Rich white straight-acting blokes who believe in God, or pretend to, hold a disproportionate amount of the world’s power and have for centuries. It’s not because, as many would like you to believe, it’s a case of ‘we are the best, chuck out the rest’. It’s simply due to circumstance. Class, freedom, money and education are the basis of power. And access to these is almost entirely due to where you were born and to whom. Sexually transmitted hereditary privilege and genitally determined advantage.
This quote has been waiting in my draft posts for over a month now, waiting for me to have something valuable to add to it. And like her or hate her (and there are plenty on both sides of that divide), I don’t think that you can really argue that Catherine Deveny is actually wrong here.
For those of you who notice these things – it’s been quiet here for the past week or so. Back on Friday the 13th (ominous I know) I finished up at work, and so for the past week and a bit have been taking it easy and not doing any more than I need to. There has been a few things to do: we had an open for inspection for our current house that required a bit of preparation, and managed to get a golf game in with Dad on Friday (followed by a brief but intense period of not being at all well). We’ve got another week off coming up: and we’ll be down at Rye for most of it.
Starting to think that unemployment is looking like a pretty sweet deal.
The fall of the wall in Berlin seems to me to be one of those events that the West has a pure love for: mostly because (at least in the retelling) it is a triumph of “democracy, freedom and capitalism” over the tyranny of communism. It’s a story we can tell where we can unambiguously claim the moral high-ground. And make no mistake: this is a beautiful story: a triumph of the force of will of a people, to overthrow their oppressors. How nice it is to be sure that you’re the good guys in the story.
But I couldn’t let this opportunity go past, and while I have no ability to verify the accuracy of this story, that doesn’t change it’s worthiness. In my year 11 German class, we were studying a bit about the fall of the Berlin wall, and saw a great film: “Das Versprechen” (The Promise). In one scene they were showing the East German guards in their guard towers, while just the other side of the wall, West German propaganda was blaring from cars driving alongside. Through the loudspeaker came one of my all time favourite quotes:
“The Roman soldiers would wear red so that their enemies could never see their blood, and your soldiers wear brown pants”
Feel free to get someone to explain that to you if it doesn’t make sense at first pass.
So far, the main thing occupying the minds of our business people and politicians is how we can introduce an emissions trading scheme without hurting anyone.
Henry offers the tart observation that the introduction of such schemes ”is intended to cause a significant shift in the structure of the Australian and global economies over coming decades; quite possibly the largest structural adjustment in economic history. That is the point of doing it.”
Translation: It’s meant to hurt because that’s what changes people’s behaviour. If it doesn’t hurt it won’t work.
Found this quote a few days ago, and thought it was a valuable insight; worth cutting through the bleating of both sides of the political aisles as they attempt to make the ETS policies hurt the least they can.
