John Quiggin

Green Army: Persons of Interest

[The] culture wars are just a device to keep the right-wing base agitated enough to turn out [and] keep pro-rich politicians in office. …
The great majority of [climate change] “sceptics” are, in fact, credulous believers in what they are told by trusted authority figures, notably including conservative political leaders.

— Climate claims a victory in the culture wars, Inside Story, 17 December 2015.


The Global Financial Crisis has shown that, for most of the past decade, market estimates of the relative riskiness and return of alternative investments have been entirely unrelated to reality. …

In Australia … it has become routine for retired politicians, of all political persuasions, to be offered cushy jobs in the financial sector, provided, of course, that they have followed the right kinds of policies when in office. …
Public office is no longer a goal in itself but a stepping stone to bigger and more profitable goals.
The incentives to promote the interests of the financial sector while in office are obvious. …

An analysis by the New Economics Foundation concluded that for each pound paid to British bankers, society incurred a net loss of ten pounds. …
A study by the Center for Responsive Politics showed that about two-thirds of US senators were millionaires in 2008.

— Zombie Economics, Princeton University Press, 2012, pp 190, 186, 174-5.


Traditional models of on-the-job training (apprenticeships and traineeships) are in decline.
Funding for vocational education through the Technical and Further Education (TAFE) system has been slashed leading to the closure of manyTAFEs and large-scale loss of teaching staff.
Meanwhile, billions of dollars have been wasted on ideologically driven experiments with market competition and forprofit provision.

— Submission to the South Australian Senate inquiry into Vocational Education and Training.

Jordan Peterson

Blue Army: Persons of Interest

God the Father

Order, the known, appears symbolically associated with masculinity …
This is perhaps because the primary hierarchical structure of human society is masculine, as it is among most animals …
It is because men are, and throughout history have been,

• the builders of towns and cities,
• the engineers, stonemasons, bricklayers, and lumberjacks,
• the operators of heavy machinery.

Order is:

• God the Father, the eternal Judge, ledger-keeper and dispenser of rewards and punishments. …
• the peacetime army of policemen and soldiers. …

Chaos, the eternal feminine, is … the crushing force of sexual selection.

— Jordan Peterson (1962), 12 Rules for Life, 2018.


Fascists did not value masculinity per se – only that of some male members of the dominant race.
Socialists and communists (despite their own macho inclinations) were seen as the fomenters of ‘feminine’ indiscipline – while the fascist revolution was characterized by manly order.
The Nazis saw the Jews and Poles as ‘feminine’ races, achieving their goals through devious plots rather than masculine openness.

— Kevin Passmore (1962), Fascism: A Very Short Introduction, 2002.


[The] Western subjugation of the female is … a function of biblical thinking.

— Joseph Campbell (1904 – 87), Love and the Goddess, The Power of Myth, Episode 5, 1988.


[Even] the most thoughtful and fair-minded of [men] fall back on conservative assumptions about the inevitability of present:

• gender relations, and
• distributions of power,

calling on precedent or sociobiology and psychobiology to demonstrate that male domination is natural and follows inevitably from evolutionary pressures.

— Peggy McIntosh (1934), White Privilege and Male Privilege, 1988.

Biology is Destiny

Maybe it is more important to strengthen our characters than to repair the world.
So much of that reparation … is selfishness and intellectual pride masquerading as love, creating a world polluted with good works that don’t work. …

This idea — granted me by the grace of God — allowed me to believe that I could find what I most wanted …

All cultures … have, within their mythological history, certain constant features … just as all languages share grammatical structure …

• The lines among which culture develops are determined biologically, and
• the rules which govern that development are the consequence of the psychological expression of neurophysiological structures. …

Mythological renditions of history, like those in the Bible, are just as "true" as the standard Western empirical renditions, just as literally true, but how they are true is different.

• Western historians describe (or think they describe) “what” happened.
• The traditions of mythology and religion describe the significance of what happened …

I think I have discovered something that no one else has any idea about …

— The Divinity Of Interest, Maps of Meaning, 1999.


Look for your inspiration to the victorious lobster, with its 350 million years of practical wisdom.
Stand up straight, with your shoulders back.

— Jordan Peterson (1962), 12 Rules for Life, 2018.


[The] fact that intuitive responses are widely held is not evidence that they are justified.
They are not rational insights into a realm of moral truth.
Some of them — roughly, those that we share with others of our species, irrespective of their cultural background — are responses that, for most of our evolutionary history, have been well suited to the survival and reproduction of beings like us.
Other intuitive responses — roughly, those that we do not share with humans from different cultures — we have because of our particular cultural history.
Neither the biological nor the cultural basis of our intuitive responses provides us with a sound reason for taking them as the basis of morality.

— Peter Singer (1946), One World, Text, 2002, p 180.


Knowledge is about truth and falsehood

— discovery, evidence, and reason.

Meaning is about storytelling

— creativity, imagination, and emotion.

Wisdom is about not confusing

— knowledge with meaning,

— fact with fiction.

— peaceandlonglife