I just realised that the title could be a little ambiguous. It could mean that I’m confused by strange things as well as Peter Dutton. Or it could mean that I’m confused by strange things, of which the main one is Peter Dutton.
Whatever, I suspect that all thinking people will know exactly what I meant and it’s only a certain predictable section who insist on taking the wrong meaning!!
As strange things go, I must confess that one of the strangest lately is the fact that Peter “There’s no detail, so vote No” Dutton has been able to get away with asserting a nuclear policy with absolutely no detail apart from the idea that it’s a policy and they have support it and they’ll release the detail at some future date before the Budget or after it or during the Budget or at some time before the next election, or failing all that, sometime after the next election.
It’s also strange that number seems to be pointing out the obvious flaw in the “Australia’s got plenty of uranium so why not use it for power because we could have a power station up and running in under ten years.”
I’m not talking about the fact that the nuclear plan is being pushed by the same people who couldn’t get Snowy 2.0 up and running in the predicted time frame, or build the carparks they promised or deliver the surplus in their “first year and every year after”.
No, I’m pointing out the very obvious fact that you don’t just dig uranium up and put it in a power station any more than you strike crude oil and stick it in your car. In both case they need to be processed, and we don’t currently have a processing plant to enrich uranium. It could be worth pointing out that we might have had one if Rex Connor had got his way and we’d borrowed all that money from the Arabs back in the days of Whitlam but that would start a whole argument about Labor wasting money building infrastructure when it’s better just to ship our resources overseas and just rely on the taxes that the companies don’t pay, or the jobs they generously provide our workers. Of course, in the colonial days it was customary for the great powers of Europe to enter a country and take their resources without paying taxes and expecting the original occupants of the country to be grateful for being provided with work… Although in those days, it was done under a sort of Centrelink type mutual obligation where the obligation of the workers was to work for food and shelter in return for not being shot by the colonial powers.
So before we start our nuclear plants we need to decide if we’re going to refine our own uranium or simply dig it up and sent it overseas so we can buy it back at an inflated price… which sort of defeats the argument that we’ve got the uranium so therefore nuclear power will be cheaper than other countries.
Of course that’s not the only thing that confuses me. There are a large number of people who are concerned about misinformation and disinformation laws.
On one hand, I can understand their concerns. If we have one body who decides what is true and right and no other points of view can be entered into, it’s rather like a religious dogma or an Andrew Bolt column. However, there many times that a free society needs to walk the tightrope between the alligators on one side and the lions on the other and it’s always worth considering a ban on ridiculous metaphors that make no sense.
On the other hand, if something is clearly false and can be demonstrated as such, it seems strange that that’s the hill that Elon Musk died on in 2017 and he is now being impersonated by a robot developed as part of Tesla’s self-driving car. (This is not true: I’m just trying to show how silly it is if I’m allowed to spread such absurdity without the possibility that someone can shut me down before someone reads and takes it seriously. I know that writing that it’s not true should be enough, but so many people respond to accounts marked “Parody” as though they were real that I feel that even saying Elon Musk is still alive won’t be enough because between the time I wrote the two sentences, it’s obvious that Deep State has got to me and… sh, they’re listening…pretend you didn’t read this!!)
Ok, a certain level of paranoia is healthy. I mean you should suspect the phone call you get about a transaction that wasn’t authorised from a bank account you don’t have; giving your details so that the transaction can’t go ahead would just be the sort of foolishness that enables people to believe that Trump is good, Christian man who has every right to pay a porn star money to forget she ever slept with him… which is surely something most people be prepared to forget for free if they only could.
But there’s a moment when the paranoia is taken too far and you decide that every action by any individual who has a slightly different world view than you have to be viewed through the prism of you being one of the ones who’s taken the red pill in the Matrix… On a side note, how did Neo know that the ones offering the pills were the ones he could trust and not just some dealer offering him drugs with a suggestion about what sort of trip he could go on while under them?
Anyway, there’s heaps more strange things like Tony Abbott being Minister for Women or Peter Dutton having perfect eyesight until he lost his hair but there’s a limit to how much strangeness you can have in a day… It’s true: the communist Albanese government has imposed it and I read it on X!
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