Who does Labor represent now?

This is out of context and way off topic from a post at LaborFirst. Rather than make a pest of myself (I’m a slow learner), I thought it better to cure my indigestion back here. It’s a great piece about rising fuel, inner/outer urban divide (?) and about how Labor can get some electoral traction from the upheaval. One small par derailed the Blue Rhino:

"It's hard to appeal to an underclass anymore when there isn't one save for those who get themselves into such a position by their own deliberate actions eg. gambling addicts,drug addicts,alcohol addicts etc."

Gobsmacked! Is this really what today’s labor voters really think? It was commented in a casual way, you know? You know?

Dubbo, NSW, - how could new police powers invented for Sydney beaches so suddenly find a market out there? Labor planning? I was thoroughly enjoying the lentils right up till this cobbler. All those little guys in all those little country towns with no petrol to work with, tsk, those stupid peasants, what a laugh, eh? While we’re on the topic, what about those useless blackfellas, shoulda chose white parents, the hopeless indigents!

I'm truly pissed that the thinking is about maximising advantage rather than getting the nod for a job well done. It's a house of cards and it's getting Kim’s breezy arse all over it. Zero vision.

Rex, if you consider the conditions that grow folks who deliberately destroy their own lives, you may also see a huge block of votes going to feral Evangelicals who, like socialists before them, actually thrive on poverty and ignorance. Transport costs in outer metro and rural backwaters will create a growing market in underclass votes. Ignoring that is to affirm, and dutifully emulate, Howard's Plan. It is, above all, lousy strategy.

I don’t know if you’re aware of the grip the babbler churches have on rural NSW, if you want to understand just how to capture an electorate you need to study the relentless faith they’ve shown in the losers. At first they trained their own workforce from the displaced rural labourers that the “green Revolution” left stranded. They turned them into plumbers and electricians and gave them jobs building houses which they were given to live in whilst they built more houses for export bucks, all the time recruiting and supporting whole families.

They’ve been nearly invisible as a political force until now, but they’ve been making friends for 40 years. Labor, on the other hand, has done bugger all for this mob since Whitlam. While it continues to throw this baby out, it will continue to be just so much bathwater circling the drain.

Urbanization began when moving workers was cheaper than moving factories. When road freight begins shifting to private rail infrastructure then the likelihood of a drift back to the regionals becomes possible. With metropolitan land prices, water shortages, crime and pollution, the serfs might get the idea that small communities that look after themselves may have more to offer. Zero-tolerant rednecks are the norm in this environment, they don't vote Labor. The Church owns their houses and dictates their public morality. (To beat up on Groucho: I wouldn't vote for any politician who could win in this electorate!)

Politically, I suspect Barnaby clones will begin popping up in all sorts of electorates and the Episcopalian/whatever Jesus freaks will continue to developed institutional power in many of our pov regionals - it’s gonna take some planning and a lot of leadership to get any advantage from a mob you think of as untouchable. If Labor doesn't save the underclass, the Adventists will - with new IR laws and higher transport costs the numbers will soon be legion. Could Dubbo’s future be Melbourne’s in microcosm? There is no effective substitute for petrochems in the Australian Economy. None. Can you build enough razorwire paddocks for all the petrol addicts? Put ‘em to work chipping cotton when Auscot runs low on diesel?

"Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit." - Abbie Hoffman

'I-ain't-paranoid Point of Order' leaves Brown laughing.

On 'Freaky Friday in the other place', Sen. Bob Brown (Green, whatever) called the bastards a very Nasty Party. Brown, bereft of any ear for low humour, cracked up when hauled up on a point of order, and was asked to retract, for calling the Libs Nazis. I didn't catch which Lib stood up, but he gets my WilsonTuckey Memorial Gooseneck for to tow his ass away with.

The rest of the day was bi-polar for us little folks.
Howard's gang seems to be spending a great deal of electoral energy destroying Labor's links to both it its financial resources (unions) and its talent pool (student unions). Evidently the young Howards copped a bloody caining in school and they sure as hell got long memories. Are these people really mature enough to compete in an efficient 21st century way? Or has this nonsense totally corrupted the Howard government's ability to take us where we need to be.

The god floggers (Fielding) have achieved consensus with Shatan and gone off to con the cuddly little stooges who pay good money for their deity's patronage. (With singing to drown out the wailing and nashing outside.) Barnaby, bless 'im, has the faultless excuse - "The white people of Dogpatch elected me to parrot the deprofundis, I wuz just following horders, mate now fuck off, I got a peasant to pluck." Er, for clarity Nasty black/white sentiments have now, of course, moved to the socially accepable NeoNasty rich/poor plinth.
If you're both poor and black, or rich and white, you won't see any difference. If you're Jewish, just kick back and enjoy the peace-and-quiet. This, happily, is not about race, religion, colour or any other old business. This is about greed and the Aspirational Blindfold our bone-lazy electorate has adopted.

Damn dog's chewin' propper, again!

You can take the Boy out of The City but he'll still poo on your lawn.

It's Rex! Waddaya mean who?

Jurasic Stones

How many times have the conservative bleetocracy pointed their pointy bits at the 'disunity' and 'inconsistencies' among progressive plodders, satisfied we represent no clear and present danger. Well, they're bloody wrong!

[In the early nineties I got my Ninja coding arse sucked into Chaos math, fractals, etc., and my tiny mind fell over, again. I was a hippy during Vietnam. I traded a Uni education for some principles and wound up knowing a lotta stuff I wouldn't otherwise have known. I also missed a millennium of shoulders to stand on so don't expect anything other than fuzzy logic and some bizarre notions. The vision is, however, clear and built on a sound, generalist/elitist overview.]
Where was I . . .

What you see as disunity and lack of gruntlement in the left is not a weakness, as supposed by the right. It is a powerful enabler - 'diversity'. Something the 'singing-from-the-same-hymnbook' conservatives don't seem capable of grokking.

The rise and rise of the influence of the progressive side of the blogosphere is proof of the power of such diversity. The right, as ever, see lefty blogs as rabble, powerless and laughable. The differences in opinion among the left validate these writings in the same way that science validates some theories and consigns others to the pointy pile. I see them as historical gems because they represent the mass perception of history (Chaucer), rather than analytically-correct, political jargon (The Winner's Version).

Whether confused and bickering among themselves or distilling a perceived reality, the process is dynamic and ensures that conservative ideologies are the most likely to repeat the mistakes of history and progressives are more likely to step in unforeseen shit. Humans are the planet's top predator. We exist on the very bleedy edge of survival, totally dependent on on an overabundance of things to consume and the delicate web that supplies them. We now number over six billion, and we will depend more and more on our ability to maintain complex electronic processes.

Surviving the sheer complexity of the planet's woes will require real diversity in all of us earthlings. It is, after all, that very feature (also called adaptability) in H. Erectus that got us to planet-wide domination in the first place. An upright ape, a rapidly changing environment and a growing intelligence were enough for a species to evolve away from a three-billion-year-old blueprint:

"specialize, find a viable niche, fuck like fury and pray for diversity in your offspring - the weather may change and maybe one of your weeds will survive to recolonize and, maybe, hog some sun for a while".

Erectus exploited an improbable iteration in this fractal landscape:

Julia #1
wily humans could've been soft, squashy pink bugs hiding meekly away from the fast-food bar in the world outside. Indeed, we lost most of our abilities to do anything other than to hide our improbable self-awareness under the darkest bushel we could build.

Julia #2
Wiley humans could've been big-nasty-bastards bellowing through chest-long fangs. Forget the forehead, make the world outside a somewhat more productive place to roam. Kind of like competing in the free market, but riskier.

There are other combinations, they're called 'life on earth' (or 'Ge' as a few old Greeks prefer to think of the rock it's growing on). But, I bifurcate . . .

Julia #5.9x10^19
Shitferbrane humans wound up naked, smart, naked, powerful, naked, nukular-armed, naked, paranoid pale pink grubs that clothed their testicles in superstition. We became 'self-aware' biological machinata, like bastard children with no comforting parental assurance. We became mental beings with no heritage, no other entity we could call mum, or dad - no obvious role models in a strange universe.

It's way past time we got over the boogies we brought with us down our own long and risky experiment. We are no longer true Darwinian norms. It's time to take charge of our own little destiny, it's time to apply a little more of that reverse logic that Occam enjoyed.


Credit & Copyright: Stephen Thorley

Before all this industry and science the abbos knew, and some still do - those stars you see up there are your ancestors. We are children of the universe - not many life forms, anywhere in this universe, will ever lie on their backs at night and experience the vertigo that comes from looking down. I don't know about you, but I feel bloody honored, awed and humbled to have been part of it. Fuck god! Consider the probability that I should be sentient at this point in the Cosmos' history. Wow.

Even if you've slept through it, or hid behind some fact-farting priest, it is up there and we're still naked.

Be paranoid, by all means, but remember, with enough diversity some will survive to party on. Humans are the first "Collective Intelligence" to gain a foothold on this planet, perhaps any planet. If that's not important enough to earn us a pat on the back I don't know what is. Computers are rapidly enabling the next step in our pseudo-evolution - massive parallel communications (Collective Intelligence). Forget Artificial Intelligence (and any wannabe designers traveling that road). It will only work if the entire human spectrum is used, many of the perceived weaknesses in human behavior are, in fact, weaknesses in a society that maintains irrational fears. Facing the unpredictability of the next iteration demands maximum diversity, frank or fanciful, and only trusting the simple rules - Occam is recapitulated in fractal geometry and chaos theory and, without tipping Gummo into apoplexy, dovetails nicely with Heisenberg the ditherer.

Conservatives, historically, will continue to line up for showers at religious theme parks and pray for the Asteroid to crash somewhere else. They'll still be there next time you look up, cast in Jurasic stone.

I love compost.
Yu'd never know I've been talking to the worms all day.

CPA Terrorist Accessorises Angry Driver

"I thimply athked him to fet'th my Fewawi and bling! . . . "

Federal tallywhackers are searching for a disgruntled lemon wrangler - AKA B. S. Fairman.

Somewhat Left of Zen

Thanks to a yank hillbilly/hippy moment on NPR via NewsRadio, the recounted story of a poor country farmer's son who planted up a crop of sunflowers. His neighbours, all, reckoned he was crazy to plant a field of oilseed when there weren't no money in it, to which he replied, "I can't afford the van Gogh!"

There it is - the thaught I have most mornings, suddenly has a window I can shove it through; to the straights, all jacketed and suited in sensible heels; to the clever people you can't argue with; to those so blindly rational that Occam actually complicates common sense, and to the layabouts on the Left of the Oz specrum: your limitations are your own invention. So is pretending to be a buddhist everytime you have a zen moment.

[theOther: you've done it in your pants again, haven't you!]

erhoo.

Oops, a One-Party State is a very Chinese Democracy

Once again the Flute gets it down to the nitty gristle.

To paraphrase theBomber's luminary doorstop the other day -

"We will win the next election if we are ready for government and if our policies are appropriate"

Really makes him sound like a tough, street-smart battler for the underdog, no? Fair indication that he's swanning in a different lake these days. The ALP's betrayal (or is it defection?) is far harder to take than Howard's insane carnie geeks, but, it may just create enough space for a viable third party.

[Eh?]

Maybe it's time to start using this virtual 'single-party democracy' before we actually trade places with the Chinese. Maybe it's time to join the bloody Democratic Greens Party®. Merge the two little guys and swamp the new party with bums on seats. Aim for a million sign-ups, real paying, voting members who aren't necessarily loony hippies or desperate Nats, and who understand preselection. Rebadge 'Left' with something out of this millennia - 'family' No?

If union members paid just half the fees to the Party that they pay to Union arseWipes then the Union arseWipes would pay to join the Party. Before any ALP members are allowed to join, there must be a period of "truth and reconciliation". And a flogging.

[Whoa hip, you're a pacifist and they're cow's cocks]
OK, tell 'em to bring money, then.

Silly as this sounds, politics is fast becoming our last legal resort. I wish somebody would talk me into getting off my pointy bum and joining an after-blog 'Grog & Local Branch Meeting'. Maybe we could learn to blog it in.

[That's it, we're stuffed.]
I gotta stop telling people hippies aren't naive.

You don't have to fight for your rights, you do have to work at it, though. Volunteer before you're conscripted! Join a party in droves, chuck [vote] out the deadwood and don't rely on the MSM. Revolutionary ideas travel best from door to door. A people's party is just that, not a machine, just a choice for disaffected lefties who've strayed to the Greens, Democrats, One Nation. Most especially that large, very silent group of rural voters who know something's wrong, but the [toadly] barons like Dick Honan own the bloody shire and all who reign on her.

Now, blokes like Barnaby Joyce, sheesh - sorta shows how ready we are for a leader with a catchy phrase -

"Fuck off a minute, I'm thinking about my electorate".

Ozwok - Battle of the Blands

Chef Harunobu Inukai at Galileo Restaurant.

In a testament to the mystery that is feng shwa (?) a colourful Sydney WokSlinger slapped his Kendone Coathanger Tee and says, "Where else we gonna find a City this bent?" Sydney was reluctantly chosen after Gosford's Hautnoshery insisted on real estate as the celebrity ingredient.

Sydney: if I were a WokWalla in Tinkletown, I wouldn't go near the seafood. Considering the the ever-growing pile of compost and dark tunnels, it makes sense to feature the local fungi.

Hmm, Honey'd mushies 'n bush greens - Bang that gong!