30 September 2008
"GRANDPARENTS are the unsung heroes of Australian families and can boost the learning ability of children, a new Federal Government-funded report shows.
She said children aged from three to 19 months had higher learning scores if they were cared for by family and friends - including grandparents - as well as their parents.
"We know from this study how important it is to a child's development to ... spend as much time as possible everyday reading and spending time playing with children"."
::View Article::
More evidence that family members, i.e. real people who have a natural bond to a particular child, are important to that child's development and that young kids need to spend a significant amount of time with people who are genuinely going to interact lovingly and constructively with them.
Parents can only spend so much time interacting with their children each day and this is where extended family and close friends become important: as an extension of the human element offering the child authentic (as opposed to 'professional' or automated) love and guidance.
29 September 2008
"ONE in five Australian mums and dads is unfit to be a parent, according to child-health expert and former Australian of the Year Professor Fiona Stanley.
She says they either lack the means or the life skills to raise children or cannot devote enough time to their kids because of excessive work commitments.
"The fact we don't have maternity leave or parental leave in Australia is just indicative of our lack of valuing of parents," she said."
::View Article::
Australia and the US are the only developed countries which do not legislate for some sort of paid parental leave across the workforce. This means that numerous Aussie parents must juggle professional work and the raising a new human being at the same time, resulting in neglect, basically. Putting a child into day-care from an early age is not some sort of easy solution to this work-family dilemma. The Australian Family Association sights US and UK research confirming that putting infants, or children under 3 years of age, in childcare is likely to be harmful. Evidently parents are usually best at raising their own children.
"[A] report into parental leave, which sets the groundwork for a national scheme, has recommended the Federal Government pay new mothers or fathers for 18 weeks of parental leave.
The inquiry was set up earlier this year by the Rudd Government to examine ways to improve support for parents of newborns. Public hearings have been held around Australia, and hundreds of submissions have been delivered in favour of a national paid scheme.
While most female workers in Australia are entitled to 12 months' unpaid maternity leave, only about 40 per cent have access to paid leave."
::View Article::
Great. Hopefully this recommendation will be heard by government. Australian society is skewed in the wrong direction so long as it places an abstraction like economic productivity ahead of family. This is akin to a drug addict sacrificing long term well-being for short-term gain. Families raise children, i.e. provide love, guidance, and cultivate values better than day-care centres and television can.
26 September 2008
"What on earth do you think you are doing? As a member of the supposed politically apathetic Gen Y, I am being driven to distraction by all of you. Who can blame us for being uninterested in what's going on? If you turn off the radio for two minutes, you come back to discover half the State Government has resigned or there is a new federal Opposition leader, not to mention the sackings, scandals and cabinet leaks.
But that's not what upsets me. It's the character assassination, back-stabbing and obsession with undermining each other that really drives me up the wall. Call me naive, call me idealistic, but what happened to the business of running the country? The hospitals are in a bit of a fix, funding for education is a problem, the state's public transport infrastructure has seen better days and, in case you've missed it, the environment is apparently about to implode. What are you doing? Taking cheap shots at one another. You are all as bad as each other, and the media is hardly blameless either. Does the wealth of the PM or the Opposition Leader have anything to do with how they are running the country? It is more like teen soap opera than Parliament.
In the turmoil of that was my year 12 I considered, albeit fleetingly, the possibility of a career in politics. Thank you for showing me that I made the right decision by staying as far away from that arena as possible. What kind of an institution labels Barnaby Joyce a maverick? I'm not entirely sure of his politics, but can someone explain to me why a politician who makes a decision based on the policy and what is best for his constituents, rather than just toeing the party line, is constantly criticised? If you spent your time and energy, not to mention resources, on actually addressing the problems we have or, heaven forbid, preparing for the future, instead of digging for dirt on your opponents or undermining their character, I could concentrate on something more productive than venting with a Heckler."
::View Article::
I'm sure there has always been tension in politics between the goals of serving society and one's career as a member of a particular party. I'd also bet that this tension is not static and there are times when one takes predominance over the other and vice versa, the current political climate being one in which the introverted mentality of party politics and career interest dwarf the outward looking and holistic mentality of serving in the public interest.
Instances where MP's are freed from the sophistry-confines of party politics to vote on legislation according to the interests of their actual electorate and a more reality-based sense of right and wrong are currently so rare that they have been given a special name: conscience votes.
So what, someone might ask. Well, here we can witness a consequence of all the mudslinging, cheap shots, token-symbolic leadership changes, blame shifting, and media-orientated spin that currently characterises the political scene. Young people, perhaps with an intuitive bullshit detector as yet unsullied by political correctness, are disengaging. At its worst this disengagement will involve future generations thinking less about society and issues that transcend the individual sphere of personal empire. At its best it could involve new ways and mediums of engaging with social issues that are free from the perceptual filters of dogmatic division.
25 September 2008
"In a speech aimed at explaining his rescue package to the American public and convincing Congress to pass the proposal, Mr Bush warned that inaction could wipe out banks, threaten retirement nest eggs, send home values into freefall and foreclosures skyrocketing, and lose millions of jobs.
The Reserve Bank of Australia has welcomed the rescue proposal, saying that rebuilding confidence in the US financial system was important for the Australian economy.
[American] Democrats are worried that the package will merely reward the "cowboy" CEOs whose gambling with credit got the world's finances into the mess in the first place."
::View Article::
If the banking and finance sectors of the US economy become the acknowledged jurisdiction of the public state because of this rescue proposal then this socialism, as it may rightly be labelled, involving as it does the state interfering in otherwise 'free' credit markets, must be symmetrical, or a 'two way street'.
The bail-out must be offered to the financial sector with strings attached: an obligation to have commercial practices regulated by public officials who think of wider social interests and not simply risky short-sighted profiteering that is evidently destructive.
22 September 2008
"Most of the borrowers must have known they had little ability to repay, but still took the loan. Most of the lenders must have known they had poor chances of being repaid, but still made the loan. Both behaved in a way that was anything but rational.
...Because we have Stone Age brains in 21st century skulls. Because the heights of logical deduction of which the most recent, primate part of our brain is capable are usually overridden by the automatic responses of our most primitive, reptilian part and the emotional responses of the early mammalian part.
As if that weren't enough to get us into trouble, our conscious consideration of these matters is led astray by the economists' neoclassical model, founded as it is on the unscientific assumption that humans are "rational" — carefully calculating in all things, in full control of our emotions and utterly uninfluenced by the behaviour of those around us."
::View Article::
This is a weigh in to the debate between 'invisible hand' free market economics and socialism, or between granting primacy in economic matters to the transient whims of an atomised and purely self seeking collection of human beings (the 'invisible hand') or rather a collection of human beings coordinated by some amount of collective wisdom and planning (read: consensus regarding the social 'good').
Free market economics holds that society will be a better place if people involved in economic pursuits remain free to do what they will without the wasteful loss of economic utility generated by regulation or coordination. However as anyone who has glanced at any first year economic textbook will tell you, free-market economics rests on a few underlying assumptions that must be true if the ideology is to live up to its ideals. One of these assumption is that all the people acting purely in their own interests, i.e. with no regard to any set kind of 'whole', are (1) perfectly rational human beings, with (2) access to all relevant information that might inform rational choice.
The recent financial turmoil in the U.S., triggered as it was by the rather irrational lending and borrowing behaviours of both lending firms and borrowing customers, plainly illustrates that human beings are not always perfectly rational. We require the planning capacities of intelligent and holistic minded human beings to lead society and not abstract economic theories based on assumptions about reality which cannot be met.
21 September 2008
"TWO powerful Democrats in the US Congress have expressed reservations over the $US700 billion ($A870 billion) plan US President George W Bush has proposed to rescue the country's beleaguered financial sector.
The top Senate Democrat, majority leader Harry Reid, blamed the crisis on Bush's laissez-faire policies, then called on the president to better explain why such a sweeping program was needed as the country prepared for a presidential vote in less than six weeks.
"It is now self-evident that the Bush administration's extreme hands-off policies have been disastrous,'' Reid said"
::View Article::
This is not simply an instance of party politics hijacking an issue. The Democrats are sceptical of the asymmetrical idea that the financial sector should be left alone from government intervention to enact purely profit maximising business practices like giving out loans to people who are likely to default, but that it should then be bailed out by taxpayer's money (government intervention) when these practices go bad, with no obligation (government regulation) attached that could ensure the financial sector operates as a collection of socially-minded institutions.
"THE Government has already acted on a range of fronts to cushion Australia from the ongoing economic turmoil being experienced overseas, Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard says.
"We have a well-regulated banking system and we're putting in place some further measures to protect people with deposits to ensure that the strength of the regulation here remains."
"The Government's acted on a range of fronts to make sure that our already well-regulated financial markets are the subject of new measures in the face of this global crisis..."
::View Article::
The economic crisis in the U.S. and the subsequent clamouring for government intervention to correct it for the 'public good' shows that institutions like banks are not separate from society, not sectioned off in some isolated purely 'commercial' realm. It seems logical then to coordinate the integration of business and public society on an ongoing basis and not simply when things really hit the fan.
19 September 2008
"SO Dannii Minogue wants to bare her body to the world again in the name of freedom and self-realisation.
The singer and talent show presenter is considering posing nude again for Playboy.
"But it was liberating at the time. I would do it again. If the money was right, then sure," she said."
::View Article::
We see this more and more. Women who say something along the lines of being liberated and 'empowered' by selling their bodies and exposing some skin. But who is really empowered by the spread of this sort of mentality in society, generally? I would think it would be groups like the sex industry and the music industry more than individual girls and women.
I'm not sure liberation comes with the knowledge, closely associated with particular brand names of course, that the concrete way to get ahead as a female is to cater to sexualisation. Perhaps it does in a society that does not regulate commerce with any higher values.
19 September 2008
"Over three decades, the proportion of people who rated state MPs as ethical and honest fell from 21 per cent to 12 per cent, and the equivalent measures for federal MPs were 19 per cent down to 9 per cent. That is, about nine out of 10 voters do not consider politicians to be ethical and honest. This is not healthy for democracy.
One way to try to reverse this trend would be to introduce some form of political consumer protection. In the business and commercial world, consumers are well protected.
There are strict laws, applied by independent authorities, to which we can turn if there is any suggestion of improper practices such as misleading advertising. Yet there is no consumer protection on offer in the political sphere."
::View Article::
There is no obligation placed on politicians to speak the truth because it has been objected that the policing of such an obligation would be open to political manipulation. Concerns about "who exactly would judge what is true or not", or about "who's version of the truth is true?" currently lead us to simply give the good old shrug and fall back on the liberal position that "we'll leave it up to the voters to decide what's true and what's false". How movingly democratic and post-modern.
There are a few problems with this. One is that those voters who actually want to look past the spin and political allegiances and vote with their heads according to actual policies have to wade through piles of bullshit. Political debates slide to the level of rhetoric and become focused on symbols detached from reality, with no way of holding to account those who employ them in this way when they do.
Another is that many people who vote simply do not or cannot determine for themselves what is true and what is merely spin: most people vote merely according to longstanding political allegiances and many people cannot think for themselves.
Groundless spin also turns off intelligent realist sorts of people from politics, disengaging a large slab of the sort of people who we should really want shaping things and leaving even more of politics in the hands of those who don't look past appearances.
16 September 2008
"Women aged 20 to 24 displayed the same level of grit and determination for marriages to succeed as those aged 65 and older. Almost half these 20-something women believe you sign on to one marriage and one marriage only and the only way out is in the back of a hearse. Men under 24 are only slightly less wedded to the concept of marriage forever.
But the "succeed or die trying" brigade drops away markedly to 27 per cent of women aged 35 to 44 and 25 per cent of women 45 to 54, with similar falls for men.
But when a survey as comprehensive as HILDA is telling us our young people often match our retirees when it comes to attitudes about marriage and children, something needs to be done."
::View Article::
Young people are more perceptive than they are often given credit for and are reacting to a period in society that has seen the family defined in terms of the individual rather than the group, giving way to petty squabbles, divorces, broken families, and the emotional pain this has caused them or their friends.
They have been the losers in an era in which their parents increasingly used marriage and children as simply another accessory that could be replaced or discarded upon the onset of difficulty or boredom. Those aged 35-54 were less conservative and more 'Liberal', no doubt because their parents came from a time when the family was not so much at siege from individualism.
Is something wrong, does something need to be done, when social institutions as foundational as marriage and the family are viewed as transient personal liberties or when they are viewed as personal commitments and obligations? While some family break-ups are inevitable and even necessary, and reactionary stigmatisation of divorce is undesirable as it makes life even more difficult for those children who come from broken homes, it is no secret generally that intact families, driven by a goal greater than constant individual gratification on the part of parents, are more healthy environments for children than broken ones.
15 September 2008
"JOSEPHINE CAFAGNA: An extraordinary thing happened in the Victorian Parliament this week: party politics was put aside. MPs from opposite sides of the political fence sat together to thrash out an issue that no previous Victorian Parliament has been game to consider: the decriminalisation of abortion.
[...]
In the past 10 years, there have only been three conscience votes. They've dealt with the issues of infertility treatment, human embryos and the rights of people in gay relationships. None of those have gone anywhere near the length this one has. Three days and three nights and that's only in the Lower House.
[...]
JOSEPHINE CAFAGNA: The bill passed the Lower House without amendment at 1 am today. It's now moved to the Upper House for MPs to struggle with their conscience. Some hope that the spirit of cooperation of MPs seen this week, might continue through other debates, maybe even Question Time.
[...]
PETER BATCHELOR: There's an improved chance of that happening. It'll happen to a greater degree because of what's occurred this week. Whether that dissipates over time, we will tell. But, I reiterate the point I made at the beginning, Josephine: I've never seen behaviour - such good and productive behaviour in Parliament like we've seen this week."
::View Article::
Unlike in the U.S., Australian political parties normally require their MP's to vote on pieces of legislation in accordance with the party line as opposed to their own rationality, on pain of reprimand or exclusion. The recent abortion debate in the Lower House of the Victorian Parliament has been an exception to this, allowing members a vote of conscience.
All the politicians effectively agreed upon the need to bypass the 'party politics filter', understanding all too well that it restricts otherwise more free debate by gagging individual MP's from arguing and discussing issues according to one's heart and autonomous sense of objectivity.
Afterwards there was some vague romanticising about the possibility of there being further instances of such behaviour among our leaders and their ministers and less of a tendency for political issues to be debated in the interests of division simply for division's sake and career advancement. Why not grant other issues a similar level of dignity, on the state/territory level and the national level?
14 September 2008
"In fact, as the political becomes ever more personal, it's every news outlet's form of communication. News journalism in all its guises used to be about thrashing out the big issues. But increasingly news and current affairs reporting is less about the large ideas and more and more about the minutiae of the "me" factor.
[...]
...Westacott - and every other news editor - knows that providing your audience with what you think they need to know at the expense of what they want to know is a fast track to ruin. "If you follow the path of providing them simply with what you think they want, you'll lose your audience," he says. "If you simply sit there and lecture and hector, you lose your audience. It's an interesting balance for every news organisation, the balance of information and entertainment and challenging notions. It is a subtle art form."
[...]
"And that's understandable in terms of the economics of the industry," Turner says. "But at its broadest, your democracy is only as strong as the quality of the information that's provided to its citizens." The personalising of everything frequently means the big picture - and the detail - of issues is sidelined.
The last federal budget was a compelling example. Reporting was dominated not by how the overall package might address a tangle of economic and social problems, but by a chorus of disgruntled individuals."
::View Article::
The more we all individualise our outlooks and view national life exclusively in terms of "how does this affect me?" and "If I personally don't like it, it's evil", the more the media will tailor its news and current affairs analysis in terms of whether some piece of legislation, some ongoing public debate, or some aspect of culture is deemed 'good' or 'bad' by some one individual... anyone. The media is after all in the habit of following what the masses want: profit comes first and current affairs come second.
Consider the issue of means testing that was raised in the last federal budget. Reporting on possible benefits that might have been delivered to society as a whole by the introduction of means testing was clouded by all the reporting on various individuals who, for example, would incur some limited short term financial pain as a result of means testing removing government hand-outs that they might not have needed, relatively speaking, in the first place. Gasp.
By adopting the 'personalised' approach to social issues, considerations as to whether or not an issue might be sensible for the whole will constantly be sidelined in favour of emotion and the depth of our journalism and thinking in all matters social and political will be reduced to "well, Joe Bloggs here doesn't like it, therefore it must be bad".
12 September 2008
Times are changing. We're moving towards a 'progressive' Liberal national culture which is doing away with consensus and common standards, allowing for different view points and modes of life to be realised, all under the same roof. You have the right to be who you want to be, and society will not promote a certain set of values, Right? Take this publication from the 1995 Global Cultural Diversity Conference Proceedings in Sydney:
"A new possibility is emerging in Australia. This is the possibility of a paradoxical new universal in which negotiating differences becomes the national essence. Nation in the sense of jealously-guarded boundaries and internal homogeneity no longer exists in a meaningful or at all productive way. Instead, the new nation must be founded upon a postnationalist sense of common purpose. The national ethos must be based on the creative and productive virtues of internal diversity and an outward-looking internationalism."
::View article::
So, the 'new' national culture, or common good, in Australia is to revolve around difference? The bonds that link us are supposed to differentiate us? This sounds absurd, really.
What can it mean? Surely a group of people must have some common values to ensure at least a basic level of social harmony and order?
"This is the new basis for cohesive sociality, a new civility in which differences are used as a productive resource and in which differences are celebrated. It is the basis for the postnationalist sense of common purpose that is now essential to a peaceful and productive global order."
::View article::
But of course. All of this Liberal talk about the promotion of "internal diversity" is simply a smokescreen for the promotion of an unspoken "global order"' based purely around economic growth.
See, when a wide mix of traditional cultures, values, and standards that used to exist with more autonomy are thrown into the giant melting pot of a centralised and Pluralistic political state under the guise of "diversity" and "difference", all get levelled down to the lowest common denominator of materialism. This is because the common element held between most unique value systems is materialism, in that most unique cultural and value systems naturally recognize the need to achieve a certain level of material sustenance before their particular higher desires or ideals can be addressed.
There is nothing wrong with a certain amount of cultural materialism, obviously. The problem arises, however, when there are no values commonly held between a people to regulate materialism and subordinate it to higher collective and holistic interests.
Materialism should be a means to an end rather than an end in itself, and this is where Liberalism and Pluralism conveniently come in: they remove the 'political correctness' of any sort of positive, spoken, social consensus that pure economics and material growth might answer to, leaving society to be directed by the special interests of the economy and associated slogans like 'individual consumer choice'.
11 September 2008
"You think we live in a democracy where we choose our leaders? Then wake up and check the leaders of our states and territories.
In fact, six of the eight got their jobs without going to an election. They were picked instead by their party to replace a leader of their own side.
Both parties now realise if they are in power and voters want change, it's better the government offer it, rather than the Opposition...
::View Article::
Modern democracy stands for playing the blame game and passing the buck, as opposed to responsible and accountable leadership. The sinister element is not really that we don't vote for all these substitute leaders, but rather that governments employ the tactic of changing leaders so that failures can be blamed on that 'other guy' who used to be the leader, taking the focus away from what in the fact the party, as the government, needs to acknowledge, address, and improve. It's simply an exercise in spin.
This 'buck passing' behaviour occurs in multiple levels of our democracy and is not simply exclusive to individual party politics. Take the recent Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report which found that Australia ranks second last in terms of public education funding compared with other 'developed' nations:
"Federal Education Minister Julia Gillard says the findings show just how much the education system was neglected by the Howard government.
"In early childhood education, Australia comes pretty close to the bottom of the class and this report also confirms that we've been under investing in higher education and vocational education and training," she said.
"It's no wonder with a record like this that the Howard government left us with a skills crisis, and left us with a big job to do to get early childhood education up to world standards."
Opposition education spokesman Tony Smith has rejected Ms Gillard's criticism, saying the Coalition would have spent more if it did not have to pay off debts left by the Labor Party under the Keating government."
::View Article::
Education is one of the most important contributors to a 'civilised' society - for applied economic and social reasons and also pure knowledge-based, 'enlightenment' reasons - and here we have both sides of government blaming the other for a failure in that area.
The overarching failure however is not one isolated incidence of education funding but a political system and culture which values appearance over reality and spin over accountability. Failure in life is not the act of making a particular mistake. It's the mentality of not acknowledging the mistake and subsequently correcting it.
09 September 2008
"Green groups and the Victorian Opposition have blasted a police plan to put a fleet of black, military-style Hummers on the streets of Melbourne in an effort to combat alcohol-fuelled violence.
"I just don't know that a military vehicle driving through the streets is going to make people feel safer compared to police walking or on bicycles," ACF climate change campaigner Phil Freeman said.
"We have got a serious problem, everybody acknowledges it but rather than putting more police resources onto our streets to deal with the problem of drunken hooligans they're introducing these gimmicks.""
::View Article::
This is one example of the 'externalities' we will see more and more as Australian society embraces Pluralism and the hostile liberal attitude towards cultural consensus: a military state, not to sound too alarmist. It will involve either police all over the streets in tank like hummer vehicles, on bikes, or on their feet. The common theme however will be the need for the state to increasingly impose itself on day-to-day life because there is no consensus between the public - the people - on how to act and what behaviours are 'good' and 'bad', spawning various sorts of social friction and conflict.
The more the smart people in this country run away out of vague fear from the opportunity to come together to form some sort of consensus on what values we should foster as a joint society, or parallel sets of joint societies if nationwide consensus is not possible, - in schools, politics, the media, business etc - the more restricted life will become for each of us.
Fostering cultural consensus will promote freedom? This might seem paradoxical, but it's not, really. Its just not what we are 'accustomed' to think at present, due to mainstream cultural norms (political correctness might be included here) and a narrowing political spectrum concerned purely with unlimited economic growth and a petty consumerist version of 'choice'.
A society that enjoys consensus in its conceptions of 'good' and 'bad' and agrees on the behaviours needed to realise its particular conceptions (these behaviours being known collectively as 'virtue') does not need to spend as much of it's citizens hard earned money on intervening in their lives to clean up after spates of violence to ensure neighbourhood/civil peace. This is known as society protecting 'negative freedom': merely our freedom from the imposition of others. It is contrasted by them more positive, pro-active conception of freedom which involves some social consensus: 'freedom to...' rather than simply 'freedom from....'
Ultimately we let vague emotional labels such as 'draconianism' and 'totalitarianism' cloud discussions in matters of consensus and positive freedom. But to start down the road of more cultural consensus and positive freedom would not have to involve 'unfairly' imposing one massively arbitrary conception of 'right' and 'wrong' on all of society. It could simply begin by reinvigorating a basic, almost lowest common denominator, set of values that aren't all that contentious but which currently go un-fostered on a social level and are often even beginning to be discouraged by the emerging 'me! me!' religions of consumerism and individualism.
Higher subsequent levels of social consensus, and thus more 'positive freedom', could be realised through all the members of society who possess different values organising themselves around their respective values, which would involve a higher, but not revolutionary, amount of localisation as opposed to the contrary practices of centralisation, massification, and pluralism that are currently driving society into uncharted territory.
08 September 2008
All of the Corrupt tribes view as desirable consensus in matters of values/morality among people living in a certain society/community. The idea of consensus stands opposed to the liberal 'live and let live' mentality which argues that values like 'decency', 'purpose' and 'right/wrong' are not social matters, or matters that concern a collective of people living in relative proximity, but rather strictly private concerns to be determined in individual households, separate from any imposition by the social collective.
The problem with this ultra Liberal view is that everyone reverts into a 'heads-down' private mentality and society, as a collective or 'whole', slowly heads towards the lowest common denominator because there is no quality control that goes higher than the particular whims of a particular individual at a particular time.
This is not to say that individual households are not capable of instilling decency, purpose and conceptions of right/wrong that go higher than the individual, (many are not, but this is not exactly the point), but rather that these sorts of values require not just the efforts of private households in order to stick but the joint collaboration of private individuals with educators, leaders, people in business, idols/heroes... In other words some amount of consensus by an entire collective or society/community.
Let's take a look at today's news in a society going further down the path towards 'live and let live' and away from moral consensus:
"A female police officer has been released from hospital after being kicked in the head during a brawl at a rugby league grand final on the NSW North Coast.
Police say the officer tried to break up a fight between about 10 spectators at the game between the Woolgoolga Seahorses and Orara Valley Axemen at Woolgoolga oval yesterday afternoon.
She dropped her portable radio and was picking it up when she was attacked."
::View Article::
Again:
"Victorian police will [now] patrol Melbourne's inner-city streets in Hummers to try to curb violence.
The move comes after a 24-year-old Cranbourne man was left on life support after he was knocked unconscious at a Southbank nightclub early on Sunday. Police have charged two men with assault over the incident. The police earlier said the man had died.
Police are also looking at setting up drunk tanks at trouble hot spots, and have promised to crack down on licensed venues that serve intoxicated patrons."
::View Article::
It's not just our widely reported escalating street violence now telling us that the 'live and let live'/individualist morality position is misguided. We should be suspicious also that no society has ever been produced by an ultra Liberal group of people. Liberalism proper simply pops up in societies that have previously been built through joint conceptions of the common good, i.e. consensus.
The stage of downgrading conceptions like family, civic virtue, and hard work of the sort that actually contributes to the great good, comes about only after society is already ticking along - when we forget about obligation and decide to scramble for what we can simply get out of society, all while being controlled by the misplaced fear that accompanies the notion of a higher degree of social consensus: the fear of being judged.
07 September 2008
"You see, these men were enjoying a healthy dose of b-romance on that Saturday morning. B-romance is the term we coined as we giggled over our lattes watching the boys like they were some sort of circus act. It is the non-gay deep affection that men have for their mates.
Imagine if you and your partner loved all the same things. You are both dying to hang out at the pub, shouting over the top of a pint, talking about only two or three topics, all of which may involve sport and none of them about relationships.
You both love sex and never feel the need to overanalyse it. Outside work, the most pressing issue of your day is what you are going to eat for dinner, and who is going to get it for you.
The most beautiful part of your house is not the front garden - it's the area surrounding the couch. The most horrific thought if you were ever burgled is that the TV and 12 remotes may get taken."
::View Article::
I know we're living in the age of 'equality' in this country, but does this mean that the notion of the male gender must be levelled down? Is 'male-ness' now to be conceived of in terms of what might be its most ordinary characteristics - sport, beer, sex, food, television - rather than what might be 'its' extra ordinary characteristics - idealism, strength, responsibility, care...?
The culture we live in, which includes the common stereotypes, plays a significant role in forming our perceptions of ourselves as we grow up, and while there is nothing wrong with a bit of hedonism, I think that using it as the basis of what ever 'the' modern Australian male might be is not simply unfairly miss-representing reality, but also setting the bar quite low for future generations of men.
04 September 2008
"KEVIN Rudd will be asked to drastically lift Australia's reserves of natural forests and grasslands as part of its climate change solution in a bid to ease emissions cuts on industry as part of the transition to a low-carbon economy.
The Prime Minister's climate change adviser, Ross Garnaut, yesterday urged Australia to lift its focus on retaining natural forests and grasslands in northern Australia as part of its climate change response.
The Australian understands the concept of boosting biosequestration has the support of senior government figures, particularly given its potential to reduce the impact on industry of the Government's carbon reduction measures."
::View Aritlce::
Increasing the amount of our forests and grasslands that are protected as reserves is obviously a great idea for many reasons, and I doubt many people would disagree. However, purely as a policy response to battle the carbon emissions from an otherwise 'business-as-usual' Australian economy and society, it falls short.
It's like treating the symptoms of a cancer but not the cancer itself, for it ignores the fact that our current consumption and population patterns, globally and not just in Australia, are unsustainable.
Protecting forests that already exist is not going to reduce carbon pollution and the greenhouse effect this pollution fuels rather than simply prevent a bad situation worsening. We would need to embark on a large national tree planting mission to secure any net-benefits. However, any hypothetical net lowering of current rates of carbon pollution would soon be cancelled out via our high levels of population growth fuelling future consumption and thus future carbon pollution.
04 September 2008
"The Deputy Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, had flagged Labor's intentions in school education when interviewed on the ABC's Insiders on August 10. She revealed that on a recent visit to the US she had been influenced by the Teach for America program operating in New York. The education minister stated that she wanted to achieve a similar transparency with public and private education in Australia to ensure that "people know everything that there is to know about schools" and "can compare like schools". At the moment state and territory governments, supported by teachers' unions, refuse to provide such material. So it is all but impossible to determine which schools are achieving the best possible results and which are the best managed.
[...]
The reason why conservatives and social democrats have a similar attitude to education reform in Australia results from the fact that they are attempting to resolve a continuing problem. Namely, that the public education system is dominated by public sector unions who have no genuine desire for real education reform. There are many excellent principals and teachers in the government system along with some duds. The former do not need union protection. The latter use the clout that potentially results from collective action to avoid the consequences which flow as a result of incompetence or laziness in most other industries.
The Howard government failed to achieve school education reform because it could not override the state and territory Labor governments which protect the interests of the education unions. Rudd has indicated his intention to succeed at this task. He told The Australian last week that some teachers' unions are "locked into a view of equity which doesn't work". In other words, Rudd and Gillard believe education unions are preventing young Australians from low-income backgrounds from achieving their full potential in society."
::View Article::
The Labor government is attempting to lame, in order to bypass, one of the worst aspects inherent in any sort of unionism and collectivism: the herd mentality that protects the useless. Education unions currently make it difficult for planners to work out which schools are the ones that are simply not working, the ones which need the attention, so as to protect its members from possibly being identified as incapable or underperforming teachers.
The education of youth is one of the most important jobs in any society, not merely for economic reasons, and it is more than simply a shame that teachers are not looked upon with more esteem in the community and that the teaching profession as a whole is increasingly a 'turn-off' for bright young people choosing a career. The capacity to identify and weed-out genuinely lazy and incompetent teachers can only help elevate the reputation of the profession and also improve the intimidating environment in many schools that turns off prospective teachers.
02 September 2008
"PRIVATE companies will get a greater stake in Victoria's public education system, under a radical State Government shake-up.
[...]
Under the changes, big companies will be asked to play a greater role in public education, "partnering" schools in disadvantaged suburbs and areas with skills shortages.
They will also be asked to assist with financial contributions, student mentoring programs or "in kind" donations such as computers and equipment."
::View Article::
So, we the public can't provide the resources needed to improve schools, so we'll get big business to do it? Big business has one main interest at the end of the day, and it is certainly not an interest in objective, nihilistic (i.e. value neutral), wide-reaching fact and thinking. It is an interest in the much more partisan and narrow pursuit of making profit.
If we value a wide, objective and rich education for our children we should be wary that this sort of reform could give big business the ability to assert undue influence on the students or curriculum in any school it might be 'supporting'. Students and individual schools might become simply markets for the specific supporting business, and the curriculum might be narrowed state-wide to focus on those conceptions of the world that hold up the value of the share market as the highest collective good in life.
01 September 2008
"PUTTING babies into childcare is a form of abuse, leading children's author Mem Fox claims.
Ms Fox, a children's literacy advocate and author of the best-selling Possum Magic, said she believed society would look back on the trend of allowing babies only a few weeks old to be put into childcare and wonder, "How could we have allowed that child abuse to happen?".
"I just tremble," she said. "I don't know why some people have children at all if they know that they can only take a few weeks off work."
::View Article::
I do. It's because parents too often want their careers and material standards of living to be the focus of their lives rather than their family. 50 years ago our parents and grandparents were content with going without a new appliance or radio, as they didn't expect so much out of the material side of life.
"Working mothers have criticised Fox's comments, while family groups have offered qualified support.
Australian Family Association spokeswoman Angela Conway said the author's language was too strong, but US and UK research backs her view.
"Large amounts of research are coming in showing that - particularly for children under two, but also under three - child care is generally likely to be harmful to them," Ms Conway said."
::View Article::
No surprise here, surely? Child care facilities simply cannot provide infants with the affection and care parents naturally give to their own. Nor can child care, to all ages, provide kids with the moral guidance they need to form characters worthy of respect in later years.
Unhappy children, burnt our parents, and broken relationships will become the norm rather than the exception if material standards of living and the rat race continue to dominate our lives. As a nation we're abandoning the family, one of the most important instututions that made civilisation possible, and filling the gap we've left with cheap labour immigration. This says something.
01 September 2008
"ABORIGINAL leaders have sharply rejected outgoing Governor-General Michael Jeffery's claim that the vast majority of indigenous Australians are living "integrated normal" lives, and that disadvantage was confined mostly to remote areas.
Indigenous leader Pat Dodson said the remarks by the head of state were superficial and suggested that all that was needed was to "force these (remote) people out of their communal ways".
"It really denies the uniqueness of who the indigenous people are and what their contribution to this country can be in their own right, as if they have nothing to contribute except the absorption of the culture that the west has offered to us. It's a pretty damnable statement if that's the case."
::View Article::
Aboriginals don't want to be 'integrated' into mainstream Australian society and become faceless consumers. They want to retain their own values and practices because their indigenous culture provides them with meaning in life.
"We're not living normal lives, we're totally over-represented in the social indicators, we're dying a lot younger, we don't have the education opportunitie ... (people are living) below the poverty line in many parts of Australia, it is not just those in northern Australia who are battling to make ends meet," Mr Dodson said."
While there might possibly be some discrimination at work here, it's evidently not entirely clear that it is possible in the first place for Aboriginals to be fully integrated. Reality sometimes does not reflect moral fantasies: the moral fancy here being that Aboriginals are 100% compatible with the Anglo-Saxon basis of mainstream Australian society, that 'we're all the same in the end, man'. Sorry, we're not, due to tens of thousands of years of evolution in different geographical environments.
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.