racism

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The 9pm Edict #14

03 December 2011 in Internet, Media, Politics, The 9pm Edict by Stilgherrian | 7 comments

Homosexuals are special. They can vote people out of their club. Heterosexuals whine that their institutionalised racist breeder-money has been cut by, gosh, seven perfect. (Hi, Sherlock!) And the three stages of Top Gun and more from the CBS Interactive Christmas Party.

In this disturbing and long-overdue return of The 9pm Edict podcast, you’ll hear about the legal problems with the 2008 Gay Softball World Series, face the facts about cuts to Australia’s stupidly-named Baby Bonus, and hear a bunch of people at the CBS Interactive party talk about their childhood heroes.

If you were at that party and just want to listen to yourself, fast forward to the 10 minute 40 second mark.

Yes, there are bad words. And bonus hypocrisy.

You can listen below. But if you want all of the episodes, now and in the future, subscribe to the podcast feed, or even subscribe automatically in iTunes.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 42:01 — 27.8MB)

If you’d like to comment on this episode, please add your comment below, or Skype to stilgherrian or phone Sydney +61 2 8011 3733.

[Credits: The 9pm Edict theme by mansardian, Edict fanfare by neonaeon, all from The Freesound Project. Photograph of Stilgherrian taken 29 March 2009 by misswired, used by permission. Extracts from The Breeders song Cannonball and the movie Forbidden Planet.]

Weekly Wrap 13 and 14

11 September 2010 in Enmore, Internet, Politics, Weekly Wrap by Stilgherrian | 1 comment

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets, once again done fortnightly because I forgot to do it last weekend. Suffer.

Articles

Nile’s porn excuse doesn’t hold water, for Crikey. Sydney’s Daily Telegraph alleged that various NSW politicians had been using their parliamentary computers to access pornography, and that anti-sex-industry campaigner and Christian Democrats leader Reverend Fred Nile was the worst culprit. He denied it, but as the story stood on 2 September 2010 I didn’t believe him.
NSW Parliament’s flawed porn hunt, for Crikey. By the following day, it was clear that the “audit” of parliamentary web browsing was deeply flawed.
What the NBN will deliver to Windsor’s mob, for Crikey. Independent MP Tony Windsor said that the National Broadband Network was a major factor in him choosing to support Labor over the Liberal-National Coalition.
ACMA and Nine demonstrate Australia’s institutionalised racism, for ABC Unleashed. Sam Newman’s continued low-brow bigotry on The AFL Footy Show gets “punished” with a slap on the wrist. Again. It took only six comments before someone accused me of political correctness gone mad and compared Australian with North Korea. And another commenter said that I “looked like a potato that had been boiled too far”. The standard of discussion at ABC Online isn’t all that flash.

Podcasts

Patch Monday episode 55, “BYO computers: cloud security risk?”.
Patch Monday episode 56, “Parliament’s poor porn probe exposed”. If ZDNet allowed longer headlines and more robust language in their stories, I’d have entitled this podcast “Pollies’ piss poor Parly porn probe exposed”. Poetry.

Media Appearances

On Thursday 8 September 2010 I did a brief spot on ABC Radio’s Statewide NSW to chat about Stephanie Rice’s Twitterfaggotgate. Alas there is no recording.

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos eventually appear on Flickr.

[Photo: Enmore Village on a Spring evening, taken from one of my favourite afternoon working spots at the Warren View Hotel, corner of Stanmore and Enmore Roads. Compare it with the photo in this post, My village really is home.]

Links for 12 September 2009 through 19 September 2009

19 September 2009 in Daily Links by del.icio.us | 1 comment

Here are the web links I’ve found for 12 September 2009 through 19 September 2009, posted not-quite-automatically.

Steak House or Gay Bar?: Can you pick the steakhouses from the gay bars, just by their names? It’s harder than you might thing!
Greenpeace frees ocean life from Pacific longliner | Greenpeace Australia Pacific: Greenpeace’s report on their ship Esperanza “freeing tuna, sharks, marlin and an endangered sea turtle from a Taiwanese longliner”, the Ho Tsai Fa 18. Or, as I prefer to label it, Greenpeace committing piracy and endangering the lives of mariners going about their business.
Fish Now, Pay Later | Greenpeace Australia Pacific: Darren Smith told me the article on dolphin-safe tuna wasn’t right, that Greenpeace didn’t support any kind of industrialised fishing. Here’s what Greenpeace is currently doing in the Pacific.
The ecological disaster that is dolphin safe tuna | Southern Fried Science: By promoting “dolphin-safe tuna” — I prefer to spell it with a hyphen thusly — we’ve ended up with a system that’s unsafe for pretty much everything else.
Meet my hot new stripper wife / Turns out the mid-life crisis is a cruel global phenomenon. Can it be stopped? | Mark Morford: Mark Morford is rapidly becoming one of my favourite writers. In this piece from February 2008 he explains a man’s mid-life crisis rather too well. And entertainingly. I’ll never be able to listen to Justin Timberlake in the same way again.
The Lost Seasons | ABC: More details of the Australian Aboriginal six-season cycle, including a nice explanation of the system used by the Sydney basin’s D’harawal people.
War 2.0: Political Violence & New Media | ANU Department of International Relations: I’ve been invited to attend this 2-day symposium in Canberra on 7-8 October. Now, to figure out who’s paying for it, which will be the key factor in deciding whether I can go.
Jimmy Carter says that tea baggers hate President Obama because he's black | The Root: The former president points out a truth so self-evident you wonder how it could possibly be controversial. But controversial it is. Has modern journalism become so timid that it can’t handle the truth?
Understanding the Telstra d-i-v-o-r-c-e | SearchNetworking.com.au: Richard Chirgwin’s backgrounder explains just how difficult it will be to separate Telstra into separate wholesale and retail divisions.
The next generation bends over | 37signals: The makers of Basecamp, something I use every day, reckon the sale of online accounting software Mint to Intuit, the makers of Quicken and Quickbooks, is “indicative of a VC-induced cancer that’s infecting our industry and killing off the next generation”.
Kid Cannabis | Rolling Stone: “How a chubby pizza-delivery boy from Idaho became a drug kingpin.” It’s just another product distribution business, just illegal.
Rudd & Conroy Gambling On Mandatory Internet Censorship Working | broowery.com: An odd statistical analysis of the likelihood of stumbling across banned material online.
ACMA Blacklists Iran Protest Video & Boing Boing: Another example of why the ACMA blacklist process is seemingly out of step with what the community might want. That’s not ACMA’s fault, they’re just implementing a dodgy policy.
Why Sol Trujillo should be sued for stuffing up Telstra: Kohler | SmartCompany: There’s so many historical analyses of Telstra coming out this week, what with the government announcing its break-up and n’all. This one is marvellous.
2009 Menzies Lecture by John Howard (full text) | The Australian: “In the Australian context the adoption of a Charter or Bill of rights would represent the final triumph of elitism in Australian politics,” reckons our former Prime Minister. A fascinating read if only for its disingenuous use of political rhetoric and coded messages rather than rational argument.
Oil Rocks | BLDGBLOG: Imagine a city of 5000 people built on stilts and causeways some 45km out into a lake. Well, it exists, and it’s called Oil Rocks, in the Caspian Sea in Azerbaijan.
The Mushroom Tunnel of Mittagong | BLDGBLOG: A fascinating look, with photos, of a mushroom farm inside a disused railway tunnel. The tunnel itself is still government property, with the farm existing on a 5-year lease.
Death by Information Overload | HBR.org: “New research and novel techniques offer a lifeline to you and your organization,” it says.
The Economics of Sex Work | Core Economics: Good to see an update of knowledge since I did a little research on the sex industry for ABC Radio all those years ago.
CHART OF THE DAY: Primetime On Facebook Is Monday To Wednesday | Silicon Valley Insider: “Social media marketers, take note. The best days to spam, erm, publish wall posts on Facebook that you want your ‘fans’ to pay attention to are Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays.”

This ain’t no holiday!

08 June 2009 in Blogging, Personal, Project TOTO by Stilgherrian | 6 comments

People have been asking whether I’m excited about my trip to Africa. To be perfectly honest, I’m not.

Or at least not yet.

Project TOTO is still too abstract. There’s no firm dates, there’s no clear itinerary and, from a project management point of view, no clearly defined goals. Not because the project isn’t happening or doesn’t have support or isn’t being planned properly, but simply because that detailed conversation with ActionAid Australia about priorities has yet to take place.

That conversation is scheduled for this coming Friday 12 June.

Meanwhile, I’ve had many, many things on my mind. Most of them are completely unrelated to Project TOTO. But all of them have conspired to make the last three weeks extremely stressful indeed.

That’s one reason why my last video diary was back on 21 May. That’s a screenshot at the top of this post. I’m looking tired, eh? And I’ve been even more stressed since.

It’s time to catch up. So, even though this is the Queen’s Birthday holiday, here’s a rambling update. With some pictures.

Read the rest of this entry »

Echoes of America’s racial history

16 November 2008 in History, Politics by Stilgherrian | No comments

Much has been said of the supposed racial element in the election of Barack Obama as the next President of the United States. This map shows how deep the historical roots run.

The base area map shows in blue the counties which recorded a majority of votes for Obama. The overlay dot map shows US cotton production from 1860 — each dot represents 2000 bales. The similarity of the distribution is uncanny a century and half later.

It’s worth reading the comments on the original post at Strange Maps as people attempt to explain the finer details.

Links for 16 November 2008

16 November 2008 in Daily Links by del.icio.us | No comments

Here are the web links I’ve found for 16 November 2008, posted automatically and not.

Filtering Pilot and ACMA Blacklist – Not just “illegal” material | Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA): EFA’s analysis of the Australian goverment&’s policy makes it clear that it’s not just illegal material being targetted for Internet “filtering”.
From cutlass to AK-47 | BBC News: A brief history of piracy through to the present day — the real kind of piracy, not “copyright infringement”.
From Pickin’ Cotton to Pickin’ Presidents | Strange Maps: There’s been plenty of discussion about how race (i.e. the fact that Barack Obama isn’t white) affected the US election. Here’s a comparison of the map of cotton production from 1860 compared with voting patterns earlier this month. The resemblance is both uncanny and scary.
This Isn’t England | Noisy Decent Graphics: Pax Britannia! London-based graphic designer Ben Terrett notices that the UK isn’t always drawn as it should be on maps. All maps, by definition, present a distorted view of the world. But how distorted?
How This Bear Market Compares | NYTimes.com: Once more the New York Times wins with its superb infographics. Want to compare the current stock market crash with previous ones? This interactive graphic allows you to do just that, clearly and simply.
Introducing Recession: Simple Advice for Designers | Noisy Decent Graphics: While the blog is aimed at designers overall, this post is about the current world economic recession and includes links to some good infographics to help understand it, as well a rather nice FAIL photo.
Digital Surveillance Event Recorder | Jaycar Electronics: There’s just got to be some cool uses for a gadget that comes with two infra-red video cameras and records a 10-second burst of low-res video every time something moves. And it costs less that AUD$300.
Resampled Space | BLDGBLOG: Amazing but probably impossible buildings, assembled thanks to some nifty photo editing.
Anything Looks Cooler with a NASA Logo | Flickr: Yes, even mundane things.
Ethics & Principles of Permaculture browse | Permaculture Business Guild: Bill Mollison published these principles in 1980 in Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual (Tagari Publications), but the “Principles for Functional Design” apply everywhere, I think.
Internet filtering and censorship forum UNSW 27 November 2008 | Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre: A free forum in Sydney later this month discusses Australia’s proposals for Internet filtering / censorship. I;ll be there.
Economics of Spam | Link: The paper “Spamalytics: An Empirical Analysis of Spam Marketing Conversion”, details how researchers hacked into a spam network to measure its effectiveness. This post asks whether the technique of hacking into a spam botnet was ethical.
japanese bert | Flickr: There’s an uncanny resemblance between this chap and Australian television presenter Bert Newton.

Sometimes stereotypes are actually right

22 January 2008 in Human Nature by Stilgherrian | 1 comment

Just now, in the next street, I saw a very tall, lean black guy wearing Sydney Kings shorts and a singlet. “Gawd,” I thought, “Let’s follow the ghetto basketball stereotype, eh?” Then a Sydney Kings courtesy car, with two of his team-mates inside, pulled up to collect him. Oh. Oops.

Sometimes the very tall, lean black man is a professional basket-player.

Next week’s trip to Bangkok is taking shape. ’Pong has booked a fine-looking hotel at a mere THB2000 a night (about AUD66). I’ve been chatting with some Thai lads online — and been amused at the assumption that I’m a farang looking for, um more carnal pleasures. [sigh] Such assumptions! They seem to stop when I mention my boyfriend. So, 6 nights in Bangkok and then off to Chiang Mai. Any suggestions for things to do? And no, you can skip Patpong.

20 November 2007 by Stilgherrian | No comments

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.

10 October 2007 by Stilgherrian | 2 comments

Howard’s concern seems genuine — genuine spin, that is

24 June 2007 in Politics by Stilgherrian | 1 comment

John Howard’s racist intervention into the management of Aboriginal child sex abuse cases seems to be based on genuine personal shock, at least according to one feature story yesterday:

“I thought the report was just horrific,” he said yesterday. “This is very genuine. I am distressed. It is terrible. Little children. Don’t underestimate the personal interest and commitment to this. Or Mal Brough [Howard's Minister for Indigenous Affairs]. He is quite passionate about doing something on this subject. I said to him, ‘We’ve got to do something, we’ve got to grab hold of this. The territory’s not going to do anything.’”

But once that’s out of the way, the spin begins:

“It’s just terrible. Just imagine if it was Dickson, or Brunswick or Marrickville or whatever. It’s just intolerable and you’ve just got to do something about it.

Cute choice of examples, Mr Howard. I don’t know about Dickson (are you reading this, Antony Green?), but I live in the Marrickville electorate and Brunswick is the Melbourne equivalent — both multicultural Labour-voting areas.

Howard’s choice is 100% political. Mention left-wing heartlands so those on the left take the example personally and sympathise with the pain, and those on the right are reminded that these mixed-race communities are a hotbed of sordidness. He certainly doesn’t say “Just imagine if it was Mosman or Elsternwick.”

I mean, there’s no child sexual abuse in suburbs with deciduous trees, and Howard wouldn’t risk upsetting core Liberal party voters by even suggesting it were possible.

Howard doesn’t mention that the Little Children are Sacred report is the 13th enquiry into Aboriginal child sexual abuse since he became PM — three of them federal enquiries!

He doesn’t mention that NT chief minister Clare Martin proposed an interventionist solution a year ago — which he ignored.

He doesn’t mention that federal funding to tackle this issue was cut 4 years ago.

But he does keep emphasizing that he’s taking control, that he’s in control, that once more he’s Big Strong Daddy.

And as I write that a sudden thought crosses my mind. Isn’t Big Strong Daddy the one committing most child sexual abuse?

[P.S. There's interesting comments on this issue attached to my original post. Enjoy.]

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