by cameron | Apr 21, 2007 | Australian politics, Christianity, Melbourne
I’m scanning the headlines this morning and see this one on News.com.au: “Priest claims praying ‘pointless’“. You just know that’s going to get my attention, right? I thought to myself “I can’t wait to show this to Father Bob!”
You should have heard me laugh when I opened it and read:
“SOUTH Melbourne priest Bob Maguire says church leaders across Australia can pray for rain “until they go black in the face” but it won’t solve the water crisis.”
I love it when Bob says what he really thinks and bucks the establishment.
This week’s episode of The Father Bob Show on TPN should be fun. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about our “duty of care” to the indigenous population of Australia and I want to talk to Bob about it.
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I have decided that I am a racist. And it bothers me deeply.
Let me explain. A racist isn’t just someone who thinks other races are inferior to one’s own. I’m not that kind of racist. A racist is also someone who values another race less than one’s own. And based on my growing understanding of the situation that the indigenous population of this country is in, combined with how little I have personally done about it, I have decided that I must have valued their lives less than I should. And I think that makes me a racist. And I’m going to change.
200 years ago, European Christians, mostly from Great Britain, came to Australia. They invaded the country. Committed an act of mass genocide. Stole the entire continent from its traditional owners. They took children from their families, as recently as 40 years ago, thrusting them into Christian educational institutions.
What reparations has the United Kingdom made? What reparations has Christianity made? What reparations have *I* made?
Me? What did *I* do to them?
Nothing directly. But I am profiting off of what was done to them.
What duty of care do the people of European descent in this country have to the descendants of the aboriginals who were treated so abhorrently?
It doesn’t matter if our direct ancestors weren’t involved. WE are still profiting from that theft. The asset that was stolen from the indigenous population, this land, is our greatest source of wealth and prosperity.
If scientists found a living dodo specimen, wouldn’t we all feel a duty of care for it, even though our direct ancestors may not have been the ones who wiped out the rest of the dodo population?
Why then don’t we feel the same duty of care for an entire race?
Saying ‘it was 200 years ago’ isn’t a justification. Only 60 years ago, the international community gave the Jewish people an entire country which hadn’t been theirs for thousands of years. That’s a precedent for reparations.
Let’s say that when Napoleon annexed Italy in 1796 it had stayed under French control until now. Do you think the international community would be telling France to give Italy back to the Italians? 200 years isn’t a long time.
What if Japan had successfully invaded Australia during WWII. What if they have murdered the majority of Australians, taken their land, their homes, their crops. What reparations do you think we would be demanding today? Would we be satisfied with an annual stipend and access to education? Would we be saying “well that was your parents, not the current generation, so nothing can be done to turn back the clock?”
West Germany paid reparations to Israel for the Holocaust. What is the statute of limitations on genocide?
The Australian Aboriginal people lived here for 40,000 – 75,000 years before the Christian invasion and genocide. It is estimated that there could have been 750,000 – 1,000,000 of them at that time. By the early 20th century the indigenous population had declined to between 50,000 and 90,000. Today there are less that 500,000 descendants.
A friend of mine, Andrew Mullins, put it to me this way a couple of years ago:
“What if scientists discovered a population of humans living deep in the jungles of the Amazon who had been around for 40,000 years? How do you think they would treat them? They would wrap them up in cotton wool and treat them with the utmost respect.”
He opened my eyes to something, I am embarrassed to admit, that I hadn’t given much thought to. It is my belief that the media, the government, and the education system in this country, in fact ALL of us in this country, have willfully and knowingly obfuscated and belittled the issue of our responsibility to the indigenous peoples of this country.
Now – giving back the land, moving 22 million people out of Australia, is obviously impossible. But what, then, do we do? I am increasingly uncomfortable with the general opinion I hear from other white people in this country that “we give them money and they get unequaled access to opportunities – what more do they want?”.
We cannot wash our hands of this.
Russell Buckley asked me recently:
“What are we doing today that our descendants will look back on in disbelief and ask themselves how on earth we could have done that, thinking it was normal, or certainly harmless?”
I think perhaps our minimal concern over our duty of care to the Aboriginal peoples of Australia is one of those things.
by cameron | Apr 20, 2007 | Australian media, Podcast, science vs religion
It struck me last night while reading Brian Greene’s tremendous “The Elegant Universe” that if religious types were at all genuine, they would be digging through books on physics and chemistry like they were the new word of God. I’ve read the explanation of the double-slit experiment time after time over the last 20 years and it *still* blows me away. It brings out an awe and wonderment in me that I can only connect with a religious experience. The fact that most so-called religious types don’t study what we’re learning about the way our universe operates is a testament to how serious they really are at understanding “the mind of God” (as Stephen Hawking put it).
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Apparently this week marks 40 years of talkback radio in Australia. As anyone who has been watching Media Watch (and you *should*) knows, the state of talkback radio in this country hit an all-time low last week when Alan Jones and his station 2GB were found as having breached the code of practice by ACMA (for inciting violence) and then they spent the week thumbing their nose at the ruling.
For those of you who haven’t bothered reading Chris Masters’ excellent book on Jones, “Jonestown“, here is a quick review of his career highlights according to Wikipedia:
In December 1988, Jones was arrested in a public lavatory block in London’s West End. He was initially charged with two counts of outraging public decency by behaving in an indecent manner under the Westminster by-laws.
For a time until 1990, Jones had been writing for The Sun-Herald but it announced that Jones’ column would no longer appear following a petition by staff calling for his removal as a contributor. This followed Jones’ publication of a column predicting an oil crisis, in which a large amount of material had been taken from Frederick Forsyth’s novel ‘The Negotiator’ without attribution or indication that their source was a work of fiction.
Between 2002 and early 2004, the “Cash for comment” investigation was conducted. Jones had been accused of contracting to have personal commercial support in exchange for favourable “unscripted” comments, principally for Telstra and QANTAS, during his radio show. The independent Australian Broadcasting Corporation TV show, Media Watch, was heavily involved in exposing these practices. The Australian Broadcasting Authority finally decided that disclosure had to be made, hence the “Commercial Agreement Register” at the Jones portion of his station’s web site. (Jones was investigated along with John Laws from 2UE.)
Also in April 2004, a stream of flattering letters to Jones from Professor David Flint, Chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Authority, came to light. This called into question the impartiality of Flint, and the then Federal Minister for Communications, Daryl Williams, was embroiled in media speculation as to the future of Flint. With an inquiry imminent, Flint resigned. In an appearance on the ABC’s Enough Rope, John Laws accused Jones of placing pressure on Prime Minister John Howard to keep Flint as head of the ABA, made comments that many viewers took to imply a sexual relationship between Jones and Flint and broadly hinted that Jones was homosexual like Flint, who is openly gay.
In December 2005, in the lead-up to the Cronulla riots, Jones used his breakfast radio programme to read out and discuss a widely-circulated text message calling on people to “Come to Cronulla this weekend to take revenge… get down to North Cronulla to support the Leb and wog bashing day”. Media commentator David Marr accused Jones of inciting racial tensions and implicitly encouraging violence and vigilantism by the manner of his responses to callers even while he was verbally disapproving of them taking the law into their own hands.
(and, the most recent… )
Today Jones was fined $1000 and put on a nine-month good-behaviour bond for naming a juvenile witness in a murder trial. (link)
And yet Joan Warner, head of Commercial Radio Australia, says the radio industry in this country should “pat itself on the back”. Please. Hang your heads in shame, more likely.
But who is really responsible for people like that being on radio? The owners of the station? Or the people who continue to listen to him and therefore enable him to continue earning millions by behaving in this manner? Do we get the media we deserve? Or should the owners of media companies try harder to provide us with people worth listening to?
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Meg Tsiamis from dLook obviously has way too much time on her hands. She has compiled a list of the Top 100 Aussie Blogs by Australian Audience. Unfortunately TPN didn’t make it into the top ten (we were at #12) and so didn’t make it into yesterday’s AGE.
I can’t work out why Darren’s eternally-popular Problogger site was named #1 in The Age article while Meg had In The Mix as #1 but I’m sure there is a good reason.
ITM is a real surprise. Who knew dance music had a following? 🙂 Congrats to the folks at ITM, they are obviously doing a terrific job. I need me some dance music podcasts. I also can’t work out how Meg determined popularity by AUSTRALIAN audience. Can you filter Alexa or Technorati by the geography of the audience?
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It’s almost enough to make me believe in God. A new Napoleon film comes out. And it stars Monica Belluci. What more could I ever ask for??? (Okay, apart from actually getting to meet Monica…).
Elba island, 1814. Martino is a young teacher, idealist and strongly anti-Napoleonic, in love with the beautiful and noble Baroness Emily. The young man finds himself serving as librarian to the Great Emperor in exile whom he deeply hates yet soon begins recording Napoleon’s memoirs, getting to know and learning to value the man behind the myth. Among seductions and affairs, expectations and fears, he will craft a precise portrait that never less will not manage to hide a final, inevitable, disappointment.
Here’s a link to the trailer (in Italian).
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Speaking of trailers… the new trailer for “Live Free or Die Hard” is surprisingly cool. Good to see Timothy Olyphant doing something big now that Deadwood has been canceled. It’s a big jump up for director Len Wiseman as well. His Underworld films were pretty cool concepts but never really seemed to pull it off… not that you need much of an excuse to watch Kate Beckinsale for a couple of hours.
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I’ve decided that running a startup is a little like running a marathon. Not that I know anything about running a real marathon (and I have no intention of ever finding out), but stick with me on the analogy.
A startup, be it a business or a podcast, takes time to build. I was reminded of this when I sat at E&Y the other day. One of their guys gave a presentation talking about how it takes 5 years for a business to get through the startup phase. It takes another 10 – 15 years to become a mature business. Phillip Goodman from Rivers talked about his business lost money for something like the first 8 years.
Hanging around with the web 2.0 crowd, it’s easy to forget that. There’s this idea in web circles that if you ain’t a billion business in 18 months then you’re doing something wrong. Of course, most of the people who try to pull that off, usually end up flaming out. 0.0001% pull it off.
I see the same thing with podcasters all the time. They start off with these huge promises, oh they are just going to take over the WORLD! They are SO TALENTED! The world has just been waiting for them to hit the scene. They are going to smoke it.
Then, when a few months in they only have a few hundred listeners, they disappear from few. Pussies. I really respect the folks who come in and take a long term view. Not that you shouldn’t push yourself to grow each month, to stretch yourself – you should. You should have goal and a plan to achieve the goal. I’m always trying to get better at doing that stuff. But you have to have a long term view. It takes time to build.
TPN is now at an interesting stage. When I look back over the last two years, I can see that on average we have grown our audience and our downloads at a rate of 15% month-on-month. Today we’ve got about 500,000 regular listeners. So it’s taken us two years (and change) to get to 500,000.
However… if we keep up this growth curve (and who knows if we can?), then by September we should have a million monthly listeners. Five months later (Feb 07) we should hit 2 million. That’s the power of compound growth. Martin Wells from Tangler (who, btw, recently released their baby to the world, check it out if you haven’t already), shared some of his wisdom with me a while back. He talked about how when you build a startup you spend the first couple of years just getting through one month at a time until one day, you look back and realizing that your monthly revenue increase is more than you made in your first year. It takes time to build.
Anyway… 2 million listeners starts to look like a real platform to build a business from. And Feb 07 will be our third anniversary as a network. If our revenue keeps growing the way it is, we should be having a lot of fun by then.
But back to the marathon… I’m continually surprised by how few people can actually think in terms of 5 years. I don’t know – maybe playing chess for 30 years has helped me think long term. You can’t play chess at a high level unless you can think 20 moves ahead. I think business is a bit the same. Not that I consider myself an expert on either chess or business, I’m just a learner in both. I’m trying to get better at the business side of things. One day I hope to be able to spend more time getting better at chess.
by cameron | Apr 19, 2007 | Christianity, Melbourne, Uncategorized
How’s this for a cool way to enter the office each day?
Apparently this is the the Headquarters of Red Bull in London. Pretty brilliant huh. See more images here. (via PureProfile’s blog).
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Yesterday I had the privilege of listening to Phillip Goodman speak at the offices of E&Y in Melbourne. Goodman is the owner of clothing manufacturer/retailer Rivers. Wow. What a story. He talked for 30 or 40 minutes about how he started and built the company. Totally brilliant story. I invited him onto G’Day World as a guest for our “Melbourne’s Leaders” series but he declined. Apparently he avoids the press and prefers to stay under the radar, which I kind of understand. But if you ever get a chance to hear him speak, grab it. I can’t begin to tell you how many terrific anecdotes this guy has. It inspired me for the rest of the day.
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Yesterday I listened to Thomas Friedman’s recent talk at POPtech about “why this isn’t your parent’s energy crisis”. It’s brilliant. He explains how the USA is funding BOTH sides of the “War On Terrorism” by continuing to buy ever-larger energy purchases from countries in the Middle East who then donate large chunks of the money to Islamic fundamentalist organisations who, in turn, attack the US and US interests. He suggests that the only way to break the back of this addiction is to move as quickly as possible to green, renewable sources of energy.
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This image of Cho Seung-Hui from the video he sent to NBC is pretty interesting. Anyone else see a John Woo homage? I also love Cho’s rationale for his killing rampage:
“Thanks to you, I die like Jesus Christ to inspire generation of the weak and the defenceless people.”
How many times have I said here that Christianity was a violent religion that inspired (even justified) violence? The fact that the media is carrying this quote from Cho and everyone just accepts his rationale is interesting in itself.
“Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.â€
Matthew 10
But you have to admire the resolve of the NRA in situations like this. Despite the rest of the world thinking the US are completely frakking NUTS for allowing the amount of guns they have on the street, the NRA obviously enough photos of US Congressmen and women engaged in sexual congress with furry mammals that they just breeze through situations like this.
Did you see that they are actually GIVING guns away this week in Virginia?
They are calling it the “Bloomberg Gun GiveAway”. On Thursday two gun shops in the state of Virginia will stage a prize draw. Anyone spending more than $100 in either Bob Moates’ stores or Old Dominion Guns and Tackle will be entered, and the first prize a free handgun or rifle worth $900.
(link)
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by cameron | Apr 19, 2007 | Uncategorized
Have you seen this Will Ferrell sketch “The Landlord” yet?
Seriously the funniest thing I have seen in ages. Brilliant. I wish I’d thought to exploit MY kids when they were this age. Damn it.
by cameron | Apr 18, 2007 | Uncategorized
Oh my gawd… from the sublime of my interview with Mr Deity this morning to …. this.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ES1_tAGlcKA]
by cameron | Apr 18, 2007 | Podcast, science vs religion
A wonderful show today. I get to talk to Brian Dalton, the comic genius behind one of the hottest video podcasts on the web today – MR. DEITY.
Brian talks about how the idea for the show came to him, his background as a “ForeMon” (a lapsed Mormon), his careers as a graphic artist, musician and filmmaker, the success of the show, the future of the show, and some production insights into how the put it together.
It was a lot of fun and if you haven’t already checked out MR DEITY, then do so now.
Don’t forget to make use of my new comments line – Aussies can dial into +613 9016 9699. The rest of you can either pay international charges (cmon, what price can you put on being on my show??) or just start begging me to set up an international number.
If you enjoyed this podcast, make sure you don’t miss future episodes by subscribing to our feed and leave us a voice comment!
The G’Day World Theme Song is “Save Me†by The Napoleon Blown Aparts.
by cameron | Apr 18, 2007 | Uncategorized
Due to popular demand (okay, Scienta), I’ve brought MODM 1 forward 24 hours to pacify those people who hold ANZAC DAY sacred. Kevin Rudd.
by cameron | Apr 17, 2007 | Uncategorized
Okay, for the folks in Australia (or those of you internationally who don’t mind paying international call charges), I have set up a comments line – +613 9016 9699.
Regular listeners might want to plug it into your mobile phones so you can easily call me (“To call The Cam, please press 1”) when you are in your car, etc.
I haven’t bothered setting up a US or UK number yet – I’ll see how much this one gets used first. Let’s face it – attempts at getting you guys to leave audio comments in the past has been a dismal failure but I’m hoping that because this one doesn’t require you to be sitting in front of your PC, it might get more traction.
by cameron | Apr 16, 2007 | Uncategorized
writing this on my pda while sitting at my kids acting lessons.
while i’ve been sitting here i’ve been catching up on some video casts. I’ve been watching calacaniscast and realized that’s what gdayworld would look like as a videocast. I’m wondering if there is any value from your perspective in having video on a show like this?
also wondering today if a couple of phone-in lines for comments, an aussie number and a US number, would make it easier for you to comment on a show while you are in your car or on a train, etc. You could store it in your mobile and react when the thought is front of mind and not have to wait until you get back to your pc?
oh and finally, after thinking last night how unfair the “i’m a mac, i’m a pc” ads are (although very clever and funny), today I got my first vista bluescreen. great.
by cameron | Apr 16, 2007 | Australian politics, Podcast, science, science vs religion
David Silverman has been an Atheist since he was six years old. He is an accomplished inventor with seventy-four patents, holds degrees in Marketing and Computer Science, and is the National Spokesperson for American Atheists, an organization in the U.S. dedicated to defending the civil liberties of atheists and advocating for the complete separation of church and state. He also writes their NoGodBlog
We talked today about the implications of the recent UN Human Rights Council’s resolution against “religious defamation” (link), his interview with Douglas Adams (link), the “Treaty Of Tripoli” (link), how he and his Jewish wife raise their ten-year old atheist daughter, why he likes the term “atheist” versus terms like “secular humanist”, the amazing story of Madalyn Murray O’Hair, aka “The Most Hated Woman In America” who was the founder of American Atheists, and how lucky I am living in a country like Australia where you can say “the A-word” and not get shunned from polite society.
If you enjoyed this podcast, make sure you don’t miss future episodes by subscribing to our feed and leave us a voice comment!
The G’Day World Theme Song is “Save Me†by The Napoleon Blown Aparts.
