Insert tinnie/tinnie joke here

The Indigenous Affairs Minister, Mal Brough, has announced an exemption to the alcohol bans in 70 remote indigenous communities in the NT that were announced as a core component of the government’s Indigenous Emergency Plan to combat the sexual abuse of indigenous minors. The exemption applies to rivers being used for recreational fishing on or adjacent to Aboriginal land.

Why is such a core measure being undermined?

The professor of indigenous studies at the University of Melbourne, Marcia Langton, said yesterday that relaxing the bans would open the floodgates for alcohol to be smuggled into the 70 communities where it was banned.

“It will allow illegal grog runners to sell grog into the communities,” she said.

“It’s the kind of loophole that can bring the whole system undone, by giving the big tick-off to the grog runners. It’s not going to work.”

What could be more important than protecting the children who are the whole justification for the sweeping authoritian emergency plan in the first place?

Filed under: authoritarianism, indigenous, law, racism

Linkalicious: Big Tuesday Edition

A veritable smorgasbord for you!

1. “Intimate Politics: A Roundtable”: a downloadable podcast of a panel of feminist scholars and their reactions (not book reviews, but further musings) to the book Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel, by Bettina Aptheker.

2. “Who hates to hear they look great?”: amandaw on the “But you don’t look sick!” phenomenon and invisible disabilities.

3. “What are we doing here?”: magniloquence muses at length on the femisphere, its characters, and the dynamics of blogwars. Meta upon meta, lots to unpack here.

4. “Students use sex to promote healthy foods”: Two students in Canberra come up with the absolutely ground-breaking new idea of presenting scantily clad women’s bodies in order to promote a food group. Somehow, this is “Innovative!” national news.

Filed under: Meta, Politics, Read 'ems, bigotry, birth, indigenous, interblog, language, racism

Our own desert places

I have succumbed to the July lurgy, so today: an invitation to join me in Stuff I Have Been Reading. Don’t miss the stuff below the cut. Jane Simpson is amazing.

Aboriginal Poets

We are tired of the benches, our beds in the park,
We welcome the sundown that heralds the dark.
White Lady Methylate!
Keep us warm and from crying.
Hold back the hate
And hasten the dying.

The tribes are all gone,
The spears are all broken:
Once we had bread here,
You gave us stone

Jack Davis, ‘Desolation’, published in The First-born, p. 36. Sourced from “Black Words White Page: Aboriginal Literature 1929–1988″ , chapter 8, Adam Shoemaker. Go read the link, it’s worth it.

~~~

See plain the promise,
Dark freedom-lover!
Night’s nearly over,
And though long the climb,
New rights will greet us,
New mateship meet us,
And joy complete us
In our new Dream Time.

To our father’s fathers
The pain, the sorrow;
To our children’s children
The glad tomorrow.

excerpt from Song of Hope by Oodgeroo Noonuccal.

Filed under: Politics, Read 'ems, authoritarianism, bigotry, indigenous, racism

Recklessly supplying a SIM card

Curmudgeon of the Day goes to the caller I heard on ABC702 talkback radio this morning (paraphrased from memory):

What a ridiculous charge?…How do you even do that? Tie it to a brick and chuck it at someone?

He’s talking of course of Dr Mohammed Haneef, who was yesterday granted conditional bail by a Queensland magistrate on charges laid against him of recklessly supplying resources (said SIM card) to a terrorist organisation (what other people would describe as passing on a UK SIM card he could not use in Australia to his cousin when he left the UK).

The call was in response to news of the decision by Federal Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews last night to preempt judicial due process and the presumption of innocence. Andrews used his ministerial oversight powers to revoke Haneef’s visa and consign him to the Villawood Detention Centre pending further investigations and the resolution of his court case.

Shaun at LP has a great post and links round-up on opinon about Andrews v. Haneef, and quotes Peter Wilkinson most aptly:

Indiscriminate repression is totally incompatible with the liberal values of humanity, liberty and justice. It is a dangerous illusion to believe one can ‘protect’ liberal democracy by suspending liberal rights and forms of government.

Filed under: authoritarianism, ethics, islamophobia, law

Some of these things are not like the other ones: a quiz

Six of these sentences appeared in the Australian mainstream media this week. Eight didn’t; they have been doctored by me. Can you tell which is which? Click each number for the original story.

1. Three young white people, one of them a police officer, have pleaded guilty to raping a male friend during a night of heavy drinking in Adelaide.

2. An Aboriginal preacher who pleaded guilty to child sex abuse will hear from his victims in court today.

3. Jessica was randomly abducted from her workplace in Ballarat on February 6 last year and raped repeatedly by a white man during a 29-hour, cross country ordeal.

4. Three men charged over the gang rapes of a 12-year-old boy in the remote Aboriginal community of Maningrida in the Northern Territory between April and August last year have been ordered to stand trial.

5. White man Martin, who claimed he was armed with a knife, then took his victim on a terrifying drive to Bacchus Marsh, west of Melbourne, during which time he threatened to rape her.

6. More than 30 Aboriginal men have been implicated in sex attacks on girls as young as 11 from one community after authorities uncovered a second child abuse scandal in a remote West Australian indigenous township.

7. John Nicholous Xydias, a 43-year-old chef living in white suburb Glen Iris with his parents, will appear in the Melbourne Magistrates court on Monday after police alleged he had drugged, raped and filmed 16 women between 1998 and 2004.

8. White serial rapist Robert Fardon is in police custody after being caught in the company of another sex offender who had breached his curfew. Fardon, 58, was arrested yesterday in Brisbane’s west along with fellow multiple rapist Trevor Toms, also white, when an electronic monitoring device worn by Toms alerted authorities to a curfew breach.

9. A man accused of taking a sleeping 10-year-old girl from her bed and sexually assaulting her at a remote Aboriginal community will remain in police custody.

10. A white aged-care worker digitally raped elderly women with dementia under his care, a jury has been told.

11. Police have rescued an Australian child at potential risk from a global internet paedophile ring that used a chat room to stream live videos of children being raped. Four Australian men have been arrested, with more arrests expected. [...] Investigators made the case public after the sentencing of white ringleader Timothy David Martyn Cox yesterday.

12. Three teenagers accused of raping a 12-year-old boy over five months at a remote Aboriginal community will stand trial.

13. In 1972, he was twice anally raped by an older Aboriginal man.

14. The panel appointed by the Government says there’s sexual abuse of children in almost every white suburb in Australia, possibly in all of them.

Filed under: bigotry, moral panics, racism

A timeline to think upon

If Iran Were America (And We Were Iran): A Timeline

This is a very well done example of reversing protagonists and putting shoes on other feet. It’s also a useful pointer for people who have been previously unaware of just how much throttling of autonomous political movements in ex-colonial resource-rich states has been done by the industrial powers of the West over generations.

Via Pandagon.

Filed under: economics, history, islamophobia, middle east

Living Black

First, a news snippet:

The Age: Indigenous land takeover angers NT govt

NT Attorney-General [and Member for Nhulunbuy] Syd Stirling said Aboriginal communities territory-wide were angry, confused and talking of legal action. He said the territory government was seeking advice from the Justice Department about what shape the commonwealth’s proposed amendment to the Land Rights Act might take “and then what we as a government might do”.

The Central Land Council and Northern Land Council (NLC) were expected to support any legal action and “present a united front”, he said. “If your rights are taken away there is generally a legal recourse and a legal challenge. This is critical to indigenous people in these communities… that permit is a signal to everybody else that they own that land. If that is taken away, and the views are that this is the first step, then you are beginning to unwind Aboriginal land rights.“

LIVING BLACK

But on to the meat of this post – SBS’s Living Black last night was a special on the Federal government’s Northern Territory “emergency plan”. I made a few notes, in case you missed it (or are following along from overseas). The “quotes” are paraphrase – I hope I have represented people’s statements accurately. I have added bits ‘n’ pieces ‘n’ links from the Web. My own comments and extra snippets not from the show are in italics. Bits I found particularly head-explodey are in bold.

Maningrida

First, a snapshot of the self-governing Maningrida community in Arnhem Land, home to 2600 people and a “high profile” abuse case. Their system for alcohol rationing is said to be working well, with everyone rationed two cartons of beer per fortnight. People worry that by banning alcohol completely, more people will go to Darwin to drink, leaving their children behind. The community is working on alcohol-related problems, with community “strong women” having started their own night patrol, getting children off the streets.

Filed under: Politics, Sociology, authoritarianism, bigotry, indigenous, moral panics, racism

They’re creepy and they’re … creepy. Three datapoints.

Via IBTP, buried in a long stoush about bigotry against children and whether under-18s are subhuman:

To passer-by, crying child’s ear-piercing rings of abuse.

Marilyn Johnson thought so when she heard a girl’s screams in a Wichita Wal-Mart on Sunday — and she reported it to police.
[...]
“This little girl was about 5 years old and was crying her eyes out,” Johnson said. “Her face was beet red, and she was screaming and coughing and saying things like, ‘I don’t want this! It hurts! Please stop!’ She was grabbing her ears so the adults couldn’t touch them.”

Johnson attempted to intervene verbally, and when she was rebuffed, she called 911. She was told by police to butt out, and banned from Wal-Mart. The article continues:

Ear piercing has long been the subject of controversy among parents. For some, piercing an infant or young child’s ears has deep-rooted cultural or religious meaning. Others pierce babies’ ears because of family traditions, or simply because they like the look or want to more easily identify the baby as a girl.

Because the worst possible fate for an infant or child in our society is to have random strangers mistake them for another gender, it is necessary to poke holes in screaming children and adorn them accordingly. Creepy.

~~
Creepy number two comes via the Kate Harding comments section: American Apparel “Intimates” section. I was in two minds about linking this, so be warned – I don’t know whether these photos could trigger someone, but they might.

Filed under: bigotry, obstreperation, sexual violence

“Only stupid women are breeding” – academipanic from New Zealand

Jim Flynn, Emeritus Professor of Political Studies at a New Zealand university, has pronounced himself the arbiter of which women should be allowed to breed. Note that fathers are completely invisible in his genetic-decay worldview, what could just as easily be an Onion article set in a parallel parthenogenetic society.

The Stuff.co.nz article is here – “Put the pill in tapwater – top prof “.

“New Zealalnd risks dumbing-down its future population if it does not act to boost the birth rate of its most highly educated women, says a world-ranked expert on intelligence. Otago University emeritus professor Dr Jim Flynn said easier methods of contraception, or even contraception in the water supply, could be used to reduce the number of unplanned pregnancies to less educated women. “The lower down the educational scale you go, the less people are in control of their lives, and less in control of planning for children,” he said.

Flynn argues vigorously that race is not a determinant of IQ, but that class can be. “There is no genetic difference between Maori and Pakeha in terms of genes for intelligence,” he said.
[...]

Flynn, an expert on the interaction of class, race and IQ, said in a socially mobile society such as New Zealand’s, those who remained uneducated had poorer genetic material in terms of IQ. Over time poorer genes would take their toll, leading to a “decay” in genetic quality.
[...]

“I do have faith in science, and science may give us something that renders conception impossible unless you take an antidote,” he said. “You could of course have a chemical in the water supply and have to take an antidote. If you had contraception made easier by progress, then every child is a wanted child.”

I’ve picked out just a few assumptions in this article – add your own:

1. Women get pregnant because they’re too stupid to use contraception.
2. Poor women are poor because they’re stupid.
3. Stupidity is genetic – you get it from your mother.
4. We need to act urgently to stop these stupid women from destroying the intellectual qualities of our race.
5. Stupidpoor women are out of control.
6. Men need to force contraception on all women to prevent imminent disaster- hordes of poor, stupid people taking over the world.
7. The best way to do this is to poison the entire population, and provide an opt-out only for smartrich women who can access it.
8. Smartrich women never have unplanned pregnancies. (If they do, it’s a blessing, unlike the social crime of unplanned pregnancies in stupidpoor women.)
9. Oh, it’s not about race. Jim Flynn isn’t a racist.

I’m just going to go back and check it isn’t an Onion article. Nope, it’s real.

Filed under: Politics, Sociology, authoritarianism, bigotry, moral panics, obstreperation, peeves, reproductive freedoms

Feminist read’ems: men harassing WOC online, iconic blondes, and party-pollie numbers games

Feminist read ‘ems!

~~
“A Disincentive to the Female Voice Online”

Jenn talks about men who cyberharass bloggers who are women of colour. Her experiences are harrowing and revolting, but she vows to survive:

When I participated in a popular APIA forum, I was disheartened to watch as feminist voices were shot down by male participants who threw around words like “whore” and “slut” within their counterarguments. In another forum, men angry that I am unabashedly partnered in a stable, eight-year-long interracial relationship have accused me of “loving to suck White dick”, “daddy issues”, and worse. They re-posted photos of my loved ones (that I used to host on this site to share with real-life friends) and made racially and sexually derogatory remarks about the people in them, including mean-spirited mockery of my boyfriend’s mother. . I no longer host personal photos for this reason. Still others have emailed me hateful judgements and presuppositions of my personal life while assuming materialistic, superficial motivations for all Asian American women. In all these behaviours — commonly received by many women in cyberspace – it is the woman and her experience that becomes decentralized; even in assaulting us, male aggressors shift the focus from a female blogger’s feminism to a denial of her self-worth based exclusively upon the men in her life.

~~

From Diary of a Goldfish, “Paris Hilton and the Iconic Blonde”. The Goldfish takes a generational look, drawing parallels between the misogynistic media treatment of iconic blondes Marilyn Monroe, Princess Diana, and Paris Hilton:

Filed under: Politics, Read 'ems, blogging, celebritism, cyberbullying, racism