Sooo, GetUp sent out an e-mail with a list of small would-be political parties trying to register.

One of them is the Australian Sovereignty Party:

Stand for "no carbon tax", "no personal income tax", and "no GST"; "no more wide open borders", and "no treaties without referendums," among other policies.

... no. Just no.

First of all, the carbon tax is a good thing. I agree that the GST isn't good, but I'm not sold on the removal of income tax until you declare that you plan to replace it with. (Besides, I like a progressive income tax, tbh.)

However.

We don't have wide open borders, except, perhaps, in a purely literal sense, and I don't think walling off the entire coastline of this continent is realistic, a good idea, or in any way not moronic. Our borders aren't wide open, and never will be.

Even if the world reverts to a pre-WWI era state where passports aren't a thing and international migration is largely unregulated - unlikely - Australian border controls will still exist, because even if you don't have to deal with Immigration, you will have to deal with AQIS. The Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service does vital work in entirely non-political ways. (You can tell, in part, by the way that there are what amounts to Customs checks even on domestic travel between the mainland and Tasmania. In the same way that Australia needs to protect its ecosystem from hazards from other countries, Tasmania needs to protect itself from some hazards that have reached the mainland but not the smaller island. Our airports have sniffer dogs trained to find fruit.)

But the truly, amazingly stupid part is no treaties without referendums [sic]. Seriously? Seriously?

In the first decade of this century, Australia signed 347 treaties, meaning it averaged, approximately, three treaties a month.

Holding a national referendum three times a month MIGHT CAUSE SOME PROBLEMS, since voting in a national referendum is mandatory. If we ditched mandatory voting for this, voter turnout would become laughable, and that's assuming that the AEC managed to keep running the damn things successfully at all, when they were having to bust out the entire apparatus practically every week, and all the schools and libraries and suchlike venues where elections tend to happen might start to object just a little bit.

Never mind the other ways this is stupid, it's just not even slightly practical.

I try to be an informed and thoughtful voter, personally, but to take a treaty largely at random, I don't think I have an opinion on the Agreement Establishing the Terms of Reference of the International Jute Study Group, 2001. I also don't really want to consider how to deal with Agreement by Exchange of Notes between the Government of Australia and the Government of the United States of America to Amend and Extend the Agreement on Cooperation in Defence Logistics Support (CDLSA) of 4 November 1989 getting voted down.

So tonight Sharon Needles is performing at Connections, IN PERTH. velithya is there, with someone named Melody, and not with me. She was GOING to go with me, except I HAVE A COLD. And somehow I don't think walking around Northbridge, then seeing a show in a nightclub where it will be all loud and crowded, is going to help with my constant headache. Or wooziness. Or tiredness.

So now I'm GOING TO BED INSTEAD OF BEING AT THIS SHOW I REALLY WANTED TO BE AT, because I got a stupid cold and it's probably velithya's fault ANYWAY because I probably caught my cold at the doctor's office when I DROVE HER TO THE DOCTOR'S ON MONDAY, because she is a JERK with her STUPID VERTIGO that she had, and basically, SHE SUCKS AND EVERYTHING SUCKS BECAUSE I WAS REALLY EXCITED ABOUT THIS AND NOW I CAN'T GO BECAUSE I HAVE A COLD.

And I really just want to throw a tantrum at, I don't know, the universe.

(For the record: velithya wasn't going to go, because I was all sad about not going, but I told her that she should and I wouldn't be annoyed with her. Obviously, she's still a faithless betrayer and a terrible friend and this Melody, whom I've have never met but assume is perfectly lovely, is an evil, friend-stealing bitch. But see above, re: tantrum. Also, Melody isn't going to the USA with velithya this October, now is she?)

It's not that I believe that privacy concerns aren't important, that if you are concerned about privacy it's because you have "something to hide", or anything like that.

But.

Pieces talking about e-mail privacy in terms of how the government could totally access your e-mail in circumstances X if they have a warrant, or even if criminal investigators have reasonable grounds to believe that your old e-mails/metadata thereon are relevant to an ongoing investigation, is not something that is of great concern to me.

Because, you see, if criminal investigators are able to convince a judge that it's relevant to their investigation, then I am okay with them getting the information, because I like criminal investigations to be possible.

If the police accessed my e-mail and read through it, I would only have a problem with this if they revealed the contents publically, because I would feel embarrassed and exposed, since some of the e-mails I have exchanged with friends have been personal in nature. (I would also be livid if they revealed personal information of my friends.) This would be the kind of silly embarrassment that follows things like, say, slipping on wet pavement and falling over, in that really, it's not that big a deal, but we feel silly, because odds are, anyone who read through my e-mails would not actually think less of me as a person, or anything.

My life would not fall apart around my ears. Because I like to maintain a life policy of not doing shit that would cause my life to fall apart if I got caught. I don't want to live in fear of Getting Caught. I wouldn't even be embarrassed because I got caught bitching about someone behind their back, because I don't do that, because I like how much drama does not happen in my life as a result.

It's all very well saying Petraeus's affair was revealed due to the invasion of his e-mail privacy, but you know what would have helped him avoid this?

Not having an affair. Or, if he wanted to have an affair, not taking a job as the Director of the CIA. Because apart from anything else, when you agree to be director of the CIA, you sort of have to assume that the government will be paying close attention to your life, because you're the head of the fucking CIA and if you are doing stupid shit, that is a potential national threat in the making. There are certain jobs that entail a reduction in your personal privacy, and if you don't want that, don't take those jobs.

I really, really resent being put in the position of feeling like I should stand up for Julian Assange.

The guy is, at best, a power tool. His is the sine qua non of Backpfeifengesichts. His face is in dire, desperate need of at least one fist in it, possibly many, and I can easily believe that he is guilty of the crimes Sweden is trying to allege he committed.

However.

Every single thing about the way his case is playing out is dodgy as hell, and Sweden, it seems, has already handed someone over to US custody who went on to immediate rendition.

If the prosecution against him had played out normally, instead of seeming ridiculously politically motivated, it would be different, but... it didn't. Pretty much everything the governments pursuing him have done looks dodgy. Since when can you not interview someone unless you've cuffed them?

And now the UK is even making not-very-veiled threats against Ecuador, for offering him asylum, which... seriously. Violating international treaties over him, and it's not a grudge thing? Roman Polanski didn't get chased this way, and he unquestionably deserved it more.

If the rule of law and the principles of justice we attempt to uphold are to mean anything, they have to apply to anyone, even someone as intrinsically unlikable as Julian Assange. His very image makes my teeth itch, and yet I yearn to fight, on principle, for his right to a fair trial.

So, I'm reading a book. It's non-fiction. And it is annoying me, for one simple reason:

Endnotes.

I hate endnotes. To read an endnote, I have to hold my place with one finger, flick through the book to the endnotes section, finding it before the index and the bibliography and any appendices, find the chapter I'm on, find the number I'm up to - not actually knowing whether this particular endnote is going to be an interesting added point to read, or just "ibid." - and then find my place on the page I'm reading again.

And then I either have to keep repeating this process, or else I have to keep a finger uncomfortably holding my place in the endnotes section.

All of which could be averted by the simple use of footnotes, instead. To read a footnote, I just have to glance down the page.

I realise that, in a pre-computerised era, footnotes were probably quite a challenge of typesetting and layout. However, I pretty much just don't believe that the layout of a text-only work of non-fiction isn't done with software these days, and largely automatically at that. If OpenOffice can insert footnotes trivially, and automagically renumber them when I insert and remove them and so on, then I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that layout software can probably do that too.

There is no excuse for using endnotes. Endnotes are a crime against readers of nonfiction.

A recurring theme in public discourse that annoys me:

Person A says something that many people find offensive. Person A is criticised for it. Person A may or may not be censured in some fashion by their employers, if their statements connect in some way to their employment.

Either Person A or other persons from other positions in the alphabet declaim, "WHAT ABOUT FREEDOM OF SPEECH?" Optional: If American, cite the First Amendment.

Free speech does not mean free from criticism. The critics are, in fact, exercising their own free speech rights. And an employer can, within the limits of contract and employment law, do whatever the hell they want, because free speech does not guarantee you a platform, or freedom from consequences.

The First Amendment of the US Constitution prohibits the government from abridging freedom of speech. This is, in fact, the general model of free speech rights. The government can't prohibit you saying something (although in (in my view) saner countries, the government can and does prohibit hate speech, and the like), but this does not guarantee anything else at all, or else no Non-Disclosure Agreement would be legal, and no PR hack could be fired for saying that their client ate live puppies for kicks.

So SHUT UP ABOUT FREE SPEECH.

Idly: just short of a week ago, it was my birthday. The evening featured a full lunar eclipse.

Omens and portents, goodness me. It will either be the Best Year Ever or I am going to die spectacularly.

Meanwhile, modern operating systems need to get off my goddamn lawn.

When I was a kid - okay, it was the 80s, and most people didn't actually have home computers, but my dad was a programmer and we did. The OS of my childhood was DR-DOS. Later Windows 3.11 came into our lives, but I resisted using Windows until we got the Internet at home, because I've always hated change anyway and I just didn't like not having a command line. If I wanted to run something, I told the computer to run it, I didn't have to find it and click on it with this clumsy, awkward thing that was the mouse.

However, whether Windows was loaded or not, one thing remained true: if I hit alt-ctrl-delete (twice, depending), the computer would stop everything, kill all processes, and reboot.

These days? Modern OSes take alt-ctrl-delete as a suggestion, as a mild request for it to call up a response when it gets around to it, and dammit, that pisses me off no end.

When I press alt-ctrl-delete I want the computer to take that as a divine command. If I press it twice, that's an order to reboot, right the fuck now, and it never fails to annoy me if it doesn't.

Somehow, the almost inconceivable increase in power between the computers I used then and the computer I have now doesn't quite make up for the degree to which modern computers have attitude.

I am developing a serious, intense resentment of smokers.

I am going to rant here for a while. It is possible the terms of this rant will include people who read this. The thing is... there's only so much I care, because you see, this is essentially the perspective of someone in the category people not you, and if it bothers you to hear how an activity you partake in causes major problems for other people, well, the problem essentially is that you partake in an activity that is bad for you and bad for everyone else, and I'm not going to apologise for bringing it to your attention that it is what it is.

If you read this and you're offended because you smoke... how about next time you go to buy a packet of ridiculously expensive poison-sticks, you buy some nicotine gum instead, and you quit smoking, for the benefit of yourself, people who love you, and people who share the air and the planet with you? If you don't want to go through the suckitude of overcoming nicotine addiction, that's cool, you can stay on the gum for life. You walking past an asthmatic child while chewing gum has zero risk of triggering a life-threatening asthma attack for the child. Or me. Smoking, not so much.

Save the money you normally spend on cigarettes, which is likely to be a lot, and spend it on something really cool and shiny. (Seriously: If you're a smoker, keep a tally of how much money you spend on cigarettes. Then think about all the things you could have done with that money instead of near-literally burning it.)

(Edit: Actually, this also applies if you're a regular drinker of alcohol, except that the sentence ends with: "... instead of near-literally pissing it away.")

And now the rant.

This transition to active resentment is caused primarily by the fact that our neighbourhood appears to contain a lot of smokers, with all sorts of schedules, resulting in the effect that we can't open a window in our own bloody house, ever. Because it's guaranteed that within 15 minutes, tops, smoke will be drifting in from outside.

Since I like being able to breathe, the window gets closed.

This ends up with some really annoying secondary effects - like needing to run the air conditioner a lot more, either to prevent our house being a stuffy, overheated hell, or, sometimes, just to get some non-smoke-filled air into the place after another damn wave of smoke has filled it because we dared to open A WINDOW IN OUR OWN BLOODY HOUSE.

There is a special circle in the hell of my hate for the neighbours who smoke way, way, WAY too much pot, way, WAY too often, as well. Particularly because of the fact that this can happen at any hour, day or night - 4am, 3pm, eight o'clock in the fucking morning - random pot smoke attacks.

That's why I'm developing my intense and profound resentment - the lack of breathable air in the vicinity of my home. But really, annoyance at the sheer unremitting selfishness of smokers has a lot of other trigger points. Most of which revolve around...

Smoking in public spaces.

I'm lucky - I live in Perth, where for some years, it's been illegal to smoke indoors in public buildings, in theatres, even in sporting venues. When I went to the rugby, at Subiaco Oval, I enjoyed the whole game without anyone nearby lighting up.

And then the game ended, and I left, and I had to hold my breath and hurry the first 50 metres out of the gates, because of all the stupid addicts who have to smoke right outside.

If you go into the city, indoors you're fine, outside there's smokers all over the place, polluting the air with their special blend of asthma triggers and carcinogens.

And then - and then - they complain about how unfair on them it is when it is suggested that smoking should be banned anywhere else. Complaints about freedom and personal choice and fuck you, smokers. Why should your "freedom" to "choose" to smoke be more important than my freedom to choose not to? Given that, you know, your choice causes cancer and other ailments, and mine doesn't, I really think that my not-smoking should take priority over your smoking. Mine, and every other passer-by, including the asthmatics and the newly-quit smokers and all the people who aren't committing suicide by slow poison that for some reason they feel the need to share.

Recently I read an article about a proposed ban, in Wales I think, on smoking in cars containing children.

If you don't think smoking in a car with a child in it is child abuse, then you are wrong, and don't bother commenting to tell me otherwise, because if we're friends, it will disappoint me to learn that you are that goddamn thoughtless and stupid, and if we're not, then it will preclude any possibility of that happening, and also I don't care what you think.

What really enraged me was the comments on the article, with, among other things, their self-righteous hypocrisy. Especially the "smokers' rights" campaigner who piously declared that the vast majority of smokers wouldn't smoke in a car with a child anyway.

Well then banning it won't affect them, will it? So shut up.

Despite the fact that, as a motorcyclist, I am one of the few people who actually suffers exposure to secondary smoke from people smoking while driving, I am, overall, okay with people doing it. But not if there are children, you worthless scum.

If it were up to me, smoking would be illegal in all public spaces. And enforced, with harsher penalties than there currently are, especially for those putrescent pustules who light their cigarettes standing directly under the "No Smoking Anywhere On Hospital Grounds" signs outside Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital, or for that matter the ones who light up under the "No Smoking" signs at Perth Train Station.

People can smoke at home. (As much as I wish my neighbours wouldn't, or at least wouldn't do it outside, I am not out to ban that. I'll just continue resenting it.)

In public spaces? For all the addicts who can't bear not to smoke, we could have smoking rooms - we can expand safe heroin injecting rooms, which are a good idea, to have enough room for the smokers to go in there too, in city centres. Just have an Addiction Centre, with good ventilation (filtered to the outside world), clean needles, medical supervision, and lots of resources available for people who want to quit before they kill themselves.

Because I agree with Isaac Asimov: your right to smoke ends at the point where it interferes with my right not to smoke.

The real reason why that idiot attacking Rupert Murdoch with a "foam pie" was disgusting?

Cultural preconditioning.

Rupert Murdoch is an old man. Comparitively frail and weakened by his years. Accordingly, decency declares him off-limits for physical assault.

He's still mentally competent, and he has a vast media empire at his command, so you can say whatever the hell you want about or to Rupert Murdoch, and that's fine. Criticising him is laudable.

But physical assault? He's off-limits. There are things that are Done, and things that are Not Done, and men in their twenties attacking elderly men is Not Done.

In contrast, a young man assaulting James Murdoch with a foam pie would be kind of hilarious. Because James Murdoch is not only a full-on toolbag, but he's young enough to be fair game for that kind of thing.

Meanwhile, regardless of what you may think of her or her family, Wendi smacking the guy in the face and then hitting him with his own stupid plate? Will always be awesome. She's about half his size and nearly twice his age, and if security hadn't intervened I'm pretty sure she would have kicked his ass.

"If you're in the public eye, that's the price you've gotta pay."

This was the comment made by one person responding to the decision by Clarence House that footage of Prince William and Kate Middleton's wedding may not be used for purposes of satire.

That's all well and good, dude, but there's two points worth considering here, in my view:

Firstly, that though their positions come with great attendant privilege that can be seen to offset much of the onerous duty of royalty (seriously, an awful lot of what they do is horribly tedious at best), being "in the public eye" is not something any member of the royal family had a choice about. They were born famous.

And secondly, while public scrutiny is inevitable, while they have to accept all sorts of things, there are certain things which shouldn't be public domain for mockery. Weddings are on that list, especially when the satirists in question are the Chaser, who, much as I love their work in general - and I do - occasionally do cross the line of "inappropriate".

Miss Middleton is wearing the engagement ring formerly worn by the late Diana, erstwhile Princess of Wales. Some people have commented negatively on this, apparently being unaware that it's not a hugely uncommon thing for a young man to present his future bride with his mother's engagement ring - it's bordering on traditional.

Do I trust the Chaser not to use this kind of thing for cheap jokes? No, I really don't. And for some reason people have a depressing tendency, when it comes to Diana, to forget that, leaving aside all else about her and her life, she was the mother of two boys who were children when she died.

I don't know about the rest of you, but if I were getting married, actually, I wouldn't want that to be someone's vehicle for comedy, especially if that comedy were premised largely on mocking my entire family, up to and including my dead mother.