30 April 2008
"The Retail Traders' Association (RTA) is blaming a lack of competition among Australia's main supermarkets for an increase in grocery prices. We're the only country in the OECD [Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development] where food inflation is actually outstripping general inflation, stated Spokesman Scott Driscoll. We've got to get some sort of general genuine competition back into the supermarket trade."
The less we support our local markets and producers of any good/service, even if their prices are initially slightly higher than large scale chains who can charge less due to lower production cost per unit, the worse off we will all be in the long run financially when local business has been driven out and a few chains dominate the markets and can then charge whatever they want.
30 April 2008
"AN Australian soldier has been wounded in a firefight with Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan. The unnamed soldier was wounded during an operation in the restive Oruzgan Province in southcentral Afghanistan, Defence said. He suffered a gunshot wound to his arm. Defence said the wound was not life-threatening and the soldier's condition was stable. "The soldier's family has been informed about the incident. As the operation is ongoing, however, Defence is not able to release further information at this time," it said.
[...]
The shooting follows a clash between Australian troops and the Taliban on Sunday night during which commando Lance Corporal Jason Marks was killed and four others wounded. Defence head Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston said arrangements for the repatriation of Lance-Cpl's body to Australia were in place."
While the situation of our troops being in Afghanistan is different from that in Iraq, it is related. In both cases fit and capable Australian men are worthlessly risking death for a regime that wishes to force 'democracy', materialism and corporatism on regions of the world who's constituents do not necessarily want these things. Its globalisation, or imperialism under the modern guise of 'progress', and dispite what the mainstreem media tells you, not everybody wants this globalisation.
Yes, we are on the hunt for Bin Laden and his supporters who bombed an American building, but what is not widely known is that Bin Laden committed his 9/11 act of 'terrorism' in first place, not out of evil fun and not because we in the West are not muslim, but as a reaction against the build up of western corporations and economic interests increasingly dictating affairs in the Middle East and replacing their culture with markets and products. He did not, after all, target a Western Church or some other non-economic cultural symbol. In a highly symbolic act he targeted a key symbol of globalisation: the World Trade Centre. Stop globalisation. Stop the obsessive targeting of new markets in other nations or the result will be more conflicts on the other side of the world, and indeed perhaps even in our own backyard.
26 April 2008
An active form of Nihilism is basically a worldview recognizing that value judgments like 'good' and 'bad' are simply relative or subjective. Exclaiming that something is 'good' or 'bad' can never reflect anything other than, basically, your fears and desires let alone any inherently 'good' or 'bad' nature of the thing as it is in itself separate from your perception of it.
Knowing then that value judgments or morals stem from the fears and desires of human beings rather than from objective truth, the nihilist can re-assess what he or she has been encouraged to perceive as morally 'good' or 'bad' by a society possessing a fundamentally materialistic agenda and which today values tangible things like money, size and quantity more than intangible things like happiness, usefulness and quality - and notions like 'equality' and 'consumerism' more than common sense.
Now, because Nihilism brings all of our values/morals/ethics down from the clouds and reduces them to what they are, i.e. mere human preferences, a mental attitude like Nihilism might initially seem repressive because fatalistic, in that it wrenches people of whatever 'higher' meaning drives them in life, resulting in a stale state of affairs in which people are left with no beliefs, or no internal motivating forces, beyond their desires, and no interest beyond the 'grubby' and overly self-centered urge to satisfy these desires.
However this does not have to be the case. A strong set of values are essential for any ascending civilization, and they will differ depending on the nature and constituents of the civilization. Active Nihilism acknowledges the importance of values but simply bears in mind that all ideals/values/morals are nothing but the product of human desire rather than God or absolute truth. We human beings are the creators of 'good' and 'evil' and thus Nihilism is invaluable as a mental attitude enabling one to 'clear their lenses' so to speak so that one can judge whether a certain conception of what is 'good' or 'bad/evil', or in other words a certain set of morals, is corrupt or alternatively whether it is noble and sustainable. Its about leaving emotions aside for that moment and assessing the pure structural consequences of our morals and associated shared beliefs: Forgetting questions of 'right' or 'wrong', one can look at what we are doing by valuing something as being good or bad and what consequences this will have.
A nihilist can look past the claptrap and differentiate between those human values which twist reality and depict it through candy-coated happy glasses from those human preferences which do not mock reality. Its about perceiving the intangible structure of society that will keep it ticking along well behind the flux of purely self-serving moralising, the materialism, the house & share prices, and the egos.
By David
22 April 2008
"MOST Australian women drink too much and feel bad about their weight, with some so troubled they avoid mirrors, a
Womens Weekly survey has found.
"Only one in six women were happy with their weight, the survey found. One in five had such a poor body image they avoided mirrors and 45 per cent would have cosmetic surgery if they could afford it. More than a quarter of the women were confused about what constituted a healthy diet, and 26 per cent failed to eat vegetables every day. Women weren't getting enough exercise - only 45 per cent exercised for 30 minutes or more at least three times a week.
[...]
Binge drinking appeared to be rife, with a third drinking too much and one in five women admitting she had been told she had a drinking problem."
Surprise surprise. Women are encouraged to be supermums in the rat race, with no time left in a day for things such as exercise after managing careers and family. It is increasingly far too 'old fasioned' to teach such basic and rudamentry things like nutritional cooking in schools and everywhere the media transmits images of supermodels and displays advertisements appealing to a women's sense of inadequacy. No wonder the drink is being sought after.
19 April 2008
"A civilization which moves massively in any direction without conscious self-control is in disordered flight as if pursued by enemy hordes" - John Ralston Saul: Voltaire's Bastards.
As Australian society rushes in leaps and bounds to rationalise all aspects of life into a standardised, efficient and production-line type of affair be it buildings, public spaces, music, politics, public debate, education and other essential services, it appears at the same time to possess the slightly related belief that scientific advancement is unquestionably good or that such advancement, by itself and devoid of what it achieves, reflects genuine social progress absolutely.
The scientific revolution which caught on around 500 hundred years ago in response to holistic minded folk wanting to find out about the true the nature of our world as opposed to the religious interpretation of it has unintentionally left us with the obsessive belief that "invention and change are virtues". Thus we feel it more necessary to flee, for the sake of it, into the in fact uncertain and untested future to solve many of our social problems as opposed to simply looking to the knowable and already-tested past.
We live by the near unspoken understanding that the dynamic and many-faced nature of a society is to be guided to a large degree by various scientists, or people who are rational experts in only one narrow field. At the same time we have grown be very suspicious of the notion of the civic-minded person of broad culture and understanding, who links everything together in the social context, and also of the 'conservative' person - where ever they rear their heads, as both these sorts are perceived as aiming to usher us onto the 'regressive' path back into the 'dark' past.
Indeed we seem hasty to jump onto the bandwagon of any new scientific and technological development: be it in the field of genetics, agriculture, machinery/computing, pharmaceuticals, socializing, and even boredom alleviation/entertainment, often simply because the development has recently arisen. But do we examine closely enough both the known and, more insidiously, the as yet unknown negative consequences to human dignity, health, social awareness, and imagination that stem from such scientific developments?
What I feel we fail to acknowledge, yet again as society, is that like the mental tool of pure human rationality, science and technology are merely means, or tools, to achieve ends. Only a confused society would mistake them for ends in themselves.
By David
11 April 2008
THE WORLDVIEW EXPOSED:
The general mental attitude held by the proponents of globalization and universal cultural homogenization is that the proliferation of needs and the necessary means to satisfy them (i.e. materialism) is the most important good for any group of people. Here we are of course referring to the worldwide promotion of 'consumer society' and the way in which it pours over the primal human being to identify, draw out and then viciously agitate any and every natural desire it can which has been ingrained into the human being over millions of years of life on this planet. It then creates the means needed to satisfy those desires in the form of products.
Out now in market places: The calculated stroking and encouragement of all your desires, no matter how base. Coming soon to a market place near you: the creation of new desires!
The proponents of globalization who exercise decisive power in western societies would have you existing akin to a grazing horse which spends most of its waking time appeasing its mundane urges (in this case, the urge to eat), for it is in this way, i.e. by fostering mundane desires and coming up with the only means to satisfy them, that is how the money is made. At the same time they transform culture into something akin to a generic and utilitarian shopping centre, an organisation which embraces no goal beyond the circulation of more money and excludes no body as long as they don't get in the way of business.
DESIRE: THE FUNDMANETAL HUMAN CONDITION FROM A NIHILIST PERSPECTIVE:
It is interesting to contrast two personality types that we have all probably come across in our lives. On the one hand stands the type of person who is able to control his or her desires, who has the brute will and creativity to label some desires as personally and socially meaningless and others as meaning-full. For example, such a person is able to detach him or herself from the natural desire to, say, fit in with the herd and speaks out against 'democracy' or overpopulation, or he or she ignores the desire to sit around all day watching television and instead cultivates his or her desire to get a job and perhaps even a more healthy hobby in addition to television.
On the other hand there is the type of person who does not possess the will to shape his or her preferences, and who answers to every desire as it comes calling.
THE SITUATION:
It seems that contemporary Australian society, driven by the global elite, has a keen interest in promoting the later type of individual (albeit one who has the limited self-control to get a basic dead-end job enabling him or her to contribute to the economy, but nothing more) as such a person will be much more prone to empty his or her wallet on a whim.
Fundamentally this underpins the predominant quantity-over-quality mindset that is prevalent in our society in terms of the quantity of desire being promoted over the quality. Due to the social influence that the merchants have been allowed by the masses to exercise, it is now to be understood that the greater the ease with which we can satisfy our desires (i.e. the greater the amount of income we each receive on average as a nation after being adjusted for inflation), the higher our 'standard of living' is said to be. While the economic component of this communal notion of 'standard of living' in the form of average real income is not supposed to be all-encompassing, it is a tangible and material component and hence receives the majority of attention in the news and by governments (particularly the so called 'conservative' parties).
Furthermore, it seems that decades of desire promotion has contributed to a nation increasingly comprised of individuals possessing an attitude of 'Me. Now!!' and that this is culminating in a society which is less and less attractive to participate in beyond merely rocking up to work or buying things.
By David
hink of it all - of the life that is! Study your friends and foes!
Study the past! And answer this: "Are these times better than those?" The life-long quarrel, the paltry spite, the sting of your poisoned pride! No matter who fell it were better to fight as they did when the world was wide.