tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6200339975674635262024-03-06T12:13:23.234+11:00The Michael Duffy FilesUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger551125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-620033997567463526.post-44544764786028935392009-07-24T09:47:00.004+10:002009-07-24T11:46:20.880+10:00Some final housekeeping for the moment<div>Loon Pond has now shifted and gone <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://loonpond.blogspot.com/">HERE</a></span>.</div><div><br /></div>The Michael Duffy Files has now been running a tad over a year. It started as a jolly jape, though not amongst chums, by dedicating itself to the task of celebrating, disputing and excoriating the opinions of commentariat columnist Michael Duffy in the <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Sydney Morning Herald - </span>such monomaniacal scribbling seemed a way of ensuring it would remain largely invisible to the world while acting as a kind of deep emotional therapy for the writer.<div><br /></div><div>Alas Michael Duffy ceased writing for the<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> Herald, </span>though you can still catch him trilling away on <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Counterpoin</span>t at Radio National, available in transcript sometimes or for listening and downloading <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.abc.net.au/rn/counterpoint/">here.</a></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>So then the site shifted over to a look at other commentariat columnist loons on a more regular basis, and alarmingly it began to attract readers and of course loons. Many more than expected, and while of course sensible readers only admired the plumage and the loud squawking before moving on, the odd loon left a note to indicate that indeed the site struck chords. Even if they were discordant chords only suitable for inclusion in a Stockhausen concert.</div><div><br /></div><div>Perhaps my fondest memory is of a loon from Nedlands in Western Australia who kept coming here in search of Hal G. P. Colebatch and leaving naughty anonymous messages, when he could just as easily have met Mr. Colebatch in his local coffee shop.</div><div><br /></div><div>But as the readership began to grow and the loons began to squawk and prowl, it became painfully clear that calling the site after Mr. Duffy was both unfair and improper, at least after he became invisible and absent. After all, as vile progressives, who amongst us can believe in absentee landlords or absentee columnists?</div><div><br /></div><div>While the title was changed to Loon Pond as an interim measure, the site now pops up all over the place bearing Mr. Duffy's name in its address and as a reference point. And some of the odium and opprobrium for its anti conservative bias no doubt lingers around him. This is hardly fair, because as columnists go, Mr. Duffy was largely inoffensive and on occasions sensible, and it's simply not right to have him somehow linked in to a commentary on deeply weird loons like Piers Akerman or Janet Albrechtsen. </div><div><br /></div><div>Unlike others, Mr. Duffy has shown a steely indifference to this blog, which is both sporting and sensible, and so it's only fair to call a halt after a year of musings under his name.</div><div><br /></div><div>Which is not to say it's gone forever, so much as taking a rest, in much the same way as Jeffrey Bernard was regularly unwell.</div><div><br /></div><div>If Mr. Duffy ever decides to return to regular column, the Michael Duffy Files will be on hand to pay devoted attention to his scribbling. </div><div><br /></div><div>But in the meantime, Loon Pond has shifted to its very own site and very own call sign.</div><div><br /></div><div>If you want to visit Loon Pond, go <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://loonpond.blogspot.com/">HERE.</a></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>Apologies to all those who rely on bookmarks and similar intertubes folderol.</div><div><br /></div><div>If you don't want to visit, fair enough, you may bugger off. It is after all only a form of therapy for the writer, and the fewer the loons that visit, the happier we all are (especially the loons from Nedlands, WA).</div><div><br /></div><div>In any case, to borrow from Irish comedian Dave Allen, goodnight, thank you, and may your god go with you, whomever she might be.</div><div><br /></div><div>Actually I don't think Dave said that last bit, but hey why not fling in a plug for <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Allen_(comedian)">Dave Allen's</a></span> comedy stylings and the joys of being a practising atheist.</div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-620033997567463526.post-8392152619377801332009-07-20T20:22:00.005+10:002009-07-20T20:41:30.625+10:00A Little Housekeeping<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEUMLf0kpUFKBVkZCVLej74P2wxh568TM-fpJeRSJw3voRlWfs6LTL7eIo3qg8_yxPFzc9i4KLG1rDnlvnuAr4oPw9vrVbjX39hR6HK523iFnox3PL286CNq5SPTitpc8IhNXdxO1Wguk/s1600-h/algrt.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEUMLf0kpUFKBVkZCVLej74P2wxh568TM-fpJeRSJw3voRlWfs6LTL7eIo3qg8_yxPFzc9i4KLG1rDnlvnuAr4oPw9vrVbjX39hR6HK523iFnox3PL286CNq5SPTitpc8IhNXdxO1Wguk/s400/algrt.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5360487668663463858" /></a><br />A little housekeeping.<div><br /></div><div>In the tradition of the true blue dinky di Australian, Dorothy is off to her heartland roots. No, not the Algonquin hotel in midtown Mahattan, home of the wonderful real Dorothy Parker, with her sashay and style, but rather the wonderful town of Tamworth, home of country music and the sad ersatz papier-mâché fake wannabe Dorothy Parker (and now you understand the root cause of schizophrenia).</div><div><br /></div><div>In this dark and remote wilderness, there is little by way of internet cafes, or wifi, and less by way of arty crafty chardonnay and lefties. So Dorothy will probably do a little shooting and kill a few bunnies and down a few ales (make it dark, good fellow, like a Newcastle old), and a scone or three and a cup of tea or ten, and heck if a petrol head like Tim Blair can go to Townsville, some day he might become a real man and get into a fight in Maguires. In the meantime, we heartland Australians must consider him a poseur and a ponce and a flibbertygibbet, and likely to get nosebleed ten kilometres out of a major metropolis if there longer than a day.</div><div><br /></div><div>And by the way if you saw tonight's <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/">Four Corners</a></span>, maintain the rage about the coal miners wanting to fuck over the Liverpool plains. Love the country, you Liberal fuckers ... and so called Nationalists ... and to hell with the Labor party while we're at it ...</div><div><br /></div><div>You've ruined the Hunter valley. Enough already.</div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNeeW5v0ofVSE9HO8AyQhZ8Bp5glz7Z4T7p-YgMNjILWQ4TH7DUYzgQA7QfdiBkPzSN5i-23IGSQVnqgCiXtnLe9v6c0d82Mg3vwQ5ZduPYNRu9eNWV_W7xV4s4drN8V3c-Du0xiGq6VA/s1600-h/tamworth.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 220px; height: 219px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNeeW5v0ofVSE9HO8AyQhZ8Bp5glz7Z4T7p-YgMNjILWQ4TH7DUYzgQA7QfdiBkPzSN5i-23IGSQVnqgCiXtnLe9v6c0d82Mg3vwQ5ZduPYNRu9eNWV_W7xV4s4drN8V3c-Du0xiGq6VA/s400/tamworth.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5360488600193041618" /></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-620033997567463526.post-44568025270726546432009-07-20T18:14:00.012+10:002009-07-24T11:49:09.635+10:00Tim Andrews, Jeff Koons, bodacious babes, and a plan to save Australia and turn it into a free market pond<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSQTPKKErlggO2s9fcKMeqTfvmNlk83kBoq2oW5F_dXLnkXZZ-UbM6D91_u49GZIcDNTt0InPqZGqQZCxWsQyCB5OBayVzVgoPDX2wU3BKBICB9XRdKmz5VdP6woV9ETtxzVk9z-m6z_Y/s1600-h/young+liberals.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5360477870896866130" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 304px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSQTPKKErlggO2s9fcKMeqTfvmNlk83kBoq2oW5F_dXLnkXZZ-UbM6D91_u49GZIcDNTt0InPqZGqQZCxWsQyCB5OBayVzVgoPDX2wU3BKBICB9XRdKmz5VdP6woV9ETtxzVk9z-m6z_Y/s400/young+liberals.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-STYLE: italic">(Above: bodacious babe Young Liberals as celebrated by Tim Andrews).</span><br /><div><br /></div><div>The intertubes is a fickle and cruel world. It's full of jealour malice and little green rats that gnaw away at your heart, which admittedly isn't so cruel as the pink elephants that tormented my grand pappy once he got into the moonshine (come on grand pappy tell us again about the Somme in the winter of 1917 and how it turned you into a raging drunk). <div><br /></div><div>And sometimes I wonder how it is that Andy Warhol's allocation of fame has been reduced from fifteen minutes to fifteen seconds. That hardly seems fair, after all, it's hard work being Jeff Koons and marrying sex workers and making flower puppies (now residing in Bilbao) and finding you have to reduce the prices for your pieces from 20 to 10 million.</div><div><br /></div><div>And can you now recall Tim Andrews, who briefly achieved notoriety by putting pictures of bodacious Liberal babes on his blog, some of them reading Ayn Rand? That's still the thing I can't get over. Ayn Rand!</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-STYLE: italic">It was like an act of hatred, like the cutting blow of a lash encircling her body: she felt his arms around her, she felt her legs pulled forward against him and her chest bent back under the pressure of his, his mouth on hers (Atlas Shrugged).</span></div><div><br /></div><div>Well it's good to know that minor skirmish with the shallow sordid world of Murdochian tabloidism hasn't put Tim off blogging or conspiring to change the shape of Australian politics.</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-STYLE: italic"><a href="http://insidethemindoftim.wordpress.com/2009/07/20/my-life-plans-my-classical-liberal-vision-for-australia/">How I Plan to Dedicate My Life to Reforming Australian Politics</a></span> is his latest clarion call, in which he announces his plan to fix things up by making Australia a free market in everything (especially rough trade porn, I hope, for the sake of young Liberals everywhere).</div><div><br /></div><div>Now I don't have a problem with that, in the sense that politics can always do with a shake up. But I just can't figure the angles. You see, like Rupert Murdoch, Tim says he's become an American citizen. </div><div><br /></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Most importantly though, I have the fortune of having won that roulette of lottery that is US citizenship, and have taken advantage of it. This, more than anything else, I cannot overstress the value of. Unless you have been here, no-one can actually understand the difference that living in the US makes. The fact that I am immersed in the core of the future of free market advocacy, means that I will have unparalleled skills necessary to be able to do this back in Australia. And these skills are impossible to pick up at home.</span> <div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-STYLE: italic"><br /></span></div><div>Um, but Tim, why not stay in America and fix it up? The Republican party is now barking mad right wing extreme, and if it's to come in from the cold, it needs the help of moderate, sane voices who can help it to the middle. In much the same way as the Liberal party doesn't need rhetoric about serfdom so much as a trip to the middle and power. So what's this about giving up on the Liberal party? Just because you want to set up an activist grassroots free market advocacy organization? (and please use zeee instead of s so your American spell checker doesn't create a fuss):</div></div><div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Obviously, this means that I can no longer be an active member of the Liberal Party. From a personal perspective, this pains me greatly; after all, I have dedicated almost half of my life to serving the Party. I know the personal losses that leaving will cause. Yet is necessary. There is, after all, no way I can objectively advocate sound policy, while I have a vested interest in one political party. Oh don’t get me wrong, doubtlessly I shall continue to be a member, to try to influence people as best as I can. But I cannot – and will not – continue to waste my time with the petty childish sandpit of internal party politics, nor place myself in a position where I can no-longer critique the party from outside.<br /></span></div><div><br /></div><div>Um, you're a member but you're not a member? Well if you can be an American and an Australian, I suppose it's the right stance.</div><div><br /></div><div>But you know at the same time, perhaps you should re-think job advertising on the intertubes. There's no doubt that you have impressive credentials:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Firstly, I think it’s rather important to note that, to some degree at least, I do actually possess a brain and the ability to use it. I don’t know how I can objectively demonstrate this, other than to point out that my UAI of 99.85 (for all the flaws the UAI contains) does place me in the top 0.15% of the population intellectually (and, correct me if I’m wrong, is the highest in the NSW YL’s for the last 10 years or so).<br /><br />Academically, I have a Bachelors of Economics (Social Sciences), with a double major in Government and International Relations, with a minor in economics. I have a Bachelor of Laws (Honours), with a primary focus in jurisprudence, and the relationship between politics and law. I also have a Masters in Public Policy, again, rather relevant to the intellectual underpinnings of what I wish to achieve.</span><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>But you know that's just a bunch of academic qualifications, and we know what we all think about academics. I'd have been more impressed if you'd said bugger the academic qualifications, I just want to make a shitload of money in an entrepreneurial way. The rest of the CV is equally fine, but I do wonder why you want to set up a freemarkets grassroots advocacy group in Australia:</div><div><br /></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-STYLE: italic">So why exactly do I want to do this. The answer is unfortunately simple: there is no-one else. I mean this by no means out of arrogance, but simply as a statement of fact. There is no-one else who wants to do this. After all, I fully recognise I need more than simply desires, I need concrete skills. So let us look at my skillet as objectively as possible.</span> <div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-STYLE: italic"><br /></span></div><div>Um, okay, let's overlook the skillet business and your persistent refusal to use zeee instead of s, but have you thought of a reverse takeover of the Sydney Institute, run by that desiccated coconut and aging free market figure Gerard Henderson (<span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-STYLE: italic"><a href="http://www.thesydneyinstitute.com.au/">here</a></span>)?</div><div><br /></div><div>Henderson hanging on by the fingernails? Never mind, let's look at your pitch:</div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-STYLE: italic"><br /></span></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-STYLE: italic">I have no doubt whatsoever that we need to set up a free market grassroots advocacy group in Australia. I have no doubt that this is essential if we want to prosper as a society and not tumble headfirst down the road to serfdom. I believe, therefore, that I am the person with the enthusiasm, the experience, and the skills to make this happen.<br /><br />So help me. Please help me. I cannot do this on my own. I cannot raise the money necessary, I cannot come up with the business plan, I cannot create the strategy by myself. I need your help. So please, contact me, and together, we can change Australia.<br /><br />If you and I fail, if together we can not start up a genuine advocacy group, then freedom in Australia truly is doomed.</span> <div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-STYLE: italic"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-STYLE: italic"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-STYLE: normal">You can't do a business plan? You can't raise the money? You want it all handed to you on a plate? Then truly Australia and freedom are in trouble, and the road to serfdom likely. A degree in economics and you can't do a business plan? WTF. Truly, we are doomed, and likely so is America.</span></span></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Having thus established the necessity for such an organisation, the obvious question is: why me? Am I really so arrogant as to believe I can personally reshape the Australian political landscape? Is my ego so big that I really think I can bring about that much change?</span><br /><br /></div><div>Well it'd have to be big to think about changing everything without being able to do a business plan. My advice? Either keep on with the bodacious babes, or toughen up, stop the bleeding over the intertubes, and for the love of the lord work out how to do a business plan. Or arrange for a bus to run over Gerard Henderson.</div><div><br /></div><div>And can the condescension:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-STYLE: italic">The core idea is simple: Create an activist grassroots free market advocacy organisation. Something to take abstract ideas, intellectual theories, and policy papers, and package them into something nice and simple that your average citizen can understand. To set up an organisation to fight in the trenches, to spread the message, to actually engage in the battle of ideas. Australia has some of the best think tanks in the world, in the CIS and IPA, but they are think tanks – they are not ground troop warriors. And that is what we need. And I want to set something up to actually be such warriors.<br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-STYLE: italic"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-STYLE: normal"><br /></span></span>Dumb it down for the average citizen so they can understand it? The average citizen can do a business plan ... they do it every week in every year. You should get down in the trenches with them some time ...</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-STYLE: italic">(Below: bodacious Jeff Koons, and while in Bilboa can I recommend Licor de Hierbas, more potent than acid on an empty stomach. You will outshine Fellini in your dreaming).</span></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdHCTpbzi86aWm9NCg2k2_VfgP4KpFtri4Uc2Op1UUZjmjlrJOriuII2kL5L8IZv2MMBDp83RzsYDQaQ6fVHvC91pcEI934Xdxivg2aRC9z10QNhgMFbPCS1BMu8TkdegIVdiZjX47UBM/s1600-h/Bilbao_Jeff_Koons_Puppy.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5360479772081266914" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 335px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 400px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdHCTpbzi86aWm9NCg2k2_VfgP4KpFtri4Uc2Op1UUZjmjlrJOriuII2kL5L8IZv2MMBDp83RzsYDQaQ6fVHvC91pcEI934Xdxivg2aRC9z10QNhgMFbPCS1BMu8TkdegIVdiZjX47UBM/s400/Bilbao_Jeff_Koons_Puppy.jpg" border="0" /></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-620033997567463526.post-86067572276495154612009-07-20T12:33:00.005+10:002009-07-20T16:27:59.093+10:00David Gazard, Politics, the Church and feeling sorry for christians<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvhJl8n3Q-bDieSSBP-r4-9XUXKCWG734xDZpknidE5w0e-1uv33HlhEHsHmDEwwbA47WH_wMHypSeSu7tMb17lSQgQVfLXQxieo6kORYQzS-6p5CDn9hgL1ibqdcgwNocW0pVmlrLwCI/s1600-h/life-of-brian.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 234px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvhJl8n3Q-bDieSSBP-r4-9XUXKCWG734xDZpknidE5w0e-1uv33HlhEHsHmDEwwbA47WH_wMHypSeSu7tMb17lSQgQVfLXQxieo6kORYQzS-6p5CDn9hgL1ibqdcgwNocW0pVmlrLwCI/s400/life-of-brian.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5360421064433059634" /></a><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">(Above: Life of Brian. Blessed are the cheesemakers, and if you think that's a typo for peace makers you haven't read David Gazard. Enough with your UN talk of peace making with black helicopters, what about the sterling work of cheese makers feeding the poor as small businessmen facing the crushing burden of socialism).</span><br /><div><br /></div><div>When you look at <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Punch </span>often enough, Australia's dumbest conversation, the befuddled editorial policies tend to come into balance.<div><br /></div><div>Throw in a bit of populism (<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">MasterChef</span>), a Labor politician or two for balance, a Liberal to tip the scales the other way, then flavor it with a soupçon of loon.</div><div><br /></div><div>David Gazard does nicely as a prime contender for loon pond gold status with his contribution <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/prayers-for-the-taliban-but-not-for-a-businessman/#comments">Churches pray for terrorist and ignore a businessman,</a></span> which yet again recycles comparisons between locked up in China businessman Stern Hu, against locked up in Guantanamo Bay David Hicks.</div><div><br /></div><div>Gazard's target is Christians and their churches - and who can argue with that - but his argument is so full of holes and illiberal illogic that you just wish there was some other character roaming around the temples taking on the money lenders.</div><div><br /></div><div>Let's cut to the chase here:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">As a person of faith who holds a deep interest in politics, I think it is in our nation’s interest for the church to help fill the moral and spiritual vacuum. And there are a great many churches out there doing just that.<br /><br />But if the traditional church is to succeed, it must get back to doing what it does best, delivering a spiritual message, not attempting to replicate a Left-of-centre political party or Greenpeace.</span><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>WTF? Oh yes, I can just imagine Gazard way back when writing an editorial for the <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Jerusalem Times</span> reporting that a strange figure was seen roaming around the temples over turning tables and benches and getting upset about a few guys selling a few doves (and won't someone speak up for the doves).</div><div><br /></div><div>If the traditional Mr. Christ is to succeed in his new ministry, Gazard might harumph, he needs to get back to doing what he does best - you know, miracles and stuff, and spiritual messages about Christmas and Easter, not attempting to replicate some kind of socialistic agenda about innocent money lenders and dove and rug dealers doing a bit of business in the temples. </div><div><br /></div><div>It's that kind of Greenpeace Gaia nonsense, Gazard might continue in his op ed, which makes me wonder if he's the right kind of character to fill in the moral and spiritual vacuum around town. I've even heard he's used his skills to create wine, and I understand he keeps the company of peasants and prostitutes, rather than upstanding company directors and honest traders.</div><div><br /></div><div>But wouldn't you know it. The brand new nineteen sixties moral and spiritual vacuum was created by Marxist baby boomers. Good news for vegan Adolf Hitler, and no need to worry about breaking Godwin's law:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The retiring Bishop of Rochester, Dr Nazir-Ali traces the decline of the church in Britain back to the 1960s when there was a steep decline in Christian worship.<br /></span></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br />Marxist students encouraged a “social and sexual revolution” to which liberal theologians and Church leaders “all but capitulated,” he says.<br /><br />“It is this situation that has created the moral and spiritual vacuum in which we now find ourselves. While the Christian consensus was dissolved, nothing else, except perhaps endless self-indulgence, was put in its place.”</span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>Oh yes, if you want wild sexual liberation, go to Russia and China and see how exciting it gets there. Luckily the United States has nothing to do with endless self-indulgence, given it never fell to Marxism. </div><div><br /></div><div>What's that you say? How dare you equate my plasma screen and playstation box with mindless self-indulgence.</div><div><br /></div><div>You see, there's endless self indulgence, and then there's mindless self-indulgence, and you must always be ready to separate the two.</div><div><br /></div><div>And then of course there's the indulgences you can buy (any good church will sell you one), and the indulgence of being born gay or a woman, and really complicating matters. </div><div><br /></div><div>The next thing you know Christians will be ordaining gays to take a place in the church. Or -s steady, don't faint - women. Why on earth can't the traditional church agree on a traditional social agenda. You know, Islamics terrible and gay people even worse. Women a necessary evil.</div><div><br /></div><div>Lordy, some of these clerics can't even agree on whether god actually exists. Or if he or she is an actual sex, or whether (s)he is some kind of bizarre TG kind of creature, or whether (s)he might be a socialist marxist or even worse a one legged lesbian whale lover.</div><div><br /></div><div>But back to the beginning. Gazard opens in best debating school manner:<br /></div><div><br /></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">I keep waiting for the traditional church to launch its campaign against the government’s treatment of boat people.<br /><br />Perhaps Stern Hu needs a rocket launcher to get the churches' attention<br /><br />After all, boats carrying asylum seekers keep entering Australian waters in greater numbers, there are allegations that boats are left to drift and, worst of all, some have perished along the way.<br /><br />I glance skyward in Melbourne, looking for the immense banner hanging from the spire St Paul’s Cathedral, like there was a few years ago. Instead of “Justice for David Hicks”, it will read “Justice for SIEV 624”.<br /><br />“Excising islands and placing boat people in New Guinea and Nauru and so removing them from access to the Australian legal system was too clever and inhuman. Have we no sense of shame as a nation?” asked the Most Reverend Peter R Watson, then the Archbishop of Melbourne in 2004.<br /></span><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Surely Rev Watson, or his successor Dr Philip Freier, who defended the “Justice for David Hicks” banner, will be out of the blocks soon to criticise the fact that boatpeople are dying and to demonstrate the traditional church’s deep adherence to social justice is non-partisan.</span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>Err, actually it seems Gazard hasn't read Piers Akerman. </div><div><br /></div><div>Once you've done that, you know that the current government is way too soft on illegal asylum seekers. Akkers is outraged at the way the government has helped out these wretched aliens. So what's for the clerics to protest at? All's peace and love under the christian Chairman Rudd.</div><div><br /></div><div>Could it be that - gasp - Akkers is wrong. The government is still being tough? Gazard seems to think so, in which case me and Akkers must have missed the mail. I find it hard to believe, but that would certainly give the clerics some work to do.</div><div><br /></div><div>Well, err actually that might explain why some of the clerics do think the government is still being too tough. Gazard doesn't seem to notice that the wretched do gooders and soft sook Christians are still out there raging at the government for being too hard on asylum seekers. But I guess they do it in publications that Gazard doesn't bother to read (on pink paper). </div><div><br /></div><div>I guess if it's not in a huge banner on a cathedral these harmless do gooders going quietly about their work are invisible.</div><div><br /></div><div>But then there's nothing like conflating a businessman held in prison in the one party state of communist China (still not up to a month) versus the treatment handed out to David Hicks (years and years) - and many others, innocent and guilty - by a country which is supposedly the leader of the free world, and which in this matter and the question of torture should have known better.</div><div><br /></div><div>How about using hanging as a metaphor to make your point? Sure thing:</div><div><br /></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> Or how about this for something really radical, seeing as the Melbourne Anglicans felt that a self professed terrorist needed support because he was held without charge: “Justice for Stern Hu.”<br /><br />I’m not going to swing by the neck waiting.</span><br /><br />Well I'm not going to state the obvious, which is that high church types seem to love supporting the pillars of state, and think the church should be one of those pillars, so that then the true believers can berate all the do gooders and lefty activists. Just like Gazard:<br /><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The point of this column is not to state the obvious. That the social justice wing of the traditional church is infected with Left-wing activists, many of whom would be agnostics at best or atheists at worst is well known and well documented.<br /><br />And it’s not to have a crack at the social justice agenda or the people deeply committed to making their society or community a better place. And it’s not to make the argument that the church should never involve itself in politics. That would be ridiculous.</span><br /><br />Yep, that's the christian church all right. Infested with agnostics or atheists. In fact atheists can't think of anything better to do with their time than go along on a Sunday and stand shoulder to shoulder with a bunch of Ned Flanders. </div><div><br /></div><div>Which is terrible when you think about it. Because the church should of course support right wing politics, as natural and relevant today as part of Christ's message when he was way back riding donkeys and saying things about the ease with which rich people could get through eyes of needles straight into heaven (while the poor would be left waiting to collect two hundred dollars from go or Old Kent road). </div><div><br /></div><div>After all, General Franco was a jolly good Catholic and he ran Spain in fine style. Back then the traditional church was really relevant. Right now?</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">... the traditional church is ushering itself to irrelevance.<br /><br />I write this in the full knowledge that the church has made a big difference for the better on some big political issues, the abolition of slavery for one.</span><br /><br />Not that in the old days the church had any understanding of the policy positions in relation to slavery, or the expertise to push any position at all when you remember that slavery successfully underpinned several economies. </div><div><br /></div><div>And still does, and still can if we had only a modicum of policy sanity in the church. Unlike the festering lovey dovey position in relation to gays and women, two groups who seem to think that somehow they deserve equality in all things, when we know that doesn't serve the bible or the economy.</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">But on some issues, the church has no business pushing any position. It does not have policy expertise to do so. It’s trenchant opposition to the GST, for instance, proved that.<br /><br />And there’s a big difference between slavery and garden variety political issues of the type that the church involves itself with more and more these days.</span></div><div><br /></div><div>Yes, they should stick to tea and cheese and cucumber sandwiches.<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Stop globalisation rally, the church will be there. Walk against the G8 Summit, the church will be represented—along with every other activist group and ratbag anarchist.<br /><br />Leaked union documents before the last election showed the ACTU had a deliberate strategy to infiltrate churches in a bid to get them to push a pro-union message.<br /><br />And, of course, the church did.</span><br /><br />Pro unionist lick spittle lackeys. That's the christians. In fact it might not be so bad to have an honesty survey at the front door of the church, and if we find a unionist pretending to be a christian, he can be prevented from entering the service. Come unto me little children, but you have to draw the line somewhere and it may as well be big fat surly union thugs of the CFMEU kind.</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Is the church the winner in any of this? Not if you count numbers, it isn’t.<br /><br />While traditional church leaders might get a thrill out of seeing themselves in newspapers commenting on “cutting edge issues”, the sad reality is that people are staying away in droves.</span><br /><br /></div><div>Ah yes, cutting edge issues. Like those vexatious gay and noisy harridan women.</div><div><br /></div><div>Not that this might have anything to do with people actually stopping believing in god or preferring material things or discovering different kinds of spirituality. No, it's because people would much prefer to join the Greens, with their weird religious faith and capable campaigning style:</div><div><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">This makes sense because other organizations are better equipped to run political campaigns.<br /><br />If you want liberal policies and political campaigns, you go to the Greens website, not waste your Sunday morning on a Uniting Church pew listening to environmental policy.<br /><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Greens don’t bother with rhetoric about saving souls on the way to figuring out how to save a tree.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">And dammit christians shouldn't go on about saving a tree when they should be saving souls. After all, the tree can be chopped down and turned into something useful, like a crucifix.</span><br /></span><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">So in persistent advocacy of secular issues, the church has willingly allowed itself to become no different to most of the other voices across the Left of the political spectrum.<br /><br />And that means that, in the political cacophony, it carries a diminished voice, because it has no specific expertise, no particular skill set with which to argue its case.<br /></span><br /></div><div>Yes, and I've always found the word of god to be singularly useless in understanding the world or why we live in it, and isn't it particularly pleasing that Gazard notes that as policy advice the bible is hopeless, and that his church - even with the bible to hand - is absolutely lacking in specific expertise and skill sets. Christ is just another socialist dipstick, the Lenin to God's rampant Marxism.</div><div><br /></div><div>And there you have it. What a great rant. </div><div><br /></div><div>For a moment I almost felt sorry for the soft core christians being given a lashing by Gazard. After all, it takes a particularly peculiar kind of understanding of spirituality to think that somehow it's like the inside of a walnut, capable of being separate from the world, whether that be left of centre or right of centre, or outside or inside of politics, as if the word of god should have no impact on the ways and means of how you make your way through the world. </div><div><br /></div><div>You know, like you loot and pillage the earth and humanity, and then you front up at the end, cheeky and bold as brass, and you get a cadillac class trip to heaven, with gold handles (no gilt please) running on good old fashioned 12 miles to the gallon leaded petrol. As if there's politics and religion and never the twain should meet, and never have done in the past and never will in the future, unless the politics are Gazard approved political stances. As individual as a cloning stamp.</div><div><br /></div><div>After all, we all know that Christ said give to Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's. But that was just a cunning answer to avoid being trapped by lawyers, priests and politicians. You will note he didn't say exactly what was Caesar's and what was God's. For that you have to look at his ambit claims and they were pretty wide. Like life and love and death and the whole damn thing.</div><div><br /></div><div>For example, want Christ's views on the military and on theft and on being forced to go an extra mile?</div><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you. (Matthew 5:38-41)</span><br /><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>Oh yes, it's a tough religion all right, and Gazard doesn't have a clue, so why am I unsurprised to discover he's worked for Peter Costello, who you will recall hung around with clap happy types until they decided the Victorian bushfires were due to abortion law reform.</div><div><br /></div><div>And at that point I thought what the heck. Let Gazard tear the christians apart like a lion in the colosseum. Where's the harm in that? A few less christians, and more memberships for unions, socialist parties, lefty wanker go gooder revolutionary parties, greenies and Greenpeace. </div><div><br /></div><div>Because if a high church is a place for high dudgeon, Gazard's welcome to dwell there with any like mind he can find ... while the rest of us can get on with the tricky business of living and not getting the neighbors too agitated ...</div></div><div><br /></div>And now we turn to the text for the day:<div><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Mrs. Big Nose: [trying to hear Jesus' sermon on the mount] Oh, it's blessed are the MEEK! Oh, I'm glad they're getting something, they have a hell of a time.<br />Reg: What Jesus fails to appreciate is that it's the meek who are the problem.</span><div><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Brian: No, no. Please, please please listen. I've got one or two things to say.<br />The Crowd: Tell us! Tell us both of them!<br />Brian: Look, you've got it all wrong. You don't need to follow me. You don't need to follow anybody! You've got to think for yourselves! You're all individuals!<br />The Crowd: Yes! We're all individuals!<br />Brian: You're all different!<br />The Crowd: Yes! We're all different!<br />Man in crowd: I'm not...<br />Man in crowd: Shhh!<br />Brian: You've all got to work it out for yourselves.<br />The Crowd: Yes! We've got to work it out for ourselves!<br />Brian: Exactly!<br />The Crowd: Tell us more!<br />Brian: No! That's the point! Don't let anyone tell you what to do! Otherwise - Ow! Ow! </span><br /></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-620033997567463526.post-30718090032001796342009-07-20T09:31:00.005+10:002009-07-20T12:00:02.620+10:00Mike Rann, twits twittering, and the joy of not having a filter<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVWN6NhvtWmerLo7xEVJcc7cUyb7Px2xznINqyVPe9wJU6jZyhpwO0IMcjGiPb5grSrtbI5t_tkrroNmm3c8CZlBbw6d1dKOAZVPjStApZaxMYXWtc-_nlOSrW36-f1_PzUYFvRXK9wRg/s1600-h/twitter.png"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 255px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVWN6NhvtWmerLo7xEVJcc7cUyb7Px2xznINqyVPe9wJU6jZyhpwO0IMcjGiPb5grSrtbI5t_tkrroNmm3c8CZlBbw6d1dKOAZVPjStApZaxMYXWtc-_nlOSrW36-f1_PzUYFvRXK9wRg/s400/twitter.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5360353563807355090" /></a><br />You can always rely on a preening Mike Rann, premier of South Australia, for a bit of old fashioned hypocrisy.<div><br /></div><div>This week the ostensible subject is Twitter, with the subtext how wired Rann is, along with the democratic joys that hot electrification brings. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/get-busy-tweeting-or-get-busy-dying/">Get busy Tweeting or get busy dying</a></span>, he triumphantly blogs, and perhaps best of all is the way politicians can avoid the filter of the mainstreeam media:</div><div><br /></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Twitter followers want straight talk, humour and occasionally a stoush.<br /><br />They don’t want sanitised, bureaucratic blandishments.<br /><br />Funnily enough, some reporters can’t deal with Twitter. It makes them defensive.<br /><br />This puzzles me.<br /><br />After all, Rupert Murdoch understands the new media. Some of his journalists don’t.<br /><br />Is it because pollies are now able to communicate directly with the public, rather than through a filter?</span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>That'd be the local media filter rather than Stephen Conroy's internet wide filter? Suddenly I prefer the local media filter.</div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">You can hear the sneering resentment when we are quoted as “speaking on the social networking site, Twitter, …”<br /><br />That’s like newspapers reporting quotes gleaned from a politician speaking “through the fax stream” or even “through the internet device known as email”.<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Or perhaps like newspapers reporting quotes gleaned from a politician speaking from behind the Chinese bamboo internet curtain, or the theocratic Iranian intertubes censorship system, or Stephen Conroy's Steve Fielding approved network wide internet device known as network level filtering, as a bonus add on to the NBN.</span><br /></span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">I’ve also been attacked because a handful of my Twitter “followers” may be involved in “unsavoury activities”.<br /><br />The Liberal’s raincoat brigade trawled through thousands of my followers and handed over the naughty tit-bits to a fellow traveller in the media.<br /><br />It was the same team that brought down their own leader by peddling dodgy documents. Sleaze is their substitute for substance.<br /><br />I’m sure the risqué also follow Malcolm Turnbull.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Well we won't have any sleazy stuff or the </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">risqué to worry about when Stephen Conroy's grand plan kicks into gear, along with his three strikes and you're off the intertubes plan for dealing with pirates. Then the raincoat brigade will have to go back to trawling through garbage bins or their local purveyor of brown paper cover publications.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span>‘The Australian’, in particular, seems to have got its knickers in a knot.<br /><br />It’s the newspaper that campaigns against censorship, and its sister publications carry advertisements for “escorts”.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Lordy, say it ain't so. Well Stephen Conroy will soon sort out that mob. Once the intertubes are banned from carrying anything hinting at escorts, maybe it'll be time to start on the filthy hard copy brethren.</span><br /><br />I guess I could vet those who follow me on Twitter.<br /><br />But that would be like employing a bouncer, or a censor, at my street corner meetings.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Yes, and why employ a bouncer or a censor when Stephen Conroy is to hand.</span><br /><br />For me, Twitter represents a “virtual” town hall meeting.<br /><br />It’s a talkback show involving thousands of people who are interested in policies, programs, and personalities.<br /><br />After all, politics is a contest of ideas and personalities.<br /><br />Soon, Twitter won’t seem so threatening to journalists, especially when they realise that their own jobs are likely to be on-line.<br /><br />Or perhaps on the line, unless they adapt to new technologies.<br /><br />Ultimately, it’s about giving people what they want, whether they are readers or voters.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">I always thought that twitter was for twits, and know I know that giving voters what they want is giving them the tweets of Mike Rann, I'm sure of it.</span><br /></span><div><br /></div><div>Meantime, after all this talk of freedom from bouncers and censors - and presumably that includes right wing thuggess from the federal Labor party - I look forward to Mike Rann's active campaigning against Stephen Conroy and his desire to impose a network wide filter on the intertubes in Australia.</div><div><br /></div><div>I'm dreaming? </div><div><br /></div><div>When will we be rid of the prattling prats from the Labor party? Oh and here's a warning from Rann to Mark Day that newspapers are dead, along with a guide to what we can expect when twits are ascendant:<br /><br /></div></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">I started using Twitter earlier this year.<br /><br />Why?<br /><br />Essentially, because I rarely saw young people at my street corner and town hall meetings.<br /><br />Newspapers are having to appeal to a new, younger, audience by going on-line.<br /><br />People are no longer content to have their news thrown over the fence once a day.<br /><br />So media is adapting to changing consumer demands. If they don’t, they’ll perish.<br /><br />The same is true for politicians.<br /><br />By Twittering, I am reaching a different audience.<br /><br />But it’s not just a one-way street.<br /><br />Through Twitter, people ask me questions. They argue. They disagree. Feedback is healthy in a democracy.<br /><br />Twitter also takes up very little of my time.</span><div><br /></div><div>Takes up very little of his time? Gee, I guess that means the healthy feedback is very short, the questions are simple minded, the arguments soon disposed of and the disagreements just a misunderstanding amongst chums. See it the Rann way, or see the highway.</div><div><br /></div><div>Presumably that's because Rann can dispense with the twittering twits providing tweetish feedback. </div><div><br /></div><div>You know: healthy feedback. </div><div><br /></div><div>Oh Mr Rann, you're wonderful. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Thnks u2.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>And then even healthier feedback:</div><div><br /></div><div>Oh Mr. Rann you do blather on. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">I b so 1337</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Teh ful be pwned.</span></div><div><br /></div><div>And then Conroy style feedback:</div><div><br /></div><div>Oh Mr. Rann ain't freedom wonderful. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Ful, pr0n b deadly, phreak off. Conry b teh d00d</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>Ah yes, the brand new state of the art uncensored world of high technology in the land of Labor twits twittering their tweets. And yes if you want to see Mike Rann in his full intertubes glory, so wired he's so over My Space, rush off to to see him in his old media My Space days <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.myspace.com/mikerann">here</a>.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>Props to Don Dunstan for this (no not the real Don you ghost whispering optimist), but one of Mike's loyal fans, and how long before this page goes down? Here's R. Diddy sending Mr Rann a greeting on 25 April 2008: <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">happy birthyday motherfucker</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>Hey, that's short enough to go in a tweet.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-620033997567463526.post-67141691486611049312009-07-20T07:46:00.004+10:002009-07-20T08:48:53.481+10:00Mark Day, Matthew Robson, troublesome teens and the way ahead for Murdoch rags<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYkg6Hdq4_hN6_FxGhGTjaUN4wpF1t0gzpYuEjVpPAmAZz_yvAlCGePDcg5vu4GUi6D_bMIbTIV8MjBJyiYSf3UN-Qs-KuXfUNJMGaVhAcasMRJ08AdfUjJChso9Zsb_hDqsbRBhdZ42g/s1600-h/kylekinky.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 273px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYkg6Hdq4_hN6_FxGhGTjaUN4wpF1t0gzpYuEjVpPAmAZz_yvAlCGePDcg5vu4GUi6D_bMIbTIV8MjBJyiYSf3UN-Qs-KuXfUNJMGaVhAcasMRJ08AdfUjJChso9Zsb_hDqsbRBhdZ42g/s400/kylekinky.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5360303234661041026" /></a><br />(<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Above: the Daily Telegraph continuing its online campaign for adult content).<br /></span><div><br /></div><div>Poor Mark Day remains traumatized by the future of newspapers, when he really should just be facing the future with a 'meh', for what will be will be.<div><br /></div><div>Casting through the runes, fossicking amongst the entrails, he gets agitated by the findings of Matthew Robson, intern at investment bank Morgan Stanley, aged 15 years and seventeen months when he wrote a report on teen media habits picked up by the London <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Financial Times</span>.</div><div>(And if you're interested you can pick up a pdf <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://media.ft.com/cms/c3852b2e-6f9a-11de-bfc5-00144feabdc0.pdf">here</a></span>, a link Mr. Day should really have provided in this new media world, and if that link drops out, you know how to google).</div><div><br /></div><div>In <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/markday/index.php/theaustralian/comments/teen_as_media_news_guru/">Teen as media news guru,</a></span> Day recycles the alarming news that teens don't read newspapers.</div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> Matthew is blunt when it comes to print.<br /><br />“No teenager I know regularly reads a newspaper,” he says. “Most do not have the time and cannot be bothered to read pages and pages of text when they could watch the news summarised on the internet or on TV.”<br /></span><br /><div>Day recycles Robson's insights into other media - Twitter bad, Facebook good - and teen multi-tasking skills, and things that are hot - anything free, online game playing, free voice calls, phones with large memories and good battery life, and giant screens.</div><div><br /></div><div>But it's the bit about newspapers that worries Day, and he finds ways to reassure his own fevered brow:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">All this provides an interesting window into how a small section of society thinks.<br /><br />But it is dangerous to assume too much from it—especially the assumption that because teenagers act this way now, they will continue to do so.<br /><br />It is simply illogical to draw from the revelations of a teen mind anything masquerading as profound insights to future media. It would be wrong to assume that if it is nigh on impossible to reach such a fragmented, flipperty-gibbet teen audience today, it will be equally hard to reach them tomorrow.<br /><br />Teenagers are going though a phase. We did it in our youth; our grandkids’ grandkids will do it too. Soon the grunts, grunge and spottiness will give way to confident young men and women in their 20s—Generation Z, or whatever name they adopt.<br /><br /></span>Phew. It's just a phase, like pimples and braces. Soon enough, when they get kids and a mortgage, they'll want to settle down and read a decent set of school league tables in a tabloid Murdoch rag:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">And as they enter their 30s, they’ll come to embrace the same issues that consume most mature adults: how to buy a house, where to get the best mortgages, finding the best school for their kids’ education and getting the best advice on health and lifestyle matters. It has always been the way.<br /><br />In my era, many people adopted the newspaper habit around the time they put their youthful years behind them and settled down to raise families.</span><br /><br />But what about all these other digital distractions? What about the full to overflowing intertubes? Will dad want to settle in a comfy old lounge chair and get newsprint on his paws while missus whips up grub in kitchen and kids play cricket in back yard?</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Newspapers may find it harder to develop this habit in a future dominated by digital dissemination of information, but people will still want to get their news from sources they can trust.</span><br /><br />Like the Murdoch press? With due respect, the only news I'd trust from the Daily Terror is an update on Kyle's kinky sex kitten, knowing that anything said therein should be taken with a grain of salt.</div><div><br /></div><div>And what happens if older folk confronted by the consistent dumbing down of the Murdoch press begin to take other paths? For example, we were astonished, while picking up tickets at the Sydney Opera House, to see the Saturday <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Sydney Morning Herald </span>lying in racks - as they do at airports - waiting to be picked up for free by any passing punter, and no doubt counted in circulation figures.</div><div><br /></div><div>Ostensibly it's a subscriber thing, but no one was guarding the gold and the rags were in essence being given away for free. The only thing going their way was that the punters tend to stay outside collecting another zillion images of the opera house to the quadzillions already available on the intertubes.</div><div><br /></div><div>When we got the thing home, we were startled to have a paper in the house. We didn't quite know what to do with it. We poked and prodded it, and then my partner went online to get the news, and we both ended up reading <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The New Yorker</span> and <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The New York Review of Books,</span> both of which have much better in depth articles (along with a smattering of fiction and cartoons). </div><div><br /></div><div>In fact, we first began to drop off the newspaper habit when it became clear that most internationally orientated articles and columns were being picked up by Fairfax and Murdoch rags for their hard copy runs. But if Maureen Dowd is available online on <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The New York Times</span> and the article from <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The New Yorker </span>is a cut down version of the hard copy that now lands in my mailbox less than a week after publication, why should I pay double for this cheap assed double dipping? Or if I was less old school, I could find online with bonus footnotes?</div><div><br /></div><div>Whatever you do, don't mention payment for content:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The teenage concept of knowing what’s going on by osmosis will morph into more regular and bankable media habits.<br /></span><br />Bankable media habits? Well it's a nifty evasion for that deep question. How to make kids pay when they have more redbacks in their pockets than Uncle Scrooge. When even some older folk have broken through the pay fence and found the free grass greener on the other side?</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">If Matthew has a message for today’s editors and media managers it is that we should adopt a “horses for courses” approach to various products.<br /><br />Today’s markets are broken into many sections and subsections, and the notion of one-size-fits-all is deader than the dodo.</span><br /><br />Well I guess that means the odd page or two dedicated to comics will soon be lost to the world of tabloids, but the idea that you can save generalist publications by turning them into a one size fits one reader model is a radical, extreme kind of optimism.</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">For generations the mantra in publishing has been to “down age”: to adopt a youthful profile and attitude in order to attract young readers.<br /><br />Today, in the face of evidence that young people are not reading, a compelling case can be made for newspapers—particularly our state-based dailies—to be edited to meet the demands and expectations of those that read them: adults.</span><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>But what if adults are jack of them as well? What if an adult reader thinks <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Punch</span>, allegedly the most intelligent conversation in the southern hemisphere is a bizarre mix of free kicks for passing politicians, airheads and eccentrics with bees in their bonnets.</div><div><br /></div><div>You can sense each week in Day's writing an incipient nervousness that the old ways are dying or dead, and his beloved newspapers are going the way of dinosaurs and dodos.</div><div><br /></div><div>I share his nostalgia - I can still remember my father turning up smelling of beer and newsprint, with the long gone <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Daily Mirror</span> folded and tucked into his trousers' back pocket - but once a habit is lost, it's hard to get it back - unless of course it's something decently addictive, like cocaine.</div><div><br /></div><div>Newspapers aren't cocaine, nor even a cup of tea. Once the issue of a universal reader is solved, the days of the old generalist rags will truly seem remote and astonishing, and the new forms might in fact find a kind of bankable alternative market. But they'll be so different it would be a stretch to call them newspapers in any meaningful sense of the word.</div><div><br /></div><div>And there's another problem - while Day provides insights into the media habits of his grandson in Perth, he doesn't once mention piracy or other alternatives which happened to be 'free' in relation to other media.</div><div><br /></div><div>For example, last year British teens averaged 842 illegal tracks per iPod, and while this year file sharing percentages have dropped, they're still the go, and where they aren't, they've been replaced by listening to streamed music, sharing burned CDs and bluetoothing tracks via mobile phones. And where once music trod alone, now movies and television tread with them.</div><div><br /></div><div>Above all, anyone - no matter the age - familiar with technology has the capacity for flexibility and a diverse way of getting what they want for free.</div><div><br /></div><div>In this new digital world - to which anyone with hardware has access to the golden key - to imagine that by targeting adults, and hoping that teens will grow up, settle down and start reading hard copy newspapers, is the way forward in saving hard copy newspapers is fanciful in the extreme.</div><div><br /></div><div>If Day is right that the young are lost and that down aging isn't a viable strategy, then tabloids like <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Daily Telegraph</span> are dying, but just don't know it. But if what he's offering as adult content is <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Australian,</span> then it's time for that rag to take a look around at the competition offered by publications providing genuine adult content (and we're not just talking about thinking person's erotica).</div><div><br /></div><div>Could it be that in fact relentless down marketing is the way forward, while toffy up market rags with 'adult' content get taken over by niche specialist suppliers who can do a better job than imagining Greg Sheridan, Glenn Milne and Janet Albrechtsen constitute a sufficient sampling of world views?</div><div><br /></div><div>In the end I'm with Robson, and the ability to read or watch when and how you want, on portable devices or up on a big screen. And that's not just a phase. Reclaiming the right to watch a TV show without ads is to hand for anyone with a dvd player. And I like it free, unless the content is so irresistible (or the avi such a good small screen promotion) that I stump up the cash.</div><div><br /></div><div>And hard copy newspapers bulging with a variety of sections and advertisements found for free in a rack in the city?</div><div><br /></div><div>Meh.</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">(Below: the National Library of Australia's campaign to find lost newspapers. Look in the free racks at the Opera House mebbe?</span>)</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_71zlYwtVobeGHPi6JDQd7sm4PJ2W63sC-9A53sqUL7gWSbtkMr02mBl1rJG8oBjtC6MkT_VUyxdclmmXSO9csjpwDqOvrh-gMDf0gjDZXETXCidUDezGrMk5HgY5qMK02h_EBS1C02M/s1600-h/anplan.gif"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 283px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_71zlYwtVobeGHPi6JDQd7sm4PJ2W63sC-9A53sqUL7gWSbtkMr02mBl1rJG8oBjtC6MkT_VUyxdclmmXSO9csjpwDqOvrh-gMDf0gjDZXETXCidUDezGrMk5HgY5qMK02h_EBS1C02M/s400/anplan.gif" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5360303235600084770" /></a></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-620033997567463526.post-73265235470544010752009-07-19T10:46:00.007+10:002009-07-19T11:53:02.069+10:00Hal G. P. Colebatch, G. K. Chesteron, the ballad of Alfred and eternal truths and verities<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuC7yo2CCDSeZTcXRsQO4ufpGvSsBPLjHm2OYPKvsLRImbDcM7Et_XfNssv4cbz4lUVPbZqL62fatIhpc5rFCGC1nOmnmpcevUxxmcdpM4s9gVV95gxUapGue4tA2gGA9-McbeK5VQEuM/s1600-h/whitehorse2.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 243px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuC7yo2CCDSeZTcXRsQO4ufpGvSsBPLjHm2OYPKvsLRImbDcM7Et_XfNssv4cbz4lUVPbZqL62fatIhpc5rFCGC1nOmnmpcevUxxmcdpM4s9gVV95gxUapGue4tA2gGA9-McbeK5VQEuM/s400/whitehorse2.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5359979835361979298" /></a><br />Every so often, we love to drop in on favorite authors, and who could be more favorite on loon pond than Hal G. P. Colebatch.<div><br /></div><div>It being a slow Sunday, what better way to fill in the empty hours by a visit to <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The American Spectator </span>and his last column.</div><div><br /></div><div>Sure you might be greeted by the unsettling visage of Ben Stein begging for money for the site - y'all will remember Ben Stein for his epic <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,</span> which managed to celebrate the science of intelligent design while conflating the theory of evolution with the rise of eugenics, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.</div><div><br /></div><div>But intrepid explorers of ideas are made of stern stuff, and so on we go to<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://spectator.org/archives/2009/06/11/epic-chesterton/"> Epic Chesterton</a></span>.</div><div><br /></div><div>For those who've come in late Chesterton was a twentieth century writer who has largely disappeared from the popular imagination he once occupied centre stage, though there are still some who see him as part of a trinity of Christian writers, the others being C. S. Lewis and Evelyn Waugh (though truth to tell Waugh creams the other two in the art of writing). (As usual Wikipedia has an extensive entry, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton">here)</a></span>.</div><div><br /></div><div>Chesterton turned Catholic in later life, and there's no doubt that Hal G. P. Colebatch regards him as close to sainthood:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> While some scholars have begun meeting at Oxford to discuss the cause of his eventual sainthood, G. K. Chesterton is remembered largely today by the reading public as the creator of the Father Brown detective stories, in which a humble Catholic priest solves crimes largely because his experiences in the confessional makes him exceptionally informed about the real nature of good and evil.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">But Colebatch has other fish to fry than Father Brown, and for that he turns to Chesterton's epic poem </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="">The Ballad of the White Horse:</span></span></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">In its style, though not in its ultimate concerns, The Ballad of the White Horse is a rather different work from the adventures of Father Brown. It is not perfect as poetry but it is one of those works -- there are not very many -- that can actually change the reader's life and is a perennial source of inspiration and hope.</span><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>Now let's not linger too long on the poem itself, life changing and perennially inspiring as it is. Colebatch quotes from it extensively, and presumably he's paid for his important work, so it's important you click on his column to boost the <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">American Spectator</span>'s numbers, but if you have a hankering for the whole event in free form, you might like to avail yourself of a free copy from Project Gutenbe<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">rg <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1719">here.</a></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>It might take you a time to wade through the whole thing - it's in eight books and runs to a flatulent length - but it's about the legend of Alfred, the sort of visionary stuff which chills an English spine as they smack and smote the colonials all over the field in the way they once taught the Vikings a lesson. It even has its own Wikipedia entry <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ballad_of_the_White_Horse">here </a></span>so you know it's pretty significant, and might even have been ripped by Tolkien!</div><div><br /></div><div>Colebatch's first quote gives you flavor enough, with things looking grim for the Christianized kingdom of Wessex and its symbol, the golden dragon:</div><div><br /></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">There was not English armour left<br />Nor any English thing<br />When Alfred came to Athelney<br />To be an English king …</span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br />And the God of the Golden Dragon<br />Was dumb upon his throne,<br />And the lord of the golden Dragon<br />Ran in the woods alone …</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>Now some of the wretched Saxons just want to give the game away, but Alfred is made of sterner stuff, and is intent on setting the course of England to its ultimate situation, with conservationist Bonnie Prince Charlie ready to inherit the throne and save the world, with or without Al Gore.</div><div><br /></div><div>Well things in the poem go on apace for many pages and then - spoiler alert - it looks like Alfred and his arm are hopelessly beaten. Luckily Alfred gets his act together and smotes the Vikings with his axe and Odin falls. Take that you filthy Scandinavians with your Ikea and your Nokia and your Volvo.</div><div><br /></div><div>But there's a bit of a downside. You've always got to watch out for the heathens threatening to topple civilization. As Colebatch notes:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">In the final part, describing the years of peace that follow, the king warns the fight will go on: barbarians will come in the future armed not only with warships and burning torches but also with books, with "the sign of the dying fire," and: "By this sign shall you know them: that they ruin and make dark."<br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>Let's consult the holy text in detail so we can be forewarned and forearmed:</div><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">By this sign you shall know them,<br /> The breaking of the sword,<br /> And man no more a free knight,<br /> That loves or hates his lord.<br /><br />Yea, this shall be the sign of them,<br /> The sign of the dying fire;<br /> And Man made like a half-wit,<br /> That knows not of his sire.<br /><br />What though they come with scroll and pen,<br /> And grave as a shaven clerk,<br /> By this sign you shall know them,<br /> That they ruin and make dark;<br /><br />By all men bond to Nothing,<br /> Being slaves without a lord,<br /> By one blind idiot world obeyed,<br /> Too blind to be abhorred;<br /><br />By terror and the cruel tales<br /> Of curse in bone and kin,<br /> By weird and weakness winning,<br /> Accursed from the beginning,<br /> By detail of the sinning,<br /> And denial of the sin;<br /><br />By thought a crawling ruin,<br /> By life a leaping mire,<br /> By a broken heart in the breast of the world,<br /> And the end of the world's desire;<br /><br />By God and man dishonoured,<br /> By death and life made vain,<br /> Know ye the old barbarian,<br /> The barbarian come again--<br /><br />When is great talk of trend and tide,<br /> And wisdom and destiny,<br /> Hail that undying heathen<br /> That is sadder than the sea.</span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Yep, the anti-sword pacifists are at it again, along with the greenies and their like, not to mention clever post modernists and post structuralists and post semioticians, with the leather patches on the elbows and clever dick words, doing old England down, bringing on the ruin and the dark. Is it a sign, a portent, that bonnie Prince Charlie is a charlie? Must noble warriors take to the streets yet again?</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">C. S. Lewis has said that The Ballad of the White Horse is "permanent and dateless…does not the central theme of the ballad…embody the feeling, and the only possible feeling, with which in any age almost defeated men take up such arms as are left them and win?"</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Feel ye not the stirring within your loins proud Englanders? Thrash the Australian cricketers, throw away the color television sets, abandon your love of the Beatles and take up the bowler hat yet again. One day perhaps India and Pakistan and the middle East will recognize what they lost and welcome you back as conquerors, as opposed to weekend travellers blitzing Spain, Amsterdam and any European soccer match in which English footballers might be participants.</span></span></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Join with Colebatch :</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">It is good to read The Ballad of the White Horse, and also to reflect that it is basically true. There really was a climatic battle at Ethandune (possibly modern Edington, where a white horse is carved on the chalk hillside, possibly originally in memory of the battle), and where, against all odds, the nascent Anglic civilization and its noble and undaunted king, after years of defeats and betrayals, really won the day, and where the barbarians really were not only defeated but Christianized: Guthrum, with Alfred as his Godfather, took the Baptismal name Athelstan and kept the peace for the rest of his life. In England learning, culture, and civilization were revived under Alfred's rule, and we really were saved from being savages forever. Thank you, G. K. Chesterton.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Onward Christian Anglic soldiers, saved from savagery and marching off to war. Better a heathen in hell than happy in this world ...</span></span></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Thank you Hal G. P. Colebatch for reminding us of eternal verities and truths. Let's keep yearning for a past that never was and a future that will always be dark with fear and uncertainties, knowing that a good man with a rifle can sort out the heathens ... (or a cricket bat, unless a good nuking is required, and that too can be delivered, for along with the thwack of willow on leather there's nothing like the cleansing of split atoms on philistine skin) ...</span></span></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">And now as republicans threaten Australia and we suffer under the yoke of the evil tyrant Chairman Rudd, we turn to the north and mutter a silent prayer ... save us oh bonnie Prince Charlie ...<br /></span></span><br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-620033997567463526.post-34369833827739436472009-07-19T09:35:00.003+10:002009-07-19T10:21:27.602+10:00Piers Akerman, Chairman Rudd, and counting the many ways he's ruined everything this week<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEil_y7-oeKLuRWXxzRYLIoeiT7awDplqIOMQVXh7Nn-9To1KCDaTH4_2j4JS47Z_xZuAmibTLQsBtHms9iue-SR7xKZJkognD5thaHc9MHvTqrtK_ry8WFxAy3o4TUjaJV5MCwQjnBj5tk/s1600-h/monomania.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEil_y7-oeKLuRWXxzRYLIoeiT7awDplqIOMQVXh7Nn-9To1KCDaTH4_2j4JS47Z_xZuAmibTLQsBtHms9iue-SR7xKZJkognD5thaHc9MHvTqrtK_ry8WFxAy3o4TUjaJV5MCwQjnBj5tk/s400/monomania.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5359955514579532258" /></a><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">In psychiatry, monomania (from Greek monos, one, and mania, mania) is a type of paranoia in which the patient has only one idea or type of ideas. Emotional monomania is that in which the patient is obsessed with only one emotion or several related to it; intellectual monomania is that which is related to only one kind of delirious idea or ideas.</span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>You can read more about monomania <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomania">here.</a></span></div><div><br /></div><div>Or alternatively you can just go read Piers Akerman. He has a serious case of monomania, limited to the case of Chairman Rudd. The latest bout is to hand in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/piersakerman/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/rudd_is_a_bit_player_on_the_world_stage/">Rudd is a bit player on the world stage.</a></span></div><div><br /></div><div>It amazes me that the Daily and Sunday Terror continue to publish what might make for an interesting case study for a psychiatric journal, as yet again Akerman publishes a litany of charges against the Ruddster worthy of a Greek tragedy. If a man were so profoundly inhuman and incompetent, surely he'd already have been thrown into the flames of hell.</div><div><br /></div><div>Here's Akker's opener:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Prime Minister Kevin Rudd had a short-lived and undistinguished career in the Australian diplomatic service and now we know why. He wasn’t very good at diplomacy and the prospect of working for a Queensland Labor premier, Wayne Goss, obviously seemed vastly more attractive.</span><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>A nice bouncer to the head. Then there's the now obligatory countdown of Chairman Rudd's many current failures, failings and delusions of grandeur:</div><div><br /></div><div>1. In all the talk of climate change, everybody seems not to have noticed that the G8 isn't the G14 which isn't the G5 which taken together doesn't amount to the G20, but the G20 which includes Australia isn't the same as the G14 which includes the G5 and the G8 which might make you think it's the G13 but you forgot about Egypt.</div><div><br /></div><div>2. In all the talk of China, everybody seems not to have noticed that the Mandarin speaking PM's glib tongue falls on deaf ears in Beijing as they told him to get lost in special language that required no special translation, as the case of Hu represents a gross breach of convention which has never occurred before except in the case of Australan Chinese businessman James Peng during the time of the Howard Government, with Peng spending six years in the slammer.</div><div><br /></div><div>3. In all the talk of businessman Hu, some lefties have laughably claimed that this behavior in relation to Hu is somehow related to David Hicks, when in fact the only good thing about habeas corpus is that it produces corpses interred in jails as all jihadists should be.</div><div><br /></div><div>4. In all the talk of the recent bombing in Jakarta, the media forgot to notice that the rise of Islamic fundamentalists might well be attributed to the poor relationship between Chairman Rudd and our northern neighbour. Unlike that Islamic president Obama, who has special ties with the country, while Chairman Rudd is really only a Mandarin speaking lackey for the dragon from the north.</div><div><br /></div><div>Now it's time to quote a long time member of the Australian diplomatic corps, who for all we might know could well be a sinister anonymous blogger with no respect for actually standing up for what they believe in:</div><div><br /></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">"Ever since Rudd personally blocked [Australian diplomat] Hugh Borrowman’s appointment to Berlin after he had been nominated by the Foreign Minister, no onewants to make a decision which the PM might overturn,’’ he said.<br />Rudd blocked Borrowman’s appointment on the basis of his `"language skills’’, even though the experienced diplomat had "qualifications’’ in German. </span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>This is all apparently the result of Borrowman and Rudd knowing each other during their ANU days, which reminds me yet again how John Howard never carried a grudge and was always personally charming and charismatic and never did anything to repress the careers of anyone as they strove to serve Australia.</div><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Former prime minister John Howard, who praised Borrowman, said the diplomat had been "very intelligent and highly professional. He had an excellent grasp of all foreign affairs issues’’. </span><br /><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>Well yes, and let it not be said that in any sense Akerman is motivated by a personal and petty hostility to Chairman Rudd.</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">In the Borrowman case, as with the G8 grandstanding, Rudd appeared to be acting in a petty and personal manner, not as the professional he likes to portray himself as. </span><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Whereas under the previous government, Australia let its actions speak for themselves when it successfully took decisive global initiatives, under the Rudd government it’s all talk and irresponsible and damaging action. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">That's right, as case file number one thousand and forty two draws to a close, it becomes clear that Australia is just one step short of being a bum in the gutter with an empty sherry flagon on the international stage, while domestically it is already in the casket and awaiting cremation and a pauper's funeral.</span></span></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">As for monomania? Well let's leave that to the likes of Hal G. P. Colebatch of Nedlands WA, who sees the decline and fall of the English Empire in the Beatles and color television. </span></span></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Our Piers is made of sterner stuff than that. He sees the decline and fall of Australia at the hands of a Mandarin speaking doofus, and he sees it over and over again, column after column, week after week.</span></span></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">It almost makes you wish that the basket case known as Australia would in fact disappear, that the failed Mandarin speaking Rudd was sent to Xi'an province as penance, and that John Howard could be brought back from the political grave, a Lazarus risen yet again, with mothballs applied to ease the smell, if that's the only way Akerman's monomania might be cured ...<br /></span><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="">Now check your own mental health against Wikipedia's handy list of monomaniac ailments. If you answer Chairman Rudd to any of these questions, consult your Doctor.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br />Capgras's Syndrome: Delusion that an impostor has been substituted for a significant person in the patient's life.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Easy. Chairman Rudd is an impostor.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span>de Clerambault's syndrome (erotomania): Delusion that a man or woman is in love with the patient. This can occur without reinforcement or even acquaintanceship with the love object.</span></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="">Easy. Chairman Rudd is in love with my vote, but I spurn him.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br />Fregoli's illusion: Delusion that a tormenting individual is changing his appearance to resemble different persons in the patient's life.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="">Why yes, I've noticed that Chairman Rudd changes his body shape at will in order to persecute me in many different ways.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br />Genital retraction syndrome: Delusion that the penis is being retracted into the body.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="">Tricky for me, but I can see how it might work. Can women worry about how Chairman Rudd causes small breasts? Or breasts that are too big?</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br />Wendigo (Wihtigo): Fear that one is being tormented by a demon who devours people. Alternatively the patient can take on the characteristics of the windigo. (Seen only in isolated members of the Algonquin Indian nations of Canada and the USA.)</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Well that's a lay down misere. The demon Rudd doesn't just devour people, he devours Australia and shortly will devour the world.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span>Demonomania Delusion that one is possessed by demons.<br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>Yes, I lie awake at night dreaming of being possessed by Chairman Rudd, knowing he only sleeps three hours and is always on the prowl. Not even Darren McGavin in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Nightstalker </span>can save me. I feel a 360 degree neck turn Linda Blair style coming on right now.</div><div><br /></div><div>Eek, it's clear. Kevin Rudd truly is a demon, and we all suffer under him. We need a ghost whisperer or a medium, a Patricia Arquette or a Jennifer Love Hewitt to guide the demon into the next world, and we need them right now ...</div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-620033997567463526.post-49812413211546871882009-07-18T09:29:00.010+10:002009-07-18T10:48:07.469+10:00Peter Garrett, Annabel Crabb, Shaun Carney, and a break from loon pond except for a passing reference to Tim Blair<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOoKNl3e13GPDcf76xCx_VUby7VeT779oIotSb-Gv83DVtJqn8NCe6tDfWLvgzPECAkqnOAN2IvlqoMXmivCUYkxESvqODklgtBX4pfkc53aHzNPatCJ20CXKqkIB73Txl5vlIH8DYeio/s1600-h/fame_is_the_spur_1.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 263px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOoKNl3e13GPDcf76xCx_VUby7VeT779oIotSb-Gv83DVtJqn8NCe6tDfWLvgzPECAkqnOAN2IvlqoMXmivCUYkxESvqODklgtBX4pfkc53aHzNPatCJ20CXKqkIB73Txl5vlIH8DYeio/s400/fame_is_the_spur_1.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5359586635053107554" /></a><br />Way back in 1940 Howard Spring wrote a bestselling novel about the rise to power of a Labor politician. The title<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> Fame is the Spur </span>took its name from a poem by Milton,<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> Lycidas</span>:<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise<br />(That last infirmity of noble mind)<br />To scorn delights, and live laborious days.<br /></span><br />In the way of things, it was then made into a film by the socialist inclined Boulting Brothers, with Michael Redgrave in the lead role.<br /><br />The key visual metaphor in the film is the way a sword retrieved from the Peterloo massacre rusts into its scabbard, and when an aged Redgrave tries to get it down and pull it out, the effort is too much for him. He huffs and he puffs and he totters, but the sword of youthful ideals and hope stays stuck, betrayed by old age, compromise and the lust for power and fame.<div><br /></div><div>Inevitably - it being an English saga - Redgrave moves from being an illegitimate child from the Manchester slum of Ancoats to Lord Radsahw, a bumbling old fool in the House of Lords dedicated to preserving what's left of his image.<br /><br />The metaphor of the sword was so strong that it's stuck in my mind ever since the day I saw it long ago in a now demolished flea pit. It seemed to evoke the image of every failed politician who in the end looks out for themselves rather than their customers - and whenever Peter Garrett's name is mentioned, it sears back into the mind.<br /><br />Peter Garrett is much in mind these days because of his licensing of a fourth uranium mine. Annabel Crabb does a very nice ambivalent piece which cleverly manages to have it both ways on Garrett. <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/the-brutal-thriving-industry-that-is-the-modern-garrett-hunt-20090717-do7z.html?page=-1"></a></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/the-brutal-thriving-industry-that-is-the-modern-garrett-hunt-20090717-do7z.html?page=-1">The brutal, thriving industry that is the modern Garrett hunt<span style="font-style:italic;"></span></a> manages to skewer Garrett, his hunters, and then find a kind of redemption for the beast in his Labor days, before going on to skewer him and Labor over their current policies in relation to nuclear energy. A couple of sentences reminded me yet again of Milton's insight:<div><br /></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">How many of us would trade that for the grub and muck of actual change, the hard and often dispiriting slog of working within the system?<br /><br />Politics is awful, a lot of the time.<br /><br />It's full of debilitating compromise and settlements that are a pale shadow of what you'd really like to do.</span><div><br /></div><div>Oh those laborious days. </div><div><br /></div><div>And Crabb reminds Garrett and Chairman Rudd that they now have to thread their way through an issue still trembling in the background:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">If climate change is indeed the greatest challenge of our time, is it really appropriate to be ignoring one feasible and low-carbon - albeit contentious - solution? Is the Government serious enough about all of this to risk its own political hide?<br /><br />Not at the moment, it seems, although there are ministers who will readily concede in private that nuclear should be part of the debate.</span><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>Yet over in the corner there are old nuclear warriors like Helen Caldicott proposing that <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/uranium-export-is-the-first-step-to-war-20090717-do5z.html?page=-1">Uranium export is the first step to war</a></span><a href="http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/uranium-export-is-the-first-step-to-war-20090717-do5z.html?page=-1">,</a> as if the days of<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> Dr. Strangelove </span>had<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> </span>never left her (while she also confesses bizarrely to forming a working relationship with that deviant dinosaur Robert McNamara):</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Export of uranium ore is therefore the epitome of immorality both from a public health perspective and because it could be responsible down the line for triggering a nuclear holocaust.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>Once Garrett would have been on the barricades, shouting or singing into a microphone, and now he's in a daily pickle. </div><div><br /></div><div>Crabb captures the flavor of the pickle in an evocative way - she's way out in front as a political writer these days, and it's a relief to turn to her after wading through the tripe that constitutes <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Punch </span>and if you want to learn a little more about her - why am I unsurprised that she grew up in South Australia? - she was recently interviewed on ABC FM about her musical tastes (<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.abc.net.au/classic/throsby/">here</a></span>, but be warned this link will expire fairly quickly).</div><div><br /></div><div>Crabb summarises the situation of Garrett neatly:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">On one construction, it's a personal hypocrisy.<br /><br />On another, it's the most earnest surrender of ego to the democratic process that this Government has seen.<br /><br />Has it been worth it?<br /><br />Only Garrett can know the answer to that question.</span><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>Garrett's predicament also provokes a sympathetic analysis from Shaun Carney in his column <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/on-the-borderline-20090717-do62.html?page=-1">On the borderline</a></span>, with his conclusion being that Rudd should shift Garrett from the environment ministry to another portfolio:</div><div><br /></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The public and media reaction this week should provide food for thought for Kevin Rudd. Garrett's responsibility was to act on advice about the environmental impact of the Four Mile mine, not to make a decision on the merits of uranium mining. That had already been taken by the Rann Government, which wants more mines.<br /><br />And yet, if you cared to ask just about anybody, they'd tell you that Garrett was singularly responsible for a new uranium mine and that he's now pro-uranium. That's the quick, if inaccurate, take on the Four Mile decision.</span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>Crabb and Carney remind me that it's sometimes worth taking a break from loon pond, and especially from the ranting to be found in the Murdoch press.</div><div><br /></div><div>But the heat isn't going to leave Garrett. It's not just the impending debate with nuclear warriors like Caldicott, up against the Ziggy Switkowskis of the world, and his report suggesting that 25 nuclear power stations could take care of one third of Australia's energy needs by 2050, provoking a howl of NIMBYism Labor was quick to exploit. </div><div><br /></div><div>Next up for Garrett is the decision regarding the implementation of the Productivity Commission's recommendation to allow parallel imports of books. Will he reject the advice and help out local writers in maintaining a cozy price fixing arrangement (not so bad as adding a cent or two to each cardboard box in the land but in the same spirit) or will he jump into the realm of the free traders?</div><div><br /></div><div>A realm in which incidentally I discover I live with the likes of Tim Blair, as he shows with <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/turn-page-on-archaic-book-laws/story-e6frezz0-1225751510914">Turn page on archaic book laws:</a></span></div><div><br /></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> That's another curious thing about these writerly types. If you have a postcode tattoo and chant "we grew here, you flew here", you're an ignorant redneck. If you demand the protection of Australian publishers and seek to keep foreign books off Australian bookshelves, you're some kind of gifted intellectual.<br /><br />Beats me. Meanwhile, here's my plan on how Australian writers can remain viable: Write something interesting that people will actually want to read.</span><br /><br /><div>Phew. At least I can distance myself from his rampaging bother boy book hating rednecked steel toe capped style - I guess that's what happens to a petrol head who resents writers who can write better than him, complete with cheap jokes about wearing novels as socks or using them as toasters. Why next he'll be joking about using newspapers in outhouses the way we used to in the old days. </div><div><br /></div><div>But it does show the permanent dilemma that Garrett faces, and I wonder each day why he does it. He doesn't need the money, and while he might think he's making a difference, few of his old comrades think the difference is worth a pinch of anything.</div><div><br /></div><div>What makes Peter Garrett run? Well who knows, even if it's a matter of intense personal curiosity on my part, but in his retirement, I'd hate to sit down and watch <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Fame is the Spur</span> with him.</div><div><br /></div><div>Like reading Annabel Crabb's sympathetic but incisive piece, it might be just too close to the bone to be a comfortable experience ...</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">(Below: Peter Garrett in his youth. Are we all doomed to become de facto Michael Redgraves in a sic transit gloria kind of way? Short memories and every show a sell out? Better to have ideals and lost them than never to have had any ideals at all. If you're not a liberal when you're 25 you have no heart. If you're not a liberal by the time you're 35 you're a fucked in the head Christian fundamentalist? (Sorry Winston think I got that one wrong).</span></div><div><br /></div></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUZUEj0YyxN4EPTbsc-FhA2SWszN5IvxqHflSSb4BNJIZWJTN9Ina5LH-jRqg4iVas9wxfJyLFl5DR5BWUqrdrJHlXcM928HXRWSZUsekqNZa5lcGRclJZqIJIMVJcpPkoPvoj0bam2SE/s1600-h/midnight-oil-australia.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 303px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUZUEj0YyxN4EPTbsc-FhA2SWszN5IvxqHflSSb4BNJIZWJTN9Ina5LH-jRqg4iVas9wxfJyLFl5DR5BWUqrdrJHlXcM928HXRWSZUsekqNZa5lcGRclJZqIJIMVJcpPkoPvoj0bam2SE/s400/midnight-oil-australia.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5359591551025961826" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHTeaQxE56T6EBXl8Y1U-S2zCBSKnJAJMR0O9TFx7HX57GMKq3HvkWyozXKSShLwHFThP75o7_4-mV2QpySUBIGyOSBh8WFDzp-tjpBAPoNlJTbtLQjBy6W923kq7OuX9soJBzM_DK73w/s1600-h/Peter-Garrett.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 300px; height: 282px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHTeaQxE56T6EBXl8Y1U-S2zCBSKnJAJMR0O9TFx7HX57GMKq3HvkWyozXKSShLwHFThP75o7_4-mV2QpySUBIGyOSBh8WFDzp-tjpBAPoNlJTbtLQjBy6W923kq7OuX9soJBzM_DK73w/s400/Peter-Garrett.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5359591553831267074" /><br /></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-620033997567463526.post-11286035039443707582009-07-18T07:32:00.005+10:002009-07-18T08:25:37.730+10:00Lenore Taylor, old media, politicians and twits atwittering<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTkMNk5gvy2RtNdfmyssocD3n_XVhRthyb45T9lwpm74rLZgyjNP-Ub9y3E9ZHyghqTgP1fW6dzjwwZTjxe6F9yXdWjrFiMTuS0Ne6vNg3f6yBiAkBXfsMEZjvPrrHsm9rsFzVcjU8mDQ/s1600-h/twitter.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 286px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTkMNk5gvy2RtNdfmyssocD3n_XVhRthyb45T9lwpm74rLZgyjNP-Ub9y3E9ZHyghqTgP1fW6dzjwwZTjxe6F9yXdWjrFiMTuS0Ne6vNg3f6yBiAkBXfsMEZjvPrrHsm9rsFzVcjU8mDQ/s400/twitter.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5359555340185929842" /></a><br />Voters need something more than newspapers.<div><br /></div><div>Why do I think this? Well I've just read Lenore Taylor's penetrating and insightful column <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25797511-7583,00.html">Voters need something more than blogs.</a></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>Which on reading turns out not to be about blogs but all about Twitter, with a couple of totally minor references to blogging. </div><div><br /></div><div>And if a header can't tell you the contents of a column, there's a pretty big roadblock to understanding anything.</div><div><br /></div><div>Then there's the admission by Taylor that she's a nube twit:</div><div><br /></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Twitter is clearly a medium with a potential still being fully explored.<br /><br />I am, I must confess, a notorious late adopter of new technology. Not in a closed-minded "I want nothing to do with that new-fangled stuff" kind of way. It's just that I'm busy and have precious little time to check out new things unless there's a need.</span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>As with all late breaking novitiates, there follows an explanation of twittering, and a prompt recoil at the new form of communication. As if reading the Daily Terror was somehow a virtuous exercise in philosophy by comparison:</div><div><br /></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> At first blush a micro-blogging site that asks you to report what you are doing in 140 characters or less, 24 hours a day, seems a perfect forum for narcissists with attention deficit disorder. Why would I be interested in reading about what someone is doing every moment of every day when I'm not even always all that interested in the edited highlights they offer once a month over a cup of coffee?<br /><br />And the popularity of some twitts is truly beyond my capacity to explain. For example, Ashton Kutcher, a photogenic young American actor married to actress Demi Moore, appears to have more than 2.5 million followers for tweets about what party he is about to go to and pictures of his latest pair of "favourite shoes" (an ostentatious pair of black, brown and white brogues).</span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Which suggests to me that Taylor needs to get out more - if she wants arcane trivia beyond the capacity of any human to explain, I suggest a course in reading Sydney </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="">Confidential </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">in the Daily Terror for a week. Then she'll understand twits twittering so much better. Especially the stuff about favorite shoes and party going. (Or she could be trapped in a train with </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="">Mx </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">- the first form of newsprint to aggregate twits into hard copy form, guaranteed to reduce commuters to brain dead zombies within five minutes).</span></span></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">But as has become a recent theme in the Murdoch press lately, the real concern is that devious politicians might now be able to bypass newspapers and their filtering and communicate directly with their customers. Twits twittering to twits without any filtering from twits. Now this might sound alarmingly like democracy - after all 140 characters is more than enough to sum up the Australian psyche on any issue (the Murdoch press usually reduce their polls to yes no and maybe) - but to Taylor it feels like a fiendish exercise in avoiding tricky media gotcha questioning:</span></span></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> But the appeal of the site to politicians is obvious. John Howard was quite open about his strategy to go over the heads of the press gallery -- whose members ask altogether too many questions -- to communicate directly with voters via talkback radio and soft television shows.</span><br /><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Rudd has enthusiastically followed suit, taking the strategy even further with appearances on even softer TV shows such as Rove.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Um, old media talking about old media and ways to avoid hard questions, but how do we get rid of a twit like Rove? Thank the lord, new media:</span><br /><br />But new media, such as Twitter and blogging, renders that strategy, like, so last decade. Twitter removes all the middle men and women. It offers the possibility of direct communication with potentially millions of voters. That communication can be key political messages -- in just 140 characters there's no need for any inconvenient background information or evidence -- or personal, humanising titbits of daily life information.<br /><br />Twitter also potentially opens doors to younger voters who don't listen the radio or read newspapers.<br /><br /></span>Ah yes, the tricky younger votes who don't read newspapers. Or care about middle persons. Curse the twits.</div><div><br /></div><div>Time then for Taylor to dissect tweets by Chairman Rudd and Malcolm in the middle, and find them lacking in insight. One was about the football, another about the cricket, the cat and the dog, while Turnbull also delivered dog advice and a note about an upcoming forum. Fair average twittering from whoever handles their tweets.</div><div><br /></div><div>"Have yet to master koan form for profound insight into meaning of life" seems to be Taylor's conclusion, but by this time I'm thinking Taylor would have benefited from the brevity of tweeting in her own column. New form of hamstrung dumb communication, don't know what to say, young people, help.</div><div><br /></div><div>So all poor bypassed Taylor can do is poke and prod at the twits twittering, like she's inspecting a furball that's suddenly turned up in the middle of old media to rain on its parade (gee, what a twit, with a mixed metaphor like that):</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Twitter is clearly a medium with a potential still being fully explored, even by those who have been using it for years. And it is of course not without its dangers. Information sent has not been verified, and in fact much of the information sent from Iran turned out to be wrong. And it can be easily manipulated.<br /><br />But from my admittedly inexpert standpoint, the biggest danger for politicians is likely to be that their followers will get bored by the barrage of inanities contained in their tweets. Surely after a while people will want a bit more than the blog of their dog or the mood of their cat?</span><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Well from my admittedly inexpert standpoint, I'm wondering whether the biggest danger for newspapers is that it's a medium that has been fully explored and found wanting, even by those who've been using them for years. Information often turns out to be wrong, and is easily manipulated, and it's likely readers of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Punch </span>or any Murdoch blog will get bored by the barrage of inaccurate inanities contained therein. Surely after awhile people will want more than another dose of David Penberthy? Who after all makes the mood of a dog or a cat somehow strangely compelling.</div><div><br /></div><div>I also doubt if the new Murdochian desire to engage with the intertubes will actually reach the young.</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">... a recent report commissioned by Morgan Stanley from a 15-year-old work experience student also raised questions about Twitter's usefulness in connecting with youth.<br /><br />"Teenagers do not use Twitter. Most have signed up to the service, but then just leave it as they realise that they are not going to update it ... In addition, they realise no one is viewing their profile, so their tweets are pointless," he wrote.</span><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>Wow, old media right on target as usual. Why it was only a year ago in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Time</span> magazine that Bill Tancer from Hitwise was telling us that the key demographic was 18 to 24 year olds, and now it has skewed to males in the 35 to 44 year old age group (you can find data on a PEW study <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.socialmediatoday.com/SMC/78505">here</a></span> and link to other data <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.nickburcher.com/2008/08/twitter-demographics-middle-aged-men.html">here)</a></span>.</div><div><br /></div><div>But wait, it's not enough that mature age men are now twittering like twits, instead of displaying a steely laconic quality we expect of men while the women tweet like twitterers, but there are other enemies facing old media.</div><div><br /></div><div>It seems young people prefer Facebook, but Taylor notes this won't faze politicians, as most of them have been amassing Facebook friends for ages. Taylor doesn't go on to tell us whether she too has been amassing Facebook friends for yonks - the experience of encountering the twits in twitterdom seems to have exhausted her - but by providing her own admittedly inexpert point of view, I've formed the alarming view that old media is now flailing around, desperate to find a new and coherent role and sense of self in the age of twits.</div><div><br /></div><div>If only Taylor had bothered to seek out some of the data, she might have been reassured. There's nothing like old news to produce a reliable sense of tradition and inertia, and nothing like reading about a nube grappling with the fiendish new world of the technologically astute to produce a realization that even if I'm a twit, there are plenty of other twits out there too. Even if they turn out to be men heading towards middle age. </div><div><br /></div><div>And the data might also have saved her sudden panic about journalism and the need to write a column bemoaning new mediums that demand some kind of understanding in this crazy mixed up world.</div><div><br /></div><div>Because Pew data suggests that twits love reading newspapers ...</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">(Below: Pew data on news consumption, and Quantcast data on the American demographic breakdown of twits six months ago).</span></div><div><br /></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4yu0Zs3iSCm5w6_O8zwNOanudGtuk2DDnqia8u9dll9RNn0QrFRoOtzqu05G00Abn5NVYPq858NoramFgJnqJMM-BYJ1KGoQ7GmaGsWNWDNXnenfflzpXlLeTC521bGaPj7kNyadmYhY/s1600-h/pew+data.gif"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 251px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4yu0Zs3iSCm5w6_O8zwNOanudGtuk2DDnqia8u9dll9RNn0QrFRoOtzqu05G00Abn5NVYPq858NoramFgJnqJMM-BYJ1KGoQ7GmaGsWNWDNXnenfflzpXlLeTC521bGaPj7kNyadmYhY/s400/pew+data.gif" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5359554309768456034" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4-xPZTPKLcPvKjGbtk9yXVidIUHIlLteHQbFLYqb_CsZbK4xapvNfRXHI101n3T7uqwO4kmWiwGSBwkAMsZJZIBFRFh5lMHDStGADfE0XSBMmedBHPoOmNyMMh8iHdwAFq4NiW-uXw0I/s1600-h/quantcast+data.gif"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 274px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4-xPZTPKLcPvKjGbtk9yXVidIUHIlLteHQbFLYqb_CsZbK4xapvNfRXHI101n3T7uqwO4kmWiwGSBwkAMsZJZIBFRFh5lMHDStGADfE0XSBMmedBHPoOmNyMMh8iHdwAFq4NiW-uXw0I/s400/quantcast+data.gif" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5359554306987246562" /></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-620033997567463526.post-80943914660149777202009-07-17T16:33:00.004+10:002009-07-17T17:33:59.465+10:00Leo Shanahan and celebrating a moon landing that never happened<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNf9W89CCw4PFqhWHMkHWeRnuEQYHeF0lxU5a0NPmj9c43Uv65iwSWGCaC17Uo22PVrUnqazsxriplfCIo9kwO2b4wJ38eYeymBf4jgFRYqgR_mEwp6FNG8KRomtYKAsUf73nm931d2Lk/s1600-h/capricorn.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 197px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNf9W89CCw4PFqhWHMkHWeRnuEQYHeF0lxU5a0NPmj9c43Uv65iwSWGCaC17Uo22PVrUnqazsxriplfCIo9kwO2b4wJ38eYeymBf4jgFRYqgR_mEwp6FNG8KRomtYKAsUf73nm931d2Lk/s400/capricorn.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5359328947379980402" /></a><br /><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">(Above: Capricorn One).</span></div><div><br /></div><div>No neo Michael neo Costa today in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Australia</span>n, and so loon pond feels peculiarly empty and forlorn. Can't understand how I made it through the day without some ritual bashing of unions and the federal Labor party and Chairman Rudd.</div><div><br /></div>What to do? Well there's always <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Punch</span>, which lately seems to have taken to afternoon updates. Reading it is somehow like watching a slow motion crashing and clashing of loons, worthy of the absent Costa.<div><br /></div><div>Take Leo Shanahan's unexceptional <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/did-you-need-that-moment-in-history-i-taped-the-cricket/">Did you need that moment in history? I taped the cricket</a></span>.</div><div><br /></div><div>Springboarding off the NASA release of newly compiled footage of the Apollo 11 Mission - complete with YouTube video and links to NASA - he asks whether his dear readers had ever, in NASA fashion, taped over videos or otherwise erased precious things.</div><div><br /></div><div>At the time of writing, he'd copped five comments, including these handsome offerings:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">DJG says:</span><br /></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The most uncelebrated event in American history. Why? It never happened, thats why.<br />TimsonM says:<br />They haven’t been there, that is why they “lost” the originals.<br />Winsor Dobbin says:<br />The whole moon landing thing is a charade that simply became too big a lie for the Americans to turn back on their invention. Remember this was the time of the Cold War when the Americans would do anything to get one over on the Russians, If it was really that easy to have man walk on the moon 40 years ago, wouldn’t there have been thousands of subsequent expeditions, landings, even attempts to stay up there?</span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Now by my feeble maths that makes sixty per cent of his commenting readership barking mad loons. Count me in, and he's up to sixty six per cent.</span></span></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">But it did remind me of </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="">Capricorn One</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">, an old Sir Lew Grade romp which thanks to the vicissitudes of his company seems to have fallen into the public domain and anyhow for this moment is available on Google video in its full bloatware two hour plus version (you can see it </span><a href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-364883774856478814">here</a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">).</span></span></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Directed by Peter Hyams, the thinking person's Michael Bay, it features a classy cast, including Elliott Gould, that successful bed post impersonator James Brolin, hoarse voiced Brenda Vaccaro, Sam Waterston before he settled into a career doing vacuous noddies on television, O. J. Simpson before he got away with it, and Hal Halbrook doing yet another sinister turn as the ever so smooth baddie. </span></span></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">It even features special appearances by wild eyed Karen Black and the bald headed lolly pop sucking Telly Savalas long before neo con Michael Costa stole his thunder by doing imitations. Jerry Goldsmith contributes a thumping score, and it's a high concept version of a really dumb conspiracy theory before you could find a decepticon in the house.</span></span></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">It's all about how the Americans never made it to Mars, but instead faked it by building a set in the studio and beaming the signals out to an unsuspecting, duped world. It's only an anomaly - much like those anomalies in the moon TV footage - that gets the conspiracy theorists going and solves the fake landing, to the peril of the astronauts involved.</span></span></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">I guess it says something about the show that you can see it free on the intertubes - it's correct format but not up to an dvd rip avi - but equally what does it say about </span>The Punch'<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">s readership?<br /></span></span><br />I guess when you pitch your readership expectations at the lower end of the market, the mugwumps will come out of the swamp.</div><div><br /></div><div>Which is why Tory Maguire, competitor for the title of bubble headed booby on the site, is distinctly unreadable, when she starts meandering on about how journalists and major media outlets are wonderful because they filter information and images (<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/citizen-journalism-you-might-not-like-what-you-see/">Citizen journalism: you might not like what you see</a></span>).</div><div><br /></div><div>Actually Tory, I'm still shocked at <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Punch, </span>or at least its readership,<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> </span>revealing to me that the moon landing was a hoax. Next your unfiltered site will be shocking me about the tooth fairy and Santa Claus. </div><div><br /></div><div>But it takes a particular kind of gall in classic Murdoch style to deliver this kind of homily when talking about a distressing image currently doing the rounds in relation to the Jakarta bombing:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> It’s the kind of thing picture editors in newsrooms see all day every day. They look carefully at these images, analysing the amount of blood and body parts visible. They use their own personal judgment about their news value compared to the level of distress they will cause readers.<br /><br />They go home at night with them running on high rotation in their minds, and they do it so you won’t have too much trouble getting to sleep.<br /><br />But now that filter has been effectively removed.</span><br /><br />I guess Tory's too young to have seen footage of the holocaust and its victims. Or the unvarnished footage of people caught up in war. It's been available a long time. So when she writes this kind of nonsense I wonder whether it was the moon or Mars conspiracy she's trying to hide. But back to the Jakarta snap she righteously won't show but will blather about:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The person who took the photo doing the rounds on Twitter had gained nothing from the picture - other than perhaps the intangible feeling every human being gets when they know something someone else doesn’t, or have something no-one else has.<br /><br />It’s that feeling that is driving the relatively new phenomenon known as citizen journalism. Unfiltered by newsrooms full of trained journalists, we’re getting coverage of big events that is more timely than ever, more diverse than ever, and evidently, more raw than anything we’ve ever seen before.</span><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>The day I need Tory Maguire's trained filtering expertise is the day I'll roll over and die. </div><div><br /></div><div>And the sanctimonious notion that the intertubes is a festering mess only trained journalists should be able to handle? Come on down Iran, China, Stephen Conroy and Uncle Rupert. Especially by hinting that they're in the know about things which should be banned and which they won't show but which you can find easily enough if you look hard enough?</div><div><br /></div><div>The relatively new phenomenon known as citizen journalism? Citizens and amateurs have been doing it since they invented the printing press. The medium might have changed, but the impulse has a long history.</div><div><br /></div><div>More raw than anything we've ever seen before? Let's not get into a debate about what's rawest of the raw, but maybe Tory should get out and about a bit more. I'd expect a professional filter to understand a little more about the history things before she gets into the business of filtering ...</div><div><br /></div><div>And I'd expect a bit more class than using the dire after effects of a terrorist attack to slag off social media while promoting a <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Punch</span> special on social media this coming Monday. Suddenly I do believe in filtering ...</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-620033997567463526.post-76549023423283800012009-07-17T14:41:00.004+10:002009-07-17T15:29:19.236+10:00Luck McIlveen, Patrck Smith, and sporting loons at ten paces<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuPlKl64KR9pGM7qMW4EAqKFVr176nfO79CRsScGzBgZdNQWF3UmsldHhuSwYr9HZcoxIEx0jcY6ENrdX-FJbAsQEirnXflYJWxZwL-SJdlgAthlHH7JNbcU-L8wdxFM_vASTLmlgnf20/s1600-h/gladiatorsandmonstersheep.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 307px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuPlKl64KR9pGM7qMW4EAqKFVr176nfO79CRsScGzBgZdNQWF3UmsldHhuSwYr9HZcoxIEx0jcY6ENrdX-FJbAsQEirnXflYJWxZwL-SJdlgAthlHH7JNbcU-L8wdxFM_vASTLmlgnf20/s400/gladiatorsandmonstersheep.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5359293456413868514" /></a><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">(Above: gladiators going at it with monster sheep).</span><br /><div><br /></div><div>We rarely do sport on this site. The turkeys take up way too much space already. But the chance to demand a smack down between two Murdoch hacks is irresistible.<div><br /></div><div>Righteous smug up himself Patrick Smith in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Australian</span> on the punch up at the end of the rugby league state of origin and how <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25794165-5013459,00.html">Origin biff leaves rest of us cold</a></span>:</div><div><br /></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">No action will be taken against White, no matter that his blow forced Price to be driven off the ground, senseless, with his neck in a brace. As Ray Warren explained to Melbourne radio audiences yesterday, that's quite the done thing in rugby league.<br /><br />That may well be the case, too, because talkback callers with a rugby league background thought the description of the incident by Queensland coach Mal Meninga was insightful.<br /><br />That Origin was a confrontation driven by fierce hate and one-on-one punch-ups were well and truly within the code of conduct as understood and adhered to by the players. And officials.<br /><br />But to the rest of Australia this was more than a bit of Origin biffo. It was an act that spoke with great clarity about the future of rugby league outside Queensland, the ACT and NSW. It ain't happening.<br /></span><br />Blood crazed gladiator loving Luke McIlveen - the man who loves to run bicyclists off the road -in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Punch</span>, home to Australia's thickest conversations, on <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/savage-dead-rubber-that-breathed-life-back-into-league/">Savage dead rubber that breathed life back into league.</a></span><br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">There are certain things you’re supposed to say when people ask what makes you proud of your home state. Nice things like the shimmering Harbour, the Opera House, the SCG or the Olympics.<br /></span><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">I would trade them all for the bloodied grin that Brett White gave Justin Hodges in the moments after knocking out Steve Price on Wednesday night. As the flashy Hodges ranted about payback, positioning himself behind bigger teammates, White simply poked out his bloodied tongue and smiled, mocking Hodges for the pea-hearted, adolescent sook that he is.<br /><br />At that moment, NSW hearts swelled with pride. Until then, we had almost forgotten the things that make the Premier state better than Queensland. Like having a first-world economy and houses made from bricks. </span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br />When Brett White landed that magnificent right cross, he struck a blow for every NSW fan who’s been bailed up in a pub by a pissed, red-headed Queenslander dribbling on about their superior passion and commitment to Origin.<br /></span><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Conclusion:</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>Smith and the deluded AFL are so far up themselves that they can even manage to get righteous about letting Barry Hall run around for years in best thuggee style, and then finally get even more righteous by saying that enough was enough. Not to mention that their particular brand of footy show features "Sam" Newman, possibly the most offensive turkey on television. This at the same time as Smith babbles on about the beating of a man in a fast food outlet in Melbourne? Which has what to do with anything, except the danger of ordering fast food n a state dedicated to AFL? Never mind, for Smith the match was "just another slash of the knife in what has become rugby league's year of unprecedented self-harm".</div><div><br /></div><div>While McIlveen displays a taste for blood that is faintly disturbing even in a journalist who might want to worship the Emperor Caligula as a sports lover. "His work was done the moment the Medicab carrying his opposition front rower left the field." Wow, and a glassing means I trooly rooly loves ya.</div><div><br /></div><div>Okay, here's the deal. Into the new super boxing HD program on One with the pair of them, with chairs and tables allowed as props, as you'd expect in a smack down, with the last still standing to be hailed as being in the right.</div><div><br /></div><div>Result? At least one less crazed Murdoch sports journalist chewing up precious space on the already full to overflowing intertubes. And if it's Luke McIlveen, cyclists can feel safe that this road vermin hating journalist has been taken out by a good Barry Hall type thump to the jaw.</div><div><br /></div><div>I won't be watching of course - I've taken to watching pimply kids with braces win five hundred thousand euros in poker games - but the thought that footballers might destroy themselves can only be enhanced by the notion that football journalists can follow in their footsteps.</div><div><br /></div><div>And that's the last we'll mention of football, at least until the next glassing or motel incident precipitates some community concern about the blockheaded nature of footballers and brings out the feminist in me. </div><div><br /></div><div>And why is football so problematic? Just read the sporting journalists and all will be clear ...</div><div><br /></div><div>Sigh, now we have to renovate and extend loon pond once again. But if we allow sports writers in, we might actually have to designate the entire Pacific Ocean as a haven for loons ...</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">(Below: meantime, something for the more genteel gentleman who might consider taking his fair companion out on to the road this weekend on their vélocipède knowing that the roads are safe as Luke "Road Vermin" McIlveen prepares for his big bout with Patrick "the Saint" Smith).</span></div><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOZTEvIdMaXRm-aLpQDd3mrVcaAN-3Hm612S9BgJCA_q9HsTq54cwCaCwwEi_TbdIfm2voMmHQTHxAKv9Za7anDJVLMTOPc6cZwunn6QSFenozjSIol9zaDdFi7Y_XEJ2VV9YSrqVzT98/s1600-h/gladiator-cycles.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 274px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOZTEvIdMaXRm-aLpQDd3mrVcaAN-3Hm612S9BgJCA_q9HsTq54cwCaCwwEi_TbdIfm2voMmHQTHxAKv9Za7anDJVLMTOPc6cZwunn6QSFenozjSIol9zaDdFi7Y_XEJ2VV9YSrqVzT98/s400/gladiator-cycles.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5359293459581354882" /></a><br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-620033997567463526.post-27098238723004473342009-07-17T10:03:00.006+10:002009-07-17T12:10:35.613+10:00Daniela Elser, hairdressers, and the Punch still striving to be the dumbest conversation in Australia<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOkPPqb4JMDPXaXmJoaqVu2Me4tYdO8kySVbiRd6Mp-CGjmgEl4aAcyojDLh_abQ8nhagHT0VqkTmgZWNytGf5ch4vaHMvrRItaRWi8CVVsrVhD2ZKswD2WC7GKj3hLrcAZWrYQB7Wn1Q/s1600-h/Delacroix.grave.gif"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 318px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOkPPqb4JMDPXaXmJoaqVu2Me4tYdO8kySVbiRd6Mp-CGjmgEl4aAcyojDLh_abQ8nhagHT0VqkTmgZWNytGf5ch4vaHMvrRItaRWi8CVVsrVhD2ZKswD2WC7GKj3hLrcAZWrYQB7Wn1Q/s400/Delacroix.grave.gif" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5359243671248420866" /></a><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">(Above: Delacroix doing Hamlet, ah fuck it, this culture stuff is thirsty work, feel like a beer?)</span><br /><div><br /></div><div>It used to be that Tory Maguire was the aspirational bubble headed bimbo at <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Punch</span>, Australia's dumbest conversation, but recently a new contender has risen in the ranks.<div><br /></div><div>Following her insightful <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Wanted: youngster to write about drugs and blow jobs,</span> Daniela Elser now offers up <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/drop-out-get-drunk-become-a-hairdresser/">Tune in, drop out, get drunk, become a hairdresser.</a></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>Dearie me, are the young so unhappy and despairing and cynical. Or worse still, thinking that they're still writing for <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Honi Soit,</span> the student newspaper of Sydney University?</div><div><br /></div><div>It seems poor Daniela spent five years at university studying arts and was scarified by the experience. But what attempts to be an insight into university turns out to be a strangely revealing and self-pitying exercise in fear and loathing of the y'artz. Which makes it all the stranger that Daniela seems to want to be a journalist, which is a kind of writing. Yeech.</div><div><br /></div><div>Somehow she seems to think her university experience is a good argument against Julia Gillard's desire to create another 300,000 places for students. But does Daniela's sense of a wasted life mean others - perhaps without her opportunities - will proceed to waste any chance given to them?</div><div><br /></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> If you’ve ever pondered the question, what does a 2.1 in History and a post-graduate qualification in Journalism get you, then you’re looking at it - a HECs debt, 18,000 poetically un-spell-checked words about something to do with social protest movements of the 21st century (a page-turner and a half) and several Ikea shelves full of half- read books.</span><br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Then there’s a lingering sense I could have somehow better spent four years of my life actually reading books or helping save the third world or just sleeping in. I’m starting to wish that I had thought more about what I really wanted out of the whole tertiary gambit before I plunged in head first and had to spend hours of my life reading Brecht.<br /><br />To those 300,000, (most of whom are currently learning how to use scissors and the important lesson why we should never eat Clag), and to the HSC students of 2009, I ask you this - think very carefully about your university choices, because frankly, why don’t you choose not to?<br /></span><br />Ah well, I suppose Brecht is a bit too lefty and arty for the average <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Punch </span>reader, what with his blather abut epic theatre and dialectical materialism. So let's stay rigidly on the surface of ideas instead:<br /><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">I propose this instead - have the awkward drunken sex, live in abject poverty, eat the bad food and pretend to understand Marshall McLuhan for a couple of years without the burden of having to knock out 5,000 words on Ford Maddox Ford’s ‘‘The Good Soldier”.<br /></span><br />Or maybe just sit around doing nothing at all and indulging in rank self-pity? Whatever. </div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Make the choice not to rack up an IOU to the federal government to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars and have only a vague understanding of Foucault to show for it. Choose to tread your own beer-stained path to nebulous maturity unfettered by Union fees or having to actually read Ulysses (or pretend you’ve even started the damn colossus).</span><br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Spend several years drinking with abandon and do away with the pretence of higher education and tertiary qualifications and then actually do something that will help the country- like take up hairdressing at Tafe.</span><br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Now a nation of hairdressers, surely, that’s something Julia would really like</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">.</span><br /><br />No actually I think Julia would love a nation of writers for <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Punch </span>proving conclusively that a hated for universities can be turned into a way of life. </div><div><br /></div><div>But you know it's actually one of the oldest, cheapest, weakest tricks in the book, to conflate the honesty of hairdressing with university ponces who've never done an honest day's work in their life, or the uselessness of culture and the y'arts up against the honest yeoman learning at TAFE. As if somehow they're mutually exclusive. Tell that to a carpenter building a set, or a grip doing the perfect track.</div><div><br /></div><div>Which is why it's a pity Daniela wasn't around to explain to our electrician as he re-wired our house why he pissed us off by boasting how he was going to the complete Beethoven cycle - using our money for his pleasure no doubt, while we sat at home listening to economical CDs. Oh yes these tradies know how to rub it in.</div><div><br /></div><div>So it goes.</div><div><br /></div><div>But surely Daniela learned something at uni, even during the depths of her despair:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">If you go to university you will learn how to negotiate your way through the mire of Centrelink bureaucracy.<br /><br />You will learn how to drink, nay, truly appreciate wine supped from a 4-litre box and you will become quite deft at fending off the feeble overtures of an engineering student.<br /><br />You will learn to treat with abject distrust, tinged with antipathy, anyone with a Jesus fish on t-shirt, anyone from the Womyn’s Collective and a certain philosophy lecturer with a penchant for post-lecture private tutoring.</span><br /><br /></div><div>Great. Life values you can take with you anywhere for ever. A detestation of the Evangelical Union and rank lesbian feminism mixed with a hostility to men who just want a fuck. Along with a hostility to engineering students (what about the rural scientists as well?) and an appreciation of Chateau cardboard. Why perchance Daniela might even later in life turn into a female Bob Ellis.</div><div><br /></div><div>I keed, I keed. You wouldn't wish that fate on any uni student. But it seems that as usual it's all the fault of baby boomers:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">We seem to be surrounded by people (usually baby boomers with fond, stoned memories of watching free Fellini films and furtive fumblings in the bar after a shandy too many) who speak nostalgically, glowingly, of the so-called ‘university experience’.<br /><br />But in my five or so years at various institutions studying a veritable swathe of subjects, I found nary a hint of this collegiate, intellectual ambience.</span><br /><br /></div><div>Well actually Daniela, though I guess it's a bit late for you, university is a place where you can be exposed to ideas and where you can expose yourself to ideas, even if that means all you can do later in life is be flip about D. H. Lawrence, Brecht and James Joyce.</div><div><br /></div><div>But you hit your mark. Your first comment comes from a self described rationalist who says:</div><div><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Solution: stop subsidising wastes of time (ie. arts and most of humanities).<br /><br />That is where all the communists and other gits are.<br /></span><br /></div><div>Ah yes, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Punch</span>. Home to fuck witted conversationalists where cretinous philistinism is a way of life. But wait, there's more. Cue Eric:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Rationalist has it right. Most of the “humanities” serve no other purpose than left-wing indoctrination. They’re a waste of money for both taxpayers and students.<br /><br />Our universities could be greatly improved if the worthless half or so were simply dropped.</span><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>And there's more all about the uselessness of the arts in the comments. </div><div><br /></div><div>Well somehow between reading rationalist or Eric or Daniela, I'd rather be reading Shakespeare than their dumb fuck ideas on life and the joys of doing a course in engineering so that they can build another motorway to clip the petrol heads like sheep as they go from job to pub and footy.</div><div><br /></div><div>But you know that's just a personal choice, personal taste thing, and to each their own, but it does remind me of Malcolm Bradbury's genuinely funny satire on provincial redbrick universities in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Eating People is Wrong,</span> which amongst other things has a great time with one student doing a thesis on fish imagery in Shakespeare.</div><div><br /></div><div>There's just one irony. I doubt whether I would have come across the book unless an English lecturer had thrust it into my rural paw one night, along with exposing me to Indian food after a lifetime of lamb cutlets and three vegies.</div><div><br /></div><div>So it goes. I guess that's just a hazy stoned memory of people being people.</div><div><br /></div><div>I'm also reminded that Malcolm Bradbury was much given to one liners:<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">If God had been a liberal we wouldn’t have had the Ten Commandments; we’d have the Ten Suggestions.</span><br /><br />So can I make a suggestion to Daniela in her bid to become a writer for T<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">he Punch</span>. Enough with the self-pity and the cheap anti-intellectual clap trap. If you love a career in hair-dressing, go do a course in hair-dressing. That doesn't mean you can only read <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">New Idea.</span> Unless of course <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">New Idea</span> is your idea of an intellectual rag full of riches and insight - and given you write for <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Punch</span> I'm not trying to second guess here.</div><div><br /></div><div>And can I make another suggestion to the arts hating cretinous philistines who infest the commentary section. Go to this random Shakespeare abuse generator <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://demo.graphitesuite.com/shakespeare.html">here</a>.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>Apply any combination to yourself as you disappear up your fundaments. </div><div><br /></div><div>And if you can't be bothered with that exercise in culture, why not just go fuck yourself, though I believe Hamlet put it with a shade more subtlety and nuance when confronted by his first skull:</div><div><br /></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">There's another: why may not that be the skull of a lawyer?<br />Where be his quiddits now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures,<br />and his tricks? </span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Why does he suffer this rude knave now to knock<br />him about the sconce with a dirty shovel, and will not tell him<br />of his action of battery? </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Hum! This fellow might be in's time a<br />great buyer of land, with his statutes, his recognizances, his<br />fines, his double vouchers, his recoveries: is this the fine of<br />his fines, and the recovery of his recoveries, to have his fine<br />pate full of fine dirt? </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Will his vouchers vouch him no more of<br />his purchases, and double ones too, than the length and breadth<br />of a pair of indentures? </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The very conveyances of his lands will<br />scarcely lie in this box; and must the inheritor himself have no<br />more, ha?</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>Memo to Daniela. If you're going to pitch to the punters, the commoners, the groundlings and the stinkards in the pits and the stalls, try doing it with a bit of style. It's the least a hairdresser would do, and it's the least a writer should try to do ...</div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-620033997567463526.post-69096687963153499892009-07-17T08:08:00.004+10:002009-07-17T09:06:18.881+10:00Tim Black, swine flu, feverish deconstructions of decontextualized hysteria and the filthy elites<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiagK50Q-2xDQ-etf4Y-Hws5eaIDSm0wYZwFssthQ5NlRtwJhWmTD_g0Hs5tmjbAoEXTuUCOpYgYhKn5kLm6iCPE70oYnWRIBve1e7kSHJJdgZApt8PYgBM3kePLx4w4rcDY3JZJ4mtmV0/s1600-h/swine-flu-baconrevenge.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 376px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiagK50Q-2xDQ-etf4Y-Hws5eaIDSm0wYZwFssthQ5NlRtwJhWmTD_g0Hs5tmjbAoEXTuUCOpYgYhKn5kLm6iCPE70oYnWRIBve1e7kSHJJdgZApt8PYgBM3kePLx4w4rcDY3JZJ4mtmV0/s400/swine-flu-baconrevenge.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5359193590541554242" /></a><br />You know you're in the company of a fuzzy thinker when the word 'elite' pops out in a column.<div><br /></div><div>The elites are responsible for so much it's a wonder they ever have time to rest in their busy work - but I guess the elites need to keep doing their thing, so people can expose, reveal and malign the elites for the filthy ideas which they constantly devise to inflict on long suffering humanity.</div><div><br /></div><div>Take Tim Black on the subject of swine flu in his column <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25792433-7583,00.html">Feverish obsessions with fantasy flu instead of real ills.</a></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>It's Black's important mission to establish that too much has been said and written about swine flu - by writing another column about swine flu.</div><div><br /></div><div>Black knows the real source of the problem. Swine flu is the fault of flu geekery and the elites:</div><div><br /></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> The elites' obsessive flusteria does not just detract from other, more serious, ailments. It also makes it difficult to put swine flu into any perspective, to contextualise it in terms of similar conditions. Take the following statistic from Britain's National Institute for Clinical Excellence: the average mortality rate of influenza in Britain is 600 deaths a year in a non-epidemic year and 12,000 to 13,800 deaths a year in an epidemic year. So while swine flu is, in rare cases, fatal, so are the other strains of flu that we cope with year in, year out.</span><br /><br /><div>Yep, I too am staggered that the 'leets haven't generated a global warming related hysteria about malaria and about Ross River fever shifting south and about the spread of tropical illnesses to Tasmania. Oh wait, they have you tell me? Filthy elites.</div><div><br /></div><div>Right, and there's no doubt there's been an unhealthy hysteria about swine flu, in much the same way that the elites are unhealthily obsessed with sex and violence. And the best joy with this kind of column? Why if the elites don't pay any attention to swine flu, then they're guilty of dereliction of duty, and a dangerous taking the eye of the ball, and before you know it the Poms have scored five hundred runs. </div><div><br /></div><div>But back to those damn pesky elites:</div><div><br /></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">But now it is here, swine flu is likelier to be the object of jokes than panic among the public.<br /><br />So while the occasionally tragic reality of swine flu is clearly not a creation of the authorities' feverish imaginations, the political and media obsession with it is.<br /><br />A top-down politicisation of an illness has served only to obscure and problematise a clinical problem.<br /><br />That most people seem largely unflustered by the hype simply reveals its unhealthy elite origins.</span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>Pigs are the new unhealthy elite? Oh sorry, it's the hype that has an unhealthy elite origin. The pigs can pick up a 'get out of elite jail for free' card after passing go, while the unhealthy elite can get a good old clobbering, a roistering and a spiking.</div><div><br /></div><div>So who are these 'leets? Well it seems that its politicians and officials and of course the World Health Organization, which has no doubt used black helicopters to spread pandemic panic.</div><div><br /></div><div>But I'm not sure who's the hysteric here. Last time I heard Nicola Roxon speaking on the subject, she was trying to hose down an estimate of deaths which seemed extravagant. But Black is an object lesson in establishing that all the 'leets are in the conspiracy together. A global one - a full-scale siren-headed pandemic - and a parochial one. The 'leets are coming and we might not get out alive:</div><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The public announcements continue. A worst-case scenario could see about 6000 people die from swine fluthis winter in Australia, federal Health Minister Nicola Roxon said yesterday in a pangloomian attempt to imagine the worst in the worst of all possible worlds.</span><br /><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>But this is where a columnist has to get cunning. Here's the technique. First establish that the number of swine flu cases and related deaths in Australia are currently low, then attack likely carriers of 'leet catastrophist panic - the <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">ABC </span>and the <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Sydney Morning Herald</span> - then throw in the WHO with their steady drip-drip of anxiety-inducing statements, with their be alert but not alarmed caveats, pragmatically cultivating fear, then bemoan how swine flu has been lifted from a level five to a level six global pandemic (never mind if this is deployed in its strict technical definition):</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Never has fear been cultivated so pragmatically. Indeed, since swine flu provides the seemingly all too imaginable threat against which people must be protected, thus providing some semblance of a point to policy-making, one suspects that if the disease did not exist the authorities would have to invent it. Which, in a sense, they have.</span><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Aha, they did invent swine flu. The filthy 'leets. The pigs are innocent! Save the pigs! Free the pigs!</div><div><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">While WHO preoccupied itself with second-guessing the apocalypse, the Prime Minister was advising people on basic hygiene. For the frighteningly unsocialised, or just the extravagantly rude, advice such as cover your mouth when coughing phlegm everywhere may have been useful, but for everyone else it just seemed to highlight the strange, exceptional nature of swine flu.<br /></span><br /></div><div>Yeah, well tell that to the guy who hacked and coughed then spat on the railway platform right next to me yesterday, but I guess I looked at him and just saw him as another 'leet fear merchant peddling the strange, exceptional nature of swine flu. After all, he was wearing a suit, so he couldn't have been frighteningly unsocialized. Maybe he was just extravagantly rude because he saw me as a 'leet promoter - even an inventor - of the swine flu hysteria.</div><div><br /></div><div>Have we come to this level of uncertainty in our subjectivist relativist post modernist 'leet times?<br /><br /></div><div>Curse you elites. But what to do? Well how about you give yourself a 'get out of jail card' in the form of a bold caveat, just in case the pigs might have been involved:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> Not that swine flu is to be taken lightly. By all accounts swine flu is more serious than normal seasonal flu. </span><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>Yaaay. Right at this moment you too can become a 'leet person by showing your 'leet understanding of swine flu by discussing swine flu and then by reassuring everyone it's all fine (unless of course you die from swine flu related problems, but let's just call that unfortunate rather than a justification for 'leet hysteria):</div><div><br /></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Biological sciences professor Ian Jones, summarising recent US research published in Nature, concluded that the new virus is about five times more pathogenic than seasonal H1N1 but that, nonetheless, the likely outcome to infection is recovery. For the few cases of severe infection the data will help in clinical management of hospitalised patients. Also having looked at the Nature research, Mark Henderson of London newspaper The Times noted: "It's not a mild illness, but neither does it seem especially severe. Perhaps moderate is the best term." Yet moderate hardly seems apposite for a strain of flu that has dominated the news headlines at various points during the past two months. And it is precisely that predominance that is the problem.</span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>Well that's alright then. It's joke time right? Even the 'leet papers (yes a Murdoch rag can be 'leet) are telling us not to panic. Where's the problem? </div><div><br /></div><div>Well it seems you don't understand that swine flu in fact reflects the dangers of having people worrying about pandemics. They've turned it into a politicized justification for socialistic public policy, perhaps even a perverted justification for socialized medicine, a potent symbol of fear more debilitating and threatening than the swastika.</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Each policy announcement, each subsequent media report, ripping swine flu from any clinical context, adds to the impression that it is not just flu; it is something more significant. In other words, it is not just a moderate strain of influenza, it is an exceptional strain of influenza. So while politicians and officialdom are simultaneously forced to admit that, for most people, swine flu will not even require treatment, their incessant swine-flu chatter, their constant need to make announcements, to speculate and faithlessly reassure, ends up creating swine flu as something extraordinary.<br /><br />Swine flu has become more than a clinical problem; it has become politicised, a symbol of the fear that legitimises and underpins security-conscious policy-making today.</span><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>Funny, I remember that the 'leets tried to change the name from swine flu to the banal N1H1 virus - as a way of trying to undercut the swinish hysteria - but to Mr. Black, that's just a terminological inexactitude beloved by the "increasingly popular flu geekery". Can't get them coming, make sure you get 'em going.</div><div><br /></div><div>Oh dear lord, I feel a panic attack about the 'leets coming on. The fear ... the fear ...</div><div><br /></div><div>And then I began to notice certain words deployed by the good Mr. Black. Here's a sampling: "the narrative of swine flu", fear cultivated "pragmatically", "fear that legitimises", "cannot help but decontextualise", "what is problematic", "to contextualise it" and so on.</div><div><br /></div><div>And I began to get the uneasy feeling I was reading something written by a tainted 'leet person, someone who had caught a whiff of semiotics and structuralism in an earlier life - perhaps from a coughing, spluttering academic who in turn might have caught it from a French academic - and become diseased for life. With an illness way worse than swine flu ...</div><div><br /></div><div>And at that point the fear really gripped me. Because you see not once during his column - despite telling us that swine flu is being treated as a joke by the population at large - does Mr. Black give us a good swine flu joke.</div><div><br /></div><div>Instead we get a lot of bluster and hot air about 'leets. Which is why I'm suggesting Mr. Black go kiss a pig so that we can all contextualize our lack of panic ...</div><div><br /></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">(Below: a swine flu joke, credit to Panric).</span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjy2H22P9dVmqK4hHDIh8HUHHF2QZ8sVu000LHMPzQAnWFlMms50N9hGGEyO-4qhP7P6VkzlZnjZ0vqy_p5McNUG9ZI8R-NRsaZVZNEkScxAmaN2cdkZa8hqvm4mFUgZcYIecZeIGRlzOg/s1600-h/swine-flu-joke.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 303px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjy2H22P9dVmqK4hHDIh8HUHHF2QZ8sVu000LHMPzQAnWFlMms50N9hGGEyO-4qhP7P6VkzlZnjZ0vqy_p5McNUG9ZI8R-NRsaZVZNEkScxAmaN2cdkZa8hqvm4mFUgZcYIecZeIGRlzOg/s400/swine-flu-joke.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5359193599701099746" /></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-620033997567463526.post-74263668175587195352009-07-16T14:25:00.004+10:002009-07-16T16:02:56.808+10:00Steve Fielding, Kevin Rudd, CityLife Church, and shacking up to save the planet<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5mUBHxOtFeVmcefW6oYAdOTtmg1Hcm3aCOPz4r_4V9XpC2cOmeUqnni7pNzys9sbWekJz3IMwdWrw5M3e3XFGRwo7dXoEX0ed_vpAu7MK8TvLQ3FCZt2Re5O8wm8fLInhK7NPbjnh8Po/s1600-h/marriage-cake.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 269px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5mUBHxOtFeVmcefW6oYAdOTtmg1Hcm3aCOPz4r_4V9XpC2cOmeUqnni7pNzys9sbWekJz3IMwdWrw5M3e3XFGRwo7dXoEX0ed_vpAu7MK8TvLQ3FCZt2Re5O8wm8fLInhK7NPbjnh8Po/s400/marriage-cake.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5358929974144597890" /></a><br /><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">(Above: Senator Steve Fielding provides the best argument for gay people to get married and live together yet devised by a creationist fundamentalist loving Christian church goer).</span></div><div><br /></div><div>You might have forgotten this story, which really is only as old as February 25, 2009, but it's worth re-visiting to remember the quality of Senator Steve Fielding's thinking on global warming (<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/money/story/0,26860,25102743-5015795,00.html">Divorce adds to the impact of global warming - Steve Fielding</a></span>):</div><div><br /></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Divorce adds to the impact of global warming as couples switch to wasteful single lifestyles, according to an Australian politician. Family First senator Steve Fielding told a Senate hearing yesterday that divorce led to a "resource-inefficient lifestyle" and it would be better for the planet if couples stayed married.<br /><br />When couples separate, they need more rooms, more electricity and more water, which increases their carbon footprint. </span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Is this the best argument for gay marriage you've yet come across?</span><br /></span><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">"We understand that there is a social problem (with divorce), but now we're seeing there is also environmental impact as well on the footprint," Senator Fielding said.<br /><br />The senator, who came from a family of 16 children, has been married for more than 20 years and focuses on family issues in his political life. </span><br /><br />Until he became an adept in the art and science of global warming. And discovered he was completely clueless, so now he's become completely clueless in a new way. But back then he was a believer:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Senator Fielding read out quotes from a US report to the country's top environment bureaucrats.<br /><br />"Mitigating the impacts of resource-inefficient lifestyles such as divorce helps to achieve global environmental sustainability and saves money for households," Senator Fielding quoted.<br /><br />Ross Carter, from the Department of Environment, said he had not read the report but would look into the issue.<br /><br />"Certainly, now that we're aware of it, we will discuss that with other agencies."<br /><br />He said divorce was one factor that could diminish the efficiency of housing. </span><br /><br />How did this sudden discovery of the efficiency of housing go down with the good senator's peers?</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Opposition and the Greens declined to comment on Senator Fielding's concerns.<br /><br />However, one source said Senator Fielding's campaign could encourage couples to live together in sin to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>Yes folks, shack up in sin to save the planet. Gays and straights. Home cooked sex and the planet saved.</div><div><br /></div><div>Now suddenly this loon, who thought divorce was a contribution to global warming, is a hero to the sceptics for suddenly discovering climate change is a furphy. Only Andrew Bolt and Tim Blair could take him seriously. But then they took Sarah Palin seriously.</div><div><br /></div><div>Once a loon, always a loon I say.</div><div><br /></div><div>Meantime, some scientific thoughts from the good folks at Steve Fielding's preferred house of worship, CityLife Church:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">If we simply evolved from chemical gases, grown up germs or recent improvements of the apes, how do we account that in almost every culture in the world there is a preference for love over hate, truthfulness over lying, kindness over violence, and justice over injustice. What accounts for this? Are gases, germs or genes capable of creating a moral code of values in people worldwide, one that is remarkably consistent even though billions of people have existed on different continents? Do morality and ethics have a Darwinian explanation (altruistic genes selected through the process of evolution giving people natural empathy) or are they evidence for God? </span><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>No, look to the garden of eden and the talking snake, I say. Who is this caddish god-denying Darwin, and what would he know about global warming.</div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>You can find a lot more of what Fielding presumably listens to week in week out by visiting the church's sermon and discussion notes <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.citylifechurch.com/resources/sermonNotes.aspx">here</a></span>. Or you can live a useful life. Your choice.</div><div><br /></div><div>Meantime, I found this happy set of notes by John Stear, detailing his correspondence with CityLife, Family First and Senator Fielding. Wonderful to see such ducking and weaving, or in the case of Fielding simply no reply at all when it comes to the matter of answers in Genesis and the teaching of science in schools. He did get one honest reply from CityLife Church-Knox:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Our Christian school, Waverley Christian College, is an important part of the Church and its ministries. It has a strong record of academic achievement, whilst also providing a caring and supportive Christian environment for the students. Creationism is taught at the College, whilst Evolution is also noted as a theory. Given that it is a Christian school with our belief system based on the Bible, it is natural that we would teach origins based on Creation.</span><br /><br />I'm amazed Stear had the energy for the hunt. Well done.</div><div><br /></div><div>But not a word from Fielding. What's he afraid of, what's he running from? Is he doing an Al Gore on the subject of creationism? After all, Al Gore's a preacher for global warming. What or who is Fielding a preacher for? Has he read all the advice in CityLife's sermons on "Conversations & Evangelism"? Is he doing his best in "Reaching the Unchurched Next Door" (in four parts). After all, it's the fundamentalists who got him the gig. (You can catch John Stear's correspondence at <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.noanswersingenesis.org.au/family_first_origins.htm">"Family First'? - not in science education</a></span>).</div><div><br /></div><div>Remind me yet again how the Labor Party helped Fielding into power with just under 2% of the votes of Victorians, and how Fielding will now will demand of Conroy that the intertubes must be subject to draconian censorship. (I'm told that Fielding's vote amounted to 2,519 first preference votes).</div><div><br /></div><div>Now if Fielding is inclined to creationism as a philosophy, I want him to meet up with Ian Plimer. It should be a fifteen round battle royale, alternately smack down and love fest, as the anti creationist Plimer bonds with the fundie Christian over global warming.<br /><br />But instead of a decent all in bring a bollard with you state of origin match, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Punch </span>offers us Kevin Rudd with his first blog on <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/heres-why-fielding-should-support-us-on-climate/">Here's why Fielding should support us on climate.</a></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>Talk about a love tap on the chin. Only a Queenslander would go down. And it's so unscientific. He doesn't even include one graph, the one clear graph that indicates climate change is a furphy. And golly the loons come out in force in the comments.</div><div><br /></div><div>Why do I think loon pond is these days undergoing a population crisis of the hugest kind. So many loons flocking and squawking.</div><div><br /></div><div>If only Malthus had been right ...</div><div><br /></div><div>Ah well, if Fielding can provide solid arguments in favor of saving the planet through shacking up, perhaps he can provide a coherent critique of the government's current legislative plans in relation to global warming, and devise a better model.</div><div><br /></div><div>Oops, I looked out the window and thought I saw a number of porcine like creatures flying ... mebbe on their way to or from the garden of eden.</div><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQJ_ymZYQjZ0mMOhyjcAOa41Iz2PQjPsuXzT_5GFKiuvUujDkUHqC90_qSA6N4fnX8gh3fR_XZI7AjUOTrPrKZ-mQ0-8bZjkv0o2i-wdAuMjNCFsMTTVPnvZ13qbIkjRyFB_9P3LdEMsY/s1600-h/gay_marriage_cartoon.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 303px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQJ_ymZYQjZ0mMOhyjcAOa41Iz2PQjPsuXzT_5GFKiuvUujDkUHqC90_qSA6N4fnX8gh3fR_XZI7AjUOTrPrKZ-mQ0-8bZjkv0o2i-wdAuMjNCFsMTTVPnvZ13qbIkjRyFB_9P3LdEMsY/s400/gay_marriage_cartoon.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5358929981291867762" /></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-620033997567463526.post-61469063722780913662009-07-16T09:24:00.005+10:002009-07-16T11:57:58.179+10:00Steve Fielding, climate change, and Australia's dumbest conversation<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8gydWFVPu6rDjJP5unsnY7wYSl-2KVwjnDn6mGiD9ThB4xmHomDXBJZqKPFdK9tom3gFfbZomtPgW_BiGmOWRvK1HE5nUEJGeg3HH8U-h2iTPR9H9vdE5R5FqhxeGb0vONM5Ym74V-vs/s1600-h/fielding.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 259px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8gydWFVPu6rDjJP5unsnY7wYSl-2KVwjnDn6mGiD9ThB4xmHomDXBJZqKPFdK9tom3gFfbZomtPgW_BiGmOWRvK1HE5nUEJGeg3HH8U-h2iTPR9H9vdE5R5FqhxeGb0vONM5Ym74V-vs/s400/fielding.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5358863099861596514" /></a><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">(Above: Senator Steve Fielding demonstrating that a goose by any other name remains a goose).<br /></span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Punch </span>seems to have aspirations about turning itself into Australia's dumbest conversation.<div><br /></div><div>But then it's the Murdoch press's attempt to get down and get hip with the intertubes, so why am I surprised.</div><div><br /></div><div>I guess they wouldn't lead with a story from Pauline Hanson these days - though who knows what might have happened with Hanson in her prime. </div><div><br /></div><div>So they settle for Senator Steve Fielding as the top of the page lead, with <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/the-real-reason-ill-fight-in-the-senate-on-climate-change/">The real reason I'll fight in the Senate on climate change</a></span> - thereby proving that bears with very little brain can get an indecent amount of exposure. And <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Punch</span> is doing what it knows will work - pandering to climate change deniers, the so-called sceptics - in the way that Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt have established as the sine qua non of Murdochian blogging.</div><div><br /></div><div>Which makes you wonder why they bother, since there's a already a Murdochian super abundance of this kind of nonsense feeding the chooks.</div><div><br /></div><div>Fielding's piece is offensively simple minded, in much the same way as his political posturing is insufferably self-righteous. You can tell he's taken a liberal dose of the kool aid with his self serving grandstanding on the matter of meeting Al Gore, which clearly wasn't about Fielding getting an education in science from Gore. </div><div><br /></div><div>After all, this lone intrepid science driven warrior has made up his mind on the basis of one graph that the science is clearly inconclusive. Which in Fielding's world is code for incorrect and irrelevant.</div><div><br /></div><div>A rough equivalent of his scientific pilgrimage would be me going off to a true believing priest and ask him to prove his faith, while I maintained my own lack of faith. When science is reduced to a debate about beliefs, it's a wretched kind of debate, of the kind always on view in the gadfly snipings of Tim Blair.</div><div><br /></div><div>And who turns up to play the priest to the pontificating know all Fielding?</div><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">But then enter Al Gore. Here was a man who had a lot of power and went around the world preaching about climate change. I thought he might have the answer for me, the ones I couldn’t extract from the Rudd government.</span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Why? Surely since Fielding is in the sceptics' camp, he now knows Al Gore is just a grand-standing self seeking rich man, the anti-christ of the global warming brigade, without a shred of scientific understanding, and worse than Michael Moore.</span></span></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">But then that's all there in the tone Fielding's words. Gore's a preacher man, with a lot of power, traveling the world, preaching. He surely must have the answer, since a trip up the Himalayas to meet a guru with the answer to the meaning of life is a tad too difficult. Tell me Al Gore what do you know?<br /></span></span><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">I briefly met Mr Gore at a breakfast in Melbourne attended by more than a thousand people. He was aware of the important role Family First plays in the senate and was keen to catch up.</span><br /><br /></div><div>Yep Al Gore knows all about the wonderful Family First. Choke on my rising gorge. Al Gore gives a flying fuck about Family First and was keen to catch up to discuss Christian fundamentalism?</div><div><br /></div><div>But apart from knowing about the wonderful Family First, it seems Al Gore knows fuck all about anything else:</div><div><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">After a series of phone calls I was met with a stonewall of resistance. I offered to meet Mr Gore at any place at any time but had no luck. Here we had the former Vice President of the United States, a self proclaimed climate change preacher running away from me over a few simple questions. I could hardly believe it.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Jesu, who does this man's copy writing? A stonewall of resistance. Any place at any time. No luck. Self proclaimed climate change preacher running away from me. Over a few simple questions. I could hardly believe it.</span></span></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Running away from Steve Fielding and the visionary, demolitionary power of his scientific insights?</span></span></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">No, I can hardly believe it myself, you hopeless gherkin, so full of delusionary self serving twaddle are you that it's possible your emissions alone are solely responsible for the rise of the sea waters, thereby letting Al Gore off the hook.</span></span></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">But wait, there's more:<br /></span></span><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">I would have thought if Al Gore was really committed to the cause he would want to meet with all senators who had concerns about the science if it would help ensure that the CPRS legislation would pass. Obviously I was wrong.</span><br /><br /></div><div>Or maybe he could spot a loon recently escaped from loon pond and wondering how he could avoid being caught up in a no win situation arguing with a loon about his already made up mind:</div><div><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">I have written to every senator urging them to look at the graph and ask themselves the key question - what is driving climate change? If they can’t answer that simple question they shouldn’t be voting for a CPRS. This decision is the biggest economic decision in this country’s history, one which is too important to vote along party lines.</span><br /><br /></div><div>One graph is the answer to it all? The complexity of the earth's current situation and the truth of denialism can be reduced to one graph? Well I guess that's better than saying 42 over and over again.</div><div><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">I call on the government to answer my question with a straight answer. If they’re not prepared to do so, I’m happy to fight the lone battle in the senate until those senators who are honest with themselves break party lines.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Oh now we're jerking our collective chain about lone battlers and calling on senators to join the heroic delusionary by breaking party lines. A straight simple answer based on one straight, not so simple deceptive and misleading graph ...</span></span></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">The sad thing is that there's better ways of doing things than what the government is currently proposing, but if Fielding had been around in the senate in the days when we had to do something about fluorocarbons, the hole in the ozone layer would now cover the earth.</span><br /></span><div><br /></div><div>Now you might think that <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Punch</span> is being dreadfully clever by allowing Steve Fielding to promote his delusional stupidity to the world. But the comments section gives away the game, with all the usual loons chipping in to support Fielding's brave stand. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Punch</span> is just printing the controversy, and shortly I expect to see lead stories on intelligent design, creationism and the dangers of Darwinism to the health of Australia. I mean I know it was always intended for people who avoided university degrees for fear of learning something, but should it reduce everything to kindergarten incoherence?</div><div><br /></div><div>It reminds me that the Labor Party thought it was incredibly clever by preferencing Fielding, and then to their astonishment watching as he actually got up, and now they have to contemplate his infinite loonacy at work in the senate on a daily basis. As my new heroine Bronnie might say, whom the gods would destroy they first make read Steve Fielding's guide to the inner workings of his mind.</div><div><br /></div><div>Because you see there's an infinite more of Fielding's self seeking grandstanding tireless self promotion on view in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Punch</span> column:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> I went back to the government with this question but was met with a wall of silence. They had clearly decided it was safer not to engage with me because I had legitimate questions which they probably were unable to answer.<br /><br />I was left feeling that the only responsible thing to do was to vote against this legislation. At the end of the day, it would be a betrayal of my duty to the Australian people to put at risk the national economy and many thousands of jobs on what is clearly inconclusive science</span>.<br /><br />But you see wherever Fielding looks, he can't get an answer he can understand:<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Armed with this information I sat down with Minister Wong, the Chief Scientist and Professor Will Steffen of the ANU to hear their explanation. After an hour and a half I left none the wiser ...<br /><br />I received a written response to my questions from the Minister a few days later which had me even more uncertain ...<br /><br />Some of the data led me to question whether the Rudd government had got the science right. I then took some of the information and questions I had to the White House where I met with one of President Obama’s senior climate change advisors. While these discussions were fruitful, I was left at the end with even more questions than when I had started ...</span><br /><br />Well perhaps that's because bears with little brain are better off just munching on honeycomb and not trying to absorb too much information all at once.</div><div><br /></div><div>But<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> The Punch</span> will no doubt be pleased. They've stirred the pot and got everyone agitated. </div><div><br /></div><div>But has the understanding of the world's current situation been advanced one whit or jot? </div><div><br /></div><div>Well in the sense that we understand just how comprehensively the ALP has comprehensively helped fuck Australia by getting Fielding elected to the senate, yes, in spades ... But as for actually understanding things, no, in spades ...</div><div><br /></div><div>Time to sing a song of Pooh, tra la:</div></div><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">When the sun came out,<br />the sky cleared up<br />and the bear of little thinkage<br />began to dry,<br />and by and by<br />showed a high<br />amount of shrinkage.<br /><br />Hooray for you!<br />Hooray for me!<br />Hooray, hooray,<br />The Pooh will soon be free!<br />Now the time has come for proving<br />What the diet did for Pooh.<br /><br />And since we pledged<br />He'd be unwedged,<br />That's what we're going to do.<br />He'll be pulled and he'll be tugged,<br />and eventually unplugged.<br />We'll have a tug of war<br />To open Rabbit's door.<br /><br />Think heavage, think towage<br />And out the Pooh will goage.<br />For mind over matter<br />Has made the Pooh unfatter.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">(Below: saving the shrinking Pooh, in a case of mind over matter, but who will save Senator Fielding?)</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibS6-avETJSwRi7pW00ygwJ8F9GZM-WLWxjFt71QxBvBkcQuhnh0kcW0I32DoQl6VnZEoE0g9gsbrqZsmdkgBM3SxSdnvmIuTt57-f9Cym72Tjkh3h06zBqza04UlfFNIkQDXv2Njcv8o/s1600-h/stuck1.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibS6-avETJSwRi7pW00ygwJ8F9GZM-WLWxjFt71QxBvBkcQuhnh0kcW0I32DoQl6VnZEoE0g9gsbrqZsmdkgBM3SxSdnvmIuTt57-f9Cym72Tjkh3h06zBqza04UlfFNIkQDXv2Njcv8o/s400/stuck1.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5358863103018792978" /></a></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-620033997567463526.post-53285833424561205192009-07-16T08:02:00.004+10:002009-07-16T09:07:10.388+10:00Piers Akerman, Chinese thugs, Indonesian thugs, the false speaking Chairman Rudd and so many bones to chew<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgA3JvKZ2yJR9u4jzZCSFKZel28NcpRVNRLFruyHLMuYZv4ESzD41JPS0cmXhhOedNIx-tOtyEcTW2j3TVDAeTov7XKkwVVspnR3Ohl2Mk5x1cHnrEXu4fpS7o6kOa7BpCHTO0PhAqlS0/s1600-h/akermanchina.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 269px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgA3JvKZ2yJR9u4jzZCSFKZel28NcpRVNRLFruyHLMuYZv4ESzD41JPS0cmXhhOedNIx-tOtyEcTW2j3TVDAeTov7XKkwVVspnR3Ohl2Mk5x1cHnrEXu4fpS7o6kOa7BpCHTO0PhAqlS0/s400/akermanchina.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5358821016575659394" /></a><br />It seemed like another hard day on the intertubes. Being Thursday it was Akerman day and being Akerman it wasn't surprising to see the splash on the front page Akerman: <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">China thugs bullying Aussies.</span><div><br /></div><div>When Akkers gets hold of a bone, he worries it to death in bull terrier style, and only when the last bit of flesh has been stripped from it and the marrow sucked from the bone will he bury it in the back yard. Which doesn't stop him digging it out every so often to sniff and lick and munch on. And the more dirt, as you know, the tastier the bone.</div><div><br /></div><div>So it seemed like the old China bone would be getting another going over.</div><div><br /></div><div>Then came an alarming thought - what if the few remaining subs at the Daily Terror never bothered to read Akerman - after all, it must be one of the most draining and exhausting jobs on earth. Repetition after repetition, fear and loathing, whining and stomping around, re-hashing old grudges over and over until the track in the shellac is worn down by the grinding effect of the needle.</div><div><br /></div><div>So what has Akkers got to say about China in his latest piece, which turns out on the actual page to be titled <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/piersakerman/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/pm_turns_blind_eye_on_thugs_bullying_aussies/">PM turns blind eye on thugs bullying Aussies?</a></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="">Just this as a taster:</span></div><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Kevin Rudd has now let down Australian citizens in two foreign countries. The Chinese Government has so far snubbed his attempts to get any substantial news about the arrest of Rio Tinto executive Stern Hu</span>.<br /><div><br /></div><div>It would of course be a much simpler sentence and a much shorter column if Akkers had written: Kevin Rudd has now let down all Australian citizens in Australia now and forever and ever, amen, and in any foreign country I can find a story to write about. Fill in the details at your own leisure ...</div><div><br /></div><div>But instead Akkers drags out the Indonesian bone, using the murder of Australian Drew Grant in Papua province as an excuse to berate Indonesia and the Rudd government.</div><div><br /></div><div>Never mind that Akkers and his ilk went missing on what Indonesia got up to in Papua in the old days, and displayed extreme hostility to the notion that Australia might shelter Papuan refugees. Never mind that Indonesia has at last managed a decent presidential election. Never mind that the murder is subject to a police investigation, still in relatively early days.</div><div><br /></div><div>Akkers knows all about it.</div><div><br /></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Australian Government is too timid to point out that security forces around Freeport have in the past resorted to standover tactics to blackmail the mine into paying higher premiums for peace.<br /><br />It’s a practice that some say provided an incentive for security forces to attack the mine to justify their lucrative presence.<br /><br />While Indonesian security forces continue to have to find the means to meet their budgets while on the job, it seems unlikely the central government will be able to contain regional corruption.<br /></span><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Australian Government has sent two police officers to assist Indonesian authorities but they are likely to run into political interference from both the Indonesian and Australian Governments.</span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>Political interference from the Australian government? Presumably he's basing that on the craven attitude of the Howard government to Indonesia during its time in office. Or perhaps he's basing it on nothing at all, except the mad bone munching of a terrier with the subtlety and wit of a bull in a china ship.</div><div><br /></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> Freeport is Indonesia’s largest taxpayer and its military, despite the setback forced on it by its withdrawal from East Timor, remains an entity largely beyond control.<br /><br />The Australian-Indonesian relationship, no matter what Rudd’s spin doctors will claim, has gone backwards since the Rudd Government came to office.</span><br /><br /><div>Say what? So the Rudd government has no relationship with Indonesia and Indonesia has no control over the military in Freeport? Well good luck to their campaign of political interference then.</div><div><br /></div><div>Meanwhile, Akkers has solved the case. The Indonesian military did it. How's that for investigative prowess up against due process (Golly I bet he's a dab hand at Cluedo). </div><div><br /></div><div>But wait, it wouldn't be an Akkers column if we didn't drag another bone out of the back yard for a salivating if irrelevant munch:</div><div><br /></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">A prime example is shown in the Australian Government’s failure to lay charges against accused East Timorese murderer Guy Campos, who entered Australia on a pilgrim visa during the Pope’s Youth Day visit.<br /></span><br /><div>Well actually every day we live and breathe under the Rudd government, Australia lives in a hell hole of dire inhumanity, of epic failure and abject incompetence, of profound disaster and inhuman suffering.</div><div><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Faced with the challenges of Hu’s arrest and the murder of Grant, the Rudd Government appears impotent.<br /><br />Making speeches in Mandarin may make Rudd feel better but it won’t bring transparency to any case the Chinese authorities may make against Hu.</span><br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Addressing the Australia-Indonesia Society may promote a warm inner glow but the words are worthless if Grant’s murder remains unsolved.<br /><br />Diplomacy demands more than words alone . . . it requires trust and a determination to back words with actions.</span><br /><br /></div><div>Which is why I think Akkers will back this site's demand that chairman Rudd immediately drop all other duties and proceed to Papua to solve the murder mystery, and having done that - I think the two days we've allocated is more than sufficient - then proceed on to China to obtain the release of Stern Hu. </div><div><br /></div><div>Now the latter matter is more tricky - busting a business executive out of prison isn't the easiest job - but that's why we're proposing that the government hire Tom Cruise and treat the whole thing as a <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Mission Impossible </span>caper. Sequel and spin off rights will be sold separately.</div><div><br /></div><div>Failure to do so will establish the credentials of chairman Rudd in craven cowardliness.</div><div><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The failure of the Rudd Government to act on behalf of Australian citizens abroad is in keeping with its dismal record in almost all other areas of policy. </span><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>Yes indeed. A totally dismal record of complete and utter disaster. Why if they hadn't found that stout British lad lost in the Blue Mountains without his mobile phone it would have been yet another black mark against the Rudd government. </div><div><br /></div><div>And their refusal to deal thoughtfully with the Michael Jackson murder case indicates extreme contempt for Jackson's Australian fans. While the tsunami alert indicates extreme incompetence - wave, what wave - and the bones of a woman found in a cave on the central coast indicate the abject failure of the law and order policies of the Rudd government (I know, I know, she's been missing for seven years. Details, you pedant, details).</div><div><br /></div><div>Oh yes Rudd might be able to speak Mandarin, but how's that a match for hysterical English Akkers style.</div><div><br /></div><div>But the funniest thing of all? After beating the drum loudly, the Murdoch press has now decided it can catch Rudd coming and going. While Akkers is over in one corner, there's Jennifer Hewett over in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Australian</span> with <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25788837-5014087,00.html">PM's harsh tone may misfire.</a></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="">Here's a sample:</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Kevin Rudd's decision to publicly up the ante in his reaction to the Chinese detentions of Rio Tinto executives is curious as well as extremely risky.<br /><br />The Prime Minister's words were his most critical so far, and will reverberate loudly in Beijing. To what purpose is far less clear. The rhetoric is more likely to further irritate the Chinese than it is to persuade them to change course over the imprisonment of Stern Hu.<br /><br />Rudd would presumably appreciate that. It suggests that his comments are designed more for domestic consumption and for blunting the opposition's hysterical demands for the government to pick up the phone.<br /></span></div><div><br /></div><div>Speak up in Mandarin, no don't speak up, too extremely risky. </div><div><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Certainly Rudd's firm warnings will sound tougher and more decisive at home. In China, it will make it even harder for any possible resolution to be quietly negotiated through diplomatic channels. What now?</span><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>Quiet diplomacy, no stern action. No, no - stern action needed, right now.</div><div><br /></div><div>Well if you relied on the Murdoch press for insight, the world would likely be at war within the week.</div><div><br /></div><div>So it goes. That's the bones thoroughly chewed this week, time to put them back into the ground until they come in handy again. And isn't it comforting to realize that it isn't just dogs that can see the world in black and white.</div><div><br /></div><div>Oh I know that might be an area of scientific dispute, I know there might be claims that dogs can see red, blue and other colors, but trust me if you're Akkers and you're looking at the world, it's strictly black and white.</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">(Below: Gustave Dore's Andromeda on the rocks, 1869. One of the earliest examples of an artist capturing the way the Rudd government puts women in peril. Note the crocodile bottom left hand corner, the artist's nuanced way of including Chairman Rudd in the painting).</span></div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7QcTi9A9lvUfLDE7qW3k49uxg7dIRei0Qlh6uIjykifpkl0XRMMtykmQynHAtL5kDT-CjA3SvP5vA4LEjzspb6RdtzfNo9Co3GHs639oAojQLl-2g-Rk7FRpuzXxZM2SRxV2opOlCBv8/s1600-h/andromedagustavedore.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 265px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7QcTi9A9lvUfLDE7qW3k49uxg7dIRei0Qlh6uIjykifpkl0XRMMtykmQynHAtL5kDT-CjA3SvP5vA4LEjzspb6RdtzfNo9Co3GHs639oAojQLl-2g-Rk7FRpuzXxZM2SRxV2opOlCBv8/s400/andromedagustavedore.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5358821022139583746" /></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-620033997567463526.post-41908260131561584222009-07-15T10:41:00.008+10:002009-07-15T11:37:22.993+10:00Terry Barnes, Tony Abbott, the punitive mind set of the conservative, and all the king's horses<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhr_83rnKK6tQDtOTHF1aLObOstkqgAEKAzfL4OfJo9fH0wTMxoEpcn_UbdmPBSshMpG3gx2uoBX1SBS-MCGneU5JsNvVsNxEQrgRw3736Rg1F4IGDnlKGXunGPcKn2PaiYa7ysdBEMuRE/s1600-h/ball-and-chain2.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 360px; height: 360px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhr_83rnKK6tQDtOTHF1aLObOstkqgAEKAzfL4OfJo9fH0wTMxoEpcn_UbdmPBSshMpG3gx2uoBX1SBS-MCGneU5JsNvVsNxEQrgRw3736Rg1F4IGDnlKGXunGPcKn2PaiYa7ysdBEMuRE/s400/ball-and-chain2.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5358492266695848578" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4Sslr55q1MBTMmXh1CYUs2uhVm93RWssFmpLZ0RUQrt0Zb5dq3dDhQ-alOI00GO27qj4r6Wh3kTxXc9ULh6tpZhnNah7w0Vbwzt2spVA7P3crIULpswBWai-U2nOY2_9wg5wSB7pIIx4/s1600-h/ball-and-chain.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 302px; height: 237px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4Sslr55q1MBTMmXh1CYUs2uhVm93RWssFmpLZ0RUQrt0Zb5dq3dDhQ-alOI00GO27qj4r6Wh3kTxXc9ULh6tpZhnNah7w0Vbwzt2spVA7P3crIULpswBWai-U2nOY2_9wg5wSB7pIIx4/s400/ball-and-chain.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5358492261569441794" /></a><br /><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">(Above: great cake topper ideas for conservatives about to get hitched until death do them part, unless divorce lawyers and private eyes and courts can sort out the unholy mess in which they landed themselves).</span><br /><div><br /></div><div>At first I thought Tony Abbott's new proposal to bring fault back into marriage and divorce - as if marriage wasn't already fault finding and punitive enough according to conservatives - was the product of his own fevered conservative Catholic brain.<div><br /></div><div>After all, Catholicism is adept at guilt and confession and punishment and forgiveness as a way of keeping the tithes ticking over.</div><div><br /></div><div>Then I stumbled on Terry Barnes in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/lets-help-more-of-us-to-have-and-to-hold-on-20090714-dk0x.html?page=-1">Let's help more of us to have and to hold on</a></span> and I realized that Abbott must have workshopped the concept and decided it was a goer.</div><div><br /></div><div>Barnes in his tag is noted as having advised Howard government ministers Michael Wooldridge and Tony Abbott, and concludes his column in a bizarre way worthy of an Abbott advisor:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> Provided people aren't forced to remain in abusive relationships, if reintroducing a reasonable and defensible concept of fault into relationship break-ups will help more partners to stick together for the long haul, it is something well worth considering.</span><br /><br />WTF? What on earth is a reasonable and defensible concept of fault? Like you were swinging your dick around and now I'm going to take you to the cleaners, or you were having an affair with the postman, so now you can get out on the street and deliver the letters with him?</div><div><br /></div><div>Barnes arrives at this conclusion by regaling us with an anecdote about his aunt:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">In the early 1970s my aunt spent several years nursing in a remote community mission in the New Guinea highlands. Reminiscing recently, she said that it was a constant struggle to coax every last bit of use from surgical instruments, syringes and other essential equipment.<br /><br />When she returned to Australia in 1973, however, she was astonished to find how things had changed at home. Disposable equipment had become the order of the day, and reusable items suddenly were obsolete. Her nursing experience was an analogy for those times. On July 1, 1975, marriage itself became a disposable item with the introduction of the Family Law Act and no-fault divorce.<br /></span></div><div><br /></div><div>Marriage as a disposable syringe? What is it about conservatives that they fail to understand the essence of marriage? People come together and they stay together. Or they don't. Putting lawyers and courts and private eyes into the bedrooms of couples isn't going to swing it one way or the other.</div><div><br /></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> In his forthcoming book </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="">Battlelines</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">, former Howard government minister Tony Abbott will argue that the relationship pendulum has swung too far, and that the concept of fault as grounds for divorce should be back on the agenda.<br /><br />Abbott's argument is simple: if the way out is too easy, attempts to save or even shore up a troubled relationship will be set aside.<br /></span><br /><div>Well the argument actually might better be described as simple minded, since on the one hand Abbott has recently blathered on about the joys of passive smoking in cars as opposed to the nanny state, then he starts blathering about how he wants to bring the nanny state back into marriage and divorce.</div><div><br /></div><div>And when you look at the logic, it's like marriage is some kind of trap or prison in which the unwilling victims must be kept locked up for fear they'll take the easy way out. Yeah, let's make divorce so tough suicide will seem like a sensible solution.</div><div><br /></div><div>Bizarrely, in support of this bizarre proposition, Barnes quotes data that suggests that the median length of marriage to separation was 8.9 years in 2007, as opposed to 7.8 years in 1998. And that the median length of marriage to divorce was 12.5 years for divorces granted in 2007, while in 1998 it was 8.9 years. And that after peaking at 2.7 per thousand of population in 2003, the divorce rate in Australia has declined in 2007 to 2.3 per thousand.</div><div><br /></div><div>So what's the problem here? Well when you're in opposition, I guess all that remains is blather and a pious willingness to ignore the figures:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">Such numbers, however, don't tell the stories behind them. What kept these couples together for as long as they did, and what finally tore them apart? Was it marrying in haste and repenting at leisure, "for the sake of the children", partner or child abuse, financial difficulties, infidelity, or simply familiarity breeding contempt? How hard did they try to work on repairing their relationships? This is where Abbott's point goes - was the leaving of the relationship proportionate to the problem?</span><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>More to the point surely is the question of whether staying in the relationship would fix the problem, and how on earth would returning to the days when couples turned the end days of a relationship into an ugly court room drama of recriminations and blame and guilt, while the children stood on the sidelines wondering what emotional truck had just driven over them.</div><br /><div>Do Barnes and Abbott really think they will be able to stop the trend to divorce or serial monogamy by a return to the old days and by introducing punitive approaches to divorce? Well only if you think saying thirty Hail Marys will somehow prevent fornication and adultery:</div><div><br /></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> That divorce is still common, despite community support for marriage and publicly funded services such as the Federal Government's Family Relationship Centres, suggests that too many of us either take the words lightly, or simply don't realise how hard the marital road can be after that initial brilliant glow of romantic love - and lust - fades.<br /></span><br /><div>But after the ritual tugging of the forelock at how wonderful the Howard government was when it comes to the family unit, and the need for hard work in relationships and sacrifice ... Hang on, why do men always describe marriage as thick and thin stuff, and suffering and hard work and sacrifice? Is marriage like some kind of living hell, working away down mine digging out coal or tending furnace in steel works? Hard work, but no joy?</div><div><br /></div><div>Well no matter all the wonderful work the Howard government did, and the way the stats seem to be heading the opposite way to the problem perceived by Abbott, there's still a need for more tinkering, and this is where it gets really weird, because somehow it seems to involve same sex marriage:</div><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Nevertheless, we still need to revamp relationships law, especially the federal Marriage and Family Law Acts, to ensure that all those who want to make such a commitment are encouraged, championed and supported in their often difficult task. In this day and age this should apply not only to marriage between a man and a woman, but also to marriage or similar binding commitments between same-sex partners.</span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Ah yes, it seems that the conservatives recognize that there might actually be marriage between same sex partners somewhere down the track in Australia. So let's make sure it's the kind of hell heterosexuals had to endure in the old days. That'll teach them. It's difficult and hard, this getting hitched, and let's see how they handle it.</span></span></div><div><br /></div><div>Then we can have standard off the shelf lite marriage for gay folk and others in search of the easy disposable syringe, while conservatives will have Leet Marriages, which are hardened and toughened and durable, because they know if they don't work and suffer their way to success the divorce courts are going to have fun fixing the blame on all and sundry. Meanwhile, while we devise this new form of marriage as cilice wearing, let's see how the gays cope with this game:</div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">If two people want to pledge themselves freely and publicly to each other, to respecting each other and to making their relationship work, they shouldn't be legally barred from doing so simply because of an accident of gender or sexuality. Society is tolerant and open enough to welcome and encourage such declarations of commitment, rather than to dismiss them as outside the pale. Gay couples are just as entitled as their heterosexual equivalents to make public and legally binding vows to love and honour each other, but equally must account for the consequences if they break their vows.</span><br /><br /></div><div>Yeah, and once you get hitched, let's see what happens if you go back to the old ways of touring the beats or heading off for some clubbing. There'll be consequences. Oh yes, we'll make you regret getting hitched. You bloody disposable syringe lovers.</div><div><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">It's vital for our society that all couples, regardless of their sexuality, accept that their legally recognised relationships are not disposable items in our throwaway society. Just as marriage shouldn't be entered into lightly, ending a marriage or civil partnership shouldn't be too easy either.<br /></span><br /></div><div>No, it should be bloody hard to break up, onerous and burdensome and tough, like marriage is, and like it used to be in the old days when marriage was hell, and divorce even more hellish.</div><div><br /></div><div>Oh the suffering and the humanity.</div><div><br /></div><div>Is there any more poignant, tragic and sad example of how conservative thinking contends that life must involve pain and suffering and work and obligation.</div><div><br /></div><div>Try this for a thought. Marriage can be fun. You stay in it because you like it. But if it breaks, all the kings horses, plus Tony Abbott and Terry Barnes, won't be able to put it back together again. And then the bonus punitive measures they propose will just scramble the egg even further. </div><div><br /></div><div>Been there, done that, bugger off Abbott and Barnes, and take it away Dolly:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> Momma moved out<br />Daddy sold the house<br />They split up the money<br />And went on their way<br />And all the king's horses<br />And all the king's men<br />Couldn't put mommy and daddy back together again<br /><br />Starting over again<br />Where should they begin<br />'Cause they've never been out on their own<br />Starting over again<br />Where do you begin<br />When your dreams are all shattered<br />And the kids are all grown<br />And the whole world cries<br /><br />Got an apartment<br />She moved in with her sisters<br />He's scheming big deals with one of his friends<br />While she sits at home<br />Just sorting out pieces<br />Of left over memories<br />From thirty odd years<br /><br />Starting over again<br />Where do you begin<br />You've never been out on your own<br />Starting over again<br />Never any end<br /><br />What will the neighbors say?<br />They're talking talk, its small town news<br />Facing fifty years old<br />Making up a happy home<br />And this far down the road<br />You find yourself alone<br />Two fools<br /><br />Starting over again<br />Now where do you begin<br />When you've never been out on your own<br />Starting over again<br />Never any end<br />When your dreams are all shattered<br />And the kids are all grown<br />And all the king's horses<br />And all the king's men<br />Could never put mommy and daddy back together<br />Back together, again</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">(Below: marriage as a disposable syringe).<br /></span><br /></div></div></div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1_P5ceLA0FppqRVQg7a5EDnGoHT4ztF0BXe-BnSGMjM0rbJwZxTOrOWw4EDRoEoWnbH6qOTw7I_OyD_Nxh5bRcNcSrjlXmJ5kDef0NbhbISi0IsDYgjGehyphenhyphenkVF1MseeQSohRaDYFtCAQ/s1600-h/lifesshortgetadivorce.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1_P5ceLA0FppqRVQg7a5EDnGoHT4ztF0BXe-BnSGMjM0rbJwZxTOrOWw4EDRoEoWnbH6qOTw7I_OyD_Nxh5bRcNcSrjlXmJ5kDef0NbhbISi0IsDYgjGehyphenhyphenkVF1MseeQSohRaDYFtCAQ/s400/lifesshortgetadivorce.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5358493029465232690" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVlBlmRsMEFdNM_yZqoNiDZcQTeyfRAYtA2U4gRf9CjnOgzBlReWq5z1oPPDSZIWkQkf0gWT1xTY1P2mrrMIrZOWJKWGezqfGNsvj9axcz3AQgio7x52t55grNAGT9OhOcy-OZRPjhqMY/s1600-h/lifes-short-get-a-divorce.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 246px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVlBlmRsMEFdNM_yZqoNiDZcQTeyfRAYtA2U4gRf9CjnOgzBlReWq5z1oPPDSZIWkQkf0gWT1xTY1P2mrrMIrZOWJKWGezqfGNsvj9axcz3AQgio7x52t55grNAGT9OhOcy-OZRPjhqMY/s400/lifes-short-get-a-divorce.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5358493026905548994" /></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-620033997567463526.post-55595216313010359022009-07-15T07:40:00.005+10:002009-07-15T08:51:39.030+10:00Janet Albrechtsen, Kevin Rudd, and god botherers bothering god botherers about bothering god, the media and Bonhoeffer<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBAAvLdtp4ljODNml6bpLvc3Ze0z3dCA6sZ2Rsb8W2aNBNJ2YUC1T46_o7QKspXvSeFaBv4bl7LYPayf-tOwn9g1ExncCyTakTGMJtwc1rlg_JWCzhzoqQZGEijOhEnmGuvLoMZee5O4U/s1600-h/kevinruddwithpope.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 262px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBAAvLdtp4ljODNml6bpLvc3Ze0z3dCA6sZ2Rsb8W2aNBNJ2YUC1T46_o7QKspXvSeFaBv4bl7LYPayf-tOwn9g1ExncCyTakTGMJtwc1rlg_JWCzhzoqQZGEijOhEnmGuvLoMZee5O4U/s400/kevinruddwithpope.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5358448011138796210" /></a><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">(Above: on the right Pope Rudd issues a blessing to the commentariat columnists of the world, with a particular benediction to Janet Albrechtsen. On the left is some kind of parish priest god botherer, name unknown at time of writing).</span><div><br /><div>You might recollect where Janet Albrechtsen was during John Howard's sordid dance with the Exclusive Brethren, a pernicious cult destructive of the family values he purported to hold, and now with its paws in the funding of private religious schools.<div><br /></div><div>I don't. You might recollect where Janet Albrechtsen stood when John Howard and Peter Costello went off to sing along with the clap happy crowd at Hillsong. I don't.</div><div><br /></div><div>You might even wonder what she had to say when only this year Peter Costello issued his fatuous Australia Day message to a bunch of fundie Victorian loons who subsequently claimed that the Victorian bushfires were the result of God's response to abortion law reforms. I share your sense of wonder.</div><div><br /></div><div>You might even wonder where she is when Senator Steve Fielding trails his Family First religious convictions behind him like a blaze of glory - especially when he seeks an audience with Al Gore to soothe his doubts as to the reality of climate change. Isn't that a little like asking the anti-Christ for an explanation of the reality of heaven? Seeing as how Tim regularly tells me Al Gore knows nothing about science. Which makes Fielding's grandstanding a prattling befuddled kind of religiosity and knavery.</div><div><br /></div><div>But in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/janetalbrechtsen/index.php/theaustralian/comments/pm_proves_a_convert_to_the_politics_of_faith/">PM proves a convert to the politics of faith,</a></span> we're left with no doubt about what she thinks of Rudd's regular display of Christian piety - it gets up her nose.</div><div><br /></div><div>Which is about the first time I've thought there was a useful purpose in Rudd's Christian posturing.</div><div><br /></div><div>Apart from her complaint that Rudd has turned into a public Christian - a complaint I can't ever remember reading her make about Peter Costello - she has an even more heinous charge:</div><div><br /></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> Midway through his term as Prime Minister, whatever else one thinks of Rudd, he has proven to be a political operator of the highest order. He is a master of political manipulation.<br /></span><br /><div>Learned well he did from the master. You know, John Howard. But now it's a crime to be good at the game? </div><div><br /></div><div>Well if you're on the wrong side. It's a bit like watching the toads demolish the cockroaches. Sure we all love the skills involved in the game, but not if it means the toads winning. Fuck that notion that what's good for the game is greater than the particular result. You can already feel Albrechtsen bunkering down, settling into the bomb shelter, thinking my god, another four years of Kevin.</div><div><br /></div><div>Which is why she does her best to tag him on the subject of religion.</div><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Under John Howard, any conservative MP who touted their religious beliefs was consistently treated by the political cognoscenti with derision and not a little suspicion. Books such as Marion Maddox’s God Under Howard claimed religion had been co-opted for sinister political purposes by conservative politicians. This was a hot topic for discussion. However, the sort of cynicism that informed much of the commentary about Howard’s apparent embrace of the religious Right is missing in action these days. Yet no Australian prime minister has used religion for such overtly political purposes as Rudd.</span><br /><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>Except John Howard. Learned well he did at the feet of the master.</div><div><br /></div><div>Because Howard and Costello and Tony Abbott consistently displayed their faith (or in Howard's case his faith that faith would deliver him votes) as a dog whistling trawling to the electorate. And when it worked the pack of commentariat columnists thought it a jolly fine thing, shoring up western civilization as we know it against deviant perverts, secular liberals and rampant Islamics.</div><div><br /></div><div>But the funny thing is that to make her charge stick about Rudd displaying his religion, Albrechtsen has to do the time warp, and go back to the days before he became PM - discussing the God factor in a May 2005 interview on <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Compass</span>, and publishing an essay on <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Faith in Politics </span>in October 2006:</div><div><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">During that Compass interview in 2005, Gillard castigated Tony Abbott and then deputy prime minister John Anderson “for putting matters of faith more on their sleeve” for political purposes. Much of the media agreed with Gillard. What would she—and they—make of Rudd’s 5000-word <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Faith in Politics</span> essay in October 2006 when Rudd openly touted his religious fervour, writing at length about German theologian and pastor Bonhoeffer, the social gospel and his Christian faith? Not much. A more intellectually honest and genuinely sceptical press gallery might have explored Rudd’s expedient embrace of religion back then. It may have asked why Rudd’s various “convictions” seem to appear on his sleeve at only the most politically opportune moment. They didn’t.<br /><br />And they still haven’t.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>Now here's the tortured logic. Way back in her column, Albrechtsen has to admit that Rudd can legitimately claim religion has always been a part of his life - born a Catholic, shifting to the Uniting Church, ending up an Anglican, and just loving it when he can hand over some dinkum Aussie wine to the Pope.</div><div><br /></div><div>So how is it an expedient embrace? No, the thing that gets up her nose is that Rudd seems to be getting away with what John Howard did all the time:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> Had Howard written such an essay, the intelligentsia would have whined about a breakdown in the separation of church and state. By contrast, the silence on Rudd and religion grows more baffling as his politicisation of God grows.</span><br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="">Memo to Janet. Shock, revelation. God is political. Or at least his (or her if you will, you feminists) representatives are, not having seen god cast a vote at the last election.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">During the Compass interview, the narrator noted that “Kevin is wary of outward displays of religious piety, so pictures of him worshipping and praying were off limits”. Now, Rudd frequently does doorstops with the press the moment he steps outside a church on Sundays, perfect footage for the Sunday news bulletins. Now, there are photographs of him and his wife praying.<br /><br />The PM is fortunate the media has extended to him the sort of long honeymoon that even the most amorous newlyweds never manage.</span><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Well yes, and you can just imagine the fun the media would have if they turned up on the Sunday outside church and Rudd told them all to fuck off. No, it suits them, and it suits him, and so the pieties in Australian life continue as one kind of conservative takes over from another.</div><div><br /></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> When Rudd struck out at media treatment of him in recent weeks—particularly at News Limited newspapers—it was clear he had grown too accustomed to media lapdogs. That is especially apparent in the media’s feeble refusal to explore Rudd’s religious opportunism.<br /><br />If the media chooses to look, it may find our man in the Lodge is so full of hubris he uses his religious views for some particularly base political purposes. Bonhoeffer would hardly approve of that.<br /></span><br /><div>Of course John Howard has already proven that you can't attack a politician when he espouses Christianity, or even when he does a dance with a cult like the Exclusive Brethren. It just doesn't fly. The religious lobby still cuts a rug in the modern world. Which leaves poor old Albrechtsen hyper ventilating in the corner.</div><div><br /></div><div>But there's a deal to be done here. If Albrechtsen spends a few columns deploring the use of religious convictions on the conservative side of politics - damning Tony Abbott and his coat tailing of Catholicism, and tearing into his new book, ripping into that dummy Steve Fielding and his family first values, deploring the decay of secularism in politics by both sides - she'd certainly get an audience amongst secularists. </div><div><br /></div><div>Heck, why stop there? Why not a regular spray of articles showing how useless and divisive religion is in the post-modern world. Not just Islam, but all forms - Christian and Judaic for starters, but let's not forget the Hindus and every other kind of pie in the sky show.</div><div><br /></div><div>But when it's just a whine about how Rudd is doing what Howard did for years, and he's doing it well enough to get re-elected, there's a smug satisfaction that at last she's getting to choke on the wafer like secularists did during the Howard years. </div><div><br /></div><div>But wait, there's even more bad news for Albrechtsen. Not only does the pope meet with the likes of Rudd, it seems Benedict XVI might be going socialist in his latest encyclical <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Caritas in Veritate</span> (and it's 30,000 words long, so it must be right):</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">... a great surprise in Benedict's encyclical is the way he highlights Pope Paul VI's 1967 encyclical, Development of Peoples, as the most significant Catholic document about the ethics needed to confront current global perils and poverty. Pope Paul's urgent call to action stirred Catholic social reform movements mightily, especially in developing countries, where most Catholics now live.<br /><br />Benedict wants to inject renewed commitment into the global struggle for social justice and human wellbeing as "the heart of the Christian social message". Neo-conservatives in the US and elsewhere will be very upset that Benedict has, like preceding popes, recommitted the Church to engage more vigorously in the struggle for social justice as part of its essential mission. Leading Catholic neo-cons Michael Novak and George Weigel have been prodigious in extolling US free-market capitalism as the embodiment of Catholic social principles. Weigel has now protested that the Pope has been conned by justice and peace circles in the Vatican.</span><br /></div><div>(there's more here at <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/popes-worthy-plea-up-against-market-forces-20090713-diq4.html">Pope's worthy plea up against market forces</a></span>).</div><div><br /></div><div>Tony Abbott, Kevin Rudd, and the pope, and only Janet Albrechtsen to man the pumps and clean out the bilge. But don't worry Janet, I'm right behind you, and thank the lord you offered to go first ...</div><div><br /></div><div>Just remember one thing. God is political. Some even suspect he's the ultimate politician. He knows how to spin and he knows how to offer pie in the sky ...</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">(Below: poor Tony Abbott, clutching a photo while Kevin Rudd gets to drop off Aussie plonk in Rome. Where's the justice in that? Oh my lord why have you forsaken me? Heli Heli lema sabacthani hoc est Deus meus, Deus meus, quid dereliquisti me?)</span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8vW3_oO4Ea6mVElEsYrghCjSMs-3An8iQrCHJsuC4y6h5QyyKq_UuZsDrJTJUJoNyTPxki4Eqcw_C37OK-9rcJvQ9dSFHKXhcWYdfvJudRbJypII8NdG9DiqQSCCvpO_I27dZVEQ-ZZ0/s1600-h/tony+abbottwithpope.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 232px; height: 282px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8vW3_oO4Ea6mVElEsYrghCjSMs-3An8iQrCHJsuC4y6h5QyyKq_UuZsDrJTJUJoNyTPxki4Eqcw_C37OK-9rcJvQ9dSFHKXhcWYdfvJudRbJypII8NdG9DiqQSCCvpO_I27dZVEQ-ZZ0/s400/tony+abbottwithpope.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5358448016691251362" /></a><br /></div></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-620033997567463526.post-69737856107075983502009-07-14T21:46:00.007+10:002009-07-15T07:28:47.027+10:00Tony Abbott, family values, private dicks and Chinatown<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIqzwthmMk1y4tmm-myWwNOBkKYr71oPzcEpdnq3i8haYpr_EGWhoRS_D-G_r1ltFcEjP5sTBUo1_01EVlpolgKG0ZqjHl4e8ZiS_E4OwiWZySIQyKsWhAUQtVYjFMuF6CSVWEcmc9tlE/s1600-h/chinatown.jpeg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 171px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIqzwthmMk1y4tmm-myWwNOBkKYr71oPzcEpdnq3i8haYpr_EGWhoRS_D-G_r1ltFcEjP5sTBUo1_01EVlpolgKG0ZqjHl4e8ZiS_E4OwiWZySIQyKsWhAUQtVYjFMuF6CSVWEcmc9tlE/s400/chinatown.jpeg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5358287042404624962" /></a><br /><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">(Above: Jack Nicholson in </span>Chinatown,<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> back in the good old days when you could enhance family relationships and values by having a daughter and a sister all in one).</span></div><div><br /></div><div>We were shattered to learn of the reaction of the private dick industry to Tony Abbott's grand strategy to re-introduce a "fault" clause into divorce proceedings.<div><br /></div><div>Rick Feneley has penned an hysterical, outrageous portrait, an extremist view of the consequences of the Mr. Abbott's proposal, in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/lifematters/private-eyes-dread-a-return-to-infidelity-on-camera-20090713-ditv.html">Private eyes dread a return to infidelity on camera</a></span>.</div><div><br /></div><div>I mean, what do you make of an anecdote like this?</div><div><br /></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Picture this: a husband so desperate to escape an unhappy marriage that he commits fraud to "expose" himself in an act of infidelity. He hires a prostitute to act as his lover and a private investigator to burst into a motel room and photograph them in flagrante delicto.<br /><br />Australia's private investigators can recall the boom days of a seedy, sordid business, when a spouse would go to such extremes to get a divorce. </span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>I mean really, no mad monk comments please. We're above that kind of language, and besides this was most uncommon. In the old days it was much more sensible and simple just to embark on an affair, and have a private dick catch you in the act because your spouse had sooled the hound on to you, and you didn't know the bugger was on to you and had the latest state of the art "flash bulb" technology hooked up to his camera (no implication should be read into the wording of 'hooked up').</div><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">"Heaven help us," says Warren Mallard, managing director of Sydney's Lyonswood Investigations and Forensic Group. He does not want want a return to the "ugliest days of all" for marriage in Australia.<br /><br />"People had to be caught in a compromising position. That required evidence, so there were a lot of photos of ankles wrapped around ears, for want of a better expression. It was not work that investigators relished."<br /><br />The humiliating pictures could be tendered to the Divorce Court. "But it got to the point where people wanting a divorce would commit fraud and deception and 're-enact' the offence of infidelity - hire a prostitute, hire an investigator, to catch them in the act." Even in cases of amicable divorce, couples agreed to such fabrications.</span><br /><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>What spoilsports. What cynics and ne'er do wells. What a pack of mean minded heartless scoundrels. What's wrong with an ankle wrapped around an ear, for want of a better expression. (Though if you want a better expression why not a man thing in a woman thing, or ringing the bell or hiding the salami or playing doctor or santa or dropping anchor or clubbing the kitten?)</div><div><br /></div><div>Not only would it be great business for the private dick industry, it'd be great fun for tabloids, already running short of material as Republican governors evade the cameras and head off to South America for their fun.</div><div><br /></div><div>The wretched Mallard - a name that qualifies him for a corner of loon pond - babbles on about privacy laws, and the difficulties of barging into motel rooms and people's houses.</div><div><br /></div><div>Dearie me, is this in the spirit of the great J.J. "Jake" Gittes, always ready to tear a page out of a public document with the help of a ruler and a cough.</div><div><br /></div><div>Thank the lord that John Bracey, president of the Australian Institute of Private Detectives, can see a way forward, with private dicks on standby, at the ready, to take instructions, gather evidence, and establish in a court of law the evidence of spousal adultery, contriving with lawyers - at a reasonable expense - to establish guilt, mortification, lashings, and sordid revelations. But there is one minor catch:</div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> "And if there is a law that infidelity is grounds for divorce, we can't have another privacy law that prevents us from gathering evidence of the infidelity. It would be lunacy."<br /></span><br /><div>Not a problem. Let's just change the useless privacy laws! </div><div><br /></div><div>Now some might think the mad monk's proposal (sorry monks of the world) is the actual lunacy, so bereft is he of understanding the way the world works these days, so much in love with the conservative wing of the Catholic church that he simply can't remember what it was like in the old days (though you'd think that the return of a possible love child would have given him at least a gentle prod in that direction).</div><div><br /></div><div>Sadly Mr. Bracey suspects Mr. Abbott's proposal will be buried, which is ever so unsatisfying given that it would be so much better if Mr. Abbott had been interred in the same place as his social engineering - somewhere dank, dark and festering, and possibly infested with vampires or zombies.</div><div><br /></div><div>But I'm pleased to learn that the work for the private dick game now lies in family law and custody disputes and adequacy of care for children and abuse and refusals to pay maintenance.</div><div>They've moved on from people who fuck up their marriage to people who fuck over their children.</div><div><br /></div><div>I guess it's a kind of progress.</div><div><br /></div><div>Oh and maybe you missed the piece about <span class="Apple-style-span" style=""><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.smh.com.au/national/abbotts-family-values-20090711-dgmr.html">Abbott's family value</a></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.smh.com.au/national/abbotts-family-values-20090711-dgmr.html">s</a></span>, wherein he played down rumours he was seeking the leadership of the opposition:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Australian couples have the option of being married under a new law that would make it more difficult to get a divorce as part of a push to strengthen traditional family values by conservative federal politician Tony Abbott.<br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br />The outspoken Liberal frontbencher wants a return to a fault-based system of divorce similar to the old Matrimonial Causes Act that provided grounds for divorce, including adultery, cruelty, habitual drunkenness or separation for more than five years. Mr Abbott's proposed new law would run alongside current legislation that allows people to divorce after a 12-month separation.<br /><br />The strengthening of the institution of marriage is part of Mr Abbott's bid to ramp up a campaign to bring conservatism back to mainstream Liberal Party politics.</span><br /><br />Bring it on I say. Bring on the new world of conservative values. Let conservatives "come out" instead of hiding behind the bushes as they did in the Bush and Howard years. Let their wacky values meander in the sunlight. Let them be as visible as gay folk at the Mardi Gras, since they seem to have hid their light under the haystack this last decade or so.</div><div><br /></div><div>And make Tony Abbott leader of the Liberals now!</div><div><br /></div><div>Not going to happen? What kind of deviant devious plot would prevent that from happening? But I guess that'd allow Bronwyn Bishop to lean over and whisper in Tony Abbott's ear my favorite line from one of my favorite movies:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Forget it Tony, it's Chinatown.</span></div><div><br /></div><div>And if you've read Piers Akerman, you'll know all about what living in Chinatown means.</div><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsR_AgLoup__VElwChPkUN1qClzBvVamA-7mkFauoVPRoi1XDPyj2LvlaDky4YY6L1Fp_GaMMdLEUWV9YK-V4YlspefjPyN-rhhygThpKTvkrHAM_DDCtUkNUkPcRDSLlWkMCrGyRXVd4/s1600-h/chinatownwatching.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 256px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsR_AgLoup__VElwChPkUN1qClzBvVamA-7mkFauoVPRoi1XDPyj2LvlaDky4YY6L1Fp_GaMMdLEUWV9YK-V4YlspefjPyN-rhhygThpKTvkrHAM_DDCtUkNUkPcRDSLlWkMCrGyRXVd4/s400/chinatownwatching.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5358287043829423394" /></a><div><br /></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsm0ysNwY_nkbzglhn2Ca6r2LysM2RekUCLHAUNLfJWA8giJunWktvm-gJwb_J7MJPqGFjQDto3o6VseJdNm1rrKgCQWF2eQUzjtBDM7N1UAhJH3xgUEbRHhyMirXWlnvm_uJBKvJZIXo/s1600-h/adultery2.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 222px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsm0ysNwY_nkbzglhn2Ca6r2LysM2RekUCLHAUNLfJWA8giJunWktvm-gJwb_J7MJPqGFjQDto3o6VseJdNm1rrKgCQWF2eQUzjtBDM7N1UAhJH3xgUEbRHhyMirXWlnvm_uJBKvJZIXo/s400/adultery2.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5358287048382550146" /></a></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-620033997567463526.post-36087473842179226052009-07-14T20:01:00.004+10:002009-07-14T20:23:17.834+10:00Bronwyn Bishop, the freaks at Bundanoon, and a burqa led economic recovery<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9dABFL-vNHeTsn6CjE4IyIp_tYG5caWYjZtcrVeZ_QnDDMdEsbwVSnj3RVjb4cwaknOCStTK5w_Cf2PuAn3ry7xQCCTB9Orpp45PHYZb19bQOjrJwY_T9jDrsGr0EvE-nuvXd475PzaA/s1600-h/bishop.jpeg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 310px; height: 232px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9dABFL-vNHeTsn6CjE4IyIp_tYG5caWYjZtcrVeZ_QnDDMdEsbwVSnj3RVjb4cwaknOCStTK5w_Cf2PuAn3ry7xQCCTB9Orpp45PHYZb19bQOjrJwY_T9jDrsGr0EvE-nuvXd475PzaA/s400/bishop.jpeg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5358257955640969602" /></a><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">(Above: Bronwyn Bishop glaring and dressing in style).</span><br /><div><br /></div><div>Lordy, lordy, lordy.<div><br /></div><div>By their sins shall they be known.</div><div><br /></div><div>Here's this from Bronwyn Bishop in her eloquently titled piece <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/fair-suck-of-the-water-bottle/">Fair suck of the water bottle</a></span>:</div><div><br /></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> I am pleased to see the President of France take a hard line on the burqa – that black prison of fabric from head to toe which totally obliterates the human persona of a woman. He has said it is not welcome in France.<br /><br />Perhaps the time has come to declare the burqa an instrument of harsh and unusual punishment and change the Declaration of Human Rights to have as its first statement – women are human beings not chattels.</span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Could it be that I am at one with Bishop and Sarkozy? Who was it that said god was a sick surrealist with a Salvador Dali sense of humor? How did this happen? Where did I go wrong?</span></span></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">The rest of her piece for </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="">The Punch </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">was happily as mad as a cut snake, and there was no need for me to go there, with her outrage at the banning of bottled water in Bundanoon - she managed to conflate the binge drinking of alcopops with the decision of the locals to use their local water supply, saying it was a sin, illogical and crazy. I guess drinking water for free as opposed to forking out a hefty premium for the pleasure of looking cool, trendy and now is a sin, crazy and illogical, but WTF has that got to do with binge drinking.</span></span></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">That piece of decepticon logic was followed by handy hints for NSW crims (kicking the crime can in the usual Liberal way), along with her desperate attempt to keep utegate alive when not one of her sentient comrades mentions it when they can instead demand immediate action against the Chinese dragon.</span></span></div><div><br /></div><div>It's lovely to see Bronnie still somewhere back in the last century while the debt truck chugs around the nation, and everybody is appalled at the lack of gumption by the government, when all the Ruddster has to do is speak Mandarin and even the gates of hell would open for him.</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">But one thing she wrote resonated with me:</span></span></div><div><br /></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> Euripidies was right – Those whom the Gods destroy they make first mad.</span><br /><br /><div>And they make them mad by making them share a prejudice with Bronnie.</div><div><br /></div><div>Okay, I'm up for it. Bring on the foot binding, bring on the burqa. As D said in his eloquent note:</div><div><br /></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">But what about all those people whose jobs depend on the manufacture of the burqas, supplying the burqas and delivering the product and finally selling the product? Who will think of them?</span><br /><br /><div>Yep, it's time for a burqa led economic revival in this country. And I vote that Bronnie show the way.</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">(Below: Bronnie on the beach. Note the extensive use of clothing while the men display their lustful inciting love handled naked bodies. Can we learn something from this image?)</span></div><div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFMJOsvdV1TdLpGb9llyDMk-4z8WJrEmM7qRMr5Vzaz0lvpBj7adp-nTymYfkyPzcYK9oKGM7au0x_8GFCROcMQASJKSsB48ydbtQF1jucKS3wnXMxiX8Tjt5WHJZVDjgnq0zVBo9qfyU/s1600-h/bronwynbishop.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 284px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFMJOsvdV1TdLpGb9llyDMk-4z8WJrEmM7qRMr5Vzaz0lvpBj7adp-nTymYfkyPzcYK9oKGM7au0x_8GFCROcMQASJKSsB48ydbtQF1jucKS3wnXMxiX8Tjt5WHJZVDjgnq0zVBo9qfyU/s400/bronwynbishop.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5358257958373436866" /></a><br /></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-620033997567463526.post-60671879376634718962009-07-14T10:39:00.006+10:002009-07-14T11:44:31.267+10:00Piers Akerman, the Chinese, barbarians at the gate, the opium wars, history and a hammer for a head<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5NiSw0BjbbFtB7b_UrWYHZ6rvuxpmrw6qhboezDXv2ZCow6jQt8_O1R-Xu_-8Q881QDaaeczbO_CyjXlj8ojs5eY-5w_soAlA387NkrSWcf6Grp_7Za_K9Cf7xxlRzzyrC_xUmxMki1g/s1600-h/LambingFlatRollUpBanner.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 232px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5NiSw0BjbbFtB7b_UrWYHZ6rvuxpmrw6qhboezDXv2ZCow6jQt8_O1R-Xu_-8Q881QDaaeczbO_CyjXlj8ojs5eY-5w_soAlA387NkrSWcf6Grp_7Za_K9Cf7xxlRzzyrC_xUmxMki1g/s400/LambingFlatRollUpBanner.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5358121688543851378" /></a><br />And so we come to the strange and disturbing case of Piers Akerman's fear and loathing of the Chinese.<div><br /></div><div>His latest rant - <a href="http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/piersakerman/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/rudd_stymied_as_the_barbarians_shut_the_gate/"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Rudd stymied as the barbarians shut the gate</span></a> - would be worthy of a digger on the Australian goldfields in the nineteenth century. Indeedy, he even manages to revive the term celestial, a word you don't find being used outside the muckraking that inspired the Lambing Flat riots in 1861.</div><div><br /></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> As Peng discovered and Hu is now learning, after 177 years the Chinese are still adhering to the established laws of the Celestial Empire and ignoring international covenants which apply in the more civilised modern nations.<br /></span><br /><div>Peng is of course James Peng, who spent six years in a Chinese prison, and Hu is the latest Chinese-born Australian businessman to find himself in trouble in the Middle Kingdom (see, I can do the Sons of Heaven gibberish as well as Piers).</div><div><br /></div><div>But enough of that, let's get back to the history lesson that Piers provides us so we can better understand the fiendish nature of the Chinese:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Not withstanding the muscular actions of the seafaring door openers of the British East India Company, it is the Chinese who could now best be described as barbarians in the matter of both Peng and Hu.<br /><br />It is Chinese enterprises which enjoy the support of the weight of the state, despite the best efforts of publicists to claim the state ensures businesses in which it holds an interest (all mainland Chinese businesses) operate at arm’s length from the political wing.<br /></span></div><div><br /></div><div>Muscular actions? Perhaps they learned too well the lesson of the British East India company, which happened to be fuck them any which way you can in whatever direction you can manage.</div><div><br /></div><div>But what you ask about the Opium Wars. Why were they fought? Did it happen perchance to involve the British government sorting out the Chinese so that their businessmen could get on with the business of screwing the Chinese?</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> For all the nastiness of the opium trade, the merchants from Britain and the other European nations which opened China to the world did mightily assist in the modernisation of a feudal state.</span><br /><br /></div><div>Nastiness? Ah that'd be the couple of wars that were fought so that the British smuggling of opium into China from India would be tolerated by the Chinese government, and the noble private sector British East India company could flog its crap to a hooked nation. Well I guess trying to turn a nation into a bunch of dependent junkies is some kind of modernization.</div><div><br /></div><div>The first war prompted the newly elected MP William Gladstone to wonder if there had ever been <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">a war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated to cover this country with permanent disgrace, I do not know.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>We could go on through the despicable litany of misbegotten western imperial behavior in China, while not forgetting the contribution of Japan in the second world war, or mentioning the determined desire of the British government to hold on to Hong Kong right up to 1997, after having first got hold of the territory after China's defeat in the second Opium war and the signing of the Convention of Peking.</div><div><br /></div><div>Yes, tough lessons and the Chinese learned them well. But now we have our very own colonial Colonel Fawcett telling us how it was done in the old days, and how presumably diplomacy should be conducted these days. Quoting Jim Spigelman, Akerman recites an anecdote about how Hugh Hamilton Lindsay had the Daotai's measure in his quest for the opening of Chinese markets:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> He sent two tough sailors ashore to deliver a petition to the Daotai requesting he rethink his order. After knocking on the locked entrance gates of the principal public building in Shanghai and receiving no joy, the worthies applied their shoulders to the barriers and shook them open.<br /><br />Lindsay then stood up to the Daotai, refusing to take back his petition once it had been read and copied, refusing to accept a reply which used terminology of rejection not just refusal, and rejecting the use of the word translated as “barbarian”.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>This is of course so Akerman can brood about the word barbarian and its shocking deployment in relation to westerners. Actually the anecdote deserves its proper re-telling:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">On June 20, 1832, with symbolism bordering on the vulgar, two English sailors from the Lord Amherst shouldered open the locked entrance gates of the major public building in Shanghai so that their commander could present a petition demanding that the city be opened to British trade. As the commander, Hugh Hamilton Lindsay, reported to his superiors in the British East India Company: "They shook them off their hinges and brought them down with a great clatter." However, conscious of British standards of proper behaviour, he took pains to report that, of course, he had knocked first. </span><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>And Akerman misses the point of the anecdote, deliberately of course, perhaps because he could never see the point of knocking first:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Reacting to the use of the word barbarian, Lindsay protested: "The affront is intolerable, for by such conduct the respectability of my own country would suffer. The great English nation has never been a barbarian nation, but a foreign nation."<br /><br />A document was produced which referred to him as an "English trader". Even though the Shanghai public never saw it, Lindsay was placated. However, his conduct was not calculated to convince any Chinese that the term was inappropriate. </span><br /><br /></div><div>Why? What did Lindsay get up to¿ Well I guess in much the same way as you might take a dim view of somebody deploying a false name and fake occupation:</div><div><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Lindsay and his interpreter Charles Gutzlaff also made their reports, which were published in England and became very influential. Lindsay was particularly critical of the deceptive conduct of the local officials, referring to their "petty and degrading duplicity". He said this without a trace of embarrassment about the fact that, in order to hide his association with the East India Company, Lindsay had given a false name and claimed to be a private trader blown off course on a voyage from Bengal to Japan. Gutzlaff, who had also given a false name and translated everything that Lindsay said, had spent some of his time distributing Chinese-language excerpts from the Bible and certain religious tracts with such titles as "A Tract against Lying"; "A Tract against Gambling" and "A Tract in Praise of Honesty".<br /></span></div><div><br /></div><div>A tract against lying and dissembling hey. What a pity Akerman doesn't read this kind of tract on a regular basis:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Lindsay was adamant as to the model of effective European conduct. "Compliance," he reported, "begets insolence; opposition and defiance produces servility and friendly professions." It apparently never crossed his mind that he was simply being humoured in order to speed his departure. </span><br /><br /></div><div>And so we have in Akerman the Lindsay of his day. Well even his master Rupert found things tricky in Beijing and when you cite the lessons of history, you should be careful:</div><div><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">In his report, Lindsay's strongest contempt was reserved for his assessment of Chinese military prowess. He dismissed the war junks he saw as "wretched and inefficient". He thought the army, with its antiquated and decrepit armaments, would be despatched by one-tenth the number of European troops.<br /><br />Gutzlaff, the missionary, plainly shared the low value placed on military virtues by the Chinese scholar gentry and its difficulty in accepting the proposition that great skill in the art of killing others was a mark of a superior civilisation. He seemed to understand the Chinese position when he said:<br /><br />From the long peace which China has enjoyed, all their military works have fallen into decay. They even seem anxious that all should crumble into dust and that wars should be blotted from remembering ... they detest bloodshed and have generally made the greatest sacrifices to prevent it. We attach no blame to their cowardice [a word he clearly used bearing his European audience in mind] but hope that while they continue to be pacific they will cease to be overbearing towards other nations who have power to humble their arrogance. </span><br /><br /></div><div>Ah yes, how things have changed. After being done over, time and again, the Chinese worked out that they needed to get up a bunch of weaponry and a huge army, and then see what happens when the barbarians turn up at the gates and politely knock.</div><div><br /></div><div>Well done Britain and Japan and every other nation that congregated in Hong Kong in search of the elusive Chinese market - sell every one a bottle opener and you'll be a billionaire my lad - and while we're at it Akkers, why not revive the opium trade? Oh sorry, we already have, by arranging for it to flourish in Afghanistan.</div><div><br /></div><div>So what's the history lesson for today folks? There are barbarians at the gate, and they carry greetings from Akerman. But beware an ignorance of the implications, subtleties and nuances of history, lest you stumble around in the circus like a clown who can't find his way to the ring ...</div><div><br /></div><div>Oh as for the rest of Akkers' column, it's a standard dumbed down gloss of the situation of Hu from the perspective of the outraged Liberal party and columnist commentariat, which if read by Chinese officials would do more harm than good, but there you go, when you've spent a lifetime kicking the Chinese and communist can, what else can you do. </div><div><br /></div><div>When all you've got for a head is a hammer, everything will always look like a nail ...</div><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxtIdfMiyS5ZPWAOWC8WT-YNPWxBBC6dw25VBOJGPd9Kl8CAr9fxkFZR3680NxGNaPqn_MYtaE3Amc2et5-9JqAHB-YPZuhepY2aELXSv9wb_H98QpYMG_wdhndi8-PSt1hnaywNIyELY/s1600-h/anti_chinese_toon.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 241px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxtIdfMiyS5ZPWAOWC8WT-YNPWxBBC6dw25VBOJGPd9Kl8CAr9fxkFZR3680NxGNaPqn_MYtaE3Amc2et5-9JqAHB-YPZuhepY2aELXSv9wb_H98QpYMG_wdhndi8-PSt1hnaywNIyELY/s400/anti_chinese_toon.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5358122413912153794" /></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-620033997567463526.post-23780539464050878542009-07-14T07:46:00.007+10:002009-07-14T08:56:59.822+10:00Gerard Henderson, John Howard, John Howard, John Howard, the basic wage and a pox on the workers<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDECILvKzePCNb_ahBbiJoiwXsueYVgNf0CDGkVTUyn4X0UKpD363Zn9zeWMDRGAx4uXcsx1znuHif3Qaklv8QUrxzrY5TssqNey2e5K_kPrVsIjoh3a_hKwZVfK6pSyC4vHNokzJBEsQ/s1600-h/basic+wage.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 250px; height: 341px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDECILvKzePCNb_ahBbiJoiwXsueYVgNf0CDGkVTUyn4X0UKpD363Zn9zeWMDRGAx4uXcsx1znuHif3Qaklv8QUrxzrY5TssqNey2e5K_kPrVsIjoh3a_hKwZVfK6pSyC4vHNokzJBEsQ/s400/basic+wage.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5358078778548662562" /></a><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">(Above: we have no evidence that Gerard Henderson or his father or his grandfather wrote the caption for this Bulletin cartoon 16th October 1919: The minimum wage: "All damn fine, but are we going to be guaranteed a minimum of bad conditions, so's we can pay without going further into debt?")<br /></span><div><br /></div><div>Today is Tuesday and yippie yi yo, it was bet collecting time.<div><br /></div><div>Admittedly it was from a poseur dilettante who had no idea what they were talking about but you take your fun where you find it.</div><div><br /></div><div>The poor lad couldn't believe me when I explained that reading that prattling Polonius, that desiccated coconut, commentariat columnist Gerard Henderson, would invariably within any column on any subject involve a reference to the Howard Years. Usually with a golden hue, or a rainbow like quality, or a halo affixed firmly to the memory.</div><div><br /></div><div>It was like watching Old Faithful. Sure in the moments leading up to the gushing of the geyser you might have your anxieties and doubts. You'd turn up wondering whether the name was a trick, and given the frequency of the eruption (between 45 and 125 minutes) you might begin to think the epic trip might have turned into a curate's egg, with the geyser suddenly falling silent.</div><div><br /></div><div>And then there's a whooshing and a wheezing and a spurting, and up comes the heated water, as reliable as ever.</div><div><br /></div><div>It's the only way to get through some of Henderson's dry as dust columns. </div><div><br /></div><div>In another life he writes a media column that flails about at others with a ponderous inaccuracy and a pretense at liveliness, but I guess when you're a short odds geyser in your own columns, you need a funeral director like solemnity to carry the day. And of course to show respect to the departed leader.</div><div><br /></div><div>In<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/fair-work-makes-no-sense-in-gfc-20090713-dir0.html?page=-1"> Fair Work makes no sense in GFC,</a></span> we have several Howard citations. The first references unemployment, noting that when Bob Hawke became PM, the unemployment rate was around 10 per cent:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> When the Howard Government was defeated in 2007, it was around 4 per cent and there was a shortage of labour in significant parts of the country.<br /></span></div><div><br /></div><div>Thanks to labour market deregulation of course, nothing to do with digging up the country and shipping it overseas, especially to those filthy, fiendish Chinese, with their tendency to lock up Australian executives at a drop of a hat. Resources boom? Western Australia? Shortage of labor? Que?</div><div><br /></div><div>But Henderson is so reliable, his next reference to Howard delivers a triple dunk whammy:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">It is clear, however, that the commissioners and bureaucrats at Fair Work Australia will play an increasing role in regulating labour markets. What's more, Fair Work legislation restores many trade union privileges abolished under Howard's Work Choices legislation. And the overwhelming majority of academics covering the field - many have never run a business or worked in the private sector - can be expected to appear in the media supporting Fair Work Australia.</span><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>Yep, there's John Howard, and academics who've never run a business or worked in the private sector and evil trade unions peddling privilege for indolent workers, bludgers who want to destroy Australia.</div><div><br /></div><div>Which leads me to wonder exactly how private sector Henderson is. According to his brief Wikipedia entry<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_Henderson"> here</a></span>, he's worked as an academic, in the Commonwealth Department of Industrial Relations, and was on the staff of both Malcolm Fraser and John Howard. But his main gig has been executive director of the Sydney Institute, a privately funded current affairs forum and think tank which relies on corporate sponsorship for a crust in this difficult and troubled world.</div><div><br /></div><div>Which I guess is why his column is a tedious mix of personal recollections and pro corporate propaganda.</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">I was employed in the award enforcement section of the Commonwealth Department of Industrial Relations in the early 1980s. It became evident to me that the rigidity of the centralised industrial relations system was actually creating unemployment since there was not sufficient flexibility to make it possible for employers to retain workers at a time of recession. My experience as a public servant led me to condemn the prevailing system in an essay The IR Club, published in Quadrant in September 1983.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>Dearie me Polonius, you've been prattling since 1983 about the importance of stripping away workers' rights and indulgences and bonuses and perks. Some things never change for the Old Faithful's of the world, first the bubbling and then the eruption, over and over and over.</div><div><br /></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> In the latter half of the 1980s, the increasing call for industrial relations reform was led by Costello, then a barrister, and by Howard within the Liberal Party. After the recession of the early 1990s, Keating introduced significant reforms which saw the decline of the IR Club and the move to enterprise agreements.<br /></span><br /><div>A hit, a palpable hit. Another reference to Howard. And to Peter Costello. Both lawyers. Funny that academics with no experience of the private sector are uninformed while a bunch of lawyers kneecapping the workers are wunderkind for the commentariat.</div><div><br /></div><div>But Henderson isn't just content to hark back to the recent past, his purvey takes in the old days:</div><div><br /></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Gillard is a long-time admirer of Henry Bournes Higgins, who established the Australian basic wage just over a century ago. Like Gillard, Higgins was full of the best intentions towards workers. But his Harvester Judgment of 1907 priced workers out of jobs and was substantially altered over the next two decades.</span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>Well yes, and I've always regretted those labor laws that removed children from the business of climbing up chimneys and sweeping out the soot, since they were ideally sized for the job and were given a fair rate of pay for the work (and as they often died of lung related diseases required no form of socialistic medicine for their care). </div><div><br /></div><div>And you might argue that it was Hugh Victor McKay's stupidity at Sunshine Harvester and his implacable opposition to doing any kind of deal with trade unions that led to the court case, and the Harvester judgment, but why actually spend any time on the specifics and merits of the case in question when you can just pluck a view out of the air, and perhaps even blame it for the great depression (which coincidentally occurred only a a decade after the judgment, say no more).</div><div><br /></div><div>Anyway, it strikes me that there's been way too much mollycoddling of workers, what with the bizarre notion of the eight hour day and the five day week and a couple of days as a weekend, when in fact the best way to deploy the cattle (and get them away from the trough and off the teat) is to cut their working hours, junk their shifts and scrap overtime. Call them in at a moment's notice and then send them away when they've run out of blood and fresh blood is required.</div><div><br /></div><div>A return to the vigorous opportunism and adventurism of the Victorian days would far better suit business in the perilous times of the GFC than the rampant socialism of that redheaded Gillard (when she could have had any color out of the bottle, she chose red! Say no more).</div><div><br /></div><div>What we're facing is the return of an Industrial Relations Club which will set wages, enjoy support from journalists covering this area, and bankrupt business. Well when we say journalists, let's exclude Gerard Henderson and other commentariat columnists.</div><div><br /></div><div>There's more of course - including praise for the Fair Pay Commission refusing to raise the minimum hourly rate of pay, without wondering why we have a Fair Pay Commission whose business it is to set a fair rate of pay, much as Henry Bournes Higgins determined an Australian basic wage way back when.</div><div><br /></div><div>Bring back the days of frugal comfort I say. Why seven shillings a day should be enough for any working man with wife and child, and be damned to those who say otherwise.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div>But enough. Listening to Henderson gush like clockwork is a bit like listening to the ACTU's Sharan Burrow babble on about how hard the workers are done by. Sure, it's a fair show of steam gushing into the air, as predictable as the steps in the mating dance of the bower bird, but sadly in contrast to those natural phenomena, as dull and as tepid and rank and malodorous as ditch water. <br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Meantime, we'll keep a close look watch on Henderson's special pleading column, and try to fleece a few more unwary punters of a buck or two. Still never doubt the usefulness of Old Faithful. Comes the day he fails to mention Howard is likely to be a sign that the rapture is imminent ... </div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">(Below: old faithful and buffalo roaming and give me a home, but no overtime or other fringe benefits. Yet another irrelevant image in the proud long standing tradition established a month ago by The Punch).</span></div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYuNgZja5EYmTWkvQRxl4DOR5fwAPylekpEme_HYuJeI46zkQ4VWHB96D8dNgjar5gMlIeN4oPZrIocdlXE7HAGtKEgevfK37xKFTnn42UbCwRrzhKU8j0coEdf__hP8k_R2n2ejOEabo/s1600-h/old_faithful_buffolo.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 281px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYuNgZja5EYmTWkvQRxl4DOR5fwAPylekpEme_HYuJeI46zkQ4VWHB96D8dNgjar5gMlIeN4oPZrIocdlXE7HAGtKEgevfK37xKFTnn42UbCwRrzhKU8j0coEdf__hP8k_R2n2ejOEabo/s400/old_faithful_buffolo.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5358079178641165522" /></a><br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-620033997567463526.post-21682114545848624382009-07-13T08:41:00.010+10:002009-07-13T12:04:27.493+10:00Paul Sheehan, Tim Winton, autoerotic asphyxiation, and the Mormon missionary<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIzp50ViqkqW53Z43Zgb4roewEg5r6s8HCvD6OCuQe30QIeHN9cS_k22mfNoEDRToaajMSKtxONGnyM7Otq-o-L1xThpks96skOrnl8aedqcq5ibsu0e9F-ClfI9v5xzyK7Kjhyphenhyphen_CVkXo/s1600-h/madonna.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 275px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIzp50ViqkqW53Z43Zgb4roewEg5r6s8HCvD6OCuQe30QIeHN9cS_k22mfNoEDRToaajMSKtxONGnyM7Otq-o-L1xThpks96skOrnl8aedqcq5ibsu0e9F-ClfI9v5xzyK7Kjhyphenhyphen_CVkXo/s400/madonna.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5357728275646351218" /></a><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">(Above: an example of this site's feeble attempts to emulate News Corp with a gratuitous shot of Madonna while trying to make a point about fetishism. Surely by now we've established our credentials for a career as a News Corp columnist?)<br /></span><div><br /></div><div>What on earth are we to make of this remark by Paul Sheehan?<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">As for the physiological explanation of the link between asphyxiation and sexual pleasure, and the psychological explanation of the urge to exploit that link, I don't know, because my curiosity has been overtaken by my recoil mechanism.</span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>That's after a column supposedly devoted to the ins and outs of autoerotic asphyxiation (<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/breathless-sex-simmers-at-the-edge-of-compulsion-20090712-dhc1.html?page=-1">Breathless sex simmers at the edge of compulsion</a></span>). Well oxygen depletion is a simple enough mechanism and as usual Wikipedia has an informative article on it and the matter in question <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erotic_asphyxiation">here</a></span>.</div><div><br /></div><div>Breath play isn't a form of kink to be recommended, because of the obvious dangers involved, but what's sublime about Sheehan's fatuous ignorance is the way he manages to blame the internet for the technique seemingly becoming commonplace, and apparently the new best way for lonely males to end their lonely days in lonely hotel rooms (but come to think of it that's on a par with his decision pleading recoil, to end his column right at the point when he could have ended his and his readers' fatuous ignorance). </div><div><br /></div><div>Yep, it's Tim Winton's fault for deploying the technique in his novel<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Miles Franklin winning</span> Breath, </span>and that reflects the baleful influence of the intertubes:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The mainstreaming of erotic asphyxiation in this novel is another element in the process of mainstreaming the values that have exploded out of the largely hidden margins of society thanks to the advent of the internet. The porn industry, more than any other, has been able to export some of its sensibilities into schools and homes, to the point of social conformity among the young.</span><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Tim Winton and the intertubes, conspiring to bring down western civilization as we know it. And shipping it into the minds of the socially conforming young.</div><div><br /></div><div>Which establishes Sheehan's ignorance - because it's been a fairly well known form of extreme sex play since composer Frantisek Kotzwara died in 1791 from erotic asphyxiation, which according to Wikipedia, is probably the first recorded case. No doubt it's due to the baleful effect of the intertubes in the eighteenth century.</div><div><br /></div><div>Perhaps the most famous twentieth century death involved Sada Abe, who killed her lover in 1936 and then cut off his testicles and carried them around in a handbag for a number of days. It became a cause celebre in Japan, featuring in any number of novels as well as films, but achieved international recognition with Nagisa Oshima's <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">In the Realm of the Senses</span>, produced in 1976.</div><div><br /></div><div>That film was widely banned, though given the associated scandal you'd have to have been a monk in a monastery to suggest the notorious show was part of the largely hidden margins of sexual life.</div><div><br /></div><div>I do remember watching it in a flea pit in Adelaide, and being amused by the number of men in raincoats who hastily exited the cinema as the tale of the mad, obsessed lovers ground to an inevitable and profoundly unerotic conclusion. Those were the days when I'd willingly surround myself with panting men in a darkened room in the interests of auteurism. </div><div><br /></div><div>Whew, thank the lord those days are gone. I mean there's sex and passion, and then there's death, which rather limits the options for experimental sex play. And then there's the swishing sound of frustrated men stomping out of a cinema stinking of sweaty unfulfilled sex, a smell worse than buttered popcorn.</div><div><br /></div><div>But I guess it was the infamous role of the internet in the nineteen seventies that should shoulder much of the blame, rather than Oshima.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Still, at least it's a change from blaming comics, which always liked to show aliens threatening evil towards scantily clad, bound or chained women, or <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Joy of Sex,</span> which in the seventies devoted a whole page to the pleasures of bondage.</div><div><br /></div><div>All the same, it seems that Sheehan is titillated by the subject, and he manages not only to conflate it with the prevelance of pornography on the intertubes, but with the safe practice of BDSM:<br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The more you learn about the subject, the worse it gets. I've been looking sideways at this for years, not wanting to know, but like other highly dubious practices, erotic asphyxiation, or asphyxiophilia, has a following within the subculture known as BDSM (bondage, discipline, sado-masochism).<br /></span></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br />In BDSM roleplay, erotic asphyxiation is known by a variety of terms such as "edgeplay" or "breathplay" and an erotic asphyxiator is sometimes called a gasper, and can use various paraphernalia including gas masks, plastic bags and bondage straps. Usually a partner is present to avert catastrophe.</span><br /><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>Well what are these other highly dubious practices which infest the world of BDSM? Sheehan doesn't go there, which is fine, because then we won't go into the highly dubious practices of safe heterosexual sex, such as glassing as foreplay and rape as a demonstration of male passion.</div><div><br /></div><div>But then Sheehan is fond of completely unfounded comments:</div><div><br /></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> The real list of such fatalities is long, and much longer than the official record. Most are men.</span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="">A long list of fatalities? Much longer than the official record? So what's he got? A couple of celebrity deaths including the recent death of David Carradine, and by implication the death of Michael Hutchence:</span></div><div><br /></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Nor is Carradine the first prominent casualty. Ever since the singer Michael Hutchence was found hanged in a hotel room in Double Bay in 1997, there has been doubt about the official cause of death, which was ruled a suicide.<br /></span><br /><div>And now it seems there's the intertube influenced Winton and his book, which brings the subject out of the closet, so to speak, so now it can be revealed that many many men have died lonely deaths in strange parts of the house or in hotels:</div><div><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">One of the characters in Breath ends up like Carradine, hanging lifeless in a closet, like a suit. Winton wrote the novel long before Carradine's death, because for years police have been finding the result of erotic asphyxiation gone wrong, bodies hanging in hotel rooms, closets, bathrooms. Many have been ruled suicides after a family member or friend sanitised the scene by removing sexual apparatus.</span><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>By golly, for a column that manages to list no more than three celebrity deaths, that's a pretty evocative image of a world gone mad, with men driven to insanity by what's available on the intertubes. Could this be the worst killer of all time, way ahead of passive smoking in cars, which can now only be used to understand less significant matters, like the way Tony Abbott experienced intellectual development difficulties in his youth.</div><div><br /></div><div>Sheehan really isn't interested in making any sense on the subject. He starts his column by explaining that he doesn't get vampires:</div><div><br /></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">I don't get vampires, avoid them at all cost, but Australia is having a love affair with them. The bestseller list is dominated by a 35-year-old American Mormon, Stephenie Meyer, whose vampire-driven Twilight romance novels hold positions one, two, three and four on the Herald's best-seller list. They've dominated the list for a year, spending a combined 192 weeks there. Australia alone would make Myer a prosperous woman but her four Twilight books have sold more than 40 million copies worldwide.<br /><br />I don't get sexual asphyxiation, either, and have avoided the subject for years but it, too, is sitting there, surreptitiously, on the bestseller list, just below the Twilight dominance. It can be found in Tim Winton's latest novel, Breath, a best-seller which won the Miles Franklin Award last month, the fourth time Winton has won Australia's most prestigious literary award.</span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>Well from reading this column, I dare say that Sheehan also doesn't get the cult of the goth, bright red lips, pale cheeks, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Wuthering Heights </span>(and its implications for women), corsets, fetish clothing, Betty Page, Betty Boop, Buffy, bondage, the beneficial power of garlic, silk stockings, six inch heels, conical steel bras, the importance of carrying a wooden stake, a cross and a set of silver bullets, the sense of style wearing only black provides, the joys of cross dressing and taking a walk on the wild side.</div><div><br /></div><div>But can he stop blaming the internet for them and suggesting that somehow the full to overflowing tubes have produced a new pornographic social conformity among the young?</div><div><br /></div><div>Can we just agree that the sudden outbreak of rampant sexuality in fundamentalist Christians and Republican governors has been around for a long time, well before the intertubes got going.</div><div><br /></div><div>As the priests used to say to the young boys in my school, stop it or you'll go blind, or even worse, get hair on the palms of your hands. </div><div><br /></div><div>Yep, there's very little that's new under the sun, and the sun has been rising (and setting, in a strictly metaphorical way) for a long time. Legends about sex and sex play and kink have been going around for an equally long time - why it feels like only yesterday I was reading Apuleius's <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Golden Ass </span>(which involves an ass doing <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">things)</span> and Seutonius on what the emperor Tiberius liked to lick,<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> </span>but as with Sheehan's speculations, idle regurgitating of nonsense about how the intertubes made them do it, don't make it right ...</div><div><br /></div><div>Which reminds of the story of the woman who kidnapped a male Mormon missionary and chaining him to a Devon cottage bed with mink handcuffs, and forcing him to have sex. It seems she might be the same woman as a year or so ago paid a substantial sum to a South Korean laboratory to have her pitbull terrier cloned.</div><div><br /></div><div>Never mind whether it's true or not, the <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Daily Mail </span>rehashes the original story of McKinney and the Mormon <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1042506/A-cloned-dog-Mormon-mink-lined-handcuffs-tantalising-mystery.html">here</a>.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>And it's good clean salacious tabloid fun, as opposed to the sanctimonious pieties of Sheehan. And it's available on the intertubes. Even if it's a story that happened in 1978. You can surely see the sinister relevance.</div><div><br /></div><div>Stand by for more cases of women kidnapping young Mormon missionaries and having their evil way with them. Using mink handcuffs. Oh intertubes you have so much to answer for, and you give so little.</div><div><br /></div><div>Moral to the tale? There are more things in heaven and earth, especially when it comes to sex, than are dreamed of in Sheehan's limited philosophies ...</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">(Below: Joyce McKinney, the woman in the 'Mormon missionary with mink handcuffs' affair, proving the baleful influence of the intertubes on bondage in 1978, as well as elevating this site once again to the responsible level of News Corp reporting, in a fair and balanced way, while refusing to sensationalize. We maintain such high standards we'd ski naked down Mount Everest with a carnation up our nose rather than lower the quality of insight provided herein).</span></div><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj934U96X_lunJ5OpMp7BhZb9WOotMexF4QruE1CL1OqUrT08FE-AWKC8Zb_dj-CkY1lx4oOc3xkSWFmfxlH5Dq5FrI18AqG1lX_selLSi8thdPOPHwe_50tBVJa4D0mXzLFLAeNTWSfCs/s1600-h/joyce+mckinney.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 292px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj934U96X_lunJ5OpMp7BhZb9WOotMexF4QruE1CL1OqUrT08FE-AWKC8Zb_dj-CkY1lx4oOc3xkSWFmfxlH5Dq5FrI18AqG1lX_selLSi8thdPOPHwe_50tBVJa4D0mXzLFLAeNTWSfCs/s400/joyce+mckinney.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5357728281248205794" /></a><br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-620033997567463526.post-3573106960571267472009-07-13T07:45:00.004+10:002009-07-13T08:35:37.786+10:00Janet Albrechtsen, David Hicks, Stern Hu, GetUp and the intertubes<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFMtGgxYkBpFl_GCRJBD7dt2Db6y2xzPxBbnV8YS-hNbJMOMHhGG3QMf9HHifv6uEVEMZpwB3ugzi6DK27LggriI5jBwC2VxEBBrqLXXOL0Rv6ZIrcnH-WJUU_jlfsa4Zhy8tYaAqJOf4/s1600-h/internet+1.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 332px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFMtGgxYkBpFl_GCRJBD7dt2Db6y2xzPxBbnV8YS-hNbJMOMHhGG3QMf9HHifv6uEVEMZpwB3ugzi6DK27LggriI5jBwC2VxEBBrqLXXOL0Rv6ZIrcnH-WJUU_jlfsa4Zhy8tYaAqJOf4/s400/internet+1.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5357701105985974610" /></a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjf5Ze7j8hb1OZoST-go70ZTuRawlVgb5KQywcKxHoSzdnnXYYN1r0ASgiq_ZqAMoegeBkQ3t6re2TMyxlB9sdb42p6rN_dpqvDPGB40d-S9N_iAX2A0DVxf6UlHkOt4n-Iz-BLjxRN0QQ/s1600-h/internet3.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 390px; height: 323px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjf5Ze7j8hb1OZoST-go70ZTuRawlVgb5KQywcKxHoSzdnnXYYN1r0ASgiq_ZqAMoegeBkQ3t6re2TMyxlB9sdb42p6rN_dpqvDPGB40d-S9N_iAX2A0DVxf6UlHkOt4n-Iz-BLjxRN0QQ/s400/internet3.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5357701121981776818" /></a><br />How do you say Janet Albrechtsen in Mandarin, as spoken by someone with a Stephen Conroy accent?<div><br /></div><div>A thought prompted by Janet Albrechtsen's column <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/janetalbrechtsen/index.php/theaustralian/comments/how_do_you_say_get_up_in_mandarin/">How do you say Get Up in Mandarin?</a></span></div><div><br /></div><div>You see, the good Dame Slap berates <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">GetUp</span> for overlooking the situation of the situation the Australian born Chinese Rio Tinto businessman accused of espionage and stealing state secrets.</div><div><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">I checked Get Up’s website. Nothing there. It was a case of Mr Who? Same absence of interest over at Liberty Victoria. But let’s be fair and give them time. Maybe we will soon hear from Amnesty International, the various trade unions and civil libertarians who so eagerly became involved in the Fair Go For David campaign and the International Day of Action for David Hicks? Will we see a Fair Go For Stern operation? Or could it be that the brigade of do-gooders who paraded their commitment to human rights for David Hicks were largely driven by the fact that Hicks was imprisoned by Americans under the watch of President George W Bush?</span><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>Inspired by her example, I did a check of her recent blogs. To see what she had to say about Senator Stephen Conroy's plan to impose no opt out censorship at network levels on Australia, in a style only managed by the Chinese and Iranian and North Korean governments in recent years.</div><div><br /></div><div>Couldn't spot a word, not a peek a boo, from this supposedly fierce libertarian. But let's be fair and give her time. Maybe she's just biding her time, waiting for the right, most destructive moment to strike. Or could it be that she thoroughly approves of the Federal government's plans, and thinks a blow against pornography will be a blow for truth for all right thinking conservative Christians?</div><div><br /></div><div>Sure we've had Albrechtsen spank Conroy for the cost of the new NBN:</div><div><br /></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> Will consumers be prepared to pay $150 or $200 a month for 100megabits per second of broadband? Because it will probably need to cost this much to attract private investment. Or would consumers rather pay Telstra or another operator half that for a 50Mbps service? Is this likely to be a monumental white elephant overtaken by technology or outwitted by the offerings of others?<br /><br />In other words, where is Australia’s P.J. O’Rourke? The renowned American political writer, who will be in Australia next week, would have a field day poking holes into the hazy $43billion broadband proposal being flogged to mum and dad investors by Rudd. He would remind us, no doubt, of his basic law about politicians: namely that giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.</span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>But where's Australia's P. J. O'Rourke when it comes to Conroy's filtering plan, remembering that this wasn't devised a few days ago, as with the arrest of Hu, but has been long festering in the government's mind.</div><div><br /></div><div>So what about the network level filtering tied in to the new NBN? Is that like loaning your credit card to teenage boys so they can have a good time in the brothel?</div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div>Or is it just that arguing about what your ostensible opponents haven't commented on is just a fairly crude ploy, in much the same way as it would be more than obvious to note that during David Hicks' time in Guantanamo, our vast array of commentariat columnists were running a very vocal campaign explaining how the wonderful Americans were wonderful for incarcerating him and keeping him locked up, and demanding that his rights be ignored? So that Australia could stay safe.</div><div><br /></div><div>And they never forget or forgive any deviancy from their self devised and imposed norm.</div><div><br /></div><div>Well who knows what the rights and the wrongs of the Hu case are. Who knows if he'll turn into a cause celebre like Schapelle Corby. Who knows if the Chinese government are guilty of grave misconduct. Time will tell, and it's likely Hu will have a lot more attention paid and be given a timelier resolution than that afforded Hicks.</div><div><br /></div><div>But what's this? Suddenly Albrechtsen discovers that Bob Brown has the same capacity to waffle on about human rights as she has.<br /></div><div><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">To his credit, Greens leader Bob Brown has demanded more action from the Australian Government, telling ABC Radio that. He had no brief for Hu but “I’ve got a total brief for his rights and his rights are non-existent when you compare them with the, what’s required under Australian law. And we should be standing up for Australian norms to be applied to this Australian citizen who’s under arrest and at great threat for his future wellbeing under the Chinese communist system.”<br /></span><br /></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> Surely any time now that regular troupe of church leaders, human rights lawyers and other motley activists will line up to echo the same sentiments and demand that the Rudd Government “do something” to protect Mr Hu’s human rights.</span><br /><br />Yes and surely any time now that regular troupe of commentariat columnists and motley newspaper journalists will line up to echo the same sentiments as <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">GetUp </span>when it comes to Stephen Conroy's internet level filtering system, and demand that the Rudd government do something to protect Australian adults from the loss of their right to read and see as adults, instead of being reduced to the level of infantilism on view in China.<div><br /></div><div>Or maybe not. </div><div><br /></div><div>Since she went to the web site, looked around it in detail, and ignored that which stared her in the face. So she could conduct a beat up on our vast array of human right activists, with their extensive - nay vast - access to the pages of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Australian. </span>So that they could jump up and down without knowing the facts of the matter, on the assured basis that the Chinese government is bad and Hu is an innocent victim. If that's the case, let's hope an activist judge lends a helping hand.</div><div><br /></div><div>Selective indignation is the cheapest and easiest form of righteousness, especially when you blame others for the selective indignation you yourself practice.</div><div><br /></div><div>Humbuggery rides again, and who else can you expect in the side saddle than Albrechtsen.</div><div><br /></div><div>(Memo to Albrechtsen and/or her subs. It's GetUp!, or if you find the exclamation mark too offensively in your face, GetUp).</div><div><br /></div><div>And if you want a look at GetUp's current campaign about Conroy's plan to censor the web, involving the beneficial powers of Censordyne (one scrub and your cabling will be free of everything) you can find it all <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.getup.org.au/">here.</a></span><br /><br /></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgdt8cUEusiCfsyxG3gjeH7A14IrZXXrM1qgX8nrvBXJAsxlZMnPF1xo_ygPM-YQgwAqssC5c_hzb6BLcgwQMBBdpdrRcZzcRAAK9OIJHY5POoSopA6t8gFqOLyCMtGLgp8ZMCClPQezw/s1600-h/internet+2.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 327px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgdt8cUEusiCfsyxG3gjeH7A14IrZXXrM1qgX8nrvBXJAsxlZMnPF1xo_ygPM-YQgwAqssC5c_hzb6BLcgwQMBBdpdrRcZzcRAAK9OIJHY5POoSopA6t8gFqOLyCMtGLgp8ZMCClPQezw/s400/internet+2.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5357701114510831650" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuZAtucU7kCHDxN9EbP4dYvk1It7z1ODqBSZhB_HR-HXUfV-_sI-Ui3mKlgj3tJDfLG3bcuDp_HyPxdyf_3gvGzk7rfRbnS8VBxPpcr6FjzEjxPsjSyfYtVqohaIfJlNayl15NYTFsCx0/s1600-h/internet4.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 323px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuZAtucU7kCHDxN9EbP4dYvk1It7z1ODqBSZhB_HR-HXUfV-_sI-Ui3mKlgj3tJDfLG3bcuDp_HyPxdyf_3gvGzk7rfRbnS8VBxPpcr6FjzEjxPsjSyfYtVqohaIfJlNayl15NYTFsCx0/s400/internet4.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5357701127035118994" /></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0