It is to an audience of no one bar myself that I finally arrive on a blogging site - free of the irrelevance of MySpace; unhindered by the dislocation of blog sites that are not affiliated with internet titans such as this place we are in now; less internally tormented by the divergent notions of either keeping Facebook as the majority viewpoint wishes it to be (a place for faces, not for books), or bucking the system (and in the process being highly inconsiderate to all of my friends as they browse Facebook on their mobiles, only to have to scroll for metres to get past my "updates").
It is to a potentially wider audience that I can take the many crystallized concepts in my mind and share them, in order to make the world and the future inherently better. It has been wondrous to test my various ideas and theories on those whom I am already familiar with, and it has been an honour to have praise from those who support me, but also continuing relationships with those who have disagreed with me on a number of points.
The civilisation we are both blessed and cursed with can be viewed as containing philosophies and perspectives coloured in fifty shades of grey, but with white and black at each end of the spectrum. Very few people are in the "black" (ie. truly extremist, fundamentalist, regressive, draconian and selfish), and no one is actually "white" (ie. entirely selfless, purely progressive, perfectly tolerant), but by treating people as if they fit a particular philosophical shade in relation to your own, there is always opportunity to teach, to learn, to compromise, and to maintain peace even when the ingredients for war still bubble at the surface or lurk beneath (unless they are indeed "black" of heart and mind, in which case there is hypothetical cause for punitive action against such individuals, but such matters will be discussed in this place very soon).
I intend this to be a place whereupon I rail against apocalyptics, nihilists and radical environmentalists. Conversely, I seek to praise the scientists, the technologists, the philosophers, the artists, the workers, the families, and in sparing cases the athletes and more sparingly the politicians, as well as others who don't fit a category, whom are dedicated to giving Earth, life and civilisation the best possible chance for continuation and improvement.
As I write this first blog here, in Australia we are faced with the seemingly never-changing electoral choice of people dominated by nihilist intentions (with some apocalyptic colleagues in tow) whom have run a fairly dysfunctional Federal government, and a bunch of halfwits (most of whom desire the impossible "Second Coming of Jesus") who have shown no interest in progressive policy, infrastructure improvement, and are inherently anti-science and anti-future-technology. The next party along has absolutely no idea of how it will take the world to 100% renewable energy and gigantic reductions in carbon emissions and reductions in other pollutants without ensuring the deaths of billions of people. Australian politics is an absolute schemozzle right now, and none of Palmer, Katter, the Sex Party, or Julian Assange will do anything to correct the current imbalance and instability. The only way there can be a "New Way" (sorry to say, Kevin) is for all of the current 226 sitting members to resign, for every member in our State parliaments to resign, to disband all the major parties, and to have new elections in which only people who actually give a holistic shit about the future are allowed to run.
I have run for Federal politics and local government before, though not in any serious capacity. When one has almost no discretionary funding, no media connections and no public profile, it is always going to be an uphill battle to get more than a thousand votes in whatever contest you're in. But that experience, and other more recent ones, has led me to meet countless people who are actively engaged in politics, and I can safely say that just about none of them has any vision, let alone a positive one, for the future of Earth, life and civilisation. Six years after I first ran, on the basis of being appalled at the lack of intellectual calibre, rationality, reason, and charisma in our crop of politicians, it feels twice as bad right now!
I'm not currently in a position to run at Federal level again. Much of that is based on reasons with great merit - being in the band CALIGULA'S HORSE, we have an album due out in October, and things are going so well for the group that international touring and bigger things lie on the immediate horizon. As I build my finances, my equipment base, and contacts in music, I will look to release my own musical works concurrently, hopefully as well as literary works. I am privileged to be in a band where not only are the gentlemen in question extremely gifted musicians, but also themselves intelligent, logical, rational, scientific and philosophically progressive. It keeps the standards of discourse at a constant high, and much of that comes out in our music.
The other thing preventing me at a tilt at Federal politics at this present moment is the small matter of have acquired British citizenship in 2008. The Australian Constitution was written at a time when citizenship was a strange beast, and certainly no one would have foreseen the idea that an Australian-born man, who has lived his entire life in one Australian city as a Australian citizen, would decide to acquire a second nationality as a way of opening up more potential lifestyle and economic options. The most important political document in Australia only cares that you are "not a citizen of another nation". With the likelihood of constitutional change in this area being minimal in the next fifteen years, I will eventually have to renounce my British citizenship. It is fairly surmised that one only gets one shot at that arrangement, so I hold that maroon passport for now (don't worry, I'm not going to move to England and bowl legspin for them!).
So for the coming years, while my hands and my four-to-five-octave vocal range still work effectively, I will continue to make the most of my artistic and musical career. Along the way, I hope to spread the word about the best of the best in the aforementioned fields, and demonstrate some of my own ideas about how we can make this place and this life inherently better.
I call this blog The Layman Polymath because I read widely and I think widely, but my qualifications and my current lines of employment do not appear to match the concept of what a true polymath would be. Indeed, it will be upon me to relate some examples of the many mistakes I have made in my approach to life, particularly from 2003-2009, in order that those who read these ramblings take note and do not engage in the same errant methodologies. But for all the mistakes, I wouldn't change the underlying fabric of my being for anything - to know as much as I can about as many things as I can, in order to understand the world as best I can, and to be able to call out people on their anti-intellectual, anti-progress, anti-future bullshit when the opportunities to do so arise.
As my audience grows into the tens (lol!), I hope you will engage with me on this keyboard journey, be it through comments or through sending me topics for discussion.
Peace,
Dave
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