Category Archives: Politics

Blackmail

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I don’t suppose either Jacqui Lambie or Glenn Lazarus is a regular reader of my blog, but I owe them both an apology.

Last night, on the popular ABC TV programme ‘Q&A’ Jacqui Lambie (pictured below) stated forecully that she would not be blackmailed. This was in connection with the present shenanigans in the Australian Senate, where she sits as an independent. She was referring to the pressure being applied by the Government to independent senators (the ‘cross-benchers’) to pass a contentious bill or face an early election and perhaps lose their seats.

JacquiLambie

“That’s not blackmail!” I spluttered. “How dare these people mangle my language, the language of Shakespeare, the language of Milton, the language of J K Rowling!”

This morning Glenn Lazarus, another independent senator, was reported as saying exactly the same thing, so I spluttered again – while eating porridge.

But before sitting down to post about it I checked the Oxford English Dictionary and found the following:

blackmail

  • n. the action of demanding money from someone in return for not revealing discreditable information.  >  the use of threats or unfair manipulation in an attempt to influence someone’s actions.
  • v. subject to blackmail.

– DERIVATIVES blackmailer n.

– ORIGIN C16 (denoting protection money levied by Sc. chiefs): from black + obs. mail ‘tribute, rent’, from ON mál ‘speech, agreement’.

I think the little arrow symbol means ‘Derived meaning’ or something like that. If so, I have to concede that ‘the use of threats or unfair manipulation… ‘ comes pretty close to what Ms Lambie and Mr Lazarus meant. So… sorry for spluttering at you.

However, I offer only condemnatory bile to those who persist in using ‘bacteria’ and ‘criteria’ as singular forms. I frown at those using ‘data’ in this way, but that battle’s lost already.

Nuclear Waste

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Today is the 5th anniversary of the Fukushima accident.  It comes at a time when my state (South Australia) is contemplating setting up a nuclear waste depository.  Proponents say that this would close the circle of the nuclear fuel cycle, since Australia mines and exports much of the world’s uranium ore.  Opponents point to the obvious risks.

Mrs SG and I have second-hand experience of the consequences of mismanagement in the nuclear industry, having spent two years in Belarus and longer in Ukraine, both countries still heavily affected by the Chernobyl disaster.  But on balance I support continuation and expansion of nuclear power generation and, as a corollary, the reprocessing and safe storage of spent nuclear fuel.

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I also support South Australia’s entry into this final stage of the fuel cycle. We have a huge area of desert, with no ground water vulnerable to contamination, and stable geology.  And having lost our automotive and most other manufacturing industries, what else are we going to do to maintain our material living standards?

Every economic unit – be it a country, a state, a town, an enterprise or a household – has to find an economic niche where it has an advantage. Saudi Arabia has oil.  Singapore has a great harbour in a great location, a lot of smart people and ready access to cheap labour in neighbouring countries.  New Zealand has sheep and cows and the Tolkien films.

If one’s natural endowments cannot support the lifestyle to which one aspires, one has to look for economic activities that other people don’t want to be involved with. They may be dirty, risky or morally questionable.  In most cases they require changes in policy and law.  I’m thinking of assisted suicide services, driverless cars, drugs trials on human subjects, legalisation of marijuana, storing other countries’ unwanted migrants… and storing other countries’ nuclear waste.

Jats

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I am stroppy as hell about the sabotaging of a canal supplying water to New Delhi by a caste that wants to be officially recognised as ‘backward’ in order to benefit from positive discrimination in matters of education and employment. There is a good account of it here at the BBC website. This photo is from the same source:

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I do understand the Jats’ problem.  They’re a farming caste and have been quite prosperous, but now they see better opportunities for their children in the cities.  And they see those opportunities being taken up by people who have historically been their social inferiors – people from lower castes who are given preferential access to universities and government jobs.  They want some of that preferential treatment for themselves, and if that means being branded ‘backward’, well, so be it.

But I’m inclined to brand them ‘criminal’, ‘sociopathic’, ‘violent’ and ‘reckless’. If it were up to me the only thing they’d be given would be long prison sentences – with hard labour, like repairing the canal.

Confess

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There is a ‘metal band’ in Iran called Confess (picture below). The context is music, and I assume that a metal band plays music on a spectrum that has heavy metal at one end.  It’s also referred to as a ‘thrash band’.  I know about Confess because its members are in prison, charged with a list of offences including blasphemy, which is a capital offence in the Islamic Republic of Iran.  You can read the story here.

Confess

You can even hear the band playing at this same site. I think it’s god-awful music, but I wouldn’t condemn the perpetrators to death.

I’m stroppy because we are being drawn into something like an alliance with Iran, since the Revolutionary Guard, Hezbollah and the Kurdish Peshmerga seem to be the only people with boots on the ground who are effectively opposing Daesh.

I’m sure the people of Iran, the great majority anyway, are decent sensible folk who take their religion with a pinch of salt and are interested in much the same things that we are. I don’t know if Fawlty Towers has been translated into Farsi, but if it has I’m sure it has a huge following.  (‘We’ means secular westerners like me, by the way.)

But let us never forget that Iran’s leaders are staunch theists who claim to be guardians of the only true interpretation of Islam; and therefore anything they do, no matter how cruel or loony, must be right.  I’m not saying they’re worse than the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia but I don’t think they’re significantly better.

A Massive Experiment

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Which prominent political leader said this, in 1988?

“For generations, we have assumed that the efforts of mankind would leave the fundamental equilibrium of the world’s systems and atmosphere stable. But it is possible that with all these enormous changes – population, agriculture, use of fossil fuels – concentrated into such a short period of time, we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself.”

I’ll post the answer tomorrow (Valentine’s Day, and that’s not a clue).

Julian Assange

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Julian Assange (Photo: Pool/Reuters)

Julian Assange (Photo: Pool/Reuters)

 

Let me say at the outset that I am generally sympathetic to the Wikileaks cause, and to Julian Assange as the preeminent actor in the business of leaking in the public interest.

But this latest ruling, advice, declaration, whatever from a UN panel, is utterly daft. Julian Assange is a fugitive, voluntarily residing at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London because he fears the consequences of being arrested and extradited to Sweden.  To charactise that as ‘arbitrary detention’ (or any kind of ‘detention’) makes no sense to me.  It serves only to reinforce the low opinion that many people hold of the UN, and weaken Julian Assange’s case in the Court of Public Opinion.

Am I missing something?

The Bomb

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Remember when we were all afraid of being annihilated in a nuclear war between the USA and the USSR (aka ‘the Russians’)? At least, that’s what historians tell us; I don’t remember being afraid of that personally.

Well now there are so many people with their fingers on so many buttons that nuclear annihilation is just part of the scenery. If Israel, Pakistan and North Korea have nuclear bombs – whether of the atomic or the hydrogen variety – it’s a matter of when and how big, not if.  It’s like the next mega-volcanic eruption or the next really big asteroid strike or the next Global Financial Crisis.  Why waste emotional energy worrying about it?

This post was inspired by Kim Jong Un’s latest test, of course.  Nuclear bomb test, I mean, not psychiatric.  And also by a cool animation I saw in the Washington Post showing the size, location and perpetrator of every test since 1946.  Do have a look.

Cecil Rhodes and Other Reminders

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A statue of Cecil Rhodes, the British imperialist who did much to promote British imperial interests in Africa, was removed from the University of Cape Town earlier this year.  Now there are calls to have another removed from Oriel College, Oxford.

I have worked extensively in the former Soviet Union where I have seen statues of Vladimir Ilich Lenin, Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky and Joseph Stalin.  Some have been defaced, some have been carried off and dumped – I saw one massive stone head in a railway yard.  But I cannot believe that airbrushing history in this way is ever right.  Surely it is better to confront our past, the ugly bits as well as the glorious, the better to control our future?

In Gori, Stalin’s birthplace, the museum commemorating that bloody dictator has been preserved exactly as it was in Soviet times.  An extra room has been added to supplement its content with a more modern, less laudatory version of events.  Destroying the evidence of history only opens the door to myth-makers.

I don’t always agree with Tony Abbott (former Australian Prime Minister) but I do agree with his stand on this issue.  I believe it is fairly reported in this article from the Sydney Morning Herald.

Islamic Reformation?

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I’ve read and heard several commentators lately, either advocating an islamic version of the Christian Reformation or arguing that such an event has already happened and the results are not pretty.

Former Australian PM Tony Abbott leads the advocacy pack, implying that a reformation would be a modernising influence, moving Islam away from the beliefs and practices that make it barbaric in many people’s eyes.  I don’t want to put words into Mr Abbott’s mouth, but I assume he would share my hope that modernisation would do away with animal sacrifice, pointless dietary rules, punitive mutilation, oppression of women, suppression of other beliefs, contempt for infidels, and capital punishment of individuals categorised as blasphemers, apostates and heretics.

Waleed Aly, a young Australian Muslim who has become my second favourite radio journalist, argues that “Islam’s own version of the Reformation already occurred in the 18th century” and led to Wahhabism, a form of Sunni Islam which is enforced in Saudi Arabia and is the philosophical platform for al-Qaeda, DAESH and other extremist organisations.

Paul Monk disagrees with Waleed Aly in many things but agrees with him in this.  I commend his article in the Sydney Morning Herald.

The UK’s Chief Rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sacks, also agrees. In a recent interview on Australian radio he pointed out that the Christian Reformation was a reaction against corruption in the Catholic Church.  The reformers wanted to return to true Christian values.  This is how Md ibn Abd al-Wahhab saw his 18th century reformation: a return to true Islamic values.

It is as erroneous as it is understandable that we tend to equate ‘reform’ with ‘improvement’, ‘progress’ and ‘becoming more like us’.