Does Andrew Bolt Love Horse Cock? (Or: Why Freedom of Speech is Relative)

I confess I was looking avidly forward to the result in Eatock v Bolt, on the basis that the decision would either result in the expansion of the implied constitutional freedom of political communication in Australia, or it would result in Andrew Bolt receiving a widely publicised kicking and his followers engaging in highly entertaining championship tantrum-chucking.

Either one of these outcomes contained sufficient silver-lining to offset any negatives I could see. In the wake of the public spanking delivered to Bolt by the Federal Court, several things about the nature of free speech in this country have become clear.

Firstly, Andrew Bolt's free speech did not in fact extend to making factually innaccurate claims about pale-skinned indigenous Australians which had the effect of damaging them as a class . By the way, ragey tantrum-chuckers of the libertarian fringe, this doesn't mean that we live in less of a democracy than we did before Eatock v Bolt. A right against Bolt in such circumstances against racial vilification was only one civil option - the standard vanilla defamation proceedings would probably also have been successful.

Bolt's free speech didn't extend in this way because no one's does. It has always been limited by injunction, defamation remedies, rights to privacy and non-disclosure policy, and expanded and protected through alliance to a limited right to political information, which is derived from the notion that since we must vote, we have a right to make that decision without having access to that information hindered. That right has been extended to broadcasting material obtained of animal rights abuses while trespassing (Lenah Game Meats), prohibiting the government banning political advertising in the lead-up to an election (ACTV), or reasonable political critique (Lange). What is clear from the case law is that we're talking, with the possible exception of parliamentary privilege defences, of a situation where free speech derives from a right to be informed. It clearly runs into problems where the speech is baseless opinion misrepresented as authoritative fact.

As well as these restrictions, freedom of speech is, and has always been, a right which is correlative and accountable to other rights. It has never been unlimited. My right to photograph you in the shower and publish those photographs does not trump your right to privacy, and it shouldn't. Nor do I have an unqualified right to publish an article about someone who is not a public figure, making accusations about them without bothering to check the factual accuracy, or, knowing there is no fire, to shout 'fire' in a crowded theatre. This should not be mistaken for state censorship -there is nothing preventing me putting that speech out there in the first place save my own awareness of the consequences, legal, ethical and practical, of so doing. If one is trampled in a panicked mob trying to flee a theatre which is not in fact on fire, well, that is a consequence of having shouted 'fire'. Similarly, a group of people you have attacked in a nationally syndicated newspaper bringing a civil claim against you is a consequence of the initial decision to publish. There's a reason for the phrase 'Publish, and be damned!'.

For example, if I were to make the claim that Andrew Bolt is routinely indecently engaged with farmyard animals. This is a claim that I cannot verify based on my current experience, nor one which I am basing on an authoritative source or considerable research. I could perhaps look through some of the columns he has written, and make use of innuendo to suggest such things, but on the face of it, I am likely only to turn up enough to suggest Andrew Bolt hates PETA and has changed his mind a few times on the live animal export issue. Our defamation law works such that even if it were true, publishing would as a starting point be grounds to sue for defamation simply as something likely to impair the reputation of the ordinary reasonable person - because, again irrespective of truth- we assume everyone's reputation is good at common law. Were I able to show any of a range of defences - such as truth, genuinely/honestly held belief - or make arguments on the mitigating factors, I may still get away with publication of such vicious rumour and defeat any defamation suit that's brought.

Most major media organisations have in-house legal counsel, whose job it is to answer questions about whether publication of a particular article is likely to open the organisation up to legal liability. Often, in practical terms, the decision may come down to not 'Is this libelous?' but rather 'Is the person we are libelling likely to sue?'. In the case of Bolt, the gamble is that Bolt's abrasive style and casual bigotry sells copy, and sales of copy mean the lifeblood of advertising revenue continues to flow. If no one sues - or if they reserve their right under the Australian Press Council to file a complaint (and thus waive a right to sue), then the paper wins out by publishing anyway, even when they know it's likely to be libellous.

In this case, one more attempt by Bolt to chip away at the credibility of indigenous rights in Australia did not go unchallenged. If you're outraged there's a law saying your free speech is limited by hate speech legislation, you should probably be even more outraged about the overuse of injunctive relief in interim civil cases and the use of defamation law to shut down critique of those with the money to launch applications for injunctions with relative ease. If you're not - if you're just angry that Bolt got slapped around for making a (not particularly well-informed) point about light-skinned Aboriginal people having access to government funding and grant programs, a group who initially didn't even seek damages, simply a judgement against - then maybe you should be wondering what your free speech is worth. When someone is allowed to pump untreated sewerage and profitably sell it as Evian, the marketplace of ideas needs a rethink.

Australia Has A Lot of Gay Friends, But...

Dear Local Australian MP,

In the world in which we live, the phrase "I have a lot of gay friends" is almost always a signpost for some form of bigotry. It usually prefaces words like 'but' or 'and', as though the speaker is keen to clarify that while they personally know plenty of gay people, they don't see a need for the political progress that is necessary to ensure that the LGBTIQ members of our community feel the full benefits of community membership and equal rights with their neighbours and friends. It is a peculiar and condescending kind of friendship that sees our friends treated with less respect and as lesser citizens purely because of the people that they love.

My friend Hannah spends long days working with Amnesty International, fighting for the political freedoms of people she will never meet. The Australian government won't let her marry her girlfriend, as though somehow their love is worth less than the love of any heterosexual couple, as though it is less considered, less passionate, less true.

My friend Victoria's parents nearly disowned her when she discovered she was in love with a woman. She faced harassment and bullying at school, a hostile home environment, and a government which sees a lesser recognition of the relationship she has suffered so much to realise and protect as unproblematic. She has always been a very traditional, family-oriented person, and marriage has always been important to her - her realisation that she would never be able to pledge her love and commitment to someone, exchanging rings and vows before trusted friends and family, was something that struck at the very core of her identity. I can't help but think that the hateful things she has heard were somehow made stronger because by not legalising gay marriage, the Australian government implicitly endorses the homophobic sentiments and attacks she has faced.

Another friend lives a life of quiet desperation, scared to acknowledge his longterm roommate as his life partner because he believes the most important relationship in his life is stigmatised in our community. He is a bright, senior and respected man who contributes a great deal to Canberra's community, and he feels that if people knew he was gay he would be respected less. Our Australia hurts him, too, because our government continues to signal to the him, and to our community at large, that there is something wrong with homosexual relationships, that there is something okay about treating the love between two men as somehow lesser. Our governments at territory and federal levels say "We have a lot of gay friends, but"; what we hear is that some loves are more equal than others.

So many Australians have similar stories. So many of us have brothers, sisters, family, colleagues, neighbours, friends - who are injured by the refusal of our politicians to take this necessary step - the simple recognition of gay marriage - to remove another bastion of inequality, another arbitrary barrier that serves only to harm. It is a move that costs so little, but means so much to so many.

Although I am not gay, I have a lot of gay, lesbian and queer friends, colleagues, neighbours. We share classes at university, cubicles at work, smiles on the bus in the morning on the way down Northbourne Avenue. We share a common humanity, we share dreams and aspirations for our own futures, and for an Australia which is fairer and more inclusive - an Australia which says that any dreams I may have of one day meeting someone I may want to marry are no more valid than similar dreams of my gay and lesbian friends.

I have a lot of gay friends, Mr. Local MP, and I'm tired of hearing my political representatives tell me that they personally support marriage equality, 'but...'. This is 2011. It is past time we stop making excuses for not helping our friends, for not protecting the members of our community. It is time our government stops quietly offering legitimacy to the sentiments of homophobes and bigots, and openly recognises that preserving marriage exclusively for heterosexual couples is the denial of a basic freedom which should be open to all Australians. Denying the LGBTIQ identifying people in our community any privilege otherwise open to heterosexual couples is discriminatory policy which belongs to an uglier era.

I trust that you will take these sentiments on board, and look forward to a more inclusive Australia.

Yours sincerely,

Canberran Curmudgeon

[This first appeared on the Letter Amnesty blog, where there are more brilliant, eloquent, poignant and strongly persuasive letters to MPs. It's a good place to start if you're inspired to write to your local representative to tell them how you feel about marriage equality.]

Heads on Spikes Are Sooo c.1650.

In an address that stopped a nation, President Obama confirmed for the world what twitter had been guessing for a few hours; Osama Bin Laden, significant Al Qaeda figure and the face of the twin towers attacks nearly a decade ago, was dead.

He had been killed in a firefight in a mansion in Abbottisbad, Pakistan. The body had been dumped at sea. The conspiracy theories began circulating almost as fast and loose as this falsely attributed Martin Luther King quote: "I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy."

A quote like this goes viral because it resonates with a sentiment which we feel we cannot express for ourselves - perhaps we feel unqualified, or ineloquent, or alienated by the more mainstream sentiments being expressed. In this case, this quote validated that feeling that there was something barbaric about the jingoistic fervour, the chants of "U-S-A!", the self-congratulatory ceremonies and celebration over a violent death.

I watched horror-struck as the plane flew into the second tower nearly a decade ago, as the buildings collapsed. As people jumped to their deaths to escape the smoke and flames, the uncertain death that their workplaces had turned into. As the death tolls climbed and the pieces of human wreckage were pulled from the rubble. I make no apologies for those who planned this nightmare, saw to its execution, and celebrated the fear, suffering and trauma that was its aftermath.

The world sat largely silent as the US launched first strikes against Kabul, bringing shock and awe into our living rooms and the horror of industrial warfare into the lives of Afghani citizens too poor to flee. There seemed to be a sense that such a response was necessary, because how do you wage a war against dead hijackers? How do you wage a war against a force which has no state? How do you feel safe as a citizen of this world, and how do you protect your own state? There was a sense in which even though the links between 9-11 and Afghanistan were tenuous*, the world recognised that America needed to do something other than lick her wounds and worry about what happens next.

I was disgusted at the parties in the West Bank, the comments that the US somehow deserved September 11. The sense that there was anything righteous, anything to be celebrated in the death, destruction and grief of that day left me cold. Commentators rightly came out to condemn these displays.

Where were those commentators when the mobs gathered to chant "U-S-A!" and pump their fists in the air? Where were they when an ex-judicial slaughter was described with gravitas by the President of the United States as 'justice' having been done, as though justice and vengeance are synonymous? I am not sad that Bin Laden is dead, but I am sad that this event reflects that humanity hasn't progressed much ethically beyond heads on spikes, saber-rattling, primitive, barbaric. A grave recognition that a violent act may be necessary is not the same as cheering for an execution.

Martin Luther King did say:

"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that."

There is something unevolved about an eye for an eye, something dark, primitive and regressive that reflects the very worst motivations in human behaviour, that makes us all less safe. Our world is littered with political speeches claiming moral high ground against an opponent, but it is our conduct which defines who we are. If we are attempting to celebrate the ending of a life from the moral high ground, it may be time to cede our claim to it.







* You may recall that the grounds were that the Taliban, repressive and evil but not fantastically well-resourced, did not hand Bin Laden over to the United States when asked to do so. This would be the very same Bin Laden it has taken one of the wealthiest, most technologically advanced military powers of the world nearly ten years to locate.

Cigarette Smoking is the New Ugly Green

Actually -- I'm not a smoker, and I've never really aspired to smoke.

It smells unpleasant, yellows teeth and skin, has various associated health risks and was immensely popular with all the people I aspired to be nothing like in high school. Add to that it's rather addictive and relatively expensive, and not smoking is a fairly easy decision to make.

The example of the inimitably cool Hunter S. Thompson and the romance of the smoke-filled press-rooms of yore, , the fact that it gives the socially awkward something to do with their hands and a quiet space to bond with others, and that it apparently helps maintain a svelte figure and looks cool in film noir is still not enough to convince me to buy and smoke cigarettes. My disapproving Grade Three teacher mentally looms Obi-Wan Kenobi style over my mid-twenties consciousness, tutting over the barest inkling of a thought that smoking might be that elusive step I need to take to be cool. Realistically, of course, I'm so far from cool that the minor image rhinoplasty of rebelling against relative good health is not going to be much help anyway.

This means I'm probably not the target for either the new mandatory snot-green plain packaging measures designed to make smoking less trendy, or even the reaction campaign by cigarette companies concerned to make the colour of cigarette packaging a civil liberties issue. By the way, congratulations Australia - if this is the direst emergency for individual rights going around, we might've just won best country in the world. Yeah -- Suck it, Sweden.

Cigarette companies are conscientiously very worried for small businesses, who are apparently going to find it time consuming and expensive dealing with selling cigarettes without conspicuous branding and it's going to put them all out of business... and, we're reminded, it won't work to stop smokers smoking anyway and it's an entirely pointless exercise of minor irritation.

If we look at the market for cigarettes, we'll see that it's made predominantly out of pre-existing smokers and prospective new smokers. Since this is a product which eventually kills most of its consumers, attracting people who don't currently smoke to the path of lung cancer is the way to increase profits and market share. We also know that smokers tend to be fairly brand loyal, and this is despite the decrease over time in allowable cigarette advertising, because smoking and purchasing cigarettes eventually become habitual behaviour. This means that it may be easier to increase sales by attracting new people to smoking than it is to convince a smoker to switch brands.

Given what we know of the behaviour of smokers as consumers, it seems odd that cigarette companies feel genuinely threatened by the advent of plain packaging. If all brands are forced to have the same shite packaging, this actually removes an element effectively creating a branding demilitarised zone, where all of a brand's competitors are being compelled to behave in the same way.

This surely means that cigarette companies are more concerned that olive green packaging will stop people taking up smoking in the first place, and so impact their bottom line. If the risk of lung and throat cancer's not going to do it, I hesitate to suggest an ugly package will have that much impact - but why else is Big Tobacco splashing out on these campaigns?

Funding public information campaigns for corporate self-interest is not new, and it makes sense as entirely rational behaviour for a corporate entity to engage in - if a new tax will cost your business $1 billion, but you can stop it with a $6 million television, radio and print media blitz aimed at convincing the average punter that your interests are their interests, then it makes rational sense to do so. We've seen it with the Mining Super Profits Tax, too (Clive Palmer really cares about your superannuation, kids, that's why so many of his profits stay in Australia). We'll see it again as various interest groups come out against carbon pricing, too. What these campaigns tell us is that someone within the corporate interest group has crunched the numbers and discovered that even a very expensive campaign will be cheaper than the cost of successful legislative reform.

So, cigarettes are doing us damage and green packaging is apparently going to make fewer people take up smoking, even the tobacco giants are placing their bets there. Cue half the Australian denizens of the internet calling for the government to show some stones and raise the excise by more than 50 per cent in line with the recommendations of the preventative health taskforce. Why, if the government wants to make a moral statement about cigarettes, do they not just raise the excise to price addicted smokers out of the market, or ban cigarettes altogether?

Libertarian moral panic inevitably follows, trailing conspiracy theories about how wedded to the income from tobacco excise the Australian government really is, so much so that it's worth the extra costs to the healthcare system which smokers inevitably bring. If the government really wanted people not to smoke they'd make it much more expensive, they say, with the kind of po-faced ignorant sneer typical of those who find the arguments presented on bumper-stickers compelling.

Smoking excise is a regressive tax. It's a tax targetted disproportionately at those of lower socio-economic backgrounds who are more likely to smoke. As an addiction, it becomes for some households a necessity in the family budget. Making cigarettes cost more means some families will buy less bread, milk, schoolbooks, and moreover it leaves the government open to accusations of cash-grabbing by the sorts of people who think speed cameras exist purely to raise revenue.

A balance needs to be struck between disincentivising smoking through pricing signals - because we don't want to be seen as promoting risky behaviour amongst the poorer groups within society- and recognising the nature of addiction means that people will often buy the product of their addiction even when they cannot afford to.

Sure, if the government really wanted to stop people smoking, they could ban it entirely (because that worked so well for alcohol in 1930s America). They could legislate that cigarettes have to taste like rotting arse, too. They could require that they be available only under prescription, thus making doctors waiting rooms places of cranky withdrawing nicotine addicts and week long queues for a check-up. Sadly, an excise on cigarettes does not exist in a vaccuum, and public policy considerations are necessary.

It was never going to be an uncontroversial move, but by making the available options less palatable but still allowing the individual free choice to smoke or not to smoke, the Labor government has come in for ridicule rather than aggressive criticism based more firmly in social justice, equity and civil liberties.

Even though Phillip Morris and Co are quaking in their large tobacconist cowboy hats at the prospect of generic packaging, I think the politicians have underestimated the appeal of communist chic with the indie/hipster kids generation. While I'm manifestly not a cool kid, and hence can't be certain about this, I suspect the kinds of kids who drink Pabst Blue/Melbourne Bitter for the irony value will lap up the plain packaging for the faux anti-consumerist trendy it will impart.

It is therefore possible that government is just starting a populist campaign to get rid of annoying hipsters, one diseased lung at a time, as they all rush to accessorise with some ironically topical tobacco products. As the spoilt indie kids come out to play once more with the conspicuous traits of the working class, the working class just might be so disgusted with the mirror being held up to them that there'll be a rush on cissy Nicabate and smoking will be something done exclusively by trendy elite of wankers. Chuck us the Winnie Greens, will you love?

Into the Advertising Abyss: Supermarket Wars

It might be the two years I spent studying BComms, but more likely it's my recent overdosing on (the frankly brilliant) Mad Men, that makes me feel so (unjustly) qualified to form opinions on the advertisements assailing me from supermarket aisles as I groggily and somewhat unevolvedly hunt for the essentials; juice, cheese, and for the love-of-shiny something caffeinated. This week, I'm looking at what some major campaigns are trying to convince you to buy this week, and how they might be considered to have somewhat cocked it up.

I'll start with the alarming. Woolworths' giant cardboard cut-outs of Margaret Fulton are an unkind thing to have jump out at a sleep-deprived and hungover undergraduate on a Sunday afternoon. I'm not entirely sure what this campaign is supposed to do except make children cry out in fear. I wasn't equipped with a ubiquitous cameraphone, but here's a much smaller sample image of Our Lady of Cookbooks. If I recall correctly, the only difference is the cutout is lifesized, and I think she may be wielding some cut of meat like the alpha Zombie at the front of the horde.

(frightening)

I'm as big a fan of Fulton's recipes as the next child of the Australian 1980s. For some reason, however, I had thought that she had passed peacefully away in her sleep at some point in the past few years. This is something I was genuinely a touch sad about, she seems a nice lady who really enjoys baking and who won't sue me for stating that her cut-out alter ego frankly terrifies me. This leads to the situation where this new campaign unfortunately makes me think "Tsk, Woolworths, using the re-animated corpse of Margaret Fulton to sell yourselves as fresh. Look at those cold, dead, betrayed eyes". Or it would, if my brain wasn't too busy quivering in fear and trying to hide behind my liver from what may be a scout send ahead from the apparently oncoming zombie hordes.

As a side note, I'm genuinely quite pleased Margaret Fulton is not dead. As is, I think, the organic supplier whose trademark "Honest to Goodness" is the subject of proceedings against Woolworths, since this is the phrase emblazoned across cardboard Maggie. The supplier claims it's a rip off of his trademark - Woolworths claim that it's a commonly used phrase which they should absolutely be allowed to whore out in to support their claim that they are fresher, healthier, more honest than their frankly identical competitors.

Aldi is back in the game as well, setting itself up as the third party for Australian shoppers with a campaign where they ask "What will you spend the your Aldi savings on?". I found the TV spot for this when I was looking for a copy of the poster to link you to, somewhat bewildered that the answer appears to be "A water feature".

The video merely confirms what I thought was an interpretation-fail by me ("no one could seriously be answering this question with water feature, maybe it's about family-time or purchasing small children on the internet or something. Wait, what the?")-but the answer is, depressingly enough, a water feature. They're presumably not saving up for water-feature number 2, or they would have remembered to bring their greenbags instead of buying the plastic ones instore.

I'm not sure what kind of market research went into this, but I get the impression it's founded in the notion that Australians can be convinced to change their shopping habits over Freudianesque fountain-envy, a point not-so-subtly rammed home as the non-Aldi-shopping neighbour in the piece holds a wilty looking, much smaller garden hose as he gazes covetously at his neighbour's spurty barrel-fountain. I think we're no longer talking about Jamie-Durie-esque decorative garden design at this point, although perhaps phallic competition has always been at the heart of Aussie garden design. Crap. That thought, and distant memories of Gardening Australia and Burke's Backyard are probably now going to cause me to wake screaming in fear at some point.

Also, I know virtually every wholesome Aussie ad runs a bingley jingle as background to their smiley family of actors, but that one is particularly grating.

It's probably a moot point at this stage, but does Aldi even sell water features?

Just once I'd like to see a "look what you can spend your savings on" campaign that doesn't result in the answer being some entirely boring unnecessary consumeristic status anxiety piece of crap. Why not have neighbour A's kids having a college fund by dint of the twenty-five cents Mum and Dad have saved buying Aldi brand fish-fingers? Why not show them getting mail from the family they're sponsoring in Darfur with the extra cash they have now that their bog-roll costs less? Hell, why not have a suite of adult escorts pull into the driveway in the last frame to show that a year's worth of purchases at a supermarket that does low-budget remarkably well gives you more money to spend on areas where you really shouldn't cut costs?

I don't know. Sometimes I think advertisers just aren't trying any more. Insert wholesome looking family + at least one cute child + tacky jingle + soft-focus homey backgrounds (kitchen/garden). Attach interchangeable brand, sell to highest bidder. Branding Aldi as a cheaper alternative - that's a reminder, not a rebrand. Woolworth's fresh food people imaging is also not really improved by continued attempts to reshape and redevelop it, particularly where they've tried (somewhat unsuccessfully, in my view) to attach another Australian brand to themselves as a kind of quality stamp. They'd almost both be better reverting to shouty community television ads where they just hope your brains will fall out your ears in a mushy goo trickle, and you'll end up craving whatever brand of snackfood it is that is exclusively available at one of the nearest major supermarkets. A tip, though- just try to be alert, and not alarmed, by the cardboard zombie Fultons.

Curmudgeon Asks: Where The Bloody Hell Are You, Then?

Forgive me internets, for I have sinned; it has been more than a week since I have updated this portfolio of cranky. The three spam-bots, two people and functionally literate chimpanzee who read regularly will, I am sure, grow and move on.



Canberra has been in the midst of what can fondly be termed IndieFest2011 (also known as the You Are Here festival) for just over a week now, with festivities winding up this weekend. I know it's fashionably post-hipster to sneer ironically at hipsters (and am clearly guilty of it myself at times), but I'm going to concede that this was actually a pretty cool idea. Any publicly funded arts event will inevitably raise some hackles about what the money could have been better spent on, but my best guess would be that this was run on a relative shoe-string, with the highest costs being printing the (admittedly very hipster) program and probably public liability insurance, with quite a bit of support being kicked in by local businesses like the alternative bookstore, all of whom will ultimately benefit if this grows big enough to rival Newcastle's This Is Not Art (TINA) Festival.

As with any festival of arts, attendees probably need to suspend their snark reflex, seek out the events they're most likely to enjoy, and try not to be whiny jerks about the free entertainment in some vain attempt to appear more interesting/complex/sophisticated/coolly aloof than everyone else. Fun and irony in equal measures abound if you're willing to kick in and explore, but if your idea of a great evening is pontificating about your general superiority from the couch then you'll probably have a terrible time.

Given the crapload of money the Territory will be spending on supporting a loud and sparkly firework background to bogan debauchery this weekend (Skyfire), recognition of Canberra's thriving and largely unpaid arts community goes some way to acknowledging the diversity of the Canberra community: we have, at the very least, bogans, hipsters, and the public service to consider. Plus, Friday night's Zombie prom was all kinds of amusement. Cheers to the organisers - you might be incorrigible hipster kids for all I know- but you manage some excellent festival.

CisforCurmudgeon: Why Sophie Mirabella is not Gaddafi; On Getting Along

Like all misanthropes, I cherish living alone as a sort of Valhalla-type paradise of win. Hells yeah, every day is pants-free day and I don't have to hide the gin! Unfortunately, the economics of being neither congenitally wealthy nor a high-priced hooker means that securing a one bedroom home within two hours drive of university or work is about as attainable as the Prime Ministership - should everyone else who wants to live in Canberra fall off the face of the planet in some freak accident that rewrites our understanding of gravity I might be in with a shot- otherwise it's housesharing, that quaint university town practice where people you don't necessarily know very well become your nearest neighbours and gen Y select-a-family. At some point, as well, you're probably going to have to leave your room and get to know these strangers you live with.

My current select-a-family is pretty decent. They're both literate, relatively clean, definitively not racist, and most of the time they pay the rent. We've reached a point of self-referential familial comfort whereby we now stage enormous twitter house civil wars over people's opinion of Black Swan (if you're new, you can find my thoughts on the matter here). Housemate B recently saw this film and decided that he liked it. Since Housemate B is in all other respects a gentleman of discerning tastes, I have to conclude that he is either trolling me (a unique experience when there is the continuous and ominous threat that either one of us might shave off the other's eyebrows in their sleep) or that some hipster zombie stole his brain once the film had lulled him into the semi-consciousness such faux-artistic travesty inevitably promotes.

The point is, like parliamentarians (and except for in relation to Black Swan, you hipster nerd) we've probably got more in common than not. All parties are able to recognise that leaving someone else's cheese on the bench to go sweaty is a crime against all that is right and good in the world. Likewise, all parties are aware that picking a fight over cheese is the action of a petty tyrant, and life mostly goes on and everyone gets to keep their eyebrows. Win! I think the important thing is that no one ever gets compared to Gaddafi over who takes the rubbish out, and I think that makes our house of largely itinerant student-types a cut above Coalition MPs like Sophie Mirabella, at least in terms of basic human decency and perspective.

If we want to split hairs on this issue, what Sophie actually said this week was that if PM Gillard believed people were actually willing to pay more for things to offset the risk of cataclysmic climate change, then she was clearly "as deluded as Colonel 'My people love me' Gaddafi". Which is not entirely the same as calling someone a mad dictator, but given the wide range of possible similes to draw other than unstable and violent dictators turning the army onto protesters, it is clear that Sophie was showing the restraint, civility and quality judgment of Charlie Sheen on a drug binge. Also, Tony Abbott gets shouty a lot, and so did Hitler. Not that I'm saying, of course, that the two have anything else in common...


Is it trite to compare what happens in the national parliament to what housemates do when someone won't take out the rubbish, or leaves the cheese to go sweaty on the bench? Yes. It absolutely is. We work on the assumption that our representatives are presumably supposed to be better than this, above petty disputes and the kinds of minor human failings that characterise the interactions of the mere plebeian class. If I have to put on pants and learn people skills in order to go downstairs and use the toaster, by all that is right I expect our politicians - practitioners of the 'art of the city-state', to go at least one better than that. Accordingly, however, when the Libyan people are dying on the streets for the sorts of basic rights we take for granted in this country, it is fair to say that is cheap and shallow, by any standard, to use the name of their oppressive dictator to describe a political opponent who wants to institute a carbon tax.

In other news, South Australians are represented by someone who is incapable of making a rhetorical point without an extended hokey-pokey dance session, so maybe we should just all hope our global leaders have long since lost access to the nuke launch codes, settle them down for a post-afternoon-milk nap, and teach them about sharing, toilet-training and human decency once they wake up. Think back to the most thuggish kid you knew in kindergarten - the one that threw sandpit trucks at other kids and who perpetually had one finger up his nose as though attempting to dig through to his scalp. That kid probably votes now, and there's a reasonable chance he might get elected to the Australian parliament to represent your interests at home and abroad.

Maybe we should just all climb back into the trees and wait for armaggedon, really.

[P.S - The Asshattery Award would go to Sophie Mirabella this week, except the fact that she exists and gets to wander around being a representative of the human race, much less a parliamentarian, makes me so despair of the human race that I want to go curl into the foetal position under my bed and wait for society to make some sense. Also, I think if we're handing out awards for worst human being this week Gaddafi probably ought to make the short list, and I don't want to fall into a Mirabellan rhetorical trap].

CisforCurmudgeon: Untangling the Assange Debate

Julian Assange's legal team are currently contesting the extradition order made in Belmarsh last week which would see Assange returned to Sweden to face charges of sexual assault. Look kids, it's easy. No reference to conspiracy theories, Wikileaks, traitors, trumped up charges or the national misandry of Sweden, just a sentence containing a single fact.

This issue appears to have become a signpost issue for ideological positioning, with various hysterical oversimplifications of the facts highlighting from whence on the political spectrum a person hails from.

Variously, the extreme left holds that the charges themselves are a conspiracy by the US Government to silence Wikileaks, that the women were a honeytrap, that Assange can be more easily extradited from Sweden to the Guantanamo Bay and that Assange is a political prisoner. From somewhere in the deep undergrowth of the centrist left comes support for Wikileaks coupled with suspicion of Assange as an anarchist who wants to overthrow all governments using the weapon of truth, and the claim that anyone who dares suggest anything dodgy about the sexual assault charges is secretly a misogynist and apologist for sexual assault. The vocal far-right variously appears to hold that Assange is a traitor to America, a kind of criminal terrorist mastermind who deserves to be locked up, tortured or executed, and they don't really care by what process this occurs.

Thus simplified, this entire debate seems reminiscent of climate change, with various groups who don't understand the science at all deciding that whether or not climate change is happening is a left-right issue and positioning themselves accordingly. Whether climate change is happening, however, is not a space for ideological argument in the same way that gravity is not. Whether or not the global mean temperature is rising, and why, is part of a series of discoverable facts about the universe, and politics really should only be coming into it as a matter of public policy - determining what action needs to be taken, given the best possible understanding of the facts.

The problem with positional adoptions of factual situations is that, even in our cutesy post-modernist intellectual world, science, the law, and David Duchovny's character in the X-files all want to hold that there is a truth out there, somewhere. The bulk of commentators, coming largely from non-specialist media, appear to be content, once they realise the extent to which they must wade through the arcane system of law or complexities of science, to settle somewhere near the bottom and draw conclusions according to the most convenient selection of facts.

Julian Assange's extradition was heard by a Magistrate at Belmarsh. Under the 2003 Extradition Act, which brought British law in line with EU extradition agreements, the Court needed to ascertain that Assange was wanted for a prosecution of an extraditable offence, and also that none of a specified list of exceptions which would make extradition unjust, applied. The court ruled that, although Assange was not arraigned for the alleged charges, certain oddities of the Swedish judicial system meant that we could understand that Assange was in fact wanted not merely for questioning, but for answering the charges before a Swedish Court. The threshold here is low, and the British court would have had to impugn the Swedish process for handling sexual assault charges and indeed the Swedish legal system as being susceptible to coercion, were the judgement made that Assange's extradition to face these charges was improper. In shiny new EU happy family land, that was always going to be extraordinarily unlikely.

That being said, Assange's legal team is correct to appeal this decision to a higher court. The central evidence in favour of Assange's extradition was provided in affidavit (written) form, and the prosecutor did not make herself available for cross-examination, meaning that evidence was never tested. The alleged events took place between 13 and 19 August 2010. On 20 August 2010 the Swedish prosecution (improperly) made a media announcement that Assange was the subject of a rape investigation. At some point over the next month, the charges are dropped by the Swedish prosecution and Assange is advised he will not be held to answer them. Enter the new prosecutor, Ms. Ny, who decides to prosecute after all.

This raises some questions about why the prosecution was revived. In the case of sexual assault, it is manifestly unlikely that new evidence arose, as the nature of the offence is such that evidence is eroded over time. It is also unlikely that, over time, a witness' statement becomes more credible. This makes the decision to re-open the prosecution appear to be a politically motivated one.

I do not wish to comment on the likelihood or otherwise that Assange has committed the offences that are alleged. I know that some commentators have, but to my mind as someone who was not present at the time, my opinion is entirely invalid and would be based on speculation. I do note that the process by which Swedish courts handle sexual assault charges is considerably more private than in our common law tradition. The media in Australian trials is allowed to be present but restricted in what they can report. In Sweden, they are not entitled to be present. A single judge and panel of three political appointees hear evidence and interrogate the accused and witnesses. A judgement issues at the end, but to my mind, if I were hoping to tar and feather someone without giving them an opportunity to publicly defend what have been extraordinarily public accusations, there could be no better venue selection. This is especially the case given the media play the prosecution case has already had in Sweden, with there being little left in terms of protecting the identities of the victims to necessitate a private trial.

Honey trap or no, Assange's extradition is beginning to look very likely, and there are real concerns about impropriety in the way in which the prosecution has handled the investigation. Focus on the idea that it's easier to extradite Assange from Sweden to the US misses a critical point, however, which is that it is not tremendously difficult to extradite from the UK to the US, provided that Assange has a case to answer under US law. Unfortunately for the US, no one can yet point to a US law which he has breached. As is made clear in the judgement issued last week, further extradition from Sweden would likely require the consent of the UK Secretary of State.

I don't think this is a PR move, either, because there is almost no way in which the extraditon of Assange from Sweden to the US doesn't generate a media shit-storm approximately a hundred times bigger than Charlie Sheen's narcissistic meltdown. If the US were prepared to do that, and accordingly undermine the sovereignty of both the UK and Sweden by pressuring their judicial system for a particular outcome, then there's almost no sense in which the US is restrained at all by the restrictions of diplomacy, in which case it would probably have been easier to simply arrange for Assange to be killed and face the possible diplomatic ramifications later.

The real loser in all this is Bradley Manning, the American defence employee who allegedly leaked the cables to Wikileaks in the first place. He's suffering torture, solitary confinement, and the real chance of execution. As a US citizen and someone who leaked confidential information, there are few legal remedies to his current plight. The law, weakened and sullied in a post-911 world to bring us Guantanamo Bay, military trials, and the absence of common law protections for those merely accused of terror offences, in fact protects those who wish to confine, torture and execute Manning. Whether you consider his actions to be a serious crime or not, it remains to be said that his treatment post-arrest has been far beyond what we would hope for from a civilised nation led by the rule of law.

If a tiny bit of the attention on Assange reminds people about Manning, then it can only be a good thing. Underpinning Wikileaks is the notion that exercises of power which occur silently and in the darkest corners where the powerful play, confidentially sequestered from the public gaze, should be feared. Manning's actions, from which we can assume a belief in transparency, shining a light into dark places, has plunged him into the sort of nightmare that makes 1984 look tame, and it is not the time to turn our faces and attention from that dark little military cell in favour of the glittery show-trial of Julian Assange.



Seriously, how can that childlike face not prompt some sympathy, even at the very least 'aw, maybe let's not attach electrodes to its testicles'?

Senior Libs Apologise for Timing of Apology

Desperate to keep the issue of asylum seekers on the agenda, senior Liberals have held yet another press conference to clarify the Coalition's position vis-a-vis funerals for refugees.

"Obviously we are well aware that some sectors of our electorates are suffering the depths of human misery when they are forced to think about tax-payer funding being spent on refugees attending the funerals of family members tragically killed in the Christmas Island boat wreck" said Opposition Immigration Spokesperson (and all-round sensitive guy) Scott Morrison.

"It was insensitive and badly timed for senior figures of the Coalition to suggest that it was insensitive and badly timed to attempt to politicise government facilitation of attendance of refugees at funerals. We simply didn't think about the human cost to the multiculturally-challenged citizens of Mossman and Toorak."

"After extensive tax-payer funds have gone into the detention of these asylum seekers, and then the further cost to the tax-payer of retrieving the bodies of the dead -well, we really think it is our job as the fiscally responsible Opposition to ensure that the government is forced to justify expenditure of every single Aussie taxpayer dollar that could otherwise be going to keep Senator Joyce in off-road vehicles."

Coming so soon after a particularly disquieting episode of Border Security, Opposition leader Tony Abbott joined Morrison in offering their sincerest apologies to any white people who had been further emotionally traumatised, distressed or mildly inconvenienced by their remarks.

As many as 50 people died when the asylum seeker vessel known as SIEV 221 crashed on rocks and broke apart off Christmas Island's Rocky Point in December last year.

The grieving refugees, grown fat on the tax-payer funded teat of luxurious mandatory detention, declined to return CisForCurmudgeon's call prior to publication.

The Surly Valentine

When did this become a thing, this wide-eyed tacky embrace of all things coupledom for St. Valentines' day in Australia? Like Easter and Christmas, it seems to come on earlier and stronger every year. Even my beloved Aldi, the cheap eurotrashy supermarket that keeps me in mushrooms, broccoli and gluhwein while letting me keep my labour in the lower paid community sector, is, two weeks out from the supposed big day, offering chocolate roses. It begins to look as though a total boycott of the festival of mush is entirely impossible. Is there nowhere outside the curmudgeonly cave that is safe from kitsch heartshapes, pinks and reds and cliched sentiment?

It is beyond unlikely that I will be spending February 14th entwined with some other soul, making mushy faces in some overcrowded restaurant, gushing over something Hallmark finds a romantic sentiment, and pretending that every cliched motif of romanticism is somehow a sweet and unique expression of something genuine, as opposed to a crassly commercial, over-packaged and manufactured emotion. Of course, your Curmudgeon would say that. My history around these situations is somewhat fraught.

Growing up in Australia in the 1990s, Valentines Day was a concept as foreign as Krispy Kreme doughnuts and Halloween. There were always going to be a couple of people who embraced the concept, but we never exchanged cards at school or really focussed on the day as a calendar event. When I was fourteen, I contemplated organising a Valentines' day gift in a fit of tacky adolescence, but decided instead to dispense chocolate frogs to other girls at my single sex school who did not have single stems of roses to carry from class to class all day (P.S girls who did have roses, please note they *will* fit into a locker, stop with the conspicuous smuggery). That became a fun tradition as, adolescents being adolescents, there was always someone in need of chocolate and cheering up on this day designed to remind us all that, OMG, the perfect state of being is to be permanently attached to someone else.

As we got older, it became the Anti-Valentines outdoor cinema night, or the Lonely Hearts (fuck you, Valentines Day) bar crawl. It was a paean and ode to our youth, our freedom, and the city we found ourselves in. Healthy sense of irony engaged - no one was particularly bitter about being single, but nor were we in a hurry to hide at home from the smug couple hordes. We believed this night should belong to us as well.

I haven't always been as single on Valentines day as I will be this year. I too have had the gushy Valentines Day experience of the cringeworthily cutesy young love variety. I forget what we did, but I recall he wrote me a poem and we had what could somewhat unoriginally be described as a magical evening. Melbourne in February puts on decent weather, and it felt like we had all the time in the world. It was coffee, sunshine, our own little world - but then, when you're a little bit in love with someone every day is like that. The crowds and the conspicuous coupledom of the holiday of lurve neither adds nor detracts, because that would involve peeking outside the adolescent-hormone bubble of each other and noticing that the rest of the world continues to turn.

The relationship was pretty seriously on the rocks when we shared a Valentines Day which involved a teddy bear holding a heart, a single rose, and some chocolate, the scatterbomb approach to human engagement if I've ever seen it. I was never sure if he covered all of the traditional bases because we had just gotten back together after a break-up, if everything was half-price (since we'd missed the actual day out of a combination of busyness and apathy), or if he genuinely didn't realise that the poem he'd written me a year before, the notes he used to leave scattered around my room, actually meant something, whereas a bear saying "I wuv you" means someone's suffered a frontal lobotomy. We had stopped putting anything of ourselves into what we were doing, and we were ready to settle for tokenistic and expected.

The curmudgeon comes out here - these things were somewhat meaningless because they had nothing to do with who either of us were as people. They involved a transaction in which no thought was required, to purchase a message that was made trite and somewhat meaningless by mass-production. This is not an aesthetic or consumeristic point - I would not have liked the idea of these gifts any more if they were expensive, quite the contrary - the only reason I had any time for them at all was because, despite everything, I cared for the person proffering them. It was the fact that thoughtfulness ceased to become a part of the situation. A plush heart to say "I love you" is about as meaningful as a fill-in-the-blanks eulogy from a cereal packet.

Since then I've largely avoided VD in all its forms. If I like someone, I don't need the excuse to show my affection. I do hereby pledge, however, that I will never buy someone a plush animal wielding a heart in cold blood. Maybe this year I'll distribute chocolate frogs to my friends or leave a thoughtful note somewhere to be found, or I'll go back to my favourite haunts and let my city be my Valentine for one more year. Being a complete and solitary human being on Valentines Day, despite the social pressures of monogamy etcetera, is something of a relief. This year I'm curling up with a volume of Charlie Brooker's articles, listening to Van Halen and not giving a fuck what anyone thinks. I recommend it.

Fundies Ineffectual in Aid Relief: Send Help, Not Prayer, says QLD.

This was originally written at the height of the Queensland flood coverage back in January 2010 for release on www.threesixfive.org, a site devoted to the satirisation of current affairs from an Australian perspective. As TSF appears to have had a life-cycle shorter than the average double-glazing start-up company, I've reproduced the article here for your general amusement.



Fundies Ineffectual in Aid Relief: Send Help, Not Prayer, says QLD.
The wrath of God is upon Queensland in the form of a shit-tonne of water because Kevin Rudd "not only called on Israel to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), but said it should open all its nuclear facilities to UN inspectors", according to Catch the Fire Ministries’ Pastor Nalliah.

Authorities have not responded to what Nalliah refers to as "floods of biblical proportions" by constructing a large wooden boat and plotting the slow death of every species on the planet through the sorts of genetic diversity failures that happen when an entire species is descended from just two samples. Evacuation and relief funding are, controversially, being considered more responsible state responses than constructing an Ark.

Authorities also urge concerned Queenslanders not to go rounding up two of every animal just yet, (especially since locating the dinosaurs will be pesky), citing implausibility that God came out of aeons of retirement purely to dampen some bogans. Nalliah, who frequently blames and praises God for various atmospheric and physical conditions causing natural disaster in Australia, denies that his God is not that petty, saying He absolutely would.

However, despite these massive, Mel Gibson reminiscent, fits of pique utilising the full force of natural disaster, God was apparently powerless to stop satanic rituals/teenagers drinking goon on a mountain near parliament from promoting parliamentary discussion of equality for homosexuals. In early 2010, these events prompted an evangelistic roadtrip from Nalliah’s congregation, who hoped daubing olive oil and babbling in tongues on said mountain would solve the whole ‘evil female Prime Minister’ problem for God.

To be fair, He has probably just been too busy reading the minute details of every press-release our Foreign Minister has ever put out in relation to Israel. It's not like being an omnipresent dude means you can be everywhere at once. Hang on a second...

Nalliah also takes credit for the "saving of Rockhampton", claiming that this was the result of “answered prayers”, exulting “We have a God who answers prayer!”. The nature of such a "miraculous" escape for the citizens of Rockhampton is questionable, given the context in which it occurs, with a rising damage bill and more than eight people confirmed dead across the state - but hey, Rockhampton's okay! Thanks, God!

Except... well, Rockhampton's really not okay, is it? It was submerged under six feet of floodwater, and remaining survivors are having to deal with venomous snakes driven into populated areas by rising floodwater.

If we assume the correlation implies causation logic which works so well for CTF Ministries' press releases, then the real culprits become apparent - adherents to the faith are simply not praying hard enough. Certainly things appeared to go backwards for Rockhampton after Pr. Nalliah’s announcement.

And if their prayers are being heard and answered, then what precisely does CTF have against the rest of Queensland, that it refuses to use this apparently magical line to divine emergency assistance to help Brisbane, Theodore, Dalby and Bundaberg?

Not to be too picky, but if one has a direct personal relationship with an interventionist metaphysical being capable of exercising supernatural power that can't be explained by mere climate physics or meteorological science, why be so half-arsed about it as to ask that it be slightly less of a bad situation than in other disaster zones? Why not ask, while you're at it, that the floodwater be turned into something useful?

There's biblical precedent for this with the whole 'water into wine' miracle. In this reporter's experience of Queenslanders (ed: schoolies), they are a people uniquely placed for the challenge of drinking away the flood, provided the floodwater was turned into mediocre beer (wine being something more of a challenge to the palate to the average Toowoomban, if I recall correctly - these are a people who will drink Mebourne Bitter even when there are other beers available).

Kevin Rudd has had a pretty crappy year, Pr. Nalliah, and it seems a bit of a stretch to argue that the mere suggestion by Rudd that Israel should be compliant with the sorts of international standards we apply to any nuclear state would cause God to wash away half of Queensland. I mean, sure, the Labor Party blames him for things which are also only slightly correlational, like hung parliaments, but at least if you squint there’s a causative link.

On the other hand, Pr. Nalliah want us to believe God answers his prayers sufficient to ‘only smite Rockhampton a little bit’, on his instructions, which suggests that Catch the Fire Ministries presumably also in some way instructed God to flood the rest of the sunshine state.

If someone has access to supernatural forces which can wash away entire towns, cause untold damage to the economy and potentially kill hundreds of people, and that person is prepared to use that influence to influence political outcomes (such as letting Israel construct an unregulated nuclear force in order to hasten the Armageddon that CTF believes will bring on the return of Jesus and the rapture), that person is at least one of three things. They are either dangerously deluded, someone who ought to be detained under anti-terror laws by using the threat of violence for political ends, or they are cynical and manipulative assholes seeking to gain through the misery of others.

Clearly, the only way to avoid any of the above charges is to harness the glorious power of prayer to turn the snake-infested rivers into rum, or to deliver a heavenly bounty of enough Sham-wows to soak up the equivalent of two Sydney Harbours.

In the alternative, perhaps Pastor Nalliah and his rabid flock may be persuaded to leave the floods analysis to the experts and stop seeking credit for things they can in no way meaningfully influence through telepathic conversations with their apparently petty and vindictive imaginary friend.


--> Addendum: Since posting, there has been some more crazy, nicely summarised and snarked by PZ Meyers over at Pharyngula.
----

P.S Since there’s unlikely to be a divinely alcoholic intervention anytime soon, I heartily endorse supporting the Flood Relief Appeal, here. It's getting a lot less coverage than it was at the height of the floods, but the clean up continues and funds are still desperately needed.

Curmudgeon Reviews: Black Swan

IMDB describes: "A ballet dancer wins the lead in "Swan Lake" and is perfect for the role of the delicate White Swan - Princess Odette - but slowly loses her mind as she becomes more and more like Odile the Black Swan, daughter of an evil magician." That's probably a fair synopsis, although it does entirely manage to avoid discussion of Natalie Portman's crotch. Given the gratuitous number of times the film returned to focus on that region, I would almost have expected it to get a billing all its own.

I am somewhat at a loss to understand the critical acclaim which has followed this film, particularly when compared with the masterful character work in The King's Speech. It manages to bewilder and disturb audiences with what appears to be a spectacular attempt to be artsier-than-thou. This film was alienating and mawkish at worst, and simply pretty and awkward at best. It's that hipster kid at the party who wants to argue with you about how he was a hipster before anyone else even knew what it was.

It's not trendy to diss this film, as emaciated Natalie Portman (it's amazing how malnourishment can age a person) goes somewhat brilliantly mad, as illustrated by visceral and downright gory special effects that are actually painful to watch, and perhaps the most cringeworthy and entirely gratuitous female masturbation portrayed on screen in any cinema where the seats aren't hosed down after a screening.

It is a film that wants very badly to be an artistic, interesting masterpiece, but it ends up being awkwardly overplayed, painful to watch, and unrewarding as a cinema experience. At times, Portman's portrayal shines, but almost as often we are left with the wooden character familiar to those who followed her Star Wars prequel days. There is a sense that with the loss of a quarter of her body weight and presumably intense dance training that the recognition of her acting in this film is more a reflection on the hard work that went into the role, much like Nicole Kidman's having to wear a false ugly nose to play Virginia Woolf, rather than any sine qua brilliant performance.

Try as it might, it lacks the depth and substance a film so wholly unentertaining requires. The symbolism is obvious and overplayed, while the narrative within a narrative (the Swan Lake motif) provides no interesting twist. Broken music box ballet dancers. The breaking in of ballet shoes. The children's toys and single bed. The red lipstick. The perfect bun which becomes disarrayed as the character begins to fall apart. This film stabs you in the eyes with the sorts of screamingly obvious film techniques studied to death in high schools across the country, without once engaging on a deeper level.

The gore was realistic and visceral - blood, tearing skin, broken bones, scar-tissue - enough to be uncomfortable viewing. This too was overdone, gratuitous, and seemed to lack a deeper narrative point beyond shock value and the illustration of Portman's character's fading grasp of reality.

Add to this, the characters are often shrill and not especially likeable. There is a tendency toward downward spirals of mental stability rather than any sort of development. With one possible exception, they are so superficial that despite the fairly unpleasantly violent events which occur to them, they evoke little sympathy. For example, the girl next to me audibly cheered when one of them was stabbed in the face with a nail file, which was a sentiment I could sympathise with. The audience members find themselves putting not insubstantial amounts of effort into the film in the form of suspension of disbelief, for minimal reward. I won't spoil the ending any more than the producer did, suffice to say 'trite and cliched' would be a generous description. Frustrating.


High points
~The highest point of the film, for me, was the mild ironic value of Winona Ryder's character having some crap stolen from her. That's right, petty larceny for the no longer especially topical inadvertent LOL. The film so failed to transport me that by this stage the recollection of Ryder's shoplifting charges was something my brain did to amuse itself while this film failed to engage it with anything of substance.

~The drug trip that lasted the entire rest of the film. One can only assume that they shared the good stuff with some of the reviewers/awards panels floating about. Honestly, honey, when your reality shifts that quickly and remains that warped for so long, you need to eat a sandwich or something and try not to puke up every piece of sustenance that crosses your lips. Which reminds me...

~Bravo to the ballet film for the vague social policy win in the example that eating disorders aren't fun, and they aren't clever. This was probably entirely inadvertent, but it is nevertheless a positive thing. Oh yes, thinspired fourteen year olds, do you really want to look fifty and mummified when you're supposed to be playing a character in their early twenties? Purging's not so fun now, is it?

~The film was, I must concede, visually spectacular at times, with costuming and make-up especially well done, but these were features which occasionally arrested my attention, long enough to make it vividly apparent that the rest of the film was quite disappointing.

~The biggest highlight? The end credits. This was a film which made you appreciate life and never want to waste one hundred and eight minutes of it in such frustratingly aimless pursuit ever again.

Curmudgeonly Weekender

There's a broad misconception about us curmudgeonly types that we are surly kill-joy pessimists who hate the world all of the time. Not so, at least in this case. No one has the energy for that sort of single-minded raging fervour these days anyway (with the possible exception of Andrew Bolt). My personal curmudgeonly streak comes more from the sort of warped idealism that genuinely sees how much better the world could be, if only people thought more about things that genuinely matter and were less easily swayed by manipulation of their worst, most insecure sides (Thanks, Border Security and Neil Strauss). There is very little to deeply loathe, for example, about the sort of lazy Saturday that follows a delightful Friday summer evening in good company.

As Bertrand Russell argued, leisure is essential to both human happiness and a functional society. Tea, fruit salad on warm maple pancakes and a copy of the Good Weekend in a peaceful house while the smell of summer rain wafts through the open window may not be Marx's idea of anything other than bourgeois decadence, but the space, time and peace in which to shrug off the pressures of the world must surely be critical to the ability to beat down the oppressiveness of Mondays and the great mass of human stupidity more broadly.

I believe I have come to that point in my life in which solitude has such comfort that, while it is delightful to share the company of a good friend, there is nothing especially lonely about being alone. The opportunity to recharge, rebuild the resilience which has taken a bit of a battering over the past few weeks, is invaluable to a mindset which allows for a healthy curmudgeonly bemusement at the general foolishness of life, rather than anything genuinely bitter and hate-filled.

Mind you, as a complex entity fully capable of experiencing a complex range of (even sometimes contradictory) emotions at the same time, there's still a part of me that, on Friday night encounters with Narcissus at the bar, would like nothing more than to gently shove him (with a feather-light touch of acerbic wit) so that he falls, flailing with a splash into the reflection he is so enamoured of. It's not that I'm opposed to musculature- quite the contrary, in fact - it's just that, well, I can't help think that the time spent polishing one's arm muscles until they are shiny, beyond anything necessary for the mere lifting of stuff, is probably indicative of the kind of insecurity that powers serious mental delusions.

But today is a day of leisurely bliss, which will probably involve the production of baked goods, wandering about the fresh food markets, and other such prosaic joys, and so I shall leave off the curmudgeonly rant about gym junkies for another day.


Coming soon on C is for Curmudgeon:
- Gym Junkies;
- Tracey Grimshaw and Current Affairs Programs as Social Justice Advocates;
- Why Pseudo-Pop-Psychology About Dating Spells Doom for Humanity.

Shh! Libraries and the Decay of Civilisation.

Well hello, the Internet. Nice to see you again for another curmudgeonly blog post, dipping once more into the unfathomable depths of cranky rage lurking beneath this mild-mannered exterior.

The local library has turned into a combination hyperdome wrestling centre with flashing lights, vacuous noise and obscene quantities of the kind of literature that is wholly unrepresentative of the notion that we are a moderately advanced culture. That's right, kids, the path to ruin is one where the literate people in our society will only read chick lit about vampires or the sorts of books that form the basis for films with which spend their entire plot budget on explosions. This is the path to a dystopian future where the monkeys keep people in cages and Charlton Heston confuses shouting with dramatic emotional depth ("It's a maaaaadhooooooooouse!").

I dream of the libraries I remember from my childhood, where you had to be quiet on pain of a stern shushing from a serious-looking librarian. The modern community library is the product of a fallen, decadently ignorant civilisation. There are toys, free internet access (ergo lots of bogans shouting out their Farmville achievements), and no one to stop the kids from the local high school hooking up on the beanbags in the reading area. Frankly, it makes me fantasise about when global hegemony is mine and I get to institute literacy and intelligence tests in order to ensure that the deeply stupid are quarantined in their own homes. This may sound somewhat illiberal, but I can assure you that it is essentially for their own safety. I'm not cruel, they'll still have access to all the Judge Judy, Jerry Springer, and Farmville they could want. Give the modern semi-literate bogan a McDonalds which delivers and house arrest will probably even be a kindness.

I don't understand this notion that we need to 'modernise' libraries, as though free access to books is somehow an anticlimax that can only be sold to the populace by stealth. "Oh look, here near all the free internet access and DVD collections of Jersey Shore, there are these bound things with lines of text in them! Maybe you could pick up some literacy by sheer proximity!" It is as though local governments are trying to force the stupid to read the way a parent goads a recalcitrant toddler to eat, hiding the wholesome stuff under mountains of sugary crap "Here comes the aeroplane!" Surely we have enough books that are the literary equivalent of cheezburgers (insert yet another dig at Stephanie Meyer here) that this misguided democratisation of our libraries is at best counter-productive, and at worst, simply making libraries no fun for people who actually like reading. Give them some bread with their cake, preferably something dense and grainy with nutritional value and intellectual depth.

I'm painfully aware this entire rant seems a bit elitist and classist, particularly given that it is highly probable that the semi-literate goons disturbing the library peace and disrespecting the books are from the disadvantaged socio-economic classes. We are talking the sorts of people who consider the baby bonus value for money, and who plan a fourth child as a finance scheme for a flatscreen television. Flatscreens appear to be important bogan lifestyle necessities, perhaps because Border Security just isn't as edifying on the smaller screen.

It is elitist, but only a little. I love the idea of democratisation of knowledge. I love the concept of universal literacy, the idea that everyone can have access to the combined knowledge of Western (and for that matter, Eastern) civilisation. Every child should be given the opportunity to know and love Orwell. I just think that turning libraries into entertainment complexes is the worst possible way to go about this grand plan. We should be concerned with helping people reach a reasonable standard, rather than continually lowering the bar. By lowering our expectations of these groups within society we do them a far greater disservice in the long term.

Also, my idealism falters somewhat when confronted with the sorts of people who think making a flamethrower from a Lynx deodorant is the height of intellectual endeavour. I am transported to memories of a high school experience in which learning how to put out spot fires in your hair was a necessary survival skill. I can't help wishing these kids had paid more attention when the primary school was trying to help them understand the complexities of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. There is no doubt that the system failed them and that many were probably raised by the kind of only barely sentient bogan parents who see the education system as convenient childcare, a necessary evil until the kids hit sixteen and can go start a family of their own on the dole. Nobody inspired them with the written word, read to them as children, listened to them read. Nobody showed them the value in knowledge, and this is a tragedy. I don't have an easy fix for this, but I think it's probably not a terrible start to bring back corporal punishment and empower librarians to brutally beat people incapable of using inside voices within what should be peaceful places of learning.

At the very least, we should be capable of ensuring a minimal standard of behaviour for within libraries such that they are not periodically turned into centres attracting confused-looking neanderthals whose minimal attention-spans are positively indulged with shiny colours and the sort of literature which would be of more social use pulped and lining litter trays.

Oh, such utopian and nostalgic dreams. The peaceful stacks, the quiet studying areas, the libraries of my youth are gone forever. Libraries now apparently feel the need to compete with the local shopping centre for tack and vacuous shiny things, encouraging 'expression' and 'approachability' so that the bogan is essentially transported to the book section of Big W, except the books are free and no one will shout at them for being particularly obnoxious or letting their children climb all over the shelves.

It is archaic, and far too much to hope, this expectation that people might come to the library to be quiet and read something. It is surely only a matter of time before they begin to hold Zumba classes and offering little cocktail sausages on sticks. And then, why not allow for corporate sponsorship, so that the children's section could, for example, be sponsored by Dora the Explorer and be all about teaching pidgin Spanish and the joy of merchandising to inquiring young minds? Hola Kids! Come Explore(TM) the Dora The Explore(TM) Combine Harvester! It's pink and makes pretty sounds while it's grinding the other neighbourhood kids into a scarlet jammy pulp!

I may have gotten a little carried away there, although since there is apparently already a Dora themed toaster, probably not as carried away as it is possible to get. Let me make this simple point relatively clear. The library should contain books. It should contain useful periodicals. There's probably nothing wrong with some documentary style DVDs in moderation. It should probably contain some sort of internet access, but preferably in a space removed from other areas of the library so that no one needs to hear excitable bogans ramble on about how good they are at Farmville. And maybe some sort of nasty-looking contraption with lots of spikes bearing a sign which explains in quite small and graphic words what happens to those who can't manage to keep their voices down and control their infinitesimally tiny attention spans for the duration of their stay in the region of the books.

We are unfair on the bogan. By never requiring it to adhere to a bare standard of civility we never give it the opportunity to peel itself from the glittery tack of its cultural aesthetic to embrace something more substantial. The modern library is in the business of making the bread and circuses shinier and more distracting while civilisation itself is buried under a mound of consumeristic refuse.

Don't get me started on museums without explanatory placard things, either. Glorified fucking pomo art displays...