Convincement by Concussion

Yesterday at 1.30pm I noticed I hadn't woken up yet, and that I'd been 'working' on the same sentance for 10 minutes. I shambled up to my manager Andrew and confessed oddly 'I think I have concussion' the whack so to speak had been from an intricate and clever faint playing basketball on Sunday afternoon. I guy with a clear shot at a layup converted it into a pass that because of the superfluity of the manouvre I wasn't ready for and simply copped a blow directly to the head.
I also broke or didn't break a joint in my right index finger. It doesn't really matter because there's nothing I can do about it.
I'd never been concussed before so I just thought I was tired and had a headache. When I went to the doctor he confirmed I had concussion and my mother suggested I might have hepatitus in the height of her anxious paranoia.
But now I am at home taking sick leave due to my short attention span and waiting to see if my condition improves so hopefully I can get out of a brain scan.
So I clicked onto wikipedia, because it is a news service I actually appreciate. Unlike the constant headline news bar across the bottom of existing news shows of which one can watch up to 5-10 hours of news and investigative journalism. Wikipedia has about four news headlines of newsworthyness that rotate in a new headline once a day on your average news day.
Day mcfucken day I said day a lot in that last sentance.
So I read about yesterdays news which was Pope Benedict, I read the quote of offense which was quoting another one and while flicking between cartoons this morning (something I do to stimulate my mind and avoid the news in the morning) I did pick up the latest islamic reaction to the statement the offending quote was:

Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.

Which a) you could immediately argue is hypocritical given the Spanish empires method of spreading catholicism to South America for instance, the Spanish Inquisition also could get a mention in the good old days of torturing heratics.
b) the lecture was about the relationship between faith and reason. Now if one was going to argue that the Islamic interpretation of god isn't bound by reason one would have to be coming from the perspective of a religion whose God was bound by reason and had to act in a consistent and reasonable way.
But the funny thing is some groups reactions to the blasphemy of the statement is to violently target the pope and his 'western allies' and not stop until all the world bows down to islam. Which isn't a quote and comes from good old reliable old channel 7 but seriously is nothing but a precise example of the criticisms raised.
For every fucking islamic group declaring jihad's and earmarking prominent figurehead s for assasination you will (if you look hard enough) find two things i) prominent red neck westerners proclaiming to 'bomb the shit' out of 'them' and ii) perfectly reasonable muslim's having to defend their religion and identity because of the media portrayel.
And if you think about it 'reasonably' if you were a muslim and sent a letter to Today Tonight outlining your plan's for peaceful dialogue and diplomacy between all nations it probably wouldn't get shown whereas if you sent a letter outlining your plans for jihad and terrorism you can bet it would get on the air even if 100 of the other kind of letters went through.
Why? Because from a marketing perspective you only choose information that agrees with what you already know. Everybody knows that Islam is a violent religion. The news reports it monthly. It is a perceptual cage.
The only way to change peoples mind is to force them to behave in a different way or attach a message to the 'perceptual cage' that is add to what everybody already knows rather than try and change the perception completely. Islam suffers politically from having no single heirarchy or authority. Mohammed's prescriptions for how he and the Koran are to be treated as opposed to Jesus' loose and liberal terms denoted to Paul mean of the two religions Catholicism has been able to run a much tighter political institution.
But enough of that I had to check out Father Bob MacGuires' reaction to the statements so I logged onto his blog for the first time in a long time and didn't find any reaction at all which is probably a good one half the time but I did see
this and it was interesting. It put me in mind of Arundhati Roy's arguement about the 'anti-american' label that was a convenient condition . It touches also on this bullshit suggestion of 'Australian values' that are going to be introduced to gaining Australian citizenship. One Kim Beazley is dumb, Australian values are going to be impossible to define, think about it particularly when we can't acknowledge any wrongdoing in the past we are not going to find any consistent set of values. It would be much easier to define what Australian values aren't but even then still difficult. I guess you could say we don't smile on people who eat their own young, that's definitely not an Australian value, eating our own young. We are quite happy to steal a generation, we don't like entreprenuers, we're pretty cowardly, we like gambling and drinking...the whole suggestion is useless.
It is simply to protect a boring and stale culture that is under threat: anglo culture.
I personally think Brunswick is made more interesting by having stores where every sign and every package just about has arabic text. I work with people who's english is as good as my Japanese and it is a welcome change.
Furthermore it harks back to a dumb fucking arguement about flags I had, Sylvia told me what colours in a flag meant. Which was to say only red white and blue had meanings, yet she seemed to think these values applied to all the flags of the world that's why Brits, Australians and Americans got on so great, whereas I recall China's flag indicated all sacrifice and no wisdom or bravery or some shit.
Values are universal, there is not a place in the world you can go and kill someone's kid and spit in that someone's eye and have them love you for it. Frankly I find the notion of 'being Australian' ridiculous. It's a man made Geographical boundary and nothing more. Well more than that 'Australia' can be disconnected from the land all together and just be a society I was born into and charges me membership fees via tax and has a built in education system. If the new values are just 'act like you were raised here' that would be more acceptable, like Apu when he is trying to fake his American citizenship in the Simpson's episode.
If your at a party and the crowd that turns up isn't quite yours you can shut down in a corner somewhere and talk to the one person you do know (I do this a lot) or you could make the conscious effort to intermix, intermingle (I do this occasionally) and before you know it your narrow social sphere has evolved.
Australia's greatest threat isn't terrorism or a corruption of values, infact a professor from America said the Koran needs to be taught in Australian schools so people can actually understand what it is about, and in my opinion it's the same shitty religious text as held by every other religion on equal footing with the bible just below the Baghvad Gitta and the Buddhist sutras. If you want real incomprehensibility try Zen Koan's.
No Australia's major threat is irrelevance. It is becoming one of those little island nations nobody ever thinks about like well like all them little pacific island nations.
At the moment our glorious political leaders seem to be putting measures into place to turn Australia into one big RSL club and you can imagine what that will do for tourism.
Or we could have a mixed bag of people, new words getting introduced to make up an actual 'Australian English' on microsoft word and maybe even greater consumer choices and styles out there.