Get Your Mao On (III): Relations Between Officers And Men
Our comrades must understand that ideological remolding involves long-term, patient and painstaking work, and they must not attempt to change people’s ideology, which has been shaped over decades of life, by giving a few lectures or by holding a few meetings. Persuasion, not compulsion, is the only way to convince them. Compulsion will never result in convincing them. To try to convince them by force simply won’t work.
I don’t know why “ideological” has to be an epithet in these post-normative days of universal middle-class entitlement mentality. I was brought up on my parents’ knees to understand ideology as an identifiable system of beliefs or a worldview which prompted measurable behaviour in a society, nothing more and nothing less.
loltories
At the risk of elevating the level of political discourse around here, I just wanted to post this retort to Joe “the People’s Tory” Hockey’s criticism of changes to the Medicare levy:
Get Your Mao On (II): Contradictions Amongst The People
Recently there has been a falling off in ideological and political work among students and intellectuals, and some unhealthy tendencies have appeared. Some people seem to think that there is no longer any need to concern oneself with politics or with the future of the motherland and the ideals of mankind.
Plus ça change and all the rest of the French deviationist cliché. It’s not the Chairman’s fault that we’re made to imagine politics as a leadership race of inconsequence and personality, and if our Parties compete in an arena of mediocrity, subsidised homeownership and baby production. At least we have moments of sublime insanity to keep us entertained (if also repelled).
Sadly for him, and Morrissetti-ronic for me, Gerard Henderson agrees with Zedong. The Conservative intellectual tradition in Australia really is pretty moribund—moribund in the arse, an unkind person might say.
So… intellectual dormancy. What’s the big fella’s solution?
To counter these tendencies, we must strengthen our ideological and political work. Both students and intellectuals should study hard.
Thanks Mao. That was useful.
Get Your Mao On (I): Correcting Mistaken Ideas
With victory, certain moods may grow within the Party - arrogance, the airs of a self-styled hero, inertia and unwillingness to make progress, love of pleasure and distaste for continued hard living. With victory, the people will be grateful to us and the bourgeoisie will come forward to flatter us… the flattery of the bourgeoisie may conquer the weak-willed in our ranks.
This is from the famous Little Red Book so well-used by the sincere soixante-huitards and insincerely by banally sarcastic smartarses (as here).
This post will be the first in a series in which I apply selections from the Quotations to the current state of the Party of which I’m a despairing member, out of their twentieth century context, with a faux-ironic sense of sneering detachment. I’m all for moving forward in a spirit of consultation, but let’s also have a bit of enlightened self-criticism too.
Let’s remember that the labour movement can also make good use of things made in China.
I am a shield. I will protect you.
Mmm Grazie Italian Spiderman!
Pest control
It’s being reported that a species of aquarium fish may be swimming feral around Newcastle, and may thus be the latest pernicious weed species inflicted by man on Australian ecosystems.
When will we learn? Never, judging by this article, to wit:
The department’s acting manager of aquatic biosecurity, Bill Bardsley, said that if the fish had spread to the dam it might be too late to control its numbers.
“This does highlight the need for ongoing public education, which we already do a considerable amount of,” he said.
“If you have a fish and you want to get rid of it, the right thing to do is to dispose of it humanely or give it to a fish shop or pass it on to a friend because you never know the damage they could do if released.”
Sure, but if you let people have these fish at home, sooner or later they’re going to get into the wild, because no amount of education will ensure that no one ever releases one. Just as we in Australia are not afflicted of the American madness of letting people have automatic firearms on the understanding that they don’t misuse them, similarly we shouldn’t be letting people be keeping potentially devastating species as domestic pets. I fail to see that people have a fundamental right to keep exotic fish.
Requiem for a good hat
This is your correspondent, in a paddock somewhere,* no doubt up to nefarious nefariety, perhaps organising a foco insurgency or maybe a revolutionary reconnaissance, but certainly up to no good. Note the presence of a suspicious superfluence above the eyebrows: yes indeed, a beret.
It’s my unpleasant duty to you all, my comrades, to report to you the loss in action of the hat you see there on my head. It fell in active duty—keeping me warm on a bus ride home from my disagreeable duty to capitalism that the ruling classes term “work”—and in the act of gathering my possessions, when I left the vehicle, the beret without me was carried heroically into martyrdom past my stop and onwards to paradise/terminus.
Technically speaking, I made a disembarking maneoevre without fully engaging my headgear. As I write, I’m mourning the loss of a good friend, a warming companion of the upper scone, a good solid felt friend, and let’s be honest, an identifying feature for an unremarkable man.
Goodbye, hat.
The authorities have yet to determine the whereabouts of my beret in the optimistically named Lost And Found Department.
*South Australia, 2007. I had the map and the binoculars, I knew exactly where I was.
The Arrogance of Incumbency
I’m struck by how much the NSW state Labor government resemble not the new federal Labor government but the old Howard regime. The arrogance of incumbency, populist social conservatism and neoliberal fundamentalism all remind me of that old administration. The particular thing that puts me in mind of the Howard government though is their new use of public funds for a political advertising campaign, which itself is a beat-up. Howard was the master of this, and action has rightly been promised at a federal level to stop it happening in the future.
The advertising campaign I’m referring to is one hyping the state government’s new plans to put in a metro link to the North-West from Sydney CBD. The fact of the matter is that not one thing has yet been done to actually build this link, that the Labor state government has a long history of announcing public infrastructure projects and then shelving them, and that it in fact shelved a more comprehensive plan to build a new full-scale CityRail link in favour of this plan.
Announcing and advertising infrastructure is a lot easier than building it. Fortunately, I don’t believe (as a materialist) that it can have anything like the same effect.
Clearly, the Iemma government is reviled in NSW. People in this state are well aware of the slippage of their quality of life in recent years, and the crucial link of this slippage to the lack of government action on metropolitan transport. Which is to say that, outrageous though it is, I think this campaign will be about as electorally successful as Howard’s WorkChoices advertising spree.
Earth Hour 2: Insignificance Doubled
“Please take a bow, Sydney
Last night Mother Earth hosted a candlelight supper for a few million close friends.”
coos the unbelievably smug smh.com.au
To begin something of a tradition, I would like to call readers’ attention to this before-and-after ‘Earth Hour’ shot released by the originator of ‘Earth Hour’, the Sydney Morning Turd Herald:
While the campaign has clearly been 100% successful in getting large public buildings to dim their ultimately pointless floodlighting, it does not seem to have been able to persuade them to dim any of their other lighting, and it does not seem to have persuaded any of the North Shore Harbourside dwellers who really ought to be Earth Hour’s bread and butter (the idea was dreamt up over a Mosman back fence, after all). Indeed, the lack of interest in Earth Hour this year was crushing compared to last year when, as I argued then, hardly anyone observed it anyway.
Earth Hour is a media fiction from start to finish, although kudos to the SMH this year for not photoshopping the evidence as it did last time. Its only really enthusiastic backer seems to be the NSW state government, which is surely the worst endorsement imaginable, given that under Morris Iemma the state government as embarked on a course of environmental assault worthy of Cyril Sneer.
Update: the Harold is now trumpeting a 5% national reduction in power consumption as the net gain from ‘Earth Hour’.
Paul Bird from the National Electricity Market Management Company told ABC Radio the impact of last night’s Earth Hour event was the equivalent of two large power stations (or 1000 mega-watts) being temporarily shut down.
This may be so, but since two large power stations were not actually temporarily shut down, there wasn’t actually any decrease in carbon dioxide output, was there? Indeed, as Andrew Leigh points out (thanks to Emmeline in the comments to this post for pointing that out), the carbon dioxide output of the insipid candles purchased for the occasion means that ‘Earth Hour’ actually increases CO2 output.