Friday, 31 October 2014 - 8:56pm
"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake in the middle of the night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world around you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting."
Sunday, 26 October 2014 - 12:37pm
"While the skills students are learning need to be relevant for 21st century jobs…" Gah! No! Do even the Greens not understand that human beings have value beyond their utility as wage slaves? The public should be providing education, not training. If businesses want employees with 21st century job skills, let them provide the training.
Saturday, 25 October 2014 - 3:19pm
What these students won't be told is: that, compared to universities in major cities, SCU's range of courses is thin and almost entirely vocational; that the Coffs campus only runs a small subset of these; that due to savage staff cuts, even notionally on-campus units of study are now offered via what SCU calls "convergent delivery" - i.e. no different to distance education, little chance of any face-to-face interaction with academic staff, and even in some cases lectures recorded months or more earlier; or that SCU's vice chancellor is publicly supporting the deregulation of tuition fees.
What they will have been told, albeit implicitly, is that their only hope of employment that doesn't involve a flouro vest and safety shoes is to voluntarily subject themselves to the most regressive tax in Australian history (HECS). Under its current administration SCU is part of a nationwide credential scam that preys on a mass market of gullible children, most of whom are not yet ready for university but will end up in debt to the ATO whether they graduate or not.
Why be good?
I'll be posting my uni work from the last term - any work that contains some morsel of general interest, at least - here for posterity. This is the first installment: an alleged class presentation. This being an external unit, the way we present the material to the class is on Blackboard's bulletin board system, so it's not so much a presentation as an essay split into chunks and posted in installments ever day or two over a week. So here it is all cobbled back together, minus the few comments from my classmates I was able to provoke. You'll note that, despite being a task for the "Philosophy on Screen" subject, I don't mention any films at all. I've found that being a uni undergraduate is rather like being a politician; you will do much better if you answer the question you want to answer rather than the question you've been asked.
In considering the daunting question "why be good?" it is perhaps best to mark out the terrain we have to explore by first excluding those kinds of ethical systems (here I will use the the words "moral" and "ethical" interchangeably) which have no bearing on the question. I propose a "Ring of Gyges Test", using Plato's parable as a yardstick. If a particular approach to moral philosophy has no guidance to give to the protagonist of the story, we have reasonable grounds to set it aside as irrelevant to our question.
We can therefore quickly dispense with moral scepticism, moral relativism, or moral nihilism. If we have no way of knowing what is good, or completely deny the existence of moral absolutes, all we are left with to guide us is one or another form of prudentialism. In turn if, as Glaucon suggests, Gyges should only act with regard to the consequences of being caught violating local law or propriety, we are back in relativistic territory: one morality for the visible, another for the invisible. Alternately if - given God's omniscience - Gyges restrains himself through fear of divine retribution, either through karma in this life or damnation in the next, we are at most moral nihilsts, using the term "good" as shorthand for "divinely mandated".
It follows then that for the question "why be good?" to be at all meaningful, we must assume that natural (i.e. not artificial or supernatural), objectively verifiable truth claims of the form "state of affairs X is good", or "person Y is good", are possible.
Before going on to consider what conception of morality we ought reasonably to entertain, I'd like to illustrate the importance - and contemporary salience - of the choice between different ethical systems by asking the following: What are we to make of a morality which says that everything that Gyges did was good, and that, if anything, he was morally lax by not pursuing his self-interest more aggressively?
In the early 18th century Bernard Mandeville published a satire titled "The Fable of the Bees", which illustrated his contention that "private vices are public benefits", i.e. that without the spur of individual self-interest, no productive work would be done at all, and indeed that the most obnoxious pursuit of personal indulgence results in the greatest degree of industry. Later that century, this argument was given additional impetus by a selective reading of Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations", where Smith claimed "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages."
Such decontextualised fragments of Smith's work were also pressed into the service of the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, who argued that all efforts to help the poor were futile, or even harmful. "To remedy the frequent distresses of the common people," Malthus wrote, "the poor laws of England have been instituted; but it is to be feared that though they may have alleviated a little the intensity of individual misfortune, they have spread the general evil over a much larger surface." This in turn fed into the work of the social Darwinist Herbert Spencer, and the eugenicist Francis Galton. According to Spencer, "The poverty of the incapable, the distresses that come upon the imprudent, the starvation of the idle, and those shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong, which leave so many 'in shallows and in miseries,' are the decrees of a large, far-seeing benevolence." (One suspects the poor were rather less inclined to celebrate their role in this big-picture, survival-of-the-fittest benevolence.) By the late 19th century this doctrine was so influential as to be easily recognisable in Dickens' Ebeneezer Scrooge. By the mid-20th century, it had found its apogee in fascism.
After a polite pause, these ideas resurfaced again as "neoliberalism" (more commonly known in Australia as "economic rationalism"), which as Noam Chomsky observes, is neither new nor liberal. Adherents even identified themselves by wearing the "Adam Smith tie" (presumably sending that genuine, honourable liberal rolling in his grave). Their theories were first tested in the bloody torture chamber of Pinochet's Chile and similarly receptive dictatorships throughout the western hemisphere. Later they were applied to the UK by Margaret Thatcher who declared "there is no such thing as society; there are individual men and women, and there are families," and subsequently in the US, New Zealand, Australia, and elsewhere. That the conception of the human being as the purely rational, self-interest-maximising "Homo economicus" is ridiculous is illustrated by this exchange between two such individuals, as imagined by Amartya Sen:
"Where is the railway station?" he asks me. "There," I say, pointing at the post office, "and would you please post this letter for me on the way?" "Yes," he says, determined to open the envelope and check whether it contains something valuable.
However implausible is Homo economicus, the distortion of public institutions, ostensibly to suit him, is pervasive. One does not have to go far to find evidence of the preeminence of shallow short-term self interest. Universities, once (arguably) dedicated to the discovery and dissemination of knowledge for the public good, now offer courses "designed in consultation with industry [...] to produce work-ready graduates". These students supposedly shop for an institution in which they may make the most profitable investment in their future earning potential, receiving an education only incidentally, if at all. In place of free, open-ended academic enquiry is a predetermined set of "industrially relevant" "learning outcomes".
Later I will argue for alternative foundations for a conception of the good, and also examine why, in the pursuit of being good, moral dilemmas appear so frustratingly difficult to resolve, and so frequent. In the meantime, I would be most interested in your comments and questions.
There followed a comment remarking upon the student's perceptions of some of their fellow students' motivations for attending uni, which gave me an opportunity to bang on at a bit more length on a side topic:
Thanks. I should stress that I cast no opprobrium at the staff or student-customers of Australian universities. It's been 25 years since the existing universities were compelled by the government to become commercial institutions, and the "new universities" like ours were created by merging Colleges of Advanced Education (CAEs) to be commercial entities from day one, so by now most of the staff and nearly all of the students in Australian universities have never known a higher education system that ran on any other basis. Whenever I tell people I'm studying at uni (or rather at home, 5 minutes drive away from a near-deserted campus), most automatically ask "what job does that qualify you for?" My friends know better. I've had plenty of jobs, and am by now quite certain that I don't like it. It's impossible to do anything useful with your life if you have to spend most of it on pointless busy work.
I was struck by a press release earlier this year which opened with the words "Universities are more accustomed to competing than collaborating", and had to reread the sentence several times to be sure I got it right. But the same is true more broadly of a whole range of institutions. If you go to a major city and look up at the skyline, most of the names you see emblazoned across the top of skyscrapers are likely to be of for-profit corporations that started out as non-profit cooperatives, mutual societies, government agencies, and so on.
When I first left home, the process for moving house involved going to the local Telecom office and giving them your new address, then to the office of the local electricity supplier (there would be only one) to do the same. Now I don't even have a landline because I can't afford to spend a significant portion of the day fending off sales calls from utility retailers. That doesn't stop the pairs of backpackers, with laminated ID cards hanging from ribbons round their necks, turning up on my doorstep, demanding to know how much I spend on electricity. I don't know how much I spend on electricity! If I cared enough about something so trivial that I could rattle off a figure at a moment's notice, I think I would want to kill myself! I never thought I'd live to see the day when I'd be relieved to see Jehovah's Witnesses at the door.
The ludicrous faith in market-based provision of services know no bounds. I was amused last year by all the job advertisements by NBN Co. subcontracters for experienced "fibre splicers" in Coffs Harbour. What on earth did they expect? "Ah, yes. We're all fibre splicers 'round these parts, going back generations. My father 'afore me, and his father 'afore him. Never got a stroke of work, mind you, but now at last our patience has paid off!"
Someone directed me to this article: 6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person, to which I replied:
I think Kant would say that the author of that article is treating people as means rather than ends.
My 2c, from a position of justified cynicism, would be that in my experience there's a huge gulf between what people need and what they want. You often don't even have to give people what they want; just say you have. I spent much of the last decade doing battle with an endless procession empty-headed blonde, blue-eyed, 20-something marketing consultants who would only have to spout gibberish to make a good living. "I've search engine optimised your social media strategy in the cloud. That'll be ten thousand dollars thanks." I eventually had to give up in the face of the sheer profusion of these people. My theory is there's a Nazi eugenics program run from a secret underground bunker just north of Coffs. When they realised the program had gone horribly wrong, and that they'd produced a generation of morons with no grip on reality, they quietly funnelled them through the SCU School of Business Studies, and out into the world to make it even more stupid and ugly than it already was.
This acrimonious view is a result of years of practicing what Satre would call bad faith. When I told a friend and fellow wandering eccentric drunk that I was moving to Sawtell to become a professional web developer, because that was the well-reasoned and eminently sensible thing to do, he sighed and said "Matt, Matt, Matt. Is that really what you want to do?"
"Yes."
He cocked his head and smiled seraphically. "Really?"
Oh, how I wish I had listened!
I think that while it appears seductively pragmatic and hard-headed to pretend we know what people should do (or pretend the invisible hand of the market knows), we are probably better off encouraging people to pursue their own eudaimonia as they see fit, as you never know what talents will one day be of use. For instance, I maintain that the fundamental requirements for human happiness are a steady supply of beer, junk food, and interesting reading material. While of course this is self-evidently true, sometimes you also need something entirely unexpected, even if you don't know it.
One evening I was sitting at the street-level window seat of a pub in Sydney, reading, with the need for junk food temporarily satisfied, when a particularly ragged homeless man tapped on the window. I looked up to see him smiling and holding up a twenty cent coin. Okay, I thought, I know the drill. I got down from my stool and started going through my pockets for change when he motioned to me to stop and pay attention to his coin again. He transferred it from one hand to the other, then opened his palm and stared at it with mock amazement. Poof! Gone! Ta-da! He game me a wave and a big toothless grin, and carried on down the road. Now ordinarily, I am not "in touch with my feelings". My feelings and I are at best nodding acquaintences. So until then I had no idea that I was feeling particularly glum that evening, but this fellow could see it. And thanks to his generosity of spirit, for the rest of the evening I felt really, really great.
Another student helpfully asked about the definition of "good".
Ha! Thank you! I needed someone to ask about the definition of "good", and was halfway through writing the post below - interrupted by a visit from a friend, dinner, cuddling cats, and looking up 'whorl' in the dictionary to see if I was using it correctly - when you did that very thing! Let's pretend that I saw your post before starting on mine.
And yes, it seems like there's an attempt to out-Scrooge Scrooge in Australian politics. Canberra's representative here in Coffs Harbour and Assistant Minister for Unemployment, Luke Hartsuyker MP, is asking "Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?" because the "age of entitlement is over" due to an imaginary crisis where the government is supposed to be running out of the only thing that it can never run out of.
A consolation is that, although there are always Scrooges, Scrooges are always miserable, because they know, though they deny it to themselves, that by being merely "work-ready", they are not meeting their own moral obligations.
"But you were always a good man of business, Jacob," faultered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself.
"Business!" cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. "Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!"
I go on. And on, and on, and on…
It is often argued [citation needed] that to resolve the question of "why be good?" one must first have a definition of the good. However "good" appears to be a rather slippery concept. It defies a simple abstract description, and even to try to adumbrate (word of the day) a set of things that are commonly regarded as good ("pizza, relaxation, sunny days") quickly results in contradiction ("healthy eating, exercise, adequate rainfall"). "Good" appears to be a particularly intractable case of "I can't tell you what it is, but I know it when I see it." So perhaps it's more productive to identify any firm grounds upon which we can make these moral distinctions, whatever they happen to be. There are three ethical systems typically nominated for consideration: virtue ethics, deontological ethics, and utilitarianism. Unfortunately, I have problems with all three.
Virtue ethics appears somewhat arbitrary and flimsy. Not only is it by necessity a subjective list of qualities a person may posess, it provides us with no additional "explanatory power", as the philosophers of science would say. Any given moral virtue can simply be rephrased as being a tendency toward behaviour(s) that we may consider either intrinsically good, or productive of good outcomes.
There are a number of problems with utilitarianism, although the showstopper for me is that it appears visciously circular. i.e. What is "good"? That which maximises utility. What do we mean by "utility"? Well, er, things that are, um, "good"...
Deontological ("duty-based") ethics appears to have a longer and more impressive pedigree. Kant's injunction to "act only according to that maxim by which you can also will that it would become a universal law," has "Golden Rule" near-equivalents in "Do unto others...", Rabbi Hillel's "“That which is hateful to you, do not unto another”, and so on, for practically every cultural tradition you can name. The more negative formulations from antiquity appear inadequate as a basis for action; they say what you should not do, rather than what you should do. On the other hand Kant's categorical imperative seems to claim too much. For example, one's choice of livelihood appears to have moral implications, but it doesn't help to imagine a world solely populated by insurance salespersons, taxi drivers, or bagpipe players.
Of course I am being unfairly shallow and crude here. However even given several encyclopedias worth of space, not to mention a sharper mind, with which to definitively refute these ethical systems, one still must admit that each has some element of intuitive appeal. And this is where I think we find our solid ground, or at least the best we are likely to find.
Moral sentimentalism says that the moral sense which tells us that a particular act is ethical, that a particular person is virtuous, or that a particular state of affairs is good, is a human capacity which is just as natural, and as prior to reason, as the sense which tells us that the sky is blue. Moral sentimentalists include such figures as David Hume and Adam Smith but, in subsequent centuries, this school of thought has not attracted much attention. However, in part due to new insight available to us through the cognitive sciences, philosophers such as Jesse Prinze have revived the idea of morality as a biologically-endowed capacity closely related to our capacity for empathy and sympathy. (Watch a short interview with Jesse Prinze here.)
If our sense of morality is in fact a sense akin to that of sight, hearing, etc., one might expect to see a similar capacity in other social animals - at least those quite closely related to Homo sapiens. This does in fact appear to be the case (here's a TED talk by primatologist Frans de Waal which delightfully illustrates that finding); an observation that pet owners may greet with "Well, duh!"
Like our other senses, our moral sense is far from infallible, particularly in the context of modern civilisation. We have difficulty with the large and/or complex moral problems that accompany modernity - in the same way that we are so terrible at driving cars that we need a convoluted and expensive system of rules, signs, and brightly painted guidelines everywhere, to prevent (most of) us from killing ourselves within minutes of getting behind the wheel. In fact if you look at the typical moral dilemmas, you'll find that they tend to be concerned with problems that wouldn't arise for our ancestors on the African savannah. There are no trolley problems if you have no trolleys.
So if our naturally selected capacities are so inadequate how do we make moral judgements on large and complex problems at all? Cognitive scientist George Lakoff will tell you that we work with complex moral problems in the same way that we work with other classes of complex problems: by using metaphors to simpler concepts. This also explains how we can come to such wildly varying conclusions on moral issues. Human beings don't have greatly divergent moral senses; we're just using the same sense with different metaphors. If you're opposed to government spending, how do you feel about government investment? Same activity, different metaphor. Here's a short interview with Lakoff, but if you have time I recommend this longer talk. (Budding sociologists may appreciate the use of Erving Goffman's concept of framing.)
So, to return to the topic (at last), why be good? My suspicion is that it's just very hard to be anything else. Why else would we occasionally go through such extraordinary whorls of justification to convince ourselves that we're morally right when we really know otherwise? Humans are neither fallen angels or risen apes. We are a species of animal with particular capacities, unique perhaps (on this planet at least) in the wide range in which we are free to exercise them, but we are rightly uncomfortable when pushing the boundaries. We might get a thrill from looking over the edge of a cliff, but our senses tell us not to step over it, long before our reason gives us a full account for this caution. We may lose our moral sense through pathology or extreme adverse circumstance, but we would not do so gladly, because we know we would be losing a vital part of ourselves.
[I estimate half a dozen obvious objections to the argument above, and a good few less obvious. I'm happy to be given a free ride, but equally happy to be taken to task.]
Technically, I am well past done at this point, but someone posted about the evils of "piracy", in the sense of copyright infringement, so I couldn't resist:
Ah, thank you! I can't believe I didn't think of this example - it's only been absolutely central to much of my work life for the last 20 years or so. "Piracy", "intellectual property", copyright "protection" are classic examples of moral metaphors (hence the scare quotes). I've been a member of the free software community for nearly 20 years. Until the 1970s it hadn't occurred to anybody that computer software might be copyrightable, but then businessmen began calling the people who shared software in the (formerly) traditional manner "thieves" and "parasites" - more moral metaphors. In the free software community, we believe that the (now) usual terms and conditions which people don't read before checking the box that says they have read the terms and conditions, take too much freedom away from computer users. It's immoral to demand that of people who have legally acquired a copy of your software. So we don't create or use software that is distributed under terms that mean you can't freely use, share, modify, or improve the software. At least I don't except for when I have no alternative, such as when using the SCU campus computers, or Blackboard.
I was able to became a software developer thanks to the availability of free software, and working in that trade paid the bills for a good few years, hampered only by my utter hopelessness as a businessman. I even tried to organise Free Software Day events here in Coffs for a few years running. One of the best presentations we ever had at one of those events was by Anne Hellou from Coffs TAFE. She and her colleagues were using Blackboard in the course of doing their work, and found that it didn't quite work the way they wanted it to. However they did work out how to modify it to do what they wanted. Because they thought their modification would be useful to others, they thought it was only right that they send their modification to Blackboard Inc. so that other people could benefit from their work. Now you would expect that the response would be something along the lines of "Cool! Thanks." What they actually got from Blackboard Inc. was essentially a cease and desist letter, threatening them with legal action if they persisted in infringing copyright by using a modified derivative of Blackboard Inc.'s copyrighted work. So they switched to using the free software Learning Management System (LMS) Moodle, which they could freely modify, instead. Last time I bumped into Anne, a year or two ago, she said they're still happy Moodle users. So the moral question becomes, is making software, which you have legally acquired, more useful to yourself, and maybe also others, "stealing", or "piracy"? Either it must be, or those moral metaphors are misleading.
The rubber really hits the road (literally) when you realise that cars have become (physically) big computers that you ride around in, so software bugs have the potential to kill you, and the legal and technical ability to have that software scrutinised (and possibly fixed) by a trusted third party would be quite handy. If it so happened that you were technically, but not legally, able to do this and you did so, would you have then "stolen" your own car? Moreover phones are now (physically) small computers that just happen to make phone calls, and also have the potential to track your movements and listen to everything going on around you, and send that information to a third party - and you have no way of even knowing whether this is going on if you can't legally control all of the software that is on that device. Recently we learned that this is not a hypothetical problem. Is knowing you are not being tracked and bugged, at least not by your own phone, "piracy"?
Fine, so that is software. Artistic works must be a totally different matter, surely? Rampant "piracy" must be taking it's toll on artists' ability to make money. Well, it would if it were the case that more than a tiny minority were making money in the good old days of vinyl, or CD players that were read-only devices. I had a friend in school - with much more talent, ambition, and maturity than I had - who went on to start a band that became quite successful. More Triple J successful than mainstream successful, but still successful enough. Eventually some executive at Mushroom Records, coming to the same conclusion as the shrewd fellow at Decca who turned down the Beatles, decided that guitar bands are on the way out, and dropped a large contingent of their artists. This resulted in my old school chum being given all the unsold stock of his records as a farewell present, which he was now able to sell at gigs. This was the first time they had made so much as a cent from any of their recordings.
At the height of the Napster piracy panic Courtney Love gave us a reality check from the perspective of a mainstream music industry success:
"What is piracy? Piracy is the act of stealing an artist’s work without any intention of paying for it. I’m not talking about Napster-type software. I’m talking about major label recording contracts."
Basically, if you sign a contract with a record company, unless you have a massively successful career spanning decades, i.e. unless you are the Rolling Stones or U2, you will not make money from the sale of your recordings. And unless you are very successful, you will probably wind up owing money to your record company. Either way, the record company retains the copyright in the recordings, so you don't even have control over your own work. So it seems to me that since we can all now distribute digital works globally at virtually zero cost, this is a pretty bad deal. Nevertheless you're free to accept that deal if you like. I have a lot of music on vinyl (less on CD), but in recent years, I haven't had much reason to listen to music distributed under "all rights reserved" terms when there's a tremendous amount of great music distributed under terms that allow sharing. I recommend Studebaker's Blacksmith Shop, Brad Sucks, Fresh Body Shop, and Lorenzo's Music for starters.
There is a lot more I could say on this topic, but for our immediate purposes it is enough to observe that audio cassettes didn't "kill music" and the VCR didn't turn out to be "to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone". Metaphors like these, coined by those with vested interests, are obstacles rather than aids to understanding. Copying digital works may be legal in some cases, illegal in others, moral in some cases, immoral in others, but copying is not theft, and ideas are not property.
"He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me." - Thomas Jefferson.
Friday, 10 October 2014 - 6:21pm
[Shouting] "Swamp for sale! Swamp for sale!"
"Um… Hello?"
"Hello, yes?"
"This swamp you have for sale."
[Shouting] "Swamp for sale!"
"That's the chap. What kind of swamp is it?"
"What kind of swamp? How many kinds are there? The wet kind. The unpleasant to be in kind. The infested with nasty stinging biting things kind. Swamp for sale!"
"Is it zoned?"
"Is it zoned? Of course it's bleeding zoned! I wouldn't try to sell swamp that isn't zoned. In fact, I would venture to say that you couldn't get swamp that has been more thoroughly and comprehensively zoned. Swamp for sale!"
"What's it zoned for?'
"For? What's it zoned 'for'? It's zoned for mud and reeds and leeches and mosquitoes and rotting carcasses and stolen cars and shopping trolleys and indescribably horrid smells. In short, it's zoned for swamp."
"Well, can I build on it?"
"You can try. I wouldn't advise it. Swamp for sale!"
"What would I do with it, then?"
"Well, obviously you'd sell it. You'd be mad not to. Look, don't worry; it's perfectly simple. Repeat after me: Swamp for sale!"
"Swamp for sale."
"Good, good. A bit louder. More urgency. Swamp for sale!"
"Swamp for sale!"
"Splendid. Now just sign here."
"On this dotted line? Swamp for sale!"
"And again…"
"Swamp for sale!"
"No, I mean sign again down here."
"Oh, sorry. Swamp for sale! I say, there's nothing to it, once you get into the spirit of the thing. Swamp for sale!"
"Glad to have been of service. Best of luck."
"Swamp for sale! I say, where are you going?"
"Oh I'm off. Pleasure doing business with you. Try putting your shoulders back and projecting from the thorax: Swamp for sale!"
"Swamp for sale! I say, that is better. Ta-ra, then. Thanks for the advice. Swamp for sale! What a nice man. Swamp for sale!"
Sunday, 5 October 2014 - 11:41pm
I don't know how on earth I missed this. Normally I love nothing more than watching a large group of short stocky men with no necks clashing heads in "a five star performance" of "heart, courage, and desire". Thankfully, your correspondents have brought me all the way there, with the breathless description of a "f...ked" player, "blood flowing from his nose and mouth, his right cheek swollen and his eye closing up," as a "microphone" is stuck "in his battered face" by "a former kangaroo". Swelling, penetration, bodily fluids, metaphoric bestiality... Excuse me; I'm just having a little moment...
This final clinch had it all! What normal, manly Aussie bloke wouldn't want to take part in this "rugby league fairytale" including, hugging "part" owner Russell Crowe in the afterglow, before considering whether he might want to "do it all again"? There must be some sort of analogy to explain the allure that football holds for the average Australian male, but it continues to elude me…
Sunday, 5 October 2014 - 11:23am
University league tables are mostly a garbage-in-garbage-out statistical exercise, certainly irrelevant to prospective undergraduate students. But it is useful from the Group of Eight elite universities' point of view as a justification for fee deregulation; they provide a higher-quality product, so there should be price-based market segmentation. This is the only way that they're willing to swallow the expansion of deregulation of commonwealth-supported student numbers that the academically barren credential mills like Southern Cross University are demanding; by itself this expansion can only further undermine the academic integrity of the system - an irrelevant quibble for SCU, but very important for the Go8, who have a reputation to trade on.
So in recent weeks SCU's v-c (and chairman of the Regional University Network) Peter Lee has sold the non-elite unis down the river, and endorsed fee deregulation, in exchange for a promise of cross-subsidisation via scholarship funding assistance, effectively coming from the budgets of the Go8. Tactically this is immensely stupid. The Go8 need RUN's support this year, not next year, so very quickly any cross-subsidisation will evaporate: Sorry Pete, in these tough economic circumstances, we have no alternative; it would be unfair to our students who are making such a substantial investment in their futures, etc.
There are few university administrators with any integrity to be found in this squabbling morass. The mass market of kids utterly unsuited (at least at the age of 18) to university, who are swindled into volunteering for a more regressive tax than even the GST (i.e. HECS-HELP), are far from the only victims of credentialism. With the universities drained of the last remnants of their public purpose and irrevocably reconfigured as commercial institutions mainly providing vocational training and R&D for private industry (at the expense of the students and researchers!), public policy debates will become the exclusive domain of paid propagandists like the Institute of Public Affairs and the Grattan Institute (who, far from coincidentally, virtually authored the Pyne plan). Emigration is becoming an increasingly attractive option. Norway looks nice.
Thursday, 2 October 2014 - 2:51pm
Sigh. Where do I start? Last year I euthanised a small business I'd been failing to run for nearly a decade. The reason was that, for the business to work, I needed customers who were themselves businesses, and businesspeople in Coffs Harbour are incredibly thick. Really jaw-droppingly dim and mindless. (No exceptions: did I mention it took me 10 years to spot the obvious fact that I was on a hiding to nothing?)
I went to business networking breakfasts, chambers of commerce, training courses, business coaches, thinking I must be missing something; a town can't be run by morons! I met nobody who'd had an original thought in their lives, or read a book about anything but how to be "successful". I worked for a very important and highly-paid man who favoured a smart tie with his short-sleeved business shirts, two-finger-typing in all-capitals, squinting lest he be caught wearing his reading glasses - thereby diminishing his masculine dominance of the office, and whose only punctuation was the exclamation mark, preferably deployed in groups of three or more. I worked for another who replied to email by printing it out, scrawling over it in red felt-tipped pen, and express posting it to me.
I worked for consultants, advisers, snake oil peddlers, and tea leaf readers; the only clients I ever had who performed any useful function were community groups who could only afford to pay very little or nothing for my services. You might as well look for the secret to a vibrant and viable city in your sock drawer as in the local business community; they are only interested in scamming and in turn being scammed. These people thrive only because they are able to draw on the value created by the productive members of society, who in a town that runs on tourism and urban sprawl, are mostly underpaid children.
Friday, 26 September 2014 - 11:36pm
I just love the way that accommodation for four wheel drives has been built into this concept. We can all pretend we live sustainable carbon-neutral lives if we ignore the several tonnes of metal we have to move every time we leave the house. However this vision of a life-sustaining ideal society of individual consumers of a prestige architectural product, enjoying "outdoor living" within the bounds of their private property, is incomplete without the defensive walls and battlements that will be necessary in the long term to keep the unsustainable mass of the population at bay.
In fact, the need to open out to public streets is a major strategic weakness. The dumb brutes who cannot afford it will be envious of your sustainability, and will inevitably try to take it by force. Have you considered helipads? While you're at it, a sprinkler system deploying chemical defoliants to create a cordon sanitaire around the sustainable compound, thus denying any attacking lower classes ground cover, would be a sensible move. I'm not being critical; nobody expects the first iteration of a product to be perfect. I'm just saying that once you've made the commitment to respond to the world's multifaceted problems within, and only within, your own four walls, you must be prepared to destroy the world in order to heal it.
Tuesday, 9 September 2014 - 1:58pm
Will the last academic to leave SCU please turn out the lights? Bear in mind that the nominal 16 redundancies so far do not include the far larger number of casual academics who have just been told their services will no longer be required.
The sad thing is that this didn't have to happen. SCU vice chancellor and chair of the Regional Universities Network Peter Lee has been actively campaigning for greater university deregulation for years. Apparently at no time did it occur to him that the Jesuit-and-sandstone educated Prime Minister and his Jesuit-and-sandstone educated education minister might want to privilege their alma maters over the commercial interests of a handful of crappy vocational distance education colleges. Professor Lee and his colleagues could have been standing shoulder to shoulder with other university administrators demanding a restoration of genuine higher education. Instead they gambled on the professional credential Ponzi scheme running for ever. I expect their six-figure salaries will be some consolation as they proceed with the grim business of winding up their failed commercial ventures.