Some are freer than others

Was it really just a little over six months ago that our Attorney-General George Brandis stood up in the senate and declared that people have the right to be bigots?

As stupidly glib as his comment was, he was right. In a free society, people should have the right to be bigots if that’s the way they want to be. And the rest of us should be able to call them out for the bigots they are at every opportunity. It’s one thing to recognise the right to bigotry, it’s another thing entirely for the government to be facilitating bigotry. When Senator Brandis made that comment in March, he was defending the government’s plan to repeal section 18C of the racial discrimination act. By an astounding coincidence, this was the law that Andrew Bolt was successfully taken to court under in 2011. In the election campaign and early months of the new government, repealing this law was a priority for the coalition because freedom of speech trumps hurt feelings. Okay then.

Then in August, the prime minister humiliated his attorney-general by scrapping the repeal. The excuse for this surprise was that “When it comes to counter-terrorism, everyone needs to be part of Team Australia.” If you have any idea what that’s supposed to mean, please let me know in the comments.

Mr Abbott also said that repealing the law had become a complication in relations with the Muslim community – which would be fine if they didn’t then turn around and pander to the “ban the burqa” (yes, I know they probably really mean niqabs, but most of them don’t know that) mob. The issue was first inflamed by Palmer United Senator Jacqui Lambie. Rather than dismiss her comments as a rookie mistake though, the following week, the prime minister’s chief of staff and the speaker of the house exercised power above that of the prime minister by having people in face coverings sit apart from the rest of people in Parliament’s public galleries. Now for sure, it could have been any face covering at all and if you believe that isn’t discriminatory, you probably think it’s fair that rich people are forbidden from sleeping on park benches just as much as the poor. Even Andrew Bolt thought it was unhelpful.

Now there are moves to make it harder for so-called “hate preachers” to come to Australia. I’m not entirely against this. I just wonder what happened to the right to be a bigot. Tony Abbott even apologised to Alan Jones (making you wonder who actually runs the country) for not acting sooner to impede the “objectionable.” So we’ve gone from defending the right to be a bigot, to going out of our way to stop some fringe dwellers being merely objectionable.

And this morning during a radio interview, Mr Abbott brought it full circle by saying,

Certainly if poor old Andrew Bolt is...

Okay, wait, I have to stop this here for a moment. “Poor old Andrew Bolt”‽ Yes Tony, poor old Andrew Bolt is the real victim here, what with his loss of reputation and livelihood. Oh, hang on, that never happened. In fact, since being taken to court and receiving the penalty of having to apologise, he has been given his own television show, so poor old Andrew Bolt has really suffered for his free speech.

Sorry, where were we?

Certainly if poor old Andrew Bolt is prosecuted for a mild, relatively mild piece,

No, sorry, I’m going to have to interrupt again. I think “relatively mild,” might be in the eye of the beholder here and we should also remember that the beholder wants to consider himself the prime minister for indigenous affairs. So it’s informative to know which side Mr Abbott comes down on in a disagreement between those he claims to represent and one of his ideological mentors.

Anyway, let’s try this again…

Certainly if poor old Andrew Bolt is prosecuted for a mild, relatively mild piece, I know it was different law, it was Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, but if we are looking for objectionable speech, the kind of stuff which we're hearing from Hizb ut-Tahrir is infinitely more objectionable than anything you'd ever hear from Andrew Bolt.

Picture taken from the
I’m Voting Liberal Facebook page.
Do you feel stupid yet?

I see. So there are now degrees of bigotry that we should defend? Reasonable people have argued all along that freedom of speech is no excuse for being an arsehole or a shield from the consequences of exercising that right. Having gone in to bat for the likes of Andrew Bolt though, the government has lost the ability to use that perfectly valid argument.

In times of alleged terrorist threat, we often hear a lot about sending messages, and the government has sent one over the last six months, but they’re probably not aware they’ve sent it.

To cut a long story short,
If you’re white, male, rich and support our politics, and you do something illegal, we’ll change the law to protect you,
If you’re brown, Muslim, female, or any combination of them, and you do something that’s not illegal, we’ll change the law to stop you.

 

The Rules: Respect

An old saying, bordering on cliché, states that respect is earned, not given.

Sadly, this has become an argument of convenience for those who want to justify being disrespectful.

It’s true that respect is earned, but that leaves us with two options. We can treat people with respect until they have shown they haven’t earned it, or we can treat people without respect until they’ve proven they have.

Anyone who chooses the latter gets no respect from me.
  
 

One day in September

This Saturday is Grand Final day in Melbourne. The Grand Final is championship game of the Australian (formerly Victorian) Football League and winning it is the ultimate achievement in Australian Rules Football. For my international readers (both of you – and yes, I am going to use that lame joke every time), it’s the equivalent of the FA Cup or the Superbowl, including all the ridiculous pageantry. It is a really, REALLY big deal.

If you’re into that kind of thing.

I’m not.

It’s terribly un-Australian of me but I do not like football. I didn’t like playing it when I was forced to in primary school, I do not like watching it, I do not like hearing about it.
I. Do. Not. Like. Football.

Now this is not to say that I begrudge other people liking it. I used to, back when people who liked football begrudged the kinds of things I liked, such as music and poetry and that kind of shit, but I’ve grown up a lot since then. I am not here to piss on anybody’s fun. If people enjoy football on any level, then good luck to them. I hope they all have a great day tomorrow.

I just wish they could do it without shoving it in my face.

My one tradition on Grand Final day is to see how long I can go without finding out the result. This is much, MUCH harder than you might think.

My record was 10pm, back around the turn of the century. I had been out to a movie with an ex-girlfriend and we continued to a nightclub where they blew it by playing the club song of the winning team. Way to kill the mood, DJ. On other years, I haven’t been able to go five minutes. You seriously have to hide if you want to avoid finding out. It’s on every radio in every shop. Don’t visit a friend, they’ll be watching. You can’t even go for a walk for risk of some yobs driving past yelling the name of their victorious team. This has happened.

It’s not until you try to that you realise how bloody hard it is to remain unaware of a particular piece of information without also being ignorant of everything else. Those of us who like to consider ourselves above such things can often be mocked for having heard of Snookie or the Kardashians. But there is such a thing as accidental knowledge. If you’re interested in important things that are happening in the world, and therefore access media that provide information, how can you not have heard of Perez Hilton? How can you not know that a princess is pregnant? The only way is to cut off all other information.They say no knowledge is ever wasted but really, some is.

That is why tomorrow, I am going to try to go offline. This is a lot harder than it sounds because I would prefer to remain connected to the news that I am concerned about – and there’s a fair bit of it about at the moment. Over the last six years, the longest time I have spent offline would have been during trans-pacific flights. For the first few hours I wonder what I might be missing, but after that, I adjust and realise that I really don’t need to be connected to instantaneous information all the time and I might just be able to do without it for even longer. Of course, as soon as I’m off the plane, I’m back on my device looking for signal. I could probably give up if I wanted to, but I don’t want to. And there are worse addictions to have.

This Saturday though, for the sake of being able to remain unaware of just one little bit of sports trivia, I will try to sacrifice my awareness of the rest of the world. As I said, I do not begrudge the rest of the country’s obsession with this event. I just want to option of not having to know something that has no relevance or importance to me.

Even US media, which can usually be relied on to ignore anything that does not directly
involve America or Americans, is no refuge from the Festival of the Boot.

Never not forgotten

I don’t need to remind anyone what date passed this week. It’s the date that has become shorthand for the atrocity that was committed on that day. And all over social media, we see the inevitable pictures of the twin towers, or lights taking their place, blended with stars and stripes, or perhaps an eagle and the caption “Never forget,” or words to that effect, in a suitably elegant font.

I don’t question anyone’s way of remembering, but I do note that all the iconography focuses on solely on New York. I see no pictures of the Pentagon, or of an empty field near Shanksville with appropriately patriotic enhancements.

Why? Well, at the risk of possibly upsetting people, allow me to theorise that it’s because it wasn’t on TV.

Like millions of others, I watched it live. It was about 11pm here when networks shifted to constant coverage. I could see that the first tower was beginning to collapse before the news anchor did. And like millions of others who didn’t even know anyone directly affected by the atrocity, I was traumatised by it – just to think that I was watching innocent people die and I knew that hundreds more were just about to. It was – to use a word in a completely literal and dispassionate form – spectacular.

And isn’t that kind of the problem? It seems like the spectacular nature of the crime and two of its targets are what people are commemorating more than the people who died. Yes, I get that it’s symbolism and that’s fine but we should be careful of worshipping the symbols over what they represent.

Now don’t get me wrong. If there’s one thing I can’t stand… well, forget that. There are lots of things I can’t stand but one of those things is a compassion hipster. That’s my term for those people who always pipe up saying, “Oh, you’re all upset about that thing that’s been in the news? I’m much more upset about this other, more important thing that you’ve probably never heard of.” Fuck those people!

It’s right and proper that people should remember innocent lives lost and bring those responsible to justice, regardless of the circumstances. But this is why we should perhaps examine our reactions. At the risk of sounding like a compassion hipster, there was another anniversary recently, of a time when nearly 3,000 Americans died more recently than 2001. Yet there was no grief porn splattered all over the internet – it was barely mentioned outside the areas that were affected. What’s the difference? Could it be that man’s inhumanity to man makes more memorable television to man’s negligence and indifference to man?

I think this is a discussion we really need to have one of these days. We should examine why we react differently to situations that are comparably unjust. We should ask why, if you were unlucky enough to be sitting on a plane that a psychopath chose to fly into a building, then we will remember you but if you were shot to death by a paranoid vigilante, well, you should have thought about that before being a black kid wearing a hoodie in the vicinity of a racist with a gun. And no, I’m not suggesting that there aren’t people who are equally and appropriately outraged by both situations – but there are some who aren’t and we should be bothered about that.

Have we learned anything? Probably not. America is again rounding up a posse to go and confront a terrorist threat. Again, don’t get me wrong, ISIS are the scum of the Earth. To borrow another line from Bruce Cockburn, if I had a rocket launcher, I wouldn’t hesitate. But let’s not kid ourselves about our motives. Only the extremely naïve would suggest that western democracies would be putting themselves on a war footing if not for the fact that two western hostages were decapitated on YouTube. As the reliably brilliant John Birmingham points out though, this is not a satisfactory reason to go to war.

As with September 11, video forces those of us safely ensconced in western democracies to witness the kind of threats others are used to living with every day. This is no accident. They want to provoke the west into a new confrontation and they’re doing it in the medium that we’re trained to respond to most. If you doubt this, try to find a report about ISIS that doesn’t gush over the production values of their videos. Yes, because that’s the story: production values!

If you think this is an overly intellectual way of looking at things, consider this: the Free Syrian Army, which stands in opposition to the Assad regime, are also fighting ISIS. And they also behead people. So, what exactly is it we’re upset about?

One other observation: The man suspected of murdering James Foley is 23 years old. That means he was 10 on September 11th 2001 and 12 at most when Iraq was first invaded. As the president said before he was president, we cannot afford to keep doing the same things and expecting different results.
  
 

Quotes of the century

"If [force] is to be used, it is not knowable how long that conflict would last. It could last, you know, six days, six weeks. I doubt six months."
- Donald Rumsfeld, 7 Feb, 2003

"I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators."
- Dick Cheney, 16 March, 2003

" I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency."
- Dick Cheney, 20 June, 2005

"Our country... cannot afford to keep doing the same thing over and over again and expect a different result."
- Barack Obama, 1 August, 2008

 "These American forces will not have a combat mission — we will not get dragged into another ground war in Iraq.
- Barack Obama, 10 September, 2014 


"The enemy have CNN just like we do."
- Falsely attributed to Colin Powell. Although, he did say this:

"No battle plan survives contact with the enemy."

It seems like the second consecutive administration is about to ignore his advice.

  

The Generic News

It works every night. Only the examples change... occasionally...

We're governed by idiots

Fundamentalists are crazy

Celebrities are people too

But wow, look what this one did!

Social media makes people do stupid things

Traffic's a bugger

Something something stock exchange

Foreigners, eh? They're a weird mob!

Somebody won the sportsball

Somebody lost the sportsball

Somebody's upset about why somebody lost the sportsball

Somebody got injured in the sportsball

Somebody got reported in the sportsball

Weather's a bugger

Don't despair though, animals are cute

Goodnight, and see you again tomorrow.
 
 

A polite request for advice from the prime minister

Dear Mr Abbott,

On the evening of Monday, 7th October last year, I had to take my wife to Melbourne Airport for a flight early on Tuesday morning. We could have travelled really early on the Tuesday, but we decided it was better to avoid any unforeseen delays and just stay at the airport hotel on the Monday night.

It was a purely personal trip, but as luck would have it, I had a work meeting in the CBD on the Tuesday morning. Naturally, I didn’t for a moment consider charging my employer for the accommodation, or even the travel, which I would have had to do anyway – the meeting the following morning was a happy accident of timing.

I never questioned my decision until last week.

The reason I’m telling you this is because as prime minister – or “team captain” as you’ve taken to describing your position – you set an example for all of us.

So I was intrigued to read that you explained your lateness to a parliamentary party meeting by saying that you had to pay a visit to the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in order to justify a parliamentary expenses claim for a private visit to Melbourne the night before.

Therefore, I have two questions:
Firstly, is it true? I’ve heard conflicting reports, but you refused to answer (24:36 in video) a question on the subject because it was two days old. I think you’ll find the statute of limitations on rorting expenses is a bit longer than that. Just ask Craig Thomson.

Secondly, if it is true, then can you tell me if I’ve made a bad decision? My employers are the best, and although my income is humble, I consider myself to be very well treated. Have I taken the wrong lesson from my Catholic upbringing? Should I just grab all I can get while the getting is good? Like you, my wages are ultimately paid by the taxpayer, so does that make it a kind of victimless crime? I mean, I think I’m paid enough, but I’m not paid anywhere nearly as much as you are. And if you still have to fiddle your schedule in order to afford a stay in Melbourne, then am I, who technically qualify as a low income earner, just being a fool to myself? My claim, like yours, might possibly be legitimate - I just felt it would be immoral.

I’m sure you can appreciate my dilemma and I would appreciate your advice.

Of course, given the conflicting reports, it might not have happened at all. So please Mr Abbott, as my leader, my captain and as a man of morals, say it ain’t so. But please mean it. And no sneaky paying it back before making a statement, please.