Yesterday Crikey noted the launch of a new US political web site, Politico.
What’s of particular interest to the Australian Centre for Democracy and Justice is that it has a whole section dedicated to Lobbyists. It excellent to see someone finally focusing on this often ignored factor in the political process.
But Mr Howard said yesterday the flag did not cause violence and accused the Big Day Out organisers of “running their own political agenda”.
…and Guns don’t kill people, I do!
I think that our hats should go off to the Big Day Out organisers for actually addressing the issue and showing some concern that certain members of the public may be ostracised by flag carrying racist thugs. To be fair, racists do hide behind patriotism. Moreover, patriotism isn’t an inherently good thing (that said I think I could reasonably be described as a patriot).
I was in Germany during the world cup and there were German flag everywhere. Many people commented to me that they found this really concerning and that German flags had not been displayed so profusely since the Nazis were in power. I don’t want to degenerate into calling people Nazi’s I’ll leave that up to Andrew Bolt but extreme nationalism has certainly been problematic in the past.
I don’t think the flag should necessarily be banned (which it isn’t incidentally – let’s not get too carried away) but a healthy dose of caution when it comes to nationalism is always a good idea. In this respect, my hat goes off to the BDO organisers for even having the debate.
For more on this see Fluffy, Web Diary, Andrew Bartlett and Jess Ausculture. I’m sure there are plenty of others around as well.
(Update: Just uncovered Clem Bastow’s piece on the Age web site which I think sums up a lot)
The always remarkable Free Software Foundation have released a new campaign/site: http://badvista.fsf.org/
It is advocating free software (free as in “free speech” not as in “free beer”) and opposing adoption of Microsoft Windows Vista. Being a recent Linux convert and generally despising Microsoft for a list of reasons too long to mention here I’m quite excited by the campaign.
However, to give one example, as the site says:
Vista is being marketed to content producers, not consumers. If Windows XP was Microsoft’s attempt to embed a browser into the operating system then Vista is the attempt to embed DRM. Digital Rights Management technology has been applied to literally every ring of the OS architecture.
And like all good tech-savvy campaigns there is a blog associated with it at http://badvista.fsf.org/blog
The front page of The Age reported today that there has been a Local push for an Islamic state.
The ultra-radical Muslim group Hizb ut-Tahrir, which is banned across most of Europe, will be holding a conference in Australia soon which will “promote support for an Islamic superstate.”
It strikes me that the only problem here is that The Age is presenting this as front page news. Moreover, the only reason that it is considered new worthy is because the perpetrators are Muslims. I’ve little doubt that similar calls are made quite regularly by socialists or white supremacists and so on – both of who probably have comparable membership levels (in in the 100s at best).
So now a particularly obscure group of nutters which a nominal membership base has front page coverage and the war on terror is given more fuel and we continue to be alert and alarmed and the Muslim community continues to be branded as a terrorist one.
