Spreading the word pragmatically.

Peter Hartcher, (“Winners and losers keep Abbott afloat” Saturday 30 SMH) paints Abbott as a pragmatic survivor who prospers by saying the things key players want him to say on the international stage. Sounds like he has signed up for a round with Obama in the Middle East. He copied Cameron’s sentiments chiding naughty Scots who wanted to separate from England. Strangely though he is silent when the Vatican City boss urges compassion for the poor and dispossessed, better distribution of wealth, less military spending and feeding the hungry. Maybe this Abbott serves a different pope.

"Although we may like to think that we live in a world of reality, the reality is that we live in a world of personal opinion." (Watzlawick, 1976). from Strategic Interventions for Pewople in Crisis. Everstine L. and Everstine D. 2006.

http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=41823
Good treatment and comments on the secrecy of the Abbott Government.
Governments which are not accountable and manipulative love to have a 'threat' with which to motivate the fear they can exploit among citizens. This piece shows how the current Australian government has shut down the agencies and sources with which Australians know what is happening in their country. Whistlebolwers like Assange and Snowdon have not endangered national securities as they have endangered the credibility of governments and endangered the unaccountable antics of politicians.

G. K. Chesterton wrote the following: 'If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgement. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.'

The philosopher Whitehead said that all philosophy is a footnote to Aristotle and Plato and he had a good point. There are not many new ideas in ethics — most theories are in some ways a revising of old ideas and the debates today would have been recognised by the ancient Greeks. Not much is new.