Catsidhe

What the politician said:

"Fines such as these for publishing blatant untruths or misleading news reports, or temporary suspensions of the right to publish or broadcast, would lead to a major improvement in the accuracy and fairness of our media."

(My emphasis.)

Which seems clear enough: if you lie, if you say something blatantly untrue, if you make shit up or don't bother checking, then you should be punished for it. That's not "Oops, we spelled this witness' name wrong", or "we were honestly misinformed," that's talking about Andrew Bolt-ian levels of disingenuity and agitprop.

How was this reported?

MP wants journalists fined for mistakes.

THAT'S NOT WHAT HE SAID AND YOU FUCKING KNOW IT YOU GODDAMN HACKS!

But thank you, nameless ABC journo, for proving his point. I have no doubt all the other sources will be similarly misquoting and mischaracterising Steve Gibbons MP from now on in, and squealing that they're the aggrieved parties the whole time they're shamelessly pretending he said something he didn't.

Boltwatch informs me of Andrew Bolt's addition to the discussion about the tragic killings in Finland yesterday.

“We don’t know what is behind the killing. I’m interested in Auvinen’s contempt for humanity, which is not just a feature of the neo-Nazism he spouts, but of the more extreme global warming advocates who demand we reduce the number of dirty, earth-raping humans.

...

I’d better be clear for the jumpers-to-conclusions. No, I’m not accusing Auvinen of being a green, and greens of being murderers - or Nazis.”

Pay no attention to what he says, instead listen to what he tells you he said.

Because he is NOT saying that Greens are Nazis. He is just saying that they are like Nazis. And murderers. No, wait, ‘like murderers’.

And that makes it alright.


And the comments, just the first few, proceed to blame the murders (and presumably the Nazis and Greens) on Avant-guarde artists and Scandinavian Socialism. Dog whistle, much? Actually, I take that back. It's not a dog whistle if everyone can hear it.

OK, so it's been sex-obsessed. It's been patchy. The acting has tended towards the hysterical.

It still doesn't deserve having had Channel Goddessdamned Ten happening to it.

First this week's abomination where Big Brother went overtime for almost an hour (an hour, dammit!), showing quite clearly the complete and total contempt they have for anything where 13-year old girls don't get to spend fortunes on SMS voting (expect voting on the news any day now).

But after Mim looked at today's green guide, Channel Ten's abhorrance of the audience they have found themselves with is made painfully plain: as of next week, Torchwood is to be moved to midnight.

Midnight.

MIDNIGHT!!! FFS!

The only way they could have made their contempt more plain is if the Channel executives had gone around to every household in the country personally and left a paper bag filled with dog-shit on the front step.

If they hate sci-fi and fantasy shows so much, as evidenced by this, and by how they killed Battlestar Galactica, et al., then why, by the Goddess' Left Nipple Ring, did they buy them in first place? Except to deliberately bury them? In which case, why do the producers continue selling to them?

Unless it is a sneaky plot to force people to buy the DVDs of the series, by making it impossible to watch them any other way.

Maybe that's it. Channel Ten has a deal with Amazon and broadband providers. It certainly would explain a lot.

What do we know about our beloved government?

Well, we know that they don't like people who disagree with them. A lot. It's almost like they think that such people should either not exist, or never say anything, because the government is always right, and no-one who disagrees with them can ever, therefore, have anything useful to say. Of course, the ABC is by definition a hotbed of Stalinists and Anarcho-Syndicalists, each and every one frothing for the chance to campaign for the Labor Party. You know, people like Pru Goward and Gary Hardgrave. We know, of course, a priori that Senator Fierravanti-Wells is a balanced, rational human being, free of barrows to push.

We know that they think that money is more than sufficient compensation in return for total abnegation of sovereignty. In fact, they react with shock and dismay when people say that the government can keep its money, they would rather die poor and thirsty than hand over, hastily, all power and ownership, now and forever. It should be noted that in each case the ungrateful bastards have actually said that they're not rejecting the idea per se, but that they have, despite the urgings of the Feds, actually considered the terms of the deal, and have found them laughable. If only they had just done what the Federal Government had told them, NOW, NOW, NOW DON'T THINK, JUST SIGN! SIGH HERE! SIGN NOW! WOLVES! WOLVES ARE ATTACKING!! SIGN!!!1!.

We know that if you're not talking about exactly the same solution as we are, then you are exacerbating the problem. Only the government has the solution. Any deviation will make things worse, so much worse. Why, advocating ‘Harm Minimisation’ is tantamount to personally injecting babies with dirty heroin! Moreover, allowing two people with similar genitals to call themselves ‘married’ is one short step from fucking cattle in the streets and raping small children.

We know that, as the government is by definition right, that whatever is spent on advertising is only ever important information. Anything, everything, put out by the ACTU or Labor party, on the other hand, are either in agreement with Liberal party diktat, in which case they are superfluous, or they disagree, in which case they are blasphemous blatant lying propaganda.

We know that thanks to eleven years of being the Avatars of 51%, that Howard and the Liberal party have long since identified themselves with everything Good and Proper and Right — they must be, because 51% of Australians after preferences think so. If it turns out that the magical number is now below 50% — well below — then there is a problem. The problem, however, can't be with them, because they're always right, remember? It must be someone else's fault. Like Labor and the ACTU; their nasty, vicious, slanderous, lying propaganda is twisting the poor innocent minds of the trusting voting public. Or those stupid greenies, scaring people, terrifying them with unfounded paranoid rantings, which must be countered, for fairness, for balance, for human dignity, with demonstrated propaganda considered counterarguments. And the important people, those whose reasoned and articulate opinions actually matter, agree whole-heartedly. So that's alright.

Or else, the problem is the population itself. If the Liberal Party is so obviously right, then not voting for them, not supporting everything they do unreservedly and reflexively, is ipso facto symptoms of unreason, of hysteria, of the public being so STUPID as to turn away from the Light of Truth and Justice. It's everyone else's fault!!1!


It could never be that people are sick of Big Strict Father in Canberra telling everyone that they're wrong ... except for big businesses and millionaires, of course.

It could never be that people are finally realising that their McMansion's mortgage is going up anyway, and while Howard was pretending to be your friend when it was going well, he's fucked if he's going to help you up if when it all goes pear-shaped.

It could never be that people have realised that, holy shit, the climate is changing, and we have to do something (Just because people have been saying that for thirty years or more — there was an entire episode of Carl Sagan's Cosmos dedicated to the concept for Goddess' sake!), but Howard has put a millionaire in charge of the Environment, and his biggest action to date is to claim complete sovereignty over a good third of the nation directly, in return for thirty sheckels of silver, which will have their destination dictated in any case.

It could never be that even the rusted-on Useful Idiots (who over-represent themselves in Andrew Bolt's blog and Talkback Radio everywhere) are wondering when Howard is going to retire, and having a good hard look at the choice of succession. And not liking it.

It could never be that people have finally realised what some have been saying all along, that the Invasion of Iraq was a mind-bogglingly stoopid waste of time and money and lives, while the guy who actually is responsible for 9-11 is still running around out there. That invading a country is a big, horrible, messy, sticky tarbaby, and that while Saddam Hussein was a really, really bad man, and his sons worse, the Invasion and its aftermath has been so, so, so much worse.


No, it must be the population's fault. For believing Labor. For listening to Scientists. For talking to their accountants. For watching the news. For looking around them. For thinking.

For not drinking the Kool-Aid, like they have for the last eleven years.



Now if only the rest of us had a real hope of anything changing as a result.

Further to this, from here we find:

He said the people who made the complaints heard only excerpts aired by an ABC broadcast, which also provided information on how to make a complaint to the authority.

"The people who complained to ACMA had not heard any of my program," Jones said. "If people don't listen to the program all the time, why then are 26 seconds of comment that I might have made chosen to hang me? If that doesn't constitute bias, I don't know what does."

Jones was overwhelmingly supported by listeners, who were given the telephone number of the authority's media spokesman, Donald Robertson, and encouraged to ring him with their views on the report.

Jones demonstrates his hypocrisy, once again. For those who can't immediately see it:

1. he calls fire down from the heavens for the unfairness of people complaining about his show, who hadn't actually sat down and listened to it all through. (You have to understand his calls for bikie gangs to meet 'Lebs' at the train station in context, you see.)
   
2. In retaliation, he gives his useful idiots faithful listeners the contact details of the head of the ACMA, and urge them all to complain about a report which none of them have read.

How dare you react in any way to knee-jerk ignorant complaints about me! I shall now bombard you with knee-jerk ignorant complaints, which shall teach you the Error Of Your Ways! Hah!



The problem is, Mr Jones, that while you may indeed have said "But please don't actually hurt people that would be wrong", the 26 seconds you used to say that may be considered to have been drowned out by the other 2 hours of hatred, vitriol and frenzy.

And his bleating whinge that the complaints were taken out of context, somehow I doubt that the context was missing from the 835 pages of transcripts used to actually determine whether there was a case to answer. As far as it went, all that was needed was one complaint. The rest was more in the line of an affirmation that Jones does not, despite his megalomaniacal frothing, speak for all Australians.

Belligerent Design. It sounds an excellent theory.

---

Andrew Bolt was on Speaking in Tongues last night.

Honest to Goddess, he stated that Third-World Sweat Shops are a good thing, and that those who work in them should be thankful that they do (as opposed to being unemployed, or getting a living wage or living conditions fit for a dog, or human rights, or whatever).

His thesis was that Conservative politics are the real way to help the Poor and Underprivileged. Indeed, he implied that the bleeding-heart (lower-case 'l') liberals and Lefties actively harm the poor people they claim to want to help.
Father Bob asked him "So, what do you do?"
"Well," replied Andrew, "I donate to..."
"No, what do you do -- on the coalface, where I am every day."
Andrew didn't answer.

I love Father Bob.

Andrew continued by saying that conditions in Afghanistan (which he had visited recently) prove something or other.

Here's what I think conditions in Afghanistan prove:
When a country is bombed flat by a Superpower, has fanatical thugs (who were sponsored, trained, organised and otherwise encouraged by the other Superpower) rule it by banning anything not found in a paranoid schitzophrenic's interpretation of a 1300-year old (and badly edited) book, then is bombed flat again by that same other superpower, and has more, different thugs handed the country on a platter, who immediately return to the national pastimes of growing heroin and killing each other and everyone else who looks at them sideways, the only thing you can expect is that that country is comprehensively fucked, and unlikely to get better without a lot of effort, and not at all in the short term, like, say, a generation or five.

---

Christmas/Yule/Hannukah/Gregorian New Year was good. Saw Mum (hi, Mum! Did you have much trouble on the highway getting through Great Western and Stawell?). Saw Dad's mother. Saw other family. Saw (some) friends (tooticky, usuakari, we should have dinner or something). Mostly kept out of the heat. Weathered Abbi's tantrums. Got some nice presents. People seemed to like the presents I got them.

Generally worked out OK.

Parental Advisory: this post contains strong language and ideas which may offend.



Well, Joe Korp is dead. I hope the media is proud of killing him.

Guilty or innocent are utterly irrelevant concepts here. He was hounded unto death for the sake of a sexier news bulletin.

I can't remember a stretch of three days without recent footage of Korp, or his house, or Korp in his house. This includes the last two days.

Yesterday, the day of Maria Korp's funeral, Joe stayed away, for the professed reason that his presence would denigrate from the solemnity of the event. This was undoubtedly true. Certain court orders preventing him from contact with his son and step-daughter may also have played their parts, but that could have been arranged around if desired. Joe was praised for his consideration and restraint.

Did it do him any good? Well, no. Alongside the footage of the public part of the funeral, on every channel including the ABC, was footage of Joe wandering around his empty house. Of him drawing the curtains on his own small memorial and prayer (with accusing tones from the voice-over: how dare he attempt a private moment?!). Of him wandering the garden, and dissappearing into the shed.

Well, we know now what he went in there for, don't we.

Do you feel any better for having watched the last moments of a suicide?
Does it make it any better that the fact that you did watch was almost certainly one of the reasons why he did it?

And tonight, on every channel, after a clip sequence of Joe around and about, there was Joe's last public appearance: in a body bag, on a trolley.

That strikes me as a little ghoulish. No. Strike that. That is COMPLETELY FUCKING OBSCENE!

This isn't fucking hard, you scum-feeding parasitic vultures who pretend to the status of decent human beings, and have failed dismally. All you needed to say was "out of respect for the family, Joe Korp did not attend Maria's funeral. He held his own memorial service last week."
You did not need to camp on his fucking doorstep for months.
You did not need to follow his every move for months.
You did not need to show him on the news every fucking night whenever anyone says anything. And even if there was some pressing reason why you did, which there wasn't, what is wrong with showing just the one or two stock shots, like everyone has been doing for Steve Vizard? Why do you need new footage of him every fucking day?

You motherfucking vultures killed him.

It might have been interesting to have found out from a court of law whether he was, you know, possibly innocent or anything. But you guys moved some more papers, and got some more eyeballs on the n o'clock news, so what do you care, right?

By the way, what's happening in Gaza right now? How about the foreign minister assassinated by a sniper yesterday? Have any more innocent chemists been falsly accused of being terrorists lately? What about the 2004 US election, have any reports of widespread and systematic fraud been released lately?

Isn't there something you fuckers SHOULD be telling us?

Fuck you. Fuck you all very much.