Interesting stuff

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Blowin started the topic in Friday, 21 Jun 2019 at 8:01am

Have it cunts

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Blowin Saturday, 24 Apr 2021 at 1:29pm

It’s both. The Mafia takes what the mafia sees fit if it’s protection is required.

I personally think the US are far and away the better option if we need to cede to the protection of others- which we do. In the same position, China would demand we submit entirely and not a single Australian worker would have seen the inside of the Gorgon project. At least the US let us use our own labour. Too bad that our corrupt politicians bent to demand from their donors and soon enough opened the floodgates to the foreign workforce anyway.

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udo Saturday, 24 Apr 2021 at 6:27pm

WSL - Scoring

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san Guine Saturday, 24 Apr 2021 at 8:27pm
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udo Monday, 26 Apr 2021 at 7:47pm

Does anyone remember a story by Paul Witzig that ran in Tracks mag sometime in 1977
Paul describing a funny session out at Big Sunset ..a humourous story [or was back then at least]
Getting asked by Ken Bradshaw 'What the fuck are you doing out here' and getting flogged by big sets ...nearly drowning..would have been Feb or March issue i reckon ?
Who's got a Tracks stash and can have a look ?

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simba Monday, 26 Apr 2021 at 8:44pm

stu?

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I focus Monday, 26 Apr 2021 at 10:54pm

Yeah Udo had the copy but chucked out all the old tracks when moving.

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AndyM Wednesday, 28 Apr 2021 at 3:31pm

In a world of carefully cultivated Instagram accounts, radically conformist hairstyles, and, for surfers, ostentatiously individual board choices, the question of what it means to be authentic looms large.

This Aeon article puts forward the idea that in such a highly commodified and surveilled culture such as ours, making an effort to be ourselves is one of the surest ways to be like everyone else.

It also posits that genuine authenticity requires both a resistance to self-absorption and also an acknowledgement of our dependency on others.

And according to the author, learning a craft (such as surfing) can teach us a lot about what exactly it is to actualise a self.

Interesting read.

https://aeon.co/essays/a-history-of-authenticity-from-jesus-to-self-help...

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velocityjohnno Monday, 3 May 2021 at 3:29pm

The inexorable progression of Science continues:

https://www.tag24.com/animals/cats/kids-science-project-explores-whether...

(cat owners may wish to scrutinise the conclusion)

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garyg1412 Tuesday, 4 May 2021 at 9:03am

velocityjohhno I would be more concerned about their mouths than their buttholes. I just ended up on an IV drip for 5 days with septicemia when our cat bit me on my finger trying to shove a worming tablet down it's throat.

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GuySmiley Tuesday, 4 May 2021 at 12:27pm

Still got the cat gary?

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garyg1412 Tuesday, 4 May 2021 at 3:00pm

Yes Guy but it doesn't know that it silently used one of it's lives in this instance.

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indo-dreaming Thursday, 6 May 2021 at 1:14pm

WTF? "Woman gives birth to nine babies after expecting seven"

I didn't even know its was possible for humans to have more than 3 or 4 babies at the same time, and even crazier they all survived.

https://www.9news.com.au/world/woman-gives-birth-to-nine-babies-after-ex...

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Blowin Thursday, 6 May 2021 at 2:26pm

So close to double figures. Maybe next time.

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Quint Thursday, 13 May 2021 at 6:38pm

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Blowin Saturday, 15 May 2021 at 8:11am

On the Hypocrites at Apple Who Canceled Antonio Garcia-Martinez
Much easier to ruin a career than mess with a corporate cash cow
Matt Taibbi
May 14

I’m biased, because I know Antonio Garcia-Martinez and something like the same thing once happened to me, but the decision by Apple to bend to a posse of internal complainers and fire him over a passage in a five-year-old book is ridiculous hypocrisy. Hypocrisy by the complainers, and defamatory cowardice by the bosses — about right for the Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style era of timorous conformity and duncecap monoculture the woke mobs at these places are trying to build as their new Jerusalem.

Garcia-Martinez is a brilliant, funny, multi-talented Cuban-American whose confessional memoir Chaos Monkeys is to big tech what Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker was to finance. A onetime high-level Facebook executive — he ran Facebook Ads — Antonio’s book shows the House of Zuckerberg to be a cult full of on-the-spectrum zealots who talked like justice activists while possessing the business ethics of Vlad the Impaler:

Facebook is full of true believers who really, really, really are not doing it for the money, and really, really will not stop until every man, woman, and child on earth is staring into a blue-framed window with a Facebook logo.

When I read Chaos Monkeys the first time I was annoyed, because this was Antonio’s third career at least — he’d also worked at Goldman, Sachs — and he tossed off a memorable bestseller like it was nothing. Nearly all autobiographies fail because the genre requires total honesty, and not only do few writers have the stomach for turning the razor on themselves, most still have one eye on future job offers or circles of friends, and so keep the bulk of their interesting thoughts sidelined — you’re usually reading a résumé, not a book.

Chaos Monkeys is not that. Garcia-Martinez is an immediately relatable narrator because in one breath he tells you exactly what he thinks of former colleagues (“A week before my last day, I had lunch with the only senior person at Goldman Sachs who was not an inveterate asshole”) and in the next explains, but does not excuse, the psychic quirks that have him chasing rings in some of the world’s most rapacious corporations. “Whenever membership in some exclusive club is up for grabs, I viciously fight to win it, even if only to reject membership when offered,” he wrote. “After all, echoing the eminent philosopher G. Marx: How good can a club be if it’s willing to have lowly me as a member?”

The irony is that if Garcia-Martinez has a failing as a writer, it’s that he’s too nice. Universally, the best writers are insane egomaniacs obsessed with staring at the great mirror that is the page. Garcia-Martinez, on the whole, would rather be sailing. I believe the reason he decided to go back to tech is that he preferred a quiet life of flying a desk to make mortgage payments to the never-ending regimen of self-salesmanship that the literary life requires (and which, again, is the easy part for most egocentric writers).

Anyway: Chaos Monkeys contains scenes from Antonio’s private travails. Characteristically, they’re painted as comedies, where his personal life is depicted as an unpredictable third party over which he has little control — only occasionally, it seems, does it even listen to his suggestions. He meets a woman via Match.com whom he calls British Trader, “an imposing, broad-shouldered presence, six feet tall in bare feet, and towering over me in heels.”

He’s enthralled, but everything about her is a surprise that keeps him off balance, from the fact that her “strapping and strutting” South African ex-boyfriend docks a boat next to his not long after their first date, or that she sleeps on “a cheap foam mattress about the width of an extra-jumbo-sized menstrual pad” above a floor covered from detritus from a recent renovation. She dis such work herself because, Antonio explains, “she made Bob Vila of This Old House look like a fucking pussy.” Even this side of her life has him tiptoeing. “Postcoitally it was all I could do to balance myself on the edge of the pad and off the drywall dust,” he noted.

At one point, as a means of comparing the broad-shouldered British DIY expert favorably to other women he’d known, he wrote this:

Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel.

Out of context, you could, I guess, read this as bloviating from a would-be macho man beating his chest about how modern “entitlement feminism” would be unmasked as a chattering fraud in a Mad Max scenario. In context, he’s obviously not much of a shotgun-wielder himself and is actually explaining why he fell for a strong woman, as the next passage reveals:

British Trader, on the other hand, was the sort of woman who would end up a useful ally in that postapocalypse, doing whatever work—be it carpentry, animal husbandry, or a shotgun blast to someone’s back—required doing.

Again, this is not a passage about women working in tech. It’s a throwaway line in a comedic recount of a romance that juxtaposes the woman he loves with the inadequate set of all others, a literary convention as old as writing itself. The only way to turn this into a commentary on the ability of women to work in Silicon Valley is if you do what Twitter naturally does and did, i.e. isolate the quote and surround it with mounds of James Damore references. More on this in a moment.

After trying the writer’s life, Antonio went back to work for Apple. When he entered the change on his LinkedIn page, Business Insider did a short, uncontroversial writeup. Then a little site called 9to5Mac picked up on the story and did the kind of thing that passes for journalism these days, poring through someone’s life in search of objectionable passages and calling for immediate disappearance of said person down a cultural salt mine. Writer Zac Hall quoted from Apple’s Inclusion and Diversity page:

Across Apple, we’ve strengthened our long-standing commitment to making our company more inclusive and the world more just. Where every great idea can be heard. And everybody belongs.

Hall then added, plaintively, “This isn’t just PR speak for Apple. The company releases annual updates on its efforts to hire diversely, and it puts its money where its mouth is with programs intended to give voice to women and people of color in technology. So why is Apple giving Garcia Martinez a great big pass?”

From there the usual press pile-on took place, with heroes at places like The Verge sticking to the playbook. “Silicon Valley has consistently had a white, male workforce,” they wrote, apparently not bothered by Antonio’s not-whiteness. “There are some in the Valley, such as notorious ex-Googler James Damore, who suggest this is because women and people of color lack the innate qualities needed to succeed in tech.”

Needless to say, Antonio never wrote anything like that, but the next step in the drama was similarly predictable: a group letter by Apple employees claiming, in seriousness, to fear for their safety. “Given Mr. García Martínez’s history of publishing overtly racist and sexist remarks,” the letter read, “we are concerned that his presence at Apple will contribute to an unsafe working environment for our colleagues who are at risk of public harassment and private bullying.” All of this without even a hint that there’s ever been anything like such a problem at any of his workplaces.

Within about a nanosecond, the same people at Apple who hired Antonio, clearly having read his book, now fired him, issuing the following statement:

At Apple, we have always strived to create an inclusive, welcoming workplace where everyone is respected and accepted. Behavior that demeans or discriminates against people for who they are has no place here.

The Verge triumphantly reported on Apple’s move using the headline, “‘Misogynistic’ Apple hire is out hours after employees call for investigation.” Other companies followed suit with the same formulation. CNN: “Apple parts ways with newly hired ex-Facebook employee after workers cite 'misogynistic' writing.” CNET: “Apple reportedly cuts ties with employee amid uproar over misogynistic writing.”

Apple by this point not only issued a statement declaring that Antonio’s “behavior” was demeaning and discriminatory, but by essentially endorsing the complaints of their letter-writing employees, poured jet fuel on headline descriptions of him as a misogynist. It’s cowardly, defamatory, and probably renders him unhirable in the industry, but this is far from the most absurd aspect of the story.

I’m a fan of Dr. Dre’s music and have been since the N.W.A. days. It’s not any of my business if he wants to make $3 billion selling Beats by Dre to Apple, earning himself a place on the board in the process. But if 2,000 Apple employees are going to insist that they feel literally unsafe working alongside a man who wrote a love letter to a woman who towers over him in heels, I’d like to hear their take on serving under, and massively profiting from, partnership with the author of such classics as “Bitches Ain’t Shit” and “Lyrical Gangbang,” who is also the subject of such articles as “Here’s What’s Missing from Straight Outta Compton: Me and the Other Women Dr. Dre Beat Up.”

It’s easy to get someone like Antonio Garcia Martinez fired. Going after a board member who’s reportedly sitting on hundreds of millions in Apple stock is a different matter. A letter making such a demand is likely to be returned to sender, and the writer of it will likely spend every evaluation period looking over his or her shoulder. Why? Because going after Dre would mean forcing the company to denounce one of its more profitable investments — Beats and Beats Music were big factors in helping Apple turn music streaming into a major profit center. The firm made $4.1 billion in that area last year alone.

Speaking of profits: selling iPhones is a pretty good business. It made Apple $47.9 billion last year, good for 53% of the company’s total revenue. Part of what makes the iPhone such a delightfully profitable product is its low production cost, which reportedly comes from Apple’s use of a smorgasbord of suppliers with a penchant for forced labor — Uighurs said to be shipped in by the thousand to help make iPhone glass (Apple denies this), temporary “dispatch workers” sent in above legal limits, workers in “iPhone city” clocking excessive overtime to meet launch dates, etc. Apple also has a storied history of tax avoidance, offshoring over a hundred billion in revenues, using Ireland as a corporate address despite no physical presence there, and so on.

Maybe the signatories to the Apple letter can have a Chaos Monkeys book-burning outside the Chinese facility where iPhone glass is made — keep those Uighur workers warm! Or they can have one in Dublin, to celebrate the €13bn tax bill a court recently ruled Apple didn’t have to pay.

It’s all a sham. The would-be progressives denouncing Garcia-Martinez don’t seem to mind working for a company that a Democrat-led congressional committee ripped for using “monopoly power” to extract rents via a host of atrocious anti-competitive practices. Whacking an author is just a form of performative “activism” that doesn’t hurt their bottom lines or their careers.

Meanwhile, the bosses who give in to their demands are all too happy to look like they’re steeped in social concern, especially if they can con some virtue-signaling dink at a trade website into saying Apple’s mechanically platitudinous “Shared Values” page “isn’t just PR speak.” You’d fire a couple of valuable employees to get that sort of P.R.

When I was caught up in my own cancelation episode, I was devastated, above all to see the effect it had on my family. Unlike Garcia-Martinez, I had past writings genuinely worth being embarrassed by, and I felt that it was important, morally and for my own mental health, to apologize in public. I didn’t fight for my career and reputation, and threw myself on the mercy of the court of public opinion.

I now know this is a mistake. The people who launch campaigns like this don’t believe in concepts like redemption or growth. An apology is just another thing they’d like to get, like the removal of competition for advancement. These people aren’t idealists. They’re just ordinary greedy Americans trying to get ahead, using the tactics available to them, and it’s time to stop thinking of stories like this through any other lens.

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Fliplid Saturday, 15 May 2021 at 8:37am

Apple. ACCC rules state that no supplier can set minimum retail prices.

Apple state that if a retailer sells for less than the minimum price they will no longer be supplied.

Guess who wins? Apple does, no tax, top dollar.

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zenagain Saturday, 15 May 2021 at 12:44pm

Good piece Blowy. Apple putting the 'i' in irony (but not in a good way).

I hate using the word woke but to me it just seems to walk hand in hand with hypocrisy. A man expresses his love and admiration for a strong, capable woman and then proceeds to have his career destroyed because people feel "unsafe". Maybe there's more to this story but on the surface, you have to feel for this bloke.

These days, maybe if you just shut up, nod and proceed to cut your balls off, you'll get on just fine.

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sypkan Saturday, 15 May 2021 at 2:12pm

that taibbi piece is depressing...

not least because the new moralising thought police are hollow self righteous, self serving, cultists, able to see evil everywhere, except in their own practices...

(a bit like the old moralising thought police cultists... but with twiter as a tool of shaming and damnation...)

but possibly worse, is they are making creativity, humour, and a witty line things of the past

what a bleak dull future lies ahead if these keyunts aren't nipped in the bud

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sypkan Saturday, 15 May 2021 at 2:18pm

...and, you know when the corporates are on board, it's probably an idea of movement that's long lost it's shine...

yet here we are, the spectrum tech. giants are the new god

it's just flat out bizarre the crew that will endeavour to defend their hypocrisy

again...

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sypkan Saturday, 15 May 2021 at 2:21pm

the language zen!!

'unsafe'

I also hate to use the term 'woke'

but hey, they started it...

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Blowin Saturday, 15 May 2021 at 2:59pm

Woke is just another corpo smokescreen. No different from the WSL preaching how Green they are after shuttling 300 punters and 500 surfboards around the planet on a private jet just so they can play splash splash for profit.

It’s a distraction. Some marketing smoke and mirrors in which they enlist the useful idiots of the world as blowflies to spread their dung.

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AndyM Saturday, 15 May 2021 at 7:20pm

In my most paranoid moments, l sometimes suspect that the whole woke thing is some giant Machiavellian headfuck, a psychological masterstroke whereby people are pitted against each other so as to neuter any opinion, and to make public discourse so bland and filled with fear that it's virtually meaningless.

The greatest diversion and smokescreen the world has ever seen.

And businesss as usual continues on.

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Blowin Saturday, 15 May 2021 at 7:26pm

Agree. Part of the race / gender / political partisan team barracking nonsense used to distract from the class war.

That’s why it’s so promoted by the multinationals.

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AndyM Saturday, 15 May 2021 at 7:31pm

Yeah I don't think it's been created as such, but as I've said before it certainly serves the pollies and the corporates and they're laughing their fat arses off.

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soggydog Saturday, 15 May 2021 at 9:33pm

Fuck it! Good article Blowin

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Roystein Sunday, 16 May 2021 at 9:40am

Sounds like his book would be a good read.
Fucken wokesters...

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Island Bay Sunday, 16 May 2021 at 2:22pm

Good, if depressing, piece.

Worst period I've lived through.

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velocityjohnno Sunday, 16 May 2021 at 4:13pm

The woke stuff combines with a new facade for Wall St/Gov - ESG (environmental/social/governance) funds - basically a re-package of the current system (including the least savoury parts of it). Meet the new boss same as the old boss. The good thing is it presents opportunity and wokeness can be converted into profit (insert Cypher speech from the Matrix). Spreads on options on futures of an invisible gas - sign me up. Those at the top remain at the top and proclaim their virtue.

The wokeness plays on a facet of Western civilisation - the moral sense of right/wrong - and has precedents over the last few centuries (eg ending of slavery in British Empire 1833) and movements that have existed to "make things better". In fact you could say it goes all the way back to Aristotle vs Plato, with the latter's view of what an ideal society would be contrasting with the former's vision of quantified reality (A is A) and those best-fit ruling. This tension explains the continual reinvigoration of Western civilisation. The idealism gets bloody at times (eg John Brown at Harper's Ferry)- and having the foresight to avoid the great bloodshed by containing the idealists' extremism, can be useful.

This time, it could be pushed too far, and so far that every separate grouping in society eventually bands together with their own colour/gender/view and lobbies/etc against the others. If your childrens' future is put in danger because of policy targeting/denying them as of the colour of their skin/gender/views - then you join with others similar and then it's on.

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wally Sunday, 16 May 2021 at 4:52pm

‘Woke’ is just respecting and giving consideration to the needs and concerns of minority groups, particularly those with less political sway. It’s the same as we wanting local councils on surf coasts to be ‘woke’ to the concerns and priorities of surfers.

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Blowin Sunday, 16 May 2021 at 4:56pm

Dividing societies into racial / gender / sexual / political barracking teams is a great way to delegitimise the pesky concept of unity under a national banner. Globalist strategy in full flight.

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freeride76 Sunday, 16 May 2021 at 5:09pm

"‘Woke’ is just respecting and giving consideration to the needs and concerns of minority groups, particularly those with less political sway. "

It makes me deeply queasy that this consideration is being enforced by Big Tech, some of the most powerful corporations that have ever existed on Earth. It seems often to sway extremely closely to a sort of soft totalitarianism.

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Blowin Sunday, 16 May 2021 at 5:31pm

Worth googling the lyrics to the “Bitches ain’t shit” song by Dr Dre referred to in the article to truly grasp the extent of the hypocrisy being played out by the staff at Apple.

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indo-dreaming Sunday, 16 May 2021 at 5:42pm
wally wrote:

‘Woke’ is just respecting and giving consideration to the needs and concerns of minority groups, particularly those with less political sway. It’s the same as we wanting local councils on surf coasts to be ‘woke’ to the concerns and priorities of surfers.

It started out as that, but it's no longer that, it's morphed into something much different.

It's kind of hard to describe but I think wokeness is about something being pushed past a point of balance where it becomes unbalanced in the opposite direction and becomes irrational and illogical often damaging to the original aim too.

Cancel culture plays a big part in woke culture, i think cancel culture is all about seeking power over others and as pointed out above those that cancel are often worse than the ones who get cancelled.

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AndyM Sunday, 16 May 2021 at 6:29pm

Highly recommend listening to the following podcast, it discusses the "woke vs liberal" issue (as in, the real definition of liberal).

12.45 - the left-left divide
25.10 - general issue relates to a critique of structure and power
38.22 How woke tactics build compliance through intimidation

https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/theminefield/is-cancel-cul...

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GuySmiley Sunday, 16 May 2021 at 9:37pm

Wouldn't really know nor do I care all that much in this "background of white noise" but I see weaponised terms like woke and cancel culture mostly used by the far right to attack the progressive side of politics. To me, if my premise is correct, these type of discussions in countries like the UK, US or here is so full of irony given the dominance of right to far right leaning media where the right's stationary view of the world is on daily rinse cycle. Heard the other day the UK only has two left leaning news outlets left and I get the sense that the US would be the same. Here, Murdoch dominates in WA, SA, Tas and Qld and 9News has most certainly changed the editorial direction of The Age and SMH. You really have to laugh at the right who love free speech but only their side of it. So, the cultural wars continue as they must to resist, retard or stop anything that threatens the status quo of privilege and inequity.

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AndyM Monday, 17 May 2021 at 9:00am

Definitely used by the right GS, they made the blueprints for virtue signalling and cancel culture.

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D-Rex Monday, 17 May 2021 at 9:26am

Did you watch Craig McLachlan's story on Ch 7 last night? ABC and Fairfax used Weinstein's exposure to launch their own attack. They literally created a scenario where women were encouraged (and coached) to demonise McLachlan. So much for the progressive left media, they should hang their heads in shame.

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stunet Monday, 17 May 2021 at 9:34am

Excellent podcast, Andy.

Resonates not just on a theoretical level, but I also see a lot of the strategies/tactics play out here on the forums like a real time case study.

My own pet peeve is somewhat similar to Wally's comment, but I hate seeing 'identity politics' used as a one-size-fits-all pejorative term for the parlous state of modern debate, in the process erasing the reason why identity politics is crucial to creating a more just society.

It's a story as old as time, but those who are marginalised or oppressed can only find power by grouping together. Ironically, many times the 'identities' have been foisted on them by the dominant group, not by themselves. Said Nick Giannopoulos from 'Wogs Out Of Work' after trying to assimilate, "they [Caucasian Aussies] called us wogs, so that's what we were". Similarly the gay and lesbian mardi gras arose from being persecuted by the dominant group, called fags or dykes so they began to own the terms.

Part of the reason IP has been pursued as much as it has is that, for some minorities, say for instance Aborigines, there are individuals who have been or are going through tertiary education and it's the very first time anyone has advocated for their group from an educational standpoint, new academic ground is being broken, and it's the nature of academia to promote and pursue new thought.

Doesn't mean it's right of course. Other academics will eventually come in and shave off the overreaches and the logical fallacies, though in the meantime they remain easy pickings for right wing shock jocks and anyone looking to grab one or two small points and use them to tear down the whole identity politics project.

And that's what it is, a project, there is an endpoint, which is social and economic equality I guess.

Reckon the better debate is not the value or otherwise of IP, but have those minorities who employ IP reached full equality? (and hence don't require it anymore)

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zenagain Monday, 17 May 2021 at 11:08am

I think another question would be those minorities who employ IP that have reached full equality have now actually surpassed it?

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zenagain Monday, 17 May 2021 at 11:25am

Gosh, that was poorly worded.

Hope you get the gist of it though.

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sypkan Monday, 17 May 2021 at 11:48am

poorly worded maybe zen... buy the gist is clear...

and that is the question that many want to ask

the question that irks so many, as 'the narrative' continues to bleat on so relentlessly...

I'd say many minorities have well and truly surpassed it, hence people like shaun micaleff making jokes one needs to brown or gay just to get a gig at places like the abc...

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sypkan Monday, 17 May 2021 at 12:14pm

equality or equity stunet?

equality of opportunity, or equality of outcome?

the goalposts, ....'the narrative' ...has clearly changed / changing... at least in the US, which we sadly just seem to follow...

a result of decades of affirmative action like policies getting little result... which many now put down to limited class opportunities, through associated culture and networking, rather than any remnant discrimination

which comes back to blowin's point...

...and the wider agenda, which for decades has been quite elitist, not in a donald trump sense, but in terms of empowering and rewarding the best and brightest of minorities... starting in early education...

which arguably has been very successful, for the best and brightest. ...whilst also leaving a trail of despair in it's wake... a similar result that has manifested for the wider community, funnily enough...

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velocityjohnno Monday, 17 May 2021 at 12:11pm

This is kind of what I was getting at Sypkan. When the differing groupings realise/perceive a lack of opportunity baked into policy - those that do not benefit will withdraw into their own and only employ/promote their own. Anyone left in the middle of the equality will get surpassed by the policy, unless they are the intended recipient. I see fracturing.
Perhaps most important is an independent means of making a living. My 2c.

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stunet Monday, 17 May 2021 at 1:17pm

I don't fully understand the points you two are making?

  • There has been oppression / marginalisation / discrimination.
  • Oppressed groups naturally bunker together forming the rudiments of IP.
  • Said groups use the collective power of their identity to advance the cause (the goal being equality with the dominant group)
  • Arguably, at least here in Oz, many of those groups have acheived that goal.
  • A problem is that it's not easy to disassemble the vehicle that provided said equality, thus we still find IP in places where it's not required.
  • Which makes it easy pickings for right wing bloviators who've no knowledge nor curiousity about the good deeds that have arisen via IP now trying to discredit everything about it.

I think we only have to look at the modern history of homosexuality, say from 1977 when gays were being killed in significant numbers around Sydney's Eastern Suburbs and the first Mardi Gras kicked off, to now where the wider community largely don't care who you sleep with to appreciate the value of Identity Politics.

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stunet Monday, 17 May 2021 at 1:28pm

And just to throw some home chemistry into the mix....

When you have a young generation that are economically hobbled, who realise they'll never buy their own house, who see diminishing employment projects and increasing work insecurity, who feel ostracised from the 'Australia project' and unsurprisingly have more allegiance to corporations like Apple and Facebook because that's what parents and politicans have allowed, making them the first fully birthed products of the Great Neoliberal Project, then what power do thay have?

Their identity.

Their gender.

Things the state and society can't touch.

And they'll fight for them as fiercely as Boomer's will fight to negatively gear their investment properties.

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GuySmiley Monday, 17 May 2021 at 2:03pm

".....negatively gear their investment properties".

Heard on the weekend a discussion on this year's federal budget along the lines that the LNP learnt from the Howard years that you can blow huge sums of taxpayers money on things like negative gearing, 1/2 CGT and all those other concessions to their base and get away with it, get away with locking in structural deficits by introducing ongoing programs initially funded by one-off or short-term gains. The discussion went on that while the economy did grow after Howard to at least pay for some of his largesse this time around the debt will be so great that future growth alone will not cover it ..... and that repayment will be forced upon the younger generations Stu refers to by (further) cuts to government services and/or increases in migration; note increasing taxes isn't in the mix on the contrary the LNP wants to further reduce tax. Surely we are fucked.

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Blowin Monday, 17 May 2021 at 2:25pm

The Woke project appears to me to be way less organic and way more premeditated and systemically imposed than you seem to appreciate, Stu.

Don’t confuse basic human decency with the Woke project. The two are no more than superficially aligned.

You keep referring to dismissal of awoke as something reserved for the right wing, but that’s completely discounting those who’ve voiced their opinions above as representative. You think that Island Bay, Freeride, Sypkan , Zen or VJ are right wing?

I believe in respecting human dignity, equality of race and sexual orientation and gender. I believe in social democracy and the curtailment of neoliberalism. I believe in egalitarianism and a fair go for all but I think Woke and it’s accompanying cancel culture is the biggest crock of shit, retrograde rubbish under the sun. Not sure how you reconcile that with anti-woke being the preserve of the right. Maybe we have different definitions of Woke?

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stunet Monday, 17 May 2021 at 2:31pm

Fuck I hate that word...won't even use it.

No, I don't like it, don't like how far Identity Politics has come in some instances either, but I do appreciate what they arose out of, and the good they've done for creating a more just society. My point is that that should never be forgotten.

Like a lot of things, the pendulum has swung too far and a correction is in order, and I'm glad to see it happening right now - i.e the aforementioned letter with signatories from across the political spectrum.

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Blowin Monday, 17 May 2021 at 2:41pm

Today was a fckn cracker.

There.....I’ve said it.

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Island Bay Monday, 17 May 2021 at 2:45pm

Over here in NZ, it's far beyond "some instances". Everywhere and everything is IP, and if you dare question something aligned with intersectionality, you're a racist/misogynist/hate speaker/transphobe etc etc.

The papers have swallowed it whole, and all normal debate has been quashed. Every HR dept in every organisation is gleefully in on it, and are growing exponentially through it.

It's not fun, and not funny.