Speaking Of History: Though I Disagree With What You Say, I Am Doomed To Repeat It!
Ok, let’s have a little think about Dutton last week, but before we do that, let me just state that I’m an angry white male just like that guy with the funny name that nobody can spell. You know, whatsisname… David… David… Leyonhjelm. That’s it. Honestly, I don’t think people with names that don’t follow good old normal Aussie spelling should be allowed to say anything controversial but I guess the politically correct brigade will be on me in a flash restricting my freedom of speech by telling me that they disagree with what I say. And that’s what makes me really, really cross. After all, I’m white and I’m male, so I should be allowed to say what I bloody well like in my own country without the likes of women and other minorities having the temerity to criticise and tell me that I’m wrong.
Now, Senator Leyonhjelm – or Grumpybum, as I’ll now refer to him because I can spell that without looking it up – has recently announced his intention to lodge a complaint against Mark Kenny with the Human Rights Commission for referring to him as having “angry-white-male certitude”. He intends using 18C which – as I’m sure you all know makes it an offence to “offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate” a person because of their race or religion. Unfortunately, Senator Grumpybum assured us all that he wasn’t offended, insulted, humiliated or intimidated so most thinking people would suspect that this puts a rather large hole in his argument. Sort of like when James Ashby was complaining about sexual harassment from Peter Slipper, but that’s a whole other story. The good senator tells us that he’s only bringing the complaint to highlight the absurdity of the whole 18C thing. In much the same way that if Scarlett Johansen were to speak to me and tell me that I looked pretty cute, I could attempt to bring a charge of sexual harassment against her, because even though I didn’t mind it at all, it shows how absurd it was anyone could object to being complimented on their figure.
So, I’m very, very angry that – like Senator Grumpybum – I can’t take advantage of all the privileges of 18C just because calling me a “fat white bastard” doesn’t upset me. Well, apart from the “fat” bit and I have to concede I could lose a few kilos without the adjective “gaunt” springing to mind. As for the “bastard”, well, my parents were married, but if one means it in the colloquial sense, I’d have to agree that I could hardly be upset by what is really a term of endearment.
And that’s why I was so angry when poor Peter Dutton had to defend himself when it was leaked that there were over 2000 cases of alleged abuse against asylum seekers on Nauru. The way people carried on, you’d think that we had an obligation to investigate complaints even if we don’t know if they’re true. I mean, don’t we need evidence before we start to look into whether or not something occurred?
Certainly that was the way newly elected One Nation senator, Malcolm Roberts, saw it on QandA last night. If he finds evidence that abuse is occurring, then he’ll support a Senate inquiry to look at the evidence, but until evidence has been found, then there’s no need to look at the evidence. Say what you like about the man, he was certainly consistent. When the subject later turned to climate change, he again demanded evidence. Not just that data that had been concocted by NASA and Bureau of Meteorology – an organisation, he reminded us, that Greg Hunt wouldn’t allow to be investigated, but “empirical evidence”. And until he was given such evidence, he found no need to look at anything that anyone was asking him to examine, because, well, if it wasn’t consistent with his position, then it was clearly “doctored” or “dodgy” or “silly” or “too full of facts and figures to be worth reading” or…
But back to Peter Dutton… As he pointed out, a lot of these things are exaggerated. You know the sort of thing, a guard gives a five year old a bit of a slap on the cheek and it’s reported as though it’s assault even though no bones were broken. And as for claims of sexual abuse, well, how often do people make up claims of sexual abuse?
All right, maybe not that often in the scheme of things. And before anyone starts bringing up how the Royal Commission is discovering all these cases of sexual abuse where the person wasn’t believed and the perpetrator was allowed to stay in their position, I’d like to remind people that these things happened a while ago. In some cases, it was last century; in others, it was as far back as 2012… Whatever, it was certainly, before these asylum seekers were sent to Nauru, so that’s a completely different thing.
I’ll happily concede that we should have believed the people who are testifying at the Royal Commission, because they were true blue Aussies, not foreigners. At least in most cases…
And when Dutton said that people were self-immolating in the hope of getting to a better place, clearly he meant heaven and not Australia.
So you can see why I’m angry. I live in a country where we now have to check the spelling of people’s names and I have to worry about people’s feelings and we can’t just be cruel to foreign people without someone complaining. God, this isn’t the Australia I grew up in.
I’d suggest that we should have a day to celebrate people like me and Grumpybum and Malcolm Roberts and Andrew Bolt, but I suspect you’d end up calling it “Sooking, Sad, Old White Man” Day!
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17 comments
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lawrencewinder -
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jimhaz -
wam
Return to home pageOi, what a bloody circus.. grumpy old white men, Pyne the Whyne bitching about “pairs” (should he talk to Ashby?) Barnyard looking embarrassed about how well he is looking after dairy farmers, Truffles-in-a-Muddle using ABS heads as bowling balls, Don Quixote de la Roberts proving science is unreliable ans Bestiality Bernardi just being himself and all the while the Bankers like Narev continue to rape the nation.
And Turnbull trying to look stern about dairy cows to Murray Goulburn.
It IT IT IT ITITITITIRITIRTIT
Nah nah nah I’e got my fingers in my ears, I can’t hear you I won’t hear you, stop talking go away I don’t want to know, leave me alone in my best of all possible worlds.
I think Grumpybum is most upset by the word certitude – possibly because he is not sure what it means.
In Lampedusa they had coffins for the asylum seekers, they showed respect for the dead; soft toys for the little coffins and flowers on the adult size.
Here we don’t even allow their ashes in the country for possible friends and relatives to honour…
Talk about losing our moral compass.
I hope Lyinghelmet gets his knuckles rapped very hard with a big stick by the Human Rights Commission for being a vexatious complainant.
If HRC does not have the power to rap his knuckes, then this is another area requiring reform as soon as sanity returns to Parliament.
As there is such a large range of media available nowadays we have essentially become entertainment junkies. Even politics is seen as a sort of entertainment. There is so much shown on screens that only the loudest or weirdest or stupidest or most biased tends to be able to cross media channels.
It is the old quantity V quality problem that we see in so many areas. The breadth of entertainment has resulted in our attention span being scattered, our empathy being scattered , many belief systems made redundant increasing nihilistic or views, we are less committed but more ambitious, we are more connected in shallow ways and less connected in deeper ways, we are more anxious about somewhat irrelevant things in the far smaller world and less anxious about local things we could fix, we are fussier and more impatient, more self-indulgent etc etc. We want more, more more – even on this site we want the government to do twice as much as it currently does.
This is the same problem with our universities – the more people accepted into courses the lower the quality of the education, the lesser the advantage per person. This also applies to our working lives as controlled by the 1% who seek base line profits – overspecialisation is a quantity situation and our level of satisfaction declines. It also applies to our population, excessive immigration is making our individual lives to be of a lower standard.
We don’t notice these things that directly as they are progressive, not sudden, not affecting everyone to the same degree, and we acclimatise on the way.
Murray Goulburn is looking for a cash injection to stay afloat. So, they turn to their suppliers – their cooperative members who supply the milk – to claw back money.
The government’s solution is to lend money to the dairy farmers, to give to Murray Goulburn so that MG doesn’t go broke : the dairy farmers acquire more debt at the precise time when they don’t need it.
Wouldn’t it be easier for the government to give MG a loan rather than saddling the farmers with more debt ?
Problem of their own making : the Conservative precedent has been set with the auto industry – they won’t give industry support no matter what.
Go figure !
JM-S As usual I agree completely with your post. This CLP,L&NP, LNP tory govt seem to crash from one disaster to the next, Abbott will soon be the PM again, given that he has the numbers in the Liberal Party room.
Thanks townsvilleblog.
It would be so funny, if it weren’t all so damned tragic.
Now we have Turnbull demanding that Labor honour the support for the Coalition spending cuts that they said they would pre-election, casually forgetting Labor’s expenditure components that went in tandem with them. Of course, having already been called mendacious by the Fixer, Labor are bound to agree to that, aren’t they.
It is already falling apart, and they haven’t even started yet. Just waiting for the Abbott revival, and the clusterflucking omnishambles will be well and truly complete.
As there is such a large range of media etc
Very deep. jimhaz Harqueabus
Steve Laing that’s it. Of their own making, all is falling apart around them, but in typical LN-P style instead of owning it and making some little attempt at addressing the failings, they seek to shift the blame by every circuitous means they can conjure up.
In the meantime spending so much time and energy in blame shifting accomplishes little and more things fall apart in an ever expanding circle of increasing severity.
Yoy know what scares me, I mean, REALLY scares me? The people who voted for Leyonhjelm. And Hanson. And Dutton. And the LNP generally…
Gary Helou sounds like a complete turd, a very typical one track mind corporate suit. Why – profit ambition (leading to a bigger salary) over reason.
Next to unchecked globalisation, he appears to be the most significant reason MG is failing. In trying to make MG into “a global dairy food processing and milk company” (which should not have been the plan) he locked in 10 year deals with Coles for their $1 milk.
https://milkmaidmarian.com/tag/gary-helou/
His actions remind me a bit of the ABC childcare fiasco – another case of overstretch.
lol. I just Wikied ABC’s Eddy Groves and lo and behold
“In 1988, Groves and his subsequently estranged wife, Le Neve, opened a childcare centre in suburban Brisbane, having previously concluded that childcare was a universally “needed service” much like milk distribution.”
empirical evidence will come but like breast/prostate/ melanoma cancer by then it will be too late to do anything (what drove the loonies to support the rabbott????)
spot on jimhaz the BOS vice chancellors(Bums On Seats) have unlimited access to gov cash which is covered by personal debt. the rabbott unleashed enormous debt on the poorest educated. this needs and deserves a royal commission ahead of children in detention or the banks but as labor introduced the concept and the vice-chancellors and rabbott have only rorted the system labor stays silent. But a check of facebook and uni websites will show the ads?(on mine every day has been paramedics)
Have a think about teachers/nurses without jobs but 10s of thousands training, all compound interest loans and then add thousands 457?
whew we will owe the government the gdp. the debt collectors will be breaking a thousand legs a day to employ nurses and physios there will be no public schools, only private to employ teachers at $53K so the gov can cream off some of the debt.