Too Many Words

We've Said Too Much Already

When Pharmakeus was fresh out of University with his Arts degree, he used to pontificate a lot on a whole bunch of subjects. He would talk at great length about the ins and out of Post Modernism as it was unfolding, or how fractals defined the very shape of life, the universe and everything. He was full of this kind of intellectual excitement. One day as we sat in a park bench he made the joke that a person only had a certain words in the that they could utter in a lifetime. His girlfriend of that time quipped "I'd better prepare your funeral for tonight then?" 

He didn't die that night - in fact he is still alive and well. Yet these days he communicates in brusque utterances of monosyllabic grunts. Maybe he did run out of words. 

Come Join The Fun!

Blues In The Key Of 18C

'The Right To Be A Bigot' Politics Truly Sucks

I don't mean to write a lot about politics or economics. It just ends up that way. I couldn't imagine being a real life political correspondent covering the comings and going in Canberra. I imagine it would be quite insular and tedious to begin with, but made worse by the rhetorical games and the not-answering-your-question-but-shoving-my-agenda thing that politicians do that makes bullshit out of important subjects and perhaps does more to obfuscate things rather than reveal.

The modern cadre of journo covering politics would have the added horror of having to follow politicians through social media as well as having to translate the politi-speak employed by the politicians into plain English. It's not an enviable job. Back in the day when Peter Smark, Peter Ellingsen and Alan Ramsey wrote for the Fairfax, you never got the feeling that they got too exasperated even when the going got silly or for that matter violent as it did in Tiananmen Square.

Then again, they didn't come up against the wall of bullshit that gets erected daily by our contemporary politicians. The wall of bullshit can get so high, it can get a man with no idea and no policies of merit, get voted in to become Prime Minister of the land. That's some steep bullshit.

I can't really imagine what it's like to be Katherine Murphy or Laura Tingle who have had to work the press gallery in Canberra during the Abbott Government, because some of what they've written lately betrays a quiet disillusion with government, politics and what politics can achieve in this country, given the calibre of people we've voted in. I mean, it's bad enough blogging this stuff. Doing it for work would suck.

That in a roundabout way brings me to this current brouhaha they are having down in Canberra to do with the Racial Discrimination Act part 18C. The Liberal Party claims with the highest possible ground can muster, that 18C interferes with freedom of expression. To recap, this notion exists because conservative commentator Andrew Bolt got himself into a spot of bother over vilifying somebody for not being Aboriginal enough. It's stretching things. This then gave enough impetus for the Coalition government to try and rewrite this little section that says you can't offend and humiliate people, and George Brandis infamously championed the cause of people's right to be a bigot.

If the great crusade for freedom of expression culminates with the right for people to be bigots, then you have to think maybe you took a wrong turn somewhere. Surely you'd think the moment those words left his lips, George Brandis might have thought, "hang on, maybe I'm giving ammunition to the wrong people?" After all, the first thing that sprang into my mind was the line from 'Catch-22':

"Racial prejudice is a terrible thing, Yossarian. It really is. It's a terrible thing to treat a decent, loyal Indian like a nigger, kike, wop, or spic.”

If you're arguing for a special, specific spot to protect plain obnoxious assholes from the Racial Discrimination Act, maybe you're arguing too fine a point to be called 'freedom of speech'. If you want a special exemption from the RDA, and that exemption is to be allowed to offend people and humiliate them by calling them words like nigger, kike, wop/wog or spic, (or abo, boong, chink or gook too!), maybe it doesn't say much about the free press or freedom of expression in this country? After all, what kind of press is going to say, refer to Mr. Obama as a nigger and cite freedom of expression to allow it, and by extension, not to cop to the judgment and opprobrium such a description would earn them?

Maybe it just says more about George Brandis and his own tremendous, irrepressible desire to be a bigot? Is it really a win for freedom of speech if the upshot of changing this act is so that Andrew Bolt can use the bully pulpit of his radio microphone to vilify people without much of a voice in our community? Maybe this is simply too hard asking the party of "ditch-the-witch" to consider. Maybe it's just too hard for them to comprehend.

Think of all the things this government doesn't support, like a bill of rights. Or the things it chooses to censor, treating its own citizens like children. It goes after artists for fear their work might be paedophilia; it censors films that point to the corrupt nature of power, like 'Salo'; you can't argue this wowser government is doing everything it possibly can to protect freedom of expression. How can all this fixation and fuss over 18C be anything but the desire to be bigoted and not to be punished for it? One can't possibly take this bunch on their word about this principle.

So here we are, folks - a Parliament busily arguing the imagined merits of rewriting 18C. Read it and weep.

Quick Shot - 16/Feb/2015

Celebrating Freedom Of Expression

No, I'm not going to write about the poor person shot dead in Denmark. Instead I'm just going to point at the abject idiocy of finding in an audit that Sarah Ferguson was not respectful enough in her questioning the treasurer. It strains credulity but somehow, we have these things:

While acknowledging the Ferguson-Hockey interview was "compelling television", Ms Ryan finds: "I felt that the 'tone' of the questioning in this particular interview could have been interpreted by some viewers to be a potential breach of the ABC's impartiality guidelines." 

Ms Ryan singles out three points of the interview for criticism, starting with Ms Ferguson's first question to Mr Hockey. 

"Now, you've just delivered that budget," Ms Ferguson said. "It's a budget with a new tax, with levies, with co-payments. Is it liberating for a politician to decide election promises don't matter?

Ms Ryan found the question was factually correct but said its tone made the Treasurer seem "under attack".
"In my view, the language in Ferguson's first question was emotive," she found. "I also believe that the average viewer would consider that the Treasurer was not treated with sufficient respect by the interviewer." 

Ms Ferguson later told Mr Hockey that she had asked a "yes or no question". She then said: "I don't need to teach you, Treasurer, what a tax is. You know that a co-payment, a levy and a tax are all taxes by any other name."

I mean, really? Naturally the finding has been rejected by the ABC. Well, of course it would it's so clearly stupid. Ms. Ryan felt the tone could be interpreted by some viewers to be a potential breach of the ABC's impartiality guidelines? I mean really? She feels (not thinks, perhaps vaguely or even strongly, show won't say which) that maybe some minority in the audience-land watching might be doing some interpreting in such a way that it's not impartial? And that makes it a breach? Just how stupid is this auditor? 

If I said I was impartial and made a statement 'X' (fill it in any way you like, It's hypothetical), of course I can expect somebody out there in the readership to maybe interpret that statement to be not as impartial as I say it is; but the onus is on that person to argue that case. Sarah Ferguson is right to ask the Treasurer whether election promises don't matter, after he delivers a budget that completely flies in the face of the election promises. It's a legitimate question that at least 50% of the population would like to know. 

It's not the ABC's or Sarah Ferguson's or Emma Alberici's fault or problem that the government finds itself trying to squeeze a budget through which contravenes their own election promises. If the folks in government can't handle the questions that come from such  budget, let alone consequences of their actions, maybe they're in the wrong profession. It is most certainly not the job of the press to let this kind of thing go by to the keeper. We all know this; we all know how this works; anybody watching the interview would be watching on the basis that they understand this as a fundamental tenet of the position the press holds in our democracy. So Colleen Ryan has invented a straw man, not to beat down, but to wave around and say, "this straw man right here might have missed the context! The ABC is biased". 

I mean, "hullo". 

Drawing the kind of conclusion that this Colleen Ryan has drawn is so stupid it blows my mind that she was one the editor of a newspaper. But of course she was the editor of a Murdoch rag. Surprise! Ms Ryan, try this advice for size: one might feel that the act of the ABC audit itself could be interpreted by some observers to be an abject failure at reasoning. But of course there is a lot of stupidity going around at the moment. 

The government wants to muzzle the ABC because it asks blunt questions. Yet it says Freedom of Expression is an important thing in a democracy when a terrorist shoots a cartoonist or film maker. If they hold both positions, there's a lottos cognitive dissonance going on in this government and it's not helping the electorate at all. 

The Death Penalty Thing Over In Indonesia

As the execution looms for Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumuran, you get the feeling that Australia is inexorably being dragged into a weird orbit of Indonesian legalism. Indonesia for its part is arguing the death penalty as good deterrence and that the law is the law and if the punishment is not meted out, it discredits the whole legal system. Australia is trotting out all the emotional arguments about the death penalty and amazingly seems to have forgotten the reasoning behind its own end to capital punishment in Australia. 

Personally, I am against the death penalty so it goes without saying that I do not wish to see the two men executed. But it does embarrass me greatly when I watch the arguments put forward as reasons why mercy should be shown to these two men. Surely there is a deeper point of jurisprudence that is universal and appropriate to appeal to the Indonesian government. It strikes me as very odd that we only seem to have our own personal moral objections as something that should apply to Indonesia. It's a really bad argument, and is hardly likely to succeed. 

There's got to be a better argument to be mounted. 

Also, it seems rather ironic that the former lawyer  who fronted for big tobacco and James Hardie in the asbestos trials is now the foreign minister trying to stop the execution. 

Being Charlie Hebdo Part 2

The Aftermath of Crazy Is More Craziness

Pleiades sent me an article by Guy Rundle where he argues that the western ideology is so bereft and bankrupt of ideas, when it argues in principle, it ends up arguing something incoherent. Instead of heading for a transformative idea, our commentators and politicians alike sink back to old Left-Right partisanship, seeking opportunistic angles to score points within our own polity.

It's content behind a pay wall so I can't link to it, but here's something worth bringing up.

The Right is falling apart as a political formation so fast you’d need stop-action photography to catch the process. Bruce Petty was quite correct, in his cartoon this week, to draw the Right sloping to the drawing board to sketch out a new plan for surveillance and control. But he was wrong I think, to draw it as a great beast. It’s more a Caspar Milquetoast/Monty Burns figure, barely able to hold up the pencil. The failure of Iraq, free-wheeling capitalism, the collapsed legitimacy of Western Right governments, and increasing wars between its liberal and conservative factions sees it without a program, coherent worldview, common sense, or much cheer as far as I can see. 

The Hebdo massacre brought all these contradictions to the fore. Hebdo’s nihilism is actually culturally corrosive, as conservatives charge such obscene desacrilising with being. Conservatives know that a viable culture is a closed system to a degree, and unless it has pinion points -- usually religious -- which are not themselves, by matter of custom, subject to a general back-and-forth, then it is quickly in trouble. This week, sundry idiots have been suggesting that "free speech is part of our cultural tradition".
What nonsense. 

Until the 1960s, hundreds of books, films and plays were banned, even in the US, as way of maintaining the limits of what was publicly talked of, in terms of sex, religion and the like. That maintained a Christian division between profane body and sacred soul. Once abolished, Christian Western culture collapsed. A transitional period lasted into the 1990s. Remember the furore over Madonna’s hokey video "Papa Don’t Preach?". Remember when the porn industry was some marginal thing, and not another career option?

Yes, does anybody remember the furore over things like 'Piss Christ?'

How about the PMRC/Mothers of Prevention episode when a bunch of conservative mothers formed a committee to censor rock music in the 1980s? And Frank Zappa had to testify to Congress?

As Frank would say, "I mean seriously, folks! This is altogether a ridiculous state of affairs!"
It's all well and good that the Conservatives like David Cameron and Tony Abbott are thundering that  Freedom of Expression is our way of life but you sort of wonder if this is because it's just bloody expedient. As somebody who was on the side that supported 'Piss Christ and liked listening to Frank Zappa and certainly never yielded from the position of letting gangsta rappers kill as many cops in their songs, I find it tremendously strange that the very same conservatives now want to stand up for Freedom of Expression. Yay for Free Speech, it's finally self-evident even to the dumbest Conservatives.

You know what? I somehow doubt Cory Bernardi is stocking up on Gangsta Rap music on his iTunes. Anyway, Rundle goes on to have a hack at the Left too:

But much of what remains of the organised Left has revealed its own exhaustion and bankruptcy too. Though Left figures were not the first to repeat the "this has nothing to do with Islam" meme -- Merkel and Cameron joining Hollande in repeating that mantra -- many were quick to adopt it, and to focus on a revival of Islamophobia due to such an event. 

The event itself was barely glanced at, not even in an analytic way. The only response to the ludicrous pseudo-politics of declaring for free speech when no one had declared against it, was to reconstitute Western Arab-originated/descended Muslims as a whole, a subject of history, and then become their representative against oppression. The old, old accordian, got out for one last wheezing squeezeplay. But the wave of attacks against Muslims failed to eventuate. Maps of such events showed about 20 such, not good, but no Muslim-pogrom. 

It was cautioned that the attacks would create a surge of support for the French anti-immigration party Front National. But there was no sign of that (though it may come), giving a strong suspicion that the FN had reached near-saturation level. Charlie Hebdo’s nihilistic style was taken as racism, its physical depiction of Arabs vastly exaggerated. Some jokes against the Right, using their language, were taken as witless Bill-Leakesque curmudgeonliness (the eternal fate of the satirist - if Swift’s ‘Modest Proposal’ were published today it would have a beyondblue tagline, a body image trigger warning at the top, and a "Visit Ireland" google ad pop up). This shoehorned French political style into Anglosphere political divisions, where such a robust space for pre-identity politics Leftism has largely ceased to exist. Implicit was a causal model, which constructed Charlie Hebdo as having a FOX News-ish right-wing, pseudo-populist style, which it was using to rag on racial-religious minorities only -- this effectively accusing it of a certain naivete as regards race and oppression, with lethal results. As Daily Kos’ selection of some of Hebdo’s anti-imperialist cartoons showed, that wasn’t the case at all. 

But the causal/determinative model dies hard. And one popular article tweeted around was one about the "anomie of the banlieues". Ah, the anomie (i.e. lack of meaning) of the banlieues (the featureless, high-rise housing around Paris and other cities) -- Shift-F1 on the keyboard of a certain type of feature writer.

There's been a growing opinion that maybe Charlie Hebdo with its crude, rude and pointed satire in some way had it coming, and that no, some of want to say 'Je ne suis pas Charlie' because some ideological sticking point makes it "none-of-my-concern". Which is probably more honest but also goes to show why the identity politics being exercised is (as Helen Razer would have it...) Stupid.

The added absurdity of arguing that Islamism is not to blame in the face of people who yelled "Allahu Akbar" after they shot 12 people is, you know, pretty Islamophilic - as in, an unnecessary love of things Islamic, - to excuse that crime on some level.

Nobody in their right mind is pinning the blame on all the Muslims the world over for what happened. Yet the guys who did it are saying they did it for Allah. So somewhere in the discussion of ideas, we have to tackle Islamism and ask it some probing questions. To date, the argument the Left-side commentators is mounting as whole is a kind of "it was just provocation by the magazine when they insulted their faith". In other words, simultaneously abandoning Freedom of Expression and condoning violent action. If we accept that, we're essentially accepting the brothers arguing "look what you made me do."
I don't think we're ready to dumb ourselves down to that level for the sake of political correctness. At least, I'm sorry, I'm not going there. And why is the Left suddenly acting Stupid?

None of this is going to play out properly without a major argument with Islamism. In Northern Iraq, it's being contested with lethal force. They are winning in parts because they have a lot of conviction in their bullshit. If we are to contest our ideas against them, we'd better get our shit straight. If it is going to be Freedom of Expression and that's where we plant a flag, it's a good start. Somehow I share Guy Rundle's doubts that what we have is just massive cognitive dissonance and a bare cupboard for transformative ideas.

Should We Be Concerned?

The Junior Murdoch Speaks Up

I always find it unlikely when a Murdoch stands up for freedoms, what with the generally casual fascist tone their editorials in their miserable newspapers take. Of course, one shouldn't be surprised that they do it when it suits them directly to do so, for maximum effect. And so it is with Lachlan Murdoch who is invoking his grandfather's reporting of the Gallipoli campaign.

Mr Murdoch said Australia's press freedom was under threat and had already fallen dramatically by world standards. 

"It might surprise you that today Australia ranks 33rd, just behind Belize, on the Freedom house index. 20 years ago we ranked 9th," Mr Murdoch said during the Keith Murdoch Oration at the State Library in Melbourne on Thursday night. 

Mr Murdoch said the government was frequently asking Australians to trust them 'we're from the government', when attempting to censor the media. 

"But trust is something that should not be a consideration when restricting our fundamental freedoms. Our freedom of speech and freedom of the press are not things we should blindly entrust anyone." 

Mr Murdoch singled out the government's national security laws that could jail journalists for up to 10 years for revealing "special intelligence operations".

Mighty fine sentiments on a night for orations. I have to say, it's still a bit rich coming from the scion of Rupert Murdoch, hardly an egalitarian or democrat. If Mao said justice comes from the barrel of a gun, the Senior Murdoch certainly has behaved like governments are born from the printing press. The senior Murdoch set about killing Whitlam's government back when he was junior's age.

The US National Archives has just declassified a secret diplomatic telegram dated January 20, 1975 that sheds new light on Murdoch's involvement in the tumultuous events of Australia's 1975 constitutional crisis.

Illustration: Ron Tandberg 

Entitled "Australian publisher privately turns on Prime Minister," the telegram from US Consul-General in Melbourne, Robert Brand, reported to the State Department that "Rupert Murdoch has issued [a] confidential instruction to editors of newspapers he controls to 'Kill Whitlam' ". 

Describing Mr Murdoch as "the l'enfant terrible of Australian journalism," Mr Brand noted that Mr Murdoch had been "the principal publisher supporting the Whitlam election effort in 1972 Labor victory". 

With a publishing empire that included The Australian as well as daily or Sunday newspapers in every Australian capital, Mr Murdoch's new editorial direction was seen as a critical political development. 

"If Murdoch attack directed against Whitlam personally this could presage hard times for Prime Minister; but if against Labor government would be dire news for party," Mr Brand telegraphed.

And so it was in 1975 that Rupert bent his considerable powers of the press to undermine and ultimately destroy the democratically elected Whitlam Government. It's pretty much in line with what Chris Boyce (the Falcon in 'the Falcon and the Snowman') told us all those years ago. The CIA took a great interest in undermining Whitlam's Labor Government. Rupert for his part obliged by unleashing his dogs - just as he did with Beazley, Crean, Latham, and ultimately Rudd and Gillard. It's almost the rule that the ALP should find every legislative means of limiting Murdoch's power because it is the largest opinion-maker as well as being totally anti-democratic and anti-social. He likes us to think of him as a contrarian codger. He's not. He's full-blown Citizen-Kane-type, trying to turn our democracy into his plaything.

In that light, it's really difficult to imagine that the son is any less meddlesome as the father. And by extension, he's not really standing up for journalists, he's standing up for his right to publish and report a scoop in the press without facing gaol time. I mean, yeah, that's really bold of you Latch. 

How Can They Call Their Rag 'News'?

While I'm on this topic, Pleiades sent in an article from Crikey that lays out where the News Corp mouthpieces sit in the wake of Whitlam passing away. Here's the juicy bit:

The first person who might consider checking “the facts” is Sheridan. He asserts rather confidently that under Whitlam, “inflation got above 20% at one stage”. His confidence is misplaced. During Whitlam’s government, inflation as measured by the consumer price index peaked at 17.7% in the first quarter of 1975. Since the beginning of Australian Bureau of Statistics records, inflation has only exceeded 20% in three quarters, and in all three of them, it was Robert Menzies’ pyjamas that were tucked under the doona in the Lodge. (Perhaps Sheridan could let us know if “ruinous” is the right adjective with which to garland our longest-serving prime minister.) 

Things don’t get much better when Sheridan turns to the international scene, where he is apparently more of an expert. Here we discover (and though Sheridan generously allows that there was a tiny little oil shock to contend with) that on the question of inflation, “the outcome in Australia was much worse than in comparable countries”. This might have come as a surprise to Aldo Moro, the then-prime minister of Italy, where inflation reached 24%, or to Harold Wilson, who presided over a British inflation rate of 26.6%. 

Other commentators trying their hand at sacrilege fared no better. Thanks to Gough, Miranda Devine lamented, “half the ­nation is now on welfare”. In 2012, the last year for which the Department of Social Services has released data, only around a quarter of the population over 15 was receiving some kind of income support payment. A bit under half of these are old age pensioners. Presumably, sans Gough, we would have adopted work-for-the-pension schemes or simply euthanised the elderly to spare them the moral decay of Devine’s “culture of entitlement”. 

Meanwhile, Andrew Bolt, making the daring argument that Kevin Rudd was merely Whitlam digested and reconstituted, credited the former with “the same debt blowouts” as the latter. When Whitlam left office, Australia had negative net debt. But did not Whitlam “lose control” of the purse, as Alan Mitchell wrote? Of the three budgets prepared by Whitlam’s government, two resulted in surplus; deficits accounting therefore for a third of his budgets. That fiscally continent duo Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, on the other hand, recorded 10 deficits from 13 budgets (about three-quarters in the red).
For all of the ruin occasioned by Whitlam’s supposedly disastrous programs, government spending has, as a proportion of economic output, never retreated to the levels seen before 1972. 

Whatever else the electorate might have thought or now thinks of the government he led, they have never really shown much interest in reversing the increase in the size of government he oversaw. In this sense, budgetary history since 1975 has been a remarkable vindication of Whitlam rather than an repudiation.

In other words, the Murdoch journalists are still banging on about the Whitlam Government, believing in their own crappy press which was all made up in the first place, for the sole purpose of destroying the standing of the Whitlam Government. Stuff most people would call mischaracterisations. It is mischaracterisation right now, as it was back then. So it's really just too rich hearing from Lachlan telling us how journalism should work. 

The Pinko Crisis

Pinko Blues

The big irritating topic of the month was the brouhaha surrounding Ben Affleck's appearance on Bill Maher's show together with Sam Harris. You all know what happened next - Ben Affleck said "That's gross, you're bigoted, and you're racists," then proceeded to lambast Maher and Harris for the rest of the short segment. What was more perplexing was how Affleck would garner a lot of public support for having tarn a stand against racists and 'Islamophobes', and then there was a dearth of any kind of sensible discussion about any of the topics. Since then Sam Harris has put up an excellent explanation of his side of the fracas so I won't be mounting a defence of atheism or central state materialism here.

What I do want to write about is this growing notion that you can't criticise a group of people for having a particular beliefs, and to criticise them is

1. somehow intolerant 
2. leads to 'ethnocide' and that is 
3. tantamount to genocide.  

These thing are clearly big leaps. You can be tolerant of people having beliefs and still question the basis for their beliefs. This is not offensive in of itself - although let's be honest is is offensive to religious thinning to ask any questions, no matter how value neutral the question might be. All the same, asking questions of beliefs does not automatically indicate intolerance. If people are going to go around waving their beliefs, then it is legitimate that they get ridiculed for their silly beliefs.  It's just the split coin of freedom of religion and freedom of expression.

The second notion that questioning the ideas in other people's cultural beliefs leads to ethnocide needs some examination. If we came across a tribe of people 'X' in a remote place of the world and they had a cultural practice that was against our values (and you can insert your most hated taboo here), is it ethnocide to try to change their practices?

I am reminded of a friend of mine who once taught a high school class about evolution. A muslim girl  raised her hand, and said "sir, I don't think you should be pushing your Christian views on to us."
Is teaching evolution ethnocide?
Sometimes bog ignorance is exactly that and getting educated might mean the abandonment of dearly held beliefs. After all, things that fly in the face of reality have a limited utility. It's hard to argue the gain in utility by the ignorant as ethnocide.

The third notion is perhaps the most pernicious. It suggests if we were to change people's beliefs, it would spoil their culture, and if their culture is gone, the people are gone. It is argued vehemently that this is genocide. I have great trouble with this construction. Genocide, to my mind of thinking is systematically targeting a people and trying to kill them into extinction. As the Ottoman Turks did to the Armenians or the Nazis did to the Jewry in Europe, or the Bosnian Serb did to the Bosnian slims, which was to round them up an kill them; that strikes me as the working historic model of genocide, from whence we get this notion. The jump from ethnocide would mean if you taught the tribe 'X' not to commit taboos, it kills Tribe 'X'.

I have a friend Roddy the Samoan, who once told me that his people used to eat people. Roddy felt that this was just wrong. Some Samoans wanted to hide behind cultural practices as a defence, justifying cannibalism but Roddy was dismissive of such arguments. He felt that some things are just wrong and better left behind.
If you make Samoans stop cannibalism, is this ethnocide? Did they really lose their identity as Samoans when they stopped the practice? Can this legitimately be called 'genocide' in the same sense  as the Ottoman Turks and Nazis and Bosnian Serbs carrying out their respective killing programs?If we did, aren't we cheapening the definition and gravity of the genocide offence to take a cheap political shot? Is that a worthy exchange? Really, I think not.

I raise all this to point out to the hysteria on my own side of politics with the desire not to demonise people. It's understandable that we ought not demonise anybody for their beliefs. Not even Satanists - even though they're really into demons themselves - and so I totally understand the politically correct impulse to say one should not attack a people for their beliefs. Yet Maher and Harris made those caveats, just as any proper thinking small-'l' liberal pinko would do - and really wasn't the point under dispute. The mischaracterisation of their position that followed has left me wondering just how polarised the left end of the left has become.

The crux of the argument is, how explicit are the injunctions to attack apostates and infidels in Islam, and should this cultural practice really be given a free pass on the basis of our liberal tolerance. This actually hides a very difficult problem. For instance in Algeria during the 1990s Muslim brotherhood put up a candidate for election whose electoral promise was to shut down democracy and return Algeria to Sharia law. In other words, the candidate stood in a democratic election on the promise of ending democracy. It's unthinkable in the liberal west that we could have such a candidate, let alone that such a candidate would find significant popular support. Just how far must our tolerance stretch for these ideas? Is it really unreasonable to say, "look, you can have your religion but we're keeping our laws and institutions." Is that really bigotry, racism and 'Islamophobia'?

This is sort of weird. We're at the point where some small-'l' liberals are willing to sell out their own institutions and traditions that gave them the small-'l' liberalism for the sake of staking out the most politically correct position. And being the small-'l' liberal pinko lefty that I am, I'm just not comfortable crossing that bridge to that penultimate PC-ground being staked.
Instead I would posit that an infinitely open mind is not a mind at all.

Perhaps missing in this trendy-lefty intramural crossfire of abuse is that we have to understand that appeals to tolerance includes a hefty dose of our own cultural baggage that allows us to understand what tolerance might look like. we have freedom of speech, expression and religion, and nobody is talking about revoking those things. It really shouldn't exclude discussion of whether Islam has injunctions that we might find politically for philosophically unacceptable. That's not 'white privilege' and 'entitlement', as some have claimed in lauding Ben Affleck. Ben Affleck shouting down the discussion is privilege and entitlement.

Free Pussy Riot

Cast Out Putin

I'm a bit of a stickler for freedom of expression. I just can't let issues of censorship go without a comment. It's too easy to let the powers that be go after pornographers or performance artists and say, well, my work is not going to infringe with the authority so I'm okay. Every creative artist, every creative writer, every composer or musician, painter, sculptor or actor, is a canary in the coalmine of culture. If one goes down, we have to look at it as they'll come for me next.

This is why I have a committed position in support of what the Nazis would term "degenerate art". My own credo is that if it's something the Nazis would have hated, then I'm on the right track. Equally, it seems if it's something Vladimir Putin hates, then we're on to something good.

Such is the case with Russian Punk Rock band Pussy Riot, who find themselves sentenced to two years in 'prison camp' as a result of their political stunt in a Russian Orthodox Cathedral. A lot of people are saying they got what they asked for and that they are undeservering of world attention. I beg to differ. We ca only surmise from the sentence that Russia is still a place with medieval sensibility about performance and art - that they should be things sanctioned by the state and church, never questioning authority. It  is ironic that the Soviet republic was once progressive and modern and would not have had a bar of this kind of reactionary thinking until Stalin seized control. Now we seem to have 'Putinism' which is just as reactionary in spirit.

There's no dressing up the verdict. The women from Pussy Riot are political prisoners f conscience, and thus it is the duty of every creative person to stand in solidarity with them. This injustice is intolerable to all of us who work within freedom of expression and freedom of speech.

And so, this is my little contribution in support of Pussy Riot: Free Pussy Riot

What Is That Stench?

Oh It's The Stench Of Moralism

This is a bit rich. Catherine Deveny lost her job as a columnist from The Age because she tweeted  something about Bindi Irwin.

Deveny used Twitter to deliver a series of remarks about celebrities during the awards ceremony at Melbourne's Crown Casino - including one about child star Bindi Irwin.

"I do so hope Bindi Irwin gets laid," Deveny wrote.

The comedian defended her comments, saying she was using satire "to expose celebrity raunch culture and the sexual objectification of women, which is rife on the red carpet".

However, her response did not sit well with readers - many of whom launched scathing attacks of their own on Twitter and in the online story's comments section.

I keep saying this but the creeping moralism that people keep expressing is just so sickening. I don't see how the Age's editor-in-chief Paul Ramadge can see it as his job to sack somebody for making a tweet that is in poor taste. It's actually not as if Deveny was advocating criminal activities or dare I say it race hate and terrorism. She merely pointed out the irony and discomfort in our society over sexuality and childhood and the media's fascination with it, all in one succinct ironic tweet.

Let's face it, it's an uncomfortable tweet because it hits us exactly where we don't want to be hit: by forcing us to line up an 11 year old girl with all the women on the red carpet who are presented as sexually desirable. It's a pretty insightful, witty remark.

My question is this: what gives the Editor-in-chief of The Age Paul Ramadge the gumption to make a character call on one of his columnists and sack her? He's essentially sacked somebody for bad taste. What if another employee turns up wearing 1980s fashion? Is he going to sack them too? Shouldn't he be the one out there defending Deveny, telling the stupid baying crowd, "back off, she didn't break any laws, she's allowed to express her opinions"?

Instead, Paul Ramadge has positioned himself at the head of the witch hunt and cast Deveny to the mob, in the process giving the idiotic moralism of the mob some social legitimacy. I mean, if it really is a character issue, wasn't this the same editor-in-chief who commissioned columns from Deveny on multiple occasions? Didn't he know her character better? Did it take for one tweet of bad taste to reveal Ms. Deveny's character to this Mr. Ramadge? What kind of snap judgment is that anyway? And how could one trust such a judgment, let alone judger? How can we ever take The Age seriously again? It's editor-in-chief is a witch-hunting book-burning intellectual troglodyte!

BTW, I don't know any of these people - Deveny or Ramadge or Bindi Irwin. So it matters to me very little how all this turns out, but it's really quit appalling. Is this how low our intellectual life has sunk to in this country? Or worse still, was it always thus?

Maybe it doesn't matter. When the old dinosaur of the newspapers finally go down the gurgler in the digital age, Ramadge hopefully will be jobless himself; and it would serve him right for not standing up for the principles of freedom of expression while holding such a prestigious job as the editor-in-chief of a big newspaper, thus hastening the decline of a fine institution.

Freedom of Expression Blues

Freedom Of Speech In Retreat

I guess I'm cranky when I get the flu, and very impatient too.

One of the big issues for me at this blog is actually the freedom of speech issue, whether it be letting artists do their thing (like Bill Henson) or letting cartoonists do their thing, or letting authors do their thing - I mean, I want to do my thing, get into it you know? Like a Blog Machine. Count it in now! - yes, even let musicians sing about sex and drugs.

So here's an article in The Economist that's worth checking out.

TWO decades ago, on 14th February 1989, Salman Rushdie received one of history’s most notorious Valentine greetings. Ayatollah Khomeini, then Iran’s Supreme Leader, issued a fatwa (a religious edict) calling for the death of the Indian-born British author in response to his novel, “The Satanic Verses”. Khomeini called on all “intrepid” and “zealous” Muslims to execute the author and publishers, reassuring them that if they were killed in the process, they would be regarded as martyrs.

Rarely had a book stirred up such intense feelings. Hitoshi Igarashi, its Japanese translator, was stabbed to death. Ettore Capriolo, the Italian translator and William Nygaard, the book’s Norwegian publisher, were stabbed and shot respectively, although both survived. Bookshops were bombed and the tome was burned in public across the world. Mr Rushdie, fearing for his life, was forced into hiding.

Horrific though these consequences were, many argued that freedom of speech itself was at stake. To cave in, by withdrawing publication or sale of the work, would represent the crumbling of a defining principle of liberal societies. Britain broke off diplomatic relations with Iran over the threat to kill a British citizen. At no point did Penguin, the original publisher, withdraw the book. It remained possible to argue that Mr Rushdie’s intolerant detractors, despite their violence, had lost their battle.

Yet critics today, such as Kenan Malik, a writer and broadcaster, argue that the detractors have gradually won their war. Mr Malik and others suggest that free speech in the West is in retreat. Other publishers, faced with books that were likely to cause widespread offence, have been less resolute. In 2008 Random House was set to publish “The Jewel of Medina”, a misty-eyed account of romance between Muhammad and his wife Aisha. The firm reversed its decision after a series of security experts and academics cautioned them against publication (one American academic described the work as historically inaccurate “soft core pornography”) warning it would be dangerously offensive. Gibson Square, another publisher, took up the novel and saw its offices firebombed in September 2008, 20 years to the day after the publication of “The Satanic Verses”. “The Jewel of Medina” has since been released in America, but it remains under wraps in Britain.

There are always reasons people list that one shouldn't just write anything, because it might cause offense or that it might be vilification. Now, that is a very general thing. I don't condone vilification either, but I'm not willing to say one shouldn't make any negative critiques whatsoever. Part of having any blog is to call it like you see it, and you can't really be doing it under the threat that the Ayatollah of Iran might declare a fatwah against you or that they may burn effigies of you in those countries with turbans an angry bearded men. The world over knows they burn effigies of people at the slightest of perceived slights. Clearly they don't have better things to do, and it speaks to their station in life.

In any case, this paragraph irritated me.

Two decades after the fatwa was imposed on Mr Rushdie, it appears that many Western artists, publishers and governments are more willing today to sacrifice some of their freedom of speech than was the case in 1989. To many critics that will be seen as self-censorship that has gone too far. But a difficult balance must be struck: no country permits completely free speech. Typically, it is limited by prohibitions against libel, defamation, obscenity, judicial or parliamentary privilege and the like. Protecting free expression will often require hurting the feelings of individuals or groups; equally the use of free speech should be tempered by a sense of responsibility. But that sense should not serve as a disguise for allowing extremists of any stripe to define what views can or cannot be aired.

Did you notice they slipped in the word 'obscenity'? Obscenity laws are precisely the point at which artistic freedom of expression threaten to get shut down. Whether its the Tipper Gore-led mother of prevention trying to gag Frank Zappa, or the wowsers that hound Bill Henson, or for that matter the NAZIs with their label 'academy of degenerate art' to punish the Modernists, clearly get way too much say on the base of 'obscenity' laws. Hlf the time good comedy works through offending the common prejudices, whether it be racism or class snobbery or simply manners.That's how it's done: by risking obscenity.

It irritates me greatly that having argued that Freedom of Speech might be in retreat in the west, they throw artists under the bus. It's deadset wrong.

News That's Fit To Punt

Jaws In A Lake

Cue the cellos!
This may be a hoax; it certainly sounds like a hoax, but here goes:

Police issued a warning today after a seven-metre great white shark was reportedly netted and freed in a Central Coast lake.

A commercial fisherman reported to police that he netted the monster in waters at a popular school holiday vacation spot at Tuggerah Lake.

The fisherman reported snaring the seven-metre shark in nets he had cast off Canton Beach, at the northern end of the lake about 5.30am today.

"He claimed that he actually caught the shark in his net and the shark came up and started thrashing about, and hit his boat,'' said Chief Inspector Tim Winmill said.

"He said it was bigger than his boat - he's got an 18-foot boat and he said it would have been about 21 feet.

"Tuggerah Lakes is only about 12 kilometres long and five kilometres wide.

"It's not a big lake but it's a bloody big shark, if it's true.''

The shark was last seen heading south towards the middle of the lake, Chief Inspector Winmill said.

Mick Crowe, president of nearby Soldiers Beach Surf Club, expressed surprise there had been reports of a shark in the lake.

"That's quite bizarre if that's the case - Canton Beach is only ankle-deep water for the first 150 metres,'' he said.

But the Department of Primary Industries and the Fisheries Department both believed the fisherman's claims, Chief Inspector Winmill said.

"They believe he's a credible witness, he's been a commercial fisherman for a long time, he's well aware of species of sharks ... they don't have any reason to doubt the truthfulness of his allegation.''

I dunno. It sounds like a hoax to me - like the one that got away.

A 7m Great White is roughly the dimensions of Bruce the shark from 'Jaws', so take this one with a grain of salt, a dash of lemon and some tartar sauce.

Leave My Pal Puppy Binkum Alone!
This is hilarious riposte to the media-inflamed political hysteria surrounding the children-in-nudes issue.

FIRST it was the Bill Henson kids sinking the boot in. Now Olympia Nelson, 11, has launched her own stinging attack on the "art ignoramus" running the country.

As the fallout from this latest attack continues, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: it's time for children to lay off Kevin Rudd. The man is not in a position to defend himself.

Nor should he have to. The protection of middle-aged men, especially politicians, is one of the most sacrosanct elements of our social compact.

Rudd has done an excellent job maintaining his dignity in the face of multiple, juvenile attacks. But in his retreat to the false comfort of an emissions trading scheme and his constant, almost Pavlovian references to the Garnaut report ("Art Monthly Australia asked me to pose nude for the cover of their next issue, but I said I would have to wait until Professor Garnaut releases his final report before coming to a decision."), it's hard not to perceive the shadow of some deeper, darker abuse.

Some adult male protection advocates have even suggested Rudd may have received coaching for recent media performances from his own children - a revolting thought. If children have something to say, they should say it themselves.

Either way, these developments provide yet more evidence of the increased sexualisation of middle-aged politicians in Australia. The modern trend began in 1986, when Henson photographed Malcolm Fraser pantsless at the Admiral Benbow Inn in Memphis, and has only intensified since. From Alexander Downer's collision with a pair of fishnet stockings to Troy Buswell's manipulation at the hands of a renegade band of chair pornographers, the annals of Australian politics are filled with examples of the most pitiful, scandalous exploitation of defenceless adult men.

To say that middle-aged men deserve better is to say no more than the obvious: middle-aged men are sacred. For many men, middle age is a time of unalloyed delight and wonderment at the world, a golden age of unbridled salivation and unpredictable, no-strings-attached urinary flow. By press ganging our men into service as political foot soldiers in the art-porn debate, the children of this country will do lasting, perhaps irreversible, damage to the fragile balance of financial bombast and prostate pain that does so much to make middle age such a special period in the life of a man.

Fifty-year-old male politicians deserve to have the innocence of their political careers protected. They deserve to enjoy the fruits of those careers - the raucous nights on the Central Coast, the trips to Scores, the expletive-laden appearances at state party conferences - unhindered by the posturing and politicking of this country's children. There is a time for people to make independent, informed choices about the direction they would like to take their lives in. That time is not when they are in their 50s and in the middle of a political career.

For God's sake, let's just allow middle-aged male politicians to be middle-aged male politicians.

The politicians sure had that coming to them. :)

Fight For Freedom Of Expression [Part 987 Wherein Doris Gets Shafted]

Gag You, Gag Me

There's a giant disconnect between the arts community and the legislative assembly of Australia, and it comes down to one stupid thing. When the arts community see a naked person in a work of art, they see a nude. As such, they respond to the work in relationship to all the other nudes in history - and there is a mighty long history - and ponder its aesthetic merits.

The elected officials of this land see a naked person and think it is borderline obscene, and then if they see the person is a under 18, they see 'the sexualisation of children'. It truly is a case of Art being in the eye of the beholder. Whether it is the Bill Henson pictures last month or this time, Olympia Nelson's photos of her daughter this month, the same concern for protecting children runs through the diatribe coming out of our politicians.

Again, I can't state this enough that I personally believe that children should be protected, but I cannot and will not concede that a policeman or a politician is better fit to assess whether a work is pornographic or not. We have the censorship/classification board for that (and that is bad enough but I concede it is a necessary evil). So it disturbs me greatly that the politicians want to have it out with artists over this issue.

THE girl at the centre of the latest controversy over child nudity in art said yesterday that she was "really, really offended" at comments by the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, that he "cannot stand" the naked image of her, aged six, on the cover of an art magazine.

At the same time the Opposition leader, Brendan Nelson, described the use of her picture as "a two-fingered salute to the rest of society".

Olympia Nelson, now 11, appears naked on the cover of Art Monthly Australia in a photo taken when she was six by her mother, Polixeni Papapetrou, a Melbourne photographer.

Speaking to the media outside her home yesterday alongside her father, the art critic Robert Nelson, Olympia said she was "really really offended" at Mr Rudd's comments that he could not stand the image of her.

But the federal Minister for Families, Jenny Macklin, joined the chorus condemning the pictures yesterday, saying children were being sexualised in ways that robbed them of a childhood.

The federal Minister for Arts, Peter Garrett, who has described the publication of the photos as "needlessly provocative", said the Government would call on the Australia Council to devise a set of protocols addressing the use of images of children in art and publications that receive government funding.

Oh dear. Is that really Mr. Peter Garrett, formerly of Midnight Oil saying it is 'needlessly provocative'? Well we know one thing for sure now: Midnight Oil and everything they stood for was phony and bullshit. What the hell would the younger Peter Garrett have said if say, Bob Hawke or Paul Keating had condemned his band as being 'needlessly provocative'? It's a joke and a very bad joke at that. he would have thundered "Piss Off" and that would have been his belligerent position of choice. Now that he's the Minister for the Arts, he's turned into this moralising turd - which goes to show how shallow his artistic commitment to his craft and causes were in the first place. I feel nauseous from the disgust. Peter Garrett, you are the worst hypocrite. It should be your job as a practitioner in the arts to stand up for the artist, not to bury them.

It gets worse:

But Olympia Nelson said she loved the photo used on the cover of the arts journal in protest at the recent furore over the work of the photographer Bill Henson. "It is one of my favourites, if not my favourite photo, my mum has ever taken of me, and she has taken so many photos of me," she said.

"I think that the picture my mum took of me had nothing to do with being abused, and I think nudity can be a part of art.

"I'm really, really offended by what Kevin Rudd had to say about this picture."

Dr Nelson said he would ask the police to investigate the use of the picture of Olympia Nelson and added that it warranted a review of classification laws.

Dr Nelson said he was no wowser, but "the use and sexualisation of children in this way is indefensible, whether in the name of art, parental consent or political protest".

"If you were sitting on a bus and the person next to you turned on their laptop and this was the screensaver, you would be very concerned. What these people have done in this publication and using the photographs of this child in this way is send a two-fingered salute to the rest of society."

Dr Nelson said parental consent was inconsequential.

"Once consent for use of a child in this way has been given, it can never be taken back."

A spokesman for the Australian Federal Police said yesterday that it had received no referral over the images.

But it was the context in which the photographs were published alongside other more disturbing sexual images in the magazine that needed to be taken into account, said the director of Women's Forum Australia, Melinda Tankard Reist.

"The little girl is in there along with bondage images, including one of a Japanese schoolgirl in school uniform trussed up in rope while another image shows an adult woman also trussed up, with breasts and genitals exposed."

Ms Tankard Reist said it was hard to talk about art restoring dignity when another image in the magazine showed a woman being fellated by an octopus.

This is so idiotic, Dr. Nelson should shut up before he loses more credibility in the eyes of the public. The only person who would be disturbed by the screen-saver using this image would be the person who looks at it and sees child porn instead of art. And yes, that's th very definition of a wowser, Dr. Nelson.

Dr. Nelson would win more points if he stood with the artists. Of course he likes to pose with the artists but he won't stand up for their freedom of expression - instead he's lining up with the conks to put the boot in. So much for the trendy poser with the ear ring.

Now, I understand there's a gap, and that both sides want it to be buried conveniently in some wonderful stroke of the spin doctor's advice. Well, life is a whole lot more complicated than that, and that is exactly where the artist comes in. There won't be any easy answers to this, and there won't be a solution unless the politicians stop trying to be censors.

In the mean time the hysteria is getting out of hand. I don't know why more artists and writers are not speaking up about this. It's always been the case that one person's obscenity is another person's art. If you let the wowsers take down a photographer who took a picture of her daughter, then who is to say they won't come after you next for your political views or *gasp* your artistic views?