Giving up power and anticipatory obedience

I recently read “Black Klansman” (Century [Penguin], London, 2018, first pub. Police and Fire Publishing, 2014, ISBN 9781780899299), Ron Stallman’s book on infiltrating that racist organisation which led to the powerful movie “Blakckklansman”, which is the reason I bought the book.

Now there are many things which struck me from the movie and the book. One was a racist fireman. He did his job, as far as he was concerned, by rescuing people of colour from fires and fighting fires affecting them, but he would have preferred people of colour “lived elsewhere” – which is very like work colleagues I’ve heard say “Muslims should stick to “their own nations”, as if nations don’t have a mix of all religious faiths and agnostics and atheists and as if people are not allowed to change their path. Apart from both being wrong, one of the many problems such attitudes lead to (and their beliefs do show – they “leak out”), is that it will lead to a reluctance to call on emergency services in the future.

This is probably one of the reasons there was such a quick reaction to the violent and wrong raid on Hares and Hyenas (currently being investigated by IBAC), although I consider it likely other reasons included a desire to assure members of the public that (the majority – a small number are currently subject to investigation) police do intend and try to “do the right thing”.

Going back to the racist fireman, he is probably is doing that job because he wants adulation. He possibly gets that from majorities (i.e., most white people), but he is probably also too stupid (an article I wrote on a similar error is here) to see that he is actively harming others by promoting discriminatory attitudes that do cause actual harm, and thus, no matter how many people of colour he rescues, he will be an abhorrent person.

(As a side note, I was also staggered to recently discover how racist US President Woodrow Wilson was – see here, here, here, and here, for instance. The CS Monitor article includes: “While he worked with diverse world leaders to spread American values, Cooper writes, ‘his reluctance to enter the war for fear of further depleting the white race disclosed what really moved him.’ ”. The Wikipedia article includes: “The Wilson administration escalated the discriminatory hiring policies and segregation of government offices that had begun under President Theodore Roosevelt, and had continued under President Taft.” What a hypocrite!).

There are many other powerful aspects to both film and book.

On that, one of the epigraphs to Ron Stallman’s book is:

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.

Alice Walker

People giving up their power . . . 

Well, that’s what I want to write about next.

One of the most frustrating things for me is workers just giving up and meekly accepting claims by bosses – such as the claim that “normal practice” is to be available 24/7. That is the case now, but when it started it wasn’t – who was the first irresponsible coward who gave up workers power by agreeing to that claim without even questioning it, let alone discussing it?

I’d hazard a guess they were probably a male who either didn’t have, undervalued or ignored “family duties” – or they were someone who was cowed and intimidated by fear of losing their job.

And where were unions while this was happening? (Doing compliant things like telling women how to negotiate salaries better rather than questioning why the system was built on a fundamentally patriarchal view of competition rather than decency???)

Another frustrating area is security  theatre – especially what amounts to sexual assault in the USA (and too many other nations as a result of US bullying [aka "coercion"]).

There was objection – a lot of it – when these measures were introduced (and evidence of very considerable trauma – including to adolescents and victims of sexual assault), but the dissent appears to have been suppressed (a website is still blocked ;from China?!], but they appear to be have been able to set up on social media), but the main objection was people refusing to fly – which has led to higher road fatality rates as around 6% of people do exactly that (and there was also one plane crash that killed 150 people that could happen because of the reasonable measures that had been introduced).

Keeping in mind that most of what has been introduced is security theatre, nothing of great effect (the underwear and shoe bombers were unsuccessful, remember) and possibly actually harmful to safety, this is a perfect example of an out of touch, short sighted bureaucracy/politics causing more harm than it prevents. The 80% of people surveyed in the USA who agree with that are guilty of shallow, superficial and sloppy thinking (and the bloody USA didn’t even have baggage screening and basic procedures at the airports the 9/11 violent extremists used) – the sort of thinking that results in people giving up their power, and leads to less democratic, less free, and ultimately less safe societies (read Masha Gessen's magnificent "The Future is History" [pub. Riverhead Books, New York, 2017, ISBN 978-1-59463-3], for more on this).

To cap it off, some morons claim not continuing to fly despite the sexual assaults is “allowing the violent extremists to win”, when in actual fact they WON when the security theatre was introduced.

(Do the agents in the USA’s TSA think that being groped by someone in a uniform is acceptable because it is being done by someone in uniform? If so, they share that fallacy with others, and they’re wrong. From a recent email of mine: “The sort of attitudinal problem I am describing is something I first came across in the 80s in Queensland, where a police officer I knew was talking blithely of his preference to pointing a loaded gun at cars stopped during road blocks for his safety, and refused to acknowledge that such could cause any problems to the victims of that behaviour - he seemed to think that his wearing the uniform prevented damage, which is utter rubbish. [For what it is worth, if such situations involve danger, I am OK with officers having drawn weapons, but not pointing them at innocent people.]”)

Most recently, this sort of sloppy thinking and meek compliance has been demonstrated by accepting use of electronic copies of signatures without a quibble (again, where were unions on that one?), and with the casual ignoring of privacy risks on the internet and even, more recently, handing over biometrics without even asking what security precautions are being taken to employers (this led to a court case that was a win for sanity, but not for the right reason – see here) and technology companies.

All of this actively harms the sheeple going along with this, and creates a culture where others are compelled to be subjected to harm.

While that is bad enough, it also sets the scene for the problem of “anticipatory compliance”.

From Timothy Snyder’s book “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century” (Pub. The Bodley Head [Penguin, 2017, ISBN 9781473549296):

ANTICIPATORY OBEDIENCE IS a political tragedy. Perhaps rulers did not initially know that citizens were willing to compromise this value or that principle. Perhaps a new regime did not at first have the direct means of influencing citizens one way or another. After the German elections of 1932, which permitted Adolf Hitler to form a government, or the Czechoslovak elections of 1946, where communists were victorious, the next crucial step was anticipatory obedience. Because enough people in both cases voluntarily extended their services to the new leaders, Nazis and communists alike realized that they could move quickly toward a full regime change. The first heedless acts of conformity could not then be reversed.

So . . .  from bigotry to sheeple compliance to anticipatory obedience . . . what is the solution?

It’s certainly not “shouting louder”, but what would help, in my opinion, is, firstly, better education – teach kids to think: if they can learn to see through advertising, they can learn to see through some of the rubbish claims being made in general. If they can learn to take a more philosophical, broad perspective view on life, they will questions the rubbish claims.

And secondly, better – more objective, nuanced, sceptical, and broader perspective – media reporting, and continued, more widespread education and advocacy.

A third dream is for public servants and politicians working together for the longer view, but I fear climate change has shown that, while some of each group will, it can be too difficult to get enough sheeple to elect the better MPs who will enable that to happen – which takes us back to better education of children so the next generation doesn’t repeat our errors.

But above all these is for people to recognise that they do, as Alice Walker inferred, have power.

Apparently competing rights

Richard Bach, author of the wonderful and famous "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" (Amazon), wrote, in the introduction to a subsequent book, words to the effect (I'm writing this from memory - those books are still packed) that an idea will

burst through your front wall, seize you gently, and say "I will not let go until you put me down, in words, on paper".

I've experienced - and still experience - that compelling nature of ideas, but there's another area of life I am aware of that compulsion, of that call, if you will: religion and spirituality.

I won't go into my personal experiences of that (you can find such at my main blog - e.g., here, here, here, here, and just generally buried in this lot), but John Beckett, "Pagan, Druid, and Unitarian Universalist", has written compellingly about religious experience and calls, on his "Under the Ancient Oaks" blog. Those posts include:

• "Exploring the Origins of Religion", which includes:

"as good as Part One is, it’s missing the same thing every other “origin of religion” and “evolution of religion” essay is missing: first-hand religious experience."
"If you assume there is nothing supernatural, sacred, or spiritual you can never hope to understand the beliefs and practices of someone who actually experiences the supernatural, sacred, and spiritual"
and
"I’ve had tangible experiences of beings I’m convinced are not of this world. I’ve had less tangible but just as real experiences of beings I’m convinced are Gods. I talk regularly with other people who have similar experiences. We can debate what these beings really are and what our encounters mean, but the experiences themselves are undeniably real."

• "Learning to Trust Your Experiences", which includes links to other materials and excellent comments on aspects such as now thyself, separate the experience from the interpretation, deception, "just because they're dead doesn't mean they're smart" (which I've written about elsewhere myself), mental health, and more, and this:

"But if have an experience that fits an Otherworldly or magical matter and you eliminate every ordinary explanation, all you’re left with are extraordinary explanations."

• "The Morrigan Calls people in Different Life Situations", which includes excellent links and the following:

"Some people compare being called by the Morrigan to being drafted into the army. You get a notice saying to go fight and you don’t have any real choice in the matter."

• and "How Do I Know if a God is Calling Me?".

In addition to being called, which is a deep and very real (and not exclusively Christian / neochristian / Abrahamic religion) matter, there are a number of reasons one can find oneself in a particular religious setting - including as a result of an intellectual exercise or some sort of personal quest, parental and/or peer influence, and even a search for community.

Being LGBTIQ is stronger and more intrinsic to oneself than all those reasons - including being called. That statement is being made by a trans lesbian and Pagan Priestess and Elder, on the basis of lived and observed experience, and the evidence - including scientific - of others.

Being LGBTIQ is NEVER a flippant "choice" - and neither is one's religion.

I'm a member of both camps, so am reasonably well positioned to know.

Now, the idea that there are competing rights here: let's look at that a little more closely.

Now, we're considering first generation rights (see here for a summary of terms etc) here. One of the sub-categories of that generation of rights is "inviolabilities", which - from my linked post - are:

"protection of the immediate sphere of personal security, privacy, identity of the person [and goods related to these], and thus rights to life and to personal integrity, personal liberty and security, prohibition of slavery, a name, sexual self-determination, and intimacy and privacy of the family and of the correspondence, and freedom of conscience [but civil liberty of proselytising may be limited] – all of which apply even if person utterly passive"

Another of the sub-category is "civil liberties". Again, from my linked post:

"based on interactions with others [recluse has, but to exercise must interact, which is regulated much as traffic needs traffic lights]- liberty of action in the political, social, and economic spheres, including freedoms of expression, seeking and receiving information, assembly, association, movement, and residence"

So basically, in the - as referred to in a West Wing episode ("Game On" in Season 4) - "one square feet of real estate" of one's head (and mind, or heart, and soul), one's liberty to opinions is inviolable. (As far as the law and legally defined rights are concerned, you don't have to love people, but you have to make sure any hate you have does not flow into real life. This is where the great Dr Martin Luther King. Jr.'s saying "“It may be true that the law cannot change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless” applies.)

To a large extent, what one does in the privacy of one's home, or with consenting adults, is also covered. The exception is where others are being harmed - for instance, domestic abuse - or could be harmed - such as planning a violent extremist event: in both those two examples, others have rights to interfere in order to protect others.

This is a good lead in to the exercise of rights in public life, which is largely civil rights (defined by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights). From the MOOC  Chile (part of the Universidad Diego Portales) course "Introduction to Human Rights":

"Civil rights refer to the immunities every individual citizen should have in a political system based on the will of the governed and the legitimate monopoly of public force they bestow on the authorities they freely elect. Such monopoly of force ought to be used to enforce the law, protect basic rights, and promote the common good. Civil rights, then, imply the freedom to act in the economic and social spheres of society."

The rights are:

• the right to life;
• the prohibition of torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment;
• the prohibition of slavery;
• the right to liberty and security of the person;
• the right to equality before the law and the prohibition of discrimination;
• the right to have access to justice and to a due process of law;
• the right to privacy;
• the freedom of thought, of conscience, of religion, and of expression; and
• the right to vote and to run for public office.

The following is from the MOOC Chile course:

"Yet, as a rule, persons do not just remain in their intimate sphere. Social life and all its benefits come with the cost of trying to accommodate competing interests. This entails frequent collisions which must be regulated, much as an intense city traffic requires rules, red lights, and traffic signs. So, there are some reasonable and necessary restrictions to the exercise of certain civil and political rights, particularly civil liberties. These restrictions may consist of limitations applicable at all times, and derogations or suspensions, which may apply in times of certain grave emergencies."

Recent media events suggest that the second last of these may lead to a conflict between freedom of religion and expression, and the rights of LGBTIQ+ people - specifically, a well-known sports player who was sacked after a tweet that gay and lesbian people (and others) will go to hell.

There are a few points which need to be considered here:

• the details of freedom of expression or opinion are defined by international treaties and case law, and is currently understood to cover the liberty to hold opinions and both impart and receive (or seek) information and ideas, by any means, without interference; 
• there are limits - most famously expressed by the American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes rightly pointed out, in 1919, that freedom of speech does not include the right to falsely shout “fire!” in a crowded theatre. 

Those limits are accepted as including the protection of:

• Firstly, the rights of others (e.g., to privacy and reputation, the protection of minors, or the right to a fair trial). According to an ancient Kantian maxim, the liberties and rights of others are the frontier which cannot be trespassed when exercising one’s rights;
• Secondly, collective security or law enforcement: the exercise of civil and political rights cannot entail the disruption of peace and social tranquillity. Criminal law is the main system called to deal with disruptions of social peace, but this also includes limits on the publishing of military secrets;
• Thirdly, the authority or impartiality of the judiciary.
• And finally, international law mentions ‘common good’ reasons, which are the requirements of national security, public order, public health, and public morals, to limit certain liberties. 

 Now, my understanding of the situation of recent controversy is:

• I understand he was dismissed for breaching rules about bringing the sporting organisation into disrepute, not for homophobia, and that legal action is underway so that aspect may well be cleared up;
• His views on LGBTIQ+ people are hateful, but do not meet the criteria for hate speech.
  Again, from the MOOC Chile course:
  "Hate speech and war propaganda are directly forbidden by international human rights law. Hate speech is the advocacy of national, racial, and religious hatred that constitute incitement to discrimination, hostility, or violence. For hate speech to be prohibited, it does not suffice [for it be] a hateful expression, it must also advocate wrongful actions against a person or a group";
• However, his position gives the views expressed significance and weight of exposure, and are the sort of view that causes harm to people - particularly young LGBTIQ+ kids, as well elucidated by a former player from that code who is gay. This harm is as real as domestic violence or violent extremism.

Therefore, my take on it is:

• the player has the right to his opinions; 
• as his expression of those views in those circumstances are likely to cause harm (much as shouting "fire" in a crowded theatre would), there is a good argument that he exceeded what was reasonable for his self expression, and began to trample on the rights of others.

If he had not been such a public figure, it is unlikely his views would have much, if any effect, and thus the argument about harm becomes weaker, but does not go away.

There are, however, broader aspects to this.

I've written about the inviolability of one's mind - one's "innermost / truest self", in a sense. That covers the right to have a particular religious belief, as well as acknowledging the right to be LGBTIQ+ - and those two groups overlap (as example, we had a National Queer Spirituality Conference in Adelaide in 2003 [see here], followed by a Victorian Queer Spirituality Conference in 2005).

The greatest beneficiaries of that protection have often been what are considered to be mainstream religions. The first major religious discrimination in Australia was against the Irish Catholics, who were a significant part of convicts being shipped out here in the late 1700s/earl;y 1800s, and that discrimination continued until at least the 1970s - albeit without the level of violence and visceral hatred in Ireland, where it was also intrinsically melded with nationalism.

As another example of that, antisemitism is still - disturbingly - present.

Thus, protecting the right for people to acknowledge / "choose" their own personal identity is a matter that is off benefit to mainstream religions.

To give another slant to this, the Chinese who came to Australia in the 1800s were not Christian; however, of late, a significant minority of Chinese in Australia are Christian, possibly fleeing the persecution of Communist China. That is, these people are choosing to leave a situation where their "one square foot of real estate" is not inviolable, to go to a place where it is - or is supposed to be.

That inviolability is attacked whenever mainstream religions attack LGBTIQ+ people (which includes a number of Christians) - it is, apart from the factual errors and the fact that those views are held only by a fraction of Christianity, a massive case of shooting oneself in the foot, as they are weakening the protections that they have benefitted from, and continue to benefit from.

Now, I want to go back to the limits of the law, summed up by Dr Martin Luther King. Jr. The law cannot change what is in people's heart (or their "one square feet of real estate"), but spirituality / religion can take such matters much further  by addressing what is in that "one square feet of real estate", or one's heart, or soul.

The following quotations by the great Dr Martin Luther King. Jr. - and one by a former UK Ambassador - illustrate that:

The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral. Returning violence with violence only multiplies violence, add deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. 
It may be true that the law cannot change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless.    

Dr Martin Luther King, Jr

The real dividing line is not between Christianity and Islam, Sunni and Shia, East and West. It is between people who believe in coexistence, and those who don’t. 

Tom Fletcher, Former UK Ambassador to Lebanon

What was in the sports player's heart and mind was - from a moral, spiritual and religious point of view - wrong. It may be that his views are not only based on theology, but also from not having truly known any LGBTIQ+ people - meeting LGBTIQ+ people in real life does seem to help people move beyond such views. I have no control over that - and, in all honesty, would be reluctant to suggest anyone subject themselves to such a potentially abusive experience. In the meantime, I will pray to my Deities that he becomes enlightened and is aided to grow beyond those regressive views.

And I will continue to strengthen human rights laws wherever I can, which actions are based on the reality of the normality of LGBTIQ+ people.

Motivation and discrimination

One of the biggest problems to deal with in the anti-discrimination field is the myth that people are only discriminating if they are actively hating or deliberately planning harm.

That is utter rubbish.

To illustrate that, consider the difference between murder and manslaughter.

Murder requires active intent - and the fact that courts are able to assess this makes a mockery of ALL claims that courts cannot consider motive. Motive - intent - is inherent to the charge of murder.

Manslaughter, on the other hand, is when someone did something that was stupid, and they may have intended harm, but they did not intend - or it was not possible to prove beyond reasonable doubt that they intended - to actually kill the person.

Discrimination covers both cases.

Genocide - another matter that requires the establishment of intent - and similar crimes are clearly in the category of being equivalent to murder. Having seen the vitriol in the faces of racists, homophobes and transphobes and the like, many cases of that are also in the same category - intent to cause serious harm or death. Keep in mind that this week someone has been charged over the death by shooting of a transwoman in the USA, which is the land of lynchings - maybe not all in the past . . .

Most discrimination, however, is in the second category - being more akin to manslaughter - or, perhaps, breaches of safety regulations. A worker who dies from poor safety in the workplace is most probably not dead because the owner actively hated that individual, but because they loved profit and didn't think of what the consequences could be.

When a group of whites excludes people of colour because the whites feel more comfortable that way, they may be focusing on personal comfort more than the consequences - which, to the person being excluded, are devastated.

When a transphobe casually misgenders a trans person, they may not be thinking at all (another serious problem in and of itself) but the devastating harm is done.

Intent to harm is not a prerequisite for guilt of discrimination.

Some thoughts from my current reading

I am at present reading - among others - the book "Congo - the Epic History of a People", by David Van Reybrouck (pub. Fourth Estate [HarperCollins], London, 2015, first pub. 2014, Amsterdam; ISBN 9780007562923; Amazon).

I am finding this a very well written book, and will be giving it a high rating when I finish it (I'm also finding that I don't use the speed reading I do on physical books with e-versions - curious, and maybe that'll come back with familiarity with the new modality). One matter which is striking me at the moment is that what is being described (I am about half way through, at the moment) is, in many ways, the national-scale equivalent of leaving a car accident without offering assistance: creating a problem (the accident  or, perhaps more accurately, the "accident"), and then abdicating all responsibility for it.

This is something I consider, as an example, the US-led coalition did immediately after the invasion of Iraq (and I see there is a book on this - which I haven't read, ), with its reliance on Iraqi exiles and the perspectives of out of touch elites (especially in the USA) and what can, in my opinion, be generally characterised as "winning the war and losing the peace" - again (the US military has shown that it is capable of - eventually - learning military lessons [the War on the Rocks blog is an active example]; the US political side has lacked the same alacrity . . . For other perspectives on this concept, see here [Sri Lanka], and a reverse perspective from India).

It is something I also thought with Australia giving Papua New Guinea (PNG) independence in a rush in the 70s. There had been some preparatory work, but too much of it, in my opinion, had been high level stuff, and not enough at the scale of everyday people (those trying to provide education and health care were doing exactly what should have been done for decades beforehand throughout that nation, including the highlands, in my opinion; as examples of the problems, see here, here and here [note the effect of lack of funds], here, and here).

Now I have found, through reading Mr Van Reybrouk's book (and doing some internet searching along the way), that there is an earlier example: the independence of Congo. Here are a few quotes from that book:

"The chronology of events brought to light a paradox that could be noted at best, but not resolved: the decolonization [sic] had begun much too late, independence came much too early."
"After one month this was the situation in Congo: the army had been tossed topsy-turvy, the administration decapitated, the economy was on the blink, Katanga had torn itself away, Belgium had swept down on the country, and world peace was being threatened. And all because, at the outset, a few soldiers in the capital had demanded better pay and a higher rank."

I'm very aware of the line in the movie "Gandhi" to the effect that there are no people in the world who wouldn't prefer their own bad governance to the good governance of foreigners, and I agree with that as a general principle. However, the foreigners who have been governing have an obligation to actually do their governance well - at least as well as they would have in their own nation, and that's what has been missing BECAUSE that governance has (a) generally been the means for an economic rip off , (b) not considered efficient use of resources by enabling the training and use of local people at all levels of government (a bit like enabling the participation of women to increase access to resources), and (c) not showing any forethought by not enabling the occupied (or colonised, if you prefer) nation to, if not independence, at least effective self governance aka autonomy - which frees up the occupier's (sorry - "coloniser's") resources to be used elsewhere.

On top of that, what happened in Congo, which suffered the resources curse in a big way, shows just how serious "bad governance" can be - in the Congo's case, that eventually led to a dictatorship, and a still struggling transition to democracy (see here, here, here, here, and here).

(For more on the history of the Congo, in addition to Mr Van Reybrouk's book and the preceding links, see also here, here, and here.)

To throw a nation, after decades or centuries of abuse, at independence without a realistic commitment to ongoing support (if nothing else, returning funds from the sale of resources from that new nation should be undertaken, in my opinion) is compounding abuse with contempt.

If not legally, it is a moral crime. 


Postscript
There are a few other aspects of concern from 1960 in the Congo:

• the historical creation of ethnicities that had not existed prior to the late 1800s by the Belgian occupiers - in particular, the effects of restrictions on travel that were introduced to deal with (potentially fatal) "sleeping sickness";
• the use of child soldiers to commit terrible crimes;
• the influence of Communist China, which is of longer standing than I realised); and 
• the murders aka assassinations - of Lumumba and Dag Hammarskjold, with Eisenhower apparently ordering that "preparations" be made for Lumumba's murder.

A commentary on this week's news

If there is something LGBTIQ+ people know about - particularly older LGBTIQ+ people like me - it is the damage that can be done by being forcibly outed. That knowledge of the destruction of lives from being forcibly outed gives us a little extra empathy with the whistleblowers whose lives are at risk of destruction from the - legal and very polite - AFP raids on the media this week.

As one article today spells out, this will have a "chilling" effect on whistleblowers - thereby enabling all governments to "get away" with - what? We don't know, but the government that created the laws - or failed to enact protective laws - that allowed this to happen is inherently untrustworthy, just as governments that fail to enact anti-discrimination laws - another area LGBTIQ+ and other minority groups are very familiar with - are as equally guilty of the abuses committed against those not protected as those who committed the assaults and other forms of discrimination, and those governments that enact apartheid, anti-sodomy, and other laws that enshrine the evils of discrimination.

Are we going to have to resort to the tactics  used in the USSR to circulate knowledge of the gulags and other wrongdoing?

We need, as a matter of urgency, laws to protect bona fide journalism, and their sources.

Bona fide? Well, sadly, the media has shown itself to be incapable of managing its irresponsible elements - the homophobes and transphobes of the tabloid trash, for instance (see here), as well as those who seem to be nothing but mouthpieces for the neoliberals. It's a complication that may be unnecessary and will be unliked, but as someone who has suffered at the hands of homophobic and transphobic rants in the media, as well as the homophobes and transphobes in politics, I'd like to err on the side of caution.

But as a citizen - a very out of vogue term, I know, amongst the glitterati of governance - with lived experience of the devastation of being forcibly outed, and of the power of the press for both good and evil, I still want to see decent protection for the press and their whistleblower sources as soon as is  possible.

Reflections from this week's reading

As a kid in Australia in the 60s and early 70s (I don't recall the last two years of the 50s :) ), I grew up with things like reuse of food containers (milk bottles were washed and out out for replacement by the milko * , and clean containers were refilled with butter or it was dished up into paper [my recollection of the latter is hazy, but of the former is clear - especially as my maternal grandfather wouldn't mix the cream into the rest of the pre-homogenised milk, so he got the cream and we got a "lite" milk] etc ** ) and the idea that Britain had "lost the flower of its youth" in World War (part) One. Of course, Australia had also lost a lot of young men, but we seemed to be so fixated (from my perspective) on this as "coming of age" as a nation that the notion of "loss" wasn't too much part of the official narrative other than around ANZAC Day - and survivors would then mostly be forgotten about and ignored for most of the other 364 days of the year . . . and they would be forgotten and ignored for an extra day in a leap year.

In fact, from this page, the UK lost around 1.9 to 2.2% of its population, and Australia lost ~1.2% . . . while the USA lost 0.1%, Russia 1.6 to 1.9% (in ~3 years and had two revolutions and a civil war thereafter, with a further 7 to 12 million casualties), Italy - fighting on the side of the allies - lost 3 to 3.5% of its population [and considered itself so badly done by it eventually developed fascism], Austria-Hungary 3.5 - 4%, France 4.3 - 4.4%, the Ottoman Empire 13 - 15% (including the Armenian genocide), and Serbia lost 17 - 28% of its pre-war population . . . (the fact that there is such a range in the estimates suggests, to me, that many areas didn't have enough survivors to indicate how many people had lived in an area before it was subjected to fighting - which I understand was a problem that also was part of estimating deaths from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami in some places.)

I think a fair few other nations have a greater right to narratives around loss - and perhaps many did build some sort of narrative (France seems to have remembered honestly, but Germany eventually - more in the 30s than the 20s, perhaps? - twisted the memory into a mythology of false claims that its army didn't lose in the field, and of being "stabbed in the back').

Nevertheless, there is still the narrative that somehow "the best" of a nation's population had been lost - certainly the physically bravest, and possibly those who were most inclined towards service to the community (this is something that was part of a short story I wrote - see here; better writers than I have written about this - for instance, the British soldier-poet Wilfred Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth"). Possibly that is true - certainly the war had scarred the survivors in terrible ways (including what is now termed PTSD) that we, as societies, were only just starting to come to terms with.

Also, as societies, there were massive financial costs - before that war, there were comments (see Barbara Tuchman's "The Guns  of August",  "The Great War" YouTube channel, and the BBC TV miniseries "37 Days") about economies being so interconnected that war - or prolonged war - was impossible, which was clearly, even as it was said, a stupid, naïve and blind comment (and still is, every time some idiot trots it out now); the winners paid massive costs (I recall reading somewhere that the Australian General and later engineer Sir John Monash had calculated the cost of destroying a town by bombardment as being three times the cost of building it), and the losers had reparations - reparations sometimes described as onerous, given that Germany needed to be bailed out, but I suspect that view is a simplification, and that other influences (such as greed and unregulated banking) and consequences of the "war to end all war" contributed to that calamity.

One question that does come to mind is, if many nations indeed lost the best of their (mostly male, in the case of the UK and Australia, and other nations which did not have much or any fighting on their lands) youth, did that contribute - together with the financial costs and the poor regulation of greed and the many other factors - to the Great Depression?

But, moving on, this week I have been doing more reading (on the electronic reader that I finally weakened and bought [my concerns about such devices are part of this article] - and am liking as it makes finding quotes easier, now that I've learned how to use highlights . . . but I still like the physicality of books, especially for fiction) on the Viêt Nàm war - I read Robert McNamara's apologia some time ago, recently read Ted Sorensen's autobiography, and have now - after having re-watched the Spielberg film "The Post" - started reading the Neil Sheehan - Hedrick Smith - E.W. Kenworthy / New York Times  book on the Pentagon Papers (I downloaded the declassified  Pentagon Papers from the US National Archives some time ago, but it is heavy going, and I haven't got far into it as yet - maybe another retirement project . . . ).

And as I have done this reading, another thought has struck me: did the losses and injuries of the USA's participation in the Viêt Nàm war also lead to a similar effect to that which is mourned/glorified from World War (part) One - did a significant part of a generation "get lost" as a result of that war (although I don't consider "the counterculture" of 60s a loss)?

This is not just the casualties (and those who tended the wounded and dying, men AND WOMEN, were also scarred) - horrendous enough though that is (58,000 US and one to two MILLION Vietnamese dead [although that doesn't seem to show in the demography of the USA - it equates to ~0.03% of the total population, and ~0.3% of the age bracket], 300,000 US injured [~1.2% of that age bracket] and how many Vietnamese?), but the hope and trust and faith that might have prevented - or at least mitigated - the so-called Decade of Greed, the 1980s that saw excesses (or perceived  excesses, or greater revelation of existing excesses) and the start or acceleration of neoliberalism? (As I pose that thought, I am aware of the many other losses that had an impact - including the murders of John F Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, and the great Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., and others - deaths that were the most calamitous for both the USA and the world since the murders of Abraham Lincoln and Archduke Ferdinand.) I know some of what I was living through doesn't show in the official statistics and articles, but, in everyday attitudes and lived experience, the 1980s was a indeed a "Decade of Greed" that undid a lot of the gains of the 60s and 70s - a Decade of Greed made worse by the treacherous participation of so many (not all) former members of the counterculture in it.

Would that have been less of a problem if we didn't lose to death and injury of body and soul so many young people?



 * One of my uncles in my adoptive family was a milko: his horse was trained to walk the route, while he would trot off from side to side, collecting the empty milk bottles and delivering the full, leaping side fences to stay up with the horse - all of which worked well until the time he wound up injuring a leg and had to slow down, but the horse wanted to get back to its nice warm stable :) 

 ** There are obvious environmental benefits with this (no disposable containers), but there were public health risks as well - I saw several containers being brought back for refilling that weren't properly cleaned, and wonder what the illness rate was?

Let's not beat around the bush . . .

Beating around - or about - the bush is an Australian expression for wasting time by refusing to admit or face up to facts.

So . . . one of the main reasons we still are fighting for inclusivity and an end to discrimination in workplaces etc, is that too many people don't want to change. Some do, or will if convinced, but there are a significant number who just don't think they are doing anything wrong and don't want to change. This is the reason there are still some men in male dominated workplaces, and some women in female dominated workplaces, who are being passive aggressive about change, and pay lip service only to inclusivity.

Those people are hurting not only themselves (especially their job prospects), but also the companies they work for, and society more generally.

These people are indulging in the same sort of cognitive dissonance and lack of moral courage that climate crises deniers/sceptics are.

(And when they're police not taking hate crimes seriously - see here - the harm is greater.)

The truly difficult thing is that just confronting them or having a rant like this post doesn't change them: they have to be mollycoddled and nursed through the apparently tough challenge of facing the true nature of reality - which is frustrating, and increases the pain and trauma of those who are trying to get a modicum of decency, rather than abuse, from those people. (They're generally in powerful positions, so can't be sidelined or ignored - mind you, I have been very heartened by the decent people now appearing in such positions in ever increasing numbers, so maybe they will be moved into irrelevancy - eventually.) Rants like this are good for letting off steam (and I'm doing so because work has intruded and utterly stuffed up my first week of holidays), but they don't change the dinosaurs (and recall I mentioned the female dinosaurs in female-dominated workplaces: they're fewer in number, but they do exist).

There are a lot of other problems slowing, stopping or even reversing change, such as the strategic error of feminists in the 60s and 70s who aimed at just removing identification of gender rather than dealing with the underlying bigotry - they got a short term tactical gain, but we're still paying the price (and the use of chairperson as the female version of chairman is the perfect example of the resultant problem).

Going back to my day job ... nah, I'll leave it at that.  

Accepting asylum seekers strengthens our borders

Borders mark a differentiation between two things - the edges where two things that are definable as different meet. Our skin marks the personal border of our physical bodies; our fences mark the borders of our homes; and borders bound our nation - but they do not define it. For borders are more than just physical markers, borders exist also of the mind, the soul, the psyche, and, if we move beyond the individual, borders mark the meeting points of cultures, ways of living, and ways of being.

The struggle for human rights has been about far more than solely our physical integrity, it has also been about our emotional and mental integrity, and greatest of all, the integrity of our soul.

And just as our personal integrity and essence has borders, so too does the morality, integrity and essence of our nation - the nation we see as, or wish to see as, noble, or "great", or influential.

Those moral borders set us apart, we hope, and mark us as being better than the places that, sometimes through no fault of that place, people are fleeing - seeking safety or a better life for themselves probably, but more often for their family and loved ones.

That border exists on the premise that our nation, the collective "we", is better than elsewhere - more easy going perhaps, the land of a "fair go", and we often pride ourselves on being more respectful of the rule of law.

But, just as a judge will take mitigating circumstances into account when setting a sentence, so too should we treat those who came here in hope but without meeting the legal definition of refugee with some forbearance - if nothing else, for the compliment they give us in thinking our nation is a better place to be. And refugees have, by law, rights of access.

When we do not accept the lawfulness of being a refugee, when we deny and abuse, or allow others to do so, those who come here seeking asylum, we make a mockery of our commitment to the rule of law, we rob others of the fair go we espouse so blithely and hypocritically, and we sacrifice our generosity on the pyre of mean-spiritedness - the same sort of mean-spiritedness that quite possibly led to them leaving their distant shores.

When we make the error of closing the borders of our hearts and our nation, we weaken our moral borders: we show the image of our culture as "better" to be a facade - a shallow and superficial lie. We lessen the difference between our supposedly "good" place of being, and the "bad" places that drive their people away.

And when we do that, I weep for my nation and its peoples.

On the other hand, when we accept asylum seekers in, and treat them with decency and respect, that does not weaken our borders: it strengthens the borders that matter.


PS - To be clear about the sort of difference I am talking of: many, if not most, of our refugees are coming from Syria, a totalitarian regime, burma, a partial democracy currently actively committing genocide, or Afghanistan, a nation struggling t form a stable democracy and showing signs falling back into a misogynistic theocracy. To be a genuine small-l liberal democracy respecting freedom and human rights, as compared to a totalitarian regime, a genocidal regime, or a misogynistic theocracy, is a difference I consider we should be seeking to make.



 * For those who are unfamiliar with this word, look up the phrase "beating the bounds" 

Tiny homes: a possible opportunity

To all residents of my home state of Victoria (in Australia): if you're interested in tiny homes or small, more appropriate homes, a review has commenced into regulations for "caravans and mobile homes" which may open an opportunity for advocacy.

I am currently preparing a submission - due by 23rd June, 2019, and urge others with a similar interest to consider doing so.

I will post a copy of my submission after 23rd June, as I consider others should write their thoughts, not mine.

One note of caution is that I have not finished reading all the details as yet, and thus there may be something which precludes my submission, in which case I will send it to the relevant Minister and regret the lost opportunity.

 The invitation is at https://engage.vic.gov.au/caravan-parks-regulations-sunset-review.

*****

 It's a few hours early, but in the end I went with a simple form entry rather than the more complex document I had started working on. My submission is below.

What do you think about caravan park registration requirements?

This can include length of registration period, documents required, suggested categories of registration. Feedback can relate to caravan parks as a whole, or different types of park.

No comment

What do you think about caravan park safety requirements?

This can include fire safety requirements and reports, emergency management plans, flood risks, safety of common areas. This can relate to caravan parks as a whole, or different types of park.

No comment

What do you think about the facilities that are/should be required in caravan parks?

This can include required number of toilet and shower units, standards for water quality, lighting, rubbish, or the maintenance of facilities. This can relate to caravan parks as a whole, or different types of park.

No comment

What do you think about movable dwellings standards?

This can include construction, installation, and compliance requirements. 'Unregisterable movable dwellings' includes cabins and dwellings in residential villages, but does not include caravans.

The following comments are based on owner-built (and for those people, it would be extremely beneficial for a single and readily accessible document detailing all applicable requirements in an understandable way for the lay person, as the construction document is the first time I have been able to find these) or built-for-an-owner tiny home.

This should include tiny homes, however tiny homes can be transported by truck / trailer, so they do NOT necessarily have to be registerable.

Tiny homes have been designed by architects, so they are capable of being built to most building requirements EXCEPT size. However, if building to higher standards is made COMPULSORY, the low cost advantages of tiny homes is lost, and they become useless as a means to prevent or address homelessness. Also, the tiny home market could potentially be used to help cater for downturns in the larger house market - provided they are affordable. (It is unlikely that this will become a major portion of the market, as the number of people who wish to live this way is a small, but unknown percentage of the total housing market.)

What SHOULD be made compulsory is means of securing them in high wind, and (unless they will only be use in a park with adequate facilities), for wastewater, a composting toilet / onboard WwTP (e.g., small MBR) / holding tank - the latter of which should also include grey water. In addition, tiny homes can be constructed to be fire resistant - see, for instance, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2FyCO9FJ-s

With regard to environmental standards, the main benefit is their small size, and thus more stringent requirements for insulation may be counter-productive as they will result in fewer people being able to pursue this option. Similarly, minimum sizes would be counterproductive (and, frankly, absurd, as the small size is one of the key attractions - and those advocating for imposition of a minimum size should be careful they are not trying to impose their preferences and comfort zones on a small percentage of people who are genuinely OK not living in a semi-palace).

Expert inspection during construction would be useful if inspectors had the attitude of trying to enable / aid those building tiny homes - but it is vital that flexibility be allowed (e.g., GRP construction / steel frames may be used at some stage, if not already).

For the tiny homes in this category, universal design should no more be imposed than for private larger, fixed dwellings. However, if the tiny home is publicly owned (e.g., as part of a homelessness project), universal design would be appropriate.

Do you have any other feedback on how the current regulations are working, or suggested changes?

If you have any other feedback, or are unsure where to include your feedback, please provide it here.

As has been shown in some overseas cities, allowing people to have tiny homes in their backyards can be a quick way to address homelessness and aid those at risk of homelessness. This also allow homeowners to gain a source of income by renting space, with minimal cost (connection to sewer, and possibly water and power).

The developments of tiny homes also shows it is possible to live comfortably in much smaller places than the current range of palaces on offer in most areas, and some houses have been built using tiny home principles - for instance, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPBDPcqfCwA Smaller houses would result in an IMMEDIATE reduction of both construction and operating GHG emissions (and costs), so ALL area requirements should be reviewed with the intention of reducing the area requirements to around half of what they are now.

It would also be useful if all surveys on the size of dwellings desired by people included guidance on likely costs, so that such surveys don't show unrealistic pipe dreams.

For those who cannot build their own tiny home, ways of encouraging the market to move into this in a reasonable way (especially during downturns for conventional houses) would be beneficial.

An ageing world and other myths

When I came back to Victoria in the mid-1980s, the water industry had an infrastructure replacement fund - in the jargon of today's world, where people give an old concept a new world so they can pretend it's new (like calling "Whole of Catchment Plan" an "Integrated Water Management Plan"), that would probably be called "asset replacement fund". It was a certain amount of money put aside each year so that when an asset reached the end of its life, you had money to replace or, at the very least, repair it.

Ignoring inflation for the moment, say a pipe was going to last 50 years; you would save 2% of the cost of the pipe each year so that when it was about to fail significantly, you had the money to replace it, or do enough repairs to keep it going.

In the field of public infrastructure, it makes good sense - if the world had followed that practice, we wouldn't now be facing an "infrastructure cliff" (not my term) of assets built for the baby boomer era that are now all going to fail, while we don't have enough (any?) money to deal with the problem.

You could consider it, in a sense, a retirement scheme for pipes, roads and other public infrastructure, except that it is unemotional replacement, not impractical retirement of an object meant to provide an active service for the public good.

Retirement . . . that also raises another matter: that of our proportionally ageing population - that is, we proportionally have more older people. In the arena of economic thought, where money is supposed to be "active", pensions are supposed to be paid by the rest of the population, rather than out of money set aside for a known, coming expense. Governments seem to have a habit of wanting that money to come from other sources, rather than the government equivalent of the everyday person's practice of setting aside money for a rainy day, and for clearly known coming expenses.

Thus, we have had superannuation schemes introduced to attempt to ensure that retirees have enough money to live on comfortably (they often don't, partly because of fallacious assumptions about home ownership, but that is another matter) without taxes on younger people that may reach a level that causes the younger people to vote for someone else - sorry, that are "unsustainable".

Now, effectively, the saving is being pushed from the public sector to the private sector. There are efficiencies in that, as the public sector quite rightly is obliged to focus on rules of accountability to ensure there is no waste, corruption, etc, but this would result in a reduced rate of return of saved money, whereas the private (superannuation) sector focuses on rates of return . . . and loses a lot of money when things like the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 occur . . .

I'm not quite sure why the government fund couldn't be invested in a superannuation fund or similar, or even used to provide funding for public projects (there are often what are called "internal rates of return", which are effectively what most people would consider interest rates).

Another aspect of public finances is that of opportunity income - things like what was covered by the "mineral resource rent tax" introduced by the Gillard government. That tax was, in my opinion, a completely reasonable thing - to choose an equivalent from an everyday person's life, it is like winning lotto, and setting a side a portion to make sure you can spend the rest of your life living comfortably, before you go wild with travel and parties, etc (incidentally, most lotto winners lose all their winnings within two years).

To continue the analogies with everyday life for a moment, the infrastructure replacement fund would be the equivalent of making sure you had enough money set aside to cover replacing fridges etc when they reach the end of their life without having to get a loan (and credit cards are loans). 

There are a few other points I'd like to make here, in passing:

• until the Andrews government, decades of governments have been reducing spending on infrastructure because (a) they thought there would be votes in reduced taxes, (b) for ideological reasons, as with the neoliberals - including the neoliberals who seem to infest world financial organisations and infect the ideologies of same, or (c) both the preceding; 
• in the 1980s, it was accepted that governments would take out loans to pay for infrastructure. This was shot down by the infesting ideologues of the neoliberal movement, but it also did (while it existed) create a true, intergenerational version of "user pays". The neoliberals I was working for back then prattled on about "user pays", but what they really meant was "current users pay for all now".

A lot of battles have been lost - then, and since, on the provision of infrastructure, and the management of public money. If I could, I would love to reinstitute the practice of saving to replace infrastructure, but that does seem to put a burden on the current generation to pay for future generations' infrastructure, except it doesn't really, as it only provides money to replace the current infrastructure: at the time it is replaced, there will need to be additional expenditure to expand the infrastructure for population growth, and the demands of new working conditions (e.g., replacing a pipe in an open area costs a certain amount, but replacing it after that area subsequently becomes developed costs a lot more).

Perhaps more importantly, as we move into the climate crisis, is ensuring we spend sufficient money to maintain assets properly. I've done some work in my day job on this, and proper maintenance was one of the main aspects of ensuring infrastructure resilience. Personally, I would like to see every grant for an asset such as a country road include an ongoing allowance for maintenance (or an amount set aside for that purpose in the grant), but the ideologues often work on the basis that "we'll pay to build it, but you must pay to maintain it", which often ignores the arguments of broader social benefit that underlay the construction grant in the first place.

In terms of how we change from the current situation, I consider that Norway has the best approach: they outsourced responsibility for thinking about such matters to a philosopher. Either the Norwegian government or the state oil company (they won't answer any emails, so I can't find details other than passing references in the media) hired a philosopher to advise on how to achieve the greatest good with income from their oil revenue, and the philosopher advised them to start . . . setting some money aside.

Here's to our Chief Scientist, Chief Veterinarian and Chief Medical Officer being joined by our Chief Philosopher :)