Re: AUT: Re: Australia swings right and Reb Derissa karks it

[David McInerney <borderlands@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Impact Records closed????  That's terrible news, as I've been
considering moving back to Canberra. "John Zorn", where will Canberra
fans buy your Painkiller and Naked City CDs now?
Though there is no escape from Howardism anywhere in Australia.  Maybe I
can move to New Zealand instead?  I'd like to vote with my feet
Is there anywhere better?
No surprise on Halliburton front
DM


john zorn wrote:

>Tis indeed a glorious time to be alive. If ya got em, I'd
>say between now and July, get ya passports to foreign
>places fired up and ready. It's already been a grand time
>in Canberra recently what with the closing of Impact
>records and two separate occasions on Friday and Saturday
>of the local pigs pepper spraying people at a little
>occupation of Haliburton, and an RTS on Saturday. Oh yes,
>the new era promises to be marvelous indeed.
>
>And then there's Derrida's bucket kick on Friday/Saturday.
>The only good thing about it is that at least there can now
>be some ending eventually to the endless and interminable
>publications (of translations) of every word he wrote and
>spoke, and of every crap he took and every time he blew his
>nose. Otherwise it sems kinda symbolic that he was born in
>the midst of a time of particular worldwide barberism and
>died similarly (and at the precise marking point of the
>great increase in the level of barbarism we can expect
>locally). It's been a good weekend all round
>
>A genial sincere Howard wave to all!
>That sullen chap in the corner
>
>Philosopher Jacques Derrida Dies at 74
>Saturday October 9, 2004 9:01 PM
>AP Photo PAR114
>By ELAINE GANLEY
>Associated Press Writer
>
>PARIS (AP) - World-renowned thinker Jacques Derrida, a
>charismatic philosopher who founded the school known as
>deconstructionism, has died, the French president's office
>said Saturday. He was 74.
>
>Derrida died at a Paris hospital of pancreatic cancer,
>French media reported, quoting friends and admirers.
>
>The snowy-haired French intellectual taught, and thought,
>on both sides of the Atlantic, and his works were
>translated around the world.
>
>Provocative and as difficult to define as his favorite
>subject - deconstruction - Derrida e modern-day French
>thinker best known internationally.
>
>``With him, France has given the world one of its greatest
>contemporary philosophers, one of the major figures of
>intellectual life of our time,'' President Jacques Chirac
>said in a statement, calling Derrida a ``citizen of the
>world.''
>
>Born to a Jewish family on July 15, 1930, in El Biar,
>Algeria, then part of France, Derrida wrote hundreds of
>books and essays. His reputation was launched with two 1967
>publications in which he laid out basic ideas, ``Writing
>and Difference'' and ``Of Grammatology.'' Among other works
>were the 1972 ``Margins of Philosophy'' and, more recently,
>``Specters of Marx'' (1993).
>
>Derrida was known as the father of deconstructionism, a
>branch of critical thought or analysis developed in the
>late 1960s and applied to literature, linguistics,
>philosophy, law and architecture.
>
>Derrida focused his work on language, showing that it has
>multiple layers and thus multiple meanings or
>interpretations, challenging the notion that speech is a
>direct form of communication or even that the author of a
>text is the author of its meaning.
>
>Deconstructionists like Derrida explored the means of
>liberating the written word from the structures of
>language, opening limitless textual interpretations. Not
>limited to language, Derrida's philosophy of
>deconstructionism was then applied to western values.
>
>The deconstructionist approach has remained controversial,
>with detractors even proclaiming the movement dead. So
>divisive were Derrida's ideas that Cambridge University's
>plan to award him an honorary degree in 1992 was forced to
>a vote which he won.
>
>Critics accused Derrida of nihilism, which he adamantly
>denied.
>
>``Deconstruction is on the side of 'yes,' an affirmation of
>life,'' Derrida said in an August interview with the daily
>Le Monde.
>
>Former Culture Minister Jack Lang, who knew Derrida,
>praised his ``absolute originality'' as well as his
>combative spirit.
>
>``I knew he was ill, and at the same time, I saw him as so
>combative, so creative, so present, that I thought he would
>surmount his illness,'' Lang said on France-Info radio.
>
>Derrida was often named - but never chosen - for a Nobel
>Prize in Literature.
>
>In 1949, Derrida left Algeria for Paris to further his
>education, receiving an advanced degree in philosophy from
>the prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure in 1956. He later
>taught philosophy at the Sorbonne University from 1960-64
>and at the Ecole des Hautes Etude en Sciences Sociales from
>1984-99.
>
>He also taught in the United States, at the University of
>California at Irvine and at Johns Hopkins and Yale
>universities.
>
>Despite his esoteric path, Derrida said in several
>interviews that he really wanted to be a soccer player but
>wasn't talented enough.
>
>He refused to confine himself to an intellectual ivory
>tower, fighting for such things as the rights of Algerian
>immigrants in France and against apartheid in South Africa.
>
>
>French Culture Minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres called
>Derrida ``profoundly humanist,'' saying the philosopher
>spent his final years working for the ``values of
>hospitality,'' particularly between Europe and the
>Mediterranean.
>
>``He wanted to build an open idea of Europe,'' a ministry
>statement said.
>
>As Derrida grew ill, death haunted him. In a Le Monde
>interview in August, Derrida said that learning to live
>means learning to die.
>
>``Less and less, I have not learned to accept death,'' he
>was quoted as saying. ``I remain uneducable about the
>wisdom of learning to die.''
>Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
>
>On Sun, 10 Oct 2004 10:35:12 +1000
> Thiago Oppermann <difference_3ngine@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
>>Hi all,
>>
>>The conservatives have just been re-elected with  a swing
>>of 3% in their
>>favour, which delivers them a majority of 20 seats, a
>>landslide. They have
>>probably taken control of the senate. There is little
>>good news for
>>reformists: the Greens performed strongly, but were
>>outpolled in several
>>places by evangelical rightwingers, and overall they may
>>have ended up with
>>a solitary extra senate seat. Turn out in the compulsory
>>election was high,
>>and the donkey vote low.
>>
>>Right about now, I could really do with being told off
>>for caring about
>>this. People in the US should probably be concerned about
>>it also, except
>>that Howard has 'sound economic management,' unlike Bush.
>>It is ominous that
>>a government which has been implicated in a collection of
>>scandals to rival
>>Washington should have been reelected so convincingly.
>>
>>I suspect three things happened. One is that there is a
>>compact of interest
>>rate votes, which joins business on the one hand, which
>>cuts wages, demands
>>lower taxes, fewer services in the name of lower interest
>>rates, and
>>indebted workers on the other, who receive the lower
>>wages and lose
>>services, but in the absence of any political party
>>arguing for increased
>>taxation or higher wages, see that their only option for
>>retaining some
>>social product is to leave interest rates low. Add to
>>this the fact that
>>when Labor was in power real wages declined and interest
>>rates shot up, and
>>these heavily indebted workers, who began working in the
>>late 80s to mid
>>90s,  make a rational, if short-sighted choice for the
>>Liberal party. To
>>this you can add the low cunning of the Liberal
>>government's effort to
>>engineer a housing price bubble.
>>
>>It's not really a case of backlash politics; that's never
>>had much traction
>>in Australia. Rather, large sections of the working class
>>are thinking like
>>bond traders, for material reasons. These people must
>>either not understand
>>what wise economic 'stewardship' means - ie. hacking
>>services to pieces,
>>putting a lid on growth ??or, they believe what they have
>>been told by the
>>ALP and the Government, that the alternative is lower
>>wages and tougher
>>interest rates.
>>
>>Some commentators are already bemoaning the death of the
>>fair go and the
>>rise of self-interested 'fuck society' voters. This is
>>naive. The interest
>>rate thing works particularly well in a country with a
>>strong nationalist
>>egalitarian ethos and ideological commitment to property.
>>The home owner,
>>with debt, who works, and has children is shouldering his
>>or her 'fair
>>share' - or maybe even a little more than that - so it is
>>only right that
>>government services to layabouts be decimated.
>>Egalitarianism has always
>>been in fact an ideology of social differences. As for
>>the repulsion to
>>unions, the ALP is largely to blame for having coopted or
>>destroyed the more
>>militant ones, and as I said, the record of ALP-trades
>>hall corporativism in
>>the 1980s was a very dismal one for the working class.
>>
>>The second effect is that John Howard's politics have
>>come to appeal
>>strongly to the ultra-right, which had abandoned the
>>party in the two
>>previous elections for racist oppositionists. The swing
>>of 3.3% in
>>Queensland to Howard is almost identical to the swing of
>>3.1% against the
>>One Nation Party. That effectively rendered a ALP victory
>>impossible. The
>>striking thing is that he recuperated this vote without
>>losing the 'wet' or
>>socially liberal portion of his vote. This takes some
>>explaining, which
>>brings me to the third factor
>>
>>The antiwar movement and the politics of conscience more
>>generally simply
>>failed to register. That is surprising if one remembers
>>that 18 month ago,
>>half a million people took to the streets in Sydney, and
>>rallies of ten
>>thousand people were happening every week in Australia.
>>Opposition to
>>government policy regarding the war, immigration and
>>Aboriginal
>>reconciliation (says it all, really) is in fact solid.
>>Most people in
>>Australia believe they have been repeatedly lied to by
>>the government,
>>regarding very serious issues. Yet they believe the
>>patent lies about
>>interest rates (there is no reason why the ALP policy
>>would increase rates
>>now more than the Liberals, and it is virtually certain
>>that rates will
>>increase no matter what.). Short of calling Australians
>>fuckheads, which I
>>have done a few times this morning already and leaves me
>>just as confused, I
>>think that what can be proposed is a variation on what
>>Angela said last year
>>about the big antiwar marches.
>>
>>Effectively, the organization of these marches served to
>>demobilize
>>Australian activists, and funnel their energies into the
>>cul-de-sac that is
>>'anti-imperialism'. The operation of parties attempting
>>to harvest votes
>>from mass dissent is essentially to railroad discontent
>>towards the
>>politically most neutral issues ? dislike of the 'rat'
>>John Howar, his
>>lying, his nastiness, his lack of 'compassion', etc...
>>??all of which puts a
>>lid on the radical challenge posed by anti-war politics
>>such as it may have
>>been. Faced with the apparent weakness of Howard and
>>surging popular
>>discontent, the left of the ALP ??the faction which alone
>>was in a position
>>to ring the bell on the interest rate issue ??moves
>>towards popular front
>>politics (together with miscellaneous leftists), and
>>target the racism,
>>nastyness, etc.... But outrage is blinding. Without
>>articulating how
>>detention centres imprison those outside, for instance,
>>refugee politics has
>>about as much political traction as World Vision
>>fundraisers. To make those
>>links, however, would be highly damaging to the ALP,
>>however.
>>
>>After all the work railroading dissent into easily
>>handled forms, the ALP
>>did what the ALP has always done, and mothballed its own
>>lukewarm opposition
>>to the war and objections to refugee policy. Vast amounts
>>of work by a lot
>>of very good comrades was thus simply squandered. This
>>has been a manifest
>>lesson in the pointlessness of popular frontism.
>>
>>I don't care one iota for the ALP - a party of racism,
>>corporativism,
>>opposed to working class organization and led by
>>brainless third-wayers and
>>neoliberals. But I do care for what this vote indicates,
>>both in terms of
>>the abysmal attitudes of the majority of Australians, and
>>also in terms of
>>the force of the material conditions underlying
>>Australian conservatism.
>>It's terrible news, and relatively important too.
>>
>>At least I get to see this madness taken to its logical
>>conclusion. There is
>>something satisfying about that, grim though the end may
>>be.
>>
>>Thiago
>>
>>
>
>
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