Ducks in a row
I was told once that it's rather gauche to make bilingual puns about ducks. But I think that's a terrible canard.
And, anyway, Zohran Mamdani has just shown that it's no longer gauche to be left!
Yes, this post is mostly an excuse for those awful puns, as well as to share the joy of duckling season in Canberra's inner north.
But I can't resist adding one more Dad joke / observation that came to me when riding past this little family the other day: these sweet birds are in the "chasm [quacksm?] between no longer [ducklings] and not yet [ducks]."
Ok, sorry.
But while we're talking ducks in a row, I want to welcome lovely new subscribers (thanks largely, I suspect, to the wonderful Ketan Joshi signal boosting the blog) and let all of you know the kind of posts you can expect in the near future.
The two next pieces that I hope to complete in the coming days are the already promised review of the excellent and thought-provoking book, Don't Talk About Politics, by Sarah Stein Lubrano, and a longish piece exploring the Mamdani / Polanski phenomena through the lens of "the necessity and limits of left populism". I suspect the latter might set a cat amongst the pigeons (ducks).
After that, I'm working on one around "the peculiar responsibility of living in between" that will examine the mythology that we have no choice but to keep engaging with politics-as-usual, despite the fact that this is increasingly disempowering and disengaging, and that genuinely facing up to the world as it is, as Arendt's frame of "between the no longer and the not yet" demands of us (see here and here), is more realistic, more empowering, more engaging... More to come.
And then there's a few early drafts expanding on various articulations of why we have to let go of trust in the current system and start genuinely living into being the world that can emerge from the ashes of this one.
Since you're here, though, I'll just make a couple of observations of the no longer from today:
Apparently, "Nine Entertainment has asked the Albanese government to pay it compensation if it bans gambling advertisements".
This bizarre moment of rent-seeking is brought to you by Rudd-era climate politics. No, seriously, though.
The idea that corporations engaged in truly objectionable, socially destructive, and deeply unpopular behaviour should not just keep doing it until ordered not to, and not just lobby hard and use their financial and economic power to hold back regulation that might make them stop, but actually deserve to be compensated for finally doing what basic decency would have had them do in the first place?
That particular layer of inanity comes from the CPRS design. I'm not aware of anything quite like it before in Australian politics. I'd be happy to be told I'm wrong, of course. Feel free to inform me and I will issue a correction.
If I'm right, it's another neat example of how the boa-constrictor-like asphyxiation of our democratic norms and institutions by fossil capital has starved our political brain of oxygen sufficiently to make this ludicrous demand somehow acceptable.
And then there's the news that Tesla shareholders have decided to make Elon Musk a trillionaire.
Capitalism is, at least formally, based on the idea of meaningful exchange value. This is meaningless. This is absurdity. This is inanity beyond the net zero nonsense I wrote about the other day. This is more meaningless than my terrible jokes about gauche ducks.
I did a few sums, just for the inanity:
Homo Sapiens emerged about 300,000 years ago.
Imagine you gave an early Sapiens $9,000. They looked at you and said "WTF?" But, anyway, you were there. And you piled up $9,000 EVERY SINGLE DAY since the first Sapiens walked the Earth.
You still would not have a trillion dollars.
How about this one?
Imagine you were on the beach at Hastings in 1066, and saw that fateful arrow fly into Harald's eye.
You turn to Guillaume and said, "hey mate, here's $2.5 MILLION DOLLARS". He didn't really know what to make of it, since he'd just won the throne of England and that meant more to him. He kind of wanted someone to weave a tapestry, though.
But, anyway, you pile up an extra $2.5 MILLION DOLLARS EVERY SINGLE DAY since the Battle of Hastings.
You still don't have a trillion dollars.
The number is meaningless. The politics is meaningless. The economics is meaningless. The money itself is genuinely meaningless. It's not gold. It's not even paper. It's ones and zeros.
The impact, though, is real. It's horrific. It will lead to more hate, more division, more crumbling.
Might it, though, help a few more people wake up to the fact that capitalism is over, and we have the opportunity to grow something better in its ashes?
Maybe enough ducks are in a row now for something transformative to emerge?
We'll see, I guess. In the meantime, here's Billie Eilish being a badass and telling the Bad Guys to give their money away.
