If only this weren’t a common response.
It is an actual quote from Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
Not far from here, such marches, even now are being met with bullets, but not here in this country,Mr Morrison told Parliament.
This is a familiar defense of the status quo. You want equality? With ME??!? You should be grateful that we didn’t shoot you. It is the ubiquitous old white man defense of their privilege, which allows them to perpetuate the inequities that exist now, because they can always find someplace else that is much worse. The existence of a sliding scale of misery is used to justify itself — that protesters are shot in Myanmar allows us to smugly pat ourselves on the back when people in our country protest injustice because This is a triumph of democracy when we see these things take place,
and not do anything. Then why are they protesting?
It’s the same old story, substituting an old white man from Australia for an old white man from England.
Dear Muslima
Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and . . . yawn . . . don’t tell me yet again, I know you aren’t allowed to drive a car, and you can’t leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you’ll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.
Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep”chick”, and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn’t lay a finger on her, but even so . . .
And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.
Richard
We are reduced to comparing the weight of the chains of the oppressed so we can ignore the existence of the chains altogether.
Recently a woman was kidnapped and murdered by a policeman over here in gb ,some women held a protest ,plod broke it up .
There are some photos taken at the event out there on the interweb .
I don’t wish to defend the details of the police action in GB, but we have extensive regulations here to try and contain COVID-19 and this protest is said to have been in breach of those regulations. This puts the police in a difficult position.
aziraphale@2,
The police in most other UK cities where vigils took place managed not to assault those attending.
aziraphale @2: From what I’ve read, the Met refused to meet with the organisers before the vigil. That was, at best, just stupid.
Well, never fear again UK buddies, Priti’s law went through the Commons today, so now protesting anything in your country is pretty much a 10-year prison sentence if the police feel like it.
As to Mr Morrison the fascist qanon-associated Hillsong-practicing member PM of Australia, other than passive-aggressively threatening female protestors with shooting them, he is currently sheltering his alleged anal rapist of a child Attorney General, and a minister in whose office a staffer is alleged to have raped a woman, who laid on a couch passed out bleeding while government staff called steamcleaners instead of an ambulance.
In case you wondered how Australia is going.
@#2, aziraphale:
The vigil — it wasn’t even a protest! They were leaving flowers at a memorial! — was properly social-distanced, and the women attending were wearing masks. There are lots of photos of the event before the police descended available online.
Oh, and in response to the murder, the police have announced that they will henceforth have plain-clothes officers attending nightclubs and theaters. Because that’s totally reassuring when the accused murderer was a cop and the UK has recently passed a “spycop” bill which makes it nearly impossible to prosecute undercover officers who rape, torture, or murder.
It probably helps to have predispositions (adhd, tourette syndrome, probable social ocd) and cultural opportunity and reinforcement, but rage and regret tied to chosen target beliefs and behaviors are part of it. The positive feeling parts are hard to figure out. I’m starting to think in terms of approach, hold, and withdraw behavior tied to objects and social context. I think it’s a combination of things, abstract withdrawal (fear) from the bad thing with concrete approach (anger) for a social response? It’s tricky because this has to apply to me and the people I’m arguing with.
This seems to be appropriate
hyperlink removed to avoid embedding. Cut and paste:
Sorry, I tried to remove the hyperlink. But it’s a good song.
FWIW, I ran across the following note in this week’s “round-up” article on the (UK) F-Word’s blog. The context is a collection of articles about the events in the UK that “The Vicar” refers to above (#6)
@2 What the vicar said .@5 Pritti vacant is a nasty piece of work ,seems to hate the colour of the skin ,and is taking it out on other non white people .Daughter of immigrants ,who if her rules where in place when they came to GB ,would have been denied
entry .
Im in OZ, and I apologize for the PM who was quoted in the cartoon.
Hes also a lunatic conservative, climate denier. A real blokey bloke. You get the picture.
well said !
yet another example of how twisted guilt producing fundamentalist religion breeds such dangerously damaged people. racism and sinful sex, violence and repression compounded by perpetual ignorance.
yet another person who has destroyed his life by performing such appalling destructive actions
uncle frogy
@12 Scotty from marketing approach to any difficult issue is to deny he has any responsibility for said problem, even though said issue becomes fractally bad the more you look into it.
Trigger warning: this story involves rape and suicide.
This whole debacle kicked off in 2019 when the Liberal Party staffer Brittany Higgins was allegedly rape, (FWIW I believe her) by another Liberal party staffer on the couch of Defense minister Linda Roberts parliamentary office. She was also drunk at the time. The accused was sacked, and Brittany claims she was pressured to keep quiet to keep her career. After two years she made her allegations public.
A flurry of denials were then issued by various ministers with the requisite back-pedaling we’ve come to expect from politicians of all colours. Linda Roberts called Brittany ‘a lying cow’ during a staff briefing. Scotty tried and true I don’t hold a hose mate tactic of denying he has any responsibility inexplicably failed again. Finally he told a press conference how bad he felt about it because his wife Jen explained to him that it rape would be bad if it happened to his two daughters.. He was then completely flummoxed by a reporter who asked him if would feel different if he only had sons.
And now for the really bad shit.
Labor senator Penny Wong and Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young received a letters from friends of a woman who had committed suicide last year. The letter alleged that a liberal cabinet minister raped a 16 year old girl at a debating competition in Sydney in 1988. Both senators passed the letter to the police. Unfortunately the woman involved asked police to drop the investigation and then committed suicide last year.
Again Scotty denied any knowledge of the allegation and tried to wash his hands of it by saying it was a matter for the police. After a week of speculation Attorney General Christian Porter outed himself in a press conference, and declined to step down from his ministerial duties. Labor, the Greens and independent MP have called for an inquiry into this historical allegations and so far Scotty has stubbornly resisted, claiming that this would violate the rule of law and hurt Christian’s fee-fees.
I don’t feel I’ve given this issue enough time to properly address it, but I think I’ve hit the main points. As I said it gets worse the more you look into it.
The Australian Prime Monster , Scott Morrison is regularly abbreviated to ScoMo. Less politely he is called Scummo or occasionally ScumHo but, that insults prostitutes trying to earn an honest living. His party spent tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars on an empathy coach for him. As you can see it was wasted. He is a happy clappy follower of a megachurch founded by a child molester and preaching the prosperity gospel. It should come as no surprise that his government is populated with and relies on the support of even nastier types in fringe extremist parties all of whom would happily shoot demonstrators if they thought they could get away with it.
Australia use to be a chill place, but slowly over the decades as American Christianity has infected the place, we’ve become more outraged and more pearl clutching. Murdoch news keeps pushing the hour of hate every dinner time and people get outraged by everything- while screaming about “PC culture” – which is an idea push by the same hour of hate news programs they watch. It’s like watching a snake eat it’s tail.
@16, We were never a chill place. We’ve been one of the bastions of white supremacy for centuries, founded on theft and genocide. We are profoundly reactionary, and terrified of having to share our position of privilege. The only reason Australia ever seemed ‘chill’ to middle-class whites is that their dominance of economic, political, and cultural power was so absolute and policed so rigorously that it was possible to completely ignore the existence of any other sort of person on day-to-day life.
Any deviation from approved conservative Anglo-Australian norms was and is viciously suppressed – Murdoch is not a cause, but a symptom. His worldview was shaped by the Australian culture in which he was raised, not the other way around. The “laid-back Aussie” nonsense is a front, it’s marketing, nothing more. We were one of the world’s most enthusiastic banners of books, and put our own citizens in concentration camps for fear of ‘disloyalty’.
In an “appology” about the “lying cow” comment the minister said it gave offense because it was interpreted differently to the way it was intended.
I have been trying hard to think of a different, more ok, interpretation of the comment and have failed. I not the minister still has her job.
In the Christian Porter case the scum bag is no suing everyone for defamation, despite having outed himself. Also Scott Nomoralson has made mind numbingly stupid statements about rule of law that a former high law office shot down in flames.