A taxonomy of takes For several hours yesterday, there was simply no way to avoid the takes billowing away from the slap Will Smith flashed across Chris Rock’s face at the Oscars like dust from a collapsed building. Muting keywords was useless; the takes simply evolved away from anything you could predict, new variants getting around any defence. I assume if you were to run to the street away from your screens you’d hear people screaming from their windows, Network style, about how the sight of two scrapping millionaires interacted with their personal circumstances.
And so we should be grateful to the Young Liberals for their attempt to stop the whole thing in its tracks by being the first political organisation to reference the event, the surest way to kill off a meme. Heroically, their job done, they deleted the tweet.
Whatever flavour of take you like — smug, bad faith, self-involved or preposterously grandiose — it’s out there. But our local favourite is The Saturday Paper that had to know what it was doing when it asked Christos Tsiolkas to write about how a slap wasn’t enough to make the event exciting.
Climate 200 As we hurtle towards election season, the Climate 200 group has taken a leaf out the book of The Juice Media, putting together a fun sweary ad to attack government talking points. The ads which cropped up online yesterday take aim at the “positive energy” ads which cost us $26,000 a week on Facebook alone, as well as the science behind them:
The Australian government’s making bullshit ads about its climate action. We use your money to pay for ads that look sciencey. Cute! …. $30m of your money went to coin the bullshit phrase ‘positive energy’. Bargain!
The ad goes on to argue that excluding “dodgy land use accounting”, real emissions “have fallen by less than 1% under our government”.
This was immediately followed today by Australian Unions’ “aimless, blameless and completely shameless” campaign, cropping up on top of the news.com.au website (and a lot of people’s fences).
Green day There’s an interesting choice of words in the messaging for Greens candidate in Macnamara Steph Hodgins-May: “People are tired of politics as usual — we need independent voices in Canberra.”
Which is an interesting selling point for a (now well-established) political party. Are the Greens trying to grab a bit of their “progressive outsider” status back from the contingent of climate action-centred independent candidates, who have so far dominated much of the discussion about who might form the crossbench after May?
Trump watch Associate justice on the US Supreme Court Clarence Thomas — whose bitter confirmation process in the early ’90s, opposed by Democrats on the grounds he was alleged to have sexually harassed attorney Anita Hill, echoed in the Brett Kavanaugh hearings — has long been considered the most conservative judge on the bench.
However, that’s apparently nothing compared with the views of his wife, Virginia. It was revealed last week that in the weeks after the 2020 presidential election, she sent no less that 29 texts to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows urging him to do everything he could to overturn the result:
Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!…You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.
But this isn’t just an idle bit of tomfoolery from the spouse of a public figure — the Supreme Court has been required to rule on various cases related to the events of January 6, 2021, and Thomas has frequently gone against his colleagues (and the evidence) when it comes to Trump. Senate judiciary committee chairman Dick Durbin is calling on Thomas to recuse himself from January 6-related cases in future.
Why are the views of Virginia Thomas and those like her considered ‘conservative’? There are words far more applicable, including ‘seditious’. They are trying to overthrow the state, not conserve it. And they are very close to winning.
Reactionary, rather, also Morrison and all his ilk.
The Oscars Charlie for me, are in the same category as Hollywood Gossip, Sport or advertisements – as soon as any discussion comes on the TV or radio, the OFF switch is immediately activated!!
I am utterly disgusted but, alas, no longer surprised, that ABC’s RN led with the OscarSlap on ALL of its news bulletins Monday arvo and evening – even the once vaguely cerebral Drive show led with it and later in tedious detail.
On Tuesday morning, there being no other news apparently nationally or internationally of such vital importnce, RN breakfast covered it excruciatingly – or so I assume as I turned it off but it was still going when I checked several minutes later.
Of course, it was not a concocted occurrence and had absolutely nothing to do with the organisers’ concerns about the steady decline in interest, as viewing figures show.
Agreed. ABC News’ editorial priorities recently are bizarre and hardly believable. This is only the latest example. Several times recently something about sport or a sport personality has taken over more than half its top news coverage for days. Instead of reporting news it seems far more interested in celebrity speculation, gossip and scandal. Perhaps the ABC imagines one benefit of filling the news with such fluff is the low risk they annoy government ministers.
And the ABC continues to beat up the coalition rabble rousing on Kimberley. That matter should be allowed to quietly go to bed. Is it a new editorial direction from the right wing board do you think?
certainly not the even handed news and comment we were used to . . .
It is bizarre that they continue the farrago – even still using the tawdry term ‘Mean Girls‘ as if it were not a film title from 2004.
Talk about up to date with the zeitgeist! – from the depths of the Rodent’s reign of Misrule.
Bit unfair? Morrison’s zeitgeist reaches at least as far as 2013, when The Croods was released. How zeitgeisty is that?
I think that he has already denied saying that – which is very much (his) zeitgeisty.
Oh yes, the ABC’s efforts concerning Kitching seem to be taken straight from Coalition talking points used to make very aggressive ‘gotcha’ assaults on any Labor figure being interviewed. There is no effort at any thought, let alone analysis of what happened. But let’s remember this is only the latest in a long line of such bias or prejudice. For example the ABC has for years consistently and often referred to something it typically calls ‘Labor’s pink batts disaster’. That may be the most successful beat-up of all time, a diabolical invention that is firmly lodged in the national consciousness forever. It is only a disaster for Labor because the facts are ignored or twisted beyond recognition while the phrase keeps being used to bash Labor.
A perfect example – it was not federal but state OH&S regulatory failure, the batts were not pink and it was raging success for which many home owners, schools and small villages are profoundly grateful.
Apart from errors of fact in all respects, it is fine.
Funny how the party known to be the highest taxing are the ones trying to imply that it will be Labor that will tax ordinary workers the most. For the record, closing tax loopholes to ensure the very rich pay what they owe is *not* the same as being “high taxing”.