It’s always great to see a successful Native title claim. Native Title can mean a wide range of advantages for the claimants and often means a better ability to positively exploit both western and indigenous cultures. Of course this is very far from a guarantee.
It’s also important to remember that there has yet to be a successful claim in Victoria.
(cross posted at The Australian Centre for Democracy and Justice’s Blog)
I’ve come across Geoism a few times before in a few different conversations with people involved in the Geoist movement. It’s an idea that really interests me but that I disagree with.
Geoism is an idea put forward by Henry George. He argued that we should not be taxed on our wage but on our resource use – specifically land. If land is part of the commons then why should people profit from land speculation. So you tax the increase in land value thereby reducing the cost of land and making it afordable for people to own but prohibitively expencive for land speculation to happen. Land is not the only resource that is taxed however, the idea being that we are much more efficient and concious of our resource use which has obvious ecological benefits. The hope it to create a fairly localised community which is based on small businesses. There is plenty of individual incentive but also plenty of support for the community.
It’s important to note that I have completely bastardised this idea in the previous paragraph so if you do want to know more about Geoism read something else. Moreover, I’m happy to accept critisims in the comments. Most importantly though, the ideas are a lot more complex than I have said. So if you want to know more a couple of good places to start are here and here.
So, keeping in mind that I’m particularly under schooled on the topic I have the following critisms of it. Firstly it concerns me that a resource based tax then makes these resources more expensive. There is the potential to make basic food stuffs unaffordable for low income households. I think its reasonable to say that if we actually paid the full cost of our food – taking into account the environmental cost then food would quickly become unaffordable. Moreover, there is then the issue of calculating that cost and I’d suggest that we couldn’t reasonably do this if we acnoledge the high level of interconnectivity of the environment. That’s not to say we don’t need to readdress the way we get our food and the increased localisation of our foods needs to be encourgaged.
I’d also suggest that the idea places too much faith in the market. The market can be a good distributor of resources in some instances but it is generally a rather poor distributor when it comes to environmental issues. Of course it’s also a poor distributor of health and education resourse as well but this is hopefully overcome in Geoist theory through the creation of a fairly large tax pool based on this new resource tax.
The next key critism is that it is a very resource-based understanding of the world. It’s simply too dualistic to me and views the environment as an exploitable resource for human consumption. This is understandable considering it’s a 19th Centrury idea but I can’t help feeling that Geoism’s environmental credentials are perhaps overstated. Along similar lines, it’s a dated concept of land and wealth generation.
The finally issue I’d like to mention here is that of economies of scale. In short, economies of scale are desirable because they allow for a high level of specialisation which in turn means that highly specialised needs can be catered for. Disability is always the example I think of here where the needs of the disable simply can’t be accomodated on a small highly localised scale.
Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m a little excited about the Moto GP coming to Philip Island in October. Every year it’s a weekend of drunken hilarity.
You camp track-side, drink until you pass out (generally sometime in the afternoon), wake up a few hours later, start drinking again, pass out again, wake up in the morning to the sound of the screaming 2-stroke engines of the 125 s which is horribly painful considering the splitting headache you have. At which point you start drinking again and repeat for the rest of the weekend.
So you can imagine my concern when I read this: “Under the latest proposal, two accommodation villages would be built on the golf course and a third village would be built next to an area currently used for camping during the Australian leg of the international MotoGP.”
Fuck you Lindsay Fox – got back to your helipad in Portsea!
I seem to be posting a lot of crap of late – really must stop. But if you found this in the Urban Dictionary you’d do the same I’m sure.
Urban Dictionary: hammy: “A person or thing is defined as a ‘Hammy’ when they possess a large genitalia.
‘I slept with this guy last night and he was definitely a Hammy, I’m still aching this morning!”
Alternatively:
“Highest complement known to man.
My god!! This is almost as good as hammy’s!
She screamed “Hammy” in ecstacy!”
Guardian Bad Sex award winner:
Hoyt began moving his lips as if he were trying to suck the ice cream off the top of a cone without using his teeth. She tried to make her lips move in sync with his. The next thing she knew, Hoyt had put his hand sort of under her thigh and hoisted her leg up over his thigh. What was she to do? Was this the point she should say, ‘Stop!’? No, she shouldn’t put it that way. It would be much cooler to say, ‘No, Hoyt,’ in an even voice, the way you would talk to a dog that insists on begging at the table.Slither slither slither slither went the tongue, but the hand that was what she tried to concentrate on, the hand, since it has the entire terrain of her torso to explore and not just the otorhinolaryngological caverns – oh God, it was not just at the border where the flesh of the breast joins the pectoral sheath of the chest – no, the hand was cupping her entire right – Now! She must say ‘No, Hoyt’ and talk to him like a dog. . .
. . . the fingers went under the elastic of the panties moan moan moan moan moan went Hoyt as he slithered slithered slithered slithered and caress caress caress caress went the fingers until they must be only eighths of inches from the border of her public hair – what’s that! – Her panties were so wet down. . . there – the fingers had definitely reached the outer stand of the field of pubic hair and would soon plunge into the wet mess that was waiting right. . . there-there-
(p368-9)
From Wikipedia:
Godwin’s law (also Godwin’s rule of Nazi analogies) is an adage in Internet culture that was originated by Mike Godwin in 1990. The law states that:As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1 (i.e. certainty).
There is a tradition in many Usenet newsgroups that once such a comparison is made, the thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress. In addition, it is considered poor form to invoke the law explicitly. Godwin’s law thus practically guarantees the existence of an upper bound on thread length in those groups. Many people understand Godwin’s law to mean this, although (as is clear from the statement of the law above) this is not the original formulation.
Nevertheless, there is also a widely-recognized codicil that any intentional invocation of Godwin’s law for its thread-ending effects will be unsuccessful.
This post by Kim over at Larvatus Prodeo got me thinking about something I’ve blogged on before.
Is it conceivable that this lack of coupling is the next stage of the process of individualisation? Margaret Thatcher once famously said “There’s no such thing as society.” What’s often left off from that quote is “only individual and families.” Could it be that the “families” part has been lost to indivualism? It would be an interesting debate for the right to have as I suspect they would be divided along the lines of neoliberal and neoconservative – if we are to distinguish the two.
