Archive for category Letters
Ticket to ride, and ride, and ride, and ….
Posted by eN0ch in Letters, Politics and society, The Age on 7 January 2012
Those folks who say Melbourne’s Skybus isn’t good value just haven’t considered the technology. Granted the tickets have barcodes. But from my experience yesterday, the limited barcode scanning capacities of the nineteenth century holepunch used on my ticket offer excellent value for minimum enterprise.
Runs and rupees
Posted by eN0ch in Letters, Politics and society, The Age, World on 6 January 2012
“Should Australia continue to increase its economic ties with India?” (The Age, Reader poll, 5/1) Well absolutely, if Clarke keeps batting like this.
A bigger vision
Posted by eN0ch in Faith, Letters, Politics and society, The Age on 5 January 2012
Australian Marriage Equality convener, Alex Greenwich (The Age, 5/1), needs to listen a little more to religious community concerns on gay marriage. Proposed legislation “assur(ing) churches they would not be forced to marry gay couples” may offer some consolation. (Although overseas experience suggests such protection may be temporary anyway.) However for those people of faith who oppose the redefinition of marriage, the central concerns are broader and deeper than the impact of gay marriage on the church itself or it’s ministers. We believe such a change would be to the profound detriment of future generations and of our whole society, not just ourselves. Others are fully entitled to disagree with our worldview. But any serious discussion of this vexed subject must reckon with the scope of our unease, which will not be assuaged by some self-directed political deal.
Generally speaking, the more profound the proposed cultural change the longer and more patient the debate required, if trust is not to be a casualty. This national conversation has barely begun. Now is not the time for legislative haste.
The voice of experience
Posted by eN0ch in Letters, Politics and society, The Age, World on 15 December 2011
Two PMs? We know all about it. But how many independents?
Don’t thank us
Posted by eN0ch in Letters, Politics and society, The Age on 4 November 2011
If you’re one of our customers directly affected by the grounding, you can look forward to a special thank-you … (Fullpage Qantas ad, The Age, 4/11)
Don’t tell me; let me guess. “Thank you for not flying Qantas”?
An uglier game
Posted by eN0ch in Letters, Politics and society, The Age on 27 September 2011
The race to the moral bottom has gone viral, it seems. No longer confined to our major politics, it now infects our major religions too. The next time you put on your football scarf, there’s more to worry about than who’s out injured. Now you can ponder what proportion of your membership dues or gate takings is being invested off the field, in protecting your club’s pecuniary interest in the shattered lives of problem gamblers and their loved ones, whose finals will be anything but grand.
Words and conspiracies
Posted by eN0ch in Faith, Letters, Politics and society, The Age on 16 May 2011
In a free, democratic and diverse society it’s only to be expected that the place of religious belief in public life will be debated. This is as it should be. However in the interests of balanced and informed dialogue a bit of common wisdom in how the debate is conducted goes a long way. Respected organs of media should set the standard.
The basics of constructive debate include caution with hearsay, resisting conspiracy theories, attention to the meaning of language peculiar to certain groups, and great care when quoting phrases without a context. The present debate about Christian teaching in schools has too often lacked attention to such concerns, and it shows in some of the alarmist and polarised language now being used. This will serve none of us, our children included.
Like any organisation or professional circle, the Christian community uses peculiar sets of words, phrases, images and metaphors, some drawn from the Bible itself, others from a variety of contexts in Christian history. The world could not contain the conspiracy theories that might arise from a layman’s hearing of language used in a medical conference, courtroom or mechanical workshop (among an endless list).
When words like “preacher” start to be applied to the religious education class at the local primary school, it’s time we all asked questions.
The silence of the plods
Posted by eN0ch in Letters, Politics and society, The Age on 9 May 2011
I would love to know what really went on between Mr Overland and his former deputy, Sir Ken Jones – just as between Nixon and Ashby, Rudd and Gillard, Turnbull and Abbott, Howard and Costello, Hawke and Keating … and a horde of other leadership intrigues if I’d only known about them. And if starved of facts, then I have sufficient time, intelligence, imagination- and Twitter – to feed an exhaustive cache of urban myths, innuendo and conspiracy theory.
But then would we really want to live in a world of unconstrained accountability? Anyone who’s been an executive leader of just about anything, has dealt with the sometimes daily necessity of keeping certain information restricted to a very few. The absence of such constraints could be a recipe for anarchy – or worse. This is precisely because we humans love to know and love to tell. When the organisation in question is the one chiefly responsible for keeping all of us safe from the darkest of human intent, we might just be especially glad that some files stay locked and some lips stay sealed.
I still wish I knew. But I like being safe.
Anyone for a truly secular long weekend?
Posted by eN0ch in Faith, Letters, Politics and society, The Age on 26 April 2011
Thanks to 2011′s happy confluence of the lunar cycle, a Christian festival and the Australian calendar, Australians have enjoyed the mother of all long weekends. If the current tsunami of secularist zeal achieves its utopian dream of a land free of any public religious expression, then let’s hope this was a good one.
Observant Jewish Australians have always been resigned to taking religious festivals out of their normal annual leave allocation. Do we want a land free of the alleged “discrimination” that favours Christians over other religionists? Well then, we’d better abolish public holidays associated with the Christian calendar.
Could be a worry though, this brave new world that beckons. Consider the impact on the retail industry if the great festivals of the jolly fat Santa and the chocolate-laying bunny had to come out of annual leave. (No discrimination, please. We’re secular.) Avvagoodweegend! (And do pray it’s not the last.)
Be sure your tweets will find you out
Posted by eN0ch in Cyberspace, Faith, Letters, Politics and society, The Age on 26 April 2011
Before the commentariat, Christian and other, condemns the Australian Christian Lobby’s Jim Wallace as a loony fundamentalist bigot, let’s all take a deep breath and consider …
This is the Twitter age, and we’re all still meeting its perils along with its undoubted benefits. Staff and readers of The Age should be especially attuned, given the dismissal last year of an outspoken journalist after a similarly careless post on Twitter, amidst the frenzied online banter occasioned by the ABC’s weekly Q&A program.
If, as one of the anonymous millions, you forget who you are while tweeting in under 140 characters at the speed of light, you should consider yourself lucky merely to see red cheeks in the mirror. The same misfortune bears the sword of instant professional death if you happen to have a very public profile. Catherine Deveny and Jim Wallace make the strangest of bedfellows. But they merely share the doubtful honour of learning a most common lesson before a million judges. Let’s be slow to condemn either.
Let the twitterer without sin cast the first stone.
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