So, sure, China – you can bully someone like Stern Hu into pleading guilty to bribery charges. But it doesn’t mean any of the rest of us will believe you’ve proven he did anything wrong – a system guaranteed to return a guilty verdict makes any guilty verdict suspect.

And a system in which the guilty can escape no matter what they’ve done, provided their connections are good enough, just encourages the sort of corruption the rhetoric claims that you oppose. The distinction between the person in prison and the person near the top isn’t that the former abused his position and the latter didn’t; it’s that the person at the bottom fell out of favour. Their punishment isn’t a discouragement to others to offend: others know perfectly well that being innocent is no protection at all.

You either treat all defendents fairly, and equally, or the process of “law” is completely meaningless.

Frankly, I’m not sure why oppressive states even bother with the pretense of having courts.

A “dinkum” Aussie “larrikin”?

Does anyone lap this drivel up?

Just for the record, this is NOT how genuine Australians actually speak day to day – it’s how politicians and media organisations trying to sell us something speak to us, trying to gain social currency by referring to an imagined culture that exists only in theme parks and tourist brochures. They’re awkward cliche expressions that are used by people who suspect they’re seen as elitist and out  of touch.

Like, for example, a British prince who’ll be our Head of State when he succeeds his grandmother and father.

The Hun story tries to paint a narrative of enthusiasm for royalty, filling it’s puff-piece with expressions of “delight” and talking of “hordes of teenage girls”, hoping it will sell newspapers; tomorow it’ll be back to bashing “elites” in government without the slightest hint of being aware of the irony.

It’s a bit sad that all the monarchists have to fall back on now is the hope that they can sell William as a “dashing young prince” who kinds of “gets us”, isn’t it?

India strongly condemned the fatal stabbing of a 21-year-old Indian graduate in Australia and said Monday the incident could affect bilateral ties. External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna called on Australian authorities to speedily find and charge those responsible for Saturday night’s attack on Nitin Garg, saying that Indian students in Australia were increasingly targeted with violence.

I’m sorry – what? What did they think we were going to do? Of course the police are going to do everything in their power to catch the murderers. What makes India think they wouldn’t? And what’s the evidence that Indian students are victims of this violence more than anyone else?  

The Age went and transcribed a series of the more outrageous responses to the incident on Indian news websites:

‘‘I am an Indian occupying a reasonably responsible position in Australia, but I can state without any doubt that this is a racist country, which discriminates Indians on every count,’’ James wrote. ‘‘Well can’t blame the Aussies,’’ wrote Daffy. ‘‘They started as a bunch of thugs, killed the Aborigines and now they continue to do same.’’ Sunny commented: ‘‘In India, target these criminals and teach them a lesson’’. Neck Breaker said: ‘‘Ban over flight of Qantas through Indian air space. Ban all imports from Australia. Ask British to de-colonise Australia or India does it. These white dogs understand only one language, kick in the face … ’’

Isn’t it terrible when the actions of a few nutbags are used to smear an entire country?

If there’s a problem with knife crime in Melbourne, it’s most likely linked to the closing down and underfunding of mental health facilities over the last 20 years, not racism. If Indian students do turn out to disproportionately be victims of those sorts of unhinged attacks, it may well be for very straightforward reasons – the fact that there’s a disproportionate number of them with late-night service jobs who are often travelling in poorer areas of the city in the small hours of the morning, where such attacks are more likely.

Meanwhile, it’s not like India has some magic wand to rid itself of violence.

The Wuhan-Guangzhou high-speed railway with the world’s fastest train journey at a 350-km-per-hour designed speed, started operation Saturday.

…The service between Wuhan, a metropolis in central China, and Guangzhou City, a business hub in the southern Guangdong Province, was put into trial operation on Dec. 9, reaching a maximum speed of 394.2 km per hour.   

The airlines claim not to be worried – “In the long run, the coming of high-speed railway age is rather an opportunity than challenge to our airline company”, said the president of China Southern Airlines – but you’d have to see this sort of technology as a positive step towards reducing our dependence on air travel.

Pity the Australian government hasn’t the imagination or courage to plan anything similar.

The planet has been trying to bully us into stopping releasing all the CO2 it spent millenia locking away back into the atmosphere by unsubtly throwing its weight around. Increasingly severe winters. Increasingly severe summers. Unprecedented droughts and floods.

Well, screw you, Earth. People died because of your shenanigans. Why should we, as a species, give in to any of what it appears likely would be your demands if you were conscious and not just an inanimate ball of rock floating through space on which we depend for our very survival? Won’t that just encourage you to hurt us more?

Anyway, separate from the terrorism angle, these are my six reasons I will refuse to do anything about this issue – and want my government to refuse to do anything about this issue – until it’s too late:

1. I refuse to believe that anything that’s happening is our fault.
2. The climate isn’t changing.
3. If it is changing, it doesn’t matter.
4. If it does matter, it’s got nothing to do with us. Prove it’s not solar flares.
5. If it does have something to do with us, well there’s nothing we can do about it now.
6. It’s what the liberals want us to do.

The last one’s the real kicker. Imagine how happy (well, somewhat relieved) the lefties would’ve been if there’d been some agreement at Copenhagen that was actually going to tackle greenhouse emissions. They really want us not to make the planet unliveable, the tree hugging weirdos, and they genuinely think that greenhouse gases have something to do with the greenhouse effect you can easily observe in any hothouse. They don’t understand that the atmosphere is magically infinite and impervious to whatever we throw at it, so they think we should be cautious.

CAUTIOUS? With this planet?

We’ve treated it too gently, for too long. It’s time it learnt who’s boss.

Good to see that the majority of the world’s politicians agree with me and my unimpeachable reasoning.

The Federal Government has detailed its plan to require internet service providers (ISPs) in Australia to block a list of banned material.

When Parliament resumes next year the Government plans to introduce amendments that will require ISPs to block banned material on overseas servers.

Broadband and Communications Minister Senator Stephen Conroy says some internet content is simply not suitable in a civilised society.

He says the Government will not determine what is blacklisted on the internet in Australia, rather an independent body will determine what sites are rated as RC for refused classification.

Refused classification material will include child sex abuse, sexual violence and detailed instruction on crime.

Although the government keeps talking about how the filter will somehow “protect children”, there is of course no detail on how exactly that will work. Unless all adult content is blocked, unsupervised children will of course be able to gain access just as now. And simply blocking “child pornography sites” (whatever they are) won’t stop paedophiles – it’ll just drive them further underground where they’ll be harder to catch.

Meanwhile, leaving the decision on what will be blocked to some unanswerable body gives plenty of scope for mission-creep – if earlier reports are to be believed, for example, Australians might simply lose access to any overseas commerce site (like playasia or Amazon) that sells content that isn’t rated in Australia (such as R18 games).

The government is proposing to waste more than $100 million on giving lobbyists control over the internet, and bequeathing that power to all its successors. Which is why the Liberal Party will probably vote for it, despite it being entirely contrary to principles of “liberalism”.

After all, there are pro-censorship control-freaks in marginal constituencies to placate! There’s a reason the so-called “Australian Christian Lobby” got an early look at the test results – it’s all being done for them.

It’s only the Greens who are standing against the censorship tide – and there simply aren’t enough of them yet in parliament.

It’s a sad time to live in Australia.

Higher property prices music to Singaporeans’ ears

There are 900,000 public flat owners in the island plus another couple of hundred thousand private property owners. Any hike in property prices is music to the ears of these owners. No wonder everyone feels so good in shouting up the prices.

A 10 percent rise in property prices will mean that the net worth of these owners will go up proportionally. The only minority that may feel the pinch will be the young couples that are starting a new life but don’t have rich parents to buy them their dream homes. But this is a minority and their protest votes, if any, will not cause any dent to the 900,000 happy flat owners and the rest of the private property owners.

Well, to start with, that’s at least 900,000 renters (more, because many homes have more than one resident) who are going to be stuck renting indefinitely, so you’d think their votes would at least cancel out their landlords’.

It also seems silly to describe the next generation as a “minority” that can be ignored – they are inevitably going to replace older Singaporeans, after all. As will the one after them. And the one after that.

And as for the “net worth” of property owners going up – well, yes, that’s true. But it’s not much use to home owners, who don’t actually get that money unless they sell their house and don’t need to buy another one. The only people who really benefit from houses rising ahead of inflation are those with investment properties, and they do it at the expense of those trying to enter the market to buy one single home.

Leng cheerfully boasts:

Weighing in all the numbers and factors, objectively, the higher the property prices, the more people will be laughing their ways to the banks. And this will mean more votes in the general election for the ruling party. Thus the higher the prices go up, the better it is.

The equation is simply for high property prices. Anyone hoping that property prices will come down is deluding himself. Prices cannot come down or more votes will be lost. Singaporeans should cheer and look forward for more higher property prices. It is their nest eggs that is at stake.

The only thing higher property prices enable Singaporeans to look forward to is an increasing gap between the rich and the poor, and the accompanying social instability from a generation of permanent renters who no longer even aspire to own their own home. If it continues, the only Singaporeans who’ll be able to buy a house will be those on the very highest incomes and those whose parents bequeath them property. It’s not a recipe for a happy country in the long term.

It’s increasingly a problem here in Australia, too.

Here’s a question – in the piece of utter garbage by Sarah Palin to which Tim Lambert refers, how do you think she came by the following utterly false claim?

The e-mails reveal that leading climate “experts” deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to “hide the decline” in global temperatures

Anyone who’s read the correspondence knows that’s totally wrong. Even the Washington Post explains the email thusly:

Phil Jones, the unit’s director, wrote a colleague that he would “hide” a problem with data from Siberian tree rings with more accurate local air temperature measurements.

So, is Palin really so stupid that she doesn’t realise that the emails are about tree rings and not “global temperatures” – or does she know perfectly well, and is just misleading her followers?

In Uganda, they’re currently debating introducing the death penalty for gays:

KAMPALA, Uganda – Proposed legislation would impose the death penalty for some gay Ugandans, and their family and friends could face up to seven years in jail if they fail to report them to authorities. Even landlords could be imprisoned for renting to homosexuals.

Gay rights activists say the bill, which has prompted growing international opposition, promotes hatred and could set back efforts to combat HIV/AIDS. They believe the bill is part of a continentwide backlash because Africa’s gay community is becoming more vocal.

“It’s a question of visibility,” said David Cato, who became an activist after he was beaten up four times, arrested twice, fired from his teaching job and outed in the press because he is gay. “When we come out and ask for our rights, they pass laws against us.”

How dare gay people demand that they not be discriminated against! We’ll show them!

Elsewhere in Africa, it’s not much better:

Homophobia is rife even in more tolerant African countries.

In Kenya, homosexuality is illegal but the government has acknowledged its existence by launching sexual orientation survey to improve health care. Nevertheless, the recent marriage of two Kenyan men in London caused outrage. The men’s families in Kenya were harassed by reporters and villagers.

In South Africa, the only African nation to recognize gay marriage, gangs carry out so-called “corrective” rapes on lesbians. A 19-year-old lesbian athlete was gang-raped, tortured and murdered in 2008.

Lovely.

And in our own Asian region, a quick roundup via Wikipedia -

• In Myanmar (10 years to life), Malaysia (2-20 years), Brunei (up to 10 years), North Korea (prison camps), a gay person can and will still be prosecuted.
• India recently had its criminalisation of homosexual sex ruled unconstitutional by the Delhi High Court – likewise discrimination on the grounds of sexuality. The government has not yet reformed its laws in line with the ruling.
• In Singapore, oral and anal sex was decriminalised in October 2007 – but only for heterosexual people, although it supposedly hasn’t been enforced against gay people for ten years. Gay servicemen in the Singapore Armed Forces are downgraded.
• In China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia (except for Muslims in Aceh), the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, homosexuality is not illegal.
• None of these countries legally recognise same sex relationships in any way.
• Only Taiwan and some parts of Japan ban discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. Only the Philippines, Taiwan, Japan and Thailand let gays serve openly in the military. Only the Philippines lets gays adopt.

That’s a lot of people being treated as criminals, or at best second-class citizens, simply for being gay. Still. In 2009.

As for Uganda… is it the new proxy for dissatisfied Western fundamentalists, giving a hint of what they’d really like to do?

Okay, so they’ve built this advanced new city, with decent housing, but no-one can afford to live there? Or, more accurately, the people who can afford to buy there only want it as an investment, and charge too much for people to live there – particularly since once the place was built, the Government forgot to do anything to get the local economy started.

Despite it being somewhat mystifying that this sort of problem could’ve caught city planners so much by surprise, I expect they’ll get on it soon – from the footage of residents in the old Ordos wearing face-masks, it looks like there are plenty of people who are keen for the barriers to surviving there to be fixed so they can enjoy the better standard of living for which they, through their government, have paid.

It’s an impressive ghost town in the meantime, though.

American television advertisements featuring golf superstar Tiger Woods have been pulled off the air.

Woods’ standing with the public has fallen dramatically since reports of his extramarital affairs, according to an index used by advertisers to measure a celebrity’s ability to affect consumers.

Before news of his infidelities, Woods was rated sixth. But now the The Davie Brown Index has him at 24th.

I was tempted to buy this set of golf clubs endorsed by Tiger Woods because of what I understood to be his strong relationship with Elin Nordegren. But now I learn that the world’s best golfer has personal flaws that have nothing whatsoever to do with what he was good at anyway! He must be shunned!

Tiger involved in some kind of sporting contest whilst engaged in his most important public role – being faithful to his wife. Or SO I THOUGHT.

People are stupid.

About 150 defectors from North Korea signed a petition urging the International Criminal Court to investigate North Korea and arrest its authoritarian leader for alleged rights violations. A group of defectors will travel to The Hague, Netherlands, next week to file the petition with the court, they said.

Activist Ha Tae-keung said if Sudan President Omar al-Bashir could be charged in March with war crimes and crimes against humanity for atrocities in the Darfur region, Kim Jong Il should be prosecuted, too. “North Korea’s crimes against humanity are no less serious than Sudan’s,” he told a news conference in Seoul.

NK will of course respond with a shameless garbage answer:

Last month, a key UN committee expressed “very serious concern” over widespread reports of rights violations. North Korea rejected the statement as “a trite political plot hatched by hostile forces.”

North Korea “categorically and totally rejects as it did in the past any ‘resolution’ fabricated by the US and its followers to do harm to the ideology and system” in the country, its Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

And why not? Obviously nothing’s going to happen. When the world talks about “regime change” it means restoring human rights to the countries without their own nukes.

See, there’s an “uncanny valley” for human rights abuses. Imagine a graph where the horizontal axis is the seriousness of human rights abuses, and the vertical axis is the safety of the leaders from ICC prosecution. At one end, the left of this graph, you’ve got countries with media that will flush out egregious conduct – mostly – and functioning courts that will then prosecute it themselves. Highly unlikely the ICC will get involved. Then as you move towards the oppressive end you have tyrants whose grip on their country is weak enough that they can be pressured out with sanctions and other non-violent international actions. A little further you have the tin-pot dictatorships with second-rate militaries and, importantly, resources the rest of the world wants. That’s where the graph dips lowest, where leaders are most at risk of finding themselves before the ICC.

But that’s the limit of any prospect of “justice”. Now we climb out of the “valley”, the abuses are getting worse but the perpetrators are increasingly secure. You’ve got countries that are a complete mess (Somalia, Afghanistan) that no-one could tame. You’ve got non-profitable basket cases like Zimbabwe that no-one really wants to spend the money on. (If he doesn’t die in power, Mugabe will negotiate some kind of immunity before handing over the reigns.) And then as we lunge upwards to complete safety for the leaders as they commit atrocities you’ve got military dictatorships that can do what they like because they’ve got nukes. Like North Korea.

The only thing that’s going to ever loosen the Kims’ grip on that country is them dying and the potential successors fighting it out amongst themselves for control – and in the short term that wouldn’t exactly be a good prospect for either the North Korean people or the world at large.

Of course, this is all obvious, and depressing. Perhaps it’s news to the defectors, though – maybe they thought that escaping to freedom they’d find that the rest of humanity actually stood up for human rights, that as soon as we found out what’s going on we’d do something about it.

Isn’t that sweet?

He won 42-41, as close as it could be. A margin that makes a mockery of his claims of the “great unity” of the Liberals. Julie Bishop remains as Deputy Leader.

The conventional wisdom is that this will be electoral disaster for the Liberals. They’ll shore up their hardline base that would vote for them anyway (unlike in the US, where they could’ve just stayed home, we have compulsory voting), and will lose the middle-of-the-roaders to the ALP. The ALP will move a little right to encompass these voters, and the Greens will have a reasonable shot at finally winning some seats in the lower house.

It’s still a day of mixed emotions, though.

On the one hand it’s good to see the now ridiculously-named “Liberal” Party lunging into electoral oblivion. On the other, it’s bad for Rudd to have no real opposition. And even worse, Abbott is just one utterly disastrous ALP campaign from becoming Prime Minister. Fortunately, that scenario is vanishingly unlikely.

Some twitter responses (#spill became a global trending topic) as the morning continued:

• “The Liberals Hipster Faction forgot that ironic votes for Abbott still count.”
• “Obliged to be pro ETS, now obliged to be anti ETS. What does Julie Bishop stand for? Only a meal ticket”
• “Having an inconsistent, uber-conservative, loathsome individual as leader did work quite well for the Libs in the past”
• “Nothing says conservative christian agenda like a party led by an Abbott and a Bishop. “
• “That was not the press conference of a credible alternate PM.”
• “I have to say am utterly transfixed by the new Liberal leadership and ETS debate. You know, like watching a car crash.”
• ““a loyal girl” Tony Abbott said while giving Julie Bishop a squeeze. Oh dear”
• “the liberal party’s ranking of the leadership candidates – abbott, turnbull, hockey – was the exact opposite of the public’s ranking”
• “TonyAbbott complains Rudd has gone back to the 70s – promises to go back to the fifties instead”

More to come, undoubtedly.

Note: html links now work in comments. Fire away!

Greedy Wall St types – brokers, bankers and so on, who get rich by screwing other people over (betting on companies failing, using their information advantage to out-bet ordinary shareholders, gambling with other people’s money, deliberately creating a convoluted ownership trails of things like debt so they can be off with the money before anyone figures it out) – stuff up. Who pays? The taxpayer. And, more specifically, the poor, who are left with even less. The people who caused the mess, whose excesses were excused as just the deserved rewards of capitalism? They do fine. Goldman Sachs posts huge profits. The wealthy do fine. The poor pay for it.

And now it’s happening again with Dubai – which, remember, is an empire built on exploiting the price of oil and exploiting immigrant workers from places like India and the Philippines. These workers are treated appallingly – effectively as slaves. Their passports are taken, they’re housed out of sight in the desert, they’re paid a pittance, their working conditions are appalling and they are discriminated against by the law. And yet the world turns a blind eye because all we can see is that precious money.

Well, as we’re finding out this week, the illusion of it.

Naturally, the exploitative scum at the top of the Dubai pyramid will be bailed out. That’s what happens to people like them. When they’re on top, they offer no mercy to the desperate. When they’re on the way down, the desperate are once again forced to help them out. The status quo – the status quo that involves them sitting fat on the top of the pile – must be restored.

They’ve got us over a barrell.

1. That there be some kind of national scheme to recognise gay relationships BUT SEPARATE FROM MARRIAGE;
2. That DFAT not put bureaucratic impediments in the way of gay people wanting to marry overseas; and
3. That the Bill be rejected.

One Liberal was so anti-gay that he couldn’t even support proposals one and two. The lone Green on the committee simply voted that the Bill be passed in its entirety (ie, equality) and the major parties allow their MPs a conscience vote.

The Inquiry received 28,000 submissions – 11,000 in favour, 17,000 against. The vast majority of those against were simple form letters repeating the “if this definition of marriage is changed, what will I do with my dictionary then?!?!” complaint, and the facile “children are entitled to a father and a mother and I’m going to pretend that there are no single parents out there or divorced families”. The 11,000 in favour argued a simple, straightforward and compelling point – in the absence of even a single good reason for it, it is wrong for the government to discriminate against people on the grounds of gender.

How was that argument dismissed? With nothing more than this paragraph:

While the committee agrees that the current definition of ‘marriage’ in the Marriage Act 1961 is appropriate, other types of relationships play an important part in Australian society and deserve recognition. For this reason, the committee’s recommendation not to alter the definition of marriage should not be taken as a lack of support for same-sex couples. However, the committee considers that the current definition is a clear and well-recognised legal term which should be preserved. The committee recommends that the Bill not be passed.

What? That’s not a reason. How is that a reason? The term should be preserved, and people should be discriminated against, because the current definition “is a clear and well-recognised legal term”? You could’ve said that about ANY form of discrimination in history. Electors being male should be preserved because “the current definition is a clear and well-recognised legal term” Slavery should be preserved because “the current definition is a clear and well-recognised legal term”. And so on.

Unbelievable. Well, not really. Politicians get very spooked by organised religious campaigns – unlike the equality crowd, the religious lot get up every Sunday morning and go to a formal meeting. They campaign hard. Even on things which really don’t affect them in the slightest.

There’ll be rallies for marriage equality around the country on Saturday. If you’re in Australia, I hope to see you there.

UPDATE: Photographs and video from the rallies here.

The issue, for those who haven’t been following it closely, is one that highlights the divisions in the supposedly “broad church” of the Liberal Party. It’s made up of classical liberals (who are socially progressive but economically conservative) and straight down-the-line conservatives. And the latter are very annoyed with their current leader Malcolm Turnbull, an ex-banker who actually campaigned for the Republic over the Monarchy when that issue was last explored. They’re particularly angry at his ordering the party to vote for an Emissions Trading Scheme – even the half-baked, very limited one that the ALP has proposed. They’re not happy with the compromise ETS that the ALP proposed to get Turnbull to agree: they don’t believe there’s any evidence of climate change, or if it exists that there’s no evidence it’s caused by man, or if it is there’s no point Australia doing anything about it until China does.

Hence yesterday’s spill and today’s resignations.

It’s not even as if they have a plausible alternative candidate in mind. Andrews and Hockey are both closely tied to the staggeringly unpopular “WorkChoices” policy of the Howard Government, and are thus unelectable. Abbott’s a hardline religious conservative and alienates pretty much everyone else. Pyne, Hawke and Mirabella are far too young and inexperienced to mount a real challenge. Turnbull is the Liberals’ best chance, but they’re determined to drag him down, and themselves with him.

Anyway, whilst I’m not at all sympathetic to the Liberal Party as a whole, and still hold it responsible for one of the most appallingly dishonest and divisive governments this country has ever endured, I also don’t particularly trust the ALP. And without an effective opposition, they’re getting away with whatever they like. The Greens, the party I’d like to see take over that mantle (now that the ALP has drifted so far to the right), are hardly in a position to do that job yet. They have five senators but no MPs whatsoever in the House of Representatives. And it’s unrealistic to expect that they could go from no seats to enough seats to challenge the government as the formal opposition in one election.

Awesome though that would be.

So we’re stuck with the Liberals in the meantime. All Australians, not just conservatives, are counting on them to get their act together. They promised they knew what they were doing before the last election and their voters deserve better. The country needs it.

What the Liberals are doing is giving Kevin Rudd free rein. I have no confidence that any good whatsoever will come of that.

From the region, Singapore-trained doctors are particularly recognized. Doctors from other countries can still apply to be considered, depending on their qualifications.

You know the stereotype of the New York taxi driver who’s actually a doctor in his native land? Well, it’s about time that professional immigrants got a real chance to practice their profession wherever they live. It’s good to see the powers that be here being sensible enough to offer the opportunity.

Why am I telling you this? Oh, no reason.

We seem to celebrate those who stand up against corrupt authority.

So check out the comments on this story about a Melbourne police officer who has been sacked for using his discretion when issuing speeding fines, because “he thought the posted speed limits in certain areas were too high and he was being ‘humane’”:

nelson of melb Posted at 11:56 AM Today

yay sack the only decent cop out there. well done. 

 

sad_day_for_commonsense Posted at 12:04 PM Today

Bugger, a decent cop gets shafted by the bureacrats. sorry to here it. Speed doesn’t kill, INAPPROPRIATE SPEED AND INCOMPETENCE KILLS.

 

Paul of Melb Posted at 12:08 PM Today

And they say this is not about revenue, crikey, give this guys his job back with a promotion and a payrise, what a great ambassador for VicPolice a cop who cares.

 

Lisa Spinks of Junction Village Posted at 12:18 PM Today

good on him! give him back his job

…and so on.

Victoria has some of the toughest, most extreme, unsympathetic and inflexible road laws in the world, and I suspect the comments above derive strongly from citizens’ frustration with what they see as injustices about which they can do little. Both major parties support the policies in question. Speed limits are set at what appear to be cynically unreasonable levels, leading to strong suspicions they’re much more about revenue-raising than saving lives. Fundamentally, it feels like a lie – a lie that has cruel and harsh consequences to many Victorians who depend on their driver’s license.

And when a police officer uses his discretion to treat road users “humanely”, and is then sacked for it – well, you can see why the punters are outraged at the treatment of him.

Will our descendants make feature films about Sergeant Mark Ashton and be singing songs of his exploits in a hundred years? Probably not, but I suspect he’ll be being toasted around the country tonight.

In the case of the biggest emitters in the region, that means hoping that they will genuinely reduce their increasing outputs. In the case of smaller emitters like Australia, that nonetheless rank high in the scale on a per-capita basis, I’d hope we can practise what we preach. It will be difficult, sure, and if we want to protect ourselves from the risks we’re going to have to act before the potential disaster hits – but it’s not like we have a backup planet to flee to if we stubbornly refuse to do anything and the predictions come true. We’d be fairly silly not to err on the side of caution, wouldn’t we?

Unless, of course, our entire scientific understanding of the planet’s climate turns out to be wrong and we have a magically-impervious atmosphere that can absorb anything we throw at it with no consequences whatsoever.

Which is why I’ve certainly been THRILLED to hear all about a whole lot of emails stolen from some climate scientists this week. Apparently the scientists made some remarks back in 1999 that could be interpreted as their having exaggerated some data. Also, one seemed to be a bit ghoulishly glad that an opponent had died.

So, that’s that then! Problem solved.

Because some of the people arguing that it seems fairly absurd to assume that the atmosphere can continue indefinitely to absorb whatever our industries belch into it with no effect whatsoever have been embarrassed. Therefore, by the transitive property of agreement, everyone on their side of the argument has been embarrassed.

And if their side has suffered a loss of face, then that must mean that the side that says we should do nothing and it’ll sort itself out must have won.

Ergo, we are now entirely safe. The Earth’s atmosphere wouldn’t dare gradually warm as CO2 levels rise just because that’s what we know happens on every scale we’ve been able to measure. It certainly wouldn’t dare start altering weather patterns such that we’d start having unprecedented extremes – extreme winters, or extreme summers.

I mean, how could it, when some climate scientist can be made to look a bit dodgy?

I’m warning you, complex atmospheric systems on which our civilizations depend – if you pull any of that funny stuff with us, I’m going to show these emails to… um. The other planets. I’m not bluffing.

The Earth wouldn’t dare piss us off now. Problem solved. Human civilization saved. You can cancel Copenhagen.

ELSEWHERE: This style of scientific debate is really knocking down the pins! Newton’s private correspondence proves gravity a hoax, too.

The first, Travel Sisters, wanted to run women-only tours.

She had heard from women who were tired of being hit on during boozy package tours, and recognised that some women also did not want to, or could not, mix with men while on holiday, perhaps due to religious beliefs, or through having been victims of sexual or domestic violence. So, a month or so ago, she applied to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal for an exemption from anti-discrimination laws.

VCAT said no:

VCAT vice-president Judge Marilyn Harbison said that Maitland was welcome to reapply to VCAT if she could come up with ”credible evidence based on charter considerations” that her women-only travel service deserved an exemption from anti-discrimination laws, because at this stage the business ”cannot presently be justified on human rights principles”.

We’ll see whether she can find any clear evidence – you can’t expect the Tribunal to simply rely on common sense – of the problems she anticipates men causing on her tours, and whether she then comes back and tries again.

Meanwhile, the tour company that runs P&O cruises also applied for and was denied an exemption, this time for excluding under-21s not accompanied by a parent or guardian:

A rejected passenger lodged an age discrimination complaint with the Australian Human Rights Commission, the nation’s arbiter of federal anti-discrimination law.

Carnival responded by asking the commission for an exemption from its so-called under-21 policy of the Age Discrimination Act, “to combat the risk of binge-drinking among young people in a holiday environment.”

But the commission on Wednesday rejected the exemption application, leaving Carnival open to claims for damages from rejected passengers in the federal courts.

“The commission is not satisfied that unaccompanied under-21s pose a serious threat to the health, safety and security of passengers,” Commission President Catherine Branson wrote in her ruling.

The policy “is inconsistent with and undermines” the law’s aim of eliminating age discrimination in the provision of goods and services, she said.

The company is going ahead with the policy, anyway – feeling that its policy protects more passengers than it inconveniences. Oppressed 18-21 year olds will just have to find some other way of entertaining themselves. Or bring their parents.

The thing that strikes me about both of these rulings is that they’re protecting groups that are not in any way oppressed in society. Seriously, isn’t the spectacle of men and 18-21 year olds suing for their right to party a fairly absurd misuse of laws designed  to help groups that really do suffer discrimination – say, in employment for reasons of gender or race or sexuality – be treated fairly in day to day life? Isn’t it a total waste of the tribunal’s time?

Anti-discrimination law is there to help the downtrodden, not help the privileged protect their position.

Isn’t this kind of an insult to the people who actually are discriminated against in their daily lives?

Call me an agnostic.

Anyway, I can understand why people who are convinced that they’ve chosen THE TRUE RELIGION, and that all its precepts are true, want to try to save the rest of us – if you knew someone was going to roast in the fires of Hell, wouldn’t it be incredibly selfish and uncaring just to condemn them to that fate without trying? And why they want their rules adopted more widely and imposed on others – even though if they thought about that from others’ point of view, and if they were honest with themselves, they’d have to concede that they wouldn’t like any other religion being imposed on them. Of course they can’t contemplate the possibility that they’re wrong without questioning their most fundamental beliefs. Which most people don’t want to do.

That said, you’d hope that most religious people would also accept that for salvation a person has to come willingly. You can’t force your beliefs on someone else without undermining the entire point of faith and free will. And, consequently, you’d have to accept that a theocracy – where the government uses the military might of the state to impose a religious doctrine (something which cannot, by definition, be defended with reason alone) on everyone within its borders – is not really a legitimate form of government. Because it involves imposing one person’s arbitrary religious rules on another.

I raise this in the context of both Indonesia and the Philippines, both of which have recently used particular religious opinions to withhold basic rights from people who disagree with them.

In Indonesia, a Japanese porn star, Maria Ozawa (“Miyabi”), has cancelled her visit because of vigorous opposition from religious figures who’ve only just succeeded in having the government impose their beliefs on the country’s filmmakers:

The cancellation comes weeks after Indonesia’s parliament passed a law ordering filmmakers to uphold “religious, ethical, moral, and national cultural values.” Movie makers are concerned a new censorship body outlined in the law will bring back the days of extreme censorship under the Suharto dictatorship, which was toppled more than a decade ago.

In the Philippines, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) has refused to give a party advocating for equal rights for gay Filipinos party-list status because:

The Comelec Second Division—composed of Ferrer and his fellow commissioners Lucenito Tagle and Elias Yusoph—last week rejected Ang Ladlad’s petition to be allowed to run as a party-list group in the May elections.

The division said the group’s espousal of same sex relations violated the Civil Code and Revised Penal Code’s provisions against immoral doctrines and those on decency and good customs.

Says who? Who defines these “immoral doctrines”? Some religion?

According to the article, it did so “because the practice of homosexuality offends morals”. Homosexuality is also against Christian and Muslim faiths.

Say for the sake of argument that is true – so what? What on Earth does that have to do with the right of a group of people to peacefully campaign in their country for what they believe in? How would the religious groups like it if the gays were in charge and declined to register their political party because “the bigotry of their beliefs offends morals”?

Paul Farol, writing at Pinoy Buzz, is not sympathetic:

Now, morality issues aside, is there any real need for legislation that will benefit people of a particular lifestyle choice?  Are gay people really and truly marginalized?  Are gay people in the Philippines really discriminated against? What bills or laws will they seek to enact?

I am pretty sure Ang Ladlad has some sort of legislative agenda, like same-sex marriage… laws defining sexual discrimination… a law allowing gay couples to adopt children… a law getting the government to subsidize the treatment of people stricken with AIDS… and whatever else that gay people in other parts of the world are demanding. Does Ang Ladlad really have any kind of legislation in mind that is specifically tuned and responsive to the needs of Filipino gay people?

Obviously gay people are marginalised in a country where they’re not allowed to get married, where discrimination against them based on their sexuality is lawful, where they are prevented from adopting children solely because of their sexuality, where medical treatment for something like AIDS is not subsidised like other illnesses because of some perceived connection with “immoral” behaviour – and why shouldn’t they campaign to rectify this?

What other choices do they have? Just to sit back and accept second-class status and oppression because some religious person thinks it’s mandated by their God?

Okay, so it’s too much to ask someone who has made the decision to adopt a particular religious doctrine to consider that they might in some way be wrong – that maybe they picked the wrong religion (funny coincidence that the vast majority of religious people pick the same religion as their parents, isn’t it?), or that maybe their religious leaders have misunderstood something their God/Prophet/Messiah actually said – but when the values in question are those about taking away another human being’s rights, couldn’t they keep them to themselves?

Demanding that “immoral” people don’t enter the country, or be prevented from running for Parliament – that’s taking it several steps too far.

The White House hoped Monday’s town hall meeting with Chinese university students would allow Obama to telegraph U.S. values — through its successes and failures — to the widest Chinese audience possible.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – respect for human rights, and democracy, are not “US” or “Western” values at all. They are the default human position – the position that expresses at its most basic that every human being has a right not to be oppressed, and that only a government that is chosen by its people actually represents its people and therefore is legitimate. As I’ve previously posted:

Anything short of democracy is a group of tyrants doing what they want without their people’s permission.

Frankly, it’s pretty offensive to people in these countries and cultures to suggest that they shouldn’t have a say in how they’re governed (democracy) or that those most at risk of oppression don’t deserve protection from it (human rights).

People in power in places where governments have got away in the past with authoritarianism and mistreating minorities like to pretend that the system which they’ve conquered and which keeps them on top is somehow what “the people” really want. They want it so much that there’s no point in even asking them. We already know what they’ll say! They’ll say they want us to rule them without any checks or balances. No, you can’t talk to them.

Of course, there are lots of different ways of “talking to them” – many competing forms of democracy. There’s a spectrum of democracy, running from countries where the makeup of their parliamentary bodies closely represents the general political consensus of the citizens (those with preferential and proportional electoral systems, mainly, and compulsory voting), through to countries which claim to be bastions of democracy but are in fact two party states where governments are elected by a small percentage of the people, through to states where ballot boxes stuffed with votes for the ruling party miraculously appear before the polls have even opened. (The latter is not actually a form of democracy.)

But all recognise that citizens should have a genuine say, and that there should be a way of a government being held to account short of the people having to stage a bloody uprising.

You’d think that the above was obvious. But check out these comments from various Chinese commenters on the twentieth anniversary of A Certain Incident In A Prominent Square In Beijing That I’d Probably Better Not Mention By Name If I Don’t Want This Site Added To The Great F… uh, Fun Wall of China:

• “In a relativistic society, we can’t say that democracy is morally better than a dictatorship.”
• “Some people may argue human rights above all else, but for people like myself, $$$ and food on the table ranks so much higher.”
• “the students and those so called ‘leader’ in the square didn’t appeal in a reasonable way. what they want is change the government. it’s not acceptable by all Chinese people.”
• “All Chinese backs the action taken by party.”

There are obvious responses to each of these (take the last one – how on Earth does that commenter know what “all Chinese” people want, if they’re not being formally asked?) but what surprised me was that anyone, in 2009, could argue that democracy is not “morally better than a dictatorship”.

For whom?

A system where governments are held to account without violence is not “morally better” than one where they can get away with anything that’s not quite serious enough to invite bloodshed?

How?

It’s not a “Western value” to call “bullsh*t” on that claim.

Don’t believe commenters on right-wing blogs; most Australians are sympathetic to Indian students’ concerns – we don’t want anyone being abused because of their race. Their AFL team, sure, but their race – no. We can still perhaps be a little insensitive as to what might constitute “abuse”, though.

The Labor government’s decision to refuse to export uranium to India until it signs the non-proliferation treaty is also kind of principled, although obviously that’s “principled” in the “with the compromises and inconsistencies that are inevitable in real-world diplomacy” sort of way.

So it’s amusing, and kind of sad, that what his trip will be remembered for is the BBQ cockup.

The release unveiled a new program – to be run by Rotary Australia – in which Indian students would be invited for barbecues with Australian families as a gesture of inclusion.

Mr Rudd claims the barbecues were a Rotary idea, while the organisation says the plan came from Mr Rudd’s office. And like Indian students, Rotary says barbecues are not an ideal welcoming gesture as most Indians are vegetarian.

I’d put money on the idea having come from some junior bureaucrat in Rudd’s office and the rest of his staff having been a bit too preoccupied with the major issues of the trip to notice until it was just about to be released, when – to their credit – they did notice, and withdrew it. While Indians might wonder how anyone could be so stupid as to fail to realise that a very large part of their country is vegetarian, it’s almost understandable how an Australian might make that mistake. After all, the biggest exposure most of us have to Indian cuisine is probably suburban curry houses, and – because Australians eat a lot of meat (traditionally – its ubiquity is reducing) – their menus are usually predominantly meat-based. (Even though it’s not particularly authentic, vindaloo works really well with chicken, for example.)

This is most Australians’ main exposure to “Indian” culture or cuisine – but is most Indians’ exposure to Australia any less stereotypical and inaccurate?

I suppose the way to avoid this in future, is for bureaucrats to remember that, when you’re dealing with completely different cultural groups, there may be important things about their traditions that you don’t realise. Not because you’re a bad person, or particularly ignorant – it might seem absurd not to know something as basic about such a populous country as India or as major a world religion as Hinduism, but there are few people in the world who are not, if they’re honest, fundamentally ignorant about the traditions of large parts of the rest of the world – but because assuming that you could have developed a decent understanding of a country through little more than having eaten food adapted for them and cooked by former citizens, is both stupid and arrogant. And likely to result in humiliation.

Every country does it, of course. I’m sure Indian public figures make inaccurate assumptions about Australia all the time (when they think about us at all, of course). Part of the reason America faces so much antagonism abroad is not how often it makes these embarrassing errors, but that its approach to dealing with them seems to be “well, why should we care about your quaint little traditions anyway? WE’RE AMERICA!” At least Rudd’s office has the decency, if not to apologise, but to at least realise be ashamed enough to try to blame it on someone else…

This can’t just be a Western vs Asian thing, though. It’s a big region. What stuff-ups based on cultural misunderstandings have infuriated or amused you the most over the last few years? Let us know in the comments.

Thaksin was responding to numerous statements by Democrats questioning his patriotism and asking if he was not a traitor. Matichon has a statement by Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva’s spokesman Thepthai who says Thaksin’s behavior of accepting the position has a name, namely a traitor to the country.

Matichon also has Abhisit asking ”why does [Thaksin] care about the interests of another country more than his own?“. He then later states “or does Thaksin have a problem with loving the country?“

As calls to patriotism usually are, it is fairly juvenile name-calling.

Yo’ mother works for Cambodia!

Irrespective of well-known git (he disowned his own daughter for being gay) and Premier of Cambodia, Hun Sen, being deliberately provocative (Ha! I’ve got your fugitive right here – and I’m appointing him a special economic adviser! How’d you like THEM apples!), you’d hope that Vejjajiva could do better than that. Maybe take the high ground?

Here in Australia, we’re traditionally fairly cynical of authority and US-style flag-waving patriotism. (We laughed derisively at the idiotic “Barack Obama hates America if he doesn’t wear a flag pin” confected controversy in 2008.) Still, overt displays of flag-waving “patriotism” became much more prominent under our former conservative Prime Minister, John Howard. It was very quickly linked in with racism, from Pauline “Australia is being swamped with Asians” Hanson…

…through to the Cronulla riots:

Apart from the racism on display, the showy patriotism and aggressive flag-waving saddened me because our lack of silly, self-absorbed nationalism was, ironically, one of the things about this country I most admired.

People try to draw a fine distinction between nationalism and patriotism (“your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it”, according to Bernard Shaw), but ultimately they boil down to the same thing for their practitioners – my country, right or wrong. Fundamentally I see them as innately negative.

How does patriotism make anything better? How does it do anything other than drive wedges between nations, deepen conflicts, give racists and demagogues an excuse to exclude people and demean opponents (hence Samuel Johnson’s famous “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel”), and overall make the world more dangerous and unfriendly?

How “patriotic” do you really want your country to be? How “patriotic” are you comfortable with your neighbours being?

In the meantime, I’m still blogging at An Onymous Lefty (a little like this new site, except the old one publishes occasional cat photos and has less of a focus on the broader region) and our media-response blog at Crikey, Pure Poison.

One of the early subjects for the new blog here will be gaining a better understanding each others’ domestic politics. There’s a tendency amongst political bloggers to assume that readers already understand the basic political environment in which they’re writing; the issues, the players, the context – but if you’re a non-Australian reader first coming across a blog like mine, you might be very confused about a lot of the references. As I am when reading, say, a first-rate Indian political blog. Or one from the Philippines. I’m sure a lot of similar issues are debated – but what constitutes the “centre” will vary considerably. As will, for other reasons as well, the dynamics of such discussion.

Which brings me to the point of this post. <!–more–>While we’re still in this initial phase, if you are so inclined, I’d be interested to hear your views on the existing An Onymous Lefty site, since it will be the basis for this one. Which parts of what’s up on the original page at the moment are impenetrable or confusing – or boring – to non-Australian readers?

The original site – but does it translate well to non-Australian readers?

Obviously most in broader Asia will know who John Howard was, and that Australia got rid of him in 2007 – but I suspect the irony of the man who promised after his defeat to back off suddenly popping back up this week like a horror-movie monster with one last strike at his successor might not be particularly meaningful to you without some further explanation. The subject of Australia’s approach to refugees from Sri Lanka and elsewhere might, though. Similarly, the fact that one of our local Murdoch-owned tabloids happens to fairly shamelessly distort crime reporting to scare its readers might be of limited interest to non-Australians – although it would be revealing to compare it with what your own local paper does with the same issues. It’d be a rare country in which education wasn’t an issue – but the divide between private schools and public schools, and how much funding should go towards them, or indeed whether there should be such a division, might not be your focus. The issue of gay marriage is obviously one which is controversial even in supposedly liberal countries, so I predict we can have a fairly strong debate on that.

I suspect you already have strong views on the offensiveness of those who use claims that Obama is a Muslim to attack him, so there probably is a discussion we can all have about this sort of post with few changes. Same with this discussion of the ACTA copyright treaty the US is trying to impose on the rest of us. And so on.

I’ll be interested to hear what you think. And the site as a whole should launch this week.

AND A NOTE TO EXISTING READERS: Commenting is here is actually easier than you think. “Registration” just involves entering a name, email and making up a password. And you only have to do it once. Even one of the kittehs I’m not going to mention at AC could do it.