Since this will be a long post, I'll briefly outline the points that I'm trying to make:
1) Criticism of unemployed people on the basis of not contributing to society, or being in some way a burden, is unjustified and irrational; even if considered on a purely economic rationalist basis.
2) Many jobs are deliberately structured to be inefficient and unproductive and this is at least partly a consequence of how the system works.
3) Creating or maintaining a harmful industry in order to "create jobs" is not a legitimate thing to do as the level of employment is regulated by others factors.
4) An age of leisure, where people can live in comfort while working only short hours or none at all, will never happen with the current system, regardless of how far automation progresses. If fact, we have already had the technical capability to make this happen for a considerable time.
Kicking Against the Pricks
Monday 31 July 2017
Wednesday 19 July 2017
A Rant
There are a number of things I have intended to post about on this blog, but it seems that every time I get close to finishing something, I'm overtaken by events.
The main thrust of the blog was intended to be shining a light on things that one takes for granted and showing that there is more to the story than it may appear. Something to challenge people's assumptions, make them uncomfortable, and hopefully make them think.
Not to say that I have any profound wisdom to impart, or that I'm necessarily even right, but if I can at least make people think, that's surely a good thing.
The difficulty I face is that every day I see so much outright idiocy, and jaw-droppingly evil decisions being made, that I don't know where to start or what approach to use. Ideally, I would like to construct robust logical arguments, with carefully selected references, and illustrated with relevant examples, but this approach is just simply not valid when I'm faced with things that are plainly ludicrous to anyone capable of thinking.
What sort of logic works when people are not only claiming that 1 + 1 = 3, but are going around and beating up anyone who says otherwise?
What can you do other than point out that it's stupid?
Let's just look (in no particular order) at some of the things going on at the moment:
1) We have the ongoing Centrelink Robodebt lunacy. I would have thought that since this malicious and disastrous policy was so plainly exposed, the Coalition would at the very least have thrown some scapegoat (probably the unfortunate intern who coded the logic [and BTW, I take back my suggestion they used COBOL, more likely it was something like Brainfuck to save on using all those expensive letters and numbers]) under the bus. Instead, they're not only defending it, but seeking to expand it to aged pensions.
The whole Robodebt business is like the punch-line of a joke which begins "Franz Kafka, Joseph Heller and George Orwell walk into a bar...", and the fact that it's one of the lesser evils we face just shows how bad things have become.
2) We have the government proposing laws to weaken encryption so that it can gather even more confidential data on its citizens, at the very same time as their Medicare records were found to have been hacked. This on top of the still-unresolved Census debacle of last year.
It gets worse though; in the process of proudly announcing these proposed laws, our prime-minister claims that that the laws of Australia override the laws of mathematics.
For FUCK sake, this is literally a scene out of 1984.
3) And what the HELL is going on with the Carmichael Mine?
Here we have a corrupt foreign billionaire seeking to open one of the biggest coal mines in the world. This at a time when we've just had two consecutive massive coral bleaching events on the Great Barrier Reef, and at the same time as an ice shelf larger than Kangaroo Island has just broken off Antarctica.
The mine is not even economically viable; they're going to give Adani a billion dollar handout, not even collect royalties for decades and give them unlimited free water, at the expense of farmers.
The only justification given for this is "jobs". Now I want to write more about this in future since it's wrong on a number of levels, but for the moment I'll just say that the intention is to automate the mine to the max. We will probably have trucks driven by remote control from India, by people paid 50c/hr. There might be a bit over a thousand local jobs. If it were simply about jobs, then it's a ludicrously inefficient use of money; it's costing us nearly a million dollars per job, which is more than the people involved will ever earn back.
It's also amazing that a racist/xenophobic place like Australia isn't upset that Adani is an Indian. Seemingly, being a billionaire makes you an honorary White Man or something.
If it were just to Coalition supporting the mine, that would be understandable - they are after all irredeemably corrupt and evil (we're taking about people wearing hi-vis shirts in parliament; no longer even trying to hide their corrupt ties to the mining industry, but flaunting them) - but both the state and federal Labor Party are behind this. Why?
What are the Greens doing about this? Busy falling on their swords, one after another. First the hissy fit with the NSW branch, then Scott Ludlum and now Larissa Waters gone. They are the closest thing we have to a sensible political party and their very best people are abandoning their posts one after another, just at the time they're needed the most.
It's heart-breaking, and makes me not a little suspicious that something underhand is going on.
4) And let's not get started on fracking and Coal Seam Gas. The phrase "fugitive methane emissions" should in itself be enough for anyone with a brain to demand that it be banned outright.
5) Now we have the terrifying prospect of a massive new paramilitary police force; merging the incompetent ASIO, the politically motivated AFP, the Nazi thugs from Border Farce, and more, all under the control of the worst possible person to wield such power: my nemesis, the anti-Possum Dreaming; Peter Dutton.
What's going on? Even in banana republics, an aspiring dictator would have to be smart enough to sweet-talk the colonels into staging a coup d'etat. Dutton is far too stupid to do this, but somehow he just gets handed the power on a plate, while sitting there like a useless potato.
We can only hope that he's too incompetent to wield such power effectively, but this is a very thin straw to grasp at; like giving a toddler a machine-gun and hoping he's not a very good shot.
6) When considering ludicrous idiots getting handed extraordinary power, one's mind is naturally drawn to the clown that the United States has seen fit to elect to its highest office.
There is no excuse for this in a country which claims to be a democracy.
The guy is outright corrupt, he is ridiculously incompetent at everything he does and he has a particularly obnoxious personality. For FUCK sake, the guy is a fucking rapist, which should in itself be enough to disqualify him from leading any civilised country - and should surely disqualify him a hundred times over in a prudish country like the US where they pretty much crucified Bill Clinton for much less. Trump's personal "qualities" have been known for a long time. Here is a page from a Robert Crumb comic from 1989:
So nearly thirty years ago he was widely considered to be "one of the most evil men alive".
No one can say they didn't known what he was like, and don't give me that rubbish about "The Russians Done It" either. Do you think that the vast array of US spy agencies, with almost unlimited money and power at their disposal, would allow a country, that had traditionally been their mortal enemy - a threat they had been specifically built to counter - to interfere with such a critical process as a presidential election and do nothing about it?
The only possible argument you could give for voting in such a person would be that you believed The System to be so irredeemably bad that the only alternative is to wreck it as quickly and thoroughly as possible. But this would be a desperately dangerous game to play. Who knows what the outcome would be: Handmaid's Tale territory? Nuclear war?
What is worse is that Trump is only a symptom of a much more fundamental problem. Like Tony Abbott, he is just the most prominent pustule on the face of a plague victim. Getting rid of him (and don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen) might reduce the chance of some immediate disaster caused by extreme stupidity, but won't really fix anything.
7) And this disease has seemingly spread everywhere. The UK is in chaos with Brexit and a minority government dependent on religious extremists. The Middle East is an ongoing disaster area that's been getting steadily worse for the last two decades. Turkey is rapidly falling into dictatorship...
. . .
Anyway.
The point of this rant is not so much that everything is hopeless and we should all slash our wrists, or that we need to rise up in revolt at once, but more to give an excuse as to why I haven't been posting so much. Things keep happening which make me feel that what I'm writing is lame and irrelevant and I get discouraged.
I'll try to do better in future.
The main thrust of the blog was intended to be shining a light on things that one takes for granted and showing that there is more to the story than it may appear. Something to challenge people's assumptions, make them uncomfortable, and hopefully make them think.
Not to say that I have any profound wisdom to impart, or that I'm necessarily even right, but if I can at least make people think, that's surely a good thing.
The difficulty I face is that every day I see so much outright idiocy, and jaw-droppingly evil decisions being made, that I don't know where to start or what approach to use. Ideally, I would like to construct robust logical arguments, with carefully selected references, and illustrated with relevant examples, but this approach is just simply not valid when I'm faced with things that are plainly ludicrous to anyone capable of thinking.
What sort of logic works when people are not only claiming that 1 + 1 = 3, but are going around and beating up anyone who says otherwise?
What can you do other than point out that it's stupid?
Let's just look (in no particular order) at some of the things going on at the moment:
1) We have the ongoing Centrelink Robodebt lunacy. I would have thought that since this malicious and disastrous policy was so plainly exposed, the Coalition would at the very least have thrown some scapegoat (probably the unfortunate intern who coded the logic [and BTW, I take back my suggestion they used COBOL, more likely it was something like Brainfuck to save on using all those expensive letters and numbers]) under the bus. Instead, they're not only defending it, but seeking to expand it to aged pensions.
The whole Robodebt business is like the punch-line of a joke which begins "Franz Kafka, Joseph Heller and George Orwell walk into a bar...", and the fact that it's one of the lesser evils we face just shows how bad things have become.
2) We have the government proposing laws to weaken encryption so that it can gather even more confidential data on its citizens, at the very same time as their Medicare records were found to have been hacked. This on top of the still-unresolved Census debacle of last year.
It gets worse though; in the process of proudly announcing these proposed laws, our prime-minister claims that that the laws of Australia override the laws of mathematics.
For FUCK sake, this is literally a scene out of 1984.
3) And what the HELL is going on with the Carmichael Mine?
Here we have a corrupt foreign billionaire seeking to open one of the biggest coal mines in the world. This at a time when we've just had two consecutive massive coral bleaching events on the Great Barrier Reef, and at the same time as an ice shelf larger than Kangaroo Island has just broken off Antarctica.
The mine is not even economically viable; they're going to give Adani a billion dollar handout, not even collect royalties for decades and give them unlimited free water, at the expense of farmers.
The only justification given for this is "jobs". Now I want to write more about this in future since it's wrong on a number of levels, but for the moment I'll just say that the intention is to automate the mine to the max. We will probably have trucks driven by remote control from India, by people paid 50c/hr. There might be a bit over a thousand local jobs. If it were simply about jobs, then it's a ludicrously inefficient use of money; it's costing us nearly a million dollars per job, which is more than the people involved will ever earn back.
It's also amazing that a racist/xenophobic place like Australia isn't upset that Adani is an Indian. Seemingly, being a billionaire makes you an honorary White Man or something.
If it were just to Coalition supporting the mine, that would be understandable - they are after all irredeemably corrupt and evil (we're taking about people wearing hi-vis shirts in parliament; no longer even trying to hide their corrupt ties to the mining industry, but flaunting them) - but both the state and federal Labor Party are behind this. Why?
What are the Greens doing about this? Busy falling on their swords, one after another. First the hissy fit with the NSW branch, then Scott Ludlum and now Larissa Waters gone. They are the closest thing we have to a sensible political party and their very best people are abandoning their posts one after another, just at the time they're needed the most.
It's heart-breaking, and makes me not a little suspicious that something underhand is going on.
4) And let's not get started on fracking and Coal Seam Gas. The phrase "fugitive methane emissions" should in itself be enough for anyone with a brain to demand that it be banned outright.
5) Now we have the terrifying prospect of a massive new paramilitary police force; merging the incompetent ASIO, the politically motivated AFP, the Nazi thugs from Border Farce, and more, all under the control of the worst possible person to wield such power: my nemesis, the anti-Possum Dreaming; Peter Dutton.
What's going on? Even in banana republics, an aspiring dictator would have to be smart enough to sweet-talk the colonels into staging a coup d'etat. Dutton is far too stupid to do this, but somehow he just gets handed the power on a plate, while sitting there like a useless potato.
We can only hope that he's too incompetent to wield such power effectively, but this is a very thin straw to grasp at; like giving a toddler a machine-gun and hoping he's not a very good shot.
6) When considering ludicrous idiots getting handed extraordinary power, one's mind is naturally drawn to the clown that the United States has seen fit to elect to its highest office.
There is no excuse for this in a country which claims to be a democracy.
The guy is outright corrupt, he is ridiculously incompetent at everything he does and he has a particularly obnoxious personality. For FUCK sake, the guy is a fucking rapist, which should in itself be enough to disqualify him from leading any civilised country - and should surely disqualify him a hundred times over in a prudish country like the US where they pretty much crucified Bill Clinton for much less. Trump's personal "qualities" have been known for a long time. Here is a page from a Robert Crumb comic from 1989:
 |
| HUP No. 3, page 20 [click for readable image] |
So nearly thirty years ago he was widely considered to be "one of the most evil men alive".
No one can say they didn't known what he was like, and don't give me that rubbish about "The Russians Done It" either. Do you think that the vast array of US spy agencies, with almost unlimited money and power at their disposal, would allow a country, that had traditionally been their mortal enemy - a threat they had been specifically built to counter - to interfere with such a critical process as a presidential election and do nothing about it?
The only possible argument you could give for voting in such a person would be that you believed The System to be so irredeemably bad that the only alternative is to wreck it as quickly and thoroughly as possible. But this would be a desperately dangerous game to play. Who knows what the outcome would be: Handmaid's Tale territory? Nuclear war?
What is worse is that Trump is only a symptom of a much more fundamental problem. Like Tony Abbott, he is just the most prominent pustule on the face of a plague victim. Getting rid of him (and don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen) might reduce the chance of some immediate disaster caused by extreme stupidity, but won't really fix anything.
7) And this disease has seemingly spread everywhere. The UK is in chaos with Brexit and a minority government dependent on religious extremists. The Middle East is an ongoing disaster area that's been getting steadily worse for the last two decades. Turkey is rapidly falling into dictatorship...
. . .
Anyway.
The point of this rant is not so much that everything is hopeless and we should all slash our wrists, or that we need to rise up in revolt at once, but more to give an excuse as to why I haven't been posting so much. Things keep happening which make me feel that what I'm writing is lame and irrelevant and I get discouraged.
I'll try to do better in future.
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