Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Australians out, Earthians in

The Australian Greens wield a lot of power as the Gillard Labor Government relies on their support to stay in power.

The Greens leader, Bob Brown, recently gave an official Greens oration. He began by addressing his audience not as "Fellow Australians" but as "Fellow Earthians". Whereas the Labor Party wants to ditch Australia for a regional state, the Greens want to go all the way and establish a global one.

Therefore, in Green minds you are no longer an Australian, or an American, or a Japanese - you are an Earthian and will be addressed as such (so much for diversity).

Bob Brown then told the audience that Earth is on the brink of extinction. He even put forward a theory that the reason that other intelligent life forms have never contacted us is that they all used their intelligence to alter their environment and so "extincted" themselves.

This is all meant to butter us up for Brown's radical plan: the institution of a global parliament. Brown tells an interesting story of his last attempt to achieve the aim of a global parliament via a motion in the Australian senate:

In 2003 our other Greens Senator, Kerry Nettle, seconded the motion but we failed to attract a single other vote in the seventy-six seat chamber. The four other parties - the Liberals, the Nationals, Labor and the Democrats - voted 'no!'. As he crossed the floor to join the 'noes', another senator called to me: 'Bob, don't you know how many Chinese there are?'.

Well, yes I did. Surely that is the point. There are just 23 million Australians amongst seven billion equal Earthians. Unless and until we accord every other citizen of the planet, friend or foe, and regardless of race, gender, ideology or other characteristic, equal regard we, like them, can have no assured future.

Brown is willing to throw his 23 million conationals under the bus for the sake of his ideology. In a one person, one vote global parliament we really are doomed.

Note just how far Brown's concept of "non-discrimination" goes here. According to Brown, until we give everyone on earth the same vote on what happens to Australia we are being discriminatory by not having "equal regard" for everyone.

That's why it's foolish to think that discrimination is always wrong. Is it really morally wrong to think that the inhabitants of a country cannot discriminate by having more say than non-inhabitants over the affairs of their own society? Over the destiny of their own community? Some forms of discrimination are reasonable and defensible.

Brown then goes on to speak in support of democracy and freedom. But what he doesn't mention is that the Australian Greens have been at the forefront of plans to limit freedom of the press in Australia. The Greens want tighter state control over the media; they seem to be particularly upset that some Australian newspapers have published the views of climate change sceptics. The Greens managed to get a media inquiry established which has recommended that even websites like this one be placed under government regulation. A combination of the new online media and the right-liberal Murdoch press has broken the monopoly of left-liberalism in Australia and the Greens seem to be searching for ways to hit back.

Brown's global parliament would have four goals: economy, equality, ecology and eternity. I thought his explanation of 'equality' was interesting. What is it that we are being made equal for? Brown explained:
Equality would ensure, through the fair regulation of free enterprise, each citizen's wellbeing, including the right to work, to innovate, to enjoy creativity and to understand and experience and contribute to defending the beauty of Earth's biosphere.

That's the thing. Liberal equality severely limits what the purposes of human life are allowed to be. We are no longer seen as members of nations or families; we are no longer seen as distinctly male and female; we are no longer seen to exist in a world of objective moral values. Instead, we are thought of as stripped down, abstracted, equally autonomous individuals. And what is left to such individuals? The way Brown sees things, such individuals can be workers, they can "innovate," and they can experience the "biosphere". That's all that comes to his mind when he thinks of human purposes in life. You can go to work, you can play the piano and you can go to a park to experience not nature but the biosphere. These things you can do as an equally autonomous, self-determining individual, the rest of life doesn't fit in so well with modernist assumptions.

Anyway, if any Australians are reading this who have been tempted to vote for the Greens thinking that they are simply there to preserve nature, please reconsider. The Greens have a much larger and more radical agenda, one which involves transforming you from Australian to Earthian.

10 comments:

  1. The "greens" are watermelons, "green" on the outside, red rabid communists underneath. The rest of us aren't so much "earthians" to them, but rather slaves, whose only purpose is to serve them, & to then be disposed of by means of euthanasia when no longer useful.

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  2. Is there any limit to the stupidity of liberalism? A proof of the decline of society is that people say such nonsense and nobody ridicules them.

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  3. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  4. Piety, and fear,
    Religion to the gods, peace, justice, truth,
    Domestic awe, night-rest, and neighbourhood,
    Instruction, manners, mysteries, and trades,
    Degrees, observances, customs, and laws,
    Decline to your confounding contraries,
    And let confusion live!

    Timon of Athens Act IV Scene 1.

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  5. Even if the motion to create a global parliament had passed, so what? Nobody else in the world is on board with that crazy scheme.

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  6. Earthians

    ...

    Well that's just bloody ridiculous.

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  7. "That's why it's foolish to think that discrimination is always wrong."

    I think the distinction that needs to be made is 'cruel' discrimination is wrong. By emphasising the 'cruel' aspect you instantly move the focus from being all discrimination is either right or wrong to being it's not discrimination which is right or wrong but the moral component/context in which discrimination can be done.

    One thing a lot of leftists try to do is use language to control acceptable areas of thought. Words are what allow us to conceive of and conceptualise things. When leftists try to limit language to serve their agenda by limiting our ability to critically think about subjects, they need to be called out on it and have distinctions like above be made.

    Also, you can be damn sure I won't be voting for Greens in the next election.

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  8. Furthermore by making it 'cruel' discrimination which is wrong you still also allow people who want to speak in simple statements the opportunity to do so without having to fall in line to the leftist agenda.

    An example on non-cruel discrimination: Refusing to hire a non-African-American/non-black to play Martin Luther King in a documentary about Martin Luther King. Or refusing to hire a non-white actor to play John F. Kennedy in a documentary.

    This is discrimination yet it is clearly not immoral/wrong, therefore discrimination itself can't be all wrong. It is merely 'cruel' discrimination which could be all wrong.

    Also I'm using the quotation marks as a form of emphasis not as a form of euphemism.

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  9. Chris,

    You're right that we need to reframe political concepts so that we aren't forced to accept a leftist agenda.

    I've been thinking along similar lines, although I was considering making a distinction between "arbitrary" and "non-arbitrary" forms of discrimination (not as catchy as your term).

    Arbitrary discrimination has no reason or purpose to it, e.g. refusing to sell someone a hamburger because of their race/ethnicity. Non-arbitrary discrimination serves a reasonable purpose.

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  10. @Anonymous Wednesday, 11 April 2012 8:20:00 PM AEST

    Oh but with violence they will enforce this global parliament.

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