Those naughty Nordics

While the name Rebecca St James will not be familiar to most, she is apparently a big wheel among afficionados of Christian Contemporary Music. Her regard in these circles stems primarily from the fact that her approach to pre-marital sex seemingly draws its inspiration from the “Just Say No” approach to drug awareness (and, incidentally, is likely to meet with a similar degree of success).

I have commented on this article in the past, but it incensed me to the degree that I have decided to revisit it on this blog. Specifically, it is the final line of the article, “I’ve got a lot of mainstream media attention even in countries like Norway that are not known necessarily for their morality” that raised my ire.

Evidently we are talking about a version of morality consistent with the Gospel according to St James, rather than one that accords with any objective measure of social cohesiveness. For when a rational comparison is made between Norway and St James’ adopted home country of the United States, it becomes abundantly clear which is the more “moral” of the two.

Just by way of example: Norwegians do not live in fear of the next school rampage. Recreational homicide does not rank among popular sporting activities. Norway looks after its citizens – medicine is affordable, and those requiring major treatment do not risk financial ruin. Norway does not execute the mentally handicapped, or anyone else for that matter. Norwegians are aware of their place in the world, as one country among many, and do not suffer from the delusions of exceptionalism. Norway is an egalitarian society, with its citizens entitled to a wage that they can actually live on. Finally, Norway outshines the United States over a range of other important social indicators, such as infant mortality, literacy, and life expectancy.

However, the difference that should be of greatest interest to St James is that Norway also boasts of substantially lower teen pregnancy and STD infection rates than the United States.

A boycott of Olympic proportions

For what it’s worth, my two cents on the subject of Olympic boycotts.

The consensus among at least some athletes is that they will not be pawns of the government on this issue. This is in itself a morally sound position – in a democratic society, it is not the place of the government to make such pronouncements. The decision should be left to individual conscience. In any case, they need not worry. The position of the government, unsurprisingly, is that they do not favour this course of action.

However, the athletes should be aware that they may yet end up being unwitting pawns – not of the Australian government, but of the Chinese authorities. There is a significant risk that China will interpret global participation in the Games as an indication of international approval of their domestic policies. The hope that placing China in the spotlight would help ensure a greater degree of individual freedom for its citizenry turned out to be misguided. As the recent events in Tibet demonstrate, China has shown little inclination to improve its human rights record, despite increased scrutiny from outside. Such inaction should not be rewarded. Until it cleans up its act, China should not be permitted to participate in the Games, let alone host them.

I was flogged by the nuns every day…but it never did me any harm

If anyone is reading this, they might rightly assume that I’ve been sucked in a vortex, or more likely simply abandoned this blog. The truth is, recent days have been notable for a marked lack of cooperation on the part of both my health and my computer. As the latter is now sorted and the former is at least servicable, let us proceed to the topic of this post.

I was reading an article recently about a proposal to impose financial penalties on parents whose children engage in criminal activity. There were a variety of responses to this proposal. Predictably, a recurring one was one along the lines of “How are we supposed to keep our children in line when the government/loony left/do-gooders/social engineers have taken away our right to discipline them?”

A couple of explanatory points before I proceed. As you may have gathered, the “right to discipline” is code for the imposition of corporal punishment (the possibility that parental rights might not be unconditional and that children may also have rights has apparently not occurred to these people!) Secondly, corporal punishment has not been specifically outlawed in the home in Australia – the law allowing “reasonable chastisement” of children has itself not changed since the 1930s, although the courts’ likely interpretation of the word “reasonable” obviously has.

I’m not going to turn this post into a general critique of corporal punishment. A multitude of publications have already covered the issue in significant depth, and I doubt that there is anything I could add. Instead, I will specifically address the notion that the possibility of corporal punishment is a prerequisite for keeping a child from harm.

I should disclose right now that I am not a parent. In the minds of many, this means that anything I have to say on the issue is terminally uninformed. Perhaps, however, my lack of first-hand experience will allow me to approach the issue from an unemotive perspective, without the need to try to justify my own actions in the process.

A common refrain of those claiming corporal punishment as essential is that it is needed to deter children from actions that may put themselves or others at risk. Common examples of such actions are of a child touching a hot stove, or running into a busy street. I believe this reasoning to be flawed. It is risky in the extreme for a parent to rely on the efficacy of their discipline to prevent their child from engaging in such actions. If they are too young to understand the danger, then they are likely also too young to form an association between the action and the consequence. Once they are old enough to understand the danger, they will avoid it of their own accord. In the meantime, the only effective means of protecting the child is close and constant parental supervision.

Obviously it is a long road from touching hot stoves to acts of juvenile delinquency. However, it surely goes without saying that if the only thing preventing a older child from engaging in a life of crime is the threat of punishment, corporal or otherwise, there are some serious underlying issues that need to be addressed – a quick-fix solution will not cut it. This is where the child’s nurturing, if any, and the values that have been instilled in them, if any, need to be taken account of. It is unrealistic to expect superior behavioural standards from children than those expressed by their adult rolemodels – and I have witnessed some absolutely shocking public behaviour on the part of adults, even while in the company of their own children. Perhaps this is where the focus of our attention should be.

It is undeniable that there have been significant societal changes since the days when corporal punishment was widespread and widely accepted – some of these changes have been positive ones, others markedly less so. Whether we like these changes or not, any new policies and practices need to be framed within their context. It is worth noting that the couple of dozen countries that have outlawed corporal punishment completely do not, in broad terms, suffer from delinquent behaviours to the same degree as those that have retained it. It seems likely that it is local cultural norms that are not only giving rise to higher levels of violent and anti-social behaviour, but also prescribing corporal punishment as the solution.

Okay, with that out of the way, I think a more light-hearted post is due, to act as a counterpoint to the more heavy themes explored to date. Until then, here’s a nice picture of some ducks to brighten up the blog:

Filth! Filth! It’s all filth! Sinful, sinful world!

Thanks to this article here (yes, it’s from News Ltd again, my apple-logies for that), I can confirm that South Australian Attorney-General Michael Atkinson was, in fact, not misquoted. His justifications for censorship really are that spurious.

Atkinson obviously hasn’t read the “Computer Games and Australians Today” report which parliament commissioned in 1999. If he had, he would know that his concerns about the possible greater impact of interactive entertainment are unfounded. In any event, it is disturbing that he is seeking to base the law of the country on what, to him, is still an unsubstantiated premise.

He then continues on to say that any access restriction technology is likely to be compromised by children. I would raise three points in response to this. Firstly, if they are expert enough to break the access restriction, then they’ll certainly know how to obtain the game through illegitimate channels, rendering any censorship regime ineffective. Secondly, his claim that “Today’s children are far more technologically savvy than their parents” may be true in a general sense, but if he believes that the skills of children that are able to circumvent such access protection measures are anything less than extraordinary, it indicates that he knows little about the technologies he so readily dismisses. Thirdly, even if we were to accept the second point as valid, if a parent is unwilling or unable to control the games their children play (or for that matter, their Internet activities), then surely the only appropriate course of action is to physically prevent their children from accessing the technology altogether, rather than seeking to cripple it for everyone else by advocating unjust and ineffective censorship legislation?

He then tries to terrify us with accounts of currently-banned games which, he seems to imply, would be granted the proposed R-rating. In fact, at least three of them, Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure, Narc, and Blitz: The League, would likely be banned in any case. From my understanding of their content, all three could be deemed to promote illegal activity, which cannot be accommodated at any classification level.

Atkinson needs to realise that computer games are not kid’s stuff. The average gamer is aged in his or her late twenties. It is a mature medium with a predominantly mature audience. That Atkinson takes such a casual attitude toward banning adult games is a cause for great concern. It is a compelling fact that, were the same standards applied to The Godfather, widely perceived as being the finest motion picture of all time, the adults of Australia would be legally barred from seeing it.

Won’t somebody please think of the children?

I’m on a roll today…

Now, I’m no gamer – on the rare occasions that I play a computer game, it is invariably a quick blast on some crusty retro classic. However, I do have an appreciation for the medium and believe it should be accorded the same respect as other forms of entertainment, hence this post.

A little background to begin with. In the mid nineties, Australia introduced a mandatory and legally binding age classification system for computer and video games, broadly similar to the one already existing for films and video recordings. However, there was one important difference. Unlike films, for which the highest rating available is the R18+ classification, the highest possible rating for games was capped at MA15+. As a result, to this day, any game deemed unsuitable for a 15-year-old can not be legally sold to anyone, adults included. This restriction is in stark contradiction to one of the principles that supposedly guides Australian censorship decisions, namely that, to the greatest degree possible, adults should be able to see what they wish.

How did this slightly ludicrous state of affairs arise? The primary justification offered at the time was that interactive entertainment *might* have a more profound impact on the participant than passive entertainment. However, the report “Computer Games and Australians Today”, commissioned by Parliament in 1999, found no evidence that this is the case. The motivation for basing censorship legislation upon this unsubstantiated premise was largely the fact that, at the time, the balance of power in the Australian Senate was held by Brian Harradine, a deeply religious independent senator who, as it happened, was also a stalwart of the Senate Select Committee on Community Standards and notoriously pro-censorship. His favour was no doubt viewed by the Government as a prerequisite for carrying out their legislative agenda.

Now, at last, the reform of this absurd regime is on the agenda. The Standing Committee of Attorneys-General is to discuss the possibility of introducing an R18+ rating when it meets this month. There is, however, a fly in the ointment. The Attorney-General of South Australia, Michael Atkinson, has already publicly stated that he is opposed to the proposal. Unfortunately, standing practice is that unanimity is required among Attorneys-General for legislative change to occur.

Disturbingly, according to one of Michael Atkinson’s spokespeople, his perception of the type of material that would be accommodated under the proposed R-rating for games is of “computer-generated pornography and depictions of extreme violence“. This is absolute nonsense and I can only hope that he has been misquoted. As Atkinson is surely well aware, the criteria for the games rating would be exactly the same as that applying to the R-rating for films, under which pornography and extreme violence are expressly excluded. Indeed, under the present guidelines, if a game were to contain content of an equivalent impact to that of a classic R-rated film such as, say, The Godfather, A Clockwork Orange, or Apocalypse Now, it would be banned in Australia.

Will Atkinson be successful in sabotaging this much-needed reform? Or will the adult gamers of Australia finally stop being treated like children? We shall soon know.

Viral ignorance

The inaugural (proper) post. Huzzah.

You have probably heard about a rather nasty chain email entitled “Australian Apology to the Aboriginal Population”. You may have even been unfortunate enough to have received it from one of the less enlightened contacts in your address book. As a matter of principle I will not reproduce the text here, but if you haven’t seen it, it can be readily located by means of a Google search. The email first appeared when the “Bringing Them Home” report was released, and unsurprisingly has reared its ugly head once more following the real Apology of the 13th of February.

I was anticipating receiving the email from one person in particular, and sure enough, it arrived in my inbox last week. I toyed with the idea of responding with a rebuttal of the “points” it raised, but as he had rather foolishly sent it via his work email (which I believe is his only account), I decided against it, as doing so could further increase his risk of detection and its associated consequences.

There are a few things that particularly strike me in regard to the content of this email. For example, it is obviously blatantly eurocentric in tone, and it blithely ignores the reality that the removal of Indigenous children from their families and communities persisted until the early seventies, and the legacy of this persists to this day.

The main problem though, is this: The claims it makes are an unmitigated load of bollocks.

Contrary to the claims made in this email, Aborigines do not get free travel, free weddings, or free loans. Their car loans are not paid off for them in the event that they default on the payments – this myth has been doing the rounds since at least the mid-eighties, but it is no more true now than it was then. There is no anthropological evidence that any Indigenous peoples were ever cannibals. And unsurprisingly, though more than a few people seem to be incapable of grasping this, the majority of Indigenous people traditionally lived in fertile coastal regions. Not out in the desert.

Is the depth of ignorance among those distributing this email genuinely this profound? Or are they simply trying to justify their own prejudices?

And I am…?

Hiya.

This is the latest in a string of god knows how many presences I’ve had on the InfoTubes over the years.

Hopefully this time my efforts will not be taken over by either apathy or by a paranoia that I have revealed too much of myself..

I expect that the blog will for the most part consist of my perspectives on various sociopolitical issues…Perhaps the odd album or film review…I doubt that I will ever end up boring you with mundane personal affairs, as it is tiresome enough merely to have to experience them, let alone recount them…

As I struggle to pour my ideas out, my syntax will likely show a marked convolutedness. Retrospective edits to clarify myself are to be expected.

Right, let’s go.