British Standard Handful@Everything2.comOriginally Posted by Officer of Engineers
Freddie
Never hold your farts in, they run up your spine, and that's where shity ideas come from.
vēnī, vīdī, velcro - I came, I saw I stuck around.
How do the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish feel about having such an important measure determined by the hand size of a pre-United Kingdom king?
In any case, I think this explains my observation that females from Britain tend to be buxom ... its due to 600 years worth of natural selection resulting from the desire of British men to live like Henry did. Benny Hill probably gave the trend a kick along.
The Australian Sex Party (ASP) said Wednesday that the Australian Classification Board (ACB) is now banning depictions of small-breasted women in adult publications and films.politicized sex.. where have i seen that beforeAustralian Sex Party (ASP)
The Australian Sex Party is a political response to the sexual needs of Australia in the 21st century. It is an attempt to restore the balance between sexual privacy and sexual publicity that has been severely distorted by morals campaigners and prudish politicians.
most Asian women have small breasts, are they banned?
and i assume the internet is not included in the ban
Sex has been politicised forever thanks to religious wowsers and in Australia our sex lives are being increasingly interfered with by morally vain left wingers who feel the need to run around protecting adult women from their own decisions to participate in pornography and prostitution. As far as I'm concerned they can all f*ck off ... the sexual activities of consenting adults are none of anybody elses business. The Australian Sex Party is a positive response to an increasing need to protect our right to continue to participate in one of the great joy's of life in a manner in which we see fit.
They aren't the ones who've been ratchetting up censorship over the past 15 years. That comes right down to your beloved Johnny pandering to middle class morality & traditional Christian obseesions with sex & telling people what to do. It was his policies & appointments to the OFLC that saw the re-banning of films that had been legal for years & led to the disgraceful spectacle of police raiding film screenings & even arresting people. Some of the restrictions to pornography described above were also brought in under the previous government. Unfortunately the current PM is also a morally self-righteous little turd pandering to many of the same voters.
The impact of the 'morally vain left' has been moderate by comparison. Indeed, they liberalized prostitution laws in QLD & Vic during the 80s after decades of conservative rule (DK about NSW & other states). In Victoria there are restrictions on how services can be advertised, but they are very mild. Don't forget also that it was Wayne Goss who overhauled censorship in QLD & actually sacked the censor for banning 'Bad Taste'. The constituency for the sort of left wingers sufficiently motivated to push this sort of stuff is probably smaller now even within the ALP than that of religious wowsers & middle class busybodies.
Win nervously lose tragically - Reds C C
It doesn't help when the balance of power in the Senate is controlled by the greens, independents, some being the christian saviors of our morals, normally called the idiot fringe.
Freddie
Never hold your farts in, they run up your spine, and that's where shity ideas come from.
vēnī, vīdī, velcro - I came, I saw I stuck around.
I'm not interested in getting into a party political slanging match, I'm just identifying the culprits and noting that they come from the left and the right for different reasons. I think they are all douche bags. The Australian Sex Party even fingers Clive Hamilton as one of the ones from the left, supporting the internet filter which will be one of the biggest intrusions into civil liberties that Australia has ever seen. See the article below.
Internet filter rivals contest Higgins PDF | Print | E-mail
Written by Staff Writers | Sstar.net.au
Tuesday, 24 November 2009 04:27
The Australian Sex Party has thrown its hat in the ring to contest the federal seat of Higgins, taking a swipe at Greens candidate Dr Clive Hamilton for supporting a national internet filter.
Sex Party convenor Fiona Patten announced last week she would stand for the lower house seat at next month’s by-election on a platform of sex education reform, gay marriage, and opposition to the Rudd Government’s proposed internet filter.
“I hope the gay community will support us — we certainly have very clear policies about gay rights,” Patten told Southern Star.
Patten said although the battle will be uphill, Hamilton’s candidacy had prompted her decision to run.
“Clive Hamilton has been such a proponent of the Government’s internet filter we felt he needed to be challenged on that issue,” she said.
The Government’s current filter proposal is based on a 2003 report by Hamilton which suggests internet filtering as a way to prevent children being exposed to online pornography.
Patten said the Greens had “lurched strongly to the right” socially in choosing Hamilton as their candidate.
“Clive and I have been rivals since he released that report.
“I think [the filter] should be anathema to every Australian — everyone in the world would think it’s outrageous that a government should control our internet.”
Patten, who heads up the adult retail and entertainment industry body, the Eros Association, said although the Sex Party and the Greens are virtually aligned on GLBT issues, the Sex Party differs in its economic outlook.
“In a way we’re differentiating ourselves from the Greens, I think we come from a small business background, which I hope is more attractive to the gay community as well.”
Although the blue-ribbon Liberal seat will be hard to win, Patten said she believes the electorate has changed.
“It’s a much more diverse community now than it was when the Liberals first took this seat many years ago, so we felt it was time that maybe someone who wasn’t an Anglo-Saxon, Christian, white man in his 50s, heterosexual, had a go at representing this diverse community.”
The ABC’s political pundit Antony Green has tipped the Liberals as likely to retain Higgins.
Kelly O’Dwyer will contest the seat for the Liberal Party, with a swing of 7.1 percent required against her for the party to lose.
Nominations for the seat closed this week.
A relevant article, though I would have titled it "A left, right, left on our individual liberties"
Wowserism may be different, but it's not dead
IPA REVIEW ARTICLE
| Richard Allsop
‘I'm not a wowser but...'
Those words seem to have become the standard introduction for anyone proposing a new restriction on what should be matters of individual choice.
The Rudd Government are masters of it. In an interview with 4BC last year, the Prime Minister himself said in a discussion on poker machines ‘I am no wowser on these things.' When proposing extra health warnings on alcohol, Health Minister, Nicola Roxon, asked if she was a wowser said ‘I don't believe I am.' Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, joined in when he maintained ‘I am not a wowser' when introducing his stringent internet filter measures.
Proving that ‘not being a wowser' is bipartisan, former Liberal leader, Brendan Nelson asserted that he was not one, while even Family First Senator Steve Fielding wants it known that he is ‘not a wowser'.
Victoria's new Police Commissioner Simon Overland is encouraging the ‘community to come to a position that says being drunk in public is not OK', but he too is ‘not a wowser.' Left-wing advocate of internet filtering Clive Hamilton is similarly ‘keen to establish that he is not a wowser'.
It is a tribute to the power of the word itself that whether it is politicians, police or left-wing social commentators, they are all desperate to assert that they are not one.
For a country that is apparently entirely absent of wowsers, we sure spend a lot of time discussing how best to stop each other from drinking, gambling, or browsing the wrong websites.
So what is a wowser? The word itself is one of Australia's great home grown inventions. HL Mencken, the celebrated American journalist, writer and linguist and strong opponent of Prohibition, loved the word. He thought the ‘wowser' perfectly captured the image of:
a drab souled Philistine haunted by the mockery of others' happiness... he must devote himself zealously to reforming the morals of his neighbours, and, in particular, to throwing obstacles in the way of their enjoyment of what they choose to regard as pleasures.
While the derivation of the word is disputed, its late 19th century appearance is no coincidence. This was an era when significant new restrictions began to be imposed on a range of personal behaviours, in particular, on the service of alcohol and the rights of citizens to gamble, plus, at the same time, there was increased censorship of written material.
In Australia, the First World War saw the climax of the alcohol temperance movement's influence, and with it the successful introduction of 6 o'clock closing and local preference provisions (allowing municipalities to exclude licensed premises).
There was also a strong push to ban the employment of barmaids, who, it was feared, would on the one hand lure innocent young men to drink, and on the other see things in a public bar that were not suitable for a woman to see. Radical Labor politician King O'Malley saw barmaids as ‘angels of mercy luring men to their destruction'. Several states passed laws banning barmaids, but the existence of a sunset clause enabled many barmaids to continue working and then trade their registration certificate a bit like a taxi license.
Ironically enough, labour shortages during the Second World War prompted governments to actively encourage women to work as barmaids, prompting some wags to suggest that stopping girls working was essential to defeating the Kaiser, and encouraging them to work was essential to defeating Hitler.
Attitudes towards wowsers cut across the normal political divide. Wowsers were generally seen as conservative, but it was the Communist writer, Frank Hardy, who went after that great wowser-target, John Wren, in Power without Glory. As Wren's most recent biographer, James Griffen, demonstrated, most of Hardy's charges against Wren were erroneous and scurrilous. The Hardy case against Wren was enthusiastically repeated by Manning Clark in his works. Griffen has written that wowsers were ‘oppressive and class conscious and responsible for such squalid features of social life as ubiquitous back-lane betting and the six-o'clock swill'.
At the time when lots of the old wowser taboos were being challenged, in 1968, Melbourne journalist, Keith Dunstan, wrote a book called Wowsers that looked at all the areas which the wowsers had tried to restrict, but which, by then, were being liberalised. Dunstan had ten ‘evils' that had historically been under wowser attack:
The Desecration of the Sabbath
The Demon Drink
Smoking
Theatre
Dancing
Bathing
Cremation
The Social Evil (prostitution)
The Printed Word
Gambling
Readers might be surprised to learn that cremation was not only a threat to ‘the sanctity of religion', but would also lead to bushfires and frustrate police murder enquiries. Bathing was banned altogether in some places, while in others it was only allowed if the sexes were strictly segregated, could only take place before 10am and was strictly prohibited on Sundays.
The nonconformist churches had a particular dislike of gambling. In Perth, one Presbyterian Minister proclaimed, in 1926, that ‘the first steps of a life of shame can be traced to the dance hall', while not to be outdone, a visiting Methodist in Melbourne explained, in 1935, that ‘marriages born in a ballroom were doomed to failure because the judgement of the parties had been warped through excessive emotion'.
Melbourne was also the world leader in respecting the Sabbath, as Dunstan comments ‘where else on earth, with the possible exception of Adelaide, could one find a city where absolutely nothing happened, where the biggest excitement among the citizens on Sunday was to go either to the Botanic Gardens or Essendon Airport'.
Yet, in a paradox that will stun many, while professional sport was never played on Sundays, in Adelaide in 1951, the West Indies wrapped up a win in the Third Test against Australia on Christmas Day. (Of course, there had been no play on Christmas Eve-it was a Sunday!)
It is hard to reconcile the playing of cricket on Christmas Day in the 1950s with the constant modern day opposition to the concept of the AFL playing on Good Friday, or the outcry that met the news that TABs would be opening in NSW and Victoria on that day this year. The fact that the arguments against professional sport and other commercial activity on a day such as Good Friday are now made around issues such as family time, rather than religious observance, highlight a change in the nature of wowserism over the past century.
Of course, if contemporary attitudes to cremation, bathing, dancing, or playing sport on Sundays are the criterion then it is true that ‘wowserism' has almost ceased to exist in Australia. Yet while laws relating to most items on the Dunstan list have been liberalised, smoking, has become much more restricted, and two of the liberalised nine, alcohol and gambling, remain under constant attack from critics.
In addition, the new ‘wowserism' has come up with a new entry on the list of sinful practices: eating the wrong food. The Rudd Government's National Preventative Health Taskforce is planning many new ways to restrict our food choices.
The latter-day addition of food highlights the point that for most of Australian history, wowserism had been firmly buttressed by Christian morality-the demon drink, smoking, and gambling may have had health or financial consequences, but for the most part the real damage they caused was moral. Now, even when some of the key participants in the debate are religious leaders, their calls for restrictions or bans tend to use humanist, rather than religious, arguments.
Alcohol, like the new sin of eating unhealthy food, is now classed less as a public morals issue than as a ‘public health' issue, on the same par as epidemic management and public sanitation. Public health advocates believe that the government must not only override people's individual decisions about their health, but that non-contagious, unique health problems are best treated by banning entire populations from certain activities.
The bizarre consequences of this approach was recently highlighted by the chief executive of VicHealth, Todd Harper's comment that the defeat of the alcopops tax was ‘a low point for health' and his argument that for the future ‘kicking politics out of health is perhaps the best health promotion of all'.
So according to Harper, the state intervening to deliver health outcomes is ‘not political', but the state leaving individuals to make their own choices is ‘political'. This sort of whacky logic would be laughable if it were not for the success these state-funded apparatchiks are having in achieving ever greater power over the rights of citizens to make individual choices.
While the target of the anti-drinking push has shifted over the past century from the male breadwinner to the teenage girl, in recent years, the major target of the anti-gambling lobby, a position for many previous decades taken by SP bookmaking, has been taken by poker machines.
Opposition to poker machines is one thing that unites a diverse range of conservatives and Leftists in knee-jerk opposition. What is intriguing is how poker machines only became really controversial when introduced in traditionally wowser states, such as Victoria and South Australia in the 1990s, despite having operated without any strong opposition in New South Wales for forty years.
Ever since the pokies introduction in Victoria the demand of the anti-gambling lobby has been to reduce overall machine numbers, despite Victoria only having a quarter of the number of machines as NSW. However, when the State Government recently released figures on spending on pokies per venue, Chairman of Inter-Church Gambling Taskforce Mark Zirnsak was forced to acknowledge that ‘venues only increased their take per machine if the government reduced their number of machines.'
Another worrying new development on the pokies front is attempts by local government to use planning laws to bar pokies from their municipalities. In a throw-back to the discredited old temperance policy of local option, which condemned parts of Melbourne's eastern suburbs to be dry areas for decades, councils such as Logan in South East Queensland are trying to impose a total ban on new poker machines. The councillor pushing the policies, Sean Black, claimed operators were targeting ‘battlers and pensioners'.
While Cr. Black may share the sentiment of high profile anti-gambling campaigner, Tim Costello, that ‘the weight of consumer choice and individual sovereignty has been grossly overstated in relation to gambling', there is actually something incredibly patronising in the assumption of the anti-pokies activists that anyone playing a machine is self-evidently a dupe or a fool.
There is also a degree of latent sexism in the attacks on poker machines. Women were often excluded from traditional forms of gambling, whether in the all-male gentlemen's clubs of the elites, or in the all-male working class public bar where the SPs operated. Even today, they make up a very small percentage of the clientele in the local TAB. Yet, women are a key demographic user of pokies, enjoying not only the form of gambling, but the safe customer-friendly environment of most club and pub gaming rooms. For years, feminists saw gambling as part of a patriarchal society; now women have access to a form of gambling more of them enjoy that is apparently bad too.
Poker machines, like so many products in the community, carry a risk of harm which should be addressed. However, the fact that a product carries a risk if misused is not a reason to prevent the vast majority of people who use it responsibility from having access.
Further, the new restrictions are often arbitrary. At least with the list of sins in Dunstan's book you always knew where you stood. In contrast, in the world of the new ‘wowserism', the citizen becomes subject to the latest capricious actions of government, inspired by so-called public health experts.
Whether it is alcohol, gambling, unhealthy food or access to the internet the growing coalition of academics, activists, local councillors and Rudd Government ministers are all keen to remove choice from the individual and instead create a society where ‘experts' determine how we live our lives.
They may deny that they are ‘wowsers', but it is hard to escape the conclusion that they are.
Wowserism may be different, but it's not dead | Institute of Public Affairs Australia
Michael Atkinson, South Australias AG just managed to get a law passed which states any post including this board & blogs by any individual. which mentions any political position during after the announcement of an election, MUST post their name and address truthfully or face prosecution.
Bottom of the line is Australia has lost the plot & interest groups have always been able to push an agenda because as a whole you could describe us as largely apathetic.
It really is incredible just how much we've lost it!
Point - politics in Australia does NOT reside on 'It's your right'. Arguments for laws are that in the absence of stipulation - it is NOT your right to talk about civil liberties - because they are not enshrined. Even if they were it is far too late, because Interest groups would demand that criteria be left out. For instance "We don't want the right to bear arms". On the plus side when something gets repealed at the fed level the smack down effect of the constitution is pretty clear cut - but right now it doesn't seem real good! If you doubt that, you just need to look at past High Court Justices and their public criticism of politicians. IE William Deane AC, KCE, QC.
No matter,(Tangent) when it comes to the Role of such people we don't talk about the latest subversion of how the system is supposed to run, we talk about the Republic instead of the real issues effecting the system as a sign of national maturity instead of looking at the real problems and subversion! Effing incredible!
Last edited by Chunder; 07 Feb 10, at 10:31.
Ego Numquam
Never mind my little aussie chums, console yourselves with the knowledge that a quick trip across the Tasman will bring you to a country not only enlightened enough to legalise prostitution, but with EFTPOS you can walk out of a brothel with more cash in your pocket than when you walked in.
He has repealed the law and has been made to look like the idiot that he is. See below. I think it would have been successfully challenged in the High Court anyway. We don't have a Bill of Rights but it has traditionally been very prepared to tackle political attacks on democratic rights ... the shooting down of the Menzies Communist Party ban being the example that springs to mind.
Attorney-General Michael Atkinson vows to repeal election internet censorship law | Herald Sun
Yes, but I hear that they banned the use of the word "bugger" in a Toyota advertisement in NZ. You'd never get that here
AG,
I'm happy not to make this into a party political argument if you are happy to give (at the very least) equal weight to the role of political conservatives & their allies in the increasingly censorious mood of the nation, rather than spending so much more time on the left. In that spirit I'll take the The IPA piece you posted (about which more anon.) as an aberration rather than indicative of where you are going with this.
On the internet filter - a poor idea poorly carried out, but I'm not sure on the extent to which people like Hamilton are motivated by a generally censorious mindset (not saying he isn't, just don't know). It looks to me like an outgrowth of the 'moral panic' de jure, child molestation & child pornography. People have taken legitimate concerns & genuine disgust & funnelled them into some truly appalling legislation & public spectacles. I'm not certain, however, if this very specific little piece of hysteria is motivated by the broader attitude that saw the re-banning of stuff like 'I spit on your grave' & 'Salo' or the police raids at screeings of 'Ken Park'. I'm hoping that the increasing absurdity of this process will ultimately bring it undone, but as long as Rudd is there I'm not overly hopeful.
Now, to the IPA article. Here are the forces of 'wowserism' according to Ian Allsop (we'll assume he thinks the people claiming not to be 'wowsers' actually are).
Does that list strike you as skewed in any way? I've bolded those who might be seen as conservative & 'blued' some 50/50 options - nonconformist churches have a lengthy association with 'progressive' movements. Indeed, he even turns the 'religious' category left wing by emphasising humanist arguments. Even with those firmly in the conservative camp & ALP appointments like Overland classed as 'neutral' the imbalance is embarassing.The Rudd Government,
the Prime Minister
Health Minister, Nicola Roxon,
Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy
Brendan Nelson
Family First Senator Steve Fielding
Victoria's new Police Commissioner Simon Overland
Left-wing advocate... Clive Hamilton
politicians, police or left-wing social commentators
Radical Labor politician King O'Malley
The nonconformist churches
Presbyterian Minister
a visiting Methodist
The Rudd Government's National Preventative Health Taskforce is
Christian morality
religious leaders...calls for restrictions or bans tend to use humanist, rather than religious, arguments.
Public health advocates
chief executive of VicHealth, Todd Harper
state-funded apparatchiks
Opposition to poker machines is one thing that unites a diverse range of conservatives and Leftists in knee-jerk opposition.
Chairman of Inter-Church Gambling Taskforce Mark Zirnsak
The councillor pushing the policies, Sean Black (ex-ALP)
Tim Costello
growing coalition of academics, activists, local councillors and Rudd
Where is the Catholic Church? Where is George Pell? Menzies? Bolte? Howard? Bjelke-Petersen? Fred Nile & the Festival of Light? The Sydney Anglican church? Does it not strike you as odd that he can dredge up the comments of King O'Malley yet fail to mention a single one of these estimable conservatives (or the many more I've missed)?
Then we have this little gem. The transparency of motive even on the surface here is obvious - skim over the right & hammer the left. Wren was indeed the scourge of wowsers, but the presentation of Hardy as having the same motivations is straight out dishonesty.
The problem here is that some of us actually have a copy of the Wren biography sitting on our shelves. I read the chapter on Hardy - a detailed & borderline vicious attack on a man who, to be fair, deserved most of it. 'Power' is a sh1thouse piece of literature & worse history. The attack on Wren originated with Communist Party activists. Hardy ultimately did the writing, but little of the work. Why did they attack Wren? Gambling? Horseracing? Sly grogging? Not exactly.Wowsers were generally seen as conservative, but it was the Communist writer, Frank Hardy, who went after that great wowser-target, John Wren, in Power without Glory. As Wren's most recent biographer, James Griffen, demonstrated, most of Hardy's charges against Wren were erroneous and scurrilous. The Hardy case against Wren was enthusiastically repeated by Manning Clark in his works. Griffen has written that wowsers were ‘oppressive and class conscious and responsible for such squalid features of social life as ubiquitous back-lane betting and the six-o'clock swill'.
Some hastily taken notes with pages:
Hardy & co. were happy to use every tool in the box to hit Wren, including his involvement in gambling, but that wasn't why they did it. The fact that some wowsers were happy enough to see Wren taken down & the left attacking itself doesn't make Hardy one of them. Like I said, Allsop's motivation here is as transparent & his methods as dishonest as hardy himself.Book has genisis in Communist Party. During 1940s Ted Hill came to believe that Catholic Action attacks on CP influence in unions was financed by Wren. - 386
Ralph Gibson - Dunstan (Albert - conservative Premier) was Wren’s puppet – 386
The book described the ‘Betrayal of the labour movement, Labour Party & working-class Australia by a self-regarding gangster’ – Ian Syson, Overland & publisher of Power Without Glory. – 388
Took aim at figures such as Archbishop Daniel Mannix & ‘Red’ Ted Theodore - 391
Fed info by conservative protestants keen to damage the ALP & the Catholic church – 393 & 394.
Power Without Glory was meant to be primarily a vicious assault on the Labor Party. - 409
Put simply, the article is yet another IPA hit job on the left. I'm happy to take aim at the many & varied wowsers that have & do plague us, but lets not rely on tripe like this to establish who to fling the mud at.
Last edited by Bigfella; 07 Feb 10, at 08:23.
Win nervously lose tragically - Reds C C
I'm not familiar with the laws in every state, but I'm pretty sure prostitution is legal in every state of Oz (though not streetwalking). I know of at least 2 establishments within about 500 meters of where I am sitting (one is on a major road & is VERY obvious), so the trip to NZ wouldn't be necessary should I feel the urge. If I'm even lazier the yellow pages & those free local papers that arrive in the post mean that I could order in, so to speak. All perfectly legal.
Not sure about the EFTPOS bit, I'll leave that to more experienced punters.
Win nervously lose tragically - Reds C C
On this topic I'm only interested in flinging mud in equal proportions at all those who want to limit the sexual freedoms of consenting adults. The fact that I identified both religious and left-wing zealots in my first post is proof enough of that, you are the only one who is playing party politics with this.
On the IPA article, irrespective of who wrote it or what other ulterior motives the author might have, it identifies a bunch of people who deserve their share of the mud. If you are worried that the left/right balance in the article seems to be unfair then feel free to post an equivalent article by a left-wing writer identifying more right-wingers, and I will happily fling mud at them too.
Not that it matters, I know that God botherers are probably proportionately the biggest culprits on this matter. However, there has been a very significant movement amongst left wingers, chiefly led by feminists like Andrea Dworkin, to restrict our freedoms and they need to be identified so that their ideas can be refuted. Apportioning "fair" quantities of blame is a pretty pointless exercise in my view.
On Hamilton, the link below has his argument from the horses mouth. Basically says that the Government should restrict access to online pornography to everyone to prevent kids from viewing it. On the face of it he MIGHT just be over-reacting in his attempt to prevent children seeing inappropriate material, but it is a pretty bloody huge over-reaction and I am as suspicious of his motives as you are of the IPA author's.
Web doesn't belong to net libertarians | The Australian
Last edited by Aussiegunner; 07 Feb 10, at 09:03.
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