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East Timor, Another publication, Human Rights, Beyond Federation, RuneQuest!
Concert for East Timor
At the Melbourne Unitarian Church, 110 Grey Street, this Sunday, starting at 10am.
Funds raised at this concert (through donations) will be used by East Timor Women (Australia) to support the Women's Cooperative in Taibessi on the outskirts of Dili.
See: http://www.timorwomen.org and http://www.melbourneunitarian.org.au
In other East Timor news there is a possibility I may be returning for a brief stint. Taylor's College has donated two hundred low-end Pentiums and they need someone to look over them and possibly assist in setting them up in a school in Same. The great irony of this it's exactly the sort of thing I cautioned against in my presentation to the VUT conference on Cooperating with East Timor and in my paper on IT Development in East Timor
Just discovered that my essay, The Gifts of Providence and Common Wealth has been published as the lead article in Progress (the journal of Prosper Australia) this week under the subtitle Metaphysics and Political Economy". It seems that mainstream economists and Georgists are talking to each other again. The University of Melbourne's Centre for Public Policy and Prosper Australia are having a half-day symposium on public financing.
In other Unitarian news, I'm writing their submission for the Victorian government's proposed Charter of Human Rights. That'll take up most of the next couple of days at least. I'm concentrating on the right of individuals to self-regarding acts, the right of individuals to engage in consensual acts, the right of individuals to receive a minimum income derived from resource rentals and the right of individuals to directly participate in the political process.
Not surprisingly these will also feature as key elements on my presentation this weekend at the 11th Shed A Tier conference in Sale. My topic is "Universal Rights, Confederation, and Common Wealth" (are you seeing a running theme yet?)
In gamer related news, Mongoose Publishing has announced that they will be releasing a new edition of RuneQuest - something that hasn't been seen for some twenty years. For those who don't know RQ was in its day the real competitor to Dungeons & Dragons and in many ways a much, much better game. I've managed to get myself on the playtesters list and receive their draft to date.
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How does a paper get published as a lead article without you knowing?
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Ahh, I knew it was coming out at some stage... I just didn't know that it would be the first thing!
As for the RQ thing, like so many other fans, we're actually a bit scared. The Avalhon Hill experience was of questionable value, to the point there are still die-hard fans of RQ II (from twenty five years ago!).
RuneQuest had flavour. Heaps of it. I picked up a copy of Cults of Prax the other week from the UK and was reading this magnificant narrative of a trader who travels among the different religions, and in the first page there's a description of meeting talking baboons who summon their ancestors around a big campfire.
Everything about it had the flavour of the bronze age, the magic, the settings, the beliefs of the peoples. It was miles ahead of D&D which largely consisted of 20th century personalities in a fantasy environment. And realism? In RQ if you were hit on the head with a sword, you went down like a sack of shit. In D&D you would have people being hit by a dozen arrows and still standing....
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Lately, the economists who've been managing this bequest have been squabbling with the Georgists in Sydney over how the funds are used. I don't know the details, but maybe they're trying to establish another link with a university. I know our guys want to give the money back.
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Yeah, I must admit that was a bit of a rhetorical comment on my part. So much of Georgist literature I read rails against mainstream economics, yet most mainstream economists I read seem quite sympathetic to the idea.
It's politicians that are the real problem from my experience.
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It's a good as they'll get out of Canberra without massive public protest, which is unlikely because it is actually a massive concession by Canberra (those old digger ads really rattled their cage).
Ramos-Horta is a conservative on this and many other matters.
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Continiuum?
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Did you see the proposed European Constitution? It didn't talk about "Human Rights". It talked about "Human Dignity". Which, considering that 100 years ago, homosexuality was considered an affort to "human dignity" punishable by death, struck me as a deliberate attempt to deny human rights to possible future speciated multicultures.
Human rights are absolute and indivisible. Be firm, Lev-like One, and check every iota of the wording and syntax. Every iota.
Jay Superfluous
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Human rights are absolute and indivisible. Be firm, Lev-like One, and check every iota of the wording and syntax. Every iota.
Exactly what I did. I argued against the idea of "sectional" human rights (if they're not for the entire species, then it's not a human right) and that they were universal and timeless, not to be subject to the vagaries of the political climate.
You're compeletly right about the dignity thing as well.