Commenting on No Place for Sheep

4 May

I’ve run an excessively  lenient comments policy on Sheep for all of its life. I don’t like silencing people. Unfortunately, that has to change.

I don’t mind robust discussion. I don’t mind strong language. But the personal attacks are out of hand, and enough is enough.

Please speak to one another as if you were face to face. Please respect one another as if you were face to face. Fight about your differing views as much as you like, but any personal abuse and I will delete the entire comment and if you persist, I will ban you.

If some of you abused each other like this in my house I would throw you out.

I don’t have the time to thoroughly read every comment. If anyone has a complaint please address it to me.

I am still really upset about this.

That is all. Have a good day.

More housekeeping

3 May

Look, I am really upset to read that people don’t want to come to my blog because of the  nature of some of the comments.

I am deleting every comment from my previous post, and I apologise to those who are innocent.

From now on any comments that contain abuse will be deleted.

I am seriously considering banning people for a few weeks. This is not on. This is my space and if you can’t respect my wishes as to the nature of the discourse here, you will have to go.

Jennifer.

HOUSEKEEPING. EFFING HOUSEKEEPING.

3 May

I GAVE YOU A HAPPY PLACE WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT???????

Stop this disgraceful abuse or I will implement PUNISHMENTS and they won’t be pretty.

YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE. 

Housekeeping

From Woomera to Manus: 12 years of state brutality in exchange for votes

2 May

I have beside me on my desk the transcript of ABC Four Corners, May 19 2003. This is the link to ABC Four Corners, April 29 2013

The transcript I’m currently reading is that of reporter Debbie Whitmont’s investigation into the secrecy surrounding the conditions at the Woomera Detention Centre.

Whitmont is also the reporter on the April 29 programme, an investigation into the secrecy and the conditions at the Manus Island Detention Centre.

Excerpts, 2003 transcript

80% of those detained [in Woomera] were found to be genuine refugees and given temporary visas. Many who worked at the centre say they were pressured to stay silent about what they saw and did. It is only now that the full story is starting to be told.

Alley Crace, Welfare Officer [at Woomera] 1999-2001: Just basically, I see the compound all the time. I see hundreds and hundreds of people begging and crying, and I see people dehydrating in the sun. I see people with sewn lips and buried in the ground, cause that’s what they did. I see people slashed up and cut their throats and their arms.

Phillip Ruddock, Minister for Immigration (Howard Government): It is not a holiday camp nor should it be seen as one.

After a riot at Woomera, detainees were put in lock down. Psychiatric nurse Peter Ostarek-Gammon, who worked at Woomera during 2000-2001 and witnessed the aftermath of the riot:

Yeah, well, there was a lot of anger from the officers and the management, a lot of anger directed towards the detainees. In fact, some of them were not just locked into their dongas, but they were drilled in. The doors were drilled closed. I did see that, yeah. Another nurse and myself actually had to visit one of those guys one day and they had to get an electric drill to open the cabin. 

Debbie Whitmont: Four Corners has obtained the computer records of thousands of official reports written by Australian Correctional Management (ACM) [who ran the centre at the time] and given daily to the Department of Immigration. They document the relentlessness of hundreds and hundreds of self-harms and suicide attempts. Like this boy, who smashed his own head with a rock. And this fourteen-year-old girl who saw him do it cut herself and told staff she was frustrated with the Department of Immigration.

After repeated attempts by staff to assist and protect a 12 year-old Iranian boy who was being sexually assaulted, Alley Crace tells Whitmont:

At that stage, I was told that because the people had no identity and that they weren’t actual people in Australia, there was no need, or necessities to report to Family and Community Services – as in FACS.

During the time of the Four Corners investigation, some detainees were on a hunger strike. Whitmont spoke to one of them:

He tries to explain that the detainees have nothing left to use but their bodies to plead their desperation.

Man: We are crying, we are screaming. And we are all “What to do?” We have nothing. This is what you want? This is Australia say to us? Please help us and listen as we are suffering inside. We don’t want to make any rampage. We don’t want any things to do this. (Sobs) We all came from bad condition. We want help.

∫

Sydney Morning Herald, Tuesday 13 May, 2003

Children locked up in Australia’s immigration centres have the highest rate of mental illness ever recorded in modern medical literature, according to a new study. 

The study found each of the 20 children surveyed had at least one psychiatric illness with more than half suffering major depression and post-traumatic stress disorder…

Dr Zachary Steel, [from the University of NSW's School of Psychiatry] said the findings showed detention centre were not the place for children. 

∫

The above events took place during the Coalition government of John Howard. Since then, we’ve had a change of government. Now identical events are taking place under the Labor government of Julia Gillard, this time off-shore, more secretly and less accessibly.

Politicians of both major parties have continued to brutalise, scapegoat  and illegally detain, in shocking conditions, those who have arrived here by boat, requesting asylum.

Communicate with your local member and let her or him know this is unacceptable to you. The only way this will change is if politicians believe there are more votes in behaving humanely, than there are in brutally abusing arrivals.

This is what it boils down to. Votes. This is a very frightening comment on the type of people who run this country, no matter what their political allegiance.

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Eroticism

27 Apr

It was with some mirth that I read the other day of a male author of “erotic fiction” who has resorted to Craig’s List to find a young woman willing to share a thirty-day erotic affair with him, an affair they would both write about, and which he would turn into a marketable book:

The book will detail every aspect of a mutually-agreed to romantic affair between myself and a young FEMALE lover (perhaps you), experienced over 30 days, as in the novel. The difference between the first book and this one will be verite: everything in this new volume will be the truth as both participants see it. If you agree to participate in this project, you will keep a diary of all of your thoughts, impressions and memories of the thirty-day affair that we will share. I will then combine your written thoughts with my own to present the reader with two versions of the same erotic story. One love affair, as seen separately by the man and woman.

My first thought was, this man has no real concept of the erotic, if he believes he can find it to order on Craig’s List. Others were angry at the implied sexploitation of the young woman (no payment offered) but I couldn’t get past my irritation at seeing the erotic so unforgivably reduced. Not to mention his confusion of the romantic with the erotic, which is like confusing Mills and Boon with The Delta of Venus. 

I know that “romance” and “romantic” are common euphemisms for sex, but “erotic” is a whole other concept, and far more dangerous.

Take, for example, what the French philosopher Georges Bataille has to say about the erotic: The whole business of eroticism is to strike to the inmost core of the living being, so that the heart stands still.

and:

..eroticism, unlike simple sexual activity, is a psychological quest…eroticism is assenting to life even in death.

I’m not saying it’s impossible to encounter the erotic on Craig’s List. One of its hallmarks is that it can manifest anywhere, anytime, between any two people, no matter how apparently unlikely. And when it does it is frequently in the form of a coup de foudre, and a kind of madness ensues, madness in the sense that desire for the other is so great it overwhelms common sense, and even one’s sense of self-preservation. It is impossible to satisfy the erotic through simply having sex. Indeed, there is no such thing as simply having sex when the erotic is involved.

In essence, observes Bataille, the domain of eroticism is the domain of violence, of violation…

I don’t believe Bataille is saying that actual violence and violation are necessary for the erotic experience, although they may be for some participants. Rather, the violence is in how the erotic explodes into a life, violating all boundaries and disrupting “normal” feelings and behaviours. One has up till that point been self-contained, with boundaries safely in place, and no particular sense of yearning, except perhaps now and then and weakly, for something nebulous, a yearning easily shaken off by attention to daily life and responsibilities. Then, in a moment, one’s self-containment is violated, violently, by a sustained gaze, by a touch on an arm, by the presence of one you didn’t know you were looking for until suddenly he or she is there. In the immediate clamour you cannot formulate the thought: I want to be in his arms. Only later do you allow yourself to admit that desire.

You are no longer who you were seconds earlier. And you will never be again. This is the violence I think Bataille is describing.

The whole business of eroticism is to destroy the self-contained character of the participators as they are in their normal lives…Eroticism always entails a breaking down of established patterns, the patterns, I repeat, of the regulated social order basic to our discontinuous mode of existence as defined and separate individuals… The stirrings within us have their own fearful excesses; the excesses show which way these stirrings would take us. 

The idea that an erotic affair can be confined to thirty days is laughable: the erotic has its own timetable, it may be more, it may be less, but the idea that one can determine in advance its lifetime is an indicator that one is considering something else altogether.

It is possible to refuse the erotic. William Blake, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, offers an opinion on refusal:

Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling.
And being restrain’d it by degrees becomes passive till it is only the shadow of desire.

I suspect that what the author is searching for on Craig’s List is a shadow of the erotic, a shadow of desire. A simulacrum. And yet again, the reputation of a word is unforgivably traduced.

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You don’t get peace by hating war: the theory of emotions

25 Apr

Some years ago I recall the Dalai Lama observing that hating war isn’t the way to find peace.

From this I took it that he meant personally entering into the territory of hatred and fear, the same emotions that fuel war, is not the most useful way to change a paradigm. I liked the Dalai Lama’s theory: that in order to effect wider change one must first start with the self. Every time we manage to overcome a negative emotion, he said, and allow it to dissipate without acting on it, we have achieved a miracle.

There’s nothing exclusive about the idea. There was a rich Greco-Roman tradition of shaping the self through commitment to self-improvement that involved, among other things, a theory of emotions and the necessity to understand them for the betterment of the self and the community. The Stoic philosopher and writer, Seneca, was an advocate of this culture of the self, later interpreted by Foucault as technologies of the self, designed to shape the subject through a set of practices that position one in critical relationship to oneself, with the goal of improvement not just for the self, but for society.

Currently, I am deep in Martha Nussbaum’s “Upheavals of Thought: the intelligence of emotions.” Nussbaum makes a powerful argument that there can be no adequate ethical theory without an adequate theory of the emotions. Emotions, far from being messy, sticky and yes, let’s not pretend otherwise, characteristically female hindrances to clear thinking, are suffused with intelligence and discernment. They are a powerful source of information, awareness and understanding.

On ANZAC Day, I feel sorrow for those who are sent to die by the State, and for those who lose the ones they love. I also feel a profound contempt for the State that slaughters its young, and the young of its enemies. I wish that what we were encouraged to remember on ANZAC Day, as well as those who died, is the vileness of war, and the tremendous responsibility we have to refrain from engagement, except in the most dire of circumstances.

However, hard as it is, I will attempt not to hate war, in the hope that any individual who manages, even for a short time, to refuse to enter the energy of hate, makes her own tiny contribution to changing the world.

Join me, anyone?

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Asylum Seekers: How Abbott co-opts Article 31

23 Apr

illegal-boats-0-620x349Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has attempted to justify his use of the term “illegals” for asylum seekers arriving by boat, by referring to  the wording of Article 31 of the United Nations Convention on Refugees.

This is what the Convention actually says:

The Contracting States shall not impose penalties, on account of their illegal entry or presence, on refugees who, coming directly from a territory where their life or freedom was threatened in the sense of article 1, enter or are present in their territory without authorization, provided they present themselves without delay to the authorities and show good cause for their illegal entry or presence. (Article 31, (1) )

There is no record of any asylum seeker attempting to enter this country  by boat who has not first presented him or herself to the authorities, without delay, and attempted to show good cause for their illegal entry or presence.

No asylum seeker arriving by boat has ever been found to have attempted to enter this country without contacting the authorities.

There are, however, abundant examples of people entering this country by plane, neglecting to present themselves to authorities, and neglecting to show good cause for their illegal over-stay and presence.

Commentary on Article 31 from the Refugee Council of Australia: 

Article 31: Refugees unlawfully in the country of refuge

This Article recognises that refugees have a lawful right to enter a country for the purposes of seeking asylum, regardless of how they arrive or whether they hold valid travel or identity documents. As such, what otherwise be considered illegal actions (eg. entering a country without a visa) should not be treated as such if a person is seeking asylum. This means that it is incorrect to refer to asylum seekers who arrive without authorisation as “illegal”, as they in fact have a lawful right to do so if they are seeking asylum.

Asylum is a human right

 

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