19 thoughts on “Monday Message Board”

  2. A number of posts in my name, and sometimes citing my email address, are being posted on the Brisbane Indymedia web forum.

    This is to let visitors to this site know that I am not the author of these posts, and that they are the work of malicious impersonators. I have referred the matter to the police.

    If anyone can assist with information leading to the identification of the impersonators, please phone me on (07) 38755534 (BH or voicemail).

  3. OK its tin-foil hat time guys! Let me see if I’ve got the order of events correct.

    1. Archbishop of Sydney George Pell and Health Minister Tony Abbott secretly meet before the election. Abbott is famously caught out lying about the meeting on Lateline by Tony Jones.
    2. Out of the blue during the election campaign Pell uses his moral authority to attack Labour’s education policy as ‘divisive’. This is in stark contast to the opinions of most other religious leaders.
    3. Howard government wins re-election
    4. Tony Abbott and others start giving the abortion issue political oxygen.

    OK my conspiracy theory is this – while Abbott lamely described his meeting with Pell as being about ‘personal’ issues odds on they were talking abortions. Abbott was making things clear for Pell – sell out your principles on education and parts of the Coalition will push your pro-life agenda after the election. So Pell made a deal with the devil…

  4. Arafat’s body is not yet cold and already the Likud lobby is shifting the goals posts. For years, we have heard that Arafat was the problem, and no progress could be made until and unless he went.

    Arafat, we were told, was duplicitous, unreliable and corrupt, Israel couldn’t and wouldn’t work with him, and the Palestinians had to have new leadership.

    Now Arafat’s gone, and what do we read from Ted Lapkin from the Australia/Israel Council in today’s AFR? That Arafat wasn’t the cause of the problem at all, he was just the symptom of the problem and nothing has changed just because he’s dead .

    Why am I not surprised?

  5. The re-spinning of Arafat is hardly surprising. What I think is more interesting is how long it will be until moderate Israeli’s start wishing he was still around. It seems unlikely that a Palestinian leader will emerge any time soon who will have the authority to negotiate with Israel on behalf of all Palestinians. I guess it will not be long before many Israeli’s remember Arafat’s time with at least a little bit fondness for its one virtue. That is, that while there was “no partner for peace”, at least there was only one “no partner for peace”. The reality of having to negotiate directly and individually with each of the more extreme groups such as Hamas etc is not going to a pleasant experience.

  6. i refer to katz comment that the closest parallel
    to the iraq affair is that of napoleon in spain
    (nov 15)-this had occurredvto me also but to continue it would place wellingtons peninsular
    campaign with the us and socalled coalition
    forces and i cant quite see this.
    another parallel that occurs to me is the crimean
    war fought on trumped up charges but really to block russian acess to the eastern mediterranean
    and threat to britain in the indian sub continent
    there is even the case of sardinian participation
    in order to create the quidpro quo of french
    support against austria in italy.
    here consider the shaky regime in saudi arabia
    and you have the us setting up a foothold in the region so that they would have a foothold
    in the event of saudi falling into hostile fundamentalist hands.
    compare this to the famous reference by the czar
    to turkey as “the sick man of europe” and that it
    would be a pity to see him die without making
    suitable arrangements

  7. Yeah, the Poms spent around a century backing up the Sick Man Of Europe against the Russians, who only wanted to liberate Constantinople, the bulwark of Christendom against Islamism for around a thousand years. If I remember correctly, the Ottoman holdings in Europe would have made it the biggest “State” in Europe at that time.
    And as usual the Islamists showed their gratitude for all that help by backing the Kaiser in WW1 against the Poms.
    When will we ever learn?

  8. The ABC reports that,”US forces also launched sporadic mortar rounds against targets overnight.” According to the same report, they have refused emergency medical and other supplies into Falluja. This would appear to indicate a more casual regard for the lives and welfare of Iraqi civilians than for their own soldiers.

    Surprise, there are further reports of an outbreak of fighting in Baguba. The logic of American position, short of abject surrender and retreat, similar to the approach of the Romans,might be to systematically lay waste to all the cities of Iraq.

    Short of the final solution,they are caught in an interesting conundrum of their own making. If they leave Falluja, it will become apparent almost immediately that they have achieved very little positive gain. If they stay they will suffer increasing casualites – and it would appear they would be prepared for greater non-combatant casualities.

    I suppose they know what they are doing, but I doubt it.

  9. Tipper, your unawareness of the issues of 1914 is amazing. At least read up about the Goeben before commenting on Turkey’s involvement in that war.

    I said in the last Monday Message Board that I would give some more details for Tony Healy and Jill Rush and anyone else interested in what I posted last week about my travails with the ARCBS.

    The ARCBS did not explicitly make my queries about the Progesa computer system into their grounds for acting against me. If anything, they are trying to manufacture a reality in which I appear to be a disgruntled ex-employee so as to neutralise any comments I might make. However the timing shows that the reverse is the case – that I began to receive flak after I brought these things up. Either it is a hell of a coincidence or else it led to the harassment, but it cannot possibly be my reaction.

    I already know all about bullying, since I naturally read up about everything as it happened and took advice and so on. It turns out to be a routine HR ploy to misrepresent victims as perpetrators. In one instance when two people (younger and bigger than me) gave me the stand over treatment, I was made out to have bullied them! The evidence showed this, but the selection and distortion of the evidence by the ARCBS was accepted by the AIRC in preference to my complete paper trail showing their selection.

    I am still looking for avenues to present the true situation so that I have at least some chance of getting some work somewhere sometime. The alternative is to have the distortions accepted as fact and for me to be discounted both in my job search and as a witness to the internal failures – the ones I mentioned as being in the usual pattern in bodies like the NAB and RMIT. I notice that the RMIT failings are back in the news again. Just remember, that is no coincidence, it is institutionally rewarded.

  10. wmmbb, the report clearly says that a convoy was denied entry because the area was unsafe. That’s quite different from saying medical and other supplies are being refused in general.

  11. ABC News 7pm ‘”Fallujah liberated” says US spokesperson.’ Don’t you love it when your 7 cents a day gets you propaganda instead of news!

  12. Tony this is not the first, or only instance, when similar decisions have been made, as is evident from this report in The Guardian. The area in question may be unsafe for the US Military, but safer for those can provide urgent humanitarian assistance for the trapped civilian population. Of course, tending to the sick and dying would provide cover for “insurgents’ to escape from their “nests”.

    The campaign in Falluja, if you recall, has included the “capture” of the major hospital so that it could not become a source of “propaganda” concerning civilian deaths. Military priorities appear to be inconsistent with the presumed urgency of the humanitarian situation. I am looking for any report suggesting that the US military have facilitated measures to assist the civilians caught up in the fighting?. Since they control access, over the bridges for example, and most of the direct news sources, via embedded journalists, censorship, and US military personnel at various levels, I would have expected there to be such reports, if only for the good publicity spin.

    The Guardian article, cited above, reports the following:

    According to one Iraqi journalist who left Falluja on Friday, some of the civilian injuries were caused by the massive firepower directed on to city neighbourhoods during the battle. ‘If the fighters fire a mortar, US forces respond with huge force,’ said the journalist, who asked not to be named.

    This is evidence that the methods employed have disregarded the fact that this is warfare waged among a mostly civilian population. Of course, we are told that all the alternatives had been tried and failed, but then left with the observation that the success of arms is working a treat with American news reporting and public opinion.

  13. We could also point out that the “fighters” have complete disregard for the civilian population, choosing to risk the lives of their fellow Iraqis (who may or may not agree with the fighters) to resist the US forces.

  14. Symbolic warfare, real deaths. The Americans have spent months telling the civilians to leave Fallujah. Now they don’t have much interest in the lives of those who remain.

    The attack is systematic. Receive fire, blast the building. Leave the city in ruins. Shoot anything that moves.

    In that context, how can you let doctors in? Now it is mostly over, the trick I guess is to induce the civilians to talk to the military because they are the only form of aid.

    Of course the “fighters” – not soldiers – have sod all respect for the population. They are reported by the Beeb as shooting anyone who seems to be going over to the enemy and treating anyone not armed as an enemy. They systematically used the mosques for cover and as arms dumps. They allowed this to be called down on the city.

    But they get to demonstrate that the Americans are ugly and dangerous. In return the Americans get to kill a thousand or so probably low grade militants while the important people leave. Now they can repopulate Fallujah for a while with exactly the people they want, and spread aid and compensation to those they can rely on. And build a purified Fallujah.

    Will it be contaminated from outside again? Or are the inhabitants, battered, dispossessed, wounded and fucked over as they are, inherently anti-American? Will the residents of Mosul betray or expel the “fighters” on the grounds that the Americans will mash their city if they don’t?

    Scarey chess. As I said, symbolic warfare, real lives.

  15. r.l.b. richards

    No, the parallel is between Napoleon and Bush not Wellington and Bush. Wellington had no intention of regime, social or cultural change on the Iberian Peninsula. Napoleon was the “liberator” in this scenario.

    “Liberation” is a small sub-set of history’s invasions. Invaders with no thought of liberation of the invaded can be as beastly as they like to the objects of their attention. On the other hand, “liberators” must at least begin with humane intentions. Their later spite arises from wounded pride and is often as dangerous as it is self-defeating.

  16. To blow my own trumpet for a moment, I went through the various stories and photo sources about medical aid to Fallujah and posted a composite here.

    What is not clear, is just not clear..

  17. http://www.vtpi.org

    I’m impressed no end by this site on transport and land use economics.

    Layman’s question: what do economists make of this website?

    Political question: why do so many so-called free market advocates turn a blind eye to the socialist policies of nearly all capitalist democracies whenit comes to transport and land use?

  18. PM Lawrence
    What you have described is of course, as you already know, standard in a bullying process where victims are represented as disgruntled isolated and unreasonable and yet the institutional pattern can’t be hidden as it is bound to be repeated as bullies carry on in the same way because it has been a successful tactic in the past.

    If you have read the books on bullying you will know that you have several choices to limit future damage and perhaps may need to consider a change in career path – what else could you do?

    As it is you appear to have exhausted legal remedies or yourself and of course once you get a reputation as a trouble maker it is harder to get a job unless it is in an area where they require such attributes – Greenpeace springs to mind.

    As bullying becomes easier through reducing industrial rights and protective mechanisms there may be the need for those prepared to struggle as our ancestors did to gain those rights which have been valued so little by many in Gen X and Gen Y.

    I sense that the proposed moves on a host of Industrial Relations issues will mean that it will be easier to bully workers in the future than in the past as workers lose the right to be dismissed for good reason in small business.

    One thing to have learned is how injustice can occur, how precarious justice can be and how morality can be left out of any argument in legal issues.

  19. I know monday is long gone but I was away in Adelaide and I will probably post this again next time.

    Does anyone get the feeling that the girl on trial in Indonesia for drug smuggling is just a political pawn?

    Howard may be approaching Indonesia nicely but Indonesia is telling Howard to leave them alone.

    Is Indonesia trying to send a message?

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