In contrast to the media coverage earlier in the year when the People’s Republic of China suffered such an overwhelming public relations disaster in the context of protests from human rights and Tibetan activists against the Olympic torch, very little has been heard of Tibet in the mainstream media of late. All that we’ve seen lately in the Australian press is the solemn warnings from the Australian Olympics Committee that any athletes wearing an innocuous t-shirt with a generic human rights message offered to those interested by the Australia Tibet Council would be immediately sent home. Lest they annoy the Chinese government, and violate the “spirit of the Olympics” presumably. The corporate sponsored Olympiad brooks no petty “mixing” of politics and sport, of course.
Not since the Hanging Gardens of Babylon has there been an urban innovation…oh, hang on…
Not since the gardens of Versailles have we seen…oh, wait…
Not since ivy…
Ok, so it’s not really a new concept - but there is something enormously appealing and compelling about the vertical gardens designed by Patrick Blanc, which have transformed more than a few nondescript buildings and shopping malls across Europe.
Using a kind-of trellis system and felt impregnated with seeds, Blanc can design growing walls which live off grey water and nutrients drip-fed from the top of the structure. The system is lightweight and doesn’t damage the building, as it’s suspended a few inches out from the surface.
In an attempt to further clog my arteries, I had McDonalds for breakfast this morning. At McDonalds, I had a McAmerica….err, thing, alleged foodstuff, which I think featured bacon, egg, cheese, a bagel and ketchup. Yes, in honour of the Olympic Games, McDonalds is serving up special breakfast items with a continent theme (is America a continent?). This amazing initiative also includes the McAsia, the McAfrica, the McAustralia and the McEurope. While I can’t confirm it, I suspect the McAsia is a bagel with bacon, egg, cheese and the blood of a Chinese sweatshop worker on it. So if you want to show your support for the home team, help induce a heart attack with a McAustralia (perhaps featuring bacon, egg, cheese, bagel and, err, tomato sauce). Incidentally, the McAmerica’s more tasteless than that video featuring Madonna and Justin Timberlake. It was truly awful tucker.
Much as I like the bloke, the headline on one of several op/eds Paul Keating has in the papers today criticising Kevin Rudd’s Asian Union idea says it all really - “I got it right the first time”.
I found it interesting this week to see what some of my students in Political Communication at QUT - doing group presentations on political leadership and campaigns - made of PJK. Most of them were very young indeed when Paul Keating was PM, and landmarks such as his Redfern Speech, or for that matter, the famous hand on the Queen incident aren’t present in their recollection. Researching Keating from scratch, as it were, you turn up lots of stuff about his colourful rhetoric, but seemingly, you also come to the conclusion that the man isn’t happy with his place in history - which I think is probably right.
When I was thinking about this, I decided that his criticism of Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd’s advisors last year probably related to this - because of his great hatred of John Howard, he was worried that Labor wouldn’t get over the line when Howard’s defeat looked so likely, and speculating in his mind how he might have fought such a campaign.
I’m still a little suspicious that PJK might have, in one way or another, contributed to the spate of criticism of Kevin Rudd early this week on the grounds of supposed policy drift. Continue reading ‘Keating v. Rudd’
Andrew Bartlett dissects for us the official goals of the “Olympic movement”:
* “Olympism seeks to create a way of life based on the joy of effort, the educational value of good example and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles.”
* “The goal of Olympism is to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of man, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity.”
* “The practice of sport is a human right. Every individual must have the possibility of practising sport, without discrimination of any kind and in the Olympic spirit, which requires mutual understanding with a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play.”
* “Any form of discrimination with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise is incompatible with belonging to the Olympic Movement.”
But sport has nothing to do with politics, does it? Thorpey said so. And a gaggle of superannuated IOC bureaucrats/marketing men. (They all appear to be men. What’s with that?)
Andrew goes on to detail the fact that human rights abuses in China go far beyond Tibet. It’s a great post. Go read!
There’s a thought provoking review of Richard Barbrook’s new book Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village at Mute magazine. I came across it via bookforum.com, and my curiosity was piqued because I received a flyer for Imaginary Futures enclosed with another book I recently ordered from Pluto Books in the UK (whom I wholeheartedly endorse for customer service btw - not only did they deliver a book I needed from Britain within a week, but I got an email telling me about it from an actual person as opposed to an Amazonbot).
Ian A. Boal asks some interesting questions - how did we get from seeing the computer as an instrument of dehumanisation (think HAL in 2001 and other such fictional and filmic representations of the 60s and 70s) to seeing it as a utopian saviour of humanity? How can we understand the history of “digital utopianism” and what of the interests and social positions of those who spruiked it?
Interest in nuclear weapons has faded a lot since the Cold War. These days, the possibility of nuclear confrontation between major powers isn’t treated terribly seriously, because the costs of such an exchange would be too horrible to contemplate. And, anyway, both the Russians and the US have been reducing their nuclear arsenals, right? Instead, concerns lay much more around nuclear terrorism, on the assumption that terrorists can’t be deterred by the threat of destruction.
However, amongst the small group of academics who are examining the issue, there’s a pair who are putting together some interesting, and rather disturbing conclusions. Keir Lieber and Daryl Press, two American academics, argue that in a military confrontation with China, the USA has the ability to destroy the Chinese long-range arsenal, if it strikes first. Therefore, if it came to it, an American president may be sorely tempted to try such a strike; as they argue in a recent presentation (follow the link for video), such a strike was precisely what the USA planned for against the Soviets during the 1950s, when the nuclear balance between the USA and the Soviet union was roughly analogous to the situation now.
It’s worth noting that other experts in the area (including the owner of the blog I’ve linked to, Jeffery Lewis) don’t accept Lieber and Press’s conclusions. For one thing, while a strike may well have a good chance of taking out all the missiles that could reach the US, that still leaves the Chinese with plenty that could reach Japan and Korea and the more than 50,000 American troops there - not to mention, of course the millions of Koreans and Japanese who might not be entirely happy with the US government pursuing a strategy that left their populations vulnerable to complete annihilation…
In any case, some thoroughly depressing reading and listening material on the leadup to Anzac Day.
China’s Foreign Ministry have warned against protests in Canberra because the torch “belongs to the whole world”. That the corrupt thugs who run China (latest effort – dispatching a boatload of weapons to fellow despot Bob Mugabe) object to expressions of dissent even in other countries is no surprise. But let’s get over this fetishisation of the Olympics.
Year after year the same faces, the Kevin Gospers and John Coateses who are apparently on the Olympics gravy train for life, stand up to declare that it’s all about the sport, or world peace, or the youth of the world. In fact it’s a giant media event designed to generate massive revenue which, this time around, is being employed to promote one of the world’s most brutal regimes.
And you can see where these sports administrators come from. Just about every athlete or sports person parrots the same lines about sport having nothing to do with politics or, for that matter, morality, as if sports – professional, international sport, in all its cash-generating glory – is somehow a priori disconnected from basic ethics and standards of civilized behaviour.
For those planning to have a crack at disrupting the relay, or who just want to marvel at some wonderful security overkill, the event kicks off at 8.30am tomorrow morning.
The location? Reconciliation Place. That’s Olympian-level irony.
While in the Melbourne CBD this morning, I was handed a flyer by a young man. The young man and his two friends were wearing white t-shirts that had something like “We are all family” written on the back. One of his friends had a Chinese flag. The flyer states the following:
MEDIA DISTORTION!
VIOLENCE!
In the Memory of the Victims in the Tibetan Riot (March 14, 2008)
There has been disgraceful truth distortion in large scale by such medias like CNN, BBC, CTV, NTV, RTL, FOX, Washington Post, etc.
Right to live is deprived with violence, no freedom of speech can be secured with truth being trimmed. To stop further violation on the most basic human right to life and freedom of expression, we stand up shouting out:
The flyer also contains some quotes from various sources and statistics from Xinhua. Here’s a couple of the quotes, followed by a few of the statistics:
“Tibetans gone crazy….” (ABC News)
“Oh my God, someone has a gun” “Oh my God. Oh no. That’s crazy. One hundred people are trying to stone one man.” (The Guardian)
18 civilians and 1 police officer killed; 382 civilians injured…908 shops were looted. Damage has cost a estimated loss of more than 244 million yuan (about US$34.59 million).
There’s nothing on the flyer to indicate who’s responsible for writing it, although perhaps the people who put up those websites are.
While we (or most of us at any rate) were asleep, the Guardian’s Eleanor Schor was liveblogging the progress of the Olympic torch relay/rally through San Francisco. Or rather, on a boat circumnavigating San Francisco.
Watching from Kiwiland, No Right Turn asks a pertinent question:
Is it a relay if no-one can see it?
According to the Guardian’s liveblog, the torch has since returned to land, a significant distance from its original route, and it may not even finish at the original location. So, they have no protestors - but no spectators either. So much for taking the torch to the people…
Update: According to the Students for a free Tibet liveblog, one of the torchbearers pulled a Tibetan flag, and had the torch taken away.
Meanwhile, Kevin Rudd has got up the goat of the leader of the Tibet Autonomous Region, Qiangba Puncog:
Asked about previous criticisms by Mr Rudd, Mr Qiangba, a Tibetan Chinese, said: “Australia and other countries should have a better appreciation and understanding that people in Tibet are now enjoying democracy and wonderful human rights protection and those remarks are totally unfounded.”
Whatever. They can’t expect anyone outside China to take that seriously. Obviously it’s part of their typical Maoist-era information control tactics, and to warn Rudd not to press them too hard on human rights. It’s to his credit that he’s undaunted.
The Liberal Party is demanding that Kevin Rudd and federal ministers boycott the Olympics opening ceremony.
However, federal Small Business Minister Craig Emerson said a political boycott would damage the spirit of the Olympics.
Why?
What’s interesting about the current conjuncture, according to Henry Farrell of Crooked Timber is the shift from inter-state politics to the politics of protest:
The current debacle though seems to mark an important change in the politics of the Olympics. As best I understand it (I am open to corrections if wrong), in the past, Olympics politics have concerned inter-state rivalry, and have been driven by decisions on the part of traditional political elites. The US boycott of the Soviet games in protest against the invasion of Afghanistan in 1980 resulted from a decision by Jimmy Carter, and the tit-for-tat boycott by the Soviets and their allies of the LA games in 1984 resulted from a top level decision too. The dynamic driving the Beijing Olympics seems to me to be rather different; what we are seeing is that the politics of boycott is being driven by mass-publics, and most recently by protestors, rather than by political leaders. In the absence of the public unrest that has culminated in the recent protests in Paris, I doubt very much that Western political leaders would be muttering about not showing at the opening ceremonies – the geopolitical stakes of market access etc are likely more important to them than the fate of Tibetans. But given the widespread public reaction in the West, even leaders like Gordon Brown, who obviously want very much to attend, are having to insulate themselves from public pressures by taking other actions liable to annoy China (such as meeting with the Dalai Lama). In short, I think we are seeing how public opinion and organized cross-national opposition can create significant constraints on the ability of leaders to respond to what they see as the geostrategic necessity of keeping China happy. This is, as best as I am aware, a new phase in the development of the Olympics.
Who came up with the bright idea that holding the Olympics in China would improve its human rights performance? Worked a treat in 1936 and 1980, didn’t it?
It’s doubtful what the protests against the torch relay will achieve, but props to the protesters. The only way these things ever get sorted is through the courage and will never to give up, and to make your point at the point of maximum impact and leverage. Meanwhile, the “sport separate from politics” narrative is fracturing before our eyes. And it seems to be doggingthe steps of our Dear Leader as he travels across the world (next stop - China…)
This is just a hunch, but here it is for the sake of argument.
I’ve always argued that the Fin Review is well worth $2.70 a day because a lot of what’s actually important to our politics - and our everyday lives - gets discussed there and nowhere else much. Old style unionists didn’t make a practice of reading the Bosses’ Bible for nothing. We’re fast entering a period where economics has risen to the top of the political agenda again - in a rather odd way, it’s somewhat reminiscent of the Whitlam era - a PM who has strong interests in foreign policy and nation building takes office just as the wheels start to fall off the economic engine. Obviously there are differences, but it’s a parallel that struck me when I read Brian Toohey arguing that Kevin Rudd just doesn’t get economics - and that may be exaggerated but you only have to listen to his waffle in question time when asked a question about the economy to realise there’s a fair bit of substance to it. Hopefully there’s no reason to despair, as he’s notoriously a quick study, and it was interesting to read in the Fin today that he’s seconded a senior Treasury boffin to his personal staff.
There’s an excellent article in Der Spiegel by Jürgen Kremb which really gets to grips with the politics of the Tibetan situation - and the severity and scale of the repression and the protests in Lhasa - in a way I’ve rarely seen. Kremb’s comparison of Tibet with the Gaza Strip, while not exact (the attempt to submerge Tibetan culture through Chinese settlement is an obvious contrast), really does go to the history of the current crisis - most strikingly the parallel with the development of militant movements within Tibet itself (and completely detached from the Dalai Lama) being inspired by the last major round of violent repression in the 1980s.
Kremb also points to concrete steps towards a political solution - which again is usually absent from the debate in the West which has a tendency not to transcend either the sloganeering I’ve emulated in the title of this post or the perhaps facile calls for “restraint” from Foreign Ministers.
It’s all doom and gloom throughout Australia’s farms, isn’t it?
Nope. Now that the drought has started to break in parts of eastern Australia, farmers can take advantage of record prices for “soft commodities”, such as grains. Meanwhile, dairy farming’s not doing so bad either - over in New Zealand, dairy farmers can’t get enough people to work on their properties as the industry’s growing too fast to keep up. While the irrigated dairies of the Murray-Darling basin can’t get enough water to produce much, over the other side of the Divide Gippsland dairy farmers are doing quite nicely.
What’s going on? Well, a lot of it’s the same story as mined commodities - increased demand from China and India. As people get themselves out of poverty, one of the first things they tend to buy more of is meat. And the vegetarians are right - it requires a heck of a lot more than one kilogram of grain (that could otherwise be eaten) to produce a kilogram of pork, chicken, or fish. Throw in the United States’ (and to a lesser extent, the EU’s) quixotic attempt to grow its way to “energy independence” through turning its corn crop into alcohol, and you’ve got a big jump in demand for all things agricultural. Continue reading ‘Next, the farm boom’
Larvatus Prodeo is an Australian group blog which discusses politics, sociology, culture, life, religion and science from a left of centre perspective. more»
In contrast to the media coverage earlier in the year when the People’s Republic of China suffered such an overwhelming public relations disaster in the context of protests from human rights and Tibetan activists against the Olympic torch, very little has been heard of Tibet in the mainstream media of late. All that we’ve seen lately in the Australian press is the solemn warnings from the Australian Olympics Committee that any athletes wearing an innocuous t-shirt with a generic human rights message offered to those interested by the Australia Tibet Council would be immediately sent home. Lest they annoy the Chinese government, and violate the “spirit of the Olympics” presumably. The corporate sponsored Olympiad brooks no petty “mixing” of politics and sport, of course.
Much as I like the bloke, the headline on one of 
There’s a thought provoking review of Richard Barbrook’s new book 
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