Road Rage and International Aggression

This morning something interesting happened to me while driving.  Another driver cut me off in the middle of an intersection intentionally driving through a turning lane almost causing an accident and leaving me stranded in the middle of a busy intersection.  Admittedly I shouldn't have however I flipped the bird in the general direction of the driver, little was I to know I started an interesting chain of events. As I pulled off from the intersection, the driver of the other car sped beside my car and pulled in front of my car to block me from driving forwards.  Then he rolled his window down to reveal a menacing aggressive face, hands marked with tattoos (of the prison variety) and a general intimidating demeanor.  He cautioned me sternly to watch who I flipped the bird to because one day they might shoot you and call me guilty of prejudging the whole movie by the preview but I believe this gentleman could possibly have carried out his threat.  I expressed that it wasn't worth dying over and continued to drive on my way but that's when the trouble started (isn't it always, stupid brain ascribing meaning to relatively insignificant events).  So I got to thinking, despite the fact that this gentleman behaved illegally blatantly ignoring road rules, what the hell was anybody going to do about it?  There were no police around and therefore the only system of arbitration available to us was one of intimidation in some kind of laws of the jungle lord of the flies sense.  So I am left with two options, complain about my situation vocalising my disquiet and risk physical injury, or put up with it and let this fucker get away with intimidatory behaviour towards me to his own gain.  So now I learned my lesson (don't flip the bird in traffic) but my thinking continued.  A few weeks ago while surfing there was one guy at the back of the lineup who continually dropped in on the other surfers stealing waves from surfers who were already on them.  For those unfamiliar with surfing etiquette, this is a cardinal sin.  Even when surfers called out while surfing along a wave, this guy would continue to paddle in to the wave, causing them to fall and he did it time after time after time.  Again, the law of the jungle prevails.  So if there is no authoritative body in attendance to any given situation, are we to believe that the law of the jungle is so easily instated in place of a more just authority?  And what does this have to say about international justice?  My last tangent to spring forth from this highly confronting road rage incident was one of international justice.  If a country decides to 'disobey the road rules' and murder innocent civilians in their hundreds by dropping bombs on them and taking their land, if there is no international overseer then where is the incentive to do the right thing?  Clearly morals are flexible when the desired outcome is one of personal gain so if countries with bigger military might, more soldiers and less scruples want to disobey the rules, what the hell is going to stop them?

All that from a little road rage incident exposing my vulnerability.

What the fuck is hungrythirsty?

Alright, what the fuck is hungrythirsty?  Why is it pathetic?  Why is a vegan sausage pathetic and what the hell is oak?  If you haven't seen this current advertising campaign it is for a 'new' chocolate milk drink and makes a variety of interesting claims.  This one forced me to put digital pen to virtual paper and comment on the ridiculousness of brands trying to create problems in order to sell a solution.  Of course this is not a new phenomenon as you will know if you buy anything from whitening toothpaste, through to deoderant or even the simplest of sphincter chafing garments the G-String (to solve the problem of VPL of course).  But seriously, hungrythirsty?  I get what you are trying to say oak, but I am so disgusted at the condescending nature of your accusation that I actually walked three blocks to another service station the other night to avoid buying your product.  Not to mention the fact that the other advertisement in this campaign claims to "kill hungrythirsty dead and inform its next of kin via text message".  What the hell is wrong with this world where a reference to bloody murder and lack of remorse can be used to sell a product in a marketplace.  And what exactly is pathetic about a vegan sausage?  Unless of course you wish to create some kind of representational link between meat eating, masculinity, strength, popularity and generally being 'hard as fuck'.  This advertisement is obviously trying to appeal to that energy drink guzzling hyper masculine demographic where nothing is worse than being 'soft' or 'pathetic' and the ability to appear tough as nails is the highest social capital that one can attain.  Sure we have witnessed this phenomenon before and have seen advertising agencies try to make "the fuzzies" part of our vernacular (to encourage kids to eat sugar laden breakfast cereals) along with the promotion of the idea that hair growth is abnormal on any place other than the head (thanks cK),  that men should be able to sustain sexual intercourse for periods of up to an hour (nasal delivery), or that any kind of natural cellulite on a woman's body can and should be simply be zapped away (fatzap).  I'll tell you what's pathetic, the fact that Oak would have the gall to think that an advertising campaign like this would be taken seriously by anyone at all.  I swear I will break down and cry if I ever overhear somebody in the street say "man i'm so hungrythirsty I could really go an oak" and as long as this advertising campaign lasts I will do everything in my power to avoid ever purchasing this product.  Advertising can be a perverted beast sometimes and sometimes it's all very well to scoff and say things like "well nobody takes it seriously" but the problem is that the most vulnerable members of society are those being preyed on by the industry.  People with self esteem issues, the lonely, the mentally ill and the young are all of the people that are likely to be swayed by the belief that being 'hard as fuck' is of any value at all in today's society.  Change the game people, don't buy into the bullshit. 

www.adbusters.org

BREAKING NEWS - Emergency Situation Unfolding

29 people are stuck, above ground without food or water living in poverty and are likely to die if they are not reached within the next four days.  There is hope that they can be rescued and the international community is currently considering mounting a rescue operation in a series of meetings.  Estimates of the cost to save them range between one and two hundred AUD and the victims are hopeful that the international community will provide the necessary help to reach them in time.  There will be no need for remote controlled robots to be flown from the USA or Australia nor is there a need for specialist equipment or relief wells to be drilled to provide access to them.  The international media is currently not flocking to the area, nor are they trying to put pressure on governments to help the desperate victims in this unfortunate situation. 

The Brownlow, keeping bogan dreams alive.

So it's Brownlow time again and the masses of bogans are salivating at the latest HPOA that some strapping young footy player has managed to convince to hang off his arm for the walk down the blue carpet.  The Brownlow medal ceremony evening is significant for many reasons and an important night in our sporting history.  I know you are thinking "yes of course it is, it importantly recognises the incredible amount of talent our young footballers have" but you would be wrong. Allow me to explain why the Brownlow medal ceremony is really an important part of Australian culture.  Firstly and most importantly it keeps the dream alive for many parents living vicariously through their children at under 14s footy on the weekend that their child may actually have a story on the channel ten news one day.  ACA might even agree to do a feature piece on their child's amazing 'against the odds' struggle to become an elite athlete.  All the swearing, the training, the instilling of hatred for both teammates and competitors will pay off one day with that triumphant walk down the blue carpet.  The second group of people that are happy to see Brownlow time roll around again are the not too bright but ridiculously attractive 'footy babes' that know that if they sneak into enough club functions and training sessions, then they might one day be invited to participate in the waxing, preening, and frocking that is the Bronlow for the WAGs.  There is however the possibility that during the course of becoming involved in the club they will of course be date raped by one of the young football players that hasn't quite worked out that fucking drunk girls after they have passed out doesn't count as consensual sex.  Unfortunately there will be a lack of evidence and she will receive a hefty payout from the club to keep the incident quiet but will possibly end up on ACA herself as part of an expose piece years from now.  But let's not let that detract from the possibility that there is a slim chance that she will one day be invited to the Brownlow medal ceremony night.  The final reason that the Brownlow medal night is an important part of Australian culture is that there is one last dream that it keeps alive.  Brownlow night instills the belief in the promising young footballer that despite having a face like a smashed crab and not being able to string a coherent sentence together without offending several minority groups (see pic),  he might be able to somehow snare a relatively attractive piece of arm bling for the evening.  It goes unsaid that part of this fantasy is knowing that there are teens all over Australia beating off to the revealing picture of her that will no doubt show up in the 'small' paper the following day thereby cementing his status as a football god.  The Bronlow's is all about the hype and surrounding fanfare and if a sport can't be commodified then what's the point really.  It's a shame that genuinely talented people in the public service or the arts don't get the same adulation and spectacle afforded to them. The Brownlow night has become a farce, far from the original idea of a celebration of sportsmanship and talent at the end of the football season.  It has become a competition to get the hottest chick, the most expensive bling, the most revealing dress by the most 'in' designer and let's not forget, it's also about who can get the drunkest.  Far from being a legitimate celebration of sportsmanship and talent it has become a joke of which I am sure Charles Brownlow would not be proud.

War is wrong, fight for peace, revenge for the fallen, I'm confused.

So many phrases have become synonymous with war including the three mentioned in the title.  What I am struggling to understand is how they all fit together to form some kind of coherent moral stance.  Often the same person will say war is wrong, we're fighting for peace, we need to show strength or risk defeat or similar loaded rhetoric.  Almost ten years on isn't it time to review the situation in both Afghanistan and Iraq.  The image I have published above was selected to make a particular point.  Is revenge a good enough motivation for putting a small child through the horror of war.  It should be included that my google image search of "injured civilians Iraq" resulted in images of a far more graphic nature.  So again, is revenge enough justification for countless civilian casualties and more to the point, what is justification for such large civilian casualties.  The first argument that normally gets thrown up by the advocates of Middle East intervention is that the despotic leader Saddam Hussein had to be removed from power.  Justification for this generally rests on either his supposed stockpile of WMD's or the fact that he carried out systematic genocide of Kurds in the North of Iraq.  We know only too well that the decision was made to enter Afghanistan to kill one man representative of a much larger anti-American sentiment within the fundamentalist Muslim community.  I believe it is important almost ten years later to review this justification as it seems to be a fairly groundless justification for the murder of civilians and children on an almost daily basis.  People need to get involved to send a clear message to our leaders that hypocritical justification for war crimes is no justification.  If removing a tyrant was the agenda then why was Mugabe allowed to continue the murder of innocent people and the oppression of an entire population.  For that matter why did the west not intervene in countless African nations when there was clear evidence of genocide and violations of human rights.  I make this plea because currently there is a need to keep our leaders accountable for their actions for if we do not, we risk one day becoming the group that is persecuted against and we risk that our voice too may one day be the one silenced as we try to scream out to the world for help.  The only way to stop this from happening in the future is to get involved, join campaigns, start and sign petitions, donate small amounts of money to organisations that can have a larger voice than just one person.  Organisations that apply political and social pressure on governments as they continue their agenda of revenge and military aggression for national gain.  Below is a selection of some organisations that are helping keep our leaders accountable for large scale human rights abuses and while we are pointing the finger at developing nations collectively for human rights abuses, sometimes it's good to remind ourselves that our leaders are not infallible either.  

These organisations are some that hold all leaders accountable for their actions and try to hold war criminals accountable for their actions from all countries, not just the ones from the global south.  

http://www.amnesty.org/
http://www.asf.be/index.php?module=home&lang=en
http://www.hrw.org/
http://iwpr.net/
http://www.iidh.org/index2.php?language=en 

Excuse me please, what is a typical Australian?

It is important for humans to define almost everything we come across.  If we cannot define it it makes us uncomfortable and uneasy.  Perhaps the worst kind of social or cultural definition that we can make is a general assumption based on race.  Racism manifests itself in comments and gestures designed to antagonise, exclude or humiliate people with no other basis than biological lineage or the geographic location assigned to one's birth.  As Australians, we are exposed to rhetoric from our leaders almost daily about what it is to be Australian.  Particularly during the recent federal election we were bombarded with comments aimed at 'ordinary working Australians'.  But what exactly is an ordinary Australian?  Is it even possible to define what a typical Australian is?  As you are trying to answer this question with jingoistic notions of BBQ's and hills hoists, consider also whether anybody is actually a typical Australian.  Throughout the course of human history perhaps only the indigenous Australians could even hope to come close to being defined as typical Australians and even then, what would constitute normal behaviour in one cultural group would be quite the opposite in another even though they exist within the same physical continental border.  Or consider also the fact that Poland has actually moved physical location and is now located in a completely different location than it once was.  And consider also that any notion of acceptable cultural behaviour is exactly that, a cultural construction based on an evolution of what is an accepted set of behaviours within a particular society.  So considering all this, if somebody is born outside the geographical border of Australia, and then comes to Australia and exists peacefully with those around them, would you then consider them a legitimate Australian or even typical?  Of course we can! Everybody currently living in Australia is a typical Australian.  An unbelievable amount of different personalities make up this world and it is only when we stop trying to define them that we can hope to live together as people.  It is only when we realise that the notion of nationalism or race in anything other than a biological sense relating to physical attributes is completely false.  The idea that Australians are loyal to their mates is as ridiculous a statement as 'the French are rude' or 'Germans are serious'.  Statements like this seek to homogenise a culture and evoke a sense of nationalistic pride with the goal of perpetuating the idea that the Nation State is somehow an entity in itself.  In recent news in Australia we have seen Sam Newman call a Malaysian man "a monkey", we have seen Stephanie Rice refer to a losing football team as "faggots", a channel 9 cameraman Simon Fuller call a Middle Eastern man a "fucking terrorist" and countless other acts of racism within Australia recently.  The Cronulla riots, the NT Intervention, the way Indian students were treated in Melbourne and last but not least Hey Hey it's Saturday's Blackface stunt all serve to make a statement to the world that Australia is a racist nation.  Even the UN has recently expressed concern that our foreign policy relating to the way Afghan and Sri Lankan asylum seekers were excluded from the process of application temporarily.  We need people to stand up and say to the world that we are not a racist nation and there are many good people here who realise that race and nationality is as flimsy a concept as trying to define countries by drawing lines on a map or trying to sum up a person's whole way of life in a national title.  What we need is people to stand up and say 
Sam Newman, you sir are a fuckwit and you continually try to prove it to us. 
Stephanie Rice, you used an inappropriate derogatory term for homosexuals as an insult and that was stupid.  You need to review your vocabulary (especially if you are going to tweet it). 
Simon Fuller, you are in need of some re-education if you truly believe that someone's ethnicity defines them as a terrorist. 
Hey Hey it's Saturday, your time has passed and four words sum you up - 'shit then, shit now'. 
Everyone must work together to build awareness around this topic because I do not want to live in an Australia where racism is viewed as acceptable behaviour.
People are people and deserve respect. 
Peace.
(The photo was taken in Australia at the Cronulla riots)

Yes but do they earn enough to go on holiday?

I need new shoes.  I would like to buy myself some shoes that I could feel good about wearing but unfortunately I can't feel good about these shoes for two reasons.  The first is that they are gym shoes and nobody needs to feel good about new gym shoes.  It's kind of like getting a new iron, it's new and all and there's something exciting for that brief moment you get something new (damn material conditioning) but I don't think I will be feeling good about these.  The second reason requires more explanation.  I am a fairly simple person with fairly simple requirements.  No big logos, comfortable fit, not too expensive (on account of me being an arts student and musician), and here's the kicker (get it) - ethically made.  What exactly is an ethically made gym shoe?  Can you even buy them and if so, can you buy them relatively cheaply?  My last pair of gym shoes were second hand given to me by an ex AFL footballer.  I kind of figured that if they were good enough for him to train in that they would do me for my fifty squats and general inept exercises on minimum weight setting on a Sunday morning at Fitzroy Gym.  But now I would like to get some new gym shoes.  I would like to have been the only one to have gotten slightly moist feet in them, I would like to feel that nice bouncy feeling of a new sneaker and I would like to smell that slightly rubbery smell as I pull the laces through my new shoes for the first time.  So back to the ethical shoe idea, what exactly constitutes ethical shoe construction?  Can you even buy athletics shoes made somewhere other than China?  So what would I settle for in my purchase of these shoes or what would I like to believe about the people that have made my soon to be new shoes?  I would like to believe first and foremost that the people who made my shoes weren't being threatened with violence to produce my shoes.  I would also like to think that the people making my shoes were all over eighteen and were there of their own free will.  I hope that they were able to take a lunch break and did not have to work more than a 12hr shift.  I hope that their jobs were rotated so that they did not get stuck performing the same task for said 12hr shift.  But is that it?  From the web research (open to scrutiny) the average factory worker's salary in China is $100 per month.  This is essentially a meaningless number until you take into account PPP or Purchasing Power Parity.  This concept compares what it would cost in one country to how much money you would need in the USA to buy the equivalent amount of goods.  Advocates of cheap Chinese labour will tell you that PPP in China enables the average Chinese worker on $100 p/m to afford as much food and basic essential items as a worker on $2000 p/m in the USA.  While PPP has merits as a measurement of purchasing power if all you are purchasing is food, it has little merit when you are trying to establish whether Chinese workers can afford luxury items.  Electronic devices are generally a little cheaper in China, some European made goods such as clothing and department store goods are more expensive and some things are about the same as they are in Australia.  For example you can get a plane ticket for many destinations in South East Asia for approximately $800AUD return, about the same as you would pay for a short holiday somewhere from Australia.  This is where simply looking at PPP in terms of food fails as a fair measure of quality of life and ability to buy non essential items.  If you consider that $800 is eight months wages for your average Chinese manufacturing worker it doesn't look so good when compared to the USA wage of $2000 p/m.  If a ticket for a small break somewhere close to home (but international) cost $16,000 then we might view PPP a little differently.  So my point is that while we might argue that the workers in manufacturing industries in China are paid fairly, PPP is an inadequate measure when it comes to luxury goods and access to non essential goods.  They might earn enough to eat well, pay rent and pay utility bills but perhaps we should be asking another question............................... Do they earn enough to go on holiday?