Thanks to new employment I have less time than usual to kick around solutions so to bide you over here is the best (genuine) comment I’ve seen for yonks, thanks to the inimitable* Speak Your Branes:

It high time the UK people woke up and got rid of this Labour Goverment. There policy is spend spend , as they did in 1970. I really feel sorry for you UK people , because there will be no day light from this mess for ever. The UK will end up a third world country and will now have main problems to face from letting so main people arrive . I left the UK 3 years ago, what i once called my home and moved to Spain. I now have Spanish passport and given my Uk passport . I wish you all the best
Mark Gayden, palma

The punchline you can read for yourself by clicking through the link, and subscribing in your feed reader, if you have not already, to this magnificent institution.

God help us if the future political figures of Labor’s progressive wing carry on only the dour puritanism of the Daily Telegraph’s staff, as shown by such notorious wowsers as Joe Hildebrandt and Col Allan, who wouldn’t know what to do in a party full of drunken young people but cry, leave early and arrive sober at work in the morning, and the Young Labor Right, whose strong tea and iced vo-vos have made the Labour movement a by-word for moral righteousness.

I know there are stoush.net readers who’ll have stories. If you’re not too hung over, spill ‘em below.

They’re against cluster bombs and in favour of the international treaty eliminating their use. Fair enough, so am I, so are lots of people. The premise of their campaign, however, is that the Australian Government is stalling on the treaty because wants to protect their own “cluster bombs”, despite the UK having “reversed” their position to protect their “own weapons”. To put it mildly, this is not the situation.

The Cluster Munition Coalition, a group dedicated to demining and prohibition of cluster weapons, define the weapons they oppose this way:

Cluster munitions are large weapons which are deployed from the air and from the ground and release dozens or hundreds of smaller submunitions. Submunitions released by air-dropped cluster bombs are most often called “bomblets,” while those delivered from the ground by artillery or rockets are usually referred to as “grenades.”

The United Kingdom has indeed removed its objection to the elimination of its stocks of indiscriminate cluster weapons, and good for them. The Australian Defence Force, and this is the point, has nothing like them.

The ADF munitions to which GetUp object are SMArt 155 artillery rounds. A cursory search of the internet shows that they’re a project similar to the Excalibur shell, a an excruciatingly expensive but very precise artillery round, designed to guide one relatively small bit of explosive to a specific target, and damage as few as possible of the things around that target. Yes, it’s designed to kill people, and I wouldn’t like one dropped on me, but it’s not a cluster bomb, by any reasonable standard. It’s designed specifically to do the opposite of clusterbombing or blind artillery bombardment: it’s designed to discriminate, and is, to be cynical, the perfect weapon for such a limited-imperialist war justified on liberal humanitarian grounds as the ADF is fighting in Afghanistan.

Objection to weapons of war, whatever their nature, is a coherent political position, and I would have more respect for Getup were they to take this pacifist line. To make the implicit campaigning compromise of trying to ban only some weapons, and then muddy the waters about which weapons fit into which category, is simply stupid, dishonest politics.

The worst thing is that it would have been so easy not to have mentioned the shell at all, and simply to have encouraged people to urge the Government to sign the anti-cluster munitions treaty. That’s it. Getup should do themselves a favour and campaign for the right causes with correct information.

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. The question is how to get your ideology accepted as commonsense, isn’t it?

So how to change the behaviours of the people who rule us, and how is the Government to expect any change from their thoroughly-bribed electorate, without citizens’ re-education camps, and without without communards ripping the cobbles out of Bent Street and throwing them at the donkeys quaffing red wine in fashionable eateries? Is Deliberative Democracy the wishy-washy hands-holding-around-the-fire answer, or a bit of healthy workers’ ownership?

How could a Government, for instance, convinced that its programme of electricity privatisation was necessary, convince its Party and supporters of the scheme? How would an electorate go about the same task in reverse, and persuade a recalcitrant and morbidly fixated Cabinet of the futility and non-democracy of their task?

Mao?

all people in the revolutionary ranks must care for each other, must love and help each other.

Well if we can’t be socialists, we can at least all share a chardonnay.

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.

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.

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.

Once upon a time, you and I used to be really together. You used to be a dependable beer that I could count on for a challenge to my appetite. We’d spend lazy afternoons, with newspapers, or books, or the sport. You used to be there for me, top to bottom, a delicious fistful of sour-bitter stout. When I used to come back from the bar with a single pint, I remember I could easily spend an age just enjoying the trip from a creamy head to the bottom of the glass.

When I was 16, and you and I would show up together to parties, we’d have a great time together, and you made an honest beer drinker out of me. You were a great and loyal friend over how many? I can’t count how many long nights of young going-out.

I’ve got a keyring from the Trades Hall Inn in Goulburn Street from the days when you and I did politics. My name was on the 100 pints club board, along with quite a few stoush.net readers, and a five-timer called Maurice. We used to have such a good thing going.

So what went wrong? Can’t you see what you’re doing?

Where’s the taste anymore? Where’s the bitterness, the solidity, or, let’s face it, the alcoholic effect? Since when are you putting so little effort in? I think you’ve been phoning it in for a while, and it’s just only now that I’ve separated the thin excuse for a beer that you are now from the chunky meal you used to be. It’s not you… no, actually, it’s you.

I’ll be honest… I’ve been drinking other stouts. Look, let’s just be adult about it. I’m sure you’ll find other drinkers.

Look, they’re just putting down their alco-pops now.

Pakistani cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan has made a haggard-looking appearance in a video issued from hiding, calling for protests against President Pervez Musharraf’s state of emergency.
Mr Khan, who led Pakistan to victory in the 1992 cricket World Cup, went underground on Sunday, a day after police placed him under house arrest at his home in the eastern city of Lahore.

This isn’t the guerrilla message. I can’t actually find it, but I sincerely hope that Khan used the words “like a tiger” in his communiqué from-the-underground.

If not for the people of Pakistan, then for us Late Show fans.