Global Civil War

Global Civil War is my terrible prediction.  While writing to New Whig, commenting about Peter Dutton, an unabashed racist, I added that: "Politics is too extremely polarised. In Her Majesty's United Kingdom (Aus is a separate realm) the Labour Party (u are in Labor in the UK) has just elected as leader Jeremy Corbin even further to the left than Ed Miliband; many European parliaments have powerful, extreme parties.
If the social fracture persists with a continually widening rift, the only outcome can be an eventual Global Civil War."  I could not add the emphasis on FaceBook.  I then added: "Is this the first place to write this?" or something similar, which I deleted as pretentious but then found there was no such Wikipedia page.  I haven't done a google search yet, but there were Wikipedia references to multiple electronic games.

West Asia is already fighting civil wars, not national wars.  This is partly because national borders mean less within the ummah.  It is easy to see how these issues could spread.  Support for either side in these conflicts has become a political issue in many countries, and combined with other idealistic issues like the supposed plight of the palestinians and alleged global warming.

Civil war in China is more likely than China being at war in a traditional way with the rest of the world or some other countries.  The Chinese are too canny for that; Economic War perhaps, and certainly well played brinkmanship. With a widespread Chinese diaspora, this civil war could easily take root in other countries, where it could inject energy into other social disputes and combine to form new fronts in the Global Civil War.

The United Kingdom is becoming more extremely divided.  Scotland has swung far to the left by almost totally endorsing their Nationalist Party, which on social issues is to the left of Labour.  (It is symbolic that U/you, is/are in UK Labour, but excluded from the Australian Labor Party, but they are both shifting left.)  The Occupy Movement showed how realistic people's action can be.

In Melbourne, regular popular demonstrations block the most visible intersection between the station, the pub and the church, sometimes spontaneously erupting in response to a new issue.  While these are small, they indicate the level of energy in the community and the ease and speed at which people can be mobilised in this electronic age.

Civil Wars are nasty business.  They can cause more deaths that inter-national wars. Britain has a history of civil wars, including the War of the Roses.  The Americas have had civil wars on both continents, and European history is full of revolutions and civil wars.  There is nothing to suggest humanity has changed.  Civil wars are fought on home territory, not distant battlefields, at sea or in space.

The dispute between Israel and the Palestinians is a civil war between two nations trying to share a single land, except that the problem is perpetuated by the international, anti-Semitic Moslem policy of using the un-helped Palestinians, particularly in Gaza, to demonise Israel.  The ancient dispute between branches of Islam is also civil war that could become internationalised due to the minorities in so many countries that only require enemies of their enemies to burst into action.

New Play

New Play

About a guy, based on me, married to a woman based on Billy.  She is not on stage at the start but makes an entrance half way through the first act.

He is a moderately successful architect.  Part of the action is his arguments with bureaucrats about a development or extension or something.

Anyway, the wife is an addict.  Notes to the script can suggest that the production make her an addict to what ever is plausible at the time.  I don’t want to lock in a drug.  Perhaps after drugs are legalised and normalised, there will be something of an equivalent.

Anyway, a visit from her supplier occurs in each act.  There is discussion on the virtues of the illegality. 

Perhaps I can make it a vehicle for my Melba Opera House idea.  There should also be a mother in law.  Clearly there is tension between He and Her’s family.  She can be from an aristocratic, Toorak family, old money, with the proceeds of selling the ancestral homestead and property, dating back to Selectors.  No problem knowing who she is based on.

It is a Melbourne play, about identifying with Country.  It is also about retributive justice and using the Law to punish people.  Everyone has secrets.  She about the drugs from her mother.  We later learn the Dealer has imunity and can keep dealing because he feeds information about his clients. It is why He misses out on some contract or tender, or prize.

She may in fact be of aboriginal descent.  Many old families hushed up such a thing long ago.  Opens the debate into what it means to be Australian.

Ok, so the Architectural competition behind the play is for an Opera House for Melbourne.  The winner is a foreign conglomerate design in Port Philip Bay, with a Racing Circuit round it and hotels and wealthy apartments.  Not a people’s place.

There had better be a Grand Daughter, so we have the three phases of womanhood.  Perhaps she can act as a kind of “chorus”.  She might break the fourth wall.  She ruminates on her life and family as if they were a play she was watching or caught up in.  The unreality of it.  When she is left alone with the Dealer for some reason, they can have a big argument.  Good place to put Economic ideas. He would be New Capitalist, she New Anarchist.  

scrap of dialogue

D: You only want to win because you think you can get a knighthood, now. 

H: That is ridiculous.  It is an important competition that I am entering to have my vision for Melbourne built.  I don’t care about the recognition, though I admit that would be nice.  And I am not after a knighthood. 

D: You were very supportive of the idea when it was reintroduced, when everyone else in Australia was ridiculing. 

Perhaps the four scenes can be each week, on the same day.  The play could be called “Tuesday”.  Or else the day could be what ever day the actual performance was on.  I like the idea of changing a performance, perhaps making it time relevant.  Time is cyclical.  This play is cyclical.  Not the same day repeated, like Groundhog Day, or many others, but life repeating another, new day’s, similar activities in similar order.

H: If Aus had become a Republic we would not be having this question.

D: Well, I like the Queen and all the Royal Family.  Why do you want to get rid of them?  They aren’t doing any harm, don’t cost much, what ever you say, and some people say they provide stability to our constitution, and without it we would lose our connection to a thousand years of constitutional development and all that tradition, and become just another new, young republic, whose government is open to any faction that gains power through whatever means.

H: Of course the Royals would be welcome to visit, and you can take just as much interst in them whether they are our Monarch or not.

D: But that is silly.  They are only celebrities because they actually are real royalty.  The world has dozens of deposed monarchs and other nobility, and no one ever hears about them.

H: Don’t be so sure.  The Surbian Royal Family is back in their Palace and filling many of the social activities of their ancestors, like marking important national days, without any political power.  He calls himself “Crown Prince” and is just waiting for his coronation. 

D: That just shows how relevant the Crown is to the Constitution.

Her’s speech, Act 2?

You have no idea what it was like growing up in my family.  The expectations were intense. Failure was ignored after praise for being a good loser.  But no help!  Oh, no! We were expected to do it all by ourselves. 

I saw siblings and cousins receive heaps of praise for their achievements, their ambitions, but anything I did was regarded as trivial.  Worse, any time I did manage to start something by myself, suddenly “he” would destroy everything I had started to do, just so “he” could help me start.  I remember starting to climb a ladder as a toddler, and making it up a few rungs before he saw me and came running.  Instead of praising me for being able to do it, which Marcia, my therapist says a normal father would do, he grabbed me and pulled me off the ladder, put me down on my knees, although I had stopped crawling by then, and grabbed a hand and said he would teach me how to climb ladders.  I just burst into tears, so “he” yelled something at me and walked off.

I felt I was lost in a dark forest, like in my story books, but I didn’t know there was a way out, didn’t know I should try and get out, and no indication of which way to go, anyway.

Perhaps there will be four scenes, two in the first Act.  In each “Dealer” comes in, has conversation with daughter and father separately, perhaps one each time, then “her” comes in, but takes whatever it is out of room.  I don’t want any jeckle/hyde transformations happening on stage.  No demonstration of paraphernalia, or methods of administering.  Anyway, she returns a different person, more “real”, honest, perceptive, etc.  Defensive, vulnerable sad.  Aggressive and in control. Perhaps differently each of the four times. 

The fourth time, she comes back very “natural” and life of the party and efficient, as if she had worked through her other problems, but still obviously with the dependency, but that is now seen as harmless, though costly, and indeed beneficial if kept in control.  This in contrast to “Him”s demise, because this is a tragedy, with the tragic floor of goodness.

New Story, perhaps a play. 

A  group of year twelve people.  When they were sixteen they became sexually active and all screwed around a lot including with each other, and now are bored with sex and certainly don’t want to do it with each other.  The Education System has been made very easy for intelligent children to coast through, with good results made easy, or else their futures are mapped out for them through family obligations or connections or social limitations.  Essentially, they are bored.

They decide to commit the perfect murder.  So the play becomes a debate about the morality of death.  They expect their success will come from the unexpectedness.  It must obviously be a murder, but one that is mysterious and inexplicable.  It has to be someone distant from everyone and they consider a random person, but then decide to ensure the person has no connection to any of them, and to their astonishment , everyone in the whole city has some remote, but not insignificant connection to someone in the group.

 

 

The legality of Israeli settlements

This is a major issue as so many people keep wrongly claiming these settlements are illegal.



The legality of the settlements | JPost 



Irrespective of this the Palestinians do not want Israel to exist at all, forget two states, and instead of half of Jerusalem, they want to "liberate" all of it.



Hamas in Gaza rally professes hatred of Israel 

Public Transport costs de-disadvantaged - slightly!

Vindicated!



I argued for years with whomever would listen that we should have only one zone.  The cost of double touching far exceeds the extra revenue, and penalises the less fortunate who have to travel further.  Finally, the Government has woken up. But mass-transport should still be free, walk-on-walk-off.  "Free Bread, Beer and Busses" was my campaign slogan when I stood for parliament a while back.



Commuters in Melbourne’s outer suburbs to see public transport costs slashed under Napthine plan

Washing Socks, deserves reblogging, what ever that means.

I have lived through the sexual revolution.  When I was young (that sounds so sad;-) there were just people, undifferentiated by sexual orientation.  Then the idea was promulgated and generally accepted that some people are biologically born to be homosexual, and they deserve full rights.  Homosexuality used to be a behaviour but now it is an ontological state, and is part of who someone is, not what they do.  However laudable this movement is, it has now largely run its course.  It is generally accepted that for homosexual, "gay" people of both genders to indulge in homosexual behaviour.  It is assumed that other people will not want to, but this is false.  I don't know about women, but I do know that many adolescent males, not only in Australia, indulge in private homosexual behaviour, sometimes going all the way, which is seen by them as just mucking around, and not real sex as there are no women involved.  They do it very secretly and believe themselves to be the only people who are doing that sort of thing.  What ever the present level of actual homosexual activity between heterosexual men, in a few years it will start to be socially acceptable for "straight" men to play round with each other in a sexual way, without actually being "homosexual" or "gay".  This was the situation in some ancient societies including the well documented Classical Greeks, hence the term "greek love".  Possibly, religious, moral or even legal sanctions will come back into play to minimise this social trend, even if it remains acceptable for registered and "out" homosexual people, perhaps after a genetic test, are permitted to openly live a homosexual lifestyle with full social benefits, etc.

Does morality move in waves?  With a trend towards more or less social control over individual behaviour, gradually over time in a particular culture, with gradual influence across national and regional boundaries, so the waves are out of phase.  Personally, I favour greater personal freedom.  I lived in India for about a year, a few decades and a couple of lifetimes ago, and everyone lived a very public life, by our Western standards, Families all slept in one big bed in the attic, and public nudity was generally avoided but tolerated or ignored.  But I do think the elevation of freedom of speech to a sacrosanct level is wrong, especially the proposed removal of 18C that stops anti-Semitism.

[To Xians: we didn't kill your deity, Rome did that.  When Rome became the centre of the Church, blame had to be deflected.  The present Roman Catholic Church is the direct continuation of the old Roman Empire, just changed a lot.  The religious head is still the Pontifex Maximus.  The psychological implications of the guilt they must feel for being the very people who killed their own deity must be enormous.  They have gone to great lengths to cover it up and blame us Jews.  How long can they hold out against the forces of reason and continue to believe their ancient mythologies?  It looks like it will still be a very long time, but with these things everything can suddenly change, like a mathematical catastrophe, so who knows?  I may live to see it.]