liam's blog
Your Stupid, Fat, Red Face
Comments for regular anonymous folk are once more throttled to one of the site authors’ say-so. I warned you, Russian and Turkish spammers, your licence to at least this bit of the internet is restricted until you learn to play nicely.
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:
Young Turks On The Turps
Thank goodness for the Young Labor Left, who have kept up the traditions of youth political bohemianism in the face of the Daily Telegraph.
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.
Cluster Up
Getup irritate me. I’ll make that clear from the start. As a died-in-the-nylon-wool-blend leftie this admission comes with some difficulty as they do mean well, are organised fairly cleverly, and generally side with the angels. They shit me, despite this, because they habitually simplify and misrepresent.
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.
Children of the Left
From the 1960’s through the 1980’s, those of us in the US Army Special Forces, along with our interagency partners, successfully stunted communist-sponsored insurgencies throughout Latin America. One of our prouder moments was in 1967, when Bolivian solders, trained, equipped and guided by Green Berets and the CIA, captured and killed Che Guevara.
…
Today, we see the Children of the Left, now adults, (whose parents were disenfranchised or worse) finding their voices in Argentina, Chile, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, and elsewhere. As a result, Latin America is increasingly drifting towards building new economic, diplomatic and military relationships, diminishing US influence in the region.
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.
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.
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 Media Is The Mongoloid
By putting our physical bodies inside our extended nervous systems, by means of electric media, we set up a dynamic by which all previous technologies that are mere extensions of hands and feet and teeth and bodily heat-controls—all such extensions of our bodies, including cities—will be translated into information systems. Electromagnetic technology requires utter human docility and quiescence of meditation such as benefits an organism that now wears its brain outside its skull and its nerves outside its hide. (McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media, 1964, p68)
This was one of many obscurantist passages I read this morning as my Sydney bus (an extension of both the foot and the armpit) drew me towards my work (an extension of some other unprintable bodily part). McLuhan might have been on to something, but isn’t it all just a fancy way of describing human devolution into electronica?
And is this post not just a fancy if kinda-pretentious excuse for a linkdump of DEVO covers? McLuhan would have shaken his head and despaired at our narcissistic fixation on content over context.
Balls to that. Here’s a bunch of early 80s electronica reflecting itself back onto itself, with a few catchy riffs.
Uncontrollable Urge,
The (Italian) Girl U Want,
It’s Not Right,
It’s A Beautiful World,
Whip It,
Metal Mongoloid,
And last but not least, the cover band satisfactorily covering Head Like A Hole.