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Life, Culture and Politics from BrisVegas
Larvatus Prodeo was an Australian group blog which discussed politics, sociology, culture, life, religion and science from a left of centre perspective. more»
Frist? Anyway, staying up late upgrading ubuntu studio and mythbuntu (on a computer packed with big hard drives and videos) both upgrades crashed systems and I’ve gone back to 11.04 complete reinstalls. Beware linux (or at least ubuntu) upgrades. Am learning painfully about why its important to back up / image computers.
Today I will exploit capitalism by going shopping.
Perhaps with President Obama’s visit fast approaching it might be a good time to reaquaint ourselves with the circumstances of the last US President to visit GWBush and in particular the partisan tory-only function that was held in his honour. Margo Kingston’s “Not Happy John” has a very good chapter devoted to it and shows the gross unprecedented indulgence (at our expense!!) it was. My memory of the chapter is that TAbbott had a role in organizing it and at one point claimed that the function was in keeping with previous protocols. MK shows how this was a complete lie (surprise, surprise) by comparing it to GHBush’s visit whilst PJK was Prime Minister. My memory is also that this scandal was largely whitewashed and hidden by a fawning msm some of whom were lucky enough to get invites to this tory-only function. I wonder if Neil Mitchell and Alan Jones, who are constantly railing against government extravagance, ever saw fit to return the money it would have cost to fill their troughs that day.
Trying not to look at a pile of assignments that are awaiting marking…
thinking the iraqi’s can look at libya’s example of success (if necessary) now that B’O'B is pulling 100k troops out of iraq.
would pulling out of afghanistan be such a big leap? it’s gonna be/stay brutal no matter what happens.
uh, should clarify, not bob brown, barack obama. at least not yet.
Very happy after last night – Big do in honour of my mother’s 90th, which went *off*. Jointly organised by the 2 of us. A feeling of great relief that everything went OK. There was one funny thing (not really a disaster) in that I ordered her enormous cake from a cake shop local to her and they went and put it in their glass fronted display window in the A.M. So guess who rolled up to do some shopping, pointed at it and chortled to the cake shop guy “Haha, I know who that’s for!” Well there wouldn’t have been too many people of the same name having a Happy 90th that day! He admitted it to me when I picked it up. LULZ.
Pleased to have downloaded a copy of “Riven” which I haven’t “played” for years. Still as beautiful as ever and well worth it, kids exploring a different kind of game, which is keeping them totally confused and fascinated at the same time.
Obviously Obtuse @1
I have been using Ubuntu for about 4 years. Had a few issues along the way but I was really pleased with the set up for version 11.04. Upgraded to 11.10 and it is a complete disaster, slow, clunky, programs won’t run at all, screen set up is horrible.
Has put me right off Ubuntu, which is a pity as I fully support the concept of open & free access.
With regret will revert back to Windows in future
I hear ya rossco. I’m sticking with open source though, too many hassles with licensing and dead hard drives and licensing and hardware upgrades to put up with windows. Quite apart from feeling like a member of an underground community.
Zoe Williams has a good piece in The Guardian today about protesters outside St Pauls in London.
link
One fellow mentions how he feels too tied up by mortgage family etc to keep in touch with rightful protest. I hear him too.
Anyone notice the venom and bile in the Fairfax and News Corp media comments on the Occupy # Protests. Not to mention the out and out lies. Protesters defecating and urinating in all the parks that the protesters occupy. The calls for Centre Link officers to attend to make sure that none of the protesters are unemployed and are, therefore, not performing their obligation to find a job by being at the protests. Do these people write these things because they have absolutely no empathy and are naturally horrible people or are they pure capitalists being paid for their efforts?
Helen glad to see your mum still likes to go shopping and pleased her birthday went *off*
Marisan asked:
Doubtless this reflects a combination of factors
1. Active cultural identification with the interests of the boss class (whether one is paid on that basis, is aspirational or playing out the cultural equivalent of Stockholm Syndrome)
2. Cultural angst; othering of deviance
3. Ignorance of the issues germane to class power and privilege
4. Positioning of the commercial media in relation to audience, including traditional media tropes. These greatly simply the business of composiing stories since the tropes require little explanation. This fits comfortably within standard MCBM practice.
Hi Fran,
Since, at the last Federal Election, we found Australia is almost evenly split between left and right how come there are so many right wing comments on these articles?
Is it because the left are too busy protesting and, therefore don’t have time to comment or is it the right are commenting from their work with the active encouragement of their management?
Either way the Occupy # isn’t going away so everyone best get used to it.
Thanks, Billie!
She was very happy with it. Great to be able to express our gratitude for all the things she’s done for us.
There is a show on cnn (605) in 2 minutes on Durban and the meeting.
Just so ya know
Its called ” Road to Durban; A green city…”
Actually it’s called “Road to Durban; a green city journey ”
It’s a series going country by country examining what they’re doing in the alternative energy area, this episode Turkey , next Kenya.
Anyway, its over now. oh well.
Marisan – it’s because the authorities refuse to provide free WiFi.
@marisan.. I passed through the melbourne #occupy on Tuesday as I took the kids to the display at the state library. Definitely saw people urinating on the grass.
On that note, I saw that an ex-girlfriend of Andrew Bolt got her own column in the fairfax papers. I think I’m going to give up on politics now. That’s culture wars gone fucking stupid.
“”"Definitely saw people urinating on the grass.”"”
A professional sportsperson can have a multi- million dollar contract torn up for that !!! Splashed all over the front and back pages (pun)
Luckily these folk aren’t achievers or “role models”
Originality from Libya, certain to be reproduced elsewhere.
Seen on this mornings news, a celebrating Libyan had his Toyota windscreen wipers pulled forward away from the wind shield waving at high speed with Libyan flags attached. Very clever.
Did anyboby else noticed just how many Toyotas there are in Libya?
Obviously Obtuse and rossco: I’m sticking with the LTS (long term service) version of Ubuntu – to wit, 10.04. I find it very stable.
One problem with later versions is that the Ubuntu designers decided to replace the stable Gnone Panel windows shell with their own customised “Ubuntu Unity”, which many people dislike.
Marisan asked:
Again, an explanation entails a variety of factors:
1. The audience of the Hun, which skews hard right
2. The importance of identity politics/SSA* amongst the hard right and the compelling urge to vent that flows there from
3. The strong probability that freeping** and sockpuppeteering is involved
4. The pre-digested and simplistic nature of rightwing commentary lends itself especially well to the format of letter columns. Left-of-centre commentary must, by definition, challenge an always already in existence “common sense”, replacing it with a new one and that tends not to fit easily into a sub-100 word format.
5. It’s likely that left-of-centre commentary that didn’t simply utter stereotypic “left” slogans would be substantially refused publication as it would begin to redefine the papers away from the audiences the papers want to market to advertisers.
Hope that helps.
* SSA: socio-spatial angst — a term that describes a persistent and morbid fear that non-specific “others” (often referred to simply by the indefinite 3rd person plural pronoun, “they”) are imposing upon your freedoms or discretion to act, think etc … This often manifests in rightwing populism, parochialism, the authenticity of “the local”, xenophobia, fear of government (especially “foreign government), fear of difference and deviance etc …
** Freeping the mobilisation of teams of like-minded persons to spam public blogs using copy and paste talking points so as to create an impression that “most people think {interest group opinion}” and intimidate those with a contrary POV. Freeping lends itself especially well to campaigns in which there is a clear identity community and a commercial entity with an interest in moving debate in the same direction as the identity community. It’s assumed sockpuppeteering is a common feature of these campaigns. (see also Overton Window)
Professor Quiggin posted the following over at his blog the other day:
Has the US Defense Department killed a million Americans since 2001?
The post went on to sketch some of the ideas bundled up with the “statistical value of a human life” and the opportunity cost implications of US DoD spending. Apparently, in the US, lives are worth $5million each. It’s not clear whether this applies merely to the lives of US citizens, those resident in the US (legally or otherwise) if it includes prisoners or whether allowance is made (as it is here under PBS rules) for fractionals (number of quality life years) or whether lives lost in the effort are part of the ledger. I read somewhere years ago that the US put a value of about $1000 per non-first world life. This figure is the amount in theory that any program has to satisfy for efficacy.
I’d love exact figures but I’d be surprised if the US DoD hadn’t gone through tens of trillions of 2011 dollars since late in 1945. I very much doubt they could show that this spending had saved, in net terms, 5-6000 US lives. By this standard, the 50,000 or so US lives lost in Vietnam — let’s ignore the seriously injured for simplicity’s sake — added about $250bn to the bill, or, put another way, they have to save 50,000 lives on top of the spending on Vietnam just to break even. Then there is the death of about 2,000,000 Vietnamese in the conflict, some of it through murder-for-hire programs like Operation Phoenix.
Anyhoo …
Modelling is a very difficult thing. There’s an episode of The Big Bang in which “Sheldon” and “Amy” are playing a counterfactual game, in which they posit an absurd counterfactual and try and model a consequence. Thus they ask — in a world dominated by giant beavers, what food would become unavailable?. Leonard suggests cinnamon, given that beavers feed off bark, but Amy and Sheldon are agreed that it is Prune Danish on the basis that humans build many dams to please their beaver overlords, flood Copenhagen with the result that Danes never invent their signature food. How does one not get that? Amy asks.
Fairly obviously, the causal reasoning above is tendentious, but the reasoning for military expenditure often seems to be in the same ballpark. I’m unclear how massive expenditures by Australian governments on submarines and joint strike fighters helps Australians live longer or more safely whenever they become available, but apparently our beaver overlords are in charge of policy, so tendentious is in. In the US, expenditure is even less well accounted for. Just the other day, on PM, we had some ex-wonk pointing out the massive waste of US expenditure in Iraq entailed in building PR-worthy facilities over their to keep the folks back home convinced that their troops were putting their lives in jeopardy for good reason. Go figure.
Apparently, it costs the US somewhere between $500k and $1.25mk to maintain a single troop in the field in Afghanistan. That must mean that each of them saves at least 10% of an American every year (or that a platoon of about 10 should save at least one). I’d be surprised if that were so, even if casualties were zero. I’d be surprised if US influence in Afghanistan didn’t put everyone perceived as an American in that part of the world as being at somewhat greater risk. At $5million each, I daresay Somali pirates would kidnap an unlimited number of Americans, and at least in this case, one might have some sense of connectedness between the expenditure and the Americans saved.
I also wonder where this puts expenditure on action on climate change, which, unlike military spending, might actually help people in the here and now.
OO, Rossco and D&O: Uugh, Gnome makes my eyes water. Give me Openbox any day.
Actually, if I may I’ll put a plug in for #! (Crunchbang) Linux as my geek distro of choice. Debian-based, lightweight but deals nicely with all your media. What’s not to like?
Fran I put a post on my blog that riffed off of Quiggin’s post. I have been doing quite a bit of this “value of a life” type modeling at work recently, so it seemed relevant to me.
The Right continue to become more feral by the day:
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/protester-sorry-for-pm-insult/story-e6freuy9-1226174043282
@27
Possibly “devious” rather than feral, if you link the apology over using misogynist abusive language to the Prime Minister with Alan Jones’ recent not-so-abject “apology”. Conservatives think that if they appear to make tepid apologies now, that if (“when” in their thinking) they regain Government they won’t have so much dirt to mop up.
The “when” of regaining Government got a push-along on Insiders this morning with two or three references to “when the Opposition come into Government”. No ifs, buts, or hedging. Straight out “when”. There may be two years to go yet but it looks like the media are taking out their insurances now. Perhaps we’ll now have Abbott & Co. coming out and apologising to me for attacking me for voting a different way from them at the fairly recent election.
I’m not happy with my right to vote being treated so disdainfully.
Shorten didn’t help either by essentially playing along with the rightwing meme that #theirABC were running.
Apologies for cross posting but I posted this over in CC50 but it was suggested that I bring it here:
As Merc and Roger point out the make up of the board is decidedly WASPish. Idealistically it would be lovely if they could get some more diversity in there but I imagine that the advisory board is primarily affected by the predominant makeup of the tech industry in the States: white middle class males. I wonder what the demographic breakdown of Wikipedia is?
So does anyone think this is a good idea?
Further evidence that Tepco has been less than truthful about events at Fukushima: Norwegian modelling estimates that the total release of Cs-137 is twice the official total, approximately 40% of the Chernobyl total, and that a lot of this came from the spent fuel pool at reactor 4: Scientific American.
They also state that the timing of the release of Xe-133 indicates, as others have proposed, that the quake alone caused sufficient damage to cause the accident.
Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world
“So, the super-entity may not result from conspiracy. The real question, says the Zurich team, is whether it can exert concerted political power. Driffill feels 147 is too many to sustain collusion. Braha suspects they will compete in the market but act together on common interests. Resisting changes to the network structure may be one such common interest.”
They let me out of the cell today for the morning sermon.
Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
Tomorrow I’ll be waterboarded to help me recant science. My religionless and spiritually rootlessness shall be banished. Pray for me dear friends, pray for me. Ootz