Ditch the Drongo!

I went to the March in March last Sunday. This is the first protest march I have attended in quite possibly as long as 20 years. I was what you could probably describe as riled up, and not just about the "ultimate conservationists" comment I posted about last time - although that rendered me almost speechless, in the scheme of things it was simply another layer of diarrhea icing on a very large shit cake.

My apologies to any other drongos out there

 
A problem I had on the march - and I am facing a similar problem writing this blog entry - is that I didn't make a sign, because any sign that listed all of the things that were wrong with the Abbott government, would either have to use an unreadably small font or been too large to carry.

I'll try to briefly summarise how much the current government has achieved in just 6 months. To simplify things, I'll break it down into different categories of bastardry.

War on Science

• No science minister. Seriously? This is the 21^st century, and perhaps I should emphasise that this is the 21^st century AD.
• Mass sackings at the CSIRO.
• Deliberate trashing of the NBN. 
• Multiple statements to the effect that climate change isn't happening. On par with announcing the earth is flat. 

War on the Environment

• No minister for Climate Change, but has a Minister for Sport.
• Abolishing the Climate Commission [this also counts as part of the War on Science].
• Seeking to repeal the carbon price. Abbott seems to have some crazed obsession with this scheme - a relatively simple and logical measure which has been adopted by many other countries without drama - to extent of blaming every possible economic problem on it. Multiple times he had blamed the shutdown of one business or other on the dreaded Carbon Tax, only to be contradicted by the actual company involved.
• Sending a bunch of yahoos to the Warsaw Climate Change Conference to disrupt it and block progress in general.
• Appointing Dick Warburton, a climate "sceptic" to head a review into the renewable energy target.
• De-funding the Environmental Defenders Office.
• Scrapping the Home Energy Saver Scheme.
• Cutting all aid programs for environmental purposes.
• Supporting the insane shark "cull" in WA. [This one is so stupid it also counts as part of the War on Science.]
• Bullying the Great Barrier Reef authority to reverse their stand on the Abbott Point coal terminal. Just what we need; export more coal even faster, and dump 3 M tonnes of sediment on the Great Barrier Reef in order to do so.
• Green-lighting the Galilee Basin mine. An extraordinarily large coal mine in the middle of a nature reserve.
• Seeking to de-list world heritage forests in Tasmania.
• Allowing grazing in alpine national parks. This had been banned for decades for good reason.
• Removing the Standing Council on Environment and Water.
• Scrapping the Critically Endangered listing of the Murray Darling basin to allow irrigators free reign. A serious ongoing environmental problem about to get worse.

War on the Refugees

I wouldn't have thought it would have been possible to actually make the situation here any worse than it already was (putting children in concentration camps is not the action of a civilised country), however the Abbott government has somehow managed it.

• Navy personnel "allegedly" torturing people by forcing their hands onto the exhaust pipe of a boat, and then turning the boat around to Indonesia without giving medical treatment.
• Sticking people indefinitely in a hell-hole in PNG where they get bashed and even murdered.
• Separating new-born babies from their mothers.
• Plus masses of other bastardry that makes me sick to even think about.

When things get to a stage where you have to have a media blackout to prevent the bogans (many of who are quite open about wanting the refugees shot on sight) from finding out what's going on, and when even China complains about your human rights abuses, you have achieved something really remarkable.

War on the Economy

For some reason, the coalition have a reputation as good economic mangers (not, in my opinion, borne out by the facts), so you'd think they'd at least do a little better in this area, but apparently not.

• Start off by ham-stringing the economy by crippling the NBN.
• Create uncertainty about what will happen with the carbon price.
• Repeal the (already watered down) resources rental tax so that excess profits from mining go overseas rather than benefiting the economy.
• Piss off our trading partners, especially Indonesia, but also India and China.
• Then say goodbye to Holden
• and goodbye to Toyota
• and goodbye to SPC
• Hello highest unemployment in 10 years. Quite an achievement considering that Labor did better during the entire Global Financial Crisis.
• Then there's the sinister TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) deal. I'm not sure what to say about this one since it's a completely secret process. In so far as any information is available it appears to be the sort of agreement that a corrupt third-world dictator would sign to sell out their country for a wad of money under the table, before making a run for it. It's likely to be devastating for the economy, unless by "economy", you mean "foreign-owned multinationals".
• And that's not even counting the economic effects of trashing the environment (e.g. tourism in Tasmania accounts for 5x as many jobs as forestry, so let's assist the latter at the expense of the former).

War on Women

• Abbott taking on the job of Minister for Women. I mean, seriously, that's just insulting. If it hadn't actually happened, you'd think it was a heavy-handed satire. Even his supporters call him a Man's Man. It is so obvious that he doesn't know or care anything about women, that this has to be a calculated attack.
• His explanation for appointing only one woman in his cabinet was that the appointments were made "on merit". Given that he gave cabinet posts to the likes Peter Dutton - someone who has roughly the intelligence (and general usefulness) of a termite-riddled fence post - this would also have to be a calculated insult.

War on the Indigenous

Howard's "intervention" (which Labor, to their shame, did nothing to wind back) was already such a blow to Aboriginal Australians that it would be difficult to make things worse. Pretty much every bad thing that could have been done, already had been done. Nevertheless, Abbott managed to find a way.

• Savagely cutting the budget of the National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples, such that they had to sack a third of their staff.
• Cutting Indigenous legal services by $13.4 million, while at the same time providing $2.2 million in legal aid for farmers and miners to fight native title claims.

Miscellaneous Bastardry

• Overriding ACT law on gay marriages - and not just doing this to appease some dinosaur like Fielding (which would be evil but at least understandable in political terms), but because he is actually against the idea himself. Moreover, Abbott condones the incredibly reactionary statements of Cory Bernardi, whose views on "non-traditional" families are remarkably close to those of Vladimir Putin (except that most likely Putin is doing it for cynical political motives, whereas Bernadi actually believes what he is saying).
• Abolishing AusAID. Huge cut backs in international aid generally.
• Cutting compensation for bushfire victims. Just after a big bushfire.
• Attempting to block funding to organisations who refuse corporate sponsorship on ethical grounds. Even from tobacco companies.
• An absolute extravaganza of royal commissions into even the most trivial actions of the previous government.
• An orgy of union-bashing and attempts to reduce working conditions, even going as far as introducing legislation to allow people to work for half of the minimum wage, and be exempt from health and safety laws.
• Multiple acts of bastardry against the unemployed, students, the disabled, and the less well off in general. This even goes so far as cutting the welfare payments to the orphans of soldiers.

You can see that at this point I've started to lose patience (it's like cataloguing individual turds in a giant sewage pit) and been lumping things together that deserve to be spelled out individually. But hopefully you can see why I consider this to be by far the worst Australian government ever. Even Bjelke-Petersen didn't manage to do as much damage as quickly, and his damage was limited to only one state.

Anonymous are taking up the fight, but, like in V for Vendetta, we will all need to help. 

However, the real problem we have here is not Tony Abbott.

Abbott is not a hereditary monarch, nor did he seize power by a coup d'etat. He was democratically elected by the voters of this country.

Democracy is often treated like a gift bestowed upon a people, like having a good climate or fertile soil, but with the additional advantage that it somehow makes you morally superior as well. In fact, democracy is a responsibility, or even a burden, imposed on a people. You get the right to choose, but it doesn't work unless you put in the effort to choose well.

It seems that people put more effort into decorating their living rooms, or even preparing for the Zombie Apocalypse, than choosing their government. People do sudoku or cryptic crosswords for fun, but aren't willing to fill in the senate ballot paper below the line. We are now reaping the results. And don't give me that "whoever you vote for, a bastard gets in" bullshit. Some politicians are demonstrably less bad than others; try voting for them for a change and see what happens.

Maybe I should expand on this last point. The process whereby politicians are elected is exactly like the process of natural selection. The environment dictates the nature of the animals within it. Those individuals who most suit the environment prosper, whereas those who are unsuited die out.

But the important point here is that natural selection works slowly. A giraffe does not spring fully-formed into the world, instead an environment which favours long-necked grazing animals gradually pushes evolution in that direction.

And so it is with politics. You can't expect a politician who is perfect in every way to stand up for election; instead you have a number of people to choose from, all of whom have various flaws. What you need to do is rank the available candidates in order of desirability and cast your vote accordingly (fortunately we have a preferential voting system which allows us to do this). If you create an environment that favours the better politician, you will get better and better politicians each time. Even if every candidate is unacceptably bad, you can still choose the least bad one. Casting a vote in this situation is not futile; in fact it is critically important. If you continuously maintain the selective pressure in the right direction you will eventually get your giraffe. If you stop applying pressure, it will be even worse next time.

If you punish a better candidate out of spite for not being perfect, you are applying selective pressure in favour of a worse candidate.

If you let your vote be dictated by biased mainstream media, you are applying selective pressure in favour of Rupert Murdoch's interests - and almost certainly against your own.

So everyone; next time you vote; take this important task seriously, invest a little bit of time and energy and don't be a fucking idiot.

He who lives by the chainsaw...

Recently, in a breathtaking piece of doublespeak, Tony Abbott has praised loggers as being the "ultimate conservationists".

Let me tell you about some of these "ultimate conservationists".

In the Victorian Central Highlands lives the Leadbeater's Possum, an incredibly cute native animal related to the Sugar Glider. It is currently listed as Endangered, a classification under consideration of being upgraded to Critically Endangered.

A Leadbeater's Possum [Photo from Healesville Sanctuary site] 
What kind of monster would want to hurt this animal?

Unfortunately, this possum requires trees of a certain age to provide nesting hollows. This puts it in conflict with loggers (VicForests in this case) who wish to cut these trees down. The usual story.

However, where things become really nasty is that VicForests are not merely damaging Leadbeater's Possum habitat incidentally, but deliberately and systematically going out of their way to destroy it, in a calculated effort to wipe out the Leadbeater's Possum. The logic being that when the possum is extinct, there will no longer be any impediment to widespread logging.

One trick was bulldozing wide and unnecessary fire breaks directly through prime Leadbeater's Possum habitat (and in fact even bulldozing monitoring stations constructed for the possums in the process). This happened in 2007 and extensively in 2009. Another good trick is "accidentally" logging the wrong area; usually the damage is done before anyone notices and the remarkably compliant DPI merely shrugs their shoulders. According to an insider, regulations are regularly flouted with impunity.

MyEnvironment has specific details on much of this, but even they don't have the full story.

Sign, sign, everywhere a sign...

This sign is from the easy-going tropical paradise of Mackay.

It's not clear what, if anything, you are actually "Welcome" to do.

A Rainbow Flag of caviar

A Rainbow Flag of caviar [click for larger image]

To say that people should be allowed to love one another sounds like a soppy platitude, but in some places in the world this is apparently such a controversial and provocative statement that you can be thrown in jail for saying it.

So, yes, I am taking a poke at Putin's ban on "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations to minors".

Normally, I try to give rational arguments in support of my beliefs, but sometimes it's pointless. This is 2014 and if by now a person thinks that that there is something inherently bad or evil about being gay (or bi or trans or whatever), they are simply not thinking rationally. Either they are suffering from some emotional reaction akin to a phobia, or more likely, they have been infected by a destructive (most probably religious) meme. In either case logical argument isn't going to work.

In fact, the whole concept of "teh evil gays corrupting the youth" is so silly, that I feel there might be more to it than meets the eye -  Putin didn't get to be the president of a powerful and somewhat chaotic nation without being well versed in all that Game of Thrones stuff.

It could be a distraction tactic: You deliberately do something outrageously offensive. This draws the attention of the media and gets all of your opponents busy attacking you. Once everyone is distracted, you can then quietly go ahead with your real, and more sinister, objective without any scrutiny.

Alternatively, and possibly more likely, it could be an attempt by Putin to boost his popularity by provoking attacks by the West. The superpowers have, after all, had a long history of using fear and hatred of each other as a tool for domestic political purposes.

Yet whatever the motivation, the fact is that this is an idiotic and regressive law, which will cause harm in itself (beyond whatever harm is caused by the underlying political maneuvering) and deserves ridicule.

The scary thing is that Russia is still actually fairly progressive in terms of LGBT rights compared to some other countries. It's not (yet) illegal to be gay in Russia, whereas in a total of 71* other countries it is. In a total of nine countries it attracts a death sentence, and I should add that one of these countries is Saudi Arabia, whose political system was considered so important to protect that the West fought a war on their behalf.

[* = The exact figures are a matter of debate; some countries have laws on the statute books that are not enforced, whereas others enforce general-purpose morality laws against gays.]

So remember this Valentines Day; there are couples out there having candle-lit dinners only because they're hiding a in cellar and afraid to show a light.

What was the photo about?

This was some synthetic caviar in the colours of the Rainbow Flag I made for Valentines Day. I don't suppose it's a protest that will make Vladimir Putin exactly soil himself with fear, but any attempt to counter a bad meme is better than nothing and anyway it was a fun thing to make. I might post the recipe on this blog some time.

Introduction

I have created this blog as a place to air my views on miscellaneous topics, with an emphasis on uncomfortable, unpopular and generally thorny issues.

I mostly intend to comment on political and environmental issues, however I reserve the right to post about other things. I may, for instance, write in support of the Comic Sans font, or in defence of 419 scammers. I may even post recipes (for food, that is; not drugs or bombs) or other completely benign things.

My intention is not to uncritically parrot talking points generated by politically motivated sources, but to attempt to investigate issues myself and add some value to the debate. However, I don't say that I will always be able to do this; some issues are extremely clear-cut, or have been articulated much better by others, and in this case what I write may be little different to what you may read elsewhere. I think there is often some benefit in echoing a preexisting point of view - you help keep the good memes from being drowned out by the bad memes.

What is that weird Kaiju in the header picture?

One of these...

This is a Thorny Devil (Moloch horridus), a small lizard which is fairly common in Central Australia. Despite its name and appearance, it defies the stereotype of Australian animals by not being poisonous or aggro or eating babies.

It's not really intended to be a metaphor for this blog or anything; I just think it looks cool.