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With This Gutter Mind I Thee Wed

2010-02-23T17:50:43-08:00

On the NSW Government’s Relationships Register, here is everyone’s favourite upper-house Christian conservative, Gordon Moyes:

..there is already adequate protection for their rights under all the laws protecting de-facto relationship whether same-sex or different partnerships. Having the NSW Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages administer the relationship register is just an attempt to have a back door marriage.

Over to you, boys:

Heh. Back door.

Fascist Threat And Commie Lies

2010-02-14T16:34:25-08:00

Via Diddy Wah

Limned

2010-02-01T01:39:09-08:00

cross posted at Terrible Fabulous

This is what passes for political debate in Australia; I’m actually okay with that. Engaging with Tony Abbott’s policies would just give them air. So long as I don’t have to take his statements on sex and climate change seriously, I’m happy to join the rest of Australia in marvelling at the outline of his penis. Here now are some of the key political debate points pertaining to this important issue, as raised by the commenters to this article:

1. These comments clearly authored by a Liberal staffer:

Benny of Sydney Posted at 10:40 AM Today

Good on the bloke for being fit enough to wear them. Obviously he doesn’t over indulge on meals provided at the tax payer expense, unlike some larger politicians.

Sirro of Sydney Posted at 12:50 PM Today

Give the bloke a break … he is out doing some exercise on the w/e. A large part of the population wear this type of swimming costume when they go to the beach. Are the media all turning into Ruddite wowsers who frown on anything not intelligensia driven? At least Abbott is an Aussie who generally reflects the values of the majority of Australians.

2.These comments, clearly authored by one or more Labor staffers:

sean of sydney Posted at 10:39 AM Today

Im not gay but what an awesome body for his age! lets see him up against Krudd side to side

Dave of Sydney Posted at 1:57 PM Today

I’m seriously concerned that the PM is developing body image issues.

3. These viable points made by the sexually frustrated wives of plutocrats:

Maya of Kirribilli Posted at 12:59 PM Today

You have to admit, he’s hot! Mr Abbott, you have my vote!

Lyn Posted at 1:08 PM Today

This is very good media for Abbot. It makes us women see Krudd as a girl with nothing manly about him at all. He can’t even choose his shirt and tie each morning.

4. This comment, which seems to adopt Abbott’s own paradigm in confusing hardline Catholic misogyny with common decency:

Kathryn of brisbane Posted at 11:17 AM Today

he can get around wearing that but females shouldn’t have sex before marriage? TYPICAL!!!!

5. This point, fairly made, that sports do not require abrogation of public decency laws:

InSearchOfTheTruth of Sydney Posted at 11:58 AM Today

He makes me ill. Totally inappropriate, I have also done the swim and worn appropriate clothing reflecting my age and consideration of others in my immediate surrounds.

6. This, a plea for more funding for public education in remote Australia:

John of Darwin of Darwin Posted at 12:18 PM Today

Why doesnt the Media beat up on Mr Rudd for what he promised and hasnt done instead of Mr Abbots swim wear or is it the Media is not allowed to, The Media seem very quite on the Rudd Goverment.

7. And this, which is pretty much my favourite, just because I can totally see Abbott staging Putin shots, striding around with a bare chest killing and skinning kangaroos or something:

Auds of Perth Posted at 3:06 PM Today

What about the fat whales in bikinis that walk the path ways now that is gross he at least looks fit and healthy. Putin,Sarkozy,Obama,they look like strong leaders of today and so would Abbot. The wafflers Brown,Rudd look like porky’s and not leaders.They worried give them stick Abbot.

In Arrogance The Wicked Persecute The Poor

2010-01-19T18:16:35-08:00

If I were to have a scriptural quotation in a gunsight I’d want to do better than this lot.

Coded references to biblical passages are inscribed on gunsights widely used by the US and British military in Iraq and Afghanistan, it has emerged.
The markings include “2COR4:6” and “JN8:12”, relating to verses in the books of Corinthians II and John.
Trijicon, the US-based manufacturer, was founded by a devout Christian, and says it runs to “Biblical standards”.

Come on. Christ the light of the world? That’s supposed to be inspiring for the squaddies?

Manufacturer: I’ll have mine with the full text of Psalm 10 please.

Queen of Speed

2009-12-07T20:21:28-08:00

Cool.

In 1929 Hellé, driving an Omega-Six, won the Grand Prix Féminin at Montlhéry, becoming ‘the fastest woman in the world’ by lapping the steep-sided bowl at 198 kph. Her preparation for the race had been less than ideal: ‘A green-eyed boy, a friend of one of the costume makers at the casino, had stayed the night. A mixture of morphine, champagne and sex had left her wanting to crawl into a coal hole when she woke up.’

Intellectually, I support compulsory seatbelts, mandatory motorcycle helmets, drink driving laws, speed limits, automatic cameras, stringent engineering safety standards and compulsory third party insurance for all. But there’s something about the interwar motoring culture that’s just… awesome.

No, Mister Rees, I expect you to die

2009-12-06T19:22:12-08:00

In the story, Kemal Atatürk, prototypical pre-Turkish patriot and butcher, ordered the conscript troops defending Gallipoli from the invaders to die, in order that other troops might take their places.

Paul Howes, ex-Trotskyist turned Murdoch editorialist of the AWU, reads from the same songsheet.

The scorched-earth press conference of Thursday morning, when Mr Rees said any challenger would be a “puppet of Eddie Obeid and Joe Tripodi”, was condemned by AWU national secretary Paul Howes as “a great disservice to his party”.
“The good news of that press conference is it sealed his [Rees’s] fate,” he added.

We’re only beginning to see this meme; that assertiveness and honesty in defence of a Premiership is traitorous in the Left, while shadowy maneouvring is admirable and correct in the Right. It’s not a disservice to the Party, you see, while in the absence of any particular crisis or policy dispute, to do the numbers and knock off a Premier. It’s a disservice to the Party for that Premier not to be a member of the NSW Centre Unity faction.

Left of the NSW Labor Party! You are not asked to fight. You are asked to be dutifully and uncomplaningly stabbed for no particular reason in order that the Right may enjoy purposeless hegemony.

Take their names, take their names

2009-12-02T19:46:44-08:00

Andrew West quotes Evatt:

The attitude of a small minority group of Labor members, particularly in Victoria, has, since 1949, become increasingly disloyal to the Labor movement and the Labor leadership.

The Daily Telegraph lists the putschists’ puppets:

The document cited (sic) by the Daily Telegraph includes rebel MPs Paul Gibson, Nick Lalich, Noreen Hay, Eddie Obeid, John Della Bosca, Joe Tripodi, Matt Brown, Grant McBride, Cherie Burton, Ninos Khoshoba (sic), Rob Furollo (sic), Frank Terenzini, Richard Amery, Tony Stewart, Tanyia Gadiel (sic) and Diane Beamer…

What a list. These are the people I joined the Labor Party to fight.

Julie Bishop #3

2009-12-02T13:06:28-08:00

Thankyou Annabel Crabb for this article, which contains a fantastic description of Bishop frantically hunting down her supposedly secret ballot paper to prove that she didn’t vote for the man she’s now standing behind, and also this:

“People are calling her The Cockroach,” one MP told ABC Online.

“She’d survive anything.”

Mr Abbott defended his new deputy during their joint press conference on Tuesday, declaring “She’s a loyal girl!” and patting her.

Dark times

2009-12-01T00:57:04-08:00

I am so concerned by this Tony Abbott thing. I mean, who are they kidding? This is the institutionalisation of the right in Australia. Sophie Mirabella, who has always been my nemesis (and she knows it; I sent her an email once late at night telling her so), is now in a position of raised influence and must be stopped. Minchin the Foul is kingmaker. This is absurd. Surely there will be either a split or an assassination. We enter dark times.

Bishop, I note, is still entrenched as deputy, serving her leader, whoever that may be. Perhaps I was wrong; this may prove to be a very smart move on her part, enabling her to step forward as the consensus candidate at some point in the future when the Liberal party has so terribly damaged its relationship with the female half of the Australian population through the excesses of Abbott and co. that the only possible way of maintaining some kind of electoral significance is to propel Julie Bishop into the spotlight, I was going to say blinking like a possum but as she is renowned for her blue steel gaze, I would imagine she would probably instead try to stare down said spotlight.

The spotlight would win. That is all.

Abbott: A Communiqué From The Leftist Central Committee

2009-11-30T16:44:06-08:00

[TRANSMISSION BEGINS]

Greetings, sisters and brothers of the underground movement the Australian Left.

It is with no small amount of righteous glee that we greet the Partyroom accession of Tony Abbott to the Leadership of the Federal Parliamentary Liberal Party. Such violent cupidity is typical of the imperialist hyenas in the Coalition. In this time of crisis it is no longer possible for these enemies of the people to hide behind more palatable puppets as Turnbull or Hockey. Every action further reveals them either as dangerous tools or as “village idiots”—as Mr Tuckey shamelessly quipped.

That Mr Abbott is a reactionary droog whose every thought is counter to the interests of all peace-loving people of the globe will be our movement’s most powerful tool. We will use the weight of the reactionaries to bring them down upon themselves—weak in its own ideology, the monster cannot support its own mass.

However, this is not the same as simply asserting that Mr Abbott is a Catholic. That’s just vaguely sectarian innuendo. C’mon people we can do better than that. The Central Committee hereby forbids such juvenilia upon pain of summary wedgie.

No seriously man give me the microphone back I’ll kick yer arse back to

[TRANSMISSION ENDS]

Liberal Stoush: Bishop Fail

2009-11-29T17:15:35-08:00

I like the Liberal rumble that’s going on at the moment; I enjoy the thought of Malcolm Turnbull privately comparing himself to Alexander the Great as he tackles the Gordian Knot (“familiar as his garter”).

A generally problematic aspect of the Liberal leadership issue, however, is Julie Bishop. Where is she in all this? I mean, supposedly she’s the deputy leader of the Opposition, which believe it or not could be quite a powerful position. Not so powerful as if Bishop had actually stood up and taken the shadow treasury portfolio as was her right, but certainly, on paper, the deputy should be regarded as a natural contender for succession in such a situation as the Opposition currently finds itself. And so I ask, where is she?

It always seemed clear that Bishop’s inclusion in the Opposition lineup was sadly a token gesture, designed to mirror the Labor situation and spin spin spin to counter the clear fact that the Liberal party is a dinosaur of the patriarchy. But I have some sympathy with opinion that regardless of how you get somewhere, what you do when you get there is the important thing. I mean, ideally one would get to the deputy leadership of a major political party on merit alone, but this has never ever been the case in tweedy Liberal land – witness the career trajectory of Alexander Downer - and when you’re contending with a patriarchal right-wing structure operating mostly through cronyism, you surely take your token appointment as part of that structure and run with it as best you can.

Sadly it seems clear that the Liberals have promoted somebody who is apparently unable to take advantage of the current chaos to announce a leadership bid or at least to make some undergroundy rumbling noises of interest in pursuing the leadership in the future. I mean, if Bishop didn’t have leadership ambitions, surely she wouldn’t have accepted a leadership role in the first place? And given this, now is the time to do something with that ambition, surely?

This is mildly unfair to Bishop, of course; given how awful the Liberal party really is, it may be impossible for any woman to ever be the leader. But that’s no reason not to try. The fact that she’s not indicated any wish to do anything but use her potentially key position to be a kind of helpmeet to the prating GPS-inbred leader of the day, melding effortlessly into the patriarchal narrative, makes me wonder what on earth she’s doing in politics and why on earth she accepted the position in the first place.

Naturally, given the circumstance of Bishop’s election to the role of deputy, there’s this inherent comparison with Julia Gillard, who, despite the apparent solidity of the Rudd leadership, is constantly being touted as the next Prime Minister. This is a shocking commentary on the Liberal party as an institution that is a) poison to women of talent and b) more willing to promote a person of apparently little talent to what should be a key leadership role than to make a genuine effort to actually recruit women of talent to its ranks.

Abbott to the back bench.

2009-11-26T04:45:11-08:00

True Blue

2009-11-25T15:02:52-08:00

I love this story: outnumbered 17 to 1 by camels whose sole goal is breaking into the pipes to slurp their crapwater, the townsfolk shelter quiver in their fibro demountables, their children cheering every time a long-lashed eye peers menacingly through the window.

I say, this is a job for the NSW Shooters Party – a timely deal with the NT Government would see that pesky railways sell-off legislation passed without resort to more bastardisation of the planning system, with the confusingly named Robert Brown now able to revel in camel gore to his heart’s content. I’m less enamoured by the public health implications of a pile of 6000 camel corpses gently rotting in the desert sun for several months; however, as with all things in Australia,this guy has the solution:

“The way I see it, there is a billion dollars in camel meat wandering around the central desert,” says Harvey Douglas, who owns a mobile abattoir.

I wonder what a mobile abattoir looks like? I’m thinking it’s an open-tray ute with two men in blue singlets and a bar-fridge hooked up to the cigarette lighter. I’m thinking there might be some scale issues with harvesting One Billion Dollars’ worth of camel meat using such a set-up, but what do I know? I’m not an economist.

"Do not be deceived by my peaceful face. I have a heart of stone."

2009-11-23T02:29:55-08:00

Interview with an interesting woman.

It’s nothing new, but I observe that the reason certain segments of the western media are fascinated by the idea of a female suicide bomber is because there is this feeling that blowing oneself up in furtherance of a cause is an ultra-rational activity, overcoming the ‘natural’ or feminine human inclination to self-preservation, and thus according to the law of oppositions and what have you is a hyper-masculine act. Conversely this is twinned with the feeling that young men, the celebrated pinnacle of rude and unbridled animalistic masculinity, are dangerous because of their ‘irrational’ hot-headedness; that suicide bombing is overwhelmingly a young man’s response to the hopelessness of injustice. Suicide bombers, in our western imaginary, are young and fiery (men) and really scared but determined to revenge/avenge/kill/maim etc, overcoming their fear in furtherance of their cause.

Naturally a young female suicide bomber is a problem to be investigated and probed, because young women are suppose to be, you know, the curb on young men’s violence and misdirected sexual energy and a symbol of the home and hearth or something, and not supposed to be encouraging or participating in this hyper-rational irrationality. Hence this article and others like it.

Journalists are lazy. In times of national crisis when the cultural values or vital life of the patria itself are threatened, one heavily-subscribed-to western narrative is the rise of a particular matriarchal archetype, the female warrior who spurs on male warriors to resistance and victory against the invaders; think Boadiccea, or Malalai Joya, or Pauline Hanson. When western journalists investigate the female suicide bomber, there is a tendancy to frame these women through this narrative because otherwise it’s too puzzling. I can’t be bothered to examine whether this cultural lens is positive or negative or even what those terms might mean in the context of writing about people blowing themselves up in a war. I will say, that this stuff gives me the heebie jeebies, because if my nation were the invaded rather than the aggressor in this situation, I could certainly see myself going down this path.

We the elite

2009-11-01T17:13:13-08:00

Exceptions and Public Safety
13.12. There shall be no right to participate
in public policy-making, except by way of
parliamentary and other election.

(from the Democratic Audit project, via the UK’s liberal conspiracy).