Brilliance in the Southern Hemisphere

Via IBtP, HellOnHairyLegs.

Two posts jump out as favorites - this on high school, and this:

Between the towns and fast food restaurants lay sparely grassed country side which featured cows and the occasional stunted tree. I finally got to see the Australian countryside which has inspired so many dog-awful country ballads. If I lived there and attempted to farm such a desolate area I would make bad music too.

It was a fun trip; I really bonded with my family. I would point out the misogyny in song lyrics and be ignored. Heartened by this I would point out the racism in song lyrics and be ignored. Then, for an encore I suggested that a Guy A could be singing about Person X, not Girl B. It was a totally epic family vacation. I think the highlight was having my dad throw hissy fits and having his Giant Baby ego soothed by everyone else in the car. I’m practically doing cartwheels thinking about it all.

The week without the feminist blogosphere? It was awful, depressing and a trial on my sanity. The problem with interacting with sane people for hours is that you expect people in RL to act sane. I’ve never got the hang of RL; hopefully a decent tutorial will come out soon.

That sarcasm in that last paragraph is so dry I need a drink.

The Outrage of the Day (Warning: Intense)

And I say 'day' because this sort of shit happens on a daily basis.

I've known for some time that Australia treats the Aboriginal people with disrespect, but this is so far beyond the pale that I don't think there are words (and make no mistake - the relationship between Aboriginal Australia and white Australia makes a huge difference here):

NINE men who pleaded guilty last month to gang-raping a 10-year-old girl at the Aurukun Aboriginal community on Cape York have escaped a prison term, with the sentencing judge saying the child victim "probably agreed" to have sex with them.

I have no coherent reaction to this.

There is more:

Cairns-based District Court judge Sarah Bradley ordered that the six teenage juveniles not even have a conviction recorded for the 2005 offence, and that they be placed on a 12-month probation order.

Judge Bradley sentenced three men over the age of consent of 16 - aged 17, 18 and 26 - to six months' imprisonment, with the sentence suspended for 12 months.

Because the 28-day appeal period has expired, the sentences cannot be altered.

....just go read the whole thing.

Via Feministe.

John Howard: Australia :: Dick Cheney : United States

The big difference is that Howard was willing to put himself in public, at least a bit.

Heck, they even look the same - short, old, balding, pudgy white dudes. (Of course, it's not hard when the pool of elites to draw from is almost exclusively overweight old white dudes, but hey - sometimes they have hair).

On the other hand, Howard seemed to display the same single-mindedness that has made Cheney so effective at trying to end the world achieving peace, prosperity and democracy for rich white hetero men everybody.

Anyway, Australian novelist Richard Flanagan has this great column in the Guardian's Comment is Free section that does a fantastic job eviscerating Howard and his legacy. I wish he'd added more to the end about Australia's future, but so it goes.

Flanagan:

John Howard famously said the times were his, and for more than a decade it seemed they were. Australia experienced the greatest and most sustained boom in its history. Yet at its end Australia's indigenous population was in a ruinous state, its extraordinary environment was threatened on numerous fronts, and its people were beginning to ask where the wealth had gone: public schools and public health were in crisis, social welfare was straitened, housing was unaffordable for many, and wages and conditions were being cut under Howard's industrial reforms.

Look, kids! It's Neoliberalism! It looks pretty but kills everything!

Please do read the rest; it's not that long and it helps illustrate one of the reasons Howard got along so well with the Bush Administration: If one didn't know better, one might think Bush had been responsible for all the things Howard did in the last decade.

It's also a great primer for what happens when neoliberalism works, which is about the only thing worse than when it fails.

And while Australia is finally free of John Howard, I'm guessing a religious conservative isn't going to be that much better...

Australia's Howard is out

Good frackin' riddance. That guy is incredibly racist. Everything I saw come out of his government was Bush-lite and/or neoliberalism 101. Plus, he'd been PM for 10 or 11 years or so (way too long, in other words).

I hope Rudd is better, especially on Aboriginal issues.... but I doubt he will be. My experience with Australia is that there's still an incredible amount of blatant, conscious racism there.

Hopefully it was just the people I met.

Update: Howard lost in both ways - he lost his seat and his party lost. Yay!