(Everything you know about intellectual property is wrong.) In either case, the conceptual heart of patent was the material result. . Humanity now seems bent on creating a world economy primarily based on To the extent that law and established social practice exists in this area, they Filter Bubble.
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When over 20, people smuggling clients were entering Australia per year the advocates loudly proclaimed that it was a result of the "Rule of Law". Now that successful legal countermeasures have been deployed those who advocate on behalf of people smuggler's clients complain that the actions are "not legitimate" without identifying any legal precedents that underpins their opinions.
No need for the quotes around "cruelty" Inner Westie. Our policy is demonstrably and deliberately cruel - that's the whole point of it. Westie All immigration control requires at least some level of cruely or it will be ineffective. It should be noted that the current policy of offshore detention coupled with boat turnbacks was widely condemned as being cruel but it has been effective in closing down people smuggling into Australia.
It should be noted that many found watching people smuggler's clients drowning while their boat was smashed on the rocks off Christmas Island cruel. So Colmery, define what a decent human being is please. I consider myself a decent human being. I also acknowledge that I feel no responsibility for the billions of other humans in the world that are poor and or suffering at the hands of others.
A rational human being acknowledges they cannot care for or be overly concerned with the plight of all humans. We must prioritise our efforts and emotional labour.
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My immediate family comes first. Then extended family and friends, then community, and country. I shed no tears at all for these economic migrants, does that make me unable to be called a decent human being? We in Australia generally speaking are too quick to blame the government, forgetting that in a democracy the people are the government, and the politicians merely the representatives. Everything that is good and bad about Australian policy and politics stops with those of voting age. The mining boom is just one example. Both major parties spend huge amounts of money understanding their electorate and, based on their research, the decided not to.
Know we face a revenue problem to maintain our basic services, and the real reason behind this is not spending or revenue, but a failure of the Australian electorate to ensure they voted for investment in our economy rather than stimulus packages and baby TV bonuses. We deserve nothing less. The OP would be well-served to look at the facts and bigger picture than a few cherry-picked emotive incidents. As many have mentioned, the thousand plus deaths at sea was just one piece of the bigger picture.
And he conveniently ignores the thousands upon thousands of refugees settled in Australia every year. Typical ABC leftist emotive claptrap Australians choose not to have pointless deaths at sea. The consequences represent a fraction of the harm that was caused before. This is beyond any reasonable dispute. Is there an even better option? Hi Bulldust, I think you may have miss-understood the chain of posts here. This goes for everything, not just boaties.
Also, I think you have miss-understood the term lefty, which is a term for those who think communism is a good idea, not bleeding hart humanists who sprout perfect world solutions. Such an association is a misguided as linking right leaning politics with being Christianity and backward looking conservatism. They also are not necessarily related. Then I must fall into the bleeding heart world solutions category.
Somewhere down there is a well thought out alternative strategy that actually seeks to improve both understanding and the plight of those that seek refuge. Good luck finding it. Hi foolking, You can be whomever you want. It's a free country. And even if a perfect solution could be found which I don't think it can , I doubt we'd vote for it.
I mean, look at those who vote for the Nationals. Many live in electorates with some of the lowest average wages in Australia. Yet despite decades of being screwed over, they still vote for the Nationals!. No mate, I won't bother finding a perfect solution. Even if I did, Australia generally speaking would be too stupid to vote for it. Well I am one of those voters and you should be thanking people like me that you don't have to worry about getting blown up as easily, or your wife and daughter being raped like those in Germany.
I have absolutely no guilt or concern for these people, most are no more than queue jumpers who obviously have fanatical views and we don't want them! Green's article hardly strikes a raw chord. It's a transparent attempt to foist guilt while avoiding any blame for his own failures as a self-styled opinion leader. Green implies all Australians except, obviously, the more enlightened and compassionate open-border advocates such as himself are directly responsible for Masoumali's self-immolation - Masoumali of course bears no responsibility for it, or for attempting to circumvent our border controls by paying a criminal people-smuggler and thereby ending up on Nauru.
But where is Green's acceptance of blame for his failure to sway majority opinion away from support for offshore processing? Why has he not placed blame on Iran for driving Masoumali away from his homeland, or on countries through which he passed for not taking him in?
Where is the blame for open-border advocates who encourage people to endure detention on Nauru with the false hope they will eventually be let into Australia? Note the accidental acknowledgement by Green that it's Australia's relative prosperity which draws poor people here - not the persecution or oppression suffered by genuine refugees.
Where is his blame for origin countries' failure to provide for their people? Yep youre right but in the end democracy and what the majority votes for and this is not about fringe minority views. Dear harvey I must agree - many of us do not like to face the reality of the world.
Some pretend that if we allow all who wish to migrate to Australia that we will all live happily ever after.
Others prefer to pretend that we can have a democracy and elect people to carry out policies supported by the majority, but that when a few people don't like it they can force us to ignore those democratic decisions. Still others try a form of emotional blackmail, insisting that if anyone is upset by our decisions that we must bear full responsibility for any actions that follow. Luckily most of us are mature and accept that many decisions lead to disappointment.
If I hire one person, many applicants for the job may be upset. Should one decide to end it all because of that, I am sad but not responsible. Even if that person chooses to make suicide a political statement. And I would never consider that the solution was to hire every applicant. It doesn't seem to apply when thousands of people die at sea. It doesn't seem to apply when people die whilst transiting multiple countries to get here.
It doesn't seem to apply when people languish and die in overseas refugee camps because they didn't have the means to go anywhere else. When the Allies liberated the German concentration camps in WW2 they found that the population living in towns right next to the concentration camps had no idea of what had gone on there. Absolutely none at all. Even though a lot of the slave labour was used in the towns and in also private households. So some of the Allied brass on the ground got the German townsfolk of some towns to all dress up in their Sunday best.
Then the townsfolk were commanded to bury the bodies in the town square, in front of the Town Hall. The outrage of the townsfolk was met with the simple statement that they could either bury the bodies, or join them. From then on ignorance and denial was no longer an option. Perhaps the remains of the poor asylum seeker who died can be placed in an open coffin in a capital city cathedral so that we can gaze on the results of our myopic and cruel policies. Would Malcolm Turnbull, Bill Shorten and their lieutenants then be so resolute in their denial of basic human rights to asylum seekers?
So can we also have open coffins for the infinitely more that died at sea due to the bleeding heart policies of open boarders??? Or millions of coffins for those who have died as a result of Australia's war crimes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, East Timor, Indonesia and now Syria, war crimes that hundreds of thousands are fleeing, sadly to visit Davey Jones locker.
Should we have closed the doors on peoples fleeing Nazi war crimes Well said harvey, I have strong memories of seeing documentary footage of these 'good folk' having their sorry asses dragged through the concentration camps that they tacitly supported and seeing people try vainly to look away but having armed troops make them view the horror that they had supported - all for the greater good of the country of course!
A lesson that should have been learnt all those years ago but, for some, has not. Look into the eyes of the rape victims or those assaulted by 'refugees'? Talk to the poor Germans whose government now has too little money to support their aspirations, education or welfare claims, and is directing dodgy qualification-recognition and make-work programs that means low-end jobs go to refugees and not the German poor? Do the open border refugee supporters look on with glee at the fracturing of politics in Europe, with xenophobic, reactionary governments taking power in Poland, Denmark and maybe soon in Germany and many other countries?
Not only migrants will lose rights when this happens. Accepting an excessive refugee intake has victims too. No actually Chalkie i was referring to actual film footage of this - not some racist imaginings. Western europe is fine chalky no need to get into a panic. It is still one of the most popular tourism destinations for Australians so if your assertions were correct, we would be seeing a sharp decline in visits. If you want to "look into the eyes of rape victims' but not, of course those who were assaulted by white folks, then that too is another racist panic button so let's not push it.
In regards to your dire fears for the German economy, a little education in economics might help you there, perhaps more learning and less visits to racist websites. I get confused over the moral outrage that this issue causes. I just have to laugh Not even the most deluded of commentators starts with an M could really believe that comparison and yet the insistence of calling them such is only widening the division between the "bleeding hearts" and the "hard-nosed pragmatists" on this issue the next natural step is to start calling those that have an opposing view "racist" or something-ophobic" and by doing so again will only widen the rift between opposing sides.
Mind you having the Socialist-Alliance support your stance is an automatic death knell When Labor announced the Malaysian Solution the boats almost dried up. It was not until the High Court decision and the refusal of the Coalition to allow Labor to change the laws that started them again and resulted in many drownings. The Malaysian Solution showed it was working but the Coalition were have so much success in using asylum seekers as political footballs that they wouldn't allow the problem to be fixed. Drowning after the Coalition blocked Labor's reforms are on the heads of the Coalition, not some mythical open border.
The Malaysian Solution was a particularly good idea. Mr Abbott was playing base cynical politics when he caused it to be blocked in the Senate. If ever the coalition votes with the greens you know it is probably a bad policy. We do know that there have been some dodgy deals being done in paying people smugglers to return their human cargo to Indonesia. I wonder how many we have not heard of. We also know the psychology of what happens to people when they become jailers and jail inmates - of the viciousness and abuse that can eventuate after only a week, by the guards towards the prisoners.
This was demonstrated in psychological experiments - it is proven. Knowing this, it is also clear the deep despair that can occur in prisoners. Thats why in civilised societies measures are taken to reduce the risk of this happening. The risks are not new or unknown. What is also known is the way that Australian coloniser society was able to close its collective heart to the dispossession, murder, enslavement and mistreatment of Australia's original people.
It was considered a necessary evil - tolerable for the benefits it bought the colonisers who now make up mainstream Australia. It sends a chill down my spine to hear the person holding the Prime Ministership almost quoting verbatim the rhetoric of early colonisers. All this 'not getting misty eyed' about necessity is almost plagarised from the journals and historical accounts of early settlement.
Hard nosed pragmatists in this case are being 'racist or something -ophobic'. Thank you for this post, harvey. I agree that Australians must take personal responsibility for the human consequences of any policy formed by their government, especially if they profit from it, but many draw a line at the asylum seeker issue because it s a UN policy in which Australians voters had no say. Jess, our government is calling the shots. No refugees in Australia. And they are thumbing their nose at the UN. So it is up to us if we dont like what is happening to vote for someone else.
The voters have had a say, JessC, in several elections. They demanded and decided on the system as it is. Dear Harvey I have tried several times to state that this story is just not true, but for some reason one can make up stories and get them published, but one is not allowed to correct them. It is true that some allied commanders forced some locals to march through the camps.
But I have never heard of the locals as opposed to the guards having to bury the dead. Nor of them being buried in a town square. Which would probably be a war crime. Nor of allied commanders threatening civilians with summary execution for not doing so. Which would definitely be a war crime. What the "Sunday best" is about is a mystery, but I doubt that many Germans had a "Sunday best" outfit in Anyway, what has this to do with the case in point?
Have you run out of any arguments and just resorted to "You are all Nazis" or "Manaus is a death camp"? Tabanus, there are many photos of German civilians being made to bury the dead of the concentration camps after the war. Photo of German civilians being forced to bury the dead of the concentration camp at Gardelegen Location: Gardelegen, Germany Date taken: I cannot find the reference to the story of the town, it was a war historian who revealed it.
The point is that people will deny inconvenient truths until they are forced to confront them. That is the strategy that this government and the one before it uses to quell any concerns. They have banned journalists from Manus and Nauru. So, Tabanus, you accept then that the logical conclusion of our asylum seeker policy is the destruction of the asylum seekers, whether by their own hand or by a slow mental degradation?
But you believe that because the majority has confirmed support for this approach that those of us who find it totally abhorent should shut up? I love that you moan about "emotional blackmail" while disregarding the mental trauma we routinely apply to those caught up in the system we created. I feel for you, truly I do. I would release you from this mental prison if I could. We could throw our hands up and say "The world is unfair so we can't be blamed if our actions focus that unfairness on some innocent people who are destroyed by our actions".
Alternatively, we could accept that our actions are far from blameless and work to improve the outcome for everyone, not just ourselves. We as a nation have chosen a morally repugnant course in order to safeguard our excessive lifestyles. People are harmed significantly so we achieve this. I see the problem here even if you don't. Dear ingenuous The logical outcome of our policy is that we maintain or even increase our resettlement program for refugees, already amongst the most generous in the world.
Why you think having or enforcing such a policy "destroys" asylum seekers I cannot understand. It destroys those who seek to profit from those who wish to migrate here, and prevents people from getting unachievable dreams of being invited to live here. One of the first things the Coalition did when they lied their way into power again was drop the number from a piddly 20, That is a tiny number compared to the half a million each year from permanent migration and visas. We helped create many, many more than 13, with our illegal and futile invasions of the Middle East. Now we plan to create as many climate refugees as possible by digging up every last lump of coal and selling it off to be burnt.
We are very happy to go around destroying countries and the very planet we are on but pretend that Australia is somehow 'special' and beyond reproach when we destroy asylum seekers lives. So "those who profit" are presumably the "smugglers".
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But we could also say that "those who profit" politically are those who pander to the fear campaign against Muslim people. As for people "getting unachievable dreams", it is not clear why such dreams are "unachievable". Oz has been built on migration going way back by people who had dreams - and by some who did not want to come here but were forced to do so as convicts, but were given opportunities to live here. The generosity you speak of is denied by the cruel and inhumane policy currently being implemented.
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In fact, there is nothing good to be said about it. Refugees could have been treated better in Indonesia with regional cooperation and smugglers could have been stopped without the expensive use of the Navy. The matter should have been a diplomatic exercise, not a military operation which acted like smugglers in reverse. Australia has a moral responsibility to its tax paying, law abiding citizens first before the citizens of any other country. As a nation we are in record debt and deficit. There used to be free public education but now that money is used to prop up Private schools, even by the ALP.
So we can't even afford ourselves let alone 50, single Muslim males that will eventually each request their family members all come, the dole, Medicare, education, NDIS, jobs etc. That being said we are the greatest and one of the richest nations on earth so we need to contribute.
And contribute heartily we do. What a great thing, and as much as it hurts me to say, but well done Turnbull. Abbott knew what he had to do. Now Shorten says he'll turn back the boats too. Seditious and traitorous are two words that come to mind when thinking about your anti Australian views. Whether you "shut up" as you put it or do not "shut up" is entirely up to you, ingenuous, but the voting public will not listen unless you have something to say that has at least some chance of convincing them to demand something other than what they have been demanding for decades.
What utter rubbish Harvey, most knew what was happening there. You can't hid the unique stench of burning bodies. It also shows an absolute contempt for the millions that were killed to even remotely entertain the concept that Australia's detention centres are concentration camps. Tom - they are still both concentration camps, as were the concentration camps that Boer families were incarcerated in during the Boer War. However I think what you are trying to express is that obviously the concentration camps in the 's in Germany were far worse.
Of course they were. Nobody is denying that. However the fact remains that what we have on Nauru and, illegally, on Manus, are still concentration camps. Tabanus 'but that when a few people don't like it' C'mon, lets's be honest, it's not a few people - MOST people don't like it. I am sad but not responsible You see, this is the callousness of the whole thing - if your going to have a policy of detention there are some responsibilities that go along with it - like a duty of care, some basic decent accommodation, hygenic conditions and medical care, and a process that doesn't keep you deprived of your freedom for an indefinite period.
Tell me, what if the lottery of birth wasn't so kind to you? What if YOU were the one needing help? Then I think many people like yourself might have a very different view. What is disgusting about this whole policy is that yes, there are solutions, yet the propaganda of simplistic judgmental callousness prevails. I hope I never get to think like you and the politicians that promote this awful policy. The offshore camps should be decent and have adequate medical facilities. Any failings in this area should be rectified.
And the processing should be quick so they can be released into their new communities. As you can see, overall numbers in detention have dropped considerably under this policy and will only reduce the longer it is in place. What's happened is that we've just gotten through the wave displaced by the Sri Lankan civil war and the War on Terror. In a few years, we'll get another mass of refugees from the Arab spring and the war in Syria. I think the best option is to let what refugees we currently have in, as a payment for cruel and unusual punishment made to live in tents during monsoon season, for one , and open processing in Indonesia.
This would provide a better option then the people smugglers, especially if we resettled those with experience and English Language skills in Australia. Add to this the current patrolling and turnbacks though I personally disagree with them , and you have a system that will process much more humanely whilst solving the problem. Oneiros, no we've gotten through a wave created by the change in policy settings by the previous government. Once you have open processing in Indonesia, what yearly limit would you place on resettlements?
What do you do once that limit is reached and asylum seekers start hopping back on boats? How do you deal with the inherent unfairness of giving preferential treatment to those with enough money to reach Indonesia rather than those most in need of assistance? The fact that you believe that a single factor governs the number of asylum seekers shows your willful ignorance on this issue. The way it goes is this, the wave comes, it spawns the business of smuggling, and the extent of that business is managed by government policy.
We wouldn't, for example, get asylum seekers if there weren't in Indonesia to begin with. The idea that government policy is the determining factor is self-centered and operates on the default assumption that these refugees are not genuine. Next, I wouldn't set a yearly limit, as such. Rather, refugees could ask for assistance for resettlement in the region, or apply for a second process for Australian resettlement, with places being determined on a case by case basis separate to the humanitarian intake.
This would work most to our favour if we can gain Indonesians cooperation. Finally, to ensure that boats don't start up again, I would keep the patrols and turnbacks in place as much as possible. By doing the two together, you create a better alternative to the smuggler programs, thus making their pitch all that much harder to sell. I asserted that the change in government policy was the leading factor in the change in arrivals we received in that period and it clearly and demonstrably was.
It was controlled far more by pull factors than push factors. If you refuse to accept someone for resettlement in Australia, there is nothing to stop them bypassing the system by hopping on boats. The patrols can never by effective enough if there is significant pull factors operating. And you didn't answer the question about equity. Your system gives preferential treatment to those with the means and ability to get to Indonesia. Surely this type of humanitarian system must be based on need rather than money?
You only mentioned government policy, saying that it caused the wave, a notion that is still under much dispute, and can't be properly addressed under the confidentiality of the current system. Once again, I am talking about opening up the process, but I don't intend Australia to be the only load bearer. I want the region to work to process and resettle, with Australia taking its fair share if you're worried about migration numbers, we can crack down on holiday visa overstayers, and shift more of our migratory intake into humanitarian programs.
As for the patrols, we don't know what they can and can't manage, but what I am trying to do is create a better alternative, stealing their demand. Finally, equity is difficult enough already. But what we do know is this: If that changed, I would say that we should focus on those in camps. But right now, they're stranded, and every day in Indonesia increases the chances they'll try to make it to Australia illegally.
The choices are to take them in via the system I described, and resettle them both in Australia and in the region, or to block them, leading to them resorting to dangerous methods, or simply dying. In that case, the morality is to take them, under skilled migrant and family reunion visas where possible, and have a humanitarian intake in flux, with each years intake altered by the last.
Toward the Destruction of Schooling | The Anarchist Library
We can't do this alone, but we have to do something. And you only mentioned the Sri Lankan civil war and war on terror. The change in government policy was far more impactful than those factors. If you think you can influence regional government's to accept a larger load, then I think you have too much faith in our foreign policy and diplomatic ability. They've already tried, no one's listening.
As for equity, they aren't dying in large numbers in Indonesia, not having work rights or welfare is not the same as being persecuted under the refugee convention. Helping people because it's easier than providing assistance to those who need it most doesn't cut it. If its a humanitarian program, you cannot give preferential treatment to people simply because they have money.
If you do then it simply becomes about assauging your own guilt rather than doing the most amount of good. And there we have it. The real fear of the FFs of the world is not drownings at sea - but the potential number of funny foreigners. Dear earlwarwick I am prepared to accept you and your friends don't like our policies re immigration.
But we have had several elections fought on the subject, and the majority have voted. You must live with it. Your shallowness is showing Tabanus. The fact is, most Australians vote for the major parties, and unfortunately both the LNP and Labor have the same inhumane approach to asylum seekers. There's no democracy in that - there is just very little choice, and it's nothing more than cynical political strategy. Your misrepresentation of the truth just serves to propagate the simplistic lies and judgmental callousness I spoke of earlier.
I think you'll find survey after survey finds widespread support for tough border protection policies, even when these end up up being 'cruel' for those incarcerated. Using a similar model of 'guessing' I would say Australians support a policy that denies in any circumstance Australian citizenship to those who pay a smuggler perhaps it goes against our intense dislike for anyone 'paying' or 'bribing' their way to get what they want, and our love of orderly queues.
Australians are happy to incarcerate those who try to circumvent border policy, and welcome those who come without corruptions, but at the same time I would suggest almost all Australians would prefer that the public servants, private providers, and locals in Nauru and Manus did their jobs properly. Medical care for refugees in these places should be top notch given the amount of money spent on it. A public servant that 'didn't read an email', resulting in a delay to the medical transfer of the Iranian refugee to the mainland was an example of either laziness, or a completely derelict process in the department.
Australians want that kind of thing fixed, and that it happened at all given the sums of money spent on refugees suggests a disgraceful lack of competence in the relevant public service department, an incompetent individual or both. I think it is not enough to sit on the low-lying moral high ground, as an individual or a party. We have a duty to make considered comtributions to public dialogue to generate the 'voice' that politics and politicians cannot ignore.
Virtually everything we do is wrong to some extent, too usually very wrong, and Blind Freddie can see it. We need to open a course that offers options that are better than those we choose now and raise our mindsets to make such choices by second nature. We are never going to be a healthy society while we think and act to permit the viral load of toxic options we take as a matter of course at the moment. Almost all of us know how to think and act better than we do now.
It would be a great start if most of us did so. So in true rabid left form, do you intend to organise a group of thugs to attack anyone that disagrees with you fairy land blinkered view or do you intend to continue teaching the illegal immigrants violent actions to force the issue, ie burn their kid's hand or themselves. Definitely the last type of person we should allow access to Australia.
Then feel free to come up with and offer viable alternatives, Bruce, but you will have to make those alternatives acceptable to the Australian voters.
It's on us: The real world consequences of our politics
So far nobody has come up with any such alternatives. We need human sanctuaries that use sustainable subsistence educational models combined with cutting edge technology. These facilities should be set up so as that the public can interact and volunteer, that a sense of safety and community is developed. These centres are not designed to settle people here, our normal channels of immigration play that role. The idea is that we have the ability to protect those seeking refuge in a constructive and mutually beneficial way, we attempt to equip these people with strategies to make ready their eventual resettlement in their country of origin.
It won't be perfect but if that is the clear message sent then we should see those genuinely seeking refuge arriving rather than people seeking a fast track to potential wealth opportunities. It is obvious that this problem isn't going to go away by spending s of millions on offshore detention, it will burst sooner or later. How much is your idea going to cost, foolking? If it is un-costed then it will be unacceptable to the voters.
I suppose the cost is what the public think is reasonable and whether it contributes in a meaningful way to help alleviate the problems financial, practical and ethical I think it would. Thanks for the reply. My personal "base case" scenario for thinking about the next 50 years includes Australia needing to take responsibility for quite large numbers of climate-consequence displaced people, both by physical sanctuary for some and by the supply of sustenance and contributions to the support of many others who will remain closer to their altered homelands.
The dimensions of the issues seem to me to see us having to step up as the backstop for perhaps million people and the challenge will face us for a century at least. My expectations mean that I see politics and economics as we play them at present as being nonsenses. Today they distort our choices absurdly.
Toward the Destruction of Schooling
Then, they will ne untenable if we are to call ourselves 'humanity'. So I think we should be getting some good practice in ahead of the crisis. Your suggestion is one I think we have to develop. I also think international law has to recognise some status like "diaspora citizen" which displaced persons could hold and which entitled them to a level of care where ever they were, but which would not necessarily trigger some train of events to national citizenship or permanent residency.
I do think displacement generates reasonable obligations on the people who ask for protection as well as on those who they ask for it. Among my wilder ideas is an International Legion of peace keepers, amounting to a seriously able force say strong that every nation agrees to support and facilitate and comprising volunteers. Veterans of this Legion, in good repute, might be honoured guest citizens of anywhere they happened to be.
In very serious situations - think Syria or a dozen other places in the past thirty years - the Legion might secure a sufficient tract of the homeland of people otherwise likely to be displaced and permit its operation as a Temporary State in which it and the international community would protect those people. Reaver et al would no doubt object.
Thanks Bruce , like many including yourself I have put a lot of thought into this one. I also see a future that requires the ability to put up many thousands of people with their survival being of most importance not just for their economic advantage, your ideas on the face of it sound logical to me, your response was well executed , very neat,avoided the lofty.
Establish processing in Indonesia, to provide a better option to people smuggling. The processing will go faster, as people won't have destroyed their documents yet, and to make the option more appealing, we can take in some refugees those with English language and technical skills to fill gaps in our workforce and make engaging in this process more viable then paying a people smuggler. This works best if you keep up the sea patrols and can convince Indonesia to provide refugees with work rights and welfare, potentially paid for by the money we won't need to spend on off-shore detention.
As for those already there, if they have refugee status, allow them to apply directly for citizenship. Those that don't make the cut we can find homes for in the region, and those that do we can welcome with open arms. That's my idea anyway. Your ideas have proven to be unacceptable to the voters, Helvi and Onieros. Care to try again? Your solutions must be acceptable to the majority of voters. Whether or not you think your ideas are good ideas is of no relevance. How do you know how my ideas would be received by the voters? Besides which, it isn't broad voter support that the government needs, it's marginal support, including western sydney, which is an area pushing this kind of program.
The current program has nominal voter support only because variations of it have been public policy since mandatory detention was first introduced, a massive mistake done to earn support in the less tolerant marginal seats. The fact is, that any program I put up would be met with the same dismissive response, short of advocating either: They explain much of the behavior of teachers and provide a scientific foundation for their future progress. He saw more efficient teaching practices as extremely important, hoping that teaching could eventually become a science.
It is not the rules or the enforcement of rules that is most important — it is the habitual following of those rules that helps the individual internalize desired patterns of behavior. The focus shifts from more obvious forms of discipline to the use of techniques which encourage a self-discipline which diminishes the need for those more obvious forms of discipline.
Even early in the 19 th century, Fichte saw this as ideal. Fichte called the ideal pedagogy an art, Skinner would call it a science, but the message remains the same. The Classification of Educational Goals, which had a significant influence on government schools in America. It was designed as a tool to help educators classify the ways in which students are to respond to their lessons. Thanks to standardized testing, intelligence is the new idol that educational theory must bow to.
The ideal student is a well-behaved and objectively intelligent automaton. It would be difficult to better describe the function of schooling. It is hardly radical to substitute the existing society for another one which will serve the same functions in different ways. School is undoubtedly an institution that initiates students into a life of alienated living. In school, the student learns that learning requires its usually authoritarian counterpart: Once the young learn dependence, the other lessons come much easier.
It begins to acquire all the metaphysical power that modern man attaches to facts. All knowledge becomes interchangeable and divorced from social context, and units of knowledge are to be accumulated — having practical application only within the specialized world of academia.
The detached objectivity of the scholar is idealized. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression. Divorced from its social context, the school can look like a rather positive thing. But as long as there are governments and churches, they are going to have something to do with schooling.
Schooling has a long history of pseudo-opposition from libertarians: Tolstoy, Ferrer, and Freire did not critique schools as such, but called for different educational practices. Schools are institutions, and all institutions have a certain degree of permanence that can extend beyond the control of their initiators; they are not associations developed for a specific limited purpose and they are not self-organized.
They must be a part of a community actively seeking to undermine the dominant social order. The ateneos, or storefront cultural centers of Spain in pre-Civil War times which had classes for those who wanted to learn to read and write, provide a simple example. In order to destroy capitalism and the state apparatus, we cannot simply build new institutions and expect the old ones to fall apart.
Only through attacking the old institutions and organizing ourselves in a decentralized manner can we function outside the realm of capitalism and attack it as a social system. Capitalist social relations must be actively subverted; we cannot simply form co-operative or collective exchange relationships which reproduce capitalist logic.
The Soviet Union, for example, was never communist in any real sense; it could best be described as state-capitalist. Max Stirner, a poor German schoolteacher, was one of the most radical thinkers of the 19 th century. In criticizing the institutionalization of the socialization process that was taking place in his time, Stirner criticized authority — the crux of the matter, around which all socialization revolves. A more in-depth critique of schooling in particular came from Ivan Illich in Deschooling Society, published in Illich was opposed to the school as an institution and formed a cogent critique of its functions.
Schools divide social reality: They cannot be betrayed, but only short-changed, because they have been taught to substitute expectations for hope. The themes inherent in theories of schooling have been rehashed for centuries. It is all too easy to see the devastating effects of schooling in our everyday lives: Students are taught to recognize that they are constantly under surveillance.
The rooms are distributed along a corridor at regular intervals. The teacher stands in front of the class making sure that everyone displays acquiescence in receiving the lesson. Later the students are examined, tested — observed and controlled. The superimposition of the power relations and knowledge relations assumes in the examination all its visible brilliance. Every individual is merely a component, a piece of machinery. This is the essence of modern schooling.
To argue otherwise would be mundane, untrue, and utterly academic. The university is the training grounds for the future ruling class and their most dependable lackeys. Most university students — after being constantly adjusted throughout their youth — are already well adjusted to subservient roles. They are model consumers, if not always model students. The students who are content with their social role as students have accepted passivity. Some accept passivity by ignoring all politics, others by becoming politically active. The result is the same — a useful citizen — useful to others.
The student is no exception to the rule. He has a provisional part to play, a rehearsal for his final role as an element in market society as conservative as the rest Meanwhile, he basks in a schizophrenic consciousness, withdrawing into his initiation group to hide from that future. To be a pathetic is to be fashionable. Instead of the transvaluation of all values that Nietzsche called for, however, we have experienced a further devaluation Nietzsche saw nihilism as the devaluation of the highest values — a condition at once regrettable and full of possibility. Money, too, is fashionable — how could it not be?
He is a person who has been yelled at, disciplined, and brutalized during the socialization process only to grow up with no greater desire than to do the same to others. Often he is the hero of high school, the well-trained athlete, the well-trained imbecile. What Max Stirner said of college students in general clearly applies: The modern student thrives in a milieu of privileged consumption.
Entertainment is organized around sub cultural identity — a dead world of media swill with an appearance vaguely reminiscent of actual life which has been vanquished by modern capitalism. Sexual activity, long repressed, is now tolerated within the context of relationships which could only be described as masturbatory. If it had any meaning, if it opened up new realms of communication, sex would be a force antagonistic to schooling — instead it is a safety valve.
In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud said that civilization uses sexual energy for its own purposes displacing it through work, for example. We are now so alienated from each other that it is difficult to conceive of a world in which our energies and desires are not systematically controlled and manipulated — a world in which meaningful communication is commonplace.
Our capacity for self-regulation and autonomy has been schooled out of us; we are left with a character armor the colonization of Capital which protects us from expressing ourselves freely. It is now often marketed as spirituality, an admission of some vague need to retreat from reality and be enriched by assorted mystical beliefs. Any justification for the present madness will do.
Drugs and alcohol help out as much as possible, setting the stage for all social interaction. But is it enough? Consumer goods help fill the void, but are they sufficient? So far, it seems to be. The life that gets away from us can always be sold back to us by the mass media in the form of images.
All that once was directly lived has become mere representation. The student often finds more meaningful forms of escapism — ideological escapism. Students are for justice, Che Guevara t-shirts, and affirmative action. And the socialist organizations are waiting to recruit. The student activist consciously aligns their thinking with what they perceive to be that of an oppressed group which they may or may not be a member of.
Now they can speak for that group and articulate the desires of that group, usually phrased as demands made of the authorities. Every person, every group, must be represented. Representation is at the heart of the logic of modern politics, and its so-called enemies uphold this logic better than anyone. Through appeals for justice or equal rights within the system, the academic Left perpetuates the system and its moralistic logic.
And since academia is virtually defined by the dissociation of thought and action, no revolutionary theory could possibly thrive in this context; conversely, it is here that revolutionary ideology is at home, an object of passive consideration. Indeed, many of the controlling aspects of high school are absent — but only because they are no longer necessary. Her only hope is to stop identifying with the university and its myths. The student must commit the sin of pride non serviam — I will not serve just as Stephen Dedalus did: As long as knowledge is looked at from afar as one views the world of commodities, whatever truths it may reveal remain concealed.
The fact that universities serve the interests of power is all too obvious. As Fredy Perlman observed, students are taught to be innovative when it comes to the sciences and the physical universe, but their approach must be adaptationist in regard to the social world. Every academic field must be focused toward progress where it is needed and apologetics when it comes to the effects of such progress. Every individual must fit themselves into institutions, jobs, and the whole social network without ever thinking twice about what is lost.
Our lives spin outward from the hospitals where we are born to the school systems that dominate our youth through the bureaucracies for which we work and back again to the hospitals in which we die. The university is a perfect representation of our institutional reality. The university is an impersonal bureaucracy even when it tries to be something else.
Alexis de Tocqueville clearly described the techniques through which such institutions function: The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting; such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which government is the shepherd.
The university purveys an advanced form of schooling. It is advanced mainly because the university is the schooling institution most directly in the service of Capital. They are most likely tired of it. It is not easy to have your will systematically softened, bent, and guided by authoritarian social structures. Opposition to work itself must now be the basis of any radical opposition to Capital which recuperates all forms of partial resistance.
Opposition to schooling is now a necessity for those who resist the domestication of capitalist society. And while it is not easy to resist, it is well worth it. Only through resistance to this society can life become worth living.
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This article was originally published by Marx in the Rheinische Zeitung. Berkeley Hills Books, , 61— The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, consequently also controls the means of mental production, so that the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are on the whole subject to it.
The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relations, the dominant material relations grasped as ideas; hence of the relations which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. Prometheus, , Riverside Press, , Bureau of Public Secrets, , — The Situationist International — was a relatively small yet influential Paris-based group that had its origins in the avant garde artistic tradition.
The situationists are best known for their radical political theory and their influence on the May student and worker revolts in France. Chelsea Green, , This book is possibly the most accessible and convincing critique of civilization. Lippincott Company, , Loompanics, , The Birth of the Prison New York: Vintage, , The Ronald Press Company, , This idea is echoed elsewhere: The concentration of learning in a formal atmosphere allows children to learn far more of their culture than they are able to do by merely observing and imitating.
David Swanger Orlando, Florida: Harcourt Brace, , Smith, Ancient Education New York: Penguin, , Sheed and Ward, Penguin, , 57; H. Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity. Power, A Legacy of Learning: State University of New York Press, , The Portable Plato New York: Second Edition Englewood Cliffs, N.
Prentice Hall, , 20; Mulhern, Presenting the teachings of the Church in scientific form became the main ecclesiastical purpose of school, a tendency called scholasticism. This shift from emotion to intellect resulted in great skill in analysis, in comparison and contrasts, in classifications and abstraction, as well as famous verbal hairsplitting — like how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.
Scholasticism became the basis for future upper-class schooling. Lee Statue The city of Charlottesville decided, in some closed board room, to rename a park that had been known. Hello All— The reading list expands as follows: An Article of Interest! Review of Life on the Run. Bill Bradley This may seem odd—I am reviewing a book that is now more than forty years old.
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