Signage

I'm embarrassed to say I initially thought they were being transgressive, but, no, it's just the name of the town.

At some point, if not already, I suspect townsfolk will just start leaning into this.

Times are tough all over

I have taken some solace from being able to advise young folk that however insane our present moment seems, it bears no relation to the widespread dementia of the War on Terror years, but ... it is becoming increasingly unclear how much longer I will be able to keep such codger condescension up.

"We'd like to thank the local chapter of the Hitler Youth who put up the fine props."

100 not ... oh, wait

Big day for Chomsky and Tom Lehrer, I guess.

Aesthetic

[Douglas] Murray is an aesthete turned political... His Spenglerian politics is simply the armed wing of his aesthetics, which finds the ugly, angry, sadistic grotesque Hamas raid to be, if you like, “dirtier” than “conscience-struck” Nazi killing. It’s the usual deal. Aesthetic politics is the back-channel to fascism. That lies at the heart of the general approach, which is an attempt to expel the radical evil of Nazism from the European right and attribute it to non-European “savagery”. Increasing numbers of Zionists and Israelis are doing it because of the historical adjacency of Zionism and European anti-Semitism, as entwined movements seeking communities of national purity as at the root of the good life. Claiming the savagery of intimate bodily torture and terrorism to be more evil than any amount of less procedurally sadistic killing is a way of legitimising killing through bombing with open-ended numbers.

Many of those who can see the evil of all this are non-Europeans of all ages across the West who know well the hypocrisy of imperialism and “Western civilisation” as justifying state killing on a mass scale. But they are joined by a much larger number of younger people... [who have] had an education in ... the great truth of the 20th century: that technical progress not only does not equate with moral progress, but makes domination and killing of humans easier by rendering it as a distanced process...

Leaving aside the simple deliberate amoral indifference of some, I suspect many of Israel’s older defenders truly cannot think their way into that moral truth. So they can look at the mass bombing of civilians, the wholesale killings of children, and simply not see that as the same sort of thing as stabbing someone to death no matter how many multiples of people are being killed. For those of us who do see it, Israel’s actions come out of a period of pre-Nazi morality, the 1920s in the 2020s, its passage into the present covered by the status of Jews as the core victims of the process of techno-amorality.

Silencing strategy

TIL!, "Stockholm syndrome" is not a thing, but was invented whole cloth by a police psychologist to discredit a hostage who publicly called him out as an incompetent cretin whose actions endangered her and her fellow bank employees:

After her ordeal was over, Kristin [Enmark] publicly slammed the police for putting her life in danger. She also refused to testify against both men in court.

Nils Bejerot, the police psychiatrist involved in the siege, never spoke to Kristin directly, but he diagnosed her with a condition he invented.

Calling the proposed condition "Norrmalmstorg syndrome," which came to be known outside Sweden as Stockholm syndrome, Bejerot claimed that Kristin in particular was brainwashed by her captor.

"It is to be expected that, after a point, a bond of friendship springs up between victims and their captors," he said in 1974.

Despite its fame, Stockholm syndrome has never been included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

The handbook used by healthcare professionals in the United States and much of the world is considered the authoritative guide on the treatment of mental conditions.

Jess Hill, an investigative journalist who focuses on gendered violence, researched the origins of Stockholm syndrome for her book See What You Made Me Do.

"[Bejerot] made the assumption based purely on what he'd observed from an outsider's perspective, that they had a syndrome without there being any diagnostic criteria, without there being any type of study — and that's the basis upon which Stockholm syndrome is born."

"It's really easy to say, 'They must have Stockholm syndrome,' because it's comforting to think that there must be a syndrome that explains why victims act like this. And it's also a way of saying, 'I would never act like that.'"

Even Jan-Erik [Olsson, the bank robber] himself admits that by building a rapport with him, his hostages probably saved their own lives.

"They made it hard to kill. They made us go on living together day after day, like goats in that filth. There was nothing to do but get to know each other," he said a year after the robbery.

Dr [Allan] Wade[, a Canadian therapist who has spoken at length with Kristin about her experiences] does not believe Stockholm syndrome exists.

"Stockholm syndrome became a way of silencing an indignant, angry, exhausted, courageous young woman who was speaking about the realities of the events from her point of view," he said.

"It has nothing to do with the psychology of Kristin Enmark. It was a silencing strategy."

As you may have noticed recently.

See also, also, also.

Visible ponies

Keeping busy during the sitzkrieg.

Passive

(Source)

"This is what motivated the Nazis to find ways of circumventing the existential moral decay they were entering, and allowed them to get creative by using ... passive forms of mass annihilation..."

A supporter of the current murderous assault on Gaza posts this description of the Nazi genocides and misses entirely the obvious echo, being too focussed on praising the deranged supremacism of Douglas Murray. Perhaps if Murray had specifically labelled the people of Gaza as untermenschen as part of arguing their subhumanity, the gentleman who wrote the above would have a better comprehension of on which side of history he currently stands.

Graphic Design

I like the cartoon rocketship and that injuries are represented by a couple of bandages, but what's the symbol for kidnapped supposed to mean?

Caring

The majority of all school book challenges in the 2021-2022 school year came from just 11 people.

Peterson didn’t think about what books were available in schools until two years ago. She had begun attending school board meetings in 2020, first to protest pandemic school closures and then mandatory masking.

Uh huh.

Nomenclature

As can be discerned by comparing it with its mother, this is not a spotless giraffe; it's a gaps-between-the-spots-less giraffe.

Ron S. Peno 1955 - 2023 | Louis Tillett 1959 - 2023

As these two giants fall, I am reminded of why I disliked impresario Harry M. Miller. Back in the early 90s, it was announced that the Harold Park Hotel would host a performance of Jesus Christ Superstar including additional songs by Louis Tillett, with the role of Judas being played by Ron S. Peno. This extraordinary cultural artifact was stolen from us by Mr Miller, who had bought the rights to the rock opera in order to stage it as a concert, where various famous Australian performers stood around in a circle for an hour and a half singing the bits, and consequently he insisted the Harold Park Hotel show not go ahead, rendering it only to be enjoyed somewhere in the multiverse.

Memorabilia

Apparently, Paul Tibbetts did not just sign photos of Enola Gay, the crew, and the mushroom cloud but also of the destroyed city. Personable fellow.

Cut

Mr Murray is having a problem with his insurance.

But consider this. I bought my insurance from comparethe market.com, an “insurance intermediary”, who took a cut. They got it from CETA, an “insurance broker”, who took a cut. They got it from Arkel, an “underwriting agent”, who took a cut. They were acting on behalf of Chaucer Insurance, whose frontmen get a cut from China Re, who ultimately get the profit, which goes to the Chinese State.

It is amazing there is anything left from my £450 to be pooled for the payment of claims. Which is perhaps why any claims immediately go to a loss adjuster – who of course gets yet another cut – and we have weeks of messing around, including drone shots of a roof you can walk on.

For me the worst part of this has been that every individual I have spoken to, in all these companies, has seemed a really nice person, genuinely wanting to help, but stuck there wearing a headset, reading limited responses from a screen, operating within their tiny delimited space in this nightmarish corporate jungle.

As absurd as this is, consider how more absurd is the now standard practise in government of contracting out jobs to companies that contract out to companies that contract out... God forbid the money allocated to a task should actually be spent on it, rather than whittled down in a bizarre game of corporate pass the parcel where every player takes a cut of the prize.

What's your pleasure, young fella?

Sydneysiders consume the most cocaine, Melburnians the most heroin, Darwin ranks highest for alcohol while cannabis is most popular in Hobart, wastewater analysis reveals.

...

The commission ranked findings by capital city and found that – on a per capita, per dose basis – Sydneysiders consumed the most cocaine, MDMA and nicotine while Melburnians had the most heroin, fentanyl and ketamine.

Methylamphetamine was most popular in Adelaide, the highest amount of alcohol was detected in Darwin while the largest amounts of cannabis and oxycodone were found in Hobart.

This tracks so completely with regional stereotypes it feels like the movie version of He Died with a Falafel in his Hand.

(Tangential Little Murders reference in post title in honour of Mr Arkin.)

Unfaithful

As always, people need to be reading their Machiavelli:

Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous; and if one holds his state based on these arms, he will stand neither firm nor safe; for they are disunited, ambitious, and without discipline, unfaithful, valiant before friends, cowardly before enemies; they have neither the fear of God nor fidelity to men, and destruction is deferred only so long as the attack is; for in peace one is robbed by them, and in war by the enemy. The fact is, they have no other attraction or reason for keeping the field than a trifle of stipend, which is not sufficient to make them willing to die for you. They are ready enough to be your soldiers whilst you do not make war, but if war comes they take themselves off or run from the foe...

The mercenary captains are either capable men or they are not; if they are, you cannot trust them, because they always aspire to their own greatness, either by oppressing you, who are their master, or others contrary to your intentions; but if the captain is not skilful, you are ruined in the usual way.

Casualties

The nuclear war prep pamphlet from the eighties, Protect and Survive, was apparently also a collection of short films, closely following the text of the information booklet. As I own a copy of the Imperial War Musuem reprint, I can attest that the information provided in the clip above, about disposing of bodies, was immediately followed by this paragraph:

On hearing the ALL-CLEAR

This means there is no longer an immediate danger from air attack and fall-out and you may resume normal activities.

Well, that's nice.

(Protect and Survive features prominently in A Guide to Armageddon, of course.)

Where laughing corn luxuriant grows

The Wikipedia entry for The Song of Australia goes a little heavy on the jokes. The lyrics of the song were those of the winning poem in a contest established by the Gawler Institute in South Australia in 1859, set to a tune by Carl Linger, a German expatriate and exiled 1848 revolutionary. From the article:

Publication of Caroline Carleton's poem caused an immediate controversy; that it was nice poetry, but "too tame"; one regretted that nothing more inspiring than the colour of the sky and the prettiness of the scenery could be found for the poem; one wondered "how hidden wealth could gleam in the darkness" and so on, another that it could equally refer to, say, California, while another longed for a time when such a peaceful song accorded with international politics, and regretted that the contest was restricted to South Australians, that the prize was so paltry, and there was no mention of sheep.

…

In 1924, South Australian MP George Edwin Yates proposed in parliament that the song be adopted as the national anthem. He proceeded to sing the first verse, despite the objections of his fellow members.

…

The song features heavily in the TV series ANZAC Girls episode 4, "Love", when the Peter Dawson record is played on a wind-up gramophone in several scenes, and in snatches sung by "Pat Dooley" (Brandon McClelland) while digging a latrine pit.

The lyrics themselves are absurd, as is entirely to be expected in a patriotic song, and were regarded as so at the time, at least by all the people who wrote parodies. The title of this post is my favourite line from the lyrics, but it was a hard pick.

Capital!

Oh dear. I think someone might have been hacked.

Aussi aussi aussi hoy hoy hoy

January 1st (5 July?, 9 July?)

01/01/1901 Federation of Australian Colonies (i.e. date of proclamation by the first Governor General. The Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act 1900 (UK) was passed on 05/07/1900 and given royal assent by Queen Victoria on 09/07/1900.)
First January is a good date for a national day, because Australians would celebrate their nationalism while nursing a hangover, as would be entirely apt†. OTOH 01/01 is already a holiday.

†We're a nation of fecking dipsos, is the point I'm making here.

11 December

11/12/1931 Statute of Westminster Act passed by UK parliament (date of royal assent) giving British dominions legal independence from UK parliament.
Not ratified by Australia's lickspittle imperialist government for eleven years. Bit close to Christmas. Not really Australian.

9 October (3 September?)

09/10/1942 Statute of Westminster Adoption Act 1942 passed (royal assent - commencement retroactive to 03/09/1939 [outbreak of World War II])
Only a partial r[R]atification of the Statute of Westminster Act did not, however, make Australia entirely independent*. Also the official commencement date would be an odd thing to celebrate. 9/10 is close to NSW, Qld, SA, ACT versions of Labour Day. Also, the Act was only passed to retroactively validate wartime Australian law that conflicted with UK law.**

4 December (17 February?, 3 March?)

04/12/1985 Australia Act (date of royal assent [GG] - ratified by UK Parliament [royal assent by ERII] 17/02/1986 - commenced 03/03/1986)
Yay! No longer a vassal state of the British empire. Now we're free to focus on being a vassal state of the American empire!
Local assent is a bit close to Christmas (OTOH from Easter to Christmas is a bit of a public holiday wasteland in Oz, depending which state you're in); commencement date is close to Labour Day (and variants) in Vic, Tas, WA (very), and Adelaide Cup Day - also we only had to delay the commencement date so that the Brits had time to say "yeah, alright then" which also seems odd to celebrate.

As I tell people when they ask, I would prefer to leave the flag, anthem and date of Australia Day unchanged, because it is so helpful in impressing on people, especially young people, that nationalism is childish and stupid, to have a duff national flag, a duff national anthem, and an entirely duff national holiday.

If we do change the flag, it should be replaced with the Eureka design, and people can choose their own colours.

*...s 4 of the Statute only affected UK laws that were to apply as part of Australian Commonwealth law, not UK laws that were to apply as part of the law of any Australian state. Thus, the Parliament of the United Kingdom still had the power to legislate for the states. In practice, however, this power was almost never exercised. For example, in a referendum on secession in Western Australia in April 1933, 68% of voters favoured seceding from Australia and becoming a separate Dominion. The state government sent a delegation to Westminster to request that this result be enacted into law, but the British government refused to intervene on the grounds that this was a matter for the Australian government [after 18 months of committee hearings]. As a result of this decision in London, no action was taken in Canberra or Perth. - Wikipedia.

**According (again) to Wikipedia: "The immediate prompt for the adoption of the Statute of Westminster was the death sentence imposed on two homosexual Australian sailors for the murder of their crewmate committed on HMAS Australia in 1942. Since 7 November 1939, the Royal Australian Navy had operated subject to British imperial law, under which the two men were sentenced to death. It was argued that this would not have been their sentence if Australian law had applied, but the only way for the Australian government to get the sentences altered was by directly petitioning the King, who commuted them to life imprisonment. Adopting the Statute of Westminster, so that Australia became able to amend applicable imperial law, avoided a potential repetition of this situation. The men's sentences were later further reduced."

(Amendments 26/01/2023 as indicated, including second footnote.)

Astronauts

There was a time when going to Mars made sense, back when astronauts were a cheap and lightweight alternative to costly machinery, and the main concern about finding life on Mars was whether all the trophy pelts could fit in the spacecraft. No one had been in space long enough to discover the degenerative effects of freefall, and it was widely accepted that not just exploration missions, but complicated instruments like space telescopes and weather satellites, were going to need a permanent crew.

But fifty years of progress in miniaturization and software changed the balance between robots and humans in space. Between 1960 and 2020, space probes improved by something like six orders of magnitude, while the technologies of long-duration spaceflight did not. Boiling the water out of urine still looks the same in 2023 as it did in 1960, or for that matter 1060. Today’s automated spacecraft are not only strictly more capable than human astronauts, but cost about a hundred times less to send (though it’s hard to be exact, since astronauts have not gone anywhere since 1972).

The case against a manned mission to Mars.

Alarm

In 2015, the handful of “hard Left” MPs of the Socialist Campaign Group, who fell well outside this consensus, were largely considered mildly entertaining Seventies throwbacks. The election of one of them as party leader was therefore treated—both by the party establishment and their allies in the left-of-center media outlets like The Guardian—as an embarrassing accident that had to be immediately reversed. Corbyn was declared “unelectable.” In order to demonstrate this, dozens of Labor MPs initiated an immediate campaign to render him so, via an unceasing barrage of press briefings, leaked documents, attempts to create false scandals, and a campaign of sustained psychological warfare directed against Corbyn himself—essentially waging an active and aggressive campaign against their own party. Tony Blair even openly stated that he would rather see his own party defeated than come into power on Corbyn’s leftist platform.

The problem was that the party quickly began to change, as tens of thousands of older leftists who had quit the party under Blair and hundreds of thousands of young people began to swell the ranks of local chapters known as “Constituency Labor Party” (CLPs)—inspired by the call from Corbyn and his circle to turn the party back into a social movement. This meant making local CLPs forums of democratic debate, and imagining ways to coordinate between the “extra-parliamentary left”—the peace movement, the housing movement, the climate movement—and those working within the system. It was, in short, an attempt to move away from the politics of personality to one of bottom-up, grassroots democracy. As such, Corbyn’s own lack of conventional charisma was an asset. Suddenly the left was not only teeming with ideas and vision—four-day work weeks, new democratized forms of public ownership, green industrial revolutions—but there was also a feeling that at least some of these things might, for once, actually happen.

For most in the Parliamentary Labor Party (PLP), these developments turned what was at first seen as a ridiculous accident into a genuine cause for alarm. It is important to emphasize that there is nothing like the American primary system in the UK; once selected as an MP by the party leadership, one is, effectively, a candidate for life. The only way to get rid of such a representative, short of an election loss, was through an elaborate process of “deselection.” Even the suggestion that those actively campaigning against their party’s leader in the face of protests from their CLPs might face deselection (and, as a result, the equivalent of a primary challenge) was treated, in the press, as tantamount to some kind of Stalinist purge. Corbyn’s partisans never actually attempted it. However, since so many Labor parliamentarians now found themselves so out of step with their CLPs, they had good reason to see any effort to democratize the internal workings of the party as a genuine threat to their political careers.

Still, I don’t think this quite explains the vehemence, even passion, that marked so much of the internal opposition to Corbynism. Centrists, after all, consider themselves pragmatists. For forty years the center had been drifting steadily to starboard. So what if it jumped a ways to port? It might have been abrupt, but it’s not as though anyone was proposing the abolition of the monarchy or the nationalization of heavy industry. They could adjust. A handful even did. The panicked reaction of the majority, however, only makes sense if the threat was on a far deeper level.

Most sitting Labor MPs had begun as Labor youth activists themselves, just as most centrist political journalists had begun their careers as leftists, even revolutionaries, of one sort or another. But they had also risen through the ranks of Blair’s machine at a time when advancement was largely based on willingness to sacrifice one’s youthful ideals. They had become the very people they would have once despised as sellouts.

Insofar as they dreamed of anything, now, it was of finding some British equivalent of Barack Obama, a leader who looked and acted so much like a visionary, who had so perfected the gestures and intonations, that it never occurred to anyone to ask what that vision actually was (since the vision was, precisely, not to have a vision). Suddenly, they found themselves saddled with a scruffy teetotaling vegan who said exactly what he really thought, and inspired a new generation of activists to dream of changing the world. If those activists were not naive, if this man was not unelectable, the centrists’ entire lives had been a lie. They hadn’t really accepted reality at all. They really were just sellouts.

One could even go further: the most passionate opposition to Corbynism came from men and women in their forties, fifties, and sixties. They represented the last generation in which any significant number of young radicals even had the option of selling out, in the sense of becoming secure property-owning bastions of the status quo. Not only had that door closed behind them; they were the ones largely responsible for having closed it. They were, for instance, products of what was once the finest free higher education system in the world—having attended schools like Oxford and Cambridge plush with generous state-provided stipends—who had decided their own children and grandchildren would be better off attending university while moonlighting as baristas or sex workers, then starting their professional lives weighted by tens of thousands of pounds in student debt. If the Corbynistas were right, and none of this had really been necessary, were these politicians not guilty of historic crimes? It’s hard to understand the bizarre obsession with the idea that left Labor youth groups like Momentum—about the most mild-mannered batch of revolutionaries one could imagine—would somehow end up marching them all off to the gulag, without the possibility that in the back of their minds, many secretly suspected that show trials might not be entirely inappropriate.

I was glad to find this again, apropos of winkling out an explanation for this. I can't recall why I didn't post it the first time I found it some months ago, as it is such typical brilliance from the late Mr Graeber.