Filling the Skip (1)

Saturday, 22 March 2002

Here are a few, more or less offensive, ideas to get this weekend's intellectual housecleaning started. First some trite "memes" that I'm heartily sick of. Starting with the word "meme" - what's wrong with the word "idea"?

The World changed [irrevocably] on September 11. It didn't. What changed was western perceptions of the world: for most of the world's population, life on the edge of starvation, dying slowly of AIDS and all the rest of what passes for normal life went on pretty much as usual. Crediting Osama Bin Laden and the Bali bombers with changing the world is giving too much credit to the idea that the most effective way to achieve political change is with high explosive. There are already too many people who believe this - why encourage others to join them?

History repeats itself. It doesn't. We repeat history, mostly by ignoring the events in our national and personal histories that don't fit with our preferred vision of ourselves as basically decent people. We are (for the most part at least) basically decent people, but let's not kid ourselves that we're perfect - or that our enemies (whoever they happen to be at the moment) are so much worse than us that our own faults don't really matter.

Voice(s) of reason. I know that this is convenient shorthand for "People who are intelligent enough to agree with me" but, all the same, I'd rather hear it spelled out. That way we all know where we stand.

Simon Crean should shut the hell up about the increased danger of terrorist attacks on Australians flowing from our involvement in the war in Iraq. Unless he's planning to roll over and play dead on the Government's ASIO Bill, he's pretty much painted himself into a corner from which he (at least) won't be able to mount a credible case against the Bill when it's finally debated in Parliament.

It's probably too much to hope that next time someone wants to make a moral case for war on a brutal and barbaric regime by giving us examples of the imaginitive new ways the regime has found to torture its enemies, that they will put in the hard yards and actually tell us what forms of torture they are prepared to consider humane and civilised. Would Saddam Hussein's regime have been acceptable if his thugs had restricted themselves to forcing parents to watch while their kids were thumped around with the Baghdad Yellow Pages? Thought not.

More garbage posts to come.