Politics

Passing Bull 99 – When Rupert nods, Turnbull folds 

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

The sad decline in Bill Leak was evident to all but the willfully blind.  Now the corrupt and gruesome exploitation of him in death will lead to all of his family and friends being reminded of his contributions to conflict between peoples of different colour and faith for the foreseeable future.

The people at the Murdoch press should be ashamed of themselves.  Those at Sky are hardly any better.  One of Bolt’s poodles, an otherwise affable man named Paul Murray, has swallowed the party line in whole, and hurtles to the periphery of any discussion at the speed of light, banging on about freedom and libertarians.

I think I was in Cambridge when that Four Corners story on Northern Territory black youth was aired.  When I got back, I forced myself to watch it.  It was utterly revolting. It reminded me of those poor GI’s who had to go into the death camps.  These were crimes against humanity.  Only dementia could stop you seeing that. Then I had to listen to ageing lawyers of a reactionary bent saying that this was an ABC beat-up!  Then a senior prosecutor said that these kids had serious form.  The wonder was that we had not turned them into serial killers.

Then The Australian published that Leak cartoon that would have warmed Goebbels’ heart. It is inconceivable that a quality newspaper such as The Times or  The Wall Street Journal would have published such a frightful piece.  Their inhibition would not have come from any law, but from simple human decency or courtesy, and a sense of professional responsibility.

Then our PM said the silliest thing he has ever said.  ‘Bill Leak isn’t a racist.  He’s Australian.’  That was a prize-winning, self-contradicting non sequitur.

But, worse, Turnbull’s fawning over Leak and others at The Australian points up the appallingly incestuous relations between some of our politicians and some of our press.  They are supposed to be watching the bastards, not schmoozing with them.  Well, at least as I understand it, the PM refuses to talk to people like Jones or Bolt.

And now the Prime Minister has caved in completely to Murdoch and his awful minions.  These people are seeking to relax the law against racial discrimination.  By ineluctable definition, they want the right or the freedom to insult and offend other people on the ground of their race.  What sane or decent person wants to do that?  What answer do they give me when I ask why I or any Muslim, Jew or blackfella should give up my legal rights against Rupert Murdoch when he sets out to hurt me – or a Muslim, Jew or blackfella – in a way that is dealt with by the law that these people want to do away with?

This issue means nothing at all to more than nine of ten Australians.  It should mean nothing to government that has made such a mess of energy, house prices, and marriage equality.  The only reason it does is because Turnbull keeps caving in to the troglodytes – who are willfully thick.  This government – which must surely be punished by the electorate – ineffably misses the point by going backwards on every issue it confronts.  It now abuses people in business for exercising their right of free speech to suggest that the government might govern by making a law to resolve one issue that they are holding back on – like the boy with his finger in the dyke. Could you believe it – a government actually governing? And now, it also wants to pump water back up hill – while the P M mouths inanities straight out of the Little Red Book of Mao Zedong.

This government is hopelessly out of date and it deserves to get a long sentence in opposition.  And I say that as someone who believes that Bill Shorten is far, far worse than Turnbull – he stands for nothing at all.  (For sheer insincerity, he is matched only by Hillary Clinton.)  But at least I am assured by my local member that the Labor Party stands firm against this weakness on hate speech of the government.

While I’m on the ALP, they have serious form for colluding with the press against us, the people.  The press knows its standing with the Australian people.  Juries terrify them. So Murdoch and the others got all the state governments in 2004, all I think ALP, to take damages for defamation away from the jury and to cap them.  All of the other changes to the law were pro press and against us.

And some of the bastards in the press have the gall still to complain about defamation laws.  State Labor governments denied us a vital constitutional right – to sit on a jury in judgment for damages on the press and to allow the weak to stand up against the powerful.  Now they want a federal Liberal government to help the powerful to run over the weak.

There are, as it seems to me, two classes of people in favour of the relaxation of laws on racism.  (I put to one side those academics that have never set foot in a courtroom.)  You have the ghastly paid commentariat who are an affront to humanity and who will, like Trump, say the first thing that comes into their heads just to gain attention and earn a dollar, and you have those poor brain-damaged recorded messengers from the IPA that may well believe their own nonsense, but who are crackers.

And for the umpteenth time, can they stop this lying about freedom of speech – or that code name for fascism, libertarianism?  To say that laws against hate speech are laws against freedom of speech tells us an obvious and inconsequential truth.  So do the laws against dueling and fraud; road traffic laws impede our freedom of movement; gun laws impair our freedom to shoot or to play a certain kind of sport.  And so it goes.  You don’t answer any questions about a law by saying that it affects our freedom.  You merely raise the question. All laws affect freedom, and laws against certain forms of speech – such as laws about deceit, espionage, and libel – are precisely meant to curtail speech.

The refusal of the Murdoch press to publish this simple truth shows their dishonesty.  It is worse than bullshit.  It is fraud.

I implore people, especially lawyers, to condemn the Prime Minister and this government for their cowardice and their complicity in harming race relations in a country that already has a bad name for them, and to boycott all manifestations of the Murdoch press.

Yes, I recognise that this is a rant, but now and again a rant is the only thing that will do.  If we have learned anything from history, it is that unless you take stand on some moral issues – and we are talking here of a moral issue – we are on the road to perdition.  Hitler also ranted.  The problem was that not enough Germans ranted back.

Confucius says

The master said, ‘The Gentleman gets through to what is up above; the small man gets through to what is down below.’

Analects, 14.23

Passing Bull 98 –   Gibberish and worse about death

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

We have looked before at the gibberish of Jennifer Oriel.  On 13 March, she and The Australian ranted themselves to new depths.  She said this.

On Friday, March 10, 2017, Australian painter, cartoonist and avantgarde freethinker Bill Leak died of a suspected heart attack. He was 61 years old.

In the two years before his death, jihadists and the political establishment inflicted horrific stress on him because he refused to surrender his creative genius and free mind to the colourless, artless overlords of political correctness.

In 2015, Leak was forced to flee into a safe house with his family after jihadists threatened to kill him. His thought crime was drawing a cartoon of Mohammed in the wake of militant Islamists slaughtering cartoonists at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris.

In 2016, Leak was accused under the PC censors’ favourite weapon, section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, for offending someone somewhere.

Members of a state-protected minority chose to take offence at a cartoon.

It was offensive to those offended by the truth that some men are alcoholics, some alcoholics neglect their children and some alcoholic men who neglect their children are indigenous.

In his submission to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights into Freedom of Speech in Australia, Leak said: ‘I was put through two months of incredible stress by the (Australian Human Rights) Commission’s investigation. The first complainant … didn’t have to justify anything she did. No one asked her any questions and it didn’t cost her a cent … the tortuous process (threw) my life into a state of utter chaos and it’s not over yet.

Three months after the cartoon was published, two more complaints were received and accepted by the Commission … So now, two months after being notified of the first complaint and four months after the publication of the cartoon, the possibility that I may yet be required to defend myself in court still hovers, like a dark cloud, over my life.

‘This in itself is just another part of the punishment I’ve been subjected to for daring to shine the spotlight on the truth.’

Three months later, still suffering under the immense stress inflicted by 18C backers, he died.

Section 18C is an act of violence against those who tell the truth. It is, as the slow torture of Bill Leak revealed, a totalitarian tool fashioned by bullies determined to punish creative geniuses who refuse to toe the PC party line.

It is a censor’s hammer used to bludgeon artists for thinking and speaking freely in ways that entertain truth, delight dissidents and expose PC mediocrities for their inconspicuous talent.

Since the PC class cannot compete with creative genius on merit, it seeks to destroy it.

The suggestion is, apparently, that Leak died from the stress inflicted on him.  He is, we will be told, a martyr.

Even by the standards of Rupert Murdoch, it is beneath contempt for him use the death of an employee to pursue a tawdry political objective that will make it easier for the surviving employees to offend and insult others because of their race.

What Oriel and the paper refuse to mention about the cartoon that said that aboriginal fathers were drunks who could not remember their children’s names is the following.  That cartoon was grossly offensive to a large number of white people and almost all aboriginal people.  Nevertheless, the legislation complained gave Leak a sound answer to any complaint at law.  (There is my view no answer in decency.)  At all times he had the backing of the Murdoch press and the best and most expensive lawyers in the land – as had his mate, Andrew Bolt.  He was never charged or even sued.

Are we, then, seriously to believe Leak’s whimpering about stress?  If we are, the answer during his life would have been simple.  If you don’t like the heat, don’t go near the bloody kitchen.  If you want to hand out coat-hangers, stand by for at least a comeback.  And this is in the context of a cartoon demonizing blackfellas in order to take the heat off complaints of crimes against humanity perpetrated by white people in the Northern Territory.  Leak put in what NRL thugs call a cheap shot.  ‘Don’t worry about what we whites do to black kids.  Look at what their piss-pot fathers do to them to land them in our care.’

This truly was disgraceful behaviour by an agent of the Australian press.

But the whole campaign of Murdoch and his shrill, whining minions has set a new low in Australian bullshit.  There is a daly unloading of bullshit about hate speech, the flat earth (climate change), and the ecclesiastical rejection of gay marriage by cloistered churchy men who just refuse to grow up.  They stand for the forces of funded reaction that hold back the Liberal Party and the whole nation.  They’re now terrified by the thought of a vote on gay marriage.  Who would ever trust a democrat? They should all be deeply ashamed of themselves.

And so should the Prime Minister be ashamed of himself for publicly attending their ghastly Gotterdammerung.  I did not vote for him so that he could hobnob with people who want him to cede to them the right to beat up on blackfellas and Muslims.

But, then, Mr Turnbull has something in common with the late cartoonist.  He was okay once, but then he went off, beguiled by power.

Speaking of Mr Turnbull, I sent the following letters on the third of this month.  One is the PM.  The other is to Lisa Chesters, my local member. The attached memorandum was set out in a post on 21 December, last year, Passing Bull 83.

Dear Prime Minister,

For the reasons set out in the attached document, and the following letter to my local member, I am opposed to any weakening of our hate speech laws – at the behest of Rupert Murdoch, or anyone else.
To the extent that there is any support for change in your party, it comes from people who are neither bright nor attractive.
I voted for your party at the last election.  If it even wobbles on this vital moral ground, I will certainly vote against it, and I will do all in my power to see that it gets defeated.
I know that sounds like a threat – because it is.
And, frankly, I’m of that group who thinks that it’s time you stood up to these ratbags – you do, after all, have the intellectual fire power to wipe the bloody floor with them.

Best wishes

Geoffrey Gibson

PS I now find that the prescribed form will not accept the copy memorandum that I sent to my local member.  That sad little twist says something about government in this country.  Perhaps your office can give me a reply that will enable me to pass it on – and stop wasting my time.

Dear Lisa

As a Malmsbury resident, I am writing to you as my federal member to express my deep and abiding resistance to any softening of our laws on hate speech.
I have set out a summary of my position in the attached.
For more than forty years, I have acted for and against the media, and I have formed a view of where the real power lies.  It is not with the underdog.  Andrew Bolt was a bad loser and Bill Leak is a worse winner.  The campaign by the Murdoch press is intellectually and morally bereft.  The chatter about freedom of speech is misconceived – for the reasons I have set out.
Of course we have to have laws against insulting or offending people on the ground of race – as I said, we have to have a law that allows the police to intervene where someone says in public to a man and his wife, ‘You are a coward and your wife is a black slut’ – either inside the Australian Club or outside a boozer at Alice Springs. Only a lunatic could object to that kind of law.
The Murdoch press never refers to those laws; they never mention that Leak had a defence (notwithstanding that the cartoon was an offensive effusion of a sad bigot); they forget that Bolt got rolled because he had been unprofessional; and they don’t even try to explain why they want to be free to insult or offend people on the ground of race.
I hope that you and your party stay firm on a vital moral issue.
Yours truly

Geoffrey Gibson

I got a quick, personal and fully reasoned response from Lisa Chesters, affirming her party’s rejection of the Murdoch proposals. So far, I have only a computer response from Mr Turnbull’s office.  But, then, I know he has been busy trying to save the nation from the abyss created by his moral and intellectual collapse on climate change.  And of course the Murdoch press refused point blank to publish a contrary view.

Confucius says

The Master said, ‘Claims made immodestly are difficult to live up to.’

Analects, 14.20

The Master said… ‘Banish the tunes of Cheng and keep plausible men at a distance.  The tunes of Cheng are wanton and plausible men are dangerous’.

The Nationalists

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

An occasional series on the new nationalists –  dingoes and drongos like Trump, Farage, and Bernardi – and other Oz twerps.

VIII

Hard core nationalists

It seemed for a while as if all roads from Washington led to Moscow.  The level of contact between Trump’s best men and Russia, and their dishonest denials of that contact, caused some, including David Brooks of The New York Times, to say that it was imperative that Trump produced his tax returns to show where he gets his funding from.  That proposition of course assumes that the tax returns are honest – which is highly unlikely.

But what decent bank would want to invest in Donald Trump?  We know the following.  Trump is a compulsive liar.  His failures and bankruptcies are such that he never pays tax.  Having said that he would fight a fraud claim to the death, he handed over $25,000,000 to settle it.  No decent lawyer would let him near a witness box.  He is unrestrainedly impulsive and the most blackmailable person on the planet.  He is fundamentally stupid and he doesn’t know it.  No sane man would want to dine with him and no sane woman would want to be left in the same room with him.  He looks like a heart attack waiting to happen.  He attracts the worst possible people into his feudal circle.  What decent bank would want to do business with Donald Trump?  Is it money, doubtless black, that binds Trump so firmly to the Russians?

Trump has of course lied about all this.  He says that he has no business with the Russians.  Before he met Putin, he gushed in his schoolgirl way about whether Putin might become his best friend.  He said later that ‘I spoke indirectly and directly with President Putin who could not have been nicer.’  At the Miss Universe contest in Moscow, he said that ‘I do have a relationship and I can tell you that he’s very interested in what we’re doing here today.’  During the campaign, he said that ‘I never met Putin.  I don’t know who Putin is.’  In 2008 Donald Trump Jr said that ‘Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.’

Against that, one measure of the success of President Obama is the extent of Putin’s loathing of him.

The nationalist cause in Australia took a hit on the weekend with the failure of Hanson in Western Australia.  Sensible politicians appear now to be moving to a consensus to give her time and space to show her emptiness and nastiness.

The same symptoms are about to be tested in Holland, France and Germany.  The hope is that the frightful example of the United States will put people off nationalism in Europe.

They might also look at the two most powerful nationalists on the borders of Europe – Putin and Erdogan.  Neither Russia nor Turkey has ever been decently governed – at least in the way that we understand what decent government is.  (As it happens, in each nation the association of the state with religion was largely responsible for that failure.)  Both leaders are ruthless autocrats.  Putin is just a killer.  Thirty journalists have been murdered in Russia in the last ten years.  Putin controls Russian television to such an extent that Fox News (the U S state owned TV) looks almost professional.  This manipulation makes for popularity ratings for Putin that Trump both admires and envies.

We are coming to grips with the fact that Trump apparently spends a lot of his spare time monitoring the TV to see how they are treating him.  There is every chance that he has never read a book in the last ten years, if ever.  If ever he goes out of the headlines, it is time to get ready for the next eruption.

But Erdogan looks to be authentically evil.  He makes a calculated appeal to the masses, and his indifference to truth matches that of Trump and Putin.  He is the most overtly Caesarist leader I have ever seen, and it is as well that his nation is not stronger.  Turkey is a painful reminder that we cannot find one Muslim nation that is decently governed.

In the meantime, it looks like the British Government will do its best to combat populism by denying the Scots the right to speak up on their sovereignty, while at the same time doing what they think is their part in supporting populism by denying the British Parliament the right to decide on the ultimate issue of British sovereignty.  Mrs May at times sounds disturbingly like a geography teacher.

Finally, do you remember Trump’s outrage over the judicial restraint of his Muslim ban?  It’s all gone.  He ran up the white flag.  The new order replaces the first.  He has abandoned his appeal, and he is paying the costs of the parties he abused.  Can you imagine the tantrums his aides had to endure to get this concession?  While poor Sean Spicer edges closer to oblivion.

It is I suppose something of a comfort to see that preposterous bullshit is not ours alone.

Passing Bull 97 – The complete indifference to truth

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

The book that Chris Wallace-Crabbe and I are writing is presently called Language, Meaning and Truth; Alternative Facts, False News, and the Indifference to Truth.  You will be aware of the events that have prompted the sub-title.  The phrase ‘indifference to truth’ was invoked by John Stuart Mill, and by Professor Frankfurt in his little book On bullshit.  He said:

It is just this lack of a connection to a concern with truth – this indifference to how things really are – that I regard as of the essence of bullshit … Bullshit is unavoidable wherever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.  The essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony.

The New Yorker quoted a Russian as saying that the Kremlin has decided that state media was ‘overly fawning in their attitude to Trump, that all this toasting and champagne drinking made us look silly, and so let’s forget about Trump for some time, lowering expectations as necessary, and then reinvent his image according to new realities.’

Well, we expect that from Russia and its state media.  That country has never been decently governed.  But we don’t expect it from America – at least not as brazenly as it is shown in Russia.

The complete indifference to truth of the present White House is revealed in the following extract from the WSJ.

Mr. Trump over the weekend tweeted that former President Barack Obama had tapped his phones at Trump Tower, where he lived and worked during the presidential campaign— an extraordinary claim for which the current president offered no proof. A president can’t legally order a wiretap, and Mr. Obama’s office flatly denied the allegation.

In an interview with Fox News on Monday, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway was asked why Mr. Trump believed his phone had been tapped. ‘He’s the president of the United States,’ she responded. ‘He has information and intelligence that the rest of us do not, and that’s the way it should be for presidents.’

In a separate interview with ABC, asked what evidence the president had to back up his claim, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said: ‘He may have access to documents that I don’t know about.’

On Sunday morning, White House press secretary Sean Spicer in a statement said the president was calling for congressional intelligence committees to investigate the matter, and said: Neither the White House nor the President will comment further until such oversight is conducted.

 

Do Americans understand just how demeaning and degrading this bullshit is?  Ms Conway is a worse liar than the President.  He can’t help himself; she does it in cold blood.  But poor old Dean Spicer just isn’t up to it.  Here is The Guardian about two days after the WSJ report.

The White House has sown further confusion about Donald Trump’s accusations of wiretapping against his predecessor, Barack Obama.

At a briefing on Wednesday, press secretary Sean Spicer initially said ‘we need to find out’ if the president is the subject of an investigation, then subsequently sought to clarify that there is ‘no reason’ to believe he is.

Reports emerged on the Heat Street website in November, and the BBC in January, that secret court orders were issued as part of a justice department inquiry into Russian efforts to intervene in the election on Trump’s behalf.

 Asked directly if the president is the target of a counterintelligence investigation, Spicer replied: ‘I think that’s what we need to find out. There was considerable concern last cycle when a reporter was the target of one. But part of the reason we have asked the House and Senate to look into this is because of that…….’

Spicer insisted the suspicions are baseless. ‘It was interesting if you look at last week all of a sudden these stories that keep coming out about the president and his links to Russia,’ he said. ‘It has continued to be the same old, same old, played over and over again. The president has made clear he has no interests in Russia and yet a lot of these stories that come out with respect to that are frankly fake.’

But a journalist at the briefing refused to let him pursue this tangent, returning to the initial question: ‘He doesn’t know whether he is the target of a programme?’

Spicer replied: ‘I think that’s one of the issues that we have asked the House and Senate to look into.’

Once more the press secretary pivoted to a denial of any connections between Trump and Russia. ‘All of the people that have been briefed on this situation have come to the same conclusion,’ he said. ‘It’s a recycled story over and over and over again.’

The journalist tried again: ‘Are you saying that there’s a possibility he is the target of a counterintelligence probe involving Russia, because you just connected those two?’

Spicer said: ‘I don’t – no, no, I think what I’m saying is there is a difference between that narrative and then the narrative that has been perpetuated over and over again. The concern the president has, and why he’s asked the Senate and House intelligence committees to look into this, is to get to the bottom of what may or may not have occurred during the 2016 election.’…..

The question and answer session moved on to different subjects, including an erroneous tweet that Trump issued about prisoners released from Guantánamo Bay. But just as the briefing was about to wind up, Spicer appeared to look down at the lectern, possibly at a message.

‘I just want to be really clear on one point which is there is no reason that we have to think that the president is the target of any investigation whatsoever,’ he said. ‘There is no reason to believe that he is the target of any investigation. I think that’s a very important point to make’…..

Earlier in Wednesday’s briefing, Spicer also condemned the publication of nearly 9,000 pages of CIA files by WikiLeaks, though he declined to confirm their authenticity. ‘This is the kind of disclosure that undermines our security, our country and our wellbeing,’ he said. ‘This alleged leak should concern every single American.’

Trump praised the anti-secrecy site during last year’s election, declaring ‘I love WikiLeaks’ as it continued to dump emails from Hillary Clinton campaign’s manager. But Spicer said there was a ‘massive, massive difference between an individual Gmail account and classified information that threatens national security’.

‘Anybody who leaks classified information will be held to the highest degree of law,’ he added.

It’s much, much worse than Basil Fawlty.  The poor man has been broken on the wheel by a lunatic liar.

Pauline Hanson made her contribution to nationalist nonsense and showed just how dangerously stupid she is in remarks about Muslims and vaccinations.  She has pulled back on the latter, but she still invites people to do their own ‘research’.  What does that mean, apart from speaking to a doctor?  If it means going on to the Internet, could anything be more dangerous on a medical subject for someone not trained in medicine?  She also showed the reach of Russian intervention in other people’s politics.  She, like Le Pen, admires Putin.  What have his intelligence services done to achieve that?  Well, while most Australians are chary of patriotism, Nationalists like Hanson and Trump revel in the stuff.  She says Putin is a patriot.  So were Judas, Pilate, Stalin, and Hitler.

People like Farage, Trump and Hanson have a lot of very poorly educated followers. Just look at the Hanson MP’s. Trump certainly appears to treat his supporters with contempt.  Many of the followers of these people are very gullible, and take their news from loaded amateurs on the Net rather than trained professionals in the press.  A study by New York University found that about half of readers of fake news on the Internet during the Presidential campaign believed what they read.  You would have to be uneducated to fall that low.

And a lot of these people have a chip on their shoulder about their lack of education.  And that in part explains their aversion to ‘experts’.  Remember the loathsome Michael Gove, sometime President of the Oxford Union, saying that English people had had enough of experts – unless one is operating on one of them, or keeping them out of jail, or navigating an electrical storm at 30,000 feet.

And this envious rejection of expertise is, I suspect, what lies behind the moral and intellectual collapse of the Liberal Party here and the Republican Party in the U S that has led to the worst peacetime problem ever faced by a government in this country – our complete lack of policy on energy.  And in bringing us down with bullshit, our politicians have been aided and abetted by loaded idiots in The Australian and on Sky TV – and by the even more loaded idiots at the IPA.  All parties have had a hand in this catastrophe, but Abbott and Bernardi stand out as inane reactionary house-wreckers and dummy-spitters.

Some take the view that people who get most agitated about climate change and Islam don’t really believe their nonsense they spit out on those issues – it is just a business model, a front to make a dollar.  That suggestion becomes very acceptable when you hear some of them admiring Trump.  Or when you hear Bolt still banging on about climate change.  Or when you hear the IPA still banging on about men shaking hands with women.  That, apparently, is an Australian value.  Is it, perhaps, a mark of our patriotism?

Confucius says

The Master said, ‘The Gentleman helps others to realise what is good in them; he does not help them to realise what is bad in them.  The small man does the opposite.’

Analects, 12.16.

The Nationalists

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 1 Comment

 

An occasional series on the new nationalists –  dingoes and drongos like Trump, Farage, and Bernardi – and other Oz twerps.

VII

Donald, Kim and Pauline

What do Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un have in common?  Each has a hairdresser who should be shot without the benefit of anaesthetic.  Each owes his position to his daddy.  They both like expensive and dangerous toys.  They both like to be seen as winning and they love to be filmed winning for their adoring mobs who believe anything and who blindly follow them.  Neither is too bright himself, and each of them only got the job through an accident of history – and daddy.  Neither is at his best in the wee, small hours.  Each has a visceral fear of light and the outside world.  Each has an unlimited capacity for intolerance.  Neither has any room for religion.  Nor does either have much room for ideology – the self and winning are all that matters.  Each has a puerile and boundless need for self-gratification.  As a result, neither has any kind of moral compass.  Each is capable of betraying followers stupid enough to think that anyone of them might stand in the way of number one.  They are both developing a taste for travel bans.  Each is authoritarian and autocratic by instinct.

Pauline Hanson continues to show how vicious, stupid, and dangerous she is.   “I do believe there are some that want to get on with a quiet life and a good life, but you tell me, you line up a number of Muslims, who’s the good one? Who’s not?”

Well, you could say that of lawyers, Chinamen, prostitutes, senators, Jews – or Christian priests.  This is definitive prejudice – any member of a religious faith is to be branded and looked down on, or as being at best suspect, just because of their subscription to that faith.  It is as revolting and insidious as the Nazi invocation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

An online Cambridge course on Elizabeth I reminded me of why branding people on account of their faith is inherently bad.  For some time after England broke with Rome, a majority of the English people continued to practise as Catholics, and they did so quite contentedly.  Most of them were after all too sensible to get too agitated about something like transubstantiation.  Then Queen Mary persecuted Protestants and burned some of them at the stake.  Then martyrdom worked its charms, and the Protestant cause never looked back.  The Catholics became a feared minority, and it took centuries to bring calm to the division.  In discussing persecution in England under Mary and Elizabeth, the great English historian Macaulay said:

To punish a man because he has committed a crime, or because he is believed, though unjustly, to have committed a crime, is not persecution.  To punish a man, because we infer from the nature of some doctrine which he holds, or from the conduct of other persons who hold the same doctrines with him, that he will commit a crime, is persecution, and is, in every sense, foolish and wicked.

The evil lies in punishing large group because of the bad conduct of a few people of that group. Macaulay then applied his reasoning to laws against Catholics that were passed on the footing that some Catholics wished ill to the English sovereign.

But to argue that, because a man is a Catholic, he must think it right to murder a heretical sovereign, and that because he thinks it right he will attempt to do it, and then, to found on this conclusion a law for punishing him as if he had done it, is plain persecution.

Later Macaulay said all of the persecution of the Puritans:

But the laws passed against the Puritans have not even the wretched excuse which we have been considering.  In this case, the cruelty was equal, the danger infinitely less.  In fact, the danger was created solely by the cruelty.

Going back to the persecution of the Catholics, Macaulay said:

Since these men could not be convinced, it was determined that they should be persecuted.  Persecution produced its natural effects on them.  It found them a sect: it made them a faction.  To their hatred of the Church was now added hatred of the Crown.

We are speaking of a time when the Pope had issued a Bull against the English Queen which was a full on attack on her sovereignty and which was in truth a threat to her life (that would later be made manifest in the Armada).  The danger there was far, far more explicit and widespread than any danger now to us of terrorism from some Muslims.

It is for those reasons that the conduct of Pauline Hanson is both unforgivable and dangerous.   The Prime Minister has been very clear about the danger of demonising all Muslims – and I would be surprised if the President of the United States is not getting the same advice.

In my view the same charge can be made against the revised version of the order against Muslims that has now been issued by the President of the United States.  It is idle to contend that it is not a ban on Muslims because the word Muslims is not used in the ban or because it does not extend to all Muslims.  This ban is a form of persecution that is a product of precisely the same kind of prejudice as that which operated in England in the 16th century, and it is open to precisely the same objections.

Passing 96 – Bullshit about lying

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 1 Comment

There is unrest at The Wall Street Journal.  Some journalists there say that the Editor is too soft on Trump.  The owner of the paper, Rupert Murdoch, supports Trump.  Fox News does so to the tune and extent of Joseph Goebbels.  Its news is like a torch-lit parade.

It is obvious to all but the blindest of Trump supporters that he is a compulsive liar. The editor of the WSJ does not agree that Trump’s untruths should be called lies.  He apparently relies on the Oxford English Dictionary definition of a lie as ‘a false statement made with intent to deceive.’  That is not the ordinary meaning of the word.  Nor in my view is the Compact OED definition of ‘an intentionally false statement.’  Intent may be required for some legal purposes –although two different intents are referred to here – but not for everyday use.  The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage just has ‘speak falsely.’  No state of mind is required to be shown.  That doesn’t seem sound either.  In ordinary language, you lie if you say something that you know is false.  We can leave to another day the question of whether it is sufficient that you say something that you do not believe to be true.

The Attorney-General of the United States said that he had not had contact with Russians. He knew that he had.  He therefore told a lie.   The President of the United States said:

Jeff Sessions is an honest man. He did not say anything wrong. He could have stated his response more accurately, but it was clearly not intentional. The real story is of all the illegal leaks of classified and other information. It’s a total witch hunt.

The statement that ‘He did not say anything wrong’ is false.  The President knew that – as the next sentence suggests.  Therefore the President lied about the Attorney-General’s lies.  As usual he uttered the lie in the course of a demented scattergun response of irrelevant tripe.

The Attorney-General lied on oath to a government body on a matter of national security. He should in my view resign.  He should also I think lose his ticket as a lawyer, although you may doubt whether the Alabama Bar Association would be up to that level of feistiness.  The Attorney has bad form for ‘miss-speaking’ about race, and his response to the present failure showed that he is a buffoon quite incapable of acting as Attorney-General.

This incident is another example of the complete indifference to truth that pervades the whole White House.  It makes me wonder whether the due diligence of the incoming administration that was undertaken by business hot shots like the Secretary of State and the Secretary of the Treasury extended to asking to see the tax returns of the President elect.  I incline to the view that they didn’t ask, because they knew what the response would be – and they feared that the offer might be withdrawn.  Even the prospect of power is enough to corrupt.  And how do parents bring up children in a nation whose President is a compulsive liar?

I have referred before to the gibberish of Jennifer Oriel.  This morning’s instalment shows the fineness of the line between inanity and insanity.  It includes the following.

We stand at a pivotal historical moment. In just over a week, we will learn whether the new-right movement resurrected by Brexit and Trump is going global. The looming Dutch election is a bellwether. It is the first European election of 2017 featuring a pro-Western nationalist party vying for the popular vote. Locally, the West Australian election next weekend will test whether Hanson’s One Nation will extend significant influence beyond Queensland.

If The Netherlands’ Party for Freedom (PVV) wins, its leader Geert Wilders will become the most strident pro-Western prime minister in Europe. The Trump effect will translate into a transatlantic phenomenon. Either way, the third reckoning of new-right rhetoric with political reality is nigh.

…….

The leaders of the new-right movement differ on some policy matters, but share a set of values that are cohering into an international program for action. Their shared political aims are to: restore the primacy of Western civilisation by defending sovereign democracy and the nation-state system of allied free-world countries against the supranational left. New-right politicians give greater emphasis to the national interest than centrist-left and right parties by prioritising debt reduction via secure borders and rational immigration programs. Some claim that protectionism is co-essential to prosperity, but the claim is substantially weakened by the lack of systematic evidence. Far better is the shared goal to resurrect Western culture by battling the economically and socially corrosive PC culture that dominates the activist media, academia, NGO and public sectors. All new-right parties are gearing up to drain the swamp.

Wilders has been called the Dutch Donald Trump, but he preceded Trump’s ascendancy by several years. His European allies include Hungary’s Viktor Orban, who dubbed 2017 the year of rebellion. In 2015, Wilders said to Agence France-Presse: ‘The only way to deal with (the immigration crisis) is to regain our national sovereignty and close our national borders … I am asking that our government close its doors as Hungary did.’

The year 2016 ushered in a Western renaissance led by Britons and Americans. Brexit represented a triumph of self-determination over supranational governance as Britons renewed their faith in liberal democracy by voting to leave the EU. More than 60 million Americans chose Donald Trump as President to restore American primacy by fortifying the foundations of the free world laid down in the Declaration of Independence and the US constitution.

The supranational left is working overtime to prevent Trump’s ideas developing into a coherent international program for Western civilisational renewal championed by a right avant-garde. The right is gaining ground in the war for by reminding centrist parties Western values matter and turning the weapons used by neo-Marxists and Islamists to attack the free world order against them.

……

The foundational thesis of the 21st-century left is Orwellian doublethink. Codified inequality that promotes minority supremacy through affirmative action law is rebranded equality. The systemic censorship of conservative thought is called free speech. Consistent with its neo-Marxist creed, the modern left suppresses the silent Western majority; punishes politically incorrect thought; undermines the free world by weakening the nation-state system and vilifying Western patriots; purges conservatives from publicly funded institutions; and imposes punitive taxes on wealth creators and hard workers to fatten the parasite class.

The new right is a counter-revolution whose seeds were sown in the 1970s, the decade neo-Marxism took root within the West. As Roger Kimball wrote in The Long March, the new left’s method of gradualism meant ‘working against the established institutions while working in them’.

By almost destroying the liberal in liberal democracy, the left has prepared the ground for totalitarian politics. But it didn’t see the new right coming, whose members hail from both left and right united by the fight for the West. The new right has come to take our civilisation back.

Orwell would not have believed this.  Western civilisation championed by Trump, Wilders, Orban, Farage, and Hanson?  Would you let any of them into your home?  Here is the moral and intellectual emptiness of what shamefully passes for our conservative press – the Lone Ranger on steroids of dyslexic paranoia.

The Nationalists

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 4 Comments

An occasional series on the new nationalists –  dingoes and drongos like Trump, Farage, and Bernardi – and other Oz twerps.

VI

A world turned upside down

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump’s eldest son was likely paid at least $50,000 for an appearance late last year before a French think tank whose founder and his wife are allies of the Russian government in efforts to end the war in Syria.

Donald Trump Jr. addressed a dinner on Oct. 11 at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, hosted by the Center of Political and Foreign Affairs. Its president, Fabien Baussart, and his Syrian-born wife, Randa Kassis, have cooperated with Russia in its drive to end the Syrian civil war, according to U.S., European and Arab officials.

In December, Mr. Baussart formally nominated Russian President Vladimir Putin for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Mrs. Kassis is a leader of a political faction endorsed by Russia in negotiations to end the war in Syria.

The couple said they don’t represent Russia and are solely focused on ending the Syrian conflict.

The meeting in October represents one in a string of contacts over the past year between members of the president’s inner circle and individuals connected to Moscow and to Russian interests. The Wall Street Journal in November reported Donald Trump Jr.’s appearance at the event.

Perhaps there is an answer.  There is worldwide conspiracy to turn the world upside down so that we will believe anything.  Is the nomination for the Peace Prize based on the competition between Assad and Putin as to who could bomb the most hospitals?

Recently, the President of the United States came to understand that Medicare is complicated.  It’s as if he hadn’t known that.  And his people in Congress are feeling heavy heat.  It is becoming more obvious each day that the people in the White House don’t know what they are doing.

The appointment of Flynn was obviously a mistake.  It looks like that of Sessions was worse.  Why choose a seventy-one year old from Alabama who has heavy form on race and is obviously not too bright?  He is another person in government in trouble about his dealings with the Russians.  What is it that has attracted so many Republicans to get into bed and into trouble with representatives of a state hostile to the United States?  Sessions’ problem is that he was at best loose with the truth while on oath.  That is not good in a first Law Officer.  What is the response of Mr Attorney?  ‘I never met with any Russian officials to discuss issues of the campaign. I have no idea what this allegation is about. It is false.’  Where do they get these clowns from?

Meanwhile Mrs May is steeling herself to inform her wobblers that they are dealing with a Europe which has a vested interest in England not being seen to be well off as a result of the divorce, and the ferals in the Liberal Party are doing all they can to ensure that that fake Shorten waltzes into office as if unopposed.  Where do we get these clowns from?

Passing Bull 95 – Introducing the feral – Flat Earth Reactionary (and Religious) Amateur Loser

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

For reasons set out in an extract from a book that Chris Wallace-Crabbe and I are writing, I’m against labels, such as Left and Right.  However, I do think that the term ‘feral’, as defined above, could be applied to at least three politicians – Abbott, Andrews, and Bernardi.

What do they have in common?  They believe that the earth is flat and that the climate isn’t changing; they object to the people of Australia having an Australian person (who is not obliged by the Constitution of a foreign power to be in communion with the Church of England) as their head of state; they object to gay marriage on, among other things, grounds of religion; they freely admit,  or they emphatically deny, that their political views are driven by their religious faiths; and they yearn to be free to insult and offend others on the ground of race.

The odds are that these amateurish types will lose and wind up in the dustbin of history on each of those issues, but they feel born to react against anything that might be branded as progress. They are preoccupied, to put it softly, by the number of Muslims in our midst; they’re still bitter that we gave up on God Save Our Gracious Queen; they get very defensive about Australia Day and they are very protective about Anzac Day; they’re very dirty that that little four-eyed socialist said ‘sorry’ to the blackfellas; and they are revolted by the thought that our flag might be better off without the flag of some other foreign nation on it. They don’t just want to hold the line – they want to go back in time.  In the immortal words of Spike Milligan:

I’m walking backwards for Christmas,
Across the Irish Sea,
I’m walking backwards for Christmas,
It’s the only thing for me.

 

I’ve tried walking sideways,
And walking to the front,
But people just look at me,
And say it’s a publicity stunt.

 

I’m walking backwards for Christmas,
To prove that I love you.

 

Can we detect the time when the feral cancer set in?   Yes – it was when the Liberal Party lost its nerve and its mind, and it sacked Malcolm Turnbull, and it unleashed the ferals. What was Turnbull’s crime?  There were two – he was sane about climate change, and he did not believe in opposing the government just for the sake of it. He didn’t just want to put a spoke in the wheel. What has been the result?  Total chaos, and a complete failure of government.  We are now witnessing the horrifying apotheosis of the partisanship championed by the ferals in the form of Trump and Bannon.  And the worst of it here comes with the national humiliation on energy and climate change and a moral and intellectual collapse on gay marriage.

Do the ferals have a set of beliefs?  Not really – we are not big on ideology down here.  But they get cheered on by those cranks in the IPA.  Here is some of their bilge in the AFR today.

At least part of the reason for the success of One Nation is that Pauline Hanson is not afraid to talk about culture and values. Specifically, she’s willing to support the sort of values that too many commentators are too eager to dismiss as quaint, old fashioned, or as a ‘‘sideshow’’ to the business of politics.

 One Nation is simply filling a void left by the Coalition and the Labor Party.

 In response to the survey question, ‘‘How important is freedom of speech to you?’’, 95 per cent of respondents answered either ‘‘important’’ or ‘‘very important’’. One Nation has a policy position in favour of freedom of speech. The Coalition and the ALP don’t.

 The story of Georges River College, a public school in Sydney, is another example of the difference between One Nation and the major parties.

 It was revealed this week the NSW Education department has allowed the school to establish a policy whereby male students can refuse to shake the hands of women. The policy supposedly respects ‘‘the cultural, linguistic and religious backgrounds of all students’’, and so, in the department’s words: ‘‘At the school’s2016 presentation day, the principal explained to invited guest making awards that some Muslim students may place their hand across their chest instead of shaking hands.’’

 Rob Stokes, the Liberal education minister, refused to say what was his view on the policy. Labor’s education spokesperson also refused to comment. One politician wasn’t afraid to say what she thought. Hanson called the policy ‘‘rubbish’’ and contrary to Australian values.

 The practical consequences of a school endorsing male students not shaking hands with women are legion. An education system that doesn’t prepare boys for the world of work and the possibility that one day they might have a female boss is fundamentally failing its responsibility to its pupils.

This is at best silly, petty, bullshit.  Do the Liberal and Labor parties really not have a policy in favour of freedom of speech?  Are they against it?  Are they against peace, motherhood, or mates?  Or are we banging Mr Murdoch’s can on hate speech?  Then there is this nagging worry about the practices of those who have a different faith to that which members of the IPA were born into. The practical consequences of a school endorsing male students not shaking hands with women are legion. Is the man serious?  Who could give a bugger how school kids shake hands?  Did Ms Hanson proffer reasons for her weighty decretal?  Or does our grave IPA champion of freedom of speech believe that our subscription to Australian culture and values entails that school kids of a different faith MUST shake hands whether they bloody well want to or not?

And may God save and preserve us from those who are married to Australian culture and values.

I now hereby give up on all form of politics in Oz forever.  And I solemnly make this declaration before lunch!

Confucius says

When the Master went to Wei, Jan Yu drove for him.  The Master said, ‘What a flourishing population!’

Jan Yu said, ‘When the population is flourishing, what further benefit can one add ?’

‘Make the people rich.’

‘When the people have become rich, what further benefit can one add?’

‘Train them.’

Analects, 13.9

Book Extract on Labelling

11      The vice of labelling

Some years ago, a lady at Oxford, en route from the reading room to the dining room for breakfast, was heard to say: ‘I have just been described as a typical Guardian reader, and I’m trying to work out whether I should feel insulted.’  A discussion about the meaning of the word ‘presumptuous’ then followed.

There is no law or custom that says that we should apply a label to people – or put them in boxes, or in a file, or give them a codename.  There is no law that we should not.  But most of us can’t help ourselves.  So what?

Well, most of us don’t like being put into boxes.  That is how we tend to see governments or Telstra or a big bank behaving toward us.  Nor do most of us want to be typed.  When someone says that an opinion or act of yours is ‘typical’ of you or your like, they are very rarely trying to be pleasant to you.

Most of us just want to be what we are.  You don’t have to have a university degree specialising in the philosophy of Kant to believe that each of us has his or her own dignity, merely because we are human.  We are in a different league to camels and gnats.  So, if I am singled out as a Muslim, a Jew, or an Aboriginal, what does that label add to or take away from my humanity?  What good can come from subtracting from my humanity by labelling me in that way?

So, the first problem with labelling is that it is likely to be demeaning to the target, and presumptuous on the part of the labeller.  We are detracting from a person’s dignity.  We put registration numbers on dog collars, and we brand cattle, but we should afford humans the courtesy – no, the dignity – of their own humanity.  After all, we can scarcely bring ourselves to think of that time when some people were tattooing identifying numbers on the bodies of other human beings. 

The second problem with labelling is that it is both loose and lazy.  If you say of someone that they are a typical Conservative or Tory, that immediately raises two questions.  What do the labels Conservative and Tory mean?  What are the characteristics of the target that might warrant the application of the label? 

In this country, at the moment, the terms Left and Right hardly mean anything at all – except as terms of abuse – which is how the words Tory and Whig started in England.  These terms are now generally only applied by one side to the other.  Not many people are happy to have either of those labels applied to themselves.  The categories are just too plastic and fluid.

There is one curious distinction in the way that these terms are applied in this country at the moment.  The Murdoch press is happy to call followers of the Fairfax press or the ABC ‘the Left’ (or ‘the PC Left’ or ‘the Love Media’), but those members of the press very rarely respond by calling readers of the Murdoch press Right Wing (or Far Right, or worse).  Is the difference one of custom or courtesy – or don’t we know or don’t we care?

Similarly, the labels Liberal and Labour hardly stand for any difference in principle any more.  At the time of writing, on any of the major issues in Australian politics, what were the differences in the policies of those parties that derived from their platform?  (We will come back to this point later, too.) The old forms of name‑calling between Liberal and Labour mean nothing to our children – absolutely nothing.  These old ways are as outmoded as name‑calling between Catholics and Protestants.  And there is some common ground in the two shifts – very many people have lost faith in both religion and politics.  The old tensions or rivalries just don’t seem to matter anymore.

Unfortunately, and notwithstanding the obvious problems we have just referred to, labelling is not just common but mandatory in far too much political discussion in the press, and certainly for shock jocks and those who make a career out of working TV chat shows.  While some people naturally thrive on conflict – Napoleon and Hitler are two bad cases – some journalists in the press engage in conflict, for a living.  These people rarely have a financial motive to respond reasonably, much less to resolve the conflict.  To the contrary, they have a direct financial interest in keeping the conflict as explosive as possible.  It is notorious that controversy feeds ratings and that bad news sells newspapers.

If you put up an argument to one of these people who live of the earnings of conflict, the response will very commonly involve two limbs – a personal attack  on you (the Latin tag for which is ad hominem), followed by some labels, which are never meant as compliments.  So, for example if someone, were to query the rigour of the policies of the government toward refugees, a predictable response would be ‘What else would you expect from someone who subscribes to the ABC?  How would you like these people to move in next door?’  There is no argument – just vulgar abuse.

The disintegration of thought is palpable, but a lot of people are making a handy living out of it – and not in ways that do the rest of us any good.

There is commonly a third problem with labelling – it generally tells you a lot more about the labeller – some would say the sniper – than the target, and the answer is rarely pretty.  And if you pile cliché upon label, and venom upon petulance, the result is as sad as it is predictable.  You disappear up your own bum. 

Let us take one label that became prominent in 2016 – right across the western world.  There has been a lot of chatter – some call it white noise – about populists.  Who are they?  One of the problems with this word is that people who use it rarely say what they mean by it.  If you go to the Web, you will find references to ordinary or regular or common people against political insiders or a wealthy elite.  These vague terms don’t help – to the contrary.  What do they mean? Is dividing people into classes a good idea in Australia now – or anywhere at any time?  And if it is simply a matter of the common people wresting control from a wealthy elite, who could decently object?  Is this not just democracy triumphing over oligarchy?

Populus is the Latin word for ‘people,’ with pretty much the same connotations as that word in English.  Do populists, therefore, appeal to the people for their vote?  Well, anyone standing for office in a democracy does just that.  The most famous political speech in history concludes with the words ‘of the people, for the people, by the people’.

But the word populist is not used to describe anyone standing for office.  It is used to refer to only some of those, and the difference seems to be in the parts of the people that are appealed to and the way in which that appeal is made.

So, what kind of public do populists appeal to?  Well, those who use this word say that the people appealed to are anything but the ‘elite’ – those who have got on well in life because of their background or education, or both.  In both the UK and the US this feeling about the elite – which might look like simple envy to some – is linked to a suspicion of or contempt for ‘experts’.  People do, however, tend to get choosy about which experts they reject.  This rejection does not extend to experts who may save their life (in the surgery, or at 30,000 feet) or their liberty, but it may explain the curious intellectual lesion that many people of a reactionary turn of mind have about science and the environment.

Another attribute of the public appealed to by populists is that they have often missed out on the increase in wealth brought about by free trade around the world  and by advances in technology.  These movements obviously have cost people jobs and are thought by some experts to be likely to cost another 40% over the next ten years.

A third attribute of those appealed to by populists is said to be that, in their reduced condition, they value their citizenship above all else, and they are not willing to share it.  They are therefore against taking refugees or people whose faith or colour threatens the idea of their national identity. 

Now, if folk who use the word populist are describing politicians who appeal to people with those attributes, they may want to be careful about where they say so.  The picture that emerges is one of a backward, angry, and mean chauvinist.  That picture is seriously derogatory, but it adds warmth and not light to the discussion.  If that is what people mean when they refer to populists, then it is just a loose label that unfairly smears a large part of the population.  The term does then itself suffer from the vice of labelling that we have identified. 

So, we would leave labels with George Bush senior, who said that labels are what you put on soup cans.

 

 

The Nationalists

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

An occasional series on the new nationalists –  dingoes and drongos like Trump, Farage, and Bernardi – and other Oz twerps.

V

The New Yorker opines

Has it occurred to you that the Executive Order banning Muslims was not addressed on its face to Muslims because that would have made it too difficult to enforce at the border – as well as being difficult to defend in court?  ‘I see that you come from Iran and you are wearing a tea towel.  May I take it that you are a Muslim?’  ‘No you may not.  I’m Catholic and proud of it.’  It could have got very tricky at the airports.

Well, as best I can see, no one before the Ninth Circuit argued that the ban was not a Muslim ban because it did not extend to all Muslims – a proposition of profound inanity embraced by a Harvard professor.  So, the President and his disjointed team are closeted trying to develop a lawful order, while abusing the judges that have made them do so.  It is taking them a lot longer than the President thought or wanted.  Government is hard.  Campaigning is so easy – and oh so good for the ego.  So, after just four weeks, Trump stopped governing and took off to campaign again, and just to feel the love.

Well, that statement might obscure the truth.  The whole life of Trump is a campaign.  He may even have said so himself – in which case we could chalk it up as a rare true Trump statement.  Trump doesn’t just thrive on conflict – he lives on it.  His whole life revolves around two points – the mirror and his enemies.  During the campaign, he had Hillary Clinton as an enemy, and one made for him in heaven.  Now that Hillary’s gone, he has to find new enemies.  He’s got plenty – the press, the security services, the judiciary, and doubtless there will be more to come.

Trump is apparently still carrying his supporters.  If they think that this intellectually crippled thug is delivering good government they are quite mad.  He is in truth carrying on his campaign for the benefit of his ego and to satisfy the delusions of about one third of the American people.  That is not what they elect presidents to do.  It is hard to think of a time when the nation has been more divided against itself since the time that Abraham Lincoln took office.  Nor does it seem to be an essentially American notion that the government should be carried on by and for the nation’s losers.

Although most people that Trump has appointed to government appear to be either billionaires or generals, and the awful Bannon is a quintessential member of the Establishment, some silly people still want to talk about the elite.  If you wanted to describe a member of that curious body, you could say that it was a person who gets The New Yorker, the snooty East Coast liberal journal of letters that I have been getting for nearly forty years.  It has been in mourning since the election, but it has now spoken, and it has done so in terms written by Adam Gopnik that I wish to set out here at length.

The human capacity for hatred is terrifying in its volatility…… Americans have a hard time internalising that truth, but the first days of the Trump Administration have helped bring it home.

Within two weeks of the Inauguration, the hysterical hyperventilators have come to seem more prescient in their fear of incipient autocratic fanaticism than the reassuring pooh-poohers.  There’s a simple reason for this: the hyperventilators often read history.  Regimes with an authoritarian ideology and a boss man on top always bend toward the extreme edge, because their only organisational principle is loyalty to the capo.  Since the capo can be placated only by uncritical praise, the most fanatic of his lieutenants end up calling the shots.  Loyalty to the boss is demonstrated by hatred directed against his enemies.

Yet what perhaps no one could have entirely predicted was the special cocktail of oafish incompetence and radical anti-Americanism that President Trump’s Administration has brought.  This combination has produced a new note in our public life: chaotic cruelty.  The immigration crisis may abate, but it has already shown the power of government to act arbitrarily overnight –  sundering families, upending long-set expectations, until all those born as outsiders must imagine themselves here only on sufferance of a senior White House counsellor.

Some choose to find comfort in the belief that the incompetence will undermine the anti-Americanism.  Don’t bet on it.  Autocratic regimes with a demagogic bent are nearly always inefficient, because they cannot create and extend the network of delegated trust that is essential to making any organisation work smoothly.  The chaos is characteristic.  Whether by instinct or by intention, it benefits the regime, whose goal is to create an overwhelming feeling of shared helplessness in the population at large: we will detain you and take away your green card – or, no, now we won’t take away your green card, but we will hold you here, and we may let you go, or we may not.

This is radical anti-Americanism – not simply illiberalism or anti- cosmopolitanism – because America is not only a nation but also an idea, cleanly if not tightly defined.  Pluralism is not a secondary or a decorative aspect of that idea.  As James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 51, the guarantee of religious liberty lies in having many kinds of faiths, and the guarantee of civil liberty lies in having many kinds of people – in establishing a ‘multiplicity of interests’ to go along with a ‘multiplicity of sects’.  The idea doesn’t reflect a ‘weak’ desire for niceness.  It is, instead, intended to counter the brutal logic of the playground. When there are many kinds of bullied kids, they can unite against the bully: ‘Even the stronger individuals are prompted, by the uncertainty of their condition, to submit to a government which may protect the weak as well as themselves.’

There is an alternative view, one long available and articulated, that America is not an idea but an ethnicity, that of the white Christian men who have dominated it, granting a grudging or probationary acceptance to women, or blacks, or immigrants.  This was the view of Huck Finn’s pap, as he drank himself to death; of General Custer, as he approached Little Big Horn; of Major General Pickett, as he led the charge at Gettysburg.  Until now, it has been the vision of those whom Trump would call the losers.

The three figures Mr Gopnik referred to were losers – bad losers.  With the Republicans bereft of decency, and the Democrats in disarray, it will be left to the press to carry the torch of civilisation in America.  It is of course nearly insane that those who blather on here about western civilisation are the ones who stand up for Trump – but if you wish to be reminded of what fascism looks like, turn on Fox News.  You may only last thirty seconds, as I did last night, when I was told that the American press had betrayed the first Amendment by declaring war on the President of the United States.  I had just finished reading Nineteen Eighty-Four for the third time, and the horror slipped easily from fiction to fact.  And the minions of the owner of Fox News want a licence here to offend and insult people on the ground of race.

The Executive Order was headed ‘Protection Of The Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into The United States’.  It is full of tendentious nonsense of a self–serving nature about 11 September 2001, the perpetrators of which came from Saudi Arabia, which is not on the banned list.  The Ninth Circuit asked in vain for evidence that the banned nations were a source of terrorism.  According to reports of findings by the Cato Institute referred to in our weekend press, there have not been any terror-related killings of Americans on U S soil committed by nationals of any of the seven countries in the Order since 1975.  Since then, there have been three fatal terrorist attacks, all committed by Cubans – and unlikely to have been Muslims!  The report I read said that the data showed that the prospects of dying in a terror attack at the hands of a refugee of any religion to be one in 3.64 billion.  Gun violence leads to more than 13,000 deaths a year, excluding suicides.  That rate is likely to go up under Trump because he is in the pocket of the gun lobby.

Passing Bull 94 – A miscellany of pure bullshit – and starting on Confucius

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

A major Australian law firm announced a move into forensic investigation – or the like.

 

It brings a holistic offering to the market place in response to what we have seen over the past five years as a real client need, which we think will complement our core legal skill set. That’ll give us great ability to engage early on anti-bribery, cyber risk and fraud. Regulators across the world are getting much more sophisticated in their cross-border communications.

Dear, dear, dear – holistic and core and skill set in the one sentence.  Little Johnnie nixed core for eternity.

Your taxes help fund bullshit like that which follows.

 

Should they enjoy a drink or smoke while watching an arts festival on TV, they can take pleasure in knowing that their taxes are contributing significantly to it, with Australian cigarettes the most expensive in the world and alcohol taxes not far off it. Of course, the most prolific smokers are our poorest people including regional Aborigines. So much for closing the gap.

And should they speak up about the less successful aspects of multi-culturalism, they can be hauled before a bunch of antidiscrimination bodies to explain themselves.

No major political party is interested in winning the vote of Australia’s poor.

Labor is no better than the Liberals on this. They might claim to stick up for battlers, but rarely take their side on any of the issues mentioned here. This is mainly due to Labor’s relationship with the unions, which care about workers who have jobs rather than those who don’t. And Labor is also now competing with the Greens for middle-class progressive voters who couldn’t give a fig about the impact of power prices or the price of cigarettes on the poor.

In fact, every week we hear how progressives have a new idea to make life harder for poor people. Even the push to replace cage eggs with free-range eggs will lead to substantial price increases, and now they’re talking about a sugar tax.

The poor are hectored and spoken down to. They have few choices in relation to their education and health. They are told when, where and how they can drink, smoke, eat, gamble and enjoy themselves. They are told they are cruel if they enjoy greyhound racing and too ignorant, stupid or incoherent to manage their own lives. Increasingly they are considered less important than animal rights and the environment.

Our governments are elected by the middle class to serve the middle class, so it’s hard to see how any of this is going to change.

So whatever you do, try not to be poor.

The gun-happy Senator Leyonhjelm suffers from a dual disability – he fancies himself as an ideologue, and he is seriously thick.  Shame on those shameless progressives – members of the Liberal Party, the Labor Party, or both? – for making it so much harder for blackfellas to kill themselves on fags or grog.  And did you see the mandatory Murdoch Union reference to hate speech laws? This guy reminds me of a remark of the late Jim Kennan – when you meet someone from the gun lobby, you might be looking at a person that you would least want to see behind a gun.

Next, I must stop buying North American scholarship blind.  I bought a book on historians of the French Revolution by Professor Steven Kaplan of Cornell University.

This argument was quite potent and tonic when reasoned in terms of the Braudelian reading of time (and space) and of the asphyxiating intellectual consequences of a historical (and academic) periodization generated by the reification of the Revolution’s self-representation.  To fathom the causes and outcomes of the Revolution, to understand how institutions really worked and how traditions came into being, to make cogent diagnoses, historians needed to insert it in a comparative, multivariate, long run context ( a sort of Annalesization of Tocqueville).

That is extreme bullshit.  And do you notice how the computer encourages further parenthetical mutilation of the language?

I admire the work of the late François Furet.  His writing is lucid, and to the point, and he is one of the very few historians who understands just how silly it is to look only at events in France 1789 to 1793.  Here is Kaplan again.

…..Furet becomes one of Tocqueville’s abstract thinkers, unable to navigate in the real world.  Thus, for instance, Furet is interested in the people-as-concept for the role they play in legitimising the Revolution and filling the political vacuum.  But he is indifferent to the people-as-people.  The true people are those who inhabit the collective imaginary.  Language crowds out its referent – or the referent is absorbed by the concept.  The notion of the people matters, not their comportment.  The conceptual ‘reality’ takes precedence over its social counterpart, whose existence is without significance in the sense that it resides outside Furet’s semiotic circuit.  The discordance between the Revolution-as-people brandished by the leaders (and appropriated by the galactic historians) and the revolutionaries lived by the people is neither pertinent nor profound.  And as long as he defines his démarche as conceptual rather than commemorative, Furet can comfortably march to the drumbeat of the Revolutionary protagonists.  For him the Revolution has a life of its own outside the social, a discursive autonomy and a sort of anthropomorphic existence.  Thus he can write a metahistorical phrase such as the following: ‘If, as I believe, the French Revolution was really what it set out to be…’

That isn’t bullshit, it’s gibberish.

Finally, there was a piece in the weekend press that shows why people are being turned off the big political parties.  This one was about the Liberal Party in Victoria.  A young whizz kid called Bastiaan is apparently getting on people’s nerves.  He is described by The Age, in a piece that looks to have been legalled with caution, as 27-year-old former ‘bellicose Brighton Grammar debater’.  He has the same old mantra.  The party has been overrun by ‘lobbyists, political staffers or people who have worked in government the entirety of their careers.’  Does he too want to drain the swamp?  What is the life experience of this 27 year old public school boy debater that enables him to offer this world view on his elders?  According to The Age:

A three-time university dropout, Bastiaan got into business with the aid of his father, dabbling in an antiques dealership while at university, before moving into a software design business.

He now spends his time leaping between an e-commerce start-up and politics.

The comparison with Trump gets closer.  But the politics get even denser.  His partner is a 25-year-old woman who challenged for a seat in State Parliament. She has apparently firm religious views, and she believes that women who have been raped, according to The Age, should be denied an abortion.  ‘Like Bastiaan, she claims to be focused on returning the party to its members and challenging a Parliamentary team that has abandoned its values and lost touch.’  They are like broken records.  Her partner had invoked Menzies in support of his brand of reaction, and as we were reminded in another piece on the weekend, Menzies deliberately chose the word Liberal because he did not wish the party to be seen as conservative.

But the partner of Bastiaan is, apparently, the complete reactionary.  The Safe Schools program teaches ‘radical gender theory and warped graphic sex education centred around promiscuity…’  We are ‘seeing the destruction of religious freedom, free speech, a push towards gay marriage (which won’t stop there!)  and euthanasia.’  She sees a state/nation-wide push to bring ‘conservative’ politics back into fashion.  She likes people like Cory Bernardi, Andrew Hastie, George Christensen, and Kevin Andrews.  Last year, she hosted a gala fundraiser for Andrews where the main attraction was Tony Abbott.  In the name of God – perhaps literally – the ‘Bulleen dinner featured a Latin grace and a rendition of God Save the Queen’.  (Did they offer a salute?) According to the paper, ultraconservative churches and the Mormons are fertile recruiting grounds.

What sane person could think of joining an outfit that engages in bullshit like this? It reminds me of my childhood and youth, a period of say twenty years, where this country had an opposition party that completely failed to discharge its function in opposition because it was hopelessly split by factions and dragged down by selfish idiots who cared more for ideological purity than the prospects of their party ever getting into government.  (As it happens, the split was engineered by the same denomination that this young woman adheres to.) In a way, my generation was disenfranchised, and it looks like the Liberal Party in Victoria may go the same way if these fanatics get what the press calls traction.

I have long been of the view that we should have a legal mechanism by which Opposition parties can be subjected to a form of impeachment for failing in their function.  Just look at the mess that the English Labour Party has got into with their fanatics.

Poet of the Month: Dante, Inferno, Canto 1.

When I beheld him in the desert vast,
“Have pity on me,” unto him I cried,
“Whiche’er thou art, or shade or real man!”

He answered me: “Not man; man once I was,
And both my parents were of Lombardy,
And Mantuans by country both of them.

Sub Julio was I born, though it was late,
And lived at Rome under the good Augustus,
During the time of false and lying gods.

A poet was I, and I sang that just
Son of Anchises, who came forth from Troy,
After that Ilion the superb was burned

But thou, why goest thou back to such annoyance?
Why climb’st thou not the Mount Delectable
Which is the source and cause of every joy?”

“Now, art thou that Virgilius and that fountain
Which spreads abroad so wide a river of speech?
I made response to him with bashful forehead.

“O, of the other poets honour and light,
Avail me the long study and great love
That have impelled me to explore thy volume!

Thou art my master, and my author thou,
Thou art alone the one from whom I took
The beautiful style that has done honour to me.

Behold the beast, for which I have turned back;
Do thou protect me from her, famous Sage,
For she doth make my veins and pulses tremble.’

Confucius says

There is a nasty false form of what is said to be ‘conservatism’ that claims to identify with something called ‘western civilisation.’  It’s as if we are meant to think that there is something inferior about the civilisation of the East.  Such a suggestion would be at best hilarious and at worst outrageous to the substantial part of the world’s population who live in China, India, and Japan, for example.  You might wonder if ‘western civilisation’ is code for white supremacy, but to confront this narky parochialism, we will replace for the foreseeable future what has been the ‘Poet of the month’ with ‘Confucius says’.  The context is that these sayings of Confucius were uttered about a century before the death of Socrates, and about five centuries before the Jew called Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount – in Asia.

Tzu-kung asked the Master about what a man must be like before he can be said truly to be a Gentleman.  There followed a discussion about degrees of Gentlemen.

‘What about men who are in public life in the present day?’

The Master said, ‘Oh, they are of such limited capacity that they hardly count.’

Analects, 13.20.

Two and a half millennia ago. In the boondocks of China.