Green thought, in a green shade,

Green views

The Watermelon Blog Green on the outside, social justice inside

"We can do better" (Kennedy)

Richest fluency

"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body." Walt Whitman

The Goodies

good television

good movies

good books

good poetry

more good books

good songs

good children

good boys

good people

good leaders

Try a lucky dip:

"Well it looks to me as if the whole heaven of the world is on fire now."

"landscape that had been farmed for 2000 years or more but had retained some biodiversity and variety."

"So now there are calls for children in schools to be only taught that nuclear power is good for you."

"One of those human-animal hybrids reared its head again the other day and said "Moooo"."

"If you want people to be always under control then simply abolish the concept of "private", and it will get rid of those silly philosophical arguments between teenagers on the meaning of life and the concept of identity."

"if you had to choose one person who is most responsible for the failure of governments, particularly the American and Australian governments, to act over the last critical ten years, Rupert Murdoch is your man."

"Now, for the first time we have a literally Earth-changing event, the effects of CO2 increase on the climate of the whole planet."

"The falseness of this argument is easy to spot because it is proposed by people who have never ever conceded that anything else Aborigines did was of any value."

"Lesser humans may look on aghast, as elections are fixed, opposition parties destroyed one way or another, lies told, courts and the boards of public bodies stacked with zealots, the media starved of information, laws broken, constitutions ignored, democracy trashed."

"In protests everywhere young people literally hug trees, believing, it seems, that there is some quality to a tree which allows a mystical connection with humans."

"Wow, I thought, Peter Costello has looked up from his "tax breaks for the rich spreadsheet" for a moment and smelled the carbon dioxide."

"the inability to do a Google search and instantly find an answer to a question you are pretending doesn't have an answer sure makes even a simple country boy put one flagellum with another flagellum to make three flagellae."

"these religious fundamentalists who spread the enormously damaging creationist propaganda, inflicting a kind of mental terrorism on schools, should also be on "no fly lists"."

"While most of us saw the dangers ahead for the only planet we can live on, representatives of the nuclear power industry, and their tame scientists, saw only a marketing opportunity."

"The ones who could express that love of country through creating art were lucky, but the others who came along to see it were part of that same community spirit."

"I wonder if John Howard has phoned any of his old high school teachers to say thank you for an Australian education?"

"The problem does not lie with the Iraqi people but with the fact that they have been invaded and occupied."

"before you can say "red sky at night, shepherd's delight", there will be the usual nonsensical calls for more and more dams to be built, or for rivers to be turned inland."

"I was again struck with the reality of how badly served are farmers by the leaders of the farmers' organisations."

"They are people who saw Orwells "1984" not as a warning but as a manual."

"Such approaches would certainly be much more productive, and much less damaging than a mistaken belief in the value and benign nature of "prescribed burning"."

"The strong element of belief is dangerous in science as in religion because it prevents people seeing things."

"Will the minister be happy when only 15 percent of Australians accept that humans evolved on this planet, or does he have a still lower figure in mind?"

"well, someone is going to make money out of the destruction of the planet and it might as well be me."

"The combination of course let Pauline Hanson and her shadowy backers and wacky supporters off the leash and the rest is history."

"It would be hard to see any politician arguing against the need for big business to be more accountable to the community that supports it."

"Add into the mix the shockjocks on radio and television shamelessly promoting prejudice and whipping up emotions."

"brown snake bodies wrapped around them."

"Grasslands grow where they do because of combinations such as poor soils, flat lands, high temperatures and low rainfall, they are not areas where Aboriginal burning removed forests."

"It is also often claimed that Australian ecosystems are adapted to fire. This is a bit like saying that lawns are adapted to lawnmowers."

"The business community, with the governments help, is about to send us back to those horse and buggy days of employers ruling the world."

"All care will be taken, they promise, qualified pharmacists running them."

"How could you let them subsume the economy and international interests of Australia into the interests of the Republican Party of the USA"

"but where are my slippers"

"then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies."

"I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators."

"Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey"

"a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party."

"the evening star is coming."

"You might at least try to avoid the proposition that if there is a perceived conflict between business and "the environment" that there is no question but that the thing which goes is the environment."

"There may well be people who have a spiritual dimension to their feelings about forests, just as there are people who have a spiritual dimension to feelings about V8 cars or Collingwood football."

" the only thing the market is good at, the only thing it is really for, is taking care of business, and it does that very well."

" let us not go rushing into this religious stuff until we see if there is anything science can't explain."

" Remember Iraq. Remember the flowers that weren't strewn on the streets for the invading armies."

" " we have to work with the effects of the "progress" that has been made since Ned Ludd and his merry band were smashing the new fangled weaving machines. Go Ned, I want to say."

" Hard to tell how long the eruptions of the religion plague will last, and what damage they will do."

" Greenhouse temperature rise is a massive refutation of the proposition that the world should be run by businessmen for businessmen."

" We are pulling up the drawbridge against the peasants."

" People in areas prone to bushfires are usually advised to develop an escape plan or action plan which includes having, in easily transportable form, the core possessions you want to survive."

" most of our members were probably Methodists, it being as hard to imagine teetotal Catholics and Anglicans as it was to imagine a drunken Methodist."

" he is playing , like the grasshopper, in the warm sun of high resource prices and plenty of tourists, what happens when the prices collapse and winter comes and the tourists do not?"

" as after walking all that way I think I am capable of looking after myself."

" They can be brought out onto the streets to have some rather odd laws three thousand years old put into their courthouses."

Strange

Bedfellows

John Howard

Kevin Rudd

Al Gore

George Bush

Malcolm Turnbull

Leon Trotsky

Thomas Huxley

Oliver Goldsmith

Kurt Vonnegut

Tony Blair

Samuel Pepys

Winston Churchill

Peter Costello

Joan of Arc

Fidel Castro

Sarah Williams

Peter Beattie

Ned Ludd

De-Anne Kelly

Barack Obama

Kylie Minogue

Tony Abbott

Alexander Downer

Barbaro

Sam Kekovich

Alan Bennett

Osama bin Laden

Rupert Murdoch

George Lakoff

Bjorn Lomborg

Adolf Hitler

Ayn Rand

George Orwell

Julia Butterfly Hill

Saddam Hussein

James Carville

Charles Darwin

Philip Cooney

Jacky Kelly

Irshad Manji

James Lovelock

Bob Hawke

Brendon Nelson

Barnaby Joyce

Robert Menzies

Robert Tressell

Slim Dusty

Noel Coward

Samuel Johnson

Walt Whitman

Edmund Hillary

Robert Byrd

Phillip Adams

Alisa Camplin

Arnold Schwarzeneger

Blogger's Cut

Best slices from the watermelon

Future to the back

Ox power

Whacko Texas

Ticked off

Inhaling the Sixties

God unwilling

Bakers Oven 5

Game over

All change for

Dog bites man

Whale tears

Flowers for bosses

Curtin spinning

Gotta love it

Dodgy intelligence

A glass darkly

Truth and consequences

Media-ocrity

Cant get me Im part of the society

Growing like woody weeds in the nanny state

Evolving Tony Abbott?

In response to an article I wrote recently on evolution I had a response from an American reader as follows: 'Several of my Republican "friends" (I'm a liberal) seem to think that by attempting to dominate the world militarily, mankind is acting as the ultimate agent of Evolution. "We are killing off the lazy and the stupid," is how these people phrase their arguments. So it's almost like these Neocons are -- instead of rejecting the notion of Natural Selection and Evolution -- now adopting it as their own vehicle to explain imperialism and non-inclusive Conservative policies.'

These 'Republican friends' and their counterparts in Australia have a long history for their ideas. They are essentially restating 'Social Darwinism', which became briefly popular in the late nineteenth century to justify the gross inequalities in British society, and British imperialism, before it became obvious that it was rubbish. The more things change, the more they stay the same, eh? When neocons talk in this way they are thinking of the phrase 'nature red in tooth and claw', which they think comes from Darwin, but in fact comes from a poem by Tennyson. This phrase in turn comes from 'Survival of the fittest', which again is thought of as Darwin, but initially came from Herbert Spencer, who began the idea known as Social Darwinism. Darwin had originally just talked about 'natural selection' by analogy with 'artificial selection' (what farmers and horticulturists do), but added the term 'survival of the fittest' later in recognition of Spencer's ideas.

The image of course is of the triumphant buck deer, antlers bloodied, killing all his rivals, or the male lion, supreme after chasing off the young males from the pride. And it is the image of George Bush in his flight suit, mission accomplished, or Tony Abbott wearing boxing gloves, or Mark Latham arm wrestling John Howard. It is the world of Gordon Gecko's 'greed is good', Maggie Thatcher's 'no such thing as society' and Ayn Rand's promotion of selfishness, and of economic rationalism, and of every empire's notion of imposing civilisation on inferior beings. It is the Dickensian world of Victorian England and of 21st century Australia, with deserving poor and undeserving poor, of every man for himself, and of wealth as a measure of virtue and success. And it is the world in which the people who benefit from it can say, with a straight face, that capitalism has defeated socialism because of 'human nature'.

And it is all nonsense.

Evolution doesn't work like that.

Human society certainly doesn't work like that.

Artificial selection is a slow process, natural selection is a very slow process. Both are working on tiny genetic differences, making use of occasional tiny mutations. The changes are brought about because individuals with a particular genetic makeup have a slightly above average chance of raising slightly more of their offspring to reproductive age than those with a different genetic makeup. Slightly above average chance, slightly more. That's all. You wouldn't see it happening, but you would see the end results a long way down the track. And there is no sense of 'every man for himself', there are many examples of cooperative behaviour evolving because it improves the chances of the survival of a group as a whole - and certainly this would have been a factor in the evolution of early human groups.

And leaving all that aside, the philosophy of Ayn Rand (and all her followers down to the neocons and economic rationalists now running Australia and much of the rest of the world with the help of right wing think tanks and radio shock jocks) requires that differences in wealth between individuals in a society, and between countries, is not just a measure of virtue but of genetic worth. It ignores all of the historic events, the chance factors, the luck, the nepotism, the actions of government in favour of their friends, the aftermath of wars and slavery and resource exploitation. And there is, in any case, no genetic basis of any kind in the economic inequalities within and between societies. The Right dismiss any talk of context to explain inequalities of wealth in individuals or countries as bleeding heart liberalism, preferring instead an outdated and wrong reading of Charles Darwin to justify their continued appropriation of the potential wealth of the poor individuals and the poor countries of the world.

And in Australia we continue, with the help of the tax system, to make what used to be the merely filthy rich into the super rich (perhaps the uber rich), and by getting rid of regulations once intended to protect people, we make corporations even richer too. And the Labor Party, anxious not to appear soft headed, and anxious not to annoy the media owners and the big corporate political donors, goes along with this. Even echoing the mantra of the Right that you can't change things because it is what 'aspirational voters' (or as we now call them 'Middle Australia') want, can't argue with human nature, it's in our genes. Competition, not cooperation, both parties agree, is what makes the world go round, and it is expressed most clearly in the Dickensian world of the new industrial relations system. Workplace agreements are the most recent manifestation of Herbert Spencer's 'every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost' view of human nature as he fantasized that it had evolved under natural selection.

Human nature? No, an alibi, easily broken, for greed.

Evolving Tony Abbott?
Social Darwinism

4 August 2006
Category Values
1 comments

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Evolution of society

{ 6:56 PM, 7 August 2006 } { Posted by Anonymous }
I would argue that social or communal beliefs do evolve but politics are not intrinsic to this. In fact I would argue that evolution of politics is highly removed from social or communal beliefs as we are not truly a democratic system.

Evolution of politics to me is, for example; a politician getting away with pandering to big business, the business financially supports the party, forcing opposing parties to do likewise in order to compete, hence a self perpetuating adaptation to the political environment. A counteractive social mechanism of not voting for said politician is flawed for many reasons, (eg forced to vote for them anyway for different reasons). Hence my claim that political policies should not be considered social evolution at all.

My idea of social evolution would be for example; increasing divorce rate or something like that. Many of these concepts are tied to religious beliefs but it is my position that religions evolve as an intrinsic part of the communal belief system (eg Catholic division over homosexuality).

I'm just responding to let you know there are many different perspectives regarding social evolution, and not all of them are related to the harsh social darwinistic concepts you discussed.

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