Every day I come across material posted on the internet that is worth remembering.
Index of Content
Index of Content
| Adam Morton: Government's junk carbon credits (Intro. article) | ||
| European Environmental Bureau: The great detox (Intro. article) | ||
| Richard Denniss: Australia’s carbon credits are a joke (Intro. article) | ||
| Adam Morton: Fossil fuel industry leaders added to emissions reduction panel (Intro. article) | ||
| Mark Levin: Mark Levin interviews climate scientist, Dr Patrick J. Michaels (Intro. video) | ||
| New Daily: Valuing men's rights made out to be shameful (Intro. article) | ||
| ABC News:: UN Gender Bias Survey (Intro. article TV news segment) | ||
| ABC News: Australian Child Maltreatment Study (Intro. transcript report) | ||
| ABC News: Fertility struggles (Intro. news report) | ||
| ABC 7.30 Report: Louise Adler (Intro. video) | ||
| David Spero: Louise Adler (Intro. article local-copy) | ||
| Medium article: Why this Jew turned against Israel (Intro. article local-copy) | ||
| Articles concerning Aboriginal Issues | ||
| Perception, Spirituality & Religion | ||
| General Interest | ||
| Conscription: Conscription in Australia (Intro. Wikipedia article ) | ||
| Julius Lobo: 6 Famous Libraries that were Tragically Destroyed (Intro. article) | ||
| David Wineberg: Everything we “know” about the rise of Man is wrong (Intro. Medium article) | ||
| Kevin Foster: How the opium trade shaped the modern world (Intro. article) | ||
| Michel Foucault: Wikipedia article (Intro. article) | ||
ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES
22 Sep. 2021 Adam Morton: Government's junk carbon credits (article)
About 20% of carbon credits created under the federal Coalition’s main climate change policy do not represent real cuts in carbon dioxide and are essentially “junk”, new research by the Australian Conservation Foundation suggests.
25 Apr. 2022 European Environmental Bureau: The great detox (article)
In April 2022 the European Commission announced a 'roadmap' towards banning some 12,000 chemicals known to cause cancer, infertility, reduce vaccine effectiveness and generate other health impacts, that are found widely in everyday products.
Jump forward to October 2023 and we hear that the plan has been delayed and well may be abandoned altogether. There has been a 'growing political backlash against green measures' and 'the EU chemical industry’s revenue soared by €232bn between 2011 and 2021.'
An ABC news article today, 29/12/2023, (link), on toxic chemicals getting into our food when we re-heat food in take-away containers, mentions that the Australian government has established The Industrial Chemicals Environment Management Standard (IChEMS) to provide a consistent, nationwide approach to managing the risks that industrial chemicals may pose to the environment.
You have to wonder why we haven't heard of this before. And looking at the web-site, (link), I can't work out if being interested in chemicals in the environment includes chemicals inside our bodies.
|
24 Sept. 2021 Richard Denniss: Australia’s carbon credits are a joke(article)
The Morrison government has committed to spending $310 million to buy carbon credits from landholders in Western New South Wales who promise not to clear their land. And because the less they promise to do, the more money taxpayers give them, the landholders have promised to do a lot less.
And to make matters worse, since the landholders have been receiving the handouts for not clearing, the amount of clearing in the region has increased, not decreased.
Guardian 2021 Adam Morton: Fossil fuel industry leaders added to emissions reduction panel (article)
The Morrison government has appointed fossil fuel industry leaders to a committee responsible for ensuring the integrity of projects that get climate funding, following plans to expand the industries that can access its $2.5bn emissions reduction fund, including opening it to carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects by oil and gas companies.
Mark Levin: Mark Levin interviews climate scientist, Dr Patrick J. Michaels. Fox News 2019. (video)
Dr Michaels is introduced as an 'expert on all things climate and environment', but has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the petroleum and coal industries to fund his research.
He dazzles with mysterious charts and statistics. He also denies that extreme climate events are happening. He admits that there is more damage being caused by extreme weather events, but puts that down to there being more 'things' in the world every year, that can get damaged.
POLITICAL CORRECTNESS
John Anderson — Konstantin Kisin: 'Free Speech, Comedy, and Woke Culture' (video)
Russian born british comedian Konstantin Kisin discusses (with ex-politician John Anderson) the frightening situation in western societies, where any challenge to 'woke' cultural extremes is met by viscious repression and accusations of racism.
Such are the extremes of fascist repression, (that we are all under), it is only the comedians who are able to expose the situation. However, their appeals for sanity and common sense are at odds with the goals of the powerful 'discrimination industry'— academics, journalists, writers, politicians, who are making a very nice living, (thank you very much!), by 'discovering' discrimination in every detail of modern western life.
Kissin's views are well thought out, beautifully expressed and shed a clear light on the the dark, sub-human monster we call 'woke culture'.
William Lind video: The History of Political Correctness (video)
"For the first time, Americans today, are not free to say what they think. If they say something deemed 'offensive', or 'insensitive', or worst of all, 'hate speech', they may be in serious trouble. They may be punished for violating the unholy commandments of the 90s, commonly know as 'Political Correctness'. But is political correctness a new phenomenon? We'll show you tonight that political correctness has been in the making for more than 8 decades. And it seems that a deteriorating society is exactly what political correctness strives for."
Political correctness is a Marxist ideology, translated from economic into cultural terms, in an effort going back to World War I.
Bill Maher video: A unified theory of wokeness (video)
How we teach our kids History has become a big controversy these days: Liberals accusing Conservatives of wanting to whitewash the past (sometimes that's true); but plenty of Liberals want to abuse history to control the present.
New term 'presentism': judging everyone in the past by the standards of the present. It's the belief that people who lived in the past 'really should have known better.' 'It's like getting mad at yourself for not knowing what you know now when you were 10.'
Maher examines the principal areas of 'woke' thought: gender, race, colonisers, slavery, etc.; from a refreshing historical perspective.
Insights provided such as that:
Bill Maher video: John Cleese on political incorrectness (video)
John Cleese: 'What I realise now at age 75 is that almost nobody has any idea what they're talking about.'
'[Political correctness] starts out as a half-way decent idea, and then it goes completely wrong — taken to an absurd ...'
Only 5 minutes long, but this video provides a hillarious take on 'Political Correctness'.
Bill Maher: 'Not everything that merely alludes to another culture is racist or cultural appropriation.'
'80% of Americans find political correctness to be a problem, including 75% of African Americans.'
When did Liberals become the 'fun police'? Used to be the Conservatives.
A 2 minute segment illustrating how fascist behaviour has moved from the right wing of politics to the left.
Bill Maher: Real Time with Bill Maher — Jordan Peterson (video)
Bill Maher talks with Jordan Peterson, starting with a clip of an interaction between Peterson and Cathy Newman (YouTube link):
Cathy Newman: Why should your right to freedom of speech trump a trans person's right not to be offended?
Peterson: Because, in order to be able to think, you have to risk being offensive.
Look at the conversation we are having right now. You're certainly willing to risk offending me in the pursuit of truth. Why should you have the right to do that?
Peterson comments on this quote, describing to Maher a feature of human interaction that is everpresent but not recognised:
Peterson: What I was saying was self-evidently true but not expressed very well, very often.
'Most of the time, when you're discussing something that needs to be discussed, everybody's actually rather upset about it. If you're actually talking about something important. Because, why talk otherwise? ... But if there's an issue at hand that has to be discussed, people are already upset, and they have different viewpoints, and the offensiveness, in some sense, is built into that.'
'Jordan Peterson is a prominent psychologist and is not afraid to point out obvious features of the human psychological landscape, even those that have been labelled as 'taboo' by the totalitarian forces of political correctness.'
'The notion of 'taking offence' and what in fact is politically correct behaviour, I believe is ravaging and dumbing-down the whole of western society.'
If you are interested, and keen to learn about and appreciate a culture other than your own, what do you do? If you ask someone about their culture you can be accused of discrimination or profiling (their right to 'take offense'). If you don't ask them, you are cancelling them and denigrating their cultural and racial heritage. The result is a muting, a dumbing down, some may say a menticide.
This YouTube video is worth a watch.
Bill Maher: Real Time with Bill Maher — New Rule: White Shame (video)
Wokémon, go
If someone in a racial minority is not offended by a racist jibe, then they are a racist. They have to take offence!
White liberals are the only racist group with a bias against themselves.
There is a weird self-loathing going on among white liberals. And it's not helping anyone. Hating all things white is just tedious virtue signaling.
Today, every thought needs a disclaimer now.
What's the 'I'm embarrassed to be white' sub-genre on the internet? Feeling guilty about being white puts the burden onto black people to absolve you. It's all about you.
If you really feel guilty about being white, let's tax it. We'll do it like carbon offsets: we'll calculate your exact level of white lameness, then charge you a Caucasian offset fee!
[A good fun look at wokism.]
Jordan Peterson: Jordan Peterson vs Cathy Newman (video)
Main issues discussed
Newman: Quote from your book [12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos]. 'There are whole disciplines in university, forthrightly hostile towards men. These are the areas of study dominated by the postmodern/neo-Marxist claim that western culture in particular is an oppressive structure, created by white men to dominate and exclude women.'
Gender pay gap.
Newman: There's a 9% gender pay gap.
Peterson: The claim that the wage gap is only due to sex is wrong, and only supported by a uni-varied analysis. Multi-varied analysis of the pay gap indicates that it doesn't exist.
Newman: Is gender equality a myth?
Peterson: I don't know what you mean by the question. Men and women aren't the same and they won't be the same. That doesn't mean they can't be treated fairly.
Calling trans people by their preferred pronouns
Newman: ... You got in trouble by refusing to call trans men and women by their preferred personal pronouns.
Peterson: That's not actually true. I got in trouble because I said I would not follow the compelled speech dictates of the federal and provincial governments. I actually never got in trouble for not calling anyone anything.
What I said at the beginning was that I was not going to cede the linguistic territory to radical leftist, regardless of whether or not it was put in law.
Radical leftist ideologues
Peterson: Radical leftist ideologues are authoritarian
The philosophy [of radical leftist ideologues] presumes that group identity is paramount. That's the fundamental philosophy that drove the Soviet Union and Maoist China. And it's the fundamental philosophy of the left-wing activists — it's identity politics. It doesn't matter who you are as an individual, it matters who you are in terms of your group identity.
Hierarchical structures
Peterson: There's this idea that hierarchical structures are a sociological construct of the western patriarchy. And that is so untrue. ... Crustaceans, like lobsters, have very similar nervous systems to ours and they have hierarchical social structures.
You have a mechanism in your brain that runs on serotonin, ... that tracks your status. And the higher your status, the better your emotions are regulated.
Biological determinism
Newman: Your saying, like the lobsters, we are hard-wired, as men and women, to do certain things, and sort of run along tram lines, and there's nothing we can do about it.
Peterson: No I'm not saying there's nothing we can do about it. Because it's like in a chess game. There's lots of things that you can do, although you can't break the rules of the chess game and continue to play chess. Your biological nature is somewhat like that: it sets the rules of the game, but within those rules you have a lot of leeway.
But one thing we can't say is that hierarchical organisation is a consequence of the capitalist patriarchy. That's patently absurd.
Women's interests
Newman: What's in it for women?
Peterson: It depends on what they want.
Women want deeply to have men who are competent and who are powerful. (Not power to exert tyrannical control over others, that's corruption.) Power is competence. And why in the world would you not want a competent partner.
I know why actually. You can't dominate a competent partner. Women who have had their relationships with men impaired, and who are afraid of such relationships, will settle for a weak partner because they can dominate them.
[IB:Worth a watch.]
Helen Lewis interviews Jordan Peterson about the patriarchy, the alt-right, gay parenting, fascist ideologies etc. (video)
Peterson: People are hungry for a discussion of the relationship between responsibility and meaning. We haven't had that discussion in our culture for 50 years.
We have concentrated on rights and privileges, freedoms and impulsive pleasures.
I've tried to make a case for the significance of individual life and the psychological necessity of courage and nobility, and responsibility. These things that are old fashioned in the best sense that they have lasted forever, and they're absolutely necessary.
Our culture confuses men's desire for achievement and competence with the patriarchal desire for tyrannical power. And that's a big mistake. Those aren't the same thing. Even a bit...
In what sense is our society male dominated?
Lewis: Well, the vast majority of wealth is owned by men. The vast majority of capital is owned by men. Women do more unpaid labour.
Peterson: A very tiny proportion of men. A huge proportion of people who are seriously disaffected are men. Most people in prison are men. Most people who are on the street are men. Most victims of violent crime are men. Most people who commit suicide are men. Most people who die in wars are men. People who do worse in school are men. Where's the dominance here precisely?
What you are doing is taking a tiny sub-strata of highly successful men and using that to represent the entire structure of western society [as male dominated]. There's nothing about that that's vaguely appropriate...
The doctrines that I'm opposed to are predicated on the notion that the best way to view history is as the domination of a tyrannical male patriarchy, and that's true particularly of the west.
[I.B.: Peterson deconstructs many simplistic propositions that dominate the popular dialogue on gender issues etc... Worth a watch.]
Victor Davis Hanson: The Worst Thing Any President Has Done in My Lifetime (video)
hanson-worst-thing.mp4When Barack Obama came into power he took the binary of the unique African-American experience and he said: 'it's not just black vs white it's everybody who is non-white, they're part of a collective.'
Everybody is scrambling to identify with a racial minority. Everyone is trying to find some kind of edge.
Hanson discusses the re-tribalisation of modern society — the ultimate racism.
Bill Burr video: On Women for 20 minutes straight (video)
Only a comedian can have the courage to come out with the truth about male-female relationships.
Burr gives a hilarious take on gender politics.
Bill Burr video: 11 Minutes of Bill Burr (video)
Mehreen Faruqi: Calls Pauline Hanson a racist: SBS News (article)
ABC News: Deaf Australians and those with disabilities push to end exclusion from juries SBS News (article)
This ABC News article tells of the struggle of a deaf man, whose main language is Auslan, to be allowed to serve on juries in Victroria. The thrust of his argument is that he could fulfill his duties as a juror with the help of an Auslan interpreter.
The man's case, and the article, presume that the communication of meaning that takes place when someone testifies in a court room is no more than the words uttered—which could be adequately conveyed by those words being typed up in a transcript or conveyed via sign language by an Auslan interpreter.
It totally ignores the contribution of voice tone, infelection, resonance and a host of other qualities that contribute to communication when we speak.
A deaf person may observe the physical demeanour and gestures of a witness, but he would have no reliable perception of the subtlties of tone that contribute to a witness sounding convincing and truthful or unreliable or uncertain.
This is political correctness gone mad. It is akin to the notion that quadraplegic people should be given the opportunity to become lifeguards.
ABC News: Why racially marginalised women hide their identity by 'code-switching' to act 'white' at work (article)
A new report from the Diversity Council Australia (DCA) finds that a majority of culturally and racially marginalised women (defined as women who are black, brown, Asian, or any other non-white group), code-switched because they feared that if they did not, they would be overlooked by their managers for jobs and promotions.
It is interesting to read the article carefully. The women are not complaining about being racially abused or picked on (now). They are complaining about their own attitudes to their work situations.
If you read about 'Group Dynamics', (Wikipedia article), it is clear that what the women are doing is the same as any other person would do/has to do within the confines of a social group. The difference is that because these women are members of minority racial/cultural groups, the accommodation they must make to group dynamics is classed as discrimination. Other members of the work/social group (say white men) are merely being exposed to group dynamics.
It seems to me that a fundamental principle of 'wokeism' is to take a natural feature of social life and demonise it where it applies to select, usually minority, groups. This keeps a lot of people in highly paid jobs in the 'WOKE' and 'POLITICALLY CORRECT' industries.
The organisation who 'produced' this report, the Diversity Council Australia (DCA), is a 'not-for-profit' and a 'registered charity'. I would wager though, that the people operating the organisation do not do so on a voluntary basis. I'm sure there is a dedicated team of high-fliers drawing executive salaries. And the continued existence of their organisation is dependent on the persistence of discrimination and exclusion. Little wonder they find it everywhere.
Note: The 'Australian Charities and Not-for-Profits Commission' has annual reports and financial statements for DCA. In 2022-23 they had the equivalent of 25 full-time staff, with an employee benefits expense of $3,350,103 i.e. on average $2,577 per week for each employee. (2023 details 2023 Financial Statement)
'Code-switching ... is common in Australian workplaces,' they say. I agree with them. In fact we all do it. It is called 'group participation': we put our differences to one side and work together.
There is a massive industry built around discrimination, and they find it everywhere. As Konstantin Kossin says: 'It's like when you buy a new car. You see that car everywhere else as you drive around.' (YouTube) They are never about to admit the war has been won. Then they'd be out of a job.
ABC News 12 March 2023: Racism in the Food Industry
I have taken a copy of an article that appeared in the ABC news feed on 12th March 2023:
The writers present the views of two 'food experts', (Jess Ho & Dr Sukhamani Khorana), that suggest there is an insidious racism evident in the Australian food industry.
If you believe what these two 'experts' say, then you will realise you are expressing racist views every time you eat a chinese meal or buy a kebab. (You are are only superficially engaging with the culture and are thus trivialising it.)
What is being expressed are views of people who have careers based on uncovering 'racism' and 'discrimination'. They offer no supporting evidence and use generalised terms such as 'white consumers'.
The actual logic of the piece is that 'white' people are inherently racist because of their colonial past. No accommodation is made for the existence of white Australians of Italian, Romanian, Greek, etc., heritage, who do not have a colonial history.
Also, no explanation is made for the situation where an 'ethnic' person, say an Arab, Japanese, Chinese, etc., dines on the cuisine of another ethnic group. Are they immune from racist thoughts? Or are they engaging on a 'deep level'?
The article is basically rubbish, fuelling the flames of racism and division to enrich those who make a career out of 'discovering' and 'calling-out' what they 'consider' to be non-woke aspects of modern life.
The Guardian 29th April 2023: I Think My Boss is Racist (article)
This article throws light on a dilemma facing many people in the age of fascism political correctness.
The woman complaining is the only person in the workplace of African heritage. She mentions that after she burst into tears during a meeting once, her boss was very nice to her. Also, her only complaints are that he doesn't ask her questions (which she could answer), doesn't chat and make jokes with her, and rarely even speaks to her.
The boss seems like a nice guy to me. But if he engages with a 'person of color' he is faced with difficulties and potential dangers:
When it comes to idle chat in the office and jokes! Let's not go there. It's a minefield ! ! !
SBS News 25th April 2023: Comedy Festival 'Cancels' Barry Humphries (article)
This article is about 'possible' plans of the Melbourne Comedy Festival to commemorate and honour Barry Humphries (recently deceased).
Some time previously, the Festival dropped Humphries' name from their top comedy award, because he had dared to express his personal opinions about 'transgender' and 'gender reassignment'. In particular his opinion of transgender as a 'fashion' being 'preached to children by crazy teachers', and describing gender reassignment surgery as 'self-mutilation'.
Whilst some may say the festival acted appropriately, I say it is 'cancelling' and shows 'political correctness' seeking to dictate what people are allowed to think.
It reminds me of the George Carlin quote:
"Political correctness is fascism pretending to be manners."
Whilst 'cancelling' has relegated Humphries' and his opinions on 'transgender' and 'gender reassignment' to obscurity, woke forces have been silently working away at the English vocabulary to make it impossible to express derogatory opinions of gender reassignment: until recently Wikipedia listed tattooing and cosmetic surgery under the heading of 'Body Mutilation'. Now you get a redirect from 'Body Mutilation' to 'Body Modification'. This illustrates the process of 'Newspeak' as George Orwell described in '1984'. (link)
Wikipedia: A copy of a Wikipedia article on 'Group Dynamics' sighted on 6th March 2023.. (article)
THE WAR AGAINST MEN
New Daily article: Valuing men's rights made out to be shameful
This article claims that there is a nefarious connection between Peter Dutton (leader of the federal opposition), Michaelia Cash and a group called the Men's Rights Agency.
The agency is portrayed as supporting men who commit extreme family violence, because one such man once used their services. But many of the claims that appear in a cited pdf of Courier Mail newspaper clippings (link), are alleged and sensationalised without proof. And the fundamental criticism of the group rests on unsubstantiated character assassinations of people associated with it.
The question of men's rights, which many people agree, are often disregarded in family law, is not addressed in the article. It is primarily about heaping moral scorn on anyone who associates themselves in any way with men's rights.
ABC News Report on UN Gender Bias Survey
13th June 2023 (online) (local copy) (TV item transcript)
This ABC News report is headed:
'UN Development program survey shows biases against women haven't improved over the last decade and gender inequality is stagnant.'
This is pretty shocking stuff. We all immediately think: 'Shame on Australia. Shame on Australian males.'
However, as the interview with a UNSW professor continues, we learn that the survey was conducted over 120 countries, and that in the list of the least gender biased countries, Australia is up there with the leaders, New Zealand and Sweden.
Throughout the interview, the distinction between what is happening in Australia and what is the average over 120 countries surveyed, is not defined at all. You have to download the report and really search to find any significant Australian specific data. (report download)
The TV report only vaguely mentions that the biased views are not just the views of men but women as well. Though no proportional figures are given.
The report comes with various supporting documents (link page), and the list of countries ranked in order is in an excel document that I have not been able to open. (copy)
But they tell us Australia is right up there with the leaders. Why doesn't the headline read:
'Australia is one of least gender-biased nations in the world.'
It think it is obvious that that the ABC saw this report as a chance to spread male hate content, even though it had to totally misrepresent the data contained in a UN report.
The report is full of masses of densely packed pages of numbers, and it is difficult to extract anything of relevance to Australia. However, one graph (shown following), shows that of the 120 countries surveyed over the past 10 years, Australia ranked 6th in the percentage increase of people with 'no bias in gender social norms' (9.5% increase). And I believe we were already coming from a fairly advanced position.
STUPIDITY IN THE POPULAR DIALOGUE
ABC News 3rd April 2023: Australian Child Maltreatment Study (news report)
video transcript report download
The headline for this news segment was that '62% of Australians have been abused, neglected, or exposed to domestic violence during childhood.'
The segment says that researchers surveyed 8,503 people who were aged over 15, and they found:
The stated findings are shocking, until you read the actual report:
The study does not reveal what the robo-call message was, nor does it say at what point in the over-the-phone interview process were the vast majority of participants eliminated, ruled ineligible, etc, nor what criteria were used to make this selection.
The most that could be reasonably taken from the study is that from a carefully selected group of 8,503 people, from a survey of 154,889 who say they are interested in child maltreatment (or indeed consider that they have been maltreated as a child), the claims of maltreatment in childhood by 62% of them, came up to the official description of child abuse.
The percentages given at the start of the segment may be true of 8,503 people, carefully selected from a test sample of 404,180 people, but to 'suggest' that they may have some relevance to the entire Australian population is pure sensationalistic garbage. Further, that they can be taken seriously by the Attorney General and the National Children's Commissioner (annual salary 300K+) is a worry for all taxpayers.
The arithmatic that the study leaves out is:
So the ABC headline (to be accurate), should have read:
'1.3% of Australians have been abused, neglected, or exposed to domestic violence during childhood.'
UPDATES
19th April 2023: (follow-up report): In answer to Peter Dutton's call for a royal commission into indigenous child sexual abuse, Anne Hollonds calls for an overarching national strategy for child wellbeing, citing the 'Child Maltreatment Study figures in support'.
3rd August 2023: In a report on the arrest in Australia of a major pedaphile, (a shocking case), the National Children's Commissioner, Anne Hollonds, appears on camera and quotes the figures from this report as 'fact':
Hollonds: 'The Australian Child Maltreatment Study shows that 62% of Australians have suffered one or more types of child maltreatment and nearly 30% of them suffered child sexual abuse.' (video)
21st October 2023: An article by Laura Tingel published by ABC News and the Financial review refers to the 62% as substantiated by 35 carers and experts:
"A group of 35 care providers and experts released a statement which noted that the latest Australian Child Maltreatment Study revealed the majority of Australians (62 per cent) have experienced at least one type of child abuse or neglect and that 'child abuse is far too prevalent in Australia, full stop'". (online)
Fertility struggles can be costly and time consuming. Living with a disability can make them even harder
(online news article) (local copy)
An ABC News article and TV news segment shown on 13th July 2023.
It features a woman with brittle bone disease (a cruel and debilitating genetic disease), who wants to have a baby by IVF. Because of her condition she can't work and lives on the invalid pension. She knows her child will probably have the debilitating and excruciatingly painful condition that she has, but pleads that she will be a good parent, and it is her human right to have a child.
Note: Article 16 of the 'Universal Declaration of Human Rights' states:
1. Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution. (Human Rights Document)
The article appeals to the emotions of readers: why should a person with a genetic disorder not receive government funding for IVF. It is her right to have a child!
The article is a good example of 'gatekeeping' in logic/ethics. (Where an argument is constructed within a highly restricted set of relevant factors.)
The logic of the article takes into account modern ideas of anti-discrimination and human rights. So, if these are the only factors that are relevant, there is a compelling argument there. However, the article deliberately excludes several important considerations.
Say you admit the concept of maltreating or abusing children into the logical picture. You find a woman who intends to produce a child who is more than likely going to have a life of constant pain and disability. Should this woman's desire to have a child over-rule the huge possibility of dooming another individual to a life of agony.
Say you look at the woman's life situation. She has never worked. She cannot, because of her debilitating condition. She exists on the invalid pension and there is every liklihood her child will be dependent on the invalid pension for life. I am not saying she should not have a child, but the notion that a Government should financially subsidise her efforts to do so, seems to go against common sense.
This is another example of the ABC beating the 'discrimination drum'.
TOTALITARIANISM AND FASCISM
Is a Mass Psychosis the Greatest Threat to Humanity
YouTube local copy
This is a brilliant YouTube video by After Skool, in collaboration with Academy of Ideas, entitled, 'Mass Psychosis: how an entire population becomes mentally ill'. It explores the mechanisms of totalitarianism: how a population can be brainwashed, subjected to a flood of misinformation and driven by fear and anxiety into a condition of 'menticide' where their critical abilities are so impared that they sanction all kinds of horrendous practices.
Fines for opponents of the voice. SBS News (article)
Federal crossbenchers, including Zali Steggall and David Pocock want people and organisations who say that an Aboriginal Voice to Parliament would be a third chamber of Parliament to face fines of up to $50,000. (See Malcolm Turnbull on the Voice.)
There are two logical approaches to assessing the statement "the Aboriginal voice to Parliament would constitute a 'third chamber' of parliament":
1. The Constitution states there are two chambers of parliament. So by definition, the statement is false. However, if the term 'third chamber of Parliament' is recognised as a metaphor (which I think it is), then the 'falsehood' disappears. The same would apply if the terms 'in effect' or 'like' were inserted: "the Aboriginal voice to parliament would in effect constitute a 'third chamber' of Parliament".
The ability to formulate metaphors is one of the fundamental qualities of mind that have made human civilization what it is. To 'criminalise' metaphor is to turn the evolutionary clock back millions of years.
2. The second approach is to look at the proposed structure, function and powers of the Voice. It will: be a body of elected representatives; have offices in the national capital; represent the views and promote the interests of a racial minority in Australia; make direct representations to the Government and the executive government (the public service); be able to take matters to the Federal Court if it is not satisfied with Government responses. It looks like an 'in effect' chamber of Parliament to me. What is the old saying? 'If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck.'
What happened to the good old days when the fascists that were trying to suppress free speech and throw freedom fighters into gaol were on the right wing?
Now-a-days the fascists are on the left!
Complaint submitted to the ABC — ABC failing to follow its own Code of Practice (email submission)
For the last two years I have monitored ABC TV news broadcasts all day on 19th November — International Men's Day.
Each year the ABC has failed to make any mention of the occasion. In contrast, on 8th March each year, International Women's Day receives extensive coverage. In fact the ABC remains preoccupied with this event for weeks, and features women-centred programmes relentlessly all year.
I lodged a complaint with ABC News, which they replied to 6 weeks later with a terse, 'this is a programming matter and not covered by the ABC Code of Conduct. Besides, we have a page of programs on iview devoted to the issue.'
I have pursued the issue right up to Nerida O'Loughlin, chair of the Australian Communication Media Authority (ACMA). She has dismissed my complaint by saying that the Code of Practice only applies to material after 'editorial decisions have been made' and if I don't like it I can go to the Ombudsman.
So much for the ABC's obligation to 'not knowingly excluded or disproportionately represent ... any significant strand of thought or belief within the community.' Seems like International Men's Day is not a significant strand of thought.
ABC News: The 'elephant in the room' of racism in Australia's aged care homes (article)
This article finds racism in the behaviour of people with dementia against immigrant workers. It presents a simplistic view of geriatric nursing.
I note it doesn't mention communication skills.
To adequately care for a dementia sufferer you have to be very articulate: clear in your speech and use a vocabulary and pace that the patient can understand. Patients often react to tone and cadence without actually understanding the words spoken, and unless carers can communicate effectively, the patient becomes frightened and lashes out at the stranger that they perceive as 'man-handling' them.
Whilst many aged care workers, that do not have English as a first language, make excellent carers, many lack the language skills (depth of tone and characteristic rhythm) that are essential for communicating with white caucasian dementia patients. (I have witnessed many scenes of workers 'jabbering' at elderly patients, in a dialect they can't understand.)
These old people are frightened and the system fails to recognise the 'inconvenient truth' that elderly people are most appropriately cared for by native speakers of their own language.
ABC Sports News: MCC changes 'batsman' to 'batter' (article)
23rd Sept. 2021
Human spoken language is a wonder of evolution, but what it is and its rules, are still the subject of lively debate. However, in this article, the Marylebone Cricket Club thinks it understands language and has decided that the term 'batsman' is sexist. So they intend to use the gender-neutral term 'batter' instead. (Notwithstanding most people associate the word 'batter' with deep-fried fish.)
The logic of the MCC is pretty straigthforward: not just men, but women and trans people play cricket today, and the word 'man' when appended to 'bat' is offensive to female and trans players (it excludes them). The alternatives of 'batswoman' and 'batsperson' are cumbersome, so 'batter', they have decided in their wisdom, is a sensible non-gender-specific solution.
Of couse the board members of the MCC are not linguistics experts, and they are assuming that the 'man' in 'batsman' is a gender specific term: the singular form of 'men'. However, this is not so, the 'man' in 'batsman' comes from the Latin word 'manus', meaning 'hand', and the Shorter Oxford Dictionary defines 'batsman' as 'One who handles the bat in cricket.' So gender doesn't come into it at all — a woman or a trans person could be 'handling a bat' and be correctly referred to as a 'batsman.'
This is a classic example of folk etymology, where a change in the meaning or form of a word, has come about due to a popular false belief about its etymology (origins). However, because we speak of 'batsmen' it is probable that the misunderstanding occurred at some time in the distant past when the word 'batsmen' started to be used for the plural of 'batsman'.
The sound alternation that generates the word 'men' from 'man' is called apophony. It is applicable to the word 'man' when it refers to a male human, but applying it to 'man' when it means 'handler' is a nonsense — there is no linguistic or logical justification for it. A more sympathetic rendering of the plural of 'batsman', acknowledging its derivation from 'manus', would be 'batsmans' e.g. the plural of 'manacle' is not 'menacle', it is 'manacles.'
So what is presented as a simple removal of a gender biased word, is no such thing. It is a tortuous mess of mistakes and misunderstandings. However, it does reveal some of the underlying forces at work in modern political correctness.
I suggest they include:
I think Oscar Wilde described it perfectly when he said:
'Everything popular is wrong.'
The Kenny Report: 'Long-running problem': ABC 'riddled with bias' (Sky News video)
Michelle Rowland, the Communications Minister, answers the complaint of bias on the ABC by saying that people have the opportunity to complain and they can switch to another channel.
See this SMH article on the ABC's ludicrous complaints process, (link), and the progress of a current complaint about the ABC's agenda of misandry. (link)
Your ABC's complaints process might surprise you
A Copy of a SMH article describing the ludicrous complaints process at the ABC. (article)
The ABC is meant to be governed by a Code of Practice. Part IV, Section 4 of which states: 'no significant strand of thought or belief within the community is knowingly excluded or disproportionately represented.' But if you follow my recent complaint to the ABC about their failure to cover International Men's Day (at all!), they believe the Code of Practice only needs to be followed after they have decided what issues are of current interest. So any views in the community that don't support fundamental Government policy don't get reported (that could result in a cut to funding) and any views or interests that go contrary to radical feminism or extreme political correctness are either ignored or villified.
Propelled by tech money, the menace of race science is back – and it’s just as nonsensical as ever
A Guardian article of 17th October 2024 by Dr Adam Rutherford, lecturer in genetics at University College London, claims that race science, (eugenics), as practised by the Nazis, is back with a vengance in the modern world.
See the article here: Guardian article Local copy
The article is all about 'race science' and 'eugenics', which Rutherford sees as being resurgent throughout the world. Though he doesn't define these terms before labelling them as a 'menace' and 'debunked practices' supported by 'rogue experts and rich bankers.'
He says that there is an 'international network' promoting these ideas. His evidence is basically a blogger who once wrote 'Africans are prone to violence everywhere,' (backed up by some pretty convincing statistical evidence), and a spurious, covert video. The 'rich bankers' he talks about, is one millionaire who gave money to an organisation he thought was doing genuine research, but soon withdrew his support.
While Rutherford gives only a Guardian investigation, (written in the same sensationalistic style), to support his claims, he does give references to some interesting things, like a forced sterilization program in the United States during the early to mid 20th century, and the work of Mary Stopes, (1880-1958), pioneer of contraception and family planning education.
Rutherford dismisses Mary Stopes' massive effort to liberate women from the burden of having to have excessively large families (through contraception education), by labelling her a 'keen eugenicist.' But he still doesn't define the term. Just saying he had 'hoped the fall of empire and the defeat of Nazism marked their demise.'
Indeed, the term eugenics was given a totally evil connotation after the second world war, when Hitler's ethnic cleansing and genocides were associated with eugenics. And now, through the processes of 'political correctness', the term cannot be used without risking being called a Nazi. However, there are many every-day practices that can rightly be called 'eugenics.'
Case study 1: A young couple, expecting their first baby, undergo screening that indicates a very high probability that their baby has Down Syndrome. They decide to abort the foetus and try for a baby later on.
Case study 2: A lesbian couple seek the services of a sperm donor to undergo IVF. They present the sperm bank with what they consider as a suitable genetic profile of who they want as a donor.
Case study 3: Jenny really likes Gary, but he has a lowly paid job and she doesn't think he could provide suitable support for rearing children. She is not as keen on Roger, but he has a steady job and makes good money. He could provide a stable home and many advantages to a growing family. Jenny ends up marrying Roger.
It is important to note that the early proponents of eugenics never contemplated the mass extermination of anyone. The movement was a natural development from the acceptance of Darwin's theory of 'natural selection.' Mary Stopes however, did advocate family planning—not to kill the unborn, but to enable women to restrict their family to a manageable number, so they could cope, and the family had sufficient continuing resources to rear the children in a healthy and adequate way.
It is hard to peer beneath the layers of sensationalism, fear mongering and abuse in Rutherford's article, but there are definite overtones of the 'right-to-life' movement. Though, as he purports to be a 'scientist', I would have hoped for more rational discussion, free of logical fallacies, with rigorous definitions.
Another consideration is the modern phenomenon of sizeable industries, (quite profitable ones), springing up around areas of interest to the politically correct: racism; womens' rights; aborigines; children. These topics form a nucleus around which an industry develops: not-for-profits, university departments (seeking government grants and preparing 'reports'), civil councils and survey companies who can contrive a survey so as to support any proposition their client wants. These councils and not-for-profits tend to pay their directors and senior managers very well.
For a look at some of the 'reports' I have seen presented to the public as genuine data, see my collection 'Reports & Findings.'
Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill 2023
In early 2023, the Australian Federal Government called for public submissions on a proposed misinformation & disinformation bill. (download)
There were over 23,000 responses—many of them critical of the bill for suppressing free speech and setting up the government as the ultimate arbiter of truth. (my submission)
The government has subsequently put off the bill's introduction until sometime in 2024 and undertaken to 'overhaul' its provisions. (Guardian article)
The Government department which ran the submission process, (Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts), proudly states on its website, (link), that all submissions are 'available on this page.' But they forget to mention that you must be a subscriber to 'Microsoft Office 365' to be able to open the spreadsheets containing the links to the submissions. And even Google Docs and Google Sheets were unable to open the files!
This is just another sign of the evolution of political correctness and 'wokism' into fully fledged totalitarian dictatorship.
Gatekeeper Bias And How It Impacts Everything
A copy of an article posted on Medium by Peter Burns. It puts forward a useful logical structure for understanding how the information we receive daily is selected, suppressed or trivialised so as to support various dominant forces and/or opinions in modern society.
The article provides a useful image of the mechanism by which information transmission and suppression is achieved, however, it does not delve into the forces that form the biases enacted by the 'gatekeepers'. The model leaves those as 'blank spaces' to be filled by further research.
I have started a collection of articles illustrating gatekeeper bias. (link)
Free Speech Concerns with Social Media Laws
(YouTube video) (transcript) (proposal pdf).
Peta Credlin interviews Sam Macedoni, of Macedoni Legal, and the director of research at The Institute of public affairs, Morgan Begg, on the Federal government's proposed bill: 'Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation'.
This bill will give the ACMA (Australian Communications and Media Authority) the power to determine what's true and what's false online.
Penalties for spreading 'misinformation':
For individuals: From $7,260 to $1,210,00
For companies: From $9,680 to $6,050,000 to 5% of annual turnover.*1
The type of logic that the ACMA will use in determining what is 'misinformation' is illustrated in their reply to my complaint against ABC News. They use a gatekeeping or frame process to eliminate or emphasise factors that they admit for consideration.
With the ABC complaint they chose to consider that the 'ABC Code of Conduct' only came into play once programming decisions had been made i.e. once deference had been paid to the current political masters, and any contrary viewpoints eliminated from representation (cancelled).
With this current legislation, it is to be expected that a host of 'politically correct' ideas will be accepted as axiomatic truths and any views that differ from them will be automatically branded as 'misinformation' or 'untruth'.
It sounds frightening, but don't worry, it is only content disseminated by individuals and companies that will be subject to the legislation. (So if you are not an 'individual' you are OK!) Also exempt is content produced by 'professional news services' or that which is 'authorised' by any government, (Commonwealth, state, or local). So at the next election we can expect the usual run of lies and slanders. However, independent canditates and opposition parties may be in for a bit of bother — they are not listed as 'excluded' content providers.
This is, without doubt, blatant fascist totalitarianism!
The Government is calling for comments on the proposed legislation ending August 6th (Link)
1. The fines in this piece of legislation are recorded as 'penalty units' (PU), a standard amount of money used to compute penalties. The value of one penalty unit in Commonwealth law as of 1 July 2020 was $222. It is increased with inflation on 1st July every three years. Wikipedia
17th August 2023
Former director and chairman of the ABC calls for a Royal Commission into ABC bias.
In a 'Paul Murray Live' segment on Sky News (YouTube), Murray interviews Maurice Newman, former chairman of the ABC. They discuss a recent report from the ABC Ombudsman, Fiona Cameron, and Newman calls for a royal commission into the continuing bias and misleading reporting on the ABC.
Maurice Newman was director of the ABC from 2000 to 2004 and Chairman of the ABC for 5 years from January 2007 to March 2012. He says that whilst he was chairman he tried to bring about change, and there were meetings etc. but nothing changed.
Someone of Newman's stature and experience calling for a Royal Commission is a newsworthy item. However, it has not been reported or mentioned at all on ABC TV — a textbook example of 'cancelling'.
Sighted: 15th December 2024
US Senator Bernie Sanders on 'oligarchies'
[A 5-minute video worth a watch.]
Shortened transcript:
We often talk about the 'Oligarchs of Russia' — nowhere else! But Oligarchy is a global phenomena, and it is headquartered in the United States.
A small number of incredibly wealthy billionaires own and control much of the global economy.
Increasingly they own and control our government through a corrupt campaign financing system.
Since 2020, 5 billion people all over the world have become poorer, whilst the world's 5 richest billionaires have more than doubled their fortunes at a rate of $14 million per hour.
Over the past decade, the wealthiest 1% of the global population amassed $42 trillion in new wealth, while the wealth of the bottom half of sociey barely budged.
... the top 1% owns more wealth than 95% of the people on this earth. ... the wealthiest people in the world are stacking up to $32 trillion in offshore tax havens ...in order to avoid paying their fair share of taxes...
The über rich spend money to protect their wealth. They do it by buying influence and, increasingly, by buying our elections. Billionaires in the United states are .0005% of the population yet they accounted for 18% of 2024 electoral spending.
... And AIPAC, a billionaire-funded super PAC, spent over 100 million to defeat members of congress who were critical of the extremist right-wing Netanyahu government in Israel and the horrific war they are waging in Gaza...
... This is not democracy ... this is not all of us coming to together to decide our future. This is oligarchy.
In my view, this issue of oligarchy is the most important issue facing our country and the world.
Sighted: 17th December 2024
Ryan Chapman: What is fascism?
[A 40-minute video.]
'Fascism' is one of the most loosely understood words in the political lexicon. The two recognised instances of fascist governments are those of Italy and Germany between the World Wars.
The Backpacker Tax: (article)
Usman Khawaja backs cricket journalist axed over Gaza social media posts
A Guardian article of 4th February 2025 reports that long time sports commentator Peter Lalor has been dropped from the radio coverage of Australia’s tour of Sri Lanka for his social media posts relating to the war in Gaza.
The reason given for his dismissal was that his retweeting of events in Gaza made Jewish people in Melbourne feel unsafe.
Lalor made a statement: "Standing up for the people of Gaza is not antisemitic nor does it have anything to do with my Jewish brothers and sisters in Australia but everything to do with the Israeli government and their deplorable actions. It has everything to do with justice and human rights."
This represents an extension on the conflation of criticism of Israel and anti-semitism, (see Louise adler interview), to the point where any statement of fact that is distastful to anyone is forbidden.
ZIONISM
ABC 7.30 Report: Laura Tingle Interviews Louise Adler
4th December 2023
Laura Tingle interviews Louise Adler, director of Adelaide Writers' Week, over the furore created by three actors in the Sydney Theatre Company's new production of the Chekhov play 'The Seagull', wearing the Palestinian scarf during curtain calls.
A lot of Jewish supporters of the theatre said that they were really confronted by this. Many have threatened to withdraw financial suport for the company.
Adler, a woman of Jewish heritage, supports the rights of actors/artists to be involved with the political processes in the world around them. She points out that there has been a long and assiduous campaign by those who support Israel to silence protest and promote the idea that any criticism of the state of Israel is anti-semitic.
Three Antisemitic Slurs that Israel Makes True
3rd February 2025 article by David Spero
A beautifully referenced article examining what has become obvious since the 7th October attack and Israel's continuing genocide in Gaza, that slurs brought against Jews since the Middle Ages are being made real by the actions of the Israel Defense Force in Gaza and the West Bank.
This is a well considered piece, and the amount of supporting references (links) included is impressive.
Why this Jew turned against Israel
27th September 2024
This is a soul-wrenching article published on Medium last September.
The writer outlines a long history of human rights abuses committed by Israel against Palestinians. She comments: "The only light here is that my generation and educated Jews worldwide, such as progressive groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, are finally waking up to the monstrosity that is Israel and organizing for its destruction."
The writer also names individuals and organisations who have put the alternate view of Zionism on the record.
The author makes some outlandish claims but gives no references to supporting documents/evidence. So, to test the ideas I have added footnotes listing what evidence I could find by internet searches at the bottom of my copy.
ABORIGINAL ISUES: FIRST NATIONS' VOICE TO PARLIAMENT
Andrew Provin Interviewing Marcia Langton
Afternoon Briefing ABC TV Friday 21st October 2022
Marcia Langton criticises senator Thorpe as having no common sense, an inability to understand the rules and a willingness to break them.
She lacks the judgement required for her role as the Greens spokesperson for First Nations people and the Greens are displaying a peculiar form of racism by keeping her on as the party’s Indigenous affairs spokeswoman.
She calls on the Greens to totally ditchy their present set of policies, which look like they were written on the back of a bar tab 'and seem to amount to about seven billion dollars for reparations.'
14th September 2023 update
A report in the New Daily and Sky News on a talk given by Marcia Langton in WA on Sunday 10th Sept. 2023.
In her talk, Langton says:
"Every time the No cases raise their arguments, if you start pulling it apart, you get down to base racism – I’m sorry to say that’s where it lands – or sheer stupidity."
"If you look at any reputable fact-checker, every one of them says the No case is substantially false, they are lying to you."
The Sky News article also gives access to other footages (local-copy) where Langton's statements include:
"Hard No voters of the Voice to Parliament are spewing racism."
"Families have been broken apart by social workers who are, by and large, white and racist."
"We need a radical culture change to stop the the police from criminalising more and more people. . . Simply because the police are racist, because they get brownie points to rounding people up."
Anthony Albanese: Speech made at the Garma Festival 2022 (article)
Inside the News: Tony Abbott 2023 (video)
Tony Abbott, former Prime Minister, explains his reasons for standing opposed to the enshrining of an Aboriginal Voice to Federal Parliament.
Malcolm Turnbull: Reasons why he opposes a constitutionally enshrined voice to parliament. (article)
A Sydney Morning Herald article reporting on Malcolm Turnbull's statements on Q&A in December 2017. He explains his government's reasons for rejecting the idea to enshrine an Indigenous voice in federal parliament.
02/04/2023: John Anderson explains his opposition to the Aboriginal voice to Parliament referendum
(transcript)
Reporter Matthew Doran interviews John Anderson, a committee member of the 'Recognise a Better Way' group, which is campaigning for a 'no' vote at the upcoming referendum for enshrining an Aboriginal voice to parliament in the Australian constitution. (article)
Anderson is a committee member for the 'Recognise a Better Way' group, which is campaigning for a 'no' vote at the upcoming referendum for enshrining an Aboriginal voice to parliament in the Australian constitution. Anderson's puts his group's opinions clearly:
The interviewer, Matthew Doran, reveals a fundamental feature of the ABC's massive campaign to promote a 'yes' vote at the referendum. As the ABC's chief Canberra reporter, he thought the meeting in Tamworth (Friday 31st March 2023) was the launch of the 'Recognise a Better Way' group 'no' campaign. Anderson points out that the launch happened some time previously, (20th January). As a follower of ABC news I did not hear about the launch, and the coverage by the ABC was so minimal, that even one of its own lead reporters had not heard of it.
If you do a Google search, you can find an article by ABC News on the launch, but it didn't appear in the email ABC News feed I use, and certainly was not mentioned on ABC TV. Perhaps there was a brief snippet that I missed! but certaily not repeated endlessly throughout the day as pro-yes-vote segments are.
Effects of the Waitangi tribunal in New Zealand 2023 (video)
Anthony Albanese has said that Australia should follow the example of New Zealand's Waitangi Tribunal in our efforts at reconcilliation with indigenous peoples.
The Institute of Public Affairs has recently published a report which made some disturbing findings:
General
Specific
Download full report as pdf here (link)
Pauline Hanson on the voice to parliament: Pauline Hanson speaking in federal parliament on the voice (video)
Pauline Hanson deliering a speech in the Federal House of Representatived in August 2022 outlining her reasons for opposing a constitutionally enshrined First Nations' Voice to Parliament. It is interesting to note that the chamber is devoid of any other members of Parliament.
Main Points
Ray Hadley Morning show 23/03/2023: National Indigenous Australian Agency $4.4 billion annual budget (radio recording)
It is claimed that a Federal Government Indigenous body with a $4.4 billion annual budget, has drawn up a list of 11 demands to be made once 'The Voice' is established. Copies of the original documents were tabled in parliament by Pauling Hanson.
This story was reported by the Daily Mail (link) and by news.com (link), but strangely ABC News did not mention it at all.
The 11 Points
1st May 2023, ABC News:
What 11 First Nations politicians think about a Voice to Parliament (article)
1st May 2023: We are in the midst of a discussion about the proposition to enshrine an Aboriginal voice to (federal) parliament in the Australian constitution.
This ABC article purports to be asking the eleven federal members of parliament, who claim Aboriginal heritage, their views on the issue. The headline reads:
Here's what they think of a Voice to Parliament.
You can read the views expressed via the above link. However, there is a fundamental confusion inherent in the question that is being asked.
There are in fact four distinct questions being discussed in the current debate, but the terms referring to them are continually being confused and concatenated:
These are the questions, yet the ABC, and all the parliamentarians interviewed are content to use the ambiguous term 'Voice to Parliament'.
The video link that heads the ABC article connects to an ABC production entitled 'Everything You Need to Know About the Voice' (See article below).
This video fails to mention any of the distinctions given in the list above. It certainly doesn't mention the fact that an Aboriginal voice to parliament could be established by an act of parliament, and it claims that the failure of previous Aboriginal voice bodies was entirely due to political interference.
In particular it says that these bodies were 'corrupted and abolished'. The use of the passive voice in 'corrupted' means that the corruption was done to these bodies, it didn't emanate from them.
Here is a link to a SMH article that gives a good history of the succession of Aboriginal advisory bodies since the early 70s. (SMH article)
Here is a link to a Spectator article that outlines most of the arguments against enshrining a Voice in the Constitution. (Spectator article)
This Spectator article speculates on some possible extreme ramifications of a Voice. (Spectator article)
* * *
Conclusion: Without declaring terms and using them consistently, all discussion is utterly useless and misleading. The current state of confusion, failure to properly define and name questions, rampant name calling and personal abuse, 'blaming' and claiming 'victimhood', cannot, in any sense, be called a sensible discussion.
ABC Video Lab: All You Need to Know About the Voice
The ABC has put out a 14 minute video entitled 'All You Need to Know About the Voice'. It purports to give a full rundown on the issues involved in the current discussion of the proposed enshrinement of an Aboriginal voice to parliament in the Australian Constitution.
online video transcript local copy
The video does give a history of the development of the Voice proposal but it doesn't:
The video also makes various contentious claims, such as that the voice is the best way to improve the lives of Aboriginals.
Andrew Bolt: Discussing Lidia Thorpe's hatred-stoking behaviour (video)
Saturday 15th April, Lidia Thorpe (senator) is filmed abusing white men after she is ejected from a strip club.
Andrew Bolt airs a segment two days later looking at Lidia Thorpe's history and exposing some of the hate-stoking that is on the national media.
Lidia Thorpe: Queens day of mourning protests. (article)
Protesters have set fire to the Australian flag and called to 'abolish the monarchy' hours after the national memorial service was held to mourn the Queen.
Lidia Thorpe raised a 'bloodstained' hand: 'The Crown has blood on their hands. Our people are still dying in this country every single day. The Crown's boot is on our neck and we're sick of it.'
The Australian: Senator Mal Brough says that 'the voice' referendum will succeed but it will divide Australia. (article)
online (login required) local-copy
You need a subscription to The Australian to follow the above link. For those who don't, I give the following precis:
Mal Brough, the Indigenous Affairs minister in 2007, when the 'intervention' was introduced to respond to widespread child abuse in Aboriginal communities, says of the proposed Indigenous Voice to parliament:
Vaious 'Yes' campaigners have come out to criticise Mr Brough's opinions including former Liberal Indigenous Australians minister, Ken Wyatt, who described Mr Brough's arguments as "garbage".
The Australian 2nd Jan. 2022: Silence on details is already dooming the voice to failure. An opinion piece by Greg Craven (article)
online (login required) local-copy
Craven is a director of the pro-voice organisation 'Uphold and Recognise'.
He says:
'Eminent Australians will not back the voice until they know what it is.'
'The government’s formal position is a constitutional lucky dip. You pay your money, stick your hand in the barrel and hope the prize is not a dud.'
'Who would buy a car without knowing its make or price?'
The questions needing answers from government are:
The Australian Human Rights Commission: About Constitutional Recognition
This document has no date attached, but it talks about the Expert Panel on Constitutional recognition due to report to the Government in 2011.
It is basically arguing for constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander people in the Constitution (as in a preamble), and does not mention 'The Voice to Parliament' as envisioned in the coming referendum.
It goes into much discussion of Section 51. (xxvi):
"The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws for the peace, order, and good government of the Commonwealth with respect to:-
(xxvi) The people of any race for whom it is necessary to make special laws.
It claims that this permits the Commonwealth Parliament to validly enact laws that are racially discriminatory and contemplates disqualifying people from voting on the basis of their race. It cites the Northern Territory Intervention as one example and argues that the article should be removed.
It claims that when the Constitution was drawn up, "Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were considered a 'dying race' not worthy of citizenship or humanity."
It doesn't mention that what was meant by 'aboriginal people' in the Constitution were full-blood aboriginals. Partial aboriginal-blooded people were counted in the censuses ever since 1901.
Wikipedia: "In 1901, the Attorney-General Alfred Deakin provided a legal opinion on the meaning of section 127 of the Constitution. Section 127 excluded 'aboriginal natives' from being counted when reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth or a state. His legal advice was that 'half-castes' were not 'aboriginal natives'".
Also The Commonwealth Electoral Act 1962 gave all Aboriginal people the option of enrolling to vote in federal elections. It was not until the Commonwealth Electoral Amendment Act 1983 that voting became compulsory for Aboriginal people, as it was for other Australians.
If I were marking this internet article as an essay, I would criticise it for using confusing terms and failing to define terms, and for making unsubstantiated conjectures such as 'not worthy of humanity'. Everyone should read Daisy Bates: 'The Passing of the Aborigines', for ground-level insights from a woman who devoted her life to caring for and promoting Aboriginals and their culture.
Warren Mundine on merged 'No' campaign organisation: 'Australians for Unity' (video)
Warren Mundine explains that the 'No' campaigns run by himself and Jacinta Price have merged into one, called 'Australians for Unity'.
Their main arguments against a 'yes' vote to enshrine an Aboriginal Voice to Parliament are:
Laura Tingle on the voice 'no' campaign (ABC News)
This is a copy of an ABC News article of 15th July 2023. Written by Laura Tingle, it claims to be an 'analysis' but is in fact an 'opinion' piece.
Tingle starts by discussing an anonomous pamphlet that was distributed into letterboxes in suburban Melbourne that claimed the Voice would lead to Treaty, and then to financial reparations, which would mean ordinary Australians paying higher taxes. Note: The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) estimated the cost of the referendum would be about $450 million and the federal government had supplied $364 million in the most recent budget to deliver the referendum. It is unclear if these figures include the massive injection of taxpayer funds into 'Yes' campaign activities.
The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) estimated the cost of the referendum would be about $450 million and the federal government had supplied $364 million in the most recent budget to deliver the referendum.She doesn't dispute this financial argument, but likens it to the Royal Commission on Robodebt where politicians were found to have a negative attitude to welfare recipients. So, she is saying that Aboriginal people tend to be welfare recipients.*1
She acknowledges that some 'questions or objections from the 'No' campaign on constitutional, legislative and process grounds... have been quite reasonable questions.' Note the incorrect grammar avoids saying whether the 'objections' were reasonable or not.
She then goes on to make her main point, that the leaflet 'jumps the shark straight to the issue of money.' (I was stumped by 'shark' for a moment, but have decided she means 'start'.) This she claims, is 'downward envy' — where someone in a superior position envies someone in a position lower then themselves — and is an echo of the attitude of politicians reported in the Robodebt enquiry.
Tingle dismisses the pamphet's claims of '[a] range of other things the voice will do' by the argument 'untrue' in parentheses, but doesn't list the claims or offer any argument to support her summary dismissal. She then burrows down on her main thesis of 'downward envy'.
She argues that opponents of the voice are begrudging of social security payments to the poor or are jealous of the advantages given to the poor.
The directional term 'downward' may be true of a highly paid professional who is struggling to pay off a massive student debt, when they contemplate the relatively fee-free and subsidised state of aboriginal education. But it hardly describes the situation of a non-aboriginal old age pensioner who faces a wait of 10 years to move into Government housing and sees young Aboriginal people being given priority.
Perhaps we need a new term such as 'horizontal envy'.
*1 Senate committee report 2004 A Hand up not a Hand Out: 'Approximately 50 per cent of Indigenous adults are reliant on some form of welfare payment and for young people (aged 15 to 24 years) the proportion is only slightly lower.' [Many are at school] (link)
Michael Mansell on why he opposes the 'Voice'
This is a transcript of an ABC News segment shown on 21st July 2023. Michael Mansell, chairman of the Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania, and the national secretary of the Aboriginal Provisional Government, explains why he thinks the referendum should be abandoned. The segment appeared on TV but did not rate an article on the ABC News internet site or news feed.
Newsreader: The campaigns 'for' or 'against' a voice to Parliament are ramping up with pamphlets finalised and ready to be sent out.
Michael Mansell, from the Tasmanian Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania is against the proposal. He says the referendum should be abandoned to avoid what he describes as social division.
Mansell: This is unlike any other referendum, in the sense that the content is unclear. And so, instead of people focussing on the content, they're turning against the people on the other side.
No one knows what exactly the advisory body can and can't do.
The Prime Minister should have legislated in advance — and he can still do that. Then anybody would know, via the legislation, the limitations and the extent, of the ability of the advisory body to inform policy.
But at the moment, people are making decisions on the run, and you can see that the polls are going down and down in the wrong way for the 'yes' campaign. And I think that's mostly because people are unsure — they're not against Aboriginal advancement. They are not racist.
I think people are fearful they're putting something in the Constitution that they don't understand. It's something that they're nervous about.
Presenter: michael Mansell there, talking about the voice to Parliament.
* * * END OF NEWS SEGMENT * * *
[I.B. Comment]: In this segment Mansell does not put forward his proposals for recognition of First Nations people. However, an interview he gave in December 2022 to 'Sydney Criminal Lawyers' gives some insight.
Mansell: 'The favoured option of grassroots Aboriginal political advocates is that the Australian government enter into a treaty-making process with First Nations, which serves to acknowledge two sovereign entities and provide land and water rights.'
Mansell proposes a designated number of Senate seats should be set aside for Aboriginal people. As each state has 12 senators, he proposes one of them be set aside for an Aboriginal elected person.
Mansell: 'If those six Aboriginal seats combined with the other 10 Aboriginal members of parliament who are now elected through political parties, you can see that for the first time Aboriginal people would have a real voice inside parliament.'
Mansell: 'You don’t need a treaty and you certainly do not need constitutional change, because the Constitution already provides for parliament to decide on how many members there will be in the Senate. ... At any time, a majority of one in the lower house and a majority of one in the Senate can amend the Australian Electoral Act to provide for one Aboriginal seat in each state.'
[I.B. Comment]: Whilst the Constitution does gives Parliament a power to alter the number of senators elected by each state it requires quite a stretch of the interpretive imagination is say that the extra seats in the Senate could be allocated exclusively to a minority racial group.
Liberal MP Bev McArthur reveals secret agreements between Victorian Government and Aboriginal groups
Articles in 'The Spectator' on 22nd July and 17th August 2023 by Victorian state Liberal MP, Bev McArthur, reveal details of a secret agreement entered into by the Victorian Government with Aboriginal groups. The agreement signed with 5 local Aboriginal groups affects 10 local councils.
online: article 1 article 2
local-copies: copy 1 copy 2
On top of the 36,000km2 proclaimed Native Title in 2005, 12 parks in the area will be granted Aboriginal title and they will also jointly manage all current and new parks and reserves in the agreement area.
Government will support the Aboriginal groups to obtain exemption from local government rates. The 10 local councils will have to acknowledge the Aboriginal groups as the traditional owners and pay them for welcome to country ceremonies.
All new local roads, bridges, and spaces would be given Aboriginal names, and current names deemed offensive will be replaced.
The Aboriginal flag would need to be flown on all council buildings and plaques attached and signage erected in public areas to indicate who the traditional owners are.
Etc. etc. etc... Quite a read.
Paul Bongiorno writes on the 'Voice' debate
29th August 2023
This article in The New Daily follows the familiar pattern of 'Yes' campaign material. The first clause makes a sweeping mis-statement (what we used to call a 'lie' in 'Oldspeak'):
'Though the campaign for a referendum recognising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders as the First Nations people of this continent formally begins only on Wednesday...'
Bongiorno is stating that the 'Voice' question is purely about recognising First Nations people as the first human inhabitants of Australia.
In fact there are 4 questions being asked in the referendum:
Bongiorno then proceeds to claim that the discussion has been turned into 'a partisan political contest', which is the sole reason for the decline in support for the Voice.
No mention or credence is given to any arguments against the Voice. But he goes on to claim the white settlement of Australia was 'an historical wrong' and a 'cruel dispossession', whilst the sole motivation for the Liberals & Nationals to oppose the voice was to increase their chances of winning the next federal election.
He sums up the arguments for the 'No' campaign as 'extending from crude racism to wild exaggeration'. However, he doesn't state or discuss any of those arguments.
I would describe the article as an example of 'hate speech'.
30th August 2023
John Howard gives his views on the 'Voice'
In an interview with 'Sharri' on Sky News former Prime Minister John Howard gives his views on the proposed constitutional enshrinement of an Aboriginal voice to Parliament.
He says that the 'Yes' case is very weak and he is against the proposal for three reasons:
The further ramification of the Voice, Treaty, is absurd. Treaties are made between countries, not between bits of ourselves.
Sporting codes and big business should not be coming out in favour of the Voice. They should remain neutral. How do they know they are speaking for all their members. In fact individual clubs are being 'dragooned' into support.
There are three things that maintain democracy in this country:
You don't need Governments saying now, we're going to define what's dis-information and what's mis-information. A Government pushing for a mis-information bill is absurd.
On the 'apology' Howard says: 'I don't believe one can apologise for the actions of another.'
SBS News: Yes or No? Here are the key arguments for and against the Voice (article)
13th June 2023 by Finn McHugh.
This article begins by stating that the referendum question will be:
"A proposed law: to alter the Constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice. Do you approve this proposed alteration?"
I have tried searching but I can't find out whether the voting paper will list the actual wording of the constitutional amendment. All that stuff about making representation to Government and Executive, Parliament to decide on its powers etc.
Mr McHugh seems to know more than the rest of us, telling us that it will be 'gender equal' including youth members; it will negotiate Truth and Treaty processes; its members will be accountable; it has been given the 'greenlight' by legal experts [all? or some? what does 'greenlight' mean?]; its central role will be entrenched; future Governments could change or sideline it.
This article is typical of the confused, virtue signalling of 'Yes' campaign material. It fails to mention the main arguments against a 'Yes' vote including:
Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price addresses National Press Club
'The 'voice' is flawed in its foundations. It is built on lies, and an aggressive attempt to fracture our nation's founding document and divide the country built upon it.'
The 'voice' is seeking to divide us by race, and truth-telling commissions misrepresent Aboriginal life prior to the arrival of the British, seeking to 'nurture a national self-loathing about the foundations of modern Australian achievement.'
The structures that currently exist to deliver the much needed outcomes to our marginalised communities, like land councils, native title and similar organizations — the Aboriginal 'industry' — are failing, and they need to be held accountable. If the gap were closed this industry would 'come to a screaming halt'.
Existing structures and efforts in the Aboriginal space are all ideologically based rather than evidence based. They have constructed a fantasy Aboriginal culture, populated by victims without agency. They perpetuate this and feed off it.
IB: a Wonderful speech, eloquently delivered. Well worth listening to in full.
Thomas Keneally writes in the Guardian on the 'Voice' 22/09/2023
Keneally rails against 'the astonishing lies of the no campaign...'
Let's have a look at these lies:
Lie 1: The 'voice' will result in white Australians losing title to their land.
Keneally gives no reference for this claim but the fact is that there are currently 40,000 Aboriginal land claims in process in NSW — 3,000 in the Greater Sydney Area. (article). This week on national TV Warren Mundine said Aboriginals now have title to 50% of the Australian land mass, and it will become 75%. (reference)
Lie 2: The 'voice' will persuade the government to pass laws that will disadvantage non-Aboriginal Australians.
The Prime Minister says we should look to New Zealand for a model for the 'voice'. In New Zealand the 'Waitangi Tribunal' provides representations to government from the Māori people. A recent report has found the Māori 'voice' has led to veto over certain legislation, divisive racial politics, laws that compromise community safety, etc. (reference)
Lie 3: The 'elite' First Nations people who have succeeded in white culture have nothing to tell us of their own people.
I think this 'lie' springs from observation of the displays of wealth from people such as Linda Burney — an endless wardrobe of designer clothes and pearl jewellery sets — and the propensity to describe pre-colonial Aboriginal culture as a type of idyllic Eden. Marcia Langton has just brought out a book on Aboriginal law that puts Plato's 'Republic' in the shade, and I heard an 'elder' say on TV last week that they were 'restoring the matriarchy.'
Daisy bates, in her 'Passing of the Aborigines' describes the status of women in the Aboriginal camp:
"Only those who live and work for years in native camps can realize the daily struggle of the poor women for the barest subsistence. They come behind the dogs in the economy of camp life." (reference)
Keneally goes on to liken the rate of Aboriginal deaths in custody as 'capital punishment'. He fails to differentiate between rates of committing crimes punishable by prison terms and rates of deaths in custody. Whilst a greater percentage of Aboriginal people go to gaol than non-Aboriginal people, their rate of 'death in custody' is the same or less than that of non-Aboriginal people. (reference)
Perhaps Keneally's article is a subtle play on the 'liar paradox'. (article)
Paul Formosa discuses the ethics of the Aboriginal 'Voice' to Parliament
SBS News 15th September 2023
Paul Formosa is a professor and Head of the Department of Philosophy at Macquarie University and co-director of the Macquarie University Ethics & Agency Research Centre. (So, one would expect an article by him would be logically and academically sound.)
He starts out with a statement of the philosophical concerns raised by the voice proposal:
He is talking about two groups: non-Indigenous Australians and Indigenous Australians. And in the first question he seems to be saying that only non-Indigenous Australians are going to be voting in the referendum. (But he doesn't raise this notion again.)
He goes on to clarify this by saying it is a feature of a democracy that the majority can make decisions that affect the rights enjoyed by a minority but there are checks and balances in the Constitution conferring rights and setting out structures for balance.
As for one group enjoying rights that another lacks, he points to the fact that the citizens of Queensland have a right to vote in that state's state elections, whereas citizens of New South Wales can't do so. Hey presto! Here is one group enjoying a privilege that another group doesn't enjoy.
At first glance this analogy seems apt, but a closer analysis reveals a fundamental flaw:
The constitution gives all Australian citizens of voting age the right to vote in federal elections and the right to vote in the state elections of the state where they are live (their address on the elctoral roll). The actual right is the right to vote in the state elections of the state where they live — not Queensland; not NSW; but the state where they live.
Formosa has 'invented' two 'rights':
These are 'straw men' that he constructs so he can pull them down to 'prove' his point that some people legitamately have rights that other people don't have. But in fact, all citizens have the same right — the right to vote in the state elections of the state where they live.
The analogy is false, but he goes on to use it again saying that Australians with a disability have rights that non-disabled people have e.g. the National Disability Insurance Scheme.
As with the state-voting-rights example, he focuses on two particular applications of a general right and calls them separate rights — 'straw men'.
The general right is that Australians can receive benefits from the disability support system if they are, or become disabled. Just as a NSW voter can vote in a Queensland state election if they change their registered address to Queensland, a citizen can receive disability support if they 'move into the class' of people with a disability.
Note that both these analogies would be logically sound if an non-Aboriginal Australian could 'become' an Aboriginal Australian if they wished to do so. (Perhaps this is what Bruce Pascoe is about?)
He then goes on to justify special rights as compensation for loss and disadvantage. This may be a valid point, perhaps the first in his entire article. But he doesn't give any justification for the Voice being enshrined in the Constitution, apart form 'insulation [it] from democratic meddling', nor does he mention that the 'Voice' could be legislated for now — without holding a referendum — and recognition could come from a mention in a preamble.
I don't believe a professor of Philosophy would fail to notice the glaring logical fallacies in this article. So I must conclude the article to be a cleverly constructed logical lampooning of the arguments for a 'Yes' vote on enshrining an Aboriginal Voice in the Australian Constitution.
ABORIGINAL ISUES: TRUTH TELLING
The Guardian 20th Dec. 2022: Indigenous deaths in custody (article)
The Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show that 812,728 Australians identify as Aboriginal — 3.2% of the general population (812,728), (link). The figures also show that Australians identifying as Aboriginal make up 32% of the Australian prison population (link).
The Australian Institute of Criminology reports that for the calendar year 2022, there were 113 deaths in custody — 33 Indigenous, (29.2%), and 80 non-indigenous, (70.8%). (link)
With factors of rounding and averaging, these figures indicate that the rates of death are the same for Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in custody. However, an April 2021 Guardian article, (link), calculated that for 2018-19, Aboriginal people died at a rate of 0.13 per 100 prisoners, compared to a death rate of 0.21 per 100 prisoners for the total prison population.
So the problem is not the rate of Aboriginal deaths in custody, but the rate of Aboriginal incarceration. The question is whether this is due to Aboriginal offending or police profiling and victimisation.
Andrew Bolt — Finally, Bruce Pascoe Confronted (video)
Andrew Bolt discusses Bruce Pascoe being confronted on SBS television about his claims to be of Aboriginal heritage and that Aboriginals, before white settlement, were sophisticated farmers, living in houses, in towns of up to 1,000 people, with complicated dams and wells, huge fields of crops, and silos 3 metres tall, each with a tonne of grain, which have all been destroyed by the whites.
There is a children's version of 'Dark Emu' and the ABC has heavily promoted Pascoe, including his claims in their education unit for schools.
Fact-checking has found that all Pascoe's ancestors were white.
Census figures are indicating that there are 300,000 people wrongly claiming Aboriginal heritage. There is a big problem of fake Aborigines even taking powerful jobs in land councils and other Aboriginal organisations.
Andrew Bolt — ABC's Indigenous documentary 'contains brand-new history' (video)
Bolt examines Bruce Pascoe's claims that one of his great-grandmothers was Aboriginal and Aboriginals were not hunter gatherers but sophisticated farmers, with huge fields of crops etc.
His book, 'Dark Emu', has won the NSW Premier's Award for best book and its new children's version is now being handed out to children by politicians.
Bolt presents evidence to show these claims are completely false.
Geoffrey Blainey & Warren Mundine — Dark Emu, Bruce Pascoe and the Hunter-Gatherer Controversy (video)
The Sydney Institute YouTube channel hosts an interview with Warren Mundine, a government advisor on Indigenous affairs and Professor Geoffrey Blainey a respected Australian historian. They are discussing the claim of Bruce Pascoe, author of 'Dark Emu', that he is of Aboriginal descent.
Mundine: Bruce Pascoe takes some relevant historical truths and blows them up into massive ideas such as agriculture, villages and townships of 1,000 people etc. and downgrades the gunter-gatherer society. If these had existed they would be recorded in our song lines. They are not there.
It is bizaar that the purported facts presented in 'Dark Emu' are being taught in our schools and universities, when there is no evidence to support them. The book should not be treated as non-fiction.
Blainey: Bruce Pascoe seems to make up a lot of his Aboriginal history. He claims:
1. Aboriginal Australia was the birthplace of democracy.
Aboriginal government had:
2. Aboriginal Australia was a haven of trans-continental peace.
Wars between Aboriginal groups were frequent, as they were in nomadic societies in other parts of the world.
3. Massacres and terrible cruelties were covered up by the early settlers, rarely mentioned in Australian history books.
No. They are mentioned in a few hundred books, some written by me.
4. Torres Straight Islander people are the same as Aboriginal people.
In fact their history goes back fewer than 4,000 years, not 70,000 years. Their 'invasion' by the London missionary society in 1871 is still celebrated as 'the coming of the light'.
5. Aboriginal peoples were farmers who planted and harvested crops, lived in permanent villages and towns and stored vast quantities of food until the next harvest.
This idea is far-fetched and without supporting evidence. Pascoe's supposed 'grain belt' includes 5 deserts, which he does not represent on the map in his book.
Bruce Pascoe has accepted the 'enterprise chair in indigenous agriculture' at Melbourne University. I think the university has not yet justified the appointment.
Why should people who pretend to be Aboriginal claim privileges rightly designed for others? The evidence for Bruce Pascoe's Aboriginal descent does not exist.
The practice of pretending to be an Aboriginal is now on a large scale: The census of 2016, reveals that in the 10 years up to 2016 the Indigenous population expanded at 3 time the rate of the population of mainstream Australia. Half of that increase is from people who have never said they were aboriginal before.
You can't be handing out special roles to Aboriginals if you've not yet defined what is an Aboriginal person.
Mundine: ['Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers: the Dark Emu Debate' by Peter Sutton and Kerren Walsh] was a clear outing of Bruce Pascoe's book.
This idea that Aboriginals lived in a paradise with no wars is just total nonsense. Otherwise why would we have wars and conflicts in our song lines—which we do.
Keith Windchuttle — 'The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One, Van Diemen's Land 1803-1847' (article)
An opinion article in the Australian newspaper, in which Keith Windschuttle justifies and defends the ideas he has put forward about the fabrication of Aboriginal history, in his book 'The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One, Van Diemen's Land 1803-1847'. (2002)
In his book, Windschuttle argues that violence between whites and Aborigines in colonial Tasmania had been vastly exaggerated, and he seeks to rewrite one of the most troubling parts of Australian history. He wrote the article for the Australian after Robert Manne published a collection of essays by leading writers on Aboriginal history, Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History, that attacked his claims.
M. H. Monroe: Feud and warfare in traditional aboriginal society (article)
Michael Henry Monroe has an extensive website (link) that provides information and links to online resources about the history of Australia, its geological history, cultural history, archaeological sites and Aboriginal Australia.
The Aboriginal Australia section of the site is available as an ebook and a print-on-demand soft cover book: 'A biography of the Australian Continent Aboriginal Australia: a Students Guide'.
Monroe presents some amazing material on his site, and all the material is thoroughly referenced, however the reference page, whilst massively detailed, is incomplete and almost impossible to navigate. For the references that are listed, they are most easily found by a 'control + f' search for author surname or year of publication.
Daisy Bates: The Passing of the Aborigines
Daisy Bates (1863-1951) CBE was an Irish-Australian journalist, welfare worker and self-taught anthropologist who conducted fieldwork amongst several Indigenous nations in western and southern Australia. Bates was a lifelong student of Australian Aboriginal culture and society and was the first anthropologist to carry out a detailed study of Australian Aboriginal culture.
Bates' accounts of Aboriginal culture, were published in the Journal of Agriculture and later by anthropological and geographical societies in Australia and overseas. She published 'The Passing of the Aborigines: A Lifetime spent among the Natives of Australia' in 1938.
Federal Court rejects Aboriginal elder Dennis Fisher's bid to access age pension early due to life expectancy gap
An ABC News article of 12th July 2023 reports on the outcome of a high court case brought by an Aboriginal man who argues that because Aboriginal men, on average, die 3.2 years younger than non-indigenous men, they should be entitled to receive the aged pension 3 years earlier than non-indigenous men.
Uncle Dennis's legal team argued the current laws discriminated against Indigenous people, because they had less time to enjoy their pension due to the gap in average life expectancy compared with other Australians. However, the full bench of the Federal Court ruled the current system did not breach the Racial Discrimination Act.
The judges said the age pension was not designed to provide support for a specific number of years or to pay out a certain amount of money — instead, it was meant to prevent people from falling into poverty during old age.
"The social security system as a whole would not treat members of all races with equal dignity and respect if it provided members of a particular race with more limited access to the age pension than others," the judges said.
It is interesting to note that Uncle Dennis's legal bid was backed by the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service (VALS) and the Human Rights Law Centre (HRLC). By 'backed', I presume it means 'financed'. If 'truth telling' is to have any meaningful outcome, I think we need to know how much (in tax-payer dollars), this legal action cost, and whether or not Governments — federal and state — would finance a high court case for a person of any other racial grouping.
The Productivity Commission produced reports in 2010, 2012, 2014, & 2017 that calculated the dollar amounts that Governments, State and Federal, spent on Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander people compared to Australians who identified as non-aboriginal.
The 2017 report can be downloaded here: online local copy
The report tells us that in 2008-09 there were 642,795 Aboriginals in Australia from a population of 21,045,982 (3.054%).
Six years later, in 2015-16 the Aboriginal population had grown 15.85% to 744,668 from a total population of 23,379,235. (Report page 14, figure 4.3)
In 2015-16 the average direct expenditure per Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander person was $44,886, whilst the average direct expenditure per non-Indigenous Australian was $22,356.
Some of the difference is due to the extra cost of delivering services in remote areas, but much is due to increased use of services.
It would be interesting to learn why they haven't produced any reports since 2017.
A Fact Check
I saw this meme recently. The claims it makes seemed outlandish, so I decided to do some fact checking.
The first item I checked was the 2017 Indigenous Expenditure Report discussed above. The annual expenditure per person figures in the meme are close to those in the report. So I looked at some of the other headings.
There is a plethora of organisations and bodies, and the categories given in the meme tend to overlap, so it's almost impossible to get a clear picture. Here are some of the results from searching on the headings mentioned.
Aboriginal corporations
At 30 June 2022, there were 3,521 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander corporations registered under the CATSI Act, including 243 registered native title bodies corporate. (link)
Native title representative bodies
NIAA (National Indigenous Australians Agency) funds a network of 14 native title representative bodies (NTRBs) and native title service providers (NTSPs) to assist native title claimants and holders.(link)
Native title bodies corporate
In 2015, there were 144 RNTBCs registered with the Office of the Registrar of Indigenous Corporations (ORIC). (link)
Land councils
There are variious numbers of land councils in each state, (link), e.g. NSW has 120 Local Aboriginal Land Councils. (link)
Aboriginal agencies
The Wikipedia page entitled 'Organisations serving indigenous Australians' is the best guide I could find. There seems to be well over 100. (link)
3 Aboriginal advisory bodies
I found 3 Aboriginal advisory bodies listed for South Australia (link), and an interesting historical collection (link). But the subject defies any quick answers. It's complex.
Aboriginal health organisations
NACCHO (National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation) currently has 145 members that operate Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisations (ACCHOs) in urban, regional, and remote Australia. (link)
11 Indigenous federal MPs
Fifteen Indigenous Australian people have been members of the Parliament of Australia (the Federal Parliament), eleven in the Senate and four in the House of Representatives. Ten of them are in it today. (link)
12 culturally important indigenous days
This figure may have been taken from a list published by the Queensland Government. (link)
So was the picture a meme or a statement of fact? Follow some of the links and decide for yourself.
17th January 2023 update: A letter to Senator Louise Pratt, (ALP), dated 17th August 2023, but not released until after the referendum, provides a report of 6 months of expenditure through Indigenous Advancement Strategy (IAS) and Aboriginals Benefit Account (ABA) grants. The list is 270 pages long with at least 10 grants listed on each page. Some are only for a few thousand collars but many are for over $1,000,000. (link to report)
Balmoral Beach Aboriginal land claim: Chunk of 'prestigious' and affluent Sydney suburb worth $100m is claimed by an Indigenous group
'Daily Mail Australia' article 6th September 2023.
Mosman council has voted to oppose a native title claim over a bush reserve adjacent to popular Balmoral Beach. Interestingly, the article reveals there are some 3,000 Native Title claims for land in Sydney, and 40,000 in New South Wales awaiting assessment.
Of further interest is that the responsible NSW government departments forbade any publicity or public notification of the matter, insisting it remained 'classified' up until about 30 minutes before the council meeting, and, although I have searched, I have found no mention of this item on any ABC news outlet.
One can only wonder that the 'secrecy' has been imposed so as not to tarnish the glow of the 'Yes' campaign for a constitutionally enshrined Aboriginal voice to parliament.
National Indigenous Australians Agency grants January to June 2023
The National Indigenous Australians Agency (NIAA) is a Federal Government agency. It spent $2.645 billion in 2022–23, (link), as part of the indigenous Advancement Strategy (IAS) to deliver a range of programs for Indigenous Australians (and similar amount in 2023-24).
This document gives details of the grants approved by the NIAA from 1 January 2023 to 30 June 2023.
The Paradox of Jewish Identity
An article by Antoun Ananias, (a Jewish person), discussing the notions of Israel and the Jewish identity in the light of DNA studies of the relationships between Jewish Israeli citizens, Palestinians and a wide range of ethnic groups.
According to Ananias, the modern day Palestinians have a far higher DNA concordance with the ancient inhabitants of Israel than the Askenazi Jews.
This article brings up some interesting considerations but as far as I can find out, the claim that DNA testing is banned in Israel is false. I found an authoritative articel in 'The Journal of Law and the Biosciences' which has a cogent discussion on Israeli law and 'Jewishness'. (link)
Note: this video seems to be quite authoritative, but I have been unable to trace its source.
A Conversation with Margaret Mead
A YouTube video of Margaret Mead, famed anthropologist, being interviewed by William Mitchell.
In this 30 minute interview in 1959, Margaret Mead discusses several subjects that have been banned from discussion in the modern age of political correctness (read: supression, brainwashing, censorship, crowd dynamics).
She rejects the notion of the 'happy savage.' Whilst she notes that some primitive societies, pre-western-contact, were peaceful, happy societies, many were cruel and wretched. '.. this whole image of happy primitive man is one that we've cooked up out of our heads.' (link)
She encourages us to study and learn from primitive societies and transcend our state of being culture-bound in seeing the values of Western society as superior to all others.(link)
The war between the sexes she sees as an invention of Madison Avenue, (link), and sees the synthetic heroes and heroines that are constructed by the mass media as confusing to the issue of personal responsibility.
She sidesteps the elephant in the room created by affluence and advances in medical science: the increasing proportion of people in modern societies living with serious disabilities, (link), saying our society must develop to accommodate a wider range of humans, some of whom will bring special skills as well as limitations.
She notes that Western society is evolving, but there are no models on which to base our development. We have to make up models as we go along.
An interesting mid-century view of human society by one of the true pioneers of anthropology.
Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept.
A paper by Rabeah Eghbariah, published in the Colombia Law Rewiew, (sighted) 13th June 2024).
A study of the metamorphosis of Nakba, meaning "Catastrophe" in Arabic, through the ruinous process of establishing the State of Israel in Palestine — the 1948 mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians from Palestine and the destruction and looting of Palestinian homes and villages by Zionist paramilitary groups — into a brutally sophisticated structure of oppression, including episodes of genocide and variants of apartheid.
The paper is very much about the normalisation of a horror, and its acceptance as a principle of law, to harmonise with the heroic myth of the founding of Israel as an oppressed people finally regaining their true homeland.
He identifies apartheid, genocide, and Nakba as different, yet overlapping modalities of crimes against humanity.
Update: This paper came to my attention by a 'Democracy Now' interview on YouTube with the author, reporting that rather than publish the paper online, the Colombia Law Review took down their web site.
Guantanamo at 23.
An article published on medium.com by Dylan Evans
This article gives a succinct history of the US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, (island of Cuba), for 'unlawful combatants' i.e. people who are not entitled to protections under the Geneva Conventions.
I take copies of these things because I fear, in this totalitarian, fascist age we live in, there will be a great 'clean up' to rid the internet of material deemed to be misinformation, or derogatory towards the ruling powers.
PERCEPTION, SPIRITUALITY & RELIGION
Donald Hoffman: The Case against reality. (video)
Donald David Hoffman is an American cognitive psychologist who studies consciousness, visual perception and evolutionary psychology using mathematical models and psychophysical experiments.
He is a proponent of Conscious Agent Theory where consciousness is fundamental (rather than emerging from matter).
He maintains that physicalism cannot, and never can, explain consciousness: you can't build up to consciousness from non-conscious ingredients.
The interactions of conscious agents create new conscious agents in a dynamical system.
To make sense of the mass of experience that builds up, we use visualisation tools. Our perceptions are like icons on a computer screen. We make the mistake of thinking they are the final reality.
We do not create reality but we create the icons that we take for reality. This includes space, time and physical objects.
Hoffman's conceptualisation of the processes of our conceptualisation of 'reality', discarding the physicalist framework, can add new dimensions and understanding in many fields of human endeavour: physics, medicine, etc. A useful conceptual tool.
'Hoffman's Wager'. An article posted on 'medium.com' 23 November 2022 by Aswan Unni. (article)
This Medium.com article looks at the ideas in Donald Hoffman’s book 'The Case Against Reality' (2019).
Unni summarises the theory as:
'Reality as we know it is just an useful interface programmed by evolution so that we would survive. Our perception evolved because having such abilities provided advantages in passing on our genes; they did not evolve to provide us with an accurate representation of the world cognized.'
30 Aug. 2005 John P. A. Ioannidis: Why Most Published Research Findings Are False (article)
Almost every week, (or day), we encounter a news headline citing research findings. Almost any group or business enterprise that chooses to put 'foundation' or 'Research Group' into their business name seems to be accorded unblinking credibility by the commercial (and government) media. A good example is given in my complaint about misandry in the ABC News in Australia. (link)
This article by John P. A. Ioannidis on PLOS Medicine. He takes a look at the statistics and finds:
'Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias.'
I note recent articles in the online press revealing the surge in profit-oriented, so-called 'professional journals' that will publish papers (and have them 'peer reviewed') for a price. (Guardian article)
Katrine Paulson: Magnetoreception. (Medium.com article)
This article discusses the importance of the earth's magnetic field, how even ancient cultures were aware of and used magnetism and animal species that are known to have magnetoreception (a sense which allows an organism to detect the Earth's magnetic field).
Modern research has identified a class of proteins called cryptochromes that 'are crucial to understanding the origin of magnetoreception in animals like birds.'
Humans possess these proteins but we don't necessarily have the equipment (brain regions or capabilities) to operate or process the trait.
Birds have the cryptochrome proteins in their eyes, so they 'see' the earth's magnetic field. Butbiophysicist Joe Kirschvink at the California Institute of Technology has published a study suggesting that we feel, rather than see, Earth’s magnetic field rather than see it using our visual system like birds.
Graham Pemberton: The Perennial Philosophy and Christianity (article)
This article, on medium.com, presents arguments in support of the philosophy of perennialism, the notion that all religions, at their core, are saying the same thing.
His analysis of the fundamental concepts of Christianity are refreshing and go 'behind the blackboard' of the literal interpretation of biblical passages.
The Wikipedia article 'Perennial philosophy' gives a wonderful trip through the work of many philosophers who dealt with such esoteric subjects as 'hermeticism' and 'kabbalah.' So I wasn't surprised to find there was no entry under 'perennialism' in my Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy.
Note: I have put up a readable copy of Aldous Huxley's 1947 work, 'The Perennial Philosophy' via my ebooks page.
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John Elder: The Moon and Mens' Sleep.(2021 article)
A swedish study has found that some people become disturbed when the Moon is full, or waxing — men more than women. Men stay awake longer and enjoy less sleep "efficiency" than women when the Moon is in its waxing phase whilst the sleep of women "remained largely unaffected by the lunar cycle".
A study from the University of Washington, Seattle, suggests that ancient people were essentially programmed to stay awake during the fuller moon, so they could hunt at night.
Dr Iain McGilchrist delivers a talk about his work on brain function at the UnHerd Club in London.
YouTube video local-copy transcript
McGilchrist's major works are 'The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World' (2006) and 'The Matter with Things' (2021).
The divided brain
He rejects what he calls the left brain–right brain divide in pop psychology, saying: 'it rests on beliefs about what the hemispheres do, not about how they approach it.'
The left hemisphere has evolved to sharply focus its attention on detail; it breaks things apart and tends to deal in abstractions, the explicit, and "either/or" (differentiation). The right hemisphere, on the other hand, has a broad and flexible attention that is open to whatever possibilities come along, and it sees things in their wider context, appreciates the implicit, and favours "both/and" (integration, holism).
McGilchrist writes:
"[Y]ou could say, to sum up a vastly complex matter in a phrase, that the brain's left hemisphere is designed to help us ap-prehend—and thus manipulate—the world; the right hemisphere to com-prehend it – see it all for what it is."
McGilchrist argues that the Western world has "oscillated" between predominantly left-brain and predominantly right-brain function through history, with some periods of relative balance. During certain periods such as the Renaissance, there was a movement toward the right, whereas since the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment — with exceptions such as the Romantic movement — it has become increasingly left-brain dominant. He believes that "nowadays we live no longer in the presence of the world, but rather in a re-presentation of it."
Whilst the left-brain, right-brain arguments are compelling, McGilchrist offers very little to suggest the causes through history of these brain shifts. I have examined both his books, (the first has a bibliography extending to 280 pages), yet he doesn't seem to have read Walter J. Ong's work, which is all about how literacy — beign able to read and write — alters out perception of language and indeed our basic modes of thought.
McGilchrist is an advocate of science, but he thinks science degenerates into a faith (called 'scientism'), when it admits the premise that 'science can answer all our questions.' This question cannot be proved to be the case and should therefore not be admitted as a scientifific premise. Whilst there are some good scientists, science in general has become too rigid — dogmatic.
Left hemispere activity gives rise to a broad perception of the interconnectivity of all things, is the source of spiritual perceptions. Whilst McGilchrist states he is a pantheist, he makes no effort to promote a specific spiritual agenda.
Jules Evans: The Spiritual Experiences Survey (article)
Research suggests that the number of people who report having a spiritual experiences, or a 'presence of power', is steadily rising in western societies.
This article looks at the possible factors effecting this phenomenon and cites some interesting examples.
Marcello Gleiser: Atheism Is Inconsistent with the Scientific Method
An article by Lee Billings in Scientific American 2019.
Marcelo Gleiser, theoretical physicist and winner of the Templeton Prize — for individuals who have made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension — discusses the limits of science, the value of humility and the irrationality of nonbelief.
" ... science is one way of connecting with the mystery of existence [which is] something that we have wondered about ever since people began asking questions about who we are and where we come from.
"... we should take a much humbler approach to knowledge ... science has limits ... [If we] understand and respect those limits ... science really becomes a deeply spiritual conversation with the mysterious, about all the things we don’t know."
"... atheism is inconsistent with the scientific method ... The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."
He aligns his views with Einstein's "cosmic religious feeling".
Stephen Marshall: Plato in the metaverse (article)
This article links the imagery of Plato's theory of forms with Donald Hoffman's desktop theory (link) and the recent conjecture called the mass-energy-information equivalence principle.
Bruce McGraw: The Eight Stages of Death (article)
This article draws on the imagery found in the Buddhist work 'The Tibetan Book of the Dead', first describing the Buddhist concept of the three bodies or 'Trikaya': the outer gross physical body; the inner subtle body; and the very subtle body (the state of pure awareness).
He then describes (simply), the eight stages a dying person goes through as the chakras dissolve and they end up in the very subtle body of pure awareness.
It is a delightful set of imagery from one of the world's great ancient texts.
Bruce McGraw: Harmonizing with the Cosmic Flow (article)
This article muses on the notion from quantum physics of 'evocation': where 'the future is not determined but rather is allured or enticed.'
The author comparing quantum evokation with the deterministic Newtonian paradigm. He finds the quantum notion allows us to detach ourselves from our past, feel the universe or cosmic flow and discover 'what the universe wants from us.'
This is a thoroughly delightful set of imagery. Just thinking about it is liberating!
Jonathan Poletti: 8 Fake Bible Verses That Christianity Made Up (article)
This article explores ideas that are taught in Christian churches but don't actually have a basis in biblical text.
Some fundamental ideas:
These headings seem crude and simplistic but the article looks at modern developments in translating ancient texts, which add wonderful depth and dimension to these simplistic notions.
What is Progressive Christianity? (Medium article)
This article by Andrew Springer on Medium.com, (18th September 2022), describes what many call a 'new reformation' of Christian belief and practice.
They are concerned with living this life. (inspired by Jesus, rather than being saved through him for the afterlife. They are also inspired to fight for economic, social, racial and ecological justice and the acceptance of religious pluralism.
An inspiring read.
The Religion of Jesus vs. The Religion ABOUT Jesus
This is a copy of an email posting by Andrew Springer.
local-copy
The early churched evolved into a religion 'about Jesus' rather than the religion 'of Jesus' whose essence was 'how to transform ourselves, our relationship with God, and our world through lives of radical love and resistance to injustice ... we help build the Kingdom of God here and now."
Modern Christianity has become, in many ways, the opposite of everything that Jesus taught.
This article conveys a powerful message of an active Christianity, transforming us and our world, here and now.
Alan Watts: The Path to Enlightenment (video)
Alan Watts presents some wonderful insights into the spiritual systems of the world: Buddhism, Hinduism, Zen Buddhism.
He starts by describing the three great views of the world:
1. The western view: looks upon the world as a construct, an artefact;
2. The Hindu view: is dramatic — looks on it as a play;
3. The Chinese view: is organic, and looks upon the world as an organism — a body.
He expresses some wonderful understanding of spiritual beliefs and practices derived from a lifetime of study and personal development.
Tzvi Freeman: The Four Worlds [of the Kabbalists] (article)
An article from the Chadbad.org site describing the 'four worlds' of the Kabbalah.
This presentation of fundamendal ideas from the Kabbalistic tradition is presented from a Jewish/religious point of view. Whilst the article states that God: '... fills all worlds, ... encompasses all worlds, and there is nothing else but Him'; there still remains a notion of an external relationship between God and the self—something to be worshiped and communicated with rather than realised.
In high school I was fascinated to learn about Charles Darwin's theory of evolution: how a species evolves by the increased chances of survival of those members whose total physical characteristics were most suited to the environment in which they lived. Darwin didn't know about genetic variations or mutations, but hypothesised that there must be some mechanism at play that produced random variations. (article: The Survival of the Fittest.)
The high school corriculum held as laughable the earlier theory of Lamarck that an organism can pass on to its offspring physical characteristics that the parent organism acquired through use or disuse during its lifetime. (article: Wikipedia.) But the textbook didn't mention that Darwin entertained the idea that the effects of use and disuse (pangenesis) was a supplementary mechanism to natural selection.
Come the mid 20th century and the notion of 'epigenetics' emerges. It studies how an individual's behaviour (diet etc.) and environment, can lead to selective gene expression which is inherited by its offspring. A recent, (1990), specifically biological definition, puts it as: "the study of mitotically and/or meiotically heritable changes in gene function that cannot be explained by changes in DNA sequence." (R. Holliday)
An article I read today on Medium.com by Peter Bockenthien posits epigenetics as the quantum physics of spirituality. (link) Whilst he cites some interesting material, notably a paper on epigenetics and a theory of consciousness (link) he works the material into an atheistic and essentially physicalist interpretation of belief and spirituality. However, he also delivers a blow to determinism: epigenetic changes are reversible. (worth a read.)
This little mental journey seems an apt illustration of the theory of left and right brain function espoused by Ian Mc Gilchrist. Starting with Darwin, the left brain focuses and concentrates, whilst the right brain is open to other theories — the broader context. Come Mendel and Neo-Darwinism, and now eipgenetics, and the left brain focusses and isolates and excludes the possibility of more transcendent theories.
McGilchrist labels this as a conflict with his 'Master and Emissary' imagery — the emmissary forgetting his place and taking control. But that is a very temporal view — seen from a longer perspective it is a constant movement in and out of equilibrium.
GENERAL INTEREST : THE FORGETFULNESS OF HISTORY
Wikipedia: Conscription in Australia (article)
Julius Lobo: 6 Famous Libraries that were Tragically Destroyed (article
David Wineberg: Everything we “know” about the rise of Man is wrong (article)
Exploitation, brutality and misery: how the opium trade shaped the modern world
An article in 'The Conversation', 7 May 2024, written by Kevin Foster, Associate Professor, School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics, Monash University.
It gives a detailed review (and summary) of Amitav Ghosh's 'Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories.' Amitav Ghosh.
Michel Foucault: Wikipedia article
