Monday, September 14, 2015

To Blog or not to Blog... that's not any kind of question, just a half-arsed attempt at a title.

There is a niggling voice in the back of my head that's usually effectively inaudible above the noise, and it's telling me to write, frequently, or ideally daily as a routine.  So far I've failed.  But now that I'm doing a PhD, and the advice is essentially the same for that, maybe it will be the catalyst that finally spurs me to action.

I'm tempted to start a fresh, new Blog that can be associated with my professional identity, so that I can share posts freely without any concern that the content of previous posts might damage any kind of academic reputation I might develop, or the frank, sometimes brutal and ugly posts on mental health issues, but I think for now I will just carry on here.  I can always un-publish certain posts if it comes to it.

Usually a good indicator that it's time to think about Blogging again is when I start to get carried away on Facebook.  And at the moment I'm kind of obsessed with Tony Abbott and his parcel of fools.  A lot of it is Schadenfreude, and a sense of "Told you" to all the people who subjected us to the endless humiliation he subjects us to collectively on the world stage.  But I wake up each day and eagerly check the news just to see what the latest bout of lunacy might be, and whether the LNP are sufficiently embarrassed enough to have their next leadership spill yet.  The chatter seems to be increasing, and as I type the Guardian has started a Live updates page on the leadership question.  That's a good sign I think.

But as twisted as it sounds, I think I will actually be a little disappointed if he goes now and isn't booted out by the people at the next election.  Even more concerning though is the worry that by some terrible combined lapse of reason and massive Murdoch funded bombardment he might actually get voted back in.  I mean, he got in once, and I thought at one point the idea was too ludicrous to even contemplate.  George W. Bush got voted in a second time.  And Shorten is almost a kind of Abbott lite, with the same ethos of reacting to what everyone else does without offering any kind of direction of his own.

Ultimately, I am now a Green voter, and likely to stay that way.  I watch Australian politics with a kind of morbid fascination and find it kind strangely entertaining, but I suppose what I'm most interested in is witnessing the decay of a system that is becoming less functional by the day.  It makes me think of Michio Kaku's civilisation types — he says we are a Type  Zero Civilisation, but we now have a Type One Communication system, which will hopefully help other aspects of our society progress to Type One, eventually even energy, which is by his definition when we become a Type One Civilisation.

No comments: