This is brilliant. Should I ever sit down with a bunch of 4 year olds in a preschool again, we are gonna be chanting this every day.

Having a philosophical evening.

Exactly. If there's nobody else present then arguing with a fascist has no benefits. If someone else is listening, especially a child, then go in boots and all.

The great thing about the 'Well done Angus' meme is that it will work equally well when he gets rolled in 6 months by Hastie.

This complex extraordinary essay by @felicitycallard.bsky.social which honours the great, too-little known writing of @hamayel.bsky.social is the long read we all need to understand Palestinian resistance & the psychic splitting & deflection even supporters of Palestine engage in. See thread too.

If Valentine's Day is your thing, by all means have a good one. But comrades, between chocolates do consider that (a) we could do so much better, and (b) romantic love can be a cover story for a whole lot of coercive bullshit. overland.org.au/2024/02/love...

Minns has always been a piece of work. The fact that Lismore is mired in a cycle of flood & inertia & people can't leave is entirely due to him. He shafted the Northern Rivers flood repair plan & vanished 50% of the buyback $$. Because? Making people suffer & virtue-signalling about it is his brand.

Can honestly say thay every trans person I've ever been friends with or worked with has been an exceptional human being.

What *can* be done? Stop hoping men will change and instead think about expanding women's agency by (for example): 1. Raising the Rate & maintaining sole parents benefit til child is 16. 2. Establishing specialist DV & SA courts. 3. Vastly increased access to legal services Get cops out of DV

For a decade I ran an organisation that worked with DV perpetrators. Cops were a huge problem & almost always made things worse. Lazy, misogynistic, utterly uninterested in DV except to blame women. While cops do DV response, nothing will change. You cannot reform them or educate them.

Antoun Issa's forensic, brutal takedown of the Guardian's inner workings & the patronising, racist, neo-colonial marginalising of POC there & framing of genocide in Gaza is really worth your time. Liberal white feelgood Australia laid bare. Starts @ 57mins. Excellent stuff from Sunday Shot.

We lock children up because they don't fit a white, heteronormative template of what a child should be. This is baked into transphobia, racism and a dozen other fascisms.

Put this straight into my veins. An object lesson in how to take children seriously. Clash bassist Paul Simonon, 70 next month, singing Guns of Brixton with some busking kids.

We really have to start talking about why we hate children so much. overland.org.au/2023/12/we-h...

It’s Richard Burton’s birthday Ian McShane on making Villain with Burton: He said to me: ‘You know I’m very glad you’re playing this part, Ian.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because you remind me of Elizabeth.’

This is a copy of Whitlam's 1972 policy speech I found in my local 2nd hand bookshop. Its obvs meant to be read by ordinary Australians & compared to today's Labor govt Whitlam is a raging Marxist (& to left of Mamdani). Here's a short thread of policies (Non-Australians look up The Dismissal)

She is right.

It's been a week of some achievements. Zohran elected, Cheney died, Bolsonaro still going to jail, Watson died, I cut down a large dead acacia & chainsawed it up, I planted out potatoes, I found a missing sock. All weeks should be like this.

Man, this whole project is so ghoulish. I'd walk barefoot over hot coals before I'd read this.

Me, 2 minutes ago: I would like to watch something, but everything is inane garbage. Mosfilm: Hey! Over here!

Grant on Insta in sunnies: Someone just pantsed me in the water at Cannes! 😡 Brigitte Auber nowhere to be seen! Grace Kelly says she saw nothing. 🙄 Acker: Orgasms are great sisters, the more the better! But remember patriarchy will fucking kill us all!

The world would be a better place if we had access to Cary Grant's Instagram & Kathy Acker's Twitter. No question.

Classical music is a good comparison. Until quite recently orchestras were 100% white men. So for generations we've been listening to music that was not only interpreted through perspectives of dominant masculinities, but wasn't even being played by the best players.

Seen a few 'this isn't really systemic change' takes popping up from various well-intentioned comrades. But I've long had an idea that everyone on the right is paranoid & the left chronically depressed. So, this is what the depression can look like.

Just wanna say that I stand in unconditional allyship with aloof wives.

Lol, Mamdani certainly has the juice. "Donald Trump, since I know you're watching, I have four words for you: Turn the volume up'.

Seriously, the entire media class who treat politics as a delightful soap opera are going to have the daddy of all meltdowns about socialism becoming cool & popular. Smoke coming out of their ears, eyes spinning, gibbering 'This does not compute' until they collapse.

Albo already working up his talking points for distribution to the faithful on why socialism 'won't work' in Australia.

Cheney dying & NY electing a socialist Muslim mayor 21 yrs after 9/11, is (a) awesome (b) will drive the right insane with fear, and (c) will start a meaningless & very stupid op-ed campaign from the liberal press about 'unworkable' socialism, while (d) everyone else discovers socialism is cool.

I have a lot of thoughts about Del Toro's FRANKENSTEIN, too many for BSky except to say that the lives of women, the way we split off parts of ourselves, how we haunt others and how men wall off their lives, predominate. And the word 'forgiveness' at the end of the film is carrying a LOT of weight.

Sure, you could stay at the Lunatic Hotel in a silent, decaying, one-mule Australian town in the middle of nowhere. What could go wrong?

The ALP are such imbeciles that it's entirely possible that they didn't even know this proposal is a staggering breach of due process that sets unfathomable precedents, but was just another fun way to punish anyone on benefits & are now having to double down.

You can only want to help other living things grow, if you have something alive & growing in yourself. I wouldn't say that gardening is inherently anti-capitalist - think gardening as colonisation - but it can facilitate anti-capitalist growth in someone & soften them up for the coming revolution.

It's an inherent good to grow living things. Can you imagine Trump gardening? Netanyahu? Or Albanese or Marles? Mass graves, marble dunnies, environmental vandalism are their niche interests, consonant with the nature of capitalism as a death drive.

Here in Anaiwan country it can get down to minus 5 in winter & the changes of season are really something to see. In subtropical Bundjalung country, where I gardened for years, there are basically two seasons: Extremely Wet, and Somewhat Wet. Anything will grow there & usually does.

Bro is out here just casually dropping bombs like

After years of subtropical gardening I've had to learn cold climate gardening. I've scratched my head a lot & cursed my lack of knowledge even more, but it's a lot of fun. Everyone should do it. Gardening that is, not cursing one's lack of knowledge.

Colonial sadism, in the form of attacks on children, looks like this. Mutatis mutandis for people policed by Centrelink, marginalised because they are Blak or queer or disabled etc.

I feel like I'm going to be tapping this sign for the rest of my life. overland.org.au/2023/12/we-h...

This isn't going to win votes, save $$, give them leverage anywhere. So why do it? I'm gonna go with a sadism the Oz ruling class often resorts to, an involuntary itch to police & punish which they have to keep scratching. Sure the ruling class are banal, dumb etc. But they also like hurting people.

Can't underscore this enough. It's emblematic of plutocrats & politicians everywhere. They don't enjoy *anything* & don't want anybody else to have fun, or joy or pleasure because they literally don't understand it & can't see its dollar value. Just living the most boring lives imaginable.

Either the ALP don't understand the dynamics of DV & racist policing (which would not be surprising) or they don't care. The 3rd possibility, which I am inclined to, is that they enjoy punishing women and First Nations peoples & like to invent ways to do both as little treats for themselves.

If you know how much Strugatsky books routinely go for, you'll know that this is an incredible bargain. Free postage too! (Yes, I bought them)

Peter Watkins' film on the Paris Commune blew my mind. His films are like confrontations with a reality you've struggled to face your whole life. His personal statements on commodification of cinematic languages can sound a bit paranoid, but artistic languages *have* been dumbed down & truncated.

See Burke as example: His capacity for emotional life was likely killed off very early imo. With help of career politics & trad masculinity he's now a husk, a human flatline, so dead that the only liveliness he knows is punishing others. He's become a shadow of the thing that killed him.

Struck by many things in this essay on fascist masculinities. But having worked both with violent men & disturbed children it speaks to my conviction that when they were young, the play of fascists and their grovelling fanboys (the current Oz PM) would have been flat, empty, leaking despair.

According to this interview (published today) Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is currently here at a First Nations gathering in Ngunnawal country. Anyway, great interview (long) on fighting fascists, having fun & being connected. Hard recommend for her books.

This is where we seem to be permanently located now. Headline stories that run & run - Albo's tee, Joyce's shenanigans etc etc- are things that *nobody* cares about except a tiny media class. You can log out of Oz msm for days & literally miss nothing important.

I think about this quite a bit. Capitalism is so hostile to a creative life right from infancy & becoming more so. I wonder how many writers just give up writing because it's become so difficult to be heard & find others to talk with. And don't get me started on creative life in Australia.