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.)

[Clarified my thoughts.]

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.

Emissions

Divisive internet personality and former professional kickboxer Andrew Tate has been detained in Romania...

Earlier this week, ... he told [Greta Thunberg] he owned 33 cars...

"Please provide your email address so I can send a complete list of my car collection and their respective enormous emissions," he wrote in a tweet, taunting the activist.

Thunberg replied, "yes, please do enlighten me. email me at smalldickenergy@getalife.com," she wrote.

It was in response to this that Tate then posted a video, smoking a cigar in a bathrobe before a box of pizza was placed in front of him.

Internet sleuths believe the pizza box, from a well-known chain in Romania, helped police confirm Tate was in the country and played a crucial role in his arrest.

I remain pleased that the insanity of our current moment still frequently proves entertaining.

Culture

I have a theory about the “romantic nations”. Those were nations … dreamed into existence by philosophers and writers … and the long struggle for nationhood … promoted by the idea of a certain people and language having primacy, creating a home...

In all these cases, you can detect a cycle: the nation exists as a culture before it exists as a nation; as a nation, it increasingly legitimates itself by an appeal to the superiority of its people; and in the final phase, the nation as an entity actually attacks its culture and what it stood for.

Roger Gathman writes about the history of self-determination, everyone's favourite stroke-word for ethnonationalism.

Right of Reply

I'm just reading Mark Steel's memoir about his early career in comedy, It's Not A Runner Bean, and I am struck, as usual, by the ever present evidence that our current cultural moment has been current for a veeeery long time.

[Despite the obvious absurdity of later mainstream media hysteria about political correctness, i]t was true however, that an assortment of councillors, social workers and people with massive pine kitchens and spice racks had won influence in some lower strata of society, and were using it to pursue aims that would later be labelled PC. Mostly these people were ex-university students who ... had been politicised by the events of 1968, and ... retained their support for campaigns against sexism, racism and nuclear weapons. But as they'd climbed the ladder of respectability, they'd abandoned all attempts to win working class support...

[Their] new strategy ... was to win positions in local government, hold discussion groups, argue with each other about whether certain words were offensive or not, and often spend their free time at alternative cabaret nights.

...

A string of venues was founded under the banner of New Variety and, funded by the GLC, they soon became the heart of this circuit. One of my first professional jobs was compering at these places, and I probably made a pretty awful hash of it.

On my first night, the show ended with an all-woman band called Jam Today. After they'd come off stage they marched downstairs to where I was starting to load some equipment into the van, and screamed a marvellously eloquent tirade of abuse about how I'd deliberately given them a shit introduction because I was a man. I tried to explain that the reason I'd given them a shit introduction was because I was a shit compere, but that only made it worse. Once I was approached in the interval by an angry white couple who demanded to know why there wasn't a black compere instead of me. Again, if they'd asked why wasn't there a half decent compere instead of me, I'd have probably thought it a fair enough enquiry.

A room above the Crown and Castle in Dalston provided the setting for a typical example of this kind of thing. Almost every week the show broke down into a debate about the political justification for something or other. One night a comedian began a poem which usually went:

I do not love my girlfriend because she is pretty.
I do not love my girlfriend because she is good in bed.
I do not love my girlfriend because I see her as a fastfood restaurant with take-away sex on the side.
I do not love my girlfriend.
Because I do not have a girlfriend.

Except that on this particular night he completed the first two lines and received a barrage of abuse about how he had no right to be so sexist about his girlfriend which made it impossible for him to carry on the act.

The audiences were like kids playing snap, eagerly anticipating each card, so anxiously ready and waiting to shout 'snap' that they'd frequently blurt it out in a fit of over keenness at the wrong moment. But at least kids then admit they're wrong and carry on with the game. This lot would try to compose an argument for why the jack of hearts and the nine of diamonds was 'snap,' and if only you weren't so macho, you'd be able to see it.

What made this all the more ridiculous was that at the same time as this scrutinising of each individual syllable for imperialist overtones was going on, mainstream comedy was genuinely sexist and remaining relatively unchallenged. At about the same time there was a new talent show on early evening weekend TV. One night a brash young club comic came on and opened with: 'I've never hit my wife in anger. It's always been a pleasure.' Had a posse of protesters followed him around barracking his act, it would have been justified.

An added problem for some of us was that the main target of the favourite acts on this circuit was the white working-class male. So if you were white, male and spoke with what seemed a working-class accent, it was assumed you were a drunken, fighting, car mechanic.

There are plenty of white working-class males who, like me at seventeen, deserve any lampooning sent their way. But there are also some who have black friends and who don't join in leering at Page Three.

Having to assert their ideas in their daily lives, they embody the opposite of the middle class bimbos at their cabaret evenings. For the most unpleasant side of these events was the smug self satisfaction shown by a layer of society that would make no effort to relate to anyone outside their own circle, but remain content that they were the minority who knew the true and only path.

Many of the faithful at New Variety would attend their weekly gatherings with the genuine ardour of cult members. So eventually I decided that if I was going to get harangued even when I was being as right-on as they were, I might as well gain some pleasure out of deliberately annoying them. One of my favourite lines from the time was: 'What I'd love to do to a middle class lefty is say I was going to come round their house with someone who worships a dictator and thinks all women are whores. So I could watch them going "Well no, oh please don't bring them, I'll be sick," and then, turn up with a Rastafarian.'

Another that I was pleased with was: 'These people love feeling guilty. They feel guilty for being white, guilty for being male, guilty for being middle class. Why don't they just feel guilty for being wankers.' How therapeutic it was to feel a sea of hostility that I'd caused on purpose instead of one I'd caused because they'd misinterpreted me. One night in Cricklewood, a Scottish woman stood up in the middle of my act and said I'd been racist, sexist, misogynist, misanthropic and abusive to minorities. 'Wait till I start on the Scottish,' I told her.

And in soooo many ways.

[A] section of the National Union of Students were holding an annual conference at Manchester Polytechnic and three of us had been booked to do twenty minutes each for their evening's entertainment. Many of them, being student activists, were involved in a variety of campaigning groups or political parties and there was clearly an undercurrent of hostility between some of the opposing factions. It can be extremely disheartening to watch political activists reserving their most vicious moments for each other rather than for whoever it is they're supposed to be opposing. I can only imagine that the same process takes over which leads some people in small towns to hate everyone from the next town up. The real world is ignored and the enemy becomes those who are almost the same as you but not quite.

The woman who came into the dressing room to greet us that night was a chronic sufferer of this affliction. Here she was, talking to three people who she'd never met before, having no idea of their own beliefs. And yet her opening remarks were not to ask us to support any initiatives the conference might be taking against racism, student poverty or the arms trade. Instead she launched into a tirade of abuse about every left-wing group represented at the conference, except for the one that she was a member of.

Aware of the importance of finishing on a big laugh her breathless rant ended with a joke. 'If an SWP member and a Militant member jumped off a tall building who'd land first? Who gives a fuck?!'

Even without the element of in-fighting, this was an extremely weak joke. Had she said, 'If Ronald Reagan and Henry Kissinger jumped off a tall building who'd land first? Who gives a fuck?!' it would still have not been funny. But here was a woman who presumably at some point in her life had taken up the cause of political activism in order to oppose the injustices around her, but was manically frothing at the prospect of two other activists jumping off this imaginary tall building.

I found out later that the group this woman was allied with was a supporter of the state of Israel, which had just carried out some particularly unpleasant attacks on groups of Palestinians, which included the shooting of several teenagers for throwing stones. In fact her group was linked with a Zionist student group noted for its hostility towards Arabs.

There are of course many decent people, among them a great many Jews, who agree with the idea of the Israeli state but are infuriated by what they see as that state's excesses. What her group was known for was the way in which they responded to any critics of Zionism by accusing them of being anti-Semitic. A somewhat untenable position given the millions of Jews who opposed the formation of a country which could only exist by forcibly expelling hundreds of thousands of people and agreeing to act as a highly-armed puppet for America.

The considered response to this student would have been to mutter something under my breath and forget it. The problem was the mischief gene. The gene that makes certain children tip up their father's neatly organised box of papers on to the floor, just to see what would happen. One of my earliest memories is as a two year old letting the budgie out of the cage just to see what would happen. (It flew out of the window and away.)

So just to see what would happen, half way through my set I told the story of the woman in a socialist group who'd come into the dressing room and delivered her rant, and that it seemed she was a supporter of this Zionist students society. 'No-wonder there's so few socialists around,' I said. 'If people ask what would happen in an ideal socialist state and the answer is: "Well, every couple of years we'll invade the next country along, do whatever the Americans told us to, and anyone who chucked a stone would be shot dead".' About three-quarters of the audience began whooping and clapping and the rest began screaming abuse. By the time I came off stage, a picket line had formed across the dressing room, and a motion had been prepared that the Zionist group should be allowed a right to reply.

The mischief gene was ecstatic. A right to reply to a comedian. Surely if you stopped to think for one moment, you'd realise that this was completely silly. But all around was uproar. There were arguments about the right to reply, arguments about the dressing room picket, someone screamed that they were going to kick me down the stairs and someone else said that if he did, then he'd kick them down the stairs.

Eventually, despite receiving little support for the right to reply, a leading member of the offended group got on stage and began to speak. 'I can't believe we've had to sit here listening to this anti-Semitism,' she began. 'Especially not today, because today ...'

There was a pause. She brought out a handkerchief and theatrically struggled for composure. What would it be? Today what? She was clearly aiming for a big sympathy number. The room went quiet with expectation the way courtrooms do on the telly just before the verdict.

'Today,' she said, 'is my birthday.'

There followed further attempts to link my act to Kristalnacht and other outrages of the Third Reich, but the birthday line had blown it. I did ask however, if I could just deny publicly that I was quite the fascist I'd been portrayed to be. For surely if anyone was insulting Jews it was her and her performance.

Another meeting took place about whether I should be allowed to return, and a chant of 'Let him speak' began to circulate the room. The whole situation was now so wonderfully surreal that only student politics could have created it. But the comment that summed up the evening was yet to come.

I did get back on the stage but someone pulled the microphone lead out of its socket and someone else tipped over the mixing desk.

The chanting started up again and through the cacophony of stamping, screams of 'Let him speak,' and screams to the effect of 'Don't let him speak' one voice rose above the others. 'For God's sake, let him speak,' it bellowed and succeeded in quietening the whole place. Here, I thought was a major ally.

With the room at his command, he said his piece: 'I'm hard of hearing. Has no one any respect for the disabled?'

This book was written in 1996, and the events described occurred in the mid '80s. Just so we're clear.

Lifted from pages 88 to 90, and 97 to 101, in the 3rd edition (The Do-Not Press, 2004).

Reason for the season

I look at this home-made Christmas card, and all I want is context. (And an armful of rats.)