L: Can two hydrogen atoms stick together, like H₂0 but without the oxygen?
K: that’s an interesting question. How did you come up with that?
L: Well, hydrogen only has one electron and would want one more. So I think two hydrogens could share with each other.
K: I eventually told him he was right, after double checking on google. I don’t trust myself to remember high school chem lol.
- K, May 28.
One of the things that I love is when children arrive at conclusions based upon what they understand and know and make guesses accordingly. It could be argued that the entire of science¹ is exactly this pursuit, except with more money and fancier toys.
Contained within these four lines of dialogue, is indeed the central questions which underpin chemistry and when I saw this on Facebook, my next line of enquiry is to task the very next question which underpins the entire of science¹ - why?
If I can not find out 'why' and put it in simple terms, then I will have failed in this excercise. Or to quote Ernest Rutherford, the father of nuclear physics:
"An alleged scientific discovery has no merit unless it can be explained to a barmaid."
- Ernest Rutherford (allegedly)
So then, without further adieu, here goes nothing. Kaboom.
The biggest single force (if you want to call it that) in the universe, even bigger than the forces of gravity, magnetism, the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear force, is the drive towards entropy. Everything in the universe and that probably includes time, tends to flow from a state of higher energy to a state lower energy and the difference is transformed into stillness and weak heat. When you couple that with the theory which suggests that the universe itself will tend towards a quiet and boring heat death and where black holes and space-time will evaporate into a state of absolute boredom, that means that there is an awful lot of entropy going on.
Entropy is sometimes likened to 'disorder' (that is that everything starts out ordered and gradually falls apart) but I like the other idea that unifies chemistry and physics which says that entropy is just another form of 'laziness'. Entropy is just an advanced form of inertia, where objects are lazy and like to keep on doing what they are already doing until they are forced to change.
Almost all of chemistry is rearranging atoms and molecules into different things, which either costs energy to do so or gives off energy and the results are more lazy. Laziness is the key to understanding why there are diatomic homonuclear gases (diatomic = two atoms, homonuclear = the same kind of chemical).
On the very right hand side of the periodic table are the 'Noble Gases'. Noble is a nice way of saying that they don't react to much. Actually, they're just really snooty and smug and full of themselves and have no need to react to much. For reasons¹, all of the other kids in the period table want to look the Noble Gases because of how cool and non-reactive they are. Everyone in the periodic table has electrons which are filled up in shells and while there is a good explanation¹ of how and why they work, the short answer is that everyone wants to wear the clothes of the cool kids.
Most of the kids in the periodic table are very metal and like to hang around with themselves. They're also pretty dense and too ignorant to work out how to do chemistry with others. The kids on the far left of the table can be bullied out giving away their outermost coats and the kids who want them the most are on the far right²; and so are basically just like straight up thieves and will steal from others, which makes some salty chemicals.
As all of the kids are trying to be as lazy as possible, then they all want to do as little work as they can for the conditions. The most lazy and stable states can change depending on how hot it is outside or how much pressure they're under. Some kids like Sulphur have many different stable and lazy states which change based on what the ambient temperature is. It doesn't split into free sulphur atoms; it changes into a different state which is most stable under those conditions.
The thing is that all of the atoms except for the Noble Gases (because they are so cool) get really anxious and agitated if they ever find themselves alone. They all hate being by themselves and will want to find a buddy, even if their buddy steals their stuff.
Finding a buddy who either steals your stuff, or someone who shares your stuff, or even a whole bunch of buddies all being very metal and sharing everything together, is called a bond. Forming bonds with each other is how atoms to form molecules, which are more stable than if they were all alone.
Hydrogen is a perfect example. Lonely unbound hydrogen doesn't exist on earth, almost all of it is in a bound state. Water and most organic molecules contain Hydrogen. Hydrogen is really needy and looks for approval all of the time and wants to give away its one electron just so someone will be its friend. Even when there are two hydrogens hanging out with each other and someone bigger who can bully them both comes along, they will both break away from each other and give their electron to the bully. That's what caused the Hindenberg tragedy³. Hydrogen is really unstable; a single spark can set it on fire or cause an explosion, depending on how pressurized it is.
Because atoms don't like to hang around by themselves and chemistry happens which frees up single atoms, they often want to form pairs. The diatomic state of that atom is much more stable than the lonely unbound state.
It isn't necessary that all atoms tend to a diatomic state. The reason why any atom binds with other atoms is to tend to a stabler state. Gold exists in the free state because it is highly stable, and gold atoms do not find a state of lower energy very often, although there are certain gold compounds too.
It just happens that after some chemistry has been done, the atoms which are most likely to become lonely, are the bullies. Since chemistry happens with loads and loads and loads of atoms, then because there would be so many lonely atoms, they will just buddy up with whoever is free and that usually means other atoms just like them.
Under normal temperature and pressure that people like to live in, there are only seven kinds of atoms which will form gases (well, actually six but the seventh doesn't need that much more heat and pressure). Those seven elements are:
Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Fluorine, Chlorine, Bromine and Iodine.
The short answer as to why you get diatomic gases is that atoms don't like being lonely and want to bind to other atoms to form molecules to achieve a state of lower energy and become lazier. It is not always necessary that they tend to a diatomic state; it is governed by external factors too.
¹science! which is beyond the scope of this post.
²which looks suspiciously like politics too.
³oh the humanity.
June 26, 2020
Horse 2724 - When To Write Off Liverpool's Season
Officially, today; as League Champion!
I have never before written that in a blog post because I haven't been able to.
The last time that Liverpool won the league was back in 1990. In 1990, I was 11 years old, Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister of the UK, the first Gulf War hadn't happened, virtually nobody had the internet, and Rupert Murdoch and Alan Sugar hadn't yet bought football's soul before selling back the husk to the fans for millions of pounds.
If there ever was an object lesson in patience, then Liverpool fans are it. We have seen many false dawns, I have written many annual pieces on when to write off the league, and even when Liverpool had stretched out a 25 point margin that still wasn't enough to make anything sure at all. Having previously been on track to win the league on the earliest date in a league season, the arrival of COVID-19 meant that all of that could have come to naught but instead with football being resumed, Liverpool now have the honour of winning the league on the latest date ever.
I think that it is fair to say that although this particular Liverpool side has some very good players, it is still not made up of the absolute stellar tier. There are better strikers than Mo Salah, there are better midfielders than Jordan Henderson, and there are better defenders than Virgil van Dijk. A great deal of the reason why this team has won the league is because of Jurgen Klopp who has somehow managed to capture lightning in a bottle.
Jurgen Klopp isn't like previous managers who have won the league for Liverpool like Kenny Dalgleish, Joe Fagan or Bob Paisley, but rather he is more of the ilk of Shankly. Klopp gives the impression in interviews that he does the job, not because he necessarily wants to win titles but because he genuinely loves watching football. Even during this week when asked what he thought about Manchester City playing Chelsea he said: "I like to watch them play because they play attractive football. We aren't them and we don't play like them but they are fun to watch." I know that it is very easy to make those kinds of statements when you are winning but he has been at Liverpool for five years and even when the team has failed on the pitch, he still gives the impression that he thinks that he has one of the best jobs in the world because he is up close to watch football.
Earlier in the week, Liverpool comprehensively beat Crystal Palace 4-0, in a match in which they displayed why they are now league champion. Each of the four goals was like finding a new way to tear apart a Christmas present; and the third goal by Fabinho was as if he had fired a rocket.
The final drop of water which broke the dam was a sending off of Fernandinho in the 77th minute of the Chelsea v Manchester City game. Willian converted the subsequent penalty and as the referee blew for full time, it then became mathematically impossible for Manchester City to win the league. Such is often the way with a league, the results which actually close out a result happen somewhere else.
Having said that though, Liverpool have to date this season won 28 games and might be still on track to set two new league records: both for the number of wins in a season and the number of points.
Maybe there is another drop of irony that when Liverpool travel to the City of Manchester Stadium against City which is the next fixture for them, it will be behind closed doors due to COVID-19 and so there isn't really a way for the fans to celebrate in person.
Of course, the final word probably should go to the architect of all of this, Jurgen Klopp:
I hope I don't have to wait another 30 years for another league title.
On the base of the statue of Bill Shankly which stands out the front of Anfield there is a statement "He made the people happy." I think that's about the highest complement that you can pay a manager and the players and today, Jurgen Klopp has again done that; with the help of a team of reds.
I have never before written that in a blog post because I haven't been able to.
The last time that Liverpool won the league was back in 1990. In 1990, I was 11 years old, Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister of the UK, the first Gulf War hadn't happened, virtually nobody had the internet, and Rupert Murdoch and Alan Sugar hadn't yet bought football's soul before selling back the husk to the fans for millions of pounds.
If there ever was an object lesson in patience, then Liverpool fans are it. We have seen many false dawns, I have written many annual pieces on when to write off the league, and even when Liverpool had stretched out a 25 point margin that still wasn't enough to make anything sure at all. Having previously been on track to win the league on the earliest date in a league season, the arrival of COVID-19 meant that all of that could have come to naught but instead with football being resumed, Liverpool now have the honour of winning the league on the latest date ever.
I think that it is fair to say that although this particular Liverpool side has some very good players, it is still not made up of the absolute stellar tier. There are better strikers than Mo Salah, there are better midfielders than Jordan Henderson, and there are better defenders than Virgil van Dijk. A great deal of the reason why this team has won the league is because of Jurgen Klopp who has somehow managed to capture lightning in a bottle.
Jurgen Klopp isn't like previous managers who have won the league for Liverpool like Kenny Dalgleish, Joe Fagan or Bob Paisley, but rather he is more of the ilk of Shankly. Klopp gives the impression in interviews that he does the job, not because he necessarily wants to win titles but because he genuinely loves watching football. Even during this week when asked what he thought about Manchester City playing Chelsea he said: "I like to watch them play because they play attractive football. We aren't them and we don't play like them but they are fun to watch." I know that it is very easy to make those kinds of statements when you are winning but he has been at Liverpool for five years and even when the team has failed on the pitch, he still gives the impression that he thinks that he has one of the best jobs in the world because he is up close to watch football.
Earlier in the week, Liverpool comprehensively beat Crystal Palace 4-0, in a match in which they displayed why they are now league champion. Each of the four goals was like finding a new way to tear apart a Christmas present; and the third goal by Fabinho was as if he had fired a rocket.
The final drop of water which broke the dam was a sending off of Fernandinho in the 77th minute of the Chelsea v Manchester City game. Willian converted the subsequent penalty and as the referee blew for full time, it then became mathematically impossible for Manchester City to win the league. Such is often the way with a league, the results which actually close out a result happen somewhere else.
Having said that though, Liverpool have to date this season won 28 games and might be still on track to set two new league records: both for the number of wins in a season and the number of points.
Maybe there is another drop of irony that when Liverpool travel to the City of Manchester Stadium against City which is the next fixture for them, it will be behind closed doors due to COVID-19 and so there isn't really a way for the fans to celebrate in person.
Of course, the final word probably should go to the architect of all of this, Jurgen Klopp:
"Knowing how much Kenny supported us, you've had to wait another 30 years for your club to win it. It's also for Stevie"— The Sack Race (@thesackrace) June 25, 2020
Jurgen Klopp in tears as Liverpool are crowned champions... 🥲#LFC pic.twitter.com/hGObnOOhgA
I hope I don't have to wait another 30 years for another league title.
On the base of the statue of Bill Shankly which stands out the front of Anfield there is a statement "He made the people happy." I think that's about the highest complement that you can pay a manager and the players and today, Jurgen Klopp has again done that; with the help of a team of reds.
June 25, 2020
Horse 2723 - Fascism: A 'How To' Guide
I want you to imagine that you are a political actor with designs on running a fascist dictatorship.
The first thing that you will need to do is start a political party. You might like to recruit your friends in business that you have cultivated. They will likely want to help you because facism involves an enmeshing of business and government for private profits. They will likely enjoy the idea of passing legislation on behalf of them because the golden rule is in play - whoever has the gold makes the rules - and who better to make the rules than those people who already have the gold.
If you don't want to start your own political party, then you might like to join a party which calls itself 'conservative'. The term is vague and there will be probably be factions who believe in the institutions of the state but they can be easily swung to a new standpoint. You will still need the security and judicial parts of the state apparatus to successfully enforce power. Conservatives can be converted to nationalists and nativists relatively easily.
You will need to eject some members of your party on the grounds that they are racist, sexist, or other kind of 'ist'. It isn't necessary that your party cleanse itself of these elements; merely that you have some 'other' who can become a lightning rod for your scorn. You can actively demonise these people in the press and they will actually be willing to accept the derision because of the notoriety that they will get. They can have opinions which are absolutely unacceptable and there will always be people who will follow them because they will be seen as straight talking; which is a good thing because you can then have policies which are either nativist or classist and nobody will scrutinise you because they will all be hooting about the person who you have chosen to make into a pariah.
You might also like to set up your own newspaper/radio station/television station. This is where you can broadcast your narrative of whatever you like. You can also have opinionistas who look a bit newsy but because they will spruik think pieces, they won't actually be under the relevant legislation to do with news broadcasting.
It might take you a while to finally convince people to vote for you but it can be done. The big hook lines will be that you are the first to truly listen to the people (even though you're totally not), that you have the solution to the problems (which you will totally cause), and that nobody else can solve the problems and make your country soar to the heights that it once did in some imagined past that never existed. If this involves myth making then make sure that you invoke some imagined founding fathers, or some abstract concept like freedoms, or security, or religion, or some other thing that the people can be easily manipulated into believing.
Keep it simple and stupid. Better yet, invent a slogan which is so vague that you can not be held accountable if you don't happen to succeed in doing it, and so vague that the people can project whatever they can imagine into it. If the people feel as though they own the slogan, then you can make them believe things that even go against what they benefit from and even the economic systems that in some cases literally keep them alive. Here are a few to pick from:
- Hope and change.
- Jobs and growth.
- It's time.
- Fightback!
- Making it great.
- Free society, free people.
- Work makes you free.
- Make it great again.
You will also need to find someone who you can build a cult of personality around. If the system allows the same person to stay around for a while, this might be a problem but if you are in some kind of rotating democratic system (which I know is annoying you will have to live with it for the time being - it can be changed at a later date) then you can apply the same principles of demonising your enemies as you did to the people that you ejected from your own party.
Pick out some really trifling trait about the leader of the opposition party. Call them too old, too young, question some decision that they made 20 years ago in parliament. If you can find some moral failing in their past then exploit it; it doesn't matter if you have committed that same moral failing, you only need to accuse your enemy. Insult the media. Accuse the press of publishing lies. Accuse the media of being too liberal, too timid, or of protecting your political rivals for their own gain. It's probably not true but as long as you repeat a thing often enough, it will feel true to the people. Maybe even buy some clandestine agents in the press or on social media.
Above all, keep on making the same inane points over and over again. The people who will vote for you mustn't be allowed to think too deeply about what they are voting for.
The method that you use to acquire power, which by the way is the ends to itself, must be democratic. If there has been a military takeover, then that means may be used against you at some point. While you do want power, getting it all at once via a military coup sets you up to be liable for a civil war. The aim should be civil obedience, even though you are decidedly uncivil about what you intend to do.
If you can find an affable incompetent to lead your party into winning an election then that will do, however if you have already generated a cult of personality around someone who has a vision, the people will already voluntarily line up behind you.
Once you have won an election, you need to start buying the favour of just enough of the middle class to keep you there. The poors will probably never vote for you but if you can convince the upper half of the middle class then that should be enough as in a democracy you only need to win 50% of the votes + 1 (maybe less according to the rules).
You can do this via patronage of the things that the upper middle class likes but which the poors do not have access to. Private school education is brilliant for this because you can literally spend public money to buy private votes. If you can change taxation policy to reward those people who derive income from the real work of other people, then that's also brilliant because you can create a sense of aspirationalism among part of the middle class as well as demonising the poor. If you can privatise things like the utility companies, the healthcare system and physical infrastructure like roads and railways, then even though the people absolutely need those things for the proper functioning of society (and in some cases, to actually stay alive) then do it. Private profits at public expense will help the people who fund you and thus keep the symbiotic relationship maintained.
You might also want to crack down on guilds, unions, trade associations, and anything which the poor might use to organise themselves into to complain about their lack of power. Accuse them of communism, socialism, sovietism, or simply make them look feeble by comparing them with spaced out nature types. Enforce this with police power and raid their offices.
If you want to get rid of the people who could possibly question what you have to say, then you might want to think about either defunding the humanities departments at universities, or think about installing your own centres for history. Whoever controls the past, controls the future. Once you've got rid of all of the people who might want to critique your politics, then it becomes really easy to make it look like you're increasing funding to the sciences even though you aren't.
You might also like to defund the state broadcaster who aren't motivated by the profit motive but have a claim on investigating the truth. If journalists actually do discover that you have been covertly operating spies in foreign countries for the benefit of private corporations (which your party members might be employed by) or perhaps if they discover atrocities which your military has committed, then you can get either the Federal Police to raid their offices or gt the Secret Police to conduct trials also in secret.
You should also think about making sure that just enough people have access to guns and weapons so that there is just enough domestic terrorism and unrest, that you can come in and appear to solve; thus looking like a hero to the people. It doesn't even matter if the people who cause the unrest are nominally on your side because you will have already demonised the racists.
Curate a healthy sense of nationalism and nativism by demonising immigrants, including if they escaping other brutal regimes. Accuse immigrants of taking all the jobs even in spite of your friends moving operations to places where wages and working conditions are minimal. Blame the immigrants and lock them up; lock them up in detention centres that are far away from population centres or even on island exclaves, because if the people can't see what you are doing, they can't complain about it.
...
If any of this sounds vaguely familiar, that's because it should be. Many of these policies were enacted by Germany from about 1929 onwards and that didn't turn out badly at all. Many of these policies have been enacted by the United States from 1981 onwards and that country has gone on to be a shining bacon¹ of democracy. A lot of these policies have been enacted in Australia from about 1997 onwards.
All of this is possible because people are inherently selfish. The slide towards some kind of facism/feudalism/aggressive colonial capitalism is possible because those with power like to keep it. Actual democracy² is rare.
And as for the argument that poor people want to anarchy because in some places they are suggesting to defund the police, that is just plain stupid.
You've got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists.
- G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)
¹No, that's not a typo. A shining beacon provides light to all but a shining bacon provides undeserved deliciousness.
²Athenian democracy wasn't really democracy either because the only people eligible to vote were males over the age of 35; which looks staggeringly like most of history as well as most boardrooms of corporations.
The first thing that you will need to do is start a political party. You might like to recruit your friends in business that you have cultivated. They will likely want to help you because facism involves an enmeshing of business and government for private profits. They will likely enjoy the idea of passing legislation on behalf of them because the golden rule is in play - whoever has the gold makes the rules - and who better to make the rules than those people who already have the gold.
If you don't want to start your own political party, then you might like to join a party which calls itself 'conservative'. The term is vague and there will be probably be factions who believe in the institutions of the state but they can be easily swung to a new standpoint. You will still need the security and judicial parts of the state apparatus to successfully enforce power. Conservatives can be converted to nationalists and nativists relatively easily.
You will need to eject some members of your party on the grounds that they are racist, sexist, or other kind of 'ist'. It isn't necessary that your party cleanse itself of these elements; merely that you have some 'other' who can become a lightning rod for your scorn. You can actively demonise these people in the press and they will actually be willing to accept the derision because of the notoriety that they will get. They can have opinions which are absolutely unacceptable and there will always be people who will follow them because they will be seen as straight talking; which is a good thing because you can then have policies which are either nativist or classist and nobody will scrutinise you because they will all be hooting about the person who you have chosen to make into a pariah.
You might also like to set up your own newspaper/radio station/television station. This is where you can broadcast your narrative of whatever you like. You can also have opinionistas who look a bit newsy but because they will spruik think pieces, they won't actually be under the relevant legislation to do with news broadcasting.
It might take you a while to finally convince people to vote for you but it can be done. The big hook lines will be that you are the first to truly listen to the people (even though you're totally not), that you have the solution to the problems (which you will totally cause), and that nobody else can solve the problems and make your country soar to the heights that it once did in some imagined past that never existed. If this involves myth making then make sure that you invoke some imagined founding fathers, or some abstract concept like freedoms, or security, or religion, or some other thing that the people can be easily manipulated into believing.
Keep it simple and stupid. Better yet, invent a slogan which is so vague that you can not be held accountable if you don't happen to succeed in doing it, and so vague that the people can project whatever they can imagine into it. If the people feel as though they own the slogan, then you can make them believe things that even go against what they benefit from and even the economic systems that in some cases literally keep them alive. Here are a few to pick from:
- Hope and change.
- Jobs and growth.
- It's time.
- Fightback!
- Making it great.
- Free society, free people.
- Work makes you free.
- Make it great again.
You will also need to find someone who you can build a cult of personality around. If the system allows the same person to stay around for a while, this might be a problem but if you are in some kind of rotating democratic system (which I know is annoying you will have to live with it for the time being - it can be changed at a later date) then you can apply the same principles of demonising your enemies as you did to the people that you ejected from your own party.
Pick out some really trifling trait about the leader of the opposition party. Call them too old, too young, question some decision that they made 20 years ago in parliament. If you can find some moral failing in their past then exploit it; it doesn't matter if you have committed that same moral failing, you only need to accuse your enemy. Insult the media. Accuse the press of publishing lies. Accuse the media of being too liberal, too timid, or of protecting your political rivals for their own gain. It's probably not true but as long as you repeat a thing often enough, it will feel true to the people. Maybe even buy some clandestine agents in the press or on social media.
Above all, keep on making the same inane points over and over again. The people who will vote for you mustn't be allowed to think too deeply about what they are voting for.
The method that you use to acquire power, which by the way is the ends to itself, must be democratic. If there has been a military takeover, then that means may be used against you at some point. While you do want power, getting it all at once via a military coup sets you up to be liable for a civil war. The aim should be civil obedience, even though you are decidedly uncivil about what you intend to do.
If you can find an affable incompetent to lead your party into winning an election then that will do, however if you have already generated a cult of personality around someone who has a vision, the people will already voluntarily line up behind you.
Once you have won an election, you need to start buying the favour of just enough of the middle class to keep you there. The poors will probably never vote for you but if you can convince the upper half of the middle class then that should be enough as in a democracy you only need to win 50% of the votes + 1 (maybe less according to the rules).
You can do this via patronage of the things that the upper middle class likes but which the poors do not have access to. Private school education is brilliant for this because you can literally spend public money to buy private votes. If you can change taxation policy to reward those people who derive income from the real work of other people, then that's also brilliant because you can create a sense of aspirationalism among part of the middle class as well as demonising the poor. If you can privatise things like the utility companies, the healthcare system and physical infrastructure like roads and railways, then even though the people absolutely need those things for the proper functioning of society (and in some cases, to actually stay alive) then do it. Private profits at public expense will help the people who fund you and thus keep the symbiotic relationship maintained.
You might also want to crack down on guilds, unions, trade associations, and anything which the poor might use to organise themselves into to complain about their lack of power. Accuse them of communism, socialism, sovietism, or simply make them look feeble by comparing them with spaced out nature types. Enforce this with police power and raid their offices.
If you want to get rid of the people who could possibly question what you have to say, then you might want to think about either defunding the humanities departments at universities, or think about installing your own centres for history. Whoever controls the past, controls the future. Once you've got rid of all of the people who might want to critique your politics, then it becomes really easy to make it look like you're increasing funding to the sciences even though you aren't.
You might also like to defund the state broadcaster who aren't motivated by the profit motive but have a claim on investigating the truth. If journalists actually do discover that you have been covertly operating spies in foreign countries for the benefit of private corporations (which your party members might be employed by) or perhaps if they discover atrocities which your military has committed, then you can get either the Federal Police to raid their offices or gt the Secret Police to conduct trials also in secret.
You should also think about making sure that just enough people have access to guns and weapons so that there is just enough domestic terrorism and unrest, that you can come in and appear to solve; thus looking like a hero to the people. It doesn't even matter if the people who cause the unrest are nominally on your side because you will have already demonised the racists.
Curate a healthy sense of nationalism and nativism by demonising immigrants, including if they escaping other brutal regimes. Accuse immigrants of taking all the jobs even in spite of your friends moving operations to places where wages and working conditions are minimal. Blame the immigrants and lock them up; lock them up in detention centres that are far away from population centres or even on island exclaves, because if the people can't see what you are doing, they can't complain about it.
...
If any of this sounds vaguely familiar, that's because it should be. Many of these policies were enacted by Germany from about 1929 onwards and that didn't turn out badly at all. Many of these policies have been enacted by the United States from 1981 onwards and that country has gone on to be a shining bacon¹ of democracy. A lot of these policies have been enacted in Australia from about 1997 onwards.
All of this is possible because people are inherently selfish. The slide towards some kind of facism/feudalism/aggressive colonial capitalism is possible because those with power like to keep it. Actual democracy² is rare.
And as for the argument that poor people want to anarchy because in some places they are suggesting to defund the police, that is just plain stupid.
You've got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists.
- G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)
¹No, that's not a typo. A shining beacon provides light to all but a shining bacon provides undeserved deliciousness.
²Athenian democracy wasn't really democracy either because the only people eligible to vote were males over the age of 35; which looks staggeringly like most of history as well as most boardrooms of corporations.
June 22, 2020
Horse 2722 - Hiking Uni Fees Isn't Really About Arts Degrees
In yet another move which proves to me that only is Australia moving towards functional fascism (which I am using as a descriptive term and not a pejorative), the Education Minister Dan Tehan announced last week that if you want to study arts and humanities at university then you have to pay the full economic cost of it yourself. He may as well have punched every arts and humanities student in the face personally because that's the kind of disdain which the Education Minister has shown for education. I would like to think that we have reached a new low in politics when a Minister of the Crown is an enemy of the people but I suspect that we have still further to go and we will be bashed and pushed down the stairs to get there.
Dan Tehan says the Government wants to steer people away from humanities into "job-ready" STEM fields; which basically has the effect of penalising arts and humanities students specifically with disproportionate amounts of debt. From an economic standpoint, this of course makes perfect sense because by shifting the supply curve arbitrarily, you also shift the equilibrium point to a new higher price. Also, since a higher price is a very effective barrier to entry, it means that the government has in effect determined who will study arts and humanities at university, purely on the basis of economic means. It is exactly the same strategy which is played out in school funding and results in economic apartheid by design.
The question of why the government should specifically attack the humanities and the arts, as opposed to the sciences, is both a question of ideology and teleology. It is an ideological question because it relates the enactment of policy and who gets to be able to do it and the telological question has to do with what the government intends education to do. The second is related to the first and is framed in terms of it.
I am convinced that the Liberal Party is running through the list of demands placed upon it by the IPA and is progressively checking them off as the policies that they enact, poison and degrade the proper functioning of democracy. Democracy in principle is government by the demos, that is the people, and while efforts were made to open it up from the 1830s onwards. However, government I suspect is subject to some kind of descriptive equation which always adds up to exactly 1.
Although I lack the tools, my suspicion is that within the confines of the nation state, it is possible to build an equation which describes who controls the total amount of power which exists. Power is enacted through policy and policy involves an entity taking action to achieve and do things. Within the confines of the nation state, we usually assign the authority to write the rules which we call law, to a body called a parliament, or assign them to a person called a president or king or emperor, and we assign the ability to interpret those rules to the judiciary. In times past, those three functions have been vested in a single person. In an Westminster context, Magna Carta in 1215 represents the beginning of rich people having a say, the various reform, sufferage, and representation acts starting in about the 1830s resulted in ordinary people having a say, and trade unionism and civil rights movements resulted in those ordinary people making laws and enforcible them. It is natural that those with more wealth and means should resent ordinary people having any say about how they conduct their affairs and so the last 40 years have been about those people taking back what they think should rightly belong to them.
If a national government is in essence a unitary authority, which is the sole authority to control the rules within the nation, then a great deal of the political fights which happen are going to be about who gets to control that authority. This is why I suspect that this current government has decided to hike the fees on university courses to things like law, finance, economics, law etc. They see those courses of study as the pathways to getting into the parliament and thus controlling the rules within the nation.
Likewise, since the total amount of governance within the nation also adds up to exactly 1, then calling for smaller and more limited government, means that actual governance is transferred out of the parliament and into the hands of companies and organisations which directly control the nation. This is the ideological question. Specifically, who gets to be able to enact policy? If it isn't being done by the government because governments have been forced to step out of the way, by being forced to become smaller and more limited, then the enactment of policy is by default being done by someone else. If there is one thing that powerful people hate, it is someone else having power and them becoming less powerful.
If there is anything that economists, theologians, lawyers, and financiers, s is that everyone without exception is inherently selfish. On average, the centre of everyone's individual observable universe is just shy of an inch from the outside of people's eyeballs. People can only observe the world from their own perspective and because that perspective is constructed by an ego, I suspect that it is literally impossible to build an observable universe where that ego is not the most important thing inside it. Naturally that is going to result in individual selfishness; which when compiled into families and groups, means that there are lots and lots of selfishness feedback loops going on. Also when you consider that people's ability to conceptualise any more than about 23 individual things before they are grouped is mostly impossible, then that results in families, companies, and groups and classes of people acting for the benefit of themselves. All of that roughly explains the ideology of the question here but what of the teleology? Why should selfishness and power have anything to do with the arts? It's easy to explain why powerful people do not want poorer people to have access to the levers of power by limiting their ability to get to them, but artists, that is pure artists, have no real power to change much of anything.
You might be here reading this and wondering what the point of funding the arts actually is. The irony is that you are reading this on a computer, or a tablet, or a phone, which has a graphics interface which has been designed by graphic artists; looking at text which has also been designed by graphic design artists; which in turn was first imagines by movie makers and science fiction writers. Quite literally, the future was written and imagined by artists and then built by boffins in consultation with artists.
Dare I suggest that later on, you will probably watch MasterChef, or Big Brother, or sport, or a television series, or a movie, or a multitude of other things, which have all been created and crafted by a host of artists. If you now ask what the benefit of an Arts Degree is, then maybe you need to think critically about why you are such a deeply ignorant person.
When it comes to the pure arts though, such as painting, sculpture, theatre, dance etc. even I concede that the direct economic argument falls to pieces. In this respect, I should probably be expected to side with the rentier class whose objection to funding the arts is that because there is 'no obvious economic benefit' then they shouldn't be expected to pay for it. This incidentally is exactly the same general argument against having universities not only be publicly funded but universally available. This is a question of who gets to decide what we all club together and buy. I am not going to side with the rentier class because as a citizen of a nation and a Commonwealth, I believe that the point of banding together is to make the world nicer. Why can't we as a nation have nice things? Moreover, why does the rentier class get to decide that the nation can't have nice things? Why are they morally somehow better than us?
Why then punch specifically at the arts and humanities? The problem with the hard sciences is their stock and trade is with the immutable facts of the cosmos (the word 'cosmos' I am choosing to use in the classical Greek sense of it being the world system; which mostly includes the real physical world and the real objects in space, and how they move etc.). The hardest of the hard sciences is mathematics, which contains elements like arithmetic, algebra, trigonometry, calculus etc. which not only do not change but are also impervious to the whims of politics. The humanities though, contain those pesky things called opinions, beliefs, emotions, and feelings, which are all very much subject to change and being questioned.
It is the arts and humanities departments at universities where the very idea of questioning the status quo is both awakened and nurtured. This absolutely scares the people who have and control power because once you give people the tools to question why society is unfair, they tend to want to do something about it.
Please forgive me but I would prefer to live in a society where the products of all of the arts are available to everyone. If we live in a world of nothing but vulgar capitalism, then the only thing that decides what gets produced is what is profitable. That might be all good if you happen to be a rentier whose income comes from the real work of other people but it means that the society itself becomes the consumers of a world of nothing but vulgar capitalism.
People don't go to the theater because they can't afford it but what if they could? People don't go to art galleries as often as they might because either they don't understand art or they can't afford it but what if they could? When the Sydney Symphony Orchestra put on shows in Parramatta Park for free last year, you had a bunch of people show up who almost certainly wouldn't have been able to go to the Opera House. Would society be better off if normal people engaged with the arts? I would think that a better kind of people would emerge.
Moreover, if education generally is reduced to the world of nothing but vulgar capitalism, then what is the kind of society which that is likely to produce?
Australia is begining to see the effects of that experiment in the same way that the United States has already done. What you produce almost by design, is a society which matches the ideology; that is one that is reduced to nothing but vulgar capitalism. The vast bulk of people become just smart enough to run the machines and just dumb enough to passively accept their situation. It suits the rich and powerful few to have a dumb population incapable of critical thinking because those people might realise how much they've been shafted and start demanding change.
If the right people don't have power, do you know what happens? The wrong people get it. People who study and become politicians and councillors - ordinary voters, no less!
I hate to tell you arts students but this really isn't about you. You are collateral damage as a result of a rocket which has been fired at the humanities. This stems right to the beginning of the Liberal Party when on opening day Sir Robert Menzies, in the very first speech of the assembly spoke of fighting political warfare.
Dan Tehan says the Government wants to steer people away from humanities into "job-ready" STEM fields; which basically has the effect of penalising arts and humanities students specifically with disproportionate amounts of debt. From an economic standpoint, this of course makes perfect sense because by shifting the supply curve arbitrarily, you also shift the equilibrium point to a new higher price. Also, since a higher price is a very effective barrier to entry, it means that the government has in effect determined who will study arts and humanities at university, purely on the basis of economic means. It is exactly the same strategy which is played out in school funding and results in economic apartheid by design.
The question of why the government should specifically attack the humanities and the arts, as opposed to the sciences, is both a question of ideology and teleology. It is an ideological question because it relates the enactment of policy and who gets to be able to do it and the telological question has to do with what the government intends education to do. The second is related to the first and is framed in terms of it.
I am convinced that the Liberal Party is running through the list of demands placed upon it by the IPA and is progressively checking them off as the policies that they enact, poison and degrade the proper functioning of democracy. Democracy in principle is government by the demos, that is the people, and while efforts were made to open it up from the 1830s onwards. However, government I suspect is subject to some kind of descriptive equation which always adds up to exactly 1.
Although I lack the tools, my suspicion is that within the confines of the nation state, it is possible to build an equation which describes who controls the total amount of power which exists. Power is enacted through policy and policy involves an entity taking action to achieve and do things. Within the confines of the nation state, we usually assign the authority to write the rules which we call law, to a body called a parliament, or assign them to a person called a president or king or emperor, and we assign the ability to interpret those rules to the judiciary. In times past, those three functions have been vested in a single person. In an Westminster context, Magna Carta in 1215 represents the beginning of rich people having a say, the various reform, sufferage, and representation acts starting in about the 1830s resulted in ordinary people having a say, and trade unionism and civil rights movements resulted in those ordinary people making laws and enforcible them. It is natural that those with more wealth and means should resent ordinary people having any say about how they conduct their affairs and so the last 40 years have been about those people taking back what they think should rightly belong to them.
If a national government is in essence a unitary authority, which is the sole authority to control the rules within the nation, then a great deal of the political fights which happen are going to be about who gets to control that authority. This is why I suspect that this current government has decided to hike the fees on university courses to things like law, finance, economics, law etc. They see those courses of study as the pathways to getting into the parliament and thus controlling the rules within the nation.
Likewise, since the total amount of governance within the nation also adds up to exactly 1, then calling for smaller and more limited government, means that actual governance is transferred out of the parliament and into the hands of companies and organisations which directly control the nation. This is the ideological question. Specifically, who gets to be able to enact policy? If it isn't being done by the government because governments have been forced to step out of the way, by being forced to become smaller and more limited, then the enactment of policy is by default being done by someone else. If there is one thing that powerful people hate, it is someone else having power and them becoming less powerful.
If there is anything that economists, theologians, lawyers, and financiers, s is that everyone without exception is inherently selfish. On average, the centre of everyone's individual observable universe is just shy of an inch from the outside of people's eyeballs. People can only observe the world from their own perspective and because that perspective is constructed by an ego, I suspect that it is literally impossible to build an observable universe where that ego is not the most important thing inside it. Naturally that is going to result in individual selfishness; which when compiled into families and groups, means that there are lots and lots of selfishness feedback loops going on. Also when you consider that people's ability to conceptualise any more than about 23 individual things before they are grouped is mostly impossible, then that results in families, companies, and groups and classes of people acting for the benefit of themselves. All of that roughly explains the ideology of the question here but what of the teleology? Why should selfishness and power have anything to do with the arts? It's easy to explain why powerful people do not want poorer people to have access to the levers of power by limiting their ability to get to them, but artists, that is pure artists, have no real power to change much of anything.
You might be here reading this and wondering what the point of funding the arts actually is. The irony is that you are reading this on a computer, or a tablet, or a phone, which has a graphics interface which has been designed by graphic artists; looking at text which has also been designed by graphic design artists; which in turn was first imagines by movie makers and science fiction writers. Quite literally, the future was written and imagined by artists and then built by boffins in consultation with artists.
Dare I suggest that later on, you will probably watch MasterChef, or Big Brother, or sport, or a television series, or a movie, or a multitude of other things, which have all been created and crafted by a host of artists. If you now ask what the benefit of an Arts Degree is, then maybe you need to think critically about why you are such a deeply ignorant person.
When it comes to the pure arts though, such as painting, sculpture, theatre, dance etc. even I concede that the direct economic argument falls to pieces. In this respect, I should probably be expected to side with the rentier class whose objection to funding the arts is that because there is 'no obvious economic benefit' then they shouldn't be expected to pay for it. This incidentally is exactly the same general argument against having universities not only be publicly funded but universally available. This is a question of who gets to decide what we all club together and buy. I am not going to side with the rentier class because as a citizen of a nation and a Commonwealth, I believe that the point of banding together is to make the world nicer. Why can't we as a nation have nice things? Moreover, why does the rentier class get to decide that the nation can't have nice things? Why are they morally somehow better than us?
Why then punch specifically at the arts and humanities? The problem with the hard sciences is their stock and trade is with the immutable facts of the cosmos (the word 'cosmos' I am choosing to use in the classical Greek sense of it being the world system; which mostly includes the real physical world and the real objects in space, and how they move etc.). The hardest of the hard sciences is mathematics, which contains elements like arithmetic, algebra, trigonometry, calculus etc. which not only do not change but are also impervious to the whims of politics. The humanities though, contain those pesky things called opinions, beliefs, emotions, and feelings, which are all very much subject to change and being questioned.
It is the arts and humanities departments at universities where the very idea of questioning the status quo is both awakened and nurtured. This absolutely scares the people who have and control power because once you give people the tools to question why society is unfair, they tend to want to do something about it.
Please forgive me but I would prefer to live in a society where the products of all of the arts are available to everyone. If we live in a world of nothing but vulgar capitalism, then the only thing that decides what gets produced is what is profitable. That might be all good if you happen to be a rentier whose income comes from the real work of other people but it means that the society itself becomes the consumers of a world of nothing but vulgar capitalism.
People don't go to the theater because they can't afford it but what if they could? People don't go to art galleries as often as they might because either they don't understand art or they can't afford it but what if they could? When the Sydney Symphony Orchestra put on shows in Parramatta Park for free last year, you had a bunch of people show up who almost certainly wouldn't have been able to go to the Opera House. Would society be better off if normal people engaged with the arts? I would think that a better kind of people would emerge.
Moreover, if education generally is reduced to the world of nothing but vulgar capitalism, then what is the kind of society which that is likely to produce?
Australia is begining to see the effects of that experiment in the same way that the United States has already done. What you produce almost by design, is a society which matches the ideology; that is one that is reduced to nothing but vulgar capitalism. The vast bulk of people become just smart enough to run the machines and just dumb enough to passively accept their situation. It suits the rich and powerful few to have a dumb population incapable of critical thinking because those people might realise how much they've been shafted and start demanding change.
If the right people don't have power, do you know what happens? The wrong people get it. People who study and become politicians and councillors - ordinary voters, no less!
I hate to tell you arts students but this really isn't about you. You are collateral damage as a result of a rocket which has been fired at the humanities. This stems right to the beginning of the Liberal Party when on opening day Sir Robert Menzies, in the very first speech of the assembly spoke of fighting political warfare.
June 18, 2020
Horse 2721 - If You Say "All Lives Matter", I Will Assume That You Don't Actually Believe It
In response to the protests which have happened across the world, following the murder of George Floyd under the knee of Minneapolis Police, a common refrain which has been posted in response to the slogan 'Black Lives Matter' is the deliberately undermining reply of 'All Lives Matter'; mostly by people who don't actually believe that to be true.
Suppose that you are a school teacher. You are sitting in the staff common room at lunch time and you can hear one of your students being beaten up. We'll call her Alice. Not only that but you can determine from the cries of the student being beaten up that the ones laying into her are the class prefects Bridget and Cosette. What do you do?
Any sane teacher would call Bridget and Cosette into the staff room for a severe talking to. You would tell them off for acting so cruel.
Let's suppose for a second that Alice comes from a poor family. Let us further suppose that Alice's parents work for the parents of Bridget and Cosette. Let's further assume that Alice is actually something of a troublemaker who is known for lashing out at Bridget and Cosette.
As the teacher, do you blame Alice for the circumstances which she finds herself in and give Bridget and Cosette hockey sticks so that they can do their job of being prefects better?
If you were to do that, I would probably be justified in my opinion that even though you might be an academically brilliant teacher, you lack basic humanity and common sense.
Suppose that you have a fourth student in the class called Doris. Doris has finally decided to speak up for Alice and wants to get your attention to do something about it. Do you listen to Doris? Or do you listen to Karen, whose mum is on the Parents and Teachers Association and can threaten to withdraw funds from the school? Suppose Karen thinks that just because she hasn't personally experienced any bullying that "all children matter". Is she wrong?
Suppose further still that I been incredibly sexist in my hypothetical example and the names are actually Adrian, Bradley, Colin, Darren, and Kevin. Does any of that make a difference because they're just boys and boys just do that kind of thing?
I hope that I have laboured the point beyond what is reasonable. If one of your students is being beaten up by other students and you want to spruik the line that "all children matter" and yet do nothing to address the issue of your student being beaten up, then you are not only a monster but a liar. If you are a student in this example who stands to the side and wants to spruik the line that "all children matter" but do so because you haven't actually experienced any trouble, then you too are a monster and a liar.
In lots of countries with histories of colonialism, slavery, indigenous dispossession and the like (which includes my own country), we have people who after hearing that people have been beaten up by police and security forces, then blame the victims for their own systemic neglect. 'All Lives Matter' is the equivalent of being more concerned that the children who you bothered to look after are worth more than the one that you have lost and the utterance of that slogan generally demonstrates that the person saying it, fundamentally believes that it is not true.
It is no coincidence that in those same countries, the people who fundamentally do not believe that all lives matter, consistently vote for governments who then enact policy which is consistent with those beliefs. Political parties who then run marketing campaigns to get reelected, will conduct market research and know that people actually do not fundamentally believe that all lives matter, will then adjust their marketing and messaging so that everyone can feel good about the voting choices that they make. Often the purpose of marketing and messaging is to make the consumer feel good about the purchase that they have made; which in this case is paid for by votes.
Dear White People who want to say "All Lives Matter",
If it is true, then act like it. Shut up. Listen. Act. Everyone who wants to say that "All Lives Matter" either proves that fact by listening to the cries of their fellow citizens, or proves that they do not believe that it is true, by vomiting up slogans that are worth less than cat vomit.
The world doesn't need to hear your stupidity which proves that you are a monster and a liar because that has pretty well much been the default position which perpetuates the problem.
Stop lying when you say that you "don't see colour". Either you are actually blind or wilfully lying; there are no other options here. Just because you don't personally experience problems doesn't mean that they don't exist. Shut up. Listen. Act.
Love, Rollo.
Actually if anything, I will admit that I am being radicalised online by people who want to say that "all lives matter" because that indicates to me that these are the people who are monsters and liars. Again, if the people who do go around saying say that "all lives matter" actually believed it, then they probably wouldn't be saying it and thus undercutting the sentiment and real worries of the people who have a very very legitimate complaint.
Suppose that you are a school teacher. You are sitting in the staff common room at lunch time and you can hear one of your students being beaten up. We'll call her Alice. Not only that but you can determine from the cries of the student being beaten up that the ones laying into her are the class prefects Bridget and Cosette. What do you do?
Any sane teacher would call Bridget and Cosette into the staff room for a severe talking to. You would tell them off for acting so cruel.
Let's suppose for a second that Alice comes from a poor family. Let us further suppose that Alice's parents work for the parents of Bridget and Cosette. Let's further assume that Alice is actually something of a troublemaker who is known for lashing out at Bridget and Cosette.
As the teacher, do you blame Alice for the circumstances which she finds herself in and give Bridget and Cosette hockey sticks so that they can do their job of being prefects better?
If you were to do that, I would probably be justified in my opinion that even though you might be an academically brilliant teacher, you lack basic humanity and common sense.
Suppose that you have a fourth student in the class called Doris. Doris has finally decided to speak up for Alice and wants to get your attention to do something about it. Do you listen to Doris? Or do you listen to Karen, whose mum is on the Parents and Teachers Association and can threaten to withdraw funds from the school? Suppose Karen thinks that just because she hasn't personally experienced any bullying that "all children matter". Is she wrong?
Suppose further still that I been incredibly sexist in my hypothetical example and the names are actually Adrian, Bradley, Colin, Darren, and Kevin. Does any of that make a difference because they're just boys and boys just do that kind of thing?
I hope that I have laboured the point beyond what is reasonable. If one of your students is being beaten up by other students and you want to spruik the line that "all children matter" and yet do nothing to address the issue of your student being beaten up, then you are not only a monster but a liar. If you are a student in this example who stands to the side and wants to spruik the line that "all children matter" but do so because you haven't actually experienced any trouble, then you too are a monster and a liar.
In lots of countries with histories of colonialism, slavery, indigenous dispossession and the like (which includes my own country), we have people who after hearing that people have been beaten up by police and security forces, then blame the victims for their own systemic neglect. 'All Lives Matter' is the equivalent of being more concerned that the children who you bothered to look after are worth more than the one that you have lost and the utterance of that slogan generally demonstrates that the person saying it, fundamentally believes that it is not true.
It is no coincidence that in those same countries, the people who fundamentally do not believe that all lives matter, consistently vote for governments who then enact policy which is consistent with those beliefs. Political parties who then run marketing campaigns to get reelected, will conduct market research and know that people actually do not fundamentally believe that all lives matter, will then adjust their marketing and messaging so that everyone can feel good about the voting choices that they make. Often the purpose of marketing and messaging is to make the consumer feel good about the purchase that they have made; which in this case is paid for by votes.
Dear White People who want to say "All Lives Matter",
If it is true, then act like it. Shut up. Listen. Act. Everyone who wants to say that "All Lives Matter" either proves that fact by listening to the cries of their fellow citizens, or proves that they do not believe that it is true, by vomiting up slogans that are worth less than cat vomit.
The world doesn't need to hear your stupidity which proves that you are a monster and a liar because that has pretty well much been the default position which perpetuates the problem.
Stop lying when you say that you "don't see colour". Either you are actually blind or wilfully lying; there are no other options here. Just because you don't personally experience problems doesn't mean that they don't exist. Shut up. Listen. Act.
Love, Rollo.
Actually if anything, I will admit that I am being radicalised online by people who want to say that "all lives matter" because that indicates to me that these are the people who are monsters and liars. Again, if the people who do go around saying say that "all lives matter" actually believed it, then they probably wouldn't be saying it and thus undercutting the sentiment and real worries of the people who have a very very legitimate complaint.
June 16, 2020
Horse 2720 - It's Bingo Time!
If you read enough crime fiction (or watch crime drama on television) then one of the recurring things that comes up, particularly in quaint English village life, is a bunch of old ladies going down to the Bingo Hall to play Bingo.
Inspector Morse thinks that Bingo is the reason why all ladies are forced to eat cat food. Poirot thinks that daubing at lots of Bingo cards is a mindless pastime for mindless people. Miss Marple on the other hand mentions in Bertram's Hotel that she regularly goes to bingo because she likes to hear all of the gossip, and that Mary St. Mead is like a microcosm of the world: everything that happens in the world, has already happened in Mary St. Mead.
Since "The Horse" has never had a pull out gambling section before, I thought that it would be fun in these crazy times, in these uncertain times of uncertainty, in these uncertain crazy uncertain crazy times, to have a bingo section.
You'll need your own bingo card. To make that you will need a grid. Draw six vertical lines and then six horizontal lines. That will give you 25 squares to write your numbers in. Pick any numbers that you like between 1 and 90. Put those numbers anywhere you like in the grid. I have no idea why there are 90 numbers and not 100 but there just are, and this is an immutable fact of the universe.
The standard pay out rates for a game of bingo are:
₱15 for the first "Bingo". That is the first column or row which someone has completed.
₱25 for the first X. That is all of the corners completed.
₱50 for the first "House". That is when someone has actually completed their whole bingo card.
Since Bingo cards usually only cost ₱2 and they sell 25 of them in a round of bingo, then 25 x ₱2 = ₱100 in takings, ₱15 + ₱25 + ₱50 = ₱90 paid out in prizes, and the house collects ₱10 in profit. If you compare that with a payout rate of 95% for bookmakers at horse racing tracks, 95% for most games in a casino, and about 87% for poker machines, then Bingo actually works out to be not all that great a gambling vehicle for the participants but lovely for the house. Preying on old ladies seems somewhat insidious to me; which is why I also think that poker machines are also insidious devices.
Since this publication has already taken 2 of your imaginary monies, then you can either walk away now knowing that we have already won, or you can play along at home and try to beat the house. We'll tell you when our imaginary old lady has won.
We should point out that it is possible to win all three prizes in a round of bingo and so if you do that, you will be morally obligated to buy some imaginary orange squash for the imaginary old ladies in the bingo hall. You might also like to spend some of your imaginary winnings at the imaginary bistro. Try the veal.
For the record, there are official lists of Bingo Calls but as I think that most of them are hokey, I shall use my own.
70. People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day. 70.
6. White boomers, snow white boomers. 6.
49. You have failed. Please see me after class. 49.
53. Here comes the Love Bug. 53.
25. I'm still alive. 25.
74. Recycle more. 74.
22. Two little ducks. 22.
11. Secret Herbs and Spices. 11.
23. The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not lack anything. 23.
69. The zodiac symbol for Cancer. Ha! I bet you thought it would be something else but you've got a grotty filthy mind. 69.
2. The answer to the question of life, death, the universe and everything. 42.
7. Magnificent. 7.
34. Off to war. 34.
12. Set your clocks to spooky. The midnight hour has arrived. 12.
88. Two women who don’t wish to be judged by society’s standards. 88.
21. Gun Royal Salute. 21.
26. A to Z. 26.
85. Staying Alive. Staying Alive. Ah ha ha ha. 85.
45. Spin the record. 45.
71. I'm sorry, sir, but we don't speak Swedish. 71.
75. Jump and jive. 75.
55. Snakes alive! 55.
36. Dramatic Situations. 36.
62. Turn the Screw. 62.
51. Doesn't rhyme with banana. 51.
24. Hours from Tulsa. 24.
77. H E double upside down hockey sticks. 77.
1. Is the lonliest number. 1.
29. Feeling fine. 29.
5. Coco Chanel. No.5.
43. Beans in every cup. 43.
15. Steve McQueen. 15.
83. Gluten free. 83.
27. All the famous people die. 27.
72. Chicken Vindaloo. 72.
89. Hydroxychloroquine. 89.
20. Twenty Dollars? Aw. I wanted a peanut. 20.
41. I love my mum. 41.
68. A bucket and crate. 68.
84. Big Brother is watching you. 84.
73. That existential feeling of dread that you get when you wonder if you have locked the door or not. 73.
40. Happiness begins here. 40.
48. Haters gonna hate. 48.
33. Fish and chips and peas. 33.
35. Millimeter film. 35.
63. Stuck up a tree. 63.
31. Tom Tom the Piper's son. Stole a pig and he did run. 31.
2. Number Two. Open a window. 2.
14. Kind of obscene. 14.
78. Broken Plate. 78.
16. And never been kissed. 16.
56. Clickety Clicks. 56.
39. The famous steps. 39.
30. Dirty Bertie. 30.
59. The goose drank wine. The monkey smoked tobacco on the street car line. 59.
3. Is a magic number. Yes it is. 3.
28. Shut the gate. 28.
79. Do or do not. There is no try. 79.
52. Pack of Cards. 52.
54. Hardware store. 54.
81. Set phasers to stun. 81.
32. Winnie The Pooh. 32.
58. Christmas Cake. 58.
9. Doctor Knickerbocker's Love Potion. Number 9.
BINGO - Imaginary Old Lady has a Row.
60. This week on 60 Minutes. Tick tick tick tick. 60.
8. The best things in life are free. But you can keep them for the birds and bees. I want your money. 8.
82. One fat lady taking her pet duck for a walk. 82.
37. Slices of Devon. 37.
66. Get your kicks on Route. 66.
57. Heinz Varieties. 57.
90. Top of the house. 90.
BINGO - Imaginary Old Lady has all the Corners.
61. Cinnamon Bun. 61.
17. Dancing Queen. Young and sweet, only. 17.
44. Double Death! 44.
19. What this rash that comes and goes? Can you tell me what it means? 19.
10. Boris' Den. Number Ten. 10.
65. No use crying over spilled milk. 65.
BINGO - Imaginary Old Lady has Finished.
4. Death has arrived. 4.
86. Concrete mix. 86.
80. Don't Have Breakfast. Eight-nothing. 80.
13. Unlucky for some. 13.
38. Avocado on a plate. 38.
18. Wheels of Justice. 18.
46. Dorothy Dix. 46.
76. Trombones led the big parade. 76.
64. Will you still need me? Will you still feed me? 64.
87. The Devil's Number. 87.
67. Stairway to Heaven. 67.
47. Russian diplomacy. A K. 47.
50. 5 – 0, 5 – 0, it’s off to work we go. 50.
The chances are that you have beaten our imaginary old lady in this game of Bingo. If you would like to play again, then just create an Excel spreadsheet and use the =RAND() function to generate 90 random numbers next to your list of 90 bingo calls. Organise your own imaginary den of iniquity and inequity. It is much better to take imaginary money from imaginary old ladies who aren't real, than to take real money from real old ladies.
Inspector Morse thinks that Bingo is the reason why all ladies are forced to eat cat food. Poirot thinks that daubing at lots of Bingo cards is a mindless pastime for mindless people. Miss Marple on the other hand mentions in Bertram's Hotel that she regularly goes to bingo because she likes to hear all of the gossip, and that Mary St. Mead is like a microcosm of the world: everything that happens in the world, has already happened in Mary St. Mead.
Since "The Horse" has never had a pull out gambling section before, I thought that it would be fun in these crazy times, in these uncertain times of uncertainty, in these uncertain crazy uncertain crazy times, to have a bingo section.
You'll need your own bingo card. To make that you will need a grid. Draw six vertical lines and then six horizontal lines. That will give you 25 squares to write your numbers in. Pick any numbers that you like between 1 and 90. Put those numbers anywhere you like in the grid. I have no idea why there are 90 numbers and not 100 but there just are, and this is an immutable fact of the universe.
The standard pay out rates for a game of bingo are:
₱15 for the first "Bingo". That is the first column or row which someone has completed.
₱25 for the first X. That is all of the corners completed.
₱50 for the first "House". That is when someone has actually completed their whole bingo card.
Since Bingo cards usually only cost ₱2 and they sell 25 of them in a round of bingo, then 25 x ₱2 = ₱100 in takings, ₱15 + ₱25 + ₱50 = ₱90 paid out in prizes, and the house collects ₱10 in profit. If you compare that with a payout rate of 95% for bookmakers at horse racing tracks, 95% for most games in a casino, and about 87% for poker machines, then Bingo actually works out to be not all that great a gambling vehicle for the participants but lovely for the house. Preying on old ladies seems somewhat insidious to me; which is why I also think that poker machines are also insidious devices.
Since this publication has already taken 2 of your imaginary monies, then you can either walk away now knowing that we have already won, or you can play along at home and try to beat the house. We'll tell you when our imaginary old lady has won.
We should point out that it is possible to win all three prizes in a round of bingo and so if you do that, you will be morally obligated to buy some imaginary orange squash for the imaginary old ladies in the bingo hall. You might also like to spend some of your imaginary winnings at the imaginary bistro. Try the veal.
For the record, there are official lists of Bingo Calls but as I think that most of them are hokey, I shall use my own.
70. People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day. 70.
6. White boomers, snow white boomers. 6.
49. You have failed. Please see me after class. 49.
53. Here comes the Love Bug. 53.
25. I'm still alive. 25.
74. Recycle more. 74.
22. Two little ducks. 22.
11. Secret Herbs and Spices. 11.
23. The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not lack anything. 23.
69. The zodiac symbol for Cancer. Ha! I bet you thought it would be something else but you've got a grotty filthy mind. 69.
2. The answer to the question of life, death, the universe and everything. 42.
7. Magnificent. 7.
34. Off to war. 34.
12. Set your clocks to spooky. The midnight hour has arrived. 12.
88. Two women who don’t wish to be judged by society’s standards. 88.
21. Gun Royal Salute. 21.
26. A to Z. 26.
85. Staying Alive. Staying Alive. Ah ha ha ha. 85.
45. Spin the record. 45.
71. I'm sorry, sir, but we don't speak Swedish. 71.
75. Jump and jive. 75.
55. Snakes alive! 55.
36. Dramatic Situations. 36.
62. Turn the Screw. 62.
51. Doesn't rhyme with banana. 51.
24. Hours from Tulsa. 24.
77. H E double upside down hockey sticks. 77.
1. Is the lonliest number. 1.
29. Feeling fine. 29.
5. Coco Chanel. No.5.
43. Beans in every cup. 43.
15. Steve McQueen. 15.
83. Gluten free. 83.
27. All the famous people die. 27.
72. Chicken Vindaloo. 72.
89. Hydroxychloroquine. 89.
20. Twenty Dollars? Aw. I wanted a peanut. 20.
41. I love my mum. 41.
68. A bucket and crate. 68.
84. Big Brother is watching you. 84.
73. That existential feeling of dread that you get when you wonder if you have locked the door or not. 73.
40. Happiness begins here. 40.
48. Haters gonna hate. 48.
33. Fish and chips and peas. 33.
35. Millimeter film. 35.
63. Stuck up a tree. 63.
31. Tom Tom the Piper's son. Stole a pig and he did run. 31.
2. Number Two. Open a window. 2.
14. Kind of obscene. 14.
78. Broken Plate. 78.
16. And never been kissed. 16.
56. Clickety Clicks. 56.
39. The famous steps. 39.
30. Dirty Bertie. 30.
59. The goose drank wine. The monkey smoked tobacco on the street car line. 59.
3. Is a magic number. Yes it is. 3.
28. Shut the gate. 28.
79. Do or do not. There is no try. 79.
52. Pack of Cards. 52.
54. Hardware store. 54.
81. Set phasers to stun. 81.
32. Winnie The Pooh. 32.
58. Christmas Cake. 58.
9. Doctor Knickerbocker's Love Potion. Number 9.
BINGO - Imaginary Old Lady has a Row.
60. This week on 60 Minutes. Tick tick tick tick. 60.
8. The best things in life are free. But you can keep them for the birds and bees. I want your money. 8.
82. One fat lady taking her pet duck for a walk. 82.
37. Slices of Devon. 37.
66. Get your kicks on Route. 66.
57. Heinz Varieties. 57.
90. Top of the house. 90.
BINGO - Imaginary Old Lady has all the Corners.
61. Cinnamon Bun. 61.
17. Dancing Queen. Young and sweet, only. 17.
44. Double Death! 44.
19. What this rash that comes and goes? Can you tell me what it means? 19.
10. Boris' Den. Number Ten. 10.
65. No use crying over spilled milk. 65.
BINGO - Imaginary Old Lady has Finished.
4. Death has arrived. 4.
86. Concrete mix. 86.
80. Don't Have Breakfast. Eight-nothing. 80.
13. Unlucky for some. 13.
38. Avocado on a plate. 38.
18. Wheels of Justice. 18.
46. Dorothy Dix. 46.
76. Trombones led the big parade. 76.
64. Will you still need me? Will you still feed me? 64.
87. The Devil's Number. 87.
67. Stairway to Heaven. 67.
47. Russian diplomacy. A K. 47.
50. 5 – 0, 5 – 0, it’s off to work we go. 50.
The chances are that you have beaten our imaginary old lady in this game of Bingo. If you would like to play again, then just create an Excel spreadsheet and use the =RAND() function to generate 90 random numbers next to your list of 90 bingo calls. Organise your own imaginary den of iniquity and inequity. It is much better to take imaginary money from imaginary old ladies who aren't real, than to take real money from real old ladies.
June 15, 2020
Horse 2719 - Fighting The History Wars Requires At Least A Passing Knowledge Of History
For those people who do not think that history repeats, not only was a pandemic like the one that we are currently living through predicted as a 100% eventuality and planned for (and conveniently forgotten about) but the associated period of hardship which falls mostly on the poor is also repeating and we took no steps against that either.
Humans generally are very bad at predicting the future and the economic right is even worse at it because unless there is a present danger instead of just a contingent possible danger, then the profit motive which is the biggest driver of human activity (which in reality is just selfishness repackaged) simply refuses to admit that there might be broader responsibilities that we have to each other.
One of those responsibilities is the responsibility to act with decency to each other and that I am afraid, is something that people motivated by profits simply cannot abide with. In the past that has resulted in slavery whereby people become the moveable chattel of other people, to be bought and sold, and when that relationship is severed and the effects continue due to a multitude of systemic factors including the fact that all capital is produced from the excess of past work, then it's going to have very big knock on effects.
Just like the H1N1 Influenza pandemic of 1918-20, there have been race riots on the United States as that country refuses to admit its past mistakes and wishes to perpetuate them into the future. Some starting places to look at include the Red Summer of 1919 and the Tulsa Massacre which actually included aerial bombing of black people's houses by their fellow citizens.
We haven't quite descended into that kind of violence, yet. However, the echoes from the tensions in the United States have made people question their own history in other countries; which includes the pulling down of statues of slave owners of times past.
As someone who has read a bit about the long game of history, as history and what we choose to commemorate, celebrate and remember, is always done by the people of the present, the questioning of the past is hardly a new endeavour. In fact, the defacing of statues and the sacking of treasures is something that probably extends to before antiquity.
When I read columns like Andrew Bolt's in the Daily Telegraph/Herald-Sun/Courier Mail, his insistence that the past is sacred is no less a case of playing identity politics as those he accuses of playing identity politics. It's just that he is waving the banner of a different identity.
I know that not having a university degree or even a high school certificate is no guarantee of the intelligence of a person because loads of people who have never been to university are ridiculously smart and/or have learned their craft in the University of Life but Mr Bolt never appears to be all that intellectually curious. If you are going to successfully make proper arguments against someone else's position, then it is best if you first make an attempt to understand that position. If you are going to attack the intellectual ground of your enemy then you should at very least have read across what your enemy has read. I find it repeatedly amusing for instance that I am accused of quoting left-wing writers, after having quoted Hayek and Von Mises. Actually, all this proves is that if you are going to successfully make proper arguments against someone else's position, then you should also probably understand your own.
The truth is that it is easy to pull apart Mr Bolt's arguments because like so many right-wing nuts, it you apply even the slightest torque and pressure, you can undo them very simply.
News Corp rather inconveniently hides its URLs and its articles behind their paywall, which makes linking to them rather difficult but even so, I am not sure that I want to direct traffic their way to generate ad revenue for them.
I can not for the life of me work out what the Dickens Mr Bolt is complaining about when he poses the question that race rioters would want to tear down a statue of Marx. This makes zero sense on so many levels; basic maths tells you that if you multiply zero by anything, many times over, you still get zero. Nothing times a whole lot, is a whole lot of nothing.
Firstly, I don't understand which 'statue' Mr Bolt is referring to. No doubt there are statues of him around the world but I can't think of any in Bolt's city of Melbourne; nor can I think of any in London. There is a monument in London where Marx is buried but you would expect that sort of thing in a cemetery. It could be that but does that mean that Mr Bolt actually advocates desecrating the grave of a Jewish man? Mr Bolt has already been found guilty of violating the Racial Discrimination Act; so perhaps it isn't past him to add anti-Semitism to his quiver as well.
Secondly, for people who are anti-racist to want to bring down a statue of someone for presumed racism, wouldn't that require that the person in question was actually racist? Say what you like about Marx's political ideology but racism isn't really a strand of his thinking or manifesto; which is what you would expect from someone who more than likely had members of his extended family who were the victims of pogroms across Europe.
Thirdly, to actually address the terms of Mr Bolt's article last week, I have one simple question - "Why?". What possible reason would race rioters want to tear down a statue of Marx, assuming that one existed (which by the way doesn't; neither in the United States, the United Kingdom, nor Australia). Again, that lack of intellectual curiosity is on display yet again.
To place Marx back into history, he wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1848 and was writing for various magazines on both sides of the Atlantic during the US Civil War (1861-1865). Not only is Marx aware of what is going on in the United States but he seems deeply concerned for the plight of American slaves.
Before the war started in 1861, he wrote in a January 1860 letter to his colleague Engels that the world was a tinder box and presumably revolution was at hand with “on the one hand the movement of the slaves in America started by the death of John Brown, and on the other the movement of the serfs in Russia.”
Marx is deeply concerned with the treatment of people who are mostly powerless and his economic view of the world, however incomplete and inadequate at describing how the economy works, is largely motivated by improving the lot of working people.
The day John Brown was hanged for his raid on Harpers Ferry, Marx wrote that "ending chattel slavery would not destroy capitalism, but it would create conditions far more favorable to organizing and elevating labor, whether white or black.”
Maybe you can make the argument that Marx only views the issue of racism as an incidental problem which sits alongside the broader issues of slavery, wage slavery and the ruthlessness of factory owners towards their workers but he certainly doesn't give cause for race rioters to want to pull down his statue (if it actually existed; which it doesn't).
If anything, black people might have cause to want to revisit Marx and have a look at what he said. In fact, Marx's writings in newspapers and magazines which were the only big media of the day, may have filtered through to Abraham Lincoln himself. Lincoln's address to Congress in December 1861 contains the following:
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/first-annual-message-9
Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights. Nor is it denied that there is, and probably always will be, a relation between labor and capital producing mutual benefits. The error is in assuming that the whole labor of community exists within that relation. A few men own capital, and that few avoid labor themselves, and with their capital hire or buy another few to labor for them.
- Abraham Lincoln, 3rd Dec 1861
That sounds distinctly Marxist.
Lincoln who inherited a war over slavery (I really fail to see that there was any other root cause), not only was the one who issued the Emancipation Proclamation but politically, he is the first Republican President. I wonder exactly on what basis black people in America would want to tear down a statue of Lincoln.
More than likely, Mr Bolt is preying on the fact that the readers of the Herald-Sun/Daily Telegraph/Courier Mail are just as lacking in intellectual curiosity as him. Marx is probably just another swear word in the land of the Herald-Sun/Daily Telegraph/Courier Mail; like "Aboriginal", "Thunberg", or "the left" which is repeatedly defined by Miranda Devine as "anyone I don't like".
Moreover, the organisation which Mr Bolt works for, engages in victim blaming frequently and is not above doctoring photographs and hacking the phones of the dead to push its point of view.
I am also convinced that it is this kind of article and the subsequent discussions of both it and the regurgitation of this as a topic, which is why we saw the police in Sydney defending the statue of Captain Cook against literally nobody; while they flashed white supremacist hand signals at people and while someone dressed as the cut-price bargain bin version of Indiana Jones stood inside the police cordon. The statue was graffitied anyway, during the wee small hours of Sunday morning and unless Captain James Cook was a Marxist, I just don't think that the people who did this, would be the same kinds of people who might pull down a statue of Marx, if it existed; which doesn't; so it can't be pulled down.
Humans generally are very bad at predicting the future and the economic right is even worse at it because unless there is a present danger instead of just a contingent possible danger, then the profit motive which is the biggest driver of human activity (which in reality is just selfishness repackaged) simply refuses to admit that there might be broader responsibilities that we have to each other.
One of those responsibilities is the responsibility to act with decency to each other and that I am afraid, is something that people motivated by profits simply cannot abide with. In the past that has resulted in slavery whereby people become the moveable chattel of other people, to be bought and sold, and when that relationship is severed and the effects continue due to a multitude of systemic factors including the fact that all capital is produced from the excess of past work, then it's going to have very big knock on effects.
Just like the H1N1 Influenza pandemic of 1918-20, there have been race riots on the United States as that country refuses to admit its past mistakes and wishes to perpetuate them into the future. Some starting places to look at include the Red Summer of 1919 and the Tulsa Massacre which actually included aerial bombing of black people's houses by their fellow citizens.
We haven't quite descended into that kind of violence, yet. However, the echoes from the tensions in the United States have made people question their own history in other countries; which includes the pulling down of statues of slave owners of times past.
As someone who has read a bit about the long game of history, as history and what we choose to commemorate, celebrate and remember, is always done by the people of the present, the questioning of the past is hardly a new endeavour. In fact, the defacing of statues and the sacking of treasures is something that probably extends to before antiquity.
When I read columns like Andrew Bolt's in the Daily Telegraph/Herald-Sun/Courier Mail, his insistence that the past is sacred is no less a case of playing identity politics as those he accuses of playing identity politics. It's just that he is waving the banner of a different identity.
I know that not having a university degree or even a high school certificate is no guarantee of the intelligence of a person because loads of people who have never been to university are ridiculously smart and/or have learned their craft in the University of Life but Mr Bolt never appears to be all that intellectually curious. If you are going to successfully make proper arguments against someone else's position, then it is best if you first make an attempt to understand that position. If you are going to attack the intellectual ground of your enemy then you should at very least have read across what your enemy has read. I find it repeatedly amusing for instance that I am accused of quoting left-wing writers, after having quoted Hayek and Von Mises. Actually, all this proves is that if you are going to successfully make proper arguments against someone else's position, then you should also probably understand your own.
The truth is that it is easy to pull apart Mr Bolt's arguments because like so many right-wing nuts, it you apply even the slightest torque and pressure, you can undo them very simply.
News Corp rather inconveniently hides its URLs and its articles behind their paywall, which makes linking to them rather difficult but even so, I am not sure that I want to direct traffic their way to generate ad revenue for them.
I can not for the life of me work out what the Dickens Mr Bolt is complaining about when he poses the question that race rioters would want to tear down a statue of Marx. This makes zero sense on so many levels; basic maths tells you that if you multiply zero by anything, many times over, you still get zero. Nothing times a whole lot, is a whole lot of nothing.
Firstly, I don't understand which 'statue' Mr Bolt is referring to. No doubt there are statues of him around the world but I can't think of any in Bolt's city of Melbourne; nor can I think of any in London. There is a monument in London where Marx is buried but you would expect that sort of thing in a cemetery. It could be that but does that mean that Mr Bolt actually advocates desecrating the grave of a Jewish man? Mr Bolt has already been found guilty of violating the Racial Discrimination Act; so perhaps it isn't past him to add anti-Semitism to his quiver as well.
Secondly, for people who are anti-racist to want to bring down a statue of someone for presumed racism, wouldn't that require that the person in question was actually racist? Say what you like about Marx's political ideology but racism isn't really a strand of his thinking or manifesto; which is what you would expect from someone who more than likely had members of his extended family who were the victims of pogroms across Europe.
Thirdly, to actually address the terms of Mr Bolt's article last week, I have one simple question - "Why?". What possible reason would race rioters want to tear down a statue of Marx, assuming that one existed (which by the way doesn't; neither in the United States, the United Kingdom, nor Australia). Again, that lack of intellectual curiosity is on display yet again.
To place Marx back into history, he wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1848 and was writing for various magazines on both sides of the Atlantic during the US Civil War (1861-1865). Not only is Marx aware of what is going on in the United States but he seems deeply concerned for the plight of American slaves.
Before the war started in 1861, he wrote in a January 1860 letter to his colleague Engels that the world was a tinder box and presumably revolution was at hand with “on the one hand the movement of the slaves in America started by the death of John Brown, and on the other the movement of the serfs in Russia.”
Marx is deeply concerned with the treatment of people who are mostly powerless and his economic view of the world, however incomplete and inadequate at describing how the economy works, is largely motivated by improving the lot of working people.
The day John Brown was hanged for his raid on Harpers Ferry, Marx wrote that "ending chattel slavery would not destroy capitalism, but it would create conditions far more favorable to organizing and elevating labor, whether white or black.”
Maybe you can make the argument that Marx only views the issue of racism as an incidental problem which sits alongside the broader issues of slavery, wage slavery and the ruthlessness of factory owners towards their workers but he certainly doesn't give cause for race rioters to want to pull down his statue (if it actually existed; which it doesn't).
If anything, black people might have cause to want to revisit Marx and have a look at what he said. In fact, Marx's writings in newspapers and magazines which were the only big media of the day, may have filtered through to Abraham Lincoln himself. Lincoln's address to Congress in December 1861 contains the following:
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/first-annual-message-9
Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights. Nor is it denied that there is, and probably always will be, a relation between labor and capital producing mutual benefits. The error is in assuming that the whole labor of community exists within that relation. A few men own capital, and that few avoid labor themselves, and with their capital hire or buy another few to labor for them.
- Abraham Lincoln, 3rd Dec 1861
That sounds distinctly Marxist.
Lincoln who inherited a war over slavery (I really fail to see that there was any other root cause), not only was the one who issued the Emancipation Proclamation but politically, he is the first Republican President. I wonder exactly on what basis black people in America would want to tear down a statue of Lincoln.
More than likely, Mr Bolt is preying on the fact that the readers of the Herald-Sun/Daily Telegraph/Courier Mail are just as lacking in intellectual curiosity as him. Marx is probably just another swear word in the land of the Herald-Sun/Daily Telegraph/Courier Mail; like "Aboriginal", "Thunberg", or "the left" which is repeatedly defined by Miranda Devine as "anyone I don't like".
Moreover, the organisation which Mr Bolt works for, engages in victim blaming frequently and is not above doctoring photographs and hacking the phones of the dead to push its point of view.
I am also convinced that it is this kind of article and the subsequent discussions of both it and the regurgitation of this as a topic, which is why we saw the police in Sydney defending the statue of Captain Cook against literally nobody; while they flashed white supremacist hand signals at people and while someone dressed as the cut-price bargain bin version of Indiana Jones stood inside the police cordon. The statue was graffitied anyway, during the wee small hours of Sunday morning and unless Captain James Cook was a Marxist, I just don't think that the people who did this, would be the same kinds of people who might pull down a statue of Marx, if it existed; which doesn't; so it can't be pulled down.
June 14, 2020
Horse 2718 - This Is "Not A Bin"
This weekend after I'd successfully ended up on the wrong road and going to the wrong place, we went to Windsor and pottered about for bit.
While walking along a path by the riverbank, I encountered this:
As my brain is a repository of the useless, the nonsensical and the daft, immediately my mind went to that 1929 painting in oil on canvas by René Magritte entitled 'The Treachery of Images' and which is more commonly know as 'This is Not a Pipe' in English.
This is not a pipe.
This is not a painting of a pipe.
In this context, it is the electronic representation of a photograph of a painting of a pipe with the caption "Ceci n'est pas une pipe"; which is French for "This is not a pipe" underneath it.
The painting is I assume a commentary on the concept of a meta-message; parading the thought that the representation of a thing is not actually the thing.
While I don't really want to get into the meta-argument of what this representation of a photograph is, I am prepared to question the message on the real object itself. This is a real bin in the world and it is very clearly a bin; standing in a specific holder for bins.
Why then does this carry the message that it is 'not a bin'?
I do not think that this is a piece making an ontological query about the the nature of being a bin. Granted that the nature of reality could very well be pure subjective fantasy and that space and time and here and now are only in our mind but somehow I do not think that a bin in Windsor would be making such an enquiry.
Nor do I think that this is an art installation because that is very obviously a holder for bins and this is very obviously a bin.
If anything, this could be a question to do with the teleology of the bin. Just like Aristotle would claim that the telos of an acorn is to become an oak tree, that is the purpose of the acorn is to become a thing that makes more acorns (and conversely an oak tree's purpose is to grow and then make more oak trees), the usual teleology of the bin would be to be a bin; that is, a receptacle of people's rubbish. If a bin's purpose isn't to be a receptacle of people's rubbish, then what is it for? The claim made here is that it is 'not a bin'; which implies that the bin has some other purpose, however we are not told what that purpose is.
As much as I would personally to go back in time and point at Ludwig Von Mises for being a cruel prat, I fear that his explanation of praxeology might be useful here. His 1949 work 'Human Action' lays out the case that economics is essentially a praxeological science (however murky and dark that it is) and that people's reasoning and purpose defines the economic decisions that they take. I would argue that humans are irrational and cruel and downright selfish, and that Von Mises must have been deliberately fridge blind to not offer the six years of unpleasantness which happened just a little bit before this, as evidence.
Someone has assigned some purpose to this bin (its telos) due their reasoning (their praxeos) but we the passers by haven't been told what it is. Maybe if I can put some cake into Schrödinger's Box with the cat, then I have it and eat it as well. Or it could very well be that the cake is a lie and this is actually some kind of reverse psychology, trying to get the general public to defy the notice and put their rubbish in there.
I do know that as someone with incomplete information, I am merely confused by this bin which claims that it is 'not a bin'. If it is not a bin, then what is it? What other purpose has been assigned to it, and if that other purpose exists, then why is it in a holder for a bin?
While walking along a path by the riverbank, I encountered this:
As my brain is a repository of the useless, the nonsensical and the daft, immediately my mind went to that 1929 painting in oil on canvas by René Magritte entitled 'The Treachery of Images' and which is more commonly know as 'This is Not a Pipe' in English.
This is not a pipe.
This is not a painting of a pipe.
In this context, it is the electronic representation of a photograph of a painting of a pipe with the caption "Ceci n'est pas une pipe"; which is French for "This is not a pipe" underneath it.
The painting is I assume a commentary on the concept of a meta-message; parading the thought that the representation of a thing is not actually the thing.
While I don't really want to get into the meta-argument of what this representation of a photograph is, I am prepared to question the message on the real object itself. This is a real bin in the world and it is very clearly a bin; standing in a specific holder for bins.
Why then does this carry the message that it is 'not a bin'?
I do not think that this is a piece making an ontological query about the the nature of being a bin. Granted that the nature of reality could very well be pure subjective fantasy and that space and time and here and now are only in our mind but somehow I do not think that a bin in Windsor would be making such an enquiry.
Nor do I think that this is an art installation because that is very obviously a holder for bins and this is very obviously a bin.
If anything, this could be a question to do with the teleology of the bin. Just like Aristotle would claim that the telos of an acorn is to become an oak tree, that is the purpose of the acorn is to become a thing that makes more acorns (and conversely an oak tree's purpose is to grow and then make more oak trees), the usual teleology of the bin would be to be a bin; that is, a receptacle of people's rubbish. If a bin's purpose isn't to be a receptacle of people's rubbish, then what is it for? The claim made here is that it is 'not a bin'; which implies that the bin has some other purpose, however we are not told what that purpose is.
As much as I would personally to go back in time and point at Ludwig Von Mises for being a cruel prat, I fear that his explanation of praxeology might be useful here. His 1949 work 'Human Action' lays out the case that economics is essentially a praxeological science (however murky and dark that it is) and that people's reasoning and purpose defines the economic decisions that they take. I would argue that humans are irrational and cruel and downright selfish, and that Von Mises must have been deliberately fridge blind to not offer the six years of unpleasantness which happened just a little bit before this, as evidence.
Someone has assigned some purpose to this bin (its telos) due their reasoning (their praxeos) but we the passers by haven't been told what it is. Maybe if I can put some cake into Schrödinger's Box with the cat, then I have it and eat it as well. Or it could very well be that the cake is a lie and this is actually some kind of reverse psychology, trying to get the general public to defy the notice and put their rubbish in there.
I do know that as someone with incomplete information, I am merely confused by this bin which claims that it is 'not a bin'. If it is not a bin, then what is it? What other purpose has been assigned to it, and if that other purpose exists, then why is it in a holder for a bin?
June 13, 2020
Horse 2717 - The End Of The Road For V8Supercars Approaches Fast
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic crisis was a thing, Supercars management was considering what kind of steps that they should take to future proof the sport. Those of us on the outside who didn't have to worry about the immediate commercial challenges, could see storms brewing which have only been compounded by the pandemic.
Motorsport in Australia for a very long time has been beholden to the whims of the manufacturers and the sometimes complete apathy therein. Ford for instance, had a very strong presence in 1977 and then just three years later completely abandoned Allan Moffat who had given them a famous 1-2 at Bathurst. They would not return with any proper factory support until 1993. Holden on the other hand, maintained a presence from 1969 until 2018. Every other manufacturer has either come and gone depending on the then whims of the day but still subject to the demands of the two elephants in the room. Of late, those elephants of Ford and Holden have both suffered existence failures in Australia; with the latter ceasing to exist entirely as an entity from 1st July.
Given all of that, as one of the howling monkeys of the commentariat, I think that I have the best solution going forward. If I could somehow get a foot in the office of the CEO of Supercars, then this would be my pitch for going forward.
Australian motor racing has one of the strangest pickles that it has ever had to deal with. The top flight of touring car racing in Australia now has the problem that there are no manufacturers in Australia and consequently nobody left who might provide unbuilt shells to go racing with.
In the very olden days, it used to be that you could take a car directly out of the showroom and race it on Sunday. The problem with that is that racing machines in anger is generally more dangerous and so bespoke cars with roll cages and safety equipment like fire extinguishers started to be built.
With every single manufacturer having moved out of the way, you'd think that this might spell disaster for motor racing; when it is quite the contrary. For possibly the first time since 1968 there is now an opportunity for the sport to define its own design requirements, rather than be subject to the fads and fancies of the manufacturers.
In the lower categories of motorsport, the drivers and teams run cars that they either think will give them some kind of advantage according to the rules or perhaps because they actually like running the kinds of car that they will run. There are also categories where there has never been any resemblance to road cars at all, such as formula racing (like Formula Ford) and circle track racing (Sprint Cars) and nobody seems to have a problem at all with this. Likewise in the very top eschelons of motorsport such as Prototype and GT racing where the aim and end of going as fast as possible supercedes all else, there is also no concession to running anything that looks like a road car.
In categories such as NASCAR Cup series, the concession to running anything that looks like a road car extends only as far as the cosmetic differences on the front and rear of the car. Those cars have stickers and shaped mouldings to at best give a passing resemblance to what is on the road but no further.
Time and time again, various motorsports categories prove in principle that the fans don't actually care a whole heap if the cars on track bear only a passing resemblance or no resemblance at all to what is on the road, as long as the sport is fun to watch.
- A car which doesn't actually exist on the road versus another car which doesn't actually exist on the road and which brand won't exist in 21 days either
To that end, the solution is to embrace that complete lack of resemblance to what is on the road and instead embrace the better principle that if the thing in question looks cool, then that's really all that matters.
Basically, we need to remember that sport generally and motorsport in particular is an elaborate and expensive way of playing games with expensive toys. In short, we are all born with a finger up our nose, then we get taller. The only difference between the people who drive Porsches and the people who drive Corollas is the quality and expensiveness of the toys that they are playing with.
Basically the way that I see it, the Supercars Championship can decide to go in two and a half directions.
1. They can admit that as a thing, they are basically finished and adopt GT3 regulations.
This was the route that the Japanese Auto Federation took when they originally conceived of firstly the Japanese Grand Touring Championship and then Super GT. Super GT in their GT300 class runs a mix of pure GT3 cars, so-called 'Mother Chassis' cars, and JAF cars; without getting too deep into the weeds, are equalised for performance with Balance Of Performance which is similar to GT3. They run GT3 and GT3 equivalent cars, which although haven't actually been approved by the FIA, are run as though they had been.
2. They can adopt NASCAR Gen-7 regulations.
NASCAR as discussed in previous posts, is getting ready to adopt its next generation of cars. However instead of having the teams themselves build the chassis, all of those chassis will be built by Dallara. By having a single common fabricator, they can make the cars more close in terms of performance because the individual teams no longer have the ability to chase 1% improvements.
The beauty of having a single fabricator such as this is that Dallara is already building the cars anyway and as they are already going to be building them, then ordering a few more isn't going to be all that difficult.
3. They can adopt some other current common standard.
With no future Commodore to play with, this means that the class is an open book. The most obvious thing would be to adopt the Penske Mustang as the standard and then let other teams/manufacturers put their own noses and tail light clusters on it. Since the Penske Mustang already bears no common components with the road going car, then this is hardly an issue. I could very easily imagine a Chevy crate motor, BMW V8, Toyota V8 or whatever other engine would fit, all being allowed and rated against each other. As it is, the rumours are that the sport is considering adopting the Coyote V8 as a common engine but there really isn't any need to.
What we do know is that the Commodore already is a legacy vehicle since the last ZB Commodore was built back in January. Holden as a brand is almost a legacy item as after 30 June, General Motors officially stops trading in Australia. That leaves Ford all on its own and since they don't actually fabricate the Mustang, then really the whole category doesn't need Ford's blessing either.
Motorsport in Australia for a very long time has been beholden to the whims of the manufacturers and the sometimes complete apathy therein. Ford for instance, had a very strong presence in 1977 and then just three years later completely abandoned Allan Moffat who had given them a famous 1-2 at Bathurst. They would not return with any proper factory support until 1993. Holden on the other hand, maintained a presence from 1969 until 2018. Every other manufacturer has either come and gone depending on the then whims of the day but still subject to the demands of the two elephants in the room. Of late, those elephants of Ford and Holden have both suffered existence failures in Australia; with the latter ceasing to exist entirely as an entity from 1st July.
Given all of that, as one of the howling monkeys of the commentariat, I think that I have the best solution going forward. If I could somehow get a foot in the office of the CEO of Supercars, then this would be my pitch for going forward.
Australian motor racing has one of the strangest pickles that it has ever had to deal with. The top flight of touring car racing in Australia now has the problem that there are no manufacturers in Australia and consequently nobody left who might provide unbuilt shells to go racing with.
In the very olden days, it used to be that you could take a car directly out of the showroom and race it on Sunday. The problem with that is that racing machines in anger is generally more dangerous and so bespoke cars with roll cages and safety equipment like fire extinguishers started to be built.
With every single manufacturer having moved out of the way, you'd think that this might spell disaster for motor racing; when it is quite the contrary. For possibly the first time since 1968 there is now an opportunity for the sport to define its own design requirements, rather than be subject to the fads and fancies of the manufacturers.
In the lower categories of motorsport, the drivers and teams run cars that they either think will give them some kind of advantage according to the rules or perhaps because they actually like running the kinds of car that they will run. There are also categories where there has never been any resemblance to road cars at all, such as formula racing (like Formula Ford) and circle track racing (Sprint Cars) and nobody seems to have a problem at all with this. Likewise in the very top eschelons of motorsport such as Prototype and GT racing where the aim and end of going as fast as possible supercedes all else, there is also no concession to running anything that looks like a road car.
In categories such as NASCAR Cup series, the concession to running anything that looks like a road car extends only as far as the cosmetic differences on the front and rear of the car. Those cars have stickers and shaped mouldings to at best give a passing resemblance to what is on the road but no further.
Time and time again, various motorsports categories prove in principle that the fans don't actually care a whole heap if the cars on track bear only a passing resemblance or no resemblance at all to what is on the road, as long as the sport is fun to watch.
- A car which doesn't actually exist on the road versus another car which doesn't actually exist on the road and which brand won't exist in 21 days either
Basically, we need to remember that sport generally and motorsport in particular is an elaborate and expensive way of playing games with expensive toys. In short, we are all born with a finger up our nose, then we get taller. The only difference between the people who drive Porsches and the people who drive Corollas is the quality and expensiveness of the toys that they are playing with.
Basically the way that I see it, the Supercars Championship can decide to go in two and a half directions.
1. They can admit that as a thing, they are basically finished and adopt GT3 regulations.
This was the route that the Japanese Auto Federation took when they originally conceived of firstly the Japanese Grand Touring Championship and then Super GT. Super GT in their GT300 class runs a mix of pure GT3 cars, so-called 'Mother Chassis' cars, and JAF cars; without getting too deep into the weeds, are equalised for performance with Balance Of Performance which is similar to GT3. They run GT3 and GT3 equivalent cars, which although haven't actually been approved by the FIA, are run as though they had been.
2. They can adopt NASCAR Gen-7 regulations.
NASCAR as discussed in previous posts, is getting ready to adopt its next generation of cars. However instead of having the teams themselves build the chassis, all of those chassis will be built by Dallara. By having a single common fabricator, they can make the cars more close in terms of performance because the individual teams no longer have the ability to chase 1% improvements.
The beauty of having a single fabricator such as this is that Dallara is already building the cars anyway and as they are already going to be building them, then ordering a few more isn't going to be all that difficult.
3. They can adopt some other current common standard.
With no future Commodore to play with, this means that the class is an open book. The most obvious thing would be to adopt the Penske Mustang as the standard and then let other teams/manufacturers put their own noses and tail light clusters on it. Since the Penske Mustang already bears no common components with the road going car, then this is hardly an issue. I could very easily imagine a Chevy crate motor, BMW V8, Toyota V8 or whatever other engine would fit, all being allowed and rated against each other. As it is, the rumours are that the sport is considering adopting the Coyote V8 as a common engine but there really isn't any need to.
What we do know is that the Commodore already is a legacy vehicle since the last ZB Commodore was built back in January. Holden as a brand is almost a legacy item as after 30 June, General Motors officially stops trading in Australia. That leaves Ford all on its own and since they don't actually fabricate the Mustang, then really the whole category doesn't need Ford's blessing either.
June 12, 2020
Horse 2716 - Il Gatto Rollo Con Gli Stivali (Rollo In Boots)
I am completely latest fashion apathetic. I don't care about the latest styles and trends and to be fair, I don't really want to know either. If I watch an episode of Poirot starring David Suchet, I don't look at that as a period crime drama but rather as a display case for potential fashion choices. If I could live in the 2020s but with a graphic overlay of the 1920s then that would do me fine. The boffins and the scientists have given us virtual reality but can they give us virtual unreality? I think that I should get my science butler to complain to Space X and Tesla Motors plutocrat Elon Noel Leon Musk to sort this out tout suite. Chop chop; fetch my Duesenberg!
Given an unlimited budget, I would have a bunch of black pants, waistcoats, white shirts and ties, and/or the whole kit in tweed, or if I am going out for fun, then I want sporting shirts of various kinds depending on the mood, Levi's 517s, and a denim jacket. I also want a big black scary coat which can either be a Duster or a Crombie Coat but in almost all circumstances, I want a pair of nice boots¹.
At the weekend, I found the task of looking for nice boots to be like trying to solve a Rubik's Cube suspended in a pot of honey. What should be a relatively easy task is made all the more difficult by a very stupid environment.
I despise shopping at the best of times. Shopping centres are a swirling mass of humanity which sways from side to side with the indecision of a herd of brainless sheep. This is now doubly dangerous with the threat of COVID-19 lurking in the background like an unseen madman. However in spite of my annoyances, I completely understand that this is fun for lots of people because it satisfies the same kind of dopamine centres as going on a hunt might. Finding that one thing in a place with a million choices, is like trying to find a needle in a haystack; however I don't like that as a task. I would prefer to find my needle in a haystack with a threshing machine and an industrial electromagnet; or even better, just sell me one needle: it shouldn't be that hard.
I also completely understand the struggle that women have (as a technical problem) because there is no such thing as an average person and when you have inny-outy parts all being inny-outy, then that poses a challenge to find something that fits. However, I am a chap and my requirements are insanely standardised; to the point where I will fit into exactly what I did when I was 19 and when it comes to things like pants, shirts and boots, I also want exactly what I did when I was 19. I want size 39 shirts, 77 pants, size 9 boots and if I want to be fancy, size 58 hat.
Given that my requirements for boots haven't changed in more than a quarter of a century, you'd think that buying a pair of nice boots would be a relatively simple task. Nope; not a bar of it. Buying boots is a decidedly shambolic process that makes me question the sanity of the cosmos.
Where I live in the bogan western suburbs of Sydney, retailers have almost entirely abandoned the idea that anyone out here wants nice things. Shops generally have lots of floor space devoted to women's fashion and in lots of cases, the entire floor space devoted to women's fashion and men's clothing if it is considered at all, is assigned to a corner. Now I would expect given that with such limited floor space, that the retailers would keep on giving us things that we'd like to buy in order to shift product but I am convinced that retailers deliberately stock products that are hideous, in order to make sure that men leave as quickly as possible. The ultimate expression of this is 'Bored Husbands' Café' at one department store because they know that they offer a paucity of stock for men and that they need somewhere to go while their significant other has a lovely time in the store.
Mostly the kinds of shoes that I found in the shops were either trainers, flat shoes, or work boots. If I had wanted a pair of trainers then I would be spoiled for choice but for a simple pair of boots I may as well have been asking for a Swan Kebab² on the moon.
I visited thirteen shops on the long weekend³ in the bogan western suburbs and successfully managed to fold my money in half and put it back in my wallet on every occasion. Why? Because as a consumer who has the power to vote for what I like through the power of the cash register, I get to decide what I will buy. That supposed 'Law' by economist Jean-Baptiste Say (funnily enough called Say's Law) which when reduced to its simplest terms states that 'Supply creates its own demand' is complete and utter hogwash if people don't want to buy the thing in question.
Eventually I ended up coming to my senses and resolving the question of finding a new pair of boots in exactly the same way as I did when I was 19. I went to Raben Footwear in the city; wherein I was served by a chap in his 60s wearing a Ramones t-shirt; which looked like he'd bought it new in 1979 and has been wearing it since.
I don't know what if anything that this says about me but the fact that my preferences for clothing hasn't really changed in more than half a lifetime but I guess that it indicates that perhaps I am not really all that different. Given that in this sample size of one that preferences haven't changed, why then do people who expect to sell me stuff assume that I will buy something vastly different?
Moreover, if I am not that different then what do the modern day equivalents of me do? If consumers can be sorted into tribes and cohorts, then there must be people like me elsewhere in the cosmos⁴ who also can not find nice boots.
¹No, this doesn't make me a goth. I don't think that I would do all that well as a goth, emo, or punk. It all seems like too much effort.
²Swan Kebab is either a kebab made from swan meat or the name of a 1950s French pulp fiction detective.
³actually a genuine number and not hyperbole for comedic effect.
⁴if there is someone else like me in the cosmos, they have my pity, awe, and confusion, in equal amounts.
Given an unlimited budget, I would have a bunch of black pants, waistcoats, white shirts and ties, and/or the whole kit in tweed, or if I am going out for fun, then I want sporting shirts of various kinds depending on the mood, Levi's 517s, and a denim jacket. I also want a big black scary coat which can either be a Duster or a Crombie Coat but in almost all circumstances, I want a pair of nice boots¹.
At the weekend, I found the task of looking for nice boots to be like trying to solve a Rubik's Cube suspended in a pot of honey. What should be a relatively easy task is made all the more difficult by a very stupid environment.
I despise shopping at the best of times. Shopping centres are a swirling mass of humanity which sways from side to side with the indecision of a herd of brainless sheep. This is now doubly dangerous with the threat of COVID-19 lurking in the background like an unseen madman. However in spite of my annoyances, I completely understand that this is fun for lots of people because it satisfies the same kind of dopamine centres as going on a hunt might. Finding that one thing in a place with a million choices, is like trying to find a needle in a haystack; however I don't like that as a task. I would prefer to find my needle in a haystack with a threshing machine and an industrial electromagnet; or even better, just sell me one needle: it shouldn't be that hard.
I also completely understand the struggle that women have (as a technical problem) because there is no such thing as an average person and when you have inny-outy parts all being inny-outy, then that poses a challenge to find something that fits. However, I am a chap and my requirements are insanely standardised; to the point where I will fit into exactly what I did when I was 19 and when it comes to things like pants, shirts and boots, I also want exactly what I did when I was 19. I want size 39 shirts, 77 pants, size 9 boots and if I want to be fancy, size 58 hat.
Given that my requirements for boots haven't changed in more than a quarter of a century, you'd think that buying a pair of nice boots would be a relatively simple task. Nope; not a bar of it. Buying boots is a decidedly shambolic process that makes me question the sanity of the cosmos.
Where I live in the bogan western suburbs of Sydney, retailers have almost entirely abandoned the idea that anyone out here wants nice things. Shops generally have lots of floor space devoted to women's fashion and in lots of cases, the entire floor space devoted to women's fashion and men's clothing if it is considered at all, is assigned to a corner. Now I would expect given that with such limited floor space, that the retailers would keep on giving us things that we'd like to buy in order to shift product but I am convinced that retailers deliberately stock products that are hideous, in order to make sure that men leave as quickly as possible. The ultimate expression of this is 'Bored Husbands' Café' at one department store because they know that they offer a paucity of stock for men and that they need somewhere to go while their significant other has a lovely time in the store.
Mostly the kinds of shoes that I found in the shops were either trainers, flat shoes, or work boots. If I had wanted a pair of trainers then I would be spoiled for choice but for a simple pair of boots I may as well have been asking for a Swan Kebab² on the moon.
I visited thirteen shops on the long weekend³ in the bogan western suburbs and successfully managed to fold my money in half and put it back in my wallet on every occasion. Why? Because as a consumer who has the power to vote for what I like through the power of the cash register, I get to decide what I will buy. That supposed 'Law' by economist Jean-Baptiste Say (funnily enough called Say's Law) which when reduced to its simplest terms states that 'Supply creates its own demand' is complete and utter hogwash if people don't want to buy the thing in question.
Eventually I ended up coming to my senses and resolving the question of finding a new pair of boots in exactly the same way as I did when I was 19. I went to Raben Footwear in the city; wherein I was served by a chap in his 60s wearing a Ramones t-shirt; which looked like he'd bought it new in 1979 and has been wearing it since.
I don't know what if anything that this says about me but the fact that my preferences for clothing hasn't really changed in more than half a lifetime but I guess that it indicates that perhaps I am not really all that different. Given that in this sample size of one that preferences haven't changed, why then do people who expect to sell me stuff assume that I will buy something vastly different?
Moreover, if I am not that different then what do the modern day equivalents of me do? If consumers can be sorted into tribes and cohorts, then there must be people like me elsewhere in the cosmos⁴ who also can not find nice boots.
¹No, this doesn't make me a goth. I don't think that I would do all that well as a goth, emo, or punk. It all seems like too much effort.
²Swan Kebab is either a kebab made from swan meat or the name of a 1950s French pulp fiction detective.
³actually a genuine number and not hyperbole for comedic effect.
⁴if there is someone else like me in the cosmos, they have my pity, awe, and confusion, in equal amounts.
June 08, 2020
Horse 2715 - NASCAR Needs Fins
One of the complaints about the current Gen-6 NASCAR Cup Series cars is that cars following behind each other in a giant pack tend to be more unstable than they otherwise would be if they were just in clean air. Also due to the fact that racing in a pack has been one of the consequences of deliberately limiting horsepower since about 1990, we are seeing a lot more of cars locking bumpers at speeds of more than 150mph and then watching the fallout as tiny wiggle forces are magnified because of the speeds at which all of this is occurring.
There is of course the underlying problem that the NASCAR management actually sort of likes to see very big accidents because they think that that plays well on television; which might very well be true for a highlight reel but in the moment is very boring in the aftermath as marshalls and clean up crews have to clear the wreckage. In my opinion, four seconds of excitement is completely not worth the payoff of wondering if a driver has been hurt or not and then having to sit through the boringness of the cleanup.
Nevertheless, NASCAR is looking to replace the current Generation-6 version of the cars with the Generation-7 version which they want to be safer and provide better racing. Before the current omnicrazy unpleasantness, NASCAR was undergoing testing of various components of the Gen-7 car and throughout this process they have asked the general public what they think.
If there is one thing that I do not particularly like with the current cars, it is the way that small wiggles caused by small bumps between cars, has the potential to cause massive accidents. As a race fan, I want to see racing and care not for the extended periods of boringness caused by 'the big one'. Drivers are paid to drive motor cars and being involved in an accident due to a micro wiggle is not exactly fair for anyone.
If I could contribute anything, it would be to do with the shape of the rear wings and the following implications which follow.
Although air is for all practical purposes invisible, it is still real and has mass. A thing moving through the air encounters resistance because it takes a force to move the air out of the way. You can feel this when you put your hand out of the window and pretend that it is a dolphin, as the air pushes against your hand and causes it to move.
A second thing that lines up behind a first thing, generally finds it easier to move through the air because the first thing has already done a great deal of work to push the air out of the way. This is why you see cyclists, birds, trucks and cars line up behind each other. As the thing behind has an easier job, then this means that it can either save the fuel that it otherwise would have used to push the air out of the way or expend the same amount of fuel to push harder because it doesn't have to push the air out of the way. There is a minor effect caused by air rushing in behind the first thing in the queue but that's nowhere near enough to suck along a car which weighs more than two thousand pounds; it is enough to suck along bits of newspaper behind a train in an underground railway (for a bit).
The other thing of note here, is that the air which has been disturbed in the wake of the first thing in the queue, is of lesser pressure than it otherwise would have been if it had been just standing around doing nothing; all of these things taken together have measurable effects.
The shape of the disturbed air following a car with a wing on the back which is designed to cause downforce is like a giant rooster tail following the car. A moving thing through a fluid causes a wake to form behind it which would normally be shaped like a cone except that in the case of a car, the road surface forms a flat plane which cuts off the whole underside of the cone.
Although a car which is sitting inside that rooster tail of disturbed air is getting an easier job cutting through the air because it is less dense, that same less dense air also has a small yet noticable effect on the aerodynamic parts of the following car. A car which is in marginally less dense air has aerodynamic parts which are creating marginally less downforce and this difference although small is very noticeable when speeds are well above 160mph.
The Car Of Tomorrow (Gen-5) was designed in a wind tunnel and wasn't of itself a bad design. The reason why it provided such terrible motor racing was that the front splitter on the CoT was better at providing front end downforce than Gen-4. Remember, a car which is following another and which is sitting in the wake of the car in front is also inside a rooster tail of less dense air. You can go back and watch races from the period and it is very noticeable that at some point a following car loses just a wee bit of front end downforce and what this means as far as the handling of the cars are concerned is that following cars all have a tendency to push.
The CoT which then gained a reputation for providing bad motor racing, was then marked by implication when there were a series of flips; which if you actually compare the frequency to any other season, is more or less identical. The rear wings on the back of the cars also looked really really doofusy, even though they worked very very well.
Part of the problem that the CoT had was that the front splitter had no way to contain the air which met it. Most formula cars have end plates on their front wings and modem Le Mans Prototypes achieve the same ends by shaping the front of the car to channel air inside the front wheel wells. A NASCAR Cup Series car is a big dumb object with basically the front end of a brick for a nose and so there is no real way to contain the air that meets the front of it.
If you can not contain that less dense air which is hitting the front of the car, then the aerodynamic parts do not work as well as they do in clean air; which explains why there were so many occasions of cars holding back a couple of lengths.
All of this changed by the end of the CoT and although fans mainly saw that the dumb looking wing on the rear of the cars had changed, it was actually the change to the front splitter that has allowed cars to follow each other more closely.
NASCAR removed the rear wing and and went back to a duck-type spoiler; citing safety concerns after 3 acrobatic accidents between May '09 and Mar '10 but the '11 season is where the improvements in racing were actually seen because they decided to make the splitter present more of a flat brick surface to the air at the front of the car. This is where the organisers are on the horns of a dilemma. Always you have questions of relative downforce at the front and underneath the cars which is determined by the shapes of the splitters and diffusers and putting the power down to the road.
The jump from just:
200mph - 5.89212 MJ
to
205mph - 6.19041 MJ
0.3MJ is about the same kind of energy as carrying a pound of TNT in the car; which has to be dissipated; preferably not into the bodies of the meatbags behind the wheel or into the bodies of the meatbags behind the fences (like what happened at Le Mans in 1955).
The truth is that 550bhp is already sufficient to do ridiculous speeds; so I have no problem with this aspect.
In soliciting suggestions for Gen-7, NASCAR has asked for opinions and my opinion is that they need V8Supercars style rear end plates on the cars. The cars have very big rear wings with see through sections for the superspeedways but if the entire rear wing was raised up and out of the view of the drivers, then they'd be looking through a hole behind their rear window.
The end plates on the rear wings would act like giant stabilising fins in the same way as aircraft have vertical tails, like Formula One and Le Mans Prototypes have both played with 'shark fins' and which a NASCAR Cup Series car already has with the so called glass components which are on the outside of c-pillar on the left hand side of the car.
Since the existing cars already have a rear wing which creates a rooster tail and moving where that rear wing is, relative to the rear deck lid of the car, is not the biggest determinant on the effects of the air behind it, then I think that this is a pretty good answer to improving the stability of the cars. The current cars already create massive amounts of downforce by presenting a big dumb rear spoiler to the air but by placing that rear wing higher and into cleaner air, it also creates the ability to stabilize the rear end of the car.
Since the front of the cars has already been improved from the CoT to a setup which is less front end aero dependent, then a change to the rear of the car isn't going to upset it all that much.
I like the idea of Supercars/1970 Aero Warriors/1960 Plymouth Fury style wings/fins, not because of the downforce but because the end plates provide stability in a straight line. NASCAR in particular has the unique problem where tagging people is tolerated. If you look at the incidents which caused Brendan Gaughan to flip at 'Dega last year, or Ryan Newman at Daytona this year, they are both caused by cars becoming unstable in a straight line and then causing a secondary impact.
There is of course the underlying problem that the NASCAR management actually sort of likes to see very big accidents because they think that that plays well on television; which might very well be true for a highlight reel but in the moment is very boring in the aftermath as marshalls and clean up crews have to clear the wreckage. In my opinion, four seconds of excitement is completely not worth the payoff of wondering if a driver has been hurt or not and then having to sit through the boringness of the cleanup.
Nevertheless, NASCAR is looking to replace the current Generation-6 version of the cars with the Generation-7 version which they want to be safer and provide better racing. Before the current omnicrazy unpleasantness, NASCAR was undergoing testing of various components of the Gen-7 car and throughout this process they have asked the general public what they think.
If there is one thing that I do not particularly like with the current cars, it is the way that small wiggles caused by small bumps between cars, has the potential to cause massive accidents. As a race fan, I want to see racing and care not for the extended periods of boringness caused by 'the big one'. Drivers are paid to drive motor cars and being involved in an accident due to a micro wiggle is not exactly fair for anyone.
If I could contribute anything, it would be to do with the shape of the rear wings and the following implications which follow.
Although air is for all practical purposes invisible, it is still real and has mass. A thing moving through the air encounters resistance because it takes a force to move the air out of the way. You can feel this when you put your hand out of the window and pretend that it is a dolphin, as the air pushes against your hand and causes it to move.
A second thing that lines up behind a first thing, generally finds it easier to move through the air because the first thing has already done a great deal of work to push the air out of the way. This is why you see cyclists, birds, trucks and cars line up behind each other. As the thing behind has an easier job, then this means that it can either save the fuel that it otherwise would have used to push the air out of the way or expend the same amount of fuel to push harder because it doesn't have to push the air out of the way. There is a minor effect caused by air rushing in behind the first thing in the queue but that's nowhere near enough to suck along a car which weighs more than two thousand pounds; it is enough to suck along bits of newspaper behind a train in an underground railway (for a bit).
The other thing of note here, is that the air which has been disturbed in the wake of the first thing in the queue, is of lesser pressure than it otherwise would have been if it had been just standing around doing nothing; all of these things taken together have measurable effects.
The shape of the disturbed air following a car with a wing on the back which is designed to cause downforce is like a giant rooster tail following the car. A moving thing through a fluid causes a wake to form behind it which would normally be shaped like a cone except that in the case of a car, the road surface forms a flat plane which cuts off the whole underside of the cone.
Although a car which is sitting inside that rooster tail of disturbed air is getting an easier job cutting through the air because it is less dense, that same less dense air also has a small yet noticable effect on the aerodynamic parts of the following car. A car which is in marginally less dense air has aerodynamic parts which are creating marginally less downforce and this difference although small is very noticeable when speeds are well above 160mph.
The Car Of Tomorrow (Gen-5) was designed in a wind tunnel and wasn't of itself a bad design. The reason why it provided such terrible motor racing was that the front splitter on the CoT was better at providing front end downforce than Gen-4. Remember, a car which is following another and which is sitting in the wake of the car in front is also inside a rooster tail of less dense air. You can go back and watch races from the period and it is very noticeable that at some point a following car loses just a wee bit of front end downforce and what this means as far as the handling of the cars are concerned is that following cars all have a tendency to push.
The CoT which then gained a reputation for providing bad motor racing, was then marked by implication when there were a series of flips; which if you actually compare the frequency to any other season, is more or less identical. The rear wings on the back of the cars also looked really really doofusy, even though they worked very very well.
Part of the problem that the CoT had was that the front splitter had no way to contain the air which met it. Most formula cars have end plates on their front wings and modem Le Mans Prototypes achieve the same ends by shaping the front of the car to channel air inside the front wheel wells. A NASCAR Cup Series car is a big dumb object with basically the front end of a brick for a nose and so there is no real way to contain the air that meets the front of it.
If you can not contain that less dense air which is hitting the front of the car, then the aerodynamic parts do not work as well as they do in clean air; which explains why there were so many occasions of cars holding back a couple of lengths.
All of this changed by the end of the CoT and although fans mainly saw that the dumb looking wing on the rear of the cars had changed, it was actually the change to the front splitter that has allowed cars to follow each other more closely.
NASCAR removed the rear wing and and went back to a duck-type spoiler; citing safety concerns after 3 acrobatic accidents between May '09 and Mar '10 but the '11 season is where the improvements in racing were actually seen because they decided to make the splitter present more of a flat brick surface to the air at the front of the car. This is where the organisers are on the horns of a dilemma. Always you have questions of relative downforce at the front and underneath the cars which is determined by the shapes of the splitters and diffusers and putting the power down to the road.
Part of the problem is that NASCAR wants to hamstring the cars due to the fact that KE=½mv²
The jump from just:
200mph - 5.89212 MJ
to
205mph - 6.19041 MJ
0.3MJ is about the same kind of energy as carrying a pound of TNT in the car; which has to be dissipated; preferably not into the bodies of the meatbags behind the wheel or into the bodies of the meatbags behind the fences (like what happened at Le Mans in 1955).
The truth is that 550bhp is already sufficient to do ridiculous speeds; so I have no problem with this aspect.
In soliciting suggestions for Gen-7, NASCAR has asked for opinions and my opinion is that they need V8Supercars style rear end plates on the cars. The cars have very big rear wings with see through sections for the superspeedways but if the entire rear wing was raised up and out of the view of the drivers, then they'd be looking through a hole behind their rear window.
The end plates on the rear wings would act like giant stabilising fins in the same way as aircraft have vertical tails, like Formula One and Le Mans Prototypes have both played with 'shark fins' and which a NASCAR Cup Series car already has with the so called glass components which are on the outside of c-pillar on the left hand side of the car.
Since the existing cars already have a rear wing which creates a rooster tail and moving where that rear wing is, relative to the rear deck lid of the car, is not the biggest determinant on the effects of the air behind it, then I think that this is a pretty good answer to improving the stability of the cars. The current cars already create massive amounts of downforce by presenting a big dumb rear spoiler to the air but by placing that rear wing higher and into cleaner air, it also creates the ability to stabilize the rear end of the car.
Since the front of the cars has already been improved from the CoT to a setup which is less front end aero dependent, then a change to the rear of the car isn't going to upset it all that much.
I like the idea of Supercars/1970 Aero Warriors/1960 Plymouth Fury style wings/fins, not because of the downforce but because the end plates provide stability in a straight line. NASCAR in particular has the unique problem where tagging people is tolerated. If you look at the incidents which caused Brendan Gaughan to flip at 'Dega last year, or Ryan Newman at Daytona this year, they are both caused by cars becoming unstable in a straight line and then causing a secondary impact.
If you had some end plates on the rear of the cars which ameliorated the wiggles which cause those accidents, I wonder if they mightn't have happened at all.
Also, fins look cool.
June 03, 2020
Horse 2714 - The Responsibility Of White People
Before I begin this, I need to state something right from the get go.
I am a white person.
I am not necessarily proud of this fact because of all of the idiots in the past and the idiots in the present who continue to conspire to make me feel angry at their actions. However, I am also not ashamed of this fact either because it is not something that I can change and not something which anyone should be forced to change. Therein lies a problem. People who look like me, both in the past and in the present, have tried to force and continue to try to force people who don't look like me, to change who they are by means of force and violence.
Although you hear people say that they are not responsible for the past, they will continue to perpetuate the attitudes of the past by more subtle means. As someone who lives in the ashes of empire, I am aware that that empire has had a very dark past; which people who are still alive feel the effects of. Pretending that those effects do not exist is cruel and actually adds to those ongoing effects.
For someone to proclaim that they don't see colour either means that they are functionally blind to the point of disability, or a liar.
Before someone has opened their mouth, the first thing that you see is how they look. As unique individuals who have been born into a particular time in history, every single one of us is the physical product of a unique genetic story. Whether that story is one that comes out of Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe or either of the Americas, we can no more help where we have come from than we can stop the rotation of the earth. However, to deny that someone is not the recipient of a story is also to be a liar.
As visual beings we overlay cultural, political, economic, and even nationalistic stories over the top of the physical genetic inheritance that we have been given. Again, to say that we don't see colour is to deny all of that; which again makes us liars.
This is why I hate the phrase which is often posted in response to the plea that 'Black Lives Matter' that 'All Lives Matter'. If you have a street and number 6 is on fire, then to go around saying that 'all houses matter' so that you can go back to your cosy existence at number 9 is cruel because it refuses to address the problem that number 6 is on fire. It would be even more cruel if your parents set fire to number 6 or if your relatives who live at number 7 set fire to number 6. The use of the phrase 'All Lives Matter' is a direct statement that the person who has used it refuses to acknowledge the past, refuses to address the present and would be quite frankly happy to let that house burn to the ground; with the possibility that they or their family were the ones responsible for setting fire to it.
While it is true that all lives matter, that isn't something that needs to be said because it should be obvious. Someone who has made the statement that 'Black Lives Matter' is making a category statement, which has been qualified; specifically because there is a distinct problem which requires immediate action which they are asking help to solve. Specifically, they are asking you to change your attitude and change the attitude of other people, by refusing to tolerate racism; well before it produces a fruit of bloodshed and death.
As a white person, I don't need to tell you that 'white lives matter' because the cultural, political, economic, and even nationalistic stories which have been overlaid have made that abundantly clear and have been backed up through the use of force and violence. It would be ridiculous and even cruel at this point to go around asserting that 'white lives matter' and those people who do specifically do so because they want to exact notions of cruelty and violence for their own ends.
While I’m fairly sure that my life matters, I don't need to prove that through the use of force and violence; nor do I need to plead for you to stop using force and violence against me because you aren't. Yet precisely because I am a white male, I automatically get conferred with some benefits, simply because of the physical genetic inheritance that I have been given. That is inherently stupid.
I for instance have the option to walk round near my home without getting shot or choked to death by the police. I am not likely to be spat at by people who look like me for the simple reason that the people who would do that, look like me. All of this seems to me to be some kind of animal impulse which has gone hideously wrong and indicates that someone is defective.
Furthermore, I hate to see the weasel words coming out to suggest that the boil-over of anger in some way justifies the extreme racism on show. The protests which have erupted in America this week are precisely because people have suffered and been shot and have been choked to death by the police. That's not an imaginary complaint but something which is very real and which is the lived experience of people. To deny all of that, yet again makes us liars.
Also, to deny that this is a uniquely American problem, as though it is somehow something far across the seas and doesn't apply to us also makes us liars.
It's not like Australia hasn't spent the last 232 years since Captain Arthur Philip under orders from the Royal Navy staged a military invasion and coup by plonking a flag in Sydney Cove and shooting and bayonetting the first Australians, denying and diminishing anything that didn't look like white people's conception of what civilisation looked like; before replacing what may have been here with a puerile and facile linear narrative of Anglo-Celtic superiority which conflated dominance backed by force with so-called evolutionary fitness and a right to cultural ascendency, which assigns the previous traditional owners of the land with nothing more than museum piece status.
We've been as much of a nation of complete and utter bastards as the United States if not better because we actually did achieve complete and exact genocide of the Tasmanian Aborigines. We haven't told ourselves some pathetic myth that we hold certain truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and have been endowed by their creator with inalienable rights of life, liberty and happiness, before proving repeatedly that we genuinely don't believe that and that we're prepared at the drop of a hat to kill people. No, we've spent most of the last 232 years saying that Aboriginal lives don't matter in some cases and even backed that up by legislation because we'd already exacted force and violence. The Australian story is not one of active denial but one of passively forgetting. As a nation, we don't go around starting wars but we are more than happy to kick heads in someone else's war where we don't belong, because we have carefully cultivated a national character back home where we are cruel to our own first peoples, to anyone who has recently arrived, and anyone who has come across the seas fleeing force and violence and looking for sanctuary.
Only just yesterday morning (2nd June 2020) in Surry Hills an Aboriginal boy of about fourteen was swept kicked so that his legs fell out from underneath him and his face struck the pavement, I have just as much reason to be angry at the police in my own state of New South Wales as the those United States. I note that our Premier Gladys Berejiklian has said exactly nothing on the subject. It says a lot about who we are as a nation because it turns out that we have grown up to be just like big brother America: we are just as cruel and racist.
The police officer in question is being investigated; which sounds to me to be a euphemism for excuse finding. The only reason why this has probably warranted investigation is that the video leaked to the public. We have a history of Aboriginal deaths in custody, predicated on the fact that they are over represented in both arrests and prison, which itself is predicated on a history of dispossession which has been backed up by force and violence.
What does all of this say to me, as a white person who has won the lottery of genetic inheritance and who has been entrusted with power? It is my job to stamp out racism as though I was putting out spot fires. It is not enough to be non-racist because the action of doing nothing doesn't address the issue. Those of us who actually think that Black Lives Matter and are hearing a plea to help solve a problem which eventually results in the use of force and violence, have to be anti-racist.
Society generally and people individually follow the laws of motion and inertia. Objects and people are lazy; they like to keep on doing and will keep on doing what they are already doing unless acted upon by something from the outside. You might not be able to change someone from the inside but you can push them off of the stage. To pretend that you don't see colour or the problems which have been perpetrated as a result of people who not only do but act upon that, means that you are morally blind to the point of inactivity, or a liar.
I am a white person.
I am not necessarily proud of this fact because of all of the idiots in the past and the idiots in the present who continue to conspire to make me feel angry at their actions. However, I am also not ashamed of this fact either because it is not something that I can change and not something which anyone should be forced to change. Therein lies a problem. People who look like me, both in the past and in the present, have tried to force and continue to try to force people who don't look like me, to change who they are by means of force and violence.
Although you hear people say that they are not responsible for the past, they will continue to perpetuate the attitudes of the past by more subtle means. As someone who lives in the ashes of empire, I am aware that that empire has had a very dark past; which people who are still alive feel the effects of. Pretending that those effects do not exist is cruel and actually adds to those ongoing effects.
For someone to proclaim that they don't see colour either means that they are functionally blind to the point of disability, or a liar.
Before someone has opened their mouth, the first thing that you see is how they look. As unique individuals who have been born into a particular time in history, every single one of us is the physical product of a unique genetic story. Whether that story is one that comes out of Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe or either of the Americas, we can no more help where we have come from than we can stop the rotation of the earth. However, to deny that someone is not the recipient of a story is also to be a liar.
As visual beings we overlay cultural, political, economic, and even nationalistic stories over the top of the physical genetic inheritance that we have been given. Again, to say that we don't see colour is to deny all of that; which again makes us liars.
This is why I hate the phrase which is often posted in response to the plea that 'Black Lives Matter' that 'All Lives Matter'. If you have a street and number 6 is on fire, then to go around saying that 'all houses matter' so that you can go back to your cosy existence at number 9 is cruel because it refuses to address the problem that number 6 is on fire. It would be even more cruel if your parents set fire to number 6 or if your relatives who live at number 7 set fire to number 6. The use of the phrase 'All Lives Matter' is a direct statement that the person who has used it refuses to acknowledge the past, refuses to address the present and would be quite frankly happy to let that house burn to the ground; with the possibility that they or their family were the ones responsible for setting fire to it.
While it is true that all lives matter, that isn't something that needs to be said because it should be obvious. Someone who has made the statement that 'Black Lives Matter' is making a category statement, which has been qualified; specifically because there is a distinct problem which requires immediate action which they are asking help to solve. Specifically, they are asking you to change your attitude and change the attitude of other people, by refusing to tolerate racism; well before it produces a fruit of bloodshed and death.
As a white person, I don't need to tell you that 'white lives matter' because the cultural, political, economic, and even nationalistic stories which have been overlaid have made that abundantly clear and have been backed up through the use of force and violence. It would be ridiculous and even cruel at this point to go around asserting that 'white lives matter' and those people who do specifically do so because they want to exact notions of cruelty and violence for their own ends.
While I’m fairly sure that my life matters, I don't need to prove that through the use of force and violence; nor do I need to plead for you to stop using force and violence against me because you aren't. Yet precisely because I am a white male, I automatically get conferred with some benefits, simply because of the physical genetic inheritance that I have been given. That is inherently stupid.
I for instance have the option to walk round near my home without getting shot or choked to death by the police. I am not likely to be spat at by people who look like me for the simple reason that the people who would do that, look like me. All of this seems to me to be some kind of animal impulse which has gone hideously wrong and indicates that someone is defective.
Furthermore, I hate to see the weasel words coming out to suggest that the boil-over of anger in some way justifies the extreme racism on show. The protests which have erupted in America this week are precisely because people have suffered and been shot and have been choked to death by the police. That's not an imaginary complaint but something which is very real and which is the lived experience of people. To deny all of that, yet again makes us liars.
Also, to deny that this is a uniquely American problem, as though it is somehow something far across the seas and doesn't apply to us also makes us liars.
It's not like Australia hasn't spent the last 232 years since Captain Arthur Philip under orders from the Royal Navy staged a military invasion and coup by plonking a flag in Sydney Cove and shooting and bayonetting the first Australians, denying and diminishing anything that didn't look like white people's conception of what civilisation looked like; before replacing what may have been here with a puerile and facile linear narrative of Anglo-Celtic superiority which conflated dominance backed by force with so-called evolutionary fitness and a right to cultural ascendency, which assigns the previous traditional owners of the land with nothing more than museum piece status.
We've been as much of a nation of complete and utter bastards as the United States if not better because we actually did achieve complete and exact genocide of the Tasmanian Aborigines. We haven't told ourselves some pathetic myth that we hold certain truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and have been endowed by their creator with inalienable rights of life, liberty and happiness, before proving repeatedly that we genuinely don't believe that and that we're prepared at the drop of a hat to kill people. No, we've spent most of the last 232 years saying that Aboriginal lives don't matter in some cases and even backed that up by legislation because we'd already exacted force and violence. The Australian story is not one of active denial but one of passively forgetting. As a nation, we don't go around starting wars but we are more than happy to kick heads in someone else's war where we don't belong, because we have carefully cultivated a national character back home where we are cruel to our own first peoples, to anyone who has recently arrived, and anyone who has come across the seas fleeing force and violence and looking for sanctuary.
Only just yesterday morning (2nd June 2020) in Surry Hills an Aboriginal boy of about fourteen was swept kicked so that his legs fell out from underneath him and his face struck the pavement, I have just as much reason to be angry at the police in my own state of New South Wales as the those United States. I note that our Premier Gladys Berejiklian has said exactly nothing on the subject. It says a lot about who we are as a nation because it turns out that we have grown up to be just like big brother America: we are just as cruel and racist.
The police officer in question is being investigated; which sounds to me to be a euphemism for excuse finding. The only reason why this has probably warranted investigation is that the video leaked to the public. We have a history of Aboriginal deaths in custody, predicated on the fact that they are over represented in both arrests and prison, which itself is predicated on a history of dispossession which has been backed up by force and violence.
What does all of this say to me, as a white person who has won the lottery of genetic inheritance and who has been entrusted with power? It is my job to stamp out racism as though I was putting out spot fires. It is not enough to be non-racist because the action of doing nothing doesn't address the issue. Those of us who actually think that Black Lives Matter and are hearing a plea to help solve a problem which eventually results in the use of force and violence, have to be anti-racist.
Society generally and people individually follow the laws of motion and inertia. Objects and people are lazy; they like to keep on doing and will keep on doing what they are already doing unless acted upon by something from the outside. You might not be able to change someone from the inside but you can push them off of the stage. To pretend that you don't see colour or the problems which have been perpetrated as a result of people who not only do but act upon that, means that you are morally blind to the point of inactivity, or a liar.
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