Now LOOK ….

Oct 15, 2008 | Arts, Australian Values, Cultural Values, Media Values, Values

Now LOOK ….

 

 Not this bloody time

 

W e have held it in for a very long time but today was the last straw.

For seeming ages journalists have been describing people who defend themselves against legal allegations, or who mount arguments against legal charges, as “defending the charges”. This form of words actually means that they are supporting the charges, arguing for the charges, defending the charges from attack.

It makes as much sense as saying that someone who protects themselves while being mugged is “defending the mugging”.

Now, you know…we’ve put up with it. We’ve sucked it up. We know English is a “living language” and that the education leaders in Australia succumbed to whacky theories and utterly abdicated their responsibility in the 80s, which has led to spiralling, terminal dumbing down and trashing of the language, and that today’s young reporters are, unavoidably, products of an awful and ignorant 80s education and we all just have to learn to live with it. We know that. We can pretend to be okay with that.

We almost didn’t blow our coffee to the other side of the room when we heard even Jennifer Byrne on First Tuesday Book Club talk about someone being “Nobelled” a few of months ago. That’s even worse than an athlete “medalling”. [What is wrong with “winning a medal”, except for how “cool” it makes a sports jock feel to say “medalling”?] We can pretend we didn’t hear that ugliness for whole minutes at a time.

BUT WE BLOODY WON’T TAKE THIS ONE LYING DOWN!!!!

Some bloody policeman told journalists today, after a pair of rottweilers had attacked a woman in the street, that “we’ve infringed the owner”. But you can’t “infringe a person”; you can only infringe their rights. You can infringe a law, say, or a moral standard. We think he meant that the owner had committed an infringement of the law and that he had therefore been served with an Infringement Notice.

Well, we’ll bloody tell you what you’ve bloody infringed, you knucklehead! You’ve bloody infringed our bloody right to hear people in responsible positions use the bloody language correctly, and with some respect, you ignorant bloody bonehead!

Aaaah…..That’s better…..

  

Does Bill Kristol Read Values Australia?

Oct 14, 2008 | Australian Values, Democracy, Media Values, USPol, Values

Does Bill Kristol Read Values Australia?

 

Flabbergasted!


That’s what we were! Imagine our surprise when we read this from Bill Kristol, the Ultimate Republican Death Beast:

“ Fire the Campaign!

It’s time for John McCain to fire his campaign. He has nothing to lose. … What McCain needs to do is junk the whole thing and start over.
At Wednesday night’s debate at Hofstra, McCain might want to volunteer a mild mea culpa about the extent to which the presidential race has degenerated into a shouting match. And then he can pledge to the voters that the last three weeks will feature a contest worthy of this moment in our history.”

The reason for our astonishment? (No, it’s not because he looks like an Alan Jones clone)

Days earlier we had written,

“ Voters are not attracted to this desperate man at a time when they need someone strong, balanced and dependable. He may be firing up committed supporters but he is alienating the rest … What he really needs is to look presidential.”

McCain’s only hope now, we said, was to say to the American people,

“ I apologise for the way this campaign has been run. I am unwilling to sacrifice America to my ambition, because I know that if I continue this way, whether I win or lose, I will have caused terrible harm to the nation … Therefore I have sacked my campaign advisers … Mr Obama and I differ on serious questions of ideals and of processes and I will argue those differences as forcefully as I am able in the remaining days of this campaign … From now on I will debate the issues and that is all.

So cheers, Bill. You could at least have given us a link or something!

And on another note, (remembering that George Bush presided over

  • the unprofitable Arbusto,
  • the collapsed Spectrum 7 Energy Corp.
  • and Harken Energy, with it’s Saudi links
  • and Bush’s claimed multiple violations of federal securities law,
  • (and noting that he is screwing America with the same level of incompetence)

one of our favourite comments on US politics in the last few years, from an American interviewee on tonight’s Foreign Correspondent:

“ Right now, George Bush is about as popular as Anthrax.”

We think that makes Anthrax look like a wonder cure.

‘I’m Sir Roger and I’m Fucked’

Oct 5, 2008 | Arts, Australian Values, Border Security, Capital Punishment, Citizenship, Corruption, Cultural Values, Democracy, Economic Values, Fame, Freedom of Speech, Global Warming, Humour, Immigration, Indigenous, Legal, Lifestyle & Life, Media Values, OzPol Values, PedoPriests, Racism, Religious Values, Science Values, Terrorism, Uncategorized, USPol, Values, War

‘I’m Sir Roger and I’m Fucked’

 

This is not for you

 

Really. We just want to acknowledge ourselves privately but publicly (it makes sense to us, anyway). It’s not meant to be onanistically self-congratulatory, except in the sense that we have achieved some things and we want to record them.
So this is a stocktake for posterity, if you like, that marks a moment, a milestone.

Yes, ValuesAustralia is two years old. This is our 712th post. Singlehanded, eh, Clubtroppo, Larvatus Prodeo, RoadtoSurfdom etc. etc.? That’s almost one a day. (There used to be a billboard for One A Day vitamin pills at the corner of Victoria Rd and Rowntree Street at Blackwattle Bay in Sydney. There was a picture of a man and a woman. The woman was saying, “I’m Jenny and I give John One A Day.” Soon a graffiti artist had added, “I’m John and I’m fucked!”)

And, yes, we’re just about fucked, ourselves. We’ve got a rotator cuff from all the typing and mouse clicking, especially during October and November last year.

(We went to the radiologist. “What seems to be the problem?” “I’ve got a sore shoulder.” “Hmm…we’ll do an ultrasound and an x-ray…… Hmm…. Hmmmmmm, our expert analysis of the ultrasound and x-ray indicates you have a sore shoulder. You’ll have to stop using it for a while.” “Thanks….What?)

We’ve never paid for any advertising. We’ve never submitted ValuesAustralia to any search engine. Nevertheless, we got ourselves listed on Google within 24 hours of launching the site. We tried to register the site with dmoz.org (The Open Source Directory) – as you do – but it wasn’t taking orders, and by the time it came back on line months later, ValuesAustralia was already magically listed!

We’ve been #1 for “Australian Values” on Google, Yahoo, Live and Ask most of the time for more than a year and a half. We’re #12 for “values” on Google worldwide, out of 314,000,000 results and on google.com.au we’re #2 for “values” out of 307,000,000. We’re #1 on google worldwide and Australia for “Australian political values” out of about 400,000 results.

Our Google Page Rank is 4 (used to be 5 but they changed the algorithm) which is respectable but we’d prefer a 5 or a 6.

We’ve had over 300,000 aggregate visitors and more than 75,000 spam messages (thank you, Akismet).

Earlier this year we were consistently getting more than 1000 visitors a day – over 30,000 a month, which is okay, although nothing like the big guys.

We’ve made friends all over the world and especially in Australia. We are in the top 1% of websites worldwide. We are popular in Saudi Arabia – amongst the top 42,000 favourite sites for Saudis. (That worries us just a bit…Say hullo to Al for us…) We appreciate our readers and those who choose to comment from time to time. We thought a scarcity of comments was a Bad Thing, a Failure, but we noticed that one of the most popular, most entertaining bloggers we know of, Whatever It Is, I’m Against It, doesn’t get heaps, either – a few, but not tens like Possum or hundreds and thousands like William the PollBludger.

In May 2007 ValuesAustralia was picked up by the “Stay In Touch” column at the Sydney Morning Herald, accusing us of “rhetoric”.

One of Sir Roger’s posts was selected by ClubTroppo and On Line Opinion in January 2008 as one of the top 40 posts in Australia for 2007. We’re very proud of that.

But it’s a post we made early in 2007 that we are still most proud of. Ken Parish at ClubTroppo called it

“quite possibly the best piece of passionate, angry polemic I’ve ever read, certainly on a blog. ‘Roger Migently’ is roused to extraordinary heights of eloquence… ”

Yes, Troppo has been good to us and we mourn the passing of Missing Link and Ken’s prolonged work-induced(?) absence. We were also congratulated by Richard Neville (HomePageDaily) and Steven Poole whose Unspeak blog is our benchmark for economy, clarity, style and wit.

We have enjoyed the journey so far and we have no intention at this stage of stopping, although we have slowed down (work, you know).

Bobbo the Clown

Our favourite person in the world, of course, is the clown, Bob Correll (above), Deputy Secretary of DIC, OPM, because he wrote us the letter which inspired our outburst. As we discovered he was (and appears still to be) the person who had taken over departmental responsibility for “Borders, Compliance, Detention and Technology”, or in other words, perhaps, for keeping innocent kiddies locked up in the desert, deporting Australian citizens, supporting the failed state of Nauru, making the lives of genuine refugees a misery, doing it to please the Minister, and all at the touch of a computer key. Previously he had been the driving force behind developing and implementing Job Network, or “how to design exquisite, personalised punishment for people who are already struggling with the stress of being unemployed”. Godluvvya, Bob! How’s the Volvo? How’s the kids? How do you sleep at night?

One of the most satisfying things is how we always beat the Immigration Department on Google.

Our second favourite person is Mick Keelty, just for being such a hopeless buffoon and continually making appalling stuff-ups for us to make fun of. G’bye, Mick.

Anyway, just for the record.

(And a special “hi!” to Lang!)

Pedants r Us

Sep 24, 2008 | Arts, Australian Values, Cultural Values, Values

Pedants r Us

 

What on earth is going on?

 

Is it all over, after all? Have the barbarians claimed victory?

 

First:

Sir Roger listens to ABC Radio A LOT.

One evening, or early morning, he was listening to an interview with an author by a respected ABC presenter. Now, you would think that a bookish person might be a, little…erudite, you know. Just a little. And the presenter expressed her feeling about a particular passage or idea in this book.

She described it as POIG-NANT.

This, of course, is incorrect. Simply incorrect. The correct anglicised pronunciation is POIN-YANT.

‘So what,’ you might say.

The thing is that if the presenter gets something as simple as that wrong, on what grounds can you respect anything else she says? It would be okay for Joe the Baker or the medical technologist or whatever, but the presenter is in her position because she is somewhat learned and something of an expert.

Who is the ABC employing these days? What standards are they accepting?

Secondly, and more jarringly:

Hindsight last Sunday was the NSW History Council Lecture.

The speaker was Professor Joy Damousi, Professor of History at the University of Melbourne.

This is someone who certainly effects to be knowledgeable and whose job description when she applied would have included a requirement for erudition at a very high level.

Prof. Damousi was talking about elocution, the development of Australian speech and the influence on the Australian accent of reading aloud.

One of the favourite things to read aloud, she opined, was Longfellow’s “Hiathawa”.

Yes.

High-ATH-awa.

You won’t find many results for that in Google.

You will, though, find many results for “Hiawatha”, a poem from which Sir Roger’s father used to recite sections from memory.

If Prof Damousi had ever read “Hiawatha” she would never have been able to pronounce the word the way she did.

It just doesn’t scan. The stresses are the wong syllables.

So she, an academic, referenced a literary work of which she appears to be actually ignorant.

But wait, there’s more:

She referred to GBS’s famous play “Pygnaliom“. And she referred to the “candescence” of someone’s voice. Should it perhaps have been the “cadence”?

Or “traits”: is it trates or trays? We know what we think.

Perhaps she was just really nervous; not used, as a lecturer, previously, to standing up in a large room in front of hundreds of people.

If this is typical of her academic standards – and she would have been at her best for a seriously formal lecture being broadcast by the ABC – and if this is the standard of a top-level academic at one of the three most respected Australian universities, what hope is there? (We have to say that we have searched the lecture online a number of times since to locate the exact point where Damousi said :”Hiathawa”, without success. We have no doubt personally that we didn’t make it up and wonder whether it has been edited out. However, if we imagined it, we apologise. We didn’t make up “candescence” and “Pygnaliom”, though.)

Anyway, here, to calm the mind with sweetness is a brief excerpt from The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

Homeward now went Hiawatha;
Pleasant was the landscape round him,
Pleasant was the air above him,
For the bitterness of anger
Had departed wholly from him,
From his brain the thought of vengeance,
From his heart the burning fever.

Only once his pace he slackened,
Only once he paused or halted,
Paused to purchase heads of arrows
Of the ancient Arrow-maker,
In the land of the Dacotahs,
Where the Falls of Minnehaha
Flash and gleam among the oak-trees,
Laugh and leap into the valley.

There the ancient Arrow-maker
Made his arrow-heads of sandstone,
Arrow-heads of chalcedony,
Arrow-heads of flint and jasper,
Smoothed and sharpened at the edges,
Hard and polished, keen and costly.

With him dwelt his dark-eyed daughter,
Wayward as the Minnehaha,
With her moods of shade and sunshine,
Eyes that smiled and frowned alternate,
Feet as rapid as the river,
Tresses flowing like the water,
And as musical a laughter:
And he named her from the river,
From the water-fall he named her,
Minnehaha, Laughing Water.

Sack Keelty

Aug 30, 2008 | Australian Values, Border Security, Citizenship, Corruption, Democracy, Immigration, Legal, OzPol Values, Terrorism, Values

Sack Keelty

 

Sack the Bastard

 

…and DIC Senior Management, particularly the Deputy Secretary in charge of borders, compliance, and detention, the avowed expert in the use of the visa as a tool for enforcing (at the time) Liberal Party policy. Yes, it’s our old friend, Bob Correll who, outed himself on LinkedIn as a big supporter of the LNP; (not sort of ‘correct’ for a public servant?).

And sack Andrews and Ruddock from Parliament.
Sack them all for Misfeasance. Malfeasance. Non-feasance. Abuse of power by a public official. Criminal stupidity. Any of those will do.

Federal Police yesterday released a statement saying the former Gold Coast doctor [Haneef] is no longer a person of interest to them, and they have found there are no grounds to proceed against him. [SBS News]

Well fuck me dead – I’m Foreskin Fred!

Yes, after all this time. After all the waste. After all the harm. After all the stupidity and incompetence. After Scotland Yard laughed at the AFP; months after the Queensland Police Service and ASIO both said there were no grounds. After all the subversion of democracy, the courts and the rule of law.

Sack them.

Everything about the carriage of the Haneef affair by the AFP and the government suggests that it never was about public safety; that it always was a political stunt; that it was in fact a considered and calculated decision by the AFP to use the Haneef matter for political ends. As we know from another case, the AFP sought every possible opportunity to test the envelope of the terrorism laws.

Keelty, in particular, clearly operates a political agenda, having capitulated under pressure from John Howard years ago. He learned his lesson well and in the Haneef case hung his hat on the re-election of the Howard government. This means that he has lost sight of his actual role, his constitutional – and certainly his moral – obligation to the people of Australia and the democracy they own.

And so we say in the alleged words of Lawson, the Bastard’s curse:

“ May the itching piles torment you, may corns grow on your feet,
May crabs as big as spiders attack your balls a treat.
Then, when you’re down and out, and a hopeless bloody wreck,
May you slip back through your arsehole, and break your bloody neck.”

Sunday Roast

Aug 17, 2008 | Australian Values, Cultural Values, Lifestyle & Life, Religious Values, Values

Sunday Roast

Godly Thoughts for Sunday

“ 

And now, today, we grieve for four young men [US Marines murdered in El Salvador] taken from us too soon. And we receive them in death as they were on the last night of their lives, together and following a radiant light — following it toward heaven, toward home. And if we reach — or when we reach — heaven’s scenes, we truly will find it guarded by…

…wait for it…

…we truly will find it guarded by United States marines.
– [President Ronald Reagan, June 22, 1985]

So that’s something to look forward to.

“ I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do.

When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”
– [Stephen Roberts]

 

“ I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian God may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them.

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more often likely to be foolish than sensible.”

– [Bertrand Russell]

 

“ We have just enough religion to make us hate but not enough religion to make us love one another”
– [Jonathan Swift]

 

“ When I think of all the harm the Bible has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it.”

– [Oscar Wilde]