Friday 17 June 2016

A Republic is inherently un-democratic.



A Republic is inherently un-democratic. 

Democracy means government by the people.  When we vote for our representatives, whomever they may be and by whatever method, we should be passing our power, as the people, upwards to those representatives, but that is not what is happening.

In ancient times, tribal leaders ruled the mob like the pack leaders in many social species of fauna.  By Neolithic times, this had become institutionalised in the form of Monarchy, with hereditary claims able to be challenged by competition of military might.  Power always devolved downwards from this single powerful ruler.  The first Parliaments and Ministries were the Monarch’s personally chosen advisors.  We, the people had very little actual power.  Some power devolved further down to Local Government, but even there, all our lives remain regulated by this form of power that devolved downwards.  There is no recognition of the individual rights of all living beings to have power over their own selves and the right to exercise their own free will.

True Democracy places individual power at the top of the social system.  Instead of a mathematical model that represents power like a cone with an apex at the top and an ever increasing lowest level, the further you go down, we see it as it is mathematically correct, with an upwards cone as well, with the apex at the bottom and the largest (previously the lowest) level at the top.  Here, power is delegated down to our parliamentary and ministerial representatives. 

While passing, we must not confuse the parliament and the ministry.  They look similar, having the same people doing much the same things, but they are two of the three arms of government, the other being the Judiciary.  The Legislature and the Executive are distinct, though now days indistinguishable.

‘Progressives’, as the intellectual elite that rules the ‘western’ world is now called, believe they are functioning democratically, on behalf of the people, a significant part of Lenin’s justification of totalitarian rule under the guise of egalitarianism.  Arguments that won in the debates amongst the various movements of the ‘left’ early last century leading to the Bolshevik rule in Russia instead of the Mensheviks, and it is worth comparing Russia with Germany where the same debate occurred amongst the many groups on the ‘left’ in Germany, but with the opposite choice. 

The clearenst demonstration of the actual totalitarian nature of the contemporary Australian, and world ‘left’ is their arguments for a Republic.  They persist with the idea that Australia should have an Australian as ‘head of state’, which presumably means ‘highest sovereign entity’, in our case HM the Queen.  The consequent dispute over whether the G-G is the de facto head of state, or actually the de jure head of state in some circumstances, or anything else is really irrelevant.  What would be lost by becoming a Republic for purely ideological reasons of having a pure, socialist self-image makes any other issue meaningless.  But those arguments are too extensive to elaborate on now.

The very term ‘head of state’ clearly represents the ancient idea of the single, great tribal leader, who deputises those who administer us and to whom loyalty is due.  What the present Australian republicans are saying to us is: ‘We want one of us to tell us what to do.  Pick one of us to rule over us.  Make one of us monarch over all of us.’

It might be thought that our present arrangement, with an hereditary monarch as sovereign that we would have a socio-political system that was feudal in its application, but the opposite is the truth.  Through a thousand years of wars, revolutions and coups, the system we inherited with the birth of the various colonies that became our states, developed into something closely approaching the ideal societies described and debated by philosophers since classical times, and the key is the concept of the Democratic Monarch, the keystone of the entire structure.

Her Majesty reigns but does not rule.  Nor does the power of Her Majesty’s parliemants, ministeries and courts come from the person of the Monarch, as it did in olden days.  Yet the Monarch, as a person, now represents all of us, existing only though popular acclaim as in the past.  As one of us, our Sovereign is the source of all socio-political power, but it is a power that we distribute with our ballots to our representatives.  They are still beholden to us, the people, through the Crown, because it is rarely repeated that the Monarch is ‘first servant’ of the people. 

Mathematically it might look like a circular argument, but it is still more like the double ended conical shape, with a single point at the apex of the cone on each side.  While the mathematical shape appears to exist on both sides at once, really they can only exist in isolation, yet both must be existent all the time.  It is like the wave/particle paradox.  Reality is counter-intuitive.  What this means is that power can devolve up or it an devolve down, but we cannot have both at once, yet in some way both do exist at the same time.  In our quest to improve our society, it would be a risk to abandon a system that has turned into a large to small direction of power, through the re-interpretation of the point pinnacle and the swivelling it to a point base, for one that purports to recreate it, but instead reverts to the old, totalitarian concept of sovereignty, long lost from what we have now, and entrenches them in a simplistic idea of giving one of us or anyone total power over all of us, to be delegated to people we might have some say over, like letting prisoners select their warders.

It is micro-equality we need now, the inter-personal acceptance of everyone by everyone, not macro-equality, the distribution of our collective personal power to those who rule on our behalf.  We need not a republic or any other totalitarian system, but to be united and supportive of the system we already have.  Endless argument for unpopular change is divisive in a world that need reasons for unity. 

It is the popular acclaim that most distresses republicans, because it clearly demonstrates the democratic nature of modern monarchy.  Yet, apart from its significant political nature, the monarchy provides great pleasure to a large proportion of the population, and it is parsimonious, disingenuous and nasty to deprive people of this pleasure for the sake of ideological purity, let alone for the devious purpose of thwarting true democracy and retaining an elitist autocracy.

Saturday 4 June 2016

Happy 95th birthday to HRH Prince Phillip.

Happy 95th birthday to HRH Prince Phillip.
Here is a link to a retrospective:


HRH Prince Phillip.

Friday 3 June 2016

Rain and Clouds.

Dear New Whig people, 

You are like a theatre audience that is invisible from the brightly lit stage.  

I bought a Microsoft Surface three weeks ago, and it is excellent, but I have had three weeks  of time-consuming and exhausting difficulty coping with everything that could go wrong going wrong.  To start, the Surface was itself faulty, and was replaced after a weekend of frustration. It ended with a week of daily hours on the phone and on Chat with Telstra Help, finally ending with a day with a bogus Telstra person who got into my ‘Network’.  After three weeks of endlessly explaining the problems, some of them repeating like a nightmare, I was in robot-mode, entering this or clicking that as directed, no longer knowing or caring what they were doing, as long as they fixed it.  Only when I turned up at the Post Office to pay for special software did it actually hit me like a gong that Telstra do not ask you to send money to India.  Having Norton re-installed was the second time in two weeks because the subscription had gone wrong previously and that had taken Chat with three Norton people to fix.  But enough of that.

For months there have been few posts here at New Whig.  There is so much political commentary that more seems irrelevant.  Socio-political trends are fascinating to observe, and watching the surf with sets of waves that rise and fall is like observing the gradual swing of the political pendulum.  If you know the mathematics of the pendulum will know that if it is a Compound Pendulum the system can suddenly become chaotic and extreme, just as the Political and Economic Systems do.

On this new Microsoft Surface, I call myself Naum Tered.  I regret not posting more opinions in the past, such as that in Australia, Mr Shorten was looking promising, even when he was disliked by almost everyone in his own party and not known at all by the rest of the country.  Also, it was clear to me that Mr Trump in the USofA was grandstanding to win the extremists within his party to obtain the nomination, and he was also taking advantage of free publicity with his outrageous comments instead of paid advertising.  After he is officially endorsed, he might take a holiday and return a changed man.

As to Mr Shorten, did you know that Tradies, all Trades that work on Building sites, are now paid about double what is earned by Nurses, Firemen and other occupations, and even more than is earned by most Solicitors and Medical Practitioners?  Attributable to the CFMEU, the destroyers of forests, that is not Mr Shorten’s Union, but they are ideologically siblings. 

Here is a new prediction.  Everyone assumes that Global Warming will lead to Sea Level Rise, but all that extra ocean water may well evaporate, and the world will become a planet almost entirely covered by cloud, with rain almost everywhere all the time.  The heavy rain in Europe might be just the start of how it is likely to be most of the time.  And over time, all that extra rain will cause erosion and land-scape change.  The flora and fauna of places having extra rain will change, especially as it will be warm rain in many places.  Certainly, the simplistic expectation that ‘global warming’ means higher temperature shows a failure to appreciate the full scientific description that indicates ‘warming’ means higher energy levels, and this is being experienced as more severe cyclones and more energy in more violent and more frequent weather systems.  Actual rises in the average or peak temperatures of the world’s air and water is only part of ‘Global Warming’.  It seems obvious that if you have a closed system like the world’s surface bio-system, and it contains some amount of chemical water, as ours does, then there will be a balance between the different forms: ice, water and water-vapour.  There will be a global balance, and that must be temperature sensitive.  It must be part of the feed-back mechanisms that keep the world’s weather around a stable average. (It seems to alternate between long ice-ages and the short inter-glacials, in one of which we happily live now. The equilibrium ratios between the water and the water-vapouir in the atmosphere, and the rate of exchange between the two (rain and evaporation) must change when the world’s average surface temperature rises, as it apparently is.  This means more of the water will be in the atmosphere than at present, though the total number of water molecules associated with our little planet is very close to constant, though very, very large.  This means more rain, probably heavier rain in places, warmer rain, and rain in places that had little rain in the past.

It seems that those who profess to know believe neither Messrs Trump nor Shorten will succeed, but New Whig is not so sure.  At the start both appeared unelectable to ‘those who know’ and unknown to almost everyone else.  Gradually, like the shadow of a cloud, people are gradually starting to know these would-be-leaders while at the same time they are changing to reflect the much wider population than the limited group from which they emerged.  There is a momentum to this movement that is hard to perceive as it happens, because we are immersed in it.  We only see things as they are.  The popularity shadow of these two leaders might move fast enough in time for their elections.  A storm or clouds at other levels can change the everything.

Is anyone actually reading this?  I would love to know.  Statistics suggest that sometimes some people do look at this FaceBook Page that co-exists as a Blog.  This is being typed in Word that took three lots of Chat to install.  I wonder if anyone likes these rambling?  New Whig has links to interesting things that I have stumbled across that some of you might like, sometimes with foments attached; especially Royal News that is in short supply otherwise, for reasons we need not endlessly contemplate.  Actually, it is perhaps not a bad thing that in Australia there is scant Royal News, because it increases the ‘distance’.  In London and other Royal Capitals, traditionally the Royals live in Palaces because it creates ‘distance’.  Did you know that one reason most Royals are fit and healthy is because they grow up from an early age running along corridors and up and down stairs; there is an irony in the idea that the staff in the Palaces all walk, but the Royals themselves run everywhere; one imagines the slow and stately procession of elegant Royals around whom servants run and jump, but the reality is the opposite, except perhaps on State Occasions.  I have never met a Royal, so I am being very presumptuous in commenting on them, but the same holds for politics and I have no qualms there.  

Commenting on Politics is like reviewing the circus, with clowns and jugglers and competing Ring ‘Masters’.  We might spill some of our pop-corn and if there is more than one ring we might miss some of the action, yet when it is over the world is still much the same as it was, despite the brief excitement and the illusions.

Naum Tered
4th June 16