Categories: The Immense Gothic Cathedral of WTF

3 Sep 2011, Comments (5)

…Now I’m on a horse

Author: Helen

I apologise in advance for adding to the pixels devoted to Tony Abbott. Sometimes the urge to vent overcomes the need not to add to the noise machine. I was complaining in various places, before the election of Kevin in 07, about having to listen to the excruciating, grating sound of JHo’s voice droning out of the radio at every news bulletin and often in between. It reduced my quality of life measurably. I rejoiced at the thought of those times being over. Little did I know we were entering into a new paradigm where the bloody Leader of the Opposition got his voice – “nasal, high-pitched, hectoring, aggressive, negative, bludgeoning” – on the radio 24/7. Death or New Zealand are equally beginning to beckon.

For those who do not reside in Australia and therefore aren’t exposed to this excrescence day in and day out, Tony Abbott is a man who (1) can’t resist a photo opportunity and (2) has a pretty florid Action Man complex. Every day he’s in a hard hat, fluoro vest, or some other macho uniform pretending to take part in some salt-of-the-earth toil – I haven’t seen him in a flight suit yet, but give him time. So it was that when he was out on the range in Rockhampton with some horsey dudes, of course nothing would do but he must get on a horse too and have a Bonanza photo opportunity. Tones’ Action Man shots are always embarrassing, but this plumbed new depths of toe-curling awfulness. I’m not sure if this low-res Youtube vid does justice to just how bad it was.

You can get on a bike and kind of pootle off and give the impression you know what you’re doing. Sitting on a fast trotting horse – I’ll say it again (yes, I’m repeating myself, I said this about Ian Campbell’s equestrian heroics) is an action which thousands of ten year old girls perform faultlessly every Saturday at pony club, but you need to have put in the requisite hours to learn how to do it without looking like a panicking rag doll. Action Man, having failed to do this, looks a right doofus. You’ll know next time, Tones: horse: bicycle: Not the same thing!

A day or two later, you could hear exasperated noises coming from our kitchen as I was doing pre-work sandwich making and listening to Abbott deploy his unique, circular logic on AM. “Well, it’s very important that this matter be resolved and that this boil for the Government be lanced, [Erk! Do you mind? I'm buttering bread here!] because while the Government is completely distracted by the Craig Thomson matter it’s not able to properly attend to the pressing problems that our country faces…[False - The minority Gillard government is actually getting on with the job of passing legislation and, well, governing, despite the constant Dog and Pony show distractions thrown up by the Coalition.] …Now the reason why the Prime Minister has to deal with this matter and resolve it is because that there are more important things that the Government should be focused on. [Absolutely! So why aren't you talking about these very important things? ...Oh.] But the Prime Minister’s incapacity to deal with the matter of the Member for Dobell means that these other problems just get worse…Blah blah Integrity… Let the sun shine in blah.” He thinks we’re so stupid we won’t even notice that if people are distracted – not completely distracted as he puts it – he’s the one doing his best to do the distracting with his energiser-bunny childish ping-ponging all over the place, both physically and verbally. So disingenuous, and so lacking in the dignity and intelligence we’d want in a leading politician, but of course it’s Gillard who’s always copping the scrutiny and being found wanting.

It was nice to see, the next day, that someone else noticed. “Yesterday, opposition leader Tony Abbott veered close to over-reach…He told the ABC in the morning that ”while the government is completely distracted by the Craig Thomson matter it’s not properly able to attend to the pressing problems the country faces”. He made the same claim later in the day while arguing that normal parliamentary business cease in order for Gillard to make a statement about the matter. The ”distraction” has been generated all along by Abbott.”

Yeah.

11 Jul 2011, Comments (18)

Australia’s Honour killings – In the end, they’re just as dead

Author: Helen

James Ramage released from Beechworth prison: Source, the AGE

James Ramage was released from prison last Friday, after only eight years following his conviction for strangling and bashing his wife, Julie, to death in their house and burying her in a shallow grave. The details of the case reveal a textbook case of a controlling, abusive spouse who killed his wife rather than let her leave.

One reason the Ramage case has been in the news so much is that it was the last time the defence of “provocation” was used in a court case in Victoria. That was the reason for the derisory sentence, and since the case exposed the enormous injustices flowing from that defence, the law was changed. The law moves slowly, but social mores change more slowly still.

The silencing argument that women of the Anglophone “Western Civilisation”, or whatever you would like to call it, are completely liberated, done and dusted, and have no business complaining about anything, has continued unabated lately. In such a cultural climate, a few people were rocked back on their heels when Phil Cleary and Julie Ramage’s sister Jane described her murder as an “honour” killing. But you know what? They’re right.

A couple of years ago I heard Germaine Greer reply to a question from the late Pamela Bone, as to why we (meaning anglophone “western” feminists) weren’t doing more to liberate our sisters in the Muslim world. Her answer was in two parts, and the first part was about our absence of standing in that world. The second part was that we haven’t yet cleaned up our own back yard. There is a pervasive myth in our “western” society that harsh and primitive crimes of misogyny only happen There, perpetrated by Them, those Others. Therefore, Western feminism is a hobby for genteel and well-off middle class women who enjoy perfect equality in their world. It’s false. Let’s not let them get away with it.

If Julie Ramage’s killing had been some kind of rare aberration it would still have spoken volumes about gender related violence in our society, but in fact it was just a very high-profile instance of a common and repeating pattern. Here’s the thing: Women are most at risk of being killed by an intimate partner when they have just left the relationship, or when they are planning to leave and the partner becomes aware of it. Think of the number of times you read “estranged husband / boyfriend / de facto husband” when you read about murder cases in the news.

Sure, there’s cultural differences aplenty between our anglocentric killings and the honour killings in other countries which we, rightly, deplore when we read about them. But they’re still about “honour”, a notion of honour which has been twisted and deformed by patriarchy until it looks like its opposite. Sure, the manifestations differ. Here in our more individualistic society we don’t have “but she can never get married now!” or “Shame on our family!” excuse. Instead, we have the “He just loved her too much!” “If I can’t have her, no-one can!” or some shit. But it’s the same thing, different continents; Control of women under patriarchal norms, whether it’s out and proud – as they are in the countries we finger-wag at – or flying below the radar, as in Australia, UK and US.

Instead of a ritualised, family mandated killing involving brothers or cousins or fathers – and how painful that betrayal must be to the victims – we have more individualised, but still family centred, killings where the betrayer is the person who has promised to love and cherish the woman; not the same in every detail, but still a horrible betrayal, the killing of a woman for a warped notion of “honour”. Not, here, the family-based “honour” but something more modern, the man’s ego or self worth. It’s the same thing, dressed in modern, individualistic clothes. Also, it hardly needs to be said, it involves the concept of the woman as property, which we’ve supposed to have left behind but which seems to just be thinly buried. As with everything else – our remotely controlled weapons, our Guantanamos and detention centres – we really excel, in the West, at disguising the aggressive impulses of our society to make our harms look more civilised or justified. In this case, we pretend that wife-killings are random acts of aggression rather than a repeating pattern.

This affects women of all classes, indigenous women, transwomen, up to and including women at the top of the income and status tree, like Julie Ramage. Privilege won’t save you here.

If Australians want to be smug about the fundamentalist fringes of Islam, we should take a harder look at the rising fundamentalism in the Christian churches in our society. Around the time the Victorian justice system was getting ready to release Ramage, it was jailing John McDonald for the murder of his wife, Marlene McDonald. Again, power and control was front and centre. Marlene had left the abusive relationship and was working at a truck stop north of Melbourne, where her husband believed she’d formed a new relationship with one of the customers. But it went further than that. “Ms Ritchie told the hearing McDonald had confided in her that she had been attacked by two masked men in her home one night but she knew they were her father and brother. “They both started punching and kicking her. The father was very religious and was saying over and over that she had sinned, that she had committed adultery … whilst her brother was calling her a slut and a whore,” she said in a statement tendered to the court. They continued dragging her by the hair to the laneway … when they got outside, her brother started using a baseball bat … She thought they were going to kill her.” She was right.

So, commenters on “western” blogs and news sites, let’s not pat ourselves smugly on the back and vilify feminists on the grounds that we’ve achieved absolute equality (I wish!), while they, over there, commit atrocities in the name of honour and therefore have to bear all the opprobrium. Our honour killings may appear different in detail from the ones those Others perpetrate, but in the end, the women are just as dead.
 
 
 
Crossposted at Hoyden About Town

4 May 2011, Comments (6)

What The…?

Author: Helen

In the Victorian State budget brought down today, the Baillieu government was keen to tell us that we were in for austerity in education spending – they’re aiming for over $300 million in cuts in the next 4 years “in a bid to reign in costs” (sic) (dear oh dear, it’s having an effect already). And they reneged on the election promise to improve public school teachers’ pay. But despite this solemn need for belt-tightening, somehow they still managed to keep their promise to give $240 million over that time to private and Catholic schools.

Who is going to defend the public system? Not the Federal government.

Oh, we got $24m for maths and science specialists in Primary – that’s less than half the amount the Vic government spent this year running the frigging Grand Prix.

The rest of this post was cancelled due to excessive swearing.

23 Mar 2011, Comments (6)

Take a good look

Author: Helen

If the Liberals should win the next federal election, these are the nongs who will be “governing” you.

More here and here.

Aust Opposition leader Tony Abbott standing with Lib MPs Bronwyn Bishop and Sophie Mirabella in front of a placard painted with flames and "JuLIAR Bob Browns BITCH"

To quote James Bradley of City of Tongues on Twitter, “The level of casual misogyny directed at the PM is truly appalling, and says a lot about those who endorse it.”

18 Jan 2011, Comments (15)

A 1950s Alternative Universe

Author: Helen

I’m taking some weeks off work courtesy of the wonderful 48/52 , and having an at-home holiday with a rare respite from early mornings and reasonable bedtimes. So it was that on Saturday night I found myself watching a late-night 1950s black and white movie – something I haven’t done much of since the demise of Bill Collins and Ivan Hutchinson’s shows. Oh, how I used to love those old black and white movies (cue massive eyeroll from the kids). Some of the interest lies in a mixture of plot points which appear to have been written while dropping acid combined with gender and class expectations which are all too real.

This one was No Sad Songs For Me, starring Margaret Sullavan, who was quite a hoyden in her youth, with Natalie Wood as her abnormally well-adjusted daughter. According to Answers.com,

…Sentimental melodrama about a ridiculously self-sacrificing wife based on the book by Ruth Southard and starring a 12-year-old Natalie Wood. Mary Scott (Margaret Sullavan) is pregnant when she finds out that she has terminal cancer with only a few months left to live. She keeps this information a secret from her husband, Brad Scott (Wendell Corey), who is carrying on an affair with his assistant, Chris Radna (Viveca Lindfors). Mary encourages her husband to pursue Chris as a replacement wife and mother after she dies.

Heavy stuff, eh, especially as I was in Natalie Wood’s shoes in 1968, except that I was a year younger and not nearly as adorable, co-operative or conscientious with my piano practice. So the movie should have had me wallowing in memories and grief, except for that other marvellous feature of the 1950s B&W: the LOLWUT!? factor.

Consider the events which the writer of this weepie considered believable in 1950.

The movie opens with the happy family at breakfast discussing a new pregnancy. Mary says she’s off to the doctor that day to confirm. When she does, the doctor tells her sternly that she’s not pregnant and is never likely to be again. We’re given to understand that the doctor’s an old family friend, but this is all he tells her. Oh, and the hilarity – Doctor lights up a cig while giving her the bad news! In the surgery. Oh, the ’50s, those were the days.

Dr. Bedside Manner obviously has no intention of telling her anything at this point. He only tells her about her terminal cancer when she leaves the surgery, walks out to the car, is overcome by an unseemly attack of patient curiosity and walks back into his office to ask him for more details. We are asked to believe that the doctor has diagnosed the cancer some weeks ago yet hasn’t seen fit to tell the patient, who, remember, is also an old family friend. RIGHT.

Mary then says “I remember you’ve been taking dozens of X rays for the last few weeks!”

Wouldn’t you think a woman who thought she was pregnant, instead of harbouring a fatal illness, would question having “dozens of X rays” taken in the (presumed) early stages of the pregnancy? But these were the days of smoking in the doctor’s surgery. They didn’t have those namby-pamby, politically correct safety procedures.

In 1950, it appears, cancer was universally a death sentence. Mary asks Mr People Skills if operations or radiotherapy will do anything, and he replies that the treatment’s still in the experimental stage. Well, perhaps IF HE HAD TOLD HER EARLIER she might have had a chance to get a second opinion, or something.

Instead of going straight to a solicitor to file a medical malpractice suit – seeing as he’s a family friend, I guess – Mary swears the doctor to secrecy so that she can conceal her condition from her family. The doctor readily agrees with this, since obviously he’s given to withholding information anyway. Incredibly, although he can’t do anything at all about Mary’s cancer, he is able to give the most detailed prognosis: Nine months to live, six months of which will be “on her feet”. Modern oncologists would be amazed at the ability of cigarette-smokin’ 50s doctors to pinpoint the exact course of the illness.

The rest of the movie pretty much consists of Mary becoming more and more saintly. Her terminal cancer appears to involve no painkillers, curtailment of social activities or even symptoms, apart from the occasional frown and clutch of the hand to the abdomen, or a brief lie down on the couch. We are not told where this cancer is. One imagines that the ending will be Mary lying on lacy pillows becoming ever more beautiful and radiant as death approaches. However, it’s even more hokey than that.

After participating in a batty, and saintly, ruse to make sure her husband’s affair partner/girlfriend, Chris, is around to replace her(!) (LOLWUT!), Mary spills the beans. Husband, suitably devastated, breaks his philandering and working routine to take her on a second honeymoon to Mexico, where they dance together to a mariarchi band, after which Mary obligingly drops dead, thus eliminating the need for the sad bedridden final phase, and making the handover to Chris more seamless.

Although Chris is an exasperating entitled little shit, one can have some sympathy for her as she enters the movie in the guise of a professional draughtsperson working on a dam project with the husband, Brad / Wendell Cory. Thus we have the classic 1950s/1960s scene where the new worker turns out to be a WOMAN! Oh the HILARITY! The world turned upside down! The exchange between Brad, the hirer, and Chris, the prospective employee, illustrates perfectly the complete disdain for female employees and her need to plead and supplicate to convince him to give her the job despite her manifest inferiority. He demurs because the job’ll require her to go outside and it might rain! A woman might… melt, or something.

The plot then requires them to fall in lurve, but this is just predictable, because she’s a member of the sex class. That’s why we can’t have them on the job! They’ll distract the men!

In the final scene, the LOLWUT!? factor goes off the charts. Chris, the replacement mother, and the child Polly are sitting together at the piano playing a tragic musical piece. At this point, as far as Polly knows, Chris is the family friend/babysitter and Mum and Dad are just away on a nice holiday. The phone rings and Chris answers. It is terrible news from Mexico! Well, terrible for Mary, anyway. Chris makes some cryptic remark and they keep playing. Are they ever going to tell this kid anything? She never knew her mum was even sick. When are they going to actually let her know she’s DIED? The Wikipedia article on Margaret Sullavan says that her family life was fairly tortured and marked by suicide and institutionalisation. If this was the way 1950s families were supposed to handle family crises, I’m really not surprised. “Here’s your school lunch, dear. By the way, your mum’s not coming back from Mexico. She’s dead. I’m your new mum now. I’m sure Dad will explain everything when he gets back, but he’ll be a while because of organising the cold storage for the coffin ‘n all…”

Ah, those old black and white movies. If you’re ever tempted to join the conservatives in yearning for the Good old Days before the counterculture and modern medicine changed the world, when a man could still light up a satisfying fag in his doctor’s surgery and women knew their place, watch one of these and marvel. On the other hand, there’s no room for complacency yet; Judd Apatow and Charlie Sheen still churn out stuff which future generations will watch and…LOLWUT?!
 
 
 
Crossposted at Hoyden About Town

13 Dec 2010, Comments (16)

Wikileaks – My 2c, which I’m sure you don’t need

Author: Helen

Yes, as if you needed another post on Wikileaks and Julian Assange. If the internet had weight it would have collapsed. The whole thing is intermittently exhilarating, but on balance, unspeakably depressing. All the usual dead horses have been flogged back to life and given another run around the track, including in comment threads at a group blog which I frequent. Dead horses like:

-Unless you are have been raped in the socially approved manner, that is, jumped on by a stranger out on a dark night, your allegations of rape or sexual assault must be false, and in this case, must be some kind of deliberate “honeytrap”.

-Discussing “womens issues” like these is diverting attention from the really important things. Will women please stop spoiling everything all the time! *tosses toys out of pram*.

There are two forces at play here which I don’t trust. One is what one commenter described as the “secular canonisation” of Assange. He’s Che! He’s Ned Kelly! He’s… he’s… Jesus! The T shirts are being printed! And the quasi-biblical narrative of betrayal by the Female just go along with the whole excellent adventure.

One writer after another has tried to explain that it’s possible for someone to do useful and effective activist work and be guilty of sexual assault (not pre-empting the court case, just trying to counter the popular notion that a folk hero can’t be guilty) and that one does not necessarily negate the other.

Intelligent people should be able to hold more than one thought in their head at once. The point of this piece, once again, was NOT to speculate on whether Assange did or did not commit a crime — it’s to point out that the media narrative around this story has quickly become depressingly similar to every other media narrative around rape and alleged rape. (That is to say, ugly and victim-blaming.)

Largely, these arguments have fallen on deaf ears. Or eyes. Because Assange is a hero, he can’t possibly have done anything wrong. I’m not the only person who finds this cult of personality a big turnoff.


Living Colour – Cult Of Personality

Because – and this another thing which gives me pause – when the media says that Wikileaks is a fine piece of activism by “the left” and that any subgroup, like women, should shut up and keep quiet about anything negative, because, you know, ruining it for everyone – well, that is all of a piece with the fact that the widespread and active cyberactivist groups, 4chan and its spinoff group Anonymous, are Assange’s defenders, his cyberarmy if you will. And if you identify as feminist, 4chan are no friends of yours. Try googling “4chan” and “women”. While their leader eschews anything so crude, he is also capable, at the turn of the Twentieth century, of writing a sentence like “(For) man to do anything intelligent he has to know what’s actually going on.” The technical skill is cutting-edge, the social consciousness (and thus the will to social justice) is early last century. The massed forces of 4chan and other romantic admirers don’t have any investment in seeing women as human, at all. And Assange might be a romantic hero, but he has no actual control over an “army” of pimply-faced admirers who are prone to statements like “Rule number one of the internet is you don’t piss off 4chan” and “make me a goddamn sandwich”. As Mark B says, “Where is a truly alternative politics? It’s not that of 4Chan or Anonymous.” Or, as my dear old apple-cheeked Grandma used to say, “with friends like those, who needs enemas?”

Problem number two: We think we’re on the same side at first glance, but Wikileaks is aiming to fight top-down government power (by an attack on secrecy) – seeing horizontal layers, if you like. Feminists and anti-racists and others are fighting pervasive power which comes from privilege and which exists at all levels. Seeing vertical slices of power, you might say. (Or once you add the idea of intersectionality, it’s more venn diagrams of overlapping power systems.) Whoa, I am straying into the realm of Theory in which I am unedumacated, but more simply – what’s the outcome of this Excellent Adventure? When we talk about change, some of us don’t seem to want much change, just to unseat the people on top of them. If you know what I mean.

So, Mr Assange, I hope Geoffrey Robertson does you proud and that you do indeed get the full benefit of due process. I hope your two accusers do likewise. And I’m sorry this joy-killing feminist can’t bring herself to think of you as a superhero who cannot possibly do wrong. Women a bit older than me went all starry-eyed and handmaidenish about ultra-charismatic male activists in the 60s, and look how far it got them.

8 Aug 2010, Comments (7)

HULK SMASH! ! !

Author: Helen

That’s a reference to Feminist Hulk, of course. And I was channelling Feminist Hulk on Friday reading he AGE on the train to work. It’s a worry when you’re in a crowded carriage and your tiny purple shorts start to split…

Picture of Kevin Rudd pulling his shirt apart to reveal a superhero costume with "Rudd to Gillard: I'll Save You"

No, no Disney damsel in distress narrative here at all.



I’d heard an excerpt from the Phillip Adams interview the night before so I was well aware that Kevin Rudd was going to stop sitting around in a sulk with the ALP logo erased from his placards and join the campaign properly, once he was physically up to it. As in, join the campaign. Like one of the merry band on the road to Mordor. But our news media chose to describe Rudd’s return through the lens of … Male White Hero returns to Rescue Damsel in Distress.

With a side serve of We Knew a Sheila wouldn’t be Up to the Job. Move outa the way, Gillard, and let the men do this properly.

HULK SMASH!!

Still from the spoof video Kevin Rudd "I will survive", juxtaposed with an ad for an article from the Business section

Tools getting you down? I know the feeling.



I didn’t put those images together – that was on the same page as the article headed “Ex-PM Rudd to PM Gillard: I will save you” by Michelle Grattan and Michael Gordon. Was a disgruntled subeditor making a veiled comment there? If they still have any, that is. And was there any evidence that Rudd actually said anything about “saving” anyone? There isn’t any in the article. But the actual journalists were all on song about the White Knight Rescue narrative.

This from Michelle Grattan, who I once respected so much:

“Knifed one day, needed the next…
…Move over Julia. Kevin’s here to help.
…Rudd looked positively prime ministerial when he spoke yesterday.

And the next day:

It’s the ultimate girl-meets boy encounter…His place or hers?

HURL!

…the woman who grabbed his job from him.
(John Faulkner was) a prime matchmaker for this bizarre marriage of convenience …

There’s more, but I’d really like to keep this nice Sunday dinner down.

So, Gillard can’t win. If Labor wins the election it’ll be “she couldn’t do it without Kevin10!1!”. If she loses, well, a chick just wasn’t up to it.

Headzup to the Oz media. You’ve already been called repeatedly on your crap (non) reporting. And I’m not Robinson Crusoe with my disillusionment and anger.

Shape up, please, before we end up with this.

30 May 2010, Comments (16)

It’s time to tell Electronic Frontiers Australia to stick it

Author: Helen

Oh excellent! Electronic Frontiers Australia is targeting youngsters for its campaign against Stephen Conroy’s net filter with that old classic that never loses its appeal: Mothers are brainless twits!

OK, uninformed, ignorant, whatever. But certainly clueless. (And any web page concerning us should be wall-to-wall pink.)
As activists with children who have campaigned side by side (or so they thought) with EFA to educate others about why Conroy’s net filter won’t work, the writers at Hoyden are obviously pissed off. As an IT worker, net obsessive and opponent of the “clean feed” with two children, I’m also pissed off, insulted, and hurt. I’m also deeply disappointed with Akmal Saleh, who I dearly love. No, make that loved.

Mary:

This week’s “let’s explain technology in little words to our mothers award, boys” goes to Electronic Frontiers Australia’s It’s Time to Tell Mum campaign against the ALP’s filtering proposal.
Seriously, is there some kind of bingo card for “getting mothers involved” yet? Here some squares to get you started, thanks to “It’s Time to Tell Mum”: mothers are late technology adopters, mothers are uninterested in technology and toys for their own sake, mothers are solely responsible for the moral welfare of children, (which is lucky because) mothers are pretty much only interested in the moral welfare of children, (which is also lucky because) fathers and co-parents might as well not exist. Any more?

Lauredhel:

Hello, EFA, we’re RIGHT HERE. Tigtog and I, and other Hoydens and Hoydenizens have been blogging about this proposed filter for over a year now, again and again. Somehow our current events awareness and capacity for political thought didn’t fall out of our vaginas with the baby(ies).
There’s a really strong side serve of “teh wimminz are the ones looking after children” infusing this also, which makes me wince every time.
Try genderflipping the campaign. Would the EFA have released the same campaign as “It’s Time To Tell Dad“? With cracks about dads doing nothing but watch Kerri-Anne Kennerley and Days of Our Lives? “Dads love gossip”?
“Even dads want an internet connection that’s faster, cheaper and more secure”?

See also.

Yeah, you can get on with saving Australia from the Clean Feed without me, young geeky hipsters at EFA. Since I only want to watch Good Morning Australia and gossip with the hairdresser, obviously I can no longer pretend to give a shit about your campaign, as I don’t need the internetz for those activities. I’ll be over here, crocheting a cucumber or something.

Advertising agency Fnuky‘s online pitch says: “looking for an advertising agency? We’re not one.” Fair call. Advertising agencies are supposed to be about making people like their clients. Geordie Guy of EFA tries to salvage the trainwreck by defending the video with arguments which are ineffectual and wrong, but that’s beside the point – if we’re talking about marketing, once you’re using arguments (however specious) to argue your case against angry customers/supporters/target consumers, your marketing campaign has failed.

It would have been so easy, as others have pointed out, to make the campaign “tell your folks”, or “tell your olds”. At least that would have patronised older people equally.

29 May 2010, Comments (6)

Nasty email forwards

Author: Helen

How do you know when it’s getting closer to election time in Australia? By the incidences of unbelievable asshattery, douchebaggery and sheer fuckery which start popping up.

Yesterday one of my co-workers at the Ronnie James Dio Memorial Dogs home (and cattery) got an email with a variation (it’s mutating all the time) of this. (Scroll down for the May 2010 example.)

Charming!

Using google-fu, it took about three seconds to find out the history of this…piece of work.

What about the piece of work who made it and circulated it? What kind of person does this? Whoever you are, you are the very doyen of Douchebaggery. And you, the person who forwarded the thing. Yes, you. I hope you are thoroughly ashamed of yourself and not just for being pranked by some nasty email hoaxer with an agenda.

At least we know it’s getting closer to Election time. Stand by for more horrid examples of what backroom droids can cook up in their petri dishes.

30 Apr 2010, Comments (2)

The gates of hell are open wide, with a nice fresh coat of paint in Federation colours

Author: Helen

The A-G has just announced that after much deliberation the Government has decided we’re not going to have a national Bill of Rights. We’re going to have a Framework instead, apparently. What that would mean I’m not sure. (My guess: Whatever the people administering the “framework” decide it is at any particular time.)

Not everyone is happy with this decision. Father [Frank] Brennan told The Age: ”I am disappointed that more coherent reasons for not adopting a human rights act were not offered by the government in light of the strong community sentiment for one.”

Oh, Frank, Susan, you sillies! I have no background in Human Rights law or government whatsoever but the reason is as about as coherent as it gets. Having enthusiastically taken over the job of putting the indigenous unemployed of the Northern Territory on the Susso, they’ve been busily repainting and doing up the old Curtin gulag. Signing up to a Bill of Rights at this time would just lead to embarassing questions from all the wrong sort of people.

Move along.
 
 
 
Crossposted

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