Friday Saturday Hoyden: Caroline Chisholm
This fairly blunt profile of Caroline Chisholm presents her as an impressive but uncomfortable woman due to her uncompromising standards, and came as a bit of an eye-opener to me in terms of sanitised school history: the fact that the young immigrant underclass women that she was training had been lured to the Australian colonies where they were left to fend for themselves and would have no options other than prostitution or crime to earn a living was very heavily glossed over
Invocation and Benediction: Call and Response?
When I first heard Rick Warren had been honoured with the invocation at the inauguration of president Barack Obama, all I felt was a wave of abhorrence and disgust, and I was in good company.
Some weekend reading
Firstly, the obligatory funny picture: From ICHC Dave at Orcinus: If conservatives really, really hate being called fascists … #6 … then maybe they ought to quit talking like them. Suzanne Kleid at McSweeney: ABSTINENCE-ONLY DRIVER’S ED: stamping out unbridled premarital driving. Miriam at Feministing: Want the good news or the bad news first? (for [...]
I, for one
So the Blairites seem mostly to be resigning themselves to their fate, though I’m confident they will be like pigs in shit for their time supporting the Opposition. This thread laments the fake campaign pamphlets, Don’t bother with most of it – sexist sledging and wishes for prison-rape abound. The place is lousy with creeps [...]
Busted! Racist Liberals caught red-handed. How high does this go?
[Gary Clarke, Jackie Kelly's husband, caught with dirt on his hands.] For the latest in illegal Islamic-Panic racist spew from Australia’s reigning bigotocons: the Libs have been busted red-handed letterboxing fake campaign pamphlets in Lindsay, a marginal electorate. The pamphlets, purporting to be from the fictitious “Islamic Australian Federation”, carry the ALP logo. They offer [...]
Careful there voters! You can’t return the Boogieman like an unwanted Christmas present, you know! But Unca John can keep your economy safe…why won’t you trust me?
Now our Prime Minister is treating voters like heedless children who simply haven’t thought carefully enough about what change might mean. Mr Howard says there is always a risk with changing Government. And he warns voters flirting with the idea that a Labor election victory is not like an unwanted Christmas present, that can be [...]
Anti-choice propaganda: following the source and the money
Some of you may have stumbled across a news article citing a fancy-sounding “study” by Peter Carroll of London’s Pension and Population Research Institute: “The Breast Cancer Epidemic: Modeling and Forecasts Based on Abortion and Other Risk Factors”. From the abstract (PDF link): Using national cancer registration data for female breast cancer incidence in eight [...]
Please
Please tell me this site is a wind-up. Image source: screenshot from marryourdaughter.com H/t to commentor Zwilnik at LP. Related posts: Reporting in This morning I am preemptively addressing SAD No “allegedly” about it I have nothing to add … Interesting
Something to remember the next time someone warns “we’ll all be rooned”
No smoke signals a boom for pubs, clubs NON-SMOKERS have flocked to pubs since they went smoke-free in July, a government survey has found. And public support for the smoking ban is at an all-time high. Remember the campaign against the smoking bans that ran for more than a year? Remember the forecasts of doom [...]
Predatory corporate capitalism
This is the phrase Robert Jensen (UT Austin) uses to describe our current economic system as not only unsustainable, but inhuman and undemocratic, in Anti-Capitalism in Five Minutes. His goal is to outline to progressives how to discuss radical politics in plain language in short conversations with coworkers, friends and relatives: to persuade them that [...]
More from the Minister for Patronising Minors
Shorter Julie Bishop: Oh, you poor dear children, isn’t it terrible that political activists have hijacked your Rock Eisteddfod with anti-war messages when I know how much nicer everything would be if you performed something cheery?
Why so offended? It’s not like I said any bad words!
When people on the right complain about political correctness, I’m reminded how happy I am about the trade we’ve made over the last few decades – it’s more acceptable to use naughty sexual expressions, and less acceptable to use bigoted terms for women and minorities. Which is great, because it’s more fun and better for society to talk about sex (and to cuss) than it is to say bigoted things about women and minorities.
This is nasty.
Although I am, to quote an old Sandra Boynton gag, “eruditer than you” (or at least most), I still found reading through the composition quoted below involved more than a handful of false starts and reversals. Via Making Light, via a comment quite a way down the thread about the sudden emergence of the word [...]
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