Archive for December, 2018

Legislating ‘Religious Freedom’, again

December 25, 2018

The Catholic Archbishop of Sydney has been demanding “religious freedom” in his Christmas message and it is interesting to know what he means by that…
He complains that Christmas is “one of the few occasions when the public expression of religious faith is tolerated”. Archbishop Fisher should at least include Easter as a time in which Christian expression is ‘tolerated’ or heard in considerable detail.

We also seem to have quite a lot of Christians who belong to political lobby groups, comment in newspapers and in political chambers and so on all year round. They don’t seem to realise they are ‘forbidden’ from so doing by anyone -and that is absolutely good, it indicates some degree of religious freedom is present.

Christians are pretty active in politics and in social life from what I can see, as they should be, and faith is not excluded from the public domain at all. They still have Christian prayers in parliament, and talk about the importance of the judeao-christian tradition etc. We recently had many Christians telling us that recognising gay marriage was a terrible thing, and others telling us it wasn’t. Christians were hardly quiet. The problem is, perhaps that the Archbishop’s pronouncements are not automatically respected, just because he makes them. He needs to make a case for them. This is what preaching is supposed to be.

But let’s look at his case in this Christmas message:

“We’ve witnessed moves to make the celebration of the sacrament of confession illegal…”
No one at all has wanted to make sacrament of confession illegal. People have suggested that absolution could be withheld from people who rape children until they confess to the police, or that priests should have to report such events to legal authorities. That is all. Repeat no one has tried to make confession illegal. This claim would seem to be false.

There are no serious moves to defund church schools either as he claims. Indeed the Federal Government has moved to increase funding for Church Schools. There are moves, so far unsuccessful, to make sure that the Church does not continue (as it apparently has been) to give all the funds to its most wealthy schools and leave other poorer schools ill funded. In other words there have been requests for transparency for government, taxpayers, and parents. It would appear his second claim is also false.

Moves “to charge an archbishop with discrimination for teaching about marriage” Which archbishop has been charged for teaching about marriage? None? What chance would such a case have of success? According to another source I’ve read, which may not be accurate, the person “teaching about marriage” had said something to the effect that same sex parents were all paedophiles. If he did issue this teaching, it is clearly false and possibly libellous. Perhaps we should call the Archbishop of Sydney’s claim a rhetorical exaggeration, rather than a falsehood?

He is pretty correct that people have been worrying about organisations discriminating against people who genuinely would like to belong to them, so moderate truth in that statement.

For a supposed Christian, he is being as honest as, well, a well-known Coalition politician who also claims to be Christian.

The Church not only asks to be able to bring its message to people as he states, it asks to receive taxpayer funded support for that activity, the ability to discriminate against particular taxpayers, and to hide child abusers…. and that does not really seem like hope or healing, just power and politics…

This is also an organisation which does not pay tax, accumulates property, has been found to abuse children in its care, protect the abusers and engage in financial corruption. And of course, there is the event of which none of us in Australia can speak, and that does not appear to show the Church has no influence.

So, it appears that for him religious freedom involves:

  • 1) The ability to take taxpayers’ money without accountability.
  • 2) The ability to protect criminal members of his organisation.
  • 3) The ability to lie about people and persecute them.
  • 4) Automatic respect for his pronouncements.

    • This is not religious freedom, but religious privilege, and it is not remotely clear, from his arguments, why the Church needs more protection…

    Other high status Christians managed to preach the gospel this Christmas.

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    Protecting capitalism?

    December 23, 2018

    First of all, we have to ask what we mean by failure? Systems don’t fail, they just behave.

    Let us define ‘failure’ as causing ongoing harm to particular groups of people, or collapsing.

    We might use rates of industrial accidents, or occupational illness, or dumping pollution onto particular populations as initial examples of failure.

    Capitalism protects itself against these kind of failures by law and power. If you get injured at work because of ongoing lack of safety, then you have to prove guilt, pay legal fees, and survive with no income. So the employer is pretty safe unless they are small, we get a concerned political party trying to make dangerous working conditions illegal, or you belong to a functional union. This is one reason unions are not popular.

    If you are part of a community which gets pollution dumped on it and are poisoned as a result, then likewise you have to prove this in law, and the company probably has the advantage – unless they have done something amazingly and obviously evil, when you might get some media coverage, and they could decide to settle because the bad publicity is costing them profit. As the laws are written by the capitalist class then the probability is high that even if they are found guilty, then the penalty will be minor in terms of the profit gained – at least after they appeal. Or they might simply abandon your town and move somewhere less concerned about pollution. Companies are motile, so they can often destroy ecologies and move elsewhere, leaving surviving residents to deal with the mess. The law and an engineered lack of responsibility helps protect capitalists from failure.

    Capitalists may even cheer when the government they own makes it harder to take class actions, or makes it easier to pollute. One of President Trump’s most coherent set of actions has been to make pollution and ecological destruction easier for corporations.

    Businesses will often gang up to make sure they don’t all suffer from requirements not to harm people. They will tell us how the proposed restrictions stop economic activity. However, sometimes they will cooperate to make everyone reduce the harm if that harm really looks bad or effects them.

    A further way that capitalists protect themselves from this kind of failure is through the institution of the corporation, in which officers of the corporation are rarely at fault for anything, unless it costs shareholders money. Corporations are tools designed to avoid personal responsibility, and give limited liability.

    Another way that capitalism can fail is to loose other people’s money.
    Bankruptcy is another legal tool whereby capitalists can avoid major responsibility for their debts and loosing other people’s money.

    Another tool is government bailouts, as happened in the financial crash of 2008. In this case the debt is transferred from big capitalists to taxpayers. This is particularly good if you can reduce the tax paid by the wealthy and the corporate sector, as then capitalists pay little of the insurance. This process ensures that big capitalists can be protected from their mistakes without suffering any significant consequences. This is good for them, but entrenches mistakes into the system, making it more likely to crash in the future and get more bailout money to keep it going.

    You will note that government money was not paid to householders who were losing their houses because of fraudulent loans, so they could pay the debt off; it was transferred directly to the capitalists because the system is set up to protect them, not ordinary Americans. There is some evidence that even when the housing contracts where shown to be fraudulent the judicial system still favoured capitalists. My memory is that when Obama insisted that the companies had to pay back the money there were screams of protests from the Republicans. President Bush had just given them money with no strings attached.

    So the biggest way that capitalism avoids failure, for the moment, is to buy access to the State. This is inevitable. In capitalism profit and money are the only significant markers of value, so there is little value to compete with wealth and the ‘class interest’ of the wealthy. The result of capitalism can be called ‘plutocracy’.

    Capitalists can make sure politicians need their money to get elected. They can give jobs to politicians for good service after the politician resigns. They can use their media to blacken the names of people who might work against them. They can subsidize Think tanks to provide them with useful ideology and fake ‘facts’ to increase their power and stability. They can try and obliterate facts which are politically inconvenient, although there can be disputes here. For example some capitalists think we need to do things about climate change to survive, and others think we don’t to continue their profit. Neither side will probably support anything that challenges capitalist power or tries to make them responsible for pollution and ecological destruction in our society.

    Part of normal capitalist process is to try and take over the State, or to compete in the State for influence and product security. This is how capitalists protect themselves from failure at the cost of ordinary people.

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    Trump and Mueller

    December 23, 2018

    It is odd but nowadays even inquiries into possible crimes give evidence of the wide reach of the mess of information in (dis)information society.

    The Mueller investigation is not specifically a “witch hunt” into Donald Trump as should be clear by its terms of reference.

    The Mueller investigation was appointed to:
    “investigate Russian interference with the 2016 Presidential Election, and related matters”

    This does include “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump” (because evidence suggests that the Russians aided the Trump campaign).

    The Special Counsel is also “authorized to prosecute federal crimes arising from the investigation of these matters”

    You will note that there is no special mention of Donald Trump, or ‘collusion’, as a subject of interest – despite Trump’s assertions to the contrary, and despite Trump’s evident attempts to stop the investigation and slur the investigators.

    The investigation is primarily into “Russian interference,” which seems absolutely real. Consequently, it is of no concern if Trump and his campaign is not implicated at all. In fact it is perfectly acceptable, as long as Mueller finds something out about Russian techniques of interference and helps the US protect itself from such interference.

    So we can only speculate as to why Trump has made it about him and about ‘collusion’ (he could easily distance himself from the investigation). Possible answers include:

  • a) To Trump everything is always about him…
  • b) He knows he specifically is guilty of the suggested links and coordination.
  • c) He has been involved in so much corruption, that he is not sure whether his behavior in this case is corrupt or not, but he knows there is a problem.
  • d) He was set up by the Russians and he knows it.

    • We know people in his campaign were involved in soliciting information and aid from Russia and they lied about it. There is no doubt of this – the Trump tower meeting for one. We also know the Russians interfered with the campaign. While many Republicans take the view that this interference is unimportant, it still needs to be investigated, and they would probably favour investigation if there was evidence that Russians aided Democrats.

    Trump’s behavior is evidence suggesting the corruption reaches to the top… or it suggests a deliberate ploy to make it about him, so as to help his followers see Mueller as hostile to their own interests. In this case portraying Mueller’s job as attacking Trump, shifts us into social category rhetoric. Mueller becomes an exemplar of an outgroup, attacking the exemplar of an ingroup, and is therefore less persuasive to ingroup members, who can dismiss anything he finds immediately without listening to it….

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Appointment_of_Special_Counsel_to_Investigate_Russian_Interference_with_the_2016_Presidential_Election_and_Related_Matters.pdf

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    CO2 and non-linear systems

    December 19, 2018

    The amount of CO2 in the air has dramatic effects out of all proportion to the amount of the gas in the air or in proportion to the amount emitted by humans. It produces a non-linear effect.

    Concentrations of CO2 have been much greater than they are now, in times when there were no humans around. Nobody is arguing that the world would end with much higher CO2 levels, just that relative climate stability would end, as the climate system shifts into new patterns, and human civilization would be extremely likely to suffer significant disruption and possibly destruction depending on how bad it gets.

    As far as we can tell for the last half million years or so CO2 levels have remained between 180 and 300 parts per million (again, that’s pretty low compared to some other geological periods). In the last 100 years or so, this has risen to about to 410 parts per million (people were hoping the rise would stop at 350 parts per million, but it hasn’t).

    There is no indication that this increase in CO2 concentration is slowing. That is a pretty rapid and significant change and most of it seems to have come from human emissions. The theory of greenhouse gases which has been around for well over 100 years would lead us to expect a rise in global average temperatures as a result, and this is happening – and it is happening pretty much as predicted (although a bit higher and more rapid than some official predictions).

    Again it needs to be said that the average temperature rises are relatively small, but these small rises appear to be disrupting climate stability already. What seems small to us can have large effects on the system as a whole.

    Now natural emissions of CO2 are huge – figures usually suggest around 800 giga tonnes per year. Natural ‘carbon sinks’ and conversion processes handle these emissions quite well. Human emissions are much, much, less than that, even now about 30 giga tonnes per year but increasing.

    You might think its a matter of common sense that this little overshoot would not make that much of a difference, but we are not dealing with a simple linear system here. Small changes (in CO2 levels and temperature) can make large differences, due to the way feedback loops work and trigger, or disrupt, other systems.

    For some while these emissions made little difference because natural carbon sinks could deal with the extra burdens – these sinks produced the well known pause in the rate of increase of average temperature (not a decrease in temperature or even a stabilizing of temperature, but a decrease in acceleration of temperature increase). These now seem to have been used up. The more we destroy the ecology and engage in deforestation etc. then the worse the accumulation gets and the higher the temperature increases. The rapidity of the change together with environmental destruction renders natural evolutionary or adaptational processes irrelevant – natural sinks do not appear to be able to handle the increase any more.

    The more that the average temperature increases, the more that some natural sinks will start releasing CO2, methane and other greenhouse gases. For example the Russian Steppes might already be releasing previously frozen methane for more green house emissions.

    This makes the situation even worse; it compounds the problems and shifts them into a whole other realm. We have to stop temperature increases now, if we don’t want extreme weather events to become more and more common, and remediation to become more difficult than it already is. Also as you probably know, land ice is melting and glaciers are disappearing and this will also likely lead to temperature increases and to rising sea levels. Neither of which is good for coastal cities or for human water supplies.

    So if we continue with our current patterns of CO2 emissions we are heading for likely catastrophe – we are certainly not heading for good times.

    This whole process is difficult to predict in its entirety, because of the way local conditions act with global conditions. For example, higher average temperatures could disrupt the patterns of the Gulf Stream which has kept the UK relatively warm. If the Gulf stream moves southward, then parts of Europe could heat up while the UK’s average temperature lowers. Whatever, happens the weather will change and probably change violently. If we do not stabilize CO2 emissions then the system fluctuations will get wilder, as it is subject to greater stress.

    We need to stop CO2 emissions as quickly as possible, and start protecting the rest of the environment to allow its resilience to function. So we have to stop massive deforestation and other forms of pollution as well as stop CO2 emissions.

    Human CO2 emissions largely come from burning fossil fuels, some forms of agriculture, and with some from building (concrete use). For some reason official figures for fossil fuel emissions often split the burning into electricity production, transport, industry, domestic and so on, but they all have the same cause.

    We can pretty much end coal fired power for electricity now if we put money into it and impose regulations bringing coal burning to an end. We are helped in this as building new coal fired power stations is becoming more expensive than renewables, even with all the subsidies that fossil fuel mining and power receives. Ending coal burning won’t necessarily be pretty, but it can be done. Coal is poisonous during the mining and during the burning, and devastates fertile land during mining, so its a good thing on the whole. Petrol/oil burning may be a bit more difficult. We need an excess of renewable power and storage to allow transport to work like it does now. Possibly generating hydrogen from water is one way around that, but we need heaps of excess renewables to do that and that may then come up against material limits. Changing agriculture will be more difficult still, but people are claiming low emissions concrete is becoming available (I’m not sure).

    However, there is a problem, even if we could stop tomorrow. The natural carbon sinks are over-stretched and unlikely to recover quickly. They will not remove the “excess” CO2 from the atmosphere quickly enough to prevent already dangerous average temperature increases. We may need to research Carbon dioxide removal techniques as well. These are being developed, but more money for research is needed, and we need to find some way to dispose of the extracted CO2, so it is not returned to the atmosphere in a couple of years. This is a massive technical problem, which is not really close to being solved (that is a matter of argument, but that is my opinion). Hopefully the problem can be solved.

    We need to cut back emissions quickly. We will then almost certainly need to develop an extraction technology. If we can’t do either of these, then we face truly massive disruption: more extreme weather, flooding, city destruction, people movements, food shortages, and warfare.

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    Neoliberalism and Privatisation

    December 12, 2018

    In the beginning, perhaps neoliberalism did have a belief in the virtues of private enterprise and in government inefficiency, but after 40 years of mess and profiteering, this can hardly be the case any more. For a long time it has been clear that privatisation exists to transfer public assets, public profit, taxpayers’ money and political power to the corporate sector.

    Some of our local neoliberals use the term “Asset recycling” instead of privatization. This term shows the whole farce for what it is. There is no recycling. These assets are not waste that is being given to the private sector to revitalise, but are viable, useful and often profitable parts of public infrastructure and organisation that are being taken away from us precisely because they are useful, viable and profitable. How stupid does he think we are?

    Even the supposed virtues of private enterprise are crushed by privatisation, as with the NSW Ports deal when competition between ports is suppressed by contract and legislation so as to benefit a favoured company. Many of the organisations that are privatised are monopolies, and there is no possibility of competition between the monopoly and new market entrants – for example airports, airport parking, or airport trains. The expense of building a competing airport is tremendous and unlikely to happen even if planning approval was given. The electricity grid also seems to be a monopoly for the same reason; the cost of setting up a new universal grid is enormous. So there is no competition with plenty of scope for profiteering.

    We all know how well privatisation of the Commonwealth Bank has worked for the public good. The publicly owned bank provided competition, now the banks are in lock-sync to increase profits. In the old days, banks paid you to get access to your money, now with all the cost cutting allowed by the internet and computerization, and branch closure, you pay them to look after your money – and you cannot avoid using them.

    Privatisation involves both surrendering power to the private sector, and over-valuing the private sector, so that what was once controllable in the general good, becomes sacrificed to profit and non-existant “private efficiency”, and what was public information which allowed performance to be evaluated becomes “commercial in confidence”.

    Yes, that is right tax payers’ money goes to the private sector and we, the taxpayers, are not allowed to know how the money is spent, or whether its an improvement. As for selling the titles office, how secure is that now? We the taxpayers have to bail out these private organisations when they do stupid things. So where is the benefit? The profit goes to them, and the costs to us.

    I read today, that some companies that benefit from neoliberal largess, such as Sydney Airport and Transurban (the latter receiving the gift of toll road Westconnex) have not paid taxes “since 2013-14 despite reporting billions of dollars in income” (‘One in four of Australia’s largest companies paid no tax last year’, SMH 13 December 2018). So these companies freeload even more on the rest of society, paying nothing to support the conditions that make them profitable. So its a total loss to the public.

    Where does the money raised from privatisation go? Not to public coffers, but to other private companies, like the people running roughshod over the public in the way of Westconnex, which is then to be gifted to a toll company so that we not only give money to the private sector but we have a permanent tax on travel in Sydney.

    Some money goes to massively inflated and useless rail projects which cannot merge with the overall rail system, and again have no competition. Indeed the sole purpose of some of these projects is to provide transport for development projects, while not serving other areas on the route.

    The new privatized hospital in North Sydney is way too far from the Northern Beaches for safety. You will not get there in time if you have a stroke or heart attack, whereas you could probably have got to the hospitals which are being closed and sold off to developers. Can’t have nice land and views in the public domain or being used by ordinary sick people. The hospital is crashing already. People will end up with worse, and distant, service so that corporations can profit (in this case from people’s suffering).

    All of this privatisation does help lower general wages and boost executive wages, because of the way these companies work and structure their income. – this the neoliberals think is a good thing. Thus the economy becomes depressed, because those who need money, and spend it, don’t get it.

    These “shortcomings” are not minor as the author claims. Turning things over to the market only delivers profits for high-level executives, lack of information for the public (through commercial in-confidence arrangements), and pollution and destruction of the environment, air space and living space more generally. They turn power and public money over to the wealthy, and abdicate the general good and the idea of commons. They destroy the democratic process, and that is the whole point of neoliberalism.

    The neoliberal right will not change their minds and stop privatization, because for them it was always about handing public property to the private sector, higher pay for corporate elites, the freedom to damage things without constraint, and freedom from challenge by the people.

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    Ruskin and work…

    December 10, 2018

    More Ruskin. One of his aims was to distinguish ‘good’ work from ‘diabolic’ work. It may still be relevant. This is slightly edited for ease of reading.

    Good work, then, will be, —

    a) Letting in light where there was darkness; as especially into poor rooms and back streets; and generally guiding and administering the sunshine wherever we can, by all the means in our power.

    And the correspondent Diabolic work is putting a tax on windows, and blocking out the sun’s light with smoke. [Using coal instead of solar for livelihood]

    b) Disciplining the falling waters. In the Divine work, this is the ordinance of clouds; in the human, it is properly putting the clouds to service; and first stopping the rain where they carry it from the sea, [or slowing the water’s passage] and then keeping it pure as it flows back to the sea again.

    And the correspondent Diabolic work is the arrangement of land so as to throw all the water back to the sea as fast as we can; and putting every sort of filth into the stream as it runs.

    c) The separation of earth from water, and planting earth with trees. The correspondent human work is especially clearing morasses, and planting on desert ground.

    The correspondent Diabolic work is turning good land and water into mud [or desert]; and cutting down trees that we may drive steam ploughs, etc., etc.

    d) The establishment of times and seasons. The correspondent human work is a due watching of the rise and set of stars, and course of the sun; and due administration and forethought of our own annual labours, preparing for them in hope, and concluding them in joyfulness, according to the laws and gifts of Heaven. Which beautiful order is set forth in symbols on all lordly human buildings round the semi-circular arches which are types of the rise and fall of days and years.

    And the correspondent Diabolic work is turning night into day with candles, so that we never see the stars; and mixing the seasons up one with another, and having early strawberries, and green peas and the like. [So that all sense of the rhythm of life and the cosmos is lost.]

    e) Filling the waters with fish, and air with birds.

    The correspondent Diabolic work is poisoning fish, as is done at Coniston, with copper-mining; and catching them for Ministerial and other fashionable dinners when they ought not to be caught; and treating birds — as birds are treated, Ministerially and otherwise.

    f) Filling the earth with beasts, properly known and cared for by humans; but chiefly, breathing into the clayey and brutal nature of humanity itself, the Soul, or Love, of God.

    The correspondent Diabolic work is shooting and tormenting beasts; and grinding out the soul from the flesh, with machine labour; and then grinding down the flesh, when nothing else is left, into clay, with machines for that purpose such as machine guns, huge cannon, bombs and the like.

    These are the six main heads of God’s and the Devil’s work.

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    Trump Russia, again

    December 1, 2018

    People repeatedly suggest that the Russians could not have had much effect on the US elections… This is naïve at best, and is probably a resistance to recognizing how easy it is for us all to be manipulated in our online societies.

    What I did observe, and I assume many other people observed, is that within a year and a half maximum, many people on the right seemed to shift from believing that Russia was the evil empire that could never be trusted, into thinking that the Russians were the victims of Obama’s aggression, and that their interventions in Ukraine, Georgia, and Syria, showed that Vladimir Putin was an all-round good guy just doing his best to defend his country from external aggression. Anyone who opposed Putin’s dominance, like George Soros, became seen as a devil. This was and is proclaimed with very high confidence.

    This change was truly remarkable. One I would not have believed possible if I had not observed it. It demonstrates that Russians have remarkable knowledge of how to do propaganda in the “disinformation age”.

    Given that we know that the Russians were interested in making sure that Donald Trump became President (or making sure Clinton did not), then it seems probable that they worked towards having an effect on the election and it was probably successful. They may well be still having an effect on maintaining his support.

    It needs to be emphasized that President Trump won by an extremely small margin in a few states (and lost the popular vote), even with the help of the FBI re-accusing Clinton over the emails. Consequently the effect of Russian work, could be much smaller than the change in opinion towards Russia suggests is possible for them to obtain, for it to have had an effect on the election. I have in earlier posts discussed some of the factors which may have helped the spread of this propaganda.

    One thing we know for sure is that Putin would never support anyone who he thought could make America Great again – so he clearly does not think President Trump is much of a challenge to his projects.

    The other thing we know for sure, is that in the Trump Tower meeting, members of Trump’s campaign sought to conspire with the Russians to gain dirt on Clinton, and then lied about it. So clearly the Trump campaign thought contact with the Russians was worthwhile; the only question is how deep that conspiracy went.

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