mood: calm.
state i'm in: congratulations messrs gore and pachauri.
tune: madonna "swim".
within two days of his announcements for a "new settlement" on reconciliation between indigenous and non-indigenous australians, prime minister john howard has already reverted back to his dogmatic self.
naturally his announcements garnered a large amount of dismay and bemused questioning from the media. some quarters have been especially cynical given the timing of the event and his immovable resistance in the past to anything really resembling an attempt at reconciliation. "what people don't understand, or haven't accepted, is that i've always believed in reconciliation," mr howard replies to them. however he reminds them of his unwillingness to embrace the so-called "old paradigm", that being anything other than practical measures, notably emotive and symbolic gestures. mr howard, with his typically narrow and distorted view of australian history, continues that to him, this "involves a repudiation of the australia i have grown up in and loved, and i just couldn't do that and i will never do that".
so when he "will never do that", while what he is promoting now as policy is precisely "that", how can the man truly be taken seriously. in particular, with portents of the coming campaign littering the sphere of public interest, how can he be viewed as anything but just so full of shit.
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his scepticism of Gore's "monopoly of wisdom' on global warming post-awarding of the nobel peace prize was a terrible thing for a Prime Minister of a country to profess to the media. As an intelligent man, he would understand or at least embody empathy towards the mechanics and symbolism of the Nobel Prizes. Dismissive once again with an air of ignorance because it may hurt him ego-politcally is well, flabbergasting. Dismissive of the Nobel Prize and its process is of similar refute as dismissing the validity of the United Nations..... something himself, Downer and Bush et al did pre-iraq and afghanistan.
Howard would have been equally dismissive of Tim Flannery's appointment as Australian of the Year or any intellectual endeavour outside his realm of limited existence.
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