Friday 30 April 2021

Unemployment, Education and Liberalism

Here we are in April 2021 and Australia's Employment Minister Stuart Robert has come out with the old lie that unemployment exists because people are lazy. Here's a quote

“Why have we got to a point where we are happy for Australians to say ‘no, you don’t have to do those jobs, we’ll get someone from overseas, you just stay on benefits and your neighbour will pay those costs’

It demonstrates how the plans of Liberals are not designed to work, they are designed to fit an agenda. Now I should point out that while Mr. Robert is a member of the Liberal Party, when I talk about Liberals I'm talking about those who support Liberalism, which includes all of the parties in Parliament, not just the Liberal Party.

In Australia we have compulsory schooling and people are strongly encouraged to stay in school until Year 12. That is 13 years of education. Then there is a strong push for people to go to University. That's a total of 17 years of education. Then at the end of that they are told that they are legally required to take any job that is offered to them. 

How much sense does that make?

The amount of bad planning that has gone into this over many decades is amazing!

When you have 17 years of education you want a good well paying job, that's not laziness, that's obvious. But apparently not that obvious to the political classes. 

Actually even 13 years education leads, not unreasonably, to an expectation that you should have a well paying job. 

To lead a decent life in Australia you need a decent paying job, life is expensive here. But our political class think that people should take any job for any price and that they should be happy with that. In fact they tell people that it is their responsibility to everyone else in the community.

But Liberalism is about the individual, that's why they attack the unemployed as lazy. because they are individuals. What responsibility does the individual have to the community?

It seems to depend upon which way the wind is blowing. Liberalism wants a cohesive community and a community of individualists. Those two things are not in any way the same. So out comes the whiphand to compel people to do what Liberalism wants from them, this week.  

This is a problem that Liberalism has created and it is dedicated to this course. High rates of education and lot's of low paying jobs. To achieve that it needs immigration and it is just as dedicated to it. Currently, because of Covid-19 restrictions, immigration is not 'fixing' the problem that Liberalism has created. So the pressure will be pushed onto the unemployed to take any job offered.

Education, including at University level, does not exist to create educated people. It exists to create lots of middle class jobs and to hide just how bad the job market is. That has been true since the 1970's, that 50 years!

Liberalism has no solution to the problem that it has created.


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Monday 26 April 2021

The Great Convergence

A convergence is the coming together of two or more people or ideas. When you look at the past fifty years you can see this convergence happening everywhere. The Uniparty is an example of that convergence. The way unions and business agree on issues. The way the media and the universities seem to be in lockstep with each other. How nothing today is controversial unless they agree that it is controversial. 

One of the reasons I am writing this is because of this article, Monopoly - an overview of the great reset - follow the money. It points out so much of the economic convergence. That nine media companies control most of the worlds media. That Pepsi and Coke both own large amounts of shares in each other, which means that they win no matter what drink you buy. Of course they also have investments in other companies, so producing and selling something is only part of how they make money. In fact it is possible, at least theoretically, for them to produce nothing and to still make money. 

We have also seen the convergence of political ideas. The 1980's was when it started to come into view, in fact I first heard the term the uniparty back in the late 1980's. In Australia it didn't matter who you voted for you got exactly the same thing. Of course that exact same phenomena was occurring everywhere in the West. 

But I think the real sign of how things have changed is in the unions and how the attitudes of both government and business changed. Strikes are quite rare today, not quite extinct, in the 1980's and before strikes were everyday events. Every single day someone would be on strike and industrial relations were major and constant news stories. But between roughly 1985-2000 the unions were brought under control. Trade was liberalized, strikes were made harder, immigration and feminism ate away at the traditional relationship between workers and the union and university education produced a new type of union leader. The new leaders had more in common with the people they had gone to university with then with the workers they represented. 

Government, business, unions, education and lots more besides have all received the same education, from kindergarden to post graduate education. A system that trains people and encourages them to think and act alike. That continues in the workplace, everywhere the same intrusive laws apply. Those who rise up make sure that they support the system, the convergence.

Each part of the convergence covers and protects other parts of the convergence. The media uses academics to support their position. Academics use the government to support them and on and on it goes. So attacking one point is useless, in fact it can often encourage convergence because they can see that they need to strengthen their position. Over time even those areas that seemed outside of the system, the churches, charities, private business have been converged. Money is the first point of call, it uses it's corrupting influence to break down barriers. I'm not talking about bribery, sometimes it is that crude, but mostly it is about encouraging the right behaviour.

Churches don't want to lose their tax free status so they bend. Charities see government dangling big money in front of them to deal with a problem that they want to be involved in. Business at every level wants to make money and often they will do whatever it takes to be allowed to do that. Then they come to regard that as an integral part of their business. The often complex relationship between government and business entangles both in a web.

International organisations and agreements also push this convergence. Everyone should be able to buy a Big Mac anywhere they want and have it taste the same. What is called Trade Equalisation, which means the removal of trade restrictions. The levelling of everything until you can move people, money and goods from anywhere to anywhere.

Of course the world of entertainment also does it's job, in many ways it kept that idea alive when it had mostly died in the early Twentieth Century. Entertainment is a universal language, it breaks down barriers and encourages cooperation between peoples and countries. And of course it spreads the idea's that they want spread. Entertainment is propaganda and it has been for a long time. To give just one example, since 1970 adultery in movies is never condemned. 

As the old saying goes ' The rich get richer and the poor get poorer', Billionaires get richer and today that also includes large corporations and charities. 

Investment funds, superannuation funds all fuel this. The secret is that they are not using their own money. Every woke organisation is doing it with someone else's money. As the economy becomes owned by fewer and fewer the wokeness will increase.

What this all means is that things are going to get worse because there is no easy way to reform the system that we live under. No reform can force through a big enough shift to make things better. It also means that when we attack one part of it then the other parts will defend it. I am not saying that everything is hopeless, but we must face the fact of what faces us.   

This will end if the system fails, which the massive debt is leading to. But it will only fail if there is an alternative that is ready to take it's place.


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Monday 19 April 2021

Will Wokeness Win?

If history is any guide then the answer is no.....and yes. When I look at what is happening today I think of the early 1970's. That was a radical time, when old ways were under treat and new radical ways seemed to be on the march everywhere. It was so bad that many on the right thought that Communism would win. But that didn't happen, neither did many of the radical ideas being pushed.

Many of those ideas were never going to work and so they failed, others simply fizzled out. You see the revolution is hard to keep moving and if it stops it loses it's momentum. So why does it lose momentum?

Because it requires a passion that is hard to keep up, over time people lose their passion, no matter what that passion is for. Ordinary people want civil peace and that is one reason why they go along with crazy ideas, anything to keep the peace. But over time they start to doubt that this is leading to civil peace. They start to think that there is too much passion involved and it starts to turn them off. They aren't critics, they simply stop caring and then pretend that they ever believed in this crazy stuff at all. 

The true believers, what we today call 'The Woke' also lose their passion. They were promised something, they were told that just across the hill is a better world, one that they can bring into being. That they are the midwife to a whole new paradigm. What happens when that fails to arrive?

In the 1970's it lead to disillusionment and disconnection. The revolution that was planned failed to appear. Sure some stayed loyal, but most left and they moved onto leading more or less normal lives. 

However what also happened was that they moved the Overton Window further left. Feminism was now mainstream, as was environmentalism. But not everything stayed, Pacifism lasted for about a decade and then shuffled away. It failed to remain a mainstream idea. 

This pattern is clear in the French Revolution and at other times. The transformation that is promised fails to arrive, people lose their passion and move on, but ideas that were once considered extreme remain in the mainstream.

That will be true today as well, Transgenderism will over the next decade retreat from schools and the young, but it will remain unacceptable within the mainstream to question that it is real or valid. Which means that in the future it will return in a more virulent form. That will be the civil peace that most agree with. However it is not our job to maintain the civil peace, it is our job to return sanity, even if that requires conflict. 

The revolution that is being pushed will fail, but it will leave some formally extreme ideas into the mainstream. If history is any guide then that will be how it works out.


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Monday 12 April 2021

Manufacturing the Goods Life - The Unintended Reformation - The Fifth Chapter Review

Chapter Four: Subjectivizing Morality 


This chapter is about economics and how the Reformation affected it. Before the Reformation the traditional view was that avarice, or in modern English greed, was a bad thing. That while it was not necessary for people to live in poverty to be close to God. Avarice made it hard to be close to God, it was repellent to Him. 

Of course people being people avarice was something that was practised. Even though the Church regarded it as a sin. They could not find anything good about it, it was bad for Christianity, it was bad for community and it was bad for the soul. The Reformation did not change that, both Protestant and Catholics Theologians continued to believe that avarice was bad. 

Two things would change that, the first I have written about before, the reality that as there was no Protestant Pope, any dispute lead to schism. If someone didn't like what their religious leader was saying then they could find another religious leader. One who you agreed more with. Over time this lead to more liberal attitudes to trade and wealth. In the past vast wealth could in least in principle be defended because to be rich you had to be an Aristocrat or Royalty. Your wealth was not simply yours, it was part of the governments wealth as these men were the government. But when a merchant or tradesmen became wealthy how could that be justified?

The idea grew that in trade everything had a price and therefore it was a good thing that men became rich through trade. It showed that they were good at their trade and favoured by God.

The second was a religious compromise in what is now the Netherlands, religious strife lead to finding a neutral activity that both Catholic and Protestant could partake in. That activity came to be trade, if people were busy making money then they couldn't cause religious strife. Catholics, Protestants and Jews all took part in raising money for commercial expeditions to the East Indies for spice. Over time that trade expanded and for around a century the Dutch were both wealthy and powerful. That was noticed by others and they sort to copy it. The Dutch model was very tolerant, the models adopted by others was not as tolerant religiously. But they learnt the lessons of trade quite well. 

As time went on the Protestants came to view trade and wealth as a sign from God that they were his chosen people. In time the idea that trade and wealth were good became enough in their own right. God was left behind. Today you can still hear this message in the Prosperity Theology that is preached in many Mega-Churches. Australia's Prime Minister Scot Morrison attends such a church.

What is quite clear in this chapter is that the Reformation failed. If Luther and the other Protestant leaders from the 1500's could see the state of their churches today they would be appalled. They turned against the Catholic Church because of what they saw as immoral teachings and practices. They wanted to right Christianity, not to overturn it, not to reject it. Avarice was not something that they wanted to encourage, they rejected it. However over time their followers would come to support the most extreme forms of avarice. Today avarice is portrayed as a good thing, something that each of us should aspire to. "Greed is good!"

Most of us live lives of great material wealth. I am poor but I still have more food than I can eat and a house full of things. That is not uncommon, in the West it is how most of us live and we can find it hard to think of it as anything but normal. That attitude comes to us from the Reformation. It wasn't intended but it is how it has ended up anyway.

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Sunday 11 April 2021

The Ninety-Seventh Month

I don't have much to report, things are starting to get back to normal in most areas of my life, the blog included. At Easter we had glorious weather, not too hot, just lovely. A week later and we are in winter weather, cold, wind and rain. I wonder if heaters are for sale now, I tried to buy one a month ago and they said it was out of season so they didn't have any.

The best day was the 18th March when I had 580 visitors, my worst day was the 4th of April when I had 41 visitors. That was the second time in a month I went under 50, which is quite unusual. Although as I didn't write anything for nearly two weeks, I deserved it.

United States
2.47K
Australia
488
Canada
69
United Kingdom
59
Russia
51
Germany
49
Belgium
43
Netherlands
39
South Korea
36
Argentina
30
Indonesia
21
France
20
India
19
Poland
19
South Africa
17
Peru
14
Kenya
11
New Zealand
11
Hong Kong
7
Other
194

 

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Friday 9 April 2021

Why We Will Never Win

I haven't wanted to write this because I don't want to think it, but I think that I have wasted enough time not writing about it. We spend a lot of time and effort trying to work out why things have gone so wrong. How did we get here? Why are we here? How do we turn things our way?

We concentrate so much effort upon the enemy, we think about them quite a lot. What about our side?

Why don't we concentrate our efforts upon us? Upon what we want the world to be like?

Because what we really like is complaining, pointing out how the other guy is wrong. Showing, at least to our self, that we are righteous and better than our enemies. Which is what we accuse them of being, because they are also guilty. But how often do we put in place plans for how we want things to be?

How often do we fundraise to support the causes that we believe in?

Do we organise or join groups?

But the real reason that we will never win is because we lack agency.

We expect someone else to do the work, we nearly always fail to support people who are doing the work. We criticize the way they do things. We find a reason not to get involved. Even when people do get involved they rarely want to do things and even rarer is the person who wants to do something and then follows through. I keep hearing about the Right wing threat that exists, in Australia there is currently a Parliamentary inquiry into Right Wing extremism. What threat?

How can the Right be a threat when we don't organise, fundraise or do anything?

The Inquiry will produce whatever outcome they want, it never had anything to do with us. It is irrelevant, I just wish we were also not irrelevant.

Until we get agency and decide to do things and support other people doing things we will never win. It's impossible.


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