February 03, 2006
I've been away on holidays in the mid-south west of Tasmania for the last week. I've just got back to Adelaide today----this afternoon.
Tasmania is definitely a corporate state run by the interlocking power of a giant corporation and the state government . Previously the corporation was Tasmanian Hydro around electricity that modernized Tasmania; now it is Gunns around the clear felling of old growth native forests and woodchipping. It's all overlaid with the 'pioneering spirit' of conquering and taming nature. That culture was still wrapped around the mining towns of the mid -west (Queenstown Zeehan, Rosebery) The people are proud of the way they and their forebears conquered nature and mined its resources to create wealth. Their pioneerign culture is utterly indifferent to the environmental consequences of conquering nature.
I'm trying to reconnect with the political world and philosophy. It will be slow as my head is elsewhere. This cartoon caught my eye, as I scanned the events of the past week in the media:
Bil Leak
It is the cartoonists who understand the way that the inner core of liberal democracy is now the camp, isn't it?
What they often miss is the way that the camp involves the suspension of the law associated with the state of the exception in which we now live. We cannot go back to pre-9/11. It is a machine with an empty centre that we are now within; one that puts the 'state' and the 'law' into question.
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