The same people who brought you "weapons of mass destruction" and Dr Haneef, have done it again. An extraordinary attack on the Muslim community by the media, culminating in theatrical raids by hundreds of police officers.
Do not say that it is an insane overreaction; that is being too generous, because it implies that there was something to react to in the first place.
Every bit of this is based on outright lies. There are no terrorists, no bombs, no plots, nothing. Some innocent people have been arrested in order to further a political agenda.
Clearly, as an individual with no contacts in the security apparatus, I can't know this for sure. But I can't know for sure that you don't have a dragon living in your garage either, and one is as likely as the other. I'll bet you any money that no one arrested was guilty of anything worse than a parking fine, and probably not even that.
That the Murdoch/Abbott coalition is going down this Fascist* path is no surprise, but what is a surprise is that the Labor party and a large chunk of its supporters are goose-stepping along behind them.
[* = I don't user this term lightly, but it legitimately describes the situation.]
What is the point in going along with Murdoch's lies (and anyone in politics must know that this is all a bunch of lies)? You can't appease him; he will always be your enemy and he will always attack you whatever you do. You can't win by out-nastying the nasties (as Rudd tried to do on refugees), because the Coalition will always be perceived to be tougher in this area.
I hear people saying that Shorten is doing the right thing by maintaining a small target and giving Abbott enough rope to hang himself with. "Soon Abbott will go too far", they say. I call bullshit on this.
The ALP have been saying the same thing ever since Abbott became Leader of the Opposition in December 2009. "He's so obviously a brain-dead thug that soon he will do something so stupid that even Murdoch won't be able cover for him," was the theory.
Meanwhile, over the subsequent five years, Abbott has made disastrous blunder after disastrous blunder. Rarely has anyone called him on it, and always the media have covered things up or spun them to his advantage. If there was any theoretical line which could have been described a "going too far", he has long ago crossed it.
To complete the metaphor; Abbott has, with the aid of Murdoch, used the rope he was given to hog-tie the ALP.
You need to use different tactics because what you are doing at the moment isn't working.
The ALP only has a 1% lead in the polls at the moment. Given the absolute train-wreck the Murdoch/Abbott government has become, this should be at least 10%; even factoring in the mass of disengaged (and outright knuckle-headed) voters.
And then there is this insanity about going back to war in Iraq.
The Vietnam War spelled out in agonising detail just how stupid and counter productive it was to go around invading other countries. Do I need to point out the extraordinary human, environmental, financial and even political cost of this disaster? The cost was unbelievable and the benefits none.
You would have thought people would have learned from this, yet they happily marched off to repeat exactly the same mistake in Iraq (with, if anything, even worse motives and not even any clear idea of what they hoped to achieve).
The same lesson was therefore repeated; this time with the aid of glove puppets and slowly spelled out in words of one syllable.
If you don't get by now that it was a really really bad idea, you cannot be thinking at even a kindergarten level. To repeat this mistake before the blood is even dry from last time is something I find difficult to comprehend.
Please, could we just dial the idiocy back down to 11?
Kicking Against the Pricks
Sunday, 21 September 2014
Thursday, 11 September 2014
Terrorists Don't Exist
Let's qualify that by saying that we're talking about Australia here. Other places, maybe there are some around, but over here a terrorist attack is only marginally more likely than getting gored by a unicorn.
Consider this. The last terrorist attack in Australia was the Sydney Hilton bombing outside the venue of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting. This happened in 1978. Let us discount the theory that the bomb was planted by security forces, and assume that it was in fact a deliberate terrorist attack (by people unknown and for motives that are still a mystery).
That was a long time ago. Nearly half* of the people in Australia were not even born when this happened, yet if those in power were truly concerned about terror attacks, you would think they would do their utmost to ensure that subsequent conferences of this type were secure.
[* = median age of the Australian population is 37 years as per the last census and the event happened 36 years ago.]
Yet in 2007 the Chaser team easily managed to infiltrate the APEC summit in Sydney, with one guy dressed as Osama bin Laden, and all wearing fake passes, with printed on them in red "It's pretty obvious this is not a real pass". We're talking here about an economic summit with representatives of 21 nations, including even G W Bush, being present. The mind boggles; you'd have better security at a school social.
To me this was a real smoking gun. It shows that those in charge of our security are not even slightly interested in security. They know it's just a farce.
OK, if you've been paying attention, you'll know all this already.
But some people who must realise this (and I am talking about the majority of the federal ALP) are not pulling their weight in countering the deluge of Abbott-Murdoch hysteria that's yet again flooding the media.
So let me offer some advice for you to ignore.
If legislation is proposed for the purposes of countering terrorism, don't say: "This legislation is open to being abused" - that is conceding too much. You can assume that the purpose of the legislation was only to allow the abuses to occur.
We are not talking about side-effects of an otherwise worthwhile objective, we are talking about straight-out lying to justify something that is straight-out unacceptable.
Similarly, do not criticise such legislation as being ineffective in achieving its stated goal (and I admit that I have been guilty of this). If you say "That's silly, a terrorist could easily get around it by doing X", you have already been tricked.
When we are debating what a "terrorist" would or would not do, we are implicitly admitting that terrorists a) actually exist and b) are worth worrying about. We are letting the opponent set the terms of the debate; which means we have conceded ground and are half-way to losing before we've even started.
Moreover saying this sort of thing carries the risk that those in power will say "OK, then we'll ban X too". This is what happened when some genius realised that the explosive TATP could be manufactured from relatively innocuous liquid ingredients, and led to the absolutely retarded ban on taking liquids on board aircraft. The fact that actually manufacturing the simple chemical TATP (let alone anything more sophisticated) on board an aircraft is ludicrously impractical* didn't seem to concern anyone.
[* = The owner of that site, Nick B Possum (no relation) tends to venture more deeply into the land of conspiracy theories than me, however as far as I have been able to verify, what he writes on this particular subject is technically accurate.]
If someone uses the "T" word to justify anything, the onus is on them to prove there is a problem that needs to be solved. And they won't be able to do it because there isn't one. If they say "there is a real threat, but we can't tell you for security reasons", they are asking you to take the words of a known liar, with a vested interest, on trust alone. This should be rejected as a gross insult to the intelligence.
Let's call this nonsense out for the bullshit it is.
Consider this. The last terrorist attack in Australia was the Sydney Hilton bombing outside the venue of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting. This happened in 1978. Let us discount the theory that the bomb was planted by security forces, and assume that it was in fact a deliberate terrorist attack (by people unknown and for motives that are still a mystery).
That was a long time ago. Nearly half* of the people in Australia were not even born when this happened, yet if those in power were truly concerned about terror attacks, you would think they would do their utmost to ensure that subsequent conferences of this type were secure.
[* = median age of the Australian population is 37 years as per the last census and the event happened 36 years ago.]
Yet in 2007 the Chaser team easily managed to infiltrate the APEC summit in Sydney, with one guy dressed as Osama bin Laden, and all wearing fake passes, with printed on them in red "It's pretty obvious this is not a real pass". We're talking here about an economic summit with representatives of 21 nations, including even G W Bush, being present. The mind boggles; you'd have better security at a school social.
To me this was a real smoking gun. It shows that those in charge of our security are not even slightly interested in security. They know it's just a farce.
OK, if you've been paying attention, you'll know all this already.
But some people who must realise this (and I am talking about the majority of the federal ALP) are not pulling their weight in countering the deluge of Abbott-Murdoch hysteria that's yet again flooding the media.
So let me offer some advice for you to ignore.
If legislation is proposed for the purposes of countering terrorism, don't say: "This legislation is open to being abused" - that is conceding too much. You can assume that the purpose of the legislation was only to allow the abuses to occur.
We are not talking about side-effects of an otherwise worthwhile objective, we are talking about straight-out lying to justify something that is straight-out unacceptable.
Similarly, do not criticise such legislation as being ineffective in achieving its stated goal (and I admit that I have been guilty of this). If you say "That's silly, a terrorist could easily get around it by doing X", you have already been tricked.
When we are debating what a "terrorist" would or would not do, we are implicitly admitting that terrorists a) actually exist and b) are worth worrying about. We are letting the opponent set the terms of the debate; which means we have conceded ground and are half-way to losing before we've even started.
Moreover saying this sort of thing carries the risk that those in power will say "OK, then we'll ban X too". This is what happened when some genius realised that the explosive TATP could be manufactured from relatively innocuous liquid ingredients, and led to the absolutely retarded ban on taking liquids on board aircraft. The fact that actually manufacturing the simple chemical TATP (let alone anything more sophisticated) on board an aircraft is ludicrously impractical* didn't seem to concern anyone.
[* = The owner of that site, Nick B Possum (no relation) tends to venture more deeply into the land of conspiracy theories than me, however as far as I have been able to verify, what he writes on this particular subject is technically accurate.]
If someone uses the "T" word to justify anything, the onus is on them to prove there is a problem that needs to be solved. And they won't be able to do it because there isn't one. If they say "there is a real threat, but we can't tell you for security reasons", they are asking you to take the words of a known liar, with a vested interest, on trust alone. This should be rejected as a gross insult to the intelligence.
Let's call this nonsense out for the bullshit it is.
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