catsidhe: (Default)
Amanda Vanstone¹ and Brendan O'Neill² talk about Greta Thunberg


Oh dear sweet baby Jesus on a topheavy quadbike in a thunderstorm, I don't think I've heard such a load of tendentious, arrogant circle-jerking and question-beggary in my life.

"And we're querying the degree to which Greta Thunberg is being used by other people. It's a serious question."

No it's not, you supercilious twerp. It's not a question at all. It's been a taken as an axiom that she is from the very concept of the conversation, and everything you two have been furiously agreeing with each other about³ is based around that assumption. "Given that Greta Thunberg is being used by other people, and given that it's a bad thing to use Greta Thunberg, is it a bad thing that Greta Thunberg is being used by other people? Discuss."

Then there's a load of "isn't it unfair when the other side keeps using the 'won't someone please think of the children' argument and I look like a monster when I use my usual rhetorical technique of withering, bullying sophistry on them, and that's taking advantage of children, won't anyone please think of the children." Because it can't possibly be that people have opinions and the right to express them before the age of eighteen, it must be because the Evil Social Marxist Conspiracy in teh ABC is putting them up to it in order to make you look bad.

Oh, and pleading for "won't someone please think of the welfare of Greta, who is delicate and fragile and autistic and has mental health issues and let's just go ahead and imply that young people aren't able to have agency, autistic people aren't able to have agency, therefore Greta must be someone's hand puppet, why are you being so mean to Greta."

Brendan O'Neill said that. Brendan. O'Neill. Said that. The Brendan O'Neill who called her a "millenarian weirdo". The Brendan O'Neill who complains about her "monotone voice"⁵ and "dead eyes".

Oh, won't someone think of the children, indeed.


Is this egregious nonsense the best that the Right has to offer as intellectual justification for itself? This ad hominem, petitio principii, ignoratio elenchi,⁶ incompetent sophistry. Because as an English Essay in year 10, this would get a "1/10, see me" in red pen, and an urgent referral to the school counsellor.

And the next Right Wing intellectual gatekeeper who says one word about "Virtue Signalling" on the Left is going to get a lot of tightly focussed anger and no mercy in the slightest, because I have utterly lost my ability to pretend being able to even with that lazy, ignorant, vacuous, hollow, hypocritical sneer.


And also note very carefully where I said "the Right". I do not mean "conservatives", because I know conservatives who are deeply thoughtful and insightful in debate, even where I disagree with them. (You know who you are.) These people are not "conservatives": they are Right Wing Culture Warriors of the first order, each and every one of them worse than any of the examples on the Left they like to point at accusingly. They are hypocrites and sophists, and if I were to say that they aren't even self aware enough to understand the depth of how fractally wrong they are, that's the charitable option, because the alternative is that they do know, and knowingly and deliberately spout this not-even-wrong poison on purpose.⁷


But what really got me furious at this was that in every word, and behind every assumption, they are taking even the possibility of agency away from Greta Thunberg, on the assumption that it is impossible for an autist, let alone a young one, to have any. And that ableist bullshit is something which cannot be allowed to stand.

(And in answer to the strawman Vanstone and O'Neill preemptively raised in answer to this point, no, it's not that you're not allowed to say that an autist is wrong, it's that you two are trying to claim that she's not even capable of putting forward an opinion: you aren't arguing against her argument, you are attempting to nullify her argument: you are trying to make her argument not have to be answered, purely because she is autistic. That is the definition of ableism, and that is the definition of ad hominem, and that's the high point of your exercise in intellectual masturbation.)




[1] Former Federal Liberal minister for keeping foreigners out, and not the worst Liberal Immigration Minister in living memory but only because all her successors seem to have held a "yeah? Well hold my beer and watch this" attitude to the job, leading to the current incumbent, Dutton.

[2] A sort of Renaissance Horrible Excuse for a Human Being, making him overqualified for the Center for Independent Studies.

[3] including, but not restricted to why adults are right about everything, why people under 18 years old are entitled to their opinions but shouldn't ever actually have the right to express them, why children having agency will lead to them being "entitled"⁴, that and why it's a bad thing that you're not allowed to give kids these days a "clip across the ear".

[4] presumably: entitled to having agency, which is a bad thing if they should disagree with people like Vanstone and O'Neill, but a good thing if they are a member of the Young Liberals.

[5] I dunno, as an autistic 16 year old making speeches to large groups and international gatherings in her second language, I don't think she's doing too badly myself, but then I'm also autistic and presumably don't have the right to an opinion either.

[6] and just, I don't know, look up a list of logical and informal fallacies and check off the ones which aren't present in that discussion.

[7] Which is to say, I have in mind a list of people who I very much suspect to be exactly that sort of populist authoritarian⁸

[8] Some people say that "populist authoritarian" is a good start for a definition of "fascist". (When followed by such details as public subsidy and support of citizens in good standing; no support for and arbitrarily punitive measures of severe strictness against unpersons non-citizens or citizens not of good standing; a restrictive and shrinking definition of who counts as a person citizen of good standing; expanding militarism and militaristic fetishism; and the manipulation of elections to ensure a predetermined result, up to and including bribery and threats of violence. So at least we're safe on that last count. Guess there's nothing to worry about, then.) I couldn't possibly comment. That name you're thinking right now, I didn't say it.
catsidhe: (Gilgamesh)
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.
catsidhe: (Default)
Shorter Rick Perry (at the end of the article): Gay people don't have Human Rights. My Invisible Friend said so.
catsidhe: (Default)
'Rewriting of Act' puts offshore deals in doubt.

Well, yeah, duh! That's the whole point! ONOZ, go the media, what an embarrassment for Julia and her government! Maybe they have to fall back to Nauru or Manus island!

Um... no, no they can't, because Nauru and Manus are not legal dumping grounds for exactly the same reasons Malaysia isn't, namely, our international treaty obligations forbid us from dumping refugees in a country which isn't a signatory, or which is a technically a signatory but has ‘reservations’ (ie., “except this bit”) for all the sections which matter.

And no, it's not “rewriting the Act”, it's a finding that the Act is, and always has been, incompatible with an international treaty, and therefore basically nullified. It is not a lawful law. It never was.

And you in the media? Yes, you. Do you think you might see fit to mention that these offshore dumping laws were just as illegal when Little Johnny was doing it, it just didn't get tested. The treaties and obligations haven't changed in the meantime. The only reason this didn't happen to
Johnny and his happy gang of smug sociopaths is the vagaries of the legal system (ie., the refugee advocates pushed harder this time). If this had been pushed to the High Court then, it's really difficult to see how they could have come to any different conclusion: the law which allows demands offshore refugee dumping is an illegal law.

If they really want to pass a law to allow it, then they're going to have to, one way or another, repudiate the International Treaty on the Rights of the Refugee. Let's see if they have the testicular fortitude to plainly and openly do what they so badly and obviously want to: go backwards in our adherence to international Human Rights Law.
catsidhe: (Default)
What do you do when your much-vaunted rally to show the ‘deep’ and ‘widely shared’ feelings of the astro-turfing lunar-Right demagogues, racists, and neo-MacCarthyites only attracts the usual core crowd of Useful Idiots, hangers-on and other such sad desperate wanna-be Liberal candidates loonies? (Ask for thousands of ‘Real Australians’, get a handful of LaRouchites, “Fuck off were full” stickers, and truckies who may or may not have been paid to go... do you think that might say something, right there?)

Simple: make shit up. As usual.


But that's OK: Tony Abbott still like to pretend he's the True Voice of Hardworking Average Aussies, and will continue to do so until just before the next election when he'll will be thanked for keeping the seat warm and very firmly dumped from the leadership for being a gross embarrassment to the principles which the Liberal Party are supposed to stand up to, or even to Howard's perversions thereof.

Barnaby Joyce will probably continue in Parliament, but he will also continue to laugh when everyone else does, not quite able to understand that we're not laughing with him.

And Alan Jones? He will continue to be Alan Jones, and I can think of no worse punishment.
catsidhe: (Default)
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/backgroundbriefing/stories/2011/3268730.htm

Executive summary: Monckton is an arrogant lying fraud. Every word out of his mouth is a lie, including articles and conjunctions. If you find yourself on the same side of any argument as him, it's time to seriously consider your position.

And the people who cheer him on (literally mindlessly chanting slogans of hatred) are hypocrites and idiots. "The ABC are fascists for daring to print anyone who disagrees with me! I don't think there should be censorship, but anyone who disagrees with Monckton will be locked up when we take over, and any media who published them will be broken up and sold. Because they're fascists."

For fuck's sake. Do they really not see their own jackboots?



If you quote him, or anyone who approvingly quotes him (yes, his obnoxiousness is contagious), for any reason other than to point and laugh at the logorrhoeia of lies falling continuously from his mouth, then you have just lost whatever argument you were participating in, as you have just given up the right to have any opinion you hold taken seriously.
catsidhe: (Default)
On “Our” ABC:
A simmering conflict between The Australian newspaper and the Greens has become open warfare, with Greens leader Bob Brown accusing the national broadsheet of a vendetta against his party and telling it to "grow up".

Yeah. “accused”:
Greens leader Bob Brown has accused The Australian of trying to wreck the alliance between the Greens and Labor. We wear Senator Brown's criticism with pride. We believe he and his Green colleagues are hypocrites; that they are bad for the nation; and that they should be destroyed at the ballot box.

I love how the word “accused” implies that there's any doubt. The Australian's explicitly declared editorial policy is to see the Greens ‘destroyed’. As Jeremy Sear wrote in Pure Poison at the time:
Well, there you are. You can take pretty much everything The Australian says about the Greens in that context: they are not interested in giving them a fair hearing, or listening to what they have to say, or presenting their arguments for public assessment: they want them “destroyed”.

Everything you read about The Greens in that paper can now be almost completely discounted by that fact. You can only conclude that if there’s a smear, they’ll run it. If there’s a positive story, they won’t. If there’s a way of presenting the Greens’ policies in the most damaging, least accurate light, that’s how they’ll be presented. The Greens will not be given fair opportunity to respond to critics’ claims about them (including the asinine ones made in that editorial). It will be relentless, one-sided, hostile propaganda.

Anyone who seeks to rely on The Australian for information should be aware that whatever they’re told about the Greens will be subject to the most extraordinary, deliberate bias, with the express purpose of having them “destroyed at the ballot box”.




And when the Greens call The Australian on it, it's all about Brown's “accusation”. (Sure, they mention that editorial. Once. In paragraph 15 of 21. That should cover it, right?)

I'm sorry, what was that about the ABC's “Left wing bias”, again?

Yeah; this.

Mar. 4th, 2011 02:13 pm
catsidhe: (Gilgamesh)
Seen last on A Tiny Revolution:
By: Aaron Datesman
It is possible, though unlikely, that you have not yet read this joke:
A unionized public employee, a member of the Tea Party, and a CEO are sitting at a table. In the middle of the table there is a plate with a dozen cookies on it. The CEO reaches across, takes 11 cookies, looks at the Tea Partier, and says, "Look out for that union guy, he wants a piece of your cookie."
Credit to Gar Lipow for making my life 320% more awesome.
— Aaron Datesman
catsidhe: (Default)
Before the election, Joe Hockey made a big song-and-dance about how the Opposition's budget was audited. He explicitly used that word. He made the point that it was audited by a top-five accounting firm, because they could not trust Treasury. He claimed that its numbers were superior to Labor's, because it had been audited.

He lied.

It was looked at by a big accountancy firm, that much is true. But they explicitly did not audit it, and indeed a statement to the effect that it was not an audit was countersigned by senior Opposition folks.

It was an outright, deliberate lie.

Now that they've been exposed, Hockey and Robb are pleading sophistry: they used the technical term ‘audit’ in the non-technical sense, and it's not their fault if they forgot to mention that this audit was not technically an audit.


I thought there was something suspicious about the anonymous accounting company and the refusal to let Treasury see the numbers when it first became an issue, but now we have the evidence that he was lying through his big cuddly-bear teeth.

And it's buried in The Age on page five or seven or something. (I forget exactly, and I haven't got a copy handy.) The so-called Left Wing rag. The Australian seems to have deleted the story from its site (it comes up in a search, but the liked article doesn't exist any more). It's there in Adelaide Now, though. I wonder if Adelaide Now is anything to do with the Adelaide Advertiser. Maybe the low rent version. You know, like MX is the Herald-Sun for people who don't have time for the H-S's level of intellect.


I'm sorry, media, I thought that this might be slightly more important than whether Gillard thinks Abbott used ‘harsh language’, or who's going to be playing for Collingwood next year. Maybe I just have different expectations.
catsidhe: (Default)
Matt Taibi at Rolling Stone magazine:
Vast forests have already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it's going. But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I've concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They're full of shit. All of them.
For those of you inclined to not read because you think it's all abuse on those noble Teabaggers, just hold your nose and read it anyway. Because it gives evidence and reason why these people are ignorant, hypocritical idiots. Like this bit:
Scanning the thousands of hopped-up faces in the crowd, I am immediately struck by two things. One is that there isn't a single black person here. The other is the truly awesome quantity of medical hardware: Seemingly every third person in the place is sucking oxygen from a tank or propping their giant atrophied glutes on motorized wheelchair-scooters. As Palin launches into her Ronald Reagan impression — "Government's not the solution! Government's the problem!" — the person sitting next to me leans over and explains.

"The scooters are because of Medicare," he whispers helpfully. "They have these commercials down here: 'You won't even have to pay for your scooter! Medicare will pay!' Practically everyone in Kentucky has one."

A hall full of elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing against government spending and imagining themselves revolutionaries as they cheer on the vice-presidential puppet hand-picked by the GOP establishment. If there exists a better snapshot of everything the Tea Party represents, I can't imagine it.




Oh, and all of you who have found deeply meaningful and important reasons why Muslims don't have the right to do legal things in places you don't want them to? Like set up a community center in a building they own?

I'm sure your reasoning is sound, but please understand that you have come to the same conclusion as the sort of people for whom not even a dead muslim is safe enough. No really, you've no doubt come up with a wonderful rationalisation, but you're standing amongst people who really do just hate and fear Jews Blacks Mexicans refugees Muslims.

Surely that alone must make you stand back and wonder...? Nah. Who am I kidding.

The self-awareness seems to stop with the smug Q.E.D. (And the canonical imputation of smugness and hypocrisy and making-shit-up-to-make-one's-self-feel-better to liberals and the Left.) Saying that the once-known-as Cordoba Center is a mosque (it isn't), and it shouldn't be built because it hurts Fox News' feelings (it didn't when they interviewed Rauf when it was first proposed), and it shouldn't be built because it's just too close to Ground Zero, is just so much bullshit. Because if that were true, then there wouldn't be any trouble building mosques anywhere else, would there? Would there? Is California too fucking close to Lower Manhattan? And claiming that "dur nineteen hundred thousand percent of Americans (who subscribe to the New Republic) don't like it based on what they've heard from my lies about it hurr der derp," is more than meaningless. Lots of people went to the Nuremberg rallies too, fucker. For God's sake, if you want to not be compared to Nazis, stop acting like them.

Just admit that you hate and fear Muslims, that it's an irrational thing bordering on pathological hysteria, and that it might as well be Jews you're shrieking about. Or Gays. Or Gypsies. (Oh, wait, that's happening in France.) Or Catholics.


I'm going to go think about something else now, before I have an aneurysm.
catsidhe: (Default)
I know it's a sideshow, but I have some comments on this mishegas about Oakeshott being Speaker or not.

Point the first

How long has Oakeshott been in parliament? A quick look at the Online Encyclopaedia of Lies and Rumour informs us that he was elected to the NSW parliament in 1996.

And it's only now occurring to him that when serious be-suited men with smiles that don't reach quite as far as their eyes take you into a back room and promise to be your bestest friend for ever and ever, they might not be entirely trustworthy?

Also: nice to see how long Abbott's “Kinder, Gentler” polity lasted. Which is: about ten seconds.

Point the second

The argument largely stems from a ‘Gentlemen's Agreement’ to do an end-run around the Constitution.

In the Constitution it says that the Speaker does not vote unless as a tiebreaker. No, really:
40. Questions arising in the House of Representatives shall be determined by a majority of votes other than that of the Speaker. The Speaker shall not vote unless the numbers are equal, and then he shall have a casting vote.


OK, so Oakeshott, if he were to become Speaker, would become the Nanny of Parliament, but not be able to actually vote on anything himself. Unless Parliament were tied.

Well, first, that's probably a large part of why neither Labor nor the Coalition want him as Speaker; because with a hung parliament and minority government, it is far more likely that his tiebreaker vote would come into play.

But that's not even counting shenanigans. The shenanigans here is the practice known as "pairing". Pairing is not something that many people have heard about before this whole thing blew up. But what is it?

Basically, Pairing is a Gentlemen's Agreement between Labor and the Coalition that the opposition would have a member who would be the designated pair to the Speaker – the Deputy Speaker – who would also abstain from voting. Even though there is nothing preventing him from doing so beyond this agreement. So in effect, the Opposition gives the Speaker's vote back by removing a vote against.

(So, if the Government's numbers were x+1 including the speaker, and the Opposition's were y, that means that the Opposition has agreed that they will only use y-1 members to vote against the Government's x, which gives a virtual extra vote back to the Government.)

Still with me?

So: this happy little agreement has the effect of making the spirit of §40 of the Constitution completely void. One or two people have noticed that this might be a problem in its own right.

But it's even worse than that, because if Oakeshott were named speaker, it reveals this happy fraud for the farce it is. Because he's independent, and beholden to no Whip, he can vote how he likes. So first problem: just because he backed Labor for Government, doesn't mean he would want to vote with them all the time. Which just makes things messy. But more than that... What if the Pair did his usual thing and abstained from a vote, which then was tied? Because then the Speaker gets to make the tiebreaker. Even though he has, in effect, already voted.

It wasn't just that the Coalition are acting like petulant five-year-olds having a quiet sulk at being denied their rightful place in charge, it's because if Oakeshott became speaker, it would reveal the whole sorry mess of the (until now) quiet détante to render a section of the Constitution meaningless.


Don't get me wrong. There are sections of the Constitution which are thoroughly contemptible. Such as §25.

(Oh, and that 20-year-old electee in Queensland is safe. Although §34 says that a candidate must be “of the full age of twenty-one years”, a law was passed which reduced this to 18 years in 2001. Lucky for him, eh?)

But still, there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with the idea that the Speaker should be above day-to-day politics, in preference to trying to keep the place running smoothly. In England this is an ideal kept to the point that the Speaker resigns from his party. But here, oh no. Simply not good enough. So the big two parties made a deal with each other that whoever got control would have that extra vote, and they wouldn't complain when it was the next guy's turn. Except then the big two got a great big scare, and the farce was revealed to more than the policy wonks and back-room suits.



Oh dear. I seem to have turned this into a rant. Ah, well. So be it.

Maybe someone who knows more about Parliamentary Procedure and the Constitution can explain where I've gone wrong.



EDIT: On the mathematics of an Independent Speaker or not.

It burns.

Aug. 29th, 2010 09:21 am
catsidhe: (Gilgamesh)
Hey, media? I'll make you a deal.

You stop printing conservative press releases as if they were news, correct, or meaningful, and I'll promise to try to take you a little bit more seriously.

This includes you, ABC.


FFS.
But only 29 per cent of people believed Australia should become a republic as soon as possible, with 31 per cent saying Australia should never become a republic.
For a start, they don't mention the ‘I don't know’s. But assuming that they're negligible, hell... assuming the ‘IDK’ is 10%, that leaves 31% with “No republic ever”, an assumption of 10% “Buggered if I know/care”, 29% as “WE HAVE TO DO IT NOW!!!”, leaving about 30% for the remaining option: “Yes, republic, but we can wait to get it right.”

By my count, that's almost 60% for a republic, versus 31% vehemently against.

And despite David Flint's fever dreams of relevance, that is not overwhelming support for his side.

I'll leave discussion for another time on whether this is further evidence for or against the proposition that the ABC is biased against conservatives.
catsidhe: (Default)
So the wanna-be fascists and assorted Useful Idiots of Corpocracy are busy telling us, over and over again, how Nationalised Health Care is not just wrong in practice, it's wrong in theory, and it's just plain morally wrong. They warn us of encroaching socialism, they complain that Britain's NHS is increasingly inefficient (of course, it would be crass to point out that the rot really set in when Thatcher set about rebuilding it in her own Darwinist image — where the NHS suddenly had to compete against itself, thus killing all community and social concern — and hammered by the genially incompetent Labour, who removed everything which still worked).

They say that the Tea Party protesters are all kind-hearted humanitarians, just looking out for the little guy. Well, except insofar as they're almost to a man arguing vehemently against their own best interests, which doesn't make me give too high an estimate for the average IQ at a Tea Party rally. And the next time some Libertarian douche tells you that Libertarians are kind hearted and give to charity and care for their less fortunate neighbours, yeah, you can go ahead and call them a fucking liar to their face.


And the next time a Corporatist Useful Idiot tells you that the US system does not have any endemic problems, and that people get good care out of the compulsory Private Health Insurance model, yeah, you can call them a liar to their face as well. Because the Insurance Companies are not contributing to the Health Care system, they are parasites upon it. Their concern is not the health of their clients, and if it ever was, it has not been for a very long time: they are Corporations, and their legally mandated first and only concern is to their shareholders. To this end, they make really good profits if it is a legal requirement for everyone to give them money, and even more again if they can manage to find a way to never have to pay any out.

The US system is one of the least efficient Health Care systems on the planet, and if you were to plot outcome/cost, it would probably end up bang in the middle of the Third World. Sure, if you've got the cash, you can get the best care on the planet. And if you've almost got the cash, then you can enjoy your recovery on the streets with your homeless family. And if, like the vast majority of Americans, including those mindless idiots at the Tea Party rallies, you don't have the ready cash, well then I hope you like dying on that street, because the emergency rooms are long since filled up and overflowing with all the other people who can't afford to see a proper doctor or afford hospital admission.



The only reason we have it so good in Australia, as far as I can figure it, the only reason, is because the Insurance Companies have competition: single payer public hospitals and public subsidy of doctor's visits in the form of Medicare.

And of course, those Insurance Companies claim that it's ‘uncompetitive’ to have actual competition (they'd much rather have the US Oligopoly situation, where it doesn't matter how much you treat your ‘clients’ like human landfill, the other guys are all exactly as bad). And the usual Useful Idiots from the IPA and CIS and Sydney Institute come out and pretend that this lie is not a lie.

Fuck that. We do not need, we do not want a US-style clusterfuck to happen to our Health Care System. And if we want to avoid a UK-style clusterfuck to happen, we need to undo all the Howard-era and Thatcher-inspired managerialist and pseudo-competitive crap now, before the rot becomes unrepairable.

There is hope for the Australian system. I'm not sure there is hope for America.
catsidhe: (Gilgamesh)
John Quiggan on ‘Lord’ Monckton.
Executive summary: Monckton is insane. Anyone who takes him seriously is either similarly insane, or an idiot, or a liar.

Larvatus Prodeo on the ‘MMR vaccine causes Autism!!eleven!’ doctor.
Executive summary: Andrew Wakefield is a liar and a fraud, and was paid to lie about the ‘connection’ between vaccines and autism. And the MMR hysterics who paid him — and are still paying him — are lunatics. And are causing more harm to their children through their actions than what those children already have from autism.
catsidhe: (Default)
It is a crime to be gay in Uganda. It is deemed to be such a serious crime to be gay that it can be punished with life imprisonment.

But this is not enough, it seems. You see, if being gay is, in its own right, serious enough to warrant life imprisonment, then what do you do when some is gay, and HIV positive? ‘Aggravated’ gayness, if you will? Simple. You take the next logical step, and punish it with death.


That bill would also make it illegal to discuss homosexuality, or even for a landlord to rent to a homosexual person. When asked about this monstrous denial of humanity, a minister is reported to have said
“We are really getting tired of this phrase human rights. It is being abused. Anything goes, and if you are challenged? 'Oh, it's my right'.

“Anal sex? Human rights. Robbery? Human rights. All sort of nonsense? Human rights.”



And beyond the sheer monstrousness of this in its own right (and a vague wondering why this hasn't led the news reports here...), I have two points to make.

First is that this is an entirely logical extension of the fundamentally broken thesis that some people have less rights than others. And while not being able to marry is not within many orders of magnitude of this, it is on the same continuum. The arguments are basically the same.

And second: the argument is being made that this is a push led by religious politicians from another country. When I say that, I bet most people will automatically think of Wahabbist Saudi Imams. And they'd be wrong: the trail leads to fundamentalist Christians in Washington.

The problem is not Islam, or Christianity, or even necessarily religion: the problem is small minded xenophobic fucks who have it on good authority that God hates the same people they hate, and it's a sin to think about it too deeply. That it's a sin to think.

They are the enemy, whatever they're wearing, whatever language they're ranting in, whatever name they give to the imaginary friend they abuse to justify their prejudices.
catsidhe: (Default)
Islamism is a serious problem. The world would be better off if Islamism were defeated, robbed of its power. I don't think anyone seriously disputes that.

The argument, then, comes down to the means. There are two possibilities:
  1. We could bomb the fuck out of brown people until they are dead or acknowledge the West as their betters and masters, or
  2. we could not be rampaging dickheads and steal the force of Islamist propaganda by, and this is an amazing concept: proving it false


Guess which one works?

The radical, xenocidal Islamists base their rhetoric and theory on ignorance and hate. Maybe, just maybe, what the saner of us (in our millions) have been trying — to whit, extending education and hope — is the way to solve the problem, in a way that justifying that hate does not.

Of course, this relies on bloodthirsty lunatics in power and their equally bloodthirsty but far less well informed useful idiots to get back in their fucking box and stop fucking up a winning strategy.

Q and A

Aug. 13th, 2009 10:19 pm
catsidhe: (unhappy)
Pyne you fuckknuckle, the question was whether people who are so outraged about Stern Hu (and rightly so), that is, you, might not be hypocrites when their concern is compared with that they showed to the human rights of David Hicks, ignored and reviled for years.

To turn that into an attack on the hypocrisy of the Left? That's just the most mindblowing act of stomach-churning sophistry I've seen, and that's while you're sharing a podium with that vile toad Akerman.

Well done. Just don't come anywhere near me, you smug, arrogant, virulent little turd.

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