Archives, eh
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# Links for 2004-10-30
- Apache HTTP Server Version 2.0 Documentation – Apache HTTP Server ✴
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# Come and get me...growwwwwwwl!
You know how in The Simpsons when Homer sees something that terrifies him? He does that scream, "Ahahahahahahahh!" with his tongue doing that weird waggle. I've always wanted to be able to do that. It helps if you imagine that I am doing that when you view this return from a google search.
It's all lies, of course. I don't have a "calm and relaxed personality".
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# Oh yeah,
today was the anniversary of oficially being in remission. No big deal though; as you can possibly imagine, I tend to celebrate the anniversary of my last treatment, July 9th.
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# Mine is a grey-armband, thanks
There can certainly be no comparison between the lot of the Untouchables and Australian Aborigines.
For starters, there never was a policy of genocide. Never.
In Australia there seems to be only two ways of viewing the history of Australian Aborigines post-1788. Either white Australians are the most loathsome people alive for what we did to the Aborigines; or nobody did nothing. What a load of bullshit.
When people like Piers denounce the idea of "black-armband history" they do us all a dis-service. They build a straw man and tear it down with gusto; only the wildest, woolliest claims are of deliberate violent genocide. Even the idea of 10,000 deaths by violence is contentious.
What isn’t contentious is the cold hard fact that the population of Australia Aborigines fell by up to 90% after colonisation. By disease, by violence, by being pushed off land, Aborigines died. This wasn’t genocide. However, to suggest that white Australians did nothing wrong is ridiculous; the Aborigines dies as a direct result of the rapacious actions of our ancestors.
The government before Howard had a policy of reconciliation. This offended John Howard; his is one of the louder voices in denouncing the "black-armband" view of Australian history. He in turn has offended sections of the community by his dismissal of reconciliation entirely. He and they are both wrong. Reconciliation needs to happen; constant demands for Howard to give some formal apology aren’t the solution.
Australia needs instead to accept that what our ancestors did was wrong. Don’t wallow. Don’t derive some masochistic self-loathing of anglo-Australia from it. But stop dismissing it as an attitude from another time. It is, but it doesn’t excuse it.
And when I say ‘we’, I mean all of us, we as a society. White, black, yellow; we’re all Australians, and we have all derived some small benefit from what was done from 1788 onwards.
Maybe once Australia has accepted that some wrong was done, we can move on and start acknowledging that life for most Aborigines is a disgrace. Aborigines have an average life span twenty years less than the rest of Australia; now that’s something we can feel ashamed of.
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# Links for 2004-10-19
- DOM ✴
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# My Desk
D started a meme in the knitting world – proof that she is more cool than I – so there seem to be a lot of knitting blogs with pictures of the sky. I’m far too boring to start memes, I just come in on them after wards. So, my desk.
Apparently, this picture shows that I am pussy-whipped.
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# This time for sure!
You know, I don’t do these little one sentence posts to spread interesting links, espicially ones about the origins of glyphs; I do it to nag myself into writing some linklist (cause there’s just not enough linklist code in the world); this time for sure; lots of semi-colons to ensure it really is a one sentence post :- )
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# My version of an investment fund
It has dawned on me, when I checked my pay-slip today, that if I really want to get a notebook computer, the best way to go about it would be to get a new job and leave the current one, taking with me my payout for 247 hours of untaken annual leave. That's 30 days. Six weeks. I've practically got long service leave after only 3 years and 8 months.
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# Hang on, I (didn't actually) vote for what?
What I love about governments, and John Howard’s government is a fine exponent of this, is taking a victory in an election almost entirely on domestic issues, and finding a mandate for the occupation of another country.
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# Voluntary voting != Representative Democracy
I basically have no fucking clue who Ricki-Lee is, except that she was voted off Australian Idol last night. And that apparantly this is a bad thing. It has penetrated by protective shield of uncoolness that there was a flood of teeth-gnashing and breast-beating on talkback radio and elsewhere today. People moaning that fans of Ricki-Lee may not have voted for her, thinking that she would be safe.
I have a question. How many of the people asking that question were moaning on Saturday over being ‘forced to vote’?
