Jul. 22nd, 2013

dreamer_easy: (snow kate)
The incumbent government's mad plan to send asylum seekers to PNG is coming under heavy fire. Paul Sheehan, a columnist with whom I usually have little patience, lets loose with an impressive gout of flame about the entire mess. Hell, I'm even gonna quote him:
"His Devil's Island tactic, putting asylum seekers in tents on a malarial island off the coast of an impoverished, violence-ridden state, is malevolent politics. He has made a massive bet that he can get away with this ploy before it can be tested by the courts, where it would almost certainly be rejected... Not surprisingly, there was a riot at the detention centre on Nauru on Friday night, leaving the centre destroyed by its inmates and a bill estimated at $60 million - to be footed by you."
Although Sheehan's real target is Kevin Rudd, to see a conservative columnist placing the blame for the Nauru riot on the Australian government, instead of using it as more anti-asylum seeker ammo, gives my jaded heart some hope.

Asylum seeker advertisements exempt from scrutiny because they were "too urgent". Really? Looks like we are in for an August election, then.
dreamer_easy: (snow kate)
So tired and fed up at the moment. One of my many frustrations is online activism. I've shoved a dozen keywords into Tumblr Savior just to avoid topics in which I would once have been deeply interested, just to avoid all the laziness, self-righteousness, and untruths. Constantly fact-checking for my own side is exhausting.

Meanwhile on lj I've been grumbling at people who, in response to a hilarious video in which vloggers encounter Kpop, keep slagging one of the participants off, complete with a dusty charge sheet of his past sins. It's bullying, of course, social exclusion and malicious gossip: although he does nothing objectionable in this video (at least, we assume not, we haven't watched it) you should not watch or enjoy this video, as you will be contaminated by this outcast, and here is the proof (which of course is the unfiltered truth, trust us).

Coincidentally, this morning I stumbled across a clipping from last November's Washington Post - handily, it's online, making it easy to quote the bit I highlighted at the time:
"People hold onto things for all kinds of reasons, many they can't articulate. A common one is that people form impressions, organize them in a way they understand — and hang on to that filing system because it's more secure-feeling than recognizing that over time, they have to reacquaint themselves with the people they supposedly know best in the world."
Columnist Carolyn Hax is talking about a mother and daughter here, but I'll bet this applies even more when you don't know the person at all. It makes sense to me that people who maintain and share their in-group and out-group lists would also maintain and share lists of the out-groupers' past sins. One problem is that these lists tend to be ancient, feeble, dubious - and sometimes incomprehensible, if you weren't present for the initial drama. Another problem is that everyone makes idiotic remarks online; if a list was trotted out every time we showed up, none of us should 'scape whipping. And yet another problem is that this behaviour has a tendency to backfire and make the poster look a lot more obnoxious than their target.

Balls to all that. Here's the video, which is blissfully free of any of the above garbage - and a riot to boot!

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