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"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

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"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

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Al Gore

George Bush

Malcolm Turnbull

Leon Trotsky

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Kurt Vonnegut

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Samuel Pepys

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Sarah Williams

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De-Anne Kelly

Barack Obama

Kylie Minogue

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Alexander Downer

Barbaro

Sam Kekovich

Alan Bennett

Osama bin Laden

Rupert Murdoch

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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

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Cant get me Im part of the society

Growing like woody weeds in the nanny state

Growing like woody weeds in the nanny state

George Lakoff calls it 'framing' and the Right in this country and in America are getting very good at it, so good at it that they keep winning elections even when most of the population hates everything they stand for, or, at least, would do if they were able to understand what that was. Framing is a way of creating a debate favourable to your political agenda by using words that have their own resonance in a different context. Lakoff's first example is 'tax relief', which immediately creates a picture in the mind of a burden that must be taken away, relieved. The Right here endlessly uses that term, and the Labor Party has picked it up, falling straight into the trap, since the objective has nothing to do with relief for the poor, and everything to do with giving the rich ever more riches, and starving government services to the poor. 'Workplace Reform' is another recent example - reform is good, right? Who can argue with reform?

In both America, and here, 'Communist' was a term freely thrown around to stigmatise any opposition to the agenda of the Right. Communists are bad people, ok, so you wouldn't want that label to stick, so you start arguing that, no, you are not a communist, and the more you argue, like Brer Rabbit fighting the tar baby, the more the label becomes entrenched, and the Right can just sit back and watch, their work done, as you dig yourself deeper and deeper into a hole. In America of course, you could add 'Godless' to the word Communist, and that would make the tar baby even bigger. Since communism was destroyed by America this label has lost its value. But in America 'liberal' has replaced it (including, to complete the circle, 'godless liberal' in a recent book title from the queen of American shock jocks), and more recently, 'terrorist sympathiser'.

There are also plenty of less general frames to suit particular parts of the neoconservative agenda. 'Political correctness' was an early and very successful frame used to great effect by John Howard. It immediately silenced patterns of speech aimed at trying to reduce the disadvantage of women, migrants, Aborigines, children, gays. But more than that it effectively silenced those who used that speech, as they endlessly tried to deny 'political correctness' and lost any traction with the issues themselves. In the mean time of course, far from being genuinely concerned about restrictions to language, the Right quickly established a new speech regime, in which only the language of shock jocks and far right politicians was to be considered normal. This is a pattern that is frequently repeated in framing.

With the success of this opening gambit (and Howard must have been amazed at how easy it was), the framing tactic blossomed with the aim of permanently changing all political discourse in Australia. In quick succession they had turned words such as 'expert' into terms of abuse, and we had the bizarre, but successful, spectacle of the Liberal Party, home of business and financial elites, accusing the left of being 'elitist' whenever there questions about their education policies for example. 'Black armband' was used to stigmatise any inclusion of Aboriginal history within Australia history, an inclusion that had only been recently accomplished. Arguing that you were not a black armbander meant implicitly accepting that there were two kinds of history.

The examples began coming thick and fast, this was such fun. 'Class warfare' (or 'class envy') was the term used to denigrate any attempts to stop the rich getting very much richer, to stop the funding of already obscenely wealthy private schools at the expense of poor public ones, and to stop money being the only criterion used in a new triage system determining who would get health care and who wouldn't. This one was so outrageous that you would have thought it would have been laughed out of town as the media and the public suddenly became aware of this new technique in its most blatant example. But no, it was accepted in all seriousness as a proposition, and the left was forced to use up valuable media time arguing that they weren't indulging in class warfare.

A very similar weapon was employed by developers and farmer's federations in the war against conservation. The public generally is in favour of conservation, a support growing as the destruction of the Australian environment becomes increasingly apparent to even the most city bound member of the public. Suddenly the term 'Extreme Green' was used to characterise any attempt at conserving anything anywhere at any time. Very similar to the 'godless communists' approach, no one would want to be associated with extremists, and conservationists were constantly confronted with accusations that they were being extreme. The Labor Party in turn quickly shied away from environmental issues, also not wanting to be seen as extreme. The idea that the real extremists were those demanding to continue development anywhere anyhow and to hell with the environmental cost was never presented by either conservationists or the media. Once you are caught in a frame it is hard to escape.

Another recent environmental example is the term 'woody weeds'. This has been created by some clever farmer's representative. They were faced with the problem that, particularly as the public became aware of salinity, of global warming, and of the continuing rape of the landscape that is broad acre land clearing, people were in favour of trees, and of regrowth (a promising sign that the land at least in some places might be able, given a chance, to begin recovery). They had tried the blatant lie that there were more trees than ever before, and people had, wisely, ignored it. Now a stroke of genius. Not tree regrowth but 'woody weeds'. Nobody likes weeds, right, and woody weeds sound even nastier. Suddenly they are in business. The ABC and more recently the Sunday program use the term, and ecologists are left arguing about the terminology not the issue, and the big agri-corporations can complete the job of destroying the Australian environment.

Another recent success has been 'war against terror'. You couldn't be opposed to fighting terrorism could you? And every time you use the term John Howard moves ever closer to another election win. And finally comes the most recent frame 'nanny state' used against those for example who want to try to control the use of junk foods in schools. Nanny state is the term used to mean any attempt to limit the activity of giant corporations in the name of individual freedom and 'responsibility'. It is used of course by people who on the other hand want total control over the individual's behaviour in relation to drugs, or literature and film, or beliefs about politics, or what curriculum they have in school, or the survival of Aboriginal culture. Words have been weapons of mass destruction (a term itself of course, an enormously successful frame) against the Left in general, and conservationists in particular in recent times. Recognising the cynical tactic may hopefully be a start towards combating it, and creating our own frames to once again balance the debate.

Growing like woody weeds in the nanny state
framing

1 October 2006
Category Politics general
2 comments

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Good read

{ 5:41 PM, 2 October 2006 } { Posted by snowy }
Another favourite is to never refer to unionists as such. Always "union bullyboys" or "union thugs". In fifty years as a unionist I never met any thugs. Just a lot of decent people trying to bargain collectively with employers. The enlightened ones acknowledged the rights of workers to do this. Then there were the others who have been let out of the cage in Howard's world.

Time the left created a few frames themselves I think.

Framing from the Left

{ 11:48 PM, 17 October 2006 } { Posted by Burrinjuck Man }
Well, we do have a few frames of our own - \"redneck\" \"neoconservative\" \"shock jock\" etc and they have a rather satisfying ring to them

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