CW: sexual assault and violence My argument is simple: right now we have an unprecedented opportunity to effect social change, most specifically to redress large gender inequities in Australian society, and we risk squandering this opportunity if we concentrate on the symptoms and not the disease. What are the symptoms? “Mansplaining” is a symptom. Gender-unequal […]
Against health advice, again, I have parsed another Morrison speech; this time his address as an honorary woman on the occasion of International Women’s Day 2021. Excerpts from Morrison’s speech are in italics, and the speech is reproduced in full below if you really want to check that he said these things. Buckle up. Trigger […]
Most readers have the attention span of a gnat. Which is why the headline and the lede—the initial paragraph—are so critical to a story, and are often all that a reader will see. The impressions gained there are usually all that is left from “reading the news”. So headlines with emotive language and stories with […]
$3.57 a day? Don’t Spend It All At Once! Or, buy a weekday copy of The Australian for $3.50 to find out how much of a dole bludger you are. Morrison’s cruel, unnecessary drop in benefits.
Translating Morrison’s Presser: what do ‘situation’, ‘issue’ and ‘event’ all mean?
Trigger Warning: Sexual Assault*
Translation: they all mean ‘being raped by a man’
Morrison’s train-wreck press conference.
There’s less than three weeks to go before Australia’s largest, most complex and most crucial public health initiative, and all we’ve got for answers is four PowerPoint slides8. Where are all the details? We don’t know.
How can five different statements about the efficacy of the same vaccine all be technically correct, while at least four of them are misleading, probably intentionally? Easy.
“The first casualty of war is the truth”
For months I’ve watched with growing alarm the obvious bullshit being fed to us by politicians on the subject of Covid-19 vaccines. Even more alarming sometimes has been bullshit from government health experts. For politicians to lie, obfuscate or evade is second nature, but when experts and scientists start playing fast and loose with facts, or decide that “you can’t handle the truth” then it’s past time to call it for what it is.
Imagine, for a moment, that you and your partner bought a home on a road leading to an industrial estate. Trucks rumble and roar back and forth on the road both day and night. It’s not ideal, but it was one of the factors you considered before buying the house. Nobody could say you’re happy […]
The operation of the new Brisbane airport runway has sparked public outcry, anger and furious debate. While that debate rages, however, a simple truth is being ignored; it’s a truth that no doubt the Brisbane Airport Corporation and the airlines are hoping that nobody notices, while instead they talk endlessly about Air Traffic Control rules […]
Current airport operations in Australia are built on a breathtakingly simple—and ridiculous—proposition: that it’s “fair” that we should suffer aircraft noise “equally”. It’s a wonderful piece of logical sleight-of-hand to suggest that it’s somehow fair and egalitarian for a particular heavy industry to be allowed to spread noise pollution over all Brisbane suburbs “equally”. That’s not the only illusion we’re being asked to believe, however. […]
Letter requesting help from the Honourable Trevor Evans, MP, regarding new and excessive aircraft noise over Teneriffe.
On Saturday the ABC published an article with the remarkable headline “The share market is telling us how we’re doing in the fight against coronavirus“. The article was by a business journalist, so I suppose the old aphorism that “if all you’ve got is a hammer everything looks like a nail” applies, but it’s a […]
A short musing about the black-hearted superannuation release by the Morrison government, and the ensuing, totally predictable “if only we had realised” news cycle from the MSM. It’s really a very simple problem. Workers’ superannuation is deliberately and explicitly locked away from early access because it’s meant for a very specific purpose – retirement income. […]
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. J. K. Galbraith There are many questions raised by the headline graph, but to begin with I want to focus on just one: the unemployment benefit. Here’s the question: […]
