Screen vs Life

Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) is the nation’s multicultural public broadcaster, and as such, its core mandate is to “inform, educate and entertain all Australians, and in doing so, reflect Australia’s multicultural society” ( SBS Charter  ).  Like other public broadcasters, Britain's BBC and Australia's ABC for example, SBS was instituted as a public sphere, the function of which is to uphold liberal democratic values by providing a forum of free speech within which everyone can debate matters of collective importance, as equals, irrespective of their political views. In principle, the explicit multicultural mandate of SBS recognized that such equality had not historically been afforded to those with non-English speaking backgrounds, and attempted to rectify this lack of access to the public sphere by featuring non-white faces and voices.  Yesterday, I read a couple of articles circulated by SBS on Facebook which seems to indicate that the ...

Cultural Policy Studies emerged as a distinct subfield within Cultural Studies in the early 1990s, and is distinguished from its parent field by its focus on activism through policy. Adherents of cultural studies have traditionally aimed to illuminate how power is maintained by an elite few in the West through its examination of cultural practices and meanings. Cultural policy studies goes one step further and involves itself within the institutions that actively regulate the cultural industries such that the inequalities exposed through cultural studies scholarship might be eliminated. The huge problem with this approach is that it is a blatant program of social engineering, and one which lacks any foundation of ethical principles to guide its practitioners.  Insofar as the field is founded upon the philosophies of the French postmodern thinkers of the 1960s and 70s such as Michel Foucault, who deny the possibility of objective truth, cultural value (criteria of artistic ...

Only days ago, I had a conversation with a friend who stated that violence was a reasonable response to the ideas expressed by Milo Yiannopoulos. The violent protests that have since erupted at Berkley University to prevent Milo from giving his final talk on his extremely successful “Dangerous Faggot” tour, indicates that many others on the progressive left believe that this is a perfectly reasonable position. As elaborated in my previous post What’s so bad about Nazism?, it is my opinion that meeting ideas with violence is a fundamentally fascist tactic which creates the climate of fear and oppression that protestors claim to be fighting against. There are three more points about Milo that need to be made in order to develop a bit more clarity about the issues at stake in the Berkeley riots. 1. The mainstream media and opponents of Milo consistently describe him as far right. This may well be true of many of the opinions that he is known for, however, the fundam...

Only days after thousands of Australian’s gathered in solidarity with their female comrades in the US to protest the inauguration of Trump , throngs of people have returned to key city centers throughout the Australia to protest the celebration of nationhood on the anniversary of colonial conquest.  While the rest of the nation fire’s up the bbq in their backyards, local parks, or at the beach, in honour of Australia Day, protesters stand shoulder-to-shoulder with their Indigenous country men and women, to remember the 26th of January as a day of invasion, as a day of loss, and a day of mourning. While this particular protest has become a decades old tradition, this year it comes after a string of protests that have led me to understand protest as a lifestyle choice more so than a meaningful strategy for political change. Behold, the irony of one country protesting the democratic election of another country's leader There are three key factors that lead me to thi...

Dear Carolyn, As Donald Trump is inaugurated as the 45th US president tomorrow I am reminded of what I have lost in the build up to the 2016 election.  It is odd that we are no longer friends given that as an Australian I have no direct stake in the US politics. But you, as a recently naturalized citizen and ten-year resident of California, are directly affected. I knew when you sent me that message that you were trying to find out if I needed to be cut like a cancer from your life. You asked for photos of family, for updates on work, on life more generally, and what I thought about the upcoming US election. My response to this last question was deliberately vague. But in the end I didn’t keep secret my political leanings. As I daily witnessed a Facebook feed awash with pro-Hillary, pro-socialist propaganda, posted by you, posted by just about everyone one else I knew and worked with, it felt necessary to also start sharing the bits of news and information that I h...

A few days ago Ashton Kutcher tweeted his support of fellow actor Natalie Portman, and her challenge to negotiate employment contracts of equal worth to her male colleagues. ‘News’ regarding the Hollywood gender pay gap have also recently also resurfaced in the form of Meryl Streep’s enthusiastic reaction to Patricia Arquette’s 2015 Oscar speech calling out the gender pay gap in Hollywood. (This was on the back of Streep’s recent Golden Globes 2017 acceptance speech, which similarly characterized the Hollywood elite as one of the most victimized demographics within the US).  via GIPHY Kutcher, and Bradley Cooper before him, has expressed their support after learning that their Portman and Jennifer Lawrence, respectively, were paid a smaller fee for starring in the same film. In these two examples, the fees earned by the male and female costars is comparable (as elaborated in the infographic below). However, more generalized  discussions regarding the H...

I love awards seasons, or at least I used to. In recent years I just can’t seem to get past the self-congratulatory wank-fest that is A-list celebrities telling me how much their work makes the world a better place.  According to Meryl Streep Hollywood actors are not only the wellspring of inter-human empathy and harmonious racial diversity, but it is the frontier, wherein directors, actors, scriptwriters, etc, wage war against the elitist injustice that ravages the USA.  The video of Streep’s speech is below if you wish to see extreme psychological delusion first hand… I’ll leave aside the fact that Streep deliver’s her injunction against elitism wearing a custom-made Givenchy gown, and instead draw attention to the economics of Hollywood, which funds its selfless representation of empathy and diversity with the taxes of those deplorables she implicitly attacks. You may not be aware of the fact that a significant number of states in the US offer tax break...

Yesterday, by way of anecdote, I proposed that academia is at least in part, responsible for the mainstream media acceptance and rationalisation of violent anti-white racism . See here if you missed it. Admittedly the points made were largely anecdotal and provided little in the way of evidence. What I offer today is more substantial in terms of evidence, and is provided in the form of a critique of what is a largely unchallenged field of study within the humanities, known as critical race and whiteness theory (CRW). My knowledge of CRW stems from my PhD research where I leaned the claims of the theory to discuss the representation of national identity in Australian film and television. If you are interested my dissertation is linked here . I am no longer a proponent of CRW theory and here’s why…  Critical race and whiteness (CRW) really began to coalesce as a theory within the humanities from the late 1990s. The interdisciplinary field CRW has deep roots within pos...

The media and police response to the recent abduction and torture of a white mentally disabled man by four black men and women in Chicago exposes a sickness within Western culture, and as humanities scholars we are all absolutely responsible for the spawning of this sickness. Despite the fact that the perpetrators live streamed the torture on Facebook, clearly articulating their racial and political motivation (the assailants can clearly be heard chanting Fuck Trump! and Fuck white people!, as well as forcing their victim to proclaim is love of black people), some mainstream media in the US refused to label this attack as racist or racially motivated. As many astute critics have asked, would journalists be so generous if the scenario were reversed with whites torturing a black victim, disabled or otherwise?  What this question foregrounds is a recent revision of the term racism such that it has come to be re-defined as a product of prejudice plus power. In othe...