And the Wages of Sin is ... (Daniel 3:17)

Like a lot of laymen, I have a very simple view of the practice of medicine. The basic idea is, if you see a disease you cure it. Unless there's no known cure; then it's up to medical research to find either a cure or someway to prevent the disease. After reading this post at Larvatus Prodeo, I've realised that this view of medical practice and medical research is much too simplistic.

Some diseases, it seems, should not be treated, nor should they be prevented. Cervical cancer is one such disease:

DEATHS from cervical cancer could jump fourfold to a million a year by 2050, mainly in developing countries. This could be prevented by soon-to-be-approved vaccines against the virus that causes most cases of cervical cancer - but there are signs that opposition to the vaccines might lead to many preventable deaths.

The trouble is that the human papilloma virus (HPV) is sexually transmitted. So to prevent infection, girls will have to be vaccinated before they become sexually active, which could be a problem in many countries.

In the US, for instance, religious groups are gearing up to oppose vaccination, despite a survey showing 80 per cent of parents favour vaccinating their daughters. "Abstinence is the best way to prevent HPV," says Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council, a leading Christian lobby group that has made much of the fact that, because it can spread by skin contact, condoms are not as effective against HPV as they are against other viruses such as HIV.

"Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful, because they may see it as a licence to engage in premarital sex," Maher claims, though it is arguable how many young women have even heard of the virus.
[New Scientist, 18 April, 2005]

Now, nearly a year later, Queensland Senator Barnaby Joyce (whose most recent major accomplishments was driving Senator Julian McGauran out of the National Party into the Liberal Party) has taken up this American moonbat idea:

... Senator Joyce said the decision whether to approve the [HPV] vaccine should not be left to the TGA because "they will talk about the therapeutic aspects - they are not there to talk about the psychological implications or the social implications".

"There might be an overwhelming (public) backlash from people saying, 'don't you dare put something out there that gives my 12-year-old daughter a licence to be promiscuous'," he said.

Senator Joyce - who has four daughters - said he would be "personally very circumspect" about giving such a vaccine to girls who were too young to cope with the potential consequences of sexual activity.
[The Australian, January 27, 2006]

Senator Joyce's statement just oozes sanctimonious disingenuity; what he's really talking about under the euphemism "psychological implications and social implications" is a personal religious objection to the idea of providing vaccinations to protect young girls from a sexually transmitted disease. Of course he hasn't the gumption to come out and say so directly, so he invokes a phantom legion of outraged parents instead. A vast unseen army of religious nutters who would be outraged if the Therapeutic Goods Administration approved a medical treatment which reduced the risks of committing the sin of Lust.

I reckon that if we're going to start banning medical treatments because they might undermine the dominant Judaeo-Christian ethics of Australian society, there's no good reason to confine ourselves to treatments that might encourage the sin of Lust. There are six other equally deadly sins out there - with some help from Zeppo Bakunin and one of his brother's old medical textbooks I've identified quite a few diseases that ought not to be treated because it might lead to very naughty behaviour.

Sloth: cholera, dysentry and typhoid are the biggies here. Back in the nineteenth century, some physician whose name I forget, became a medical legend when he stopped a local epidemic of cholera in one of the poorer districts of London by breaking the heads off all the local water pumps. The wells were all contaminated with sewage. If people are living in poor areas where they only have access to sewage contaminated water, they only have their own idleness to blame. If they got off their arses and did something to improve their situation they'd have the money to move to an area with clean drinking water. So away with all those development programs aimed at bringing clean drinking water to third world villages and away with the water supply and sewage disposal authorities in the developed countries. Public health problem be damned - these diseases are all work ethic problems and the solution lies with the individual.

Gluttony: All those diseases caused by diet or addiction - atheroschlerosis from cholesterol consumption, cirrhosis of the liver, dental caries (see also Vanity) most forms of hepatitis and diabetes - including insulin dependent diabetes. Let the buggers learn to live without sugar - it'll build up their fortitude.

Vanity: cosmetic surgery is obviously out (see also Envy). As are acne treatments, treatments for warts, moles or winestain birthmarks, hair replacement for chemotherapy induced hair loss and all forms of cranio-facial and recosntructive surgery. If people are born hideously deformed, tough - surgical reconstruction might just encourage them to become vain in later life. Oh and all that root canalling and crowning and dental reconstruction that goes on to deal with the results of dental caries. And orthodonty (by the time I get through all the major sins, I suspect we'll have built a good case for banning dentistry altogether).

Avarice: obviously most of the depression that is epidemic in Australia is the consequence of living in a materialistic, consumer society where everyone more or less believes that they will be happy once they have the latest iPod, the latest Nokia mobile phone, etc, etc. It's all down to avarice. So are the rest of the work related disorders.

Anger: Congestive heart disease, hypertension, angina pectoris.

Envy: Penis extensions, breast implants and reductions are all medical treatments that obviously cater to patients' envy of people who are better endowed than they. Less obviously, infertility treatments have to go. Remember:

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's.
[Exodus 20:17]

And that "any thing that is thy neighbours" includes the motility of his sperm and the fecundity of his wife, sport.

By Popular Acclamation

As I expected, Tug Boat Potemkin came nowhere near being voted Australia's best humorous blog. The Daily Flute came close but the laurel actually went to Samuel Gordon-Stewart on the back of TSSH preferences. So it such is. Nonetheless congratulations to Samuel. As for his sponsors, least said, soonest mended.

Looking to next year's awards, I've decided that the 'best humorous blog" is probably permanently out of reach. Right now I'm looking into the possibility of starting up a new community organisation - the Australian Foundation for Survivors of Dentistry, with a group blog on how to make the difficult personal journey from seeing oneself as a dentistry victim to the liberating realisation that one is a dentistry survivor. That might have reasonable chance of winning in the best new blog, best group blog, best overall blog and best community service blog categories.

Oh and that other bit of broken tooth came out this morning without any need to resort to the needle-nosed pliers. Which leaves me looking for a new excuse for feeling totally pissed off with life. So it such is.

Some Reader ...

I wasn't planning to write anything on that article by John Birmingham - the one where he takes the left to task for being completely humourless unlike Tim Blair, Australia's answer to P J O'Rourke. I haven't read enough of O'Rourke to comment on that comparison but, in my view, Tim's work is a match for the stand-up comedy of US comedian Andrew Dice Clay. I never found him particularly funny either but that was obviously something to do with my own personal tastes because on the one video tape I saw of "Dice" in performance his audience were pissing themselves - possibly quite literally - over such pearls as "What's with these bisexuals. Let's get this straight - you either suck dick or you don't!" That one had them all cheering and the little collegiate fists pumping in the air. Homophobic? Maybe, but the guy had found his audience and he knew how to work them. For all we know, off-stage, Clay might have been a flaming nancy-boy, slipping away to the seedier parts of town after each performance for a spot of rough sex, preferably with a stoker or greaser. That seems unlikely though; if it were true we would have read about it in the tabloids.

As I said, I wasn't planning to write anything on John Birmingham and why he's so utterly wrong about how humourless all us lefties are but a lot got written before I got around to it and my thinking on the topic didn't come to much. Then I got this e-mail which included this comment on the piece:

Was thinking - yeah but wonder what Gummo would say..
(no names, no pack drill because I haven't actually asked for permission to reproduce the contents of the e-mail).

Now I can recognise a hint as well as any other bloke - that is, well enough to studiously ignore it.And I would have gone on studiously ignoring this one if it weren't nearly six o'clock in the morning, all the sound and fury of thunder and lightning on the southern horizon signifies nothing - especially not the prospect of rain and a real cool change and I hadn't just found yet another fragment of broken tooth in the gum crater. That's the third so far. I got rid of two tonight but this one needs to poke its way out a little further before I stand any chance of getting to it with the needle nose pliers. Assuming that I still own a pair of needle nose pliers - otherwise I might have to make do some cheap eyebrow tweezers from the chemist. All in all it's a good night to write about John Birmingham, the topic of Phil Ruddock having been all used up a week or so ago.

Birmingham's article (which also gets a good bollocking at Helen's place) finishes with this sad prognosis of the future of a levity-challenged left:

The left, on the other hand, has indulged for so long now in the guilty pleasures of relativism, protected by a value system that says discussion of certain topics is off limits, that any sense of confidence they might have had at one time has now entirely disappeared. And with it their sense of humour.

It's like the old joke. How many angry feminists does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: that's not funny!

I'm old enough to remember when that old joke was a new joke and there was no pussy-footing around about "angry feminists". It was:

How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?

That's not funny!

Of similar vintage are:

What do you call that useless piece of flesh on the end of a penis?

A man.

and this cracker:

How many men does it take to wallpaper a bedroom?

One, but you have to slice him very thinly.

Of course, only a man-hating feminist could find that last one funny - to anyone else it's another offensive example of man-hating feminist double standards. It did occur to me that, as a demonstration that lefty humour is still possible, it could be updated a little:

How many cabinet ministers does it take to whitewash a dunny?

It doesn't matter how fine you grind 'em up, they'll never come out the right colour.

But sadly, that's a bit of a failure in the funny stakes and quite possibly seditious too. So I'd better make it quite clear that I'm in no way advocating that cabinet ministers should be ground up and used to paint dunnies. Well, not today anyway. In any event, it's unlikely that cabinet ministers would prove a superior dunny paint to Wattyl Solarguard.

Since Birmingham brought the light bulb joke into play, I thought I might get some mileage out of How many neo-cons does it take to change a light bulb? But then I realised that the idea of neo-cons changing a light bulb is absurd. Let's face it, if George W Bush got up in his State of the Union address and told everyone that the way forward in the centuries old struggle between Christendom and the infidels (more commonly known as the War on Terror) was a restoration of hereditary monarchy and feudal vassalage, the buggers would be falling overthemselves to demand the return of ducking stools, scolds' bridles and the Black Death, not necessarily in that order. It took a while to get over that hurdle and I'm not sure the results were worth it:

How many neo-cons does it take to change a light bulb?

The end of the cold war and America's rise to pre-eminence as the world's only superpower (or hegemon) has made burnt out light bulbs a thing of the past.

We'll get the Marines onto it, as soon as they've finished with those drains we asked them to unblock.

Let me tell you, we have a smart missile in our armoury that can home in on that burnt out little sucker and take it out, without damaging any of the plaster ducks flying up your living room wall.

Update: Birmingham's article turns up again in the A2 section of today's Age. The front page of the section says of it "John Birmingham Lampoons the Left". Skimming it over a second time, I didn't feel lampooned so much as bored shitless. And it strikes me that someone who blows his punchline by wimping out on a feminist joke is in no position to complain about political correctness strangling humour. So there.

The Enchanted Toasting Fork - Episode 7

The story so far: Episode 1, Episode 2, Episode 3, Episode 4, Episode 5, Episode 6

There are moments in men's lives - and women's too, no doubt - when all that has gone before is called into question and the habits and opinions of a lifetime crumble under the devastating impact of some new and transcendent insight. It may happen at night on a dusty road between the city one has purged of a troublesome new sect and the next city on your clean up list; it may happen in the depths of a south-east asian jungle, when one is shot with a metaphorical diamond that blows away all your pretensions to civilised standards; it may happen the morning you drain half a litre of sulphuric acid from your baldder and most of it misses the bowl; and it may happen when you are standing in the kitchen of a couple of friends, clutching a cheap "Paw of Renown" from Y'ha-nthlei in one hand, while the other rifles through kitchen drawers searching for that toasting fork you enchanted in a protracted fit of pique and gave away as a wedding present. These moments are called epiphanies. They are rarely pleasant.

Petro's epiphany, if such it was, was a slow grinding one. First, there was the realisation that the monkey-corpse light of the Y'ha-nthleian "Paw of Renown" was hopelessly inadequate compared to the full on corpse-light of a well-crafted Hand of Glory. The light from the birthday cake candles tied between the dead monkey's fingers, and the magical concealment it was supposed to provide, weren't going to last much longer. He still had the rest of Claudio and Cossima's house to search. After what he had seen so far, he wasn't enjoying that prospect. If only he'd taken up the six for the price of five offer when he had bought the paw. At least the house was empty so he might be able to risk turning on a few lights. After the blending of their families, it seemed unlikely that Claudio and Cossima had anything in the way of a spare room where they could stack away unwanted gifts - where then would the toasting fork be, if not in the kitchen? Under the house? In a stack of boxes on a couple of planks laid over the rafters in the roof space? One of those self-storage warehouses?

One after another, the errors and follies that had brought him to this last, most desperate folly of all, ground away at his spirits, wearing him down to the realisation my life is totally, completely and just about irredeemably fucked. Maybe I should check the bathroom cabinet for some St John's Wort. With so many kids in the house they're bound to keep in a good supply. Maybe I should have taken that phone call from Ruby instead of letting it slip through to the answering machine. Maybe I should get the hell out of here. Call Ruby when I get home. Find out if she's up for a visitor. Wonder what she's up to tonight. What do civil celebrants do on week nights?

***

There was no avoiding it - the most recent letter from the seventeenth junior clerk in the office of the King's Chancellor and Chief Busybody was quite clear. For bureaucratese, that is. "Celebrants are reminded that under the laws of the kingdom, marriage is the union of a man and a woman, forsaking all others. This office considers it inappropriate for licenced celebrants to place themselves in situations where they may be seen to be offering either active or passive endorsement to unions which do not conform to the legal definition of marriage. In the light of numerous complaints this office has received on this issue we will have no alternative but to review the licences of celebrants who are reported to have endorsed such unions."

This wasn't aimed at her personally, she assured herself. The fact that the letter had arrived today had nothing to do with the fact that she was invited to celebrate Jadwiga and Jennifer's not-a-marriage-just-a-life-long-commitment on Saturday night. All the same she had no choice but to call Jadwiga - her oldest friend - and tell her she had to cancel. Jadwiga wasn't going to take it well.

"Hello, Jennifer speaking."

"Hi Jen, it's Ruby. Is Jadwiga home?"

"Hi, Rube. You're sounding upbeat as ever. How do you manage that?"

"It's an enchanted princess thing." Ruby said. She had lost count of the number of times she'd had this exchange with Jennifer. "Could I speak to her please?"

"Oh, secret princess business, is it?" Repetition hadn't quite worn the edge of resentful commoner sarcasm off Jennifer's pronunciation off that phrase, "Sure, I'll get her for you."

Ruby heard footsteps then, at a remove from the other telephone, Jennifer said "It's Rube, for you. Wants to talk about princessy stuff again." Jadwiga responded with something indistinct, in a complaining tone. Which, thought Ruby, was typical when you thought about it. Jadwiga had missed out on the whole enchantment thing - lucky cow - so she had no idea what a drag it really was. Ruby doubted that the whole thing with Jennifer would have had a chance to happen if Jadwiga had pricked her finger on a spindle or had any of the other unfortunate accidents that routinely befell princesses and left them dependent on finding - or being found by - a handsome prince if they were to have any chance of a half-way normal life.

"Hi, Ruby. What's up."

Ruby came straight to the point. Despite her best efforts, the vibrancy in her voice could not be completely suppressed. "Bad news, Jadwiga" she said, trying to hold the gush down to a trickle, "I don't think I can make it Saturday."

"I can hear just how much that saddens you, Ruby dear."

"I would, if I could Jadz. You know that."

"Oh bollocks, Rube. You're barely trying to hide how bloody happy you are to be off the hook."

The conversation didn't improve. By it's end Ruby was fairly sure that she and Jadwiga were no longer friends. At least they wouldn't be until Jadwiga apologised for that crack about her vibrant voice being a childish affectation, like a lisp, and all she needed to sort it out was a few hours with a competent speech therapist.

***

In the end, getting out struck Petro as best idea. He closed up the kitchen drawers and cupboards. In the last dim glow of the Paw's monkey-corpse light he made his way to the front door. As he stepped into the hallway he heard footsteps on the front porch, followed by the scrape of a key entering a lock.

Down to Earth Club

"You ever had sex on a train?"

"Naah."

"Would you like to try it? Do you wanna do it?"

Smooth talker. Wish I could come up with lines like that. And hey, don't mind me sitting here across the other side of the carrriage - I'm getting off debarking in two stops.

"Naah. They have security cameras and guards and stuff."

Damn it, girl, you're in the prime of your youth! You're wasting the best years of your life. Wake up to yourself.

Nothing doing. They get off the train at the next stop. On the way out the door he asks: "What about the queue at Centrelink? Ever tried it there?"

Thanks for the Flowers

I've just realised that I've been nominated for an Australian Blog Award for Australia's Funniest Blog. Since I'm in the running, I suppose that sometime soon I shall have to get around to doing a little electronic ballot-box stuffing or look around for a graveyard of abandoned e-mail addresses to vote.

Anyway, thanks to whoever dobbed me in for this one. I'll be thinking of you when the inevitable happens and the award goes to some tosser who specialises in inocuous posts about the hilarious antics of the birds in their back yard, neurotic rants about dentists and other topics of burning public interest.

Worth Watching

If you missed out on it the first time round, SBS is screening The Staircase again in its "Hot Docs" spot, starting tomorrow night at 10.00 pm.

The ABC is once again repeating Walking With Beasts, on Saturday afternoons at 3.30. The last episode of the series, about homo erectus, is worth taking a look at, if only for the sequence showing two hominids copulating. In any other context, you might call it fucking but this is a nature documentary after all, so it's probably more appropriate to use the more respectable scientific term. It's pretty clear that the producers of the show went out of their way to forestall any accusation that they were just slipping in a gratuitous paleo-anthropological soft porn insert. In your average stick flick, the visuals would have been accompanied by some pretty enthusiastic grunting, gasping and give-it-to-me-babys accompanied by some off-the-peg electronic music, heavy on tinkly chimes and sugary synthetic strings but, instead of that, the action is accompanied by an earnest voice over from Kenneth Branagh, explaining how the vulva of the female erectus shifted forward to accomodate an upright posture, obliging homo erectus to copulate face-to-face. In the missionary position, of course, with the female lying back and distracting herself from the whole sordid business with thoughts of all the berry-gathering she'd be doing tomorrow.

I have no idea how Branagh kept a straight face while he was reading this guff, which tells you a lot more about the sexual experience of the narrative's author than it does about mating behaviour in homo erectus. The truth is, we have no idea how homo erectus went about the business of screwing although the current state of human sexual practice suggests that they had a lot of options. Whether they had the imagination to exploit them is another matter and somewhat moot; anything we say on the subject is completely speculative, however entertaining the possibilities might be.

Nostalgia Spot (Slightly Damp)

Over at Oz Conservative, Mark is pining for the days of good old fashioned romance, exemplified in the fashion philosophy of Alannah Hill:

When I was at uni (more than ten years ago now) one of my disappointments was the mannish style of appearance of the young women on campus. The women would typically wear boots, jeans, a T-shirt, and a windcheater, with no makeup or jewellery or ornamentation of any kind.

They actually managed to look a bit boring, despite being in the full bloom of their womanhood age-wise.

I felt a bit robbed. I thought it a waste of youth, both theirs and mine.

...

Earlier this year, Alannah Hill was interviewed for The Age newspaper. True to form, she described her fashion philosophy as follows:

I spend most days designing the most romantic clothes so that girls when they wear them will evoke some gush of love from the opposite sex.

When I was at uni (well over ten years ago now) a female friend of mine spent one vacation doing the obligatory cheap STA whip around a few European countries where you can't speak the language. Her tour included Paris, the city of eternal romance, where she left a crowded Metro carriage one evening to discover that she'd copped a quite substantial gush of love on her Levi's. It just goes to show that even a "mannish style of appearance" is no impediment to the flowering of romantic feelings in the male heart.

Simply Rotten

I didn't make any New Year's Eve resolutions this year, unless you count "First thing Tuesday I'm getting something done about this bloody tooth" which would make this year my first 100% success for keeping New Year's resolutions. A marked contrast to that disastrous resolution I made in the early eighties (I was totally shit-faced at the time) that "This year I'm going to get a lot more of the other". 100% failure on that one - it brought on a drought of El Ninõ proportions. The fact that I started cleaning up at the regular Friday evening office poker game was little consolation.

One resolution I have made recently is, once again, to cut back a bit on the on-line time but that has nothing to do with this being the first Year of the rest of my life; it's about the exorbitant amount I'm paying for all the time I spend on the web. That resolution got a bit dented when I got around to actually reading the Age I picked up this morning, after watching Thunderbirds on Channel 9 - insomnia again. I went to bed last night thinking that the phantom tooth pain was going away at last - instead, it underwent a weird mitosis and migrated into the two teeth adjacent to the gum crater. They were busily jostling to take possession of the vacant space before one of those poncy ceramic prosthetics moved in and their familiar tumbledown neighbourhood got all gentrified.

After ten days of enduring the world's most trivial agony, I'm feeling pretty pissed off. So I think I can finally produce that post on Phil Ruddock that I've tried to write, on and off, for several months. Our hollow, stuffed Attorney-General, his headpiece filled with straw, his shrivelled conscience pinned to the lapel of his jacket for all the world to see. I despise him.

I've tried, at least occasionally, to look on him as a man of principle who kind of lost his way but it's simply impossible. The first time was when I read an op-ed in The Australian, where the writer bemoaned how the Phil Ruddock he used to know had been ruined by his tenure as Minister for Immigration. Another time was when I saw the story of the split in Ruddock's family over his handling of the Immigration portfolio on Australian Story. I'm still tempted to look for something redeeming about the bloke when I see him interviewed on TV news and current affairs. But it's bloody impossible - he went to dinner with the devil and forgot to take his own cutlery. Just how low he's sunk showed up in this report on page 3 of today's Age:

THE Federal Government has moved to obstruct gay couples wanting to get married in countries that recognise same-sex nuptials.

The Attorney-General's Department last year told at least two of Australia's embassies in Europe to refuse help to citizens requiring proof of their single status for a same-sex marriage...

This comes on top of news on January 7, that:

... After shutting the door on gay nuptials, the Federal Government is clamping down on heterosexuals who deviate from a traditional wedding script.

In a series of edicts to civil celebrants that overturn at least 30 years of accepted practice, the Attorney-General's Department insists couples must exchange vows only as "husband" and "wife". Celebrants must also remind everyone that "marriage, according to law in Australia, is the union of a man and a woman".

(Julie Szego, The Age)

It's worth noting that, in both cases, Ruddock comes up clean under the current conventions on ministerial responsibility; it was the Attorney-General's Department, rather than the Attorney-General, which blocked consular assistance to gay couples seeking to marry overseas and issued the edicts to civil celebrants. In both cases, the Attorney-General's view on the actions of his department came via a spokesperson. On gay marriages overseas, the Attorney-Generals spokeswoman:

... said one purpose of the certificates was to certify a proposed marriage would be valid in Australia.

And on the instructions to civil celebrants a spokeswoman said:

... the Government is simply ensuring the country's growing number of civil celebrants understand their legal obligations ...

There's a couple of statements of principle delivered with all the ringing conviction of Pontius Pilate sending for a handbasin and towel.

I won't deny that these spiteful, petty intrusions into the lives of ordinary Australians can be justified - they are reminders of the legal basis of marriage in Australia and the tradition that underlies them. In their mean little way, both are defences of that tradition. So is the new policy requiring married couples to undergo three hours of compulsory counselling before heading off to the family court. Whether the last will amount to anything more than a gravy train for the organisations that win tenders to run the counselling centres is moot. All three of these defences of the tradition of marriage in Australia are idiotic.

Ruddock's willingness, on behalf of the Government, to accept his Department's obstruction of gay marriages overseas is of a piece with his equal willingness to accept more serious infringements on the rights of Australian citizens who just happen to be offside with government sponsored mainstream opinion. I refer of course to Mamdou Habib and David Hicks. It's of a piece with the willingness he showed, as Immigration Minister, to dump "criminal non-citizens" on countries they had not seen since childhood - a practice that was recently found unlawful by a couple of Federal Court judges (in the Nystrom case). A High Court challenge to this decision is still pending - it would be interesting to see what happens if the High Court upholds the Federal Court's ruling.

Because then we would have as Attorney-General, a man who will have been found by the highest court in the country to have acted outside the law in several cases where he exercised his Ministerial discretion to get rid of one of those "people like that" that we don't want in Australia. I like to think that his position as Attorney-General would become unsustainable. In wildly optimistic moments I imagine him being replaced by either a Burkean conservative or a liberal in the tradition of John Stuart Mill, either of which would be an improvement. The trouble is, off the top of my head, I can't think of any candidates who fit either bill.

The Questionable Consolations of Philosophy

257. "What would it be like if human beings shewed no outward signs of pain (did not groan, grimace, etc)? Then it would be impossible to teach a child the meaning of the word 'tooth-ache'." - Well, let's assume the child is a genius and itself invents a name for the sensation! - But then, of course, he couldn't make himself understood when he used the word. - So how does he understand the name, without being able to explain its meaning to anyone? - but what does it mean to say that he has 'named his pain'? How has he done this naming of pain?! And whatever he did, what was its purpose? When one says "He gave a name to his sensation" one forgets that a great deal of stage-setting in the language is presupposed if the mere act of naming is to make sense. And when we speak of someone's having given a name to pain, what is presupposed is the existence of the grammar of the word "pain"; it shews the post where the new word is stationed.

665. Imagine someone pointing to his cheek with an expression of pain and saying "abracadabra!" - We ask "What do you mean?" And he answers "I meant toothache". You at once think to yourself: How can anyone mean 'toothache' by that word? Or what did it mean to mean pain by that word? And yet, in a different context you would have asserted that the mental activity of meaning such-and-such was just what was most important in using language.

But - can't I say "By 'abracadabra' I mean toothache"? Of course I can; but this is a definition; not a description of what goes on in me when I utter the word.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

And then 'abracadabra' might be a good enough name for the sensation you're left with after the source of a toothache is gone. For what it's worth, Wittgenstein pays a lot less attention to the philosophical issues raised by headaches:

314. It shews a fundamental misunderstanding, if I am inclined to study the headache I have now in order to get clear about the philosophical problem of sensation.

I reckon he's on the money there but it would be a different story had he suffered from migraines.

Just Speak for Yourself

Am I book slut? Hell no! No way would I ever

... go to sleep worrying whether Jennifer Anniston and Vince Vaughan are actually a couple, if Nadine Coyle from Girls Aloud is losing too much weight and how much cosmetic surgery Teri Hatcher has really had.

No, not me - that sort of stuff is pretty much a chick thing, right, and so is

[loving] all kinds of texts equally, refusing to play favourites and treating them all with the same kind of intense but ultimately casual affection.

Isn't that just typical. You'd never catch me doing that: like any bloke, I know that there are those books you just read for fun - cultural quickies you pick up at the library, skim through overnight, or over a weekend at most, then drop casually down the return chute on your next visit - and real, serious books that are actually worth shelling out your own hard-earned (or hard-bludged) readies for. And as for those gossip mags and women's magazines, no way I'd be caught dead reading one of those. You have to wonder what the editorial staff at Cosmo and Cleo are thinking when every time they run one of those articles on "Ten great ways to be better in bed", they follow up with a half a page of sex tips for guys. Who do they expect to read this stuff? I bet you wouldn't find the editors of Ralph making that mistake. Not that I'd be caught dead reading Ralph of course.

I'll admit that I've had a few disappointments with books - like the time I bought "the best novel to come out of New Zealand this year", and decided, after finishing it, that there would have been no great loss to world literature if it had stayed in New Zealand. Some of the alleged classics have been no better - like that fat-arsed tome by some dead Russian fart that begins "All happy families are alike but each unhappy familiy is unhappy in its own way ..." - or something like that. The sort of portentous bull that gets a novelist a totally inflated rep for giving good human condition. Over time I've learnt to ignore a lot of the gossip about authors who give good human condition, just as I learnt how little substance to all that talk about Marjorie Malvern-Starr's precocious sexual accomplishments back in my Greenfields High School days (all my two bob's worth of licorice bullets from the school tuckshop got me was an angry glare and a slap in the face).

"Intense but ultimately casual affection" indeed; you won't catch me ever falling for a book that way. I've read around a bit - I'm wise to their sly little ways, their so called literary conventions. Read 'em and leave 'em, that's the way to go. OK, now and again you find one that's worth keeping around for a while, good solid works of reference and such but they're few and far between. When it comes down to it, reading books is just a pleasant way to pass the time.

Tough Guy, Me

I was just about ready to bite down - hard - on the thumb she was pressing down on my lower jaw, when she said "OK, Gummo, take a breather." While I lay there, taking deep breaths to wash away the pain, she said, "I'm sorry Gummo, but I can't let you leave here with that tooth."

I wasn't fooled by the patient tone. To make sure I got the message, the dnetal nurse grabbed a handful of shirt and pressed the muzzle of a Glock 9mm into my left nostril. "One way or another," she snarled, "That tooth is staying here. Got that?"

I got it.

"OK, OK," I shed, "Issue theel thash thongly abad it, oo can have the toosh. Ish no damn ushe to me. Lesh get thish over widge."

The Misguided Doctor and the Good Sydneysiders

(A Fable for Our Times)

A man was leaving Oxford Street after the Sydney Mardi Gras in his parade costume - a gold lamé posing pouch and he fell among poofter bashers who beat him and departed, leaving him near dead.

Now by chance a doctor was going down that road; and when he saw him he started to cross the road. But his way was blocked by a pastor who said
"That man has been brought low by sin. If you treat him he will just continue in his sinful ways. Is this what you want?"

The doctor gently pushed the pastor aside and carried on but he found his way blocked by a columnist, who said: "That man lives an unacceptable lifestyle. If you treat him he will be back here next year to promote his unacceptable lifestyle. Is this what you want?"

The doctor gently pushed the columnist aside and carried on but he found his way blocked by a politician, who said: "Perhaps you think about the importance of family values before you go any further."

The doctor gently pushed the politician aside and finally reached the injured man. He took up his hand to check his pulse, then looked at his watch He opened a side compartment on his black bag, where he kept his prescription pad and a few other standard forms. He took the form he needed and on it wrote "Pansy Doe, Time of Death 1:37" and signed and dated the form. Then he folded the death certificate in four and gently tucked it into the gold lamé posing pouch.

Postscript: this piece could just as easily have been set in Melbourne after Midsumma. If you find the plot vaguely familiar, you might like to check out the original.

Dame Nellie, eat your heart out.

(With a tug of the forelock to Anthony at spiceblog).

C'mon Huey, Shift Your Bloody Arse

We've just turned on the air-conditioner for the first time in two years. There's enough airflow through the ceiling vent in the lounge to stir the cobwebs; after I finish here I'm going to go lie on the couch to see if under-powered air-conditioners produce a placebo effect. I went out into the back yard for a ciggie a few minutes ago, barefoot on sun baked concrete. Fire walkers are wimps. There were a few promising little clouds on the western horizon; if they actually get overhead before evening, I might shoulder the laundry bag and head up to the laundromat. Based on past experience it ought to start pissing down when I'm about halfway there.

Still, I'm not going to cite this hot spell as evidence of global-warming; that's a false induction, an example of confirmation bias and all the rest of it. All the same, I'm willing to bet that there are quite a few bloggers out there who're shaking their heads over the blizzards and record low temperatures that Europe is experiencing and asking, as usual, if global warming is real, how come this is happening? Don't expect an answer from me - all I want to do right now is get away from all the waste heat being pumped out by the PC's cooling fan.

Oh, and best wishes to all and sundry for the New Year. Hope your 2006 is, in every way, an improvement on your 2005. Actually there are few sundries for whom I'm inclined to wish the opposite but it's probably better not to mention that. Oops, too late.

The Survival Machine of Colin M Turnbull (III)

(Part I, Part II)
A lot of the difficulties in producing a synopsis of The Mountain People come from its novelistic construction so it might be helpful, at this point, to treat it as a novel. Viewing it this way, we see the book as the simple story of Colin Turnbull, anthropologist, who journeys to a remote part of Africa to study a fairly typical tribe of hunter gatherers. During the time he spends with them, he discovers that they are nothing like the obligate noble savages he imagines them to be; instead the Icien way of life turns out to be a grotesque caricature of the advanced western society he has left behind. The story is told in the first person, with three narrative threads running through Turnbull the author's straightforward plot; Turnbull the narrator's slow awakening to the realities of Icien life, the reflections this prompts on human nature and human societies and finally, the simple facts of Icien life as he has observed them. That may sound like a very post-modern take on a work of anthropological research and reporting but it has its uses. Such as, in this installment, finally moving our focus away from the concerns and character of Turnbull the narrator, to what he sees in his stays with the Ik.

First let's note a fact that Turnbull reveals quite slowly; at the time of his study, there was a great deal of starvation among the Ik. The Kidepo valley, their major hunting ground, was no longer available to them - it was a national park. The Ugandan government had encouraged them to take up farming but the mountainous country they had settled in was not good farmland. And there had been a prolonged drought. Turnbull cops a bit of stick around the traps for not noticing that the Ik were a society in crisis but it seems unlikely that this completely escaped his attention during the three years in which he did his field studies or that the realisation completely escaped him during the writing of The Mountain People. Where Turnbull does leave himself open to the charge of insensitivity is in his depiction of the way he learnt of living conditions among the Ik, for example this telling episode from the end of Chapter 3, "the Disenchanted Tree":

... Kauar was exceptional, and he used to volunteer to make the long two day climb back to get mail for me, or buy a few things for others. He was always pleased with himself when he came back, and asked if he had made the trip more quickly than the last time ... Then he used to sit and watch while I read the mail, studying the expression on my face to see if all was well. When we drank tea together he always took exactly the same number of teaspoons of sugar that I took, and helped himself to exactly the same number of biscuits, never more, never less. The biscuits he often kept for the children, who used to snatch them from him and run away laughing at him for the fool he was.

Then one day Kauar went to Kaabong and did not come back. He was found the day after he should have returned, high up on the last peak of the trail before it descends to Pirre, cold and dead. Then you could see how thin he was, or so I was told, for those who found him just took the things he had been carrying, pushed his body into the bush and left it. "Why bother carrying him back? He was dead!" they said as they distributed the goods ... I still think of him probably running up that viciously steep mountainside so that he could break his time record, and falling dead in his pathetic prime because he was starving.

The significance of this episode is difficult to miss; it reveals a great deal about the state of Ik society, the fact of starvation among them and some unpleasant and less than flattering things about Turnbull himself. Earlier in the chapter, there's another episode, whose significance is much less obvious, at least on a first reading:

On this occasion an antelope had been killed by Lomeja, a happy man in his late middle age, which is to say he was in his early twenties. He had set off early in the morning alone, and had picked up his bow and arrows where hehad concealed them during the night so that no-one would see that he was going hunting ... [p82]

Unfortunately for Lomeja, he was observed and followed; after he had killed an antelope another Ik, Lotibok appeared, claiming that it was by chance. While Lomeja and Lotibok were cooking the antelope, taking precautions against being seen, two more Ik saw the smoke of their cooking fire. They immediately set out in the direction of the fire, with Turnbull in hot pursuit. In the end, the antelope that Lomeja had planned to keep to himself had to be shared between five people:

It is a curious hangover from what must once have been a moral code that Ik will offer food if surprised in the act of eating, though they go to enormous pains not to be so surprised. [p81-82]

This is a far cry from the co-operative hunts that Turnbull imagines in Chapter One of the book. But here, once again, I'm going to give myself a break - this time so that I can put in some library time and get into some of the secondary references on Turnbull. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

The Survival Machine of Colin M Turnbull (II)

(Part I)
His lack of enthusiasm for field work among the Ik declared, Turnbull uses the rest of Chapter One to tell us what he knew of the Ik before he set out for Northern Uganda. Just before World War II they had been encouraged to settle in the mountains in the northeast corner of the country, where it borders on Kenya and Sudan. Before then they had roamed as nomadic hunter-gatherers through all three countries. Their major hunting territory was the Kidepo Valley, now a national park:

Kidepo was undoubtedly where they spent the best part of the year, but, like most hunters and gatherers, these depended as much on vegetable resources as they did on game, and vegetable resources can be exhausted even more quickly and permanently than game if a band stays in one place too long. Mobility is essential to the hunting-and-gathering way of life and nomadism is by no means the random, aimless meandering it is sometimes thought to be. At the same time, hunting and gathering, even in a marginal environment, are neither as hard nor as precarious as they seem ... [The hunter] knows the world he lives in as few others do, and he lives in sympathy with it rather than trying to dominate it. He is the best of conservationists, knowing exactly how much he can take from where at any given time. His nomadic pattern is geared to this knowledge... [p 21]

From here through to page 31, Turnbull describes (admittedly in retrospect) the society he expected to find when he was in Kampala, preparing for his trip North. Of the people he expected to meet he says:

The smaller the society, the less emphasis there is on the formal system, and the more there is on inter-personal and inter-group relations, to which the system is subordinated. Security is seen in terms of these relationships, and so is survival. The result, which appears so deceptively simple, is that hunters frequently display those characteristics that we find so admirable in man: kindness, generosity, consideration, affection, honesty, hospitality, compassion, charity and others. This sounds like a formidable list of virtues and so it would be if they were virtues, but for the hunter they are not. For the hunter in his tiny, close-knit society, these are necessities for survival; without them society would collapse...

It was not foremost in my mind, I suppose, but, as with the physical conditions , I took it for granted that the Ik would possess these same qualities. it was a shock to find myself wrong on almost all counts... [p31 - original emphasis]

In Chapter 2, "Careless Rapture," Turnbull describes his journey from Kampala to North-Eastern Uganda. For all that he has said about his coolness toward his project in Chapter One, he depicts himself here as becoming more enthusiastic for it as he travels North:

The Administrator ... discussed freely many of his problems and said he would welcome any ideas that might come out of my researches. Thisis the kind of interest and co-operation that is all too often lacking and it added to my growing enthusiasm. [p38-39]

Turnbull's growing enthusiasm takes a severe hammering when he encounters his first Ik and is introduced to the Ik sense of humour. On the way to the first Ik village he visits, his guides take him along a perilous mountain trail and get a good laugh when he stumbles after traversing a ledge that is too narrow for two feet to be placed side by side. He is also introduced to the brusque, cursory nature of Ik manners; his polite traditional greetings are met with demands for tobacco. One of his guides greets the mother he hasn't seen for two years with the demand "Give me food" to which she replies "There's no food" (p49-50). From chapter 3 onwards the book becomes inceasingly depressing reading. It also defies synopsis, as Turnbull's account of Ik society freely switches between anecdote, reflection and analysis. So here I'll leave you with a choice of options; you can wait for the next instalment of this series, where I'll take on the task of providing a plausible synopsis with selected lowlights or you can bugger off to a library and track down a copy of The Mountain People to read for yourselves.

The Enchanted Toasting Fork - Episode 6

The story so far:
Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3
Episode 4
Episode 5

With luck, that'll keep you buggers busy over Yule so I can have a bit of time to honour Freyr in the traditional manner - stuffing oneself with pork smallgoods.

King Otto - A Legend

"Good morrow O wise King," said Lothar the bard, standing before the throne at the north end of King Otto's great hall, "Thou hast summoned me and here I stand before thee, to do thy bidding."

"This is meet, Lothar." replied Otto, "This is indeed meet. In these troubled times of ours it is good that a king should have such faithful servants as yourself."

"And how may I serve thee, O wise King?" Lothar fawned.

"The season of Yule approacheth, as thou kenneth well, Lothar," replied Otto. Lothar nodded - indeed he did kenneth well that the season of Yule would soon be upon them, "And my land is troubled by foes without and traitors within. It is meet that at Yule my subjects shall give great honour to Freyr yet there be those among them who speak ill of the ancient rites and dare to say that we ought temper them, lest we offend the adherents of that milksop, Christ the Redeemer, whose cult is now openly preached in the steads of my kingdom and whose churches have sprung up hither and you, offending the eye. And I say this shall not be."

"Nay, My King, it is not meet that this should be. And how shall I aid thee in this matter?"

"Lothar, thou shalt journey through my kingdom and in the steads of my people and the halls of their Lords you shall sing to them of Yule and the need to make fine sacrifice to Freyr. You shall tell them it is the will of their king that this be so and of my disdain for those who would have it otherwise. Do this, and I shall reward thee greatly."

"This I shall do, O King." Lothar made his obeisance and departed, happy to do the king's will. Freyr should indeed receive fine sacrifice this year and not merely pigs in great quantity. And in his heart, Lothar felt the happiness of a husbandman who has brought in a bounteous harvest - for had he not himself planted the seed of the king's plan and nurtured it to this fruition?

The Survival Machine of Colin M Turnbull (I)

Preamble: a week or so ago, a little fatigued by comments threads where a few commenters seemed to be disagreeing with others purely for the sake of being disagreeable and the feeling that I was getting sucked into playing the same game myself, I decided to have a crack at writing an extended essay. Then I had the bright idea of posting selected passages from the references I intended to use under the title Dark Materials. Cryptic I know, and self indulgent.

After posting Dark Materials I, it occurred to me to do a web search for more up-to-date information on the Ik and Colin Turnbull. What I found was surprising. I changed plans yet again. Whether the essay I originally planned will actually appear is an open question (the odds are pretty long, based on past experience), but given what I've found on the Internet on the subject of The Mountain People, I've decided it's worthwhile to take a close look at the book. This could take a while, because beside the on-line sources, there's going to be off-line literature to track down and take a look at. So this essay will be presented in instalments. Then we might move on to one of the other authors I was going to use for reference.

***

The Ik were, and are, a small tribe living in Northern Uganda in the mountains where Sudan, Kenya and Uganda all meet. They became notorious in the 1970s after the publication of Colin Turnbull's The Mountain People. The book is Turnbull's account of anthropological field studies of the Ik he conducted between 1964 and 1967. The notoriety it brought the tribe was heightened by Peter Brook's 1975 play, called simply The Ik.

According Wikipedia, the Internet's foremost repository of authoritative libel, Turnbull

... was a famous British anthropologist who gained prominence with his book The Forest People (1962), a detailed study of the BaMbuti Pygmies. In 1972, he wrote his most controversial classic, The Mountain People, which portrayed Uganda's hunger-plagued Ik tribe. Turnbull was an unconventional scholar who rejected objectivity. He idealized the BaMbuti and reviled the Ik, whom he recounted as so coldly self-absorbed that they allowed their children to die if they could not survive after being kicked out at the age of three, and refused to share food with anyone, even gorging on the occasional excess of food until they got sick, rather than save or share.

There are two pretty serious charges against Turnbull there - they bothered me enough to make me question whether The Mountain People has anything useful to say at all. Turnbull "rejected objectivity" and "reviled the Ik" says the Wikipedia contributor. How justified are these accusations.

Chapter One of The Mountain People opens with this declaration:

Any description of another people, another way of life, is to some extent bound to be subjective, especially when, as an anthropologist, one has shared that way of life. This is as it should be; but then the reader is entitled to know something of the aims, expectations, hopes and attitudes that the writer brought to the field with him, for these will surely influence not only how he sees things but what he sees. At best his story will only be a partial one.

This I suppose, might be taken as a rejection of objectivity. To me it reads more like a standard disclaimer which I've commonly found in books on the social sciences: a declaration that however objective the writer might aspire to be, his work cannot claim the lofty objectiveness we assume that physiscists say have when they report their experimental findings.

The first few pages of Chapter One is taken up with a description of how Turnbull came to do his field study of the Ik. Turnbull is frank about his lack of initial enthusiasm for the project; it was his third choice and his attitude to the porspect of studying the "Teuso" as he then knew them evoked no enthusiasm, merely a clinical interest:

... But no amount of clinical interest could suppress the disappointment at the failure of the two preferred projects.

I make this point because one of the most delicate tasks of the field anthropologist is to establish a really satisfactory and amicable relationship with the people among whom he is going to live, and to regard them with a jaundiced eye is hardly the way to win favor. [p 18-19]

Once again you can, if you wish, take this as a rejection of objectivity if you wish. Or as an admission of impaired objectivity if that's your preference. Turnbull's enthusiasm for the project took quite a few more knocks as he travelled to northern Uganda, with transport and equipment problems addin gto his frustrations:

... the Land Rover, painted fire-engine red, posessed the singular and by no means welcome ability to attract elephants, particularly male elephants very obviously in search of female company. This, like the leaky roof, remained a constant quality. [p 19]

So by Turnbull's own admission, he was somewhat disgruntled with his project by the time he reached the field and, therefore, not in the best frame of mind to reach an amicable rapport with his subjects. Did his lack of enthusiasm lead him to revile the Ik, as the Wikipedist alleges? To answer that question, we'll have to take a look at what Turbull had to say about them. I'll get back to you on that subject after I've done some more reading and pretty intensive note-taking.

Dark Materials I

Luckily the Ik are not numerous - about two thousand - and those two years reduced their numbers greatly. So I am hopeful that their isolation will remain as complete as in the past, until they die out completely. I am only sorry that so many individuals will have to die, slowly and painfully, until the ned comes to them all. For the individuals one can only feel infinite sorrow at what they have lost; hatred must be reserved for the society they live in, the machine they have constructed to enable them to survive. They have not created it willingly or consciously; it hascreate ditself through their biological need for survival, out of the only materials available, and in the only possible form. It is that survival machine that is the monster... They had a simple choice of living or dying; they had already lost the rest - family, friendship, hope, love - and they made the same choice that most of us, I believe, would make...

There is no goodness left for the Ik, only a full stomach, and that only for those whose stomachs are already full. But if there is no goodness, stop to think, there is no badness, and if their is no love, neither is there any hate. Perhaps that, after all, is progress; but it is also emptiness.
[Colin M Turnbull, The Mountain People, New York 1972 - p285-6]

If we grant, as the evidence says we should, that the Ik were not always as they are, and that they once possessed in full measure those values that we all hold to be basic to humanity, indispensible for both survival and sanity, then what the Ik are telling us is that these qualities are not inherent in humanity at all, they are not a necessary part of human nature.Those values which we cherish so highly and which some use to point to our infinite superiority over other forms animal life may indeed be basic to human society, but not to humanity, and that means that the Ik clearly show that society itself is not indispensible for man's survival, that man is not the social animal he has always thought himself to be, and that he is perfectly capable of associating for purposes of survival without being social. The Ik have successfully abandoned useless appendages, by which I refer to those "basic" qualities such as family, cooperative sociality, belief, love, hope andso forth, for the very good reason that in their context these militated against survival. By showing that man can do without these appendages the Ik show that man can do without society in the sense we mostly mean by th eword (implying those qualities), for they have replaced human society with a mere survival system that does not take human emotion into account...
[p289-290]

Note: the title of this post is a fairly obvious reference to the title of a book that I haven't actually read. Naughty me.

Qu(ot)e?

PRIME Minister John Howard returned to Australia from the East Asian Summit with a plea for Australians to ignore text messages calling for more riots.

"Don't take any notice of them, be sensible, enjoy the sun, it's Christmas and have a good time and, for heaven's sake, remember you don't achieve any advances in this world through the use of violence, thank you," Mr Howard said.
[Brendan Nicholson, The Age]

He's right you know - what it really takes to achieve advances in this world is a bit of diplomacy by other means.

"(Let's) celebrate the fact that this is still the greatest country in the world in which to live and let nobody tell us otherwise and let's not wallow in self-pity and self-flagellation and self-criticism."

And anyone who is the least bit unhappy, or has difficult personal problems, will be prosecuted, under the Happiness Act (1995 as amended).

"If there are some longer-term lessons to be learnt then the time to reflect on those is not right now," he said. "Maybe there were warning signs around that have been ignored and shouldn't have been ignored."

But with Christmas coming up, we'll ignore them a little longer. With luck we'll get through to the resumption of Parliament without another bucket of shit hitting the fan.

"Some of it is just incredibly bad behaviour fuelled by too much drink … We ought to calm everybody down, deal with the law breakers, support the police."

And the rest, let's be quite clear about this, has nothing to do with the R-word.

"I have a very simple view that this country should welcome people from all around the world, and benefit from that, providing when they come to this country they become Australians. That's my simple philosophy full stop."

What is mine and what it is too. If those foreigners aren't prepared to fit in, well what can they expect. It's the Australian way. Which, I remind you, is not at all racist.

Postscript:

With every man and his dog finding dire predictions from yesteryear on how things were going to go terribly wrong sooner or later, I can't see any good reason not to join in. Here's something some poms wrote 32 years ago:

Once upon a time, long long ago, there lay in a valley far, far away in the mountains, the most contented kingdom the world has ever known.

It was called Happy Valley, and it was ruled over by a wise old King called Otto, and all his subjects flourished and were happy, and there were no discontents or grumblers, because Wise King Otto had had them all put to death along with the Trade Union leaders many years before. and all the good happy folk of Happy Valley sang and danced all day long, and anyone who was for any reason miserable or unhappy or who had any difficult personal problems was prosecuted under the Happiness Act.
(from The Brand New Monty Python Papperbok, Palin et al London 1973)

Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1494 - 1573)

Another Great Dickhead of History

In 1518 the Spanish colonists in the Carribean wrote to their King, Charles, asking him to allow more black slaves to make up for the loss of the native population of the Carribean islands, who had been worked to extinction. They were supported by the four Jeronymite priors who governed the islands for Spain and by Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, self-appointed defender of the native Americans. Like any enlightened man of the Sixteenth Century he believed that an African enslaved by Christians was better off than one left in Africa. He was less trusting of his compatriots and co-relionists when it came to the natives of the New World.

Around 1524, Las Casas conceived a development scheme for the north coast of South America. Forty Spanish colonists were to set off with ten African slaves each, to remove the temptation of misusing the Indians. The enterprise was a failure. Most of the settlers were dispersed in the Carribean before they reached the site of the new colony. Those who did arrive were slaughtered by Indians "who had not yet learned to distinguish between good and bad Spaniards" (Thomas).

In 1535, Las Casas wrote to the king saying:

the remedy of the Christians is this, that His Majesty should think it right to send to each of the islands 500 or 600 blacks or whatever other number seems appropriate.

I expect you're wondering why Bartolomé de Las Casas isn't named at the top of this post. After all, he does sound a lot like a dickhead. The answer is simple; while I was doing the research, I found a bigger dickhead, the Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda of the title.

While Bartolomé de Las Casas was advocating the interests of the Indians - admittedly at the expense of the interests of the Africans - a controversy was going on, in Spain, about the treatment of the American Indians. The argument began in 1511 when the Dominican Fray Antonio de Montesinos gave the colonists a serve from his pulpit in Santo Domingo. This set off an argument that culminated in the Valladolid Controversy of 1550 which pitted Bartolomé de Las Casas, apostle of the Indians, in the red corner against our protagonist, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, the colonist's friend, in the Blue corner. In front of a judging panel of 15 notables they debated whether the Indians of the New World were Aristotle's "slaves by nature". Nothing was said about the Africans. The judges awarded the debate to Las Casas. Whether thishad any effect in the real world is questionable.

In the 1550s, when writing his Historia de Las Indias, Las Casas explained that he had realised that it was wrong to replace one form of slavery with another. His book wasn't published for another 350 years.

Special Bonus Dickhead: In the 1570s the subject of African slavery finally did become controversial in Spain and one or two people spoke out against it. On the pro-slavery side, Fray Francisco de la Cruz, a Dominican Friar, told the Inquisition in Lima that an angel had told him:

... the blacks are justly captives by reason of the sins of their forefathers and that becasue of that sin God gave them that colour.

Convenient.

Sources:
Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade
Wikipedia

Lazy Day Links Post

Evan Jones (no relation to Alan) at Alert and Alarmed has two good posts on deportations and Phil Ruddock.

Samuel McSkimming does a nice job on Alan Jones at catallaxy. A lot of the comments there make the "Sedition Watch" post I was writing, with selected excerpts of David Marr's article in the SMH, look pretty redundant. So instead of all that stuff, here's a bit of the Commonwealth Criminal Code 1995 (as amended last week):

80.2 Sedition
Urging violence within the community
(5) A person commits an offence if:
(a) the person urges a group or groups (whether distinguished by race, religion, nationality or political opinion) to use force or violence against another group or other groups (as so distinguished); and
(b) the use of the force or violence would threaten the peace, order and good government of the Commonwealth.
Penalty: Imprisonment for 7 years.
(6) Recklessness applies to the element of the offence under subsection (5) that it is a group or groups that are distinguished by race, religion, nationality or political opinion that the first-mentioned person urges the other person to use force or violence against.

Oh, alright, here's a quote from Marr:

[Jones] assured his audience he "understood" why that famous text message went out and he read it right through again on air: "Come to Cronulla this weekend to take revenge. This Sunday every Aussie in the shire get down to North Cronulla to support the leb and wog bashing day …" ...

When John called on Tuesday to recommend vigilante action - "If the police can't do the job, the next tier is us" - Jones did not dissent. "Yeah. Good on you John." And when he offered a maxim his father had picked up in the war - "Shoot one, the rest will run" - Jones roared with laughter. "No, you don't play Queensberry's rules. Good on you, John."

But before we all start up a hue and cry for Jones (Alan, not Evan) to get seven years for sedition, it might be worth taking a look at his last daily comments on the Today Show. We should also remember that the "new" sedition provisions are merely some old law renovated and both John Howard and Phil Ruddock have made it perfectly clear that the sedition laws won't be enforced. Especially, I suspect, in the case of Alan Jones and 2GBH.

Update: guess who's joined the root-causists:

So does Sunday's riot add up to a simple case of damn-us white racism, or to something far more complex and human? Oh, yes, the rioting was cowardly, vile and disgusting. Pack attacks are, which is why we must not merely condemn, but understand.

To prevent. Best start now. There will be more riots before we spruce up this home of ours and only quiet thinking, not screaming, will help us.

And now for something completely irrelevant:

Don't be too proud of never forgetting a face: It turns out even a humble bumblebee can distinguish and recall different human faces, say researchers who have conducted experiments on the surprisingly canny insects.

Researchers in the UK have found that bumblebees show a remarkable ability to spot the same human face even days after training.

I wonder if it's possible to train them to attack on sight as well?

Quick Bits

The Stanford Prison Experiment has its own web-site.

As David Tiley says, now this is a meme:

Brandis "Own Goal" Record Finally Beaten

The federal government "has gone a bridge too far" with its sedition laws and is more interested in protecting itself than the Australian people, opposition leader Kim Beazley says.

With the Senate due to pass new counter terrorism legislation today, Mr Beazley said the Labor Party supported tough laws to help the struggle.

But he also said the government had gone too far with its sedition provisions within the legislation.

"We think the government has gone a bridge too far with its sedition laws," he told the Nine Network.

"It's now wandering around protecting itself, not the Australian people with sedition laws.

"We don't think you need to jail cartoonists, we do think we need to jail terrorists."
(The Age, Monday, November 6 2005)

Even the government agrees that its sedition laws are badly worded and has already promised to review them early next year.

But they are still demanding that the Seanate vote on them this week.

That is just as ridiculous as it sounds. Pass laws that everyone agrees are inadequate, then review them, then come back to Parliament to make changes.

...

Labour will vote to delete the sedition provisions from the anti-terrorism Bill and then subject them to a general review.
(Nicola Roxon, shadow Attorney-General in The Hun, Monday, November 6 2005)

Despite these lofty assurances, the ALP in the Senate voted with the government on Tuesday night. The Anti-Terrorism Bill 2005 was passed 53 to 7 after the government gagged debate. The sedition provisions in the Bill were passed unamended. So, having decided that it was more important to be seen to be tough on terrorism than tough on democratic freedoms, the Federal ALP handed the Government the power to declare it an unlawful association.

Here's how section 30 of the Commonwealth Crimes Act reads after the changes made in the Anti-Terrorism Act 2005:

- SECT 30A
Unlawful associations
(1) The following are hereby declared to be unlawful associations, namely:

(a) any body of persons, incorporated or unincorporated, which by its constitution or propaganda or otherwise advocates or encourages:
(i) the overthrow of the Constitution of the Commonwealth by revolution or sabotage;
(ii) the overthrow by force or violence of the established government of the Commonwealth or of a State or of any other civilized country or of organized government; or
(iii) the destruction or injury of property of the Commonwealth or of property used in trade or commerce with other countries or among the States;
or which is, or purports to be, affiliated with any organization which advocates or encourages any of the doctrines or practices specified in this paragraph;
(b) any body of persons, incorporated or unincorporated, which by its constitution or propaganda or otherwise advocates or encourages the doing of any act having or purporting to have as an object the carrying out of a seditious intention (see subsection (3)).

(1A) Without limiting the effect of the provisions of subsection (1), any body of persons, incorporated or unincorporated, which is, in pursuance of section 30AA, declared by the Federal Court of Australia to be an unlawful association, shall be deemed to be an unlawful association for the purposes of this Act.
(2) Any branch or committee of an unlawful association, and any institution or school conducted by or under the authority or apparent authority of an unlawful association, shall, for all the purposes of this Act, be deemed to be an unlawful association.

(3) In this section: seditious intention means an intention to effect any of the following purposes:

(a) to bring the Sovereign into hatred or contempt;
(b) to urge disaffection against the following:
(i) the Constitution;
(ii) the Government of the Commonwealth;
(iii) either House of the Parliament;
(c) to urge another person to attempt, otherwise than by lawful means, to procure a change to any matter established by law in the Commonwealth;
(d) to promote feelings of ill-will or hostility between different groups so as to threaten the peace, order and good government of the Commonwealth.
[emphasis added]

The new sedition laws (or if you prefer the same old sedition laws modernised) are to be reviewed by the Law Reform Commission next year. Kim Beazley had better hope that this results in at least those sections in bold being removed from the Crime Act: otherwise, the ALP might find itself at risk of being unable to campaign in the next election. After all, what is the business of an Opposition at election time, but to urge disaffection against the Government of the Commonwealth? And how does it do this? By running fundraisers to pay for advertising that urges disaffection against the Government of the Commonwealth, having its members letterbox and doorknock in their neighbourhoods urging disaffection against the Government of the Commonwealth and so on - all of them acts having or purporting to have as an object the carrying out of a seditious intention.

So Senator George Brandis can finally hand on his unwanted laurel for scoring "the greatest own goal in Australian politics" to a worthy successor - the very party that awarded him the accolade.

King John The Blind of Bohemia (1296 – 1346)

A Great Dickhead of History

Back in the 1960s, when values were real values, teachers were real teachers and school principals were all called headmasters and kept a Education Department approved strap in the office for special occasions (and made damn sure that word got around that it was there, too) there probably wasn't a school library anywhere that didn't have a copy of Paul Brickhill's Reach for the Sky, the story of Douglas Bader and how he became an ce fighter pilot, despite the loss of both legs. Compared to John of Bohemia, Bader had it easy.

Born a mere Count of Luxembourg on August 10, 1296, John became King of Bohemia on his marriage to Elizabeth of Bohemia in 1310. Between 1312 and 1322 he knocked her up a total of seven times, begetting 4 daughters and 3 sons. After her death in 1330 Beatrix of Bourbon and had one son by her, which balanced up the family quite nicely.

But getting his end away wasn't John's only major passion in life. His major hobby was going the biff:

He loved fighting for its own sake, not caring whether the conflict was important. He missed hardly a quarrel in Europe and entered tournaments in between, allegedly receiving in one of them the wound that blinded him. Hissubjects on the other hand said the cause was Divine punishment - not because he dug up the old synagogue of Prague, which he did, but because, on finding money beneath the pavement, he was moved by greed and the advice of German knights to dig up the tomb of St Adalbert in the Prague cathedral and was stricken blind by the desecrated saint.
(Tuchman, A Distant Mirror)

Regardless of the opinion of his subjects, John was widely regarded by his peers - the peers - as one of Europe's most chivalrous knights. The last quarrel he decided to involve himself in was the Edward III's second campaign against France, which culminated in the Battle of Crecy on August 26, 1346. John fought on the French side:

The valiant king of Bohemia called Charles of Luxembourg, son to the noble emperor Henry of Luxembourg, for all that he was nigh blind, when he understood the order of the battle, he said to them about him: 'Where is the lord Charles my son?' His men said: 'Sir, we cannot tell; we think he be fighting.' Then he said: 'Sirs, ye are my men, my companions and friends in this journey: I require you bring me so far forward, that I may strike one stroke with my sword.' They said they would do his commandment, and to the intent that they should not lose him in the press, they tied all their reins of their bridles each to other and set the king before to accomplish his desire, and so they went on their enemies. The lord Charles of Bohemia his son, who wrote himself king of Almaine and bare the arms, he came in good order to the battle; but when he saw that the matter went awry on their party, he departed, I cannot tell you which way. The king his father was so far forward that he strake a stroke with his sword, yea and more than four, and fought valiantly and so did his company; and they adventured themselves so forward, that they were there all slain, and the next day they were found in the place about the king, and all their horses tied each to other.
(Froissart, Chronicles)

We can only speculate as to what his son Charles had to say when "he saw that the matter went awry" and departed the field. As for John, Froissart makes it clear that he died bravely, valiantly hewing at the foe with the mighty thews of his sword arm, his ears filled with the clangour of battle, the screams of the enemy and the voices of his friends spurring him on with a special war-cry "I'm on your side you stupid blind prick!"

The Unluckiest Bastard in the World

On New Year's Eve 2003, Macedonian authorities took Khaled Masri off a bus at the Macedonian border. Masri said he was travelling to Macedonia to blow of steam after a row with his wife. He was taken to a motel in Skopje, the Macedonian capital, where he was held by Macedonian police for 23 days.

On the 23rd day he was taken to the airport, handcuffed and blindfolded. There he was handed over to the CIA. His clothes were cut off, he was (probably) given an enema, drugged and flown to Afghanistan. He found himself in an Afghan prison:

The first night he said he was kicked and beaten and warned by an interrogator: "You are here in a country where no one knows about you, in a country where there is no law. If you die, we will bury you, and no one will know."

By May, the CIA learned that Masri was not a terrorist; he was just some bloke whose name was a lot like a terrorist's:

... the question was: Now what? Some officials wanted to go directly to the German government; others did not. Someone suggested a reverse rendition: Return Masri to Macedonia and release him. "There wouldn't be a trace. No airplane tickets. Nothing. No one would believe him," one former official said. "There would be a bump in the press, but then it would be over."

...

Several intelligence and diplomatic officials said Macedonia did not want the CIA to bring Masri back inside the country, so the agency arranged for him to be flown to Albania. Masri said he was taken to a narrow country road at dusk. When they let him off, "They asked me not to look back when I started walking," Masri said. "I was afraid they would shoot me in the back."
(Dana Priest in the Washington Post)

I'm trying to look on the bright side of life at the moment, so I've decided not to be shocked, stunned and appalled. The way I see it, Costa Gavras could get a cracker of a political thriller out of this little saga.

Postscript - here's another choice bit from the report:

Members of the Rendition Group follow a simple but standard procedure: Dressed head to toe in black, including masks, they blindfold and cut the clothes off their new captives, then administer an enema and sleeping drugs. They outfit detainees in a diaper and jumpsuit for what can be a day-long trip. Their destinations: either a detention facility operated by cooperative countries in the Middle East and Central Asia, including Afghanistan, or one of the CIA's own covert prisons -- referred to in classified documents as "black sites," which at various times have been operated in eight countries, including several in Eastern Europe.

In the months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the CTC was the place to be for CIA officers wanting in on the fight. The staff ballooned from 300 to 1,200 nearly overnight.

"It was the Camelot of counterterrorism," a former counterterrorism official said. "We didn't have to mess with others -- and it was fun."

I think the best way to cope with revelations like this is to sing a happy little song.

They get round in the dead of night
They'll come for you if you don't do everything right
You're gonna be the sorry one
'Cause spies just wanna have fun
Oh spies just wanna have

That's all they really want
Some fun
You'd best look out for number one
'Cause spies - they want to have fun
Yeah spies just want to have fun

(With no apologies to Cyndi Lauper - after all, she's never bloody apologised to me)

Pot Blogging

I've just thrown out my largest stockpot. It just had to go, no two ways about it.

This afternoon I braved the rain and took a walk down to the local supermarket, where I picked up a leek, some celery, button mushrooms in a punnet, a chicken breast fillet on special, arborio rice and (much as I hate to admit it) one of those cartons of ready made chicken stock. Oh and some hydroponically grown Italian parsley - because it was there. All up, it came to a little under $16.00.

Once home, I took the old enamelled stock pot, poured a generous slug of olive oil into it and started work on a mise-en-place. I trimmed the ratty bits off the leek, sliced it in half lengthwise and washed it under the tap. Some quick chop, chop, chop with my kitchen knife and then on to the celery. That done I stripped the skin and fatty bits off the chicken breasts and finished up by measuring two cups of rice into a bowl. I took the jars of minced garlic and chopped chilli out of the fridge. Now I was ready to start cooking.

The stock pot went onto the heat and, after a couple of minutes, the chopped leek went into the oil. Followed, a little later by a generous teaspoon of minced garlic, a level teaspoon of chilli and the bowl of rice. I stirred it around until the rice was translucent and then set it aside, on an idle burner. The chicken should have gone in before this, but I forgot.

With the pot sitting off the heat, I measured out a cup of the chicken stock and poured it in with the rice. This is when I realised I'd forgotten to sear the chicken. Oops. But it wasn't a big deal; chicken's a white meat anyway, so cooking it by poaching it in something resembling its own stock is acceptable. You don't lose anything by it. So in went another cup of stock, and two cups of that Queen Adelaide reisling that's been sitting around the house for the past month or so. Then some chopped hydroponic parsley, and all the mushrooms - I stripped the plastic off the punnet, thought about what would happen to the any mushrooms I put aside in the fridge for a later that would never come and thought, to hell with it. In went the lot. I put the pot back on the heat, turned the electric element down to its lowest setting and went off to check e-mails and stuff.

About half an hour later I came back to the kitchen to check what was going on in the pot. When I lifted the lid, something was wrong. The contents were definitely a bit whiffy. Not pleasantly whiffy, smelling of wine, leek, garlic and chilli but with a nasty bacterial smell. After a little thought, I transferred the whole lot to a smaller stainless steel pot (which was barely big enough to hold everything) and took the old stockpot out to the bin.

I've just paid it another visit and that whiff is still there. It's not so strong now but it's still noticeable. Which means I've just spent sixteen dollars (plus electricity costs and preparation time) on cooking up a batch of potentially toxic risotto. So much for cookery as occupational therapy.