First step to solve Melbourne's urban crisis

In today’s Age, Brian Buckley shows that devastation is threatened by Melbourne having a projected population of seven million by 2049 – and this in a city with no fresh water and a climate as hot and dry as that of Arabia!

Buckley is right to be appalled that Melbourne emits more carbon than London – a city twice the size and living on soils with an order of magnitude more soil nutrients per unit area.

If ecological justice remotely existed, the average resident of Melbourne would emit no more than one thousandth the carbon of the average European city, simply because the ancient Australian environments are so fragile.

To achieve ecological justice Australia must:

1. put an absolute ban on new non-residential roads
2. tranfer a rail:road spending ratio of 1:4 to at the very least a situation where rail spending exceeds road and air combined
3. make car, mining and fossil fuel corporations pay the entire cost of climate-related disasters like bushfires and the Queensland floods
4. phase out irrigation in at least the southern Murray-Darling Basin (which global warming models strong suggest will soon become desert)
5. aim to revegetate as much farmland as possible with native flora
6. use fuel taxes to pay for rail as well as road construction

The trouble with achieving any of these goals is that Buckley cannot understand the emotional benefits a sprawling city has, viz:

1. at least three times as much housing space (or, as much space per person for a four-child family as for a one-child family in Europe or Asia)
2. because larger families build deeper emotional ties, people become more compassionate and sensitive
3. lower mean house prices in suburbs add to the increased possibility of family formation
4. the much slower pace of life vis-à-vis densely settled European and Asian cities (I can testify to this from living even a few days in London how incredibly fast-paced it was compared even with inner Melbourne)

A fast-paced and hectic lifestyle, as Rod Dreher wrote in his excellent book Crunchy Cons, encourages a shallow, highly materialistic and unemotional lifestyle in which satisfaction of the ego overrides everything.
Dreher argues that the lifestyle of noisy cities is of itself as force against tradition. Sprawling suburbs, as I can testify living in Ashwood and Keilor Downs, are much quieter and slower-paced, giving people much more time for reflection. The slower pace also offers, according to Dreher, opportunities for socialisation that are hard in the inner city. E. Michael Jones (a writer whom I have definite distaste for) apparently made a similar argument in his book Living Machines.

That selfish materialism dominates the culture of Europe, Asia, Canada and New Zealand there can be no doubt. David D. Kirkpatrick shows people in those nations to be obsessed with individual choice to the complete exclusion of tradition or morality. They wish to have the highest-quality and most individual records and books in a manner that serves, if you will, to build bigger and bigger egos and leave no room for relationships. (Those on welfare tend to be even more materialistic in this way, as Arthur Brooks shows).

For the majority who are not autistic or otherwise lacking empathy, such a culture and lieftstyle is extremely repellant. Like a magnet, even modestly empathetic people are lured to Melbourne's sprawling suburbs, and want conditions under which their way of life is not threatened. Buckley does not consider that sustainable development in Australia would require a severe effort both

1. at home by not pandering to a powerful road lobby and
2. abroad by sanctioning Australia for its exceptionally bad environmental standards and realising that its living costs are, ecologically, untenably low

The Janjawid and rhinos

Long interested in poaching of rhinos because of their rarity and the knowledge of how their horns are used to make ceremonial daggers in Yemen and medicines in now-affluent nations of East Asia, it is terrifying to know that in the present economic downturn rhino poaching is increasing after efforts to stabilise rhino populations in the eighties and nineties.

What is surprising is that, in Sudan and Chad, poaching of the now extinct Northern White Rhino constituted a major source of funding for Muslim terrorist groups known as the Janjawid. The Janjawid are camel-herding tribes of the eastern Sahel who have been the major force kiling non-Muslims in southern Sudan and adjacent Chad over the past decade. The price of rhino horn is so high that the Janjawid, even with no more rhinos to kill, still have a good deal of money from their operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo where the last Northern White Rhinos were found. More than that, the Janjawid also have elephants to poach for ivory if they run out of rhino horn.

What is more revealing still is that Janjawid insiders admit that the Sudanese government sponsors poaching. Doing such a thing is terrifying even for a country that is not a signatory to CITES (neither is Yemen) but is shows extremely bad behaviour on the part of the Asian dealers who buy rhino horn and who are signatories to CITES.

How will the media view the Nineties?

In dissecting Jonathan Leaf's The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Sixties, I have noticed how commentators note here that

The media has always seemed to look down its collective nose at the Fifties, and the Seventies, and even the Eighties. (How could the media, with its usual biases, not despise a decade dominated by Reagan - and at its end - by the collapse of communism?)

What I have been thinking about lately is the question of how the media will come to view the Nineties.

The first thing I considered analysing this question is whether the media will support the Nineties simply because for most of the decade a Democrat was President - something that occurred in the Sixties but not in any of the decades said to be criticised by the left-wing media. The spread of democracy in poorer nations and the end of (at least outside the Middle East) US-sponsored overthrows of governments for moving too close to Communism is another reason for praising the Nineties. The efforts to deal with the ecological crisis (though Mariana Trench-level petrol prices prevented anything from being done in the US at least) are another reason for praising the 1990s. The related Kyoto Protocol and successful phase-out of CFCs and halons will make the 1990s, despite the radical climate changes which are too little-known outside Australia's scientific community, possibly further praised.

Although Nirvana and other grunge bands have not maintained the critical reputation they once had, there remains the popular viewpoint that the 1990s saw the demise of many of the worst moments in music history, such as the middle-of-the-road muzak that dominated 1980s America.

There is also the point of the PMRC being largely overthrown and bans on politically correct rap and metal being eliminated.

On the other hand, there are many serious issues about the Nineties that would make support for it difficult. One of course is the fact that teen pop and nu-metal, which the fashionable hate. I would also say that the Nineties stand as the only decade since 1950 where, in Jonathan Leaf's words,

the most important (new) intellectuals were on the political Right.

The Nineties saw a major reaction to the radicalism of the Bush Senior era. Even though it was led by Silent like Pat Buchanan, Robert Bork, Peter Kreeft, Donna Steichen and Judith Reisman, it soon grew to encompass younger writers like E. Michael Jones, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Rush Limbaugh, Roger Kimball and Dinesh D'Souza. Another big conservative moment in the Nineties was the publication in 1996 of Michael J. Behe's Darwin's Black Box, whose theory of "intelligent design" has become a clarion call for many people who find Darwinism inherently radically nihilistic. I must say that "intelligent design" is a less convincing argument that most things coming from Regnery.

All in all, it is hard to tell if the Nineties will be remembered more favourably by "politically correct" media than the Seventies or Eighties. My brother has even said that it is unlikely there will be such strong emotions about the Nineties as exist about the Sixties and even the Eighties (both of which are actually similar in that they began conservative and ended with a radical cultural revolution).

Was the 1989 Sydney Morning Herald wrong?

Yesterday I read a special Sydney Morning Herald article from the end of August 1989 to commemorate fifty years sicne the outbreak of World War II.

Such a finding is of itself nothing to seriously note, except that I found a very interesting article about how, contrary to what was believed at the time, Japan's imperial government had never planned an actual invasion of Australia, as apparently some 1980s historians thought. It said that Japan would have required a full twelve divisions for an invasion of Australia, and that doing so would have necessitated a diversion of huge numbers of troops away from the war being fought with China over Manchuria. The article also said that the Japanese would have, despite the absence of opposition to invasion in the north of Australia, had a great deal of trouble with an invasion of Australia because of the extremely harsh environment in the north and centre of the continent, to which their troops would have been completely unsuited. The Sydney Morning Herald said that Australia's military would have had a major advantage had their been a war on our soil, which even with the climatic differences compared to Australia's milder southern regions,

What I cannot agree with is the idea that there would have been no point for Japan to try to invade Australia, for reasons relating to Australia's vast and still not-fully-explored mineral resources. However, in the years of the Great Depression, the proportion of Australia's economy contributed by mining reached its lowest level on record, and it has risen since.

Because of this fact, the Imperial Japanese would naturally have failed to realise how much benefit they could have gained from invading Australia. If the Japanese had succeeded in gaining control of Australia's metal ores, there would have been a chance to monopolise valuable industrial resources that would have been as valuable in peacetime as in war, which would have given them an economic power far greater than they gained from the postwar "economic miracle". The history of Europe and East Asia after the war shows how a boom in a resource-free nation cannot be sustained because of the cultural changes no industrialising nation except those with abundant flat land has ever escaped. (In this context, it is interesting to see what effect Federation in 1901 had on Britain's twentieth-century history by removing Australia's enormous undiscovered resources?)

The most ridiculous song list ever

Today, as I was searching for possible blogs on music to make sure I can discuss it better than I have been lately, I found a list that makes me laugh hard because it is so, so, so absurd!

It was titled Top Ten Songs for Obama Haters and was originally written by the Miami New Times. When I saw it I was really curious because I wondered so much what songs of significance would criticise Obama or - if older than Obama's presidential campaign - would have themes coherent with the current opposition to him?

As it turned out, the songs were, with two exceptions, songs that I had never heard of. The full list is:

1. ‘Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother,’ (by Jerry Jeff Walker and written by Ray Wylie Hubbard)
2. ‘Teach Your Children’ (by Crosby, Stills and Nash)
3. ‘Ignorant ****’ (by Jay-Z)
4. ‘Liar, Liar’ (by the Castaways)
5. ‘Conservative Christian, Right Wing, Republican, Straight, White, American Males’ (by Todd Snider)
6. ‘Waves of Fear’ (by Lou Reed)
7. ‘People Putting People Down’ (by Bob Dylan; written by John Prine)
8. ‘Highway to Hell’ (by AC/DC; written by Angus Young, Malcolm Young and Bon Scott)
9. ‘Your Racist Friend’ (by They Might Be Giants)
10. ‘Rednecks’ (by Randy Newman)

All of these are either unknown joke songs or ones that do not make sense. ‘Rednecks’ could fit the bill because it could be seen as a defence of racism with the use of “n******”, but ‘Your Racist Friend’ is an attack on someone for befriending racists, and thus would be pro-Obama. ‘People Putting People Down’ is analogous, whilst ‘Waves of Fear’ may have been chosen because it reflected fear of loss of personal control under Obama, though nothing in its lyrics is directly anti-liberal.

However, of the top five songs only ‘Teach Your Children’ and ‘Ignorant ****’ are likely to be at all familiar. The former was chosen because it encouraged children to listen to parents instead of politicians - which any sensible person would see as decent advice.

‘Ignorant ****’ is a ridiculous choice even if it is vilely anti-female (which as we shall see is not so politically incorrect as people think), whilst the other three songs in the Top Five are just ludicrously silly conservative pieces nobody except specialised listeners could possibly know and which offer no constructive criticism of Obama.

However, what really amazes me is the inclusion of AC/DC’s ‘Highway to Hell’. For a start, every website of almost any Right faction will deny the justification given for its listing. The real problem is however that, more than any other band in music history, AC/DC have driven Western culture in precisely the direction desired by the modern Democratic Party and almost every party in Europe, Canada and New Zealand. AC/DC, as a result of their catchy songs and populist working-class message of easy fun with not the tiniest restraint, have turned the West towards a libertinism and radical individualism that has no room for any ethical standards. Their songs contrast with even the pre-AC/DC rock era where many singers had a sense that there was a definite “wrong” ethically and that what rock musicians were doing could have consequences, as is noted by JKM here.

The playing of ‘Shoot to Thrill’ on the radio has always startled me because the lyrics quite explicitly say one should kill the defenceless if one desires, especially women. However, AC/DC’s sexism is hardly that politically incorrect. It is undeniable that radical feminists, rather than protest as I imagined they would have back in 1980 when Back in Black came out, instead found clear common ground with AC/DC. They view AC/DC’s songs as a call to completely shed all femininity and create a culture consisting only of males. If we should define Left and Right in terms of defeminisation (left) versus refeminisation (Right), then we can see that AC/DC would be seen as “far left” even if apolitical. Add their cultural influence in turning society towards people like Obama and it becomes a total joke to have a list of songs for “Obama haters” containing anything by them.

All in all, one must see the Miami New Times as having made a list, than which I can hardly imagine anything worse.