Tomorrow, Britain will vote in what is pretty widely considered the most important British general elections in years. On one side of British politics, you have a bunch of elite, pampered, born-to-rule overpriviliged arseholes whose brains are too small to imagine anything but a cruel status quo whose victims they patronise and insult with empty platitudes and vacuous rhetoric.
And that's just the majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party! The actual Tories are even worse.
But on the other you have a youthful, growing, determined mass movement of people who want an end to anti-poor austerity measures, oppose the privatisation of health care, who want to stop selling arms to brutal regimes like Saudi Arabia and end bloody Western interventions that kill large numbers and create the conditions for the sort of horrific terror attacks in Manchester and London.
And this movement is coalesced behind one man: Jeremy Corbyn.
Much maligned by the political and media establishment, who treat him like some sort of bad joke, the veteran socialist MP has defied expectations ever since he entered Labour's leadership race in 2015.
Armed with a powerful Manifesto that represents a decisive break with austerity and proposes tilting the scales in favour of the working people against the 1%, his campaign has turned what looked like a Tory rout into a potentially very close run thing.
Most of all, Jeremy Corbyn represented the ordinary person. Not just in policy, but in his decidedly unfashionable dress. I deliberately avoided saying "proudly unfashionable" because I am not sure it would have ever entered his head until recent weeks to feel pride in his attire one way or the other.
That means a lot to many people, myself included. Even here in Australia, I have been inspired at the sight of a man aiming to lead a whole nation while dressing like a high school geography teacher just before his fortnightly trip to the laundry down the street.
My own fashion sense is famous. I have perfected the "woke up too hungover and late to do more than throw on yesterday's crumpled clothes while dashing for the door" look, which I have honed over years of waking up hungover and late and throwing on yesterday's crumpled clothes while dashing for the door.
Corbyn was an inspiration. There was that time he met a baying media outside his front door in socks and shorts with a daggy, brown-striped short-sleeved shirt, and you knew that wasn't a calculated decision.
His wife probably said to him as he opened the door "Oh you are not greeting the hyenas of the capitalist press out to smear and demonise you in order to crush a movement of working people seeking to use your leadership of the Labour Party to push back against the elites destroying all that is decent in society dressed like that?"
To which a genuinely bemused Corbyn no doubt responded with "What?" before walking out to put his logical, carefully thought-out case that the interests of the majority should be put before a too-powerful minority and, as another point, perhaps weapons programs whose function is to obliterate millions of lives with a single push of a button isn't the wisest course.
'Look why are we spending tax payers money on these weapons of mass destruction while starving the NHS of badly needed funds? Sorry, what? Where did I buy my socks?'
But Corbyn has changed.
And it is not just that the largely wonderful Manifesto includes a compromise for the veteran anti-war campaigner by including a commitment to not scrap nuclear weapons. No... far worse than that.
Of late, Corbyn has started dressing... and it pains me to write this... snappily.
Yes, the very thing that defined the soul of Labour's socialist leader has been thrown out the window in favour of carefully chosen outfits that exude... there is no other word for it, unfortunately... they exude style.
If you think I am exaggerating consider the fact that Corbyn's sartorial shift has been noticed and praised by none other than Vogue magazine itself!
WHO is Jeremy Corbyn’s stylist? He must have someone advising him on his wardrobe. For while the shifty suits remain at least one inch too large for his wiry frame, Corbyn’s certainly turned a corner in the long old road to chic.
As one Twitter user commented after his confident performance on BBC1’s Question Time on Friday evening, it is a very skilled individual who has “turned the Corbyn look from a freight train-jumping hobo into a vaguely credible-looking adult”.
As if there is anything wrong with the "freight train-jumping hobo" look! I call it the "I'm Pretty Sure this T-shirt Has One Wear Left And that Beer Stain Isn't Really Noticeable" look.
I mean, this has been a feature of Corbyn's career for a long time. Check out this clip of Corbyn responding to a Tory whinging about "Labour scruffs" (he even names Corbyn) not dressing of a standard fitting of parliament. (I guess when working extend imperial power across the globe while crushing working people at home, you should at least try to wear a decent tie.)
And now Jeremy Corbyn wears outfits so nice they draw comment from Vogue!
Look at him now!
God.
Oh Jesus.
Ok that baseball cap is just taking the piss.
I mean honestly, here is a reminder of how Corbyn used to dress.
Yes those are socks with sandals! Red socks, of course!
"What is wrong with brown anyway?" Nothing I can think of, Jezza.
I don't even know what you can technically call that sort of "all tracksuit" action, but I know I call it awesome!
And I know what many of you are thinking. "Really comrade, the fucking election is tomorrow. Now is not the time to be bringing up such criticisms, no matter how important and eloquently expressed as they are on your wonderful, well-written blog!"
I get it. It is a crucial election and Corbyn-led Labour must win. But that does not mean we must lose our critical faculties! Or choose to be quiet on the things that matter out of some cheap electoral opportunism!
The day we cease to speak out on the things that matter is the day we begin to die, as a very wise person, whose name I cannot be bothered googling right now coz my fucking Internet is so slow it's driving me insane, once said.
But, despite my strongly worded criticisms here, I wish to still emphasis that, from Australia and with full solidarity, I support a vote for Corbyn's Labour. I merely do so critically, and well aware of the limits of a supposed anti-establishment socialist entering Westminster in a tailoured suit.
Oh well, here is some Manic Street Preachers anyway.
What price now for a shallow piece of dignity? I wish I had a bottle Right here in my dirty face to wear the scars To show from where I came
We don't talk about love we only want to get drunk And we are not allowed to spend As we are told that this is the end
Not actually working class: A billionaire property mogul and a private schooled City banker.
"I was looking for a job and then I found a job and Heaven knows I'm miserable now," sung Morrissey in Manchester band The Smiths' song from the depths of Thatcher's England in the mid-80s.
I have never really heard a better description of the essential condition of the working class, forced to look for work they hate just to survive. I don't want to get all "Karl Marx" on you, but that is the basic definition of that mythical beast, The Working Class ... those that fucking work, or seek fucking work, and do so because they have no fucking choice.
Does that apply to you? Does that apply to the vast majority of people you know? Then I am sorry to be the one to break the news, but you're Working Fucking Class. Or WFC if that makes you feel any better in this age of social media-speak, hell go for a #wfclol hashtag if you want to retain your essential ironic sense of self-deprecation. You'll still have to get up far too fucking early tomorrow morning and go perform mind-numbing and possibly body destroying tasks under the direction of some prick you despise.
Does this matter? Does such a passe concept as "class" really count for much in our glorious neoliberal post-modern, post-class, post politics, post fucking a safe fucking climate for human fucking habitation world? Does it matter if most people view "working class" as some outdated trope of a white bloke in a hard hat or as some sort of sociological label determined simply by income level? As opposed to, you know... whether you work?
Yes, I think so, to judge by the endless think pieces right now on a fictional working class where everyone is white and fulfilling the stereotype thought up in the heads of some journalist who, just days ago, was certain Donald Trump would lose badly and now, having ignored class for years, is full of wisdom about a mythical Working Class that Must Be Heard.
I think it matters because, understood as "those that work", the working class is a large majority in the world, divided up, of course, across many racial, ethnic, gender and other lines.
It matters because we've been hearing so much about this great mythical Working Class beast since the Brexit vote in Britain in June. We've been hearing even more since the position of Leader of the Free World/Nation that Drone Strikes Children and Overthrows Governments for Fun and Profit, was won by the KKK-backed billionaire child rapist slumlord Donald Trump.
Many, understandably, want to know how the Hell did that freak reality TV show bigot win the White House.
Was it maybe the hollowing out of US institutions and total corruption of what little democracy that was by oceans of corporate money? Was it maybe the fact that the Democrats, in the Oval Office for the past eight years, have long pushed a brutal neoliberalism destroying livelihoods across the country, while also pursuing brutal war overseas and mass incarceration of predominantly Black people at home (a key part of their voter base), while also mass deporting Latino migrants... and in doing so totally destroying the ground on which they seek to stand?
Was it the fact that when Bernie Sanders ran an insurgent campaign for the Democrat nomination, setting it alight with calls for a "political revolution" against the "billionaire class", and received polls after polls suggesting he could easily defeat Trump while Clinton would struggle, the Democrats sabotaged his campaign and installed the ultimate establishment candidate any way?
Was it the extreme restriction of democracy in the self-proclaimed Greatest Democracy on Earth(TM)? Things like the fact that many who wanted to vote couldn't, in part coz the elections are on a working day, the Voters Rights Act to protect Black voters had been rolled back for the first time in 50 years, and there were hundreds of less polling booths in places where predominantly poor and black people vote? Was it the fact that literally millions of (again disproportionately Black) prisoners and ex-prisoners were denied the right to vote at all?
No. It was, as alleged "think" piece after alleged think piece insists, The Working Class. Somewhere, Hillary Clinton is angrily shaking her fist as terrified campaign workers cower while she shouts, "AND I WOULD HAVE GOTTEN AWAY WITH IT, TOO, IF IT WASN'T FOR THOSE DARN WORKERS!"
Don't worry about the fact that actually the evidence is Tump attracted the support of wealthier voters than Clinton (perhaps not surprising since he did promise widespread tax cuts), don't worry about his appeals to deep-seated racism and bigotry, don't worry about the fact that the Republican vote actually dropped overall compared to 2012, it is just the Democrat vote dropped even more.
Forget all of that. In some key states, some white rural workers with economic concerns voted for Trump and therefore, we must all listen to The Working Class, OK?
And don't get the liberal think pieces wrong. They don't mean this as an attack on The Working Class! God no!
Sure their version of The Working Class voted for a misogynist racist self-confessed sexual abuser, but it is only because the poor people are in such pain. We just need to listen to their pain! Don't call them racist just because they say, think, chant and vote racist. Try to understand.
Of course, at this point, it probably important to note that the working class of these think pieces has one clear characteristic that is usually openly admitted.
That it, it is white.
Yes it was the white working class, which, to go by the think pieces, is the most workering working class to ever be a class and also work!
This, of course, is not the entire US working class. Huge chunks of working people in the US are not, actually, white and research suggests white people will be a minority of the US workforce in about 15 years.
Not a white worker.
But not only do many pieces talk about the US working class as if it is exclusively white, they describe a narrow layer of blue collar white workers.
Take this piece I've seen shared around. It's headline is "What Many People Don't Get About the US Working Class" and it was shared by Daily Kos, a pro-Democrat liberal, progressive leaning site as a "must read".
Despite a headline suggesting it is about the "US" working class, it explicitly about, and only about, a narrow sector of workers — a layer of blue collar white workers who, as the post spells out, support a right-wing agenda, such as resenting and opposing those poorer than them receiving government assistance.
And what does the Daily Kos, a website associated closely with the Democrats, conclude?
Must read Harvard Business Review article for all of us as we reflect and regroup. We don’t have to pander to any racism but we still need to retain enough of the white working class vote in MI, PA and WI for 2020 with a message of economic populism even as we wait for the demographics to turn.
Well that is real caring for The Working Class right there! Send a "message" of "populism" to a sector you clearly don't understand and seem to despise while you "wait for the demographics to turn"!
Really I have no idea how such people failed to defeat Trump.
Forget Black people robbed of the right to vote! Forget the poor who found voting near impossible or just couldn't bring themselves to vote for either candidate who hates their guts, forget the fucking millions of Latino migrants who grow the fucking food and clean the fucking homes and face mass fucking deportation (and not just from Trump but from Obama first)...
The Key Sector is the White Working Class. And the White Working Class backed Trump because... well because it seems to suit people to imagine they did even when the statistics say that wasn't who voted Trump.
And I see this shit about the "need to listen to the working class" being shared on social media by people who a) don't support Trump in the slightest and b) are themselves working class.
Now that is self-hatred for you. Left-wing working class people pushing the idea that the working class, as a collective, is right wing. The working class is forever presented as some sort of "Other", mysterious, romantic, hard-to-pin-down... as opposed to what it is — that is, those who work.
So was Brexit and Trump's win a "revolt" of the working class?
Yes, in Brexit, many working class people voted for Brexit. Many working class people alsovoted to stay in the EU too. In the stay camp was the large majority of people who identified as Black, as Asian and/or as Muslim — who are overwhelmingly working class — and most Scottish and northern Irish people.
So if you want to talk about the "working class revolt" in Brexit and ignore Black, Asian, Muslim, Scottish and Irish workers within the British state.... then... well the polite way to put it is you are not really helping combat racism exactly.
And in Trump's win... we are told, endlessly, we need to listen to Trump supporters. Never mind that actually the vast majority of American people did not vote Trump and he won with about 25% of registered voters.
The problem with presenting The Working Class as that narrow layer of white blue collar workers who joined the largely middle class voting base for Trump is it ignores a key challenge facing the actual working class. Which is how, when so stratified by race, ethnicity, gender and more, to actually unite to pose a challenge to all of our enemies in the corporate elite?
Because Trump's appeal is to small-minded privilege, for white people to blame those weaker, for men to keep their power over women in their lives, and to see the "Swamp" in Washington in these terms — those whose "political correctness" hands over the narrow, petty privileges of white people, of men, of straight people, of "proper Americans" over the fucking usurpers of every minority that wants to get the fucking boot off their necks.
We hear repeatedly that "We need to listen to Trump supporters", but the people who say that clearly don't. I mean have a fucking listen! It is not like they are quiet! These bastards SHOUT their views and concerns at the any opportunity!
When Trump supporters chanted “We don’t like Muslims, we don’t like Blacks, we want our country back”, it is unlikely this was code for “we need to be more concerned about the impacts of pro-corporate trade deals on our nation’s manufacturing industry and its flow-on effect to a drastically weakened working and middle class”.
It is likely they meant they don’t like Muslims and they don’t like Blacks.
And when Trump supporters at Sydney University responded to Trump’s win by chanting “grab them by the pussy, that’s how we do it!”, it is unlikely they meant “What Australian politics needs is a genuine outsider to take on a corrupt, out of touch political class and reverse the neoliberal economic policies causing a serious decline in living standards”.
It is likely they meant they like sexually assaulting women.
Plus there is this tweet, which says the same thing in much less words:
Please keep an open heart/mind and understand that people drawing swastikas on walls are just concerned about the economy.
If you want an actual working class revolt in the United States... well I can think of two right now that are worth actually listening to... and these revolts are completely against the interests and policies of BOTH Trumpite Republicans and Clintonite Democrats.
On May 1 2006, more than 1 million largely Latino migrant workers staged mass walk-outs in protests for amnesty for undocumented migrants and and end to deportations. They shut the country down.
More workers who aren't white.
As Green Left Weekly said at the time:
According to combined police estimates, 1.1 million immigrant workers and their supporters marched in more than 75 major cities across the US on May 1 ...Over and above those who marched were hundreds of thousands more who boycotted shopping and skipped school or work ...
One of the goals of the actions was to demonstrate the impact of a "day without immigrants". This goal was surely met. School attendance in cities with large concentrations of immigrants was way down. The New York Times reported that "stores and restaurants in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York closed because workers did not show up or as a display of solidarity with demonstrators". In one area of Chicago, only 17% of students showed up. There were TV pictures of empty supermarkets usually patronised by immigrants.
In California's Central Valley, where much of the country's produce is grown, no farm workers came to work. TV showed eerie shots of vacant fields. Much of the construction industry was shut down across the country. Major meat-packing companies, including Tyson Foods, Swift and Perdue chickens, shut down many plants because their immigrant workers didn't show up. The largest port on the west coast, in Long Beach, California, was shut down, because the truck drivers were nowhere to be seen.
Vast swaths of service industries — hotels, restaurants, car washes, and so forth — were affected. Nannies took a day off. Workers who couldn't take the day off went to rallies after work ...
I might go out on a limb and suggest this is what a working class revolt against an out-of-touch establishment looks like. But there is a second, more recent, example. CNN reported on October 31 on a mass strike by US inmates, who do large amounts of forced labour for very low pay, producing key goods for various authorities and companies:
Last month, on the 45th anniversary of the infamous Attica Prison uprising, tens of thousands of US inmates launched a nationwide protest that continues today, according to advocates who helped organize the effort.
The inmates' grievances are as varied as the states they came from: Pennies for labor in South Carolina, racial discrimination in California, excessive force in Michigan. However, they share an overarching goal: End legalized slavery inside American correctional facilities... the 13th Amendment of the US Constitution, while banning slavery, allows prisoners to work for little to no pay, in what inmate advocates say crosses the limits of human decency, amounting to modern-day servitude ...
Since September 9, the Incarcerated Workers' Organizing Committee, a prisoner rights advocacy group, estimates as many as 50,000 inmates have taken part in coordinated strikes planned through social media on cell phones and snail mail across nearly two-dozen states ...
OMG, more non-white workers? But then who do we listen to???
Don't forget that those carrying out these working class revolts generally can't vote (as prisoners or undocumented migrants). Yet, hand-wringing liberal media responses to the rise of right-populism notwithstanding, they form part of the working class you might want to consider listening to.
This all matters because working people have some real power. But not if you invent a fictional working class, based on a narrow layer of some white workers, because it fits some strange narrative you are trying to present. Consider that actually, the actual working class, the one capable imposing its will for progressive change, includes you.
Here are two songs about the working class I really like. The first is those working class Welsh rockers and socialists, the Manic Street Preachers, with their track about working class culture and defiance (which went to number 2 int he UK charts in 1996). the second Latino hip hop duo from the Bronx, Rebel Diaz, re-interrupting the classic working class anthem "Which Side Are You On", written in the 1930s in support of a US coal miners strike, for the 21st Century.
Libraries gave us power Then work came and made us free What price now for a shallow piece of dignity I wish I had a bottle Right here in my dirty face to wear the scars To show from where I came We don't talk about love we only want to get drunk And we are not allowed to spend As we are told that this is the end A design for life
Making money for suckers and our communities poor Ripping flags off of coffins, man, this ain't our war Colonized and terrorized by the world's biggest killers The US government, the biggest weapon and drug dealers Filling prisons with children, incarcerating the future Myspace and Facebook got us stuck on computers Stuck on stupid bumping music that's abusive to the shorties And the nonsense that you spitting, they just listen and absorb it I've been dormant, I've awoken, I'm a giant, I'm ready I'm with the APPO in Oaxaca and we holding machetes
This Manic Street Preachers song from 1994 is pretty much just true. The same applies to Australia.
Images of perfection, suntan and napalm Grenada, Haiti, Poland, Nicaragua Who shall we choose for our morality? I'm thinking right now of Hollywood tragedy
Big Mac, smack, Phoenix R, please smile y'all Cuba, Mexico can't cauterize our discipline Your idols speak so much of the abyss Yet your morals only run as deep as the surface
Cool, groovy, morning fine Tipper Gore was a friend of mine I love our free country The stars and stripes and an apple for Mommy
Conservative say, there ain't no black in the Union Jack Democrat say, there ain't enough white in the Stars and Stripes
Compton, Harlem, a pimp fucked a priest The white man has just found a new moral savior Vital stats, how white was their skin? Unimportant, just another inner city drive-by thing
Morning fine, serve your first coffee of the day Real privilege, it will take your problems all away Number one, the best, no excuse from me I am here to serve the moral majority
Cool, groovy, morning fine Tipper Gore was a friend of mine I love our free country The stars and stripes and an apple for Mommy
Zapruder, the first to masturbate The world's first taste of crucified grace And we say, there's not enough black in the Union Jack And we say, there's too much white in the Stars and Stripes
Fuck the Brady Bill Fuck the Brady Bill If God made man they say Sam Colt made them equal
So if I can shoot rabbits, then I can shoot fascists...
Yes, its Manics Monday! By which I mean I have, in a desperate bid to somehow inspire myself to post SOMETHING, SOMETIME on this godforsaken fucking blog, I have invented another novelty I'll drop more or less straight away.
I have decided to institute days of the week to post songs according to the name of the act, and so this is the first Manics Monday, in which I post a classic track from the veteran Welsh socialist rockers.
I was going to post A Design For Life, the Manics '96 anthem about working class life and defiance that, a decade ahead of its time, seems to capture something essential about the rich's class war austerity in their native Britain and beyond.
But, well.. I dunno... there is just something about Australia right now... with our government absolutely determined, like it is a MOTHERFUCKING POINT OF PRINCIPLE for these pricks, to send MORE BABIES to the hellish prison camp on Nauru -- a place the scene of serious allegations of child abuse where employees are actually bound by law TO NOT REPORT CHILD ABUSE... I dunno... It just makes it impossible NOT to post "If You Tolerate This, Then Your Children Will Be Next" (and a great "live in the in studio" recording I hadn't heard before)
Coz that is not just the NEEDED sentiment... it is the actual sentiment of large numbers of people across the country in a humanitarian uprising of sorts to say NO. At the centre of this, baby Asha -- in a Brisbane hospital after suffering bad burns in the Nauru jail, whose medical personnel refused to discharge her to be sent back... with an ongoing picket focusing the government to promise to place the baby in :community detention"... only to then come out and insist that, as soon as they can, they send the one-year-old to the widely condemned hell camp. Despite NZ offering to take Asha and dozens of other innocent asylum seekers the government is determined to jail in on an isolated island in hellish conditions.
Say what you will, you gotta admire principles, even if the principles seemingly belong to 1930s Nazi Germany.
The Manic Street Preachers' 1998 track was about the Spanish Civil War -- in which thousands international volunteers travelled to fight against those principles... resisting General Franco's fascist forces under the slogan "No Pasaran" (they shall not pass).
The title comes from a recruiting poster (below) urging working class anti-fascists and socialists to join the anti-fascist side -- and the phrase "if I can shoot rabbits, then I can shoot fascists" was the explanation a Welsh farmer gave for deciding to fight.
But today, in Australia and elsewhere in the Western world where asylum seekers face growing racist hysteria and terrible treatment, the recruiting poster slogan carries its own resonance. It is something captured by Tony Benn, the late English socialist politician and longtime comrade and mentor to current British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, when he said:
“The way a government treats refugees is very instructive because it shows you how they would treat the rest of us if they thought they could get away with it.”
Well there you go. I plan to do another post tomorrow based on an act starting with T for Tuesday, but I dunno... I don;t know if I can think of any act I like at all that starts with T. I've wracked my brains and nothings comes up... maybe something will come to me before midnight tomorrow.
The Sydney Morning Heraldreported today on a particularly evil piece of email spam involving one of this nation’s biggest liquor store chains, Dan Murphy’s:
Liquor retailer Dan Murphy’s has been hit by a hoax offer that claims friends and family of the business can buy alcohol at a 30 per cent discount.
The Woolworths-owned liquor seller confirmed there is a flyer circulating online that advertises the fake discount. The retailer warned consumers on its website that the offer is not valid.
“To avoid any disappointment, please be aware that a hoax flyer is being circulated that did not originate from Dan Murphy's or Woolworths Ltd,” the company said. “THIS OFFER IS NOT VALID.”
A fucking hoax! The spammers have gone too far. There are some things you just don’t joke about and cheap booze is one of them. Not in this country. Not with this alcohol tax regime (combined with profiteering scum alcohol industry involving the likes of ... Dan Murphy’s).
What makes it so much more hurtful is that it is not as though this type of thing is not badly needed! The news is bad for alcohol on all fronts.
The mainstream media maintains its ceaseless flow of biased anti-drinking propaganda. The SMH today contains possibly the most outrageous story yet, entitled “Binge drinking puts young women at risk”.
You read it, expecting horror stats of brain damage or inflated livers, but no... The risk?
“Heavier drinking is exposing young women to increased risk of sexual assault for which male perpetrators routinely escape blame, a government-sponsored study has found.”
There you have it, fellas. It is young women drinking that is to blame for men sexually assaulting them.
Really, young women should just fucking stay at home where they fucking belong and do nothing so unladylike as enjoy a fucking beer. And then men would not be tempted to rape them.
Now, does anyone else recall the flood of outrage when Sydney Muslim cleric Taj El-Din Hamid Hilaly made the following offensive comment about how women dress: “If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the garden or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover, and the cats come and eat it ... whose fault is it, the cats’ or the uncovered meat?”
The question is what is the difference between excusing rape on the basis of women dressing in a way that provokes it and excusing rape on the basis that a women brought it on herself by being “too drunk”?
Consider this comment. The SMH reported that, in response to this study, “Trish Worth, chairwoman of DrinkWise, said there was a need for Australia to reshape its drinking culture”.
That’s right. Rethink its “binge drinking” problem. Because if there has been a rape, it is quite obviously all this damned drinking that is to blame.
It is like we have suddenly been transported back to the 1950s and the mainstream media is rehashing the plot lines of propaganda films such as “Reefer Madness!” — only instead of the demon weed we have FUCKING BOOZE!
Rethink its binge drinking culture? Here is a small suggestion from Carlo Sands, feel free to accept or reject it: How about ... you’ll laugh at this, no doubt it is just a silly thought but I’ll throw it out there ... how about ... just give it some thought ... rethinking a culture that allows men to think they can rape and sexual assault women???
I know. I’ve always been a radical. But don’t just dismiss it out of hand as the ravings of a mad Bolshevik. Give it some thought.
What about rethinking a culture that, when a young woman is assaulted, a study finds “victims of sexual assault were more likely to blame themselves and alcohol and exonerate men”.
Well, it is quite clearly booze’s fault, isn’t it, because the study says “young women often used alcohol to ‘transgress social norms’ of being female, then found themselves drunk and prey to the sexual advances of one or more young men”.
Right. Drunk and “prey” to sexual advances from men.
Carlo Sands is not now, nor has he ever been, a young woman. But I am going to take a stab in the dark and say young women don’t need to be drunk to receive sexual advances from “one or more young men”.
There is, of course, a difference between being prey to sexual advances that may be unwanted and actually being assaulted. And to be assaulted, a young woman does not need to be drunk or sober, just at the mercy of a rapist.
And if a woman is raped, it is not because they are drunk. It is because the rapist made the decision to rape them.
Now, why would a rapist do that? If I may go out on a limb here and make another radical suggestion (I know, I’m fucking sounding like fucking Trotsky addressing the fucking Petrograd Soviet on the question of storming the Winter Palace), but maybe the problem here is not how much the man who commits the assault has drunk, nor how much the woman who is assaulted has drunk, and maybe it is NOT ABOUT FUCKING BOOZE at all!
Maybe the problem is misogyny.
Maybe the problem is deep-rooted sexism in society and in our culture that gives too many men the assumption that women are objects to satisfy men, and they are, or should be, a man’s property, and they are beneath men and that men have a right to take advantage of them.
Both booze and the young women who enjoy consuming it are innocent. Young women who are sexually assaulted don’t bring it on themselves because of what they wear or what they drink. They have a right to wear or drink what they like.
“You can't knock em out, can’t walk away. Try desperately to think of the politest way to say, ‘Just get out my face, just leave me alone. And no you can’t have my number’, ‘Why?’, ‘because I’ve lost my phone’ ... ‘Please fuck off. No, it’s not going to happen, not in a million years’.” Lily Allen (with a great film clip made by young wommen at St.Angela's Sixth Form in east London) on the pressing question of how young women should, while out drinking, deal with arseholes making unwanted sexual advances. Presumably, SMH thinks whatever the arsehole may or may not do, the young woman in question had it coming, what with the explicit setting of this song in a pub and everything.
Beyond my heart attack-inducing rage at the SMH piece, my point is: this is is just the latest, if one of the more offensive, series of attacks on drinking. It all works to creates the atmosphere for such proposals as the one from the City of Sydney to close all pubs at midnight.
The result of all of this? Media and government hysteria notwithstanding, the tragic news has come through: Alcohol consumption has dropped for the fourth running year, the Australian Bureau of Statistics has reported.
It is in this context that this fake offer has been made. It is undoubtedly cruel to get drinkers’ hopes up in such a way, only for them to be so horribly dashed after a drinker has made the effort to stagger or crawl to the nearest Dan Murphy’s bottlo.
But let us not only blame the spammers. Much responsibility lies with Dan Murphy’s too. The prices in these liquor stores are too high!
It is ridiculous, the way beer prices, especially, are going through the roof.
I know the capitalist gangs in control of liquor production and distribution will blame the government’s taxes. And they have a point — they are ridiculously high. Why should our livers pay for their system of corporate welfare and the privileges of the bureaucratic and political class?
But, if that is solely to blame, then I ask here, before the world, why will these liquor giants not open their books and allow society to see for themselves their profit margins?
In a matter so crucial to society’s function as access to alcohol, society must be in a position to ensure it can be accessed in a fair manner and not left to the whims of those whose minds are only on profit, not on the drinkers’ well being.
Let us collectively decide what would be a reasonable return for these companies!
And any company in the liquour industry caught abusing their position and engaging in excess profiteering should be NATIONALISED and WITHOUT COMPENSATION! Then we can begin to create a network of alcohol production and distribution under collective control and for the collective interests of the drinkers.
If one good thing may come from this cruel trick, let it be that these questions are posed before society.
In the meantime, Carlo Sands blames both the spammers for raising false hopes, and the liquor giants and government for creating a situation so unfair that these tricksters can prey on our hopes and dreams. To all of them, I dedicate the following song by a group of Welsh rock legends...
“But there’s no — no truce with my fury... you stole the sun from my heart.” Carlo Sands saw the Manic Street Preachers play on Monday and they rocked. They played this song and Carlo Sands jumped around almost as much as a much mascara-ed Nicky Wire.
When I discovered the terrible news yesterday that Google had disabled my Google adsense account and taken away my beloved Google ads, I felt a crushing sense of disappointment that I would no longer be able to offer my beloved loyal readers so wonderful an array of shopping opportunities.
Google, in its wisdom, has found Carlo Sands in violation of its so-called terms of agreement.
It doesn’t explain. These giant corporations never do.
It merely accuses my blog of generating “invalid clicks” — clicks on the ads done not with the intention of genuinely checking out the products on offer, but merely to generate cash for the blogger.
I mean, as if! As if the glory of my google ads was not the reason for their runaway success! Why would my loyal readers not be attracted to the ads?
Oh, the offers! A common one was “Alcohol treatment”. Who does not wish to be treated with alcohol?
But there was so much more. Let me quote from the ultimate source: myself.
...from "Beer" to "Spirits" to "Alcohol" to... all sorts of things.
Sometimes they go all left field and the ads will offer a range of seemingly random things, such as a series of NGO jobs: "Teach English", "NGO jobs", "NGO jobs in Kenya", "NGO jobs in Bangladesh".
There is always choice on offer, such as the time the two google ads on offer where "Humanitarian aid" and "Un humanitarian aid".
Choice is what this blog is all about and I am proud to provide ads that allow people to decide for themselves whether to help or hinder the less fortunate.
My personal favourite, though, was one automatically generated by my last post about Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow, which offered "Pirate Treasure Chests". I really think you cannot ask for more than this.
And yet Google would have us believe that some of the clicks on such wonders were “invalid”!
Well, what a joke!
I actually think my ads were the victims of their own success. So enticing with their offers of “Alcohol treatment” and “Un humanitarian aid” that the clicks seemed illegitimate.
Now, my mass fan base are of course my first concern in this matter, but I should like to point out that Carlo Sands has suffered too.
Google disabled my account owing me 92 bucks! The fucking god damn thieves. Google says it has given that cash “back” to the advertisers in question!
Well, Google, you fucking owe me $92 and I here by declare before the entire world that Carlo Sands shall get it. I shall, in the first instance, use your appeal processes and point out the fundamentally injustice that has been committed.
It hurts, it really does. I loved those ads. They were my reason to keep on going, knowing I could offer them to my legion of fans, knowing it was a way Carlo Sands could give something back.
Seriously Google, why didn't you just steal my heart too when you nicked my ads, coz what use is a heart so badly broken?
Follow the easy to assembly instructions and you'll have yourself a few album — but be quick, the offer is going to run out sooner or later.
There you go, loyal fans. An *entire* album worth of live Tom Waits songs. Some 22 songs all up. Includes many favourites from his then just released brilliant album Real Gone.
So... I can't offer Google ads, at least until my appeal is accepted or Google somehow sees the error of its ways... but I can offer you free music from the Greatest Fucking Singer-Song Writer In The Entire Fucking World Ever.
Ok.
Now, while we are on the topic of FUCKING Google, below is the delightful Manic Street Preachers with the closing track from their latest album Postcards from a Young Man. A song written about Google, entitled “Don’t be Evil (Just be Corporate)”.
(I am off to see the Manics in just a couple of hours, I mean I don’t like to boast, but I fucking am...)
“The sickos and the bullies praise your name. You've enriched their lives with pleasure and fame. As a corporate as the suits you won't wear, as stupid as the jeans you tear, as evil as the pretense you care, God save us all from Satan's stare... Don't be evil, just be corporate. Fool the world with all your own importance...” The Manic Street Preachers give Google a well deserved kicking. Did I mention I’ll be seeing them in a couple of hours?
