While i'm bleeding

I didn't realise that it was my 300th post yesterday. Damn I waste a lot of time on these things.

It's time for your 15 minute politics lesson! There's even a treat at the end involving Darwin.

The much needed critique of liberal democracy has increasingly been coming from 'communitarians'. They maintain that if society and even democracy are to work, they need strong community ties and plenty of civic virtue. Rights should therefore be accompanied by social responsibilities, and we need a concept of 'the common good.' We emphasize our interdependence, our embeddedness in various communities, the duties we owe to each other as well the advantages of mutual solidarity and the importance of economic, political and cultural localism. To quote Robert D. Putnam: "strong and free government depends on a virtuous and public-spirited citizenry."

However, two problems emerge: Communitarianism is strong on community but weaker on citizenship. While it is true that liberal democracy risks producing a non-society of passive and isolated individuals, communitarians risk producing an alternative of regressive communities, based on ethnic and other exclusive identities, which are internally repressive and externally hostile. (important phrase, remember it.)

A classic example of this are the kibbutzim in Israel. They are internally repressive in that the "kibbutz came to mean not merely socialist production and collectivist agriculture, but collectivised family life and socialised child-rearing. Mothers and fathers saw almost nothing of their own children, boys and girls were encouraged to think of the kibbutz itself as their parent, and the most despised values were individuality and privacy."(from this.) Chomsky describes the kibbutzim he was in had an incredibly macho culture in it; all the boys in the kibbutz had been in the Army, and were expected to maintain that ideology. They are externally hostile in that they are racially hostile; Chomsky left his kibbutz due to the 'appalling' level of racism exhibited against Arabs and Palestinians.

The second problem is that communitarians often fail to recognise the extent to which commercial market forces are now able to corrupt communities. Nevertheless, this is an enormous challenge, but it cannot be forever avoided. Given the problems of communism, it may stand a better chance of resolution as an issue of civic republicanism.

If you read through all that, it's a tortoise!

Ain't it precious? And it's not just any tortoise, it was Darwin's tortoise. She's very old. And she lives in Australia Zoo! I wanna visit and see if it gives any clues that Darwin was WRONG. Damn sinful bastard. Only the will of our Lord kept this tortoise alive!

Tortoise 1, Darwin 0.

I also finished past HSC maths paper. Granted, it was the 2004 paper, which apparently was so easy that our school performed too well on it, and so had to be audited. So maybe it didn't count. Maybe you don't count. Nyau.