Teachers Sans Frontieres in America

It’s an unfortunate quirk of global geopolitics that only 5% if the world’s population get a say in the election of world leader, and that this 5% has less interest in and knowledge of world affairs than the other 95%.

"God?" Bush seeks spiritual guidance

Rightists deliberately work to keep the people ignorant. They try to limit education to that which will be sufficient to facilitate efficient labour. They’ve had spectacular success in the US, and it impacts on us all.


It’s a human right to be educated. Which brings me to my plan: Teachers Sans Frontieres. Teachers from other Western countries will deploy to America to provide free supplementary education for schoolchildren, especially in working class areas. Save American people from oppression through ignorance and save the world from suffering the chaos that American ignorance wreaks.

Van Nguyen vs Singaporean Oligarchs

Today I’m jumping on the Van Nguyen bandwagon. His execution date is December 2. Here’s a quick list of companies operating in Australia controlled by Singaporean oligarchs:

Singapore Airlines
Optus
Australand
AV Jennings
Powernet
Walker Corp
Stamford Hotels

Downer and Howard’s language had been that of appeasement until about 2 days ago. Things like “We don’t want to raise false hopes” and “it’s not likely we’ll get the decision overturned” instead of something like “We will be impressing on the Singaporeans how seriously we take this matter”. Downer’s language hasn’t changed but Howard has sniffed the political winds. And well he should: Labor has a huge two party preferred lead of 58-42 despite Beazley’s blunders and inaction and 39% approval rating.

IQ, Superiority, Meritocracy

There are contradictions in the way society deals with differences in intelligence between individuals. We reward people born smart with higher income and more power. But we maintain the line that everyone is equal. Schools dump smart and dumb people into the same class and keep information on school reports that may indicate a student’s academic capabilities to a minimum so as not to offend. Kids are fed bullshit that they can be anything they want to. Universities churn out illiterate graduates.

(People that would have worked in a factory a generation ago are now accountants and low-level bureaucrats. Which is why high school teachers under 40 can’t spell and have worse general knowledge than their students. They live in McMansions, spurn unions and think they’ve climbed out of the working class.)

It’s simply not true that someone born into a body with a higher-power brain is more deserving than other people, any more than birth into an upper class family makes you more deserving. But if society functions in a way that implies this worldview than it should stop being dishonest about it.

Torture By Lion

This is gold. Now Americans are throwing Iraqis into lion cages. Next they’ll be wearing togas.

Hostility to Male Bisexuality

There is very little hostility to bisexuality in women, unlike the situation with men. Homosexuality threatens people because it asks a question of them, doesn’t allow them to sleepwalk into default heterosexuality. Bisexuality is even worse because the issue that’s been broached isn’t contained in a neat little dualised box. Homophobia highly correlates with misogyny (contempt for the feminine wherever it appears) and men control the dialogue. That’s why two women getting it on is something to ogle and two men getting it on is a crime. There’s much more to the story involving people’s prejudice of males as predatory and people’s inordinate fascination with, and fear of, phalluses and penetration. Cocks are not that impressive or scary. Get over it. And women are not passive objects for consumption or amusement.

Furtive Racism

If you’re white, racist white people try to pull you into racist conversations. They get this peculiar furtive look in their eyes like they’re testing to see if you’re part of the resistance. Are you one of us? It involves some kind of desire to engage in hostility, because if you’re not racist then they know that they’re entering into confrontation with you, even if that confrontation only involves staring at them like they’re a piece of shit. They hate non-whites and they hate whites that look down on them and consider them uneducated. It’s a scab they have to pick at.

People have already started with the arrests of people allegedly planning terrorist acts. They’re like dogs let off their leash. They’ve just been waiting for any excuse to express their hatred for Lebs.

Procrastination and Drama Addiction

I just opened one of the maths textbooks I bought in preparation for my return to the land of academia next year and because the introductory stuff is easy I almost shut it to put myself under more pressure later. It’s the tortoise-and-hare self-destructiveness thing that I do when things are OK. Like when I get into a state of mental equilibrium I often have to just push myself out of it for a while with a substance to test myself or something. I can’t imagine how things can ever go wrong for me again so I have to fuck around with it. It could be an ADD thing, only being able to respond to high stimulation. And bipolar/ADD problems with continuity of experience. It could be a borderline thing, instigating crisis to feel alive. It has something to do with the universal human addiction to drama to stave off numbness.

Category Drive vs Reality

Human cognition requires the division of data into categories. Especially into binary categories. (There is also a tendency to make categories mutually exclusive.) It’s related to the dominance of the subject-predicate conceptual structure in human thought. We can’t begin thought without the function of categorisation. But the field of experience is messy, and, I think, permanently incompatible with Platonic forms.

My hunch is that this is one of the points of being human, to deal with the mismatch between your cognitive system and the Universe. It’s impossible to ever have a true explanatory model - they just get more useful. One thing that reminds me of this is that the moon cycles don’t fit into 365 days and a year has 365.25 Earth rotations.

An example of the drive for mutual exclusivity is in the evolution of thought on sexuality. A lot of people have moved on from the gay/straight binary to a “continuum” model. But this introduces a new (though less unsophisticated) form of either/or-ness. If you’re 70% gay then you’re 30% straight. Of course, there’s no reason why your attraction to one gender would have a relationship to your attraction to the other. It’s not a see-saw.

Abstraction and Relating to God

I have to engage with religious people to find out exactly what phenomenon people are designating when they talk about their relationship to abstract spiritual concepts. Eg when someone says they “love Jesus” or “let God into my heart”. They have no experience of interaction with these personalities so how do they know it’s not someone else in disguise?

Perhaps they are pointing to subjective emotional responses or even physically-located sensations that they associate with the particular version of the concept of god they happen to have. No doubt some of them are insincere and no doubt some actually hallucinate conversations.

An analogous issue would be in dealing with abstract concepts eg “justice” or “evil”. Personally I sometimes get an undifferentiated physical/emotional sensation that feels like it connects me to something greater and wiser. I choose to place agnostic conceptual interpretations on top of it like “my soul” or “the spirit of the Universe” or “my connection to the beehive consciousness”. It could just be indigestion though.

Against Tourism

I find tourism disgusting. Especially Third World tourism.

It’s insulting to the tourees. Tourists treat tourees’ lives as if they are a theme park, something for their amusement. Animals in a zoo. Smile for the rich white guy’s camera, now. Culture prostitution.

Bourgeois people have the right to tour other people’s lives by virtue of economic disparity.

Middle class kids freed from their normal societal norms amp up their obnoxiousness factor as soon as they get off the plane.

Tourists don’t develop any appreciation of the place they visit. You need to live in a place to understand it. Disrespectful. Tokenistic.

Tourees are forced to enter into master-servant relationships with the tourists. They have to modify their lifestyles to accommodate them. Ordinary people are forced into sacrifices by their local masters who profit from the incoming foreign currency.

Local economies don’t develop industries that can provide self-sufficiency when the whims of the tourism industry change.

I hate the banality of the rich kid’s obligation to do Europe before or after uni. Part of the package before they put on their shirt and tie for good. Like in Bret Easton Ellis’ Rules of Attraction where he pays out rich college kids talking about “doing Europe” on every second page.

Tourist places can become the battlefield between the West and Third World militants. Eg Bali.

Often tourees can’t afford to use local facilities that tourists use.

Absence of Evidence, Logical Implications

Scientists and science journalists need to correct the way they speak of evidence supporting hypotheses. Too frequently “There is no evidence that A” is proffered and interpreted as implying "not A". This would meet the standard of reasonable doubt in a criminal trial, as would “There is some, but not overwhelming, evidence that A”. But it is scientifically meaningless. Epistemologically you can’t assert that something isn’t true just because no-one has published a paper showing that it is true. Orthodox scientific method requires the proposition “There is evidence that not A” before you can start saying “not A”. This is the fuckup in reasoning that allows things like last century’s tobacco catastrophe to happen.

Soapieland Troubles

Soapieland has descended into turmoil in sympathy with our society. Like heaven revolting in response to humanity’s evil in a Shakepeare play.

1) The terrorist suspect shot in the raids in the last few days was a former Summer Bay resident. Being non-Anglo, he played a graffiti artist. Police are hoping he can help lead them to the mister bigs behind the atrocity that is Home and Away.

2) Bec Cartwright has started a column in Women’s Day about her “secret” life with Lleyton.

3) Shane Connor off Neighbours has admitted to a crystal meth injecting problem and will be raising other actors’ drug problems in his unfair dismissal case.


4) Aaron Jeffery off McLeod’s Daughters assaulted and threatened to kill his wife. Why are so many hotties so fucked? I’m going to do a post soon about hot rightwingers.

Refuse To Pay Day - Melbourne

If you're a Melburnian support Refuse To Pay Day on December 1st to protest against crap public transport. If enough people refuse to pay to use the trains then the government will have to declare a moratorium on fines like what happened in Sydney last year.

John Howard, Exploited Child Labourer

From Crikey, a transcript of a radio interview Howard did in the last election with a show called The Benchwarmers:

THE BENCHWARMERS: It's interesting, when you were growing up your dad owned a petrol station.

HOWARD: He owned a petrol service station in an inner suburb of Sydney, Dulwich Hill.

THE BENCHWARMERS: How did you go from pumping gas to being prime minister of the country?

HOWARD: [laughs] Well I learnt one thing when I served petrol for dad and that is that the customer is always right. That is the first thing he taught me at the age of 14 when I first started serving petrol and I was paid below the Award rate, I should say.

THE BENCHWARMERS: Ohhhh…

HOWARD: Yeah, I was exploited. It was dreadful. And he (dad) said that the customer was always right and I sort of remembered that. So I do listen to what people say and perhaps that was a lesson I learnt that stood me in good stead later on in life.

BENCHWARMERS: What, to continue being exploited? [laughter in studio]

Audio

In the 1992 Fightback package Howard proposed cutting the minimum wage for the age group 15 to 19 from an average of $8.50 an hour at the time to between $3 and $3.50 an hour.

Adopting a US-style system will lead to US-style minimum wages (about AUD$7 vs $12.75 here). Or 25% of GDP/capita vs 54% of GDP/capita.

And why is no-one picking him up for running the line “My guarantee is my record” when journalists ask him to guarantee that no worker will be worse off? I was under the apprehension that Australia was a democracy in which we occasionally get new governments. Someone should ask Costello what he thinks about Howard’s apparent intention to stay in power for all eternity.

Shitty Australian Interviewers

ABC journalists should take a leaf out of the interview techniques on the Jim Lehrer Newshour. The questions are not mere facile echoes of partisan criticisms of the interviewee. The tone is generally neutral and the interviewers look like polite scientists seeking objective truth. They are not combative and petty. Interviewees come off looking childish, obstructionist and contemptuous if they don’t engage. They are not able to turn the interview into a game of language or roll out team lines like in a high school debate.

Uruguay Sunday Morning

Harry Kewell yum.

The Socceroos are playing hardball, refusing to reschedule the 1st leg so that the Uruguayans can get to Australia with time to recuperate for the 2nd leg. The Uruguayans successfully lobbied to get Spanish referees put on the Sydney game. Hopefully the Socceroos organise crowds to spit on their players at the airport.

Disqualifying Self from Power

I realise I should never have power. Like Gandolf giving the ring to Frodo. Emotional strength should be just about the only prerequisite for holding power in societies that require hierarchy. People with ideas and passion should be idea-feeders.

Adversarialism and Conservatism

One reason conservative judges become more liberal years after appointment is that they stop suffering the psychological effects of adversarialism. Defending one side in a dualised discussion stifles open thought, flexibility and self-criticism. This psychological effect hampers the ability of the actors in our legal system and parliamentary system. Conservatism (including irrational baked-on leftism) thrives on calcification of thought.

Oral Fixation Harm Minimisation

Have to accept that I will be shoving things into my mouth until and unless I reach a monk-like state and just try to keep the substances as gentle as possible.