Another missive from the far side?

How do you refute 1500 words of totally incredible and unrealistic accusations in 350 words?

I'll pass.

Speaking of Misogyny the classic book by Joan Smith titled Misogynies has just been republished. Joan also has a truth-telling blog with the Guardian.

As opposed to her other lie telling blogs?

The first four to comment on this article do not appear to realize that there has been a war on democracy, by those who think they are born to rule, ever since Whitlam came to power.

I was present when a Collin's Street farmer neighbor of Fraser stated that Fraser had to get rid of Whitlam before the Hayden budget rescued the Labor Party.

The recent debate on superannuation was another excellent example. How many readers here understand that anyone receiving $100,000 per year of unearned income would be a mug to pay tax. Do the sums!

$100,000 income from share dividends earns about $42,800 in franking credits. The tax on $142800 is $40,780 so a refund of $2,100 is received. Hawke and Keating were responsible for that rort against wage and salary earners.

The only tax such a person pays out of his or her income is GST. We need a sensible progressive tax system.

We also need to give up having tall poppy CEOs. Peter Drucker, a renowned management writer in the 60s and 70s, wrote that the only sensible payment system, that ensured the survival of large companies in a competitive environment, required a senior management team where the top 5-7 on the team had a close salary range of about 75-100% of the top salary. That ratio should also apply over the four to six salary steps from front line supervisor to the top.

The theory that CEOs need a substantial share in the enterprise has been debunked. What the team needs is integrity. Otherwise the company, particularly any financial enterprise, will suffer from control fraud. Read W.K. Black on that subject at New Economic Perspectives.

Foyle -

We need a sensible progressive tax system

We also need to give up having tall poppy CEOs

What the team needs is integrity

I agree with the above points, however ......

What FFS do these have to do with feminists. Obviously I haven't read the original article because I have negative interest in anything even remotely feminist. When its all said and done, the most obvious feminist we've had inflicted on is in recent years is the red-headed witch, and surely nobody suggests that was a good move.

I have been doing a lot of thinking on the way social structures are created and what might cause them to change from an apparently stable condition to another apparently stable one. I'm not really interested in the role of individual people or specific structures as much as the environmental factors, such as the energy available to the society, the population density, trade.

It seems to me that social structures are inherently stable in the absence of a significant environmental change and that the less energy available, the more stable they are. In other words, the primary impetus for social dynamism is environmental and that energy is what drives it all. The individual human responses are interesting or tragic or inspiring but they don't lead to an empirical undertanding of the behaviour of the system.

It also seems to me that the rate of change in the environmental factors is important. A population that slowly increases will not be as destabilising as one that has a sudden spurt in growth. A sudden change in energy availability in either direction will be much more disruptive than a slow gain due to better farming practises. Trade with familiar partners won't disrupt like a sudden influx of new products.

There are feedbacks, of course. Population and energy are entwined and influence each other. Technology makes more energy acessible and population increases, or population increases and can access a larger area to source energy.

The worst social disruption occurs when there is a sudden increase or decrease in energy leading to fighting and war or social revolution and a change in the essential structure of society, especially in the distributive mechanisms.

The spike in population and energy availability over the last 500 years has created enormously disruptive and rapid change.

Feminism was a creation of the corporatist model that lead to globalism. I'm not sure it will survive through the next transition phase, which I suspect will be here within a decade or so, following the surge in available energy caused by globalism

The assault on living standards, permanent work and the environment is largely due to population growth.

Loading the planet ( incl. Australia) with more of our species is stupidity.

Balanced migration ( numbers out = in ) and Govt incentives for 2 children at around 30 years of age , is a "no brainer" for Australia and other countries of the World .

The "opportunity cost" of growth means we are investing in more people
(pollution) and not into quality outcomes of education, research, health and conservation.

In the next Senate election, vote preferentially for the Stable Population Party and join a force for good, rather than lies and wishful thinking.

Very best John,
Ralph

I adore John Pilger, but like so many men of the far left, he has his blind spots about women’s role in the so-called class struggle.

The late stages of Pilger’s impressive career have coincided with an unprecedented (but still woefully inadequate) appearance of women in positions of significant political power. However, these women – Hillary Clinton, Condoleezza Rice, Angela Merkel, Julia Gillard et al – have not fulfilled the male-Marxist fantasy of strong female class warriors for the common man [sic]. Instead, they quickly established themselves as class warriors, but for the ‘other side’. They have joined with the male establishment to screw the poor of both genders.

These women are mostly from privileged backgrounds and/or rightly made up their minds early on that the only route to political power is a social-conservative one. As every politician (and journalist) knows, if you want a mainstream career, then leftist politics is suicide. It shouldn’t be like that, but it is.

However, as gender warriors (as opposed to class strugglers), women like Gillard are fulfilling an important role of being visible to women and young girls as models of power and influence. In this, they have played an important feminist role. To conflate the class struggle with the gender struggle, as Pilger does, is to remain ignorant of the common fact of life for all women – i.e. that regardless of wealth or class, women must still operate within subcultures governed by men's rules.

Ralph Bennett - Balanced migration is a "no brainer" for Australia and other countries of the World

That good, given the demonstrable lack of functional grey cells typical of the red-headed witch and the RAbbott

Ralph, a stable population is not a realistic possibility unless it is in an equilibrium with the energy available, which would mean a sustained period of depopulating and a massive reduction in fossil fuel use. Don't like your chances.

Killarney:"male-Marxist fantasy of strong female class warriors for the common man"

I have that one all the time. Then I wake up screaming.

While a don't agree with Pilger's Maxist philosophy, he speaks a lot of truth that I agree with.

It is not a left/right argument,but one of fairness and the elites with their debt money creation system have the planet stuffed. World GDP = $70 trillion, world debt = $40 trillion. The debt can never be repaid because on average,the debt is more than twice the principal.

The elites almost have absolute power and they know it. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Their Bilderberg Meeting is now happening at Watford in England.140+ of the world's richest and most influential people meet each year to determine your future and mostly, they don't want you to have one. You are infringing on their planet and with advanced robotics,human labour and intelligence is mostly redundant to them.

What a hoot! John Pilger doesn't even seem to realise that he is the Bell Wether of the bourgeoisie, the "Right" want global socialism with state capitalism, the "Left just want global socialism at any price.

I get the feeling that John Pilger has run out of things to write about.

Praxidice –
I’m passing this on from a reader of the latest issue of Crikey. It argues that Foyle’s comment is highly relevant to Pilger’s article and to John Pilger.
....
This quote appeared in Counterpunch May 2013 under Jeffrey St Clair’s by-line.
It concisely summarises how the US has sunk to its lowest point as a society since its independence.
“Our politics has gone sociopathic and liberals in America have been pliant to every abuse, marinated in the toxic silt of Obama’s mordant rhetoric. They eagerly swallow every placebo policy Obama serves them, dutifully defending every incursion against fundamental rights. And each betrayal only serves to make his adoring retinue crave his smile; his occasional glance and nod all the more urgently. Still others on the dogmatic Left circle endlessly, like characters consigned to their eternal roles by Dante, in the ideological cul-de-sac of identity politics.
How much will we stomach before rising up? A fabricated war, a looted economy, a scalded atmosphere, a despoiled gulf, the loss of habeas corpus, the assassination of American citizens…
One looks in vain across this vast landscape of despair for even the dimmest flickers of real rebellion and popular mutiny, as if surveying a nation of somnambulists.
We remain strangely impassive in the face of our own extinction”.
…
[Note apt reference to cul de sac of identity politics – EmperorJulian]

EmperorJulian

I agree with the article, Australia is only a gnats whisker behind yankeeland in all respects. Other than the general descent into damnation however, I've yet to see the relevance of feminists ... unless you are saying you see them as part and parcel of the whole degradation of society scene.

Most of the ideas and solutions and non solutions here are simply crap.

People are capable of determining their our futures. That is the great lesson of liberal democracies.

How they accomplish that has been interferred with since the 'liberated sixties'.

What has happen since and will continue to occur is that individuals will express their acceptance or rejection of the dominant mores within a society. They don't rail against this or that or proclaim the latest 'intellectual' fad. They look at what works or fails in their own lives.

Currently people are very seriously exploring their own sexuality.
aka. '50 shades of grey". Btw it has been dumped as quickly as it was read. It was rubbish. The point was it was read by millions. You have to ask why when porn is so freely available.

The next step will be to question the moralities surrounding the basic activities in society. sex and reproduction.

That is occurring now.

After that and when those issues have been resolved how we interact will be questioned. Nobody can predict the outcome of that nor engineer how individuals will decide what is best for them. They will work that ou themselves . Liberal democracies and Capitalism will respond best to those decisions.

What will determine social structural features will be energy and its social analog, money.

Money is social energy, that flows in the opposite direction to physical energy. If I want to have energy expended on my behalf, I have to expend money. I think there is a direct analog between thermodynamics and economdynamics, which is that the total amount of money possesed by any entity consists of 3 forms, which are analogs of entropy, free energy and temperature.

Financial entropy is what is required to hold the structure together in any particular state. Our entropy is high. Financial temperature is the money in circulation internally that determines the entropy that can be maintained in a stable state. Ours is high, but the increased entropy embodied in the social policies of the Government is sucking it up. Free energy is the money available to do things externally, like trade or wage war. Ours is declining.

We're going to find ourselves very short on social energy, but with a highly structured set of government programs. It is inevitably going to lead to some of that structure collapsing to release the social energy it contains. I suspect that's going to continue for a lengthy period as the global system becomes more entropic and less money flows to us to add the social energy that is lost as useless heat.

don't be silly,anti, it is people who do things. sometimes money helps but in the current dynamic it is like cream on coffee, it dissolves, is tasteless and only changes appearance. ie it changes colour it doesn't change the fundamental.

Anticeptic, money is just not social energy. It is the medium of exchange that should not created as debt,by a few Central Banking parasites.

For the last 300 yrs a few elites have owned the very essence of our creativity and productivity by creating from nothing the money to equal it. We are their debt bitches seem to have no plan to be free of their oppression.

It's the difference between a stochastic result and a deterministic event. Individuals interact and exchange social energy depending on their individual states, influenced by the total amount of social energy and the entropy of the social structure. It's deterministic and effectively unpredictable from the system dynamics since so many things affect it.

However, the average of all individual interactions is predictable from the amount of financial energy contained within the system as a whole. It's a stochastic result and is robust.

I'm hypothesising, of course, extrapolating by analogy with other such dynamical systems. It seems to me that one of the most promising developments in sociology and psychology is the description of social interactions in dynamical terms. It's far from being out of the cradle, but it is what will let it emerge from the chaos of determinism.

At the individual level, it is important to understand what drives the specific processes in the interaction, but at the societal level it is important to be able to predict the impact of gross economic and other changes. I think that dynamics is the only way to go and I'd love to see some significant effort made to understand the kinetics, which would enable quantitative predictions to be made.

Arjay, think of the debt creation as an energy gradient generated by interaction with a large energy source that is able to convert some of its entropy into social energy which can be transferred and recovered over time from the system with a slight net increase due to the social heat (interest) that is also absorbed. The net result of all such transactions over time is that the bank becomes more entropic or complex as it absorbs enough heat to change it's state.

The rest of the system becomes slightly less financially energetic, but the gradients produced by the bank's activity allow financial energy to be transferrd locally at a greater rate, so the cooling is not general. If the social energy is used to make physical energy available for transfer outside the system, then the transfer of social energy back in would compensate for the loss of interest heat, but if it's just used to transfer social energy internally, then the system has a net loss to the bank's entropy.

In other words, taking out a loan allows the borrower to do more, but the overall economy is slightly worse off unless the loan does work that brings money in from outside.

While people are trying to keep up with mortgage payments they are too busy to revolt against what are creeping intrusions on their privacy, liberty and on democratic participation. There is a growing lack of transparency, restriction of information, punishemnt of whistleblowers and incursions on democracy.

The real war, if one wants to label it as such, is about who influences government. At the moment the influence is weighted too heavily in favour of those with power and money. The 1% vis a vis the Occupy movement.

To a large extent governments have forgotten about the people they represent, who elected them and to whom they are accountable.

pelican,

Agree with your paras one and three.

Para two doesn't matter, they are all as bad as one another.

pelican & onthebeach

Am I the only one who has come to the conclusion that the never-ending financial onslaught is other than accidental ?? Its certainly an effective distraction from the ineptitude of the clowns in Canberra

Pelican, it's all about trying to impose structure on a broken social fabric that has enormous amounts of energy floating around and which has had its basic structural unit, the lifetime pair bond, destroyed. The social energy released has allowed cracks to develop between the layers of society and the cultural fields which kept people within those layers are weakened. People drift together and apart depending only on their individual attraction, with little to keep them together. At any time either could be subject to a slightly greater attraction and drift off.

The more affluent layers are the ones which are maintaining greater coherence, because they had stronger cultural fields in the first place. Even if a pair bond is ruptured, the individuals are recaptured within that social matrix and form new bonds within it.

At every level the structure is under stress and it is only maintained by local cultural force. Even at the very top, the structure is under stress and is breaking apart, with Gillard being held in her social position only because a great deal of force is being applied which is sufficient to overcome her poor fit within the matrix.

The only thing holding everything together is the cultural forces that financial redistribution brings about and since that is dependent on the amount of energy that our society consumes it is going to end very soon.

We are going to experience a great deal of social chaos and our social structure is going to change dramatically over the next decade or two. I suspect that there will arise some new cultural organising principle which is not identifiable at the moment.

Anti

The old moralities and structures that had at their apex the 'the lifetime pair bond,' hasn't been destroyed. It has been seriously questioned. aka divorce.

What is occurring is a reevaluation of the pyramid morality that gives greatest value to 'the lifetime pair bond'. Today men tend to see relationships on a continium and give equal value to all relationships on that continium.(apart from promiscuious or user type relationships to which they attach no value.) Women have not yet done that. They are overwhelmingly still stuck in the morality based on the beliefs of societies that thought women as chattels( The old testament) and futher contrived by celibate priests in the dark ages (aka St Augustine.) and it's evolutions since.

pleased you agree.

praxidice
I have not yet determined whether the financial onslaught is accidental or contrived. It might just be incompetence and a case of the snowball that gets away, too late to pull it back.

Anti
It is a complex issue because some of the older social fabric was flawed. I think there can be value in all sorts of family structures as long as those structures provide the emotional supports that foster wellbeing.

One of the problems is that with change has come the question of what do we do with the children. I have a strong personal belief that children are best raised at home at the very least until they start school. Many will disagree with me and see it as an attack on feminism. It is not, it is about allowing choices and having the infrastructure to support various choices, or at least make them possible. We have essentially outsouced part of the responsibility of raising of children to institutions.

There is accepted a new social construct that 'we can have it all'. Nobody can have it all. It is a intrinsically a selfish concept. Sacrifice is deemed as a betrayal of some cause, more to productivity and the worst aspects of capitalism than feminism. I think feminism has been hijacked by those goals to a large extent. It is time for feminism to morph into a more humanistic path IMO as long as those uniquely male and female issue are not ignored for the sake of political correctness.

OTB
You may be right about them all being the same. The key is to improve democracy through greater participation within a reasonable and pragmatic framework.

Pelican, yes, of course it was flawed, but what has replaced it is essentially unstable.

It's only possible with the active intervention of Government to provide the support that the family unit used to provide. Even those in a family unit are not free of such intervention and that is a force pulling on the bond and loosening it. If that intervention was not there, then the social arrangement would collapse into a new stable state in which pair bonds were the basic unit. Do you really think that your grandmother was less happy than any random woman alive in Asutralia today? I don't, she knew where she fitted into the social fabric, she knew what she was doing, she knew how to do it, she knew she was good at it and she knew she had no competition for her job. How many women can say that today?

Imajulianutter, the value of the pairbond is unquestioned. All that has happened is that a mob of spruikers have peddled petty resentments and offered trinkets that make the pair bond seem stodgy and stale. Once the trinkets run out the trouble will really start.

The carnival's in town and it's women only, but the men are paying for them to go.

pelican

I think you too are on the right path. The family law and courts that support shared parenting is the evuidence supporting our views.

I think when it comes to economic's it is the economics that responds to the changing social mores, which are changing, are the economics which will predominate.

To that end we are in a state of social or relationship and moral change. After that is settled economic values will fit into that new social structures. We are seeing that currently in some way, though crude and to be developed, with paid parental leave, part time work with an acceptance of the need to interact with offspring and partners and the non discrimitory nature of those.

Capitalism will best adapt to those changes.

Anti

I don't dispute, 'the value of the pairbond' nor do I question it. What I question is the acceptance that the LIFELONG pair bond as the apex of relationships.

I think it no more value than the pair bond that produces loved and valued children regardless of it's duration. I see it as no more of value than the lifelong pairbond of childless couples. I see it as no more value than the pairbond of very ill partners who form temporary pairbonds wth younger lovers in order to heal. I see it as no more value than the pair bond of life long partners who can now, due to air travel, maintain intermittant contact over forty years. I see it as no more value than partners who have multiple pairbonds over 40 years.

get the gist? There are numerous combinations of possible pairbonds. None more valued than the others.

Currently most males sexuality and our family law recognise all those relationships as equal. That is the change from the introduction of the pill. People who are stuck in the regimentation of the old hierachial moralities, who happen to be mostly women, don't seem to be able to come to terms with those new changing atitudes.

When feminism goes back to addressing the basic inequalities of the old moralities and understands modern female sexualities it will gain traction with modern women.

But there again the feminists just might prefer the mysognists models.

You may well be right. As I said I think there will be some new organising principle arise and I think that will have to include the pair bond as a fundamental structure.

You're right that the lifelong pair bond is not essential, but a series of pair bonds for a lifetime probably is. A lot of the tension being caused at present is because of the fact that the pair bond is not definitively broken at divorce, but becomes highly strained through the mechanism of child support.

That has created enormous problems for men seeking to reestablish themselves, because the energy they should have available to make new bonds is maintaining a bond with someone else, while they are not actually interacting with that other person in any meaningful way.

That in turn has meant that women who want to be part of a bonded pair are left with only a partial bond, instead of a fully committed relationship.

Everybody loses, but the structures that exist to make that stretched bond happen get stronger.

ahhh anti

I agree with your openmindedness. As well as negatives there will be balancing positrives. I don't think we have found all the answers but we are certainly asking the questions.

What do you think are my attitudes towards fidality in the pairbond?

It is not as outrageous as the community found the attitude of Bertrand Russell in Morals and Marriage in 1931, It is more confronting though.