Blogging politics, culture, sociology and life from Brisvegas
It’s good to see the USS Ronald Reaganomics still employing its namesakes creative supply (over the) side trickle down theories - leaving in its wake an impressive trail of debris scattered all along the Queensland coastline.
Amazingly consistent when you begin think of all the Republican trash and debris Reagan left as his legacy to America.
Apropos of nothing much (you can make your own connections if you like), I just think that this paragraph from James Wolcott in Vanity Fair is so apt, and beautifully put:
Conservatives grow fond of their grudges, cradling them to their bosoms like vipers and passing them down to the younger generation, where Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin model them as necklaces.
Four months ago the Danish daily broadsheet Jyllands Posten actively sought expressions of self-censorship from cartoonists. The result was 12 cartoons including one simply reinforcing the stereotype muslim=terrorist and another equating Islam with Satan. Carsten Juste, the editor who commissioned the drawings has apologised for the “culturally based misunderstandings” and clarified his position. I find it hard to believe that the “sober” drawings “were not intended to be offensive”. Some typify pointlessly antagonistic hate speech rather than the intellectualy valuable free speech Juste seems to be promoting, which Guido discusses in this excellent post.
So why the clarification now? Well, on Friday, the Danish Business Council asked for one. The top article on Jyllands Posten’s website reads “Thousands of jobs are in danger if the Middle Eastern boycott of Danish goods becomes protracted. But the boycott can not shake the whole Danish economy.” The boycott is not only serious because Danish dairy giant Arla moved has production into Saudi Arabia to cut costs, but because expansion into Middle East markets is a major part of the company’s expansion strategy. Fat free and diet milk, yoghurt and cheese have gradually been taking over traditional full fat products in Arla’s traditional European markets so the problem of fat disposal has increased in recent years. The solution? Exporting butter and other fats to Middle Eastern markets, along with other dairy products, to the tune of US$420 million a year, roughly half of all Danish export income in the region. Libya, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, accounting for half of Arla’s market in the region have all threatened or are proceeding with a boycott.
Update: The pro-cartoon and anti-cartoon movements continue apace:
Let us christians boycot moslem vegetable sellers, pizza-bakers and taxi-drivers in Denmark. Pass this text message on if you agree.
Unsurprisingly, the far right Danish People’s Party received 13.2% of the vote in the last election.
It’s simply breathtaking that this is being framed so unequivocally as an issue of free speech in which “liberal little Denmark” (!!!) must be defended against Islamists. A notable absence from the tropes of the Culture Warriors is Prime Minister Fogh’s personal opinion:
“I personally have such a respect for people’s religious belief that I personally never would have depicted Muhammad, Jesus or any other religious character in a way that could offend other people.
In the wake of Howard’s history lesson (Zoe has a good summary at Crazybrave), the spectre of postmodernism is again stalking the land and infecting young minds. Despite the fact, as Stephen Muecke observes, it’s just about dead as an intellectual movement. Luke Slattery in the Fin wrote a long article about the evils of literary theory, which Rafe has helpfully reproduced at Catallaxy. Ironically, Slattery gets some of his facts wrong. Terry Eagleton, for instance, far from spurring on po/mo literary theory, is in fact a Marxist who has always opposed it in the name of such canonical Western concepts as truth and beauty. Of course, Eagleton believes Marxism to be the true heir to Aristotelianism. So he argues for one single narrative of truth, but it’s not the one favoured by the canonical modernists. Ponder.
The attacks on po/mo are in fact - postmodernist. They proceed without regard for empirical fact, on the whole, and seek their evidence from the margins and interstices of texts like any good deconstructionist. Tim Dunlop explodes the myth that attacking postmodernism destroys an academic career. But will the culture warriors take note? No! Like any good postmodernist, truth for them is effaced by ideology. Relativism reigns supreme.
Perhaps the single most representative anti-postmodernist postmodernist is Kevin Donnelly. In keeping with the post-structuralist view that repetition in language is constitutive, Donnelly endlessly recycles the same op/ed. Like a good Derridean, Donnelly returns again and again to the same texts, reading them more closely each time. And like a good social constructivist in education studies, Donnelly prefers to put forward his “reading” of obscure policy texts rather than the Great Books of the Canon.
As irony piles on irony, one would almost think that John Howard has ushered us into the postmodernist world - full steam ahead.
The SMH has published a speech by The Honourable JJ Spigelman AC, Chief Justice of New South Wales (title used advisedly) on civility, or its decline. The Chief Justice takes aim at the usual culprits - road rage, parents at sporting fixtures, mobile phones, and the disappearance of “please” and “thank you” from every day speech (which I for one haven’t noticed).
Up to a point, you could infer different causes for all the changing patterns in social behaviour that Spigelman (title not used advisedly) cites, but he’s probably right that we can posit something called “civility” as a concept that makes sense (and there have been several empirical studies in the sociological literature which attempt to confirm or verify the hypothesis that it’s declining).
But I think that his call for the law to intervene is misguided. No doubt it is appropriate for some aspects of what he sees as civil conduct in the legal profession to be entrenched “institutionally”. But there’s a lot of confusion in his definition of the problem and the analogies he uses, for instance:
It would never cross the mind of a barrister to address me in court, and generally outside court, by my first name. That is a privilege reserved for 18 year olds in telephone call centres. All too often rudeness is justified as a form of egalitarianism.
Here, he seems to me to be talking not about civility, but about manners.
Continue reading ‘Is Civility Dead? Or is egalitarianism increasing?’
Here and at John Quiggin’s blog I have referred to the anti-environmentalist and socially conservative elements within the ALP Right and pseudo-Left as a New Right Fifth Column. In so doing I admit to having engaged in a degree of hyperbole, in that I did not mean to imply that these people were consciously doing a job on behalf of the New Right within the ALP. What I meant by the phrase was that some of these people are either espousing views very similar to those of the New Right and the Howard government (e.g. Michael Thompson and his supporters) or objectively assisting the election of Coalition governments by advocating unpopular and environmentally disastrous development projects (e.g. the idiots in the Goss government, including Goss himself, who caused that government to self-destruct in the 1995 Queensland state election by supporting the proposed Eastern Tollway in the face of massive community opposition).
However, yesterday’s column in The Australian by the Poison Dwarf, Glenn Milne, suggests that I would be justified in using the term in a non-hyperbolic, literal sense.
Continue reading ‘Labor’s New Right Fifth Column Redux’
One of the most important (and, in Australia, under-exposed) books on the relationship between environmental protection and the interests of workers is Eban Goodstein’s The Trade-Off Myth (1999). It fell to me to read and summarise Goodstein’s work in Chapter Two of my Doctoral thesis. My summary is over the fold.
Continue reading ‘Greens Don’t Cost Jobs’
Last night I was distracted from Gilly blasting a ton in Perth by the ABC documentary Cheetahs: Fast Track to Freedom. Sambu and Toki were two cheetahs who were orphaned after a lion attacked their mother. They were rescued and placed at Lewa Wildlife Conservancy in Northern Kenya. Simon King and Marguerite van Oyen from BBC Wildlife soon arrived and began to document the young cubs. Initially the battle was to nurse them to good health and then it was to give the young cheetahs the skills they would need to be able to survive in the wild.
One aspect of the documentary that I found interesting was how elements of cheetah behaviour seemed to be reflected in behaviour I’ve noticed in my cat, Aki. Purring, aggressive play, hissing and hunting and chasing down prey (cheetahs v impalas, Aki v hunstman). In evolutionary terms, all felid species share a common ancestor that lived about 10.8 million years ago. Of the great cats, the cheetah is much closer to your common house cat than a lion or tiger. Carl Zimmer has an excellent roundup of recent research into cat evolution.
During the colder months, LP hosted some grand, fast moving debates about IQ. While the study subjected to stoushing may have received a cold reception by those with relevant training, its philosophical foundations, method, assumptions and about the social world sparked ongoing debate about the scientific establishment. At the risk of giving comfort to ‘the enemy’1, a range of positions were enunciated about the weight given to social and biological factors, genes and society, biology and place and the importance of subjectivity. The cautious acceptance of PZ Myers’s equation has the potential to render obsolete some disagreement about the nature/nurture divide. Equally, ‘biological determinism’ and ‘blank slate’ as generic terms of abuse should be confined to the archives too - and perhaps not a stoush too soon.
The last resident of the Monday night doco slot on the ABC encountered some criticism here, but the latest trilogy on Race looks more promising.
Continue reading ‘(De)constructing Race’
Ophelia Benson, at TPM Online, poses the question: even if there is a god who designed us with a purpose in mind, what makes people so sure that his or her reasons are ones we would actually endorse?
Looking around at humans as they are, or at human history, it is not blindingly obvious that any god’s purpose in designing and creating us has to have been either 1) benign or 2) for our benefit rather than someone else’s. Perhaps the purpose was to see what a species with a small amount of intelligence and opposable thumbs would do to the planet, or the climate, or river valleys, or each other, or large herbivores. Perhaps it was to provide hosts and diffusion devices for viruses and bacteria. Perhaps it was because the god enjoys watching wars. Perhaps it was a slow and complicated way of getting rid of passenger pigeons, dodos, and cod. Perhaps it was to provide food for a future species.
[Via Jason at Catallaxy] Tim Lambert and Don Arthur have posted some pics from Saturday night’s festivities, and Don reveals the secret of the Socratic Diatribe Method which cunningly proved that Catallaxy is indeed a Leftoid blog and Jason is more left wing than Don 
“In its broad broad sweep this is reminiscent of the vision that Manning Clark enunciated at the beginning of volume one of his History of Australia.”
- Gregory Melleuish on John Howard’s history speech, January 30, 2006.
Over at Disambiguation, Glen has a nice post about the material conditions underlying what are often said to be “lifestyle choices” by Generation Y - in this case the phenomenon of twenty somethings living in the parental home. I don’t agree with all of it, but it’s a very good corrective generally to a lot of the tosh written about generations.
A lot more could be said about Pope Benedict’s encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, but here’s a curio. An American Cardinal, Francis George, interprets Benedict as responding to a question posed by Jacques Derrida:
The theological foundation of the encyclical, George argued, is the principle that “the giving of oneself to others constitutes the nature of God.”
“God does not create or relate to the universe to gain something,” George said. “God cannot even in principle be involved in economic exchange with his creatures. His relationship can only be one of pure generosity.”
George noted that Jacques Derrida, the Algerian-born French literary critic and philosopher, once made a pun in German about gifts being a kind of poison (the German word Gift means “poison”). Gifts are poison, Derrida suggested, because they involve both giver and receiver in a relationship of debt and obligation, inferiority and superiority.
The only way out, George argued, is to enter into the logic of God, who has no need of our gifts, and we have no claim upon God’s. The Roman Missal expresses the point by saying that God “has no need of our praise.” Thus we enter into the “loop of grace,” George said, rather than the “carefully calculated loop of exchange and obligation.”
“That’s the solution to Derrida’s problem,” he said.
The “mainstream� Anglo-Celtic narrative , the left/right divide and the rhetoric of tolerance.
It can now safely be assumed that many or most former One Nation voters have crossed over to the LNP coalition since One Nation’s demise. It is no coincidence that John Howard’s anti-multiculturalist views mirror that of Pauline Hanson and her supporters. It is sometimes difficult to separate the content of their public announcements from the personalities:
Abolishing the policy of multiculturalism will save billions of dollars and allow those from ethnic backgrounds to join mainstream Australia, paving the way to a strong, united country.�(14)
The last part of this statement could well have been a Howard quote, “mainstreamâ€? being a concept that John Howard has been reiterating for some time. Both viewed Hawke/Keating period immigration as inextricably linked to “pressure group” multiculturalism creating divisiveness. In Howard’s words in 1988 on immigration: “…the intake must be adjusted to the capacity of Australia to accept and absorb change.â€?(15) The word “adjusted” turned out to be ironic in that the very “capacity…to accept” would be directly tied to the legally incorrect,(16) year 2001 election speech by Howard “We will decide who comes to this country and the manner in which they come;â€?(17) and rapidly became an approximate 70% electoral capacity to not accept. Divisiveness from the Tampa incident raises some obvious causation and moral questions on political tactics referred to by some in the Labor party as the “wedge” and “hitting below the belt.” Accusations by Howard that Labor was “soft on border protection” and the later “soft on terrorism” has ruined prior bipartisanship and undoubtedly created considerable bitterness in the Australian polity.
Australia became a sovereign state with racism built into the Constitution. Section 25 of the constitution (until 1998 at least) includes “if…persons of any race are disqualified…â€?(18) which signified the division of powers between the Commonwealth and the States.(19) The inherent acknowledgement then in 1901 of white supremacy and homogeneity, arguably remains strong in the collective consciousness of Australia’s Anglo-Celts today. Jon Stratton states that assimilation and multiculturalism (newly conceived) both held to the same assumption, being: “the fundamental unity of Australian national culture being expressed in homogeneity.â€?(20) I would argue that that assumption was and remains flawed given the cumulative effects of major waves of immigrants in the 20th century post World War II, and along with the usual English, Scots, Welsh and Irish of the nineteenth century, a prior largely unacknowledged wave of Prussian-Germans, many post 1848,(20a) and Italians post 1880, (20b) among many others. We were losing the Anglo-Celtic homogeneity a hundred years before the southern European (post war) exodus ever began. Continue reading ‘Multiculturalism. Has it Failed? (part 2)’
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