I'll second that...

On the ABC's Q&A programme tonight, Malalai Joya gave us this gem:

"The silence of good people is worse than the actions of bad people," said Joya.

Women and children first

This week there was a tragic house fire in Brisbane in which eleven women and children are reported to have been burned to death. The outpouring of grief was immense.

The survivors, the relatives and friends of the dead, and indeed the entire nation, are all still trying to come to terms with the awfulness of this tragedy.

Three men were the only ones who made it out alive.

At the risk of being accused of gross insensitivity, and because no one has asked it yet, I need to ask a question which won't stop shouting at me from within my head:

Whatever happened to the maxim "Women and children first"?

No disrespect intended.

To leak or not to leak...

Speaking about the Bradley Manning Wikileaks furore on the ABC's Q&A program last night, ex-senator Nick Minchin wanted us to believe that the aim of diplomacy was to prevent wars breaking out (and that's why maintaining secrecy was essential).

Don't you just love the way these spinmeisters pretend they are unaware of "the other side" of whatever they're spinning about?

Only a grossly underinformed viewer would have bought Minchin's rhetoric.

The rest of us know that the diplomatic sphere is also where the dirty deals and posturing leading up to wars are discussed and negotiated. It's also the cover for espionage and the facilitation of black ops.

So should Bradley Manning have leaked all those diplomatic dispatches?

Probably not all of them.

[read previous post about Bradley Manning]

The death penalty...

In Australia we oppose the death penalty. And we would most certainly oppose even more vehemently, summary execution. But only in Australia...

And yet we're quite happy to invade other countries and send in our highly trained killers to kill anyone in those countries who shoots back at, or tries to blow up, our highly trained invading killers. No arrest warrant needed. No evidence called for. No fair trial afforded.

Just kill, kill, kill.

"They" committed the capital crime of being labelled by us as "the enemy". For this they deserve summary execution.

En masse.

I know what I'd do to someone who came to my country and behaved like that !!!

A sheriff, a posse, and some sheep...

Down in the deep south (where things are done a bit "differently") self-appointed sheriff Willy Shafter was a slick dude. He was getting kickbacks from sheep sales from two farmers in the region whose properties adjoined, and life was good. For a while. But soon the two farmers fell out over money owed and a bit of alleged sheep rustling. Things got tense.

One night, Farmer Jones approached the sheriff's deputy to sound him out about what the sheriff would do if Jones sent a few of his boys over the fence to "sort out" the other farmer, Farmer Smith. The deputy got back to Farmer Jones in due course and told him not to worry and that sheriff Shafter would turn a blind eye.

But no sooner had Jones's boys ridden onto Smith's property and started getting a bit rough with Smith's boys, than Shafter formed a posse, rode in, and drove Jones's boys back onto their own property with a brutal baton charge, where Shafter's posse then did massive damage to Jones's barns, farm house, wagons, and other farm equipment, in a clear case of destructive vandalism. Jones was dragged before the court (the judge was a close friend of Shafter's) and was ruined, being prevented from selling any sheep in future except those he needed to sell in order to buy only the most basic necessities.

Shafter stayed good friends with Smith and in fact had some of his posse stay around for a while to "keep the peace". Smith's sheep sales improved considerably.

#

Your comments on sheriff Shafter's methods, ethics, and motives would be most welcome.

Is the soldier off the hook?

For the purpose of this discussion, let's assume we are dealing with a "bad" war. An unjust war. A war we just shouldn't be waging.

In such a war, there will be two types of soldiers.

Type 1: Joined up before the conflict was begun.
Should this type refuse to fight on conscientious grounds? If they fail to lodge an objection and happily go and take part in the mass murder (which is what war is), should they be held to account afterwards?

Type 2: Joined up after the conflict was begun.
Should they be held to account afterwards?

Why should soldiers be allowed the Nuremberg Defence when this was clearly disallowed at the Nuremberg trials?

(That should do to kick of this debate.)

We snuck in, we trashed, and we snuck out...

Iraq.

We secretly snuck our SAS troops in before the invasion officially began. We helped the Yanks trash the country. Totally. Mission Accomplished. And then, we snuck our last 17 troops out of the country, trying really hard not to draw attention to it.

Such courage.

But next Anzac Day, and each one thereafter, our dishonest, cowardly, contribution to that oil-grabbing mass-murder spree will be "remembered" as our gallant and heroic contribution to the betterment of humankind.

And you dare not question that lest you be deemed unpatriotic.

What if we sold Australia to the highest bidder...

In a comment on a previous post, AndrewM said:

"When I was at uni in the 1970's the concern then was Americans buying up bits of Australia. A friend suggested that we just simplify the whole process: the Americans pay each and every Australian $1,000,000, and in return they can have the whole country, lock, stock and barrel. Would've cost the USA about $13,000,000,000. Bit more expensive than Alaska, but a bargain nevertheless."

Astoundingly, I remember raising the exact same proposal in the pub across the road from Victoria Barracks, Sydney, where I was posted at the time. The year would have been circa 1975/6.

Over several beers we arrived at the following conclusion:

Since every Australian citizen would have become an instant millionaire (a huge fortune in those days), the country would have ground to a halt and the economy would have done some very strange things.

Why?

Because your milkman, postman, soldier, sailor, shop assistant, mechanic, nurse, etc., would now be charging you a fortune for their services, or they'd be retired or on holidays, or more likely, seeing the impossibility of getting the other millionaire citizens to service them, they would have fled the country for more salubrious surroundings leaving this country Terra Nullius.

Celibacy...

The new taboo?

Discuss.

Bradley Manning needs your help...

Who is Bradley Manning?

OK, so being a clever little monkey, you've figured out that you can go to the Wikipedia article by clicking on the link above.

Please excuse my sarcasm, but my faith in humans has evaporated. Something to do with too many dying...

Now that we've got the link thing sorted, you might like to [click this one].

Yes, I know the forum was last night. I was there. Listening to two professors (with the help of a not unbiased audience) beating up on a lowly (and lonely) PhD. All in the name of ideological spin. This farce further shattered my faith in humans.

The take-out from this event? For me it was this: Bradley Manning is to be commended for putting his head on the chopping block in order to expose serious crap going down.

But he also shot himself in the foot by also leaking mountains and mountains of classified material which he did not first vet in order to ascertain the justification for leaking same. The forces of darkness are after his blood, and by his indiscriminant leaking of such massive amounts of data, he has handed them his head on a platter. He as made the job of his defence team almost impossible.

The lesson here for any future whistleblower thinking of leaking classified material is this: Go over every inch of the material you intend to leak and make sure that you have rock-solid moral justifications for every bit you intend to leak. Do not leak stuff you have not thoroughly inspected and thought about. Do not leak stuff if you cannot defend the leaking of that stuff with strong moral arguments.

Bradley Manning needs your help... He deserves a fair trial and humane treatment.