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?

Sewing their lips shut - again

If you're wondering why I have yet to comment on the desperate people locked in Christmas Island who are starving themselves and sewing their lips together to raise awareness for their plight and those who killed themselves at Villawood...it's because what the hell can you say? The point of this blog (besides rageventing) is to raise awareness about the issues. When somebody sews their own lips together, you can't top that as a red flag. That says, in letters fifty-feet high, "SOMETHING HAS GONE VERY VERY VERY SERIOUSLY WRONG HERE".

Meanwhile, Amnesty hammers home the message themselves very well with this lovely TV campaign.

Whine some more, Kochie you fatuous fuck

Actress Portia de Rossi does a book-promoting puff piece on Sunrise. As part of the interview deal she expresses a preference to being interviewed by a woman. Kochie, the ultimate ugly Australian, the racist, privileged hatemongering fuck who spews his middle of the road I'm-okay-jack oppression to other privileged white upper middle class people on his TV show Sunrise, decides she's an uppity feminist who should be back in the kitchen, not trying to oppress him. Damn her, she can't do that to me! I'm a white male and she hurt my feelings!

Don't click on that link unless you want the bile to fill your throat at the most whiny piece of mansplaining you'll see this year.

At least the SMH exposed this for the beat up it was, with the inverted commas around 'refuse'.

What's important is they're in control

50 Afghan boys involved in a brawl but that's okay, Immigration Minister Sandi Logan knows what the important issue is:

"We are concerned about ensuring the centre remains in order, remains calm and that we are in control, which we are," he said.

I currently receive a welfare cheque because my mental illness makes it difficult, if not impossible for me to work sufficient hours so as to support my family. The penalty for doing this are many. I can't get a loan. I can't save money because there's not enough. And most of all, I am a target for hate. It is difficult to miss someone, every day, decrying those on welfare. Sometimes - rarely - they will take the time to decry specifically those who cheat welfare, but that of course is not a term they are willing to define. Generally they think everyone cheats welfare. That people on it are lazy and good for nothing and should be culled to reduce the surplus population. Every day, I have to justify myself to those people, to that attitude. Or at least, I feel like I do.

But there are some who face much greater hatred. A hatred that simmers constantly beneath almost every facet of culture and bubbles up all over the place. A hate that judges and condemns people, for the crime of being different. These people don't take money, they don't cost money, they don't hurt anyone or deprive anyone of anything, they don't change anything, they don't want anything, except to be just like everyone else. All they really want is to love someone, and for that, they are hunted down and viciously attacked, denied justice, freedom and due process, segragated and pilloried, villified, stigmatised, excluded, mocked and spat on.

I know what's it like to have to wake up every morning and justify my current choices. I also know how hard it is to love somebody. Anyone who's ever been in a long-term relationship, or been a parent, or a child, who's lived with friends, who's walked as a human being with others for any time, knows how hard it is to love and go on loving, to push beyond every nerve and sinew that is worn down by the exhausting mundanity and cruelty of life and its endless demands and distractions, to look beyond the petty and the selfish and find a reason to care about someone and keep caring about them, over and over, day after day. Love is the hard option, the tiring option, the back-breaking option, and it is hard enough without having to, every day, defend that love from those who want it nullified and exterminated. When the world and all its cultures seems to want to slough you off because it feels like you don't fit in and it would be just easier to go on without you and your strangeness. When it would be simpler to just give up loving so people don't have to be angry at you any more, or scared of you any more, or uncomfortable any more, so it could just be, even for a moment, less of a battle, simply to exist. To just lay down and say, I'm tired, I can't fight any more, I just want to rest.

Every day those who choose to love someone of a matching gender face this battle, and choose not to rest. And they smile. They choose love over hate, joy over shame - and it shames me that all I can do is stand up and applaud them for it. But at least I can do that.

Join me, won't you?

Courage is awesome

Hannah Williams is 16, gay and took her school to task for being massive homophobic fucks when they wouldn't let her bring her girlfriend to grade 11 prom. John Birmingham calls the school on it beautifully. As he points out, be honest. Have the courage of your convictions. Like Hannah.

High Court says Australians have to follow Australian Law

Gosh, really? Who would have thunk it. Nice work High Court, though, for waking us the fuck up.

From their mouths

Bush confirms the buck stopped with him when it came to approving torture.

Gillard confiirms she's a bigotted gay-hating bitch.

At least we may be able to do something about the latter - see you all November 20.

Robinson Crusoe, the Master Story

This is a very, very long but excellently written thesis on Robinson Crusoe as the Master Narrative of the white Protestant ethic of exploration and enslavement and how, through the book's popularity that meme infects all modern culture to keep perpetuating that story throughout history.

The political echoes of the White Man's Burden began long before Kipling and have echoed long after. What's particular interesting is also the idea of Crusoe being the "man alone", away from the cloying nature of others, where he can make the world anew, to his ethics and his standards. Crusoe is, clearly, a maverick, not a Washington insider. He's also, of course, John Galt and his disciples, the Tea Party. We don't need society, because I'm Alright Jack. I've got my island. And that's the problem with homosexuals of course - they can live how they choose but when they come into your island, that's crossing the line.

America is the Man on the Frontier, and The Man Alone there, like Gary Cooper at the end of High Noon. Yes, he'll save the women, because, like the black folks and such, they can't save themselves - but of course just like a woman, Grace goes and gets herself captured. That's why Ethnic Sidekicks are better than women: the ethnics have the good sense to die in your arms thanking you for freeing them. Gary saves Grace (because he's a bleeding heart in the end) but John Galt would leave her and the town to die. They made their own bed by being pacifists, ethnics and women.

As always, there's Futurama:
Leela: Fry, one of these men will be the ruler of Earth!
Fry: What do I care? I live in America!
Leela: Fry, America is PART of the Earth!
Fry: Wow. I have been gone along time!

America is an island from the world; its inhabitants islands from each other. While many in the left hated Obama's centricism there were a lot of people who responded to his message of healing a divided country (another Master Story, of course). And that's because either consciously or unconsciously, they (and we in the rest of the West are not immune to this in our mad dash for individualism) can see their islands may kill them all.

E Pluribus Unum, indeed.

Seriously, WTF people

Some residents of Adelaide Hills have vowed to fight the decision that 400 people be moved into an empty army base near the suburb of Inverbrackie. 400 people into a city of 1.3 million, into a suburb of thousands. There are probably more than 400 people born in Inverbrackie each year. What kind of insanity makes you wake up and be afraid of this?

It's insanity, of course, that has to be fuelled by hate-mongering psycopaths. Fucking fuck this fucking fucker in his fucking ass. I'm sorry, I'm too angry to even have words.

What I'm Taking Away From the Rally to Restore Sanity

Obviously I have a problem with some of the ideas behind the rally. Of course I do, because I'm kind of its enemy. I'm a pundit, a rabble-rouser, the man trying to instil fear and anger into people. But I can take my lumps and find the things I do agree with.

I agree that fear is dangerous, as are those who thrive on fear, who manufacture it and sell it for their own profit. The same goes for those who make and sell division simply for the sake of division. As we saw back in 1947 division and fear are the tools of tyranny and oppression. Extremism is also dangerous, in any form. As John said in his intelligent and moving closing speech, it is through the little concessions that we not only make the struggle of our lives bearable but that we also accomplish great things and that when everything is extreme, nothing is extreme. The very problem of not being heard becomes only worse when everything becomes a critical issue. The real life and death issues becomes lost in a media where everything is beat up into a life or death issue.

My point of diversion, if you will, is simply to hope we do not forget that there ARE life and death issues. And that in taking time out to remember that all our so-called monsters are in fact men, we do not ever forget that just because they are men does not stop them from being monstrous. That although we must be ever-careful not to paint the devil's horns on everything and cast ourselves as the righteous soldiers aimed at destroying that evil, there are times when those devil horns fit and shying away from that fact lets people escape the true condemnation they deserve.

There are so many who use the cover of defusing the argument or calling for sanity to do just that, to dodge the appelations placed upon them without responding to them. There are those who are offended when they are called racists or bigots, and accuse those who apply the label as not helping the process with such extreme accusations. But the classifications fit and the very reason we use that kind of language is to drive the point home, to point out that by their views (or indeed, their inaction or silence) they consent, assent or actively pursue ideas which are monstrous and outcomes which are abusive, oppresive, inhumane, unfair, and very often, outright deadly. I don't call John Howard a murderer or children to make myself feel righteous (although I admit that can and often is part of the fun), I do it so that the world never forgets that he was a murderer of children.

And I disagree strongly with Stewart's suggestion that the asshole who comes up the turnpike and butts is only a rare abberation. He's right that the truly anti-social hater is rare (or uncommon) and that there's a difference between Fred Phelps a very nice person who is a bit startled by gay marriage...but in action, in effect, there IS no difference. It is the casual racism, the timid bigotry, the general tendency for the world to go slow and keep an even keel because we've all got to get to work and look after our families - it is these things, just as much as the madmen and hate-mongers, that keep the suffering ongoing, that let tyranny and oppression breed. Again, this is precisely WHY we must call bigotry what it is, that we must show people for the demons they are, so that they realise the suffering they are part of, and the hatred they permit.

What's more, the idea that racists and bigots are "bad people", extreme and alien creatures, and that normal people just could never be like that is a truly terrifying one that is seen everywhere these days. The insane National Organisation of Marriage has on its talking points page a way to respond to questions, viz:

1. Are you a bigot?
A: “Do you really believe people like me who believe mothers and fathers both matter to kids are like bigots and racists? I think that’s pretty offensive, don’t you?

There's that terrifying insanity, the idea that "people like me" could be "like bigots and racists". Because bigots and racists wear sheets and live in compounds. No, they really don't. They're you, they're me, and of course it's offensive. We intend to offend you for your poisonous views and tiny little minds.

BUT.

While the Rally to Restore Sanity risks doing just this - dividing the world into the extremist who is crazy and the regular people who aren't (and Stewart even invoked the working schlub idea) - it did manage to make a bigger point at the same time, which was the opposite of that idea. The idea that the bigots are you and me is the same idea of that all our monsters are also men. And that in a pluralist society we need division, and disagreement and should never turn opposiing ideas into throughtcrime or taboos. And that free men must pull in all directions - but not pull each other to pieces over divisions which can be better fixed with discourse and democracy. That, after all, is the whole point of democracy: the defying of Mao Zedong's idea that change only comes from the barrell of a gun.

We must never forget that. We must not turn things into battles and wars where they can be avoided because in the end, everyone loses. And because wars are too easy. Recently the Tea Party have been accused of showing up for pretty much any right-wing cause under the sun and thus having no real definition; what's happening in what happens in the left all the time, where you have a mobile and active activist movement who are joiners, and show up for everything even remotely near their wheelhouse. And that happens because people want to fight battles, as often and as loudly and as simplistically as they can, without actual thought. Deep down, we all want the Electric Monk so we don't need to read, listen, and think, we can just believe, and show up - and fight.

But this weekend two hundred thousand Americans stood up against that idea. And to do that, they had to have thought about it, because I'm sure most of them had to be politically aware. They had to mediate their attendance with their other, probably strong but certainly aware political views. Even if they didn't, they stood up for thought over belief. For discourse over slogans. For facts over factionalism. For the whole picture, not the flag on top. For choosing for yourself instead of following the herd. And against simply showing up and shouting because your team says so, which, whatever your side, is no help to anybody. Apathy is dangerous, but blind, hate-filled obedience is no solution.

Once, some clever people asked "what if they gave a war and nobody came?". I applaud Stewart for his new version: "what if they held a political rally, and nobody came?"

Well, I do know what that's like, I support refugee rights. But you know what I mean.

Evil then Stupid

Liberal MP Don Randall calls the ABC the "Gay BC" (evil) then fails to identify his own party's policies (stupid). All in a day's work.

One inch forward, two giant leaps backward

As I said, just the fact that Chris Bowen seems vaguely concerned about imprisoning children was a step in the right direction. But at the same time, the government hasn't actually done anything except had an MP promise an executive order that will take, apparently, nine months to execute and as yet as no actual defined perameters of what they mean by "in the community" (like the Brisbane refugees near the airport who were locked in motel rooms 24-7 and guarded by armed guards). At the same time, they've opened two new camps and expanded the Darwin one.

Read more from Ian Rintoul and Tom Cowrie.

Good news for refugees

It's not an entire solution but it's possible a good beginning: New Immigration minister Chris Bowen is moving 1500 asylum seekers into Australian borders and wants to accompany that with community placements for children and families. Just his choice of language is a relief.

Of course, Abbott didn't miss a chance to decry this as leading to more boats. Yes Tony. You must do everything you can to keep children in concentration camps and whatever else Satan instructs you. Maybe, just maybe people are getting shitted off with that line, since it didn't work last time.