Avaunt

People make a mistake, when they arm for the PREVIOUS war. I am no proponent of wars, but China is arming at an alarming rate, and Russia already has two weeks of  un-opposed control of the air all the way to Iceland if something kicks off.

If the US changes ( tactical ) horses midstream now, i.e. if it slacks off on military RnD and investment, one of its two opponents will be COMPELLED to seize the moment and the initiative.

Also if the USA had not had the ability to project power to three theaters at once, and massively arm allies, during the Iraq crisis while the crazies were murdering hundreds of thousands of moderate civilians across Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, Afghanistan and Algeria, the countries they DID over-run THIS ACTUALLY HAPPENED CHRISTIAN would have been joined by a dozen more.

Quite literally the safety of the free world depends on US military spending.

EVERY culture and community in their reach would have been murdered like the Yazidis. That is what they promised, and what they did their best to do. The USA stopped them. No one else could have.

If we hide our eyes from unpleasant facts, someone sneaks up and roots us, this is a fact of existence.

Computer says "message sent"

I turned up for my second vaccine shot, and the people had a bit of a laugh at me. Somehow, even though I was given three different "black and white" records of the appointment being the first of August, at the time I had mentally recorded it as "Sunday two weeks from now".

What a condemnation of humanity that entire town and its replicating memes is.

Some church or dome or wall or patch of rocks is claimed to have been the scene for some line of bullshit, some UTTERLY obvious falsehood being uttered . . . and, in entirely different and  far distant countries and cultures, it gains a significance greater than justice or equity or even social health care.

I guess humans are broken.

Illuminatus !

That book started me off on a whole sideways trip through many different avenues. I was so young once !.

I was looking forward to visiting Thewidebrownland again, but it would be very much like a dice role where snake-eyes is "Opps, airports closed again for a month"

Tiramasu

Cheesecake.

The ( delicious, life-shortening ) list is long.

Well done mate !

London AND a published Author. You is got it cracked.

Score ! You can have the shortest commute to work of all of us.

Bedroom-> Kitchen for coffee-> Desk.

Certainly knowing its place in fictional precedence, and its "provenance" as it were, a very interesting read, well worth it.

As to writing style, I have to admit it had that lyrical, fever-dream aspect you often find in translated works. I liked a lot of the word-play and strangeness.

Pretty interesting read all taken with all, but if you just HANDED it, un-annotated, to a modern and under-thirty-years-old reader of English ?. What could they make of it?.

Even if they were a long time Sci Fi reader, it is too esoteric. You would at least have to have a "feel" for a world far past, one where Workers still had a hope of not being slaves to capital, where there was the chance of freedom in "space" . . . far too much has changed in the real world, for this particular dystopia to seem possible.

It is the same thing with the perfectly awesome Barsoom movie they made recently. It flopped, because 90% of the people who might have brought tickets, have grown up knowing Mars is a lifeless cold pile of acidic dust. They can't relate to how it felt when there MAY have been Great White Apes to fist-fight.

I read WE !

That is a SUPER unique book, I doubt it would appeal to most modern readers. It was interesting mainly from the point of view of historical impact. Can't be many books I have read that Stalin also read.

. . .  you do understand we had only bats and sea-mammals as mammals here before humans came?. And that the "animals" in the native forest are invasive pests destroying it?. Yes, you can kill any and all deer, goats and pigs you find, in the Native stands of forest, and you are actually doing Society's bidding.

It is the aim of our Department of Conservation to eliminate introduced species in all DoC forestry, and allow the birds and invertebrates to flourish again. When Cook and Banks came here, the Dawn Chorus of birds was so loud as to make human speech impossible outside of arms length ( unlikely but true, you can read Banks and Cook writing in astonishment about it. ). It is something like that in the controlled sanctuaries, and birds you can never find outside them will casually perch on you if you stand still. 

Not one thousandth of the bird life remains if even that . . . probably no one TEN thousandth, the endemic insects are so annihilated that no one can even GUESS which have been made extinct, and the flora is so chewed that it will be lost in this century, and it is a shameful thing. I would kill every feral mammal with a knife , bathe in their blood, and know I was a hero, if I could.

Did I mention I have read two of Tariq Ali's Islamic Quartet?.

The first one was compelling writing, excellently evocative history lesson, and a really moving "memory" of a particular family. I enjoyed it so much that I brought the next two in the series.

The second one was good reading, just not somehow as piquant as the first. Probably because the list of characters was less like a cohesive group and more like a random sample from a text book.

Try him on some Midnight Oil, Cobber.

Short Memory !

Or  Power and the Passion ?

I see buildings, clothing the sky, in paradise
Sydney, nights are warm
Daytime telly, blue rinse dawn
Dad's so bad he lives in the pub, it's a underarms and football clubs
Flat chat, Pine Gap, in every home a Big Mac
And no one goes outback, that's that
You take what you get and get what you please
It's better to die on your feet than to live on your knees
It's better to die on your feet than to live on your knees

Yes, Christian, if you destroyed a Native forest here, you would be imprisoned as a criminal.

And your google-fu is pretty average. As far ago as 1920 New Zealand had the largest man-made forest in the world (at that time). Forestry is a Science here, and there are fairly stringent curbs even on planted, commercial forests. Events that provide further understanding of the dependence of our native flora on forestry result in FURTHER restrictions on even Commercial, PLANTED forestry.

The protections on NATIVE forestry are so strong, that you can not even take a leaf from the forest. Even trees knocked over by storms are protected as sources of nutrients and micro environments for endemic species of invertebrate. People have been prosecuted for carrying out of Native Forestry, the feathers of birds that belong to INVASIVE SPECIES.

I do feel I am letting the side down, but honestly I don't have the time to read the wall of Txt. If it was HALF that length, I would have grit my teeth and read it, but honestly, mate, I have work tomorrow.

I looked at it . . . but honestly, too dogmatic, too overboard. "Otherwise, anything goes in society, because the individual has the right to do or say anything else" . . .  Nope.

I don't know that there is anything to say to the majority of that except I work by reason, so I can't engage with beliefs, I don't think belief systems are a valid way of dealing with the actual world.

 Yes, I was perfectly aware that the Indian laws about beef are religious in nature, that is entirely the reason I used them in making my point. It is wrong of you to ignore my point but to misuse my statement to make a point of your own.

Actually, when you ask and  answer for yourself  "Does anyone hold those who kill the forests accountable for the inhumane killing of animals? No", you are quite wrong. Not only do New Zealand and Australia ( for two examples ) imprison people who "destroy forests" but they have very extensive legislation that ensures that ANYONE who owns or controls Native Forest, protects and nurtures it. The primary intent of the Legislation is EXACTLY to protect the environment the forest stands in, so that the flora and fauna subsiding there is protected when the Forest is interacted with. They also financially support people who own forest, so that the burden of maintaining it for Societies good, is a shared burden Society accepts. Both Right wing and Left wing governments have done so for all my life.

You are quite accurate when you say Homosexuality was illegal within our lifetimes, but neither that nor the forests thing was Governments doing, nor was the repeal of the laws Governments doing. Democratic Government naturally is reliant on public opinion, and being so, follows, doesn't lead.

All of the above simply arise from the fact that there is no such thing as "natural law". Laws are the effect of people finding ways to live, primarily ways of dealing with masses of Humans, other "people" who, unrestrained by law, make life unpleasant/impossible. There is no "Law" for Robinson Crusoe and the Law for a village of twenty people in the depths of the Amazon is primarily about as "moral" as ours.

Moral literally is an abstract Human concept, one you feel is derived from stories written by un-sceptical ignorant tribesmen about a particular gaseous Patriarch. 

You will excuse me for thinking Rational thought about these concepts makes for more "moral" morality.

No, I haven't read that. I only read a few "popularizing science" collections of his.

You make dogmatic claims such as "Without God, there can be no morality" and " the safest and best regulator of human laws are to base them around “natural law”…or liberalism" and "The more separation between private and public, the better" ,  these are obviously nothing more than shorthand for something that could be paraphrased as " Things I really believe are true just like I believe that there is a Sky-Father that made the world as an act of will ".

There is no doubt in my mind that you are perfectly sincere, Christian. Also no doubt that you base a claim such as "Without God, there can be no morality" on some convoluted bit of semantics someone reasoned out once. It presupposes so much, such as "god is good in the first place" or "Morality is an actual thing rather than an abstract concept humans invent " or " There are no hierarchies of morality, only one absolute " that it really seems like a meaningless contention. An "I say this is so" rather than something I need to refute.

I no more need to refute, say, your contention that "morality" is something prerequisite to human laws, than I need or should refute your belief in god. It is moot. Societies need LAWS, there are no absolutes such as "Morality"  but to convince people to obey the laws, they need to be not obviously "immoral" i.e. likely to damage rather than support societies aims.

Would you try to tell a Kiwi it is immoral to have a law permitting livestock to be slaughtered, or for that matter requiring the slaughtering to be done in a "humane" manner?. Or an Indian that it is "immoral" to have a law banning the wilful killing of cattle ? Morality only enters the case in an ancillary manner.

Morality is an abstract, not a stumbling block. We have Laws so we can live together without killing one another over right of way issues, or lawn mowing on a Saturday night. If they do that well enough, i.e. don't damage society in such a way as to immediately invalidate the law, they serve their purpose.

Mate, you slant every glib reference you make, and it is as if you don't remember the people you are talking to ALSO lived through the events you skate over, grew up in the same post WW2 real politic. "The goal of Socialism" etc. You just STATE that I admit the goals that YOU claim "Socialism" had are impossible, I didn't, nor are they.

Switzerland didn't get invaded, but it wasn't because they didn't have a regular army, it was because they had no strategic value but they DID have a commercial value as a clearing house.

The actual fact is the world is NOT more fascistic now than it was during WW2. Five Empires gave up, two fascisms were destroyed, and you replace them with transient democratically elected and responsible politicians. I will grant you Putin, but he isn't a fascist, he is a good old fashioned robber baron.

Well, I followed your chain of logic.

I just have to say I utterly disagree with it, because parents in X cases are immoral religious idiots who believe in sky-father. In other cases they are just idiots or mentally sub-par and whether it is  religion idiocy or simple idiocy CAN NOT make a valid judgement. Which is fine for themselves, tbh in both those cases why waste medication keeping them healthy ?

It is not fine for the case where children's lives are blighted and wasted just because their parents are idiots. People who refuse to take a vaccine are objectively idiots, inevitably when you ask them to explain their reasoning they are proven to be idiots relying on other idiots' guesses . . . and society has an obvious responsibility to protect all children from the harm that results from their care being decided by idiots.

And it confuses me that a bloke I have repeatedly been made aware rejects authority, rejects the concept of a Paternal State, yet says parents "own" children.

Here in New Zealand, if you found a person prostrate or obviously in distress from ANY cause, starvation or exposure or illness, and you did not do something, yes, in fact, you are guilty of a crime. Carries a prison sentence. Any country where this isn't so, is a place where the laws are at fault. Any Nation or people who would argue it wasn't their business are seriously immoral, at fault. ESPECIALLY an affluent people with a stable society. MAYBE it would be excusable in a third world country where everyone was on the ragged edge of disaster always . . .

Well, I do actually think the government has a responsibility to take parents out of the loop in medical questions. If a child has appendicitis the parents that refuse them the full compliant advice and actions of a Dr are nothing but mental case homicidal criminals.

If it was up to me, the entire group advising the parents in their lunacy, father, mother, aunts, grandparents, priest, bishop, pope ETC would be criminals and I would send the full press court action after them and make an example of them no one could miss.

Condoms ? hardly a genuine emergency health issue. Refusing a Blood transfusion when it is for a minor? that is exactly the same as if the parent was stabbing the child so it bled to death. An act of wilful homicide which should be ruthlessly suppressed.

Sometimes I wonder if you even WANT a Government, Christian.

Sadly Christian, the things you are talking about are mere pie in the sky. Even if every country in the world renounced warfare, who could be sure it would last?. It would be the DUTY of all governments to continue to have the capability of projecting armed defense, it is impossible to be Pollyanna about it. And in fact countries have NOT promised to be pacifist, nor have the various factions INSIDE Nations . . . as the citizens in Iraq found recently.

Having an armed force to protect your Nation and its citizens isn't fascism, saying it is makes it impossible to ACTUALLY be concerned about ACTUAL fascism.

The rise in right wing populism is nothing new, these exact same feelings exist in every population and always have. Idi Amin used it to gain power, what, you think it was left wing pacifists that he was able to mobilise ?. Why it SEEMS significant enough to fill the airwaves with bemoaning commentary is entirely because of one of our political refinements that has been undertaken to REDUCE inequity, i.e. proportional representation systems in our elections, and the resulting coalition governments that have SMALL numbers of right wing members. There is no other reason anyone detected this spurious rise in "right wing populism".

Illegal Immigrants are being held in detention camps EVERYWHERE IN THE WORLD, it has nothing at all to do with fascism.

EVERY country has controls of illegal immigrants because the primary responsibility of any government is to preserve the  society from potential harm.

Now, the PROPER, the LEGAL means for people to immigrate exist Internationally, and UN backed rights for refugees and displaced persons exist, and that is right and proper and has the support of the majority of Nations. And even perfectly innocent, peaceable, Left Wing governments, when something drives the neighbours into pouring over their border, put the  refugees into containment camps . . . what is the alternative?. Give them all citizenship?. Direct your own citizens to move out of their homes and give up their jobs for the poor of another nation?. How far do we have to go to accommodate the worlds ills, before you acquit us of wearing black arm bands?.

I got on SUPER well with my neighbour, she was like a second mother to me. But I wouldn't let her live in my home, and that doesn't make me a fascist.

Oh well. I kind of see what you are saying, but Nationalism is only part of fascism, it isn't indicative, conclusive.

Like, some State could arise where every good and noble motive became natural to it, where people did form a brotherhood, renounced bigotry and aggression . . . would it be "fascistic" to be proud of your Nationhood then ?. Would promulgating its virtues be fascistic ? defending it with your life, promoting fascism ?.

I know you focus on our failings, and fair enough, but actually the typical Liberal Democracy today is about as far from fascist as any human society has ever been or is likely to be. When you consider how the colonising States have decreased so markedly in numbers and power, it is hard to see any actual state supported fascism at all in the world.

I don't know about the litigation aspect.

You know we are all different, our societies spring from a similar base, Churchill's "English Speaking Peoples" ( Sorry about that Mr Mahon  quite a deliberate bit of tongue in cheek there ) but the common cultures are as different as they are alike.

And one thing Christians brand of King Arthur's Spawn is certainly about, is the Liberty of the Individual thing. They actually are best served, when the pre-eminence of their Personal Liberties even trumps common sense. It MAY mean additional hundreds of thousands of epidemic deaths . . . but their whole "thing" is predicated on the Liberty to die on a hill of stupid if they so personally choose.  The value of their "story" is greater than the cost in deaths.

It is not what their friends would choose for them, but it makes THEM happy to "be free" so basically that is what counts.

It is just the same as if Islamic people were  ( perfectly justified and logically ) to say "You guys are WREAKING yourselves with intoxicants, you ought to stop it" OR for that matter, the Jain were to point out the hideously large stomach cancer numbers and global warming figures that result from our beef-steak fetish here in the West.

I don't claim to speak for you, but I would say "Yeah, honestly, thanks for worrying about me mate, but Fuck off, I want my beers and burghers".

As I said, I don't advance this sort of selfishness where children or dependents are considered. There, people/peoples ought to be compelled to act on the science.  Other than that though, I am like "meh, let them go without vaccines/drink beers/eat steak/fast for a month . . . there are objectively too many of them anyway"