My links for 01 June 2008 through 02 June 2008, gathered semi-automatically:
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Ah, the music industry really doesn’t grok teh intenetz. Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI), who coordinated the Australian Music In Tune propaganda flick I mentioned on the weekend, didn’t know their website was offline until phoned them. Meanwhile I’ve written a piece on this for Crikey, to appear a couple hours from now. [Update 1.20pm: It's being held over until tomorrow. Apparently Crikey found something more important than me.]
You’ve got to hand it to “the music industry”. This week they released a propaganda film Australian Music In Tune which asks us to sympathise with musicians because they’re all poor struggling artists. Diddums.
The only reason musicians trying to “make it” are poor is that as soon as they do get that sought-after recording contract they still pay for everything from there on. Before they see a single cent from their music, they have to pay off the studio hire, recording engineer, video director, stylists, set designers, editor and dozens of other parasites — including music company executives with their nice lunches and their BMW leases.
An entire industry — “the music industry” and their retail outlets — sits between the musicians and their audience, sucking out something like 90% of the money in the process.
And they have the gall to rope musicians into their propaganda film under false pretences, telling people like Frenzal Rhomb’s Lindsay McDougall that it was a movie about life as an artist.
He said he was told the 10-minute film, which is being distributed for free to all high schools in Australia, was about trying to survive as an Australian musician and no one mentioned the video would be used as part of an anti-piracy campaign.
OK, so who are the guys in the photo? Jared Madden (left) and Adam Purcell (right) have created tune-out.com in response to the industry crying poor.
Even though George W Bush’s presidency has more than 6 moths to run, Fox News has already started writing the hagiography. The Daily Show’s John Oliver has responded.
If the video doesn’t work for you, go directly to part 1 and part 2. Hat-tip to Peter Black.
That august political journal The Onion has brilliantly outlined the new US political strategy.
We must all do whatever we can to preserve America by refocusing our priorities back on the contemplation of lethal threats — invisible nightmarish forces plotting to destroy us in a number of horrific ways. It is only through the vigilance and determination of every patriot that we can maintain the sense of total dread vital to the prolonged existence of a thriving, quivering America.
Our country deserves no less than every citizen living in apprehension.
Fear has always made America strong. Were we ever more determined than during the Yellow Scare? When every Christian gentleman lived in mortal terror of his daughter being doped up on opium and raped by pagan, moustachioed Chinamen? What about the Red Scare, when citizens from all walks of life showed their pride by turning in their friends and associates to rabid anticommunists? Has America ever been more resolute?
Hat-tip to Bruce Schneier.
“Labor, the party of the working class, has officially become the party of choice for intellectuals,” claimed The Australian last Thursday. Sorry, which “official” said this?
No, it wasn’t a Labor party official announcing a change in their funding source. Nor some mythical official spokesperson for “intellectuals” — could there ever be such a central organisation? No, the “official” is just the journalist who wrote the story, or his sub-editor.
In one way this is like that common mis-use of the word “literally”. As in: “Kevin Rudd was literally torn apart in Parliament this afternoon.” But there’s also some lovely propaganda at work — either because the journo thought it’d make it more dramatic, or because (heaven forbid!) The Australian is continuing its pro-Coalition stance.
Go read John Birmingham’s angry rant about the government’s recent straight-up racist demonisation of Sudanese migrants. I was so angry with immigration minister Kevin Andrews last week I couldn’t actually write for fear my brain would explode. Birmingham has let his explode — and the world is a better place for it.
The government’s Climate Clever campaign is, apart from a wonderful subject for satire, apparently a nice attempt to re-associate the word “clever”.
As Possums Pollytics explains, it’s trying to re-frame the word away from “John Howard is clever” as in “tricky” to “clever policies on climate”.
Word association is a powerful propaganda weapon. Think Beazley and ticker, Keating and elitist, Latham and learner, and now Howard and clever. If the Libs could disassociate the word clever from Howard and re-associate it with climate change policies, not only would they neutralise the ALP attack, but would reduce the power of any residual word association with Howard.
A shame it’s probably way too late to make a difference. Possums also reports on the latest AC Nielsen polls with a simple “Business as usual. Nothing to see here folks, please move on.”
Mr Howard, please just call the bloody election. The longer you leave it now, the more you’re going to piss off the very people you’re trying to impress.
Given the fascinating discussion happening in my piece about the Citizenship Test — and there’s plenty for me to respond to, I know, I’ll get to it — it’s appropriate to mention the Australia Institute’s new report Under the Radar: Dog-Whistle Politics in Australia.
You can download the table of contents and summary (21k PDF) free. The full report is $21.
Another week, another big-spending government TV “information campaign”. This one’s for the new Citizenship Test — and gosh, that just happens to be a Coalition-specific policy and it just happens to be running when we’re not in an election campaign, honestly.
And last night immigration minister Kevin Andrews was seen on TV with a bunch of potential citizens — all of whom, by some happy coincidence, had reasonable English and were not particularly unphotogenic. But he was still defending the test.
This TV advert is little more than dog whistle political propaganda. That’s clear for two reasons. First, look closely at the script (below). And second, if you wanted to reach the people most directly affected, mass TV advertising is far from cost-effective.
Earlier today I nearly choked. Despite Kevin Rudd making some minor tactical errors, despite squillions of our dollars being spent on government propaganda, Labor’s primary vote has reached its highest level since Kevin Rudd took over the leadership last year.
54%! Factor in preferences and that means the 2-party-preferred (2PP) vote is 60.5% to 39.5% Labor’s way. Astounding!
The graph (right) shows Peter Brent’s meta-analysis of all the major polls for the last six months. Clearly, all this talk of “a swing back to Howard” is crap. They’re just little wiggles in a much bigger picture that tells a very clear story.
There’s always a big gap in the middle of at least 10 percentage points.
Brent reckons the weighted aggregate 2PP vote is 56.5 to 43.5 in Labor’s favour. If so, Labor wins two-thirds of the seats in Parliament.
There’s lot more numbers and graphs at Mumble Elections and Possums Pollytics.
Which of The World’s Weirdest/Stupidest Conspiracy Theories do you find most convincing? I must admit, I like the idea that WWII never really happened. “The Illuminati employed elaborate special effects, stage magic, and phoney journalism to scare the world into pacifism.” Via BoingBoing.
The 16-year-old son of a major Australian blogger has written an amazing essay objecting to the Christian indoctrination at his school — particularly the peer pressure and other psychological tactics. A taste: “As a non-Christian in the heart of a fundamental Baptist school. I’ve dealt with peer pressure on the topic in the bucket loads, absolutely backwards fundamentalists, and speeches that seem eerily reminiscent in tone and substance to those that preceded the infamous Kristallnacht.”
Excellent. On the basis of the Draft Citizenship Test Resource Book released yesterday I’d fail Australia’s new Citizenship Test. And if a privately-educated 5th-generation Aussie-Anglo like me can’t do it, I reckon few other Australians would pass either.
But that’s OK, because a multiple-choice “Citizenship Test” is meaningless. Let’s remind ourselves what happened when Apu went for US citizenship in The Simpsons. “Being American” was reduced to a cliché.
And the booklet itself is a gorgeous piece of political propaganda that’ll achieve the following:
- The bitter old Alan Jones listeners Howard thinks he needs to placate will be relieved to see an emphasis on the UK as the biggest source of migrants and Christianity as the biggest religion. They’ll think this will stop the “wrong” people becoming citizens. Once more, Howard is Big Tough Daddy protecting them from the woggy bogeymen.
- It’ll cause Howard’s much-hated “elites” — that is, anyone capable of using logic, analysis, multi-syllable words or joined-up thinking generally — to run around in circles for a week or two, losing focus on real election issues.
- Howard gets another chance to moisten over all those “achievements” he personally considers important but which he could never achieve himself — being a soldier (because of his hearing problem) and playing cricket (because he’s completely bloody hopeless).
- It’ll create a minor black market in the answers to the test, which will appear approximately a week after the first potential citizens are processed.
What’s remarkable is how backward-looking the booklet is… and how biased to Howard’s personal interests.
The words “science”, “physics”, “medicine”, “genetics”, “aviation”, “satellite”, “solar” and “film” don’t appear at all, despite Australia’s renown contributions in those fields. “Beer”, “ale” and “lager” are completely absent. “Literature” appears just once. “Computer” only once too — in the context of the test being computer-based.
Who was the first Prime Minister of Australia? Who cares? “George Washington,” suggested our Korean cleaner this morning with a laugh — but of course most Australians would indeed know more about the US system than our own. Do we really need to know where Phar Lap’s heart is? Will the Opening Ceremony of the 2000 Olympics really be of any relevance in 5 years time?
Are we choosing Australian citizens for the 21st Century, or putting together a geriatric pub trivia team?
One question really makes me laugh, though. Who do members of Parliament represent? This is a trick question, right?
Are two posts about John Howard in one day too many? Maybe. But he is Prime Minister and we are in the lead-up to a federal election — and he is “playing the game” for all it’s worth.
And besides, what I’m about to explain is such a classic example of Howard spin — though I must thank Christian Kerr at Crikey for this one — though it’s subscriber-only content.
Here’s the deal. It’s likely that the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) will raise interest rates on 8 August, and John Howard reckons the state governments are to blame.
“These are Labor government deficits, they’re not Liberal Government deficits,” Mr Howard told Sky News. “The Federal Government is not out there borrowing money… and putting upward pressure on interest rates, but state governments are.”
Alas, the RBA’s own graphs (shown right) tell a different story.
As Christian Kerr explains, “[the graphs] show that state governments have been increasing their surpluses for seven straight years [and] the surpluses have been increasing in recent times, rather than deteriorating.”
Using further graphs, which I won’t bother with here, he also shows that in every year since 1991-92, the state government sector has had lower debt and then moved to accumulate assets earlier than the Commonwealth government.
But, you know, John Howard and truth… they don’t go well in the same sentence.
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