Protest Israel and you might be liable for their actions
The impact is feared to mean that even counterprotestors – such as Neo Nazis – would be included in the ambit of people for whose actions protest organisers could be held liable.
Tag: Lucy Hamilton
News Corp was at the centre of the media campaign against the Voice. While the organisation claimed to be explaining both sides…
The consequence of neutering the ABC and allowing the consolidation of private media has resulted in the media chaos we now experiencing. Privatization has been sold as the big dream but it has only resulted in Oligarchs, a Plutocracy, and a concentration of interests that doesn’t allow diversification to thrive or a political party to serve all citizens the best.
Australia can’t be a functioning democracy unless voters understand policy platforms on offer and the stakes. Unless we properly control dis- and misinformation in the civic space, we have little chance to vote well. Albanese must find a backbone for his own sake as well as the nation’s.
There is a fundamental human right and it differs from wrong. Politeness isn’t the distinguisher it’s merely an error in equivalence.
On some level, it is straightforward for a Neo-Nazi protest to be easy for police to handle. As we saw on the streets of Melbourne last weekend, and repeatedly over recent years, a high five for white supremacist protesters is an easy gesture for some police officers.
Australia must not allow our politicians and “thought” leaders on the right to push us down the destructive path being pursued by the Republicans.
The American right is waging war on modernity. The radicalised right alliance is sacrificing empirical evidence and truth for theocracy, tribal games and lies. It is determined to reverse the achievements of the Civil Rights era: white Christian man will return to his rightful place as delineator of truth. The contingent is destroying America’s standing to achieve it.
Some of the idiot balls in Australia are made local. Kmart is in trouble for deciding that Australia Day merchandise doesn’t sell well enough to justify stocking it, a version of the American “woke companies” gambit. The “threat” of the anodyne Voice to Parliament is created out of thin air by the Murdoch Dog Line. This furphy is manufactured as part of the illusory anglosphere “Critical Race Theory” threat. Any effort to teach a more balanced history of our colonial nations is met with stonewalling rage. So fragile are the white bastions of our greatness that stories of the pain inflicted in their creation would apparently destroy everything.
The damage that will be done to Australia’s First Nations people over the course of this referendum by the drastic mischaracterisations in the Murdoch media is substantial. The marriage equality “debate” was brutal for LGBTQI+ Australians, beset by slander. As Noel Pearson pointed out, Australia likes Aboriginal people much less than we like the gay people we know in our families, social and work spaces.
The exception to that calculus is trans people. There are so few that many older Australians have never met someone who is gender diverse. This has made them a very useful target of disinformation and dehumanisation.
Source: When culture war games trend lethal – » The Australian Independent Media Network
The international right is cynical and dangerous. It is crucial we look beyond the surface rhetoric to understand what it represents because Australia is not immune.
Source: The Right is toxic: what next for conservatives? – » The Australian Independent Media Network
What idiots Bolt and Kenny are. Literally, arguing that Catholic and Anglican Archbishops should be able to be heads of churches and Ministers of the State, executing both roles, at the same time in our Constitutional Secular Democracy? Forget religion the head of the Army could be PM as could Kenny and Bolt and still continue in dual roles as talking heads for Murdoch and running portfolios. Anything less for heaven’s sake is an imposition on individual freedom. Thorburn should have been allowed to execute both roles despite his conflict of interests.
Mind you the two often struggle with women having two roles, particularly if there’s a man around. We heard the incompetent Miranda Devine tongue-lash Andrew Bolt on 2GB when Bolt claimed she was his guest on Steve Price’s Show and he wasn’t hers. Shortly after Bolt was dropped or sank to doing a very failed self-managed 5 episode podcast with his son Dom which sank even deeper.
Andrew Bolt was raised in country towns showing little or no scholastic merit unlike his brother and sister all he was given was a less-than-Australian cultural sense of himself by his mother. He was the son of the headmaster. He was certain he was White Christian Dutch and of European heritage with all the superior cultural traits required to stand above the ordinary Aussie folk he met. He even let us all know he once had a black aboriginal friend.
Bolt’s Racial background was his cultural capital, his claim to fame and his only skill. From the get-go he failed academically but for years had on his CV that he was educated at Adelaide Uni when he wasn’t. He was taught one lesson by his mother and applied it. Who you knew was the far easier path to the top rather than what you knew and he’s never really changed. Without the help of influential friends Andrew Bolt either stagnated or sank. Once when he tried to portray his ex-fiancee, a woman that helped carry him, as somewhat lesser than he was threatened with being sued and publicly red-faced forced to apologise. Even his wife and family were fed tales of his larger-than-life Walter Mitty past. He claimed it was for their protection.
One wonders whether they knew of his family’s origins from Aalsmeer. That it was famous for more than flowers but rather more infamous for its Dutch-Nazi past during WW2 a past Bolt never speaks of. One does wonder why a man obsessed with White Australian and Western History isn’t as obsessed with his own.
Thorburn mourned that “my personal Christian faith is not tolerated or permitted in the public square.” This is incorrect. As he repeatedly pointed out, he manages to keep the less tolerant beliefs that his faith might dictate utterly private if he holds those views at all. It was the leadership role at a crusading church that provoked the temporary uproar and the choice he was given. Barney Zwartz inadvertently underscored this point. By asking why Dan Andrews can continue to lead Victoria as a Catholic if Thorburn could not lead Essendon, he illustrates what is clear to the rational: it is not the faith but the role that was in conflict.
The News Corp Dog Line howled over and over about how the hypocritical “priests of tolerance” were driving us into an almost Stalinist dystopia. Janet Albrechtson ludicrously thundered they would demand a “clean sweep of practising Catholics” from every institution. Kevin Donnelly sited the authoritarian left’s viciousness in their descent from the French Revolutionary Reign of Terror. Andrew Bolt declaimed that the “‘tolerance’ gestapo” and “‘diversity’ thugs” were damning Christians to Hell. Shannon Deery’s column repeats Victorian Opposition Leader, Matthew Guy, querying whether everyone would be banned from attending the services of their chosen faith. Operatic registers of imagined victimhood spilled over thousands of lines of print.
The ABC’s Ita Buttrose bemoaned that what had been a private matter – one’s faith – was now inescapably public. This is not, in general, the case. Leaders in Australian politics, business and social institutions are still mostly men, still mostly white, still mostly culturally Christian. Nobody comments on their church attendance or mere celebration of Christian festivals. The discussion about their faith arises when they are closely associated with a religious institution that would actively impinge on secular society and the rights of others.
Source: That white man’s dystopia – » The Australian Independent Media Network
The mainstream media in Australia is currently whitewashing fascist politics. It is not just sycophantic, or lazy, journalism. It is dangerous.
Without a strong news media, Australia faces a clouded future. Albanese’s government may be able to repair our Rule of Law protections adequately to protect us into the future from the international right’s authoritarian games. The radical right might lose their hold on the Liberal and National parties. We have seen in America, however, that this form of the right is prepared to play the long game. Journalists that help them whitewash their cruellest actions aid them in this plan.
Source: Dutton and Trump politics – » The Australian Independent Media Network
olddogthoughts 