Australia Day Awards - Pathetic

Happy Australia Day!



It's a day when the Prime Minister of the Australia introduces and thanks the nominees for Australian of the year and the whole country cheers when the winner is awarded "Australian of the Year" and it's sub-categories: Young Australian of the Year, Old Australian of the Year, Normal Australian of the Year and Australian Hero of the Year.

But are they really impressive people? Are they really that wonderful and inspiring?

No they're not.





The real heroes, the really impressive people, are out there unknown in the back arses of our shitty communities.

The real people deserving of an Australian of the Year award are the people struggling to make it, who then break through the shit life dealt them, and the shit people and the government throw at them every day, and they succeed through all that.

They achieve greatness after all those walls up against them. Against bad luck, bad people, bad choices. They smashed through with sheer determination and achieved the same great thing some well-funded schmuck paid for with a cheque, but guess who got the award?

Party Politics - A Necessary Evil

Throughout the socio-political history of mankind, there has only ever been two groups of people, created out of chance or heredity: the powerful and the powerless. You can't have one without the other, and it seems we'll never have neither.

This fact explains tyranny, oligarchy and aristocracy, but also today's slowly evolving and still relatively new representational democracy. This power-based division explains the immediate offspring of this perverse version of Aristotle's original definition, namely "party politics".

As soon as man invented the idea of one person representing his locals in a parliament, man upgraded the idea to get "like-minded" representers to join forces. It all sounds quite sensible. In democracy, representatives vote on ideas (nowadays called Bills) to decide on whether they become law (Acts). So, if you can get more people on side with like-minded ideas, you are more likely to have Bills passed that suit your locals.

So, what the hell happened?

Now, that innocent idea has devolved to something more caveman than modern man. The party system has re-created that recurring ancient enemy of fairness, taking us back beyond feudal Europe, back beyond ancient Egypt, back to the plains of the Africa where small-brained morons were divided between those with the biggest males, lots of rocks and sticks, and those who were smaller and not as inclined to violence, and were therefore walked over.

Now, despite attempts by other "kinds" of wannabee-neverwillbee parties (eg. parties representing racists, hippies, single-interests) there are, as were 50,000 years ago, two political parties:

1) The party that represents and is drawn from the elite rich and powerful; and

2) The party that represents everyone else, who will necessarily be screwed as a result of those above.

In the UK it's the Tories and Labour, in the US it's the Republicans and Democrats, and in Australia it's the Liberal and Labor parties.

The workers and the wankers. Thanks to the rich, taking most of the wealth from the country for themselves, the rest have to go without. Going without has necessitated "socialist" ideas, the need for the weak to get together and demand benefits are provided to the disadvantaged and wealth is spread more fairly.

So what's the problem?

The problem is the concept at the heart of democracy is destroyed by political parties. Your representative in parliament is not representing you or their constituency. They are representing their party. If a Bill is introduced that contradicts the party policy, your MP will be instructed by the party to vote against it. Is that what we mean by democracy?

Why would a political party vote against its constiuents? Because they don't care what you think. They care about their power and their elite status, which is defined and upheld by its moral code.



So, it has become necessary to balance against this horrible power in society. That's where the socialists come in. To stop the powerful getting away with aristocratic policies, the rest of us have welcomed party representation for our own counter-cause. Thus, workers parties and socialists represent our needs against the oligarchs - on our behalf.

So?

Well, the "party", this instrument of modern-day democracy, sounds anti-democratic. That's because it is. Is that a good thing? We realise that we actually don't have a democarcy at all. We have "representatives" who don't represent us, but represent their party that claims to be, like a religion, in the best position to know what we want.

(what about our right to vote, isn't that enough power to threaten our MPs to properly represent us? Well, how represented do you feel? Which MP ever asked you for your advice before voting in parliament on a Bill that will affect you significantly? Does your MP even know you exist? You cast one vote every several years, and not on any Bills, just to pick some complete stranger you nothing about and the feeling is mutual, an MP who belongs to a party. How politically influential are you?)

Well?

Well, unfortunately, until like Switzerland (where they have Direct Democracy - voting on actual Bills by referenda) we embrace the spirit of democracy, the powerful will seek to abuse us and that necessitates an opposition... socialism.



So, although party politics is not exactly democractic, without it, and without effective resistance via a counter-party, we will eventually be ruled by a single corporation.

And for most of us, that will be no party!

Compassion - It's like Freckles

Have you ever wondered how someone could be so callous, so heartless, so insensitive?

Normally, you would consider such behaviour understandable, if it were obvious that external or environmental contributing factors, such as retaliation, alcohol, momentary lapse of reason, severe stress, etc. were evident.

However, sometimes you'll be taken aback by the calm, rational decision a person makes to be utterly brutal without even blinking and then carrying on as though nothing happened. Sometimes it's like that person has no compassion at all.

Well, maybe they don't? Maybe some people don't even have the faculty of compassion, sympathy, empathy, or whatever you want to call the thing words like compassion are meant to signify. How would I like it, if that was me or my loved one? That kind of thing. Words fail description of such an obvious characteristic of most human beings. We feel compelled to suffer and identify with other beings when they are, or may be, vulnerable. We want them to feel better, we want to help.

Some of us seem not to bear such a burden at all. It's hard to tell, because all we have to go on is behaviour. When the behaviour contradicts our expectations, we look for excuses. Sometimes we don't find any. Could it be that some of us physically cannot care for the suffering of others? It would certainly explain a lot.

We the Authors argue that this is so theoretically tenable, it may as well be true - although it may not be empirically verifiable - it doesn't need to be true, because just pretending it is true will make living with others easier.

Sometimes Contingent truth is neither good, nor useful. There's no good reason to seek truth for truth's sake. Sometimes, whatever works is better than whatever is true.

So, if you go around simply assuming that some humans don't have the faculty for compassion, you will be able to explain and predict human behaviour that would otherwise inconvenience you, at best, and destroy you, at worst.

Compassion may seem subject to the tenets of Cultural Relativism - different people groups around the world would have different views on what deserved compassion and what didn't. Some parts of the world do seem to have different levels of compassion based on their social norms. But every culture in the world, every religion, every ideology, uses the language of compassion. It is not a Western concept.

Officially, it is thought by most people that the only humans that are without compassion are psychos, psychopaths, the demented and deranged. But why stop there? Why assume the condition is only available to nut jobs? Why not sane, normal people? Physicians, businessmen, judges, lawyers, politicians, sales assistants, work colleagues, bus drivers, teachers? Why not?

Therefore, We argue the following: some humans have no compassion. They never have, they never will. Like freckles, blonde curls and long legs, you either have them or you don't. Compassion is not learned or acquired. It is like an organ. You've got one or you don't. If you don't have compassion, you can appear to people as if you do by mimicing the behaviour of those who do, in order to blend in with acceptable society - like a psychopath. They walk amongst us.

Understanding this argument will make your individual life easier. Know your enemy.

But there is a bigger, societal issue at stake also:

Those who don't have a faculty for compassion are responsible for almost all human-caused suffering in the world. We as a society need to identify these morally disabled individuals and deal with them. We can't have amoral humans wandering the earth getting powerful and important jobs.

We need to quickly identify them and ensure they are not given opprtunities to harm others - just like we do with sex offenders and violent psychopaths released into the community.

Next time you see one, don't twist yourself into a knot trying to explain the behaviour. Tell yourself, I've found a live one, and warn others.

Catholic Priests and Little Boys

Be honest. What was the first thing you thought when you read the title?

Sodomy? Buggery? Rape? Sexual repression?

Now ask yourself why you thought that and to what degree you think it understandable.

Did anyone think anything different? What on earth would that be? 

Who would disagree that when a person on the planet hears the term "Catholic Priest" their mind is quickly and easily drawn to the sodomy of young boys?

This product of a mental process is not a statement, so it will be difficult for anyone to argue for or against; it can't be refuted, as it claims nothing. The fact that when we hear about Catholic Priests in the news, we next receive the thought that the issue has to do with a claim by a man that was raped, is not a logical conclusion derived from deductive reasoning. It is not empirically verifiable, because it is not a construct that propounds to say anything about nature. It occurs too quickly to be reasoned.

Therefore, the mental process of identifying Priests with sodomy of boys cannot be a conclusion derived by inductive reasoning: eg. the sun came up every morning until now, therefore it will come up tomorrow. It may appear as a causal relation, but this is not itself a rational conclusion. All you intuitively know is that there is something connecting the two things.

The problem with not being reasonable,is that there is no proposition, no sentence making a claim from which we can proceed to analyse, criticise, propound or refute. It's just an instant, automatic association between two data; but why is it also accompanied by a strong mental feeling about something in the world, so that we would treat it as we would a solid fact?

This status alone, of thinking that Priests and sodomy go together, would provide one with a weak reason to develop the process further into a proper argument, if it wasn't for one thing. It is more than a feeling. It is more than a mental thing, a thought. It comes with a powerful kind of understanding that rivals reasoning. It is supported by our understanding of ourselves, humanity, language and logic.

More than a strong feeling of association or causal relation, this strange kind of non-rational understanding makes sense to us. It makes sense to us because of the tools of reason we already have developed over a life-time, which apply themselves to the feeling as Kant's categories apply themselves to phenomena. Those tools are rational arguments we have developed from watching and learning about human nature, society and also our language and logic use/misuse.

The addition of how we understand humanity strengthens our faith in the feeling that there is a  relation, possibly causal, between Catholic Priests and sodomy or any sexual intereference with little kids. That is because some of us know empirically how repressing sexual urges affects us. Many of us have experienced long periods of compulsory abstinence from sexual relations. We know how it feels, what it does to us, how it stretches our ability to cope and changes our perception of reality and even our morality. For some, it is too much to handle, and any thing with a hole in it will do.

Rape has nothing to do with power. To rape, you need an erection, which is derived by the anticipation, real or imagined, of impending sexual intercourse. Rape is about getting your rocks off. The power is a secondary bonus. It is also a necessary ingredient for rape. It is logically entailed that you be more powerful than your subject to rape them. Your prey must be weaker than you, or else you won't get off with them. Little boys and women are generally weaker than your average rapist: an adult male.

Therefore, Priests don't rape and fiddle with boys because it makes them feel powerful. If so, why don't they pay equal attention to adult clergy and support staff or parishioners? Because these are adults who can't be threatened from going to the police or fighting back.


Priests rape little boys because they need to get off really badly and little boys are easy to threaten and get your way with. They'll keep quiet. Their prey is often very impressionable, vulnerable, isolated, weak, the perfect target.

Now, why do Priests need to get off so badly? That is the real question. Answer that and you are half way to a solution or at least a proper explanation.

Priests need to get off really badly because they are sexually repressed, because the Church forbids them from arguably the most powerful of urges, sexual satisfaction. Priests are forbade to engage in anything sexual: whether sexual relations, self-gratification, marriage, intimacy with others, the whole shabang.

It is as simple as that.

Without reasoning, we all say to ourselves, "That explains the vast numbers of incidents displayed in the media every week". Imagine how many go unreported.

Solution: keep the vulnerable and weak away from the sexually excited or sexually repressed and powerful.

A maternity nurse once told me that my child was crying for just one of five reasons. She said the needs of a baby are simple. They just wan't the basics in life: sustanance, physical comfort, reassurance, warmth and maternal contact (mum's love).

Adult males are the same. Their needs have evolved, but are still few in number and fundamentally simple: sex, power, love, comfort, survival, pleasure. Take any one of these away and you are playing with fire. Take the most powerful one away and you are playing with fire and dowsed in petrol.

There's Politics and there's politics

Who cares about leadership challenges and internal divisions within the Labor Party on the high office of Prime Minister, the re-organisation of the Cabinet?

Who gives a shit about processes and bureaucratic mechanisms?

Who gives a toss about the personalities of Julia Gillard, Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott?

Who does? The Media does.

In fact what the recent debacle in Canberra has really revealed to us

bystanders (the voting public) is that the Media and Politicians have one thing in common that is at the forefront of their priorities:

politics, not Politics.


 

 Kevin Rudd was stabbed in the back by his own Cabinet team, his own Deputy, and his own political party, and voted out of the Prime Minstership of Australia. His former Deputy, Julia Gillard, then gave him the job of Foreign Minister. 18 months later he resigned from that job (a week ago) and challenged Julia Gillard for the top job of Prime Minister, and lost. However, he was this time supported by almost a third of this own party. Now the Opposition is pointing out to us all the clear division in the Labor Party and what this dissenting third means against Julia.

Now that I know all that, am I better off?

How has this development directly affected you as an Australian citizen?

Both the Media and our democratically elected Politicians have recently had nothing on their minds of more concern than who gets what job, who did what to whom, who's undermining whom, is he/she/it coming back to his old job.

WHO CARES!

Who cares except flacid-minded morons who watch daytime soap operas.

Not a single journalist has ever asked a politician why we have this kind of Government. Why do we have a Prime Minister, a Cabinet of Ministers and Political Parties when none of these are even mentioned in the Australian Constitution (a document that clearly sets out the purpose and composition of the Federal Parliament).

Not a single journalist is asking Politicians how they represent the needs of their electorate when this competes against the priorities of their political party.

No one is talking about how well the act of Government is working in this country. Is the Party system even democratic? Isn't 'representational democracy' an oxymoron? Saddam Hussein claimed to represent his own people. Yes we get to vote them out - but are we getting another one back in?

You could argue there are two dictators ruling Australia in turns: the Labor party and the Liberal-National Coalition.

Let's remember why we're all paying for this shit. Politicians only exist because of us. We vote them in, so that they can represent us, our needs, in Parliament: to consider what we want before they vote on legislation and agree on a policy. Our elected representatives don't actually do that. Instead they represent their own political Party, not us. If an MP's electorate wants a National Curriculum of Education but their Party doesn't, then they vote against it.



Parliament is instead all about representing the Party, then Business, then Lobbyists, and then powerful individuals, and finally, not us.

Does the Media question Politicians on these issues? Do they even discuss the issues amongst themselves? No.

The Media has an agenda, and like a political party, its bottom line is not the same as ours.

Instead of turning the news on and hearing yet another bland boilerplate statement, another string of dead slogans and empty cliches, from Government about how it administrates its boring internal processes, and then the broken record of the Opposition's response "this is just another sign of a failing Government" we should be hearing something completely different.

We should be hearing journalists asking politicians exactly how every single thing they do is only to govern us in order to make our lives better, easier, and safer or whatever the fuck we want them to do and only that. Many of us died for this country, supporting our government to keep our happiness and well-being secure. Politicians should keep this in mind. We don't care which automoton gets into what job. We care about the job being done properly. Just get on and do it.

We should be hearing politicians justify to us why they should stay in Parliament, how they are representing us and no one else.

We should be hearing the Opposition (or preferably any individual opposing voice) not just robotically negating every single thing the Government does, but detailing exactly how they would deal with the issue. Instead of only disagreeing with a policy, offering an alternative. Or explaining why they disagree.

You could argue against me that all this "politics" is exceptionally important, even critical, to good government. My counter-point is that it is not even being discussed.

 

No one is talking about the link between politics and Politics. Not a single freakin' person is talking about the importance to government of "politics". Just like none of the articles in Woman's Day talk about the importance of these articles to Woman's Day readers. It is taken for granted that the articles are strategically good, because people keep buying the damn magazine. But our government doesn't have any such, immediately responsive feedback system. We vote every three years and that's it.

So why the hell do the Media and Politicians report to us with nothing but bland, robotic, vendor machine, soap opera drama, appealing to our ignorance and our childish naivety?

Why?

Because they both think we're all a pack of idiot morons.

Are we?

White Collar Versus Blue Collar Crime

 
The "Occupy X" phenomenon is a long-awaited turn in the tide of how society defines crime.

Society gets much of its knowledge on anything from the Media. And the Media pays far too much attention to Blue Collar Crime, to small-time crooks and the resource disadvantaged, when they should be paying equal or even more attention to White Collar Crime and White Collar Immorality: to persons of supposed upstanding in the community, responsibility and authority who abuse the community's trust and undermine society far more extensively and sustained than shop-lifters, dope smokers and welfare scabs.

Individually, a blue-collar crim will not cause millions of dollars worth of damage or theft. A poor mum stealing some food or clothing for her family should be seen alongside the public servant stealing $16 million to buy sports cars and hookers. But these ill-fated individual decisions are nothing compared to institutional crime, which enjoys a more agreeable fate; it isn't always defined as crime when it appears in court, but described as corporate sector behaviour, or shrewd business practice. These redefined perceptions are not illegal, but account for the vast majority of the unfair distribution of a nation's wealth amongst its citizens.

We used to give our own wealth, our savings and our salaries, to Banks for protection, for security. But now we give our wealth to Banks for convenience and convention: Try living without a bank account. Yet, Banks take a carefully calculated percentage of the combined wealth we've entrusted them with and then spend it quickly before we ask for it back. They spend our money on investments, which reap a financial reward and which they collect and keep. Then, having used our money to make themselves money, they keep every cent and give none back to us. And all this is legal.

Bankers then flash our money in our faces by driving around in luxury cars, building enormous luxury houses and living luxurious lifestyles, all bought and paid for with our money, our earnings. They supplement this wealth by charging us fees for every conceivable and inconceivable banking service. In fact, Banks now make more money from charging us fees than from investing our savings. Furthermore, the credit card was invented as a response to a Bank wanting to find a way to extract more fees.

Governments take our earnings before we've seen them and remove a percentage and call it Tax. Did we give them permission? No. Not directly, anyway. And I find it quite a stretch to admit that since I voted, for or not for, a particular candidate at a recent election that this translates into me giving some unknown people a third of my earnings forever without any discussion or explanation.

Corporate criminals go to extraordinary lengths, resulting in the creation of whole industries of service providers (Marketing, Risk Management, Advertising, Public Relations...) all geared to the same ultimate goal of taking as much money from as many people as quickly as possible in exchange for offering a good or service to people who didn't need it, but now believe they do and then trying their best not to give them that good or service unless it is at the lowest affordable quality and quantity. How on earth can you get someone to pay for something they won't get, I hear you ask? Well, they use the culmination of skill and knowledge available to human beings handed down through 200,000 years of human society: they lie, they cheat, they con, they trick, the decieve, the confuse, they complicate, they hide, they collude, they conspire and when this all fails they run to the Government for help and the Government uses our Taxes to buy them out of their troubles - without our permission. Wow. How proud must their Mummies be?

Judges and legislators make laws, policies and set standards that they will never be subject to themselves. Being privileged and protected from other humans by their wealth and power, their profession is to decide how everybody else should live and within what parameters. How can someone who has always lived the life of an Aristocrat ever command how all the peasants should live?

So who's worse? The starving impoverished, the needy, the vulnerable, the destitute who didn't choose their parents well enough and have to survive within the low socio-economic brackets? Or the middle and upper class yuppies who's parent-funded education and contacts bought them opportunities and skills that were used to deceive and steal, where it's illegal, and charge a premium to the vulnerable, where it's not?

It's easy to target Blue Collar Crime, because they look like criminals. They dress, talk and behave in a manner that is not as sophisticated as those who dress in suits, drive nice cars, have the latest hair-cuts and speak with the latest vocabulary. How could someone who looks like the President be a criminal? Also, Blue Collar Crime is easy to see, it's very visible. Money is just numbers on a computer screen. No blood, no broken glass, no burnt-out cars. A TV show can show you pictures of Blue Collar Crime that will make you gasp and cringe. It's much harder to portray the theft of millions by a boring city trader, public servant or dime-a-dozen walking Suit.

The kind of crime committed by the lower socio-economic classes is completely different in character from that committed by the rich and powerful. The News of the World used private investigators to illegally gain access to hundreds of mobile phone voicemail accounts held by a variety of people of interest to the newspaper, to make a profit. They published the private affairs of grieving and vulnerable people so that they could buy that house in the Bahamas, that private finishing school education for Mindy and Mandy, the latest Ferrari, more shoes, more struggling businesses, more sweat shops, etc. The cause of the wealthy thief is shallow and decadent. The cause of the poor is just, is understandable, is necessity, is the very result of unfair wealth distribution in society.

Wealth and power buy immunity from the Law, Taxes and even Guilt, thanks to society's acceptance that the worst criminals are Blue Collar not White Collar workers. We need to focus on the real criminals.