Another one! The Vermont legislature has voted to overturn the Governor's veto on equal marriage. Great stuff!

More good news from the Hawkeye state, the mechanics of ballot initiatives there require the proposal to be passed by both houses of the Legislature before it can be put to the people. Currently both houses are controlled by the Democrats and they've signalled their support for the Court's ruling so it's not looking good for a ballot initiative in 2011, the Republicans would have to take both houses just to have a referendum on a constitutional amendment in 2013. It's always possible, but it seems unlikely that the Republicans will be back in business two years from now to win in 2013 and even if they were, equal marriage would have been bedded down for four years at that stage and people will have realised that the sun continues to rise and civilisation hasn't imploded.

Chairman Rupert's underlings are attacking the scourge of the well researched, even handed reporting we're accustomed to in his stable of media outlets. Just what is the source of these threats? The humble news aggregator. Apparently the Chairman reckons Google News and the like are putting him out of business and he wants them to pay, and while we’re at it we’ll have another go at flogging bulky technology nobody wanted in the first place. Bloggers are just an echo chamber (the irony of one Murdoch paper referencing the editor of another to attack echo chambers) we’re told, but of course ‘churnalism’ is unheard of at News Limited

Next thing you he’ll be demanding search engines pay to put links to their searches.

Sometimes someone else puts it better than you can.

P.S. A friend tells me the Chairman is not alone in not liking news aggregators.

Australia and New Zealand have joined together to help fund the Burmese junta, Brunei’s absolute monarchy, Malaysia’s suppression of democracy, Singapore’s one party state, Thailand’s illegitimate government, and the Vietnamese and Laotian Communist Parties through the new free trade agreement with the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN).

This is the first Free Trade Agreement Australia has signed since the onset of the global financial crisis and continues the government’s commitment to ignoring human rights abuses in other major trading partners like China and countries in the Middle East.

It seems despite all the talk coming out of the G20 meeting London and the hot air coming out of Rudd last week when he talked about how people had been worshiping the false god of “unfettered free markets”, (speak for yourself Kev) the old order isn’t quite dead, it’s just recapitalising.

“It powerfully demonstrates Australia’s – and the region’s – strong commitment to opening up markets in the face of this crisis.” Australia's Trade Minister Simon Crean said in his media release.

“Australian primary producers are now being guaranteed greater access to developing South East Asian markets, many of which have a growing appetite for high quality Australian produce,” Mr Crean said.

Like all free trade agreements there will be winners and losers. Winners will be sweatshop owners in places like Indonesia and Cambodia making cheap Nikes and electrical goods who of course are world-renowned for fair treatment of their workers, high wages and their strong support for unions and Occupational Health and Safety practices. Kleptocratic officials and politicians also stand to do well through growth in corporate tax revenues and kickbacks paid to ensure ideas of changing the system remain just that.

Not so lucky are the South East Asian small farmers, workers in general and migrant workers in particular who now will have to deal with a flood of imports and more pressure to keep wages low and conditions shitty. Australian and New Zealand workers can look forward to more outsourcing of their jobs as employers look to undercut wages and working conditions at home by moving to countries with cheaper labour and more…accommodating labour laws like Pacific Brands (makers of some of best known Aussie clothing brands) did a couple of weeks ago.

The Textile Clothing & Footwear Union of Australia is shocked that the Australian Government would encourage open trade with the Burmese regime. National Secretary Michele O’Neil deplored this policy stating that it sent a bad message to a repressive regime responsible for numerous grave human and labour rights violations. “How can you have so called free trade with a repressive regime?”

Aung San Suu Kyi has long called for a boycott of Burma.

“I am proud of this agreement, as it represents a historic milestone for Australian trade negotiations,” Mr Crean tells us.

Historic indeed.

It's been a while! I've been pretty busy and haven't had that much to write about but this week sees a major step forward in the fight for equal marriage, in one week both Sweden and Iowa have got same-sex marriage. Sweden would hardly be a shock but I must admit Iowa was a surprise - and no doubt disconcerting to reactionaries in the US, after all if the heartland states are falling...

No doubt there will be a fight to keep it, but a ballot initiative will be two years away by which time the change will be bedded down, plus activists will have learned a string of lessons as a result of Prop 8 in California, so here’s hoping.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens in Vermont as the Bill for equal marriage winds its way through their Legislature. Also keep an eye on New York, the Bill for equal marriage passed the lower house of the legislature before the election but was held up in the Senate by two hostile Republicans, both of whom lost their seats last November. For the first time in over 40 years the Democrats control both houses of the state Legislature in New York and the Governor has said he’s in favour of the Bill. This is New York after all. If Vermont and New York are won it will be a major setback for the forces of reaction, coming as it does on the heals of the tsunami that washed over them and swept Obama into office last year and of course the financial crisis.

It’s a pretty good time to be alive if you’re a lefty.

One of the more positive consequences of the economic woes of late. The media conglomerate has been forced to take an US$8.4 billion write-down on its TV and newspaper assets. Not something you're likely to hear about from Chairman Rupert's many media outlets. It couldn't happen to a more deserving man.

For some time now, there has been a trend amongst the religious, particularly at the more conservative end of the Christian faith to claim that their voices are being driven from the public square. This is obviously a reaction against the increasingly diverse societies of Western countries, partly a hankering after the good old days when they could say how it was gonna be in society and people followed and partly a reaction to the ‘new’ atheism of people like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Dan Dennett, AC Grayling and so on.

This claim is most often heard when ‘hot button issues’ for at least some Christians arise – the troika of abortion, stem cell research and gay rights (and same-sex marriage in particular), but it can also be heard less frequently when it comes to demands to teach biblical myths in the biology classroom.

Several things stand out about this claim. Firstly, its patent falseness, religious figures are never backwards about coming forwards with their views on any number of issues and the ones just mentioned in particular. Their views often make the headlines of the corporate media and there are well organised lobbying outfits that can quickly mobilise significant numbers of the lay supporters to write to their local representative or a government inquiry with their views. In the US, the religious right has had an enormous influence over the past thirty years on everything from education to foreign policy, although it is highly likely that this will abate with the shift that put Obama into the White House.

Secondly, they recognise that they can’t just say “we must do X because the bible tells us so” in secular societies where the percentage of people professing a religion is sharply declining, the varieties of religious beliefs are diversifying and active churchgoers comprise a tiny segment of society. Thus they have to appeal to some other grounds for arguing what they do; typically this involves some sort of claim of objectiveness and/or appeals to the consequences of deciding against them. It is at this point that they will start saying that things like that it is undemocratic or oppressive to silence religious voices etc even though we’ve just established that religious voices are not being silenced and thus not being oppressed in the 21st century. They’re confusing being heard with being followed and they ignore the fact that there are any number of views out there that we don’t take seriously while accepting people’s right to hold them. No one would seek to persecute someone who believed that they had been abducted by aliens, but would we formulate public policy on the basis of such a view? No and nor is it oppressive to refuse to do so.

Ironically for people trying to claim objectiveness for their views (based as they are on a foundationalist or foundherentist epistemology) and who decry relativism, this is a distinctly relativist approach to epistemology. Policies based on evidence, reason and science (e.g. teaching evolution in the classroom) should be discarded they say, or at most given equal weight to those based on divine revelation because there are ‘other ways of knowing besides science’. This is of course exactly what every new-ager and ‘science studies’ professor says when arguing for the validity of everything from homeopathy to astrology and has the capacity to undermine scientific and cultural progress if ever this way of thinking was to gain currency.

Incidentally, they never establish objectiveness because often they don’t propose criteria by which objectiveness is established that people would agree on and the wide disagreement in the general community with their views on the issues indicates something less than the objectiveness of the proposition of, say, murder being wrong. The dark warnings of the consequences are never actually fleshed out, we never hear a clear explanation of what they think will happen if society doesn’t follow them because if they did favour us with their predictions, we’d be able to look and see if they are in fact borne out in other countries where they have already lost the argument or where there are comparable experiences, so better to keep things vague. Of course it goes without saying that appeals to the consequences are a logical fallacy.

Finally, and perhaps most ironically of all, they whinge about oppression when the effects of their ideas, if they were taken up, would be profoundly oppressive to others. One of the differences between conservative and liberal believers is the level of control they would exercise over others and a quick glance at the ‘hot button issues’ shows clearly that one group of people (the ones claiming they are being oppressed) would have control of another (the ones who really would be oppressed):

· Abortion – why should men control women’s bodies?
· Gay rights – why should straight people be more empowered in society than gay ones?
· Stem cell research – why should people be denied the benefits of scientific progress to treat, perhaps even cure their conditions in the name of philosophical idealism?
· Teaching evolution – why should obscurantism retard scientific understanding and why should people be confused to protect the power claims of religious dogma and its priesthood?

In each case, the people arguing against abortion, gay rights, stem cell research and teaching evolution seek to be empowered and conversely, large sections of the population would be (and in some cases are currently) oppressed by their power. Indeed, so called ‘hot button issues’ are flags for their broader quest for power. That they can generate debate on any of these issues at all shows they are certainly being heard, but thankfully despite their best attempts, they aren’t getting their way.

What is actually happening when we hear claims of oppression by reactionary religionists is that would-be oppressors are posing as victims of oppression to build sympathy for their position. In doing this they are trying to dethrone reason, the notion of equal rights, evidence-based policies and science in the name of ‘open’ inquiry and what might loosely be termed alternative ‘knowledge’. Above all they are conflating being heard with being followed.

This contemptible tactic is a reaction to a loss of power and its practitioners must be called out on it when they try it on.