Month: March 2025

Well there’s a shock

Voice referendum normalised racism towards Indigenous Australians, report finds

A report examining racism towards Indigenous Australians found one fifth of all complaints contained reference to the failed voice to parliament referendum, in what authors say was one of the nation’s “darker moments”.
The report, titled If You Don’t Think Racism Exists Come Take a Walk With Us, was released on Thursday. Undertaken by the University of Technology Sydney’s Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research and the National Justice Project, it is the second annual report about racism targeting First Nations people and is based on 453 validated reports of racism made to the Call it Out register in the 12 months to 20 March 2024.
It examined the ways in which racism and discrimination exist in Australia, as well as the impact of the October 2023 referendum – where 60% of Australians voted against the proposed Indigenous voice to parliament.
Prof Lindon Coombes, the guest author of the report, said racist views were“emboldened” during the referendum, with racist abuse and harmful and derogatory language being spread online and in person.
“One of our darker moments in this regard was the 2023 referendum. There can be no genuine discussion on the voice referendum without discussing the impact of racism, both throughout the campaign and in its aftermath,” Coombes wrote.
The report said that many noted “the lead-up to the Referendum and the outcome of the vote had facilitated the normalisation of racism”.
“The filters are off – it almost feels like it is okay to be racist.”

I made a bunch of posts about the Voice way back when; I thought there was no real reason to vote against the thing unless you were, you know, a racist. And so many of us are, and I’ve no doubt many of us felt… enabled, let’s say, by Peter Dutton’s opposition to the Voice (and his ultimately spurious “commitment” to Constitutional recognition instead). Plus, as the article further notes, about a third of the reports were related to online abuse, and we’ve had enough decades of observation to see how much the Internet enables this sort of shit too. The only surprising thing here is that the Voice only accounted for a fifth of racist incidents, but I suppose racists don’t really need special reasons… sigh.

Dementia 13 (1963)

F. F. Coppola’s “debut” film, as long as, like Francis himself, you don’t count the nudie films he worked on before it of course. I haven’t seen this possibly since the ’90s, back when I got it on VHS… at which time I remember being amazed that a film from 1963 was rated R here in Australia, and I assume that 1) it had been given that rating in the 70s and whoever put the video out couldn’t be bothered playing the OFLC for a new one, or 2) the distributor was bullshitting that detail. (OFLC most recently rated it M 20 years ago, per their database, which is more sensible.) And this is the first time I’ve actually seen the so-called “director’s cut”, too; the film as released in 1963 contained some additional footage shot by Jack Hill cos producer Roger Corman wanted another axe murder. I only discovered Coppola’s markedly shorter version (or at least this reconstruction of it) even existed a day or ago, and now, after a little searching among my usual *cough* sources, I’ve duly watched it…

Now, even back in the 90s when I first watched it, I could tell Dementia 13 was basically a Psycho knock-off, and Coppola cheerfully acknowledges as much in the commentary (though he says it was an indirect one by way of William Castle’s Homicidal); apparently Corman and American International had expressed an interest in such a thing, so Coppola offered him such a thing (replacing the knife with an axe and changing the family dynamic at work), Corman gave him a piffling budget left over from another production (classic Corman), and was then kind of disappointed by the end result. As noted, Jack Hill got told to shoot another murder scene (not in this version, though this other axe victim is still listed in the credits). This character’s removal is probably an improvement, cos the film is a bit unbalanced and unsteady as it is; Coppola is clearly unsure of exactly how to cast viewer suspicion away from the killer onto an innocent character, and Patrick Magee’s weirdly unsettling family doctor really should’ve been in the film more than he was. But, let’s face it, Dementia 13 is what it is, i.e. a cheaply and quickly turned out B film (it came out on a double bill with Corman’s X) with no higher aspirations to be anything else, it’s reasonably well made and effective on the whole, and Corman’s interference with it didn’t harm Coppola’s future career. Alas, Francis would eventually prove perfectly capable of doing that himself…

Well said

I wish he hadn’t apologised, cos I think this is hilarious:

The Western Australian premier, Roger Cook, has apologised after calling the US vice-president, JD Vance, a “knob” at a pre-election event in Perth.
At the West Australian’s Leadership Matters event on Tuesday morning, at which Cook was the guest speaker, a journalist asked the premier to finish the sentence: “JD Vance is a …” Cook replied: “Knob.”
Cook then said: “You’ve got to have one unprofessional moment, don’t you? That was it.”
His description won him laughs and a round of applause from the audience.
Cook is vying for a third Labor term in office, with the state to go to the polls on Saturday.
Cook later said he was just having fun, telling reporters at a press conference after the function: “It was a light-hearted, non-professional moment and I didn’t mean any offence.”

Frankly, if “knob” is the nastiest thing anyone calls J. Divans this week, he’ll be doing well. And, let’s face it, Cook wasn’t wrong, and professionalism is wasted on that couchfucker anyway…

RIP David Johansen

I’ve seen stories online recently about David Johansen, the last of the New York Dolls, being super-ill with cancer, as he apparently had been for a number of years. With news just coming through of his passing, it obviously looks like he was even more ill than I realised he was… Alas. That band’s all gone now apart from their fill-ins from the later period of the band and their resurgence in the oughts, but we still have the music. Fuck Whispering Bob Harris for calling this “mock rock”:

Bit late for that

Kennedy Jr backtracks and says US measles outbreak is now a ‘top priority’ for health department

Two days after initially downplaying the outbreak as “not unusual,” the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, on Friday said he recognizes the serious impact of the ongoing measles epidemic in Texas – in which a child died recently – and said the government is providing resources, including protective vaccines.
“Ending the measles outbreak is a top priority for me and my extraordinary team,” Kennedy – an avowed anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist who for years has sown doubts about the safety and efficacy of vaccines – said in a post on X. […]
A total of 164 measles cases were reported as of 27 February across Alaska, California, Georgia, Kentucky, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York City, Rhode Island and Texas, information from the CDC showed. About 95% of those infected were unvaccinated people, including children whose parents did not follow CDC recommendations to get them immunized with safe, effective vaccines providing protection against measles as well as other easily preventable diseases. Another 3% were from people who received only one of the two required shots for immunity, CDC data showed on Friday.

Dangerous fucking idiots, both Bobby Brainworm and all these stupid cunts that wouldn’t vaccinate their kids. And the ones that still won’t, even now. The child who died in the Texas epidemic was the first US death from measles since 2015, and that person had been the first since 2003. It wasn’t completely wiped out there, but it was massively reduced; Wiki tells that in the 1960s, pre-vaccine, it affected about 3000 out of every million people, but by about 2000 there was literally a one in a million chance of getting it. The vaccine fucking worked and people stopped dying. I’m glad that for once Kennedy’s overcome his usual antipathy to vaccines somehow, but it’s a bit late… especially when HE’s been one of the key figures for years in convincing people that vaccines are the work of Satan. Cunt.

RIP American hegemony, by the look of it…

Well, THAT was a grim day. You know what I keep saying about how I don’t want to report on political bullshit, and quite frankly today’s bullshit is why… Just read that Guardian link, I find the whole thing too awful to even think about. But America’s leadership of the world just ended, Mushroom Cock and J. Divans made such fools of themselves that I don’t see it ever bouncing back from this. This is their idea of diplomacy, and this won’t be the last time they do it. Friedrich Merz is very much onto something.

Let me just post some responses from others, including Liz Cheney:

MAGA aren’t Liz fans at the best of times, but WOOF. This will really have them calling for her head…

I don’t know much about this Swalwell dude, he seems to be only a recent addition to Congress, but that’s some decent and well-aimed snark. If we ever doubted that Mushroom Cock was a Russian asset, I think this disgraceful episode ended that doubt…

Well are we or aren’t we?

The quality of intellectual discourse on Twatter these days, I presume. I’m puzzled by this guy’s (and it’s 99.9% a guy) last bit, though… we’ve possibly avoided this feminist apocalypse, he says, so what’s he worried about then? Is the feminist apocalypse at hand or not? And if not, is it OK for him to go back to just being racist?