Tuesday, January 24, 2017

Incoherence of the Women's March illustrates the folly of today's feminism

Gawd, but “feminism” has lost its way, hasn't it? Lots of evidence of that, of course. But surely the best we've seen for a while was the epic daftness on open display at the Women's March on Washington and similar shriekfests across America, and the globe.

Hell, even the name was, er, msleading. It was called the “Women's March”, but really the "White Liberal Feminist Anti-Trump March" woulda been more accurate.

There were quite a few testosteroids present, too -- pale ones at that! Hmm. Aren't they the eeevil oppressor-droids of the patriarchy, whom all these brave, sassy sheilas had lobbed to rail against?

Michael Moore was there, and he even seemed to emcee it for a while. Bloke does have wedding tackle, right. So how'd he score that gig? Flash his man boobs or something?

Even if you ignore these inconsistencies and accept that the event was truly for women generally, didn't this then invoke the gender binary, a big no-no in liberal circles? Also, there were all those marchers wearing vagina hats, which explicitly equated gender with biological sex. Sooo transphobic!


Then there was the fact that one of the main organizers was a sharia supporter. Perhaps it shoulda been called the “March of the Muslim Sisterhood” …

Pretty clear from all this that these days, chicks who describe themselves as “feminist” have no real clue as to what they actually want -- other than to ponce about in pussy hats, squawking incoherently about imaginary injustices, that is.

Thanks to feminism you can be a privileged white woman in the most powerful nation on Earth; a person who enjoys more freedom and opportunity, better health, pay and working conditions than the vast majority of people who have ever lived, and still be convinced you're horribly oppressed.

WTF?

You've really gotta wonder, what's the appeal? I think that, among other things, feminism supplies a powerful drug for the comfortably smug. In between selfie snaps and visits to the local hairdresser, feminists find a different, more intoxicating excitement in the adolescent fantasy that they are slumming it big time, or living dangerously as rebels in a fascist state, bravely combating their soulless omnipresent oppressors with wit and grit … FFS, what a joke.

Feminism is fiction and fantasy. It's the video game A Sassy Screed; the movie Girlz n the Victim Hood.

It's no wonder then that many sad, washed up ol' Hollywood slebs lobbed at the Women's March for a show of, er, squalidarity. There was Madonna, fresh (if that's the right word) from offering blow jobs to anyone who'd vote for Hillary, bitching about Trump the lecherous barbarian.

As an expression of political support her oral offer was undeniably, er, madgenanimous. But it kinda negated her authority as a moral guide in sexual matters now didn't it?

At the march itself she said she dreamed of blowing up the White House, a kind of incitement to terror. Sure, that was bad. But I think her initial BJ offer was more worthy of Secret Service investigation. Hell, the mere thought of that is terrifying enough! Check out Drake's gag reflex. And that was just from a surprise tonguey!

Then there was Ashley Judd, who performed some crap poem chockas with bolshie cliches. She did it pretty badly, too, with a piss-poor southern accent. (Odd, because she definitely can act.)



Taking Trump's description of Hillary as a “nasty woman”, the poem repeated it like it was a good thing. But if you really look into what Hillary's been up to over the last several decades, “nasty” isn't the half of it. DJT was actually being comparatively respectful, even chivalrous, when he said that.

But in the end poor Ashley didn't come off as a nasty woman. Looked more like a spoiled, silly little girl chucking a massive tanty. Which also describes most feminists these days, let's face it.

Speaking of which, here's my poem on the state of the movement today:

Misogyny, misogyny!
It's all we look for,
All we see,
Oh where would we be without misogyny?


I reckon that sums it up pretty well, don't you?

Thursday, January 19, 2017

Rednecks get Australia Day billboard removed. But loving lefties win in the end. Yay!

Gotta say there's something a bit odd about how this controversial Australia Day billboard story has been developing. See, recently the billboard, which features two girls wearing hijabs, went up in Melbourne.

Apparently some locals arced up about it and it was taken down, scoring reports in the MSM. Now if you look at those, many of the headlines prominently cite “threats of violence” as the reason for removal. But the actual articles carry few details as to their nature.

Take one story from News Ltd., for example. The phrase "threats of violence" is included in the headline. But the only mentions of threats in the actual article are these:

On Tuesday, Victorian Multicultural Affairs Minister Robin Scott revealed the image would be removed, after the company behind the ad, QMS, received threats.

But he warned the issuers of the threats not to take the action as a win.

Further down:

QMS declined to comment on the threats received.

All very vague, innit?

No matter, virtue signalling lefties thought it enough to tweet furiously about those eeevil right-wing terrorists. Hell, it even allowed 'em to become patriotic for once!


Now, obviously, if a bunch of arseholes called the billboard company and said they'd blow the joint up, or that they'd physically attack the kids in the shot (or others like them) or something similarly vile and frightening then that would justify the description of “threats of violence”. Also, you would expect the plods to have been called to investigate them, even arrests to have been made, and these details included in the reports. But all you get are murky references. 

It seemed to me that maybe this “right-wing violence” angle was a tad OTT. More likely, the company got a torrent of snark on their Facebook page, and maybe the odd expletive laden phone call to their office. Understandably this freaked them out. So they pulled the billboard.

Journos reporting the issue sexed it up in their traditionally right-on way, using it to reaffirm their beloved narrative about Australia being chockas with bogan rednecks who are "racist against Muslims".

Anyhoo, I have no way of knowing for sure. But today there's been a development that seems to confirm my theory that this was all a bit of a beat up.

See, a GoFundMe page was created to help out the billboard company. Dee Madigan, the well known advertising guru seems to have had a lot to do with this. A mountain of cash was raised. And now the original billboard will be replaced, along with a whole bunch of others.



Wow! So brave ... And how inspiring. There's hope for this country yet!

FFS ... Look, if the ad was pulled because of genuine threats of violence (that is, people were packin' death about what would happen if they didn't remove the ad) then why would money make any difference to their decision?

What, so donations make people morally courageous now? And so much so that they risk twenty times the violence that was promised before?

Put it this way. If you're just nonchalantly walkin' through the bush, minding your own business, and you get buzzed by a mean lookin' insect that you know for sure is a bloody great hornet and you run away from it, then a handful of cash is not gonna make you return to where it happened, let alone find the nest that it came from and kick it ferociously, now is it?

Looks to me like the ad was put up with the very clear intention of provoking outrage, thereby prompting media coverage. Then the usual suspects could wring their hands about tolerance, diversity, and inclusiveness. Maybe pulling it to gain sympathy was even part of the plan? Hell, it could even be described as having the hallmarks of a well thought out campaign.

Who knows …

One thing's for sure, it fits too neatly into the whole sanctimonious right-on MSM narrative to seem to be an entirely genuine series of developments, covered objectively.

I'm callin' this fake news!

Sunday, January 15, 2017

Greg Jericho trends on Twitter with tried and trusted Tory-bashing

No secret that Twitter is dominated by the Left, particularly here in Oz. So, if a pollie's name is trending, it's often that of some Labor or Greens MP who's been mouthing the usual PC claptrap, provoking an orgy of affirmation from the platform's countless local SJWs.

Prolly a bit more often than that, though, the situation is reversed. For example, a Government minister says or does something that can be easily construed as elitist, sexist, racist, or homophobic and every blue-haired bolshie Down Under is furiously vying for the Most Sneeringly Vitriolic Tweet award. 

With regards to journos and broadcasters, a similar dynamic applies. Names of lefty luvvies and lefty hate objects will briefly surge on social media tsunamis of love or loathing. But what you almost never see, at least here in Australia, are names trending due to the support or snark of those to the right of the political centre. That's pretty ironic given that most Aussie voters do actually fall into that category.

I saw a perfect illustration of this today. In Twitter's local trending list Guardian Australia's Greg Jericho's name appeared. Upon seeing it I thought: Lemme guess … He's just published a Tory-bashing column of some sort.

Lo and behold I was bang on the money! As Guardian gargles go it's pretty pithy, and way more coherent than anything his stablemate Vanessa “Van” Badham might write. But it still drearily invokes the usual simplistic stereotypes of LNP ministers being not just greedy but flint-hearted, even cruel. Check this out:

The government’s horrific start to the year is not only fully deserved, it is completely appropriate. The Centrelink shemozzle and entitlements abuses are a wonderful amalgam of the absence of respect for those on welfare and the tin-eared political nous which characterises this government.

And again:

If raising revenue is the only concern, the key is to make the system as cheap as possible, and thus you remove the “costly” humans and make it automated. But you would only do this if your desire for revenue outweighed your respect of the people who you know will receive erroneous (and dare one suggest, fraudulent) debt notices.

And we know the government has no respect for those on welfare.


Jericho (like many of his fellow travellers, I'm sure) has a particularly dim view of Christian Porter, who might presently be a tad higher on their shit list than Cory Bernardi, or even Tony Abbott himself!

Social services minister Christian Porter was so determined to have people believe that those on welfare are over-paid and lazy he spent last year putting out absurd figures that attempted to convince voters the welfare system was either being rorted or was too generous – such as when he suggested a single mum with four kids was better off on welfare than if she had a job.

So when you hear Porter argue that the automated system is “about as reasonable a process as you could possibly derive”, you need to understand that “reasonable” in his mind includes spouting nonsense designed to vilify some of the poorest in our society.


FFS. Makes him seem like a bloody Dickensian villain!

The article then goes on to bash Sussan Ley and other Government ministers for their shameless rorting of the entitlements system.

Yeah right, like it's an exclusively LNP thing. All pollies -- right across the political spectrum, and all over the democratic world for that matter -- pull this kind of shit all the time. And every now and then one of them is put to the sword to quell the public's anger over it. This time it was Ley. She was just unlucky, that's all.

Still, you can certainly see why the article was so popular. By dutifully invoking such hackneyed stereotypes in such a partisan piece he gave the Twitter trollective exactly what they wanted. I'd call it ideological red meat ... if they weren't mostly vegans.

Thursday, January 12, 2017

Why Aussies are so fascinated with American politics, Trump in particular

You may have read about this list of Australia's most popular Google searches last year. What's interesting is that even though we had our own federal election, the top term was “US election”. And searches for “Donald Trump” ranked seventh overall.

I don't find this at all surprising. American politics is waaay more compelling than what happens here. And forget the actual election between nominees. The primaries are high drama just on their own.

Democrats and Republicans endure an epic, extended, comprehensively covered slugfest between several contenders. The battle is not "no holds barred", but close. With all the showbiz effects in staging and coverage it's reminiscent of pro wrestling, although more authentic ... And when I say more, I don't mean completely. Clearly, quite a bit of it is staged, with winners being chosen by shadowy forces backstage. Take the disgraceful way Bernie Sanders was cheated by Hillary and her sinister team of fixers in the DNC.

Then there's the media coverage. Not only is it forensic, it's passionate, with pundits aplenty duking it out over every issue, development and faux pas. Yes, the MSM is amazingly biased. But there's still more diversity than in Australia, particularly when it comes to TV. Here, the only well known conservatives are Andrew Bolt and a couple of others. The rest are mostly smug, virtue signaling lefties. If Australian journos aren't pushing the PC agenda with zeal they're not challenging it either.

Speaking of media bias in the USA: In that nation, I think most citizens are fully aware of it. Still, last year, journos really nailed their flags to the mast more than they've ever done. The shameless way they went all in for Hillary shocked Americans. But it absolutely stunned Aussies.

I have no way of proving this of course. But I think a truly massive shift occurred in our perception of US media giants. While CNN and the like don't shape narratives about Australian politics, they certainly do so when it comes to global issues (which we still find extremely important, of course).

I think millions of my countrymen have concluded that these massive corporations are the biggest producers of “fake news” out there. We've realized that we've been fed massive lies for decades. And it's rattled us to the core.

This often traumatic deprogramming process is another reason we've been so focused on US politics. In the past we had a moderate interest in this subject because we actually thought that it was being reported accurately and fairly. Now, we "hate watch" it as often as not, aghast at the sheer scale of the lies being told by the American liberal media.


Then there's Donald J Trump himself. He's surely the most compelling, larger than life figure in American politics I can recall.

He's the quintessential brash, bombastic American, the kind of bloke we low-key Aussies have perennially had a very dim view of. But because he stands up to political correctness (which has proven to be just as toxic here as in the USA) millions of Aussies see him as a real hero.

The Christmas-themed ad for a sign shop in Balmain shown above is testament to this ambivalence. It kinda nods to the lefty, PC view of Trump as prez being a terribly bad thing for the world. But it also employs his catchphrase in its exhortation to passers by to have a good time over the break.

Trump is clearly living rent free in the heads of millions of Australians -- which is kinda apt given his history as a global real estate mogul.

No wonder Google searches for his name came in at seventh overall. That beat all Aussie pollies by a country mile.

Now the local political establishment and MSM -- both terminally PC -- are worried. They are cogs in the corrupt globalist machine that Trump has stood up to and stared down. So they are very concerned about how his influence is gonna play out here.

At the moment the closest equivalent to Trump is clearly Pauline Hanson. So it's no surprise that she ranked as the fourth most Googled individual locally, well ahead of Malcolm Turnbull.

When you're Australia's PM and you rank way below an American billionaire and a much maligned female “outsider” in public interest, that's pretty significant. Being the narcissist he is, he's prolly pretty concerned about this. (And if he isn't, he should be.)

And to think Trump hasn't even been sworn in yet … This year is gonna be yuuuge!

Monday, January 9, 2017

Shan Ju Lin, James Ashby and the pitfalls of intersectionality

A coupla more thoughts on this mini-scandal engulfing One Nation:

So Shan Ju Lin is refusing to back down on her anti-gay comments. And rather intriguingly she's blaming her fate on One Nation Chief of Staff James Ashby, the gay former assistant to Peter Slipper:

The former candidate learned of her disendorsement while overseas, through a Facebook message from Pauline Hanson's chief of staff James Ashby, she said.

"I think Pauline gave him too much power, he is the one running the party, not Pauline," she said. "I should have had a chance to speak to Pauline but James Ashby just decided very quickly.

"There's no time left for me to come to talk to Pauline."

Obviously impossible to know whether this is true or not. And of course Ashby himself is denying this claim. But if this is what's going on it looks like a kind of Credlin-Abbott dynamic in reverse ... or something.

And if you're trying to interpret this event, and Hanson's party in general, through the lens of politically correct intersectionality, as many lefties surely are, then it'll do your head in.

For example, some people on social media are saying that Shan Ju Lin was Hanson's "token Asian". And now she's gotten rid of her under the pretence of homophobia.

Well, if that's the case and this standard was selectively applied, then why was Andy Semple, a white male, also punished for the same sin?

And while it does seem to be the case that Ms Lin has been the party's only Asian candidate so far, the racist redneck narrative has long been too simplistic in explaining One Nation.

And what of the gender angle? Well, obviously you can't say that One Nation is sexist, because it's led by, like, a chick, who is completely synonomous with it.

And what of class? On that score, it's the inner city Left who are classist in their condemnation of Hanson and her supporters, not the other way around. These sneering hipsters bang on about being champs of the underdog, the voice of the people and all that other crap. Yet when they see a truly working class person (and a woman at that) who has the temerity to disagree with their patronising political prescriptions they mock, deride and bully her for decades on end!

Really, it's much more productive to at least try to see people as individuals rather than members of a group, innit?

Sunday, January 8, 2017

Shan Ju Lin's disendorsement by One Nation confounds PC narrative

So Pauline Hanson has dumped a candidate for homophobic posts on social media. This is quite telling in a couple of ways.

Firstly, the candidate in question, Ms Shan Ju Lin, is of Asian descent. Her being preselected in the first place confounds the beloved narrative of lefties that One Nation is composed entirely of mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging, redneck racists. And the fact that she was ultimately punted for anti-gay comments gives the lie to the view that they're all deeply homophobic as well!

That'll cause some big time cognitive dissonance for more than a few lefties I'm sure. It'll be a challenge for the poor little poppets to reconcile it in their tiny collectivist “minds”. I suspect that some will say Hanson actually punted her for being Asian, not the purported reason ... But of course that begs the question of how she was preselected originally. This will provoke even greater anxiety -- though nothing that an extra-long session of bong-suckling won't assuage, natch!

While this episode is no doubt highly embarrassing for One Nation, it's the kind of thing that happens pretty regularly in the two major parties as well -- particularly the LNP. It seems that every few months there's a report about how some newbie pollie has been expelled for some previously overlooked sin -- usually to do with sex, business dealings or “wrongthink”.

The decisive way Hanson has handled this episode implies that while One Nation has not reached the level of “professionalism” (for want of a better word) of the main parties, it's waaay better run than it was in the early days. That means that the death due to dysfunction so many on the Left predict for the party is unlikely to occur.

Pauline Hanson is no longer beyond the pale. She has to be taken seriously by the political establishment and mainstream media. Shunning and abuse will no longer work to keep her at bay. On the contrary, it will just increase her momentum. 2019 is gonna be very interesting indeed.

UPDATE: Exactly what I was referring to above.

Sunday, January 1, 2017

Brass Monkey Hotel's sexist signs provoke social media storm

Not a week goes by without at least one social media storm over a politically incorrect faux pas. The latest one in Perth involves iconic Northbridge hotel the Brass Monkey. In this ruckus New Year's Eve frat party organisers hung sexist signage off the hotel balconies.

Sure, some of these signs were tacky to say the least. And they would have put some noses out of joint at any time, not just in this tragically right-on era. In those sepia tone days before the internet (i.e., the  early 1990s and beforehand), they probably would have provoked one or two stories in the local papers, and maybe a small report in the West Australian, along with a few outraged letters.

But now, with almost everyone active on social media, and so many people seeing themselves as social justice warriors, this has turned into a massive problem for the hotel.

Every business owner is terrified of this kind of reputational storm these days. And they tend to follow a set pattern:

Some business owner, employee or client does something a bit silly, and one or more SJWs gets wind of it. They express their pique on Facebook or a similar site, and hordes of their fellow travellers pile on with derision, advertising their own spurious virtue by lambasting the business in question.

At this point the mainstream media gets involved because such a hue and cry constitues a genuine story. Not surprisingly this just magnifies the outrage in both scale and intensity.

If the business hasn't apologized at this point, it usually does. But that almost invariably makes things worse. It vindicates the SJWs, who go in harder. And it gives the MSM a good reason to revisit the story.

Almost invariably the reputational damage this process causes is way out of proportion to the original sin. And that definitely applies here.

Some of the signs at the Brass Monkey were undeniably sexist and gross. You've just gotta shake your head at ones reading “Our couches pull out, but we don't”, “Daughter drop off point” and “You teach her morals, we'll teach her oral”.

But a couple of them were trying to be PC even if they were still really tacky. Those reading “We want your freshmen sons, too” and “MILFs and DILFs welcome” clearly advocated, er, gender equity and anti-ageism.

This seemed to imply that the frat party organizers were worried about a potential backlash. So they attempted to pre-emptively neutralize it with these lame appeals to PC. That was doomed to failure, of course.

It's an established fact that you just can't reason with lefties who sense an opportunity to signal their virtue through indignation and disgust. Remember that many of the millennial lefty women most outraged by the Brass Monkey Hotel signs would themselves be enthusiastic supporters of social media campaigns like “#KillAllMen”. I suspect a few might have even lobbed at the local Slut Walk.

When it comes to using sexist and offensive terminology they take pride in, er, subverting the dominant paradigm. In short, they're massive hypocrites. Which just makes this whole episode even more ridiculous, in my opinion.