Doubting the choice

I had forgotten how much I disliked Scott Morrison as Immigration minister under Abbott until I searched back through posts here.   He has, deliberately, softened his image since then; and to be honest, I think I did feel more kindly towards him after he appeared with Annabel Crabb on her one-on-one in the kitchen show.

But, he really does strike me as a blustering flim flam man at heart in interviews.  

In a way, I think he shares a bit of the same (in)sincerity problem that Shorten suffers from.   Something about both of their deliveries in interviews and debates often hits notes of blustery insincerity.  

But Labor does not have at its heart a corrosive internal culture war/climate change denial fight going on for its soul.  And, genuinely, they have been doing decent policy work on at least tax.

Labor will deserve to win the next election, and I would be very surprised if Morrison can help the Liberals avoid a significant defeat.

Lulz, as they say (and by the way - just split, Liberals)

Morrison and Frydenberg.  They're not really to be trusted on climate change, but nor are they rabidly into denying it, and so are already being declared a major disappointment for the right wing/conservative denialists in the party.   (Catallaxy commenters are appalled.)  

The decades old, fundamental problem in the party is still unresolved.

Just get out of the way and let Labor govern for a while.

Public butchery not a good idea

I see that The Sun has run an article showing graphic pictures of the animal sacrifices taking place, often on roads or other public places, for Eid in Muslim countries.   (A few posts back, however, I noted how at least one big city - Cairo - was trying to stamp out the practice on public health and hygiene grounds.)

Having a look at the photos - which I don't really recommend - it reminds of me of my theory as to why public attitudes towards gruesome executions have changed so much in the West.   (Even allowing for some people wanting to shock themselves by looking up real life beheadings and gruesome mangled bodies on the 'net, it's pretty much impossible to imagine anything other than public outrage in the West at the idea that public should want to watch any criminal beheaded, hung, or drawn and quartered, when such things did use to be a public spectacle in Christian countries.)

I think that that commonplace public butchery of animals is a possible reason why people used to be not shocked at seeing a "deserving" person butchered in public as well.  But when such animal butchery got hidden away from the market to the interior of a slaughterhouse, public sensitivity to seeing humans broken and cut increased over time too.

And you would have to say that it is Islamic nations (public beheading in Saudi Arabia) and Islamic terrorism that is the main source of such maltreatment of human bodies now. 

I know that you can argue that the public slaughter of animals is more "honest" about how those of us who enjoy meat get our food - many people say that a visit to a slaughterhouse is one of the best ways to be converted to vegetarianism - but being sensitised to the slaughter of animals by keeping it hidden has the added advantage of sensitising people to the slaughter of humans too.

And that is actually a good thing.

So yeah, I wish Muslim countries would stop the public slaughter of animals, for the sake of all of us.

PS:   a handy update on the matter of when and why Judaism stopped animal sacrifice.

PPS:   it is an interesting intellectual exercise to wonder what would happen to Islam if, in an equivalent to the Temple being destroyed in 70CE, its key sacred sites in and around Mecca were to be destroyed.  (Was it one of the three sites fake nuked in Mission Impossible 6?  I forget.)    I guess the immediate aftermath would depend on who caused the destruction.   An asteroid strike might raise particularly difficult questions as to how to interpret it! 

Imre surprises

I have never known much (or more accurately, anything really) about Imre Salusinszky beyond the fact that he was presumably pretty conservative since he and Tim Blair had a short lived stint on ABC radio in one of the early attempts to give a right wing balance, which was cut short and seems to have made Blair absolutely obsessed with wanting to destroy the organisation and all within it ever since. 

But on his twitter feed, he has been fully supporting Chris Uhlmann's attach on the Right wing media's direct and private intervention in cajoling Liberals to dump Turnbull.   He sees no equivalence with Left leaning journalists criticising, say, Abbott:

Well, good on him.

Does he talk to Tim Blair any more?   I can't see that Bolt would want to talk to him after this, either.

Come on Liberals, just split

I saw Amanda Vanstone on TV last night saying that she viewed the "broad church" of the Liberal Party as a positive thing.  She told the story of John Howard in the cabinet or party room siding with the policy of spending a billion dollars on the environment in (I think) 1996, because he said that although he agreed with the conservatives, he thought it was what the electorate wanted.

All very nice in theory, Amanda, but can't you admit that the conservatives, all due to their intransigence on the matter of climate change denial, have caused electoral turmoil over the last decade?

What's more, your pragmatic hero John Howard, once out of politics, went over to the dark side of encouraging the very climate change denialism that has stuffed up energy policy ever since.

Sorry Amanda, the "broad church" has broken down and just doesn't work anymore, and it's not because of moderates like you.

The party needs a proper split.   And the mainstream side needs to stop sending party operatives over to learn how to deny reality from Republicans; tell Murdoch to get stuffed - he and his media outfits are simply wrong about climate change; and similarly to tell the IPA that everyone knows they are just a mouthpiece for Gina Rinehart who's as self interested in her climate change denial as it is possible to get.

Ah, so it all makes sense now [sarc]

I mean, that's just amongst L/NP voters (which is arguably a better take on public sentiment, because it's not confounded by Labor voters who went for Dutton because they think he's hurt the Libs.)

Who the hell has told him he'll do great at the next election?    Has some cabal of Murdoch figures been gaslighting him about how the public will warm to him?

It's very bizarre.

Update:  I've just got around to watching Chris Uhlmann's spray against Sky News and 2GB for them apparently getting directly involved by privately ringing Liberal Party ministers and MPs.   I think he's pretty conservative himself, and no friend of green energy policy, so for him to be so upset with the likes of Alan Jones etc is a pleasant surprise.   

And it does seem to be the only plausible explanation - the climate change denying idiots of Sky and 2GB who have never liked Turnbull were freaked out over his energy policy sticking to Paris targets, and decided to take him down by encouraging the only dimwit able to be gaslit about his own popularity into challenging.     Still doesn't really explain why 35 MPs would go with it, but that's the parlous state of the party at the moment.

And now we cross to a live feed of Malcolm Turnbull in Canberra...

Update:  Or perhaps that should be Peter Dutton, not Turnbull.

I'll pay that...

Yes, quite the coincidence

A long history of demanding loyalty, and not returning it

Now that Trump has dumped Cohen like a hot potato (and tries to keep Manafort on side by praising him - man, he is so transparent), this article at Politico looks at the history of Trump giving no loyalty back as soon as it suits him.  He's really an incredible jerk.

The strange death of the Turnbull government

The bizarre thing is that it seems that no one other than half of the Liberal politicians in Canberra, and the LNP organisation in Queensland, thinks well of Peter Dutton.

I mean, can't they read preferred leader polls?   And lots of people say that for every seat in Queensland that Dutton may hypothetically save, there'll probably be a seat in Victoria or elsewhere that he'll lose.  As I noted yesterday, there's not even obvious support for him in the bitter, aged white male world of Catallaxy.  For many of them, he's not even conservative enough!

And then there's the doubt over whether he is entitled to be in Parliament at all.  What nutty challenger tries to take over leadership when there is that cloud over their head?

Finally, there's the matter of the Coalition polling actually having risen to 51/49 in the last couple of Newspolls.  I couldn't see why this had happened, and it worried me that it put Turnbull in range of another scrappy win at the next election.   So, obviously, what does the party do?  Tear itself apart.

My big hope, that this would cause a proper split in the Party to rid it of climate change denialism once and for all, is seemingly not going to happen.   Turnbull seems to love the top job too much to tell a chuck of his parliamentary supporters to leave the party - but there's no doubt that a new conservative party would form some sort of coalition with the Liberal/Nationals rather than support Labor, which is not going to give up support for higher reduced emissions targets.

Anyway, one of the best discussions I have read about this means for the future of the Liberals is from Ben Eltham, and appears in New Matilda.  A few key bits:

As Tim Colebatch noted this week in Inside Story, the struggle for the future of the party is existential, even ontological. Colebatch notes that “in most of Australia, the Liberals’ shrinking party branches increasingly comprise a narrow base of cultural protesters rather than the broad base of mainstream Australians they had when national development was the issue.”

As I pointed out in an article about the rise of Australian far right, modern conservative thinking has moved rapidly in recent years. Amongst the contemporary conservative base, the onrush of tribalism has resulted in the abandonment of enlightenment values like scientific knowledge, liberal pluralism, or academic expertise. 

As a result, movement conservatives quite literally live in a different reality to moderates and progressives, a world where conspiracy theories flourish, climate change is a myth, and western civilisation is under threat from immigrants, feminists and university lecturers. 

In the longer term, genuine questions must be asked about the future of the conservative project. Can the Liberal Party continue in its current form? Will conservatives succeed in taking over the party machinery and melding it into a much more muscular, far-right apparatus – just as movement conservatives have done in the United States? Or will the party split apart?

In mainstream Australia, the endless culture war has so far been going very badly, as the marriage plebiscite showed. But the culture war within the Liberal Party has been another matter altogether: in the party machinery, the far right is winning.

As out of touch as the conservatives are with mainstream Australia, they are extremely in touch with the active and increasingly radical right. Indeed, it could be argued that this weeks’ events represent the logical conclusion of the radicalisation of the Liberal right.

t’s no coincidence that energy policy proved the spark that ignited the current Liberal conflagration. The passage of virulent climate denialism from fringe right-wing conspiracy theory to the centre of current Liberal policy shows just how radicalised the right of the party has become. Similar trends are apparent on issues like immigration. Such is the drift that a section of the party is more than willing to sabotage a sitting Liberal prime minister in order to secure political and ideological hegemony. 
 
Such actions do not augur well for a sensible and balanced politics in this country. In fact, they suggest precisely the opposite: the rise of a powerful and dangerous far right movement, well on the way to taking over one of the two major parties in Australia’s democracy.

 Actually, I don't agree with that last paragraph - I think the nutty Right of Australia is just having a temporary confidence boost by the Trump ascendancy, but that is going to crash in a screaming wreck very shortly.  Besides, my feeling is that wingnuttery is not as big in Australia as it is in the States, and is artificially boosted in prominence and influence by the Murdoch media.  

While we're on a theme...

I'm a bit amused to read about how, in times past, professional poets to Irish kings and chieftains had to give some pretty extreme, um, lip service to the boss:

The cult seems rooted in the notion of the poet’s relationship with his royal or chiefly patron being equivalent to a marriage, the two sharing the same bed. The following English translations from the original Irish may be cited. One poet tells his patron that it is no act of adultery towards his wife to “lie with me and my kind”, while another who has fallen out of favour seeks reconciliation by urging: “Let us not refrain any longer from lying on one couch, O fair one.” A 14th-century poet calls on his patron to “proffer your red lips to me, give me a fervent kiss . . .” The same states: “To him [the poet] is due loving favour, the primest [sic] liberality, precedence in counsel, the king’s counsel, the sharing of his bed . . .” Some of the language employed is even more extravagant. Thus, an elegy by Brian Ó Gnímh over the spiked head of Alasdair Mac Donald (1586) runs: “I love the still-unbleached red mouth/Head of silk complexion . . ./ . . . smooth delicate cheek/ . . . fine soft abundant curling tresses/ . . . gaze-holding green eyes . . ./ . . . perfect tresses”.

Whether this should be seen as really, truly gay or not seems to be a matter in dispute:

However, we are cautioned by Prof Pádraig Breatnach that “the guise of ‘spouse’ could be adopted by a poet towards several patrons at once”. The poet’s “full assumption of a feminine role” occurs within terms of an established literary “conceit”, and “we must be wary of drawing hasty conclusions as to his psychology...” A parallel study by Prof Katherine Simms draws attention to the contemporary “traditional role of the poet as in some sense his patron’s spouse or lover”. However, “the bard has no intention . . . of implying a homosexual relationship with his patron . . . Bed-sharing was a general mark of esteem and trust in this society, peculiarly appropriate between a king and his poet.” Both the foregoing base their observations in large part on the earlier work of Prof James Carney.

 The guy who wrote the article goes on to argue "yeah, nah", but who is right I don't know.

I do think it kind of funny though to imagine a 100% straight poet having to gush like that to keep his job.

Just when you thought Malaysia was making sudden improvements...

..The Guardian reports that:

The general election in May has been celebrated for ushering in a new era, but the new government’s first 100 days in power have been marked by increased discrimination, harassment and violent hate crime against the LGBT community.

Which is pretty odd, given the anointment of Anwar Ibrahim, alleged sodomite, by Mahathir as the next leader.   Anyway, some particular incidents behind the report:

In the early hours of Saturday, the police and government officials raided a small nightclub in Kuala Lumpur.

The venue, Blue Boy, was known to be popular with the LGBT community, but for years had been relatively left alone by the authorities. Until the weekend. Twenty men were detained and ordered into counselling for “illicit behaviour” by the Federal Territory Islamic Religious Department of Malaysia (JAKIM).

Government minister Khalid Samad later released a statement on the motivations behind the raid. “Hopefully this initiative can mitigate the LGBT culture from spreading into our society,” he said....

Just two days before the raid, a trans woman was brutally beaten on the street in Seremban while seven others watched. The attack left her with broken ribs, a broken backbone and a ruptured spleen.

In the same week, a sharia court ordered a lesbian couple to be caned after they were caught having sex in a car, the first time in years such a punishment had been handed out in Malaysia. The judge said it was “a lesson and reminder to not just the two of you, but the members of society”....

The minister for religious affairs, Mujahid Yusof Rawa, has said the government would “take proactive measures to curb the growing lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender issues, and help them to return to the right path and lead a normal life”. The deputy minister for public affairs, Dr Lee Boon Chye, stated last week that LGBT people have an “organic disorder”.

Not a great day for Trump

Just don't do it

Here's conservative Catholic Philippa Martyr's remarkably un-detailed assessment of how to respond to the Catholic Church's crisis with regard to sex and sexual behaviour:

I don’t know a soul, clerical or lay, who hasn’t been damaged by the sexual revolution. But I also know there’s no point in saying, ‘It’s always been like this.’

The solution is not married clergy, gay clergy, or even married gay clergy. It’s the same solution it’s always been: a renewal and restoration and re-catechesis of the Church’s complete teaching on sexual morality, and practical advice on how to get it right, at least most of the time.

For the last 40 years we have had Catholic marriage promoted, explained, and supported at every level of the Church. Perhaps it’s time to look at the chaste and/or celibate state in the same way.

We all know many faithful Catholics who can’t marry – or re-marry – for a whole range of reasons. All of us could benefit from some help to live lives that are just as holy and as countercultural as faithful married Catholic couples.

What, exactly, does she see as a system of helping those who can't have sex?  

[Update:  and, I might add - I would love to know her "practical advice on how to get it right".   I'm looking forward to Dr Philippa Martyr's book "The Joy of No Sex": richly illustrated with some hairy, clothed dude getting distracted in novel ways from sexual thoughts?   I think cats would likely feature a lot, somehow.]

The whole problem with her approach is that it really is only looking at the historical context as far back as the 1960's.   Yes, it's true, the 1960's did invoke a challenge to the Church's authority in the matter of sex and sexuality, but the true historical context needs to go back at least a century earlier - to the turmoil of the 19th century, and the scientific, philosophical and theological challenge of modernity to the Church, and the way people understand the very nature of humanity.    

Poor old Philippa seems to think you can just set the clock back a few centuries and that's that.

You can't.

Update:   I said in comments I would link to a piece that appeared recently from a guy who had been a seminarian in the 1960's, but left and didn't become a priest.   As he says:

From my personal experience, I would guess that obligatory celibacy plays an important role. To paraphrase Saint Paul, for some people the burning sexual energy cannot and should not be contained. The effort often infantilizes men, subverting normal sexual urges into strange pathways, blocking sexual maturity.

For a few priests, celibacy appears to deepen devotion to God; many simply ignore it; for others it is a source of malaise and unhappiness. For far too many men, it has led to criminal depravity.

The Catholic hierarchy has primary responsibility to find the answer and to make the indispensable cultural and institutional changes in the priesthood. Prosecution of abuses has become more common, but it’s not enough. I don’t see evidence that the clergy — priests, bishops, the Vatican or even the much admired Pope Francis — are willing to address the elephant in the room: What is wrong with the institution of the priesthood and how can it be fixed?

Or how about a former priest, writing in 2010, who puts it this way:

No, celibacy does not “cause’’ the sex abuse of minors, and yes, abusers of children come from many walks of life. Indeed, most abuse occurs within families or circles of close acquaintance. But the Catholic scandal has laid bare an essential pathology that is unique to the culture of clericalism, and mandatory celibacy is essential to it. Immaturity, narcissism, misogyny, incapacity for intimacy, illusions about sexual morality — such all-too-common characteristics of today’s Catholic clergy are directly tied to the inhuman asexuality that is put before them as an ideal.

A special problem arises when, on the one hand, homosexuality is demonized as a matter of doctrine, while, on the other, the banishment of women leaves the priest living in a homophilic world. In some men, both straight and gay, the stresses of such contradiction lead to irrepressible urges that can be indulged only by exploitation of the vulnerable and available, objects of desire who in many cases are boys, whether prepubescent or adolescent. Now we know.

Update 2:   Here's a point I may have missed before.   Even though (as I noted in an earlier post) Philippa loves to blame homosexuality as at the core of the problem, the irony is that the proportion of gay priests in the priesthood has almost certainly increased over the last 50 years before of the outflow of straight priests who leave to marry!:

In the last half century there’s also been an increased “gaying of the priesthood” in the West. Throughout the 1970s, several hundred men left the priesthood each year, many of them for marriage. As straight priests left the church for domestic bliss, the proportion of remaining priests who were gay grew. In a survey of several thousand priests in the U.S., the Los Angeles Times found that 28 percent of priests between the ages of 46 and 55 reported that they were gay. This statistic was higher than the percentages found in other age brackets and reflected the outflow of straight priests throughout the 1970s and ’80s. 

So even if it was fair [it isn't, in the broad way she does] of Philippa to, um, blame the gays,  the fact that celibacy has caused heaps of straight priests to leave the priesthood would still pretty much be consistent with "celibacy is a factor in the sexual abuse crisis."  

How politics now works

Hey, I think this is a pretty good explanation of how Labor (and Liberal) politics now works from The Conversation - Labor now does politics better than the Liberals - here's why.

American politics gets a mention too.

It doesn't get into the whole culture war/climate change issue that has poisoned the American Right and bled into Australian Right too, but the big picture it paints still seems sound.

Psst...it's all about climate change

It was a bit frustrating listening to Fran Kelly interview a couple of Liberals this morning about their leadership crisis and not have her or her guests get to the crux of the divide between the conservative and moderate split within the party.

It's obvious:  it is climate change.   The so-called conservatives in the party deny reality on this,   commentators should be not shy about calling this out as being at the heart of the Liberal crisis.

Update:  yes, Graham Readfearn said the same thing yesterday: 

Climate change denial is at the root of the half-baked policies and outright wrecking that have blighted the past decade

Why aren't more commentators saying it?

And why isn't there anyone calling for an outright split in the Liberals over it?   

A positive look at New Guinea

I've missed a lot of Foreign Correspondent this year, but caught last night's remarkable show in which ageing and ill former New Guinea correspondent Sean Dorney returned to the country where he worked (and found his wife) many years ago.  

It was good to see such a personal story, incorporating a rare positive look at village life, get an airing.  

A particularly good time not to be in Cairo

It's Eid, the holiday dreaded by sheep.   I see that Cairo is trying to get on top of a street slaughter problem:

Faced with scenes of blood flowing in rubbish-strewn roads and of streets littered with animal entrails, authorities in the Egyptian capital say they aim to crack down on the outdoor slaughter that marks one of Islam’s main holidays.

Eid Al Adha, or the festival of sacrifice, is marked by Muslims sacrificing animals according to religious traditions at the end of the Haj annual pilgrimage.

Ahead of the holiday, which this year starts on Tuesday, temporary sheep markets have sprung up amid the exhaust fumes and garbage heaps of the sprawling metropolis.

But the governor’s office in Cairo insists it is on a “cleanliness” drive to stop the widespread slaughter of animals in the distinctly unhygienic surroundings of the city’s streets.

To prevent the “barbaric and unacceptable” spectacle, officials in each neighbourhood have been ordered to “strictly” enforce laws prohibiting the practice, city spokesman Khalid Mustafa said....

Traders like Hussain Abul Al Aziz say they welcome the push to eliminate the killings in the streets and claim they don’t engage in the practice.

“It is unacceptable to slaughter in the street, it must be done in an abattoir with a veterinarian who examines the animal and under the supervision of the health ministry,” Aziz said, standing among his well-fed beasts.

But it is clear that the message from the authorities has not reached most people.

Local resident Ahmad Ragab shops around for a sheep for Eid Al Adha.

The father in his fifties confides that he has not heard of the official sanitation drive and was planning to slaughter his animal in the street outside his house.

India is...a bit of a worry

Spotted in Gulf News:

Malayalam actress and fashion designer Poornima Indrajith and award-winning music composer Shaan Rahman, who have been at the forefront of Kerala flood rescue efforts, on Monday slammed haters who were spreading bigotry and hate in the wake of mass destruction.

While the majority of civilians and officials have stepped up to help the rain-ravaged Kerala to return to normalcy, there is a section of people on social media who displayed bigotry by claiming that the South Indian state had invited the floods due to their beef-eating habits.

Another hate-spewing comment was that an Indian deity was showing its fury on the state, when a section of its residents demanded that women be allowed in the temple that housed the idol.

More broadly, from a recent editorial piece from the ANU based  East Asia Forum:

Modern Hindu nationalism is not mere traditionalism, says Arun Swamy. The Hindu nationalists seek not so much to preserve existing social hierarchies in Hindu cultures as they do to rewrite social orders fascistically to the benefit of Hindu populations. The Modi government appears to be actively pursuing ‘history rewriting’ and ‘historic romanticism’ agendas and has appointed what seems to be a historical revision committee to ‘prove that today’s Hindus are directly descended from the land’s first inhabitants and make the case that ancient Hindu scriptures are fact not myth’. Other concerns include Modi’s pick for Uttar Pradesh chief minister, a Hindu priest who has incited violence against Muslims, and legislative developments in BJP-controlled states that presume guilt until proven innocent in cases of cow slaughter and urge the enforcement of archaic laws against cattle slaughter (even in Muslim-majority communities).

‘The Hindu nationalist rhetoric was played down (at least by Modi)’, as Adeney explains, ‘in favour of a development narrative. He put himself forward as a normal man, contrasting his humble origins with the “little princeling” Rahul Gandhi, presumed to be prime minister-designate of the Congress though never officially named as such’. The long-term electoral project of the BJP is rather to showcase right wing majoritarianism as the natural force synonymous with the welfare and development of India — hence perhaps that choice of chief minister in Uttar Pradesh.

Events since 2014 raise the question of whether the BJP is the new dominant party of Indian politics. It has captured a raft of state legislatures, and although it did not manage to win a majority in the recent state election in Karnataka, it did win the largest number of seats.