Screen vs Life

There are 2 very big problems that are becoming glaringly obvious at Australia’s multicultural public broadcaster, the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS). First, is it’s clearly partisan reporting on political news. Second, its political partisanship is explicitly racist and bigoted. Take for example SBS's representation, or lack thereof, of Candice Owens. Owens is a black female political activist in the US who rose to fame on social media when her satirical video on coming out as conservative went viral. She has since teamed up with conservative heavy weights such as Turning Point USA and PragerU to launch a career as a political activist and pundit. Most notably, Owens the brainchild of Blexit , a movement that aims to educate black Americans about how politicians exploit black American concerns to gain their vote, and encourages them to ‘exit’ the democratic party.  Even if you disagree with her politics, Owens is indisputably an independent, strong, articulate, black woman, w...

Dutifully and begrudgingly masked up to run necessary errands in Coburg, I regularly encounter fellow Melbournian’s with their masks around their chins chugging on their cigarette as though their life depended on it. And I don’t say this to complain of loopholes in Melbourne’s emergency laws, or to demand tougher penalties for those not properly wearing their masks. If you want to smoke while wearing your mask as an ankle bracelet, I couldn’t give a monkey’s left testicle. I do however highlight this particular type of encounter because it highlights the ludicrous principle underpinning mandatory masks. We must wear masks, we are told, to protect others . Because masks limit opportunities of unknowingly spreading coronavirus - not catching coronavirus - the principle is that we take responsibility for the health of others . In fact, it is selfish to speak of personal responsibility for one’s own health. And as Victoria’s Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton is fond of repeating, taking re...

There has been a discernible change in Melbourne, and not for the better. As I smile at fellow customers in the super market, or greet neighbors as I walk down my street very few people greet or smile back. In fact, it would seem that most people have decided that it is too scary to even make eye contact lest THE COVID leaps from my body and into their eyeballs. Only a week ago, while careful to maintain their distance, strangers still smiled at each other and joked about the strange times that we had come to live through. So why the change? Whether or not you agree with the recent measures taken by Daniel Andrews’ Government in Victoria, there are a few rhetorical strategies utilized by this government, and indeed, the mainstream media, to galvanize support for the return to lockdown, and which is successfully driving a wedge between citizens, neighbors and families.   Take for example oft repeated phrase that our medical workers are “on the frontline”. What does it mean to insist...

Competition has, in the humanities, become a very dirty word. Along with the notion of personal responsibility, it is largely denounced as a somewhat unnatural proscription of neoliberal policies that has been foisted upon academics and cultural workers, who are believed to be more inclined towards collaboration and cooperation.  Competition is here characterized as a cut-throat practice where individuals engage in malevolent and underhanded tactics to greedily accumulate resources for themselves to the detriment of everyone else. Competition is understood as a fundamental characteristic of free market capitalism; a zero-sum game which atomizes communities and valorizes narcissistic self-interest. This understanding of competition as the opposite of cooperation is a dire misunderstanding of the concept. It is a misunderstanding that underwrites the social justice activism of many humanities scholars, and the astonishing delusion that they are above such base practices. ...

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 ...

Today I read a BBC article entitled “ How Economics Killed the Antibiotic Dream ” wherein the author characterizes the impending antibiotic crisis - fueled by factory farming practices - as an outcome of greed and free market capitalism. This argument is subject to some of the same flaws as the one which advocates the introduction of taxes to curb the consumption of meat - and sugar for that matter - as a means to address a different health crisis: obesity. The article points to increasing Western wealth as the source of the problem, arguing that as average household incomes increase, demand for meat increases, incentivizing farmers to increase their supply. Brutal factory farming techniques are the logical outcome of such demand as farmers rush to cash in on the potential profit and supply this demand. According to this narrative, this directly leads to the use of low dose antibiotics to curb the spread of disease among the animals, who are kept in extraordinarily unsanitary ...

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...

What is it about Nazism that people find so abhorrent? What are those elements of Nazism that we recognize in the words and actions of the politically empowered that make us rise up and say “no more”? Is it the harsh lesson of how quickly the forked tongue of a charismatic leader can whip up support to condemn a whole race of people to extermination? Is it the uncanny ability to identify the next despot, paving his or her road to political victory by spinning tales of unearned wealth and privilege accruing to an elite minority? Both sides of the contemporary political spectrum increasingly invoke Hitler to raise the alarm about the imminent danger of the next fascistic regime. It is however, towards the left that I pitch this question, because the Hitler-Nazi-Fascist triad has largely been invoked by the left to foreground the re-emergent politicization of race, and valorization of racism. And while I certainly do not condone racism I believe that this focus is detriment...

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...