Getting There...

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 Slowly but surely, I'm plugging away at my study.

The project is driven by two factors, the first is attempting to understand the motives and attitudes of national servicemen in regards to their service in Vietnam. That will comprise the research element once I complete all my course work. I'm in no hurry, enjoying the journey.

The second is the sheer excitement of discovery. There is so much material hidden away in archives, and so little time left to share the recollections of those of us who were personally involved. 

And, of course, there are myths to bust.

I was initially advised by the University to jump straight in at the deep end and begin to conduct the research. Apparently my memoir would have been sufficient to gain admission to a Ph D programme. This course of action would most probably have been a mistake, because my forty-year grasp of the conventions of academia is weak, and would have turned the enterprise into an exercise in frustration.

Entering at master's level means I can navigate my way through the minefield of referencing and the various academic conventions that, whilst they haven't really changed since I last studied in the late seventies, use very different tools from those I employed forty years ago. These tools are essentially digital, and whilst they facilitate research and save time, involve techniques that have to be learned. My fellow students (digital natives) don't have these issues. I have forty years of progress to catch up with.

The only downside has been the elimination of the face-to-face aspects of the course programme as a consequence of the pandemic. Covid has turned the physical presence of fellow students into a virtual experience. You will always learn as much from your peers as your supervisors, and that learning is a bit stilted via zoom.

Having said that, my supervisor is a veteran of Afghanistan, and has a very clear understanding of military culture, which is a distinct advantage.

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Out of the Mouths of Innocents

This family of musicians neatly nails the rubbish being promoted by those resisting vaccination.

It is, gentle reader, worth posting.

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That Black Foulness

Image courtesy Pinterest

Yesterday was Remembrance Day.

I paused for a minute or two in the middle of helping my son to move house to consider its meaning. I reflected on the fact that he is the first of three generations of my family not to be exposed to the black foulness of war.

And yet, the old orthodoxies glorifying the absurdity of making war persist, and these institutional commemorations often overwhelm the real significance of the day. 

All that is really required is a minute's silence. That silence speaks much more eloquently for those who died than brass bands, flag waving and bugle solos. Those we remember are, after all, forever silent.

Given that Remembrance Day commemorates casualties of over 40 million (twenty million deaths and twenty-one million wounded, including 9.7 million military personnel and about 10 million civilians), it is indeed a solemn occasion.

When you recall that grievances resulting from the Treaty of Versailles (signed on On 28 June 1919, not November 11th as is the common misperception) were a large component of what led to the Second World War, it becomes even more tragically significant.

Consider the waste of so many young lives (and many of them were boys, not yet men, who could have had no idea of what they were fighting for) and the deaths of so many innocent civilians who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and you begin to understand the depth of the catastrophe.

This was especially true in a  country with such a small population as Australia had at the time, where the impact of so many lost of one special generation was enormously significant.

And to acknowledge that twenty-one years later, Europe was once again tearing itself apart in another deadly conflict, is more cause for deep sadness. 

Wilfred Owen put the old lie starkly, a few short months before he was killed in France at age twenty-five, a week before the armistice.  

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The Transpacific Virus

Apart from Covid-19, there is another virus circulating at the moment.

It is just as dangerous as the Covid Pandemic, but it originated in the USA, not China. Its consequences are real, as can be observed by the chaotic state of US politics.

I'm referring, of course, to the epidemic of distrust of institutions and government across the Pacific since the Tea Party movement emerged towards the first ten years of the new millennium. That movement grew out a sense of grievance and entitlement precipitated by globalism, automation, and the GFC.

Political movements generated by national grievance rarely end well. Examples include Brexit, which is wreaking havoc on daily life in the UK right now, and the Tea Party itself, which has changed some Republicans from a credible conservative movement to a baying mob, despite the fact that it The Tea Party largely disappeared from the scene in its original form. National grievance was one of the major factors driving the rise of the NAZI movement in Germany in the thirties, and remains a large component of Chinese nationalism, used extremely effectively by the CCP under Xi Jinping.

Another component assisting the rise of grievance politics is the role of US corporate media, exemplified by Fox news, and these days, Newsmax. Gone are the days when the corporate media reported the public mood. These days they make a profit by exploiting that mood, monetising it, and then selling it back to the consumers of that same media. 

These same consumers are always prepared to pay for what they want to hear. They become opinion junkies, and this phenomenon leeches into social media. Recently, social media platforms have belatedly started to arrest the tide of misinformation and disinformation that feeds this sense of grievance. Facebook and Twitter have begun to do this, although with great reluctance, as it messes with their business model. It took an insurrection for Twitter to give Trump the shove. 

None of this would bother me very much, except that it is beginning to have an effect locally. One example of this is the imported outrage from the US about vaccine mandates and lockdowns.  Despite the fact that the Australian death rate from the virus per head of population is about 1/25 of what is it across the Pacific (67 per million vs 2297) there are voices here jumping on the culture wars bandwagon, and demanding an end to mandates and restrictions. They even use the same four word slogan.

 The most recent example is the introduction of legislation designed to require voters to present ID at the ballot box. It is designed to solve a problem which does not exist in this country, and has already been resolved in Queensland, where people on the electoral roll are posted an ID card to their address, and present that when they vote. I'm accumulating a collection.

A far greater problem than electoral fraud in this country is the rate of participation in state and federal elections - (91.9%) at the last federal poll. Despite the Electoral Commission seeing this as an achievement, we'd be doing better as a democracy if everybody got to vote.  How about the legislature take measures to ensure this disenfranchised 8.1% of the Australian electorate votes, rather than chasing the less than 0.001% of the electorate who allegedly tried to vote more than once at the last federal poll?

I won't hold my breath for an answer.

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Hugh White - Without America

Hugh White is always provocative, and doesn't pull any punches when it comes to criticising current defence policy.

In 1995, he was appointed Deputy Secretary for Strategy and Intelligence in the Department of Defence. During that time he was involved in the preparation of the 2000 Defence White Paper, entitled Our Future Defence Forces, published by the Howard Government. 

He has since admitted that many of the assumptions that paper was based on, particularly as they apply to the rise of China, and the balkanisation of the United States, no longer hold.

Given that the US has shown us that it has the capacity to "elect" dangerously incompetent and unstable Presidents, we may at some stage be on our own when it comes to defence.

In the light of that recent history, and AUKUS, this is worth watching.

The essay* he refers to is also a good read if you can get hold of it.

*Hugh White, Without America, in Quarterly Essays Issue 68 2017

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A Pinch of Common Sense

Courtesy www.statesman.com

I found this posted in Facebook a few weeks ago, when the faux outrage about mandated vaccination first began to appear in local and overseas media.

Unfortunately, I didn't take note of the poster's identity, so can't attribute it.

Anyway, after looking at it again, I've decided that it's worth posting, as it reeks of real common sense, which trumps faux outrage every time -

Vaccination history has long been required to travel (if you have been in countries where some of those ‘old’ diseases still persist) and they’re also required when you enrol your children in most kindergartens and  schools. 

When I was studying in the 90s, I had to show proof that I had been vaccinated for hepatitis B too. We can be stopped by police at anytime and asked to submit to a test to prove that we are not intoxicated and we carry licences to prove that we have passed our driving test, library cards, club cards, reward point cards, train/bus passes, credit cards etc.

 All of these cards are required to prove something at different times and places, and many of them track where we go, what we buy etc. (For the insidious purpose of making us buy more of the same usually too). Not to mention phones which record where we go (by GPS tracker no less), our heart rate, our bank balance, where we shop, what we listen to, what we read, what we look at online etc., AND we live with CCTV pretty much everywhere these days. 

So, we have not lived in a ‘free’ world for a long time, and I personally, don’t really have a problem with carrying a card which shows that I’m happy to help keep my community safe and limit my use of hospital resources should I happen to get sick. 

I’m just really grateful that I live in a country that can afford to vaccinate everyone for free, and also that I’m not living in Afghanistan or any other country at war (civil or otherwise). 

There are a huge number of people out there who are living through traumatic experiences every day and experience limitations on their rights and freedoms that we cannot even begin to imagine. I imagine that they would be astounded that we’re kicking up a fuss about government regulations which are being put in place to protect our lives and limit the spread of illness.

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I Don't Wish to Know That*

Image courtesy Penguin Inc.

One of the most interesting books I encountered when studying years ago, is Neil Postman's Teaching as a Subversive Activity.

That was in the mid-seventies when I was completing my education degree. From memory, it was a set text. Postman's book was ground-breaking in that it rejected traditional educational practice by encouraging teachers to ensure that their students questioned everything. It set out to promote the importance of teaching enquiry skills that could be applied to a world increasing in complexity and encouraging students to question many of the half-truths western culture had accepted for centuries.

This was a revolutionary concept, especially viewed from the American notion of education which was largely about filling students up with knowledge and dogma whilst at the same time expecting them to accept it all without question.

More recently, I'm observing that same unquestioning attitude to on-line information, emanating mostly from the USA, and driven by the profit motive assaulting our local media landscape. What is now called the MSM (Main Stream Media) panders to one extreme of the political spectrum or the other and makes a dollar from selling opinions that are consumed like breakfast cereal. The consumer will always pay for what he/she wants to hear, and as the song goes, will disregard the rest.

Facts no longer matter, and reporting them has become a lost art. 

The outcome of this media manipulation is social division, the likes of which is tearing the USA apart. Unfortunately, it seems to be oozing across the Pacific. 

This post, gentle reader, offers advice on how you can discriminate between truth and misinformation when you encounter material on-line.

First up, there are a multitude of fact checking sites out there. 

Locally, we have TheConversation FactCheck, AAP FactCheck, and RMIT FactCheck.  The last of these is used by the ABC, which puts it, in my book as less reliable because of its affiliation with a mainstream media organisation.

In the USA landscape you will find FactCheck.org, PolitiFact.com,  Snopes.com, and PunditFact. There are others that are part of media organisations like the RMIT ABC site, such as FactChecker (Washington Post) but I have not included them in my list as they aren't independent.

The four listed are run by non-profit groups, as they refuse to accept money from mainstream media or PACs in order to maintain their independence.

Apart from using these sites, there are few fairly simple verification strategies that the average punter can use. The first one is "triangulation", whereby you search for three different reports of the same incident, and find aspects on which they agree. Generally (but not always) these points of agreement approach the truth.

Then there is a strategy I've used, especially in regard to recent reports of BLM activity, particularly in the USA. Reports from deeply aligned media (such as Fox News) have promoted the notion that rioting and disorder have become daily events in locations such as Portland. At the height of this reporting, I would check two or three of the local (generally non-aligned) news websites, and a completely different picture would emerge.

A very good example of this phenomenon is revealed when you compare the local coverage of the Arizona County Mariposa audit as it is reported in the local media with how it turns up in NewsNow. 

This, from the Huffington Post, is a pretty good summary -

Postman's work is as relevant now as it was in 1971, and is still available in paperback.

It's a recommended read.

*From a running joke in the original series of the Goon Show

#Inbuilt Crap Detectors

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