- The Guardian
- Issue #2206
Agnostic (technology)
Agnostic literally means you don’t know something. In a religious context, an agnostic person either isn’t sure if there’s a god or believes that it’s not possible to know. Of course you can be agnostic about other things. Most of us are agnostic about the result of this year’s AFL grand final.
For weaselly purposes, using ‘agnostic’ implies that you’re an intelligent person who is impartial. It’s a useful word for people who hate renewable energy, like fossil fuels, and want (or pretend to want) nuclear energy for Australia. If they just said “we don’t know what sort of energy we need,” they sound clueless. If they say “we’re agnostic about energy sources,” it sounds like they’re deep and thoughtful on the topic.
Reset
Everyone knows the ‘turn it off and turn it on again’ trick with computers and other machines. It often works. Resetting something sounds active and effective.
New Victorian Premier Ben Carroll has said he wants a reset in Labor’s relationship with the business lobby. With a bonus weasel word, he said he was open to “common sense” amendments to any legislation business might not like.
Alas for Carroll, the Victorian Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s idea of a ‘reset’ is ‘do what we want now.’ Chief Executive Sally Curtain has complained because Carroll decided to go ahead with WFH legislatation that has some good features for workers (see Guardian #2201 ‘Work-from-home worth legislating?’).
Curtain also complained that Carroll’s ‘do the occasional good thing for workers’ policies are turning Victoria into an “island,” which will make driving to Sydney difficult.
Progress (real)
This term is one of many that sound like positive action, but are weaselly because hard to pin down. Progress towards what? Real in what way?
Poor Richard Marles. All our Defence Minister wants to do is whatever the US desires, but the US keeps changing its mind. First AUKUS was nuclear-powered submarines, then it was second-hand ones, now it’s “morphing into an arrangement where the US has a base in Australia, as opposed to Australia having its own capabilities,” as Laura Tingle says.
Each time it changes, Marles has to contort himself to pretend that everything is proceeding as planned.
That’s why he’s saying Australia is making “real progress in relation to AUKUS.” Australia has given the UK and the US billions of dollars we’ll never get back, and we’ve agreed to become an even bigger military base for a foreign country. It’s motion alright, but not what most people would call “progress.”
Dealing with
Minister for Resources Madeleine King has never met a unit of carbon she didn’t want to put in the atmosphere, especially if it makes a large Labor Party donor happy. King was recently photographed smiling like a happy clam in a hard hat, turning the tap of one of the largest fossil fuel reservoirs on earth.
Some spoilsport asked about criticisms she was backing a “carbon bomb.” King’s answer was a word salad, but included the claim that Labor is “dealing with climate change.”
Strictly speaking, this is true. Labor is dealing with climate change by taking credit for rooftop solar, encouraging renewables, and by okaying absolutely every new fossil fuel project that comes their way. It’s a bit like dealing with driving by pressing hard on the accelerator and lightly on the brake.
