Australian Politics
Cutting off your thumbs to spite your country
This is an important article. It notes the constant nagging attacks on our society from the Left and asks will those criticisms cause young people to think our country is not worth defending? It is clearly a possibility
The truth is that our country is a great triumph of civilization but no media will say that. They would be condemned as "racist" if they did.
The Trump phenomenon shows that at least half of the American population have not bought the negative view of their country preached by the media. One can only hope that there are similar large numbers of unblinded people in Australia
Wallace Breem’s 1970 novel Eagle in the Snow is a really excellent read that I couldn’t recommend more highly, and the work upon which the 2000 film Gladiator was loosely based. This Maximus, a Roman general holding the Rhine before the barbarian migrations of the late fourth century, must shoulder the heavy duty of protecting a civilisation that has lost any conception of itself. He faces young men who have cut off their thumbs to avoid conscription, middle-aged bureaucrats who impede him at every turn seeking to enrich themselves, and old priests who extol the brotherhood of man. ‘Cross the river,’ says Maximus, ‘and find out what your brothers are like.’ I won’t spoil the ending for you; pick it up if you can.
The image of young men severing their own thumbs, rendering themselves incapable of wielding gladius or pilum, left a lasting impression on me, one that was brought recently to mind by an apocryphal story regarding the Ukrainian ambassador. This worthy was asking local high school students who would join the Australian military, should the need arise, and was disappointed by the spattering of hands that appeared. It would seem his concern is well documented: the ADF report that they are struggling to gain recruits and retain soldiers. This is not unique to us down under, as the United States army expects to be twenty thousand recruits short next year. There’s something in these sorts of stories, apocryphal or otherwise, as there are in all the stories we tell ourselves, and we ought to be perhaps a little careful what those stories are. We might consider a little more Thucydides and a little less, well, whatever you receive when you tune in to what our culture presently manufactures.
None of this should cause any eyebrows to rise among those who’ve been paying attention. The schools are the right place to start asking questions and investigating stories, not because the young have any special claim to wisdom – they absolutely do not – but because if you want to know what Australia will look like in the future, that’s where you should look. Those who aren’t here today, as Mark Steyn said, won’t be here tomorrow. Those that are here today are manifestly very different from those who made up the schools even thirty years ago, courtesy of our ill-thought-out and entirely flippant leap into multiculturalism. And as all multiculturalism is premised on the belief, now all but mandatory, that the state of affairs that pre-existed it was irredeemably evil, it’s unsurprising that few want to fight for it, and fewer still want to die for it. Those who do are typically Anglo-Celtic males, whose very existence appears a little problematic according to certain narratives presently in vogue.
We, a nation increasingly propositional in ideation and multicultural in composition, don’t tell the right stories to make the hands fly skyward. All that’s left to love, for the everyman, is ease of living and money to be made, and it doesn’t seem like those are a given anymore, either. On the other hand, the only Australia our elites seem to think matters is the Australia that doesn’t exist yet, an Australia severed from the past and couched in banal progressive sentiments, the Australia imagined by the most fervent university professor, ABC journalist, or member for the Greens. It’s an Australia that could never be born, and even if it could be created, wouldn’t be one worth dying for. The young know this, and this is why their hands do not shoot upwards when asked – why they have, in equivalent terms, cut off their thumbs.
As we tend to address collapsing birthrates, shortfalls in labour or consumption, and the ever-upward valuation of property via opening the valves of endless migration, it’s not unfair to assume answers to our military problems might come from the same source; hence a recent proposal to reimport kanakas, with Austeyr rifles instead of machetes, despite how poorly that went down last time. Hoping for a reimagined version of the foederati – those tribes that were bound to defend Rome but weren’t citizens – to fight our wars might seem a sound plan. After all, Stilicho was a barbarian, and Honorius a Roman. Many Australians from various backgrounds fought bravely in the past, like Billy Sing in Gallipoli, to name only one. But we live in different times now, and the age of the citizen-soldier is gone. The difference then was not merely numbers, but that we gave those characters – as Rome gave Stilicho, even in those darkening days – something to love and aspire to. The ‘citizen’ part of the equation is important, and robust citizenship cannot spring from contempt for a nation’s past.
The truth is that we think we can hold onto the status quo, a status quo that has been predicated on the Anglosphere’s overwhelming advantages, without being prepared to make sacrifices. The fate of those who espouse naive principles in the face of power is that of the Melians in the Peloponnesian War, who badly needed their Dorian brothers across the sea rather than a ‘great mass of words nobody would believe’. That is no argument against principles; rather, an exhortation that we ought to be careful our body politic is composed of strong ones, and not prey to bad ones.
The funeral oration by Pericles, where Thucydides relates that the men of Athens meet danger with a light heart but laborious training, has been thrown about as the best defence of democracy from the ancient world. If one thing could be said of the Athenians, it was that they loved their flawed city-state, and were unselfconscious about it. Even the metics, for whom they threw open their city, were expected to serve, if they could never be citizens by simple matter of course, nor form the mainstay of the trireme crew or the hoplite phalanx. The franchise was alive, and mattered, and we take the word ‘idiot’ from the Ancient Greek for he who was willing to let politics wash over him.
The value of such a spirit is not to be expressed in words, as Pericles exhorted; and we must wonder if our modern spirit, a motley collection of bad principles with no purchase among the young, is worth anything at all.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/cutting-off-your-thumbs-to-spite-your-country/
**************************************************Mike O’Connor: I’ve had a gutful of being told by governments what’s good for me
As a child, I would sit for hours with my grandmother on the wooden bench seats circling the main arena at the Ekka and watch the sheepdog trials.
Occasionally, an errant sheep would prop and stubbornly refuse to be intimidated by the dog’s constant urging and cajoling, but in the end, the dog always won and the flock would allow itself to be herded into the pen.
We’ve become like the sheep at the Ekka – constantly herded, urged and cajoled into accepting positions that governments tell us are good for us without bothering to ask us what we think.
The latest victims of herding are Victorians, who with Dodgy Dan Andrews snapping at their heels, have been told that they can’t have a gas stove in their new house.
Anyone with an IQ exceeding their shoe size knows that this will have zero effect on the world’s environment – but don’t argue. Just do as you are told.
Farmers throughout the eastern states are being herded into submission by power companies threatening to compulsorily acquire sections of their land holdings to allow the construction of giant transmission towers on their properties.
The lines could be run underground but this would be more expensive, so sorry, we’re going to trash the value of your property because it’s cheaper for us that way.
Don’t argue. Just get out of the way as we march towards net zero.
Net zero will never happen in the lifetime of anyone reading this but the sheepdogs have worked themselves into an absolute frenzy, racing from one side of the paddock to the other as they herd us into the belief that we can attain the unattainable.
All that is required is a blind acceptance of the absurd.
In the cities and suburbs, we are being herded into the belief that we need taller and taller apartment buildings, crammed wall to wall in defiance of the planning restrictions imposed by neighbourhood development plans to solve the “housing crisis”.
Can you recall a city council election in which the parties campaigned on a platform of promising to ignore planning restrictions, cram as many apartments as possible into any given space and comprehensively ignore any effect on the quality of life of ratepayers so that developers could make lots more money and the council could rake in extra fees and rates?
Neither can I.
Don’t argue. Just roll over and cop it with the council safe in the knowledge that any sheep that refuse to budge will be forced into the pen by the massive expense involved in challenging these decisions in the courts.
The sheepdogs had a great time during Covid, police officers and health officials snapping and snarling at our heels as they herded us into our homes, threatening dire consequences for those sheep who refused to go into the pen in a blatant, nationwide abuse of power.
We are now being gradually herded towards an acceptance of converting place names from English to Indigenous dialects.
Why? Is that what the majority of the population wants? I can’t recall being asked.
The sheep dogs have also barked and wheedled us into enduring and accepting endless welcome-to-country ceremonies.
Why? It’s my country. I don’t need to be welcomed to it. I was born here. My parents were born here. It’s mine and I object to being treated as a stranger in my own home.
The Voice campaign stands out as one of the greatest herding scenarios since the first sheepdog trotted down a gangplank in Old Sydney Town and started harassing terrified sheep way back when.
Much to the surprise of the dogs, however, more than one sheep has stood its ground and refused to be herded into the Yes pen.
This was not supposed to happen. When the dogs snapped at their hind quarters, the flock was supposed to trot into the pen without question.
For daring to stare down the dogs, holding their ground and refusing to be cajoled and bullied, they have been branded as very bad un-Australian sheep.
The extension of government power into our lives, the presumption that we will meekly submit to being told what we must accept without question has been incremental.
We are snowed with faux science, directed to “do the right thing”, toe the line, feel the “vibe”, whatever that is and generally cop whatever Big Brother says is good for us.
Quite frankly, I’ve had a gutful of it.
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The ABC is sticking to its wrong call
No admission that they could have got it wrong. They are Leftists and Leftists have a soft spot for Communist regimes so they are still trying to protect China
New claims that America’s leading infectious diseases adviser Anthony Fauci downplayed concerns that Covid-19 originated from a laboratory will not be acknowledged by the ABC’s Media Watch program and its host Paul Barry until a lab leak “proves to be the source of the Covid-19 outbreak”.
Since the pandemic began, the TV presenter has on numerous occasions been highly critical of Sky News host Sharri Markson’s reporting, including concerns in the science and intelligence community that a lab leak was plausible.
A world exclusive by Markson published in The Weekend Australian on Saturday included her interview with Robert Kadlec, former assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the US Department of Health.
Dr Kadlec said that he, Dr Fauci and National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins had discussed how they could “turn down the temperature” on accusations against China during the early days of the pandemic.
Dr Kadlec, in his first ever interview, told Markson that they tried to encourage a group of leading international scientists to reduce speculation about the origins of the virus. In a phone call on February 1, 2020, the scientists discussed concerns that SARS-CoV-2 looked like it might have been genetically engineered.
“When we talked about this in advance of that call, he (Fauci) would just try and see if he could get the scientists to take the temperature down, turn the rhetoric down, to at least find, we’re going to look into this, but we don’t know,” Dr Kadlec told Markson.
The Australian contacted Barry about the latest revelations on the weekend, but he did not respond. However, Media Watch executive producer Timothy Latham responded on his behalf in an email: “As Paul has previously said, if the Wuhan lab proves to be the source of the Covid-19 outbreak, we will update viewers and apologise to Ms Markson for our criticism.”
He included a link to an article The Australian published in 2021 asking Barry if he would acknowledge fresh allegations that were revealed in a Sky News documentary, What Really Happened in Wuhan, presented by Markson.
In a Media Watch segment on May 5, 2020, Barry dismissed Markson’s initial reporting on the origins of Covid-19 and repeatedly used the phrases “conspiracy theories” and “conspiracy theorists”, finishing his segment by saying: “Conspiracy theories like this are so hard to kill.”
He told viewers in the same report: “So how likely is it that the virus escaped from that Chinese lab? Well in short, it’s not.”
Among those to initially refute claims the virus could have originated from a lab leak was the ABC’s health expert Dr Norman Swan who in 2020 said he had “looked into this and other journalists have looked into this as well as scientists and there really is very little evidence”. “It’s on the outer bounds of possibility, but really so unlikely that you could say … it’s not the case,” he said.
However in May 2021 he said “in recent weeks alternate views of the sequencing have emerged which are quite compelling and a growing number of respected scientists are making a good argument”.
An ABC spokesman would not comment on the criticisms of Markson’s reporting and there was no response from chair Ita Buttrose.
It has also been revealed on the weekend, by The Wall Street Journal, that Facebook removed content relating to Covid-19 in response to pressure it received from the Biden administration.
The newspaper’s report included revelations about internal company communications, including emails divulging details of executives of Facebook (whose parent company is Meta) discussing how they handled users’ posts about the origin of a pandemic and the administration was seeking to control the narrative. “We were under pressure from the administration and others to do more,” responded a Facebook vice-president in charge of content policy, speaking of the Biden administration. “We shouldn’t have done it.”
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New bid to stop killing roos for shoes
The roos will be shot anyways as part of routine culling so what is gained by not using them? They reach plague proportions at times
American politicians are taking another shot at banning shoes made with kangaroo leather after Nike and Puma buckled to animal activists and scrapped using it in its soccer boots.
The Australian government has been fighting back against legislative crackdowns in several US states, based on what it says is the myth that kangaroo harvesting is threatening the iconic native species.
But a bipartisan group of US politicians has now reintroduced their proposed federal ban on the commercial use of kangaroo products, two years after their first effort fell flat.
Republican congressman Brian Fitzpatrick – who has previously predicted the bill would “pass overwhelmingly” in Congress – said it would ensure “that those who exploit these animals in the United States are held accountable”.
His Democratic colleague Jan Schakowsky added: “Over two million kangaroos are killed for commercial purposes each year. As a staunch animal rights advocate, I believe we owe it to these majestic creatures to protect their welfare.”
But the Kangaroo Industry Association of Australia, backed by the federal government, argues that humane and sustainable harvesting is necessary to conserve kangaroo populations and maintain agricultural land.
Nike abandoned using kangaroo leather in March – shortly after rival shoe giant Puma took similar action – as politicians in the company’s home state of Oregon sought to ban it.
While that bill did not proceed, Australian government officials have also been lobbying against similar moves in New Jersey, Arizona and Connecticut.
The state and federal legislation has been spearheaded by Animal Wellness Action and other animal welfare groups, who recently held protests at Adidas stores in Sydney and New York to force the German apparel giant to follow suit.
“In America, we don’t allow this kind of mass commercial slaughter of our native wildlife, and neither should we import wildlife parts and outsource these killing sprees,” Animal Wellness Action president Wayne Pacelle said in a statement.
“The Kangaroo Protection Act will cut off the US market for Australian commercial shooters and global major athletic shoe companies whose supply-and-demand relationship has been driving the slaughter of as many as two million kangaroos a year, including hundreds of thousands of joeys orphaned after their mothers are shot.”
Importing kangaroo products has been illegal in California since 1970 but other states are yet to follow suit.
It was revealed in March that the Australian Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry boss Andrew Metcalfe held talks with US officials to reinforce the “sustainability, quality and welfare standards” in the industry.
“The government is tackling misconceptions that harvesting of kangaroos in Australia is inhumane, noting the importance of sustainable, humane management of kangaroos to prevent ecosystem damage and crop loss,” a department spokeswoman said at the time.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Evelyn Rae, a conservative Australian political commentator
Margo Robbie -- a beautiful australian
My son Joe at ANU
One of the happiest pictures ever -- Cleo Smith, aged 4
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