The big purple blog is back.

Hurrah!

Posting will now resume at the proper place (see RSS module in the sidebar for links to recent posts at our main site).

Holidays!

Well, Kevin 24/7 might want to keep on working all through the festive season, but for some of us lesser mortals it’s been a rather long and intense year and a bit of recreation is in order! So I’m taking a break from blogging until early in the new year. Let me take this opportunity to thank very much all of you for sharing many of its political and other highlights with me in the blogosphere, and for great comradeship and conversations! My wish is that everyone will have a very happy and relaxed festive season and a wonderful year in 2008!

I’ll leave you, as a bit of a counterpoint to the Christmas Baubles of Doom, with some images of Angels over Brisbane I’ve taken over the last few days on Christmas shopping trips to the mall - higher res versions available by clicking on the link.

Look forward to catching up with everyone in 08!

Now … Also Now

Now:

Clarissa Keil, a freelance writer who “shares her time between Switzerland and Australia”, piously explained it all in the Sydney Morning Herald last week: “The more contemporary practice is a charitable donation on behalf of a family member or friend instead of the purchase of a conventional Christmas gift.”

It works like this. You send your child, say, a note to warn you’ve become so high-minded that they’ll get no present this Christmas. You’ve instead sent the money for their present to one of the many charities now offering “ethical” Christmas gifts.

It’s not the tax deductions you’re after, of course, although you’re careful to keep the receipts. Waste not!

What really stirred you was the thought that your child’s present would do more good if sent to someone who might need it more, such as some herder in Africa or farmer in India.

So World Vision will send, for your children, a goat to Ethiopia or a beehive to the Gaza Strip. Oxfam will send condoms to Zimbabwe and even a $15 bag of manure to a Sri Lankan farmer—which hardly sounds in the Christmas spirit, frankly.

…

(Andrew Bolt, today)

Also Now

Culture Wars… now and forever!

Okay, let’s concede a point to Planet Janet, Bolta and the rest of the defeated culture warriors - we still need your voices in our national conversation! John Quiggin suggests:

With no share of political power anywhere in the country, the culture warriors can’t do any actual harm, except to the conservative side of politics. So, there’s an argument that they should be encouraged, rather than persuaded to give up the struggle.

In a long post about the culture warriors, Quiggin correctly argues that there’s no constituency for most of the moralising mendacity of the punditariat:

As regards the policies themselves, the idea that Australians are brimming with conservative fervour, or any kind of fervour, on these topics is silly in most cases. Most people are vaguely in favour of a republic, but aren’t in any hurry. As regards legal recognition of gay relationships, only a handful of people are aware of the fine distinctions between civil unions and registered relationships, and even fewer care.

Precisely. Which is why, aside from the comedy value, I’d be quite happy for Christopher Pearson and his ilk to go on with their “battlers hate teh gay!” denialism about the fact that the fast eroding economic credentials of the Coalition and WorkChoices were the key factors in swinging the “Howard battlers” away from the Dear Leader. If they’d prefer to believe that sanctimonious posturing about family values is going to be the bbq stopper that reinvigorates the Libs and hurtles them towards electability, so be it. And if the Libs buy it, we’ll be laughing all the way to the next election, fellas…

Ps: Of course, the culture warriors claim they’re vital because they vigorously fight the battle of ideas. Taking the civil unions will be an electoral liability for Labor ”argument” as a case study, the problem with that thesis (as enunciated by John Heard) is, that as Andrew Norton demonstrates, their arguments aren’t arguments and don’t make any sense.

Wikipedia for maps

This link is to an online map of the area immediately around my house. It’s not quite as neat and tidy as the equivalent Google Map, but you’ll have to excuse the cartographer and his equipment for that. The cartographer? For most of the map, yours truly. The equipment? A $200 Garmin GPS unit (there are cheaper units that would do the job, too), a notepad, and a bicycle to speed up the process. But if Google Maps costs nothing, what’s the point of OpenStreetMap, a Wikipedia-style project to make an online street map?

Google Maps might be free to view online, but there’s limits to what you can do. Want to make a map featuring just bicycle trails? You can’t. Want to include a copy of a map in a report you’re producing. You’re not allowed, unless you pay. Want to load it into your car navigation system. No can do - and map updates for in-car GPS systems are bloody expensive! OpenStreetMap data, available under one of the Creative Commons licenses, can be used for any and all such purposes.

Then … Now

Then:

THIS may be my last column. If you don’t see me again, you’ll know the Pinata Left has whacked me, too.

You see, Kevin Rudd’s victory has unleashed a horde of haters with sticks who are trying to sack conservative commentators and close down debate.

Their demands are simple. They won. So shut up. No more of these “culture wars”. No dissent.

Andrew Bolt, yesterday, toeing the “if I do get sacked it will be because Rupert Murdoch is a tool of the left” line first enunciated by Tom Switzer.

Now:

Guest post by Christine Keeler

Being completely unable to cope with the election of a mild-mannered Queensland Christian to the highest political office in the land, Greg has apparently boarded a rickety craft, fled across the seas, and ended up in a settlement somewhere in Israel.

Having read today’s contribution on the audacity of 16 US national security agencies coming to a consensus that Iran is not a nuclear threat what can one say?

And, might I add, just a single response on his ‘blog’, too? Still, I suppose a token comment is better than nothing.

A few points:

Nine: we’re still the one… for sexism

It’s summer and one way to pass the time is to watch the cricket. For gals as well as guys. But that entrenched bastion of blokiness, Channel Nine, it appears, is intent on keeping its cricket coverage a blokes only zone. The SMH reports this morning that Stephanie Brantz has been dumped from Nine’s cricket crew.

CHANNEL NINE’S on-air cricket team will be an all-male bastion once more this summer, with the axing of the sports presenter Stephanie Brantz the latest evidence of a network struggling to shake off the “blokey” culture that has dominated for decades.

When contacted by the Herald yesterday, Brantz claimed she was told by Nine sports bosses that no one on the Australian cricket team wanted to talk to her and this was one of the reasons that she had been frozen out of Nine’s cricket coverage.

But Cricket Australia disagrees:

A spokesman for Cricket Australia, Peter Young, said he was not aware of the cricketers having any problem with Brantz. “Not that I’m aware of and I’d be surprised if they did,” Young said. “They don’t have gender concerns and most of the players I know enjoy female company.”

He said Cricket Australia encouraged broadcasters to include women journalists in their coverage in an effort to lift the number of women watching above its current level of about 35 per cent of viewers.

I can’t see this as anything other than symptomatic of a fast declining old media organisation that’s unable to transcend the aggressive boys’ club culture that mirrored its long term boss Kerry Packer and whose aggression and relentless dysfunctional negativity has seen it dethroned from its perch.

Update: More at Crikey from Glen Dyer, who concentrates on how Brantz was frozen out by her male colleagues and superiors, and thus was denied the chance to do the job she was hired to do. It’s strikingly reminiscent of the treatment of Mary Kostakidis at SBS by another mob of commercial tv cowboys. I wonder if Brantz will take legal action - perhaps some redress from the courts might make these yahoos sit up and take notice.

It merely continues a long line of harassment, abuse and denigration of women reporters, presenters and executives at the Nine Network.

This is the second strike against the returned Nine CEO, David Gyngell. The first was Nine’s News and Current Affairs boss, John Westacott, telling reporter Christine Spiteri that she should look for a job at SBS with a “name like hers”.

Culture warriors refuse to admit defeat!

Dunno if anyone else is still reading the op/ed pages of The Australian post-election. There was quite a bizarre piece in there today from Tom Switzer, the op/editor himself, which Guy Rundle characterised as an application for his own job.

The article is the usual construction – brave put-upon conservatives telling the unpopular verities etc etc to fashionable opinion etc etc. The aim is to make any sacking look like a silencing.

The truth is otherwise, which is why Switzer is worried – News Ltd has run a quasi-hysterical series of campaigns over the past years, around the elites etc, and allowed blatant spinning to infect their news pages.

The result, in terms of an impact on public opinion, has been virtually nil. “Australia is a more conservative place than it was before Howard,” Switzer opines.

Because one pointless controversy isn’t enough.

Tonight I saw one of those typical chase-the-dole-bludger-and-force-him-to-let-you-find-him-a-job stories on TT/ACA/whatever. The journo was reading out quotes from “viewers” to the poor guy as he ran down a mall. Bitching about how unfair it was that he got to live on the dole while the rest of us suckers/highly moral people work hard to make ends meet.

This isn’t new, of course, but it struck me that no-one ever makes the obvious connection between two very popular tabloid “stories”. Everyone, it seems, wants to force dole-bludgers to work, even though they don’t want to, and everyone, it seems, wants to make it easier to sack lazy employees who don’t want to work. In other words, it’s all well and good to be outraged that people are living off society’s dime, and not contributing to society, but what about the business owner who ends up paying them not to work very hard?

Sorry saga continues

It seems authorities are finally going to try and find out who’s responsible for the dreadful Megan Had It Coming site, which was mentioned in a previous post. 

According to The Age:

Authorities are investigating whether an inflammatory blog purporting to be the work of a mother blamed for driving a neighbour’s teenage daughter to suicide is just another hoax in a sorry saga of hoaxes or the real thing.

The blog is hosted on the free Google Blogger site and comprises just three posts. The last one, dated December 3, is headlined I’m Lori Drew.

It is unlikely Lori Drew is to blame for the site. In any instance, why has Google allowed the site to stay uncensored? Google has the ability to identify when blogs contain objectionable content, so it is surprising this has not happened to Megan Had It Coming.  Surely Megan is entitled to be protected from cyberbullying (especially since she was not when she was alive), and given the ridiculous mob-like response to the sorry saga by some bloggers so do the Drew family. There is a lot of junk on the Internet, but this site deserves to be censored.   

Pointless Controversy Resumed

(Achieving Community Division and Increased Newspaper Circulation Through the Rigorous Application of the Thoughts of Chairman Rupert)

I’ve just been taking a look over the recent report of the Victorian Parliament’s Education and Training Committee on Dress Codes and School Uniforms in Schools. The one that recommends that:

… schools work with Sikh students and their communities to negotiate appropriate standards for the kirpan, as part of their general consultation around the wearing of items with religious significance. The Committee also recommends that the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development investigate how the needs of Sikh students can best be met within the duty of care that schools owe to their students, and provide schools with further guidelines or advice if necessary.

A project for the Decents

Predictably, I guess, Pamela Bone’s question to Germaine Greer on behalf of ALL DECENT LEFTIES EVERYWHERE (discussed in this post from me and by Helen at the Balcony) didn’t just get play on Andrew Bolt’s blog, but also resulted in… (drum roll) the inevitable op/ed!!!

It’s a particularly poorly argued piece, even by Bone’s standards. I invite you to consider her admission that her point really wasn’t relevant, and then the strange segue into “but what about Mia Farrow!”… But perhaps the best way of refuting the antipodean Eustonistas is to turn their logic around on themselves. Have a read of this post from Vanessa at Feministing about Iranian feminist activists being arrested, detained and harrassed. Then go here and offer some support for their freedom and their cause. And then ask yourself what Bone is on about with this:

Muslim feminist groups such as Women Living Under Muslim Laws are raising their voices against the misogyny of sharia laws but, with some honourable exceptions, there is no rallying by Western liberals against the gender apartheid under which women in large parts of the Islamic world live, as there was against racial apartheid in South Africa.

If you can step out of Bone’s worldview of emotion and conspicuous compassion (and let’s give her the benefit of the doubt and assume that she really is serious about these issues and doesn’t just raise them to kick the INDECENT LEFT around… a benefit I wouldn’t give to Bolt and other feminists of convenience) and actually think rationally for a moment, it should be blindingly obvious that the way in which support is expressed and campaigning has done has changed since the 70s and 80s - a lot of it is happening on the web. Note that the “crime” for which Jelveh Javaheri was arrested was creating a website to advocate for women’s rights in Iran and note further the dissemination of her views via both that site and blogs run by “Western feminists” who are organising action to free her - if not through the tried and true method of “marching in the streets” which Bone appears to regard as the only yardstick of activism. As Darlene put it on the earlier thread, if you want to know what Western feminists are doing about women’s rights in the Islamic world, just google.

Or you could stay within Bone’s dumbassed paradigm and ask her why she’s not marching in the streets to free Jelveh Javaheri or writing an op/ed about it. After all, the report to which Feministing links was from the Fairfax newspapers, so there’s a reasonable chance Bone would have seen it - concerned as she is about these issues. See what a stupid question that is? Well, that’s the entire logic of Bone and her pals’ loud condemnation of teh Western feminism.

Rudd and the left

Gerard Henderson appears to think that what he might characterise as a marriage of convenience (or perhaps a civil union formalised by an election night ceremony?) between the left and the new ALP government is bound to break up. I’m not so sure, and I’ve put my case at New Matilda today.

BBP07

Troppo is once again running a comp for Best Blog Posts - go round there and nominate some!