Educators From Australia

"I suppose I was trying to figure out the meaning of my own existence. ...I went about it in a more indirect way: I set about trying to understand the entire Universe."

"[A]s I studied more physics the question... at the core... was: "What is matter, and how does it interact to create everything around us—including ourselves?""

"Suddenly, nothing else mattered. I wanted to know... about gravity and particles and and relativity. About stars and atoms and light and energy. Above all, I wanted to know how it was all connected and how I was connected to it. ...[I]t mattered to me as a human ...if I managed it even a little bit, I'd not have wasted this little blip of time as a conscious being. I decided to become a physicist."

"If the United States and other religious fundamentalist countries of any religion see themselves as God's people, all I can say is bring on the Antichrist and End of Days."

"is still a sparse, loose idea advocated by sometimes opposing groups. Most obviously, there is the (VHEMT), the and efilism. VHEMT is somewhat divided between those who wish the human race to cease population in order to eradicate human overpopulation and its exhaustion and destruction of the earth, and those who also choose not to breed but see an apocalyptic horizon and operate under an 'every man for himself' attitude of imminent hedonism 'for tomorrow we die." Ahumanism subscribes to no singular human extinction group, but clearly the message of the former sector of the group is more in keeping with the affirmative benefits of human death."

"The Church of Euthanasia has as its four stations of the cross sodomy, suicide, abortion and cannibalism. In their activism towards the end of human life on the planet, their posthumanism interestingly resonates with human activism. Roughly, these correlate as sodomy with queer (where sodomy is defined as any non-reproductive sexual act, including masturbation, asexuality and heterosexual intercourse with no intention of procreation), abortion with female/feminist sexuate rights, cannibalism with animal rights, where human carcasses are used as a source of food instead of murdering animals, and suicide with agency over one's own life and thus death, including euthanasia with disability rights in reference to the right to die versus the enforcement of life on those who express a wish to die but cannot execute their own death. It shouldn't need to be pointed out that neither group advocates murder or eugenics (however ironically that may sit considering the murder advocated by sanctioned capital and war machines). These are two of the longest established of now many groups advocating human extinction."

"Currently, we see the rise of the deploying , a tactic also utilized by abolitionist and euthanasia groups. The extinction rebellion remains at its heart, because it sees the threat of ecological crisis primarily through the lens of a threat to human survival. It makes no room for the grace of stepping aside and embracing human extinction so that the world may flourish, which would be the most effective form of rebellion against individual death, the death of diversity or species extinction."

"The continuation of diachrony in perceptions of life and death spreads across a form of antinatalism essentially co-opted from a kind of Western fetishism of Buddhism, namely efilism. Coming etymologically from the reverse of 'life', efilism claims it is better never to have been. Efilist philosophers such as David Benatar hinge their arguments on basic binaries of pleasure and pain which roughly correlate to good and bad and extend to a vindication of life and death. Efilism has a vague correspondence with utilitarianism but emphasizes the suffering of life over utilitarianism's greater good. Both are absolute in their perception of the capacity to evaluate which is which, making both dependent on economic measure of value as an either/or, and to an extent both on () determinism. Efilism's redeeming feature is that it promotes antinatalism, and often veganism, in its aspirations to a reduction in suffering, and this attitude promises potentials for opening the world through the cessation of the human."

"However, efilism's claim that all life, human and non-human, should be ceased is a hubris I am not convinced humans have a right to exert. While the cessation of suffering humans cause is already manipulated in a way that could come under an efilist rubric, these 'management' tools usually come in the form of culling populations of nonhumans to redress an imagined environmental balance most usually caused by humans in the first place. Domestic efilism such a neutering rescue animals is necessary, especially when rescuing can involve the speciesism of feeding one slaughtered animal to sustain another, and neutering humans is the logical way to prevent the perpetuation of this practice as well"

"For me personally, I am deeply saddened that there has never managed to be an annihilation of the human species, in spite of plague and war, the latter seeming the ultimately ironic kind of self-serving apocalypse showing the absolute idiocy of the human being the pinnacle of the pyramid of life. While the earth is in the grip of the apocalypse the anthropocene delivers, humans fear an apocalypse that our consumerism, our greed and our narcissism welcomes."

"In terms of , the worst thing you can do is have a child. And it’s the one taboo that nobody wants to speak."

"Not only does having a child really increase your carbon footprint, but we are living on an earth where there are a lot of organisms — human, non-human — that are in desperate need of care. And so, for me, if people want to care for children, for animals, whatever, there are cries for care everywhere. I’m asking us to reflect on this idea that we need to reproduce."

"Human exceptionalism is using the Earth, exhausting the Earth, treating the Earth as if the Earth is for us as a resource. We don't act as if we are part of the Earth. And nonhuman animals are beneath us in this schema. And then certain animals are more valid than others. And our measure is based on the equivalence to us rather than on the fact that they are on the Earth … and then within human, we have a similar hierarchy, where white, heterosexual, usually rich men are at the top and then arguably, you know, the rest of us."

"'[The media] promoted hoaxes that Hamas beheaded babies and carried out mass rape, in order to shore up support for Israel, and distorting events.'"

"All of the contract workers employed by the are Dalits, who are migrants. [...] Several sanitation workers [...] are forced to leave their homes in rural areas in search of work because of drought conditions, which are becoming worse each year. The two main areas they come from are in Maharashtra, and Salem and in Tamil Nadu. They are often landless, or unable to make a living from the small plots of land they own. [...] The wages for contract workers are barely enough to survive on, and many of them are malnourished. They collect garbage with their bare hands, without hand gloves, facemasks, shoes, or a uniform. There are no facilities at the work stations for employees to wash their bodies. [...] The workers suffer from various illnesses because of the poor working conditions and often die at a young age. Tuberculosis and other lung diseases are common due to the kinds of gases they are exposed to and the conditions they work in. There are frequent accidents."

"There are around 35,000 sanitation workers in Mumbai. Of these, some 28,000 are and 7,000 are hired on contract. Permanent sanitation workers have their basic working conditions protected by law. They are provided with uniforms, payment slips, medical insurance, and paid leave. Contract workers have none of these benefits. As migrants, they do not have ration cards or permanent housing either. Most of them live in unauthorised shanties that are frequently demolished, which forces them to periodically search for a new spot to build their homes again. It is not uncommon for the work of permanent employees to also be subdivided among contract workers. After years of persistent ground-level organising, the movement has come closer to the abolition of the system of subcontracting, which has made sanitation work one of the most dangerous, precarious, and dehumanising jobs in India today."

"…in the early stages, the whites were kept very effectively away from the Aborigines. And whites will tell you quite blankly, I’ve never met an Aborigine in my life, so how could they know about us, how could they feel for us? It was done deliberately. They didn’t want friends of the Aborigines coming out and upsetting the jolly old white Australian apple cart you know, rocking the boat."

"…I can’t afford the luxury of despair or pessimism. We still have to hope. We’re a timeless people, we’ve lived in a timeless land. We have suffered the invasion of two hundred years, and we’ll go on suffering. But we are going to survive…"

"…I’m very rich because I’m loved by all my people, it’s a very beautiful thing. No money could surpass that. The love that my people feel for me is just so tremendous. It’s a lovely feeling."

"…In the Aboriginal world we give way to all emotions. In the ‘British’, the present white generation of Australian people have been told that to cry is weakness, and if a ten year old boy gets up and cries they say, My goodness! But in the Aboriginal world, to cry is a beautiful thing. To us it’s compassion…"

"South Australian prison officers do have a duty of care to protect inmates from rape and from assault. Provision of condoms would not protect against rape: prisoners with rape or assault tendencies should be separated from other prisoners. So should prisoners with HIV/AIDS."

"Two of the House of Assembly members, Mr Scalzi and Mr Leggett, basically said that efforts should be made to stamp out drug use, sex and rape in prisons. I think we might as well try to make efforts to try to stop the sun rising, because the evidence we received showed that—it does not matter where you want to go—no other country in the world has been able to stop drug use in prison. If you cannot stop drug use, I doubt very much that you will be able to stop sexual practices, given that the sex drive is probably a little bit stronger than the desire to use drugs."

"Prison officers do not have a 'duty of care' to protect prisoners who harm themselves while taking part in illegal behaviour. With regard to needles in prisons, provision of bleach could also be harmful. Bleach is by nature a corrosive agent and could cause serious injury if thrown into the eyes of a prison officer or fellow prisoner, There is evidence that even the highly caustic phenol used to sterilise dental instruments does not eliminate all HIV viruses - only autoclaving in super-heated steam is fully effective. If government provided bleach fails to sterilise prisoners’ illegal needles adequately, does the government become liable for breach of duty of care?"

"Injecting illegal drugs is NOT OK! Prison must be a place where prisoners can detoxify and have the chance to break the habit. This avenue should be addressed, rather than options which reinforce the addictive behaviour."

"Provision of condoms also sends the message that sex between prisoners is OK - yet abstinence is part and parcel of a prison sentence."

"For Dostoevsky, Fourier is one of the industrious ant-hill engineers, busy, protected by the delusion that his goal, the will-ordered society, is the summation of all his desires."

"The Inquisitor is the forgiving father, the scientific materialist, and the social engineer. He is the most compassionate, and honest, of politicians; he takes on great burdens of responsibility in order to protect his subjects from ethical doubt. But he also suppresses any attempt to expand their self-consciousness: he is the ‘great simplifier’, the shepherd to a flock of carefree children."

"Dostoevsky … impeaches Christ through the mouth of the Grand Inquisitor: ‘it was pitiless of thee to value man so highly’. This Christ has no answer to the world of politics, of rational action, of knowledge. He is utterly Nietzschean in his intention not to pity, but to respect."

"The dialectical critique of positivist habits of mind … is interested only in behaviour which is ‘important’ to the actor; that is, behaviour which is emotionally charged to the degree that it is either frequently recalled, reflected upon, or day-dreamed about. … That science which is less discriminating in the behaviour it chooses to investigate gains clarity and distinctiveness at the cost of confining itself to the trivial."

"Unlike Hegel’s progress model of history, which moves by stages, each containing its own logic of growth and decline, the economic model develops as the simple function of one money-variable over time, with a long-term trend which increases monotonically."

"Stirner and Nietzsche [adopt] a mode of thinking which is personal, introspective, and which while often operating on alternative systems of belief and action does so only as a means of better grasping one dominant goal—the patterns of individual redemption. Stirner and Nietzsche are not primarily interested in critique as such. … Their work is too egoistically compelled for them ever to employ the external world as more than the repository for a series of projections of their own."

"What stands most explicitly as critique in Nietzsche’s late work in not a development from earlier interests but a return to two problems of enduring personal involvement for him, those of Wagner and of Christianity. Der Antichrist, to take one case, is not a response to a resuscitating public interest in Christian religion; it is primarily a renewed attempt to resolve for himself the question of piety."

"Man at his best is a system-breaker, an iconoclast seeking not only variety, but destruction."

"Dostoevsky believed that the gods of rationalism and materialist utilitarianism had joined in conspiracy against all other ethical systems. … The accumulation of capital, or the acquisition of money, are endeavors par excellence which establish a quantifiable goal: hence they are directly amenable to maximization formulae."

"Utilitarianism had found [in Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help] its portrait gallery of heroes, inscribed with a vigorous exhortation to all men to strive in their image; this philistine romanticism established the bourgeois hero-prototype—the penniless office-boy who works his way to economic fortune and this wins his way into the mercantile plutocracy."

"[Marx] explicates ideology as socially determined, [Stirner] as psychologically determined: both accuse it of remaining oblivious to its own determinations."

"The egoist … destroys the universal importance accorded to moral law by showing that life independent of it is possible. Secondly, and even more intolerably to the pious, he manages to do so with shameless enjoyment."

"In so far as the intention of education is to train the child for a vocation it is a millstone around his neck."

"The attachment to a rationalistic, teleological notion of progress indicates the absence of true progress; he whose life does not unfold satisfyingly under its own momentum is driven to moralize it, to set up goals and rationalize their achievement as progress."

"Education is the strongest weapon available for restricting the questions people ask, controlling what they think, and ensuring that they get their thoughts ‘from above’."

"By punishing the criminal the moral man hopes to dissuade the evil imprisoned in his own breast from escaping. Fear of self is projected in hatred of the immoral other."

"The real task is not to rid life of ethics but to rid ethics of its ideological content."

"Stirner and Nietzsche … reveal how prone morality is to being used as a means of rationalization, a cloak for concealing violent and brutish passions, and making their sadistic expression a virtue."

"Nietzsche himself was a great moralist; his writings abound with value judgments about individuals, character types, modes of thinking, and national traits. It is as if he develops immoralist psychology in order to tame his own nature, to keep his own greatest vice in check."

"There is a strong strain of Protestant masochism in this [Nietzsche’s] assault on morality and ideology. … Framing this perspective is the Protest image of the utterly self-reliant, responsible individual."

"The ‘I think, therefore I am’ of Descartes, the ‘I feel, therefore I am’ of late eighteenth century Romanticism, and the ‘I possess therefore I am’ of bourgeois man are dogmas, partial at that, incorporated to define a being that is incapable of defining itself."

"The act of greatest subversion … is the one of indifference. A man, or a group, finds it unbearable that someone can be simply uninterested in his, or its, convictions. … There is a degree of complicity, or mutual respect, between the believer and the man who attacks his beliefs (the revolutionary), for the latter takes them seriously."

"The enemies of Christ … could not bear his independence; his “Give the emperor that which is the emperor’s” showed a contempt for the affairs of state and its politics—for the moral order—that their self-respect would not let them tolerate."

"Politics and the affairs of State are dissociated from the orbit of the individual, and in so far as they cannot be repossessed as his living private property they must be rendered impotent."

"For Stirner, the social axiom of conservative, liberal, and socialist schools of political thought alike is in itself repressive: it disguises as potentially redemptive an order whose central function is inhibitory of the individual’s interests."