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Random Notes - Idle ThoughtsRandom Note — The Monash Forum And What’s in a name?
If the descendants of Sir John Monash are concerned that his good name is being politicised or traduced in some way by the adopting of it by the Monash Forum, they may like to direct their ire towards the university that bears his name and the Antifa inspired, dark, dystopian, anarchic and menacing “Change It” promotional video released this week. It takes loud, ugly, and violent to an entirely new Orwellian dimension
Random Note — The Sunshine Socialists and Renewable Energy
If the members of the Monash Forum are “coal power socialists” as Paul Kelly characterises them, then this must make the recipients of renewable subsidies “sunshine socialists” — Dependent on the weather and unable to stand alone without taxpayer subsidies to prop them up renewables will always be unreliable, unaffordable and niche boutique at best. What’s the difference between funding and building a coal fired power station and funding and building a Snowy 2.0?
Forget Facebook. Google is worse. Far worse. IT expert reveals the extent of the personal data the search giant holds on you — Daily Mail
Forget about Facebook. That’s little league. Google is worse. Much worse. From deleted files to location history, IT expert reveals the extent of the personal data the search giant holds on you. In a series of tweets, one IT expert has laid out exactly what the search giant knows about him, dating back to 2008, which he describes as ‘preposterous’. It ranges from every place he visited in the past year to every website he clicked on, and even contained files deleted from his Google Drive cloud storage account.
Brilliant Writing. Essential Reading — We can’t even keep the national fence posts painted — Greg Sheridan, The Australian
The senate is the problem. It is no longer a house of review but a house of resistance. They see themselves as a shadow government. Greg Sheridan explains “…The Australian affliction today is that our politics has lost all ambition for national development. The only ambition left is for redistribution and virtue signalling on contentious social issues. No leader is addressing the crisis in our political culture. If the Turnbull government should come to an end at the next election, one central question for our national culture would be: what national development have we got from six years of pro-business, pro-development, centre-right government? We are turning against our own national interests, the chief of which is to build a bigger, better, more secure version of ourselves. As GK Chesterton once observed, the true conservative understands that to preserve a white fence post, you cannot leave it alone. You must constantly repaint it. We’ve lost that ability..”
Random Note — George Pell and the media
Although the presiding magistrate Belinda Wallington at Melbourne Magistrates Court, will decide whether George Pell goes to trial or not, watching the media’s unseemly pursuit of Pell, over the last year or two particularly the ABC, and it’s attack dog journalist Louise Milligan, brings to mind a couple of quotes that highlight the media’s agenda.
Lavrentiy Beria, head of Stalin’s secret police: “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime” and Lewis Carroll’s line from Alice in Wonderland: “Sentence first, verdict afterwards”
Random Note — The Media, Cricket, Barnaby Joyce and George Pell (perhaps)
It was only five weeks ago that Barnaby Joyce resigned after being brought down in another hysterical, media pile on and another round of totally out of proportion, confected outrage and a beat up not dissimilar to that that we’ve seen in recent days over the cricket tamper-gate, shock horror, affair. And all because of a mid life crisis doing what millions of others from royalty down through politics, business and ordinary people from the suburbs have done when he ran off with a staffer and got her pregnant. No sense of proportion or perspective.
Decline and fall of the modern political class — Peter Van Onselen, The Weekend Australian
The question is, has the quality of political debate worsened in recent years or was it always this bad? The difference perhaps being that 24-hour news coupled with social media’s direct access to the political class simply exposes problems that always existed. We now see the sausages getting made where once such gruesome details were kept out of view. I lean towards the view that the body politic has worsened, courtesy of a narrowing of the gene pool of who goes into politics coupled with a throwaway consumer culture that has made the public and the media less tolerant of political failures.
Crickets Libertarian Debasement — Paul Collits, Quadrant
One big thing that has changed is the loss of perspective. This is sport. Losing wickets isn’t “tragedy”. Playing cricket isn’t “pressure”. Cricket is not life. But is should still be permitted to say deep things aboutlife. Indeed, it should be expected to do so.
What explains the sea-change that has occurred? There is no doubt that sport has been caught up the sheer awfulness of the corporatisation and the commodification of everything. The contemporary world is monetised to within an inch of its life. From farming – yes always a business but now thoroughly financialised – to government, to the administration of sport, to education. All this has happened to sport just at the time when objective, acceptable standards of behaviour — what constitutes agreed virtue, if you like — have been replaced by relativism as the world’s operating system. Hence the excuses that have rolled out this past week – they all do it, it isn’t really cheating, it doesn’t matter that much, let’s move on” – have currency in many of the institutions that matter, and this is the result of creeping post-modernism. What we have, not just in sport but everywhere, is an operating system where the very notion of virtue is under siege, where values are contingent.
Brilliant Writing, Essential Reading — We can’t even keep the national fence posts painted — Greg Sheridan, The Australian
The Australian affliction today is that our politics has lost all ambition for national development. The only ambition left is for redistribution and virtue signalling on contentious social issues. No leader is addressing the crisis in our political culture. If the Turnbull government should come to an end at the next election, one central question for our national culture would be: what national development have we got from six years of pro-business, pro-development, centre-right government? The Liberals came into office talking about northern development. In six years, what new town has been started in the north? From Brisbane to Cape York, all that water doing nothing. Apart from the narrow needs of some minerals projects, what has the federal government done for northern development at all? When the Coalition was first elected it talked at length about building new dams. What new dams have been built?
Random Note — The racism of The Greens
As we’ve seen in recent days and weeks their outrage over Peter Dutton’s reasonable suggestion concerning Australia accepting white farmers from South Africa as refugees, the Greens couldn’t get past the white bit and unleashed their inner racist.