We live in the best of times yet the pressure to ignore what we have in favour of what we are told we should have grows inexorably stronger every day.
Recently I have involved myself in a small exercise of dissent. An old run down building stands on a block of land highly prized by the developer for its commercial potential. The building houses a very useful community hall and is also a piece of local history.
The legitimate arguments of heritage and community have failed to move anyone who might intervene. It’s a depressing outcome all the more so because its so predictable.
Which brings me to xkcd and the things we want. Some people want a roof over their heads and enough to eat. Some people want a new car and a big screen tv for their loungeroom. Some people want to be rich…but what we all really want is to be happy.
We can be happy, but it probably means letting go of a lot of other stuff, stuff we have been conditioned to think we must have in order to be happy. Material stuff, behavioural stuff, imaginary stuff. Being happy is up to us, we don’t get too many chances and it would be a shame to go through life in a state of un-happiness.
Just a thought.
Posted 12 hours, 29 minutes ago at 10:37 pm. Add a comment
The cult of less? Predicated on owning two eBook devices and a laptop with no means of personal transport. Sounds perfect for New York, a place of 20 million people where the streets are too small to fit everyone at once and apartments extend to the height of small mountains.
Is this the face of life in the 21st century, dependent on the ubiquitous internet and a neverending cycle of technology consumption for HAPPINESS?
When do the red and blue pills start appearing?
I mean look at this guy, he jets around the world for his holidays, buys a new computer every year or two and his life at 23 is complete.
DJ’s living on couches sounds very bohemian but try telling that to small army of unemployed homeless people everywhere in the world. The values implicit in this “story” are mind boggling.
Seemingly disconnected, these far-flung disasters are reviving the question of whether global warming is causing more weather extremes.The collective answer of the scientific community can be boiled down to a single word: probably.
Rodney Tiffen writes on the last of three inquiries into the so-called Climategate emails however in his conclusion that the media created damage to popular support for action on carbon he fails to state the obvious question. Why?
Why did the mainstream media give so much credence and coverage to what was transparently a sensationalist stunt with the obvious purpose of derailing the Copenhagen summit?
A simple explanation may well be that the mainstream media, particularly the populist press were keen to reinforce their self importance in the minds of the public by “breaking” significant news. Since their reputation for accuracy is highly questionable anyway, truth was never really a consideration. They simply exploited the big story to sell their product.
While this simple and more conventional argument has some logic to it, there would seem to be a more sinister aspect to the source and motivation of some of the more outspoken mouthpieces for the denialist camp. Clearly they were politically motivated in their desire to undermine the science on climate change and furthermore they were enabled in that process by their position. The obvious objective was always to first undermine any consensus at Copenhagan with a second even more desirable objective to raise doubt in the minds of the public.
Have the reporters, journalists and editors responsible for spreading such a blatant piece of propaganda publicly admitted their wrong-doing and have they been summarily dismissed from their offices? No.
What’s more they wont be because they did exactly what they were supposed to do and did an excellent job of it. Strangely for an industry whose purpose is to manufacture consent, for once the industry decided to undermine popular belief in something it had helped create. It defies belief that such a course of action was merely the work of a handful of independent operators.
Three months after the explosion and fire that killed 11 workers and released millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico BP seems to have finnally manged to cap the well.
Kent Wells (unfortunate name) announced rather stupidly that
“I am very excited that there’s no oil in the Gulf of Mexico,”
I am sure he meant there would be no new oil leaking from the site of Deepwater Horizon since it is extremely unlikely that all the oil that has leaked into the Gulf since April 20 has magically disappeared. Of course BP and the rest of the oil industry will be hoping that the cap will end public debate on the wisdom of offshore drilling and that the business of raping the world can continue in due course. As for the environmental consequences of 100 million gallons plus of crude oil leaked into the ocean, I am sure we will get bombarded with reassuring messages of how it isn’t really as bad as we might have imagined…
David Mann’s article identifies the poverty of thinking in Gillard’s recent announcement of refugees arriving by boat. He points out that the so-called regional framework is hollow rhetoric and the “new” policy is remarkable similar to Howard’s infamous Pacific solution.
It is clear that Gillard’s policy is an appeal to voters worried about the prospect of a rising tide of refugees arriving by boat yet it seems odd that this article and the debate generally ignores a couple of salient realities which, if acknowledged, have broader implications for public policy.
Obviously the boats arriving on our northern border carry people hopeful of a better life. Who can blame them? Australia’s wealth and size compare very favourably to anywhere else in the world. Strangely we admit this fact in the glossy advertising campaigns designed to lure tourists here but somehow fail to connect the advertised image with how that might appeal to potential refugees.
If Australia wasn’t such a great place then tourism campaigns like this would never see the light of day.
Nor would refugees desperate for a better life, spend their life savings to procure passage with parasitic people smugglers.
The debate needs to move forward. We need to acknowledge the wealth and appeal of Australia. We also need to acknowledge the reality of the world north of Darwin. Asia is the most populated landmass in the world and one beset by a host of regional conflicts. The people who want to escape this genuinely want to have a better life for themselves and for their families.
The current political policy is deliberately aimed at discouraging such immigrants by making the prospect of settlement in Australia difficult and uncertain. While it might work in the short term it ignores the medium and longer term where the pressures on those people to our north will increase. India, for example is forecast to overtake China as the most populous nation. Climate change has yet to significantly impact the ecologies of Asia but if the worst case scenarios are right then the potential for refugees is unimaginable.
There is a eerie sense of deja vu about this debate. As was the case twenty years ago when Australia could have embarked on an aggressive program to harness its abundant solar energy potential and now reap the much reduced carbon pollution benefit (not to mention developing an export industry and creating a sustainable energy economy), today’s debate on immigration completely ignores the distinct possibility that Australia may well be overrun by immigrants in the medium to long term.
It seems sensible to deal with the minuscule number of refugees who peacefully want to build a better life here in Australia in a humane and friendly manner. How we treat our new migrants will inculcate them with values of what it is to be Australian and in so doing create a stronger and more robust Australia. Unfortunately for the Gillards and Abbotts of this world, the rest of the world, and especially our northern neighbours, may well be forced to ignore the niceties of international conventions. Short of arming the thousands of kilometres that is our northern frontier we need to admit this obvious fact into our domestic debates.
Gillard and her supporters are actually doing the long term interests of Australia a massive disservice by focussing on punitive short term solutions. Furthermore they are doing so because their long term vision is bereft of any considerations of where such short sighted policies may take us. As is the case with coal and green power where today’s utter dependence on fossil fuel is locked in thus producing a lifestyle and an economy that perpetuates unhappiness and inequality, so to the short term politics of immigration ignores the broader picture and long term view.
But then that’s what passes for politics in this country.
ABC management, driven mostly by former Liberal Party staffer and businessman Mark Scott seems hell bent on imposing a technocratic regime on the public broadcaster. In many ways this amounts to privatisation by stealth and Scott’s successes are many and far reaching.
While management has been able to argue that most of its decisions are in the best interests of the ABC it is debatable whether or not they are in the best interests of Australians.
While the ABC service has long relied on technology provided by third parties, dating back to its early dependence on Telecom for signal distribution, the current outsourcing and partnership arrangements do raise a question regarding what is a public broadcaster. Even the term “broadcaster” is questionable as more ABC content is distributed in the non-broadcast space.
A short list of outsourcing and partnerships reveals that the core of the ABC’s technical infrastructure is now captive to commercial operators. These include a lucrative deal with Maquarie Group’s Broadcast Australia for transmission services, a partnership with the privately owned WIN network for centralised TV presentation and an almost exclusive deal with Microsoft Australia for server and desktop solutions.
Fundamentally these arrangements undermine the independent nature of the public broadcaster. However a direct consequence of these outsourcing and partnership deals is to transfer significant amounts of the ABC’s annual budget to a small number of favoured private businesses. This in turn raises questions regarding the decision making and motivations of those dispensing such favours.
Furthermore the impetus for a highly technically centralised ABC based in Sydney is counter to an earlier philosophy of a regionalised ABC and by its very nature one more susceptible to spectacular failure as demonstrated by the new Media Hub’s effort on the recent night of the ALP’s long knives.
Mark Scott has long been at pains to paint this scenario in glowing terms as one that will transform the ABC into a 21st century media powerhouse yet his direct interference with editorial policies combined with decisions which make the ABC captive to private industry players and a wholesale attack on the internal culture of the ABC suggests that your ABC is so only in name and slogan.
Even more worrying is the broader implication of a elitist ABC managed in such a way that bestows as much money as possible into the coffers of private interests while at the same time restricting the actual content of public information in the interests of avoiding contentious or dissenting opinions. The one voice that speaks with authority that is quietly milking the public public purse for the benefit of mates in business. The new ABC model is classic partnership of government and big business combining to manufacture consent, paid for by the very people it supposedly serves.
Michelle Grattan in her analysis of Gillard’s lurch to the right has concluded that the left wing of the ALP is dead.
Interestingly, Gillard has got away with her asylum backflip within Labor Party ranks. Partly, it is that she is new; also, the election is so close. But the quietness shows as well that the left within the ALP, traditionally exercised about these things, is effectively dead
With Faulkner retiring to the backbench and Tanner leaving politics completely Grattan’s observation has some credence. Any claim that Gillard herself is a closet red is laughable. Some might say the ALP and its supporters have finally accepted economic realities, others might observe that the ALP has abandoned the fight to change the economic conditions that enslave the vast majority. I think regardless of the motivation, Grattan’s conclusion is correct.
Union Climate Connectors joined volunteers from The Climate Project and the Australian Youth Climate Coalition in a day of direct democracy. We met politicians at Parliament House to tell them, “Get on with it! The hundreds of thousands of Australians we represent and connect with want you to act on climate change.”
I mean look at this guy, he jets around the world for his holidays, buys a new computer every year or two and his life at 23 is complete.
Three months after the explosion and fire that killed 11 workers and released millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico BP seems to have finnally manged to cap the well. 
