After the racists and their fellow travellers ‘won’ the Voice to Parliament referendum vote by lying to the Australian populace in support of the No campaign1-3, it was predicted by…
In late 2022, the Australian Capital Territory’s (ACT) Legislative Assembly passed laws which will lead to a radical change in drug laws when they come into effect this month. These…
It is always difficult when a close relative dies, but when they are in their late eighties and have had a good, happy life, it is not so hard to…
We have just been down to vote in the referendum about altering the Australian Constitution to insert the following lines: “Chapter IX Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples…
[On the Voice to Parliament referendum] Come Sunday, we will either see ourselves as measured, generous people, ready to set aside the daily woes of our lives – only for a few minutes – to consider the place and state of Indigenous Australians, prepared to say yes to something which will cost us nothing, but could measurably improve their lives.
Or as a frightened, resentful people unable or unwilling to see through the scares and the lies, prepared to use the ballot box to punish the government and in the process punish Indigenous people trapped in cycles of poverty and abuse.
In the post-mortems which will inevitably continue for decades, we can and we will blame No campaigners for playing filthy dirty, for putting politics above everything else, for using loudhailers to whistle up the neo-Nazis, racists and bigots with lies and misrepresentations.
The demons unleashed by tactics to foment conflict, for short term political gain at the expense of vulnerable Australians, will live on long after Saturday’s vote.
[https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/the-miserable-fact-of-the-voice-we-were-always-destined-to-get-to-this-point-20231011-p5ebcs.html]
The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor—not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules. In this respect, it is important to realize that the means of production—that is to say, the entire productive capacity that is needed for producing consumer goods as well as additional capital goods—may legally be, and for the most part are, the private property of individuals. … Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.
“Do I really need to wear a mask forever in a hospital or doctor's office?!?” is the new...
“Do I really have to wear a seatbelt for every car trip, no matter how short?”
or
“Do I really have to stop smoking in my own office at work?!?”
or
“Do I really have to stop drinking the water from the Broad Street pump?” [source of a cholera outbreak]
No one ever welcomes new rules and practices that keep us safe. They always reject them--until they stop and adopt the sensible rules.
The website ‘arXiv’ is a curated research-sharing platform open to anyone. It was a pioneer in digital open access, and now hosts more than two million scholarly articles in eight…
A 2017 item came up in my online feed yesterday morning, and because I initially failed to notice the date I chased it up because I have an abiding interest…