Kudos to Kelvin Thompson, federal Labor MP, for having the courage to stand up to the “eternal growth” fools who currently dictate economic and development policies in the western world and point out that excessive population growth is the root cause of most of our serious problems.

It is time for governments and policy makers around the world to come to their senses and take steps to stabilise the world’s population,” he said. “It needs to happen in every country, including here in Australia – especially here in dry, arid Australia.

This probably qualifies Mr Thompson as a member of the ‘green fascists’ that The Australian is always banging on about.

And it’s the best form of discrimination too – the kind by private citizens and businesses against other private citizens, so that we can all agree that they are “free” to refuse to accept business from anyone they want in the wonderful “free” market.  Of course if they did that because a person was, say, Catholic, they’d be hauled over the coals for weeks, Inquisition-style.

Admittedly looking quite intimidating (see link), the jacket does not in fact come with a mind control device to turn its wearer into a shoplifting criminal maniac at this stage. Nevertheless, the usual brilliant minds (business groups, populist politicians, and the “think of the children” lobby) have immediately suggested that:

• the jackets are “inciteful, provocative and sinister”
• they are a tool for “hooligans”
• they are “almost Klu Klux Klan”
• they should be banned in order to stave off a descent into anarchy

Needless to say, none of these critics has stopped howling for long enough to wonder whether Britain’s pervasive surveillance culture, with 4.2 million CCTV cameras, has anything to do with the popularity of a garment which allows one to remain anonymous in a public space.

We live in an era of instinctive, reactive and ill-informed leaders and followers, marked by contempt for truth, living by the dictum that the end justifies the means. It hardly matters whether that view is driven by cynicism or ideology.

Jones urges a return to the era of the public intellectual, where serious issues are put on trial in a public arena through relatively spin-free, objective debate.

Activists in public life – politicians, academics and journalists – must make a commitment to restoring the primacy of reason, rejecting a paranoid view of history and telling truth to power. As he lay dying, Leo Tolstoy reaffirmed his commitment to rationality: “Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two plus two does not make six.”

The piece is light on detailed suggestions of how we can turn the situation around – like many progressives and rationalists, he is good at identifying the problem but not so good on suggesting realistic ways in which it can be addressed.  Nevertheless, it is well worth a read.

While we’re on the subject, the ABC persists in referring to David Hicks as a “convicted terrorism supporter” in its reports. Hicks, of course, has never been before a legitimate court of law and has never been convicted of anything, other than a guilty plea he entered before an illegal and non-judicial tribunal which had through its agents been torturing him and depriving him of human rights for several years.

The authors investigated the role of homosexual arousal in exclusively heterosexual men who admitted negative affect toward homosexual individuals. Participants consisted of a group of homophobic men and a group of nonhomophobic men (n = 29); they were assigned to groups on the basis of their scores on the Index of Homophobia. The men were exposed to sexually explicit erotic stimuli consisting of heterosexual, male homosexual, and lesbian videotapes, and changes in penile circumference were monitored. They also completed an Aggression Questionnaire. Both groups exhibited increases in penile circumference to the heterosexual and female homosexual videos. Only the homophobic men showed an increase in penile erection to male homosexual stimuli. The groups did not differ in aggression. Homophobia is apparently associated with homosexual arousal that the homophobic individual is either unaware of or denies.

Of course wheeling this paper out next time some macho jerk is being homophobic is unlikely to be good for your physical safety, but it might provide the basis for a smug smile in any event.

(via Growing Passion).

For example, on Iraq, Gore highlights the complete failure of the media and the body politic to disassociate September 11 from the Hussein regime:

…if we had a full debate and a full airing of the pros and cons of the invasion that brought out the fact that Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with attacking us on 9/11 then we would have been much less likely to have these troops trapped over there now in the midst of a civil war.

And on the US generally, he has many interesting thoughts on the direction the country could be taking:

Gore calls for the United States to rejoin the international community and lead the war on crises involving global warming, water, terrorism and pandemics such as HIV/AIDS. He calls for a repeal of the Patriot Act, and for the Bush administration to disclose all of its interrogation policies. He wants more transparency in political TV commercials and an expediting of the shift from television toward the Internet as a method of communication.

Gore’s statements can sometimes sound excellent but, on closer examination, prove to be little more than generalised, warm-and-fuzzy liberalism without too many fiddly details. Nevertheless, a political leader standing up for the fundamental proposition that rationality and factual objectivity are essential to a functioning democracy is something that should be welcomed (it’s disturbing enough that it’s even necessary to have such a debate at all). Not surprisingly the White House has already been laying into Gore with… you guessed it, lies and spin, disseminated through the mainstream press.

On the same note, the Huffington Post provides an excellent alternative to the traditional mainstream media. The level of objectivity and critical analysis of US politics is far beyond the majority of American news. Here‘s their take on the possibility that Gore (and others) will still enter the US primaries.

Some of the questions are, as John Quiggan puts it, nothing but “Carmen Sandiego” questions like “Australia’s national flower is…”. It’s very hard to see what they have to do with anything, other than making potential citizens jump through a few hoops in order to become members of our glorious nation.

Other questions are, er, somewhat misleading. For example:

5. Australia’s political system is a …

a. Parliamentary democracy

b. Monarchy

c. Dictatorship

d. Socialist state

As with most of the questions on the test, one can immediately tell what the “right” answer is supposed to be – (a), parliamentary democracy in this case. The present government’s (mistaken) view that “socialist” means “totalitarian” is neatly built into option (d) with the inclusion of ‘state’ – even though Australia has many features of socialism, especially relatively high taxes and high levels of government-funded services, government ownership and control of infrastructure, and many people living off government subsidies and payments. Option (c) is the only one which is clearly wrong… right? However, the correct answer is arguably (b), not (a) – as the test itself helpfully reminds us in a later question, the head of state is Queen Elizabeth II. Queen. Monarch. Monarchy. In fact, Australia can arguably be best described as a constitutional monarchy. That’s probably why our Constitution actually says:

one indissoluble Federal Commonwealth under the Crown of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and under the Constitution

It gets better, though. How about this one:

14. Which of the following are Australian values?

a. Men and women are equal

b. `A fair go’

c. Mateship

d. All of the above

Obviously we’re all supposed to answer (d) before performing a North Korean-style mass rally of 200,000 people marching in perfect lock-step waving banners to celebrate our glorious freedom. The aspiring citizen-to-be will need to overlook a few things though – particularly the obvious bias towards men in our parliaments, in the judiciary, in senior management, in corporate boardrooms, and in fact anywhere where real power is available, all of which might cause our ill-educated newcomers to think that (a) is not actually the case. The ‘fair go’ issue obviously excludes anyone accused of being a terrorist, or alternatively includes a process of torture and abuse in a foreign country for years without access to courts or evidence or the requirement that the accuser prove his or her case or even define it precisely. And of course it doesn’t include the right to strike or the right to collective bargaining or the right to protest except at strictly defined times and places. So (b) might be somewhat misleading for those not familiar with the local definition of ‘a fair go.’ And of course all wannabe Aussies will be able to define and live by the vague and empty notion of ‘mateship’, which to ill-educated foreign ears probably sounds more like a sailing term than the process of lending your gardening tools to your next door neighbour upon request (or whatever it actually means).

And so we come to the pièce de résistance – the ‘values’ question:

15. Australia’s values are based on the …

a. Teachings of the Koran

b. The Judaeo-Christian tradition

c. Catholicism

d. Secularism

Once again, well-indoctrinated Australians will realise that they are supposed to answer (b). Leaving aside the very questionable inclusion of ‘Judaeo’ (let’s be charitable, in accordance with the values of ‘mateship’ and ‘a fair go’, and assume it’s only there to encompass both books of the Bible), there is a strong argument that the correct answer, if any, is (d). Once again, let’s turn to that irrelevant scrap of paper, the Constitution:

116. The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth.

Hmm. That certainly doesn’t look like it’s compatible with question 15 of the “Dinky Di” test. Those blokes writing the Constitution obviously should have been required to sit a values test before they federated the nation. However, if (unlike the government) we remember our constitutional law, we will recall there is clear High Court authority for the proposition that trumped up, misleading and humiliating pop-quizzes overrule the Constitution when a conflict arises between the two. Or is it the other way around?

Perhaps the whole thing could be simplified. Here’s a simple three-stage test which more or less encompasses the unsubtle implications in the current proposal:

1. Are you white, Christian, and a native English-speaker with belief in a vaguely defined set of Anglo-Saxon cultural principles, preferably including a love of cricket?
a. Yes -> go to question 2
b. No -> go to question 3

2. Do you worry constantly about the types of people described in question 3, below?
a. Yes -> welcome to Australia
b. No -> re-read question 3 and repeat question 2

3. Are you a rabid islamofascist terrorist planning to destroy our civilization through a process of pack rape, refusing to learn the language, random bombings and religious indoctrination (with the wrong type of religion)?
a. Yes -> please return to your country of origin and create as much trouble as possible
b. No -> welcome to Australia (please note that some Australians may be under the misapprehension that you answered ‘yes’ to this question)

Current Australians celebrate the common values of
a fair go and mateship at the Cronulla race riots

Update: as pointed out by The Legal Soapbox, the government has disowned the ‘sample questions’ doing the rounds in the media.  One would be forgiven for being more than a little skeptical of this – the article linked to above and several others in other print publications clearly indicated that the questions had been supplied by the government, and it would not be at all surprising if they had been withdrawn in light of the criticism of their more idiotic elements.