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So there was an election on Saturday; and as predicted the Labor Party was victorious over the conservative coalition. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
caseopaya, imajica_lj and I spent most of the day at the Werribee Open Zoo whilch, whilst a very unusual activity for me on polling day, was a thoroughly enjoyable nonetheless - even if I ended up slightly dehydrated form the experience. In the evening ended up at the Town Hall Hotel in North Melbourne, calling the results quite early in the piece. Overall, I was somewhat disappointed; whilst the 6% swing to Labor obviously resulted in a change in government, it does mean a wafer-thin majority - although Rudd has "hit the ground running" with Kyoto, indigenous reconciliation, Workchoices and Iraq. The Fairfax papers, both in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age have suggested that the Liberal Party try to move towards the political centre. Some suggest that Labor is now the "natural party of government".
Which brings me to my second topic, of political dispositions. I am a self-confessed "Howard Hater", and quite proud of it; it is not just his racism, or his propensity to lie for power which are abhorrent in themselves. But I also suspect it is a dispositional-political approach. Howard, I believe, once described himself as a "radical conservative" meaning that he would be accepting of a radical and rapid transformation of society to ensure the adoption of his conservative social and economic values. My disposition however is as a "conservative radical"; a fundamental political and economic transformation but without a blustering, reckless and destructive approach. I would aspire more to what the great Labor left leader Jim Cairns once described as "The Quiet Revolution", or the Quebecois described their life in the 60s révolution tranquille. Likewise when a well-paid member of the chattering class Andrew Bolt expresses his great support for "democratic capitalism", I instantly feel revulsion - because this axiomatically is interpreted as "majority rules" in terms of civil issues and "capitalism" in terms of economic one's. Again, I stand in antithesis to this - rather than democratic capitalism, I am an advocate of "libertarian socialism"; a principled commitment to individual and consensual civil rights and democratic and public management of our economic resources.
On a related topic my letter to The Age on Howard's lunatic drug policy was published. My review of the 1978 AD&D module Hall of the Fire Giant King was published on rpg.net. Last Friday played HeroQuest, where the players met the local mouse God, which was pretty cool and on Sunday completed the second session of Legend of the Five RIngs: The Ainu Nezumi. In work-related news, I've been struggling with distributed client installs of MATLAB on Windows clients with a Linux license server, and still have to work on getting a certain beast called Rosetta installed on the clusters, along with LAMMPS; seriously, scientific computing installs is hard...
caseopaya, imajica_lj and I spent most of the day at the Werribee Open Zoo whilch, whilst a very unusual activity for me on polling day, was a thoroughly enjoyable nonetheless - even if I ended up slightly dehydrated form the experience. In the evening ended up at the Town Hall Hotel in North Melbourne, calling the results quite early in the piece. Overall, I was somewhat disappointed; whilst the 6% swing to Labor obviously resulted in a change in government, it does mean a wafer-thin majority - although Rudd has "hit the ground running" with Kyoto, indigenous reconciliation, Workchoices and Iraq. The Fairfax papers, both in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age have suggested that the Liberal Party try to move towards the political centre. Some suggest that Labor is now the "natural party of government".Which brings me to my second topic, of political dispositions. I am a self-confessed "Howard Hater", and quite proud of it; it is not just his racism, or his propensity to lie for power which are abhorrent in themselves. But I also suspect it is a dispositional-political approach. Howard, I believe, once described himself as a "radical conservative" meaning that he would be accepting of a radical and rapid transformation of society to ensure the adoption of his conservative social and economic values. My disposition however is as a "conservative radical"; a fundamental political and economic transformation but without a blustering, reckless and destructive approach. I would aspire more to what the great Labor left leader Jim Cairns once described as "The Quiet Revolution", or the Quebecois described their life in the 60s révolution tranquille. Likewise when a well-paid member of the chattering class Andrew Bolt expresses his great support for "democratic capitalism", I instantly feel revulsion - because this axiomatically is interpreted as "majority rules" in terms of civil issues and "capitalism" in terms of economic one's. Again, I stand in antithesis to this - rather than democratic capitalism, I am an advocate of "libertarian socialism"; a principled commitment to individual and consensual civil rights and democratic and public management of our economic resources.
On a related topic my letter to The Age on Howard's lunatic drug policy was published. My review of the 1978 AD&D module Hall of the Fire Giant King was published on rpg.net. Last Friday played HeroQuest, where the players met the local mouse God, which was pretty cool and on Sunday completed the second session of Legend of the Five RIngs: The Ainu Nezumi. In work-related news, I've been struggling with distributed client installs of MATLAB on Windows clients with a Linux license server, and still have to work on getting a certain beast called Rosetta installed on the clusters, along with LAMMPS; seriously, scientific computing installs is hard...