News That's Fit To Punt - 17/Aug/2016

You Gotta Laugh

This hung Parliament thing is going to be 'fun'. The ALP have basically promised to return the favour from the 2010 Hung Parliament where they won't grant a 'pair'. Naturally, the Coalition is unhappy about it.

In 2011, the Coalition threatened to not grant a pair to controversial Labor backbencher Craig Thomson when his wife was due to give birth during heated debate on the Labor government's carbon pricing legislation. 

"I think that a party, whose principles around looking after people in the workplace ... it's a really sad day when they say if someone's having a baby they're not going to allow them a pair, if someone's sick they're not going to allow them a pair," he said. 

"I don't think it was ever as savage as that [during the 43rd Parliament when Julia Gillard was prime minister]. If they ever say that someone, by reason of infirmity, is not going to be allowed a pair then that doesn't say much about a party that prides itself on looking after the worker."

Yes, yes it was. It's like these people have neither memory nor conscience! At the time, Tony Abbott took a no-holds-barred approach to his running of the Opposition and only grudgingly gave a pair for Michelle Rowland. Yes, this extract is from those ugly days:

Mr Entsch says he refused the pair on the basis there was no sense of urgency.
He has now issued a statement saying if Ms Rowland's "child is sick then she should leave the Parliament immediately and a pair will be granted". 

Speaking to The World Today, Mr Entsch said he granted Ms Rowland leave when he read about the matter in this morning's paper, but labelled her leave request "a stunt".
"The issue of backbench pairs was raised with me first at a meeting I had with the new chief Government whip on Monday," he said. 

"Included in that was a request for Mike Kelly. He sought a pairing for a family medical matter, and I said to him at that time, send it over to me but there's not a lot of detail there, I'll need more than that to be able to approve it. 

"There was also a request there from Michelle Rowland where she said due to her child being unwell that she'd be grateful if she could return home on Thursday night.
"My comment to Chris [Hayes] at the time was that if the child is unwell, she shouldn't be down here, she should be with her child. 

"It seems rather bizarre to be putting in a request on Monday or Tuesday asking for a leave on Thursday night because a child is unwell.
"If it's unwell now, she should be with it. 

"No other information was available to me and on the basis of that I said look, I can't approve it on the basis of the information that's been provided to me.

If it had been me and it had been my sick child, I would have been sitting with my sick child. I wouldn't have been spending a week in the Parliament.

"Now later on [Mr Hayes] came back to me and he said to me that Mike Kelly's wife was sick. She'd been in hospital for a couple of weeks and he needed to sit with her. On that basis I changed my position and approved that. 

"At no point from that discussion until I read about it in the paper on Thursday morning had there been any further discussion to me or my office in regards to Michelle Rowland.
"If it had been me and it had been my sick child, I would have been sitting with my sick child. I wouldn't have been spending a week in the Parliament.

Classy! 

Anyway. Joyce thinks that was wrong, and so two wrongs won't make a right. The answer to that is you should've thought of that before you let the precedent cat loose. Once you set a precedent, it's really hard to get the precedent cat back into the bag, so to speak. 

He said Mr Abbott and manager of opposition business Christopher Pyne were wrong to take the hardline approach against Ms Rowland. 

"If those decisions were made, then I think those decisions were also wrong ... and so I don't think two wrongs are ever going to make a right." 

Mr Joyce said the government should be "realistic and decent" in operating the Parliament. 

Speaking on ABC radio, Ms O'Dwyer said the dispute was a demonstration of unnecessary partisanship. 

"It would be turning about 50 years of convention on its head," she said. 

"Frankly I think the Australian people are very sick of party political games. 

"We want more women in the Parliament, we want people who have got parental responsibilities putting their hand up for Parliament. 

"For Labor to turn around and say, where you've got family emergences you are not going to be able to leave ... I think they need to explain why they've made that decision," she said.

*Ugh*. Spew.
The rank hypocrisy of these people. Really, if Ms O'Dwyer thinks 50years of convention means something now, she be well advised she certainly didn't behave that way back in 2013, because that was her and her party turning 47years of convention on its he'd when it suited them for absolutely short term political gain. Now that the shoe is on the other foot and it's about to be firmly lodged in their butt cracks, Joyce is asking for realism and decency. If he wants realism, he can recant his stupid climate change denials and if he wants decency he can argue in favour of doing something about Manus and Nauru detention centres. 

For crying out loud... 

It's Gold, Gold, Gold! (As The ABS Shoots Own Goal)

Pleiades sent me a Bernard Keane article, and in it is a little discussion about Olympic funding:

And more than a third of voters think we spend too much money on Olympic sports: 36% of voters say we spend too much money — with little difference between voters of different parties — while just 11% say we don’t spend enough; 34% say we spend about enough. Fifty-one per cent of voters say it’s very important or quite important that we win gold medals in Rio; 43% say it’s not important. Greens voters are the most underwhelmed by gold medals — just 29% say it’s important, compared to 63% of Liberal voters. Men — 56% — are more likely to think gold medals are important than women (47%), while older voters are less inclined to view them as important than younger voters. But there are fewer differences between people on overall interest in the Olympics — 19% say they have a lot of interest (21% men, 16% women) and 17% say no interest — although Coalition voters are the least likely to say they have no interest, and women are more likely than men — 20% to 15%.

I mean, we're just grumpy on the Left, okay? If we weren't grumpy, we probably won't be on the Left. 

Worth Flying For

Victorian Police are looking to fly to the Vatican to interview Cardinal Pell over allegations that he was a pederast too. 

In a statement, Victoria Police confirmed it has received advice from the Department of Public Prosecutions in relation to allegations of historical sexual assaults committed in Ballarat East between 1976 and 1980, and East Melbourne between 1996 and 2001. 

"We have received advice from the DPP and will now take the time to consider it," A Victoria Police spokeswoman said.

I say go ahead, make our day. Pell spent years being the ornery conservative wowser making people's lives a misery. He should be served a bit of his own medicine.

Crusader Complex

A Fool, Even in Thought, Is A Fool

Here's an article about the moral crisis allegedly affecting Australia and the western world.It's interesting because it shows there's a philosophical sense of crisis being addressed, but with inadequate tools.

''Sometimes Western civilisation is treated with outright hostility,'' read the invitation letter. ''Cultural relativism has led to our education system often undervaluing the achievements of Western civilisation.''

''The rise of the nanny state is undermining our freedoms of association, of speech, of liberal democracy.''

John Roskam, from the institute, said the evening tapped into a debate about values, where they come from and what they are grounded in - Western civilisation.

''It's rounder than the concept of a threat, it's under challenge,'' he said.

This is some pretty paranoid thinking. I am hard-pressed to think of anybody who is a cultural relativist who thinks that the values of Western civlisation are not worth preserving. Even Johnny Rotten in his rotton-est hour would concede that Western civilisation is pretty cool in parts. The single hallmark of John Howard's time as Prime Minister was his utter defensiveness about these things, and his language that almost reeked of a victim's complaint when it came to things to do with say, Aboriginal Reconciliation and Feminism. You have to take a somewhat culturally relativist position (but not much really) to let Aboriginal Reconciliation happen and be a good thing and let feminism advance. Indeed it's arguable that these kinds of things are good things that are the fruits of Western tradition.

But no, John Howard is worried.

Howard spoke off the cuff. According to those present, he argued that Australia has a secular tradition with no established church. But, while that tradition must be respected, it was his personal belief the Judaeo-Christian ethic has been the most profound moral and cultural influence in this country and it should be preserved. Other religions could be embraced and welcomed without in any way diminishing the Judaeo-Christian influence.

Howard, who never wore his faith on his sleeve, gave examples of where he saw erosion caused by a combination of factors such as post-modernism and people who think the values of Western civilisation are not worth preserving.

Really now. Again, I seriously doubt people on the Left from the champagne socialists out to some hardcore communists in Australia think that the "values of Western civilisation are not worth preserving". The extreme wing of the environmental movement probably want the West to renounce heavy industry but it's seriously questionable if they want the West to renounce, say, Socrates or Pascal or Kant or Freud.

What's really funny is that this meeting is somehow a meeting of people trying to preserve the Western civilisation and they're actually raging against the Enlightenment, so to speak. note especially John Howard's call to have more taboos. If that's not a backward step into the medieval darkness, I don't know what is.

Then you have Cardinal Pell, he of the kiddy-fiddlers-anonymous Catholic Church:

Pell went further, saying he felt suicide today was being ''celebrated''. Faith and values, he said, meant you're living for some reason other than yourself. He lamented that a secular view is legitimate but a religious view should not be heard in a public place, and that is was deemed permissible to speak openly of a green god but not a religious God.

Beyond religion, Julia Gillard's proposed national history curriculum was singled out for a belting, because it supposedly does not place enough emphasis on British and European influences.

Howard cited the recent push for a human rights charter in Australia as a consequence of a lack of understanding of our system of parliamentary democracy and an independent judiciary.

Both he and Pell acknowledged the flaws and blemishes of Western civilisation and the ''black spots'' these had left in Australian history.

But Pell referred to China, where he said an erosion of values was also occurring as capitalism took hold. ''This radically different culture is now searching for the secrets of Western vitality to provide a code for decency and social cohesion compatible with sustainable economic development.''

He quoted the Chinese economist Zhao Xiao's ''fascinating comparison with the selfism of Western radical secularism''.

''These days, Chinese people do not believe in anything,'' Zhao asserted. ''A person who believes in nothing can only believe in himself. And self-belief implies anything is possible - what do lies, cheating, harm and swindling matter?''

This is just too rich.

I've never heard the Catholic Church in Australia champion Confucianism. Ever.  Cardinal Pell lamenting the passing of the old values of Confucianism is therefore a new development. You sort of wonder how he reconciles that with his Catholic beliefs, after all Confucius clearly states that belief in the mysterious, the strong, the chaotic and gods is not a rational course of action. i.e.  a proper person does not run to cults and religions.

That China is losing its old ways as a result of capitalism is sort of interesting, as it is China's attempt to reap the fruits of Western civilisation without taking on board the core values of the west that provided for them. Like, good old liberalism. Indeed, it is the free-marketeering profit-above-all-decency kind of economic rationalism that is enabling the contemporary economic animal of China, that is being so disparaged here. Not so long ago, these were the exact western values people like John Howard and Cardinal Pell were peddling to a God-less, communist China. Surely they can't be too shocked at the results! Not if they had any continuity of thought. But of course if you listen to these people it's the fault of 'cultural relativists'.

And that's just the bit that pertains to China's modernisation. It strikes one that perhaps the biggest problem with John Howard and Cardinal Pell talking about  Western civilisation is that they don't understand its historical significance and only want to keep the bits that suit their personal political positions and agendas ("no, you don't say, art!"). This is why they're willing to admit there are 'black spots' in its history and yet they don't really want to deal with those black spots too much. Doesn't this show that the very malaise in the Western civilisation they're talking about with much alarm  is also showing up in their own discourse in their inability to recognise the faults of their own system?

Then there's the complete  muddling of religious doctrine with philosophical and historical traditions of the so-called Western civilisation. It is true, that historically the Church has played a large part in the history of Western Europe and the colonial states they have spawned. It is also true that the Judeo-Christian faith has provided the largest framework from which thinking on ethics and philosophy has been undertaken. Nonetheless, it is totally fallacious to claim that all of this has been good. We only need to look as far as Gallileo's or Darwin's experiences in having to explain scientific findings to the retrograde faithful. The Church and Judeo-Christian thought cannot lay claim to all of Western civilisation, just as Western civilisation cannot lay claim to just the good bits and not the 'black spots'. It certainly can't own all of science and therefore modern technology. It can't even own epistemology these days.

Indeed, the mere fact that we're even talking about Darwin today as a controversial figure in certain circles suggests that the Catholic Church still has not come to terms with science, let alone the enlightenment, and that the true fear of the cultural relativist is actually a fear of the Church's own irrelevance to thought.

What's really frightening is that people like this have so much influence in our society.

What Is This? A Religious Putsch?

The SMH also had this stupid little column, with this hysterical closing bit:

Secularism is certainly not neutral and those who wish to expunge Christian values from our schools and public institutions should more fully explain the worldview from which their alternative values derive.

In the mean time, if we are going to continue to recognise and celebrate our Judeo-Christian heritage, the state government should not dilute the influence of Scripture classes because they are the one opportunity in life the majority of young people have to understand what it is all about.

I don't know why religious types think that they have a monopoly on thinking about goodness. It is the single most repugnant thing about the article. A lot of Christians I know would probably balk at the degree of intellectual hubris of this writer.

Here's news for some people. Ethics is a difficult thing for religious types precisely because it seeks to address and critique morality; and morality is often defined by things like scriptures such as the Bible or the Koran. You can't have ethics unless you're willing to get objective about morality and where it comes from. It's not a big claim, it's just logic.

The simple version of ethics comes down to questions like "religion X says it's okay to do X, but religion Y thinks not. How do we address the goodness and badness of doing X"? If X is male circumcision, nobody bats an eyelid. If it's female circumcision, we all get uptight about it and rightfully so. The question then becomes, what makes it "rightfully" so? That very question is where ethics sits.

So, it's probably important to address what is considered moral under the Judeo-Christian framework of morality, but to do teachings of ethics correctly, you must critique whether thee claims to goodness or badness within the moral frame work stand up to analysis. For instance here's an ethics question for Catholics, was it good for the Pope to have covered for pedophiles when he was a Bishop? The Pope is currently trying to say, it's okay because he ended up as Pope and how dare we question the representative of God? Is this really 'good'?

What's really disturbing is that columns such as the one the SMH put up shows a clear attempt to muddle the water between what is ethics and what is morality so as to shoe-horn religion - in this instance Christianity of this particular dudes' particular denomination - back into the middle of discussions. Once again, this is such a backward step that even if you weren't a strident secularist, you have to combat it by saying how 1) misguided it is 2) how politically motivated it is in its misguidedness 3) and how deliberate it is in its confusing argumentation because it deliberately seeks to muddy the waters.

The long and short of it is, 'secularists' are not trying to sideline religion because they think it's bad. They're trying to sideline it from discussions of ethics because ethics can only begin when we stop harping about morality, and we cannot go there while the religiously motivated keep on trying to bring ethics back to "My God is Better Than Yours" routines of religious thought.

So, Mr. Jim Wallace, please stop trying to corrupt the youth of today with your opiate for the masses!

Apprehend That Pope!

Which brings me to this interesting article today.

Two leading atheists are investigating the possibility of arresting the Pope for "crimes against humanity", lawyers have confirmed.

Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are paying lawyers to investigate whether Pope Benedict XVI should be arrested when he visits Britain in September.

Mr Dawkins and Mr Hitchens believe the Pope should face charges for the alleged cover-up of sex abuse in the Catholic Church, The Guardian reports.

The Guardian reports that a letter written by the Pope in 1985, when he was then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, urged that a paedophile priest in the US not be exposed for the "good of the universal church".

Mr Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, told The Times: "This is a man whose first instinct when his priests are caught with their pants down is to cover up the scandal and damn the young victims to silence."

Mr Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great, added to the London-based paper: "This man is not above or outside the law. The institutionalised concealment of child rape is a crime under any law and demands not private ceremonies of repentance or church-funded pay-offs, but justice and punishment."

Well, right. Somebody's got to be held accountable for all this grief. I say, book him, Danno.

Bob Collins, Senator, Statesman, Pedophile & Rapist

Somebody Help Us Out Here!

Bob Collins was a Senator. He was an important statesman in days of my youth. What I saw of him as a politician was a solidly policy-based, tough, direct kind of guy who would not mince words. He'd tell us, the people of Australia, straight if it was going to work or not. For years, I was comfortable with that impression and never revisited it. I really thought he was one of the few men of integrity in a sleazy business.
Now it turns out he was up for charges in child rape.

A MAN has told how the late Labor minister Bob Collins raped him when he was a 12-year-old, while watching pornographic videos in his Senate office.

Ben Helwend has told Fairfax Media that Collins was a friend of his family in Darwin and offered to pay for his journey to Canberra in 1989 so he could learn about the workings of democracy.

"Over a period of four days in Canberra he penetrated me, masturbated me and had me [perform oral sex]," Mr Helwend, 30, said. "I was just 12. I didn't know anything about sex and I was scared not to do as Mr Collins asked me because I played with his kids and my mum and dad were friends of the Collins family."

The Federal Government has granted Collins, 61, a state funeral in Darwin this Saturday following his death last Friday - just three days before he was due to face a committal hearing in Darwin on child sex offences against another three boys in the western Arnhem Land township of Maningrida some 30 years ago. The charges were dropped on Monday, but now there are claims Collins committed suicide to avoid the humiliation of being prosecuted.

Collins was also charged in Canberra last September with two counts of committing acts of indecency on Mr Helwend and one count of sexual intercourse with the child in the capital when he was a senator in September 1989. Mr Helwend said last night his lawyer had told him those charges had also been dropped.

He has come forward as The Bulletin, published today, details allegations by the Aboriginal actor Tom E. Lewis of being sexually assaulted by Collins.

"It's caused a lot of bitterness, and twistedness in my spirit," Lewis tells the magazine. "I've been beaten, flogged, you name it, when I was a kid. I can forgive those people. I've been ripped and called a f---in' whitefella in a black community. Everything. I can still forgive those people. I've got no room to forgive this Collins. Bullshit. [If] black people rape everybody and anybody who do anything like that, they have their name splattered everywhere."

What do we make of this?
Here's Bob Collins according to Wikipedia.

Federal Politics & Senate
In the 1987 federal election, Collins was elected to the Australian Senate representing the Northern Territory.
The Prime Minister Bob Hawke chose Collins as Minister for Shipping on 4 April 1990, and a month later on 7 May, Aviation Support was also added to his portfolio. In addition, he served during that term as Minister assisting the Prime Minister for Northern Australia. In May 1992, Prime Minister Paul Keating elevated Collins to the Cabinet as Minister for Transport and Communications. In December 1993, he was made Minister for Primary Industries and Energy.
After the Coalition lead by John Howard won the 1996 election, Collins continued to serve in the Senate until he resigned on 30 March 1998; Trish Crossin was

Honors:
In the Australia Day Honours of 2004, Collins was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for services to the Northern Territory and indigenous rights.[3] appointed to his Senate seat.

The section covering the Child Sex allegations are twice as long.

On 19 June 2004, Collins was involved in a serious car accident when his car rolled over as he swerved to avoid a pig on the road near the town of Jabiru. He was taken to Royal Darwin Hospital, then flown to Adelaide, South Australia on 22 June for specialised surgery.[4]
As Collins recovered in hospital in Adelaide, officers of the Northern Territory Police flew to his hospital bedside to inform him that his home had been raided and that he was charged with child-sex offences. His home computer had been seized that prosecutors said contained 54 child-porn images[5]. Additionally four men had made allegations that Collins had sexually assaulted them as children, more than thirty years previously.[6] One of the alleged victims was Tom E. Lewis, a young actor who had played the title role in the 1978 Australian film The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith.[7]
Another allegation was made in 2006 of the sexual assault of a 12-year-old boy in Canberra in September 1989. Collins was charged with two counts of committing an act of indecency and one count of sexual intercourse with a child.[8]
Collins's continuing medical problems, including surgery for bowel cancer and injuries from his car accident, meant that he was unfit to attend the ACT Magistrates' Court for four scheduled hearings of the case in September and December 2006 and March and May 2007.[9][10]
An additional charge of possession of child pornography was set down against Collins in the Darwin Magistrates' Court in November 2006. Collins faced 21 child sex charges in the Northern Territory which were due for a committal hearing in April 2007. The child pornography charge was due for a hearing in the same court on 1 May.[11] He died before he could face court.

Appalling. So the whole thing got me thinking.

Thought No.1 - Innocent Until Proven Guilty?
What really gets me about this case is that Bob Collins being a former Senator probably got a substantial amount of protection exactly for having been a Senator and a man of considerable standing in the Northern Territory. So you wonder how innocent we can imagine him to be, given the amount of documented allegations. How can there be no fire with so many strands of smoke? And yet, we must all be vigilant and say innocent until proven guilty. If indeed Bob Collins has committed suicide, then he's evaded all charges. But was it worth dying for?
If you were going to commit suicide over your sexual proclivities, no matter how offensive, why do it? Was he insane? Was he deluded? What the hell was he thinking? Assuming he did it all, that is.

The point is, now we'll never know even on a juridical level - As in we won't even get to test justified true belief of whether he committed these heinous acts or not. However, I am saying that I now have justified belief that Bob Collins was a Child Rapist. Is that unfair? Well, as a cynic let me say this: I have to raise the bar of my cynicism considerably higher not to think so. Short of doing so, I have to assume that they're all somehow perverts.
John Howard? Rat-Fucker.
Kevin Rudd? Dog-Fucker
Peter Costello? Pig-Fucker.
Julia Gillard? Snake-Fucker.
Tony Abbott? Croc-Fucker.
Wayne Swann? Drug-Fucked.
George Brandis? Got his penis caught in a milking device when he was 12.

Who's to say the dirt on just who and what they fuck, won't come out on these people one of these years?

Thought No.2 - Who Knew About This Shite? Who Else Has Dirt?
"Bob Collins = Child Rapist" is such a shocking concept that I am asking myself, how did he get to be Senator?
Didn't anybody know? Or did they knowingly just let it slide?
What else is being hidden in Canberra's halls of power and press gallery?

BTW, I was told of a guy who moved to Canberra as a gigolo. He found so much work doing the wives of politicians, that he got to know so much about how Australian politics worked and was so disgusted he moved back to Sydney. What's amazing - apart from the fact that politicians' wives are so unimaginative that they all want to be serviced by the one guy - is that sex & sleaze is the order of the day in Canberra. So I ask again, who else knew about this shite, and what else aren't they printing?

Thought No 3 - Are His Crimes Enough To Cancel Out His Good Deeds?
What are the good deeds of Bob Collins the pollie? I can't actually recall. It's not like Paul Keating who reigned supreme as Treasurer and PM; he's not even Gareth Evans who was balling Cheryl Kernot senseless in his office while attending to *Foreign Affairs* (yeah, right); he wasn't even John Dawkins who brought Tertiary Education to its knees in this country.
But surely he must have done some good.

Now that he's been found out to have been a dirty little child-molester, we can all say yar-boo-sucks to that and flush his legacy down the toilet - because he sure did a good job of shoving it in there in the first place. I ask you, is this how we should be remembering our statesmen? This particular statesman?
If yes, then I think I'm forever done reading the news on politics. Whatever they may do, they fuck one goat or child and it's all in vain. And from Thought 2, we've established that they could be fucking anybody and any thing.

Thought No.4 - Politicians As Role Models?
There's this cult of people that screams blue murder every time an athlete turns out to be less of a man than he is an athlete. Take Andrew 'Joey' Johns and his drug habit. It didn't surprise me in the least bit that Andrew Johns was doing drugs for his entire career; that he never got caught; and 'fessed up afterwards.
However, some people say "he should have thought of his young fans. A Star is a Role Model."
After all, a traumatised kid in 1921 did ask of Black Sox's Shoeless Joe Jackson "Say It Ain't So, Joe!"
I think it's simply too much to ask of a boof-head pituitary case to be a great man as well as a great athlete. However, how about politicians? These are the very people who are *lawmakers*. If anybody should be leveled with the "Say It Ain't So", it should be politicians.
So on that line of thought... Bob Collins... WTF!?

Clearly, we all should be jumping up and down screaming our tits off because the Role Models have let us down badly. But you know what? People will just let this slide and go back to the booths to vote in the next person who they only know by name and affiliation. No wonder there are those who think Democracy is little more than Mob-ocracy.

Thought No. 5 - No Wonder the Right Hates the Left
One of the surest things in the politics is that the Right is always out to show that the Left is less than they claim they are. It delights the Right that a social reformist turns out to be nothing but a pedophile. Indeed The Angry Fat Man would be having a (pardon the pun) ball dancing on the 'corruption of the Labor Party' that allowed such a man into the halls of power on this land.
Christ almighty, what can the Left say about that?
It's unfair? He's innocent until proven guilty but he can't stand trial so he's always going to be seen as innocent?

Whatever the case, it seems to me that the Labor Party will have trouble living this one down. They may as well have had a vampire or Frankenstein's monster or an ex-NAZI in the House for those years.

The Left always stands up for obscure causes. Heroin Injection Rooms. Legalising Marijuana use. Dugongs in Okinawa. Nukes in France. Gay Rights. It's a miracle they won't stand up for Pedophile's Rights except for the fact that they stood up for Children's Rights already.
Now, I'm not saying it's wrong to do so, but you can see that the Conservatives and Reactionaries and Right Wingers are all going to see it as defending the moral decline of Civilization. That the Left want to stick up for things that brought down the mighty Roman Empire, is sufficient reason to anger the Right. Things like homosexuality drug-taking, and being kind to the slaves and all that...

Thought No.6 - Bob Collins As Gilles De Rais
Has It Always Been Like This?
I've been re-reading Georges Bataille's account of the trial of Gilles de Rais. Gilles was a man with power in his society, who used it to satisfy his peculiar lust. By the victim's accounts, Bob Collins seems to be in the same vein except without the killings. All the same, he seems to have been just as rapacious and predatory.
It's a crappy deal, but ever so often we get a total pervert who gets away with evil-shit acts for years, and that it has happened through out history. Thanks for the reminder Bob Collins, you evil pig-bastard.