verging_on_random

Aboriginal land rights

The Federal Court decision confirming that native title exists in some crown land around Perth might be a wonderful gift to the Howard Government next year. They can pull out all those old maps showing how the damn blackfellas want to take over all our land and put us out on the streets with the other homeless people. Unless of course we are saved by the Howard Government which has new native title laws ready to put to parliament, carefully drafted to ensure that Kim Beazley and company will tie themselves in knots trying to explain their position on the matter.
It will be interesting to see how the public reacts. Indigenous land rights and Aboriginal welfare have had their 15 minutes of fame. I suspect that many people’s attitude now will be “Jeez we walked across the Harbour Bridge for them …. what else are we supposed to do? Isn’t it time they did something for themselves and stopped trying to take our homes off us?” Howard has cleverly abolished ATSIC, the only body that could ever claim to speak on behalf of all indigenous people, and carefully groomed a handful of Aborigines like Noel Pearson who wear suits and ties instead of that bizarre stuff that people like the Dodsons get about in. I mean Noel doesn’t even have a beard. These are the ‘true’ leaders of the Aboriginal people according to the government, who by a happy coincidence also happen to support the government’s approach to Aboriginal issues.
Helping all this spin doctoring along is the government’s contemptible creation of the ‘pedophile ring in Aboriginal communities’ non-story, with the enthusiastic co-operation of a gullible media. If you missed how it started, an anonymous ‘Aboriginal welfare worker’ was interviewed doing the usual cloak and dagger face-blacked-out-cos-he-can’t-be-identified trick to make the story seem really dramatic. Turns out he was actually an adviser to the minister, who’s completely unapologetic about the deception because ‘the story is true anyway’.
Now we have proposals to wind back the last vestige of Aboriginal autonomy by removing their authority over who comes onto their land. I mean if tourists want to climb Ayres Rock (let’s call it by its proper name, not that foreign ‘Uluru’ gibberish) and carve their names in it so they can take a photo, why should we let a mob of primitive blacks stop them? Tourists bring a lot of money into the country.
Let’s face it, the whole idea of native title and indigenous autonomy was always inconsistent with the government’s obsession with economic growth and a free market (except in agriculture of course). It also affronts their whole obsession with their superior ‘values’, by which they mean a nasty mixture of British imperialist and American born-to-rule mentalities. Being deeply cynical, I think they’ve got themselves a nice hot election issue for next year that they can activate any time they want by introducing some new native title laws. Hey they’ve done brilliantly for 10 years by playing wedge politics, why would they stop now?

Osama Bin Spinach?

BOISE, Idaho (Reuters) - A 2-year-old boy in Idaho and an elderly woman in Maryland who both died from suspected E.coli infections raised to three the number of deaths related to a nationwide health scare around fresh spinach, state health officials said on Friday.

See kids you were right not to eat that yucky stuff.

The War On Terror

Q. Do you have a concern that if this ‘us and them’ continues that we stand the possibility of a clash of civilisations?

A. My great worry is that um eh people will not have the commitment and the resilience to keep going. We have to keep going otherwise ah we will ah run the risk of ah dropping our guard and ah paying ah very heavily for that ah failure.

http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2006/s1738199.htm

That was our revered Prime Minister talking on Four Corners, in a Liz Jackson interview. In which he demonstrated how well he has perfected the art of not answering the question that he’s asked (he refused five times to say if he believed there was a link between Iraq and September 11 …. sheesh even George W has admitted there wasn’t).

But my question is: what did he mean by “keep going”? Going on doing what exactly? What do we have to keep doing to avoid “dropping our guard”, that will presumably allow the Terrurists to do …. ummm …. what exactly? Let suicide bombers loose at the Melbourne Cup? Blow up Town Hall railway station? Fly planes into Australia Square?

Well I suppose there’s a small risk that loonies somewhere would like to do all those things. I’m just not sure what Howard means we have to do to “keep going” to prevent them. The things that I listed are crimes, and we rely on intelligence and police resources to protect us from crime. I haven’t heard many people suggesting that we should stop that.

But what I think our Prime Minister is on about is the War On Terror that requires us to engage in unprovoked aggression on countries on the other side of the world ….. lock up asylum seekers on god-forsaken Pacific islands …. engage in endless denigration of Muslims …. bray in shrill tones about the need to protect our “values” ….. buy tens of billions of dollars worth of tanks and ships and planes because gosh you need that kind of hardware to stop a suicide bomber …..

Yeah I think that’s what Howard means by “keep going” ….. maintain this bullshit line that we’re “at war” so anybody who criticises the government’s “war plan” is soft on terror and pretty much a damn traitor.

We’re lucky to have such a strong, far-sighted leader in these troubled times (yes that was sarcasm).

Steve Irwin

Mr Beattie says Mr Irwin did a lot of good for Queensland.

“He put tourism, Queensland tourism, on the international map as well as being someone who, on enviromental matters, was really a world leader,” he said.

Ummmm suuure …. Steve was right up there with David Suzuki and Al Gore.

So I wonder why Australian Tv networks didn’t think his ‘documentaries’ were worth running when he was alive.

The way our politicians wallow in faux-grief for celebrities is pathetic.

Learned helplessness

Psychologists use this concept of ‘learned helplessness’ to describe a condition where someone has come to depend so completely on another that they are incapable of exercising their own initiative. We’ve co-opted the expression in organisational behaviour studies (one day I must write about the extent to which OB and management studies generally depend on concepts borrowed from other disciplines).

Anyway we discuss the way people working in bureaucracies often become lost and helpless when confronted by a situation that’s not covered by the rules. Usually they will simply wait passively until somebody in authority comes along and tells them what to do.

I was reminded of this the other night when I watched a show about people’s behaviour in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina last year. In the Superdome about 20,000 people seem to have passively waited for ‘the authorities’ to come and do something, while in the mean time social order broke down completely. To take an especially gross example, people kept using the toilets until they were too disgusting to even go through the door, and then started using any other place they could find.

Apparently nobody thought to organise a cleaning detail, or arrange even a basic volunteer roster to maintain some kind of social order. Or if someone did try it obviously didn’t work. Nope, people just lapsed into dysfunctional behaviour waiting for the cleaners to turn up.

It’s a worrying thought that this kind of learned helplessness is fairly typical of modern cities. The response to any problem is to call on the government to do something about it, by passing some new laws or employing some more police/inspectors/judges or both. Our problems fall into two categories: ones we can solve by buying goods or services and ones that are the government’s problem. Nothing is our collective responsibility any more.
Margaret Thatcher once said that “There is no such thing as society, just a collection of individuals” and that appears to be an emerging reality. Which is a scary development when the most important issues of the next few decades will be ones that can only be addressed effectively at a social level. If we leave everything to governments, the result will be an ever-increasing level of authoritarian interference in our lives.

And the even bigger problem is that authoritarian solutions are rarely effective, meaning that unless we learn as communities to take responsibility for our own destinies the social problems (such as water management) will just keep getting worse. I will not, however, hold my breath waiting for a change to happen.

Bread and circuses

In ancient Rome, the ruling class kept the masses happy with an endless series of public holidays and stadium games. Our contemporary politicians have clearly decided that it’s a winning formula.

This thought was triggered by reading that Peter Beattie is prepared to give Steve Irwin a state funeral. Now I won’t tell you what I thought of Steve Irwin but wtf has he done to deserve a state funeral? He was a successful media personality, period. But I suppose if it was good enough to have state memorial services for Slim Dusty and Kerry Packer and Don Bradman, why not Steve?

There’s actually a longass list of suitable candidates when you think about it …. which is just as well because there’s one federal and heaps of state and territory governments who’ll want to get in on the act. There’s Paul Hogan, Dame Edna, Steve Waugh, Alan Border …. well pretty much any Australian cricket team captain ….. Kylie Minogue …. but NOT Jason Donovan because there were those rumours and … well you know, the whole purpose of these state funerals is so politicians can pretend they were best buddies with the dead person.

Of course any ex-serviceman who can claim to be the last of his kind is a candidate …. like the guy who was a steward in a merchant ship for 3 months in 1918, never heard a gun fired, but got written up as our last surviving ‘hero’ from World War 1. And we all remember the circus that was Jake Kovco’s funeral, he was a private who got killed in dodgy circumstances in his own barracks and they still gave him a flypast and the Prime Minister looking solemn …. imagine what they could do if we get an officer actually killed fighting Terrurists!!! The funeral will run for a week.

And don’t get me started on ticker-tape parades. A ticker-tape parade for returned servicepeople at the end of World War 2 was a pretty understandable thing but since then it’s got out of hand, don’t you think? First it was sporting teams that won really important competitions like world cups …. then it was sporting teams that won pretty much anything …. last I heard Steve Bracks was going to have one for the Socceroos who didn’t make it past the second round of the world cup and won a whole 1 (one) game.

All this public bullshit serves an obvious purpose of course … the politicians who organise it get reflected glory from being associated with the people who are being honoured. Or at least they think they do. Plus it also distracts the media from other stories that might be politically embarrassing, so it’s all good except where they bring home the wrong body or something (omg i would love to have seen the look on Brendan Nelson’s face when they told him they’d brought home the wrong Jake Kovco).

I can see a day soon when government representatives will be hovering at the bedside of dying Famous People, jostling for rights to the state funeral. Every night’s lead TV news story will be a state funeral or a tickertape parade. And of course the whole nonsense will get more and more devalued but who cares … it’s all about appearance, not substance. Sounds like a good reflection of public life to me.

PS Last night’s news featured Howard doing exactly the same gig for Peter Brock as he did for Steve Irwin. Same background of Australian flags, same solemn face, same earnest platitudes. And yes, Victoria’s first in the race with the offer of a state funeral.

The de-commodification of music

I have an extensive collection of music. It’s my only vice . Well unless you count drinking rum, in which case I have two vices.

Since I got broadband I’ve been downloading quite a lot of new music. I had to get a new external hard drive to put it on … last time I looked there’s about 60 hours of mp3 files.

NOOOO I don’t use limewire or file-sharing programs! All my downloads are legal. As far as I know. And that’s the first funny thing about getting free music off the net. You have no idea if it’s legal or not. I mean in the olden days if you borrowed someone’s record and taped it you knew it was naughty …. not that it stopped anyone and I’ve never heard of anybody getting prosecuted for it. But if you saw a bunch of top 20 CDs or tapes at a local market selling for half price with dodgy labels, you had a pretty good idea they were pirated and it was illegal to sell them.

But there’s no way of telling online is there? Well there is with some stuff I suppose, like if you see a best-selling James Blunt song or something by an Australian idol you can pretty much guess that’s it not supposed to be there. But what if it’s a track by those over-hyped losers the Arctic Monkeys? I mean they’re supposed to have launched their whole career on word of mouth as a result of fans sharing their music online. These days lots of bands want you to download their music for free. Even established artists release promo tracks on their own sites.

So what’s a man to do? Hire a private detective to investigate any track he wants to download? Nah, I just do what any sensible person would do …. download the thing on the assumption that if anybody’s doing the wrong thing it’s the guy who’s got it on his web page.

Now I know I’m not a typical consumer, and if any students read this yes it’s totally wrong to draw general conclusions from a single case, but I actually can’t see anything wrong with this practice … so far. I’ve even bought a few CDs because I like the one or two tracks I heard online, and they were by bands that I never would have heard of otherwise.

What has happened though is that I’ve become a more informed shopper. Until I started downloading I used to buy most of my music on the basis of reviews in specialist music mags - mainly the British ones like ‘Q’ and ‘Vox’. They got me into some stuff I never would have heard otherwise - come on be honest, how many of you are familiar with the work of the Elvis Brothers? They were GREAT!!! But anyway along with quite a lot of good purchases I also ended up with some really really shitty ones . Anyone want to make an offer for the first Mars Volta CD, only played once?

I also think it’s true that i now spend less money overall on CDs because I can get so much good stuff for free. It’s not that I’m getting stuff for nothing that I would otherwise have bought, it’s that I’m satisfying my new music craving online so I have little reason to do the random hit and miss buying I used to do. So it’s true in my case that online music is hurting CD sales, it’s just impossible to say precisely who’s losing out.

The interesting thing is to speculate on how it will all develop. At the moment mp3 sound quality isn’t all that great but then who listens to pop music for sound quality? I reckon mp3 is good enough as long as you don’t want to listen to God Speed You Black Emperor at high volume in a quiet room. Actually if you wanted to do that you’d probably be so high a $50 ghetto blaster would sound terrific .

Some people argue that artists will only keep making decent music for the public if they think they might make a shitload of money out if it. I guess this is true of the big production arrangements that have a 60 piece backing orchestra and need to hire a massively expensive studio to record in. But there’s lots and lots of good music that doesn’t depend on that kind of investment, and people make that kind of music for their own satisfaction, or maybe to play a few local gigs and make some extra cash at weekends.

Anyone who frequents MySpace knows how many bands are dying to be your friends and have you download their music for free. And some of it is really good. Moreover the technology is improving so quickly that in a few years you won’t need real musicians and a studio to sound like a 60 piece orchestra. So maybe we’re heading into a new age where music is truly democratic (about time something was) and the mega-corporations that have run things in the past will die a slow and painful death. Hurrah!!

One thing still worries me though - how t f will anyone be able to keep track of what’s available? Out of the millions of mp3s online how will I know where to get stuff that appeals to me? There you go any students who are reading ….. when you finish your B Bus go and develop a music guide service that people subscribe to …. it gives them a feed of new tracks that fit their tastes. Nooo don’t thank me, just send me 10% when you sell the company to Google for $3 billion in a few years.

WAIT is bourbon the same vice as rum or a different one? Idk, maybe I have three vices then.