The thing to remember about diversity is that it’s automatically and unequivocally good, and requires no follow-up questions or critical thinking.
For example: if Serco is telling trans kids they can one day profit from enforcing government policies that cause children to self-harm in a safe and supportive environment, well, then Serco is good now! It really is just that simple.
Similarly, Italy — though there are some formalities still to come — has all but elected Giorgia Meloni as prime minister, the first time a woman has been elected to that office. Straight girlbossing, am I right? So why is the “pro-diversity” crew, always banging on about representation in other contexts, so silent about this win for women everywhere? Thus asks The Australian’s Adam Creighton — complete with the requisite dessert for any such banquet of smugness: “Wow really touched a nerve”.
He’s not the only really smart person making this extremely great point — former Liberal senator (that’s the party that got him elected, not his new party, the Australian Conservatives) Cory Bernardi and Rita Panahi were both baffled, just baffled, by the double standard. Even Hillary Clinton was moved to observe at the Venice International Film Festival earlier this month that “the election of the first woman prime minister in a country always represents a break with the past, and that is certainly a good thing”.
Yeah, if you don’t support Meloni, it can only be because she fails your woke tests by being the leader of… Italy’s first far-right government since it fought on the wrong side of World War II. Yep, just because her party, the Brothers of Italy, morphed out of the remnants of a Nazi puppet government, use the same logo as the defunct neo-fascist group Italian Social Movement, campaigned under the Mussolini-era slogan “God, homeland, family”, and whose leader before Meloni once said “We are all heirs of Il Duce”, the so-called tolerant left is acting like her win might be a bad thing.
The fact that she campaigns against the “LGBT lobby” apparently out to destroy the family unit, and does a lot of suggestive talk about George Soros apparently financing “mass immigration” and a plan for “ethnic substitution”, is all it takes for the sisterhood to abandon one of their own, conveniently ignoring the fact that she has said she’s not a fascist.
It’s this kind of purity politics that turns people away from the left, frankly.
“Boooooooooooring” in the inimitable war cry of Villanelle (Google it). Since when does “the sisterhood” have to celebrate the female window dressing on far right parties determined to reinforce patriarchal rule whether it be Marine Le Pen or Georgia Meloni or for that matter Pauline Hanson?
C’arn, wellohwell, you can do better than ‘female widow dressing’, shorely? Chickwashing? Aunty Tom-ism? Vagichy Collaborators? Anyone…?
‘Chickwashing’ – is there any other kind? It’s certainly not men’s work! Boom boom!
(Come on, Charlie, I’m workin’ a pretty tough lefty room as your straight foil here: lay some smokin’ millennial rips down on a sad old Blimp already, willya. Seriously…this dumb, exhausting fight is long overdue for some mutual laughs, peeps. Specially b/w generations.)
Not a widow but a mother of one – a strong, independent woman like the Socialist rival to Sarkozy in 2007, Marie-Ségolène Royal who had five children unwed to the stupendously boring yet inexplicable chick magnet Hollande.
Five brats, and no sign of an honest ring? Well, we all know there’s only one place for her, eh fellers…off to Gilead it is!
A saying in deepest rural France is “No broom in her house.”
Spot on Ohwell. That accurate simplicity lost in the over-satirized piece. Overwhelming for the speed-readers.
i can only read as fast as I can move my fat lips, alas
Italian politics is all theatrics. She will fall quickly into lockstep with the standard US/NATO/EU game plan. Nothing really changes politically in Italy. Her tenure will be short as for all past Italian leaders.
Enlighten me, what is the ‘US/NATO/EU game plan’ or conspiracy, similar to that promoted by the Kremlin, white nativists & the alt right?
Apart from lacking testes, Signora Giorgia Meloni will be the first elected Italian PM for fourteen years!
Over that period there have been 8 PMs, all apparatchiks selected by the amorphous coalitions of self serving parties, none of whom were worth a bumper apparently in the view of the electorate, hence Ms Meloni’s appeal to so many voters.
Oh, Charlie, five stars for a seriously decent stab at a truly tricky manoeuvre, but…yeah, but nah. See, it’s the raw material you have no choice but to work with that’s your problem here, innit. Fella can only streeeeetch millennial irony so far before it just…you know, snaps on ya, mate, and the little bit you’re left holding onto for dear ideological life whizzes back and whacks you in your own mush. The joys of intersectionality, comrade! The joys of watching you soft pap progs trying to rationalise a messy ID politics outcome like this! Bail now, Charlie: identity narcissism and ever-finer self-parsing being what it is, such outcomes will come at you at speed now! If you thought this ‘un was tricky, wotcha gunna do with the first trans woman who gets up on a flat tax/capital punishment/no reffos ticket?! Chortle.
Hot tip: just blow off all the identity politics clip-ons, and focus on the material politics/policy. What the new PM has between her legs, like the colour of her skin, who she likes to shag, and what pronouns she prefers…it doesn’t really matter. It can’t. Not for much longer – as this ought to give you silly lot a preview of, yeah?
Focus on what politicians say and do, not who and what they are. It makes political engagement and analysis much…simpler.
But a ripper crack, and a fun read. And I mean that, without irony or condescension.
‘Focus on what politicians say and do’ – pretty much exactly what Charlie has done
Then he’s cured! Hurrah! No more millennial ID nonsense for They Charlie!
With solemnity and piety let us together lay down our generational weaponry, soft pappy proggy Crikey millennial childers. Let us never squabble about mere trivialities of genitalia, pigmentation, erotic inclination, biological heritage, physicality of carriage, salutary grammar or red hair, nay, never again.
Let the bells ring out! And proclaim…that Teh Identity Warz are OVER! O, Kumbayah, Crikey millennials. O, praise identity politics peace in our time, O Kumbayah!
I’m a pretty funny and cool Gen X reactionary old fart, huh?! Don’t youse reckon, Crikey Gen Like kidlets? (You should see me shuffle dance…)
Somehow I think an Elizabethan gavotte would be more your style.
Nah, I totes blitz the Melbourne Shuffle…or did, until it knackered my meniscus…
Spot on Jack. Lets get on with the class struggle and ditch this identity politics CRAP!
Amen, brother. Oh yeah. Let’s do just that. As if we’ll have any choice, anyway.
Solidarity, comrade.
Maybe you’re not old enough to remember the term of Margaret Thatcher, but I can.
Or Golda Meir, whom DrK called “the best man in the Israeli government”.
And Indira Ghandi would been a totes nightmare for poor old Charlie’s intersectional gang, too. Chick, brown, ethnic – privileged gentry, posh schools, Oxford!! Woman of the post-colonial century – colonial oppressor!!! Military brute bully – victim of male violence! Socialist reformer! Free market buccaneer! Feminist ground-breaker! Social reactionary! Working mum! Traditional wifey, mumsy! Woman of integrity! Corrupt, banned MP!
My head hurts. Rescue me, Charlie & The Millens, with your funky soft pap prog rock groove…!
OK, shall lay off the cheap shots now. (Chortle, though.)
I am even older and can remember the world’s first woman PM, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, who became Prime Minister of Sri Lanka (then the Dominion of Ceylon) in 1960.
Queen Lizzies (x 2!), St Joan, Catherine the Great, Amelia Earhart (*swoons*), Cleopatra, Boudica,..why, Shakespeare, the J Writer, God Herself!!!..good grief, badass girlbosses abounding, all across our cowering blokey history!!! We’re dunfer, us poor oppressed penis-wielders, Charlie…!
Meanwhile the First Woman, Lilith, looks on and laughs,
“God Herself”…is that your carer about to give you a shower and change your bed sore dressings?
very droll..though oddly enough many people who need carers do indeed come to see us in those sorts of terms twds the end …your world kind of shrinks and your needs regress to those of infancy…