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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

What would Jesus do ... ?

When the subprime crisis began in America and people began to lose their homes, I was stunned by the reactions to any suggestion that the government might come to their financial rescue in any way. Indeed might consider any kind of regulatory response to try to reduce the chances of such financial predator-prey interaction happening in future.

As best I could tell, the reaction from those who hadn't lost their homes towards those who had was a kind of an old testament judgment that they had it coming. Or perhaps the kind of glee that sees the performer you most dislike booted off American Idol in the most humiliating way. In the familiar expressions it seemed to be evidence that "a fool and his money are soon parted" and "there's a sucker born every minute".

I was amazed by the vicious comments on blogs that anyone who had lost home and money should be left to rot. It was quite clear that significant numbers of people thought that anyone who had succumbed to the massive advertising and peer pressure, by corporations using all psychological techniques refined in the 50 years since "The Hidden Persuaders" should get no sympathy at all. Not so much three strikes and you're in, but one strike and you're out.

Everything that happens to you in life is a matter of personal responsibility, it seems. No room for errors, failures of intellect, failures of education, family circumstances, personality quirks, or bad luck. No, if you have fallen victim to the shonky business practices of the subprime world you are to be left in the gutter.

Perhaps as an example to others? But how would that work? And how can it possibly benefit society to let families go to the wall, rot in the gutter? And how many families must be allowed to do this, as a sign that personal responsibility is the only value that matters? Are we prepared to let the subpoor increase in numbers until cities become unlivable, society suffers a complete breakdown, the economy heads towards another Great Depression? Does the expression cutting off your nose to spite your face ring a bell?

And why does the same attitude not attach to the CEOs of companies that go broke for whatever reason? When was the last time that a CEO jumped from a Wall Street window without a golden parachute? When was the last time one of these people, far more culpable, far more personally responsible than the average Joe Public, took personal responsibility and refused to take the golden handout?

Whenever someone like, oh well, me, writes about the baneful influence of religion in society, I will inevitably be attacked by someone claiming that atheists like me believe in evolution, nature red in tooth and claw, believe that humans who fall by the way side should be culled for the good of the race. The Nazis will be mentioned, eugenics, Social Darwinism perhaps, all in contrast to those societies like the American in which religion plays an increasingly dominant role. Where religion rules, it will be implied, human beings are valued as god's children, suffer the little children, no sparrow falling, lilies of the field and all that.

But the reaction to the subprime victims shows this for the hypocrisy it is. Here is an atheist calling for safety nets, public housing, social support, and there are non-atheists (if that is a word) demanding that there be no room on the life boat for the drowning. Religious people seeing the subprime crisis as a way of selecting out the subhumans (a bit like Katrina). Happy to see the least of these not valued but persecuted. Happy it seems to see the possession of money as a sign of adaptive fitness, and the lack of money as a sign that someone is the weakest link in the gene pool. Have I missed some religious revision? Has the new testament been rewritten to say that all poor people are going to hell, straight to hell, do not pass go, do not collect government handout? Can the poor not pass through the eye of a needle while the rich get their own heavenly mansion (in the ultimate gated community)?

Look, you all know that, while I might have moments of bitterness I don't cling to guns and god. But you guys, well, some of you guys, do. So what I want to know is - what would Jesus do about the victims of the subprime mortgage crisis? I mean, he was a sink or swim kind of guy, right?

Check out the rest of the Watermelon Blog for moments of bitterness interspersed with the sheer exhilaration of a life free of religious dogma.

subprime

29 April 2008
Category Religion
3 comments

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It is perplexing

{ 12:31 AM, 30 April 2008 } { Posted by George Mobus (USA) }
Observation confirmed David. I have friends who have naught but disdain for those losing their homes.

But I have wondered for some time what the effect of overpopulation might be. Perhaps it is the commodification of human life. As soon as there was a surplus of humans someone figured out how to turn them into instruments. What happens when something becomes a commodity? Its value is diminished because one is as good as another.

We live in an age when human life is cheap. This age began shortly after man discovered agriculture and has been growing ever since, perhaps with short reprieves after major plagues. What does it matter what happens to the retched?

So much for humanism (of any brand).

George

Piranhas

{ 2:25 AM, 3 May 2008 } { Posted by Anonymous }
I noticed a trend in the US long before I left (which was 2 years ago). I got the impression that Americans increasingly need to feel superior to others. There is an epidemic of self-righteousness in that country and it's not limited to the religious. I thought a lot about this because I saw so much evidence for it. I think rather than better themselves to improve their own sense of self worth, Americans, out of laziness maybe, would rather just gloat at others' (perceived) failures and weaknesses. I honestly think anti-smoking social marketing, which made it socially acceptable to vilify and ostracize other members of society may have been the reason why the dam burst. There is no longer a "there but for the grace of God go I" attitude in the US. (I'm an atheist but I love that sentiment.) It's more like "You're a loser and I'm not." In their cultural programming, they polarize everything, and there are only winners and losers. In that brutally individualistic, kill or be killed culture, you see your neighbor taken down by lions and don't even look back.

Pamela (frogblog)

We just inherited the attitude from the Brits!

{ 9:32 AM, 11 May 2008 } { Posted by George Mobus (USA) }
I think this just follows from the same kind of colonialism that holds the attitude of the white man's burden. The USA started down this road after WWI and it accelerated post WWII. We started thinking of ourselves as the great hope of humanity. Then when the Iron Curtain fell, well weren't we the cats pajamas?

Look at our general lifestyles. We have come to feel a sense of entitlement as well as a snobbishness about how clever we are. But that may be rapidly coming to an end soon. Peak oil and our dependence on that commodity will be a bitch slap we aren't going to miss.

George

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