history
The Kerb Stomp
As we on the broadly-defined Left slowly wait for our well-celebrated livers to dry, like so many vinegary gerkhins left out after thorough pickling, it’s probably time for a bit of digestion of the moment. I don’t necessarily share premature disappointment over Kevin Rudd’s conservatism, because George Bush after all won his 2000 election on a platform of moderation, though I’ll certainly concede that his acceptance speech was a bunch of bullshit hyper-cliché that would have shamed a rugby league coach. All it needed to complete the scene was Tim Gartrell having a bucket of ice poured over him in the background, and Laurie Ferguson scratching his balls through tracksuit pants.
A the election result was an annihilation, and it’s not hard to savour the schadenfreude. The question is, for a Left so unused to electoral success (and so unwilling to mention the unfortunate State level of Labor Government, kept by a discursive Grace Poole in a locked room of the progressive soul), how best to scratch the insatiable itch of triumphalism?
To follow the current fashion of cliché: history is the best teacher. We should look forward from our past, secure in the future, and always twirling, twirling towards freedom.
Here it is, straight from 2004, the most right-wing piece of writing ever put to publication and made infamous by social bookmarking websites: Adam Yoshida’s masterfully terrible Four More Years!
Despite all of their tricks, despite all of their lies, the people have rejected them. They mean nothing. They are worth nothing. There’s no point in trying to reach out to them because they won’t be reached out to. We’ve got their teeth clutching the sidewalk and out boot above their head. Now’s the time to curb-stomp the bastards.
Oh yeah. That’s how you do it.
Some economic fallacies
Recently we have seen the Textor-Crosby machine kick into overdrive. Howard is making the absurd argument that State borrowing levels are causing “upward pressure” on interest rates.
You can read some commentary at LP. I also commented in an earlier post that the entire proposition is delusional.
In the interests of informing people about some common economic fallacies, I have tracked down a link to William Vickrey’s “Fifteen Fatal Fallacies Of Financial Fundamentalism”, which I think is mostly intelligible for the layperson.
Fallacy 1:
Deficits are considered to represent sinful profligate spending at the expense of future generations who will be left with a smaller endowment of invested capital.
Current reality is almost the exact opposite. Deficits add to the net disposable income of individuals, to the extent that government disbursements that constitute income to recipients exceed that abstracted from disposable income in taxes, fees, and other charges. This added purchasing power, when spent, provides markets for private production, inducing producers to invest in additional plant capacity, which will form part of the real heritage left to the future. This is in addition to whatever public investment takes place in infrastructure, education, research, and the like. Larger deficits, sufficient to recycle savings out of a growing gross domestic product (GDP) in excess of what can be recycled by profit-seeking private investment, are not an economic sin but an economic necessity. Deficits in excess of a gap growing as a result of the maximum feasible growth in real output might indeed cause problems, but we are nowhere near that level.
Walk a mile in someone else's caterpillar tracks
Just a quick bit of mind-bending irony. In Hungary, apparently, you have to lodge notice 72 hours in advance of any demonstration you might wish to make, and face the wrath of the riot police once you get there. A couple of them decided to make the effort count. From the ABC:
Hungarian anti-Government protesters have gained control of a Soviet-era T-34 tank in Budapest during street riots that have marred the 50th anniversary of the anti-Soviet uprising.
Protesters managed to start the tank, which had been parked in the capital as part of the anniversary commemorations, and drove it some 100 metres towards a wall of riot police near Deak square in the heart of the city.
I suppose it could be a model of empathetic role-playing, to let demonstrators know what it must have felt like to be one of the Soviet tank crews, and for the riot police to experience being out-armed. It’s a perverse reversal of what should happen at a demo where there’s a tank.
The shopping bag man, in the unlikely event that he’s still alive and reading the Hungarian news, must be baffled. Hundreds of thousands of rock-throwing Palestinian kids must also be getting dangerous ideas.
The other question you have to ask is where the people who hijacked the tank learned to drive tanks? It’d be an added level of wierdness if it was during military service in the Cold War era.
All the Hungarians need now is flowers to go in the gun barrel.
Terror alert raised to 'Peeved' level *
The British have reacted to the recent terrorism alerts by raising their security level from “Miffed” to “Peeved.” Soon, though, security levels may be raised yet again to “Irritated” or even “A Bit Cross.”
Londoners have not been “A Bit Cross” since the blitz in 1940, when tea supplies all but ran out.
Terrorists have been re-categorised from “Tiresome” to a “Bloody Nuisance.” The last time the British issued a “Bloody Nuisance” warning level was during the great fire of 1666.
Also, the French Government announced yesterday that it has raised its terror alert level from “Run” to “Hide.”
The only two higher levels in France are “Surrender” and “Collaborate.” The rise was precipitated by a recent fire that destroyed France ‘s white flag factory, effectively paralysing the country’s military capability.
It’s not only the English and French that are on a heightened level of alert. Italy has increased the alert level from “Shout Loudly and Excitedly” to “Elaborate Military Posturing.” Two more levels remain: “Ineffective Combat Operations” and “Change Sides.”
The Germans also increased their alert state from “Disdainful Arrogance” to “Sing Marching Songs”. They also have two higher levels: “Invade a Neighbour” and “Lose.”
Belgians, on the other hand, are all on holiday, as is customary, and the only threat they are worried about is NATO pulling out of Brussels.
* Yes, I know it’s old but I laughed out loud reading it!
A Shedding Tree.
A clip of a 17 year old John Howard appearing on a radio quiz show [realplayer download] for your delectation, courtesy of australianpolitics.com, and also mentioned in that bastion of popular culture wikipedia.
Q. What is a mezzanine floor?
H: A what? (laughter)
Q: Well where do you find a mezzanine floor?
H: Oh on the floor of a, a house in a, oh, in an eastern country?
Q: you mean a, a harem?
H: HOW DID YOU KNOW! (hilarity)
mmm. Well it was the 1950s people, give them a chance.
Young Liberal Yippees
The griding train crash and media spectacle that is the NSW Young Liberals is entering another day with John Hyde Page’s right-of-reply.
[Devine’s] argument is doubtless one that has already been made, but only in the most smoky backroom of Australian politics, and by the most hardened of hacks.
As usual Andrew Norton makes a great deal of sense at the newly domain-named Catallaxy, noting that anti-political-correctness is not a particularly new or original method of getting attention and annoying your enemies.
In mocking the excessive sensitivity of the left to racial and sexual differences the right has ended up where the left was in the 1960s, trying to offend basic decency and disrupt social order.
Time, perhaps, to skip down the nostalgic route to another, larger, conference disrupted by the forces of disrespect and reflex anti-authoritarianism, the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention.
The Yippies, a social movement and unorganised group of the late 60s, half-forgotten and half-blanked-out, inspired themselves with liberal doses of drugs and the works of Abbie Hoffmann, author, anarchist, media stunt genius and author of the deservedly famous Steal This Book! (PDF, probably not safe for work if your bosses are fascist pigs and don’t like you reading bomb recipes).
Consider the very well-cooked and more than half-baked memories of ex-Yippies:
And we were motherfucking bad. We were dirty, smelly, grimy, foul, loud, dope-crazed, hell-bent and leather-jacketed. We were a public display of filth and shabinees, living in-the-flesh rejects of middle-class standards.
We pissed and shit and fucked in public; we crossed streets on red lights; and we opened Coke bottles with our teeth. We were constantly stoned or tripping on every drug known to man.
We were the outlaw forces of Amerika displaying ourselves flagrantly on a world stage.
Dig it! The future of humanity was in our hands!
Yippie!
The official Communists supposedly used to refer to Hoffmann and the Yippies as ‘Groucho Marxists’ for their lack of seriousness. Does this make the NSWYL Abbott and Costello Liberals?
Le quatorze juillet and terror
Happy Bastille Day! Alors enfants de la patrie, la jour de gloire est arrivée, and all of that stuff.
Keating, Wran, and Being 'One of Them'
You may find, reader, everything you could want to know about the launch of The Wran Era at Modia Minotaur’s reliably excellent site. Let it be said here, though, that Paul Keating and Neville Wran at any time between them, can fire up the cold smouldering mound of coals that is the fuel of Labor Party passion. I defy anyone to listen to a few curses from Nifty’s creaky throat and not be inspired to glorious, if pragmatic, revolution.
Historical Science: The Kids Are Alright
On the bus this morning, I had the misfortune to sit in front of a pair of young women whose conversation carried throughout the back of the public vehicle, and resonated painfully enough that it blocked out my own reading of my book.
International Women's Day, and the Czechs
Happy International Women’s Day to all stoush.net readers and authors.
I for one hope that it’s taken as a serious commemoration of historical injustice and hope for the future, not as it has evolved in the former Czechoslovakia:
On this day, women receive lots of flowers from family members, relatives, friends, and co-workers. For a lot of men, this day is an opportunity to have a few drinks, so it’s hard to tell who really celebrates this day.