Material World: Aussie Rules
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Below is the discussion so far. Feel free to add your own comments!Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Liam Fox was one of the first journalists allowed access to the Manus Island detention centre since it re-opened. Of his visit he said: "I've seen many shocking things as a journalist. The inside of the Manus detention centre is among the most confronting."…The greatest deception perpetrated by the Australian government is that the country is being flooded with boat arrivals. The reality is that sea-based asylum seekers arrive in a trickle, not a flood – a little more than 60,000 people have arrived by boat in the past 40 years. This is the same number as visa overstayers – mostly from the US, Britain and Ireland – who were estimated to be in Australia in 2011. But, for more than a decade, in Australian politics, asylum seekers have made a very convenient political tool with which to scare up votes. A cable obtained by WikiLeaks says an unnamed "key Liberal Party strategist" told US diplomats in November last year that the issue of asylum seekers was "fantastic" for the coalition and "the more boats that come the better". The cables show that a close adviser to Mr Rudd failed to persuade him to use the government's powers "to calmly and rationally put the issue in perspective" by acknowledging that only a small number of asylum seekers were arriving by boat compared with tens of thousands overstaying their visas each year. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/03/pacific-solution-solved-austral-201433113844238975.html
Fair Dinkum, Mate!Here is a link to a blog by a gentle Australian female artist, who normally writes and paints artistic matters:http://wotansdaughter.blogspot.com.auHer blog does not have a permalink, so look for the blog of Sunday, April 06, 2014. Her earlier blogs back to the Misogyny song of March 20, 2014 are also well worth a look.Richard WagnerThis lady is passionate about the work of the German composer Richard Wagner, and calls her blog after one of the finest heroines in all of human art, Brünnhilde, the daughter of Wotan.Richard Wagner was a revolutionary in the Dresden Uprising of 1849. He was reading Hegel’s Phenomenolgy in the watch tower, while scouting on the lookout for the arrival of the counter-revolutionary troops. His closest revolutionary companion was Bakunin, who earlier upon hearing Wagner conduct Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, with its revolutionary cry “Alle Menschen werden Brüder" [All mankind will be brothers], observed that if all else vanishes in flames, this symphony must survive.Wagner composed the greatest artistic work ever to embody the spirit of a philosopher, and that philosopher was none other than the materialist Ludwig Feuerbach.Wagner’s embodiment of Feuerbach is, of course, The Ring, and it concludes in Feuerbachian fashion with Twilight of the Gods, the end of religious illusion.Its “hero”, Siegfried, heroic not traditionally but in a Feuerbachian liberatory art-supersedes-religion sense [giving us a closer glimpse of Feuerbach, and showing us where his only other serious protégé besides Marx was led] was based on none other than the young revolutionary Bakunin.We can consider Wagner and Bakunin as nearly-young-Hegelians.[Wagner’s own, often unpleasant, protégé was the anti-revolutionary Friedrich Nietzsche, who dwelled in his household through his formative years, and is familiar for pithy phrases, just like Proudhon, such as “God is Dead”.]One final observation of mine. The year 1859 was the year that Darwin [Origin of Species], Wagner [Tristan and Isolde] and Marx [A Contribution towards a Critique of Political Economy] set the world irrevocably on a new course. We are their heirs. Let us do them justice!Yes, in Aussie slang, “Fair Dinkum”. Australia has reintroduced knighthoods, legislates to allow people to be bigots, and now this.
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