The Garden of Grubs & God Botherers

Scomo is not the first politician to have made a show of going to church, so why did we all get excited and start making fun of his Heilsong moment? So much fun, in fact, that he cracked the darks and called us “grubs”.

His arm’s length transaction was, quite simply, far too big a display of emotion for the average settler – a stereotype to be sure, but on this occasion an amusing one that led many to refer to this photo as a picture of his “O Face”.

Those of us who are usually mind-yer-own-bizness-ists have little cause to like god botherers lately: the sort that keep promoting fundo causes like gay conversion therapy, religious seminaries or talking up the good character of convicted paedophile cardinals.

 Those quick to contrast our leftie response to Scomo’s O face with our outrage in the face of vague vilifications of people like Muslims miss the most important point:

There can be no freedom OF belief

Without freedom FROM belief

What Scott-free is happy for anyone to exploit is fear based on mere rumours of what Islam stands for. That he is offended anyone then seeks answers about how his own faith would affect our welfare is astonishing. If he really has so little insight into human nature, perhaps he is not the right person to lead anyone anywhere.

Most well established churches in Australia, especially Christian churches, are progressive. The Hillsong website claims they are affiliated with ACC but wiki tells us they left last year. Several non-wiki sources tell us Hillsong promotes a toxic form of christianity.

 There is something dangerously arrogant, if not narcissistic, about a prosperity gospel, the idea a supreme being measures virtue by material success rather than seeing material success as a reward that follows and is as a result of virtue.

A key assumption of Western Culture is that material success often requires a sense of personal responsibility and willingness to create opportunities. I am happy to allow as much. But we must never forget that not everyone gets a lot of opportunities to create opportunities.

 Trying different can be helpful, but the try harder mantra of neocons is patently absurd. And belief must never be an excuse for unkind behaviour.
Equally important as our need for leaders who treat life – all life – with respect, is our need for leaders who will act now to steer us away from the tipping points of climate change.

Whether a candidate believes in God or not is irrelevant to me, but I would prefer a candidate who will do the right thing for no other reason than it is the right thing to do, than one whose prime motivation is material reward.

A real GRUB, on the other hand, is someone who is silent in the face of hate speech, sends asylum seekers to indefinite detention, allows systemic racism to keep killing Indigenous Australians, and thinks if you need help it’s your own fault.

2019 Pre Election Roundup

The Economy

Easily summed up:

aka The Tricky Down Effect

 



Social Trends

What better place to look than social media?

Hilarious, despite the rather broad swipe at one of my boxes (by which I do not mean cunt, this is a ref to #notallboomers. Keep up!)

Lots of people dislike the idea of using a word for female body bits in a pejorative tone. How can a cunt be worse than a dick? and more in that vein.

My own position on the cunt conundrum has been, for the last 40 years, that women must reclaim the word, just as the W word and the N word have been reclaimed (quite rightly) by their respective communities.

How can we use this word correctly in a sentence?

"A cunt is a fine thing, while Scott-free Morrison is a stronzo."

This, of course, begs the question for non-Italian speakers of the meaning of the word "stronzo". You could look it up in your Funk N Wagnalls, but like many good words, it possibly loses something in the translation, and will mean different things to different people. Here's more or less how it was explained to me by a native:

*"Picture it, the foot of the Gran Sasso, during the War. The snow is so bad if you have to shit you can't go outside, you just try and push it out a window. But one night you know you really gotta shit but if you shit it's gonna be really, really runny. Now that's a useless, a really useless shit. That's a stronze."

All we can do is reclaim the cunt word. It has the K sound in it. Just replace it with something else when you are looking for a pejorative.

Just Plain Rude

Any number of things are ruder and far more obscene than a fine sounding word like cunt.

Ms Day's death was just one of far, far too many no one in politics gives a shit about. The royal commission into deaths in custody recommended abolition of the crime of public drunkenness in 1991 and it is still and offence in Victoria April 2019.

White drunks not arrested.

The crime of public drunkenness is part of the system. The system does not require all drunks to be locked up, just some. If this simple fact does not explain systemic racism, what will?

Not white - not drunk - arrested for being drunk - died in custody

And thank you Labor for extending the fucking Indue card - what Mr Forrest WA Premier descendant of a long line of white premiers makes money out of.

Adani - well, bullshit approvals for a bullshit coal mine that maybe half a dozen people in Australia want.

Parliament is full of Not-cunts: of Stronzes.

One last recommendation before I leave in search of something to laugh at.

Moo Hoo

On Monday 8 April, animal rights activists engaged in co-ordinated, peaceful, protests around Australia.

Unelected PM (that’s almost a tautology in Australia) Scummo had more outrage for people who invaded farms or blocked traffick than for the murderous white supremacist Australian who went to New Zealand last month and murdered 50 innocent people while they were at prayer.

Shameful, he sez. Un-Australian.
"This is just another form of activism that I think runs against the national interest, and the national interest is [farmers] being able to farm their own land," he told radio station 2GB. (Does this mean he was chatting with Alan Jones, Moral Compass of the South? Is Alan a Pitt St Farmer?)

Never mind Scummo blew a cool $185 million re-opening Christmas Island for a photo shoot – obviously people who care about non-European humans or other animals instead of money just don’t have his respect at all.

But Scummo is in election mode and was really just doing what he and his kind do best – harvesting resentment. (Hmm, seems to be a recurring theme, here at the Clarion.) He wants to tap into the outrage of all offended omnivores, carnivores and barbecuerians across the land.

Every nook and cranny of the internet (or the internOt, as I like to call it after Malcolm’s effort) was abuzz with lively discussions of the ins and outs of veganism. Such fun.
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Eavesdropping, I did hope to learn what “white veganism” might mean.
Don’t know if this is true, but it more or less somes (late edit "somes"? good grief, Maude!) sums up the spirit of the expression, I guess:

So much of what we do is directed by blinkered thinking – whether those are the blinkers of selfishness or just plain stupidity is often hard to say.

Perhaps white veganism is a more kindly meant version of what happened in Europe precipitating many revolutions in 1848; but especially what happened in Ireland, where an early version of neo-liberal economics exacerbated the impact of the potato blight and caused not revolution but the starvation of millions. And, well, not vegan but certainly Anglo and Male and Patronising thinking.

Exports were not the cause of starvation
It was really ideological drivel of the sort we've had from Labor and the LNP for the last 20 years

Or, during the green revolution of the 1950s and 60s, when western companies casually made deals with males in power in Third world countries to buy great tracts of land, lift GDP, create jobs. Oops - exposed those living at subsistence level (often from a woman's /women's garden) to – yep, more man-made famine.

Capitalism is indifference. White veganism, at its worst, is insufferable igrigance*,
I suppose, because it presumes no matter what people’s circumstances, traditions or beliefs, that which privileged westerners currently assert as morally correct is what ought now be the rule.

*Arrogance with more than a soupcon of ignorance

But back to food and the idea of eating morally.

ClaireGColeman (who most of the time seems quite with it) got into a bunfight with someone and, I suspect, deserves a point:

Somewhere in there I think the “whitesplaining” comment implied “you can’t have an opinion cos you are white” which is sorta not really the definition of whitesplaining. And if that (me) sounds like semantics, then Claire's  “lacto-vegetarianism is not the same thing as veganism” is not semantics; just a clarification.

And, lest we need a reminder:

Race is a social invention; a caste system –
though some try to pretend it’s science.

As Nature does not choose our socioeconomic class for us

and is thus not obsessed about our children conforming to some visual “type”,

we must allow those who live with colour to know who they are and what they live.

                                                                                                               (Maude Nificent)

But mostly I’ve just gotta hand it to Ruby Hamad for cutting through most of it.

 



That second point sort of turns the Aussie saying "if you don't eat you don't shit" on its head very politely.
TBH when I see people on TV or in pubs or wherever eating a giant slab of meat I ALWAYS a) wonder why? and b) look to see if they eat any grass with it. What American entertainment serves up at a barbecue always looks like a roast meant for a family of 20 to me.

In 2019 Australia, people have different incomes, opportunities and living arrangements.
As a single pensioner I’m gobsmacked every time I go to a supermarket. With veg I can usually have a truck full of something, or none of it at all, because of the way it is packed to facilitate transport.

As a child with a rather unsettled existence, I often found myself living in various parts of rural Australia in the 1950s and 60s. Growing up, I’ve herded cows to a large milking shed, and also milked a house cow. I’ve killed and dressed chooks (rarely, cos it was never a common food item) and pitched in when sheep were killed and dressed. I know all about how other animals are treated, and where black pudding comes from. I’ve made pocket money by trapping and selling rabbits. But in all that time and with all the adult figures in my early life, I never met one with a cavalier attitude to the treatment of animals (except two apprentice jockeys in stables at Newmarket).

What I was always taught is that every animal deserves a decent life and a clean death. Even when calves were taken from their mothers, I was aware that it was hard on the cows, and I always saw people spending time with them (tho I suppose that made the hoomans feel better, not the cows).

As time has marched on, our relationship with animals in this country, as a people who eat them, has shifted dramatically. Many of us have no notion of where our food comes from, or how animals are farmed.
Where I once never had qualms about being omnivorous, I’m increasingly uneasy but only because of the way animals are treated. A few years ago, in response to consumer pressure to clearly show which eggs are free range, the RSPCA so radically downgraded the definition so that eggs that are labelled free range are more likely than ever to come from birds that are not treated well.
I have to drive miles to find eggs that are from birds kept in a low population density, that haven’t been debeaked, and must say I usually just go without.
It’s a good job I’m lazy cos protein from all sources is shrinking, all the time, as a portion of my diet. Sometimes I eat tuna but if anyone tells me they are poled instead of caught in a seine net, it’s still not good – both options are horrible for marine life and for the environment.

The sight of a sheep with fly strike is just woeful, but mulesing is cruel. Even without our shift away from dependence on wool, there is no need for mulesing to continue – the government just dicks around on the issue cos primary industry is the teat on which government suckles. And there are other breeds of sheep than merino we could be farming; breeds that shed around the tail area. (Though sheep have done so much damage to the environment it's a whole other thing.)
On and on and on.

Governments could do more about the food industry or for all sentient creatures without turning us all vegan – heaps more that I’ve not touched on at all. But the bottom line is the top end of town – totally unaffected by what happened in Christchurch - don’t want the inconvenience of helping us eat more ethically.

It's almost as if, since we moved away from a mixed economy into a neo-liberal outpost of fanta-land, ministers are no longer supposed to help the sector flourish, but are rather lobbyists with the title Minister for this that and the other vested* interest.

*(From the old English, Vestey, once owner of a large Australian cattle station.)

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In case you think I'm wrong about "neo liberal economics" - the prequel - in the 1840s:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/10/neoliberalism-freedom-control-privatisation-state?utm_term=Autofeed&CMP=soc_568&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1554879920

(ideological fervour+pure laissez faire theory) = fundamental perversion

If this is all in the TLDR or head scratching category, you'll understand why I've tried to introduce some of this stuff in a simpler way, in useful contexts or in the contexts of familiar stories in my Dramatic Reviews blog. The least you need to know about free market theories is this:

"You can't pretend apples are oranges without hurting people".