Reflections on society

Bogans: yes they do exist

2011-06-05T18:41:00.000-07:00

Do bogans really exist? I can't believe that people might try to claim otherwise:

"It's an oppressive social construction, it doesn't really exist because blah blah..."

Yes, but the label is just as useful and appropriate to explain what is going on as the terms bourgeois and proletariat. It exists because, well, what else are you going to call the type of person? We have hippies, yuppies, homies, surfies, soccer mums, nerds and yes, we have bogans too. Here's my take:

A bogan is the poor, working class, except one that has adopted the ideas and sterile culture that serve the interests of the ruling class. Rather than be economically poor, the ideas and mannerisms they have adopted have left them culturally poor.

Like racism, homophobia, sexism, watchin tha footy, dancing with the stars, eatting at maccas, getting farked up on cheap beer and hating bloody commies n unions and those god damn farkin hippes that keep tryin to take away my right to go huntin and 4WD bush bashin.

Bogans do exist, they're the working class that the ruling class have always wanted.

On Homosexuality and Religion

2010-10-30T21:54:00.001-07:00

Dearest homosexual friends, apparently you are evil. It was written in a very popular book written hundreds of generations ago:

Leviticus 18:22-24 Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination. Neither shalt thou lie with any beast to defile thyself therewith: neither shall any woman stand before a beast to lie down thereto: it is confusion. Defile not ye yourselves in any of these things: for in all these the nations are defiled which I cast out before you.

Because this book became so popular, quite the international best seller, you are damned for all eternity.

Nothing to do with how you live, whether you are a good member of society, fight to improve the world for your fellow humans, for economic equality, fight for a sustainable future, say hi to your neighbours, bake apple pies to say thanks or rescue little kittens from trees. Sex is all that matters and you are evil.

But, what if, by some strange fate, what was written by some strange Jewish guy thousands of years ago was not exactly correct? What if when he was hearing the words of god in his head, writing the religious law out as 'the very word of god', he was instead hearing his own self righteous thoughts? Perhaps his writings expressed a general attitude of the time; held thousands of years ago?

I mean, who really fact checked this guy, where's the proof? He said that it was the word of god, so therefore it just is? I'm not sure that would pass under any reasonable definition of academic integrity. Imagine writing an essay, you can say anything you want and then at the end, all you needed to do was reference god to make them fact.

Every Sunday thou must have coffee and toast in bed. Thou shalt not lie with any beverage other than coffee on this morn, not tea nor juice, neither shalt thou lie with any food, other but toast. To do other wise is to sin: it is confusion. Consume not any other but these things on such a sacred morn, relax, a lazy morn shalt thou enjoy (God, 2010).

You can't prove that I did not hear these words and that they were not the word of god. People all around the world are hearing the word of god, and he's saying all kinds of crazy shit. Go blow yourself up and i'll give you some virgins in heaven, don't have sex with women (but little boys are fine), cut off the skin around all the penis', if you're not having a baby with that sperm: WASTING IT IS A SIN! Who is to say who is correct? I prefer my toast commandment, it's has better consequences for people, it's good to take time out.

You'll notice that for each of those points, not all believers of god subscribe to each, every religion has it's quirks. So Each religion claims to hear one thing from god about sex, but they're not hearing the same thing... so who is right? Logically, when they're all disagreeing, at least most of them have to be completely wrong. My best guess is that all of them are, because man's interpretation of what god wants, especially when it comes to sex, is nearly always very messed up and plain wrong.

Here's a suggestion: use your head and use your heart to guide you on these matters.

Separate your primitive fear of the unknown, the different, the fear that says: gay people are bad because i'm afraid of gay stuff, because some how it might 'get me', I'm not gay therefore I hate gays.

De-program the bullshit lie that says: if you are accepting of gay people, that somehow makes you a bit gay. It doesn't, in fact it means you're completely secure in your own sexuality, comfortable with exactly who you are, whether gay, bi, straight or whatever.

If religion was to be of any benefit on this issue it might suggest:

Use your head, use your heart.

Honestly, people need to chill out when it comes to sexuality in general. Relax! Love not hate, embrace diversity. If you're feeling those primitive angry sentiments arise when you think of gay love, just look at this cat.

Look at the little guy. He's wearing a helmet made of peel. Made of peel!

Our transportation system

2010-09-25T10:43:00.002-07:00

Every day many millions of Australians get ready to go to work, leave their front door, and then sit in traffic for over an hour, sometimes even two. Our roads are ridiculously congested. When people are crawling along in traffic every single day, this is a pure waste. Wasted fuel, greenhouse gas emissions, wasted lives, and of course vast amounts of wasted time for everyone. This wasted time contributes to a poor family life, increased stress, loss of income and overall productivity losses for our economy as it’s common for the average driver to spend hours each day in traffic. Every day people drive to work, to pay for the car and fuel that they need to drive to work, so when I see three or four lane highways full of crawling cars I think to myself: "surely we can do better".

The answer to these problems is not more roads, but less cars.

Petrol and diesel are only going to become more expensive in the future, carbon pollution must be addressed and people are already struggling with the costs of our inefficient method of individual private transportation (the average is $260 a week or $13,520 a year). So what our government needs to do is

upscale our public transportation network and stop expanding the roads that we could get more public transport on.

I know what many of you may be thinking, "sure, but people don’t want to catch a stinky bus". I completely agree, our existing public transportation system is a joke. But have you ever caught the trams in Melbourne? In particular, around the city? They're quite nice, you hop on or off whenever a tram stops at a red light and with the number of trams circulating, this means you can jump on easily just to travel 3 or 4 blocks and you won't need to wait 2 minutes. Public transport should be regular, efficient, clean, electrified and should take you everywhere. There is no excuse for not having good public transportation in all Australian capital cities, because we have the capacity to create a system where you are a

ble to simply hop on and go. Passengers should be able to easily get to wherever their destination may be without having to worry about waiting more than 5 minutes. Trams should traverse arterial roads, going back and forth constantly, and roads should be arranged in a north, south style grid, as they are to a large extent in Adelaide. When public transport is frequent in a system like this, users don't need to know which bus connects with which, which route is which, when the next bus is coming. All they need is to know their destination and how to get there like you do in a car. when you need to make a turn at the corner of South Rd and Cross road for example, you would just get off at that corner and wait on the right side of the road for the next tram, which would be in less than 1 minute if everyone was using the trams because they were free, and motor transport was discouraged with

education campaigns and tax increases on fuel and cars.

As a matter of policy implementation for Australia's transition to free

and plentiful public transport, I suggest a sliding scale of ticket subsidisation.

As we expand the capacity of the public transport system, we increase subsidisation of the tickets in accordance until the new capacity is taken up. We continue this process until the end result is a much larger public transport network and ultimately free public transport. A big advertising campaign would need to be rolled out in conjunction to educate and inspire people to give up cars for good. Of course car sales will drop, however there will be increased jobs and economic activity as a result of the transition and overall a much more productive, cleaner and happier society.

Car manufacturing is already going down hill fast as the tide of capital investment flows to the Asian nations, we need to have a plan, not simply buy more cars from overseas and blow our trade surplus. The costs associated with public transport should be met by decreasing road expansions, small income tax increases (however you'd save much more than this each year on car expenses like petrol), slightly increasing taxes on petrol to promote public transport use and increased revenue from a more productive economy, increased consumption resulting from the savings people will make and growth in related industrial production.

Free public transportation for all! You can keep your car if you choose, but you shouldn’t need to buy one just to get around. Our public transport should be regular enough so that you wouldn’t feel the need to have a car, which would become an unnecessary luxury instead of the necessity it is for many now.

Such a progressive plan for our current energy,

infrastructure and transportation needs will not be enacted by our two major parties, unfortunately they do not have the vision, or political will to execute a plan that would produce any significant changes to the status quo.

However oil prices will continue to rise steadily if not sharply, manufacturing will continue to move offshore and international agreements will require carbon emissions to be reduced significantly.

Whether we change our transportation system, plan ahead for the future and build this network in an organised and efficient manner, or if we wait until external pressures force us into action, we will still have to switch from cars to trains, trams and buses. These future factors are inevitable, we can choose to fight them and loose, or we can improve our society in the process of embracing these challenges and come out on top. It’s our choice.

Shopping for toys

2010-09-25T10:43:00.001-07:00

I was shopping for toys today for my two nieces, I decided to go into a popular toy store in Rundle Mall (the big one). It's been a while since I've been in a toy store, but the types of toys are still the same as they were when I was a kid. What has changed is my ability to perceive things, how certain aspects of our society perform functions to mould us into what is needed by society. I have observed how experiences had by a person will effect their being, how experiences had by a child will affect their character.

Kids are perfectly pliable, learning machines, with eager minds waiting to be filled so they can grow up to be adults. So the question I am going to ask is: What do we teach these eager young minds? How do we condition them to grow up to be happy, healthy, well balanced and productive members of our society?

In our country we condition our children to be violent, hateful, vengeful and greedy. All of this is commonly thought to be normal and concerns are generally brushed off as minor without a second thought.

By the age of 5 most of our young boys have been taught that guns are fun, the US army is awesome and that they are "the good guys", that killing the bad guys will make you a hero and that violence is exciting and cool.

For the girls, they're taught that it's all about how you look, that consumerism will make you happy, everyone loves greedy brats and your job is to just sit there, make babies and look pretty like Barbie.

In our western capitalist system, the conditioning starts at a very early. Boys are taught to love violence, to embrace guns and fight the enemy at all times, because to do so goes against our human instincts. It is not natural for a person to want to kill another person, it is deeply disturbing to do so and goes against our fundamental human nature. Only through conditioning is this overcome, through play and games in childhood, then eventually professional training of some description at a military school or some other institution. Why do we shape our children to be future soldiers instead of future doctors? Why train the killer instinct when we could teach kids that social interaction and cooperation is the best way?

The reason is that the system requires this of it's people, is so that the system can perpetuate itself. This is nothing new, it's the same here today with our "modern capitalist economy" as it was in the Stalinist USSR, Nazi Germany, or for example back in the middle ages, when archery and sword fighting were the games that the kids were taught to play. It is no mere coincidence that the Holy Roman Empire was sadistically violent and would enjoy watching other people get ripped apart at the colosseum, that nearly all boys would spend their entire childhoods fighting with wooden swords, spears and shields. The violent conditioning of a populous is if not directly controlled by government decree, encouraged and guided by policies aimed to facilitating such outcomes.

This is not a conspiracy theory, where by a few shady people are pulling the strings behind closed government doors. It's simply a systemic necessity of imperialism, which is encouraged and facilitated by the state. Techniques aimed at controlling the populous have been known and written about by intellectuals and rulers since the birth of civilisation. Niccolò Machiavelli is perhaps the best known social engineer, he wrote the classic manuscript "The Prince" in 1513, which outlines techniques that rulers can employ to control and manipulate the people, making famous concepts such as divide and conquer. Machiavelli would be in awe at the modern techniques used on our citizenry to keep them in line and defending a system which works against their best interests.

Here are some pictures I took while I was wondering around the store:

I wonder if the US army funds toy manufacturers? There seems to be a heck of a lot of US army toys in the toy store, more propaganda for the kids. Our society is truly sick, we are far from free when we are conditioned from ages 3 and up that we are on the side of the US, to love violence and for us to kill our enemies in tanks.

Having kids pretend to kill each other and love doing this, is really quite sick when you think about it, but it's so ingrained, we're so desensitised to violence and conditioning that we don't really think about it. Our society requires us to be desensitised to the violence required to maintain it.

The lesson of this toy is that war is fun, bombing people is fun, that you are western and that you must destroy your enemies.

The US military are the heroes in this toy set, the message is that violence is fun. The play set is acually called heroes...

The US military are over represented in boys toys. Dodgy

We teach future generations of girls to be mindless, bratty, "mall chick" consumers with our toys. These dolls are called "Bratz".

Barbie. This toy speaks for itself

and last but not least:

I couldn't believe how obviously wrong this toy was. What the Mc fuck is going on here? When did it become Mc normal in our society for a dodgy corporation to Mc manipulate our kids?

Poverty and property in the USA

2010-09-25T10:41:00.000-07:00

I'm in the USA right now, proof that capitalism leads to a dead end is all around me. Not poor because of capitalism? If a person owns 3000 houses (people do in our sick system, then they artificially push up the value of land, housing and collect rent through their ownership of capital. They use this money, the source of which is the *exploitation* of those that don't own capital and use it to buy more houses, which in turn makes everything even more expensive, keeps the rich disgustingly and unnecessarily rich and the poor in poverty.

Many poor people turn to drugs and alcohol to deal with the stress of their horrible underpaid factory work, they are usually uneducated through no fault of their own and will likely have kids that are not any better off. They can't afford proper health care or private education, so they go to bad schools and get sick, which in turn keeps them poor and their kids. They are poor because some people own disgusting amounts of wealth and exploit everyone else to keep adding to the piles of money.

No one needs 500 million in their personal bank account, capitalism allows this disparity, whilst people starve to death and sleep on the streets. Even if you're a sociopathic wall street trader and care not for those on the bottom of the pyramid scheme system, you must see that very poor people are not reaching their full potential as productive members of society and by having so many poor, we are collectively producing pathetic economic results in comparison to what would be possible in a world beyond capitalism.

A new system would leave us with much more time left in the working week. Externalities? Don't get me started on externalities, like I said, i'm in the USA right now and could write a long book on the utterly unsustainable externalities of capitalism that are not reconcilable or able to be regulated away. The country is failing hard in all the areas that matter.

Are the poor genetically inferior and lazy?

2010-09-25T10:38:00.002-07:00

I have heard from some the suggestion that the poor are genetically inferior and/or lazy, and this is why they are poor. I find this belief offensively dumb.

For every person that scrambles up to the top and beats their circumstances, through hard work and sacrifice, they push another, or more down to the bottom. that's the nature of the structure. it's very rare to escape the cycle of poverty, because if you're uneducated along with your family and friends and the afflictions of poverty keep you down, then it's infinitely harder to beat your circumstances regardless of how physically intelligent you are. we can't deny the existence of privilege.

Contrast this with someone with 4 million in assets, each year they will earn a minimum of $400,000 through investments. they don't need to lift a finger, and many don't, unless they want even greater returns, then they pick up the phone and call a better stock broker. their kids will be highly educated at private schools and inherit a sum of money greater than the last generations. they make money because they already have money, with the money they buy things made by the workers, without contributing anything to society.

So through their ownership of capital, they have this power at our expense. the $400,000 lays claim to the real resources, the actual physical wealth of the society at that one point. the rich get even richer, because the money which they extracted from the system, from workers in the form of profit, now competes for goods, services and property that the poor need. the system allows the rich to continually increase their share of the pie, so even as the pie grows, the growth of the assets which the top 5% own still outstrips the assets of the bottom 95%, it's getting worse not better and this disparity is growing, everywhere.

The poor are not genetically inferior or lazy, they're struggling, hard working and they still can't change their circumstances, because our society does not develop the potential of the bottom 95%, the workers, it exploits them at every turn, as wage slaves with no say, you just get to pick between the left and right factions of the capitalist party each election, there's really no major difference between them and at the end of the day, they lie about what they will do in power anyway.

If we're going to fix this situation, or at least improve it, we need to start by being aware of the structure and not be blind sighted by the day to day soap opera which is politics as portrayed by the media. it's far more complicated, interesting and important than what the media are showing us, because our lives and the lives or future generations are at stake.

San Paulo, Brazil. our filthy rich are more obscured, over there they just flaunt it. The disparity between rich and poor is not humane, it is not natural, it is not sustainable, it is not inevitable. It is fundamentally immoral and when capitalism is truly understood, we are in a better position to start questioning it's validity as a social and economic structure

A Car-less Day

2010-09-25T10:36:00.002-07:00

I'd love to see a completely car-less day in a major city. Just one day where the madness, the spectacle we have created stops, one day where we are not living completely beyond our means. Our transportation system is a perfect example of the many failures of our society, one of these failures being the inability to apply technology in an intelligent way that would produce resource efficient outcomes and maximising the benefits to humanity.

The system we have produces individual transport, requires a higher consumption of resources, more work to be done, simply because private capital can get rich out of our absurdly inefficient system of individual transportation. This inefficiency is a perfect example of how the market fails miserably to provide intelligent solutions to problems such as moving people around from A to B, so as we now stand, our present transportation situation is a nightmare of absurd proportions, a train wreck in slow motion.

There are approximately 700,000,000 cars on the planet using up the earth's capacity to absorb carbon and using up precious, non renewable oil at a dangerously unsustainable pace. We’re on track to use up all of the recoverable oil well before we have a way to replace it for transportation, let alone all of the other uses, including to produce fertilisers, which we need to feel our population of 6.7 billion, plastics, clothes, synthetic chemicals etc.

Replace 700,000,000 cars with electric cars? I find this proposal as absurd. Who in their right mind would conceive this as possible, let alone desirable. Sure a few cars, but all of them? Plus the extra 400 million we're predicted to need over the next couple of decades? Individual private transport is a sham perpetrated by consumer capitalism, it is not efficient in any way, it's not cheaper for the individual citizen, in fact we're all paying through the nose for this system every single day.

Public transport, that is well planned, well funded, publicly owned, is the only way we're going to even get close to solving the crisis that we have on our hands.

There is no justification for such an inefficient system of transportation. Individually owned, private automobiles cause accidents, traffic jams, constantly break, need to be repaired, maintained, etc. Traffic jams are significant! Workers might work 8 hours a day, but spend 2 hours in traffic! If at least 1 of these hours can be avoided, then that is 10% time saved. In a city with 1,000,000 workers, that's a lot of labour, a lot of free time for families, a lot of time for anything. Absurdly wasteful

Most of the fuel used by cars goes into pulling around the weight of the car around. Think about it, your car weighs about one or two tons! You weight considerably less, maybe 10-30 times less, so roughly 90-97% of the energy used to move you is wasted! Is this really the best use of non renewable, expensive, polluting oil resources? Is this the best humanity can do?

Electified public transport is vastly superior and more efficient. If trams went everywhere and often, our society wouldn't need to work so hard, we'd all be wealthier and have more time, the air would be clean, we wouldn't produce as much Greenhouse gasses and we wouldn't be vulnerable to future oil prices and the devastation of peaking global oil production rates.

I'd really like to see these tram networks run on heliostat style solar thermal power stations, very efficient, renewable, cutting edge, base load power utilising thermal storage. Australia should produce the components for these power stations, build them here for cheap renewable power, then export the components to the world. Green Jobs! Turn around the tide of our shrinking manufacturing sectors, the service based economy is fools gold, based on debt driven consumption. Let's build a green economy, create jobs and create wealth for Australia!

Why isn't there enough food for the world's poor?

2010-09-25T10:36:00.001-07:00

Capitalism is starving people at this very moment, it is creating poverty and misery. The victims for capitalism don't generally live in the west, the nations which we are told to think of as the capitalist nations. They live in capitalist India, capitalist Africa, the capitalist nations of South America and indeed around the world. Haiti for example has the same economic system as the US, a pro-capitalism, pro-corporatist, 'free trade' system of privately owned capital.

Some might say capitalim is not working in Haiti. I would like people to consider the reason that capitalism has not been able to help Haiti and suggest that it is because capitalism creates a handful of winners; the rich nations, and a vast majority of losers, the ones the west forces into free trade agreements to produce our stuff for cheap, while they toil in and remain in poverty. I would argue that capitalism IS working perfectly well in the nations where poverty is so severe, for the reason that this is exactly what capitalism does in the real world.

In 2008, Capitalist United States, using fossil fuel, chemical dependent and environmentally destructive/unsustainable agricultural methods, produced 40% of the world’s corn. Plenty of food produced, albeit in a manner that is destroying the planet. Still, that's a heck of a lot of food.

In 2008 31% of US corn production went into producing ethanol.

31% of total corn production was used to make fuel, so that rich, fat, US citizens can have their 2 SUV gas guzzling cars, go to the mall and fill their house full of junk they don't need. You know what else happened in 2008?

In 2008 the people in Haiti were starving, a lot were eating biscuits literally made from dirt with 50% maize (corn), 50% dirt, just so they could end the hunger pains. Same story in many other nations, on the pointy end of a system of trade relationships which make the rich disgustingly rich, and the poor violently poor.

This monstrosity of a scenario only makes sense in a capitalist market system, where the wants of the rich can and do legally out price the needs of the poor.

Those nations with capital that compete on a free market with the world's poor for food, will always win. It is always more profitable to sell corn in a rich nation than a poor one, so if a rich nation decides to dramatically increase corn consumption to make fuel, the poor starve. There is no common humanity, no common goal for development, no conscience, simply cold hard profits of corporate agribusiness within a system based on private profit.

I hated the soviet economy, I don't like many other economies that claim to be socialist or communist, but I especially hate capitalism. To those critics that say, sure capitalism isn't perfect, but it's by far the best system we have on offer, I would reply:

1. No it isn't.

2. Accepting a failing system just because we don't have all the answers yet about the alternative, is not a good strategy for making the world a better place.

3. Accepting a failing system instead of seriously looking at redesigning our economic structures to become vastly more productive, humane, sustainable and reliable will hold humanity back from our full potential. The Pioneers that have moved humanity forward did not let the small minded, weak conservatives of their day hold back the march of progress.

Imagine if Galileo had let the conservatives in the catholic church stop his work on celestial bodies and optics, those small minded conservatives that condemned heliocentrism as "false and contrary to Scripture". This is the essence of conservatism, the pathology; to burn at the stake anything or anyone that is too radical, too different from the status quo.

Capitalism drowns the planet in pollution, creates poverty and allocates all of the resources to a very select minority of super rich elites.

We will never solve poverty until we start thinking about how we can build a better economic system, then implement it on a global scale!

A photo from Haiti: 'every morning I wake up on the wrong side of capitalism'.

US Corn production - Industrial agriculture on a massive scale, completely unsustainable, degradating soils beyond repair, causing climate change and producing 40% of the world's corn production.

Haiti is very poor.

These kids are forced to eat biscuits mixed with dirt to stave off hunger pain.

This is the reality in Haiti. Now remember, 31% of US corn goes into producing fuel, which only makes up 5% of total gasoline equivalent, so that fat western people may drive their 2nd car at a slightly lower cost.

Capitalism is an immoral system by nature. The free market/ food v fuel example is merely one in a large book which called western civilisation. This book is unfortunately not available at your local corporate book retailer.

Why I do not eat meat

2010-09-25T10:34:00.002-07:00

Any mind that seeks to genuinely encompass and engage with reality will seek out the truth about their food. If they eat meat, they will seek to know up close and personal the reality of what meat is, walk through a slaughter house, analyse their emotions and question their part in the chain of causation.

There is a reason why, with no conditioning to counter my emotions, I will feel deep empathy with a cow if I see it having it's throat slit, screaming, blood pissing out and kicking on the ground. The core of what is good in human nature will naturally find this painful. Empathy.

There is also a reason why when I pick an apple from a tree, I feel completely fine about it.

I you really want to know what meat is, visit my website and watch a few videos:

http://www.richardbergin.org/why-be-vegetarian

There is a evolutionary reason, an ingrained biological predisposition which benefits humanity as a social species, accounting for why we empathise with animals.

A heirachy of empathy seems to exist, where the human mind recognises the genetic similarities in other species, similar character traits and the species function (friend or enemy), and assigns a level of empathy towards the species.

Cute little lambs, dogs, monkeys etc. rank highly, because they share more genetic material with our species. Whereas jelly like blobs at the bottom of the ocean do not and we don't naturally feel as much empathy. Or take reptiles, harmless little lizards nice, poisonous snakes are not generally liked.

I'm not saying you're sociopathic if you eat meat. I would claim however that you are either:
1. completely sheltered from the reality of meat, too far removed from it.
2. molded by cultural norms passed down, generally based on necessity from hunger
3. desensitised to the act of killing

If you live in the west, you don't have to eat meat, it's not necessary. It's socially acceptable not to eat meat.

So if you do, you're unnecessarily taking life, causing harm and in most cases, especially the case of factory farming, participating in massive environmental destruction and the torture of animals.

If you eat chicken, you should be able to comfortably pick up a knife and saw off a chickens head like this man does. If you can't, there is no moral justification for simply paying someone else down the chain to do that work for you. If you do not need to eat meat, but choose to, you are creating unnecessary death, pain and often torture to animals. Again, it would be fine, if we didn't empathise with the chicken we're killing, but humans naturally do empathise.

The reason humans can happily pick an apple from a tree, not feel guilty, is because this is natural. If this child was asked to hack off the neck of a chicken, he would be traumatised, as would many adults. It is just as violent if you ask a butcher to do this on your behalf.

Can you be happy living in denial? Take a tour through your typical meat factory and wake up to reality. Then at least you can make an educated decision about your 'food'. If you still want to eat it after that, be my guest.

If you genuinely want to find out more about the meat industry that produces your food, check out a documentary called Earthlings:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6361872964130308142#

I am an atheist

2010-09-25T10:34:00.001-07:00

I am an atheist.

Theism: the belief in the existence of at least one deity.
a-, an-: (Greek) a prefix meaning absence of, no, without, lack of, not
A-theism: absence of belief that at least one deity exists.

I don't accept the statement "the non-belief in god", because that statement does not give equal weight to the non Judaeo-Christian gods, or other belief structures and takes the concept of one god as a given already. My perspective on this issue starts from a blank slate, the time and place where I was born should not determine which belief structure I am supposed to not be believing in.

In my non-belief in gods, supernatural phenomenon or religious belief systems, I am non discriminatory. I give as much weight to Quetzalcoatl of the ancient Mayans, Zeus, Poseidon, Hermes, Athena of ancient Greece, Jupiter, Mars, Juno, Minerva of ancient Roman civilisation, Ra, Osiris, Thoth, of ancient Egypt, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Thor, various fertility gods, personality cults, spiritual belief structures etc.

The people that believed in these religions at different times and places in history were just as convinced, righteous and faithful as those that currently prescribe to the dominant monotheistic religions of our time and place. They deserve equal consideration and respect and it would be naive to think that the Christian, Jewish, scientology, Hindu, Buddhist or Muslim belief structures are any more correct than the belief structures of countless other cultures that have came before me that had extremely different beliefs.

Being a non-believer in each of these gods or religions is not one belief, but many.

I dogmatically disbelieve in Zeus, as much as I dogmatically disbelieve that the Aztecs were right to do human sacrifices to the corn gods, just as much as I dogmatically disbelieve in mono-theistic gods, like the Judaeo-Christian one. I have no evidence to base my disbelief in Zeus on, likewise I don't know for sure that the corn god does not exist, the Judaeo-Christian god and whether reincarnation actually happens.

The only logical thing I can do, besides believe in them all, equally. However most are mutually exclusive belief structures, each claiming one particular version of reality to be true.

The only rational thing to do is to disbelieve in them all equally.

I don't disbelieve in 'god' but in all the gods and religious belief structures that exist now and in the past, from all around the world.

This is what I do, that's what an atheist is.

Think outside the square, then look back at the square and laugh about how absurd it was to let it control you.

This particular god could be the right one. I have no proof that it does not exist and I am not so rightous to assume that the most popular version of god in my time and place is any more important or valid than this particular blue, four armed god.

Poseidon? What if he was the right one? I've heard the argument that the ancient Greeks were just personifying particular traits of the 'one true god'. I would argue that to an ancient Greek, the 'one true god' is merely a misunderstanding of the family of gods that actually exists, that in time Christians, Muslims and Buddhists of today will discover Poseidon is in fact real and should be worshiped, for fear of his ability to smite at will and his particularly spiteful and vengeful nature.

The ancient corn god could be the correct one, but i'm not going to pull someone's heart out for human sacrifice to check.

Lord Rama ? maybe ? Looks friendly enough...

Perhaps I should practice every religion that has ever existed just to be on the safe side? However for each religion there is a different kind of punishment for not believing and often for accepting any other god but their one, or many true gods, or system of things I should be doing. I can't be going to all the forms of hell or punishment that exist for disobeying all the different religions can I? That seems reasonably illogical.

So I guess I'll just get on with my life and try to be a good person, with humanist values and ethics founded on human morality. But where did my morality come from but if not from Quetzalcoatl of the ancient Mayans you might ask? A Mayan, or any other person that doesn't believe in the rules of Quetzalcoatl will be immoral!!!! How will they decide right from wrong??? Well, I disagree on that presupposition for the origins of morality. I'm happy with my philosophical, analytical approach to morality and the humanist principals which guide me. Where they come from will be covered in a longer note, another day. The short version is: natural selection, not of individuals so much, but of genes. Cooperation is a human strategy for survival, the altruistic instincts we possess have provided the basis for the most economically efficient method by which genes can perpetuate themselves. A complicated subject which deserves it's own separate note.

Why did the Greens Block the ETS?

2010-09-25T10:30:00.002-07:00

The Greens proudly blocked Labor's 5% ETS because the target was simply too low and this would lock Australia in to failure on climate change, whilst at the same time giving the illusion that Australia was doing their part to avoid dangerous shifts in the earth's climatic system.

Their ETS would have handed over billions in free permits to already highly profitable corporate polluters, the market mechanism was dodgy and the system would have provided for an actual net increase in Australia's actual greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. The most important failure however was the incredibly low target of 5%.

Emission targets are a balance of 1. physical atmospheric CO2 targets required to avoid run away climate change and 2. a socially equitable response to reduce emissions by a fair amount to meet that target (doing our part as a developed nation and highest per capita producer of CO2 in the world).

Labor's 5% by 2020 will take us to at minimum a 550ppm C02 future, resulting in dangerous climatic change. The Greens support a policy which would bring about a 350ppm future, which is on target with what science is demanding for a safe climate.

It's really that simple, try as they might, the Labor Party can't negotiate with science. We either make an enormous effort to fix the problem, or not try at all. There is no half way there, no 'middle ground'. A 5% ETS is worse than nothing because it gives the illusion that we're doing something, when it's as good as nothing.

Arguing for a 5% ETS which will result in a 550ppm CO2 future in the hope that you will avoid dangerous climate change, is like arguing against gravity in the hope that you will avoid falling down.

ETS policy specifics aside (free permits to polluters, dodgy market mechanism, carbon trading, credit importation and derrivatives market manipulation etc.), there is no political advantage to locking in 5% and increasing the target later.

There is no advantage to getting the 'framework in place' and allowing people to get used to it before going to the required 40% reduction we need by 2020.

The capitalist market system that exists in Australia requires a degree of certainty in decisions, so that capital expenditure better reflects the future. Starting at 5%, moving to 10%, then to 20%, then 40%, would create chaos for investors. Some would be holding off of investment, waiting for a better price for carbon just around the corner, some would put energy projects on hold, requiring government money to insure the returns with taxpayer money and sweeten corporate deals even more with subsidies.

Basically it's very messy and very expensive to keep changing your mind on a major piece of economic framework.

People generally want to have the climate change problem fixed and through the falsehoods perpetuated by the two major parties, many have come to believe that the 5% ETS was the solution. As a result, if the Greens allowed the 5% ETS to pass, many people would stop caring, stop lobbying, stop trying to put Australia on the right path towards avoiding dangerous climate change. Disaster for present and future generations, well and truly locked in.

This is why the Greens blocked the ETS.

Strong decisive action is what is required. A firm target, in line with the science. We need action today, not tomorrow. Both Labor and Liberal have proven that they can not deliver these targets and have reminded Australians that they are both beholden to the fossil fuel lobby, polluting industry groups and the associated campaign contributions. Vested corporate interests are behind the policies of both major parties, as a result Australians are waking up to this fact and becoming sick to death of the same old excuses Labor and Liberal keep on coming up with to explain their terrible policies.

We can not let our future be put in jeopardy because our two party system is corrupt and failing. The Greens are the only party which will be able to have the immediate influence required to promote serious emission reduction targets and a serious policy response. The Greens propose a carbon tax, which is a simpler and more effective market mechanism than the ETS mechanism proposed by Labor, one which corporations can not simply buy their way out of with dodgy overseas carbon credits.

The Greens can win the balance of power in the Federal Senate, which will provide the Australian Parliament with a genuine force for sustainability, working tirelessly for a genuine emissions reduction target. Unlike other minor parties, the Greens have the power to do this today, not tomorrow.

That is why you should vote Green, or preference Green before you preference a major party.

Rudd's ETS was voted down essentially because Science does not negotiate and the Greens party will vote according to the science on climate change. We can't go half way towards reducing emissions and expect to avoid dangerous climate change. There is a set amount of emissions reductions we need to achieve in Australia and that target is 40% by 2020. This figure is set by the science, it's not negotiable, it's 40% or it's nothing, because any less than 40% by 2020 is pointless. We either fix the problem properly, or we give up trying altogether and the Greens are not about to give up on the future our children will inherit, as the major parties have done.

The question now is, how can the Greens effectively mount the case for a carbon tax. Next note...

Our constitution, our system and democracy

2010-09-25T10:30:00.001-07:00

Our constitution, the system and democracy The structure of any constitution must provide the foundational basis for the economic and social order which is to prevail in a given society.

Australia’s current constitution presupposes that individual liberty must be higher in the hierarchy of rights than the collective wellbeing of the members of that society. It lays the foundation, by its adherence and administration of an economic order based on ownership of private property, for an economic structure in which a tiny class of super rich elite maintain control over the vast majority of the economic system.

The nature of our constitution produces a weak, representative democracy which masks the wholly undemocratic distribution of society’s resources. Does voting lead to decision making which is in the interests of the overwhelming majority? By this test, representative democracy as it is known in the west has failed miserably.

There is another interpretation of the concept of democracy, which looks beyond the vote and directly to the material conditions of society. In this perspective, perfection is achieved through true equality between citizens. It is more than a vote but a path, its test being the equality between the physical conditions in which members of society live.

When this new measure of democracy is used we see an undemocratic society. The wretched disparity between those that earn many millions of dollars a year, fly in private jets and own hundreds of houses, and those that scrape together a living through hard work and thrift and great sacrifice, is proof that representative democracy as we know it is has failed.

It has failed to develop the minds and untapped potential of its citizens that by far, slave in the torment of long hours at menial tasks. It has failed to provide equality and by this failure justice, which is so often spoke of as the objective of law. There is no justice with a constitution which upholds the rights of some over the rights of others and creates a legal framework by which to legitimise this disparity.

The rights given by the Australian constitution instils a system of private ownership and control over vast tracts of economic and natural resources. To find an example, the decision to clear cut an old growth forest is in actual practice made by the corporation which benefits from the destruction.

Our system is one of perverse incentive which is destroying the waters, the soil, the forests and the climate.This destruction is global in nature, driven by the economic engines which were built on the constitutional right to private property, hence private capital and produces a system which individual corporate bodies must veraciously consume in violent competition or perish.

The system produces a mutilated caricature of natural selection, whereby instead of the fittest surviving, our economic landscape produces only the most rotten, sociopathic, exploitative and corrupt corporate entities.

Those that destroy the environment, rob our children, rob our soils and give the least back are those which create the most profit.They displace any remanets of sentimental benevolence which even the most corrupt king could express and the corporate entity is beholden by this structure to divulge and embrace evil by necessity. In a word, survival of the sociopathic.

The foundations of our society have produced every problem we have today, every economic meltdown, every war, every environmental disaster, including climate change, every resource crisis due to vested interests which prevent a reasonable response and long term solution. It is the foundation, our constitution and our belief in this document that brings forth every law built upon it.

For this reason I propose that the only rational means forward is the revolutionary re-constitution of our society, in order to create the social and economic framework in law by which we may build a truly equitable and sustainable society.

Let's modernise Australia

2010-09-25T10:29:00.001-07:00

This election both major parties plan not to take action on climate change, both plan to treat 'boat people' like criminals, both have failed to even begin the economic reforms necessary to create a prosperous and sustainable society.

We produce very little in Australia, over consume imported goods and resources and expect the trade surplus to balance on the back of minerals and services industries. Not a sustainable economy.

The Greens have a plan for a sustainable economy, based on a vibrant solar thermal and wind turbine manufacturing industry, producing electric vehicles and rolling out crucial infrastructure such as rail which will decrease carbon emissions while increasing productivity.

Let's build a modern, efficient and greener Australia. Vote Green!

Capitalism = Cancer

2010-09-25T10:25:00.001-07:00

Capitalism consumes resources, grows and produces a detrimental excess of toxic wastes like cancer. The necessity for capital to grow exponentially or die, is the systemic equivalent of cancerous DNA.

The giant multinationals, absorbing smaller companies and sucking up all the wealth as a result, is the equivalent of a tumour, out competing healthy cells for nutrients, until it eventually kills the host aka. the annihilation of the contending classes, as written by Marx.

The other option, is the revolutionary reconstitution of society, aka. major surgery to cut the cancer out of the host body.

on 'Natural Capitalists'

2010-09-25T10:24:00.001-07:00

These authors neither understand capitalism or the nature of the environmental crisis. This is most evident when they talk about corporate responsibility, with complete disregard to both the actual written laws which prevent corporations doing anything other than maximising profits, or else the CEO is liable to be sued by shareholders, and the natural systemic laws of capitalism which drive institutions to extract and expropriate at the fastest possible rate, and when this rate is too low in one country, to relocate to the country which has relaxed all regulation and can provide the highest growth rate via gross extraction of natural resources and exploitation of people.

Capital must grow exponentially or perish, so if they're not extracting resources and expropriating labour faster than it can be replenished, it needs the state to create new capital to sell out of formerly commonly owned natural or man made assetts, in order to meet the 7% growth rate (roughly the fixed growth rate of bonds), which equates to 100% in 10 years, and 3200% in 50 years.

Capital needs to grow, so if the entire economy isn't growing fast enough for capital, it starts sucking up more from the fixed pie of capital/resources, and starts to consume the megre amounts of capital owned by the middle class and lower class. That's what's happening in the US because the overall economic growth rate is so low, yet the growth rate of capital must remain high or companies collapse and cannibalise themselves.All this despite the government's effort to borrow 1.5 trillion to stave off the hunger pains of the beast.

When that cash injection runs dry, the banks will consolidate capital in a stagnant economy to maintain capital growth, middle class capital is at risk. Obama could sell off as much public infrastructure as possible, but that only buys another while, the problem comes back again. The situation is unsustainable.

When natural capitalists argue for growth rates in line with natural systems, they STILL miss the point about what capitalism actually is and does, how private power is exercised in reality and how government is bought and sold by capital, with the sole purpose of increasing capital. There are so many insanely wide and gaping holes in the logic and arguments of natural capitalists. They just don't get it.

To illustrate my point, first I start by outlining the obvious perverse incentives of capital. Suppose a company had ownership/rights to a area of forest. Forests grow at close to 3% p.a. therefore the sustainable level of timber harvesting is 3%. But money in the bank grows at a minimum of 6%, and higher for financial and other capital investments, so the 'rational' thing to do under a capitalist market system is to clear cut all of the forest, and put this money in the bank where it will grow much more rapid than trees do.

This perverse incentive to trash the planet exists across the board. Economists which seek to rectify this incentive with regulations miss a few crucial 'real world' facts about capitalism.

1. Capital flight. Capital will automatically move to where it can expand the greatest, generally in those countries which do not seek to, or are incapable of regulating it's expansion. Investment becomes a race to the bottom, which country can decrease regulations the fastest.

2. The nature of private capital as private power. Wallmart has a larger GDP than Poland, and when Wallmart and the myriad of other corporate giants flex their muscles to lower the bar on regulations of capitalism, the system is entirely powerless against this level of capital.

Again it might not be in the interests of a collective corporate class to screw national regulations entirely, they have to live in that country too, however capital competes in a global setting and the race to the bottom in the race for highest profit is absolutely predetermined in the system's DNA.

If you only have half your forests, you don't need half a brain...

2010-09-25T10:23:00.001-07:00

Since the industrial revolution humanity has grown in great numbers + consumed exponentially. From 1 billion, to nearly 7 billion of us. Since that time, we've been consuming resources like mad, so it doesn't take half a brain to work out that this is not sustainable.

Since humanity started settling and building cities 10,000 years ago, we've destroyed half of the planet's original forests, only 20% of what is left is what you could call functional ecosystems, and most shockingly, we've cut down most of that in only the last 35 years!

A football field's worth of forest is destroyed every 2 seconds and this rate is escalating. People wonder if it's humanity's impact on the earth which is changing the climate? Yet we've cut down half of all the forest on the planet? Trees which breathe in carbon, use the sun's radiation to build timber and leaves, and release oxygen. The global biomass (carbon based life) is measured to weigh about 2000 billion tons, 1600 of which is in forests (trees are heavy stores of carbon).

If we've cut the earth's forest's ability to do suck out carbon from the atmosphere in half, whilst destroying half of the forest which we can calculate weighed about 1600 billion tons, a large chunk of that ending up as CO2, whilst burning 86 million barrels of oil, every single day, and 6700 million tons of coal every single year, year in year out......

The atmosphere tends to change in composition when you do this.

It's really very simple. Remove half the trees on a planet with a perfectly balanced ecological system, which used to produce oxygen and store carbon in very particular quantities, and you get imbalance and environmental instability.

It should be pretty obvious to anyone with half a brain that we're destroying the planet, it's ability to support the human race and that we need to stop this ASAP.

No only does the land deforested tip the earth's ecological balance out, it has flow on effects such as widespread desertification. By 2050, studies such as Kendall and Pimentel (1994) show empirical evidence that there will simply not be enough food for 10 billion people by 2050, which means billions will most likely die. The capacity for existing arable land to increase food production capacity will peak, whilst the amount of fertile land area is actually rapidly decreasing due to increasing water scarcity and increasing desertification. These problems are caused by deforestation/land clearing, over graising and chemically treated land, beaten up by industrial agricultural processes for decades until the soil microbiology and surrounding ecosystems simply die.

Environmental issues are humanitarian issues.

The Amazon Basin. Images like this are now synonymous with the Amazon, as humanity continues to deforest this land and ensure a global collapse of the earth's ecological systems which support the existence of humans and other species. We're really not a very clever species, what we're doing to the global environment is suicidal.

drug policy failure - we need radical reform

2010-09-25T10:21:00.000-07:00

In Australia our policy on illicit, addictive drugs has been framed by a paradigm of 'tough on drugs'. This is a narrow minded, right wing, harmful perspective which is not fair to addicts and families of addicted people, whilst being entirely useless as a strategy to eliminate drugs from society.

When you criminalise highly addictive drugs three things happen.

1. People don't stop doing the drugs, the structural issues driving drug abuse still exist, the pain and suffering driving addicts have not been identified and healed.

2. Dealers and distribution networks are pushed further into the criminal underground, making it near impossible to regain control.

3. Crime goes up, because we end up arresting drug users for drug related offences. We treat addicts like criminals, not as people with a health problem, an addiction that needs to be cured by way of compassion in the treatment for those that are ill.

What about compassion for addicts and a hard line response for dealers of hard drugs? surely this would be fair?

Although it is fair, it still doesn't change those three points, so a 'hard line' approach on dealers is ineffectual. This policy is already in effect in many countries, with very little success. The drug crisis continues, to the point where around eight hundred people die each year from illicit drug use, however the number of lives that are completely destroyed by hard drugs is much higher than the number of deaths.

A solution

Any solution to the problem must tackle the basic economics of the drug market. If there is a market for drugs, producers and dealers will always find a way to profit from this demand. Criminal markets are quite free as they evade regulation, supply and demand works quite efficiently within this dynamic.

Hence any real solution to the crisis must involve destroying market demand for the product completely, thus absolutely destroying all private incentive to produce the drugs.

A radical approach to solving the drug crisis this would be for the government to create a network of drug rehabilitation services, with the legal right to provide addictive, illicit drugs such as heroin or methamphetamine to registered addicts. Addicts would be required to provide some basic health details and could initially choose to remain anonymous and they would be administered a fixed quantity of addictive drugs at each visit. This would achieve the following:

1. Word would spread of free drugs and users would rapidly start to use the free drugs provided by the health clinics

2. Drug dealers and producers would rapidly lose their customer bases and their incomes

3. Drug dealers and producers would be forced to pack up, distribution networks become unnecessarily and dealers must find real jobs.

4. Addicts have access to safe treatment, safe drugs and clean needles. Patients seeking treatment could be registered on a central database within an overaching organisational body. The process would need to be one that is easy to use and more preferable for users than paying a dealer who would not ask questions or demand identification.

5. Crime will go down, as addicts are not having to break in to houses to find heroin, or sell their bodies on the street.

6. The combination of addicts not having to do demoralising acts and the counselling/rehabilitation services combined, can increase the self confidence of addicts seeking to change, further promoting the confidence to conquer addiction.

7. Once the private drug market is completely destroyed, the government can order a two month long detoxification campaigns, where all access to drugs is stopped except treatment substitutes such as methadone and all addicts are offered intense treatment programs.

8. The regular detoxification periods are not long enough for the private drug market to re-emerge and re-establish, however long enough to dramatically cut the number of people on addictive drugs

This approach is radical, however the problem is radical by nature. Half hearted, ill thought and expensive criminalisation plans have not yet been able to deliver society from its addiction to drugs. The market for drugs must be destroyed as soon as possible, as problems such as methamphetamine, a drug which cannot be controlled using heavy handed policing approaches, are spiralling out of control. Remove the profit margin, remove the problem.

Disclaimer - * i'm not suggesting that this policy would:

gain enough public support to become viable

avoid the powerful vested interests involved in the drug trade

solve the problems surrounding the imperial nature of policies which perpetualte drug production and trafficking

solve the emotional root causes of hard drug abuse, however it does provide a better mechanism by which counselling can be delivered.

Child Care in Australia

2010-09-20T10:45:00.000-07:00

Following the collapse of the ABC learning centre’s, I think the government needs to have a good hard look at how child care is provided in this country. Do we really want to go down the route of having these kinds of private franchises taking care of Australia's children? Is having profit driven, McDonalds style services the way we really want to go?

Make no mistake, every time there is a decision to be made on whether to increase the profits of the company or to provide a better standard of service, the profits will come first and the children will come last. Some things should never be ran for profit, childcare would be better left in the hands of properly funded, not for profit community organisations, but with stricter standards on who, and what level of training is required to educate our kids.

If we get child care right, if we provide the services that mums and dads need, then we strengthen our communities, we give people some time back, help with the work/life balance which is so poor in Australia and this comes back to strengthen our economies. Healthy communities make for healthy economies, you can't cut corners on providing services that are the cornerstone of our society, that's simply taxing the future to pay for the present. The free market isn't a substitute for good governance.

Time to fix this ridiculous situation Rudd, what are you going to do about the terrible state of child care in Australia?

Case and point, leave it to the market and the ABC collapse is the kind of mess you get. The free market isn't a subsitute for good governance.

Major party failure on health and transportation policies

2010-08-20T10:26:00.001-07:00

Major party policies have set Australia up for failure, they cause and are going to cause a lot more misery.

Eg: Worried about cancer? Automotive pollution spews forth many tons of carcinogenic pollution every day, it contains free radical micro-particles which permeate cell walls and screw with our DNA causing cell mutation and cancer.

We're breathing this stuff in every day because Liberal and Labor believe in a free market designed transportation system. Then we're wondering why we have a cancer epidemic in the first place. Economic externalities? Apparently they don't exist, apparently car pollution is healthy to breathe in mass quantities over the span of a life time.

The Greens would rapidly move towards zero pollution transportation and put an end to the madness of our fossil fuel based transportation system and dramatically improve health at the same time.

Dear Anarchists and informal voters

2010-08-20T10:26:00.000-07:00

Dear Anarchists and informal voters,

I think i've ranted about this point before, and i'll rant again. Whether you're right or wrong about the only way that humanity can be free and live in a decent society, whether Green/socialist or anarchist has no bearing on what you should do in this election.

Here's the facts: after Saturday, if the Greens win enough seats in the senate, which they probably will no thanks informal voters, they will have some real legislative power. They will use this power to ACTUALLY WIN some improvements, like the right for gay couples to marry, or get the ball rolling on climate action with a half decent price on carbon, spurring the renewable energy industry on, socialised dental care aka FREE dental care.

These are things we can get TODAY and they're serious victories that we need RIGHT NOW. Fuck ideological protesting that no one can see, writing a bit A on the ballot paper is completely selfish. I can't afford dental care because i'm a poor student and time is running out on climate change! These are problems I personally have RIGHT NOW. I'm sure other people that understand the desperate situation with our energy infrastructure or that are struggling to make ends meet feel the same way.

If the Greens miss out by a few votes, and

SA doesn't elect a Greens senator because a few anarchists thought they were ideologically pure, and

the Greens don't win the balance of power as a result, and

the liberals have the balance of power, and

then we can't get the renewable energy industry booming TODAY because of that, and

Australia's commitment to reducing ghg emissions is jeopardised as a result, and

liberals have promised to scrap all of the marine national parks, and

they support old growth logging therefore it is increased, and

the foreign aid percentage of GDP isn't increased which leads to suffering and death, and

my gay friends can't get married, and

I get a toothache that I can't afford to pay for because i'm a struggling student and,

it hurts a lot......

Well isn't it bloody obvious that not voting genuinely risks screwing everyone over? and how selfish would that be?

Please vote to improve things instead of not voting at all, anything else is an irrational use of your time in the booth, self indulgent bs.

Policy considerations - Employment and wasted productive capacity

2010-07-04T10:32:00.000-07:00

The official unemployment rate in Australia currently hovers at around 5%, however on closer inspection, the situation is a lot worse. This statistic does not include people that have simply given up looking for work, are not quite ready to start immediately and if they have more than 1 hour a week of casual work. The absurdity of this assessment criteria insures that our market society appears more efficient than it really is in utilizing the productive capacity of it's citizens.

Another measurement of unemployment is underutilisation, which currently sits at just above 12%. The trend outlined in various studies (ACOSS, 2003 etc.) is that actual unemployment is generally around 2 times higher than the official rate.

Unemployment can be destructive to the confidence of a person out of work and feed into a vicious cycle where through bad experiences of work, a dislike of work develops leading to long term unemployment, or people on the casual work circuit, jumping from job to job. The unemployment of healthy, able people is bad for those people and bad for the economy.

Furthermore unemployment is extremely wasteful. There is huge amounts of work to be done, in areas of the economy outside traditional GDP measurements. Our society is experiencing social disintegration, alienation, depression and many individuals a range of detrimental behavioral and mental conditions as a result of a societal arrangement, randomly conjured up by the systemic rules by which western economics is governed. The market has created our benefits and problems.

The waste of production capacity, in labor and economic organisation, the destruction to our environment, social inequality in material wealth and education, the homeless, the ugly urban landscape choked by a sea of crawling cars, all of these problems are economic 'externalities' and the result of capitalisms allocation of financial resources solely based on what is financially profitable, as opposed to what is in the best interests of society.

There is a particular section of our economy which is not governed by the systemic rules of our market, this institution is generally recognised as using the most efficient, albeit ruthless way of getting a job done. The Australian army.

In 2009 the government spent about 20.1 billion dollars on the military, roughly a $1000 for every man, woman and child in the country. It employs about 17,064 in Active Reserve, and 12,496 in Standby Reserve, a total of 27,828 regulars. These people are paid full wages and are an expense, they contribute virtually nothing to the productive economy and the houses they build, food they eat, resources they consume are provided by the working portion of the economy, which are increasing the real wealth of Australia. The function of the Army as the government would state, is to defend the country, of course if every military in the world was truly only a force for defense, there could be no wars. We are spending billions each year on an overpriced insurance policy whilst our society is going down hill.

Imagine what we could achieve if we applied the same level of funding and organisation structure of our Army to addressing our social and environmental problems.

An Australian Army of Workers could be trained and developed, made up of builders, tradesmen, laborers, gardeners, farmers, counselors, nurses, cleaners, lawyers, artists etc. Workers from all sectors of the economy.

This Army of workers could operate under the same form of rigid and efficient command which the army does, with the same boot camp style training programs for the newly recruited. Except instead of waking up early to crawl through mud and learn how to shoot another person in the head with automatic weapons, recruits would be waking up early to learn how to lay bricks, build frames for houses and build community gardens.

An Army of artists could be employed to make our cities beautiful, with murals, street art and the application of design to an otherwise depressingly bleak landscape.

An Army of carers could be employed to look after the sick and elderly at no cost.

An Army of builders could be building government housing, so that access to affordable rent is not so difficult that people are forced onto the street. A policy which drastically reduces the speculative bubbles and inflated prices of the private rental market.

The greatest part about an army of workers is that the majority of the recruits can easily be utilised from the 10% of people that are out of work. Like the actual army, it could be an institution that virtually guarantees a person work, if they pass the initial examinations and then whips them into shape with a rigorous training program. If you can't find a job in the market, you can always get a job in the working army, an institution that trains up unskilled workers, builds confidence, builds character and pays pretty well.

It's a pretty radical proposition, that the government employ workers directly and assign them to specific tasks in the economy, as opposed to employing workers in the regular army, which are paid to learn how to kill other people. Sounds like the failed communist planned economy of the USSR you say?

I am only claiming this particular model of economic planning to address the gaping externalities which capitalism has generated, nothing more. A working army would be useful in any capitalist, socialist or other type of economy.

Not enough houses? Screwing up the market & having horrible flow on effects to the rest of the economy? Send in the Army and fight the war on housing. They'll build an additional 2000 houses on top of what the market can provide and correct the problem in an instant.

Not enough solar panels or solar hot water systems on peoples houses? particularly at the end of the electricity grid, so as to cause huge, uneconomic infrastructure costs in long distance transmission? Send in the Army and you can have entire suburbs generating their own power within a year, so you don't need to spend tax dollars to upgrade the entire grid.

The market is failed, too slow, plans the economy in a random way and creates horrible externalities. The only way around it sometimes is to take charge and plan the economy in an intelligent way, by letting the government roll up it's sleeves and just do the work that needs to be done that the market isn't able to do properly.

Each person in this picture could have been a depressed long term dole recipient, contributing nothing to society, because the market can not value the contribution they might otherwise make. Pay 100 artists full time to make the streets of Adelaide look beautiful, it's better than paying for the dole each week and receiving nothing but an unhappy, alienated citizenry which is not given the opportunity to contribute.

Not enough houses and an inflated private rental market at crisis point. Meanwhile we've got around 10% of actual unemployment. It would be madness not to utilise all those people that are in and out of work, skill them up and have them build government housing.

long term unemployment is isolating, alienating, depressing and wasteful. There is no excuse for our system to throw these people overboard and write them off as useless. Many simply need a break, something to take them out of their circumstances and build up their confidence again.

If people were given the opportunity of being guaranteed and encouraged into work, paid $500 a week instead of the $250 they'd get on the dole anyway, they'd be infanitely better off and so would society. $500 to work 35 hours a week in community gardens, on land care projects, making our cities green, sustainable and beautiful. They'd heal the emotional wounds inflicted by the market, the sense of worthlessness and become productive and skilled members of society again.

Many workers are forced into the casual employment market, where you can loose your job in an instant. Providing and encouraging an option for workers to put in a weeks work for double the dole would provide security, especially for workers trying to support a family.

Why should you vote Green?

2010-02-27T10:38:00.000-08:00

This isn't an essay, it's a political rant/ reply to a post that someone made, basically asking why they should vote green and holding the widely held opinion that a vote for the Greens is a vote towards a weaker economy with higher unemployment.

*Why should I vote Green?*

Because our society is currently unsustainable, the definition literally meaning, that even if we wanted to continue doing things the way we are, we simply can't. Take climate change, take oil depletion, soils around the world are in terrible shape, water resources drying up or becoming so polluted that we can't use them to the point where there is a global fresh water crisis. Our forests are being devastated, global fish stocks depleting and on top of that, the economic structure we have is falling to pieces because it's all based on growth and private ownership of insanely large corporations.

The Green movement's call for sustainability is not a bleeding heart argument, it is based on simple scientific principals and natural laws which outline the limits to growth, which unless observed will result in our economy hitting a brick wall like our American friends have only just started experiencing, only when limits are imposed by nature because of environmental devastation, the results are worse than an economic depression, they are catastrophic and irreversible.

Our present expansive and consumption based forms of economic organisation, which are based on perpetual and unlimited growth, are of course doomed to fail. The present mode of production relies upon absorbing profits and externalising losses and wastes, however on a finite and crowded planet, this can simply not continue as is. A Green vote will lend support to choose a sustainable economy and to guarantee a decent future for everyone.

*How does this guarantee work?*

Well i'll give you an example, farmers around Australia are loosing work, because of the drought and because water allocations are being reduced. If we had have managed the river sustainably, as the Greens would have done, then we wouldn't be in the mess we're in now, with entire communities facing major unemployment due to a lack of water and rising salinity levels. So sometimes sustainability means using less today, but it avoids far worse problems in the future. It's a responsible philosophy towards governance, which the Greens uphold.

The greens are not for a completely free market, where all of our manufacturing jobs go off shore, regulation is abolished and we end up making nothing in Australia. The other parties think we'll be ok with an unbalanced economy, relying solely on mining wealth! The greens want a balanced economy, where we're not importing cheaper and crappier products from overseas, but where we produce goods here in Australia: Sustainably.

Are we going to drive petrol cars for ever? burn coal for ever? Impossible. Why didn't the Liberal government and why doesn't the Labor government invest in Australian industry, so that we can become a major player in the production of electric vehicles? of solar panels? of wind turbines? Everyone knows this is the way forward, the world is moving this way anyway, we have to to avoid catastrophic changes to the global climate, so we should be at the forefront, benefit from the production of these goods and produce jobs galore in the process. It's a win win.

The problem with implementing this strategy is that coal, oil and conservative business lobbying money has got the major parties by the balls. That's the short answer as to why we're not making any of these products in Australia. That's why we need the Greens, to slowly grow the vote, until one day the party is challenging for government and forcing the other parties to clean up their disgraceful performances in providing a sound economic future for Australia.

The major parties have so far just followed America, and look where they're going....right down the plug hole, all out of work. Governing a nation sustainably is how you guarantee work, this extends to ecology, the economy, to social well being, everything. We need to be sustainable or the whole thing eventually falls over, simple.

Fixing up the mess the major parties have left us with will take a lot of work, meaning a lot of jobs for Australian workers. Let's make wind turbines, solar panels, electric cars and trams for our cities. More rail for freight, light rail, insulation, rainwater tanks and solar hot water at every Australian house, reforestation projects for farmers, proper land care programs, sequestration. All of these areas and more jobs than we can fill while ensuring that Australia is a sustainable country.

The solar panel industry doesn't need to be a big expense, further screwing with our trade deficit. We can produce panels here and put them on roofs in the millions, with government support and a massive program roll out, every Australian home could have solar power. Now wouldn't that be nice?

We need to demand Green jobs, the bastards in power will support their coal industry mates over us every time. Wind, solar thermal, photovoltaic, geothermal, this is the way forward!

reflections on social problems in affluent communities

2010-02-02T20:50:00.000-08:00

As I write this, I am in my cabin up on a hill in Fairfax, just 45 minutes north of Sanfrancisco, CA. It has been raining all day, it's pouring down, the sound of rain on the flat roof is constant. I'm writing this by candle light, as lightning has blown a fuse somewhere in the house. Still, electricity isn't really that essential up here as I don't have electronics anyway. On the bright side of being wet, cold and in the dark, I am now enjoying the authentic 1850's experience that Thoreau had, one step closer to the romantic idealism possessed in Walden. It is this one small consolation I receive as I freeze my ass off, writing about the social externalities of capital.

On the social externalities of capital

Today I was at the public library, taking advantage of the free internet which they provide, when I noticed the young girl next to me working on her school project. She would have been 11 or 12, working on a paper about plate tectonics. Her mother came over to help, and was fussing over things as they both tried to format the work properly. The young girl was saying "I tried that, it won't let me space it, see it's not doing it!". The mother was going over things with her and becoming increasingly frustrated and her tone was impatient and moody. "Here, put this in there", "why haven't you done this?"and "well, what's the problem now!", her snarling tone enough to make me quite uncomfortable. Eventually the young girl started crying because she didn't get it and couldn't make the thing go in the right spot, but it was obvious to me that she was crying because her mother was being so awful, was arguing with her daughter and had a mean and spiteful tone in her voice. The poor girl simply felt like her mother didn't love her.

The mother was well off, like many are in Fairfax. She was most likely a professional, I've seen that sort of impatience and frustration in many people that have stressful, fast paced jobs, often in the city. What I noticed was that the mother was taking out her own frustration, her own stress from her life, out on the kid. The poor girl was not doing anything wrong, the mother was stressed, intolerant and moody. The young girl continued to cry, the mum noticing this still continued to push her daughter more, with no compassion and still pointing out mistakes in a frustrated tone.

What I witnessed was no small event, it was a pattern of behaviour and I seriously doubt that this was a once off occurrence as the personality of the mother is shaped by longer term influences and circumstances. The mother will scar her child for life and pass on pain and imbalance in the form of feelings of rejection, low self esteem, not providing a desirable role model and creating identity issues etc. The social imbalance and dysfunction that caused the mother to be so miserable is passed to some degree, like a social virus to all those in proximity that can't escape it, her children will be highly effected, work colleagues may absorb quite a lot of the negativity, down to the level of the retail clerk, that may just have one bad day because of her which they can shrug off.

So one might ask, where did the problem start? What was the original cause? The mother might have had her own issues passed on from other people and circumstances, which manifest in an unbalanced and angry life, but let us suppose, like is often the case in today's world, that her parents were loving, her childhood was average, that she went to university, became a professional and works in a busy job. Let us suppose she is an originator of new stress and unhappiness, which she brings forth and transmits through social networks.

People in our modern capitalist society work too much, often for not enough pay relative to the profits which they create for the company in which they work. The pain however, is nearly always created by the type of work, the intensity and the duration. Let us suppose that the mother works as a well paid professional, a lawyer at a firm dealing with insurance law. It would not be surprising to find such a person working 45+ hours a week, at the office and 10-30 more hours a week at home, reading notes, emails, on the phone etc. Then there are the chores associated with living, bills to pay, meals to prepare, washing etc. Even if household duties are outsourced to cleaners, gardening to gardeners, maintenance to handymen, there is still a substantial amount of work for most people to do.

The mother is angry because she is stressed. She is stressed because she is not living the way humans were meant to live, she is not able to unplug, to live a balanced and meaningful life. Anger is a psychological response which arises when things don't go the way you expected them to go, whether you consciously expected some result, or whether you did so subconsciously, these evolved human characteristics are shared throughout humanity. They are there for us to survive, as in times of great scarcity, those descendants that got angry and fought to physically take what they wanted in the moment were the ones that passed genetics on the most.
The mother is angry because her lifestyle is no way for a human to live, it is not close enough to a natural state which is most beneficial for humans, the one which we evolved in. There is no leisure time, lazy and relaxed social interaction which primates such as humans need. There is constant conflict at work, once a problem is solved there is another to solve and this goes on until the mind is exhausted at the end of each day. Attempting to be completely happy with a lifestyle so unnatural, hence stressful is not a battle that can be won. So why do we work ourselves to hard? to the point of stress, anger and depression? Until we are unhappy and unfulfilled?

Capital demands ever increasing profits, there is no limit to how large a return on capital investment should be. Hence, the pressure on wages is always downward, whilst the demands on workers are that they should work longer and harder. Lawyers, physicians, those that master the arts and sciences, once were held as honourable, now are forced to work as paid wage slaves.

Competitive pressures of the labour market and those pressures from within the host company see individual workers forced to compete with each other. Each feels the pressure to work longer and harder, to rise within the company or even just to keep their job, as those that are willing to work back later every night may displace those that are not willing or able to make that sacrifice. So it is the fundamental nature of capital, to increase profit which is the source of increased duration and intensity of labour and hence, increases of the stress and anger of those workers afflicted.

To summarise, as workers are exhausted and squeezed by capital which then absorbs the best of their motivation, energy, tallent, capacity to deal with stress and time, there is a hidden social cost which is borne by the worker and society at large. The deficit is borne by the worker and manifest in the anger, stress and discontent, which is taken home to the family. The unhappiness, anger, stress is then taken into the community where it is spread and transmitted as any disease may be. People's lives are made miserable as a result of capitalism's insatiable demand to maximise private profit. An externality of the system.

As the work is intensified, is less fulfilling, more monotonous and hard, the suffering of the working is so by that factor increased. The division of labour, a logical necessity of increases in production within capitalism, further increases the intensity and decreases the level of enjoyment and meaning that can be exacted from the work. So for example, a factory worker will only do the smallest portion of work required in the production chain, so that they will be faster and more efficient at doing this task. Capitalism requires this of companies, to increase profits for the rich owners of capital. The work is simply so boring, so hard and long, that those working under these conditions suffer greatly, in direct proportion to exactly how boring, hard and long the work is. The suffering is only relieved temporarily by alcohol, drugs, diversions such as TV, but it remains in the mind and body. The children raised by people that suffer so much, suffer in return, are more afflicted, angry and less likely to rise above their circumstances that those with parents that do not work in such conditions. This is the nature of class society which capitalism creates, with the most inflicted hitting the bottom, falling to the lower classes of society, where they drink and smoke to ease the pain. The pain caused by intense labour is felt by all workers, albeit very unevenly across the entire social spectrum.

So the young girl, now a victim, now a social externality of capitalism, was not to blame. The mother, her suffering passed on to her daughter, now a victim, now a social externality of capitalism. Even the company, operating under the laws of the land, of private property, corporate law, of financial capitalism, was compelled to act in accordance to the principals of the economic system and find ways to suck more out of their employees to increase corporate profits.

No individual is to blame for the young girl's suffering, the problem is systematic, it has it's root in the private ownership of capital and the constitutional laws, enforced and facilitated by government, which uphold the structure of the economic system.

A solution to social externalities

The solution to those social externalities plaguing society which arise as a result of capitalist accumulation (albeit difficult to implement), is to collectivise the means of production.

If all workers own the company in equal measure, then they can be afforded equal say in the conditions of production. If a vote was taken by the owner workers, they could decide on the level of profit desired in balance with the level of work required to achieve the profit. Social externalities are instantly included in the economics of production, when it is the bosses back which pains under heavy labour. A culture of fairness and equality can be fostered in an environment where all are economically equal.

This model of business organisation is called a collective. As all profits in a collective are shared as wages amongst the workers of a collective, as opposed to extracted by a rich capitalist for the maintenance of an obscenely decadent lifestyle, far less work is required to produce wages which can maintain the lives of workers. Conditions can be improved democratically, for example if the division of labour is too great, the work too monotonous, then a vote can be help to vary the work or perhaps even decrease the level of production if desired to meet the needs of, and provide well being for the workers.

It may be that the collective can even decide to employ an individual, specifically tasked with the job of identifying the most economically viable ways of improving worker wellbeing and happiness, and implementing those strategies for the benefit of the workers. This expense only becomes viable under an organisational model in which the will of the workers is realised, so profit then stands on equal footing to worker happiness, social and environmental concerns, worker safety and the work/life balance.

The concept that managers and highly skilled professionals are to accept pay which is equal to that of a production line worker can be difficult to grasp, however when the work you are doing , the profits yielded are directly linked to your salary, work is infinitely more enjoyable than if you were to work as a paid wage slave to a capitalist. However when a business is constituted as a cooperative, those are the rules that can not be changed unless agreed upon. Only those managers and professionals that are doing the job out of enjoyment will bother to take on the extra responsibility and negotiations can be made to allow the more stressful positions to work less hours. Survival of the sociopathic and greedy becomes survival of the altruistic CEO, doing the job for the right reasons, in a culture of equality becomes the dominant culture.
Meaning is restored to work within a collective, displacing fear of losing your job if under-performing, with the realisation that if an individual chooses themselves to work smarter and harder, that their pay cheque and that of their fellow employees will be that much higher. Work is reunited with the fruits of labour and meaning is restored to even the most boring tasks when you become your own boss. In a collective, those that excel in their profession are recognised and applauded greatly by all workers, as their contribution is directly received by all peers in the shared profit. This is the essence of a community, or 'common unity' as it should be understood, a common goal and thread which is shared amongst it's members. Healthy communities have individuals which rely on each other, not for mere social interaction, but for the economic prosperity hence wellbeing of each other. If a person in a genuine community is sick, it affects others not just emotionally from a sense of human caring, but economically as their productive labour is removed as a shared resource.

Those that do not perform in a cooperative are democratically expelled in accordance with the collectives constitution and the will of the workers as a whole. Lazy or underperforming workers will quickly become unpopular in an environment where each is dependent on the next for their subsistence

Collectives do not however remove the insentive to externalise costs outside of the collective, nor do they remove the competitive pressures of a free market and undesirable consequences of such. However legal and political structures can legislate to provide a strict set of codes and laws which can counter the nature of free enterprise to externalise costs whilst lobbying and corrupting government to get what they want at the expense of the population. Furthermore, a taxation system could be established to level out the disparity between businesses of industrial sectors. The is because activities like mining are highly profitable, yet equally necessary industries although less profitable such as farming would be neglected by a disparity. Without a different levelling out style tax rate placed each sector, the collective members of mining companies would become disproportionately wealthier than farmers, and a lop sided economy would result which neglects social and environmental concerns. Although collective ownership of capital can be used and seen as an intermediate, and entirely essential step towards transforming society along the lines of something which is sustainable, this model is ultimately doomed to fail for the very reasons which free market capitalism is. It can only be viewed as a transitory progression, towards the entire collectivisation of capital, between all citizens of nations.

As a transitory policy for capitalist nations, large tax breaks should be afforded to collective business structures, which reflect the positive social changes the structure reinforces. This would help socially healthy cooperative business structures compete with the large corporations which dominate the market using anti-social organisational structures, which break the spirit of the people and produce class society.

However because class society exists, and those with capital wrote the rules, directed western education over hundreds of years to serve capitalist interests, run the parties which run the country and control the resources by their ownership of them, any significant change to the system must be taken by a mass mobilisation of the overwhelming majority of the working population.

South Australia the Defence State?

2009-07-02T10:45:00.000-07:00

I know it's an uphill battle, I know the world isn’t perfect, but I refuse to believe our species is so stupid that we have to produce large amounts of weapons and regularly murder each other.

Rann’s plan to make South Australia the “defence state” by encouraging large war profiteering corporations to set up shop in South Australia is outrageous. For our morally challenged politicians, I will offer you a purely economic rationale: Climate Change is here and the whole world is starting to act on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The market for green technologies and renewable energy industrial products is booming and about to skyrocket, the boom in renewable energy products will only be comparable to the oil boom of the early 1900’s. In terms of jobs, increased economic activity and government revenue, Rann has really backed the wrong horse.

South Australia could choose to follow Labor and Liberal down the path of mediocracy, or we could become the world’s leading producers of renewable energy products, of solar thermal power station components and wind turbines. It’s our choice

Wind

Large scale solar thermal generation

Solar thermal parabolic reflectors

Centralised solar thermal design

I just really love solar thermal! The heat can be stored so that it produces energy overnight...Base load power from the sun!!!

In response to Ian Plimer

2009-06-01T10:48:00.000-07:00

Response to Ian Plimer's comments - "When the environmentalists finally recognize that they are actually religious, then a real discussion can take place with other scientists. Until then, they're just like the creationists. They claim that they're scientific, but really the foundations are religious and dogmatic."

So Plimer thinks that environmentalism isn’t based on genuine scientific concerns? He would have us believe that there is no issue with a species extinction rate between 100 to 1000 times greater than the background rate, no issue that the Amazon will be half gone by 2050 (alarming stuff, check the satellite pics) and most of the worlds original forests aren’t there anymore, the oceans are at crisis point, global fish stocks have plummeted, agricultural soils across the world are only supported by ever increasing quantities of non renewable fossil fuel based fertilisers, supported by a resource that will have less and less available as production slows at some point (peak oil), the worlds deserts are constantly expanding in part due to over graising, no issue with a global water scarcity crisis?

Maybe he should check out a smoggy Chinese city or how about LA on a smog alert day? No cause for change? It is a rapidly depleting non renewable resource that's causing the smog and greenhouse gasses by the way, regardless of plimer's analysis of Global Warming, it will run out eventually, so which mass social movement if not environmentalism was going to force the massive widespread economic changes required to reconfigure our entire global economy to run on resources that aren’t going to run out?

Despite what Plimer chooses to believe, Global warming is the major environmental and humanitarian issue of our time and it is at the top of this list of crises, and the list is very, very long. So i don't get it, is Plimer arguing that all of these quantifiable and provable issues don't exist? That there is no cause for serious environmental concern or a movement for a sustainable future? Plimer needs to wake up!

Ian Plimer: Environmental problems? What problems?