As I write, fires are still burning around Sydney and beyond. 
Today's Sunday Snippets rambles, looking especially at a few posts from my fellow bloggers.
Over on Skepticslawyers, Lorenzo's Righteous Rage examines the way that fanaticism frames thinking. Skepticslawyers has been suffering because its main writers are all busy on other things. I think that's a pity.
On Club Troppo, john r walker's Labors damaging legacy to the visual arts looks at the way that laws and regulations imposed for the best of motives have damaged the Australian art marketplace - and Australian artists. This one really resonated with me because of my interest in Australian art.
Curious story from Ramana, Story 17. The Gentle Man Who Vanished. Dare I say very Indian? The idea of going on the road as a mendicant, that is. I don't think that you could do it in pragmatic Australia with its rules. Oddly, I have sometimes wondered about taking to the road with camera and notebook.
Winton Bates' How does 'democratic failure' threaten progress? takes a somewhat pessimistic view of democracy. He writes;
The growth of inflated expectations of what governments can do seems to be a common pattern throughout the democratic world. It is also common for responsibilities of government to expand until crisis threatens.
I think Winton is wrong, or at least places his focus in the wrong spot. But that's a matter for another post.!
Winton and I come from different perspectives, but go way back. I explored a little of our relationship in posts I wrote earlier on Neucleus, the University of New England student newspaper. Now, in a comment to Winton that will be quite obscure to my general readers, Soo Khoo sends his regards to you (Winton) and is sending me some earlier copies of Neucleus.
Denis Wright's Not the colour purple provides the story of a particular dinner set, one embedded in his memory. Maybe that's the point to finish today's very short post, for today I am going out camera in hand to re-explore another part of Sydney.
So to finish a question to to you all.
Are there particular things that you remember from your earlier periods that somehow occupy a special place in your mind, that may still survive and can bring memories back just by their presence? Why are they important to you?
3 comments:
My first memory of taking an interest in current events (other than the footy scores) was seeing Gulf War I on the telly. I remembered asking my parents how they were EVER going to put out the fires in those land-based oil rigs and they couldn't answer. Of course being a kid I didn't question the narrative that Saddam was an evil bully who had to be stopped (he was, but hardly the only one in the region), or that America didn't care about the oil rigs as long as they freed the Kuwaiti people (no mention of the emir being an autocrat himself, obviously). I'm rather more jaded now as you can see!
I can see, that. But I still think that that first gulf war was right. If I remember correctly, they blow the oil fires out with explosives! It was a huge job.
Meantime, and in addition, that's a good examples of memory.
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