Author: James R.

The idiot who owns and runs this site. He does not actually look like Jon Pertwee.

On the other hand…

…Maybe the politicisation of the Bondi horror has had at least one good effect?

Neo-Nazi group the National Socialist Network has announced it will disband in response to proposed new hate speech laws by the federal government.
In a statement posted to Telegram, the group announced the closure of the National Socialist Network would also spell the end of “co-projects” White Australia, the European Australian Movement and the White Australia Party.
“If the laws pass, there will [be] no way to avoid the organisation being banned,” the statement said.
“This disbandment is being done before the laws take effect to avoid former members of the organisations from being arrested and charged.”
The statement – which said the neo-Nazi groups would close down by January 18 — was signed by leader Thomas Sewell and other high-profile white nationalists.

No symbolism whatsoever in THAT date, I’m sure. In real terms, of course, this won’t change a fucking thing; the mere fact that Nazi groups are illegal won’t actually stop Thomas and Blair and Nool and all those other cunts from being Nazis, just that they won’t be able to do it openly without risking potentially massive jail time. And I’m sure that they’re already well practised in doing this sort of thing in ways that don’t attract attention, and there’s always the lone wolf thing (the Akrams who perpetrated the Bondi shooting appear to be have been just that). Still, I suppose if it complicates how these cunts operate, then it’s not a bad thing per se…

Still “avoiding” divisive debate

The repercussions of the horror at Bondi Beach last month have reached all the way to Adelaide, with the cancellation of the Adelaide Writers’ Week after the latter disinvited a Palestinian author, Randa Abdel-Fattah, and invoked Bondi in doing so; a bunch of other authors (from here and abroad) withdrew their own RSVPs in support of her and several board members quit, and finally Louise Adler, the director of AWW, resigned and today the whole thing was duly called off. It should be noted that Louise Adler is Jewish and objected to Abdel-Fattah’s removal from the invite list.

Who, then, is actually to blame for all of this shit? Well, this writer has an idea:

Premier Peter Malinauskas has repeatedly insisted that he bore no influence over the board’s decision to drop Abel-Fattah. He reminds us that, legally, he cannot issue directions to the board – but that he did give the board his written opinion that Abdel-Fattah had no place at the festival.
Far from keeping an arm’s length, however, the Premier has led the public charge at every stage. If the move to overrule Adler and dump Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah was the board’s alone, why did it go to ground while the Premier mounted a well-prepared media offensive to defend the decision and discredit Abdel-Fattah?
If it was the board’s decision, why did all its members resign, choosing to walk away from their duty of care to artists, audiences and festival staff less than two months from opening night?
Whatever the true circumstances behind the decision, it’s also surprising to see the Premier forcefully back a move that so plainly risked plunging Adelaide’s famous – and economically vital – ‘Mad March’ into crisis, especially after the state government has spent months fighting to save South Australia’s tourism industry in the face of a damaging algal bloom crisis.

And Louise Adler also mentions Malinauskas:

In 2023 AWW programmed a handful of sessions devoted to contemporary Palestinian writers. Propagandists leapt to exhume, misrepresent and misquote social media posts to cultivate the conditions for cancelling writers. The South Australian premier, Peter Malinauskas, took exception to one writer’s tweets, expressing his personal distaste, as was his right as a citizen in a democratic country.
It was heartening then to listen to his subsequent speech to a packed Town Hall audience. He shared his thinking about the arts, their role in society and the responsibility of the government of the day. He confessed that he had thought of withdrawing our funding. And he concluded that if “politicians decide what is culturally appropriate … it leads us to a future in which politicians can directly stifle events that are themselves predicated on freedom of speech … it’s a path that leads us into the territory of Putin’s Russia”.

By his own acknowledgement, though, Malinauskas specifically said “the state government” didn’t want Abdel-Fattah at the festival. That’s a bit more than merely “personal distaste”. And maybe he can’t actually order the board about what to do and all that, but specifically invoking the government like that could be read as trying to lean on the board to do a certain thing at least. Anyway, the Adelaide festival board has been restocked and it’s going ahead as scheduled, just without the writers… and without at least some of what credibility it had. Remember, the bullshit over Khaled Sabsabi was just last year, it’s not even quite twelve months since that began; seems Australia is in no danger of learning how to do deal with Middle Easterns creators in any hurry…

Gone to the gods

Erich von Däniken finally abandoned this planet the other day at the fairly good age of 90. Don’t know if I was aware that he’d still been with us up to now, but if I was it was pretty dimly… apparently he remained fairly popular in Europe long after Anglophone readers started losing interest in him during the 80s, and his frankly dubious influence will no doubt linger longer than it should. How dubious? Well…

“The evolutionists say that man descends from monkeys. Yet who has ever seen a white monkey? Or a dark ape with curly hair such as the black race has?”
“Were the extraterrestrials able to opt between different races from the beginning? Did they endow different human groups with different abilities to survive in different climatic and geographical conditions?”
”Today it is assumed that primitive men had dark skins.”
“Was the black race a failure and did the extraterrestrials change the genetic code by gene surgery and then programme a white or a yellow race?”
“Nearly all negroes are musical: they have rhythm in their blood.”
“I quite understand that I am playing with dynamite if I ask whether the extraterrestrials ‘allotted’ specific tasks to the basic races from the very beginning, i.e. programmed them with special abilities.”
“I am not a racialist… Yet my thirst for knowledge enables me to ignore the taboo on asking racial questions simply because it is untimely and dangerous… why are we like we are?
“Once this basic question is accepted, we cannot and should not avoid the explosive sequel: is there a chosen race?”
“A black family emigrates from its home in the tropical zone of the earth and settles in a cooler region. Pigments change down the generations, dark skins become light, perhaps so light, the negroids become white. Dark skin, say the racial specialists, no longer being necessary as a protection against the sun. OK, but in his new environment the black man would also have to lose his curly hair, his prominent dark eyes and protruding lips, otherwise he could never become a white man. But it’s all quite simple, someone will tell me. The black breeds with a white and there you are…”

That’s a series of quotes from von D.’s 1979 book Signs of the Gods collected by his “nemesis” Jason Colavito; I’ve often seen it said that the whole ancient astronauts thing and its later Graham Hancock-type lost civilisations variant relies on frankly racist assumptions and, well, Erich was clearly not above expressing some of those outright. I have my own issues with Jason Colavito (particularly his assertion that the ancient astronauts scene von D. popularised really stemmed from H.P. Lovecraft by way of Pauwels & Bergier’s Morning of the Magicians; whatever their own assertions about their fondness for HPL, they actually barely mention him in that book and spend a lot more time on Charles Fort), but he is right to call this bullshit out. In his own words:

Von Däniken asserts that the “extraterrestrials did choose a specific race.” He won’t say what that race is, but he leans heavily on Jewish claims to be the chosen people, which we have just seen him connect to the white (European) race. There can only be one conclusion, even if unstated. He then advocates eugenics, suggesting that modern genetic research will advise which combinations of races “are beneficial and which should be eliminated.” He seriously asks whether the aliens want “strict segregation” of the races, and he advocates human cloning to perpetuate the very best superior specimens in the event of disaster.
We know from documents I obtained from the National Archives that in these years von Däniken secretly tried to influence the U.S. Republican Party to use his alien theories to energize voters to support conservative politics, particularly in opposing creeping socialism. We also know from his recent books that he remains uncomfortable with changing gender norms, writing as he did in 2009’s Twilight of the Gods that if Islamic prophecy were correct the world would have already ended because “women act like men and the men act like women.”
Also in that 2009 book, Erich von Däniken decried efforts to link him to racism: “And suddenly Erich von Däniken is associated with idiotic racists, as if the ‘heavenly seed’ were my idea and I had made up the ‘chosen ones’ myself.” Well, I think that the racism claim has a bit more to it than that.

Parenthetically I was very interested to discover last night that when Chariots of the Gods? was finally published in 1968, it had actually been heavily rewritten by von D.’s editor, one Wilhelm Roggersdorf, a movie screenwriter who was also known as Wilhelm Utermann, under which name he had worked a few decades earlier at the Völkischer Beobachter… also known as the official newspaper of the Nazi Party in Germany from 1919 to 1945. For whatever it may be worth…

I am white sometimes

Oh look, a new mix (of all things) by me (of all people). Do you like music from the late 70s through the early 80s? Then LISTEN TO THIS MIX, it has an hour of that sort of thing!

Featuring Split Enz, Eurythmics, The Nails, Talking Heads, Scientists, The Replacements, Sad Lovers & Giants, Iggy Pop, Public Image Limited, Simple Minds, Skids, Rheingold, and The Stranglers.

RIP Ace

The Grateful Dead are increasingly living up to the latter half of their name, with the passing of Bob Weir. It must be said that he did pretty well out of that group considering he got kicked out of it briefly early on, though since the rest of the band played under a different name for those gigs without him that meant he still played every show the Grateful Dead ever did…

Say everybody have you seen my balls

Someone on Bluesky linked to a really interesting article, came out in April last year but I didn’t see it until late December:

The new right is a great purveyor of images. Our new Secretary of Defense revels in taking off his shirt and displaying his tattooed, muscular chest. Andrew Tate is much the same, but poses with a cigar and a raw steak while he lectures millions of young men about the right way to treat a woman. Meanwhile AI or OnlyFans or Instagram delivers you an endless stream of dewy girls with flowing hair and glossy lips just barely parted at the camera.
The internet offers a psychedelic dreamscape of gender, perfected. Men with bulging pecs and gleaming biceps. Tradwives bursting out of their cottagecore dresses, slowly whipping batter and cream. You know the aesthetic I’m talking about. You see it on the news every day—or on YouTube, or Tiktok, or wherever visual content is sold. We are all drowning in it.
I call it reactionary camp. Fox News Face, the pancake makeup and bleach-blond hair that every female Fox News anchor is required to adopt. GearBod, the puffed-up look men get on too much synthetic testosterone, veins writhing beneath their skin like grey worms.
It’s not enough to just be a man or a woman. You have to crank the dial up till it breaks. Every stereotype must be magnified to the utmost technologically possible. And I do mean technologically. I’m just saying what everyone knows. “Hard work and good eating” will only get you so far. And you’ll watch guys who took the “hard work and good eating and mail-order meds” option rocket past you.

It goes on in that sort of vein about how this sort of “reactionary camp” (great term for it) requires taking masculinity and femininity to a sort of excessive extreme, and I meant to post about this about a week ago, but I’m so glad I didn’t cos I think we just got the greatest example of it—assuming that it’s serious—in the form of the photo at the top.

Now, “Man Cereal” is an actual thing, in that there’s a website and an Instagram for it; the extent to which it may or may not be some sort of joke is something I don’t know, but the website indicates that they are serious but also self-aware and there’s quite some degree of irony involved… the question then becomes: how seriously do The Manly Men of the right take this “man product”? Do they get the apparent joke? And how much of a joke is it, really? The person who posted the picture also posted this grab from the website…

…and, well, those are some pink balls. I don’t know what to make of it all, though I can’t say I don’t find the whole thing greatly amusing…

“Morality”?

From the Graun’s Trump news highlights; apparently this is what he said in an interview with the NYT. Mushroom Cock HAS no morality, of course, and increasingly neither does his regime; as we’ve seen in the last couple of days, being an American citizen and white person will not protect you from ICE. We need to start regarding the US not only as a bad thing but an active enemy to the rest of the world; if no morality constrains how it deal with its enemies, no morality similarly constrains it from dealing with its friends the same way.