Mac Campbell, on being wrong

One of my greatest thrills is to find I've been wrong, so I welcome every chance.

The first prize for a successful attack on my thinking, is making me happy to be wrong; the second prize is to force me think more clearly.

Why I write

'Enough, if something from our hands have power
To live, and act, and serve the future hour'

(William Wordsworth, in a sonnet written to his friend and muse Coleridge, entitled Afterthought, the last in his sonnet series on the River Duddon.)

Homogeneity and exclusion

The tasks of reproduction of meaning systems may be differently layered from one society to the next, but where pressures develop within a society to enforce homogeneity by means of state instrumentalities, it is the task of administrators to do so by means of the redesign of procedures. Pressures to force homogeneity may originate in interest groups, but will usually have an ideological component, an enforced orthodoxy.

Ancient prescriptive texts illustrate exclusory imperatives, for example in Hebrew, “You shall annihilate them –

Moral contradiction and the world of administrators

The following is an excerpt from the transcript: ‘Behind the scenes: animal experimentation ethics committees’ All In the Mind (Australia: Australian Broadcasting Commission Radio National, 19 January 2008).

Natasha Mitchell: Carole Webb, can I come to you, you are a vet and you're an animal welfarist as well, and you've been on numerous committees at the national and also the local levels, animal ethics committees. What motivated you

On the purposes of governance

Institutions which deliver and reproduce entitlements can fail under certain conditions. Such a state of affairs is often described as a “failed state”

Science has permanently supplanted religious sources of intellectual authority in the realm of public discourse, and there’s no going back.

I’ve had a look at both

http://creationontheweb.com/content/view/6237/ and http://creationontheweb.com/content/view/431
The (young earth creationist) article by Jonathan Sarfati is well-nigh unreadable. It’s full of discourteous and belligerent acrimony. I found myself unable to cope with an attempt to unravel the actual arguments, because it frothed like the mouth of a rabid animal, dangerously and unpredictably.

When a child dies

Jared Diamond, in Guns, Germs and Steel tells us that the Australian continent is like no other. Damn right. These recent awfulnesses, the deaths by bushfire, suggest that we haven't yet learned from Burke and Wills. They died, as you and I would too, in country where indigenous people thrived.

On Entitlement

I am looking for a publisher for my new book,

On Governance

In the first two chapters I re-theorize governance and the history of capitalism, particularly as it effects indigenous peoples.

Here is a brief excerpt from the introduction:

“The purpose of government is to stop us killing one another.”[1]

Pastor Danny Nalliah, of 'Catch the Fire' ministries is quoted as saying that the Victorian bushfires are a punishment from 'God.'

It’s just another piece of evidence that the Christianity Industry is dead.

Moral Parsing

In a published letter about sexual harrassment to Marilyn vos Savant, Barbara DeBaere Poppy wrote, "I consider any woman who has the combined (typically female) traits of being submissive, tender minded, and security-motivated, as inadequate for a job in business. Top it off with naivete', and you have an individual who is easily manipulated, takes everything personally, and refuses to accept responsibility..."

The Orpheus Society: a modest proposal, perhaps.

Proposal to form a Society:

'The Orpheus Society'

'You speed. You crash. You kill your girlfriend. You live. But it's not really living. It's a living nightmare. Forever.'

(Queensland Gov't road safety TV ad.)

Orpheus went to hell and back, and came back with nothing but self-disappointment.

Somebody's got to do it.

It's appalling that my first entry here is a book proposal in theology of all things, the most nasty of all fields of writing. I'm an awful writer, hard to read. Give up now. Still here?