Blogging politics, culture, sociology and life from Brisvegas
Exhibit #1: ABC TV news, Sunday night, item about the Waratahs coach Ewen McKenzie, whose contract hasn’t been renewed. There’s a quick grab from McKenzie saying he’s proud to leave the Waratahs in better shape than he found them, they are a great “brand”.
Funny, I thought they were a football team. Continue reading ‘The commodification of just about everything (especially language)’
When traipsing round the blogosphere, I encounter a common patois of hatred dispensed with indiscriminate fury, and in the same patterns of speech, against all-comers in the political arena.
I am reminded of the perennial hate-figure from 1984.
To demonstrate, can you discern which politician is being hated in each of the quotes below - Kevin Rudd, John Howard, George Bush, Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton? Each of them are the target of at least one of these quotes…
I’d like to propose a corollary to Godwin’s law: As an internet thread gets longer, the probability of someone invoking free speech to prop up an otherwise unsustainable argument approaches 1.
Free speech is a tricky beast: it’s one of the most precious aspects of our civilisation, and yet, in many practical day-to-day situations it can turn out to be worthless, contributing nothing but misinformation, spreading rumour and insinuation, and damaging ourselves and others.
In discussion, the “free speech” card is sometimes played in earnest by sensitive souls who misinterpret honest rebuttal or refutation as an attempt to silence them. It is at other times used dishonestly to distract from paucity of evidence or logical flaws in the accuser’s position - attack being considered the best form of defence.
If we look at speech in the blogosphere, newsprint and on TV, we see that it is all free. But how much of it is ethical?
Continue reading ‘An ethics of free speech, from the Bible to Spider-Man’
Image of the Prague skyline courtesy of Pavelm - licenced under Creative Commons.
I didn’t comment, but I read the thread on Kim’s post on the crimes of Joseph Fritzl and discourses in the media (Austrian and otherwise) about cultural and national responsibility. I found the thread a fascinating read, and I’m not certain that anyone could finally arbitrate the question of whether a certain Nazism or its social legacy was actually at stake here or whether to think that is to misunderstand the nature of causation and social pathologies as they manifest themselves in individual lives and choices. That’s forcing the two positions argued somewhat, and occluding a lot of nuance, but I suspect that the debate’s conditions of possibility include different levels of explanation and different methods of thought and intellectual work - I thought some of the borders of the social scientific and humanistic worldviews were both marked out and blurred in that discussion. It ought to be possible to integrate the two, but saying that is harder than doing it because there is a certain split - that’s not just manifested in disciplinary training and territory in the academy - between a more hermeneutic and a more positivist style of thought. That’s actually a dividing line that’s inscribed in our everyday culture as well as in our intellectual traditions in the West, and it’s possibly a most unfortunate divide. But then national borders, and cultures, are contingent constructions of Western modernity too.
Anyway, that’s something of a prelude to some thoughts the thread stimulated for me. I remembered I’d written a post back in December 2004 on W.G. Sebald’s work. At the time, I wrote, apropos of his A Natural History of Destruction:
Literature has often been seen as a mirror of meaning, a way of sense-making, what the literary scholar Erich Auerbach called, following Aristotle, Mimesis. To take the example of the hitherto unparalleled destruction wrought by the Thirty Years War from 1618 to 1648, German literature produced such classics as Johann Jakob Von Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus (first published in 1669) and much more recently, Günter Grass ’ The Meeting at Telgte.
There is a massive, and often fine, literature of the Holocaust. But going in search of a similar literature of the suffering of German citizens during the Second World War, Sebald was surprised to find it scant, and largely unsatisfactory.
Continue reading ‘A national/natural history of memory and forgetting’
Except of course, they aren’t. Our world is chemicals, our life is chemistry.
This rant is brought to you by yet another TV talking head rabbiting on about
“natural remedies, not those chemical ones”
Sorry Kochie, all those natural remedies are full of chemicals too. Chemicals don’t only come from factories, where they are not created but refined from naturally occurring raw materials and recombined to form new compounds.
Chemicals are also combined, recombined, recycled and recombined again every time you, me and every other animal breathes and eats, just for starters. Chemicals also gad about when every plant respires and photosynthesises - every plant and every animal is made of chemical elements and every natural remedy consists of active ingredients that have consistent conventional chemical names e.g. vitamins.
This idea that chemicals are nasty and unnatural and dangerous is rampant. Why? Continue reading ‘Terrible, horrible, scary UNNATURAL chemicals’
Y’know, I don’t find this offensive. It’s clever, not least in its rather pointed metacommentary on the way that advertisements for menstrual products have relied on euphemisms since forever. This ad very pointedly avoids any salacious lingering on female anatomy as well, which is more than can be said for some other ads for menstrual products. The men gazing at the woman and her companion aren’t represented as stupid either, just bemused by the unusual sight of a beaver at the beach, which is another nice change from some other ads for menstrual products.
So, what it is about this ad which has caused so many complaints to flow into the Advertising Standards Bureau? There’s been sufficient controversy for the ad to be blogged widely overseas, for instance. Is it just that “beaver” is a direct reference to the vulva/vagina? Not euphemistic enough? Would there have been the same complaints if she’d gone through her daily routines with a team of painters in tow?
This piece struck a chord with me regarding some of the frequent epithets hurled at “lefties” on this very blog:
why have conservatives frequently insulted the type of food (sushi-eating), type of coffee (latte-drinking), or type of alcoholic beverages (wine and / or microbrews) that many progressives consume? It seems to me that they consider an individual’s divergence from their habits to somehow be an insult to them, rather than the outlandish possibility that different people just prefer different kinds of food and drinks. Does their intolerance know no bounds? And if they really like the food, coffee and alcoholic beverages they consume, why does it bother them so much that other people have different preferences? That strikes me as a shockingly high level of personal insecurity concerning one’s cultural preferences.
This literal distaste for pluralism, coupled with whining over something as petty as personal eating habits, is demonstrative of what has always struck me as the extreme insecurity among conservatives in the cultural realm. That someone even cares what someone else eats is absolutely pathetic. The inability to just live and let live reveals how the conservative cultural supremacist message is based in the highest levels of personal insecurity that one can think of. The fear of gays, of Mexicans, of Muslims, and even of food is infantile in the extreme. Does Boehner need to someone to scare away the unpronouncable words and diverse menu options under his bed at night, too? What else can conservatives fear and hate? Are they going to start holding news conferences about progressives hanging toilet paper the wrong way, too?
Continue reading ‘Lefties probably tie their shoelaces wrong, too’
Facebook asked to pull Scrabulous.
In other news, the fossilised remains of a R.O.U.S. have been discovered in Uruguay.
Image Source: CNN
In other other news, CNN seems to have sacked all employees with a smidgen of grammatical nous.
H/T to some mates on a private mailing list.
From today’s Crikey email. Cross-posted at LP in exile where you can comment on the story while we wait for LP’s server woes to be sorted:
There’s a now infamous quote from a senior Bush administration official which goes like this:
That’s not the way the world really works anymore.
We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
It may well have been Karl Rove.
If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the Howardian culture wars, it’s that postmodernism is evil. Stick to the facts and memorise the dates, get the narrative straight. That’s the mantra from the Windschuttles, McGuinnesses and Donnellys of the world. And it’s been chanted by successive Education Ministers as well as the PM himself.
But this election campaign is nothing if not postmodern.
What a shame that our current options for Dear Leader of Orstraya are Beige and Beiger. We are most unlikely to be hearing anything about drover’s dogs, or mouths filled with Achilles heels, or even a statement as relatively mild as that the other party’s policies are opportunist claptrap. There will be a definite deficit of conga lines of suckholes. The best we can expect is a few desiccated coconuts, all-tip-no-icebergs and floggings with warm lettuce from our nation’s ratbag emeritus Paul Keating.
The campaign will still absorb our attention of course, but it’s not going to be very entertaining on the insults that make one gasp in appreciation front. This is not just an Australian phenomenon, it has been noted earlier this year by The Times’ Ben McIntyre, concluding that the decline of the art of public invective is a by-product of the rise of the spinmeister.
In ten years Tony Blair has not delivered a single one-line public insult worth remembering. Even the insults aimed at Mr Blair seem pallid. Thatcher’s reign left her festooned with nasty labels: Rhoda the Rhino, Attila the Hen, Virago Intacta, Petain in Petticoats and La Pasionara of Privilege. Poodle Blair just doesn’t have the same bite.
[…]
The British political insult started to die in May 1997. The age of spin required that slighting remarks be delivered sotto voce, anonymously, though the planted story and the sly aside. Politicians were just as rude as ever, but seldom to each other’s faces: this was called “civility�.Today, to get our fix of bile, we must turn to the television diatribes of Simon Cowell or Alan Sugar, professionals churning out confected insults aimed at people who do not matter and cannot defend themselves.
In the latest New York Review of Books, the divine Janet Malcolm reviews Send: the Essential Guide to Email for Home and Office.
Why a guide? Malcolm nails the problem of email: Email is a medium of bad writing. Poor word choice is the norm—as is tone deafness. The problem of tone is, of course, the problem of all writing. There is no “universal default tone.” When people wrote letters they had the same blank screen to fill. And there were the same boneheads among them who alienated correspondents with their ghastly oblivious prose.
I agree that, in terms of how emails are written, there shouldn’t be much of a difference with any other form of communication. But there is. Continue reading ‘Email essentials’
Dooced: to lose one’s job because of one’s website.
Liberal Party candidate gets dooced.
THE federal Liberal Party has dumped its candidate for the Melbourne seat of Maribyrnong in a bid to head off a political furore over his description of a female Victorian cabinet minister as a “bitch”.
Hamish Jones made the offensive outburst against Victorian minister and senior female politician Lynne Kosky on his internet blog site.
So what did Hamish Jones post on his blog?
I really want to represent the people. Really!
by Hamish @ 11:06 am. Filed under Politics & CampaignsPUBLIC Transport Minister Lynne Kosky has told Labor colleagues not to bother her with complaints from commuters about trains and trams.
In an unprecedented order, Ms Kosky told colleagues to take their problems about fines or heavy-handed ticket inspectors to the private operators instead.
Labor Politicians really care about the people don’t they!
The bitch gets over $200K a year and a full-time driver!
F*ckwit!
Aaaah, the young Libs, just like old Labor.
BTW, there is a image of poor old Hamish attached to Michelle Grattans piece on this, and it ain’t very flattering. There but for the grace of god go many a blogger.
Mingle2 - Blog Rating
This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:
* dead (2x) * gay (1x)
The recent discussions of child sexual abuse seem to have triggered nothing for this rating system, which would be great if that indicated that it had some sensitivity to discussions meant to inform rather than titillate. Yet my own blog, Hoyden About Town, receives an NC-17 rating because of our emphasis on discussing sexuality and sexual violence, breastfeeding, homosexual activism and gendered insults for the purpose of feminist analysis.
Obviously, this is just a little blog-widget, hardly meant as a tool for sophisticated analysis. It reveals something about the limitations of the soundbite and simple solutions to complex problems nonetheless.
Down with designer babies, Emersonian moral philosophy, Triumph of the Will, the Golden Mean, and labiaplasty! At least, that’s what the fine people at Lexus HQ believe. Good for them, and good on them for taking out a full-page ad on the back of The Weekend Australian Magazine (June 2-3, 2007) to tell the world about how they feel.
Seen any good grammatical foolishnesses lately?
You would think McDonald’s would know a thing or two about image and marketing and how to come out more or less on top in the spin cycle. You would think that in the wake of the McLibel saga and sundry similar and related PR disasters (Super Size Me, Fast Food Nation, publicity about transfats etc), somebody high up in the company would have grasped the essential fact about bad press: jumping up and down and waving your arms around just fans the flames. Transnational corporate sooking is not only ineffectual, ridiculous and pathetic, it also makes the sooker look incredibly stupid and naive. I’m used to thinking of McDonald’s and its ilk as evil, but I always saw it as operating with a super-Machiavellian kind of smooth, skilled malevolence. Lately, though, McDonald’s media wing is acting like a n00b out of control.
Continue reading ‘McJob, n.‘
Larvatus Prodeo is an Australian group blog which discusses politics, sociology, culture, life, religion and science from a left of centre perspective. more»
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