Anybody But You

Write What You Know

There's that old adage about what one should write about bring what one knows, and what one knows well is mostly their own dumb opinions. Your preoccupations tend to come to the fore a lot even when you're not conscious of letting them out the door. The Beatles for instance wrote a lot about love, presumably because they had a lot of interest and insight into love. In my case I tend to write about relationships that fail and the terrible breakups the ensue. 

This might be because I have a lot more knowledge in this area. I'm not saying I had a lot more misfortune in this area than other people, but ... I did get to see a lot of people behaving very badly on their way out of relationships, so much so that I find that I'm not exactly short on fodder here. There are a lot of shitty people walking the face of this earth and they don't even know just how shitty they are - but when they do their shitty thing, they have no shame or remorse, they justify it so well to themselves, they carry on as if there's nary a problem. Really appalling human beings doing some terrible things. I used to wonder how they lived with themselves but truth be known, they're mostly okay with the carnage they leave behind. 

All of us writing songs are in the wake and slipstream of the Beatles, and so we do have to bend our minds a little bit towards love. One thing I will say about love is that it is hard to fake it. It's really hard to fake liking something you do not. When it comes to another human being? Even more so. 

Therefore even in the worst relationships and their breakups, it's not like love doesn't figure into it somehow. Even if the other person is a psychopath manipulating you to their ends they probably still like you on some level if they're bothering with the charade of love. That said, it is possible for people to kid themselves into thinking they like somebody more than they really do. It's a hard facade to keep going. People eventually tire of it and break down. It's really in those instances that one wonders if love is real at all. 

Some of these things are unknowable and you can only unpack them years later. When you do, you might find that it was more projection than love. 

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HK '96

The People You Meet On The Road

All the political stuff going on in Hong Kong to do with democracy and human rights was foreseeable. I was there in 1996, about 18 months prior to the handover. The Communist take over was slowly underway and they sent in their uniformed state police who stood on street corners demanding IDs from people. I spent a bit of my free time talking to locals about it all and told them that they won't be able to keep all of their lifestyle once the Communists took charge. 

Just about everybody I met insisted that it was going to be business as usual. As long as people were making money, there would be no reason to change things. They resented the mere suggestion that Hong Kong might be about anything but money. Money, yo, money talks and bullshit walks! If the mainlanders could just get first hand experience of capitalism, then they would not want to go all authoritarian on them. I tried to explain to them that's not how authoritarians and totalitarians think. They first thing to be kicked aside would be democratic freedoms and rights, and when those are gone, it would be a lot less pleasant for everybody concerned. They then told me I was paranoid and nuts. The thing is, it's not that paranoid to think an authoritarian organ like the Communist Party of China hates your freedoms. 

Still, given the prosperity gap and the lifestyle gap between Hong Kong and the mainland at the time, it may have been inconceivable that the mainlanders would come to call the shots in such a way as to curtail Hong Kong's very sense of itself. Hong Kong after all was like a wild flower of modern capitalism that blossomed off the coast of the mainland, while the mainland seemed to have more in common with the medieval world than modernity.  

Somehow during that time in Hong Kong, I met an American woman who explained to me the frightening things she had witnessed and told me she was bugging out to Singapore before the takeover. She could see the writing writ very large and in Hi-Viz colours on that metaphorical wall. She even had stats at the ready as to how the mainland would inevitably grow and how when time came, it would would seek to undermine the independent-thinking of Hong Kong. All, that in spite of their promise of one state, two systems. I remember walking around Lan Kwai Fong talking about all this with her. She loved Hong Kong, but she couldn't see how it could stay the same after the Handover. It might look the same but at some point it would breakdown. The pretence would get old and erode away. 

It made a lot more sense than anything else I was hearing on the ground. Years later, here we are. The communists have taken away freedom of speech and have dismantled the institutions of democracy. Democracy as it turned out, was a lot more fragile in Hong Kong, just like she had predicted. 

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No Future For Us

Dystopic Blonde

The media and political landscape seems to have a plethora of a certain kind of women: The Power Blonde. They have lots of agency combined with a truck load of motivation, which they then use to support authoritarianism. Like the blonde talking heads on Fox News. Or Julie Bishop or Michaela Cash. There's something sociopathic and authoritarian about the Power Blondes on the political right. Recently some of them have taken to complaining that their side of politics is gender deaf but of course, if you join the party for gender deafness. It must be hard to do feminism when you don't believe in feminism but you want the fruits of feminism.  

They're not just on the right, the left has them too. It's like when you see Cate Blanchett heading up a group of actresses demanding diversity. I look at that and wonder how it is that the Power Blonde gets to head up that posse and not, say, Sonequa Martin-Green. As a man of not-whiteness, I kind of wonder a little about that sort of soft-shoe-shuffle whereby the Power Blonde is on the inside of the diversity debate and I'm on the outside looking in. Or you know, Tanya Plibersek telling us about diversity in Australian Tertiary Education or something... it kind of makes me squint a bit. I feel like I'm copping friendly fire. What can I do but pick up my guitar and play, and get on my knees and pray, I won't get fooled again.   

Back in the early seasons of 'Mad Men', there's an episode where Betty Draper gets the shits with her neighbour scolding her kids so she gets her gun out and starts shooting the neighbour's pigeons. It stuck with me because as an image, it was an empowered woman choosing to do whatever the hell she liked. At the same time it was completely sociopathic. It's one of those scenes that are so shocking the episode ends without repercussions. We never see the neighbour again in the series. Presumably he moved away. 

A lot can be said about Don Draper's sexism and his escapist infidelities that brings about the end to his marriage to Betty, but we are also privy to the hard-lean to the right that Betty takes as she gains more agency through the series. The irony being the liberties Don seeks are personal, so even in the most conservative, patriarchy-drenched moments, Don's personal ethos is small 'l' liberal. Betty on the other hand is progressive to the degree she thinks something should be done about improving society. She is compassionate and believes in structure. Yet her personal ethos is libertarian and fascist. She is nakedly a gun-toting maniac in that scene, and what we learn from that moment is that Betty's desire for control can only lead to a dystopian authoritarianism. 

All that aside, I've recently been thinking about my own interactions with the Power Blondes in my life and a lot of them are like candidates to be made into 'Karen' memes. Combative, assertive, sometimes casually racist or classist or both racist-and-classist, wowsers, and ready to throw authoritarian barbs at any passing person. Some of them, I even dated, although I can't for the life of me figure out why they tried me from their end of things. It's not like there was ever going to be any future.  

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Drunk In Paradise

Sydney, Back When It Was Waiting For Its Close Up Mr DeMille

The 1990s were fun. I knew it at the time and I knew it was going to end somehow. If you want to cut to the ending, I guess the fun of the '90s spilled over until the day 9/11 happened and that was that. 

Still, when I think back, I kicked off the decade starting at film school and that was a gas; and while there was that horrible recession-we-had-to-have going on in the middle of the decade, I tumbled through the decade having a lot of fun working in the film business and doing interesting stuff. I also worked with a Japanese advertising giant a lot and that led to nights out with the client going from restaurant to drinking holes to saunas to brothels. My own motto as it were was "How Much Fun Can One Boy Have?" - which, I still keep for my facebook page. 

It was the decade where a night-club aesthetic bilged out of Darlinghurst and lots of people were drinking heavily, popping eckies and fucking at sex parties. The first half had no internet and the second half barely had any internet worth talking about., so there was a lot more of a raw interaction with other humans in those days. Somewhere in there it was decided Sydney was going to host the 2000 Olympic Games and the city went a little nuts in the anticipation of its moment in the global spotlight. My own recollection of all this was that we were out wandering from place to place quite a bit, wondering what wonderful thing might be around the corner next. 

Sometimes we would end up at the Judgment Bar in Taylor Square. The sun would rise rather perfunctorily as we staggered out and looked eastward down Oxford Street towards Bondi direction. And it would be in those moments I'd wonder if there was anywhere more like paradise than Sydney. Sydney -if it were a person - was brainless, yet attractive; It liked thinking it was sophisticated all the while being anti-intellectual and decidedly into bad taste. Sydney was a party animal with an endless reservoir for snark and even then you couldn't exactly hate it because it has its charms. Even today if I were to characterise Sydney, it would be as a city that likes to guffaw at its own jokes while strung out on substances. 

If there was a problem for me in all of this was that I nursed a heartache, a mortal wound I sustained in the 1980s - a decade I detest for the misguided nostalgia it garners  - and I was haunted by it. It's hard to get over personal betrayals. Revenge movies play big with the audience precisely because betrayals never leave you. And so there was this dichotomy of the fun, the superficial joy, the effervescent bullshit of a happy-go-lucky town and this weird animus I carted around from party to party, scene to scene. I never really soured to Sydney. What I did sour on was its propensity to celebrate itself at every turn. I mean, yeah it's good, but is it that good?

All the same, the 1990s in Sydney were great. We were all there, kinda drunk, in Paradise. 

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The World Is Crazy Enough

You'd Better Believe It

It's well over 14 years ago now, but I had the earliest inkling of something being very wrong in the market place. It's not like I had shares or anything then. It was this simple phenomenon that took place during August 2007. I had been working for the little tyrant in the production company for about 5months when suddenly I started to field a lot of calls by our suppliers demanding payment. At the same time, none of our clients were paying up. Cashflow had dried up all over town, and people rich and poor alike were trapped in this very stodgy illiquidity. We down ourselves smack dab at the cutting edge of the oncoming Global Financial Crisis. We were the canary in the calming of industry, so to speak. 

From there, the market which had peaked in July that year started to melt down all the way down to March 2009 when it bottomed out. It was during March 2009 when despair seemed rampant and nothing seemed to be viable that I bought my first shares. Talk about being a contrarian; but then I had a reason to buy what I bought. I bought shares in the rival production company which had been listed and had a monopoly on hotel events around the globe. I did so mostly because I believe in the power of monopolies as well as the enticing price of 1.0 cent per share. A couple of months later it rose to 1.5 cents so I sold and made 50%. That was my first trade.

I think about that now and I just want to run and hide in embarrassment. First of all, even though I thought I had good knowledge of where I was putting my money, I was flying in the face of the market at full tilt. The rest of the market had deemed that company was carrying too much debt to do anything good, monopoly or not. And while 50% is nice, sticking money in penny stocks without knowing how that company intends to dig itself out of their hole is ... well, nuts. 

At the same time I did some digging around the internet and to my surprise, I found that there were lots of other people like me who had decided that the bottom of the epic market collapse was a perfectly fine place to start dabbling in the share markets because the only way it could go was up. Honestly, my insanity as it were, was shared by a lot more people than I had anticipated. And that's the funny thing. The insanity of the makes begets more insanity because it draws in more crazy people willing to take a punt. 

The world really is crazy enough, but people keep going into there markets equipped with nothing but their life savings and a hunch that it's a good time to buy. 

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Fully Vaccinated

Yay Science

FWIW I've had my second Astra-Zeneca shot. I was one of the first people in my age group to go and get the first shot - so swiftly in fact that I missed out on the amendments to the rule that allowed the Pfizer to my age group. I even pleaded with the doctor at the time to give me the Pfizer if he could spare it but no, I didn't fit into the category to be a Pfizer recipient. And so it was I got my first Astra-Zeneca shot and booked myself 13 weeks hence from that date. I didn't think much of it at the time, but things have a way of changing rather rapidly. 

So 12 weeks on, the NSW government has brought in full lockdowns for Greater Sydney and found my clinic to be more than 5 km away from my domicile, so it was bit of an issue to be contemplating travel to get my second shot. Luckily a pop up clinic appeared in my neighbourhood so I sort of walked in, explained my situation and talked the people into giving me that second shot. At the end of it, the nurse said "congratulations!"

Well, if the bloody pandemic ended, that would be worth celebrating. The fully vaccinated thing? Eesh. Really?

Although my experience in waiting while some of my dear friends managed to finagle Pfizers for themselves and be fully vaccinated in 3 weeks as opposed to 12-13weeks got me thinking that perhaps one of the reasons why Australia is taking so long to get full vaccinated is because 

    a) People are waiting for Pfizer and hoping to skip the Astra-Zeneca

    b) 12-13 weeks between shots for Astra-Zeneca is a lot longer than you think when you're sitting around in-between jabs. It's a whole 3 months, baby. 

It's so bloody long, they've changed the recommendations and advised people to get it in 6 weeks instead of 12-13 - and what exact difference does it or doesn't it make? Does anybody have some data on this?

Turns out, they do.

Yay Data 

Since my 2nd shot I've also been wondering just how inferior the Astra-Zeneca is to a pair of Pfizers and my friend shared the video below which is absolutely worth watching:

Turns out the Astra-Zeneca is not too bad.

Anyway, I hope you are all well out there and that you're been vaccinated. Don't hold out - it's not worth it. Even if you're fully vaccinated, you can still get the Delta variant. It's a bastard of a virus. The good news is, it likely won't send you to the hospital if you do as long as you're vaccinated - and that's a good enough reason to get the shots. 

What an annoyance, but it's the world we live in. If you want a semblance of the old normal to come back, everybody's got to get vaccinated. The only way to live with the virus is to have everybody vaccinated. That's just what the numbers say. 

Out of Afghanistan

End Of A Terrible Era 

Everything about the war in Afghanistan sucks. It went on for so long people kind of got inured to this phenomenon out there in the middle of Eurasia whereby USA and its allies stationed their troops, flew combat missions, trained a largely low-motivation Afghan military and for years seemed to feed the Hollywood fodder of a seemingly endless, pointless, witless Forever War. It got so bad it made a defective POTUS like Donald Trump look vaguely statesmanlike when he announced he was completely pulling out the American troops.Yes, the same president who thought sitting down with Kim Jong-Un was a good move. 

The cost of the war is staggering; the human carnage and damage is staggering; the very pointlessness of it is mind warping; and we have to wonder if any of it accomplished anything. We did learn a lot about the nature of war in the contemporary world. We can't go to war without legitimacy and this desire for legitimacy prohibits us from doing drastic terrible things. We can get all the air superiority win the world, but we cannot carpet bomb them all - we're not willing to do that any more. We say we want to win over hearts and minds, but the kinds of troopers we send over like the SAS seem to be high functioning psychopaths, out on a safari to shoot locals. There's no wining of any hearts and minds with all that. 

I've mentioned it elsewhere that the USA is not willing to pay for health and education in rebuilding Afghanistan because they don't even spend that money back home in places like Alabama and Louisiana. Why would they? So that shows to us that America probably shouldn't go marching into places it doesn't want to turning the 51st state of the USA.   

There's a weird irony that then day Kabul fell to the Taliban is also VJ day. Wars rarely end with any dignity or decorum. This one ends with the powers leaving behind a vacuum that will get filled by the flotsam and jetsam of world politics. The fearless prediction we can make is that the Taliban will rise to being a threat again. The Americans will go back again. There will be no plan next time either. 

How Do We Feel About This?

I started this blog way back when around the time they first sent troops to Afghanistan. Blogging was sort of new then, and it seemed like a fun thing to pass commentary upon. I was not a soldier, I was in do danger at all in this 'war on terror', so I had all the luxury in the world to snark away at the conduct of the conservative governments in USA and Australia as well as bitch about Tony Blair and Gordon Brown's ethically challenged Labour Government in the UK. Did the war affect me? It did in strange ways. I won't go into them all but basically I watched liberal democracy dismantle itself in the face of the boogeyman it created for itself. The arts and humanities got defunded over that time, and everybody seemed to lose interest in culture-as-national-project. In turn we've allowed neo-nazis and extremely rightists to gain access to the mainstream, and everybody seems to have forgotten about Marx and Engels. 

I have to admit, the going got so stupid around the early part of the last decade that I gave up commenting on politics. There's a certain kind of idiocy with leaders who choose ideological positioning over proper policy considerations, and such idiocies are too demeaning to analyse. If it can be said that you cannot polish a turd but you can roll fit in glitter; well, there's only so much rolling around the turd can take without losing shape. That's kind of how much our politics and polity devolved in the course of the Afghan War - it turned into a formless bit of turd.

In a way I am glad the USA is out of Afghanistan. It's no place to be, and no place to be dropping money. It is a thankless task to keep the peace in a country surrounded by countries that want to destabilise it or turn it into a puppet or colony. And truth be told it's hard to say for certain the Afghanis really liked having Americans there to keep the peace. The very fact that the Afghan government collapsed like a house of cards as the Allies headed for the door suggests the Afghanis themselves were far less serious about the value of the Peace being kept by the American presence. Now is the awful time of reckoning, The Taliban will come back and run their medieval government. There will be refugees headed for Europe and America and Australia. There will be leaky boats once more. We've lined ourselves up for another bout of history repeating. 

So What Now?

America will probably do a bit of soul searching about the twin follies waged by the George W Bush Administration. They really should. The failure is very real, although somewhat vague. As with Iraq, it was easy enough to dislodge the shitty government. What was hard was to set up a viable government in its wake. Worse still, they left the military there for a long time in a bid to shore up whatever democratic civil government they could. The fact that they did for nearly 2 decades may not actually be a straight up failure.

The Chinese government had talks with the Taliban. Presumably they want to back the Taliban government in the hopes of seeing stability. They might find the Taliban are a lot worse than having the Americans on their backdoor. After all, you're talking about a government founded on the idea that if you're not Islam, you're little people. Godless-Communists-As-Your-Friends might be a bit of a hard sell with these people. Your enemy of your enemy might be your friend, but something tells me the enemies of enemies like these might just be just another enemy. 

If there's one thing I'm willing to prognosticate upon, I think the Taliban will be just as dreadful this time through as they were in 1996-2001. It was a long time ago and people have short memories but, the Taliban were simply terrible. There will be pain.  

Last Thought On This Matter

You know what's amazing? There are still prisoners in Guantanamo Bay that date back to the early days of this war. 

Barnaby's A Bit Slow

Is There Any Other Way To Put It?

Maybe it's because he insists on being on the outer reaches of ideological extremism, it's easy to confuse Barnaby Joyce with somebody who might have a clue about what is good for the country. He's convinced he's a good man, trying to good by his country but his skewed ideology takes him to places where stupid cohabitates with insanity. 

That's really all there is to it. 

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Christian Porter's Spot of Bother, Part 2

He's Most Probably Guilty

So a few days ago Christian Porter one on the offensive and claimed he didn't commit an act of rape and he's only met the woman when she was 16 and he was 17. He made a few other ambit claims which at the time seemed neither here nor there so in my naiveté I thought it was prudent to give the guy the benefit of the doubt. 

All of that was predicated on not having read what the actual allegations are, and if we were being strictly principled about it, we would not form opinions without knowing what the allegations were. Quite simply he had denied the rape and then pointed to the presumption of innocence that is standard in the court of law. 

Well, Crikey has come out with an article overnight which details a good deal of what the allegations are, and how they might relate to Christian Porter. The article was penned before Porter's presser so the minister is referred to as 'John Doe'. The woman is described as Jane Doe. Here is a section that contradicts Christian Porter's press conference comments. 

The pair first met in 1986 and again in 1987 in Adelaide when Jane was 15 at a national school competition. The group of students travelling together became close friends, socialising, dancing and studying together.

While the group was close, one friend told Crikey that John Doe had an “arrogant” side to him and as competitions intensified he would become mean.

“[Jane] talked about how she was shocked because she’d imagine that everyone was friendly, and yet the way that [John] was behaving towards it was not as a friend would behave,” she said.

“I think that was the first inkling she had that he was not what she had thought that he was.”

John would make callous remarks at women, Jane wrote. She recalled him saying she didn’t “have the tits” to wear a bikini, and joking that the alfalfa sprouts on her salad made it look like she was “eating sperm”.

But later he would flatter Jane, complimenting her — and himself. According to Jane’s statement, he asked her to iron a shirt he wanted to wear.

“You would make a wonderful wife one day,” he said. He called her “so smart and so pretty”, capable of doing “all the good housewife things”.

At the press conference, Porter made it out that he only met the woman once at the debating competition. He explained that the line comes from the fact that this 'Jane Doe' knew how to iron a shirt and he didn't. It's interesting how he used his own inept male chauvinism at 17 as his defence there, - but it contradicted greatly by what is being described. He knew her, he liked her more than just friends. He knew her enough that he wanted to marry her, - which is to say he wanted to have sexual relations with her - at least that's what is being related. Chalk that one up to motive. 

After dancing in Kings Cross, Jane — who said she was in a dissociative state — agreed to a non-penetrative sex act propositioned by John. Jane wrote that she agreed to the act because she had been hurt by John’s comments about her body. 

He then allegedly violently forced Jane into performing oral sex on him despite her saying no. Jane said he kicked her to the ground and wrapped his hands around her neck.
Later, she said he bathed her thoroughly, dressed her and comforted her as she fell asleep telling her it was “all a bad dream”. 

She said she woke to John anally raping her. He allegedly raped her twice without a condom.
“The only thing that I remember [John] saying to me was that was ‘I don’t want to get you pregnant’,” Jane wrote. 

The next day, Jane said John joked about how the night “might have been different” if he had a condom before referring to his “good Catholic girlfriend” back home.

Great. So he had access to this woman, and therefore the means. This allegation also completely contradicts Porter's own press conference statement where he denied he knew her any more than the realm of the debating competition.   

The description in this allegation is is like something out of 'American Psycho'. It's completely alien to most people with common sense and judgment. 17 year olds with common sense and judgment don't go around getting women drunk and anally raping them. Porter essentially made an appeal to the empathy of most people to imagine themselves at 17, not even remotely likely to rape, and then asked them to take their good judgment and common sense as his own. It's so sickening that he would run that manipulation on the people of this country. 

You can't be asking for presumption of innocence at the same time running a gaslighting operation. We're not taking about what we would have done. We're talking about what he most likely did. 

The crux of it comes down to the believability of the allegation. 

Jane lived with the allegation for 30 years. Feelings of shame and guilt are common in survivors; 57% of victims experience anxiety and fear in the year after the assault.

One male friend, who met her around six months after the alleged assault said Jane spoke about experiencing a “serious and traumatic event” which he assumed to be a form of sexual assault.

“For many years, we’ve had many discussions around many aspects of her being assaulted and the damage that it did without her identifying who it was,” he said.

“At no occasion did she ever contradict herself or was she ever inconsistent.”

Jane had been a high achiever. School captain. Dux. She was incredibly smart, being accepted to school teams earlier than most students and was the “brightest star” out of the school team, friends said.

But Jane struggled, suffering from mental illness and substance abuse which intensified as she went into university. In one study, 45% of survivors of sexual assault reported having a drinking problem in the year before the survey.

“She did go on to experience real challenges with her mental health,” one friend said. They added that Jane believed her mental health issues were linked to her alleged assault. While Jane still worked and studied, friends say she never had a career of longevity or finished her PhD.

After seeking counselling from both a psychologist and a psychiatrist in 2019, Jane decided to make her allegations public. She reached out to friends who were around her in 1988. These messages, sent between 2018 and 2019, have been seen by Crikey. The three friends Crikey spoke to reject the idea that the memory could be false.

“The level of ancillary detail … the sidebars and the interpersonal things that she commented on, some of them I know to be true and some of them ring very true,” one friend said.

The three friends Crikey spoke to said Jane was determined and resolved in telling her story. Her parents reportedly only found out about the allegation in 2019 and they do not believe that it is true.

For what it is worth, I believe her. I completely believe this account. If it's Christian Porter's words against the words of this woman, I take the latter. And I do not take kindly to Porter's intimation that her account was not right because somehow she suffered a mental health issue (all while himself begged off work for a couple of weeks to regain his mental health ... p'uh-lease!). That was a cheap shot. 

I think Porter's press conference was good enough to buy a few days' worth of grace while we processed what was being discussed. What has come out contradicts Porter's own statements so greatly, one has to wonder if there's any truth to the denial itself. I kind of think he perjured himself in the court of public opinion by feigning that he hardly knew the woman. This was simply not true by the account of not just the woman, but the people who knew them back then. One can't lie about this fact and then make one's denial stand. 

My opinions here don't really matter. It doesn't affect anything. I just blog to keep track of my own thinking on things. All the same if you're asking me what I think, I think he did it. 

What Now?

As I said in my last entry, ministers have lost their jobs for less. If one is in the Prime Minster's shoes l- hate him or loathe him - he has no choice but to jettison this toxic mess. This is doubly so when there is the other business of Brittany Higgins going on, ensnaring Linda Reynolds with her 'Lying Cow' remark. When you think about it, Reynolds is not the rapist, merely the boss of the victim, who tried to minimise the allegation for political reasons - and she is in as deep trouble as she is. Porter's position is worse in that he is the accused perpetrator of a crime who cannot come close to proving his innocence; worse still, the more we learn of the allegations, the more we're convinced he likely did rape the woman when he was 17. Can Scott Morrison really countenance having this man as his top law official? 

The problem of course is the Morrison is sitting on a one seat majority, with the departure of climate-change-denying-Anti-vax-Anti-mask-Trumpist-nutjob Craig Kelly from the Liberal Party. The election that brought this sorry government back was May 2019, so we're looking at latest May 2021 as the election date. Presumably Morrison's play is to make it to later this year and use the COVID-19 vaccine and management of the pandemic in Australia as his ticket for reelection but you have to wonder if he's going to make it that far. So like it or not we're marching into an election year with a lot to process. A lot of it is exactly the women problem the Liberal Party has.

If you conducted a vox pop on any street in Australia today, how many people would be able to tell you the name of Australia’s Minister for Women? Just about nobody. Because Marise Payne has done just about nothing. Move on. Zap. Forget.

Even after these torrid and shocking weeks with accusations of rape against a Liberal staff member and a Liberal cabinet minister, senior Liberal men do not think their grip on power is under threat. These controversies might increase the Labor Party’s winning margins in seats they already hold, but are not powerful enough to cost the Coalition any of their seats, they assert.

This has the whiff of hubris. It’s true that Scott Morrison’s approval rating is strong, in the 60s. This is a result of his handling of the pandemic and the recession. But it’s also true that nothing has budged the critical measure – voting intentions.

The voting intentions have not moved. The electorate is split roughly 50-50. So maybe Morrison intends to just ride it all out, pretend nothing's happened. Except right now, Morrison seems to be presiding over a Land of Rape. Things are absolutely, decidedly totally not fine - the house is on fire when it comes to topic of women's safety, and right now the fire is burning down the authority in the House of Representatives. If he doesn't do anything, Morrison may as well be anointing himself rapist-in-chief. 

The thing is, as of now, Christian Porter can just fuck off. There's no upside to the man in terms of policy, politics or legislature. There's no coming back from this allegation. He can't have moral authority as the top law official of Australia while the allegation remains - and it will remain by dint of the woman's suicide. Luckily for Porter he won't see the inside of Prison. 

So he's done. The only questions are how soon will Scomo wake up to this dire reality and how far will he be punting Porter. 

The Unfair Society

Is Fair Worth Fighting For?

After writing about this business of Christian Porter, I got to be thinking about what was disturbing me so much about the press conference. On the one hand if we are being fair to the person who accused the Attorney General, we have to be fair towards her and ask the questions. On the other hand if we're living in a society with due process, the manner in which we ask the question should have a bit more epistemological precision than a heated presser to get towards justified, true, belief on the matter. It would be unfair to everybody in society if we judged guilt on rumour and innuendo. 

Which got me thinking, I guess I'm a sucker for this notion of 'fair'. 

I saw a number of people going off on social media today saying Porter was merely denying it like Bart Simpson - "I didn't do it, you didn't see me do it, you can't prove anything" - which, to be fair is true as well, but if his denials are not sufficient from making your negative judgements, then doesn't that mean this really needs to go to court? 

If you were being accused rightly or wrongly, you'd want your day in court instead of just a presser. Yet because the would-be plaintiff is dead, there can't be a court date. It is entirely unfair to be judged on the letter. That's Porter's point. Thus fairness seemed to be one of the nodes on which this process was buckling.

This brings about the next question:

Do We Live In A Fair Society?

We value fairness in Australia. Everyday Australia's journalists describe our society as egalitarian. This is probably not quite right. I can say that it used to be egalitarian but years and years of Coalition rule has ensured a lot of privileges have been baked in as advantages for wealthy people. Going back 30 years to the year Paul Keating ousted Bob Hawke from the Prime Minister's office, there have been 11 years of ALP rule and the rest belong to the Coalition. They won a lot over the years, some times in the most dodgy manner (which I won't bother going into here) and the ALP for its part has found numerous ways to hobble itself over the years. And each time the ALP hobbled itself, that was an opportunity lost. 

Fairness has been slipping in the socio-economic sense for 3 decades. We are far less equal now than we were in 1991. Year after year we find economic inequality has risen and that the gap with the indigenous community has not closed. Opportunities are less, the economy is far less diverse, and labour conditions are more precarious for far more people. It turned out this way because successive governments have been undertaking the Neo-liberal social experiment where governments no longer look to achieve full employment, they try and cut taxes instead and hope private enterprise pulls it weight. It has not. 

A simple analysis of GDP spread tells a simple picture of unequal spread of wealth. It was pointed out by an academic to me that 8% of Australia's GDP is derived from the surrounding blocks of Wynyard and Town Hall stations in Sydney. Melbourne similarly has 2 stations that provide a similar amount, and Brisbane has one that provides about 5. If you add it up, 1/5 of Australia's GDP rests on 5 suburbs out of all the suburbs in this wide country. This skewering is partly the result of public infrastructure policy (or absence thereof) but also an expression of the unequal opportunities present in our society. 

There are whole swathes of the country physically cut off from the opportunities that are available in concentrated spots in the middle of these urban centres. Australia's unemployed numbers 700,000 and upwards. In any given week there are job listings that number about 200,000, most of which are closely tied to these GDP engine sites. In any given week there are 500,000 people who need a job, are actively looking and cannot get the economic opportunity to better themselves as per the conservative Liberal National Party prescription for self-betterment. There's no rhetorical device to cover over the plain fact that the Coalition government can't even deliver on its own stated policy. It just can't work the way they say it does, thanks to the tyranny of distance. We live in a country that if you live in the wrong place, your odds at success get very long.

So no, we do not live in a society that is in any way fair; we have a government that has made it its stated policy to keep it unfair; and unfairness is celebrated by this ruling party at just about every turn. 

Therefore, it has to be asked how is it fair that the Attorney General of the party of unfairness, presiding over a government that enacts policies to bolster enduring unfairness, that spreads the unfairness and celebrates the unfairness it creates and sustains, complain when he is not being treated fairly? Can Christian Porter really complain about all this being unfair? What has fairness got to do with his party, his government, his life experience of wealth and privilege and his pursuit of said unfairness over his entire political career? 

What, fair? Christian Porter wants fairness? Due process? Who is he trying to kid? We don't get fairness from him or his government, why should that old expectation for egalitarian, democratic fairness still stand? He's getting exactly what's coming to him exactly because of the many many actions of his life apart from his possible rape that put him in a position to look like a rape suspect. It's extraordinary in some ways that a man's life in the law and politics has led him to being utterly unbelievable when he himself is accused of a heinous crime - but that's all on him. 

You Know What's Weird About The Date?

January of 1988. 

I keep looking at the date of the alleged rape and keep thinking it's peculiar. What is peculiar about it is that it's roughly the time of Australia celebrating its Bicentenary. I remember the event. On Australia Day that year I was down in Blues Point Park with my friends to see the fireworks which, for the first time were mounted from the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Then they announced they would become incorporated into New Year Celebrations and the rest is history. The jingle went "Celebration of a Nation, lend us a hand," so we spent the year making jokes about hand jobs. It's hard to forget. It was typically a Hawke-Keating kind of Green-and-Gold Australia looking fo an identity to hang its celebrations upon, and much less the Southern-Cross-and-Union-Jack kind of Australiana preferred by John Howard.

All the same Australia Day remains hotly contested, with Porter's own party doing the defending of the day of invasion for the indigenous people of Australia. It's the ultimate day of unfairness that his party insists we keep as the day to celebrate our nation-hood. I'm pretty sure Christian Porter is also one of those guys who don't think we should move the date. It seems incredibly emblematic that around the time of the most unfair moment being celebrated was when the alleged events took place. 

And he wants fairness. Let that sink in. 

A Bit of Kafka, A Bit of Kant

I guess a part of me is still wedded to fairness. If one were to give Porter the benefit of the doubt, then it must be harrowing to wake up one day and be accused of a heinous crime 33 years ago when you were a teen. It's like something straight out of Kafka (or Philip K Dick). Like Kafka's 'The Trial', the allegation sticks, but he can't get to a courtroom to challenge his accuser or clear his name. Or maybe it is more like 'The Metamorphosis' where he woke up one day as a beetle (I have often wanted to wake up one day as a Beatle but that is another story). Instead of a beetle, Porter has woken up to find he is an alleged rapist.

It doesn't end well for Josef K. or Gregor Samsa the protagonists in Kafka's stories. It's hard to imagine this ends well for Christian Porter. He might not like it but his only shot at clearing his name is the independent inquiry being tossed around.

Immanuel Kant made a point in his book 'Critique of Pure Reason' that there are any number of things in the universe one could discuss but because of the way we are constructed, there is no way of knowing. For instance we cannot know if there is an afterlife because we can't die and come back. So any discussion of the afterlife cannot be sensibly made because nobody knows what they're talking about. Similarly, if we're careful about what we can know and what we can't know, the range of subjects we can discuss sensibly becomes self evident (or words to that effect, it's been a decade since I read the big fat turgid book). When applied to the situation of Christian Porter, it becomes self evident we can't talk about this case in any sensible way, given the circumstances. 

People are going to try anyway because it's their job to commentate, but keep in mind what Kant had to say about the limits of what we can know and whether sensible judgements can be made. They can have the independent inquiry but they might come up with bupkis. Is this fair? Is this fair on the woman? Is any of it fair? Like I said, I'm a sucker for fairness, but we're talking about a guy who tried to make fairness obsolete, asking for fairness. By all means have the independent inquiry but I can hear Kafka and Kant laughing from the grave. 

Whatever the outcome, it sucks to be you, Christian Porter. But it's no worse than the life of the disadvantaged in this country - a disadvantage your career was spent in trying to sustain.

Christian Porter's Spot of Bother

 How Awkward Was That, Shtraya?

That was a really uncomfortable press conference. I can't recall a press conference that was more awkward than that one including the one where Bill Clinton wagged his finger and told us he "did not have sex with that woman". And we know how that one turned out. Christian Porter's press conference was much more drawn out and filled with bewilderment and pointed, accusatory questions. 

You can see parts of it for yourself here.

All of it is here.

It's pretty gruelling to watch.

I Hate Christian Porter But...

It goes without saying but by dint of him being on the infernal side of politics, I don't like Christian Porter. I don't much like the smug smirk and condescension that he usually throws around, and as for this notion that he might be a future Prime Minister, well, if Scomo can be our PM a monkey's ass can do it too. When we all started playing the game of"who-is-the-rapist-minister?" his name was the slam dunk favourite. And your name doesn't become the front-runner in those stakes if you weren't some kind of entitled fuckwit that invites that judgement - more on that later.

I really can't stand the guy; but I have to say that I'm inclined to believe him based on that interview. We might quibble with the way he played politics at the edge by bringing up allegations against Bill Shorten some years ago, and implied that the press were part of the public lynch mob. I mean, come on, if it were the other way around you know he would be using the press to drum up the very same lynch mob. So the pleading for politics didn't really elicit my sympathy. 

What did get my attention was the scenario. It was January 1988. He and 3 other students were in Sydney for a debating competition. He as 17, she was 16 when the alleged rape took place. And it took 32+ years for this to surface as a case. Keeping in mind the man was in the Western Australian state government Assembly since 2008. The woman accusing him of the rape committed suicide late lats year, having battled mental illness. They're the facts as presented to us. 

Look, I'll be honest with you - Porter didn't look like a guy who got found out for a transgression from years ago. He looked like he was bewildered that the rumour mill had found him as the target of a wild allegation. Believe me, there are not that many people who would love to see him go down more than me, but I couldn't bring myself to think he was the perpetrator as described, based on how he presented himself at the presser. 

People are going to believe the accuser and that's fair enough. I was on their side right up to the point I sat through that miserable, nerve-shattering press conference. 

Maybe In The Confirmation Bias Wheelhouse?

If we were to nominate one cabinet minister out of Scomo's veritable lineup of misery-makers, Porter fits the bill like no other. Most of the prominent men in Scomo's cabinet look like Incels. Porter alone looks like he can play the player and maybe get laid in a way that is beyond say Greg Hunt, Josh Frydenberg or Peter Dutton. If you had to pull a name out of that bunch as the likely culprit, Porter would have been at the top of a lot of people's lists, not just mine. 

He's the obvious person to think the worst of, and just maybe there's a problem in that. Just because we think he's the odds-on favourite to be the one to do it, doesn't mean he did it. As much as I would like to believe out of malice and schadenfreude that Porter was the likeliest to be a teen rapist, that doesn't mean he was a teen rapist. It's not a matter to be left to conjecture or random judgments of character. Belief alone isn't going to get you anywhere meaningful. This isn't some joke about figuring out who farted in the lift. It's as grave an allegation as grave allegations come. 

Worse still, we're not going to get to the bottom of this because the accuser is now deceased. No court case can be brought, no investigation can really be completed. The people calling for an independent inquiry are on principle correct to do so, but in light of the circumstances it is doubtful meaningful answers can be gained. And by meaningful, I mean those that stand up to some kind of epistemological interrogation, with conclusions that are justified and true.  

As it is, it's left in the world of he-said, she-said. The allegations are just going to sit in the half-light of social media and mainstream media without ever seeing the inside of a court. If anything the press conference drew the line under the need for presumption innocence especially in such murky circumstances. 

Making Sense of The Bits That We Were Told

Porter had the look of a man who wanted to say "look, I am an arsehole and you can think me a tremendous, awful, entitled, arsehole but I am not that arsehole." 

It reminded me of the Nixon adage "let the bastard deny it". Or the fart joke "He who denied it supplied it." If you're out in front of the press denying something, you look guilty any way. Which is to say, that right there is the court of public opinion running wild, independent of any real court or rule of law. It's not that I don't believe the allegation or that I believe Porter is a more reliable human being than the accuser or any of that. No. None of that. It's just that right up to seeing the press conference, I was smugly convinced he was the rapist and he should go down regardless of the circumstances. 

What I discovered in the process of watching his press conference was that I got squeamish. I realised I would much rather this whole business went through courts and got litigated and contested by eminent, studied, venerable lawyers. Except it can't because the accuser is dead. This stuff of journalists hurling loaded questions - the "when did you stop beating your wife?" variety of questions, did not make me feel any closer to the truth or a just outcome. And Porter looked just as frustrated as we were in that what he was being asked to do was to prove a negative in a court of public opinion and anything less should mean his job and career. He's certainly correct to see it that way. 

In turn, I had to ask myself am I happy being a juror in a kangaroo court? You know me, I hate jury duty even in real life. Sure I'd love to see him gone, but he'd only be replaced by the next entitled jerk-off Tory, so what would be the point of a gratuitous send-off in real world terms? Meanwhile Porter can't even name his accuser in the press conference defending his name. A wag pointed out even his surname rhyming with daughter is going to kill him at the next election: "would you trust your daughter with Christian Porter?" It's a circus of malice and innuendo.

This is so murky and awful that if the ALP ran with it against the Coalition, they too would suffer a tremendous blow to their own prestige and integrity. They would never be able to argue anything from principle in Parliament again. That's how toxic this scandal has become. It's one thing for this sorry government to cover up the Brittany Higgins rape. That's terrible enough and the government deserves to be castigated. Yet I thoroughly understand the government's perplexed aporia about this allegation. I guess that's why they sent him out to face the press today. 

  

 

There's No Money

There's Never Any Money

Some time after those terrible fires, it got to rebuilding, and affected people went looking around for reconstruction/support money from the government. At the time, announcements were made that there was 2 billion dollars to go around but months later it was found out that there was no such fund as announced. People found it impossible to navigate the bureaucracy to be heard by the Federal Government. Arguably, the Federal Government put in wear plugs and sat in the maze in order to make it inaccessible A little like Major Major Major Major in Catch-22 when he says he will only take meetings when he is not in his office.  

People affected by the fires went into the winter of 2020 with the pandemic going, without having rebuilt anything. It should have been a bigger scandal but of course this Covid-19 pandemic has been such a monster of sorts it ate up all the airspace for the message to get out. 

I kind of imagine that Scomo, having been snubbed pretty hard in his attempt to PR and Spin his way out of the deep ditch he had dug himself, decided these people would get punished through the power of bureaucracy. The ABC was reporting people still living in tents in the middle of winter. This is a terrible state of affairs. 

All of which got me thinking that we do terrible things to one another. I didn't vote in this terrible government but somebody did, and those people knew full well what kind of crackpot policies would be put into place or left to die through inaction and omission. And now that people in the south end of the continent were facing this terrible plight, there were people in Queensland who were quite smug that they got the government for which they had hoped. The absence of empathy is psychopathic. It's a horrible thought, really when part of the populace abandons another to depredation and neglect. We used to be better than this. Really, we were, once upon a long time ago. 

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That Time When...

...Scomo Went To Hawaii

It's been well over a year and a part of me finds it still way too hard to forgive Scomo's abandonment of his country to go on a family holiday during the worst fire season in recorded history. The country was ablaze, he was on vacation - because it had been arranged with his family months ago, allegedly - and whole communities had been burnt to the ground.

It was a bit like FDR going on a vacation to the Bahamas the week after WWII landed on his desk. Except, FDR did no such thing, and here was our Prime Minister sipping Pina Coladas by the sea in Hawaii. I mean, come on. How do you spin that, you PR hack Scomo? 

After which he kind of hid behind his kids and took his lumps in the press and looked like yesterday's burnt toast util of course another disaster came along in the form of the COVID-19 pandemic. Then, he was quick off the mark to do things.  You sort of wonder if he would have been as quick had he not had to eat so much humble pie over the bushfire response and his holiday to Hawaii. 

His Prime Ministerial performance has picked up somewhat since then, probably because he finally connected in his head that what he does in his office matters to everybody in the country. All I can say is let us hope he gets voted out as soon as possible.

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No News on Facebook (For Australia)

"No News For You Australia!"

Nobody thought it would happen, they said - but it did. On Thursday morning, Facebook pulled all the news feeds from its services in Australia. A lot of other services were taken out in the big purge, but most importantly, Facebook thumbed its nose at the Federal Government with its gun-to-the-head legislation. 

Since then there has been much scuttlebutt about what this means, and some of it is just hilarious. 

The move was made in response to the government’s media bargaining code, which is designed to force it and Google to pay publishers for news content.

Facebook executives - in consultation with founder Mark Zuckerberg, vice- president of global partnerships, business and corporate development Marne Levine and head of global news partnerships Campbell Brown - were weighing up what to do for weeks.

The tech platform made its intentions to remove news content from its main platform clear last September, after a draft form of the media bargaining code was made public.

Even Simon Milner, Facebook’s director of policy for the Asia-Pacific region, wasn’t sure if Facebook would follow through with the threat when he fronted up at a parliamentary inquiry in late January. In fact nobody was certain until the eleventh hour, when the Facebook’s most senior executives saw the final bill to be debated in parliament and decided to pull the trigger.

Under the direction of Zuckerberg, the company’s founder, major shareholder and most powerful figure, the company pushed through tweaks to its algorithm to restrict news content for Australians.

What's sidesplittingly funny is that the government thought this was a shock move. Since then we've heard admonitions from Josh Frydenberg that somehow this would reflect badly on Facebook, and Greg Hunt telling us that without the news Facebook will be filled with fake news and misinformation. 

The joke is the government was going to rely on Facebook to get its word out about the COVID-19 vaccination programme - starting next Monday - and suddenly that channel had disappeared. You can't make this stuff up. And so they took to the airwaves on old media to wag their index fingers, telling Facebook its reputation would suffer, the news needed to go back on, and Facebook had to go negotiate these contracts with Seven West and Nine-Fairfax and the Truly-Evil-News-Corporation. 

I mean, I'm no fan of Zuckerberg but come on - a five year old can figure out if he doesn't want to do something, he can just say no. And if he had to give up 4% of his Australian business, so be it. 

Ryan Stokes of Seven West Media wants Facebook to put the new back on, and pay Seven West like Google acquiesced. 

“Their decision to ban legitimate news and information … makes them seem more like a publisher than than just a digital platform,” he told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

“I think the government’s commitment to pushing the code through and legislation through is a really important position and being resolute in that and not responding to these types of interim steps and decisions, I think is really important. And then I think it’s going to be up to Facebook. And frankly, I think it’s in their interest to get the information back on their platform, because that’s what their users want.”

You gotta laugh. Ryan Stokes sounds like he just missed out on a multi-million dollar deal with Facebook who simply declined and walked away. What a loser. 

Let's face it, the laws were written to target Facebook sharing news. If Facebook does not share the news, it's not breaking the planned law. The government looks stupid for passing a law against something that is not happening. It can't then demand Facebook break the law so it can un-break the law by signing a deal it doesn't want to sign. It's easier not to infringe the law and not pay the fine.  Everybody understands Facebook was put in the situation by the Australian government. Nobody thinks worse of Facebook than they already do by any of this. 

It's just too funny. 

Why Are You On Facebook Anyway?

It's worth pondering for a moment. There was a time when the news wasn't on Facebook and dare I say it was better then. The intrusion of news made the Facebook experience a lot more convoluted. It's not like Facebook is without its faults. The rise of trump and Trumpism, the proliferation of Flat-Earth-Anti-Vaxx-Committed Stupid can be squarely put upon Facebook. Yet a lot of that came about because Facebook allowed itself to be a conduit of all news and views.  

The reason I am these is because my friends who live in distant places are there. I guess I could call them on the phone instead, but there is something useful about quickly conveying a thought through Facebook. And that's it. If I never get to see an article from Politico or Rolling Stone or the Sydney Morning Herald or ABC..net.au through Facebook, I couldn't really care less. 

Does Facebook have a responsibility to carry the news? Surely not. 

Does Facebook need to carry the news, from the user's point of view? No. 

Is Facebook worse as an experience without the news? Not at all. 

So I think most people will stay on, The commentary saying this would drive people away fro Facebook and that some other platform will take over, are premature. Surely they have not seen what has happened with Parker in the wake of the US elections, the Capitol Insurrection, the banning of Trump and the avowed move to Parler made by many Trumpty-Dumb-pties. It's hard to find an alternative to Facebook that everybody can agree.

About Fires and Emergencies Services Getting Blocked

By the way, the panel on Q&A looked really stupid. 

It's a bit rich that the government that presided over the worst bush fires in the history of modern Australia can complain that people can't access news regarding Fires and Emergencies through Facebook. The government came out swinging like Little-leaguers on red cordial saying Facebook shouldn't switch off emergency services but when you think about it, it's not Facebook's internet. Facebook didn't switch off the internet for those services. They just decided not to carry that social responsibility ion it makes them liable to the proposed laws. The Communication Minister arguing like Facebook made those services inaccessible makes him look like a moron. 

The sites complaining that Facebook doesn't carry them any more are right to complain but at no point did the government make it official that Facebook should be the place where messages like that should be pushed out. It was the free and unfettered market that decided that. The government should take responsibility that it has intervened in the market and there were unforeseen outcomes because of that intervention.  

In some weird way I'd like to see talks break down so much that Google and Facebook both leave Australia and we all get to see what the hell the landscape looks like then. I'd imagine it would be pretty fun and wild. 

Who Do You Hate More?

What all this comes down to for the consumer is no just who do they hold responsible, but also who do they blame for the perceived disruption. I already don't like Zuck, I don't like Facebook even though I'm there. I don't like Scomo and his moron-minion Josh-boi, I don't like the Coalition, but I live here in Australia. People say I can't remove Zuck from FB and that's an issue, but I can't seem to vote out Scomo any more than I can vote out Zuck. 

So it really comes down to who do you hate more? I've realised I hate Scomo and Josh just a little bit more than I hate Zuck-the Fuck. I think we all learned something through this experience, and that is what I have learned. I hate odious idiots far more than I hate odious smart-alecs.

The politicians are trying to posture that they have the high ground. There is no high ground at the bottom of a hole you dug. It's entirely laughable. 

Justice For Lewis

A Year Later I'm Still Upset

Some things are just too awful to let pass. That's how I feel about the mega-fires that visited our land in the summer of 2019-2020. Combined with the unpreparedness, the wilful ignorance of the Federal Government, runaway heatwaves, under-investment in infrastructure for dealing with mega-fires, and you had a catastrophic failure of leadership that manifested as a total, unmitigated disaster. 

And it's one thing if idiot Queenslanders voted for Clive Palmer's mob as a 'hedge' and found themselves with this terrifyingly incompetent government were the ones getting burned out of their houses. Instead it was innocent wildlife was getting hurt and killed in these fires. You can blame the idiot humans who voted for the idiot government, but the wildlife is blame-free - and yet they bore the burnt of the consequence.

I'm not some Animal Liberationist nut job - but even I can see how disproportionately the piling up of bad decisions and their horrible consequences are falling upon those without the power to withstand it, or change it, move away from it, or voice their concerns. 

When you see footage of people rescuing wildlife amid the chaos and turmoil of the fires, you have to ask yourself, how exactly did we get to this point? When will the comeuppance visit themselves upon those who are ostensibly responsible for this land, the idiot politicians? Why do the animals have to lose their dwellings for the idiot politicians' bad decisions? Why can't the idiot politicians lose their houses and family and habitat? 

There's really no justice on that account. There ought to be. I'll leave it at that. 

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