Categories: public nuisances

28 Feb 2010, Comments (6)

R-E-S-P-E-C-T, Find out what it means

Author: Helen

You know when a government come up with something that just really stinks of “cooked up by a PR company”? To give him credit, our State Premier John Brumby took on board that the recent attacks on Indian students and workers in Melbourne really did have a racist component and didn’t try to take the “Racist? Who? Us? How dare you!” route. But. Come on. Wasn’t there anyone in the State PR machine to say “hang on a minute guys, I think this might cause widespread uncontrollable laughter, eyerolling and blowing of mighty raspberries from the people we are trying to impress with our Sincerity™?

A FORMER AFL footballer is the nation’s first “respect” minister after being appointed by the Victorian government to tackle the growing racism and alcohol fuelled violence problems in the state.
Premier John Brumby announced Justin Madden would be the minister for the “respect agenda” as part of his election year cabinet reshuffle following the shock resignation of embattled Transport Minister Lynne Kosky this week.

I mean… Madden! Not only does he come from the background of Australian Rules football – a milieu which is trying with limited success to shake off its reputation for a lack of respect when it comes to women and people of other races and cultures. He’s also the minister least likely to be associated with the word “respect” by the long suffering inhabitants of Victoria. He has a long history of showing respect to developers and money, and none to architecturally significant buildings, grasslands, coastal communities or the planning rules set up to make our city livable. This leaked email about setting up a false public consultation process for a development has shown just how much respect Madden and the Vic Government have for the people of his State and the iconic buildings and places which they love.

Really, I’m not under any illusion that the Victorian government has our best interests at heart – let alone those of international students – but you’d think with all the money from developers pouring into the party coffers, they’d be able to come up with a more sophisticated PR response to the problem.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T – Find out what it means, before you create a ministry of it.
 
 
 
Crossposted at Larvatus Prodeo, with bonus Bernice

10 Feb 2010, Comments (16)

But he meant it to be ironic!

Author: Helen

Pic of a woman crushed under a giant, retro iron, with caption "Don't let your iron get you down..."

Well, we can settle in for an entertaining year in which the hairy and hilarious leader of the opposition competes with his shadow cabinet for Tool of the Week. It’s got to the stage where HAT has an ongoing Obligatory Tony Abbott said What Now? thread.

For those outside the country, his latest effort was:

“What the housewives of Australia need to understand as they do the ironing, is that if they get it done commercially, it’s gonna go up in price, and their own power bills as they switch the iron on are gonna go up every year, I mean…”

Which immediately, of course, brought on some hilarious tweets and comments. The winner was Zoe, prize: One medium sized internet.

@crazybrave: I would like to iron Tony Abbot’s budgie smugglers. While he was in them.
@tobiasziegler: “We respect women’s right to wear the burqa, but it’s just one more thing they have to iron.”
@jeanburgess: I can only understand national policy through examples of how it might affect my daily life as an ordinary housewife. Thanks, Tony Abbott!
@tammois I know, let’s hook Abbott up with Palin to go rule Planet Stupid and Offensive.
And
I DON’T IRON, TONY ABBOTT. I DON’T IRON & I VOTE, YOU IDIOT
@antipodeankate: I’m not ironing because I am busy crocheting my husband a pipe, shaking up a litre of martini and organising his ties.
I leave the house for half an hour and Tony Abbott says something guaranteed to annoy me… I’m a wife, I’m in my house, I’m not ironing.
@TimDunlop What conservative pols of Aust have to think about when they are fantasising about housewives doing ironing is that it’s best not to share

And from the bloggiverse, some wise advice for young Tones from Paul Burns commenting on LP:

…(S)tay away from wimminz ishoos. They already know you are a turd. You don’t have to prove it over and over again day after day.

Some people think he just has to be on the ALP payroll. It does make a kind of sense.

The image above represents my vision of life under a Liberal government with Abbott as PM; I stole it from Antipodean Kate.

2 Jul 2009, Comments (1)

Repost: Where’s Spiny Norman when you need him?

Author: Helen

This is a repost from the old Blogspot Cast Iron Balcony in March 2004. I was going to link to it in this LP post about Desmond Moran and the Melbourne gangsta thing, but the old blog has lost its template, and its paragraph breaks, completely. For those who perhaps aren’t familiar with Victoria and its obsession with things “Gangland”, I’ve reposted it here instead.

The gangsters of Melbourne have been having something of a killing spree lately. Killing each other, that is. There is even a special Task Force out on them called Purana, which the radio meeja takes great delight in pronouncing “piranha”.

None of us are perfectly consistent: I may be a bleeding heart pinko most of the time but I, too, have an inner right winger. It is hard to feel any sympathy at all for these characters and the temptation is to think “There goes another one! You Bewdy!” and perhaps award a mental Darwin Award.

Callousness is a two edged sword and something that there’s too much of these days, both in the blogosphere and the world at large. It’s to be resisted. Justice can be counter intuitive. Once you say it’s OK for one idiot to blow another away because the other lowlife blew his brudda away and anyway they’re less human than the rest of us, then you’re heading for Rwanda or Northern Ireland. And you’ll be no better than Ronnie Reagan. Remember that 80s joke? Reagan says, “Hmmm, you say there’s a new disease, it’s always fatal, and it affects homosexuals, prostitutes and injecting drug users?… And the problem is…?”

One good reason for ridiculing our homegrown Dougs and Dinsdales is that we need to stop portraying gangstas as cool. The Meeja pretend not to do it, but they can’t help themselves. I guess it’s too easy for a journalist on a deadline to whack in some Hollywood imagery to help a piece along. On the way to work the day after Lewis Moran’s death I saw a Herald Sun poster: GANGLAND KING DIES. Terrific! The Hun, usually of the “lock ‘em up and throw away the key” persuasion, promotes this sad man to King status. This wasn’t on the online version, but we did have “Drama plays like a movie”.

A couple of weeks ago in the Australian, the wife of one of the gangstas had a bit of a grumble about it. Sorry, can’t find the link. Her opinion, that a group of younger wannabes at Andrew “Benji” Veniamin’s funeral, standing around in dark suits and black sunglasses, were pathetic and up themselves, reflected the views of many of us out here in the, ahem, wider community. She also mentioned, revealingly, that Veniamin was full of valium and on his way to his mum’s to get his washing done when he was killed.

Think on that, you young boys and girls. Is that glamour? Is that excitement? Valium, the drug of choice of bored Tennis mums in the 60s, and in the boot of the Merc, instead of another wasted gangsta, a load of smelly washing. Boys, organised crime isn’t glamorous; it’s boring. Gangsters are not people to admire; they’re clueless. ‘Benji’ wasn’t shot down in an exciting, Bonnie and Clyde-type scenario; he was sitting in a restaurant with a mouthful of Fettucine Carbonara*, on his way to his mum’s to get his washing done. As a crusty old feminist, sorry, I can’t resist a final poke: If he had simply learned to bung a load of washing in the machine and turn the knob, instead of being a knob, he might still be alive today.
 
 
*Embellishment alert: I do not know what type of pasta Veniamin actually was eating. It may have been Alfredo.

27 May 2009, Comments (6)

Balance! I’ll give you balance…

Author: Helen

Because of a deliberate campaign by the right-wing senator Eric Abetz, the ABC has gone out of its way to boost the Liberal voting and conservative element in the studio audience for the political discussion program Q & A.

ABC managing director Mark Scott told a Senate estimates hearing yesterday that, of the 2500 people who had attended the program this year, 34.4 per cent said they supported the Coalition, while 33.9 per cent voted Labor. Green voters comprised 12.8 per cent of audiences, while 2.4 per cent supported other parties and 16.6 per cent declined to reveal their voting intention…

…To restore the balance, Q & A producers leaned on Liberal politicians, firms such as Ernst & Young and PricewaterhouseCoopers and organisations including the Australian Christian Lobby, the Australian Union of Jewish Students, the Australian Family Association and the Australian Retailers Association in their hunt for conservatives.

The Howard government has gone but their miserable culture wars live on. The ABC has to bow to the whims of wingnuts like Abetz or, presumably, stand accused of commie radical advocacy. There is a huge double standard at play here.

If that tactic had been employed by the ABC to boost input from people Mr Abetz didn’t approve of, it would have been called “stacking”. If efforts had been made to boost input from marginalised or less powerful groups in society, it would have been called “affirmative action”, and you know how well that goes down with the Abetzes and Albrechtsons. Oh, well, consistency, you know, the hobgoblin of little minds, etcetera.

12.8 percent Greens in the audience is called “over-representation”. When a single Liberal senator pressures the ABC to use affirmative action and stacking to increase the rightwing content of the audience, it’s called “balance”. Anyway, that explains why there are so many inane questions from young apparatchiks-in-the-making in this program’s audience.
 
 
 
Crossposted at Larvatus Prodeo. Edited to correct typo “12.8 Greens” to “12.8 percent Greens

27 May 2009, Comments (11)

Clive and the Evil Feminist jackboot of Doom!

Author: Helen

The Spike-Heeled Feminist Jackboot of Doom!

Check out this illustration, which goes with this massive outbreak of flatulence on bbc.co.uk. Yes, that’s right. It looks like the kind of thing you’d see in the Mail or Telegraph, but it’s the BBC, which is very sad.

“Women who believe liberal values exploit their sexuality have something much greater to fear – the jackboot of dictatorship, says Clive James.” Oh, look, the word “jackboot” is closely juxtaposed with the image of a very, very expensive piece of bejewelled, stilletto heeled footwear – exactly the kind of footwear favoured by rich, selfish western funfeminists, obviously. The Manolo Blahniks, or jackboots, as your subconscious now suggests that they are, are stamping on… what? they’re stamping on all the women in the non-western world!

Clive thinks that it should be obvious that liberal democracy is best for women, but do you think feminists agree? No, because they hate democracy, and prefer the jackboot / manolo blahnik of dictatorship! Say whaa, you say? Yes, according to Clive this is the case. “Some Western feminists” (that’s code for most of us, I think) don’t want women to have freedom, which is proved by their lack of support for joining up with the US and bombing their countries back into the Stone age.

Kuwait is by no means, a perfectly constituted democracy. As far as I can figure out, there is a ruling family whose Emir chooses the government and calls elections for parliament. But women have now been elected to the parliament, by popular vote. It should hardly need saying that this would have been unlikely to happen if Saddam Hussein had been allowed to continue to rule the country by terror, but let’s leave his awful memory aside for a moment, if we can, and dare to put forward a general reflection.

Kuwait? Saddam Hussein? errrr….. Let’s just skip over that minor error and continue with James’s demonstration of how wrong all the western feminists are. The solution, he appears to be saying, is just to give up on this notion of women being equal to men and get themselves protectors from the world’s supply of naturally violent men. Yes, he’s reviving the old spectre of “regime change” again, to rescue the damsels who will strew flowers in their path when rescued by the violent western forces (but it’s good violence, you understand, not that bad violence practiced by The Other Side.)

Does this sound familiar? He’s reviving the old 2007 Decent talking point, that if you oppose invading and bombing other countries you hate democracy. If you’re a so-called feminist, and you don’t think the Coalition of the Willing should be reducing one country or another to rubble, that means you support the continued oppression of the women there. It’s logical, innit. And it’s linked to our unreasonable repudiation of violence. Unreasonable, because (Clive thinks) it’s a chick thing.

It’s just too clear a proof that men have a natural advantage when it comes to the application of violence. When you say that women have little chance against men if it comes to a physical battle, you are conceding that there really might be an intractable difference between the genders after all.

…Men will always monopolise the means of violence if they can. Women can learn to shoot guns, but there are no all-female armies, and even the Amazons were probably a myth. Women, on the whole, would naturally like to do something else, whereas an army, for too many men, is a home away from home, and often their only home.

…What [Aung San Suu Kyi] needs is an invading army…”

Yes, that’ll work. Depending on the good graces of the Warrior Class has worked really well for the women of the world, so far. That’s why the Sudan is such a fucking paradise. And I don’t get the feeling that the army was a home away from home for Clive. He spent his youth writing articles for the University rag and building his career. If he gets his wish, this old man won’t be invading Burma. His government will be sending younger men (and women) on this latest useless adventure. People like MY SON. Words are cheap, Clive.

And, Clive? The worst thing about this article is not that you’ve latched onto this ancient and pathetic gotcha fully two years after the other Decents did, and the rest of the blogosphere showed very convincingly what a pile of old dog’s balls it was. It’s not that you admit you won’t even use your position as a popular writer and functionary of The Burma Campaign to do anything for Aung San Suu Kyi because it’s not threatening and warlike enough – you terrifying old keyboard Kommando, you. No, it’s because you use the women of Burma and Iraq – or was it Kuwait? – to score some kind of point over the strawfeminists who you’d like to get off your lawn. And that does not make you the better person.

There’s a guy called Kant who wants a quick word with you. In the meantime though, Western Feminists, just give up your sick love of violent dictatorships! and get your bejewelled jackboot the hell off Aung San Suu Kyi!

19 May 2009, Comments (10)

B-I-N-G-O

Author: Helen

For those of you who don’t live in Australia, this is about the Australian rugby team who “sexually assaulted” / “had group sex with” a nineteen year old girl in New Zealand a few years ago (according to our very coy media terminology.) The only player identified so far is Matthew Johns. The incident was reported in an ABC documentary program, Four Corners (Transcript here, and some followup information here.) For further reading, I’d recommend these posts at Radical Rayedish and Hoyden.

For once, the response to the news about the “group sex”, (as they call it), garnered a stronger response than the usual limp slap on the wrist. Matthew Johns was stood down from playing and coaching. He has been made to apologise, twice, on television for hurting his family (although not the victim of the group attack) and was sacked from a lucrative talking heads gig. And all hell has broken loose.

Over the last week or two we’ve all had more than enough in both the internet and mainstream press to fill up our bingo cards several times over. What were you doing out dressed like that?…Hearing this must be so hard for his family! …He’s rich. I think we all know what she’s after, hmmm?… What did she expect, going off with the two guys?…

Where Johns is not being portrayed as a victimised hero (Dear god, he’s only human! How many of us haven’t … Um, well, YMMV), the commentary on what he and the rest of the NRL fraternity get up to is infused with strangely essentialist arguments. One can’t help that suspect that the Evpsych rubbish that filters into the mainstream media is picked up and distorted by people who simply want to justify their behaviour. Radical Rayedish picked up on this astoundingly self-serving and stupid comment by a senior NRL official, who, with a million motivational courses and a dash of pseudoscience under the belt, tries to get all psychological on us:

STEVE BURRASTON, CEO NEWCASTLE KNIGHTS: These guys are pumped up, they are playing a very aggressive game and they are putting their bodies on the line, it’s fearless. …When we want them on the field we want them to be aggressive. They’ve got to make tackles, they’ve got to be fearless, then we want them to do things that other people don’t do. So we attract an aggressive, young, risk taking male. We give him a shower, put a suit on him and then say now we want you to be, you know, a submissive male. We want you to go out there and not have any problems, it’s very difficult to do that.

EXCUSE ME.
Burraston throws up his hands (What can you do?) because apparently, we must allow top sportsmen to use young girls as their personal meatsock, otherwise we have no choice but to make them into submissive males, which you just know he would have described as f**king p**fters except that he knew he was being interviewed by the ABC. What a steaming pile of crap that is.

And there we have it. The obverse of the misogynist distortions of the notion of consent where the woman falls on the wrong side of the madonna/whore complex (she was up for sex with Johns and one other, therefore, she shouldn’t have complained when the rest of the team jumped in, is pretty much the default position.) This is the idea of the manly man as a force that cannot control itself, and requires constant input from women on the right side of the madonna-whore complex to keep him in line. The fact that this is hardly complimentary to the men themselves escapes many commenters, as does the fact that this makes them close ideological kin to the wahabist nutters to whom they claim to be so superior (uncovered meat, anyone?)

But I notice these arguments aren’t used so much for men in other settings. We don’t, for instance, see high-risk-taking rock climbers, parachutists, ocean yachtsmen and sea kayakers regularly fronting up to the cameras pretending to apologise for their latest “gang bang” or euphemism du jour. I’m not sure how Mr Burraston would explain this one. Going around in a pack, poor socialisation, and being paid far too much money and being fawned upon constantly would probably explain more than any faux-psychological excuse based on the need for extra aggression to run around after a leather bladder.

11 May 2009, Comments (9)

TAX SLUG!!!1!

Author: Helen

It always appears when a Federal or State budget night is – to use the MSM’s current fave word du jour – looming.

I saw it as I was coming out of the turnstiles at Parliament station. The poster for the Herald Sun: TAX SLUG BEER CIGS. Oh. Budget time.

This ghastly gastropod has terrorised the Australian scene for decades. My extensive research (i.e. Wikipedia) has eliminated the common slug, banana slug or even the Red Triangle slug (found in Melbourne snooker halls?) No, this is more of your gigantic mutant movie monster, like the Slugs that Ate Canberra.

The Hun obviously doesn’t approve of the Tax Slug and seems to be urging the citizens of Australia, as in any good B-movie, to band together to fight this mucous menace. Here is how a Hun journo and Aghast of Mt Martha see the Tax Slug:

The Tax Slug: Eating all your money!!1!1

However! We of the social democratic persuasion see the Tax Slug in a more glass-half-full way:

The Tax Slug, the social democratic view

Something I forgot to add when I photoshopped this Tax Slug… We can haz Paid Parental leave? I hear a weak cry of “yes”. But not until 2011, apparently. Bummer.

Some people of a needlessly literal and nitpicking type might drop in at this point to inform me that Slug is used here in the sense of a Tax Hit, as in taking a hit, possibly from the German schlage? Well, I refuse to believe that, that’s all. Not only have I forked out all that money for a mucus-proof suit and slug gun, but that would require me to believe that all these journos all over Australia, people who are paid to write, just keep recycling and recycling a piece of slang that was out of date when my mum was a girl. Say it isn’t so!

9 Apr 2009, Comments (11)

Pratt, you’re a prat.

Author: Helen

Me (Watching football) Oh, he’s a nice looking guy. But unfortunately wearing the North Melbourne jumper. Thugs!*
SO: No, it’s not true any more. They’ve changed!

Ah mmm, no.

And don’t tell me their oh-so-sincere apology had nothing to do with keeping their major sponsor.

28 Feb 2009, Comments (15)

The writer and the cartoonist

Author: Helen

Last year, some cartoons which accompanied two of Miranda Devine’s articles caught my attention. One article (they’re both in the SMH, as always) is about feminists – they all hated Sarah Palin ‘cos they’re nasty. The other is about cougars. You know- women of a certain age who are desperate to partner.

In the Sarah Palin vs. feminism article, Devine asserts – and I hope you’re not eating breakfast while you read this – “in her brief starring role on the global stage [Palin] has been a powerful psychic enema, flushing out the poison at the heart of establishment feminism for all to see.” Now newcomers to Devine World will be saying “But, Sarah Bernhardt and Kathy Lette are not exactly spokespersons for feminism. And US feminists defended Palin against sexist commentary while a lot of male commentators wallowed it it”. Well, Devine is Strawfeminists R Us, so let’s not waste too much time on her under-researched opinions.

Edd Aragon, 1

What intrigued me was the cartoon; it’s so over the top. Well, the “feminist” depicted isn’t the Full Stereotype, judging by the heels and dress, although the hair looks as if it’s long and grey – an absolute no-no for Western women- but the depiction of the “feminist” is so, for want of a better word, hectic. Mad, tongue lolling, muscles like a skinned rabbit; Over-coloured, gesticulating wildly, jumping up and down on the face of the hapless Palin.

Hmm. Now for the other article, about cougars in the city of Sydney trying to find love. Miranda begins with the well-worn old starting point that women aren’t partnered these days because they’re too damn fussy, then points to one of those risible “statistical surveys” that our MSM love so much, suggesting that these fusspots should simply move to different suburbs to beat the odds. But! that doesn’t mean they should be, god forbid, calculating, like her old School Chum from Ascham, who persists in having preferences (Devine refers to this as having a “shopping list”). Never mind that the demographer Bernard Salt, refers to men as “product”.

Edd Aragon,2

Here, the cartoon shows a woman who’s just doing femininity in an ordinary way: a nicer haircut, pearls, drop earrings, lipstick, manicure… but the image is, if anything, more terrifying than the picture of the “feminist”. The woman’s huge, over-life size teeth are actually chomping onto the tiny man. The poor, tiny, powerless man! This woman will eat you alive.

Because, remember, in the eyes of the lecturing Miranda, you’re damned if you’re feminist and damned if you’re not. (If women were so powerful and terrifying, why should they have to move house to find a partner?) The image says something else – men, some men, fear strong women. Really fear them.

I googled the cartoonist, and discovered he has a blog. Does he hate women? Far from it, if his blog is anything to go by. You can easily find other caricatures he’s drawn which don’t show the subject as fearsome or terrible. So, what gives?

Do cartoonists tailor their artwork to the piece of writing it’s going to be published with, or does the writer exhort the artist to make an image nicer, naster, scarier to fit what they’re saying? I can’t work out why these images are so horrible; they don’t really jive with the artist’s whole body of work.

As I said, no particular reason for this post except that I realised how little I know about the mechanics of articles-with-cartoons and whether, or how, the writer and the cartoonist communicate to put across the message. I’d be interested to hear from any cartoonists if there are any reading!
 
 
 
Crossposted at Hoyden About Town

Update 1/03/2009: Pavlov’s Cat writes an interesting response from the writer’s side of the fence.

31 Jan 2009, Comments (9)

I know you are, but what am I?

Author: Helen


See these people here? Bloody Caucasians! Wouldn’t you know?

I can’t pick up the local news without reading about some f**king Caucasians in some break and enter or stoush or something. Now here they are giving the country a bad name just by being crass and stupid. Why can’t these people just assimilate?

Go back to Caucasia where you came from!

(H/T: Hoyden about Town.)

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