Category: [Politics]

What won’t Zuckerberg profit from, though?

Over the years I’ve seen and reported a bunch of shit on Fessebouc and Instagram that they’ve refused to do anything about cos their “community standards” are shit, so the Graun reporting that Meta have taken money for ads from the Australian Christian Lobby, Advance Australia and Family First Australia is kind of revolting but not even remotely surprising. The fact that they’ve got a corporate float in the Sydney Mardi Gras tomorrow, on the other hand…

Albert Kruger, CEO of Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, was contacted for comment.
Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras has previously defended the involvement of corporations in the parade. Kruger said last week that corporate floats make up just 14% of the total floats and they were chosen carefully by the organisation.
“We choose partners who reflect the values held closely by the LGBTQIA+ community,” he said.“Mardi Gras partners have been loud advocates for the community, and their support has been pivotal in bringing about lasting social change, such as in their support for the Same Sex Marriage Post Survey just a couple of years ago.”

With all due respect, Albert, the organisation is clearly not choosing its corporate friends carefully. I have no interest whatsoever in Mardi Gras as such except when people I actually know have been in the march; I don’t identify as a member of the queer community so it’s pretty much irrelevant to me. But as an observer with lots of friends who do count themselves as such (at least one was a 78er, in fact), I get the criticism of Mardi Gras having become too commercialised. Corporate sponsorship is one thing, I’m just not sure giving them a parade float in return is the right thing… especially not when the corporation is running ads against the people MG is about. Regarding which…

A Meta spokesperson said the Australian ads were currently under review.
“At Meta, we want to make sure our platforms are a safe and inclusive space for the LGBTQIA+ community, ​​and work hard to find the balance between allowing people freedom of voice, while ensuring we minimise harm,” the spokesperson said. “We’re reviewing these ads and will take appropriate action if they breach our policies.”

But apart from it being a bit late for that, obviously the ads didn’t breach your policies, cos the company accepted money to run them. Or if they did (and the way the article describes them makes me think they should’ve done, especially since one was apparently actively spreading misinformation), then the company just didn’t care. Neither of these alternatives makes Meta look good in this case. And even if Mardi Gras has been partners with them since 2016, it doesn’t make MG look great right now either…

That aged well

Found on Tumblr, this old Esquire cover from 1967 advertising a piece within by Gore Vidal. I don’t recall reading the latter, though it’s in United States so I presumably did read it at some point… anyway, I took a quick look through it (again?), and Vidal evidently wasn’t impressed by John F.’s tenure; brutally shortened as it was, he still didn’t think a second term of Jack would be any improvement on the first, and that he was kind of holding the seat for Bobby to move into. Vidal basically sums up Jack’s career as his father’s “fuck you” to an American society that still bore prejudice against Irish Catholics, it was Joe Sr. building up first himself then his offspring (well, maybe not Rosemary so much) to get the first Catholic president of the US in the White House (initially it was supposed to be Joe Jr., but the latter had the misfortune of dying in that war that was happening in the 1940s).

Parenthetically, Mum once told me that when Kennedy was in line for the presidency in 1960, the Baptist church she attended (I think it wasn’t until the next year her and Dad moved down to England, so they were still in Scotland at the time) basically instructed everyone there to pray that Jack would lose. There are a number of things I don’t understand about Christianity, but that was one I was always particularly mystified by… I mean, Protestantism and Catholicism have always been at odds, but I’ve always been struck by the idea that this kind of pissant church apparently thought they could influence the politics of another much bigger and more powerful country. Which, obviously, they didn’t… but the mindset still baffles me.

Anyway, the somewhat gloomy prospect of a Kennedy dynasty (a Kennedynasty, if you will) (actually, please don’t, I wish I’d never thought of that now) underpins the essay, and it obviously inspired the magazine cover art… which, with hindsight, looks optimistic, shall we say. In fairness, that is hindsight talking; I’m fairly sure that in 1967, no one was expecting Vietnam to go so badly over the next year that “the hapless Nixon” (as Vidal calls him in the essay) could beat LBJ at that year’s election… similarly I don’t suppose anyone was expecting Sirhan Sirhan to deal with Bobby or the Chappaquiddick Island bridge to deal with Ted, though at least the latter did some good work later on in life. As for John-John… yeah. If nothing else they weren’t expecting what the then-6 year old would actually grow up to look like… and did he ever actually have a political career in mind? He seemed happier to promote other people’s in his magazine, though I suppose he could’ve been talked into it had it not been for that plane crash.

The kind of ominous thing about the putative dates for each on the cover, of course, is that clearly someone was not only envisaging each of the brothers and the nephew to automatically succeed each other but also that each would serve two terms (and, implicitly, so would the then incumbent LBJ) and that John Jr. would… just carry on? Weird that he has no use-by date for some reason… What a shame Vidal never lived to see the QAnon bullshit co-opting young Jack, I feel like he would’ve had some interesting things to say on that matter, and, obviously, the Trump era as a whole; I’m not sure how thrilled I’d be about a non-stop line of Kennedys, but I think it’d still have to be better than a line of Lord Dampnut’s kids. And you know they’ll be darkening the corridors of American politics for years to come, they’ve had a taste of the grift thanks to daddy and they won’t surrender it easily. Plus Don Jr.’s got to finance his coke habit somehow, why not via the federal budget…

A music lover

What if you can’t tell the difference between the Sex Pistols and some random bunch of dickheads wearing stupid sunglasses? What does that make you, Gerald, apart from someone who doesn’t appear to actually know what he was going on about? I remember being puzzled by the “US Labor Paty” bit the first time I saw this image, cos I couldn’t understand why a presumably left-leaning political party would be that interested in turning people onto Beethoven (unless they were really into Theodor Adorno). After seeing it again today, though, I decided to do a quick bit of research, and evidently the US Labor Party were a front for Lyndon LaRouche, pushing socialism while also cuddling up to Nazis like Roy Frankhouser and Willis Carto. No wonder I was confused, cos so were they…

With friends like this

So it was George Pell’s funeral today, and look who showed up…

John Howard, Peter Dutton, Alan Jones, Mark Latham and Fred Nile. What a charming bunch. Not pictured: George’s bestie Tony Abbott, who described him as a saint and the greatest man he ever knew… which doesn’t say much for all the other men Tone Abet knows, does it, if they’re even less good than this piece of shit. I am still a bit surprised at Dominic Perrottet not being there, him being a good Catholic and all… perhaps he just knew that being lumped in with the above rogues’ gallery would be a dubious look at best…

That’s… nice to know

This is possibly the most remarkable news story to hit the wide brown land since, well, the original one of the FUCKING DANGEROUS NUCLEAR OBJECT being lost in the first place.

The amount of road they had to cover in order where the thing was lost is apparently equivalent in distance to the entirety of the UK mainland. Yikes. The discovery of this miniscule (see above) thing is understandably compared to finding a needle in a haystack, with the obvious difference being that needles generally don’t need twenty-metre containment around them because needles generally put out absurd amounts of radiation that could, you know, cause grievous bodily harm. And apparently the maximum penalty for losing this thing is only one thousand dollars. Rio Tinto’s lucky there’s probably next to no one out there to chance upon it… well, maybe apart from some indigenous folks, and we know how much of a shit Rio Tinto gives for them…

Anyway, at least we know where it was, but personally I’m also a little concerned that they’re not even sure sure when the thing was lost… that was a detail I was unaware of until I read the story of its rediscovery, they reckon some time between the 11th and 16th of January, and then they didn’t announce it until the 25th. Apparently that’s when Rio Tinto found out themselves that Baby Chernobyl was missing… or, at any rate, that’s when they said it was. Rio Tinto are a pretty shit company, we know that, and I wouldn’t be entirely surprised to discover down the track that they knew much earlier and tried to cover the thing up until something forced them to admit it…

What

Yeah, that might be YOUR reality, Don Boy, but (un)fortunately I can’t do enough drugs to join you in it… I’ve no doubt Alan Alda also wishes he lives in a reality in which he actually won an Oscar instead of just being nominated for it, but, well, we can’t have everything, can we… [EDIT: yes, I’ve had it pointed out to me that this is a parody from this Twitter account, which evidently does a lot of this sort of thing. The fact that this is indistinguishable from something I’d expect Donny Jr would actually say makes me wonder how well it succeeds as parody, though.)

Splitters!

I kind of love when Australian politics takes a silly turn, and damned if it’s not doing that right now…

Not quite a year ago, advertising for Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party was … everywhere.
Now, disgruntled former candidates and members of the United Australia Party have come together to establish a new political party, The Australians United.
The name sounds similar, the colour of the party logo is yellow (once synonymous with the UAP billboards), but they say their management will be different.

Yeah, you don’t have a fucking weirdo billionaire bankrolling your failure this time… although allegedly you didn’t last time either, cos TAU leader Jamal Daoud is the guy who sued the UAP for “mismanaging” their federal election campaign that famously ended up with the Clive gang just getting one senate seat and eventually being deregistered; Daoud was whinging about having to spend his own money on campaign materials (which other UAP members apparently claimed he didn’t actually have authority to do anyway), and I see by looking at his Twitter he’s actually been trying to whip up the People’s Front of Judea… er, The Australians United since last August, not long after the angry fist-waving came to nothing. The funniest thing, though, is that if Daoud and his mates do stand in the March election, they can’t actually do it as a party cos you have to have been a registered party for 16 months before you can do that, so they’d all have to stand as independents. And even fewer people will know or care who they are then; I feel like Jamal might come out of this wishing for the days when he could get as much as two percent of the vote…

Wonder how he feels about Bashar Al Assad these days, by the way… long before cosying up to Clive Palmer, he was kind of cosying up to Julian Assange as part of the Wikileaks Party, in which capacity he was part of a much-criticised 2013 visit to Syria by party members who were accused of cosying up to the dictator of Syria. This at a time when Daoud was marketing himself as a refugee advocate, too, so not a great look… Anyway, I don’t suppose there’s much danger of him standing up for refugees these days, cos he evidently left the Wikileaks life behind a while ago for the far-right grift instead; the only question now is how long until Ralph Babet forms the Party for a United Australia…

January 26

It’s nothing if not a complicated day here in Australia today, what with our complicated history and our… mixed response to that in the present day. I confess my own response has been blunt in the past, given my own Scottish ancestry; England has been fucking over my folks’ old country for several centuries longer than this one. You’d think I’d be more sympathetic to our indigenous cousins on that account but no, I wasn’t, which is something I’m not proud of…

Anyway, I found the above image on the Aboriginal Tent Embassy FB page nearly ten years ago, it turned up in my FB memories today, and, well, it offers a perspective I’d never considered before that time. I’m still somewhat indifferent to Australia Day as such cos, let’s face it, I’m not affected by it, but there’s a lot of people who are affected by it and I have more sympathy for them these days than I once did. To be perfectly honest, I don’t think the majority of people here give a fuck about the national day itself and wouldn’t care about the date being changed as long as they don’t lose a public holiday…