na na na
I keep telling myself I should add to this here online affair but then I realise that I have nothing to say. Or at least, nothing that I want aired publicly. I mean you could stare into my head and see all sorts of nasty things, if you had the power to do so but you don't, so we'll just leave it like that for now. But I will say it pleases me no end how the Bush government is unravelling. It's great that Bush is already being treated as a lame duck president, even though he still has three more years to go. I hope he sweats and suffers. I'm looking forward to interviews over the next three years, as reporters feel steadily more emboldened to ask the hard questions that they've been avoiding these past few years. One shouldn't gloat, but it's hard not to.
Dateline interviewed a bunch of survivors of Abu Ghraib last night and I'm glad that they did. It's about time people were made aware of the human cost of deeply misguided policy. Not that Australian politicians give a shit. I wish that Howard and Ruddock and the rest would watch Dateline just to get some idea what's actually going on in the world, and just who and what they are endorsing. But I'm sure that they don't. I mean, why is Australia the only country that votes for that fucking wall in Israel, apart from Israel and the USA and a couple of pissy little Pacific island states? Shameful.
Free speech, long may it live on the net and in the street and the pubs and the cafes and in private homes and on our phones. Our Government is stupid enough to think that they will be able to shut down debate with their ridiculous, hypocritical laws. But they won't. For those of you who don't know out there in the world, the Australian Government is planning to introduce new sedition laws. I'd never heard of the word "sedition" until it was in the news. Sedition, apparently, means speaking against your country. It's the verbal equivalent of treason. So anyway, they're looking to expand the definition of it to include language that urges attacks against not just Australian troops but any allied troops stationed alongside Australians, for example. The other point is that although sedition has been on the books since federation, the only case that was prosecuted was in 1948 against some alleged Communist spies. Now they will be out after people. I just wonder if TISM would be able to perform "kill Americans" in the current political climate. Anyway, if the Government is in any doubt about the effectiveness of anti-democratic laws like the ones proposed, they should look to Communist Central Europe. People didn't shout opposition to the Government in public, they whispered it in the corridors and the regime eventually fell.
Australia is just a client state of the USA in a world that's full of them. But we're up there with the best of them. Israel, Saudi, Britain, Japan....Australia falls right in behind them.
You are allowed to speak freely, as long as you freely say what we tell you to say. That seems to be the message that the Government is conveying to us now, and it's a pretty psychotic message if you ask me. It's like John Howard proclaiming the virtues of Australian stoicism and calm in one breath, and in the next saying that terrorism is "the nuclear threat of our age". Sorry John, I'm far less scared of a few nailbombs going off downtown than I ever was of a full-scale nuclear war. I remember the sheer terror during the seventies and eighties, when we felt like the world was on edge and could end any second. It was actually the ultimate fear. Of course nothing's changed. The nuclear weapons are still there, just not talked about as much and there are other threats besides. Oceans full of chemicals and plastics, trees that have sucked in so much pollution that they start producing CO2 instead of oxygen. The rise of China and India which could mean that all the world's resources will be used up completely and the planet will finally choke on its own vomit.
I should end on a positive note I tell myself, but how? By thinking positive positive positive, chant the mantra. Think positive positive positive
Dateline interviewed a bunch of survivors of Abu Ghraib last night and I'm glad that they did. It's about time people were made aware of the human cost of deeply misguided policy. Not that Australian politicians give a shit. I wish that Howard and Ruddock and the rest would watch Dateline just to get some idea what's actually going on in the world, and just who and what they are endorsing. But I'm sure that they don't. I mean, why is Australia the only country that votes for that fucking wall in Israel, apart from Israel and the USA and a couple of pissy little Pacific island states? Shameful.
Free speech, long may it live on the net and in the street and the pubs and the cafes and in private homes and on our phones. Our Government is stupid enough to think that they will be able to shut down debate with their ridiculous, hypocritical laws. But they won't. For those of you who don't know out there in the world, the Australian Government is planning to introduce new sedition laws. I'd never heard of the word "sedition" until it was in the news. Sedition, apparently, means speaking against your country. It's the verbal equivalent of treason. So anyway, they're looking to expand the definition of it to include language that urges attacks against not just Australian troops but any allied troops stationed alongside Australians, for example. The other point is that although sedition has been on the books since federation, the only case that was prosecuted was in 1948 against some alleged Communist spies. Now they will be out after people. I just wonder if TISM would be able to perform "kill Americans" in the current political climate. Anyway, if the Government is in any doubt about the effectiveness of anti-democratic laws like the ones proposed, they should look to Communist Central Europe. People didn't shout opposition to the Government in public, they whispered it in the corridors and the regime eventually fell.
Australia is just a client state of the USA in a world that's full of them. But we're up there with the best of them. Israel, Saudi, Britain, Japan....Australia falls right in behind them.
You are allowed to speak freely, as long as you freely say what we tell you to say. That seems to be the message that the Government is conveying to us now, and it's a pretty psychotic message if you ask me. It's like John Howard proclaiming the virtues of Australian stoicism and calm in one breath, and in the next saying that terrorism is "the nuclear threat of our age". Sorry John, I'm far less scared of a few nailbombs going off downtown than I ever was of a full-scale nuclear war. I remember the sheer terror during the seventies and eighties, when we felt like the world was on edge and could end any second. It was actually the ultimate fear. Of course nothing's changed. The nuclear weapons are still there, just not talked about as much and there are other threats besides. Oceans full of chemicals and plastics, trees that have sucked in so much pollution that they start producing CO2 instead of oxygen. The rise of China and India which could mean that all the world's resources will be used up completely and the planet will finally choke on its own vomit.
I should end on a positive note I tell myself, but how? By thinking positive positive positive, chant the mantra. Think positive positive positive
posted by Craig Armstrong at 9:53 PM
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