Cross-Posting: The Struggle to Survive

This is a slightly edited copy of a post on my main blog. 

I dislike writing about the struggle to survive in the West because of the desperate problems in developing nations, but the existence of worse problems elsewhere does not mean there are no problems here (and the cretins who think distraction with worse problems elsewhere is a valid coping technique, as opposed to solving the problem, are directly and personally responsible for their share of the perpetuation of those problems). I've been moved to write this brief post because I have now come across two more people who are either reducing hours or on leave to deal with the problems caused by modern life pressures.

I've noticed this particularly over the last decade in various workplaces, with - as an example - the so-called "agile" ideology (I actually need several heavy textbooks as references to do my job: so, apart from the demotivation of not having a personalised workspace, how do I actually do my job if I have to lug those back and forth from home every day?), which is the sort of stupidity that could only have been conceived and approved of by people with limited life experience. Always being connected is another example of this sort of workplace stupidity (which gets mentioned in articles about recovering from job stress or burnout - see, for instance, here and here).

In my opinion, if the human population wasn't as big as it is, we would be better off going back to life as gatherer-hunters.

However, that isn't going to happen - it cannot, with so many billions of people here: we need agriculture, which has enabled civilisation, and the good parts of civilisation.

The problem is: how to we limit civilisation to only the good, not the bad - the learning, research, thinking, and improved medical care, not the over-consumption, status-slavery, mass vigilantism by social media, and economically-driven abuse of humans in workplaces?

The answer to that has to begin with increased awareness - don't just agree to longer hours, faster work, increased availability to more and more churlish and childish and impatient bosses (I am thinking of some I knew of last century) and clients: question or challenge it, even if you're going to agree to the demands. If nothing else, question it to yourself, in your own mind, so you can make an informed decision (whether that be out of duty to dependents, lack of resources to survive outside that job, or just cowardice).

If you can go further, by writing to your local MP (even if only to say life seems to be harder), or possibly a trustworthy newspaper, great. Even better if you have enough energy and wherewithal to do more activism, such as perhaps meeting MPs, joining a group, etc.


Perhaps above all else, know yourself, and be willing to give up the flash and trendy (e.g., the latest gizmo / social media outlet) in favour of substance in your life (such as reflection, and genuine, deeply held friendships). It is what we are prepared to forgo, that shows what we value most.

Some brief book reviews

Some time ago, I began reading three books that I regard as being about human rights:

• the fourth edition of Geoffrey  Robertson's "Crimes Against Humanity" (The New Press, 2012, ISBN 978-1-59558-860-9, 4th ed.);
• "The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World", Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro, (Simon & Schuster, New York, 2017, ISBN 978-1-5011-0986-7, Amazon); and
• "Human Rights After Hitler: the Lost History of Prosecuting Axis War Crimes", Dan Plesch (Georgetown University Press, Washington, 2017, ISBN 978-1-62616-431-4, Amazon).

I'm going to add a fourth book to this review, which is about politics:

• "The Final Days" by Woodward and Bernstein (my copy Simon and Schuster, New York, 1976, ISBN 978-0-74325-7406-7).

I didn't get too far with the third book, which is about the work on the United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC) between 1943 and 1949 "with the aim of identifying, classifying, and assisting national governments with the trials of war criminals in the European and East Asian theatres". Operating in parallel to the more famous Nuremberg and Far East trial processes, the UNWCC gathered evidence leading to over 8,000 pre-trial dossiers and charges against 36,000 individuals - including Hitler (part of the face sheet of that dossier is at the http://www.unwcc.org/ website). In its scope it was a staggering project - and a heartening commitment to justice.

As an indication of what the UNWCC did (from page 7 of the introduction), it charged individual soldiers as well as leaders, and, in some cases, whole units - and secured convictions. Interestingly, at that time, the USA charged a number of people with torture because those people were using what we now know as water boarding. (Incidentally, I understand the UNWCC website has the actual archives - although, as the site warns, they're not easy to navigate.)  From the website: "Many of those involved in its creation went on to become key figures in the fields of human rights and international law."

Tragically, after World War Part Two, the irresponsible, short-sighted and downright bloody stupid USA shut down the UNWCC and had its records declared secret - so it could start using Germans in the Cold War against Russia, no matter that some were guilty of heinous crimes against humanity (see page 9 of the introduction).

From the website:

"Owing to its politicised closure, however, and the sealing of its archives, the UNWCC went largely unremarked upon for much of the twentieth century. Despite some academic study of its work, and increased awareness due to the role its records played during the 1985 Waldheim affair, the inaccessibility of the UNWCC’s sealed archives meant that modern scholars and lawyers were unable to use the work it did and the precedents it set. This was particularly relevant during the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, where lack of access and awareness of its work on rape as a war crime severely hindered prosecutorial efforts, which had to start from scratch.

After some academic attention – from writers such as Arieh Kochavi and Christopher Simpson – work to uncover the UNWCC’s history developed significantly in the 2010s. Following a campaign by a range of academic researchers and legal practitioners – led by Dr. Dan Plesch – the UN first allowed limited access to the Commission’s records, then, through its United Nations Archives and Records Management Section (UNARMS), disclosed the whole archive to a number of research and educational organisations across the world, including the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Wiener Library, and SOAS, University of London."

The conclusion of the book advocates for accessing and using the information in the UNWCC archives:

"The information exists. In deciding whether to explore it, we may ask ourselves who we are going to support. Will it be the narrow pragmatists who initially fought the creations of the UNWCC and the international military tribunals and who later succeeded at the end of the 1940s  in halting the pursuit of international criminal justice? Or will it be the pioneers who strove to lay the foundations for such as system, many of whom were exiled to London from their native lands and sometimes forced to meet while sheltering from Nazi bombs? ... the frightening lesson of the demise of the UNWCC and its documented work is how easily great successes can be lost."

In my case, I found discovering, in the first chapter, that an effective legal deterrent to the use of rape in war could have been demonstrated if it wasn't for some utterly moronic US men - on whose heads I hand responsibility for a significant portion of the MILLIONS of lives that have been destroyed by sexual assaults since 1949 - so heart rending that I was able to only skim the rest of the book. It makes no difference to me that this groundbreaking work was done during and just after that war: it was lost, and humanity has been unalterably diminished by that.

In fact, I consider the sealing of the UNWCC records to be a crime against humanity itself.

One day I may be able to go back and finish reading that book properly, but not for a while.

So let's move on to the second book - which I almost completed.

This book, "The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World", was, in many ways, the reverse of the book about the UNWCC: it was about a positive event (the Paris Pact against aggressive war), and started off being interesting (a section on the history of international law which, in my opinion, supplements what I read in Geoffrey Robertson's book) and quite inspiring - except for the appalling treatment of US citizen Salmon Levinson, who came up with the idea and was buried by the big egos who had their names appended to the final product.

After Mr Levinson started the ball rolling (which required perseverance over many years), the final treaty basically outlawed aggressive war. As the 63 signatories included both Germany and Japan, this treaty enabled prosecution after World War Part 2 for crimes against peace (I am reading some interesting remarks about Japan's flaunting of breaking treaties, and the paternalistic attitudes of the US as the Cold War got underway)., and key parts of the Pact were include in the Charter of the United Nations (UN).

To the simple-minded, the existence of war indicates that the Pact failed - which is similar in its superficiality to assuming the League of Nations did no good at all (the Permanent Court of International Justice did some good work, the ILO is still going, the League also acheived some resolutions of conflict, and the Minorities Treaties were underappreciated - and all despite the malicious backstabbing of the USA, which occurred despite US President Wilson's best [flawed - possibly as a result of illness] efforts) and the UN is ineffective (the work it does on development - particularly of health and the reduction of poverty (e.g., the MDGs and the SDGs] - is outstanding and unheralded against the backdrop of its political struggles against powerful nations and groups of nations).

The authors wrote a newspaper article which sums up their arguments fairly well: see here.

However, their glib dismissal of the independence of my nation (Australia - the residual links were mostly cut in 1986) and Canada on the basis of the UK retaining some foreign affairs powers didn't endear them - or their critical faculties - to me, and then we got to their data analysis: the key to their argument that the Pact worked.

Before I go any further, I consider the topic of reduced acquisition of land a useful indicator of the Pact working, but I don't consider it the only nor the most compelling evidence of success. I am aware that changing peoples' mindsets takes time, and is not a simple, smooth progression - for instance, the struggle to abolish slavery has taken over two millenia so far, and there is still some residual slavery - but that does NOT mean abolitionism has been a failure.

Similarly, there has been reactionary events in the backwards-and-forwards history of gender equality following the passage of laws against gender discrimination half a century ago, and acheiving LGBT rights has also not been a smooth, constant improvement.

Those who like things as they are will fight against change - intelligently, using whatever skills and resources they can acquire, and thus one should never expect realisation of an ideal to be smooth.

Having made that qualification, I'm going to start with a quote from a review of this book published by the New Yorker here:

"Hathaway and Shapiro are lawyers, and, in making their case for the supreme explanatory power of Kellogg-Briand, they litigate themselves around some tricky historical corners. The claim about the return of conquered territories turns out to require some definitional parsing. They mean what they call “unrecognized transfers,” a category that does not include, for example, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Albania, and East Germany, which became puppet states of the Soviet Union. Nor does their definition include the Baltic states, which were taken over by the Soviets in consequence of an agreement that Stalin made with Hitler. Hathaway and Shapiro argue that the United States refused to recognize this seizure, but this is not the reason those states were awarded independence in 1991. That happened because the Soviet Empire collapsed."

In my case, it was the glib dismissal of China's violent  military  invasion of the free and sovereign (perhaps self-declared, as was the case with, for instance, the USA - a declaration, incidentally, recognised by Mongolia [the failure to recognise this independence is as evil as the refusal of the USA and Spain to recognise the Independence of the Philippines after their successful Revolutionary War - which was similar to the Tibetans expelling China) nation of Tibet (which was followed by atrocities that some have described as genocide) that lost me completely, and I stopped reading.

I would still recommend buying and reading the book (particularly the pre-"analysis of data" sections), but subject to the caveats made above (i.e., wrong assumptions re what is required as proof, and selective analysis) kept in mind. 

Fortunately, this now brings me to Geoffrey Robertson's tome - which has been expanded, and is still mostly well-written (I have a few quibbles, but nothing strong enough to recall right now).

When I started writing this, I had just read Robertson's justification for the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima (which doesn't apply to the second nuclear bombing). The argument, incidentally, was along the lines that USA was facing massive casualties (which would have been made apparent had Japan's war criminal emperor been put on trial); the argument that Russia's entry needs to be considered, but not from a perspective of hindsight, from the point of view of what was reasonably available at that time (in my view, the response of "of course they knew" just shows those people making it to be conspiracy nuts).

As stated, the second nuclear bombing was not justified, and led to the subsequent threat of annihilation that we have all been living with.

I'm treating Mr Robertson's book as a textbook this time, and am studying as I used to when I was at Uni (which is very slow, given my current limits on time and energy).

This book has lots of history, insight and accessibility, and context and background about some events that didn't make the media at the time.

I thoroughly recommend it.

Finally, "The Final Days" (pun not intended), about the events after the Watergate scandal was exposed, leading up to US President Nixon's resignation. I'm not quite half way through this book, and my overriding impression is of a group of arrogant, unethical, short-sighted people: the famous people, such as Nixon and Kissinger come off as particularly unpleasant personalities (I was a kid while all this was happening, saw the big headlines about Kissinger and peace in the newspapers [they were printed on paper then, kiddies] and wondered why my father was so dubious about Kissinger - I have subsequently found out, including through this book), whilst some of the others (particularly some of the lawyers) were trying to "do the right thing", but got lost in the imagine splendour of the tawdry - in this episode - US White House.

My overriding thought in response to what I have read is of the work allegedly identifying some people running companies as having higher than average tendencies towards psychopathy. Now, before I go further, I want to point out that:

(a) I know some exceptionally good people who are politicians and business leaders;
(b) most of the business leaders I know (and many of the politicians) are simply everyday people - neither exceptionally good or bad, but blessed/cursed with that mixture of characteristics that we all are;
(c) I have known a couple of business leaders (some time ago now) who I would put in the category of psychopath.

Having made those qualifications, I wonder how the key people in the events described would go if they were tested for psychopathy?

In fact, although it is unfair to the vast majority who aren't, I wonder if what we need is testing of all people in positions of power for psychopathic tendencies? Such testing would:

• require significant education of the broader population that, in the workplace, this is probably not just a bad-good binary (although it is quite binary in the psychological and criminal worlds: in fact, I personally would prefer to see people tested for right wing authoritarianism, which I consider would be a more useful indicator of potential workplace and political problems, but that reflects my political views), but a scale of tendencies, and that some people can work on those tendencies (e.g., by counselling, personal growth work, etc), although that tends to not work for full-blown psychopaths;
• probably initially be done by those brave, far-sighted company officers and politicians who would choose to volunteer for such testing, and to have the results made public, but I suspect public pressure would result in this becoming as expected as declaring pecuniary interests; 
• give shareholders some forewarning of potential problems;
• possibly start to restore trust in politicians that has been eroded by events such as those described in this book, and the pardon given to Nixon; 
• would best be done as part of the screening of candidates ...

Against that, it would act as a disincentive for some good people to take on such roles ...

Considerations on a public transport press release

I'd like to comment briefly on a press release in my home state this week about a new tram route in my my home city's south east. Now, in considering this, I'd like to begin with some history.

In the early 1960s, my (adoptive) family moved to Syndal, which was then on the outskirts of Melbourne (it is now close to the geographic centre of Melbourne's population). We were able to do so because the suburb had a railway (built in the 1920s). In that era, private car ownership was relatively expensive, and commuting by car was a nightmare. As a result, back in the 60s, public transport was a staple of life (as it had been in many previous decades, once we grew past the stage of being able to walk to work), and providing that sort of public infrastructure was considered desirable by public and politicians alike.

However, better and local manufacturing of cars was reducing the price of cars, and advertising on that newfangled thing called television started to have an influence, and, as a result people started wanting to use their cars more, and we started down the short-sighted path of building more freeways to cure existing road traffic problems that then grew in response to the new freeways. In the 1970s, car lobbies even advocated for having cars on roads that were built above ground level, with ground reserved for pedestrians. (If they had swapped the order, it would have made more sense: pedestrians are lighter than cars, so the higher levels would have been less expensive, and that way the pedestrians would have had the light and possibly clearer air ... which might have been why the car people wanted it the other way ... )

Nevertheless, in that era, we commenced a major piece of railway infrastructure - the City Loop. Now the City Loop in itself was an indication, in my opinion, that something had gone wrong with public planning, as it was retrofitting infrastructure to an already developed area ... however, that was probably due to the inability of predicting, in the early 1900s, the post-Second World War rise of the suburbs. (The sacrifice of the green belt, on the other hand, in response to the lies of developers that a house with a garden was like bushland was an unforgiveable error that necessitated the recent imposition of green wedges.) Importantly, public infrastructure was still being spent on - although that now also included major road works.

The independence of travel by car was popular, and trains and trams were increasingly crowded and unpleasant. Political parties are often good at working out what voters want, and thus we were seeing infrastructure spending shifting from trains and trams to roads, and it was no longer a given that a new suburb would have non-road public transport.

Government spending also increased in this era on socially beneficial matters such as welfare - spending which I consider essential, but which were seen by many as contributing to life becoming more difficult financially. That was the era of high inflation, and economic difficulties reflected international events such as the oil crisis (enacted by Arab nations against those supporting the nation of Israel that many of those Arab nations had just tried to snuff out - unsuccessfully) - but politicians never like admitting that events are beyond their control, even if they are (as is, in my opinion, so often the case when considering economic matters: mind you, responses have improved to the extent that there is some control, but it is still limited in comparison to major international trends and events).

Combine this with the underhanded and evil machinations to undermine fairness (enacted by a few rich people) from the 1970s, and we saw "economic rationalism", the early form of neoliberalism, strike - and infrastructure began being viewed as a matter for private industry. (This era also saw the use of loans for infrastructure, which provided, in my opinion, good intergenerational sharing of equity, shoved off the scene by short-sighted, downright stupid ideology.)

It has taken nearly three decades to come to an awareness of how stupid those views and that ideology were, but there is still a struggle over infrastructure as it is politically fashionable (well, almost crucial) to promise lower taxes - and taxes, as the saying goes, are the price we pay for having a civil society - that is, for having roads, railways, hospitals, schools, defence forces, welfare, and so forth.

We're still hampered by the staggering selfishness of society, partly due to the financial difficulty of living as we wish to or think we should be able to (the growing size and flashiness of houses we can no longer afford is an indication of that), and partly due to the influence of reactionary conservative governments and their oligarchical backers. This has shown itself as what is virtually a war between elected governments now - as exemplified by the former state government trying to compel the next to build a project which favoured private car use over public transport.

As it turned out, Victorians elected a government which has been trying to remedy the public transport deficit (amongst other matters). The press release I referred to is part of  that suite of tasks. In light of that, I consider there are three sets of questions which can validly be asked about the subject of the press release:

1. Is work proceeding at an appropriate  proper rate on remedying the public transport deficit/backlog?
   This includes issues such as:
    - is the timing of this project proper, or are there more urgent needs? (Ideally, this would have been combined with construction of Monash University in the 1950s, just as building Melbourne Airport in the 1960s should have automatically included a train.)
    - are there other valid ways to meet the needs of this project? (A resounding "no" is the answer to this question, in my opinion: we have decades of underspending on public transport to catch up on.)
    - are the public benefits sufficient to justify the private costs (specifically, any resumptions of people's homes - for which, in my opinion, we should pay far more than market value)?
   
2. Are the details of this project appropriate?
   This covers the questions the media has been asking, about the route, gross costs (the questions rarely match costs with benefits) and options.
   One of the things I have liked about our current state government is the level of consultation - notably, on the proposed North East Link. I am, however, unaware of the details of any consultation to date on this proposal (although there will be an election before any construction begins), I have not seen any map of the proposed route.
   
3. Have we learned the lesson of inadequate public transport spending to the extent that new suburbs will be spared the problems of inadequate public transport and the pain and disruption of remedial works by having adequate public transport included upfront?
   This particularly applies to some of the planned development to the west of Melbourne, most of which seems to include rail, but I'm not sure whether that is adequate and will be properly timed, as I haven't spoken to any town planners on that of late.
   My point is that, when I see the public transport deficit/backlog being addressed, I want to be sure that we're not creating that for some other, new area. Ideally, I would like to hear a politician commit to a realistic level of taxation to enable us to have a civil society, but I doubt any politician could answer that honestly and be elected - which is a terrible indictment of the selfishness. stupidity and/or short-sightedness of voters.

On that last point, we have an authority which provides independent, expert advice on infrastructure; that is good and admirable. Where this falls down is that it then goes to competing political ideologies and voter sensibilities (or the lack thereof ... SIGH ... ) to make a decision about the needs of future Victorians. We currently have a government which is committed to generally consulting - which is also good and admirable. Is there a further development we can make to either de-politicise taxation, or provide voters with sufficient information to understand the broader significance of their electoral choices?

We do have positions to provide specific, expert advice - for instance, the Solicitor-General, the (Commonwealth) Chief Scientist (the existence of which makes a mockery of the neoliberals twisted response to the Uluru Statement from the Heart, which called for the creation a similar Indigenous role, albeit in a different format), and the aforementioned Infrastructure Victoria.

We also have proposals, from time to time, for new advisory positions - for instance, I wrote about an idea I had for a Chief Criminologist here (original idea here; this was provided, to a large extent, by the position of Community Safety Trustee, created by the current state government - and a good indication, in my opinion, of their commitment to community and consultation), and I reviewed a suggestion for a Commissioner for Political Plurality here.

Do we also need an expert to advise on level of taxation with regard to its effect on having a civil society?

I'm aware that we have a wide range of experts who comment on economic matters, including taxation, and that many of them take a broader view on matters such as discrimination (which denies the economy access to the resources which are the skills and time of those people being discriminated against - Dr. Andrew Leigh, Member for Fenner, was the first person to demonstrate that to me), but, with respect, that is not actually the same thing. Elected politicians are hamstrung by the politics of having to get re-elected - and I would rather acknowledge that, and come up with a system that works, than trying to get MPs to be brave enough to put their jobs on the line (which quite a few do, in fact, and which many voters are too afraid to do in their lives ... ).

So ... do we need a Commissioner for Civil Society?


(I was going to comment on a few other press releases (on regional training and consultation on training), but I have run out of steam, and will leave this post at that.)

Body blows to MPs' worldviews in politics

From time to time, our worldview – that is, the sum total of beliefs, perceptions, values and core values, evidence and thinking that is our personal picture of what the world is, and how it functions – gets a body blow.

Sometimes that doesn’t matter all that much – as happens, for instance, when children find out about Father (or Mother) Christmas – it’s painful, but we get over it. At other times, it does matter.

On a personal level, things that make a difference to our worldview may include falling in love (not only for the first time), or personal losses – such as our first memento mori, or losing a loved one.

Major setbacks in anything that is important to us can also have a major impact – as many Australian cricket fans this week would probably attest to.

How we respond to those events can be personally significant. Many counsellors would probably point out, with a fair degree of validity, that many such events offer opportunities for growth – and, as children, our growing past the shock of discovering the truth about Father (or Mother) Christmas is one such example.

There are other examples.

One larger example would be, for instance, the revelations of the Pentagon Papers, subject of the recent US film “The Post”, in 1971. That was a blow to many US citizens, and would have shattered any elements of their worldview that were based on the notion that their government was trustworthy and morally “good”. However, as with the excesses of their current President Trump, quite a few responded to that shock by becoming involved in politics or socially active in some way – they hurt and grieved, modified their worldview, and then they either got on with their life, or did something constructive about what they didn’t like.

Others, less constructively, just became cynical – or more so.

Here in Australia, our comparable test to the Pentagon Papers was probably the dismissal of the Whitlam Government in 1975 by the then-Governor-General, Sir John Kerr.

I’m not sure how I would characterise our reactions to that event - other than being a wide and complex range.

At this point, it should also be noted that some events cannot reasonably be expected to have a positive outcome: being sexually assaulted, particularly as a child, is one such example.

I would now like to turn my attention to Australia’s current Commonwealth Government, led by Malcolm Turnbull.

Despite the hopes of many left-inclined voters, the Turnbull Government has largely stuck to its conservative guns. That has probably been most obvious, and perhaps most expected, in economic policy, but also shows in the continuation of Australia’s widely criticised policy on asylum seekers (with signs that the ALP’s position is shifting, in detail, if not principle), the persistence that led to a backdoor way to put Same Sex Marriage to a public vote (the result of which the more conservative elements would not have expected), and a continued denialist attitude towards the urgency of climate change despite growing scientific evidence, community concern and media questioning.

On top of that, the Turnbull Government continues to be told by voters, through polls, that there is significant discontent with it. Being in Government and enacting laws that they believe in, is obviously important to government MPs: what sort of shocks are the continued adverse polls results and events such as the strong support for Same Sex Marriage, and personal controversies having on the worldview of those in it?

It is quite possible, given that MPs need to have, to some extent, a relatively thick skin, that this is having no effect – consider, for instance, John Howard spent 13 long and difficult years - last century - in opposition before becoming Australia’s second longest serving Prime Minister.

However, it is also true that mental health issues exist in many workplaces – as James Packer has recently demonstrated. Unfortunately, these are too often poorly acknowledged and/or managed (and hence the “R U OK?” campaign). Politics is no exception to this (see for instance, here, here, and here), and there have also been articles about the toxicity of working in politics (see for instance, here, here, here, here, and here) and the increased pressure of the 24/7 news cycle.

My personal opinion, based on various experiences and observations through my life, is that one of the reactions that can occur as a result of a shock to one’s worldview (particularly when under other pressures) is denial – either temporary or longer term (and see also here). Is it possible that a number of conservative MPs have experienced a shock – or shocks – to their worldviews, and are reacting to that by “circling the wagons”?

That might be one explanation for their continued insistence, for instance, that company tax rates will be good.

I hope not. If that is the case, there are going to be some damaged people who eventually leave politics, and that would be sad for them, their families and friends, and the state of politics in general. I would prefer that any MPs experiencing such problems admit it – to themselves, if no-one else, that they get help, and that the standard and style of debate in politics, media reporting and commentary, and public reaction becomes such that it is possible to admit to a change of heart without being excoriated (which is a point others have made – see here, here, here, here, and here).
And that isn't going to be easy - the sense of powerlessness tends to drive one towards stronger, angrier reactions.