Okay, so I’m not entirely sure what “refudiate” means (as the word doesn’t exist), but as it seems she meant repudiate, I’m pretty sure I’m using it correctly! Sarah Palin’s difficulties with the English language are of course now legendary, and a favourite subject for commedians. It is however very disturbing that some one whose native language is English can be considered a credible presidential candidate, when they have so much difficulty speaking it correctly. I am far from a perfect English speaker myself, as I learned it as an adult—I would never dare to publish my unedited text here. But Sarah clearly has no problem with doing this, and even likens herself to Shakespeare! Still, a native English speaker who is a potential president should be able to publish their unedited text—the fact that she can’t should be an embarrassment to all American conservatives. The fact that it isn’t says just as much about them as it does about her, and is deeply disturbing. In essence, they celebrate poor education, stupidity and ignorance. This isn’t about right or left—this is about right and wrong.

The other thing the far right celebrates, of course, is bigotry, which as this video says, should be getting as much attention as Sarah’s choice of words. The outrage over the building of a mosque two blocks away from “ground zero” effectively equates all Muslims with the perpetrators of September 11, as that is the only way a simple mosque can be considered “stabbing the heart” of the American heartland. Yet at the same time, they claim not to be anti-Muslim, and Palin even calls on peaceful Muslims to support her! Why should they? If they are peaceful, then there is nothing wrong with this mosque (or rather, there isn’t anything more wrong with it than any other place of religious worship).

July 23 update: Well Julia has just announced her climate change policy, and while it certainly is better than the opposition’s, I think she’s taken the pragmatism a little too far this time, to the point where it looks like a bit of a cop-out. I’d really like to see her work together with the Greens (who will no doubt hold the balance of power after the election) to take decisive action on climate change.

Many people have dismissed Julia’s pragmatism as “backing down” and “not standing for anything”, but quite frankly, I think it is a good thing. This is politics after all: deals have to be struck and compromises have to be made to get anything done at all. As I’ve said here before, I often feel left wing/progressive voters are too idealistic—unless our leaders do a perfect job, we often don’t vote for them. But we have to face the reality that the nature of politics makes this virtually impossible. And it opens the way for conservative politicians to get into power, as conservative voters usually aren’t critical at all: they just believe what they want to believe (the facts be damned), and believe their politicians deliver on it, seemingly no matter what. We have to accept less than ideal solutions in the short term, so that more ideal solutions can be arrived at later. Otherwise, we are simply allowing the conservatives to turn back the clock.

The two most obvious examples of Julia’s pragmatism are her deal with the big mining companies on the government’s proposed new mining tax, and her new regional, offshore processing policy on asylum seekers. Yes, she did significantly decrease the level of the new tax to get it through, but at least she did get it through—which will still give Australia billions of dollars of extra tax revenue. As for her policy on asylum seekers, it has been dismissed as a return to the policies of John Howard, which many humanitarians were very critical of—including me. In reality though, this is only a very superficial assessment of the new policy, which is crucially different from Howard’s in a few very important respects. It is actually more of a return to the policies of the Fraser government in the 1970′s, which resulted in the resettlement of thousands of Vietnamese in Australia—something I am very grateful for every time I go to my favourite Vietnamese restaurant, or laugh at their jokes.

For one thing, Howard’s “Pacific solution” was cobbled together as a means of avoiding Australia’s obligations under international law, by shipping asylum seekers off to a country that wasn’t a signatory to the United Nations Refugee Convention (Nauru). Gillard’s policy, on the other hand, stipulates that all countries involved in the processing of asylum seekers in our region have to be signatories to the Refugee Convention. This is why she is so far refusing to consider Nauru, even though they already have a processing centre and want to use it. The other problem with Nauru is its remoteness: a major part of her policy is trying to stop asylum seekers from undertaking dangerous boat journeys, which obviously wouldn’t be the case if they had to sail to Nauru! Her preferred choice of processing country is East Timor, which is not only a signatory to the Refugee Convention, but is also right next to the country all the asylum seekers go through to get a boat to Australia (Indonesia). This would obviously make the boat journey to Australia completely unnecessary.

Another crucial difference between her policy and Howard’s is that she won’t be inhumanely and illegally turning boats back, which basically forces the asylum seekers to destroy their boat, leading to an obviously very dangerous situation. She also won’t be reintroducing Howard’s temporary protection visas, which also violated our obligations under international law, and were—like every aspect of Howard’s refugee policy—both cruel and inhumane. But Howard didn’t care about how many people his refugee policy literally killed, and all the suffering it caused—he only cared about winning elections, which very sadly, demonising asylum seekers allowed him to do with ease. And incredibly, the opposition now wants to not only reinstate Howard’s refugee policy, but make it even more cruel and draconian, by refusing to process asylum seekers who have lost or destroyed their papers. Even the Howard government rejected this policy, as they knew that asylum seekers often had to do this to escape their countries safely. But like their former leader, the current opposition knows this issue is hot enough to make a lot of working class people ignore their own welfare, and determine their vote on the basis of what is really a very minor issue.

Still, given that this is such a minor issue, why has Julia Gillard made this such a major part of her election platform? Quite simply, because she has to. You can be sure that if the opposition and the media didn’t keep making such a big deal out of this issue, it wouldn’t even be an issue in this election campaign, just as it wasn’t before a desperate John Howard decided to make it one. And knowing a winner when they see one, the conservatives have decided to keep it that way. Many on the left have criticised Julia for pandering to this issue, but what could she do? If she loses the election over this, we would have the opposition’s policy. At least Julia’s policy is still fundamentally humane. But cleverly and pragmatically, it also keeps asylum seekers offshore until they’ve been processed, which (hopefully) should be good enough for neutralise all the paranoia over this issue. And once this issue is neutralised, perhaps Australia can finally put this sorry episode behind it.

We’ve been performing some major updates to my blog over the past week, so as I haven’t been able to post for so long, this post will be a bit of a grab bag. First of all, I’ve just posted my latest Bible reading (as always, along with an extended, super high quality fully nude version for my web site members). Secondly, as I mentioned we’ve performed some major updates to our blog software to bring it up to date, and we’ve made a few refinements to the design of the site at the same time—we want it to be the cleanest and most elegant blog on the net! And last, but certainly not least, I want to bring your attention to GodBlock (thanks to Joe Miller for the tip!). It has always amused me how hysterical people get about “protecting” children from pornography, when I am not aware of a single scientific study that shows it harms children at all—certainly, it is very difficult to understand how nudity could do any harm to children anyway. It seems to me that this widely held assumption is yet another form of sexual suppression brought to us by religion—which ironically, actually has been shown to have done serious psychological damage to children in many cases. So GodBlock turns the usual internet filter on its head, by protecting children from what could really harm them: religion.