The Good. The Bad. The Asinine.

The Australian Christian Lobby’s Delusions of Adequacy

Australian Christian Lobby





Australian Christian Lobby

Lyle Shelton, proclaiming his organisation’s suspect martyrdom.




What Does Racism Mean, Anyway?


Pauline Hanson has a point.

Paragraph break while readers get back on their chairs.

The fearless Ms Hanson did have a point when she lamented that many of the people calling her a racist do not, in fact, know the definition of the word ‘racism’. I think a great many people are unaware of the exact definition. What they do know, however, is what they think it means. I find it odd that Ms Hanson would object to this kind of usage, given that this would appear to be the first time she’s resorted to anything resembling a dictionary. While I applaud this sudden lurch towards an academic understanding of words and things, I do feel compelled to point out that she’s muffed it.

You see, the main reason people don’t have a single clear definition for ‘racism’ is that the word does not have a single, monolithic definition. It’s always the same with pesky abstract nouns. There’s popular usage, the rather precise and fussy definitions used by various branches of academia, definitions in law and, after all that, the definitions that end up in the dictionary. Yes, definitions, plural. Not definition, singular.

And it’s really not the dictionary definition we’re concerned with when we’re talking about any sort of vox populi statement. It’s the duty of the listener, in any kind of communication, to make an effort to understand what their interlocutor actually means, and when people call Pauline racist, what they mean is that there is a fundamental assumption of ethnic superiority inherent in her particular brand of mythical monoculturism. Or, to put it in simpler terms – she’s a racist.

I suppose it’s not exactly a state secret that Senator Hanson is terrible at language. In fairness, linguistic capability is not what her supporters value her for. It’s for her ‘straight talking’, the way she ‘keeps the bastards honest’ and stands up to ‘lefty elites’. It’s a shame, then, that she hasn’t stuck to her core competencies. Incoherent diatribes blaming anybody and everybody for problems which are never clearly defined are the core, the fundamental bedrock of right wing populism. All of this semantic trickery is much more properly kept in the arsenal of the left.

If I were Pauline Hanson I’d be very careful about precision in language. I’d strongly advise she stick to inchoate expressions of injured outrage – if she gets too specific, it might become apparent to her supporters that she does not, in fact, have anything else.

Peter Dutton: Wave Crest and Iceberg Tip







Donald Trump Is Neither Funny Nor Incomprehensible







Still Stopping The Boats, Are We?


There were always going to be a few options when it came to stopping unauthorised maritime arrivals, or whatever it is we’re calling them this week. As it’s a complex problem, the solutions are also quite complex. For the sake of space and sanity, let’s divide the possible responses into two broad sets: Preventative and Punitive. And just so we don’t accidentally create a false dichotomy, let’s point out, right here at the top of the page, that each solution obviously contains elements of the other. What gives each set of responses its title is emphasis, rather than exclusivity.

Way back in the days before Australia’s somewhat ill-advised experiment with Abbottian Radicalism, we the people were presented with a clear choice. On the one hand, there was the humane, intelligent and nuanced Preventative solution, where government tried to ignore the white noise of xenophobia and make plans which would operate and effect well into the middle and long term (note the careful use of the word ‘government’ – neither Liberal nor Labor get a pass on this particular bucket of vile toxicity). And then there was the Punitive solution, where government would amplify, and in large part create, xenophobic white noise, and undertake actions which can either be seen as courageous and direct, or reactive and stupid, depending on which part of the political spectrum the describer happens to be shouting from.

With breathtaking courage, perspicacity and intelligence, we the people chose the Punitive approach. Bravely, we went forth on a program of deliberate and questionably legal cruelty in order, so we were told, to save lives. We entered into dubious agreements with dubious island governments, militarised and classified what had previously been a relatively benign border control operation and turned a sanctimoniously blind eye to the psychological abuse, beating and rape of the men, women and children we were so virtuously saving from death. All things pass, however, and after a while I think we became less enthused about the Punitive solution. The obvious moral ambiguities, as well as the shockingly increased cost, gave many of us pause. “Who would have thought,” the media said for us, “that a solution which requires significantly greater resources and involves indefinite internment would cost so much more and be so damn nasty?”

I don’t really understand how we of the Australian public, members of a nation and culture I love, could ever have rationalised this to ourselves. Perhaps we saw it as some kind of tough love? Or perhaps we, as a nation, had a momentary lapse of both generosity and courage, and decided in that moment to listen to the mean, reactionary, white supremacist fringe which exists in every Western nation, no matter how wonderful. Suffice it to say, having made this choice we are, for the moment, stuck with it.

What happened, way back in the halcyon days before Rudd Gillard Rudd OMFG ABBOTT WHY WHY WHY Turnbull, was a re-affirmation of one of the oldest principles of Australian politics. We confirmed, in no uncertain terms, that being tough on Johnny Foreigner was still a guaranteed lever for generating popularity. It’s in this context that the recent proposed lifetime ban on boat arrivals makes the most sense. The permanently outraged left is not, I think, alone in being nonplussed and infuriated by the proposal, but there really isn’t any reason for this. With a Prime Minister weakened by factional infighting, low popularity and his own apparent moral and political cowardice, it was really only a matter of time before the xenophobia button was pushed yet again. And it is merely characteristic that it’s being done in such a half-arsed, pussy-footed and tangential way. Half-arsed, pussy-footed and tangential could and probably will be carved on this government’s headstone.

No, Hippie, We Can’t Beat ISIS With Hugs

There has been a lot of embarrassing commentary bandied about in the last few weeks. People who are otherwise perfectly sane have, for some reason, decided to channel the bronze age and declare that the conflict with ISIS is a competition between gods, requiring us to smite the unbelieving wherever and whomever they might be. This ignores, of course, the fact that there is only one god in question, and that the question isn’t really a very relevant one. And who could forget the hate-groups, leveraging the credulity of the public in general and Pauline Hanson in particular in order to pose as grassroots movements of ‘concerned citizens’, instead of revealing themselves to be the white supremacist filth that they really are.

While outpourings of hate and stupidity like these are deeply embarrassing to all paid-up members of humanity, by far the most embarrassing commentary, for me, has been from the hearts and flowers brigade. Now, don’t get me wrong: anyone who’s spreading a message of peace, tolerance and love is generally going to get two big thumbs up from me. And I should also point out that I understand what they’re saying – to wit, that one of the main aims of ISIS is to sow division, and that by coming together we can frustrate that aim. The problem for me is that this is a nuanced message and, as such, has been completely misunderstood by idiots on both sides of the political divide. And it was always going to be.

You see, the thing about a message that contains a complete idea, and is delivered in the form of a complete sentence, is that it’s always going to go straight over the heads of people who don’t understand the difference between words like ‘Muslim’, ‘Islamist’, ‘terrorist’, ‘immigrant’ and ‘refugee’. Beyond a vague idea that they might be spelt differently, that is. It’s also going to have limited success amongst people whose solution to everything is to buy a hobby farm somewhere and blog endlessly about falling in love with trees, fair trade cocoa beans, or their own goddess powers, or whatever it is small-earther hippies are into this week. The point is that when you know full well that the bulk of your likely audience is going to possess the political sophistication of a recently concussed duckling, there is really very little to be gained by talking to them like they’re grownups.

There is, however, a lot to be lost. Like clarity. Like sensible discussion. Like the ability to avoid the conflation of the related but very different problems that are terrorism and ISIS. Terrorism is a global phenomenon that’s been around for centuries and is probably a symptom of a broader systemic failure arising from the way in which world power is organised. There are people out there who realise this, and who are working on a solution. ISIS is a localised problem, stemming from a number of factors including our own actions in the Middle East, and there are only two possible solutions, neither of which have anything to do with hugs or flowers. We either need to arrange for the total military destruction of the ISIS regime, or prepare for a world which contains a new winner of this century’s ‘most evil state’ competition. Aggressively loving each other in public is going to achieve neither of these outcomes, and it is deeply unhelpful to suggest, even inadvertently, that it might.

So, to all those pointy heads on the right, please try to understand that no sane person is suggesting that universal love is going to result in the military defeat of ISIS. And to all the neo-hippies of the increasingly embarrassing left: There have only ever been a handful of major conflicts that have been won without casualties and using free love in favour of ordnance, and none of these have ever occurred outside of the Disney universe. If we can’t wrap our heads around the basic realities of the current situation, then I’m afraid that we will effectively forfeit any rights we might have in determining our future course. This would represent, to my mind, a disastrous failure of the principles of democracy. It is for this reason that I would urge all good citizens from both the left and the right to immediately book tickets for their return to planet Earth.

It’s Not A Defence Of Islam, It’s An Attack On Stupidity










*Yes, including Buddhism. 

The Relative Irrelevance Of Ideology… Explained Through Tinder

When I first heard about Tinder, I was very excited. You see, I’ve never really been interested in having a long term relationship with anyone, and the whole notion of creating a home and filling it with prototype humans has about as much appeal for me as a bareback ride on a machete. Of course, so many people have exactly the opposite view that it’s almost impossible to convince anyone else that this is a sincere or enduring position. People just smile puffy, self-satisfied smiles and say things like: “Well, you might think that now…” implying that my considered choices about my mode of life are just a temporary aberration that will be fixed when I finally decide to be just like everyone else. Maybe they’re right, or maybe not. It couldn’t matter less. What does matter in the here and now, though, is the fact that practically everyone who is single and my age is completely sold on the picket fence and SUV model for happiness, which brings up the practical issue of how to acquire sex without love.

So, Tinder is announced and the concept is one that seems tailor-made for my situation. It’s apparently a community of people who are interested only in “hookups”. Gone is the tiresome business of trying to determine likes and dislikes, political affiliations, compatibility of both the mundane and spiritual variety – it’s just a matter of liking what you see and then arranging to meet. To a person in my position, Tinder seemed to be absolutely heaven sent. A purpose-built community of people who, like me, do not see their future solely in the context of who else will be in it and who are nevertheless saddled with a practical need for temporary companionship. Perfect, right?

Wrong. The problem with Tinder is that it became phenomenally popular. And the whole thing with popularity is that it enforces, with crushing inevitability, the Poisson curve of statistical normality. Completely disregarding the deliberately shallow, hardbitten engineering of the system and ideology behind Tinder, the hookup app became overwhelmingly a dating app. What started as a simple means of obtaining casual sex became, under the pressure of sheer single-minded human banality, yet another place where people emote at each other and look for love. Don’t get me wrong – there is still a minority core of sex addicts and other assorted extremists who wish to use the app in the spirit in which it was intended, but they are  drowned out by the sheer volume of people using Tinder as a low-budget form of eHarmony. Even when they say they’re not.

And this, really, is my point. Systems, ideologies, creeds, faiths – it doesn’t really matter what they are: people will just be people. And it is this fact, so obvious that it attains the status of a truism, that many of us seem to have difficulty understanding. Take the people who think Islam is the root cause of violence and extremism in the Middle East. They smugly quote passages of the Quran, share around images and video of extremist nutbags saying extremist things and then use these things as ‘evidence’ that Islam is somehow intrinsically evil and directly responsible for everything that’s wrong with the world today. The massive, ten million dollar problem with such a view is that it ignores the reality of human experience  – that depressing Poisson curve of normality.

It really doesn’t matter what your religion says – people are pretty much just going to go on being people. Christianity can be interpreted as a mystical creed of universal love, abnegation of the self before God and the embracing of poverty, which clearly explains why Christendom has become one of the most peace-loving and frugal regions of the globe today. No, wait… bad example. Buddhism is a creed of universal love, tolerance and the transcendence of base human impulses, which clearly explains why Buddhist nations like Sri Lanka and Thailand have embraced ethnic minorities and… no, hang on – another bad example.

It really doesn’t matter what any creed or code actually says – get enough people involved and they will basically screw it up by being themselves. There are constants in human behaviour that can be identified across more than ten thousand years of civilisation and, while the exciting backdrop of philosophies and systems flickers and changes over time, human behaviour does not. I could start a religion today that advocates the worship of Satan, whose primary virtues include rebellion against God and the state and promiscuity. I guarantee you that as soon as it has a large enough membership, it will be filled with people who pay their taxes and raise children in nuclear families. And it will probably contain a fringe element of weird beards who actually read the holy texts and call the rest of the congregation apostates. Sound familiar? That’s because it is – it’s the story of every established religion in the history of humanity. The reality is that people ignore or twist ideology and faith to provide sovereign justification for whatever it was that they were always going to do in the first place. Which is why Tinder is just another dating site, and Islam is just another religion.

A Three Point Plan For Dealing With Muslims In Australia

A deeply worrying number of otherwise rational people seem to be calling, with ever-increasing fervour, for the removal of all Muslims from this country and the utter obliteration of the religion of Islam. They believe that Islam is a cult of death and violence whose continued existence can only mean the eventual destruction of the West. We hear a constant stream of assertions regarding Islamic intolerance, terrorism, misogyny and absolutism, amidst calls to ban the migration or residence of Muslim people anywhere in the world at any time.

I’m not going to repeat here the simple, plain facts of the matter. I’m not going to point out that the fundamentalist proportion of not only Islam, but of every other religion, is miniscule. I’m tired of re-iterating the easily provable fact that terror organisations of every stamp are primarily political and not religious, and that this becomes confusing when we are talking about a part of the world that has not fully embraced the separation of church and state. I’ve become completely nauseated at the prospect of once again highlighting the logical contradiction inherent in believing that all 1.6 billion Muslims in the world are nihilistic terrorists and simultaneously being alive and well and unconquered by Muslim extremists. And I am absolutely sick to death of pointing out that cherry-picking violent verses from the Quran doesn’t prove a single, solitary thing, especially in light of the fact that the same thing can be done with the Torah and the Bible, and that drawing conclusions about Islam on such a basis rests on the (false) assumption that all Muslims are fundamentalists.

So I’m not going to bother.

Instead, what I am going to do is a thought experiment, which, as it involves thinking, will probably seem to pointy-headed fascists like some form of sorcery. Let’s have a look, shall we, at how we would actually enact the wishes of those who wish to see Islam eradicated from Australian culture.

Firstly, the banning of Sharia law. This is pretty easily done – Sharia law isn’t formal law in any Western country, and no Western judiciary is ever going allow it to be written into common law. Any ban would therefore be wildly successful, and an utter waste of millions of dollars in order to outlaw something that is not actually in any danger of being instituted.

Now, the idea of ‘getting rid’ of the Muslims. This could also be done quite easily. All we’d have to do is find the roughly 2 percent of Australians who identified on the last census as Muslims and deport them. Of course, a significant portion of these people were born in Australia and only have single nationality, so we’d be technically making them stateless. As such, removing them from our soil would be illegal, but that’s not a problem. We could just put them in detention centres, or camps somewhere, until we can come up with a final solution.

Then there’s the far more insidious problem of Muslim ideology. Obviously it’s virulent, because radicalisation is so contagious that it’s effected a staggering 300 odd people out of 22 million. Clearly a five alarm, brown trouser time crisis. But how do we fight it? How, indeed, does one kill an idea? We have a few models from history for this. There’s the Maoist method, where we simply round up everyone we suspect of ever having had an idea, as well as all their families, and starve them to death somewhere or, if they can afford the bullet, shoot them in the head. Or there’s the Stalinist method which involves rounding people up into labour camps and starving them to death or shooting them. Or the Pol Pot method… actually, scratch all that. There’s actually only the one method, and it’s about camps and mass executions. Which integrates nicely with the ‘putting stateless Muslim deportees in detention centres’ policy.

And then, finally, we’d have to make sure that Islam could never raise its ugly head again, which would mean banning its practice by law. This would of course necessitate re-writing or amending part of the constitution and destroying the provisions for freedom of religion which exist in law, but we’ve demonstrated again and again that we don’t give a tinker’s cuss about our civil liberties anyway. Of course, having laws about one religion would mean that we would have to institute a kind of religious law to protect the faiths that we do like, but needs must and so on.

So, to sum up – in order to effect the policies of people who think Islam is dangerous and should be banned, we need to enact the following provisions.

  1. A program of non-judicial detention and deportation against people on the basis of their faith
  2. The attempted genocide of a group of people who we have decided are ideologically unacceptable
  3. The institution of religious law

None of which should be very difficult as we currently have a live, working model of such policies from which we can observe and learn. It’s called ISIS, and it operates in Northern Iraq and Syria. I suggest that those who wish to see these kinds of policies enacted should fly immediately to Raqqa or Erbil so that they can learn exactly what it is that they are asking for.

If You Don’t Like Australia, Just Leave

If you don’t like Australia, why don’t you just leave? It’s a habit amongst many on the left of politics to dismiss people who say things along these lines as ignorant, racist and reactionary. Which, if you think about it, is pretty reactionary in itself. I think that the idea actually deserves a little consideration. And no, I haven’t lost my mind or suddenly become a racist, but I am rapidly losing all tolerance for the mindless, hysterical reactionism that is coming more and more to define our political discourse. So let’s think about this for a moment.

Let’s say you suddenly wake up in a country whose core values and laws are such that you can no longer abide by them. As I see it, you then have three options. You can:

  1. Whinge about it endlessly
  2. Become an insurgent
  3. Proceed in the general direction of ‘away’

If you are the sort of person whose first and only reaction to problems is option 1, then I’m afraid you’re dropped from the list of people who actually matter. So let’s move on and talk about option 2. Taking action in this way presents the western world with a challenging dichotomy. On the one hand, we have a long and proud tradition of civil disobedience as one of the safeguards of democracy, and there are many elements of our culture that would seem to actively encourage this. On the other hand, however, we have learned, since the latter half of the 20th century, to develop a whole new level of abhorrence for politically motivated violence. Should you become a political insurgent in this country, there is a very good chance that you will establish a new Guinness World Record for ‘Shortest Career in History’. In short, option 2 is a non-starter.

Which brings us to option 3 – leaving. I understand that for many people this seems unthinkable. It’s a very expensive process, for a start, and on top of that, many people who would take serious exception to Australian values were born here. So the question is not only how they are to leave, but why they even should. For me, the answer is simple. If you disagree violently with the values of your native or adoptive country, then it is by far preferable that you leave it rather than causing harm to the people with whom you share it. The world is a big and varied place and, whatever your values, there is a very good chance that you’re going to be able to find a corner of the globe where most people agree with you, no matter how crazy you might be. And if it matters that much, people generally find a way. But as pointed out, this is a major and often expensive step. So how should a person determine when it is no longer possible to stay here?

I think the test is a simple one. Firstly, identify the core values of the country that you live in. In the case of Australia, these values would include pluralism, tolerance and freedom of worship. If you find any of these values to be completely unacceptable, I’m sorry, but you probably don’t belong here. If you can’t tolerate the idea of Muslims trying to live and worship freely in our country and you think that the entirety of the Islamic religion should be expunged from the Australian community, then I’m afraid that you fail to share some of this country’s most fundamental values. That brand of intolerance really belongs elsewhere, like the Aryan brotherhood controlled wing of a US prison. Or the training camps of organisations like Al Qaeda or ISIS.

Tonight, the chairman of the Parramatta mosque, Neil el-Kadomi, is going to tell his congregation that anybody who doesn’t like Australia or Australian values should just leave. I wish to mirror this call. If you can’t get on board with the core Australian concepts of acceptance, tolerance and religious freedom, then you should pïss off too.