Category: Rants

There goes credibility

Details remain scarce, but it seems that the Indian doctor from the gold coast who has been being questioned by the Australian Federal Police in relation to the recent failed London bombings has been charged with Terrorism related offences, seemingly solely on the basis of having lived with one of the UK suspects previously, and having left his mobile phone sim card with that person when he moved to Australia. So far there seem to be no suggestion that he even knew his ex-house mate had an extremist agenda.

If that’s all they’ve got on him then the AFP is looking pretty stupid, and I look forward to a judge telling them to get the f**k out of his/her court and stop wasting the nation’s time.

I am also quietly looking forward to the other doctor who was questioned but was (by the AFP’s public statements) never even a suspect, and who had his name leaked to the press by the police, suing the arse off the Queensland police for loss of income, defamation, anguish, and breach of privacy.

We seem to live in an increasingly depressingly moronic society whenever anything related to domestic terrorism comes up.

Acute observation

I read an online comic called Bunny, which is usually pretty esoteric, but in the cartoon from yesterday they make the kind of pointed observations that I love seeing interjected into the generally ludacris public debate on terrorism:

“Bomb” attacks: Deaths:0, Cost: the same amount of council tax as usual.

Current flash flooding in the UK: Deaths: 6, Cost: Estimated to exceed 1 billion pounds.

Which one is seen as the biggest threat to the UK? The one that was foiled by Civilian emergency services, traffic wardens, concrete bollards, and members of the public.

Get over it

I must admit to being frankly perplexed by the whole Diana anniversary thing.

It’s been ten years. She’s dead. It’s sad, but surely by now you should have built a bridge and gotten over it?! That after this length of time you can still fill Wembley stadium with people to commemorate her (although the cynical part of me says that perhaps some of the people may have been there solely because there were some good acts performing), and that it gets top story on the news for several days running, seems to me to show a disappointing misdirection in the communal psyche. She did some worthwhile things, and died tragically early, but you don’t see this kind of thing for dead Nobel peace laureates, or rock stars or (god forbid) politicians/diplomats/scientists etc who’s works actively improved everyday life…

<sigh>

That’s the christmas spirit

In what has to be one of the most bizarre and foolish thing I’ve read recently Catholic Cardinal Joachim Meisner of Cologne last week unexpectedly banned Catholic children from praying with Muslim classmates.

Apparently the basis of this ban was that “The image of God in non-Christian religions is not identical with the God who is Father of our Lord Jesus Christ”.

Surely when we’re talking about (catholic/muslim/jewish) children, the fact that they’re praying AND getting along with people of other faiths in a christian/muslim/jewish manner is enough.

They’re not going to understand the dogmatic distinction between a catholic praying to god versus a protestant praying to god versus a jew praying to god versus a muslim praying to god (which all 4 groups would acknowledge is still the same god, separated by human dogmatic differences (whether you believe Jesus is the son of god vs. not the son of god vs. just another prophet). More importantly they shouldn’t have to, and for the Cardinal to try and impose division on children seems both callous and pathetic.

Thankfully it sounds as though he is pretty much being either ignored or openly criticised for the stance, and once again the chuch as an organisation is being marginalised because it continues to focus on dogmatic minutae and maintaining it’s power, while ignoring the major themes of love, tolerance, understanding and community on which most people base their faith.

My next education campaign

One of the things which I have recently been finding quite unbelievable is how easy it is to confuse people with the simple question of “What is your ethnicity?”

As part of the booking in process when we first see soon-to-be-mothers in antenatal clinic we ask them a bunch of question relating to general health and influencing factors.

Because certain ethnic groups have different risks for certain conditions that can effect pregnancy we ask about ethnic background.

And what constantly leaves me wanting to slap people is the response to this question. I say “So, what is your ethnic background” (which I now usually follow with “…where did your ancestors come from” or something like that) and in response I still almost invariably get a look of deep confusion followed by a response along the lines of “Australia…. I’m… I’m Australian”. So seeing as they are almost all whites, I try to clarify with “But your ancestors, did they originally come from Europe, you know, caucasians?” to which I once again get a confused look and “No…. I’m… … Australian” at which point I do my best not to look exasperated, write caucasian on the form, and move on.
I don’t know whether it’s something to do with the demographic population group I’m dealing with here, or whether this is a wider Australian problem, along the line of the US theme of America is the best and we’re all Americans…

Coming from NZ where pretty much every form that required demographic information has the first two options being (1) New Zealand European (Caucasian), (2) Maori, followed by the other usual options, I find it interesting that there seems to be so much confusion and ignorance about the separation between ethnicity and nationality. My ethnicity is caucasion. My nationality is New Zealander.

Surely that’s not so hard? Is it?

Pagers

One of the dubious features of being a doctor are our pagers.

When you’re a med student you can’t wait to get one.

After having one for anything longer than a week you spend significant amounts of your time alternately cursing it’s existance and thinking whether you could get away with flushing it (or smashing it, or burning it, or…).

One thing can be said about them though: They do provide some interesting insight into how some hospital staff view doctors.

Firstly you get paged all the time about quite ridiculous things (“The patient has a slightly low temperature, but feels fine, and feels warm when I touch them”, or “Can you come and finish filling out this paperwork” – “I’ve already done it” – “No you haven’t” – “Yes I have, here it is” – “Oh, sorry”).

Then you arrive at work in the morning or on monday (I leave my pager in my locker when I leave work) to find that people have paged me at 5:30pm. And 9:30 pm. And 2:00am. And on sunday when I’m not on call. And on public holidays when I’m not rostered on. I can never decide if they honestly think I live at the hospital, or if they’re just being hopeful (and they’re probably lucky I don’t take my pager home, because the best they could hope for was to be yelled at down the phone for waking me up at 2 in the morning).

It seems when I read what I have just written that I sound like a nasty grumpy bastard, but I have found recently that I have very little patience for people who waste my (now quite limitied) time, and you come to appreciate that a little bit of common sense goes an awfully long way, especially many of the people you deal with seem to fail to use any at all.

My dirty little secret

I think it is fair to say that I have always had a fairly strong aversion to four wheel drive vehicles, and so when Simone had a little accident in her Alfa and the insurance company gave her a Nissan X-Trail as a replacement car, I was a little uneasy.

I have always thought they were too big, too spectacularly environmentally unfreindly in their gas guzzling tendancies, and generally unnecessary (how many soccer mums with 4 wheel drives ever put them into 4 wheel drive mode?). Generally I maintained the view that the kinds of people who had them (in the city at least) were trying to compensate for something (kids, your parents will explain what I mean by this in about a decade..).

So when I was forced to drive one, I discovered that while my above assertions may not be inaccurate, they aren’t the whole story, and there may in fact be something to be said for (particularly recreational) four wheel drives, and those things can generally be summed up in one word: Features.
I loved the Fully electric chairs. I loved the sun roof (although it meant I had to wear my hat so I didn’t get a burned head). I loved the cruise control (it made the drive when we visited Simone’s parents on the Sunshine coast seem soooo easy..). I loved the wide angle side mirrors.

In short I rather enjoyed myself, and felt rather naughty and hipocritical about it all.

So I suppose all I have to do is find a “normal” car which has these features in it, and then I can go back to taking the moral high ground against all the people trying to intimidate me in their 4×4 polution-mobiles.

Abortion debate?… Ah crap

It has amazed and irritated me for the last week or so hearing stupid politicians trundle out their “harrowing tales” of wives, partners and girlfriends who have had abortions and how it has affected the politicians lives, without realising that the thing they are debating has absolutely zero to do with the morality of abortion.

Abortion within Australia is legal within tightly defined pre-existing parameters.

This debate had nothing whatsoever to do with the legality or morality of abortion.

It was entirely to do with whether the health minister alone and with no oversight should be allowed to decide whether a safe method of carrying out a legal proceedure should be available, or whether this decision should be entrusted to the organisation that makes these same decisions on all other medications that are available in Australia, and who posess significantly more expertise in the fields of medicine, public health, pharmacology, and medical ethics than the health minister personally does.
If the politicians want to try and change legislation to outlaw abortion then they are perfectly welcome to try to do just that, and they can have their emotional stories, and they can have their fiery debates (and they can also loose the next election because they alienate the majority of the female vote, and they can live with the fact that women will go back to having so called “back yard” abortions, and they can have the many deaths which will result from this on their conscience).

Imagine… a world without Yoko Ono

I was watching a bit of the Winter Olympics opening ceremony this morning, and while the ceremony was by and large pretty cool (I especially liked the acrobats doing the dove dance towards the end), I have to say that I really find Yoko Ono pretty blood pathetic.

She somehow involved herself in the ceremony, reading the lyrics to John Lennon’s Imagine, as some sort of poem to peace, and while I like the song, it’s lyrics, and the unquestionable genius of it’s original creator, I find it pretty sad that whenever Yoko wants to make some public statement or be in some public appearance she trots out Lennon’s work or memory for her own use.

If she had done other things of genuine note then it might be different, but as far as I can tell she’s simply another of those myriad irritating people who have remained famous simply for being associated with someone famous.

As one london Newspaper art critic put it: “”She’s shaped nothing, she’s contributed nothing, she’s simply been a reflection of the times…I think she’s an amateur, a very rich woman who was married to someone who did have some talent and was the driving force behind the Beatles. If she had not been the widow of John Lennon, she would be totally forgotten by now…Yoko Ono was simply a hanger-on. Have you seen her sculpture or paintings? They’re all awful.”

and while there is relative agreement in art circles that her early work in visual and performance art was contributory, she has certainly doesn’t seem to have done anything particularly note worthy in several decades, and the continual riding on the coat tails of John Lennon’s ghost seems rather pathetic and distasteful.

What’s so bad about torture

In what is becoming an depressingly common manifestation of both general populational ignorance and an infuriating tendency by many people to unquestioningly accept as gospel whatever tripe the government spouts I had to listen this morning to a generally well respected morning television show host ask a question to the effect of “But these are terrorist we’re talking about here. What’s so bad about torturing them?”

I can’t understand how people are unable to work through in their heads the following train of thought:
(1) Terrorists are bad (because they seek to deny people life, liberty and freedom without the foundation of laws, or recourse to a legitimately appointed judicial system to argue their case(s).)

(2) We are good (because we base our actions upon universal laws and protection of human rights)

(3) If terrorists do bad things we arrest and imprison them, both to protect ourselves, and to illustrate that we have retained both our moral superiority and the moral justification for our actions by:

a) Allowing the terrorists to defend themselves in open court against defined charges under defined laws
b) Finding them guilty of a those defined crime based on evidence and due process
c) Imprisoning them in a way that punishes them while still protecting their human rights (which, by their nature, every human retains regardless of innocence or guilt).

(4) When we act this way we also protect those who are genuinely innocent, those who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, or those who the government may choose to label terrorists simply because it does not like them (eg. Political opponents, common criminals, racial or religious groups).

As such, if we fail to do any of the above (for example by torturing them to confess to a crime, or by torturing them as part of their eventual punishment) then we become no better than the terrorists, and cannot claim that we are justified in our outrage at their “terrorist” acts, or in our reactions to those acts.

We also leave ourselves open to having the terrorists say “such and such a nation summarily kills and tortures us, so we are quite reasonably justified in defending ourselves by summarily killing and torturing them back…”, which is what is happening to America at the moment because they refuse to conduct either their interrogations or their military tribunal trials in an open and fair fashion. They may not actually be doing anything wrong, but their unwillingness to be open makes it look very suspiciously as though they have something to hide.