Rowe Rowe Rowe your note (of apology) You can set your watch to almost every development in the saga of Jessica Rowe having Senator Pauline Hanson on her podcast for a chummy “apolitical” chat about living/loving/laughing, juggling parenthood and a busy career, and keeping Australia safe for the white man (that last bit may not have come up). The bright initial announcement. The swift backlash. The defence, where Rowe argues she has “interrogated Pauline many times over the years” and makes it “clear in the podcast I don’t support her views”.
Then the backdown and the screencap apology. “Kindness is at the heart of who I am,” Rowe bravely points out, before thanking two of the more unimpeachable progressive celebs for telling her what a terrible idea it was. If it weren’t for Australian of the Year Grace Tame, Rowe might never have known why it was inappropriate to have a humanising chinwag with someone whose views on Asians, Muslims, Indigenous people or whatever minority she happens upon have been a matter of public record for a quarter of a century.
The original interview was swiftly removed from the website.
Of course, Rowe or Hanson cannot lose in this situation, not in any lasting sense. Hanson has done her job — everyone now knows Jessica Rowe has a podcast. She’s the only politician on the show’s list of guests for a reason. Hanson can now leap on the episode as an example of the dreaded cancel culture and push for donations and members. Expect a lot more of this faux-bafflement in the lead-up to the next election.
Bully for you Now here’s someone whose views on parenting we’re very keen to hear. YA author John Marsden is discussing his new memoir Take Risks, which “explores teaching, parenting and society”, at an online event being held by Readings.
Back in 2019, while promoting The Art of Growing Up he had a theory about the leading cause of bullying — it’s those little dipshits no one likes. He got a lot of flak for saying most bullying was prompted by “unlikeable behaviour” on the part of the utter loser being bullied, and that it can act as “valid feedback” for the fuckin’ dork in question. This was only a minor aside in The Art of Growing Up and we’re hoping Take Risks dedicates more time to expanding his theories.
Et tu, YouTube In things that you can’t believe are only just happening now, YouTube has just decided to ban anti-vaccination content on its platform after more than a decade of amplifying such views to the world. All it took was a 18 month long global pandemic that has killed 5 million people. The Google-owned video platform’s approach to content moderation has long lagged behind other services like Facebook and Twitter, despite the fact it’s more influential and popular than the latter.
This is a platform used by 14.6 million Australians who spend an average of 21 hours a month watching it! But for some reason — perhaps because the people who do the regulating and the reporting are often outside the younger demographic who primarily use it — it seems to skate by without the same scrutiny as other platforms. OK, YouTube, now do climate change denialism.
A Handy Guide To Climate Change Gymnastics, Part 2 Speaking of which… Yesterday we started our guide — illustrated by Mitch Squire — to the contortions our painfully slow slouch towards a target of net zero by 2050 is requiring of various political and media figures. Today, it’s the News Corp Flourish:
A staple of the artistic floor routine: the athlete douses the gymnasium in accelerant and sets the building on fire. The athlete emerges from the blaze with a beaming smile as they proudly announce to horrified onlookers that they no longer plan to set gymnasiums on fire.
Why do they dread cancel culture so much? Surely it’s not that powerful? Oh but how I exult in their discomfort!
Australian media is in competition with US media in mainstreaming white Christian nationalist or far right ideology….
Still does not compare with ABC’s 4 Corner’s platforming of Steve Bannon, both we and he were told that he was not a racist? He must have been laughing his head off….
John Marsden may just be on to something there. I wish him well in his endeavours. Unfortunately the end result of protecting children from hurt feelings is that they grow up weak and inconsiderate of others. Later in life they can be found, among other places, in anti-vaxxer, freedumb marches protesting their rights to entitled behaviours over the common good.
Of course, protecting them from physical harm or sexual predation requires no rationale, it must be done. But protection from hurt feelings is a losing end game.
Indeed. Look for the “character-building” aspects of the bullying next time you see your child suffer. Reinforce the message that bullies are only bullying them “for their own good” due to some “personality defect” or other, and if they learn a positive lesson from it, they will thrive.
Fark! What was the offence of my last post, that it was met with the dreaded ‘Awaiting for approval’? Was it the b word? I may never find out.
Crikey seriously needs to attend to some problems with its comments field.
I once had three days of ‘approval waiting’ for putting some words in brackets.
But which words? 😉
Quite often common grammatical terms such as “…” and “…” or similar, not to mention quoting the article’s headline, never mind words or clauses from within it.
My favs. though are the flagging of composite words, such as the 20th component of a an old pound or describing the federl vaccine roll-out as taking a casual walk.
As banally bad as is the MadBot, the soft machines* who are supposed to oil & grease it seem to be barely sub literate, so engagement with them/their avatars is fraught.
* Given the pro forma responses, whether seeming to reply or even when apologising for an especially egregious, unjustified withholding of benign verbiage, it leads me to suspect that even they do not exist beyond the pound-shop, rather wonky Matrix of a badly programmed prototype Turing machine.
Hyperlinks in your comment always get the awaiting treatment. Even if the link is lifted from the Crikey item being commented on.
Certain words do too. Words like sh*t and f*ck. Even s*x sometimes. But how or why “boully” (take out the o) qualifies is beyond me.
“the soft machines* who are supposed to oil & grease it seem to be barely sub literate, so engagement with them/their avatars is fraught”
The way of the modern world, Selkie. In the past few months I have dealt with inadequate responses from clearly semi-literate people on a range of online matters. From my ISP to food delivery services, they don’t have even basic comprehension of the grammar or sentence structure required to communicate clearly. How they can be expected to provide an adequate response to customers is a mystery. But that’s the thing, they don’t. They answer only the questions they choose to respond to, and the answers they do provide are usually ignorant and unhelpful.
Not only is their literacy a problem, I fear their inteliigence – or lack of it – is too.
Modern world? Boomers are the most illiterate people online
Only Boomers write like this and they don’t even realise it. It’s a constant meme on social media to get a message from a boomer filled with ‘…’ and weird style choices like they just discovered bold.
Oh and throw in randomly trailing off. They use ‘…’ as a filler and also ‘…’ to just randomly trail off.
Younger people have issues with writing too, it seems everyone does. I’m not perfect. But when Boomers say young people can’t write that’s very funny because Boomers are shockers who don’t even realise no one else uses that style.
Silly Millie.
Gosh! … I didn’t think we left such obvious TRACKS…..
It seems “young people” just string a few phrases together and think that everyone will understand the point they’re trying to make. Good grammar, good sentence construction and building an argument up to support a conclusion are not skills I automatically associate with anyone under the age of about 60.
Firstly, try writing a complete sentence that is not just a mishmash of thoughts. What “style”???
Secondly, try reading a few different styles if you find the switching of styles discomfiting. With practice, you’ll get used to it.
Thirdly, don’t patronise boomers.
I don’t know why the right wing says the mainstream like Rowe or The Age or NY Times or CNN or various celebrities like Clooney are ‘left wing.’
These people are just the slightly more palatable face of the status quo. People like Rowe are no friend to real justice. They are neoliberals with more pleasant social policies like being pro gay or vaguely in favour of women sort of. As high income earners they don’t really want tax or wage reform. As white people they don’t really want to confront their own privilege.
These are just people who are smart enough not to say the ugly part out loud, except for cases like this where they accidentally stuffed up and exposed themselves. Everyone knows they’re fake when it comes to real progress.