Posts Tagged ‘politics’
Always look on the bright side….
Okay, trying to stay positive, or push myself into positive mode, what about female leadership on the world stage in these torrid times?
Here in Australia, we’ve had one Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, from 2010 to 2013. It seems, like many of these recent female leaders, she was on the conservative side, for a Labor PM. Most ‘notorious’ at the time was her opposition to same-sex marriage, a view she later changed – after her stint in office. The Marriage Amendment (Definition and Religious Freedoms) Act was finally passed in 2017, during Malcom Turnbull’s period as PM (Turnbull was more liberal than the Liberal party generally). It had been a long struggle beginning in 2004 when the Howard government passed an amendment to the Marriage Act (1961), explicitly excluding same sex unions from being recognised as marriages. I see it as a minor victory for the Bonobo Sisterhood, though I suspect that change will occur through a multiplicity of such minor victories.
Globally, currently we have Sanae Takaichi, PM of Japan, Giorgia Meloni, PM of Italy, Judith Suminwa, PM of the DRC, Mia Mottley, PM of Barbados, Mette Frederiksen, PM of Denmark, Evika Silina, PM of Latvia, Inga Ruginiene, PM of Lithuania, Brigitte Haas, PM of Liechtenstein, Sara Zaafarani, PM of Tunisia, and that’s not a full list – for example Mexico’s current political leader is their President, Claudia Sheinbaum – they don’t have a parliamentary system. Many of these are ‘firsts’ in terms of female leadership in their countries. Never a female leader in the USA of course, and I wouldn’t hold my breath… Canada has had one PM, Kim Campbell, and she didn’t last six months. I think it’s gonna be a long long time… It will take many generations, not years, to recognise the full value of female leadership. And it will need to be collective, not just one female surrounded by pushy male ‘minions’. As I’ve written before, slowly slowly catchee monkey…. a very appropriate term for the bonobo sisterhood, and its brotherly friends.
The big worry at present is that the most powerful and dangerous countries – the USA, Russia and China in particular, seem to be the furthest from female leadership (ok, leaving aside the Middle East). This is hardly coincidental of course. If we can weather the storms created by these macho, bullish nations over the next century or so – a big ask, admittedly – we just might start inching towards a bonobo humanity….
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_elected_or_appointed_female_heads_of_state_or_government
One nation – not so bonobo
I’ve been focussing on global politics, sort of, when I’ve been focussing on politics of late, but what about Australia, my home, and where I’ll be stuck for the rest of my life? – not that I’m complaining. A few glances today, for the first time in a while I’m shamed to say, tells me that everyone, or everyone who posts online, seems to be obsessed with the rise of One Nation, at a time when all the Yank pundits are getting hopeful about MAGA’s decline. I’m hearing about it also at the English conversation class I’m helping to supervise, so …
Headlines include ‘Why is the populist right surging in Australia?’, ‘One Nation is back on top as the most popular political party in Australia’ [One Nation was never anywhere near that position], and ‘Shock poll upending Australian politics’. It all sounds very heady, but I don’t really trust the websites that seem to come up instanter when I start my web search. It always pays to check how old these pieces are – and in fact I’m struggling to find anything recent on youtube. In any case, no federal election is expected for at least another year.
However… as in the USA, wealth has come more and more to dominate politics here, and wealth is rarely on the side of the kind of humanism I’ve long espoused. It’s going to be on the side of the already-rich and exploitative, and of those who can be easily bought. It’s all very depressing.
But what, actually, are One Nation’s policies? No doubt they’re much like Fats Frump’s policies in the US – self-aggrandisement, racism, and various versions of exploitation. And the fact that the party is led by a woman isn’t going to lead to anything pro-bonobo. One Nation’s website tries to be sophisticated – for example it tries to present its ‘policy’ on climate as some kind of reasoned denialism:
We know that the majority of people believe in man-made global warming caused by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. This belief is reinforced by media coverage of events like forest fires and droughts, but government policy needs to rest on the evidence and there is a growing concern about the evidence on which the claims of man-made global warming rests.
It is just too easy to allow our memories, often unreliable, to accept the often repeated claims that it has never been hotter. Given the economic costs, we believe we need to listen to the evidence.
There is of course no growing concern about the evidence. Greenhouse gas levels are increasing – CO2 levels are at more than 428ppm, higher than at any time in the past 2 million years, and it takes no time at all to get that information from reliable, scientific websites. But One Nation makes a policy of disregarding that evidence. It has other ‘interesting’ policies, on abortion (no mention of women there), on COVID-19 and no doubt other vaccinations, on oil and gas (more of course, and nothing about solar), and on firearms (oh dear). No mention of an immigration policy, which is doubtless a wise move. The devil is in what they won’t disclose.
The party achieved peak popularity in mid-2026, and has likely declined alongside Frumpism in the US, but it still has a substantial following, and is doubtless influencing our major right-wing party, the Liberals, to move further in that direction. We live in a much more connected world these days, so I’m guessing that the US mid-terms will affect One Nation’s standing here. The trouble is, I’ve come to be very sceptical of claims that Frump will be badly beaten in the mid-terms. I was listening to all the talk before the 2024 US election, and it led me to believe that the Democrats would win. I also found it ridiculous and shocking that Frump would be allowed to participate in that election, but that’s the USA for you. It’s all a bit depressing….
Finally, what does the term ‘One Nation’ actually mean? That we all should be ‘one’ somehow? All ‘united’? As what? Patriots, presumably? Nationalists? I’m not a nationalist myself, or an anti-nationalist. Australia, under that name, became a British colony because – well, because they stuck a British flag in the ground at Sydney Harbour and said it was British. And later, because it was all too hard to govern this massive land from the other side, they ‘made’ it a separate country. And virtually all countries have these peculiar, ad-hoc histories, most of them far more blood-stained than that of Australia. I’m not proud or ashamed of Australia’s history – I wasn’t there after all, I didn’t help to make it what it is. If circumstances had been a little different my family might have stayed in Scotland and I’d now be trying to work out whether Scotland is or should be a separate country. We’re thrown into this world, as one famous philosopher put it, and for me, the best way to deal with it is to get along as well as we can with those we’re thrown together with. We’re all just trying to make the best of our lives, and we all need help in that. It’s a human thing, not a national thing.
Bonobos, by the way, are quite good at all that stuff.
References
https://www.onenation.org.au/climate
https://wmo.int/news/media-centre/carbon-dioxide-levels-increase-record-amount-new-highs-2024
Female leadership? It needs to find strength in numbers
Sanna Marin, current PM of Finland. The Scandinavians so often set the example
I live in Australia, thankfully, far from the madding crowd of male thugs and bullies in charge of such scary northern hemisphere oligarchies and/or dictatorships as Russia, Iran, the USA, China, Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Afghanistan, Burma, Uzbekistan and Trump’s Venezuela, to name a more or less random few. It really is demoralising to find, as I pass my 70th birthday, that so much of the world is in such a mess, with so little good news to turn to.
Where do our future hopes lie? Not so much in individual female leaders – Japan’s first female PM, Sanae Takaichi, has views described by Wikipedia as ‘conservative or ultra-conservative’, and she apparently wants to be seen as Japan’s ‘Iron Lady’, as she’s a big fan of Margaret Thatcher. Oh dear. At least she has a pro-Taiwan foreign policy. Italy’s first female PM Giorgia Meloni, another ‘right to far right’ leader, was involved in fascist politics in her youth. It almost seems as if female political leaders can’t be trusted, or popular, unless they come from a solidly conservative – that’s to say, male-dominated – part of the political world. Then again, New Zealand has had Jacinda Ardern (PM from 2017 to 2023), and we in Australia had our first and only female PM Julia Gillard (2010-2013). Both were Labour Party leaders. And I think it’s fair to say that Gillard in particular was given a really rough ride because of her gender. Ardern, on the other hand, benefitted, I would think, from being the third female Prime Minister of her country. Their second female PM, Helen Clark, held the post for nine years. This has paved the way, in New Zealand at least, for female leadership being something slightly approaching ‘the new normal’. Another approach has been that of Australia, where I live. It now has 22 women in the Cabinet, the core governing body of our federal system. That’s 55% of the total. By contrast, Margaret Thatcher only ever had one other woman in the cabinet in her 11-year tenure as PM – a Baroness who spent two years in the House of Lords. Currently, 50% of Britain’s Cabinet are women – a record for the country. Gradually, creepingly, the numbers are rising for women in government positions throughout the WEIRD world, and just look at those countries that eschew female political empowerment. They are invariably the world’s worst.
As for the power of the purse, or wallet (or crypto-wallet?) which is massive in that same WEIRD world, that power is still held overwhelmingly, and I do mean overwhelmingly, by men. I could provide the gory details, but surely everyone knows how true this is. Even though my own knowledge of crypto-currency is less than zero, I’m certain that it’s more or less entirely controlled by men, simply because I’m not a complete idiot.
Anyway, leaving that mysterious realm aside, female political empowerment in the future could be a weapon against the Puddings and Frumps of the world. Imagine if the current President of Ukraine was a woman, with a largely female cabinet, how that would play out in terms of global politics and alliances.
Losing our religion is another way we can boost the eternal feminine. Christianity, which is fading fast in Australia, involves the worship of a double male father-and-son act, and in its Catholic form, the next tiers of power are the ever-male Popes or Papas, the ever-male cardinals, the ever-male archbishops, the ever-male bishops and the ever-male priests. How delightfully aberrant. It’s my view that Protestantism was the first step away from that patriarchal religion, and towards atheism.
And then there’s Islam, the most patriarchal of all the world’s long-standing religions, all of which are patriarchal.
The growth of feminism in our global politics and economy, a slow but steady development – would that it were so much quicker – will lead to the increasing isolation of these rogue macho states. Take for example supposedly secular China, which surely has little excuse for its machismo. It has had no women in its 24-member politburo since October 2022, and has never had a woman in its 7-member Standing Committee, the elite body that essentially runs the country, when it’s not a dictatorship, which it arguably is today. But then, Xi PingPong is 73, and Mr Pudding almost a year older, and Frump is 80, I believe. They’ll all be dead soon enough, and the odour of machismo that hangs over the northern hemisphere, like that of a never-cleaned toilet, may just start to fade a little….
some meandering complaints about our world
It’s a well-known fact, though it should be better known, that being super-rich makes you indifferent to the financial struggles of others. Frump, for example, is very crookedly wealthy and takes advice, if he ever takes advice, from wealthy cronies and tries as best he can to place them in positions of power, and yet his impoverished MAGA fans still think he’s the greatest being in the multiverse. Yes, he’s looking bad percentage-wise, but I’m talking about hardcore MAGA fans who will go down with the ship.
This indifference, and selfishness, of the Elon Skums of the world should always be borne in mind when examining your own government and its advisors. Take note, as I have, of libertarian types, as they’re generally into ‘every bloke for himself’ (it’s a very blokey ‘philosophy’, pace Ayn Rand). And, just as an aside, one of the great joys of life consists of telling a libertarian, in no uncertain terms, that ‘free will’ is a myth, and then watching them boil over with rage.
The difficulty of course, with all governments, is that the powerful, aka the rich, are the ones whose voices are most heard. Their voices always rise ‘above the fray’ somehow, and their ‘magical’ wealth always suggests that they have something better to offer to government than any random street protestor.
So what happens when just about everyone in government is super-rich? This happens in Putinland of course, because he’s basically the only one in government, and the same goes for other bizarro ‘governments’ like Turkmenistan and North Korea.
And then there’s the USA…
It’s so hard to ignore that country, it casts its bleak shadow everywhere, especially in the WEIRD world. And of course it has plenty of billionaires, and the biggest rich-poor gap in the west. And considering its extreme jingoism, and ‘rugged individualism’, that’s never going to change. Its Presidential system is the best/worst example of that individualism. It’s basically an elected Kingship – I’m sure I’ll never see a Queen of the USA in my lifetime. And will they learn from the Frump disaster and develop a more distributed, inclusive political power system? Never never never. And I wouldn’t care but they interfere so much with other countries, pushing their weight around so that we have to sully ourselves by negotiating with them. Australia, at least, is at a safer distance than most. We need to keep minding our own business, but that’s hard, and it could be that their next King is reasonable enough to draw us in against our better judgment.
I’m meandering on with this, but it seems to me that the human world has become a more unpleasant place over the last few decades, at least politically. Crises will grow – climate change, the nuclear threat (Hiroshima-Nagasaki is fading in the public memory, and I recently heard someone suggesting nuking Putinland), the failing of internationalism, it all seems to be going the wrong way. I wish I had some decent, non-political focus to take me away from it all, to some calm, steady Lagrange point where I can indulge in purely autistic speculations.
Perhaps I should focus more on the local, Australian scene, but then I’m such a global citizen (sigh), and I suppose I’m too old and set in my income and circumstances (barring some sudden accident or disease, etc) to be too self-concerned. In Australia the arguments are about tax levels, and there is a concern about extreme right movements drawing their ‘inspiration’ from MAGA (I just now typed into Youtube ‘how do I get rid of Sky News from my Youtube feed’ and the result was a whole heap of Sky News videos. I’m not into conspiracy theories, but….). I do have concerns about Australia’s stance re the ridiculous but dangerous Frump declaration of war against Iran, and I worry about the government’s positioning on the David and Goliath Israel-Palestine conflict, with anti-semitism claims being tossed around like confetti. As to domestic politics I suppose I should be ashamed to say I’m mostly woefully ignorant, though the NDIS cuts have caused serious concern among friends with a severely mentally impaired son (a very rare trisomy), and I’m concerned, as I’ve written before, about funding going to private schools from our largely private school-educated MPs. And we also have a rise in MAGA-type noises from the rabid right, which will no doubt subside when Frump carks it.
Anyway, that’s enough meandering, I’ll try ro find something more substantial to write about next time.
See also
On a couple of repulsive dictators, mostly
So in my old age I’m finding that the world is going to pot. Under the circumstances I’m lucky to be living in Australia.
Of course the world is much more than China, or the USA, or Russia (in population order), but these are the potty countries I’m referring to – or to be fairer and more accurate, the countries with the pottiest leaders – that I know of.
China has Xi Jingping, the first of the scumbags – not necessarily in order of scumbuggery. He’s in a battle of sorts with his military leaders, apparently because they’re not being warmongering enough. The USA has Trump – need I say more? And Putin – it’s now more or less official – has failed in his brief military operation against Ukraine, with a loss of men, or drone fodder, coming up to 2 million. Not that psychopaths care about such numbers.
Of these three horrific scenarios, the one I’m probably least willing to look at is the Trump shite. So… well let’s, look at Putinland. I’ve been watching The military show on Youtube, which can get quite technical at times, but they generally present a scenario of Russian failure. This is of course what I want to hear, but I’m also quite skeptical. The Russians surely aren’t this stupid. I’m surprised that Putin has miscalculated so badly, but I just can’t see him giving up after having invested so much in this invasion. And yet… if he had something more substantial to throw at the Ukrainians, leaving aside the nuclear option, he surely would have used it by now. And surely, even Putin’s position must be less secure after such devastating losses.
So… I’ve been watching more of The military show, which presents the devastation being wrought upon Kiev – so maybe they’re not being so one-sided, though it’s clear this is no Russian propaganda show, to put it mildly. I just hope their stuff is accurate. Recently they’ve presented ‘the most dramatic naval upset in modern history’, no less – that being the destruction of Russia’s naval blockade in the Black Sea. Ukraine, as even I knew, has long been a massive wheat and corn exporter to many NATO states, as well as China and other rather powerful countries. When the war started, those exports were reduced by almost 50%, and things were looking very grim for the country’s ability to fund its defences. However Ukraine and its allies appear to have outsmarted and out-manoeuvred the Russians, using mines, artillery and missiles – a ‘defensive triangle’ (watch The military show for details), and then developing its unmanned drone defence/attack systems with a rapidity that has apparently astonished the military world. They seem to be underwater drones, or not, pardon my ignorance, and they were designed to attack en masse. A second iteration of these drones, far more powerful than the first, has been launched successfully, and Ukraine’s exports have more or less completely recovered. And much of this response happened within the first year or so of the war! They’ve described it as ‘one of the most successful blockade-breaking operations in modern history’. Of course, I’m not sure if there’s been much competition – I’m such a spoiler.
So, hats off to Ukraine, in a situation in which the US ‘superpower’ under Frump has been mostly less than helpful, and NATO seemingly bound up by a less than helpful bureaucratic structure. Meanwhile, how is Mr Pudding faring after all these years of anti-Ukraine warfare – arguably starting in February 2014? Well, it seems that, though he’s nowhere near winning, he’s also nowhere near giving up. In fact, it seems he can’t give up after all his rhetoric and all his losses. This just can’t be all for nothing. And that of course is a dangerous situation indeed, because there is only the nuclear option. He can’t win otherwise, he can’t go on forever, but then, how can the nuclear option be a win? It won’t of course, so the whole thing becomes a monument to stubborn stupidity which can only end with the end of Putin. It’s truly tragic for the Ukrainian people, and the Russian people too.
So let’s look at China, which I’ve not really been focussing on (nor Russia really, for why focus on god-awful governments that are far away and you can’t do anything about? Hmmm). One website called China Update has the headline ‘Total Annihilation’, just in case people aren’t paying attention.
So apparently a couple of the top military figures of the country have been arrested by China’s dictator, Xi, and what with other brutalist changes, the military leadership ‘group’ has now been reduced from seven to two – but effectively one. Meanwhile a long-term anti-corruption drive, aka Bullshit Incorporated, has been fuelled by Xi’s paranoia and hubris, and has left ‘command chains fractured and experienced leaders sidelined’, which has supposedly degraded the country’s capacity to ‘conduct complex operations, particularly against Taiwan’. That sounds promising for Taiwan, but my impression over the years has been that Xi really really really wants to attack Taiwan and kill people there, and to do it yesterday. The reports I’m hearing about the situation, though, are confusing and conflicting. He likes ‘anti-corruption’ purges apparently, and he has, over time, trimmed down the political and the military leadership, the latter to just two. All of which can only make one laugh, or cry, at the Orwellian newspeak. We mock the North Korean title for its country – the Korean Democratic Republic – but surely the Chinese government, or leadership, calling its country ‘communist’, is even more risible, considering that communism is meant to be about collective control and sharing of government, labour, resources, etc. On that definition, China must surely be about the least communist nation on the planet, and more than 1.3 billion more Chinese people are being hoodwinked than North Korean people. And surely a large proportion of them know they’re being hoodwinked, but – what can they do? If you’ve lived such a lie all your life, that lie just becomes the reality.
So the number of party members who have been removed or disciplined for corruption during Xi’s rule has increased year on year, and it would be impossible to tell whether this purge has been fair given the lack of oversight of of what is essentially a dictatorship. And according to the video referenced below, Xi has managed to concentrate more power in his own hands, at least militarily, than any previous Chinese dictator of the ‘communist’ era (or at least since Mao, the greatest mass-murderer the world has ever known). He has also presided over a massive increase in military expenditure, with obviously ominous connotations. I mean, what could this ballooning expenditure be for?
I worry for Taiwan, which was experimenting with participatory democracy, according to Jess Scully’s hopeful Glimpses of Utopia.
References
The USA has the worst political system in the democratic world, but they don’t think so
full democracies in v dark green
Okay, so I’ve written along these lines before but I need to double down. The USA has a problem with its history, as well as its national ego. The obvious needs to be pointed out to United Staters – that no other democratic country has ‘no kings’ rallies, because no other democratic country has what is in effect an elected monarchy, with massive pardoning powers, massive immunity, and power to appoint never-elected individuals to positions of great power and impact on the welfare of the state. And he gets to live in a massive white palace surrounded by courtiers for the four or eight years of his reign (and it looks like this king will always be male). Even the judiciary is overly politicised. And there seems to be no limit to the amount of money that can flow to favoured candidates. And yet, ask more or less randomly any bunch of United Staters to name the world’s greatest democracy, and we all know what the answer will be.
Here in Australia, voting is mandatory for citizens of 18 or over. Of course such compulsion is out of the question for ‘the land of the free’, but I do think that mandatory voting does remind us that we’re all in it together, that we’re fundamentally social creatures, and that we would do well to consider seriously the kind of society we want. It is a kind of participation in the broader society, which hopefully should bring us together. But when Australians vote, we vote for a local candidate as well as a set of policies. We don’t vote for anything like a king, or an ‘I alone can fix it’ superhero. As in the USA there are two major parties, but the parties decide on their leader, and they can dump that leader by a simple vote of no confidence if they feel she’s ineffective, or if they feel it’s time for a change, or whatever. She’s like the captain of a soccer team, she’ll be dumped if the team is performing poorly, or if they lose confidence in her leadership and so on. It’s all about collaboration, and the success of the team.
Of course, there is no perfect political system, and reform needs to be ongoing as societies evolve. The White Australia policy, which existed in my lifetime, now strikes us as an embarrassment, and it’s possible that much that seems normal now will strike others as an embarrassment in 60 years time. Maybe by that time the USA will have dumped its monarchy – but probably not.
Change often occurs when a crisis reveals serious problems with a system, and Trump, who is essentially a crime machine, as many have pointed out, has certainly shown how bad a so-called democratic state can get, but there seems to be something in the US psyche, something profoundly insular, and blindly nationalistic, that prevents it from engaging in the kind of root-and-branch reform that outsiders see as necessary.
The Trump saga continues because he hasn’t suffered a moment’s harm from the criminal convictions against him, in a nation that has the highest per capita incarceration rate of any democracy, by a very large margin. The only other countries with a higher rate are El Salvador, Cuba, Rwanda and Turkmenistan, but it’s unlikely that most United Staters are aware of this revealing fact. It seems clear that those being incarcerated are not the ultra-wealthy, a tiny minority that wields a highly disproportionate degree of power. The vast rich-poor gap and the high incarceration rate are clearly related.
This is a nation that really struggles to be clear-sighted about itself. Its influence on South Korea’s type of democratic system – an imperialistic Presidency, rather than the more party-based, team-focussed system more or less successfully used in Australia and other Westminster-style democracies, has been disastrous, as it would be anywhere else. It’s my own view that even many of these variants of democracy are too individually-focussed. We need governments to be as collaboratively and inclusively based as it is possible to be. We need to reduce, as far as is humanly possible, the old left-right divide, in which one government dismantles the policies of its predecessors, only to have its policies dismantled in turn, often at great cost to the public at large. A more inclusive and collaborative system, devoid of ‘I alone can fix it’ hubris, must surely be the politics of the future, but that future, I admit, seems distant. There are few nations following this model, and if they are, they’re largely being ignored by the rest. I can’t pretend to be an expert on global political systems, but I suspect that some Scandinavian systems are heading in the right direction. I shall look at some of those systems in future posts.
I’ve referenced below an interesting 2020 survey by Wurzburg University, ‘Ranking of Countries by Quality of Democracy’, which tends to confirm those suspicions. The top 5 countries, in order, are Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden and Germany (perhaps a bit of local bias for number five!). These countries, along with the next 30, are classified as ‘working democracies’. The next country, number 36, the USA, is the first of the ‘deficient democracies’. Few people in the USA would agree, of course.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate
Rutger Bregman’s Reith lectures – an amateur commentary. Lectures 1 & 2
As I’m thinking of picking Rutger Bregman’s Humankind as my 2025 book of the year, I noticed, through browsing someone else’s youtube feed, that he has delivered this year’s Reith Lectures. I listened to the first lecture today, but due to a surfeit of Christmas cheer I was barely able to make sense of it. I also don’t really know what the Reith Lectures are supposed to be about, so let me start there.
They’re a BBC thing, named for Johnny Reith, first BBC director-general, and a Lord and a Baron and such, though whether he became the BBC’s D-G because he was a Lord and Baron, or vice-versa, I don’t want to know. Anyway the inaugural lecturer was old Bertie Russell back in ’48, so that was definitely a good start. Apparently the topic can be anything that ‘enriches the intellectual and cultural life of the nation’ – and presumably other nations too.
Humankind had a very international, humanist approach to society and its problems which certainly gave me something to hope for, what with Putin, Trump, Gaza and such, so I’m sure these lectures will be worth listening to. However, he warned that the first lecture would be focussing on the bad stuff – the problems before the possible solutions. So, in this lecture he talks about the survival [and thriving] of the shameless. ‘A time of monsters’, he calls it, after Antonio Gramsci. According to Bregman, focussing on the USA, we’re hearing a lot of BS from private companies as well as the giant, prestigious educational institutions about the great example they’re setting in corporate citizenship. It’s hard for me to make a judgment, as I live on a different planet, but it’s obvious that big tech, big oil and the like spend vast amounts in trying to convince us of their wonderfulness, while global warming accelerates, the rich-poor gap widens, and many basic needs, such as housing and healthcare, are left unmet.
What Bregman seems to be emphasising in this first of, I think, four talks, in which he quite deliberately discusses fascism, a term that I notice is beginning to be used almost favourably by some, is the rise of corporations answerable to nobody, and able to buy and manipulate politicians, and whole political parties, to particular ends. This is particularly evident in the US, while Europe is mostly overwhelmed and dithering, unable to choose between opposing or placating. Bregman puts the situation in neat soundbites regarding the self-serving nature of elites – ‘a meritocracy of ambition without morality, intelligence without integrity’. Those with integrity, he claims, are outnumbered, though I think it’s better to say that they’re outmanoeuvred, due to inequalities of wealth and power. There are many who are so powerless that they simply aren’t counted or considered. In any case, he finishes this lecture with a call to a moral revolution. Of course – we just can’t continue like this. So, on to the second lecture.
The abolitionist movement, something that comes up in my reading of Darwin’s life, notably his disagreements with the great US botanist Asa Gray during the 1860s and their Civil War – Darwin being a fierce abolitionist, not much interested in the nuances of north-south USA politics – that’s the major topic of Bregman’s second lecture.
I should point out here something fairly obvious – that I’m summarising, perhaps badly, these lectures entirely for my own edification. The lectures are available online and it would of course be better to watch them than to read me. Oh, that’s right, nobody reads me.
Bregman does a good line in soundbites – this is about seriousness v laziness, determination v apathy, good v evil, and so on – that’s how he starts each lecture, with a nice optimism, or at least hopefulness. Humanism, no less. So he starts the lecture with the downfall of the decadent Tzarist regime in Russia and the horror of the Bolshies, with the ideologue Lenin giving way to Stalin the nihilist terrorist. But then remember the goodies – Florence Nightingale, Louis Pasteur, the suffragettes, Norman Borlaug and the green revolution. He then quotes Margaret Mead, very nicely:
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.
I’m writing this largely for my own sake, to focus on the important stuff, as I’m going through some personal difficulties at the moment, and focussing on these global issues is a help and reminder.
Bregman, though, is following up on Mead’s remark, and the individuals and groups who made a positive impact. So while the current ‘unravelling’ of humanism is going on in Gaza, in Ukraine and in the US, he takes us back to late 18th century Britain – the ‘redemption’ part of his ‘three-part sermon’ (his words), ‘misery, redemption and thankfulness’. Interestingly, he wants to focus on those individuals and ‘small groups’ aforementioned, rather than the larger forces such as the ‘scientific revolution’ or ‘democratisation’, and as I come to the end of Janet Browne’s second volume of Darwin biography, The Power of Place, I recognise Darwin as one of those individuals, who risked so much, especially at the beginning, to bring attention to our connection with all other life forms…
So the anti-slavery movement of the late 18th century was essentially British. Britain was for a time the largest slave-owning and trading nation, Liverpool being its major trading centre. This trade rose with the British Empire itself, but the backlash, according to Bregman, was sudden and surprising. Starting with a small London-based group of twelve men, the anti-slavery movement took hold throughout the island surprisingly quickly, and nowhere else, at least at the time. The whole of the US economy was based on slavery well into the 19th century, and Britain was heavily involved in the slave trade in previous centuries, but it was British pressure that ended the slave trade in Europe. Bregman describes this anti-slavery push as weird and unlikely, more or less coming out of nowhere:
In the summer of 1787, it spread up and down the country like wildfire. It was all over the newspapers and in the coffee houses there was talk of little else.
No sure how Bregman knows this, but he goes on to mention how impressed Alexis de Tocqueville, himself an apostle of equality, was by the speed and brilliance of the movement.
In Bregman’s account, it was all about those 12 black-hatted men and their meeting in that year, 1787, to initiate perhaps the world’s first human rights campaign. It’s easy for us, in retrospect, to see slavery as morally repugnant and patently unjust, and yet, clearly, this was not the general attitude in the ‘free’ USA of the 1860s, nor in the thoroughly Catholic Spanish colonies that Darwin visited, and was appalled by, in his Beagle days. Bregman emphasises the lack in Europe of anything like the anti-slavery movement in Britain. It was only British pressure, apparently, that slowly turned the tide. Or not so slowly:
The Royal Navy launched a massive campaign against the slave trade, which would go down in history as ‘the blockade of Africa’. It has been described as the most expensive international moral effort in modern history. Two thousand slave ships were seized and 200,000 enslaved people freed. Researchers have estimated that direct British efforts brought about the eradication of 80% of the global slave trade.
No wonder Chaz Darwin could consider himself at the pinnacle of the most civilised nation on the planet, tut-tutting at his less benign neighbours’ treatment of the world’s savages. But I judge from a world well into the 21st century, changed mightily by the ground-breaking work of Darwin and others.
Bregman feels that today, the west’s best and brightest are generally not driven by solutions to climate change, the next pandemic or democratic collapse, that’s to say, ethical or humanitarian issues – and my own limited experience of the young and bright chimes with this, I must say. And yet the British abolitionist movement, according to Bregman, was largely an entrepreneurial one – with William Wilberforce, something of a Johnny-come-lately, being given much of the credit. Deserving of more attention was Thomas Clarkson, the youngest founder of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. His involvement started at Cambridge, when he won a prize for his essay on the topic, which may have started as a vanity project, but afterwards consumed his life. Other experts claim that Clarkson was the ne plus ultra of British abolitionism.
So the late 18th century was a time of decline, according to Bregman. There was of course the French Revolution and its subsequent reign of terror, and in Britain, parliamentary drunkenness and decadence was commonplace, and George IV, who became Prince Regent in 1811, was notoriously repulsive. London had gained a reputation as the world’s sex capital – petty theft for young men and boys, prostitution for young women and girls. Public executions were a popular spectacle, and mistreatment of animals was in vogue – foreigners were horrified at the decadence.
So it was within this context that the abolitionist movement – of Quakers and other evangelicals – evolved. And according to Bregman, it was all about practising good behaviour. He ends this second talk by advertising his own project – ‘The school for moral ambition’ – something to raise us out of the mire of selfishness, incompetence, ethnic hatreds, greed, callousness, dishonesty and indifference that makes the news so hard to follow these days.
And so ends his second lecture.
women and leadership in Australia, etc
Australia currently has a Labor government with a larger number of women in the cabinet than at any time in its history…. but before I go into that – why Labor and not Labour, the general English (ie British) spelling? It’s a minor issue, but I’m torn between a dislike of the USA and its fulsome jingoism, and a preference for simplified spelling (labor, color, etc). Apparently, back in the 1880s, the trade union movements that went on to form the Labour/Labor party were enamoured of a number of US texts such as Edward Bellamy’s utopian socialist novel Looking backward. The USA had over time adopted the simpler spelling, perhaps largely due to the impact of the 1828 Webster dictionary of American English, while Australian spelling, at least of that particular word, had/has been equivocal. Theories vary, but some have pointed out the usefulness of distinguishing between Labor, the party, and the labour movement in general, with its appropriately labourious (actually laborious) spelling.
But back to women. There are 23 members of the Federal Cabinet, including the PM and Deputy PM. Twelve of them are women, and I vaguely wonder whether the leaders, such as Albanese, Marles, Wong and, say, Plibersek, tried to arrange it so that they would just manage to have more women than men, to create some kind of record for the books. Margaret Thatcher apparently had no women at all in her cabinet in eleven years as British PM, and the new, first-ever female PM in Japan, Sanae Takaichi, is apparently a big Thatcher fan. She has, at least, appointed two women to her cabinet, which has rather disappointed the media there. The USA’s Congress is currently 28.65% female (155 women in House and Senate), and a significant majority of them are Democrats. Their numbers are way up compared to 30 and 40 years ago.
So Australia is at the forefront of creeping changes in the political empowerment of women. I should also mention that the current leader of the Liberal opposition is a woman, Sussan Ley, and that our PM, Anthony Albanese, was brought up in a single-parent family, which very much helps to explain his faith in female leadership.
Female political empowerment, in Australia as elsewhere in the WEIRD world, has been slow, too slow from the perspective of one lifetime, but steady. We had our first and only PM, Julia Gillard, from 2010 to 2013, and before that we had female state leaders, starting with Rosemary Follett in the ACT in 1989, then Carmen Lawrence (WA) and Joan Kirner (Victoria) in 1990. In 2001 Clare Martin became Chief Minister in the Northern Territory, and in 2007 Anna Bligh became Premier of Queensland. In 2011 Kristina Keneally became the first female Premier of NSW and Lara Giddings became the first female Premier of Tasmania. Finally, in 2015 Annastacia Palaszczuk became Queensland’s second female Premier.
From all this, one might think female leadership has become run-of-the-mill here, and that ‘patriarchy’ is over, but that’s definitely not true. Of the six current state Premiers, only one, Victoria’s Jacinta Allan, is female, and that’s a fairly standard situation, though interestingly the Northern Territory’s most recent three Chief Ministers have been women. My home state of South Australia is the only state that has never had a female Premier.
There’s also the question of economic power. The mining sector, which is of course male-dominated, is the most fundamental sector in our export economy. Domestically, there’s a persistent gender pay gap, and a lower participation in the workforce vis-à-vis women, with men holding more senior positions. Business leadership and related wealth generation continues to be overwhelmingly male. AI (never lies) tells me that ‘men have approximately 40% more net wealth than women’, but, though I know I should worship the never-lying god, this time I’m skeptical. Wealth is surely about far more than salary. The world’s, and Australia’s, wealthiest are not ‘paid’, their financial worth is not so easily measured. And they are overwhelmingly male, without a doubt – but I value my life too much to try and uncover the murky details.
Of course, if we think in terms of centuries – not a long time in the scheme of things – women have come a long way, all over the WEIRD world. From being largely barred from universities in the early 20th century, they now head departments, even in the so-called ‘hard sciences’. They’re prominent in the judiciary, and in law generally, and in medicine, journalism, the media, the arts and so on. In fact the changes have been so great in the last couple of lifetimes, I’d love to see how things are in 2225, if humanity is still kicking….
Perhaps by then we’ll have realised how vitally important female leadership is for the survival of just about everything that lives on this planet.
References
Conservative Christianity is strange
choose your messiah
I’m not a Christian and never have been, though I was sent to a Salvation Army Sunday School every week, from about the ages of six to ten, where I listened with bewilderment to very serious stories about our father in heaven, who made us and loves us and who we should be endlessly grateful to for our existence, and who knows our every thought, and who will punish us for our bad deeds, and who is everywhere though he lives in heaven, which is in the sky somewhere, and we should pray to him regularly, because then he’ll know that we love him, though he doesn’t really need our love because he is omnipotent and omniscient and words like that, and he had a son who lived for a while on earth, but that’a another story.
It all sounded pretty unlikely to me, but it was actually scary how seriously these Salvation Army people took it all. However the Jesus stuff seemed a bit more comprehensible, as mostly he seemed to be a real person who lived long ago preaching kindness and forgiveness and telling stories about good deeds and healing the sick and saying nice things about the meek and the weary and the heavy-laden. His being the son of this invisible all-seeing and all-knowing god bloke didn’t make much sense, except that he also performed miracles like his Dad, who miraculously created the whole world. But what seemed to make sense was that Jesus was like some model human being, a kind of example to us all as to how to live a good life.
Which brings me back to conservative Christianity, especially in the USA, where Christianity holds sway more than in any other putatively Christian nation. Interestingly, the two countries I’m most associated with, Scotland, where I was born, and Australia where I’ve long lived, are both leading the field in abandoning that religion, doubtless due to my enlightening, or baleful, influence.
The question being, was Jesus, as portrayed in the gospels, a conservative?
Some years ago, during Trump’s first term, I went to a meet-up, of sorts, called ‘deep thinkers’, which turned out to be a bit of a joke. At the bar I encountered a bloke who I deemed to be of Middle Eastern origin (I had a lot of Arabic-speaking students at the time, and he looked similar), and we talked briefly about his work in computing. Then I asked him where he was from. ‘Port Pirie’, he said – pointedly, it seemed to me. Oops, he didn’t want to be considered a ‘foreigner’, presumably. Then, more or less out of the blue, he announced that Donald Trump was the greatest President in US history. Well, I never. He also described himself as a conservative Christian – I can’t recall which announcement came first, but the combo immediately linked Jesus and Trump in quite a curious way.
Years ago in either this or a previous blog, I wrote, over a number of posts I think, an analysis, of sorts, of the gospels, influenced no doubt by the classical scholar Robin Lane Fox, especially his books The unauthorized version: truth and fiction in the Bible, and Pagans and Christians. There are many difficulties – different translations soften or ‘beautify’ the original language, the gospel of John differs markedly in its account from the synoptic gospels, some events, such as ‘the woman taken in adultery’ (John 7:53–8:11), are later interpolations, and the whole Christmas day as the birth of Jesus thing is of course spurious. Arguably, the Jesus character is full of contradictions – ‘blessed are the peacemakers’ on the one hand, and ‘I come not to bring peace but a sword …. to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother’, etc, on the other. But generally I’ve always preferred the ‘gentle Jesus meek and mild’ version – I mean, who wouldn’t?
But again I ask myself, did he preach conservative values? Not consistently. If this means ‘family values’, I’ve just quoted his words against them. In another speech he says ‘Whoever reviles his father and mother must surely die’, which doesn’t leave much room for nuance – but then again, everyone must surely die, so it’s a bit meaningless. And what if the mother of X is an axe-murderer and the father of X is a whore?
Anyway, I was wanting to argue that conservative Christianity is self-contradictory but now I’m not so sure, since Jesus himself is not as coherent a character as might have been hoped. My vague image of him wandering around Judea barefoot, healing the sick, telling stories about good Samaritans, changing water into booze, and encouraging little children to come to him, for some reason, is one of a well-meaning, slightly eccentric Mr Nice Guy, a bit pompous at times, but, according to his many portraits, quite nice-looking in a pleasantly effeminate, and surprisingly non-Jewish, non-Levantine way.
So I like to take the view that Jesus was a nice guy who mostly promoted peace and love, so I wondered at this conservative Christian being a fan of Donald Trump. Surely no Christian, conservative or otherwise, could possibly see ‘Old Shitmouth’, as a like to call him, as bearing any resemblance to their religious hero. And yet, my Christian interlocutor did talk about ‘illegal people’ on the USA’s southern border – this at a time when the news was full of children being locked in cages in southern Texas. I have to say that I was so flabbergasted that someone who was so keen to announce to me that he was a Christian should talk about people being ‘illegal’ in any sense, that I was rendered speechless. Much later, the Yiddish term trepverter, picked up from a Saul Bellow novel, came to mind. It’s about thinking of a smart retort, or comeback line, after the moment has passed – though for me it was less a retort than a disquisition on the legality and legitimacy of all creatures great and small, because, after all, the Lord God made them all….
And that’s the point – many of the biggest US supporters of old Shitmouth label themselves as conservative Christians, which raises the question of what Christianity actually means to them. Love thy neighbour? Blessed are the peacemakers? It can’t mean these things. It must mean that sword stuff, the crucesignati, the fight to death against the infidels – with Old Shitmouth as their Dear Leader….
From this distance, in Australia, it’s tragicomedy on a grand scale. We shall see how it all ends…
dithyrambs and dead ends….
So how does the great, yet still prospective, Trumpian dynasty finally establish itself as the ne plus ultra of all dynasties Americanian? How does it rid itself of the pestilence of the other? There is surely much work to be done. The current, almost too-belated and yet still maligned Apollinian leadership must, in its height and depth, ensure that the Dionysian dithyrambs of the soi-disant ‘Democratic’ canaille be rendered down to their most lassitudinous level, a level to which they are all-too naturally inclined. These untermensch have stained the great Americanian nation and threatened its proper and all-too-deserving ubermensch place in the political and all-essential financial world for too long, and their grave must not be risen from.
Voting, I can assure you, does not occur in heaven. What purpose would it serve but to lower standards? And when heaven is created on Earth, there is nothing for it but to celebrate, and fill ourselves with the love of the eternal. But we must have keepers at the gate, and be ever-vigilant regarding the enemies within, for in this soiled world impurities lurk everywhere, even our heavenly corner is not entirely safe, and nothing is forever, though we must strive to maintain our dynasty as thoroughly enriched as it could possibly be, as a haven against the levelling forces of inferiority.
So let’s have no more polling, and no more useless, disruptive, and profoundly unvisionary dissent. We are better than this. The future is already here. We will never dismantle it.
Okay, enough of the bullshit. I’m thinking, if that’s what it’s called, of doing a course in economics, to try and understand how the super-rich get away with paying far far less than their fair share of taxes, and what can be done to change this, and how it is that the US can have a national debt of over $37 trillion and yet be described as the world’s richest nation or biggest economy or whatever. According to AI, which never lies, the US has a projected deficit for the 2025 fiscal year of about $1.9 trillion. A fiscal year is apparently a 12-month annual accounting period, with the dates varying from country to country. In Australia it’s from July 1 to June 30, and I always thought that dating was a global thing, so parochial and untravelled am I.
I recently watched, with some skepticism I must say, a video recounting the fall of empires – that of Rome, Spain, Britain, Russia and – just stay tuned – the USA. It argued, in a rather pat and I should say smug way, that they all followed precisely the same pattern and the USA would inevitably follow suit. Obviously, being a 20-minute video it was a wee bit short on detail, but of course it was broadly correct in that no empires, or dominant nations, last forever. One thing it didn’t mention of course was the USA’s nuclear arsenal – or that of Russia. Both of these countries will remain a massive global threat for as long as those arsenals are maintained, and there’s absolutely no sign of them being dismantled in the foreseeable.
I was told today by a woman in the conversation class I help to facilitate – all the attendees were Japanese, as it happened – that Japan now has its first female Prime Minister. How did I miss that? Does she wear high heels? Anyway, it’s a good sign, But Sanae Takaichi, the new PM, has only 2 women in her 19-member cabinet. Then again, Margaret Thatcher never had a single female in her cabinet in her eleven and a half years as PM. Australia’s current 23-member cabinet under Anthony Albanese features 12 women – the first-ever female dominant cabinet in our history, and likely a world record for Prime Ministerial governments. Can’t wait for it to be the first female-only one. Sigh. But it’s interesting that Japan has a Prime Ministerial system, which I tend to associate with English-speaking, Westminster-based political entities. Clearly the fact that it still has a monarch, or emperor, and feels a strong need to maintain that imperial link as fundamental to its history, would make a constitutional system like that of Australia, and of course Britain, very appealing.
So the emperor plays much the same ceremonial role as the monarch in Britain and the Governor-General in Australia, but I note that Japan hasn’t gotten on board with female succession, unsurprisingly, being one of the most patriarchal nations in the developed world. This could cause problems in the slightly distant future, as current Emperor Naruhito, in his mid-sixties, has no sons. He does have a daughter, Princess Aiko, but it’s claimed that his nephew, the young Prince Hisahito, is being groomed to take the throne when the time comes. Now, I’ve mentioned that Japan is quite patriarchal, but feminism is certainly raising its voice there, and I’m hearing it. A lot of women are not happy that the succession is not going to Princess Aiko, which would create the first Japanese Empress. Modernising to maintain an ancient tradition – sounds perfectly cromulent to me.
Continuing on the feminism theme, I wrote recently on wealth-is-power, wondering just how much wealth/power is in the hands of women. My vague guess was 1% female compared to 99% male. AI (never lies) tells me that 86.5% of billionaires are male, 16.5% are female. There are no trillionaires as yet (which is why autocorrect thinks I’ve made a mistake in writing the word), but they’re getting there. Anyway I’m guessing that the 1% figure is still correct, as it’s likely most of the females on the list are thoroughly impoverished compared to the top males. Female empowerment is all very well but let’s not get ridiculous.
Economics is a subject of some interest to me, and I’m wondering if I might do a thorough study of it my old age. Courses are available at the usual institutions, but unfortunately not for the impoverished. Funny that. Meanwhile there’s economics talks on youtube which might be worth commenting on, so that’s a start – but the news is, we don’t have to worry about trying to work out how to make money or regulate our economies, whether we be families, nations or planets, because never-lying AI will be doing it all for us, so effectively that we won’t be needing economists or indeed humans. The BBC World Service, no less, has kindly informed us that artificial intelligence will ‘go rogue’ by 2027, leading to human extinction about ten years later. I’ll be only about 81 or so by then – way too young to die… but then, I’ll be in great company. Maybe that’s what happened to all those dead exoplanets out there….
References
Friedrich Nietzsche, The birth of tragedy
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c751z23n3n7o
https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-general/japanese-monarchy-0016250
AI2027: Is this how AI might destroy humanity? – BBC World Service