Tag: History

The ten commandments

by David Horton, posted in atheism, History, politics

“Conservative” political parties in western countries all share ten fundamental features.

  1. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy, and a determination to put a stop to it.
  2. A policy that no limitation of any kind should be applied to the ever-rising profits of corporations, while insisting that it is never the right time for workers to have a pay rise (two policies that are not unrelated).
  3. A belief that any education of the lower orders is too much education.
  4. The firm conviction that the role of media in society is to present the beliefs of conservatives, all the beliefs of conservatives, and nothing but the beliefs of conservatives.
  5. The knowledge that religion is the handmaiden of conservative politics, particularly by labelling the rulers as being annointed by god, and convincing the poor that they will get their reward after death and not before.
  6. An attitude that anything in the environment you can’t make a buck from is disposable, anything you can make a buck from, ditto
  7. Brains replaced by calculating machines, set to measure the price of everything and the value of nothing.
  8. Have members who, by happy chance, are too old to personally fight in the wars which are an essential part of capitalism.
  9. A certainty that society has no place for scientists (referred to as experts) because conservative ideology is all they know and all they need to know.
  10. The sure and certain knowledge that all recent social and cultural developments are both evil and dangerous, and that there is no limit to the depth of time at which a preferred society will be found (Victorian? Medieval? Dark Ages? Roman? Egyptian? Prehistory?).

What’s past

by David Horton, posted in climate change, ecology, evolution, History, literature, media, poetry, politics, science

… is prologue.

My book concerning fire in the Australian environment, extinction of the megafauna, and Indigenous interaction with the environment in general (and in total opposition to the works of Flannery, Pascoe and Gammage, among others), is available online. https://www.routledge.com/The-Pure-State-of-Nature-Sacred-cows-destructive-myths-and-the-environment/Horton/p/book/9781865081076

All my individual publications in this field (and others) are available free online at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David_Horton9

Also many of my older essays are still available here: https://www.abc.net.au/news/david-horton/28320

Christopher Robin went down with Alice

by David Horton, posted in History, science

There was a time

I could sit in

the town square at

midday and see,

passing by, my

contemporaries,

going about

their lives, knowing

they, we, were the

generation

creating the

world around us.

These days I see

no one I know

and the world has

moved on to

those of a new

generation,

leaving us, me, as

ghostly figures,

not signifying,

tell tale idiots,

watching from sidelines.

So it goes

by David Horton, posted in History, media, politics, science

Every time an expert suggests the slightest change to the way things are done which will benefit the environment or improve the lives of people it will be immediately resisted by business, farming and religious leaders, whose resistance to change will be praised and supported by the Murdoch media and then by right wing politicians, at which point left wing politicians will decide it would be a courageous decision to proceed and pull the plug on the whole idea, ensuring there will be no change until the next expert suggests something.