The milieu through which we swim
A Federal election in September, violence in Egypt and Syria, Obama proposes immigration reforms and appoints John Kerry his new Secretary of State, deaths and damage are being tallied in Tasmanian/Victorian fires and Queensland floods. What has piqued your sociopolitical media interests lately? Please share your bouquets and brickbats.
This bench is in Vienna. Do you have a favourite bench?
Reposting a Friday Hoyden post on Lizzie Bennet from 2007 to honour the 200th anniversary of the publication of Pride and Prejudice.
Gary Younge is upset about the level of deception which is present within everyday society. He feels this is dangerous, and we’re in danger of subsiding into a culture of fakery and deceit. He uses the examples of Beyonce’s lip-synching the US national anthem during the presidential inaguration, the discovery of horse DNA in budget beef burgers in the UK, and Lance Armstrong’s very public confession of taking performance enhancing drugs during his professional cycling career as examples of this tendency.
I have a slightly different take on things. I think it comes down to the tyranny of expectations.
Wesley Enoch, Artistic Director of the Queensland Theatre Company, and always a wise voice from the Aboriginal community, wrote this about the significance of what we have chosen to commemorate today. I found it both insightful and moving, and (with his permission) wanted to share it:
Hippieses, I hatesssss them.
I see it all the time, both online and off – Person X writes/says something, Person Y says “gee, what you just said/did was kinda *ist” and Person X comes back with “how dare you call me a *ist” (or Person Z butts in with “how dare you call X a *ist”) .
But behaviour is never a fully accurate reflection of character. Bad habits we engage in unthinkingly don’t necessarily make us generally bad people or even generally thoughtless people, but this tends to be the reaction to having those bad habits challenged as marginalising behaviours – that the challenger is calling us a bad person.
The point is that this one particular act that is being criticised has problematic cultural assumptions embedded within it, and those problematic cultural assumptions are what need to be challenged.
What has piqued your sociopolitical media interests lately? Please share your bouquets and brickbats.
Parliamentary Labor Caucus will meet at 4:30PM to vote on all leadership positions.
This article in The Atlantic by Phoebe Maltz Bovy, “The ethical implications of parents writing about their children” is incredibly unforgiving of mother writers and bloggers. She sets the benchmark very low for the test of appropriateness with writing and… Read More ›
Hoyden About Town 