen, and deserving of Australian assistance as any other citizen in his position would be. He has not, the bizarre Swedish allegations side, committed a crime. I say this because the U.S. has not been able to pinpoint exactly what law it is he has breached. The Australian government has similarly not been able to identify the crime he has committed. One need not approve of Assange in order to appreciate this point.

So what should be done with Julian Assange? If the Australian government is seen to be washing their hands of Mr. Assange, if they allow him to be handed over to a foreign power -- however friendly -- without charge, or if there is a possibility he may face execution, they will make themselves very unpopular at home. The Australian government must assure Assange's rights are protected. That's their job, and they will pay at the polls if they can't or don't make this assurance.

It may be that the Wikileaks scandal will have a greater impact in Australia than anywhere else.

Schopenhauer and the vanity of existence

2010-12-07T02:58:00.000+11:00

If ever I find myself in a bad mood I need only turn to the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer, the man for whom the world was hell and its inhabitants both the tortured souls and the torturing devils.

Reading Schopenhauer you are always coming across interesting passages, such as this one, from "On the vanity of existence".

Every moment of our life belongs to the present only for a moment; then it belongs for ever to the past. Every evening we are poorer by a day. We would perhaps grow frantic at the sight of this ebbing away of our short span of time were we not secretly conscious in the profoundest depths of our being that we share in the inexhaustible well of eternity, out of which we can for ever draw new life and renewed time.

You could, to be sure, base on considerations of this kind a theory that the greatest wisdom consists in enjoying the present and making this enjoyment the goal of life, because the present is all that is real and everything else merely imaginary. But you could just as well call this mode of life the greatest folly: for that which in a moment ceases to exist, which vanishes as completely as a dream, cannot be worth any serious effort.

Mixed up confusion

2010-11-27T02:55:00.003+11:00

As you've probably heard, Sarah Palin said something ridiculous on Glenn Beck's radio show. When asked about the recent troubles between the Koreas, Palin mistakenly described North Korea as an ally of the U.S. Predictably, the liberal press have accused her of being so stupid as to not even know which Korea is America's ally and which its enemy. Now, I'm not sure if any commentators really think Palin is that stupid, but it ought to be obvious that her silly comment was a simple, albeit embarrassing, slip of the tongue. I can't say it makes her look good, but it's the sort of thing that could happen to almost anyone. (Though it does seem to happen to her a lot!) The strange thing is that liberals know, or should know by now, that mocking her in this way serves only to make her more popular. Yet they continue to treat her like a fool. Why not take the woman seriously instead? The quickest way of discrediting Palin might be to treat her as if she was a serious person.

After all, what was really awful about her appearance with Glenn Beck was the combination of her glib certainty that Obama was to blame for North Korea's inexplicable attack on the South, and her inability to offer an alternative policy. And it wasn't merely a matter of not being able to suggest anything new; Palin offered no suggestions at all, and I got the distinct feeling she hadn't thought about the conflict at all except as a means with which to attack the President.

"You buy more fried chicken than ANYONE ELSE and we LOVE YOU!"

2010-11-25T23:30:00.007+11:00

Johann Hari on the moment he knew he was a "fat bastard", and what he did to change. And yes, there are pictures.

Now, I'm not sure Johann actually ate at this Tennessee Fried Chicken, but from reading his article it seems this is the sort of restaurant he frequented. With all due respect to these establishments, I have to say they do look more than a little dodgy. Anyway, Hari's piece is really very funny.

Life in paradise

2010-11-16T16:14:00.001+11:00

Increasingly, I've noticed that conservatives in this country are trying to play poor Australians off against asylum seekers, claiming that funds which would otherwise go to the poor are being swallowed up by foreign 'queue jumpers' who come here by boat. The latest attempt to do this comes in the form of a complaint that child asylum seekers, whom we lock up in detention centres, have been given six computers to share. This is held to be obscene because "many Australians can't afford computers". Likewise, it's often claimed that the housing shortage is due to refugees, and that poor Australians sleep on the streets while successful asylum seekers live in comfortable homes. That's not even close to being true (and where are these families living on the streets?)

There is something especially vile in playing the poor off against each other.

Meanwhile, an Iraqi asylum seeker committed suicide in his cell last night. Yeah, these people truly are living a life of luxury in Australia.

Leonard Cohen's dream

2010-11-15T05:31:00.001+11:00

"I started this tour three years ago, when I was 73, just a crazy kid with a dream . . . " Leonard Cohen to his Sydney audience the other night. I haven't been to one of his concerts, but people who have tell me that many of the audience are in tears throughout the show. I've never quite been able to get into Cohen, but he seems like a charming person all the same.

National Dress

2010-11-11T01:36:00.006+11:00

The South Koreans have celebrated the coming G20 meeting by creating dolls of the leaders of participating nations, each one in national dress. But our poor PM Julia Gillard looks awfully Austrian for an Aussie.

There's an old story that when Edwin Flack (who is honoured with a suspiciously small statue just down the road from me) won Australia's first Olympic gold medal at the 1896 games, newspapers around the world celebrated Austria's success. Australia was not a nation in 1896 (neither was Austria, strictly speaking) so the confusion was understandable, but you would think that 109 years after federation South Koreans would be able to tell the difference between the two countries.

Anyway, the Koreans say they're going to rectify the situation and change Julia's outfit. God only knows what they'll come up with this time. I just hope it won't look like this. For all her faults, Ms Gillard still deserves better than that!

What kind of sport is this?

2010-11-09T03:23:00.003+11:00

Pakistan wicketkeeper Zulqarnain Haider has disappeared, apparently fearing for his life after scoring the runs which won Pakistan a game they had agreed to lose. He was last seen leaving the team hotel in Dubai (cricket has not been played in Pakistan since the Sri Lankan bus was attacked by terrorists.)

Despite the appalling corruption plaguing cricket in that country, the ICC will allow Pakistan to continue playing international cricket. This is the right thing to do, politically speaking, you see. Just as it was right to prevent John Howard becoming deputy leader of the ICC because, as Australian PM, he spoke out against Robert Mugabe. There has never been more money in cricket than there is today -- and it's killing the sport.

Humanism again

2010-11-09T01:00:00.000+11:00

By chance I noticed this piece which argues against Humanism. Why, Mary Midgley asks, should we worship ourselves?

And here is Professor Norm Geras' take on the debate.

Equality in school

2010-11-07T21:40:00.004+11:00

The Humanist Society should not grieve too much at having their proposal, which would have seen Humanism being taught in schools as an alternative to religion, rejected by the Victorian Labor government. It was, in fact, a good proposal. Today, Australian schools teach the Christian Scriptures in special religious classes. Introducing humanism into the classroom would have at least provided some kind of balance -- and after all our schools are supposed to be 'secular' places.

But as I say, the Humanist Society should not feel too disappointed. It doesn't appear that religion classes are having any significant impact on schoolchildren, which appear to leave kids with, at best, an indifferent attitude towards Christianity. A more interesting question is whether Christianity should receive more class time than other religions. Even a permanently aggrieved atheist (like me) can mount an argument in favour of this proposition, Christianity being the most popular religion in Australia and having played a major role in shaping Western civilisation. But for some reason I want to laugh whenever I read or hear of Australia being described as a "Christian nation". The most realistic and, in a way poignant, description of the attitude of Australians toward religion that I have heard, was when it was described as a "quiet hope". There is something dignified about that, and worthy of understanding and respect.

But there is something in this episode the Humanist Society ought to worry about: the new power of the Christian right has been revealed. They -- a tiny minority -- managed to prevent the teaching of Humanism in Victorian schools. Having won this victory, it is unlikely they will stop there.

Blake's London or Blake's America?

2010-11-04T01:05:00.006+11:00

"London" is my very favourite of Blake's poems. Part of its power, says Mark Edmundson of the University of Virginia, is that it describes not only the London of Blake's day but ourselves and our time. That's not to say that "London" describes every city in every time, but that there is something about it, writes Edmundson, that speaks to our time in particular:

Blake suggests that if you want to understand the moral state of a country, you had better check first and see how it deals with its children. Does it treat them with loving kindness, or does it exploit them? Does it look down upon them from the perspective of the greedy and frightened Selfhood, or regard them with the generosity of the enlightened Soul? Blake's verdict on his own nation is not hard to discern. Can our own nation claim to be doing better?

Amid blazing wealth, great numbers of American children do not get enough to eat. Perhaps they are not starving, but they are hungry. The food they do get is overprocessed junk, which will in time make them sick. They live in horrible dwellings, both in the country and in the city. They go to bad schools, where there are few or no books, and where the teachers are overworked and overwhelmed. Many American children are as trapped in their own lives as the poor chimney sweeps were trapped in theirs. There is simply no better place for them to go.

This is pretty melodramatic stuff, though I don't doubt there is some truth in it. But what annoys me is this: I don't think we always need to be making literature 'relevant' in order to appreciate it. In this case the poetry itself should always come first. It is relevant if it pleases you. Anyway, London itself, when I visited, did not resemble the city of Blake's poem. But then I was, as I was later informed, visiting some of the nicer parts.

Playing away... at home

2010-11-03T16:17:00.005+11:00

Today Australia play Sri Lanka in a one-day game at the MCG. There are about 10,000 spectators at the ground, an extremely small crowd, and almost all of them are Sri Lankan. Probably 90% of them. I think we can declare one-day cricket dead in this country. About the only way you can get Australians to attend cricket these days is if there's an Ashes series on. But I get the feeling this won't be a pleasant England vs Australia series from an Aussie perspective.

Of course, it's hard to feel too bad about the death of the one-day game. This form of cricket is probably the most corrupt sport on the planet right now.

"Americain"

2010-11-02T15:16:00.006+11:00

The Melbourne Cup was won by a horse born in America, trained in France, and owned by Australians: Americain. Our race certainly has become very international (it only took 150 years!) The French jockey wore silks which featured both the American and French flags, and gave a very gracious speech thanking the 120,000 who stood in the rain to watch him win.

I suppose little has changed since Mark Twain visited Melbourne and attended the cup in 1895. Twain later wrote of the event,

They come a hundred thousand strong, as all the best authorities say, and they pack the spacious grounds and grandstands and make a spectacle such as is never seen in Australasia elsewhere.

The grandstands make a brilliant and wonderful spectacle, a delirium of colour, a vision of beauty. The champagne flows, everybody is vivacious, excited, happy; everybody bets ...

Cup Day is supreme it has no rival. I can call to mind no specialized annual day, in any country, which can be named by that large name—Supreme. I can call to mind no specialized annual day, in any country, whose approach fires the whole land with a conflagration of conversation and preparation and anticipation and jubilation. No day save this one; but this one does it.

This was all far nicer than last year, when Mourilyan, a horse owned by the murderous Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, was allowed to run. I did not watch.

The conservative intellectual

2010-11-02T01:30:00.005+11:00

Orwell writes in his famous essay, "The Lion and the Unicorn", that the last British right-wing intellectual was T.E. Lawrence. From about 1930 onwards, according to Orwell, all intellectuals have been leftists. This was necessary and natural, because "If you had the kind of brain that could understand the poems of T. S. Eliot or the theories of Karl Marx, the higher-ups would see to it that you were kept out of any important job."

In America it remains, I think, possible to be a conservative and an intellectual, but in the age of Glenn Beck and the tea party, this is becoming ever more difficult. The conservative movement of today makes a virtue of ignorance and stupidity, as if being naive or cretinous makes a person a solid citizen. As such, it's hard to imagine the American right producing another writer like H.L. Mencken (there's an interesting article about him here).

Closer to Mencken are, I think, the marchers at Sunday's "Rally to restore sanity" in Washington, who identified themselves self-consciously as intelligent and educated people, and who showed up with humorous and ironic signs mocking the tea party movement as stupid, reactionary and ultimately comical. Interestingly, it wasn't so much the political positions the Tea Party take that was the target of the marchers' ire and humour, but their absolutism and willful imbecility. Mencken would have appreciated that, if nothing else about the rally. (And there was little else he would appreciate about it -- it was a bizarre and non-political parody of a rally).

Finally, you've got to wonder whether conservative thinkers in the U.S. are having second thoughts about the direction the movement has taken. It's starting to look as if they are.

Hizb ut-Tahrir and the ABC

2010-10-29T01:22:00.010+11:00

gladiolus
Originally uploaded by N G M

I was disturbed, but not entirely surprised, to find that the Australian Broadcasting Corporation has published an article by Uthman Badar, the media representative of the extremist Hizb ut-Tahrir Islamist group. The author is typical of the group; an intelligent person and an able writer who poses as a voice of reason and moderation in a violent and crazy world.

In the article promoted by the ABC, Badar calmly insists that Australia abandon its alliance with the United States and pursue a wholly independent foreign policy. Australia has chosen, he says, to be America's slave. Common sense tells us, he continues, that the United States is a declining and morally debased power; what then could Australia possibly gain from its alliance with this once great nation? And yet, he says, there is little debate in Australia on this issue at all, and what there is could hardly be called robust. But perhaps, he concludes, the weak and superficial debate in the political class might yet spread to other sectors of society. Then, he says, and only then might the tough questions about Afghanistan and the U.S. alliance be asked and sanity prevail.

Badar is an articulate and concise writer, but he is not the sensible man he pretends to be in this article. He is, in fact, an entirely unreasonable and immoderate person. He is the mouthpiece for an organisation which is on record praising the Taliban, calling Australian soldiers "terrorists", insisting on the segregation of the sexes, defending the Niqab, calling for the entire world to be ruled by a Caliphate, claiming that Muslims in the United States live under a dictatorship, referring to freedom of speech as a "colonial tool" and a "western concept which contradicts Islam", agitating for the abolition of democratic rule, and so on. And while Hizb ut-Tahrir do not explicitly, or at least as far as I know, advocate violence, their spokesmen have a history of defending and excusing the violent actions of others. This is the group whose spokesman is given a platform by the ABC.

If they ABC wants to air a Muslim view on the Afghan war they could do a lot better than publish this meretricious trash, which insults the ABC's readership, the vast majority of Muslims (who once again suffer by having an extremist chosen by white leftists to speak for them) and the Australian taxpayer who paid for it to be published.

Halloween

2010-10-28T22:56:00.003+11:00

Every year around this time you have to listen to tiresome idiots going on and on about how Halloween is an American invention which shouldn't be celebrated here. Why, they say, it's an offense to Australia's rich culture! We don't need American holidays when we've got plenty of our own.

Well, one man speaks out in favour of bringing Halloween to Australia. After all, says John Birmingham, it's fun and kids like it. I take it this is the same John Birmingham who wrote the comic novel, "He died with a falafel in his hand". Either way, he makes a fair point.

But I wonder if we could do an Aussie version of Halloween. Maybe kids could dress up like Ned Kelly and his gang and terrorise the neighbourhood. Now that I think about it, there are plenty of scary Australians to dress up as. Dennis Lillee scared the hell out of batsmen in the 70s, as did Merv Hughes in the 80s (and his giant mustache was enough to make children cry). And David Boon drank 52 cans of beer on the flight from Sydney to London, which is a truly disturbing amount of alcohol. Of course, that's to speak only of cricketers. Yes, Halloween could have a big future in this country.

The quickest way to end a war

2010-10-20T00:05:00.001+11:00

The Americans are not directly negotiating with the Taliban, but they may as well be. The Obama administration's Afghanistan policy is, as far as I can tell, something like the following: The U.S. and her allies pound the Taliban with bombs until, weakened, they agree to negotiate a peace settlement with the Karzai government. That done, the U.S. hands the Taliban some measure of power and political legitimacy and leaves. I can see (at least) two problems with this policy. First, the Taliban know about this strategy and can simply hold out until the U.S. gives up pounding enemy positions and, weary of war, leaves Afghanistan in defeat. Second, even if a peace settlement can be negotiated, the Taliban may tear up the agreement the moment the Americans leave and resume their war on the Afghan government, safely assuming the U.S. would be unlikely to invade again in order to protect their weak, undemocratic and corrupt ally, the Karzai regime

The quickest way to end a war is to lose it, but the United States and her allies -- that includes us -- have decided to lose slowly rather than quickly, as if this will ensure that we will all be able to leave with 'dignity'. But once western troops are gone and the Taliban are controlling large sections of Afghanistan, with all the evil and horror that that naturally entails, then it will be impossible to speak of our 'dignified' exit. We will only be able to speak of our appalling betrayal of our friends and allies in Afghanistan, to whom we made promises, and of a defeat which will be remembered for a very, very long time.

Poetry makes nothing happen

2010-10-19T17:02:00.000+11:00

From a talk and question and answer session given by Syrian born Arabic poet Adonis:

Just where does poetry fit into all this, one young woman asked a little skeptically, adding: “Isn’t poetry a pretentious, elitist form, not really a force for change?”

“Poetry cannot change society,” Adonis said. “Poetry can only change the notion of relationships between things. Culture cannot change without a change in institutions.” But to the criticism that poetry was an insufficiently popular form he replied: “Poetry that reaches all the people is essentially superficial. Real poetry requires effort because it requires the reader to become, like the poet, a creator. Reading is not reception.” He smiled and added, “I suggest you change your relationship to poetry and art in general."

If there's one thing I can't stand it's the way certain people, populist conservatives and idiot pseudo-Marxists alike, throw around the word "elitist". It joins "fascist" as an empty and almost meaningless insult.

Melbourne laneway

2010-10-19T01:33:00.002+11:00

Melbourne laneway
Originally uploaded by N G M

Blogging has been very light recently. I hope to change that soon. Till then, here's a picture of a gritty Melbourne laneway.

I never noticed how gritty this place can be until returning after a visit to Sydney. Sydney Harbour on a clear day is a sparkling and beautiful place. I remember standing on the shore, by the opera house, and looking out across the water as the light bounced off the waves. All around were beige and sandstone coloured buildings, and everything was so lovely I could hardly believe my eyes. When I came back to Melbourne it was dark and cold, and the place looked almost monochrome -- just like in this picture. Still, the city has its charms.

National Anthems

2010-10-15T01:14:00.000+11:00

I'm watching the closing ceremony of the Commonwealth Games. The last games were here in Melbourne, but I can't remember what our closing ceremony was like. The Indian ceremony has been rather unusual and therefore somewhat memorable; right now there are a half dozen Indian pipe bands playing at once. Earlier a curious recording of the Indian national anthem was played. This same recording I have heard several times over the past couple of weeks, and each time I've noticed that it sounds like it was recorded some time in the 1930s, and on substandard equipment.

Of course, I've heard many national anthems during the games, some better than others. The New Zealand anthem, for example, seems to have been recorded by a 1980s synth-pop group using Casio keyboards, and does not, so far as I can tell, contain anything that could legitimately be claimed as a tune. Our own Australian national anthem sounds somewhat improved without the laughably uninspiring words being sung. "Our home is girt by sea", one line famously goes. Well, that much is certainly true.

England has designated Jerusalem as their national anthem for these games, but each time I hear it I miss Blake's extraordinary words. It's also an improvement over the somewhat dreary God save the Queen. And Jerusalem, as much as the pipe bands, reminds me of my own school days back in the early 90s, when we sang it far more often than we sang our own anthem.

Kim Jong-un and I

2010-09-29T01:44:00.005+10:00

The politics of North Korea are ever mysterious, but it now seems clear that Kim Jong-un, the son of North Korea's "Dear Leader" Kim Jong-il, is being groomed to take control of the enigmatic state upon the death of his father. Kim Jong-un got the job by default; the eldest Kim boy was considered too effeminate, while the middle child is said to be a complete and utter idiot. Of course, little is known about the heir apparent, beyond the fact that while in high school in Switzerland he enjoyed the films of Jean-Claude Van Damme and Jackie Chan, skiing and basketball, and idolised Michael Jordan. The press is having a bit of fun with these facts, but perhaps it's unfair to judge Kim on his teenage taste.

Interestingly enough, Kim Jong-un and I are about the same age, and similarly I remember enjoying a couple of Jackie Chan's 1980s era Hong Kong films as a teenager. And Van Damme's idiotic movie "Hard Target" has its moments.... well, admittedly not many moments, but its badness is compelling and occasionally hilarious. And I loved David Lynch's work, in particular his debut feature, Eraserhead, and his Twin Peaks series. Now, were I a citizen of North Korea I would not be particularly enamored with the idea of a David Lynch devotee exercising complete control over the state. But then, who in North Korea would have even heard of David Lynch, let alone seen one of his films?