Confirmation of long held suspicions...

My own family experience and long held suspicions about voting patterns have been confirmed (well supported at least) by the "British Houselhold Panel Survey". The results of tracking about 10,000 adults over 15 years have shown that the presence of daughters within a family correlates positively with tendencies to vote for the more Left wing parties (and vice-versa for sons).

They hypothesize that women are "intrinsically more leftwing than men" because "they value health, education and creches and rarely get paid so much that they worry about top tax rates". Yes, yes, yes. Now where do we sign up to run the world?

Not that we don't go there but....

This from the SMH this morning:

"IN BELFAST, near a stern statue of Queen Victoria, who didn't believe lesbians existed, and greeted by demonstrators waving "Sodomy is Sin" placards, Shannon Sickels married Grainne Close in Britain's first gay wedding."

Um, guys? Sodomy? I think you might mean the other ones...

EDIT:

This story gets even better. Apparantly these protesters were met by supporters and gay rights campaigners and two comedians who arrived without pants but in "Y-fronts and Hitler moustaches with placards saying Bring Back Slavery and Earth is Flat". Thanks to

eurovladd

for the info. It's always nice when good politics and good humour go together.

EDIT 2:

This keeps on getting better. These women have made my week. They got married to Dolly Parton's "Touch Your Woman". Awesome.

peri peri and polkas not politics

I've just seen this quote by Mr Peter (Proletariat Eater) Costello saying multiculturalism was good if it meant "eating souvlaki and dancing the Zorba" but not if it meant non-assimilation”. In comparison DIMIAs website contains this positive but rather ineffectual spiel about government multicultural policy:

"Australia’s multicultural policy promotes acceptance of and respect for our cultural diversity. It embraces our Australian-grown customs and the heritage of Indigenous Australians, early settlers, and the diverse range of migrants now coming to this country. It supports the right of each Australian to maintain and celebrate, within the law, their culture, language or religion"

Multiculuralism is of course a government policy rather than just what happens when people from different cultural heritages hang out together. It has also been a way of ‘managing’ the twin ‘problems’ of culture and race and has had mixed success. Regardless of whether we subscribe to the cultural mosaic, fusion, melting pot or salad bowl (the decay of the english language continues) understandings of multiculturalism surely it is a warped sense of culture that only includes only food products and funny dancing. It’s quite amazing to see how every other culture can be reduced to these nice clean things; yummy exotic dishes that you can make at home thanks to Continental and dances that are included as the local ethnic component in street fairs or 3 day tour Asia package deals. If anyone suggested that Australian culture was only the meat pie and that peculiar dance people do when they hear Cold Chisel the government would be up in arms. Then again, if one included something about mateship it might cover most of it...

The whole assimilate thing is both too Star Trek (and what made the Borg the best TV villians since the Daleks) and too “I don’t care what you do in the bedroom as long as you don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses”. Cultural diversity should not be confined to take-away menus (though anyone living near Newtown might share my excitement at receiving anything other than Thai menus) and assimilation arguments come too close to mandating cultural and sexual closets for my liking. I'm not sure there's an upbeat hopeful ending here. As a friend said, i think that's the punchline.

I didn't know she was running Israel..

I wish that Ariel Sharon's surname had some kind of accent so that the moment of confusion when reading newspaper headlines and wondering why a nice lady called Sharon would blow up settlements could be avoided.

I also wish the same for Edward Said. This might get rid of the "Said said ..." moment as well.

And a part of me wants Condi Rice to win the presidency of the USA just because this would ensure tagline writers could exhaust their fully supply of Rice puns. Especially if there were disagreements with China. Priceless.

The death industries of a deadly culture.

Turning to the arts in crazy times has always been a particular weakness of mine perhaps partially as escapism but also for alternatives.. Harold Pinter is my hero. I have never read any of his work or (to my knowledge)seen any of his plays or movies. Nevertheless, his Nobel prize acceptance speech absolutely kills me. Its pathos, eloquence, historical awareness, bitterness and optimism remind me how one can face up to the terrifying reality of a political situation and keep hold of one's integrity and thirst for life. Quotes below are from his speech, scroll if allergic to extended quoting.

'I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It's a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, 'the American people', as in the sentence, 'I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.'

'It's a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words 'the American people' provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it's very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.'

'It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.'

I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.

'Blood is dirty. It dirties your shirt and tie when you're making a sincere speech on television'. Writers need sometimes to remember both the blood and the speeches on television. How else can we write? Why else would one bother? This year i was introduced to the "so-what" factor by one of my lecturers. It is a nice way to force yourself to consider the political intent, import and efficacy of anything you might be writing or doing. Thank you Harold. (Now i better read some of his works).

Miscreants and Miscommunication

I've never like Alan Jones since being forced to sit through a company christmas party where for some baffling reason he was the keynote speaker. A full half hour of my life dissapeared into an ideological cesspit involving a rather tortured allegory between working in a garden-centre and coaching a national football team.
Since then he also managed to use a friends honours thesis to argue that money spent on education is wasted if it is ever given to arts students.

His recent efforts however are what qualify him for the 1st against the wall list. Mr Jones claims that it was in fact he who has lead this charge to "take back our beaches". It was really the old 'protect our culture' white supremacist stuff of course lacking the nuance that even these arguments might have but his dodgy journalism (reading out anonymous emails with highly inflammatory content and repeatedly reading out the SMS which was used to organise enough people to be a proper mob) singles him out as one of the lowest of the low. Thankfully David Marr was able to present a more two-sided appreciation of the situation but it would seem that talk-back has definitively changed into rave-at.

His response to one caller was particularly illuminating. When she tried to argue that the story was more complex than Jones was allowing he responded: "Let's not get too carried away, Berta. We don't have Anglo-Saxon kids out there raping women in western Sydney."

Um, really? Why is it that we always return to the "woman problem" whenever ethnic conflict arises. And how is it that such wide swathes of the political spectrum are willing to condemn 'their' treatment of 'our' women? One sometimes gets the sense that this is protecting our own right to treat women this way. Sure the gang rape cases recently had a high profile racial element but out of the many rape cases actually reported this one was the exception rather than the rule. As for derogatory comments they are exactly why I moved away from the (still whiter-than-white) Northern Beaches. They are always a problem, maybe in some cultures rather than others but lets not pretend (all) surfies have particularly amazing feminist politics. That kinda crap is something most women face and from many different groups of men, i'm sounding all feminist again but surely men using arguments about other men mistreating "their" women is far too 12th Century and simplistic.

Rant over, i'll go back to the kitchen now Alan. Just stop looking at me like that.

"Integrity has no need of rules"

Maybe because it's the end of the year it seems to be getting harder to face the rank ugliness of the world. Paranoia sets in and i wonder if voting for Howard's VSU laws will be sufficient for Family First to crush the alternative families that so many of us have spent years building and caring for (RU486 being a foregone conclusion really).

How will they get rid of us? I think the burning at the stake option is too cliche nowadays. Perhaps ECT might have a revival if nicely cleaned up and redefined (hey, it's not torture if we call it interrogation right?) or some kind of selective genetic screening to allow pre-natal weeding out of the queerer components of a society. This year is almost done and the goons running the world have made a right bloody mess of it. Although only an arbitrary temporal demarcation there's something so alluring of starting over...

allegedly adelaide

Is it just me or is there something inherently funny about this headline from ninemsn.com.au?

"Former Saddam bodyguard 'living in Adelaide' "

Why is he 'living in Adelaide' rather than just living in Adelaide. Is the existence of Adelaide still in question? Or is it questionable that someone actually 'lives' there? Or have we all taken Descartes' evil demon to heart and cannot any longer make any declarative statements about existence?

Adelaide is like puppets, it makes me laugh.

Asking for Trouble

Who knew Exodus International everyone's favourite ex-gays were silly enough to have an Annual Conference called the "Freedom Conference"?

Stage: A Conference Centre somewhere around the bowels of middle America
Cast: 1000 people who "once lived the homosexual lifestyle" until booped on the head one too many times with the bible upon which suddenly they're ... not gay any more. Hmmmm.

Great. A thousand people who loathe themselves and are completely bathed in guilt because of their lives of sin.
Sounds like Stonewall.
ROAD TRIP!!

Right to power over Life

I know the blogsphere is probably overloaded with people on this one already but the recent execution of Van Nguyen has prompted some rather screwy debate from too many people that i know to let it pass.

Just to get this situated, i believe that capital punishment is ALWAYS wrong. No state should ever have power over human life in that way. Ever. Some of my reasons for this one include:

1. A personal belief in rehabilitative models of disciplinary systems. In an imperfect world and with a criminal justice system that has been known to get things wrong the risk is simply too high that an innocent life could be taken.

2. Historically, states (and sovereigns) have tended to use this power over death to regulate life in strikingly repressive ways, it is to open to abuse to have this at the centre of any understanding of justice.

3. The deterrent argument is quite a difficult one to propose when there are so many reasons that people might break the law and so many different ways that people relate to their punishments. The executions of the bali bombers is a good example of this where the bombers expressed satisfaction over the death sentence because it assured them (in their minds) of their place in paradise.

4. Practicing capital punishment provides a precedent of sorts (or is a corollory of) laws preventing abortion, suicide and euthenasia. These are cases in which women are deprived of rights over their own bodies and people are deprived of the right to make decisions about ending their lives. Surely if we do not possess even these rights we cannot then give them over to the state.

To clarify, I don't think the minutes silence really had any point but it did allow the 50% (so says the SMH) who thought he should not be killed to take some kind of group action. I don't care where the PM was. And i do believe that we have to respect the sovereignty of other country's laws although it can still be morally imperative to support interventions through international body's like the UN/world court into unjust systems.

It is simply the hypocrisy of jumping in on this one case and lobbying Singapore when we had not done so previously, we have not been to the UN over this and if i remember correctly lil' John was making moves *towards* the intro of capital punishment here. Sheesh.