Chris Gardiner, moral guardians at the gate, and Houston we have an fcuking problem

(Above: careful sweet young things. You start off wearing an fcuk T-shirt, and the next thing you know you've turned into a dangerous radical denouncing the status quo, rioting in the streets, abusing police horses, and perhaps most alarming of all, listening to Kyle Sandilands).

I write on the ongoing matter of Kyle Sandilands from a position of firm, unshakeable, invincible ignorance.

I have yet to hear a minute of the lad on air. Not a minute. Not a millisecond. Not even a nanosecond. He may as well be broadcasting in bizarro world for all I'd know or care, or in an exotic language. Say Urdu. Which isn't exotic in the Punjab or Uttar Pradesh, but is to me.

Which gives me naturally a tremendous amount of expertise, allowing me to sound off on the matter of Kyle, like Big Ben sounding the hour.

Because it seems to me that - whatever his on air sins - we have the familiar sounds of a lynching party at work, never mind the scale or quality of the crimes.

So it is with Chris Gardiner's rant What Kyle says about the death of our civility.

Now what this kind of rant allows is the use of a couple of Kyle related incidents to announce the death of civility in western civilization as we know it, just as the likes of Don Watson wants to announce the end of English as a result of a few terminological inexactitudes. People being economical with the truth or imprecise with their deployment of the lingo.

Here's Gardiner's predictable opener:

A radio personality returned to the air this week after time out to recover from an unfortunate incident arising from a social disability before now not previously categorised – he is, I have concluded from the incident and his lack of remorse, ‘civically challenged’.

The ‘civically challenged’ person is so self-absorbed or insensitive as to be oblivious to the social and cultural impact of his or others’ egotistical or crass behaviour.

Well you might argue that the civically challenged - especially if inclined to turgid pomposity -goes on kicking a downed dog with steel capped boots, even after the chastened dog has returned to air, thus far without having managed to piss on the aspidistra in the corner or made yet another on air blunder. Sure, that's likely a matter of time, but for the love of the lord, leave the dog alone.

But Gardiner has other fish to fry than just Kyle. It's all of us, who somehow lack civic virtue and sensibility. And there's no way out, no recourse from this hideous condition:

The basic condition is compounded by an instinctive defensiveness that, when the offensive behaviour is highlighted and there is the risk of embarrassment or shame, allows him to dismiss critics as humourless and priggish and ‘politically correct’, rendering self-reflection, therefore, as unnecessary.

So you might in fact have someone sounding like a classic humorless, priggish politically incorrect turkey - like Gardiner - but that's no excuse. Oh no, no, no, and it's not just Kyle, though let's recount his sins yet again, because The Punch might not love the sinner, but boy do they love repeating his sins:

Of course, it is not just the disc jockey who thinks morning radio is better for broadcasting a masturbation competition, or dismisses an unexpected disclosure by a child of sexual abuse as one of possibly many sexual experiences, or who commends concentration camp life as a weight loss option, that I have in mind in establishing this new category of social deficit.

Yep, there's Kyle's sins laid out yet again for all to see. So now let's get on to the other sinners and their social deficits (and if you see a sinner, remember, pick up the first stone and throw it, lest the other bugger smash your glass house first):

I am thinking also of the egotists who keep our Police and accident and emergency units busy as a result of their regular drunken binges and unquestioningly assume the cost of their ‘fun’ should be borne by the public, or the attention seeker who wears a FCUK t-shirt to the supermarket, or the foul-mouthed parent at the football match who put his coprolalian outbursts down to passion for the game.

What the fcuk?A smart arse T-shirt is suddenly a sign of uncivil armageddon? Okay, another disclaimer. I don't wear Fcuk clothing, never have, never will, but some sweet young thing wearing a t-shirt with 'fcuk' draped over it isn't quite the same as kristallnacht (here).

For that matter, it isn't the same as a punch fest at a rugby league game, nor should it be led in the same breath as a passing out drunken binge of the kind favored by media types. It's in that stretch, that reach too far, that Gardiner joins all the other 'jump up and down on the spot' loons always making a splashing and a squawking in some corner or another of loon pond.

Now you think I might have gone a little too far - broken Godwin's Law yet again - by evoking kristallnacht as a real sign of civically challenged behaviour. But bear with me, because soon enough Gardiner moves away from T-shirts to people lying in pools of blood:

There is also a form of ‘civically challenged’ character that is essentially one of passivity.

It was recently expressed in the mindless betrayal of a bashed off-duty police woman left lying in her blood whilst people journeyed on their way to work – our very own Kitty Genovese experience.

Naturally the media have to be brought to account, held to blame:

The civically challenged, of course, sometimes hold positions of power and influence in business and professional life.

They can be seen in the TV producers who pass off Big Brother voyeurism or slogans like ‘bring back the biff’ as harmless popular culture.

Heck, the whole world is to blame:

They can also be seen in the bonus fixated businessmen who have recently destroyed the life savings of so many.

And yes, I'm glad you stayed with me, because Gardiner can't resist bringing up the Nazis:

The condition at its worst has recently been portrayed in the self-absorbed character of Professor John Halder, played by Viggo Mortensen, in the film Good.

If you haven't seen this dull self-absorbed movie, a half baked adaptation of a stage play - often quoted by self-absorbed people concerned with pious ethical issues - Mortensen plays a university professor who joins up with Hitler's Nazi machine to once again illustrate the banality of evil. So we move from T-shirts to Hitler.

Now of course this kind of argument requires a 'but', so Gardiner offers up a standard 'but':

I do not put the idiocy and offensiveness of the on-air comments of our now returned morning DJ, of course, in the same category as the ultimate betrayal of morality and personal responsibility by the character Halder.

No, no, they just happen to be part of the same wide ranging column.

But what's worse is that Gardiner then withdraws the 'but' he's just offered up, instead putting in a variant 'but':

They do, I think though, sit at one end of the spectrum of the character type I want us now to describe as ‘civically challenged’.

Yep, start with Kyle, or maybe an fcuk T-shirt or a dire Big Brother television program, and the next thing you know, you've got spewing in the streets, police women bleeding to death, and some new rough beast, Adolf Hitler reincarnated, slouching towards Bethlehem.

Well there's some civically challenged behaviour going on in Gardiner's hysterical column, but for once I'd let Kyle Sandilands off the hook, and look to the author of the article.

If he keeps banging on about it this way, likely as not western civilization as we know it will come to an end by lunch time Friday ... and Gardiner can take all the credit. Because putting anyone in the same basket or lineage as Hitler's men isn't civilized discourse. Unless of course it happens that they are (hello Stormfront).

As the farmer used to say to the blue heeler, settle, settle ...

(UPDATE: oh, I see Kyle isn't scheduled to be back on air until 7th October. Whatever. I won't be listening, but does it also suggest that Chris Gardiner doesn't know what the fcuk he's talking about?)

(Below: see, see, didn't I warn you. Now we've got all these fcukers down under).

Don Watson, fish and chips, and wearing concrete elbow patches on linguistic nostalgia

(Above: a vision of golden chips, or as a New Zealander would say, chups, hold the fush).

One of the sweetest joys of the intertubes is the collapse of all moral, ethical and practical standards when it comes to the writing of the English language.

Eventually with a bit of luck we'll get fully back to the good old days, back before the state of flux in which Shakespeare wrote his masterpieces, back before the vowel shift and the wandering 'e'. back before the anarchy of Chaucer and middle English, back indeed to the vigor and anarchy of the primal swamp of old English. Where if you said something, or scribbled it down, it was okay, provided that the intended recipient sort of understood what you meant. Now tweet me that and who knows, I might c u lata.

To reach this linguistic haven, we need to defeat the pedants and the dullards, who constantly seek to do down the imaginative use of language. They found their home in the eighteenth century, in the striving of the likes of Dr. Samuel Johnson to fix the language through his dictionary (though fortunately he was so eccentric that the exercise provided much amusement, especially when it came to describing Scottish folk).

Perhaps the worst outcome was L'Académie française, and its wretched dictionary, which attempted to fix the French language in amber, like a mosquito locked in to a plot for a Stephen Spielberg movie featuring the reconstitution of dinosaurs. The French for a long time fought against Franglais - the contamination of French by English - but frankly Je ne care pas for that kind of thinking, in fact Je suis tired of it. Vivre le Mark Twain in Innocents Abroad with his letter to a Parisian landlord:

PARIS, le 7 Juillet. Monsieur le Landlord--Sir: Pourquoi don't you mettez some savon in your bed-chambers? Est-ce que vous pensez I will steal it? La nuit passee you charged me pour deux chandelles when I only had one; hier vous avez charged me avec glace when I had none at all; tout les jours you are coming some fresh game or other on me, mais vous ne pouvez pas play this savon dodge on me twice. Savon is a necessary de la vie to any body but a Frenchman, et je l'aurai hors de cet hotel or make trouble. You hear me. Allons. BLUCHER.

Now what prompts this outburst? Why it's because these days there are pompous pedants always ready to savage writers about their abuse of the English language, and being what it is, the intertubes will always mock their pronouncements. Here's Don Watson with Buzzwords from the McDonald's bucket:

The jargon-infested public pronouncements of modern political and financial leaders are all potato and no meat. Whatever the shape of the new economic order, the language is sure to continue on its present depressing course.

Well we can see where this is heading. It's clear, concise communication, and tremendously predictable, especially for those of us who will remain fiskally and linguistikally challenged. But thankfully in the very next para Watson is unfrocked, de-personned, by an aberration well known to users of the intertubes, involving the pesky mis-interpretation and placement of the aberrant question mark:

Frankly the interpolation of question marks perks up this tired old piece of nostalgia, hinting at mystery and style in a very Don Marquis' Archie and Mehitable style, much better than pretending Watson's experience of crappy country town fish and chip shops has anything to do with the proper use of the English language (and yes I grew up in a town with fish and chip shops, and they produced uniformly greasy and hideous chips, and if you stop off at country town fish and chipperies today - say Quirindi - you can still get the same hideous grease laden offering, only redeemed by copious amounts of salt).

Watson proceeds to rabbit on about the mis-use of the English language in describing McDonald?s chips (I keed, I keed):

Now, consider a bucket of McDonald's chips – or "fries", as they have become. Consider them, as Michael Pollan does in The Botany of Desire, as the Platonic ideal of French fries: "slender golden rectangles long enough to overshoot their trim red containers like a bouquet." The potato abstracted, globally: so abstracted, it is likely that many people who eat McDonald's fries are unaware or have forgotten that it is potato that they're eating. Just as likely, if they do think of the fries as potatoes, the only breed of potato they have ever tasted is the kind McDonald's demands of its growers and sells not so much as potato as a brand made from potato. That kind is the unnaturally elongated, uniform and almost eyeless Russet Burbank, or in very recent times an even more sophisticated Monsanto invention, the New Leaf.

Then perversely, having celebrated country town fish and chips, and berated Michael Pollan, Watson embarks on his own foodie fantasy, as if discovering the joys of nuance when once a grubby schoolboy hand feeling up pulp would have sufficed:

The subtle differences of flavour, fragrance and texture which distinguish one kind of potato from the many others that exist are unknown to most of the world's regular potato-eaters. Floury and waxy, big, small, smooth and gnarled, deep eyes and shallow ones, sweet, aromatic and bland potatoes, potatoes that bake well and potatoes best mashed, potatoes with red soil or black or grey soil still sticking to them. I mean potatoes both for eating and for talking about: subjective, nuanced, paradoxical, real potatoes; not just carbohydrates but the rudiments of life.

But this of course is all just an elaborate ruse, a kind of rush of words to set up the main game, which is to attack politicians and political speak, as if ponderous pedantry were a recent invention, when as we all know, Shakespeare used Gerard Henderson for direct inspiration when creating his character Polonius in Hamlet.

Shooting at politicians and bureaucrats is very much like shooting at fish in a barrel, especially when dealing with words uttered by the poor buggers when they have to shoot from the hip in the glare of cameras, knowing that if they say something meaningful, direct, explicit, understandable or coherent, a pack of jackals will descend on them, and peck them and their words to pieces. Much like Don Watson dealing with a bit of waffle from the current Premier of Victoria:

"What we do have in this state, I think, is an exciting agenda, going forward, a very positive agenda in terms of education and health, and we've also got some big challenges there that we, you know, need to get on top of."

So what's the poor bugger to say?

In this state we have a very dull unimaginative agenda, a very negative agenda in terms of education and health, hoping that we can keep the train on the rails, rather than off frolicking in the meadows, and that way we hope we have no challenges at all, so we don't have to be on top of anything, especially the English language.

Watson of course gets very righteous:

Imagine this sentence broken at random into bits and arranged in the McDonald's bucket like fries. It's a bit wordy, so we can take out everything up to exciting agenda and everything after challenges – unless you are especially keen to get on top of them. This will leave room for his next sentence that day – "And I've indicated that public transport is an issue in our state" – which was to say he had "indicated" that something the public knows from maddening experience was an "issue", though not to say why he thought we needed to know that he had "indicated" what we already knew, or why countless cancelled train services were an "issue", as opposed to a pain in the neck or a consequence of bad management or policy. Try not to think about it; just put it in the bucket and move on to the next sentence:

I've announced a number of initiatives in terms of improving our public transport system, but tackling congestion in public transport and on the roads remains a key agenda issue for me, going forward.

Well actually I find the potato metaphor (or is it a simile, whatever) over-extended, and over-abused when dealing with a potato head talking to potato heads about issues for which - look at NSW transport at the moment - no viable solution is available. So of course you're going to get mealy mouthed clot eared pious nonsense. And where?s the ?arm in that?

But Watson is relentless in his use of the potato. On and on he goes, forcing every bit of starch he can from the spud in his bid to stiffen users of English language:

What you have, then, is a bucket containing everything that modern managers (including premiers) need to make sentences, as McDonald's customers find in the bucket everything they need in the way of potatoes.

This is the meat and potatoes of politics and management – without the meat. And there's no nourishment in the potatoes. And, although it is almost certain they are committed to diversity, no variety. In truth, the Premier might have assembled his words in all manner of other combinations and still said much the same thing – that is to say, nothing of consequence.

Managerial language is today's public language, the language of politicians, bureaucrats and chief executives; of all managers, in other words, including the captains of cricket teams who, with no apparent strain, are likely to tell us that Andrew Symonds might "impact the team in his personality" or that Herschelle Gibbs has "made an effort in terms of improving his lifestyle".

Now if I were being perverse, I could of course retreat to the sublime send up of the abuse of English language on view in George and Wheedon Grossmith's The Diary of a Nobody (here):

April 16.—The night of the East Acton Volunteer Ball. On my advice, Carrie put on the same dress that she looked so beautiful in at the Mansion House, for it had occurred to me, being a military ball, that Mr. Perkupp, who, I believe, is an officer in the Honorary Artillery Company, would in all probability be present. Lupin, in his usual incomprehensible language, remarked that he had heard it was a “bounders’ ball.” I didn’t ask him what he meant though I didn’t understand. Where he gets these expressions from I don’t know; he certainly doesn’t learn them at home.

Not that I'm accusing Don Watson of being a cad or a bounder, but he really should look at the exigencies that force the current perambulations around the truth performed by politicians. Like the GFC. Oh and please excuse the question marks, they?re as ?ound in the original text:

To save my life, I could not speak credibly about economics for 10 seconds, yet I can see why the ?nancial bubble took so long to burst. It was because all that ?nancial innovation was manifestly good. So good and so manifest that, whether it was in making millions or having a title to their own modest home, it inspired wonder in those who felt the bene?ts: wonder at the great and mysterious power of the market that innovation unlocked for them; wonder at the genius of the market, and at the power the market moved in them.

A New York hedge fund manager told me in 2005 that he could not account for his dizzying success without believing in "some ... greater force" – he did not have a word for it. An earlier generation would not have hesitated to call it Providence. We are less articulate about the nature of the divine, and more likely to claim all the credit for ourselves, but people like that hedge fund manager are co-religionists with the old capitalists in the sense that they are believers; and believers are believers, whether they believe in God's tremendous ear or the robustness of the distributional assumption.

What we have here is a writer drunk on words, and the power of abuse they offer up, so that the righteous can smote the unworldly and the tongue-tied. As if it's somehow necessary to understand provenance or even providence. As if we must all somehow be locked in a time bubble of Puritanism. If we call on the use of providence, can a call for witch trails be far behind? Or is that trials?

And only a delusional writer could somehow see newly creative uses of the English language as an explanation of how the GFC came to pass:

It is much harder for an economics ignoramus to explain why the bubble burst: to what degree cleverness, cupidity, Alan Greenspan or faith in the ef?cient-markets hypothesis brought about systemic failure. As ever, such questions can only be answered by experts. Let the ignorant choose their favourite. What seems a safe conclusion is that the world financial system was built on all kinds of bogusness – the more bogus, the more pretending to predictive science. The dogma of free markets, the new credit instruments, the disguised con?icts of interest among the credit ratings agencies, the compliance of governments and central banks – it was all phoney. And the language with which insiders persuaded themselves and each other that their schemes were downright inspired, and the rest of us that they were at least sound – the language was phoney too. This perverse, cabalistic, technocratic language was part of the general folly.

So a mis-use of language also explains the great depression, the south seas bubble and the folly of the Dutch tulip boom, not to mention the way computer geek nerd speak clearly produced the great IT crash? This sir, is more cant and dribble, nonsense dressed up in verbal finery.

No doubt, in what remains of the ?nancial industry, people are still using the buzzwords and pretending to science, but not so often in places where the rest of us can hear it. At last we hear words we recognise, even if it takes an effort of memory: words like greed, corruption and stupidity, which describe concrete things with more precision than the technical language they have replaced.

Stupidity is a concrete thing? Why I'd associated concrete more with patios or paving, or even autobahns. But this is just so that Watson can embark on a standard rant against all kinds of innovative words describing innovative concrete activities, performed in a transformative way which will no doubt transform the world at large, and filter on to the intertubes where they will undergo a virtuous virtual transformation. Naturally innovation is on his list. Oh yes, he has a little list. Actually a very long list:

Innovation also has much to answer for. When we talk of embedding innovation in legislation, or in company cultures, or in departments of housing or ?nance, or in local councils or schools, we embed a platitude – a husk of a word with just the pretence of truth, little different from a ?ction or a lie. Of course, an organisation is often better for being innovative. It is not a bad ambition to have – to introduce something new. So long as the new is better than the old. But in an innovative culture inferior thoughts – including ?awed or stupid thoughts – might be preferred over good ones for no better reason than the newness with which they satisfy the creed of innovation.

Oh there's the fey cleverness and the abstruse put down always to hand:

No one dies, of course. Or to put that another way: "Whatever the adverse outcomes, in terms of language, death is not one of them, very often." It is not key. The present ?nancial crisis will pass. It will wreak its creative havoc and leave us with a new, well-regulated economic order, on which the world's next generations may depend. At least let us imagine such a happy future. But in this new order, what language will our leaders and managers speak? What will be the language of work and education? Will the new order discard all those abstract nouns that require equal numbers of in terms of to hold them together, and hardly fewer impacts for when they meet? Will they still call education learnings? Will they still describe sacking staff as a synergy-related headcount reduction?

But if you're Evelyn Waugh writing about the funeral industry, you need innovative people dealing out innovative concepts with fine verbal flourishes. Where else would your satire come from? Where indeed would Don Watson himself be without such people? Finally even he has to come clean and admit he loves it, he needs it, he admires it:

In a sense, management language deserves our admiration; like many successful weeds, pests and viruses, it has adapted and thrived.

But then of course comes the mordant, morbid posturing, like a goth stationed outside Harajuku railway station in Tokyo, mourning what's been lost, and it's not just Wuthering Heights and Victorian corsets and lace:

Nuance, humour, irony, metaphor, invention, streams of consciousness or fancy, the vernacular – hundreds of elegant and useful words and phrases have gone the way of the telex and the roneo machine. Management language elbowed aside everything that a modern organisation did not need. It strangled original thought. What the market could not turn into commodities management could – with language. Everything, including a 10-year-old child's schoolwork, became product. The arts became an industry; artists, practitioners and works of art, artworks. Football players became accountable and played accountable football. Every drongo wanted closure. Whoever they were and whatever they did, managers addressed their charges in management buzzwords, and only when the answers came back in the same terms did they feel secure in their authority.

Oh enough already. I can already imagine a conversation in the publisher's office as the hacks gathered to deal with Don Watson's tome, a product, as it so happens to be sold and bought, and packaged, and dressed up with sharp elbowed marketing techniques, including pictures of crows and foxes, and even a prompt that suggests the work is most enjoyable when read aloud.

Naturally Watson can only see gloom ahead, as all verbal conservatives must do, and as all verbal conservatives managed when James Joyce introduced Ulysses to the world. Because Watson is really using the words to slag off the things he hates - bureaucrats in government departments who don't give a toss about their client, banks who aren't really customer focussed but instead driven by clock watchers anxious to escape their captivity as soon as they can, politicians forced to endure water torture by media and then able to retreat to their office to grope the office assistant, school teachers who imagine that writing a five hundred word essay regurgitated from an encyclopaedia is somehow more useful and imaginative than a tweet or a piece of rap.

Whatever the shape of the new economic order, the language is sure to continue on its present depressing course. Can anyone imagine a premier sometime in the future speaking to us in a spontaneous and amusing way? One might as well imagine a government department that isn't values-driven, a bank that isn't customer-focused, schools that teach rather than deliver learnings and outcomes. Far from retreating, the public language will increasingly invade the private sphere: the patio, the spa, the gymnasium, the bedroom.

And of course this kind of deep seated mock turtle despair is only useful when you don an Oscar Wilde affectation of doomed despair. With perhaps a wan Noel Coward smile, and a bemused vision which requires an Orwellian plain speaking defiance, never mind that once upon a time a word like refusenik would have been refused entry to the English language as a hopeless aberration, a bastard distortion, a shameless co-joining of Russian otkaznik with refuse (which led the world in a similar way to such strange outcrops of thought as sputnik).

Oh yes, once the rebels were outside the gates, refused permission to emigrate, and now suddenly they're inside Don Watson's compound:

There will be refuseniks, of course, and not all of them in nursing homes. They will continue to speak and write in whole sentences, use concrete words and phrases, recite poems on their bicycles and "fasten words again to visible things". It will be a kind of boutique language, spoken by a substantial minority, perhaps with their own FM radio station and wearing small badges on their lapels.

Oh how quaint and twee. Perhaps they will remember and recite books in the style of the inhabitants of the world of Farenheit 451, as imagined by Ray Bradbury. Perhaps the badge could read "I only speak concrete language, do you?", and the FM radio station could promote concrete language, and the music would of course be Musique concrète, and the poems would of course be in the form of concrete poetry, perhaps shaped like the mouse's tail in Alice in Wonderland, or Archie's efforts on his typewriter, with a few keys stuck.

And this bedraggled group of refuseniks will of course stick to FM radio rather than the new fangled digital or intertubes radio, and quite possibly have concrete patches on the elbows of their concrete corduroy blazers.

Naturally, in the main they will be middle-class but there will also be some from factories and farms, the older classes, and the odd politician risen from them, who do not want their memories ground in the churn. So long as they don't burn down learnings centres or in other ways hinder synergies, there should be no need to form secret societies and meet under freeways at night. They will be tolerated as readily as society now tolerates the people who grow old potato varieties, or buy them in little health food shops.

Indeed. And I suggest they adopt the humble question mark as their new secret society symbol. For doesn?t that suggest that in the new world order there?ll be constant attempts to undermine their cause, and reduce it to cheap comedy and cornball laughs and ritual humiliations and mockery of their ?unny ways?

(The SMH column was an edited extract from Bendable Learnings by Don Watson, Knopf, $32.95).

(Below: a concrete cartoon, part of the New Yorker caption contest, so feel free to add your own concrete humor, even if the contest expired back in June, plus further below a concrete cover for a concrete book with examples of how a poor cement mix will lead to the ruin of the English language).

Rob Hulls, Christian zealotry and discrimination, and time for secularists to take a stand in honor of Barabbas

(Above: why not try Luis Bunuel's Nazarin as a refreshing sorbet after da Vinci? Time for a little discrimination in your movie viewing habits?)

Well here's a go that will please the right wing commentariat.

Yep, that's the ongoing right of Christians and other loons (Scientologists and fundie Islamics amongst them) to discriminate against others, or so The Age advises in its story Government bows to religious right.

Attorney-General Rob Hulls will today announce a controversial compromise struck with the state's religious groups that will allow them to continue to discriminate against gays and lesbians, single mothers and people who hold different spiritual beliefs.

In a move that has delighted religious groups but angered gay activists and discrimination experts, Mr Hulls will protect the right of hundreds of church-run organisations - including schools, hospitals and welfare services - to refuse to employ or provide services to people who they believe may undermine their beliefs.

Yep, that's right, government-funded schools and hospitals and welfare services. Funded by taxpayer mug secularists, sending buckeroos in the direction of creationists and Xenu haters.

Well how about I get to exclude my tax dollars from the discriminationists?

And what's this about undermining their beliefs? What - a few secularists, gays and single mothers will undermine their cloud cuckoo land beliefs? I thought only cults worried about their members interacting with the real world and having their beliefs undermined?

Poor old Professor Margaret Thornton is quoted as paddling against the extremist tide:

''In terms of a person's private life … their sexual preference or marital status really has nothing to do with their ability to perform a job. Being able to discriminate on marital status is particularly absurd. It is really out of date. It really amounts to the policing of women because the focus is on single mothers, not on men.''

Yep, if you're a single father, come right in. What's a bit of sowing of wild oats up against the fornicating ways of unclean women. Well certain times of course you can't allow them in the office for seven days:

If a woman has a discharge, and the discharge from her body is blood, she shall be set apart seven days; and whoever touches her shall be unclean until evening. Everything that she lies on during her impurity shall be unclean; also everything that she sits on shall be unclean. Whoever touches her bed shall wash his clothes and bathe in water, and be unclean until evening. And whoever touches anything that she sat on shall wash his clothes and bathe in water, and be unclean until evening. If anything is on her bed or on anything on which she sits, when he touches it, he shall be unclean until evening. And if any man lies with her at all, so that her impurity is on him, he shall be unclean seven days; and every bed on which he lies shall be unclean.

By golly, that'd mess up a school or a hospital routine, right there.

Religious groups have mounted a campaign to save their exemptions, which mean, for example, that conservative religious schools can refuse to hire single mothers or gays - even as cleaners - and that an Islamic organisation can decline to employ a Christian.

Well heaven forfend that I'd suggest secularists should strike back. You know, like finding out whether an applicant for a position testifies for the lord, and then - after praising the Yahweh worshipper for their strange beliefs, perhaps even hinting they might introduce a little clean living into an office full of vile secularists, single women and gays - immediately do not pass go, but instead offer the job to any passing ratbag humanist on safe anti-discriminatory grounds, such as the way the humanist's MA in arts is a better fit for the skills requirements of a cleaner.

Trust me, without a Christian in the office, you're spared a lot of clucking and frowning and righteousness, not to mention covert sexual harassment and secret stashes of pornography.

That cheerful rogue Charlie Waterstreet today published his usual column of genteel self-mockery with the preposterous title Work is love made visible, and proceeded to quote Kahlil Gibran. So we'll do the same, since Charlie is a jolly barrister, and unlikely to sue us for filching his digital content:

Work is love made visible.

And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.

If you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man's hunger.

And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge distils a poison in the wine.

And if you sing though as angels, and love not the singing, you muffle man's ears to the voices of the day and the voices of the night.

To which, in view of the carry ons and cavortings in Victoria, we can now add a coda:

And if you turn away from the person, and love them not but view them with distaste, and fail to think of work is love, but prefer those who are different to be unemployed rather than near you, you muffle your ears to Christ's message (or Mohammad's message, or your inner Thetan, or whatever other loon message you have running around in your oddly wired brain).

But then we all know that Christian institutions have little to do with the actual Christ or the actual Christ's message, which is worth reading every now and again, and which reminds me of that zen koan:

A university student while visiting Gasan asked him: "Have you ever read the Christian Bible?"

"No, read it to me," said Gasan.

The student opened the Bible and read from St. Matthew: "And why take ye thought for rainment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They toil not, neither do they spin, and yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these... Take therefore no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself."

Gasan said: "Whoever uttered those words I consider an enlightened man."

The student continued reading: "Ask and it shall be given you, seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you. For everyone that asketh receiveth, and he that seeketh findeth, and to him that knocketh, it shall be opened."

Gasan remarked: "That is excellent. Whoever said that is not far from Buddhahood." (here)

Sadly there are a lot of Christian institutions a long way from Buddahood, or even Christ-hood.

So let's have a few more thoughts from the man close to the Budda:

You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

If you greet, or employ only your brothers? What are you doing more? Never mind:

Judge not, that ye be not judged.

For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?

Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.

Guess that the nonsense about Christ wandering around with working class bums, fisher folk, proletariat stiffs, hanging on the cross with criminals and passing the time of day with hookers is all just so much nonsense. Look at the bishops in their preening finery and how absurd they are up against the real thing.

Which reminds me of how I strayed into the deeper waters of theology recently:

Has contemporary Christianity watered down Christ's teachings? I do not think they have been diluted; however, I do think that we often become inexorably bound to legalistic man- made dogmatic prescriptions that do not necessarily appear in the gospels or were not espoused by Christ himself. We fail to appreciate that Jesus' life (not dogma) is the moral compass of how we should live. Stanley Hauerwas (2001) writes: " Indeed, the very announcement of the reality of the kingdom, its presence, here and now, is embodied in his life. In him we see that living a life of forgiveness and peace is not an impossible ideal but an opportunity now present. Thus Jesus' life is now integral to the meaning, content, and possibility of the kingdom" (p. 117). We are theologically misguided if we judge, accuse, deceive, banish or cause enormous angst to individuals based on their sins. We are not practicing the moral maxims set forth by Christ. We lose the direction that he set forth for us. In essence we lose him as our Lord and myopically worship the agenda-based standards written by reactionary men. When our emphasis is on man-made moral codes rather than the words and examples set forth by Christ, I believe that we are embarking on a misguided path of moral impoverishment reminiscent of the Pharisees.

Don't worry Dr. Stanley M. Giannet, writer of the above (The Radical Ethics of Jesus, A Commentary on Feasibility), in Victoria they've already arrived at that level of moral impoverishment. It's just a question now of how much further they can elevate it to a canonical view of the world...

(Below: sheesh, how many millennia have the mob got to live down the freeing of Barabbas? After all, Christ wanted it to happen, and so did God, it was in their mission statement, and their free will analysis of the future, which just happened to be pre-destined. As if Christ cared anyway. Didn't he get Dismas off the hook and on the way to paradise with him? Oh yes, there's plenty more, but we haven't got the time to go into the good samaritan and all the other parables about this kind of thing, not when discrimination is all the go.)

Glenn Milne, Chairman Rudd, a little phrenology, and reaping the whirlwind

(Above: Charlon Heston playing Glenn Milne in an epic biblical story of whirlwinds, plagues of locusts, swearing and waters turning red with blood).

Back in the good old days - I think I've mentioned how I loathe people who start by mentioning the good old days - a sharp analyst could take a look at the shape of a person's skull, and know everything worth knowing.

The science - it wasn't an art - was called phrenology, and if want a classic study of how deluded people can become when offered up a form of quackery, why not read a little more here.

Or you could always read Glenn Milne, as he scribbles Rude Kevin Rudd will reap whirlwind.

Milne doesn't even need a skull, he just uses photographs, to examine entrails, determine signs and portents, find hidden significance in the runes.

There were some revealing political pictures in last week's edition of The Australian Financial Review: you know, worth a thousand words and all that.

They came to us in the form of the paper's annual "Power Edition" - a magazine that features the most powerful people in the country. The portraits I liked most were those that showed some self-deprecation: Ken Henry, the Treasury chief, looking wistfully at the ceiling, as if he wished he were with the wombats he cares for in his spare time.

Kevin Rudd's bright, impossibly boyish chief of staff, Alister Jordan, looking at his boots, smiling, hand crossing forehead, as if to ask: "How did I get here?"

Mark Arbib, the young factional warrior from the NSW Right - to whom Rudd owes his Prime Ministership - coming at you out of the frame, handling a soccer ball as bald as his head.

Rudd's picture was in a different category altogether. It was bigger than all the others, of course, perched in a chair looking straight into the lens, his hand fussing with a pen. What struck you, though, was the sense of satisfaction that came off the page. The projection that "this is where I deserve to be and you had better get used to the idea".

Well I guess it's a step up in witch doctoring from taking a detailed look at chicken livers or tea leaves at the bottom of the cup.

But I wonder if Milne realizes that this kind of projection, based on pictures, photographs, whatever, usually says more about the projectee than about the thing examined. Now we don't have to wander down the path of rorschach tests (here), or even remember Jung's use of the mandala in analysis (here) to realize that a picture might tell a thousand words, but a thousand words of blather based on a photo tells a hell of a lot more about Milne and his fixations, fears and loathings.

In short, he loathes Kevin Rudd, and he can't wait for the whirlwind to arrive, for a hard rain to fall, for the radioactive glow to arrive. Like an old testament prophet, Milne stands astride the mountain, hurling thunderbolts at Chairman Rudd:

OK. We all take bad photos. But the point here is that this picture reveals a side of Rudd which, behind the scenes, is increasingly beginning to rankle his colleagues in government, as well as across the broader labour movement.

There was much debate last week surrounding The Sunday Telegraph's revelations about Rudd's recent foul-mouthed outburst at factional leaders. Most of the talkback was about the swearing and whether it mattered.

For political insiders, the real point of the story was two-fold: firstly, it raised the question of whether Rudd's calm, rational and church-going persona actually matched the private man; or whether this image was manufactured.

Ah yes, all you talk back folk understand nothing, up against the sharp insights of political insiders like Glenn Milne. For they've discovered that political images are manufactured, and that sometimes inside the manufactured image there are real people with tempers and foul language. Fuck me dead, how I'd love to have the capacity for that kind of insight, and all drawn from a detailed examination of a photograph.

More importantly, the story marked the first time in government that Rudd's own side had given him up. The faction leaders walked out of the meeting and complained long and loud to their colleagues about how arrogant and authoritarian Rudd had become. And then someone who agreed with them told The Sunday Telegraph because they were sick of it, too.

This is a warning shot across Rudd's bow. And there will be more to come. Within the union movement, too, there is growing dissatisfaction, even from previous supporters.

"I can't stand him," was the verdict of one senior union leader last week. "Rudd's problem is that he behaves like an American President - as if he's above the party and the movement.

"Everything he does is for his own, personal ambition."

But why bother quoting anonymous senior union leaders? Why doesn't Milne come clean by simply saying how much he hates Chairman Rudd? Why does he have to dress it up and disguise it as some kind of analysis, when the analysis has the weight of feather down? Well I guess that would be unseemly when snideness and personality sniping will do the job just as well.

The interesting thing about this is that the charge against Rudd is not policy-based: it's about his personal style. Certainly, there have been policy-based tensions with the union movement over Rudd's issues - like his failed promise that no-one would be worse off, under Julia Gillard's award modernisation.

"Broadly, though, we've done all right," says the same union leader, who now can't abide Rudd.

Which is to say Milne can't be bothered leading with policy issues. No, he wants to trawl through Rudd's prissy style because he can't stand the prissy fucker, and the way he swears in private and gets away with it, and shouts at air hostesses over sandwiches and should be called to account.

Never mind that Milne himself has been known to display a little aggro in public and go the biff. I guess that's just a little human failing, which doesn't mean human failings can be tolerated in others, at least if you hate their prissy guts.

So, put simply, what aggravates his colleagues and union leaders is what they see as his prissy, self-centred, top-down, "nobody's right, but me" approach to government. It wasn't always that way. He used to have the ability to take himself down. Listening to those who interact with him now, you get the impression that this trait has been all but obliterated by high office.

See? It's nothing to do with Milne, it's all to do with Rudd's colleagues and union leaders. Even though Milne started his column with a tale of a photograph that struck him as revealing how Rudd was in a photo fussing with a pen, exuding a sense of self satisfaction.

But now the man has been ruined by his arrogance, his self-centred top down administration, it's time to don the garb of the prophet.

Now when approaching the guru at the top of the mountain, firstly you must come armed with insightful questions:

So, will Rudd be able to weather these internal criticisms? Probably, at least for a while. Right now, his total dominance is built on the twin pillars of his economic success, which feeds into his phenomenal poll numbers, and the fact that he has turned ALP tradition on its head, when it comes to the appointment of his ministry.

Ah, so the whirlwind at the moment is probably somewhere around Bourke. How disappointing. But still there must be more signs of outrage suggesting that the whirlwind is on the move.

Until Rudd came along, it was the Labor caucus that elected the ministry. But, in Opposition, he unilaterally declared that he would be both choosing the frontbench and allocating portfolios. An outraged caucus, desperate to win, bit its collective lip.

Yes!! An outraged collective lip.

The effect has been to make Rudd probably the most powerful Labor Prime minister in history. It means his Cabinet and ministry are totally beholden to his judgement on their performance. Frontbenchers rarely argue the policy point with him, Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner being a notable exception. This subservience leaches all the way down to the caucus, whose major pre-occupation is a second term. So, while ever the polls tell them that Rudd will deliver on this objective, they will tolerate his autocratic style.

Why am I suddenly reminded of Louis XIV? No better, I'm reminded of Louis XVI and that dreadful woman Marie Antoinette and boy did they reap a whirlwind with their autocratic style. Oh yes comrades there might be abject lickspittle subservience, but then at some point, the worm turns and then there's a fine blood-letting.

Well here's hoping, because if Rudd keeps on giving the peasants cake, who knows how long we might have to put up with him. And then the cracks in Milne might start to show. Oh wait, got that wrong, the cracks are starting to show in the statue they've erected in honor of that deviant arrogant Ruddstra:

Given that fact, it's remarkable that some cracks are starting to show. There is no love for Rudd on the backbench. In all probability, he'll win again. But the moment he faces a credible Opposition Leader, or the economy sours, and those poll numbers start to slip, he will reap the whirlwind of his disdain for his own colleagues who put him where he is today.

Sob. Oh no, say it ain't so. There's no love, but in all probability he'll win again!! We've had to endure all that blather to endure the news that the odds favor Rudd. The chicken livers were sound, the mandala exquisitely symbolic, the phrenological analysis concluding that the skull is well shaped. Rudd with a well shaped skull?

Come on prophet, don't leave us with that kind of doom-laden analysis. You mean we have to hope for a terrorist strike, or a million boat people, or the economy collapsing like an over heated souffle? You mean we have to want the world to fuck up to rid of us this arrogant photograph of a man?

Well at least give us a dire imprecation, a muttered oath, a hope for doom and gloom.

Early indications are that, when it comes, the whirlwind will be savage.

Yes, that's it, that works. A savage whirlwind. Dust everywhere, gumming up the works.

What's that?

"Return evil for evil to no one. Provide fine things in the sight of all men. If possible, as far as it depends upon you, be peaceable with all men. Do not avenge yourselves, beloved, but yield place to the wrath; for it is written: “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, says Jehovah.” But, “if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by doing this you will heap fiery coals upon his head.” Do not let yourself be conquered by the evil, but keep conquering the evil with the good." -Romans 12:17-21

Oh damn you, you smug arrogant Christians, with your do gooder ways in public and your evil swearing ways in private. And your really bad photographs.

Well Milne and I know that in the real world it's an eye for an eye:

"You have heard that it was said, 'Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.' But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.

What's that? And not be allowed to blather in a newspaper column about nothing in particular and fear and loathing of Rudd in general?

Well enough of all that nonsense. Bring me the skull of Chairman Rudd so it can be given proper phrenological analysis. Yes it has to be flensed of all flesh. And stick the brain in brine in a jar. Maybe we can download it to a computer and use it to develop a program designed to teach Mandarin in ten easy steps.

Sorry, went a little mad there, but that happens when you read Glenn Milne, and think you're going to get political analysis and are instead swept back to the days of the Old Testament or the Delphic Oracle.

Of course a whirlwind will come. In politics, just as with dust storms, they always do. But ain't it funny that this cheer squad, which this week offers up only phrenology as political science, is likely to end up with a woman in the chair instead of Chairman Rudd. Lordy, however will they cope with that ...

(Below: when analyzing photographs, make sure you use these handy analytical tools, as deployed by political insiders who are in the know and know about these things because ... they know).

Miranda Devine, John Clarke, the AFP, and the Haneef matter yet again

It was only a short time ago that a former Sydney Qantas cleaner was sentenced to a maximum twelve year jail term for publishing online a "do-it-yourself jihad" manual. (here and many other places).

It was a work out for the new law involving making a document connected with assistance in a terrorist act.

Does anyone have a problem with a loon going down for publishing a manual like this on an al-Qaeda endorsed web site? My preference would be to lock up all fundamentalists - Islamic and Christian - preaching acts of violence, but I'm afraid the prison system wouldn't handle the strain. And of course we'd get the usual nattering from the right wing commentariat worrying about the Christians, as well as the children.

But the result does make me wonder exactly which planet Miranda the Devine inhabits, as she goes on yet another rant about ham-strung cops, this time under the header Police tied in terrorism red tape.

Tied in red tape. Except when they send someone down for twelve years.

The police can't win. When it comes to weighing the safety of the public versus the perhaps mistaken detention of a terrorism suspect it seems we don't want a seasoned police commander trusting his instincts, and erring on the side of caution.

It will be our own fault when we eventually get a police force of automatons, blocking every hunch with the dead hand of objectivity.

The police can't win. Except when they send someone down for twelve years.

As usual, there's another agenda at work in the Devine's frothy attempt to whip up fear and loathing, and that's the ongoing campaign to redeem Mick Keelty, while pretending that the Haneef case wasn't such a bad caper after all.

Seizing on comments made by John Clarke, QC, at a conference organized by the Commonwealth Ombudsman (press release here) that the Haneef affair wasn't a debacle, she does his best to spin his remarks in a quite different direction. Because while he wouldn't call it a debacle, he does keep saying that serious mistakes were made. Okay so let's forget debacle. Let's settle for a nice masculine word like cock up, or fuck up.

If you want to listen to what John Clarke actually said on ABC Radio National breakfast, why not head off here.

If you want to read the original report by Clarke, why not head off here (downloads a pdf, main address takes you to the inquiry website).

Because when the Devine asks for someone to apologize now to Mick Keelty, as if he's somehow been exonerated, she takes cheekiness (or blatant use of white cleansing soap powder with extra sudsiness) to a new level. Umm, he was in charge at the time of a cock up, or a fuck up. Call it what you will. Suddenly we should apologize for a cock up? Well maybe for the language, but not for the deed.

Then the Devine manages to top her own cheekiness, with a desire to exonerate the cop leading the case, Ramzi Jabbour. Here's what Clarke's consistently said about Jabbour:

‘Decision makers need to step back for some moments and reflect on what they’re going to do and consider if it’s right,’ Mr Clarke said. ‘Too many decision makers don’t do that and that’s why we get such a proliferation of mistakes.

‘In the Haneef case, the person making the decision got too close to the action and got suspicions which, frankly, weren’t justifiable suspicions. I know that he thought Haneef was guilty but that, in my view, is because he lost his objectivity.’

And that's when the Devine resorts to a petulant "The police can't win." Despite in her very own column noting that the cops can win - as well as the matter of the Qantas cleaner, the cops also had a win in the matter of Abdl Benbrika and six of his followers.

When you read the Clarke inquiry, you realize that as usual, when confronted with an emergency, the explanation of a muddle will always win out over a conspiracy - at least so far as the police investigation went. The behavior of the Federal government is another matter, conveniently removed from any investigative analysis.

As Clarke notes, the cops weren't equipped for the investigation. They made major mistakes, and they didn't have the training or the expertise or the experience, to deal with complex and difficult new legislation, which Clarke considered difficult for lawyers to understand, let alone police officers required to apply it in what seemed like an emergency situation.

Clarke also had a number of unkind words for Minister Kevin Andrews, and still can't understand what he did, and why he did it at the time he did it, in relation to the matter of Haneef's visa. And he also has complained about how he wasn't give any power or capacity to investigate the political aspects of the case, not that you'll find the Devine complaining about that.

So when Miranda the Devine wraps up her tale with a bizarre image of a police force of automatons working under the dead hand of objectivity, you have to wonder if her real preference would be police state, or a return to the good old days of rampant corruption, as once exemplified by the NSW police force.

Because Haneef was innocent, the AFP buggered it up, Mick Keelty was in charge of the AFP at the time, and the Federal government deployed politics rather than justice to stir what they thought might be an election winning strategy. Live with it, and move on.

Mike Rann, bikies, and a little bashing heads the way of the government

(Above: no, not a game of pick which one's the bikie, just a drink for a job well done as Mike Rann slumps down with Bob Ellis, not knowing who might get up with fleas).

As Sydney - centre of the known universe - wakes up to another dust storm, this time the joke's worn thin, and the print media has shown a 'so far over it' attitude that hints at a new maturity when confronted by signs and portents of the apocalypse.

Perhaps it was because the dust this time lacked a dark orange red aspect reminiscent of a day in hell that the coverage in the Daily Terror lacked any stridency. No eerie red pictures as we get closer to the outer rings of hell.

Perhaps it was also because football fever (and hang overs) still grip the land. Why I didn't even feel a flicker of fear when tuning into the SMH only to get this on the screen:

Hey, when the apocalypse strikes, or they start charging for digital content, I'll be getting that message all the time.

Anyhoo, it seemed right to look further afield to assess the state of loon pond, and where better to look than South Australia.

If you're a careful student of loonery, you might recall that The Punch - Australia's most cheap skate conversation - regularly features cheap (which is to say free) scribbles from assorted politicians, or whichever back room flack they can get to ghost write, and way back on the 31st May, the puffed up premier of Mike Rann hit the intertubes promoting his new anti-bikie legislation, under the header Defending the right of bikers to bash, kill, steal, deal.

Rann was indignant that people were indignant about his bright shiny brand new laws:

Civil libertarians around the country have condemned my new anti-crime gang laws aimed at outlaw bikie gangs. Defence lawyers and pseudo-academics have lined up to tell the public that the bikie gangs are a harmless sub-culture comprised of grandparents who simply like a ride on big bikes.

Following the passing of our most recent law, we’ve seen demonstrations by hundreds of bikies from around the country converging on Adelaide in so-called “Freedom Rides”, an insulting reprise of the civil rights movement in the US.

Yep, those bloody pseudo academics again. Why is it when I hear a politician use "pseudo" in an argument that I think he's being a pseudo politician?

Well I guess it's an even more insulting reprise of the civil rights movement that the Full Court of the Supreme Court of South Australia yesterday ruled a key part of the legislation, in relation to control orders, void:

Under the laws, gang members were not given the opportunity to appear in court when orders were sought.

Justice Bleby found it was a "fundamental proposition" of law that accused people should be informed of the case against them and be given "an opportunity to answer that case".

"A court . . . which is required by statute not to observe that fundamental rule of law . . . will inevitably be acting in a manner incompatible with the proper discharge of judicial responsibilities," Justice Bleby stated.

The laws also "severely impaired or undermined" the court's integrity.

You can read the rest of the story here in Adelaide now, the intertube face of The Advertiser, under the header SA Full Court declares Rann's bikie control orders illegal (and you'll also find a link to the full ruling there, which will land in your box as an rtf file).

The state's dunderhead Attorney-General Michael Atkinson - responsible for the way gamers in this country can't get an "R" rating for adult content video games - tried to put the best gloss on what was in fact an embarrassing failure:

"As a government we were always aware of the vulnerability of our legislation, because as a government we are willing to test the constitutional boundaries and are willing to take the fight to the outlaw motorcycle gangs," Mr Atkinson said.

Sure, sure. They just pushed a little too far, and now will re-group and get on with it. Well it's a spin, but why am I reminded of the last few overs of Stuart MacGill in test cricket? Probably because I was told the jocks at The Punch would understand the metaphor.

Of course back in May Rann was jumping up and down like a Mexican bean in a bottle:

We have not taken this action lightly, nor are we recklessly indifferent to civil liberties.

Indeed, we will appoint a retired judicial officer to review the use of powers under the Act.

His or her report will be tabled in Parliament.

We are determined that only hardened criminals and groups set up for the purpose of serious crime will need to fear this legislation.

A report in parliament! How's that for democracy.

Well along with the hardened criminals, I guess we now have to add the learned judges of the Supreme Court.

What a pity Rann and his team didn't get it right the first time, and what a pity that the state opposition did a Turnbull over an email, so that any attempt to attack the puffery of Rann looks like more support for gangster bikies.

If you want a sample of that kind of nonsense, why not inhale a dose of David Penberthy, and his rant Bikies' spin is criminal.

At the time, Penberthy was indignant about bikies disparaging and denigrating honest, hard-working journalists, while lashing out at free speech purists for participating in a non-debate producing crap scenarios where Australia drifted casually towards Nazism.

In his usual way, Penberthy went off half-cocked, like a genuine tabloid ratbag, and missed the point entirely, about rights and entitlements in a democracy. Like Rann. Well it'll be interesting to see how the other states go with their legislative variants, as they rushed into print following the bikie murder at Sydney airport, using the SA model as a basis for action. Like lemmings happy to follow Rann towards the edge of the cliff.

Is it something to do with the quality of the extra hard water they drink in South Australia, since Penberthy is a refugee who sought a new life in 'centre of the universe' Sydney but obviously still shares a mind set with Mike Rann?

Who knows, but I still think Don Dunstan would be revolving in his grave at the preposterous notion that Mike Rann is carrying on his legacy ...

Meantime, you want a method to tackle the bikie issue? Try here.

Yes there are ways, but they require intelligence and diligence, rather than cheap grandstanding and easy rhetoric and incompetent execution. Exeunt Mike Rann ...

(Below: a Mike Rann twitter. Ignore the spelling. We're all fiskally challenged here, but I can't believe there are politicians incapable of tackling bikie drug gangs by drafting legislation that works. The twit came from here).

Tim Blair, conservatism, motorbikes, and the art of world maintenance

Tim Blair here:

Further proof: the 1960s was a sick decade, and its creepy stars were some of the saddest, vilest people this side of the United Nations.

What next? You know, in the way of making a political point of a truly sad vile kind out of someone's personal, familial misfortune?

How about this?

Further proof: the thirties and forties were sick decades and its creepy rulers were some of the saddest, vilest people this side of neocons waving their feet around in a toilet in an airport somewhere.

Still it's an ill wind and all that. If you go here, you can enjoy all Blair's attempts to link to David Penberthy at The Punch. Gee cross promotion at News Corp is a hard game, as the last time I checked only the cached version produced a result in this flurry of attempts:

The Punch‘s David Penberthy – from Adelaide, originally – has written a very thoughtful and clever piece about the Collingwood football club. I urge everybody to read it.

UPDATE. Link fixed. Apologies.

UPDATE II. Oops! Got that link wrong again. Click.

UPDATE III. How embarrassing. It should work now.

UPDATE IV. We appear to be suffering some technical issues. Try here.

UPDATE V. Now?

UPDATE VI. I can’t imagine what might be the problem.

UPDATE VII. All fixed! Enjoy!

UPDATE VIII. The tech people say it could be a software glitch. Click twice to see if that works.

UPDATE IX. Maybe there’s been a fire or something. Here’s a cached copy.

UPDATE X. At last!

UPDATE XI. Let’s try this one more time.

(No, I couldn't be bothered inserting all the links that didn't work).

Clear implication?

Further proof: the noughties was a sick decade, and its creepy Collingwood supporters were some of the saddest, vilest people people this side of Carlton supporters.

Now prepare for a little leap here, but it still involves Tim Blair, and it revolves around the most recent example - this time in my back yard - of a piece of junk from China failing, the warranty useless, the only option to throw it away and buy a replacement.

In the old days - god how I hate people who start a line with 'in the old days' - a conservative was someone who wanted to conserve. (Latin: conservare "save" or "preserve" - here). When I got my renovated second hand bicycle as a child, I was pleased to get it, I used it for years, and it was passed on, so it could keep on keeping on.

These days you throw the bike away and buy another one from K-Mart. It's too dear to fix. So many things are too dear to fix. Throw it away, dispose of it, maintain the growth, never mind the junk. I usually spend a little more in the hope that things might last a little longer, the quality reflecting the price premium. But nope, they're just more expensive junk that can't be fixed.

There's something to do with the opposite of disposability - a kind of conservatism - that is splendid, glorious and sensible. The New Yorker not so long ago ran a story by Kelefa Sanneh, Out of the Office, which looks at some of these strands (sorry, not sure if you need to register, but hey have a go, and see where it takes you).

Ostensibly it's about motor cycle maintenance, and associated crafts, but it's also about values. The sense of a good job well done. Sanneh's piece hinges on a book by Matthew B. Crawford, who is clearly a fetishist, a descendant of Robert Pirsig, a book for which I still have much fondness, even though I haven't read it for years. A Pirsig sample:

The result is rather typical of modern technology, an overall dullness of appearance so depressing that it must be overlaid with a veneer of "style" to make it acceptable. And that, to anyone who is sensitive to romantic Quality, just makes it all the worse. Now it's not just depressingly dull, it's also phony. Put the two together and you get a pretty accurate basic description of modern American technology: stylized cars and stylized outboard motors and stylized typewriters and stylized clothes. Stylized refrigerators filled with stylized food in stylized kitchens in stylized homes. Plastic stylized toys for stylized children, who at Christmas and birthdays are in style with their stylish parents. You have to be awfully stylish yourself not to get sick of it once in a while. It's the style that gets you; technological ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort to produce beauty and profit by people who, though stylish, don't know where to start because no one has ever told them there's such a thing as Quality in this world and it's real, not style. Quality isn't something you lay on top of subjects and objects like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Real Quality must be the source of the subjects and objects, the cone from which the tree must start.

Ah stylized typewriters. Those were the days. These days we have stylized computers. But back to Kelefa Sanneh:

(Crawford) quotes a long scene from “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” in which the narrator has a frustrating encounter with careless mechanics who can’t be bothered to correctly diagnose his bike. Crawford’s stern verdict: this is “at once an ethical and a cognitive failure.” Such mechanics show, in their disregard for the motorcycle, how little they care about their profession, and, by extension, their fellow-citizens. Crawford says that big corporations—including, for instance, the ones that produce cheap motorcycle engines that aren’t worth fixing—tend to encourage this kind of anomie, by forcing workers to stick to mindless tasks or insipid scripts, thereby making it hard for them to take pride in their work. But Crawford is no Marxist. For him, the solution to big business is small business; he pits the work ethic and scrappy spirit of “small commercial enterprise” against the “softly despotic tendencies” of “outsized corporations.” His book takes up a variant of William F. Buckley’s old conservative rallying cry: it stands athwart capitalism, yelling, “Stop.”

It seems that every generation discovers anew what Crawford has discovered: that work is—that we are—stupid and getting stupider.

There's a lot more, but rather than me rip the text off, why not visit and have a read. I'm not saying that I agree with everything Crawford's saying, but the day I read Pirsig I understood the value of things that last, and doing things that help things that last to last longer. Which doesn't mean I can tell a spanner from a handsaw, but I can tell now the value of things that work, and keep on working (and if you want to read Stanley Fish on all this, go here, though again you might have to register).

When you look at America, and its current, via Wal-Mart and the like dependence on cheap crap from China, you do have to wonder whether the world has taken a turn for the worse. Because we too are like America, and I too have been known to lurk in $2 stores knowing that whatever I buy can't be good, and can't be good value, but I buy it all the same ...

What's all this got to do with Tim Blair? Well a little while ago, he created an open thread inviting readers to Confess Your Biggest Eco-Sin!

It was an adolescent - childish is probably more accurate - invitation to indulge in a bit of anarchist stupidity so removed from genuine conservatism as to be genuinely startling.

Blair isn't in fact a conservative. He's a destroyer, one who wants to celebrate the destruction of things that might last, of a world and things worth preserving, in the conservative way, as opposed to the temporary pleasures of the moment. Because he could never contemplate the moment when conservatism, hippiedom, Zen Buddhism, and the art of motorcycle maintenance might arrive at a consensus.

The responses were - as required - predictably childish, defiant, petulant, indulgent, frivolous, and, it almost goes without saying, greenie bashing. There was much triumphant talk of flying all over the planet, and installing quadrillion air conditioners (probably from China and requiring replacement soon enough after the warranty's expired).

There was, as expected, a triumphant joy in fucking over the world, but it also goes without saying, none of the loons mentioned that they bought a lot of their inexpensive "throw it on the useless heap of shit pile out the back" from China. Which will fall apart in three months when the warranty suddenly terminates.

Which is really funny when you think about it. Six pages of comments and not one of the dunderheads pauses to reflect about the way their extravagant pursuit of conspicuous consumption supports the hegemony of the Chinese communist party. As well as filling the world with dumps full of useless, unrecycled shit.

In the end, the cockroaches will win, because we are stupid, and getting stupider. Each time I read Tim Blair I know that for a fact. And sadly true conservatism is lost to the world, and we are left with idiots.

Which leaves me with one last corollary:

Further proof: the noughties was a sick decade, and its creepy neo-commentariat columnists were some of the saddest, vilest people this side of the Chinese manufacturers who kept on selling crap to the world ...

Now for the love of a lord whom I currently find hard to believe in, can someone find me a decent bicycle which will last for a decade or more, like the crispy bacon we used to have before the war ...

Come back Malvern Star, all is forgiven, and there's a nice thumbnail set of bicycles here.