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.