The Failure of the West

There is so many things going wrong in the West right now. It is really hard to know where to start.
Leadership is a talentless, moral and ethical vacuum. Our political leaders are increasingly coming from the Right, more extreme Right Wing politicians are being elected, so I think we can see fewer and fewer elections in the future. The clouds that hang over Donald Trump, the so-called “Leader of the Free World” threaten us all. What seems to threaten another politician seems to roll off Trump’s back. “Fake news” he says, but pipe bombs are delivered to opponents.
In Oz we have some nut case go off and kill someone with a knife, and that is an act of terrorism. The guy has increasing mental health issues, has already tried to join up with Islamic State, why didn’t they let him go?
Darwin Awards are handed out to such people on a regular basis. Why give such a person a title like “terrorist”? There is an election looming, that’s a good enough reason.
Otto von Bismark said “People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.” This is what we are seeing here? The build up to an election? You bet we are.
The same old tired lies are being trotted out yet again, only now, with a twist. It’s the Muslims and Africans who are the alien among us now. Not the Irish, not the Italians, Greeks, Balts, the Vietnamese, the Chinese, our traditional aliens bringing threats, its Muslims and Africans.
These are the pawns used by our leaders to focus the attention of the mindless masses onto something meaningless and off the failings of our leadership.
I saw a poster the other day, well it was an image of a poster that was reputedly put up as a joint distribution of the Council of Greater Melbourne and the Islamic Council of Australia.
In this poster, people were being warned off eating pork on a beach, wearing bikinis, infringing on Muslims prayer times and a range of other don’t do’s while on the beach.
Absolute nonsense of course, the Greater Melbourne Council does not have any beachfront within its council borders. Also, the Islamic Council of Australia does not even exist, so phoney it is. Also, the poster looked like an A4 page that was printed in colour and just stuck up to look like a poster. Councils do not do things like that, even temporary signs are metal or printed core-flute, not an A4 paper stuck with sticky tape. Also, Council transparency would have anything like this spread all over page 1 and the news channels before it got to printing stage. There are people who keep an eye on councils just for that reason, so it’s all nonsense.
The other thing that got me going was the Port Arthur massacre. In 1996, Martin Bryant took a Colt AR15, designated a L1A1 SLR, and killed 35 people and wounded 22, Bryant was wounded himself bringing the total of wounded to 23. Bryant was a mental case, very low intelligence and intellectual disabilities. John Howard turned the case to advantage by banning high powered SLRs and a lot of other weapons. Got away with it too. The issue has been that Bryant was the perfect patsy for conspiracy theorists. The theory is that it was really Jewish terrorists and Bryant took the fall. This means there has been a massive coverup by police, witnesses, fake video footage, the courts and politicians to keep it quiet all this time. Is this for real? Nothing this big could ever be covered up for this long without a leak.
How that works I have no idea, but for the haters, it’s good. It reads like the flat Earthers manifesto; and no evidence will ever convince them the planet is a ball, that gravity is real. The haters will never be convinced it was Bryant that killed all those people, no-one else, just Bryant. Another piece of nonsense.
(Terry Pratchett has done a terrific job, btw, but I think the flat Earthers draw the line at a giant turtle swimming through space with four elephants holding up the disk. They shouldn’t really, it is just as silly an explanation as the flat Earth but more comically brilliant than theirs.)
OK, to get back to the point. What does a madman in Melbourne, a conspiracy theory and the flat Earth view all have in common? Poor political and social leadership. These things are all designed to distract people’s attention from the fact they are being robbed blind by the banks, business and even Internet companies. People are made to worry about terrorists, that they don’t look at their crumbling infrastructure. People are made to worry about race related crime they overlook how business is corrupting the political process.
Really? We have to do it better than this.