One of these men will be Prime Minister from 2010 to 2013.
Be afraid, Australia. Be very afraid.
Archive for February, 2010
Spoilt for choice
Feb 16
Bon voyage
Feb 16
Former One Nation Leader Pauline Hanson, who made her political name railing against immigrants, says she is emigrating to Britain because there are no more opportunities for her in Australia.
In an interview with Woman’s Day, the divisive former federal MP revealed her plans to sell her south-east Queensland property and leave Australia.
“I’m going to be away indefinitely. It’s pretty much goodbye forever,” she said in the interview.
A sad farewell:
Customer lip service
Feb 15
Apart from a couple of landline telephone connections in pre-competition days, I’ve managed to avoid being a Telstra customer for most of my adult life. I consider myself fortunate that I’ve had very little chance to take part in the national sport of Telstra bashing, but I don’t need to be a customer to wonder why on earth anyone would choose Telstra over its competitors if a choice is available. Unfortunately, my current 3G mobile coverage-scarce living circumstances have forced me to purchase a Telstra mobile broadband service and my Telstra experience has begun.
Firstly, Telstra’s mobile broadband is ludicrously expensive compared to its competitors. Like, stupidly so. My current residence is within the advertised 3G zones of several providers but is relatively remote and located in a valley, cutting off all signals but Telstra’s. Rotten luck.
Secondly, to activate the service I had to call a Telstra 125 phone number that was not available from my non-Telstra mobile phone. Brilliant. Thanks, Telstra.
Thirdly, four hours after I called the 125 number from a Telstra landline the account activation, promised within two hours, hadn’t occur. I called the number back, waited for 20 or so minutes because Telstra was “experiencing a higher number of calls than usual”, and explained the problem to the operator. “Could you check to see the progress of the activation?” I asked.
Pardon my snit
Feb 15
The atheists are gathering …
Something you will never see: an atheist boarding a plane with a bomb strapped to him, waving a copy of On The Origin Of Species, before he blows himself up in a violent attempt to further his cause.
So says David Nicholls, the head of the Atheist Foundation of Australia, the man at the increasingly pointy end of the reinvigorated and freshly vocal atheism movement.
And, by way of response, cliches cluster …
Atheists may not be suicide bombers (”Atheism’s true believers”, February 13-14) but it doesn’t mean they are any less adept at mass murder than Islamists. Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot come to mind. In extolling the virtues of atheism, David Nicholls shows a severe case of historical amnesia – Lyle Shelton Kaleen (ACT)
Let’s get one thing perfectly fucking straight here, shall we?
Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot constructed societies where all authority was vested in one individual and one only, and a personality cult, a cult of worship around this one individual was expected, encouraged or made compulsory, replete with nifty little uniforms and symbols and slogans and all manner of cheap and whiffy paraphernalia.
In this respect, these individuals have far more in common with the “cult” of Jesus Christ, the Pope, and the Pells and Jensens of this world than they have with your average atheist or agnostic, all of whom would just like to be left the fuck alone and would dearly love it if the theists would kindly stop attempting to ram their beliefs down our throats by way of influencing state and federal legislation.
Now, I don’t know whether this qualifies as some variation on a “Godwin’s Law” type thing, but the next time some crotch-fiddling nutball attempts to equate atheism with Hitler and Stalin, would you kindly point this out to them and then tell them to fuck off out of it.
Because it’s giving me the shits.
Ta.
Fruits and loins
Feb 11
The World of Wallace …
A Christian lobby group says surrogacy should be a last resort for infertile married couples, not a solution for gay and lesbian couples who want children.
The Australian Christian Lobby has called on Queensland MPs to amend or reject a new bill to decriminalise altruistic surrogacy, where a woman carries another couple’s child for no payment …
… The ACL says children are not pets and should not simply be given to anyone who wants one …
… ACL managing director Jim Wallace says the surrogacy bill should have been directed at permitting surrogacy as a last resort for infertile married couples …
… “This is experimenting with children’s lives and at this stage they have no way of really knowing just how devastating the effects on the children will be, or the extent of identity confusion that will result …
… “The state should not be accommodating the desires of single men, single women, two men or two women to do what is not possible in nature – that is to have babies,” he said …
The World of Wallace and others of its ilk revolve around an axis of purest fantasy, inhabited by that peculiar breed of bug-eyed imbecile for whom adherence to an “ideology” or “belief system” trumps observation, experience and the (to them at least) novel concept of living in an actual reality at every turn.
When I was approached to contribute to this blog, I was asked to avoid the low-lying fruit. I can see the rationale for that, but I couldn’t resist commenting on this venomous little piece of spittle. It appears at the new (and ‘leading’) blog for centre-right Australians, called Menzies House. When they’re not live-blogging the Young Libs’ conference, or spruiking the virtues of free markets and virginity, some of them are attacking asylum seekers.
Patrick McGorry is a youth psychiatrist in Melbourne, who was named Australian of the Year for 2010. He made some criticisms, earlier in the years, of the Government’s policies regarding detention for asylum seekers, pointing out (not unreasonably) that they are likely to exacerbate mental illness.
Enter Menzies warrior James Darby.
Professor Patrick McGorry, newly appointed Australian Of The Year has said asylum seekers had experienced severe torture and trauma in their home countries and that people in detention needed to be processed quicker and while living in the community.
So far, so good. Unfortunately, it’s all downhill from here.
The slippery slope
Feb 8
A couple of days ago I had a horrid case of gastro with the works – both ends plus a fever. Punctuated only by regular visits to the toilet, I spent the day laying on the bed and staring at the ceiling fan. I got to thinking about voluntary euthanasia and in particular one of the political arguments used against it, namely the “slippery slope”.
Even though it was just a bog standard stomach bug from a dirty Indian saucepan, thinking about euthanasia was natural in my circumstances. For two days I was unable to eat, unable to participate in any of the activities I had planned, and unable to do anything pleasant to kill time. Using the slippery slope argument I was just a few slips of the slope away from being in a permanent and terminal state of extreme pain and discomfort, drifting in and out of consciousness thanks to the strong medication I needed to cope with the pain, not a single shred of dignity intact, and condemned to living like this for the rest of my limited and pointless days. It was simply terrible, I tell you, and temporarily reinforced my belief that were I ever in a situation like that I would want access to a legal voluntary euthanasia option.
But then I thought about the slippery slope, and I was reminded of why we should never make anything legal that might benefit some people if an adulterated and more evil version of that thing is possible. Voluntary euthanasia, if legal, might bring to an end the suffering of people in the most horrible of circumstances at their request, but it’s possible to think of a future version of a voluntary euthanasia law that made it, perhaps, involuntary, or even that legal voluntary euthanasia encouraged involuntary euthanasia. These outcomes are clearly undesirable so good must be sacrificed to prevent evil.
It’s just like how they started limited overs cricket and from there it was a slippery slope to Twenty20. Or how the Internet was invented and down the slope we slipped to Twitter. The world has suffered, and will continue to suffer, thanks to these short-sighted initial acts.
However, wrapping myself in a blanket to ward of a feverish chill, and grappling with these heavy issues, I was struck by a sudden thought that the whole slippery slope thing is the biggest pile of intellectually-lazy shit ever to be shat out into reasoned debate. Maybe it was the gastro talking, but I couldn’t see why any rational human should ever have to listen to the words “slippery slope” again.
So, with a few solid meals now in my gut, and my thinking being a lot less sloppy, I see no need for any more talk about slippery slopes or other out-of-your-arse arguments. We’re all adults here.