Revenge of the Voters

Hugh McKay on the NSW election, and the fact that you can't keep treating voters like dogs, chained up and being beaten. It may take a long time, but eventually, they bite back.

LIberals rev up the hate machine

Liberal Senator Gary Humphries recently tabled a petition to the senate calling for a "http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/one-nation-wrapped-in-a-blue-ribbon-20110218-1azky.html">10-year moratorium on Muslim immigration. It's one of those moments when your head whips around and you realise that it's not as bad as you think it is, it's much much worse. But it makes a terrible terrible sense. Hate sells. Hate gives you power, and the liberals want it. And Labor is bleeding lefties to the Greens. They tried to play the fear and hate card last election, BUT JUST NOT HARD ENOUGH TO WIN. As that article reveals, since November - since the regroup after the last election, in fact - the liberals new policy is to run Islamaphobia as hard as they can. They think it's their ticket to power.

And what's truly frightening is already they're able to get away with this shit. That the environment is so filled with bullshit they can table this kind of insane, unrestrained bigotry without expecting a backlash. That means we're in trouble. The groundwork is being laid. This is not the beginning; we're long past that. Since September last year a war has been waged by the Liberals and their cronies to pump so much fear and hate and ignorance into the public sphere they can light a match and explode into victory.

And let's be clear: we know exactly what the consequences of these policies will be, because they're ALWAYS the consequences. An agenda of fear and hate leads to discrimination, repression, exclusion, violence and murder. Without a doubt, these policies will put real human lives at greater risk. To them, this is an acceptable price for winning reelection (and deceiving millions of people is just an extra fun bonus).

Somedays, I wonder if I'm just too damn paranoid and histrionic. Then you have days like this where politicians, without an atom of shame or subterfuge, build an altar of corpses simply to feather their own nests. And there's just not enough paranoia to go around.

Sometimes, there's not enough hate in the world

At the back of my mind, I always knew the unions put a lot of pressure on the ALP, and that a lot of that pressure had to be based on private, personal interest. But you just hope, and believe, that most of the interest has to be for the benefit of the working man. Not random shit that's completely outside their remit, not to mention completely against the wishes and needs of the union's members. That would be deeply fucked up. Especially if they used the size and weight of their union to ensure their dick-flopping gets the most attention possible. That would be pretty immoral. That would be a complete betrayal of the members of that union, and a gigantic abuse of power.

But apparently, that's business as usual for Joe de Bruyn, a man who truly deserve to be raped to death with knives.

Ayn Rand: Big Old Hypocrite

Not only was Ayn Rand wrong-headed and batshit insane, we now have some lovely evidence that she was a big ol' socialist when it came to Stuff She Needed. Oh my, what would John Galt say?

Rilstone, in full flight

I've always liked Mr Rilstone, but it's been a while since I caught up with him. These days his blogging appears to be more political, as he points out that the Daily Mail is constantly making up lies in order to radicalise the middle class into a monster only they can control, which presumably they will then sell to the highest bidder on election night, and Melanie Phillips is their high priestess of Hate.

He would no doubt disapprove of my lack of intellectual rigour in my own blogging; I can only apologise and point people to his work instead.

More wiki, less leaks

As in, what have we actually found out from this giant pile of stuff, rather than talking about if it is a crime? I admit, I'm as weak and lazy as the next man at sorting through giant dumps of information, and haven't been tracking a lot of it, but this wonderful site has synthesized some of the really important leaks.

Of course, it's still a lot of stuff, and that may be its own greatest weakness - you can't effect change without dominating a news cycle and you can't dominate a news cycle with a hundred facts a day. Not only does news not work like that, humans don't work like that...

Prime Minister suggests using army for defence, people are shocked

So Wikileaks has revealed that Kevin Rudd said to Hilary Clinton that everything possible should be done to get China to the table, but should "everything goes wrong" Australian should be "prepard to deploy force".

And there is a problem with this? I guess the Liberal solution to say, China starting World War 3, would be to not use force? To use knitting?