Alienation

With one simple tale, she summarised the process whereby people at work feel no connection with whatever they're producing. She was working on an assembly line, on which apple pies would emerge from an oven, then Smith and her colleagues would pick them up as they passed and place them in their boxes. Every single time, she said, as the pies approached, one worker who'd been there 20 years would flare his nostrils, look menacingly at them and snarl, "Here come the little fuckers."

- from Mark Steel's obituary for British comedian and radio performer Linda Smith.

Foolish Laws for Foolish People

I assume an important punitive element of David Irving's three year sentence for Holocaust denial will be that every time he complains about being in prison the guards will reply "No, you're not."

Heh. Three years for some cretinous comments this anti-Semitic tosser made fifteen years ago? Very silly, Austria, very silly indeed, and rather poor timing what with Europe's mainstream media at pains to stress the West's principled commitment to freedom of speech, in stark contrast to those excitable Musselmen, enraged to violence by some silly cartoons and nothing else! Be that as it may, there's really no justification for this. I know some claim that Holocaust revisionism amounts to racial vilification, implying as it does a dishonest conspiracy on the part of those who were witnesses to mass murder, but allegations of insinuation should not be sufficient to throw someone in the pokey. Even if I regarded anti-vilification laws as a sensible legal concept - and I don't - I'd still be concerned about allowing states to lock people up for subtext. And one might simply ask, how does Irving's expression of bizarre falsehoods do as much harm to anyone as imprisonment does harm to him?

Such prohibitions on denying the Holocaust also raise the sticky question of why this particular case of genocide should be so privileged, when any number of historians (and sociologists) have built careers on glossing over the atrocities of empires old and new, and the exterminations attendant on them. But, then, perhaps that's a good thing.

Kerry Saved Me from Hicksville

From a letter in today's Herald justifying the state service for Australia's richest dead man:

I am in year 12 and thanks to Mr Packer's charity have been privileged to attend Ascham School as a boarder since sixth grade on a full scholarship. Without this gift I would have been relegated to a country high school and would not have experienced or learnt half as much.

It's funny coz it's true. A' course, I hope the locals won't be waiting for you, lassie, when you venture home for the hols.

Naysayers might argue that a man who had millions to throw away on the geegees could have tossed a few in the direction of the public education system (perhaps, who knows, by simply paying a fair amount of tax), rather than merely sponsoring a few toff changelings from less fortunate circumstances, but these sort of commos clearly fail to understand that a good education is like the old school tie: it isn't worth much if everybody has one.

Paying Tribute

Here's my tribute to Kerry Packer: he probably wasn't so evil as to deserve being devoured alive by giant aphids. And while this is likely to be true of many other people, very few of them were also rich bastards. So as their legacies won't be celebrated with a publicly funded memorial at the Sydney Opera House, let their tribute be the fact that they weren't devoured alive by giant aphids. As far as we know.

Mr Packer's death also makes it even more unlikely I'll ever get the opportunity to publicly respond to some corporate mouthpiece whining about left-wing bias on the ABC with "Well, yes, you're right, the commercial media shouldn't be held to the same standard of 'balance' you keep throwing at public broadcasting. After all, the public stations are funded by taxpayers, whereas the commercial stations are owned by people who DON'T PAY TAX.

"Has your bitching got you a spot on Radio National yet?"

I mean, I don't suppose Kerry Stokes pays much tax either, but with Bullimore gone it doesn't have the same ring to it.

Potential Australians, Actually

I've actually read in The Daily Telegraph where a certain Imam from the Lakemba Mosque actually said that Australia's going to be a Moslem nation in 50 years time.

I didn't believe him at the time, but, you know, when you actually look at the birth rates and you look at the fact that we are aborting ourselves almost out of existence by 100,000 abortions every year, and that's on a guesstimate. You multiply that by 50 years: that's five million potential Australians we won't have here.

I'm not sure to what idiot constituency* Danna Vale was directing her bizarre remarks, but I like to think she was making an appeal to fans of Spike Milligan.

"We have to be careful," said the Chief Inspector. "The Chinese are very clever. If we let this Chinaman become a policeman here in Dublin, very soon all of the police in Ireland will be Chinese."

The Sergeant looked worried. "Including me?"

(Until such time as I can dig up my copy of Puckoon, that's going to be a paraphrase.)

* You'll notice those Americans are under the impression Ms Vale is a member of the Labour Party. Perhaps the concept of a Pro-Life Liberal was too much for their minds to encompass.

Enough Already

I am so freakin' tired of this Cartoon Wars shite. Clearly the people burning down embassies are Islamic right-wing tossers. Now I hate right-wing tossers on principle, but I'm damned if I'm going to hate Islamic right-wing tossers more than I hate non-Islamic right-wing tossers just because some non-Islamic right-wing tosser tells me to and claims that the Islamic right-wing tossers' actions prove their societies can't comprehend Western Enlightenment values. No-one ever points at non-Islamic right-wing tossers and claims that. Name one person who ever pointed at Andrew Bolt and said he showed Melburnians had turned their backs on the Enlightenment, embraced the Romantic era and now spent their time lounging in gothic follies, smoking opium and having free love with tubercular poets. See, you can't. I reserve the right to hate all right-wing tossers equally. Does this make me a cultural relativist?

Anyway, here's a blogosphere round-up, a healthy mix of refusal to take the righties' framing of this issue seriously and impatience with the stupidity of people who can't tell the difference between freedom of speech and bigoted incitement.

Roy Edroso

lenin with a small l

Sisyphus Shrugged

The Rude Pundit

Ken MacLeod

William Burroughs' Baboon

Dennis Perrin

Worker #3116

The Assparrot

And, of course, Chris Bertram's gorgeous "I'm Offended" post from Crooked Timber, not so much about this fiasco as about all of them.

And now, let us never speak of it again.

See you in another six months.

Zzzzz

Work is insane at the moment, and even if I wasn't exhausted when I get home of an evening, my mind's a blank anyway, so I hereby declare a hiatus. This blog is now officially moribund.

You could always go look at my crappy photos.

Getting Felt

Wow, that Peggy Noonan really is completely fecking insane:

Was Mr. Felt a hero? No one wants to be hard on an ailing 91-year-old man. Mr. Felt no doubt operated in some perceived jeopardy and judged himself brave. He had every right to disapprove of and wish to stop what he saw as new moves to politicize the FBI. But a hero would have come forward, resigned his position, declared his reasons, and exposed himself to public scrutiny. He would have taken the blows and the kudos. (Knowing both Nixon and the media, there would have been plenty of both.) Heroes pay the price. Mr. Felt simply leaked information gained from his position in government to damage those who were doing what he didn't want done. Then he retired with a government pension. This does not appear to have been heroism, and he appears to have known it. Thus, perhaps, the great silence.

...

Even if Mr. Felt had mixed motives, even if he did not choose the most courageous path in attempting to spread what he thought was the truth, his actions might be judged by their fruits. The Washington Post said yesterday that Mr. Felt's information allowed them to continue their probe. That probe brought down a president. Ben Stein is angry but not incorrect: What Mr. Felt helped produce was a weakened president who was a serious president at a serious time. Nixon's ruin led to a cascade of catastrophic events--the crude and humiliating abandonment of Vietnam and the Vietnamese, the rise of a monster named Pol Pot, and millions--millions--killed in his genocide. America lost confidence; the Soviet Union gained brazenness. What a terrible time. Is it terrible when an American president lies and surrounds himself by dirty tricksters? Yes, it is. How about the butchering of children in the South China Sea. Is that worse? Yes. Infinitely, unforgettably and forever.

I ask again, why can't Australian commentators be this entertainingly deranged?

Oh, and my apologies for the title. Did I mention I was ill?

Sickboy

Now I really do have a cold, so I'm going back to bed. But I note in passing that Andrew Bartlett's got a weblog. Pity he doesn't have a party, but I guess you can't have everything.

Oh dear. It seems a head full of phlegm brings out my mean side. How unfortunate. Go read him anyway.

Absurdity

Bush:

It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on the word of -- and the allegations -- by people who were held in detention, people who hate America, people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble -- that means not tell the truth. And so it was an absurd report. It just is.

I wonder if it's relevant whether or not they hated America before they were detained.

Note also the reference to material in the Al Qaeda Training Manual about "spreading rumors and writing statements that instigate people against the enemy". If Bush is alleging this is why released detainees have been making allegations of abuse he's either a) admitting the US has released AQ operatives without charge or b) a fecking idiot. Either the released detainees are AQ so they wouldn't have been released, or they're not AQ and therefore haven't been trained to make up stories. Rather an obvious bit of reasoning, I would have thought.

Edit: That's interesting. So taken was I with the stupidity of Bush's argument, I completely failed to notice his intriguing pronunciation of "dissemble".

Dummy Spit

I read a Matt Taibbi piece a while ago about the disturbing use of mannequins in advertising. Here in Sydney just recently we saw the re-emergence of a similar campaign that had seemed so wrong-headed the first time it came out it seemed impossible that the commercials could have been successful and, yet, here they were again. The campaign first ran a few months ago to publicise the opening of a local multi-level suburban mall, and involved television and poster ads featuring a young woman shopping while accompanied by a talking ventriloquist dummy. (Or possible a puppet without strings, it's not entirely clear.) She'd look at products and the dummy would say obsequious things like "Of course you need a pair of diamond stilettos", or (as she peruses a menu) "What looks good, apart from you?", or - my personal, skin-crawling favourite - "If it makes you feel good, it's a bargain." Even if we discount the longstanding horror-movie tradition of animated puppets, what normal person could not find these ads anything but irredeemably creepy? My local bus stop sported the most grotesque example, in which the dummy watches our heroine while she sleeps (Caption: "Your hair looks beautiful on the new sheets"). This is supposed to encourage people to shop? As opposed to, say, awake screaming in the night, running with sweat and clutching at the covers?

What disturbs me is that the ads must have worked with their target demographic because they were brought back, at least as bus shelter posters. Perhaps there's some everything about the advertising industry that I don't understand. I'd hate to think this was the average woman's idea of a perfect man, a fawning marionette that follows them about and validates their purchases.

At any rate, the posters have gone again now, the bus shelters now feature the teaser campaign for Hollywood's most recent exploration of the theme of beautiful people with guns, and the world seems a sunnier place.

Two Idle Thoughts

This refusing to comment on current events is working out just swell, isn't it? See, this is why I can't make small talk at parties - I'm only really interested in religion and politics.

I think I'm going to have to significantly lower my threshold of what I consider non-trivial enough to post. This will likely involve me simply posting every nonsense thought that occurs to me. Two examples should suffice to illustrate why I have resisted this approach so far:

1.

I was ruminating, for no reason at all, on the legend of Cassandra. Beloved by Apollo, she was granted by him the gift of prophecy, to see the future with perfect clarity. However, for spurning the god's advances, she was cursed with the proviso that her prophecies would never be believed by anyone.

It occurred to me that if Apollo's original gift had been bona fides then his spiteful codicil would have been superfluous, because it follows naturally that a prediction, at least of events other than natural disasters and similar phenomena beyond human control, can only be accurate if it is not believed. Had the people of Troy accepted Cassandra's forecasts of doom, they would have acted to prevent these events from occurring, thereby making her prophecies false. A prophetess can only correctly perceive the future actions of people if these actions remain uninfluenced by that perception.

If I had the necessary theoretical grounding, I could perhaps proceed now to compose some monograph on pre-Homeric conceptions of the Uncertainty Principle, but, thankfully, I don't.

2.

Reading through some neglected back issues of Interzone, I discovered in David Langford's list of brief obituaries that the number of the year of Christopher Reeve's birth (discounting the century) was the same number as his age at death, that is, fifty-five. Morbidly, I began to consider how the number of people of whom this would also be true would fluctuate over the years of any century.

In most centuries, including the 20th, and, for that matter, the 21st, there would be a significant peak at the beginning of the century accounting for the deaths of the very young. I would guess - students of infant mortality statistics should be able to make a better calculation - this peak would sharply decline at about '08 to a very low figure which would remain low throughout the rest of the century before rising again in the decades of the '50s to '80s (earlier centuries would have earlier inclines, but even in the 20th the impact of Third World lifespans on the average would bring the first appearance of a peak quite early). I was born in 1966, and so have only a moderate, and not extreme, chance of fitting into this numerological quirk myself - touchwood. After the '80s, the numbers steeply decline again.

Depressingly, the 20th Century is marked by a prominent peak in the first three years of the 1920s, these being the birth years of those who turned 20, 21 and 22 during the years of, respectively, 1940, 1942 and 1944. This spike is most noticeable for the populations of Europe and the Mediterranean regions, the Middle East, Asia, Australasia and North America, before disappearing almost entirely in these areas, although parts of South East Asia would have such a peak also appearing in the 1930s.

And there you have it.