Modern misogyny

Failing to see misogyny when it’s in our faces always surprises me and yet when I mention it, people often can’t imagine what it looks like.

In this video (which I haven’t posted, deliberately), which went HUGE on social media, the woman in the white top confronts the driver of the removalists’ truck, because he is double parked and preventing her from driving down the street.

She yells at him and retreats to her car. Another woman pulls up behind her and comes to her car window to also abuse her for not moving her car. The ‘hilarious’ part of the video is that the second woman has a working class accent. Too funny.

As you can see, the video attracted thousands of comments. I read about 100 of them, all of which were promoted to the top of the list by their popularity. All of them were abusive towards the woman in the white top, claiming that she was an entitled bitch, and that her vehicle was too big (and too ostentatious) and that she was probably married to a cop, and that she was driving the car that her husband bought for her and that should should have never left Long Island. People also cheered on the second woman who abused the first woman. Many people praised the truck driver for his calmness in dealing with her.

Yes, the truck driver who calmly but heroically blocked the road in the first place.

I don’t have much sympathy for rich people driving Urban Assault Vehicles, but to not see the blatant misogyny in this scene is breathtakingly obtuse.

American culture has a weird relationship with wealth. On the one hand, it is idolised. On the other it supercharges what our politicians like to call, ‘the politics of envy’. And when there is resentment, it will always fall along the traditional ley lines. In this case, a middle aged woman (no longer considered a sex object and therefore of no intrinsic value) is driving a car that represents wealth (which she no doubt illegitimately gained through her relationship rather than ‘earning’ it herself). And, she has the audacity to speak up and say that a man has done something wrong (blocking the road).

It is also a perfect example of lateral violence – the second woman abusing the first woman, because of frustration that neither of them can do anything about (the man who blocked the road).

The term ‘Karen’ is truly a word of its time. It is recognition of the threatening power of a new generation of middle aged and older women who are naming things that are wrong, representing themselves and often others. This is inherently dangerous and so must be vociferously shamed.

In a meeting recently I complained about the lack of accessible doors in a building that is used by people in wheelchairs. I’ve complained about it before, but nothing was done. I was congratulated on ‘going the full Karen’. I said that I prefer to use the term ‘Kevin’.

If the woman in the video had been a man, none of this would have attracted attention. Social media is a shaming-machine and the repercussions are immense for groups who have traditionally been subjected to dispossession and violence. I know for a fact that if I commented on that video above, pointing out that this would not be a viral tiktok video at all if it were a middle-aged man who yelled at the truck driver for blocking road, that I would also be shamed and told that this is clearly a wealthy white woman and therefore, I should join in on the vitriolic shame-fest.

This proves my point. Women who are the closest to realising power – wealthy white women – must be kept down first. If anyone thinks this will stop with rich white women I’ve got a bridge they might be interested in.

The second example of misogyny I’ve encountered in the last couple of days comes from the odious pits of a Twitter shitstorm over a ‘spa’ (whatever that is) in California that legally admitted a man who claimed to be a transwoman (and may be – I haven’t had the belly to delve into it and it’s not really relevant to my point) into the changing rooms. He/she/they was the subject of complaints from customers because their genitalia was visible – essentially described as ‘flashing’. The Spa was operating legally and it turned into a showdown between the usual suspects in the culture war. It transpired that the person in the changing room was a convicted paedophile, which is of course why it blew up on social media.

What’s disturbing is that some of the most staunch feminists posted about this even on Twitter, claiming that the 9 year old girl who had been the subject of ‘the flashing’ should have not looked at the person’s penis etc.,. Multiple self-described feminists accused the 9 year old girl of being rude and inappropriate, poorly parented etc.,.

This, to me, is in direct opposition to the previous social media #metoo campaign of, ‘believe women’. ‘Believe women’ was obviously far too dangerous and needed to be effectively shut down. To be clear, the pushback against male sexual violence that took off a couple of years ago encouraged people to think about warning signs and expressions of entitled behaviour that were indicative of male sexual violence. It was no longer just, ‘random violent acts’ – rather, the focus shifted to ‘rape culture’ – the prevailing set of ideas that normalises male access to women’s bodies, and shames women for being fearful of it (the fear part isn’t new, it was just drawn to people’s attention). And so, we saw campaigns where women attempted to illustrate all the ways in which they kept themselves safe my male sexual violence (from the obvious like not walking in the dark to the more subtle, like making sure they didn’t ‘look’ at a man the wrong way, or find themselves alone with a man in a secluded place). This campaign was quite shocking to a lot of men, as they came to terms with the kind of implicit violence that women structure their every day lives around.

And, part of this discussion of what we now call rape culture is the idea that if a woman asserts boundaries, or keeps herself safe in a certain situation she should be shamed as being hysterical, or paranoid or a manhater etc. etc. The point is to place the onus for the sexual violence onto the woman. Victim blaming is one of the most obvious illustrations.

I don’t think the feminists who shamed the 9 year old girl for looking at the paedophile’s penis thought they were undermining feminism or women in general. This is how the culture war works against all women. Everyone gets so caught up in defending their positions they lose sight of the previous gains, and ultimately this is why the shaming machine must be kicked into high gear.

Thatcher, Reagan and a little country in the Pacific

I’ve been watching The Crown. I was enjoying it for all the reasons I should – the opulence, the soap opera melodramas, the depictions of the politics of Britain in the post war period. Thatcher’s Britain came as a kick in the guts.

I think this Scottish woman’s eulogy for Mrs Thatcher sums it up nicely;

I am a child of the 80s. My first memories are of thin leather jackets, bad perms and cigarettes. Thatcher’s Britain was not too far removed, in terms of ‘look’ from New Zealand at the time – lots of shambling poverty, cups of tea and unemployment. Thatcher renovated the British economy from top to bottom (as she put it). Basically, as Britain’s colonial power declined, and with it, the money extracted from milking ‘real’ resources in its overseas territories, the country was increasingly ‘domesticated’. That is, reliant on making things within Britain. This wouldn’t be such a problem, if Britain had kept up its technological dominance, but it hadn’t, lulled, as many before it, into a false sense of security provided by a healthy stream of income from its resources obtained overseas.

Thatcher knew this. Britain was becoming less competitive and was suffering economically for it. Thatcher’s Britain aimed to shift the very structure of the economy to emphasise the one thing in which Britain still retained supremacy – a hub for financial trading. The City (of London) drew in enormous wealth for Britain. Thatcher decided to hitch the country’s fortunes to this horse, and, at the same time, embark on a radical monetarist inspired restructure of the welfare state. This was what we now refer to as neoliberalism. ‘The Washington Consensus’ and Britain’s structural adjustment signalled an enormous shift in the basis of the economy. I’m not going to summarise the details here, as many have done a far better job of that than I. However, what I think The Crown gets right is the cultural oeuvre of neoliberalism, Thatcher’s words piped into the existence of its downtrodden, penurious protagonists as they stand in line waiting to be ritually humiliated at the dole office, or in their shabby council flats.

Neoliberalism presented an economic idea as a cultural one – the idea that the economy and society were one thing, and that the individual was a discrete, atomised actor, completely in control of his or her own destiny, regardless of one’s circumstances. Success or failure was based purely on personal, individual gumption and hard work. Society, according to Thatcher, ‘did not exist’. It’s worth noting that all this individualism did not extend to taxes, which were still collected by the state.

Citizens were endlessly re-educated into this new way of thinking, the language of individualism. It was a mean-spirited thing that viewed all the workings of society – housing, healthcare, education – as economic products rather than social goods. There was no longer any ‘social’. Everything was privatised, speculated on, governed by the ‘invisible hand’ of economic rationalism.

The impact, of course, was to reduce transfer payments from the top of the economy to the bottom, thus concentrating wealth upwards. The rich got a lot richer.

New Zealand, with its dour, pinch-faced Scottish Protestant-Calvinist tut-tutted Thatcher for her gentle touch. In 1984, faced with a similar ‘traditional’ economy in decline, New Zealand embarked on a massive neoliberal experiment, known today, in the fine Kiwi tradition of austerity in naming, as The New Zealand Experiment. This was an extreme version of neoliberalism, carried out even more radically than in Britain. The country floated the dollar and embarked on a massive overhaul of the public sector. Unemployment shot up, poverty flourished, homelessness and social alienation became entrenched by the early 90s.

The results, of course, were devastating for ordinary people.

I think what’s most striking to me, having mostly grown up during this period, is that this represented a new way of thinking about ourselves as political, social and economic beings. It seeped into the way we thought about ourselves. For instance, in the 90s in NZ there was an incredibly strong stigma attached to being ‘unproductive’. Neoliberalism had unleashed an extant cruelty that fostered hatred amongst friends and neighbours. Using terms like ‘working class’ or, ‘benefit’ was openly sneered at. Working full time was the only way to be fully human, and in my opinion, this element of neoliberalism remains. For women, having a child was judged harshly and women should ‘get back out there’ as quickly as possible. Unsurprisingly, the economic arrangements of the day had the harshest judgements for women. My mother, for instance, was a ‘solo mother’ *gasp* after her husband left her. She struggled to get work and eventually, through friends, got a full time position as a telephonist (yes, in one of those phone offices with the long cord and plug thingos). Her relief was enormous as it meant she could pay a mortgage on the small house she’d managed to buy (after being refused several times by the ANZ bank because she didn’t have a husband on the paperwork.

The problem, of course, was that she had two children, which was somewhat incompatible with working full time, in the age of zero childcare. We attended every single day of school, no matter our condition. She simply had no choice otherwise. Mum had 5 days of sick leave per year, and the fact that I remember this from the age of 5 is testament to how it dominated our lives. Mum had an illness that eventually required an operation and she rationed out those sick days like gold.

In the afternoons I went to a Barnardos home and my brother went to a neighbour who had other children his age. We collected food boxes (in another woman’s car) from what Mum called ‘the vege co-op’ but I now realise was a food bank. I remember sitting cross legged in the back of an HQ stationwagon with several other kids, all of us woozy with the petrol fumes, with next to boxes of food as the car made its way around the neighbourhood. The irony is, of course, that we weren’t even considered particularly poor. I remember my Dad picking us up for a visit and discovering that Mum hadn’t packed us any clothes and he took us into Wellington city, at night, and bought us new clothes. I got a pair of jeans and a jumper. Until that point all my clothes came from my cousin Glen, who was the only cousin bigger than me. I wore boys’ clothes for my entire childhood, including Y front undies. Shoes were optional.

Unless you lived in a household with a full time employed husband, you were fucked. There were plenty of people in our situation.

New Zealand prior to 1984 wasn’t exactly rolling in cash either – there was a strict division between rural and urban kiwis, and money was almost hermetically sealed amongst those in the farming sector. Liberalisation and the removal of tariffs knocked that on the head.

I think what’s interesting to me is that Neoliberalism, for many New Zealanders under the age of 40, is just a given. It was presented as an incontrovertible set of natural laws that would govern the fortunes of the country and enable success. It tapped into New Zealanders’ Calvinist leanings, their inherent distrust of their neighbours as bludgers and leaners, their cruel racism.

There was no ‘citizenry’, no longer any sense of social contract or licence. All there was was the cut and thrust of economic primacy and success. The idea that government should support, foster, regulate, ameliorate, prime or undergird economic activity was an anathema. The government should not ‘pick winners’. Of course, this was because the winners were picking themselves. No one laughed longer than I did when New Zealanders chose John Key as their Prime Minister, a man who had colluded in the fevered currency speculation following the floating of the NZ dollar that almost bankrupted the entire country, overnight.

From https://www.stuff.co.nz/sunday-star-times/features/249633/Who-is-John-Key

So suppose what I want to flag is something hopeful. Neoliberalism has, as predicted, has not guaranteed the stable economic success it promised. It was brought increased inequality and poverty. But, and this is a big but, I am now old enough to recognise changes. People are increasingly seeing it for what it was and is. They’re aware now, especially in the wake of massive social spending following the GFC and more lately, the pandemic, the role of strong governments that are integrated into the economy in a more traditional Keynesian, interventionist way. There are arguments about what this means economically, but what’s changed is an awareness of the separation of the economy and society, and that one must serve the other. As I live in Australia I increasingly witness the political consensus coalesce on what we might recognise as something like ordo-liberalism, rather than neoliberalism. It’s clear that there’s no point in simply working very hard to tip money into the top end of a FIRE economy (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate).

I’m just dribbling on now, but part of my 2021 resolution was to write more, and reflect more through writing, and so now I’m doing just that.

(I’ve written about The NZ Experiment before – here)

The Noble Victim, a cartography of absolutism.

Ah, the ABC this morning.

Click bait, aimed at provoking transphobic hatred from all corners. Whoever made the decision to choose this story has a lot to answer for.

Here’s the intro:

That’s right, Mara was locked up for 23 hours a day because she’s transgender.

We’re told that Mara is terrified, alone and scared in prison.

One week in, another inmate calls her a ‘faggot’. She punches him and is placed in ‘unit one’ (solitary).

Now we are told something different, that Mara was placed in solitary because she punched another inmate, not “because she is trans”. This would have happened in a women’s prison too. Likewise, the fear, confusion, terror, alienation, sadness and drug withdrawal. This article is not exactly an exercise in balance.

Obviously this story violates the ABC’s editorial policies that require it to accurately report facts. ‘Mara is placed in solitary because she is trans gender’ is not true. The editorial policy makes a clear distinction between reporting or editorialising and crusading. Clearly, this is the former.

However, I am not interested in the explicit misrepresentations in this story. What I am interested in how these stories come to be made in the first place. What causes a journalist to write such tabloid crap? Year 11 creative writing at Cremorne St Patricias College for Ladies has a lot to answer for.

Mara is positioned throughout this story as a victim. Her background is described. It is harrowing (assuming it’s true). Her prison experience is detailed as something extreme, which of course makes you realise that the authors aren’t aware that being strip searched and called names is a bog standard part of the prison experience, no matter which one you go into.

Mara is described as wholly innocent, without culpability, a complete victim of her circumstances. It reminds me of the simple binary moralising of the ‘Noble Savage’ discourse that occasionally pops up – describing people whose very existence is noble and unblemished, spiritually superior, higher-than-human.

The noble savage idea is a dangerous one – it positions some groups of people as so different they’re not really human, reinforcing the idea that some people are irreconcilably different. It has extremely serious consequences for indigenous people and groups who try to forge claims for compensation or recognition, because it delineates which claims are legitimate and which are ‘outside the frame’.

Mara’s victimhood operates on a similar, simple set of binaries. Her past experiences render her unable to be responsible for any of her negative actions. Her bad behaviour isn’t her fault. Consider the language in the article:

Mara’s relationship was turbulent. She was convicted for assaulting her partner.

All in the passive voice, as if she was just standing there in the self check out at Woolies minding her own business and then got convicted for assault.

The article deviates from the details of her incarceration in ‘unit one’ at the critical moment: when we would otherwise hear why she’s actually in there. There is no discussion of Mara’s victims, simply the ‘turbulent’ relationship.

Mara’s victimhood status denotes her as having a childlike innocence. She is absolved of wrongdoing. It’s a form of holiness. The parallels with Christian puritanism are overwhelming.

An accurate representation of Mara’s situation would do her better service. It doesn’t take much imagination to understand that being a trans woman in a men’s prison is not a good scenario. Australia was actually one of the first countries in the world to recognise this and make some arrangements accordingly, but of course, it’s not a perfect solution. Mara would struggle in a men’s prison, and would be considered too dangerous to be placed in a women’s prison. It’s a simple logic – the justice system has privileged the rights of female inmates (in a women’s prison) over Mara’s individual rights. Mara gets the raw end of the deal. There should be improvement in the arrangements for trans gender people in the justice system, and we should all advocate for that. This article doesn’t do that, it simply states that Mara should not be in a men’s prison.

How did we get here? How did we get to the point where the ABC will sensationally lie in the opening paragraphs of an article in order to create their blameless, Disney child-victim, to obviate and sabotage any real chance of sensibly discussing a real problem?

Social media increasingly polarises people. True story. As a consequence, there is now an entire generation of young adults who’ve grown up with the idea that culture can be neatly ascribed along very simple, binary lines. It’s the Disney-fication of morality. You see it all the time in the debates around BLM, feminism or trans politics – anything that is nominally cast as an ‘identity’ issue (when, in my view, is mostly likely a structural class issue, but that’s for another day).

Of course there are real children who actually are real victims of their circumstances (child soldiers blowing each other away with fully automatic machine guns, teenaged girls being abducted into fundamentalist military groups to produce babies).  We see these victims when they turn up in Australia, battered, emotionally ruined, unable to speak English. They are widely pilloried.

To be clear, childlike, innocent victimhood is for some and not others.

So who makes these decisions? Who trivialises stories and agendas like Mara’s, with such sycophantic, polarised, misrepresentative, sensationalist rubbish?

No doubt the authors/producers of Mara’s story felt like they were doing her a favour. They’ve been had, in the truest sense of the term.

What’s most clear of course, is that the ABC chooses to publish this ‘content’ at the zenith of funding crisis, when hundreds of staff are losing their jobs. This expensively produced feature article appeared on the main ABC news page, demonstrating to even the most left of ABC audiences that if this is the calibre of one-eyed, crusading, hysterico-drama the broadcaster is cobbling together it could probably do with a bit a trim, if we’re honest.

So who made the editorial decision to run this and why now?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gen X The First Generation to Have Worse Fountain Pens Than Their Parents.

Children born between 1976 and the mailbox are three times more likely to suffer from badly malfunctioning ink pens than the generation that came before them. Not only will GenX have a disproportionately high rate of stained handbags, they also have up to 18% more chance of experiencing at least one disappointing Club meal before retirement age.

Can we please stop comparing the economic prospects of Gens X and Y to the Baby Boomers’ fortunes? This is not a linear progression.

Baby boomers experienced one of the greatest increases in ‘life everythings’ the world has ever known. John and Sue were born at the thundering apex of the late industrial revolution. Their greatly enhanced wellbeing galloped in on ten thousand flaming jets of fossil fuel. Of course their lives were going to be better than their parents.

On masse, baby boomers have mostly avoided being blown to bits in war, filleted by heavy machinery or turned inside out by some hideous biological liquifaction. Certainly, when viewed alongside the long and dramatic list of their undoings presented in the media – from mesothelioma and heart disease to adult men in velcro sandals, it’s easy to lose sight of their clear run. However, the fact remains, baby boomers experienced an extraordinary growth in human comfort and material wellbeing.

The grumbling statistician deep within my soul would prefer a more fruitful question – how can we explain the revenge effects of the Boomer’s economic flourishing? Given the cornucopia of food, medicine and elasticated waistbands, shouldn’t the Boomers be a bit better off than they are, stumbling towards their 80s with fistfuls of Lipitor?

I would suggest that Gen X and Y might be economically poorer than their parents and grandparents, but will realise wealth in other ways. For starters, they will recognise the shortcomings of the Boomers’ exceptional wealth and prepare for them. Information is a resource.

Why I only buy books written by men.

Yes, it came as something of a shock to me too. But I think I know how it happens.

I buy books from op shops. This is for two reasons. First: I am poor. Second: There is nothing I enjoy more than tipping an entire cup of coffee and/or brake fluid into a good book. The three-for-a-dollar shelf at the Salvos is the clumsy reader’s natural habitat.

Op-shopping hones my reading choices in a rather hokey way, unmediated by popular media or breathy reviews on National Radio. It introduces a deliciously wobbly stochastic process oriented by little more than, ‘For fuckssake, just tell me which one of these boxes isn’t going to the tip, Russell’.

What it doesn’t do, however, is weight for gender.

Last Thursday’s three-for-a-dollar selection is typical;

1. a peculiar work of ‘experimental literature’ (Habitus, by James Flint)
2. a well known but tragically dated work of cleverness (Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express)
3. a classic that I should have read as a teenager but chose to modify a set of header pipes instead (Huxley, Brave New World).

You’ll note these books are all written by men. Female authors are under-represented in the publishing industry, and therefore, ultimately, on the op-shop shelves. But this doesn’t entirely explain why I end up taking home only male authors (so to speak).

Last year, Booker prize winner, Marlon James firmly planted himself in a towering pile of shit for claiming the publishing industry deliberately appeals to white, middle class women (WMCW). According to him, writers of colour are tacitly encouraged to write WMCW’s stories. This, according to James, is the key to getting published.

James characterised these books as;

“…pander[ing[ to that archetype of the white woman, that long-suffering, astringent prose set in suburbia. You know, ‘older mother or wife sits down and thinks about her horrible life’.”

He’s right, of course, writers of colour are tacitly encouraged to write stories for White Middle Class Women. Mostly however, WMCW write these books for themselves. In other words, most self-involved, white women’s narrative fiction is narrated by self-involved white women.

We’re all familiar with this genre. I like to call it suburban-ennui, it is characterised by suffocating interpersonal relationships, pop-sociologies of motherhood or overly considered evocations of minute moral dilemmas. Frequently, these books do little more than reconcile the small generational differences between the author’s mother’s life (as remembered by the author), and the author’s own. They are unutterably dull and redolent with the scent of score settling. Men are one-dimensional or absent altogether. The storyline is often animated by some kind of contrived family secret *gasp*, a banal horror like alcoholism or sexual abuse of which the white, middle class author knows sweet fuck-all. They are portraits of seething proximity and emotional tourism, a claustrophobic, technicolour yawn.

It’s worth mentioning the type of middle class white women’s literature — something I like to call Gyno Grunge. The apotheosis of the exhausting suburban tomes above, Gyno-grunge is equally formulaic. Unlike their motherly suburban counterparts, these stories typically revolve around a single, hideous alter-femme, women who are overtly, grotesquely physical — comprised of cheesy creases and coarse, unbidden hairs. Venal and lazily violent they are part circus-freak, part modern morality play — women in extremis. Invariably they succumb to the purple excesses of loneliness, masturbation and poor dental hygiene. Their class status and motivations are unpredictable and unknowable. They are foreign and base, a clunky ‘other’. Like its suburban-ennui counterpart, above, Gyno-grunge also makes for dispiriting reading.

‘Suburban Ennui’ and ‘Gyno-Grunge’ comprise an inward-looking women’s lit, as tedious and insulting as it is dominant. And the fear of encountering it amongst the jaunty stacks of paperbacks at the Salvos has me clutching for the Wilbur Smith.

And this is how I end up buying the work of male writers. It’s not that I think all women writers produce the kind of work as described above, but many do, the industry rewards it and I fear I might accidentally read some of it.

I’ve decided, though, that in 2018 I will right the balance. I will only select works by female authors upon which to drop honey and brake fluid. Let’s see how this goes.

We never had water like this under a Labor government.

We’re currently experiencing a king tide.

This morning ABC radio interviewed a meteorologist about the rising water levels.

“Yes, it’s about the distance from the sun. So we should be seeing the water recede nearer the end of the week. There’ll most likely be some water dropping into the weekend”.

Most likely? Should be? Ahhh, this isn’t actually meteorology.

Errant rubbish

Radio National is being gutted, apparently. And frankly, if yesterday’s lunchtime sample is anything to go by, perhaps a filleting might do it the world of good.

Yesterday I heard The World Today’s ‘story’ on Australians who are spending $555 million on ‘useless study’. Apparently many students obtain qualifications they don’t use when they leave university.

We were treated to the damning example of the person with a degree in tourism who then got an entry level tourism job. We were told;

‘The boss is unhappy because the employee lacks everyday customer service skills and the employee is unhappy because their degree, which covered things like management and policy) is unused’.

The interviewer, Linda Mottram responded with the theatrical gravitas of a home shopping presenter,

“How much would you expect to pay for this useless education?” she shrieks. “What’s the cost?” sotto voce – to the taxpayer

Perhaps if Ms Mottram had undertaken a useless degree in journalism, she would have instead asked questions like;

 – What is the time frame on deeming a qualification useless? How many of those with ‘useless’ qualifications go on to use them later?

 – Does the tourism grad expect to start working in the industry at a lower level, and work their way up, therefore using their degree later? 

 – If the tourism graduate is short on customer service training, how does this negate the value of their other tourism qualifications?  One thing does not lead to another, or as we simpering morons without extensive customer service training would say, this is a post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy

 – If a student forgoes their tourism degree for a qualification in customer service, and then ends up running the company, do you deem their original qualification useless? 

 – You said that employers were using a bachelor’s degree as a ‘filter’, choosing candidates who had a degree. It seems to me that if a degree makes you more likely to get a job it doesn’t fit well with the definition of ‘useless’. Or are you saying that employers are so stupid they need to be told who to employ?

 – How did you judge useless? If, for instance, the student develops self discipline, or perhaps basic literacy during the course of their degree, is this deemed ‘useless’ to their entry level position? 

 –  Let’s talk about the broader context. SkillsIQ is a government research body. The Liberal government actively supports private training organisations which provide ‘skills training’ in areas like customer service (ingratiating servitude), or using a cloth and breathing at the same time. How do you respond to the claim that this is simply another example of the government attempting to undermine the university sector in favour of their well-heeled donors, the private training sector? 

And finally, perhaps the most important question;

 – Given that the university sector is currently under pressure to limit the amount of the everything it currently offers that isn’t Vice Chancellor’s reimbursements, can you tell us how this isn’t just some made-up, bullshit study intended to appeal to Liberal voting Murray and Janice who always knew that young people’s degrees were useless and students would be better off just working hard like they did in the 1970s, and also aren’t young people annoying and full of themselves?

These are just a few of the gaping holes in the four minute interview. How on earth Radio National can be considered a serious broadcaster beggars belief.

 

Racism for some but not others

This morning the ABC had a cracking good joke – an English woman rang in and told a hilarious story about how her son, who is married to a Kiwi and lives in New Zealand came across a car crash in which the two occupants of the car were critically injured. When the son opened the door the critically injured driver (tee hee wait for it) kept asking about his pit rit. Guffaw! Critically injured!

The announcer sounded a bit tired at this point.

Oh yes, she continued, he actually meant his pet rat! It was loose in the car and caused the crash in which the two people were critically injured! Hilarious!

Imagine if someone called the ABC and told the same joke about an Indian with a funny accent. Or a muslim.

I’m not particularly fazed by the NZ jokes thing – aggressive nationalism will always be mocked – it’s bloody good sport. However, I think it’s worth noting that this English lady obviously thought she was in good company, slagging off the New Zealanders. There was something quite smug about it. Or perhaps this is lateral violence, where the Poms can only take so much before they pass it on.

Artificial grief

Straight to the pool room

There’s no shortage of issues to be concerned with at the moment, foremost of which is Australia’s energy ‘restructure’ that will have major implications for this country’s emissions…not that you’d know because no-one seems remotely interested in it.

What everyone is interested in is the ridiculously polarised debate over the detainees on Manus island. Honestly, it’s like the two sides of the media collude to create a brainless duopoly. Missing altogether is any mention of the real mandate of the anti-asylum seeker politicians.

It’s all very well to talk about how few asylum seekers are coming to Australia, or how Australia should admit those who’re currently being held in (or ‘released’ from) the Manus island detention centre BUT the main reason Australians continue to vote against asylum seekers is that they think if Australia admits everyone who comes by boat or plane then more will come.

I personally think Australia should take many more refugees than it does – we are currently engaged and complicit in fucking up the Middle East, and have benefitted massively from its general instability, now and in years gone by. Even the most cursory examination of history will tell you how this works. However, that’s my perspective and I know it’s not a popular one.

What needs to be addressed in the refugee debate is the perception that if more can come, more will come. I have only once seen an acknowledgement or discussion of this idea in the mainstream left media (in The Monthly, several years ago).

Now, it’s hard to imagine a more pressing issue than the status of refugees being abandoned in Papua New Guinea. Or at least that’s what I thought until I read our local newspaper this morning.

The front page featured a group of local fishermen petitioning for an artificial reef. It turns out that after 200+ years of European despoil there just isn’t quite enough shit cluttering up the bottom of the ocean. If only there were just a little bit more!

After all, it’s getting harder and harder to catch fish, so clearly there needs to be something that organises them into a more easily accessible area. And actually, while we’re at it, let’s get rid of the Marine Park as well. Because God knows, that thing has heaps of fish in it.

You might think this issue is a little mundane, but that’s where you’re wrong. Because the fishermen are not the only local group furiously sweating into their heavily branded baseball caps this week. There is another group of ‘concerned locals’ who’re being actively concerned in the direction of the Mayor. This group don’t give a shit about the artificial reef. They’re concerned about sea level rise – specifically, the lack thereof.

Our Council has had the audacity to suggest that the avalanche of scientific evidence regarding climate change is probably accurate. Sea levels are likely to rise. But not without a fight. Because nothing turns back the ocean like a group of crimson-faced fatties belligerently sweating into their nylon short shorts. It’s in the bible, somewhere near the back. Check the index for; ‘coastal inundation’, or ‘double-brick’.

Between artificial reefs and sea level rise it’s hard get a moment of peace.

But all is not lost. There is a delightful symmetry here. Because, on the off-chance that protesting sea level rise does not hold off the inexorable creep of the ocean, our local coastline is set to acquire a rather substantial artificial reef, complete with brick-and-tile patio and floor mounted swivelling bar stools. That’s right, most of the region’s waterfront properties will eventually fall into the sea.

The fishermen would love it for the snagging opportunities alone; ‘Fuck, Bazza, I’m snagged on the rotunda’ would enter the lexicon, a development that is certainly overdue.

The fish would love it too – they could lay their eggs in the entertainment unit and hang fibreglassed humans above the bar.

Why I’m not rich is beyond me.

Vote to marry a year ten brachiosaurus!

To begin – this shit, from the ABC, no less. IT’S NOT A FUCKING VOTE, it’s a survey.

The whole point of a survey is so the government doesn’t have to have a vote. I note however that this article comes to us from ‘Hack’, the Millennial’s ABC, so one doesn’t expect it to be remotely accurate because, like, facts are like so, like lame or something, meh.

Second – the NO media campaign ads.

Apparently these ads are going to be popular, because they have women in them. Women who don’t make any sense. Seriously, there are some coherent arguments against SSM (depending on your point of view) but these ads don’t encompass them.

Here’s a snippet of the dialogue;

If same sex marriage is passed it will be like overseas, where we don’t have a choice anymore….

That’s right, everyone will be forced to marry gay people.

Also, Concerned Mum of Tuggeranong (she’s the slightly cross eyed lady looking upwards towards the camera in faux penitence) says;

If same sex marriage goes ahead my year seven boy will be told it’s OK for him to wear a dress to school next year

Yep, that’s right – this survey will have far reaching consequences that may or may not bear any resemblance to the original fucking issue. Here’s the outtake,

If same sex marriage goes ahead my year seven boy will be told he can wear a fur-suit and marry a brachiosaurus! Won’t someone think of the children?

Quite. So let’s think about those children….well, while everyone was working themselves into a state about the ‘damage’ same sex marriage will do to children, these two stories emerged, one about toddler Braxton Slager who drowned in his foster carer’s illegal backyard pool, and the other, Braydon Dillon, the nine year old boy who was killed by his father in Canberra;

I heard Slager’s mother and father complaining vociferously about their son’s death on the radio. Apparently the state services had ‘let them down’. Even the Minister, Prue Goward, called them to apologise. The system is broken!

The media intimated that the toddler should have never even been placed in foster care. His mother said she didn’t want him placed in foster care, and that she was already the primary carer for other older children. Surely he could have stayed in the loving embrace of his mother?

But let’s be clear-eyed about this – FACS don’t remove toddlers because Mumsy doesn’t have the latest Wiggles DVD. In fact, a recent report showed just how hard it is to get FACS to do anything at all,

It shows in July 2012, the St Mary’s office closed 60 per cent of “risk of serious harm” reports without assessment due to competing priorities, while in June 2013 at Mt Druitt 86 per cent of reports were closed without assessment.

I’m prepared to entertain the idea that FACS thought the toddler was in immediate danger if he stayed with his mother.

It’s worth noting, given the statement above, that  FACS in Western Sydney might appreciate a lazy 122 million dollars, but no, we need it for the government sponsored survey that’s going to tell us exactly how bad it would be to officially recognise gay people who are already raising children perfectly well, as married.

Which brings me to Bradyn. I was thinking about him as I heard the ‘No’ campaigner telling ABC’s Patricia Karvelas that the best environment in which to raise children was with a mother and a father. Bradyn Dillon’s father hit him in the head,

…multiple times between December 2015 and February 2016.

The final beating, which caused previous brain injuries to re-bleed, was sparked over an accusation Bradyn had stolen lollies from his father.

Dillon had just beaten Bradyn with a belt as he was bent over naked on a coffee table.

“Bradyn told the accused he didn’t want to live with him anymore and that the belt did not hurt,” the documents said.

Dillon then forcefully hit and kicked his son in the face and head.

Bradyn’s mother had contacted authorities multiple times to report this abuse, although for some reason Bradyn couldn’t go and live with her. I won’t speculate as to why. Once again, we witness the failure of authorities to protect a child at risk. 122 million probably wouldn’t go astray there either.

Then, still on the subject of children, I see this morning that the Catholic church has come out against same sex marriage. Yep, the catholic church has defined gayness as an act of moral turpitude. Let me get a pen.

And final salvo in this weird, stupid and offensive campaign that seems to know no bottom, goes to the frankly weird campaigning of the Greens – I received an email from them with the subject line;

You’re enrolled to vote YES!

This is ridiculous. IT’S NOT A FUCKING VOTE.

The Greens shouldn’t tell anyone they’re going to vote yes, it’s smug and presumptuous, and finally, people who aren’t enrolled might think this means that they are, and therefore not bother to check (yes, the email came before the cutoff to update your enrolment details).

Opposing same sex marriage because it might damage children is patently fucking ridiculous, as there are thousands of gay men and women raising children already. People’s ability to provide a loving home isn’t dictated by their sexual orientation. It just plain isn’t. You might oppose it for other reasons – mainly due to western-judeo christian something-or-other and that’s a matter of religion, but the ‘community is just thinking-of-the-children’ argument rings hollow in the light of the horrors above.

If you’re that fucking concerned about the welfare of children, put all your efforts into stopping parents from hooking into the methamphetamine. 122 million dollars might help with that.