thedamiansmith

[thedamiansmith]

Et tu, ScoMo?

And so Malcolm Turnbull tumbles, in much the same circumstances as describes his entire political career: token resistance then inevitable capitulation.

In his place we have Scott Morrison, ScoMo, a man as bland as a communion wafer and politically just as nutritional. I’d go so far as to say that just like a communion wafer, Morrison is representative of a regime that commits a raft of grievances on the human race but somehow gets away with it due to wealth, stature and longstanding tradition

Morrison’s own rise to the top job mirrors Turnbull’s conquest over Abbott to no small extent, that of being the most palatable of a suite of horrible options, the Sophie’s Choice of party leader. Morrison triumphed over Peter Dutton, a jackboot fascist with a distinct lack of basic humanity and Julie Bishop, the ever-looming vizier and virago finally throwing one of her outlandishly extravagant fascinators into the ring.

Morrison’s career can be described in much the same way. His stint as Immigration Minister was categorised by lies and secrecy and built on a foundation of human misery. Yet this has been forgotten due to the dictatorial human rights abuses of the man that succeeded him in the role, Peter Dutton.  Morrison’s tenure as Treasurer would see him out of his depths and taking on water, much the way as the “illegal boats” he built his profile on. Under Morrison’s watch the national debt blew out exponentially in a display of voodoo economics so egregious that even Reagan would blush. Morrison’s saving grace though was that he wasn’t as publically odious as his predecessor, Joe Hockey.

On a federal level, at nearly every point, he was the lesser evil - but an evil nonetheless. This was not the case in his preselection. In 2007 the longstanding member for Cook, Bruce Baird (himself something of a political exile for not kissing the ring of Caesar, John Howard) retired from federal politics. This was a big deal. Cook, encapsulating the cashed up bogan Mecca of ‘The Shire’, was considered a safe Liberal seat. Whoever ran for Cook was a near certainty for federal representation.

Naturally there were a number of candidates. ScoMo of course was among them, looking for work after being sacked as managing director of Tourism Australia, after overseeing the poorly received and much lambasted “where the bloody hell are you?” campaign - the first of his dubious decisions in a position of the public trust. He is also indirectly responsible for the rise of Lara Bingle and (in this writer’s opinion) the fall of the Australian cricket team, Michael Clarke and Sam Worthington. Which isn’t a crime, but should be.

But back to the preselection. Among the other candidates were Paul Fletcher, now the member for Bradfield, and a man by the name of Michael Towke. Towke won the initial preselection ballot in a landslide - 82 votes to 8, eliminating ScoMo in the first round. By all rights he should be the representative for Cook. But he isn’t. We all know it’s ScoMo. So what happened?

Well Michael Towke is Lebanese. Despite his clear popularity in the Liberal Party there was a lot of concern among the upper levels of the Liberals that a man of such...ethnic origins couldn’t win the famously racist seat of Cook, the capital wasteland for the Cronulla Riots. And he couldn’t be removed, that would look racist. So the Liberals (senior figures, working from the shadows as ever, known but not named) worked in concert with their allies in News Ltd and ran a series of hit pieces on Towke in what amounted to a character assassination. He was accused of lies, deceit and even engaging in criminal conduct. Towke defended these allegations, as he had not actually engaged in any of the behaviours he was being accused of. But still the stories ran. Towke took News Ltd to court and sued them for defamation. News Ltd settled and agreed to retract the stories and pay compensation.

What they couldn’t compensate for was the damage done to Towke’s political career. While he was fighting to clear his name against false accusations, Scott Morrison - a long time high roller in the state Liberal Party - was parachuted into this safe seat and into federal politics.

This is nothing new to the Liberals. Backstabbing is in their nature. As Paul Keating would say “tories are mean little people” and, as ever, he’s not wrong. Scott Morrison is no exception to this rule. He is a duplicitous and conniving snake, he just likes to hide it behind his devotion to an evangelical cult and his support of an equally ethically challenged football club.

Menzies might have built the Liberal Party, but John Howard turned it into what it is today - a serpent’s nest of pimps and thieves, Machiavellian hucksters and ambulance chasers. Scott Morrison is the living embodiment of that born-to-rule, mine-not-yours, crush-your-enemies Liberal Party attitude. He’s just less obvious about it. And now he is their king. And ours.

Just because Scott Morrison has coasted through most of his life by being the lesser evil doesn’t make him any less evil. Bring on the election.

[thedamiansmith]

The Fault In Our Star Wars

The Fault In Our Star Wars

Beware spoilers for Solo: A Star Wars Story

Solo: A Star Wars Story looks to be the first ever Star Wars film to bomb. This is hardly surprising, the film is awful. It isn’t as heinously bad as The Last Jedi - nothing will ever come close to that - it’s just that Solo is...boring. Tedious. For something that is supposed to be entertaining it is anything but. Watching it is a chore. For almost the entire duration of the film I found myself wishing that it would end. It is the opposite of entertainment.

The problem is that ever since Disney acquired the license to Star Wars this seems to be par for the course. One can now confidently walk into a Star Wars film with the expectation that it will be bad. Not flawed or lacking or flat but objectively bad. As in it’s abundantly clear that the people making them have no idea how to write a script, or perhaps that the Disney branding juggernaut bowdlerised said script into a soulless husk.

The new Star Wars films are fundamentally lacking in the basics of storytelling.

Whilst writing as a craft is a creative endeavour, and enjoyment is an inherently subjective experience, there are certain rules which must be followed for a story to work. George Lucas, for all his faults, understood this when he rebranded the monomyth and built an empire. The new quote unquote “writers” of these films do not.

The Force Awakens was a mess. Stuck in a limbo between striking out on its own and bridging the gap between the old fans and the new, it’s a film which attempts to appease everyone and ends up pleasing no one. It’s big and it’s flashy, with a lot of sound and fury but ultimately signifies nothing. It’s a patchwork of cool individual scenes cobbled together into the barest semblance of narrative. But that’s what we knew we were getting when JJ Abrams signed on to create it - he has a track record of creating cool concepts and developing mystery only to forget about them when the plot becomes too complicated (did the numbers in Lost ever turn out to mean anything?).

Perhaps I’m being too harsh on TFA, after all it’s not JJ’s fault that Rian Johnson burnt it to the ground, pissed on the ashes and then threw them to the wind.

Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi is objectively the worst film ever made. I’ve been over this before and covered it at length and everyone is sick of me harping on about it, so I’ll be brief here. The Last Jedi is, without a shadow of a doubt, the worst film ever made. Worse than Gigli. Worse than Alien Opponent. Worse than anything. In fact it is so bad, it gets everything so wrong, that if I were to teach a course on film writing it is the only material I’d need. If you want to make a good film then think “what would Rian Johnson do?”, do the exact opposite and you’ll have a decent product. There are so many plot holes that the script looks like a colander. The entire narrative depends on every character making the worst possible decision at the worst possible time. The most proactive character was prevented from doing anything. Finn’s character arc was identical to the previous film. Canto Bight happened. The hyperspace thing happened. Snoke happened - a plot point that could only possibly have occurred if Rian Johnson was deliberately telling fans to go fuck themselves. It is the worst movie ever made.

(I’ll pause here for a note on critiquing the new Star Wars films. Much has been said of the backlash against The Last Jedi and the fandom’s rejection of it. A sizeable portion of Star Wars fans, their venn diagram overlapping with Incels and Red Pills, has taken to social media to express their outrage at the female presence in the films, so much so that those stars have withdrawn from social media. This is vile and disgusting, to be sure, and I can’t really add anything to the debate at this point, but I’ll mention that their behaviour makes it harder to express a negative opinion regarding the films without being tarred with the same brush.

For instance Rey is a terrible character. One of the worst written characters I’ve ever encountered in film. I express this opinion with no malice towards Daisy Ridley. I like Daisy Ridley. I think she’s extraordinarily talented as an actor and that she does an amazing job rising above the material that she’s given. But it is hard to critique the character that she plays without being accused of attacking the actor. Rey is everything a writer is told not to do with a character. She never struggles. She never falls. She never doubts or has reason to doubt. The only time we ever see her in a moment of weakness is when she’s sad and lonely in her AT-AT hut. From then on she goes full Mary-Sue.

She’s a competent and accomplished scavenger. This is reasonable, it’s her job. We see on Jakku that she’s a fearsome fighter, able to hold her own against multiple opponents. Fair enough, we can accept that, it’s a rough neighbourhood. She’s also a brilliant pilot, even though we aren’t told how she acquired those skills. This is getting harder to believe. Then we learn that she’s incredibly powerful in the Force. Well, I guess that’s how the Force works. Then she learns how to use the Force without tutelage at an incredible and exponential rate, so much so that she accomplishes feats that we’ve previously only seen Jedi Masters perform in her second day as a Jedi. She bests Kylo Ren, one of the most powerful Force users in history, in a mind duel without any apparent effort. She breaks free of her incarceration without any effort at all. She beats Kylo Ren in a duel. She beats Luke Skywalker in a duel. She beats Snoke’s guards without much effort, and absolutely no training. She effortlessly levitates a quarry worth of rocks a week after finding out she’s Force sensitive, when Luke could barely summon his lightsaber in the Wampa cave at the same level of training. Rey never, ever fails and never, ever earns her victories. When Luke ran off from his training it costs him his hand and his best friend, when Rey ran off and confronted Snoke/Ren she won without breaking a sweat then swooped down in the Falcon to save the day. She is a truly awful character - and that has nothing to do with the actor portraying her.)

Even Rogue One, a film I personally adore and enjoy immensely, is not without its problems. I love almost everything about it but Jyn Erso is a passive protagonist. The first half of the film lacks punch. The whole thing snowballs once it hits the threshold, and it’s awesome, but it takes a bit to get cooking.

Rogue One is also somewhat tainted by the other films. I came out of Rogue One with hope for the franchise. Here, finally, was the Star Wars movie that I’d been waiting for since I was a kid. Here, finally, a film delivered what the prequels had promised. The future was bright. Then along came The Last Jedi and shat on everyone’s dreams.

Which brings us to Solo. Solo is poorly written (which is surprising given the pedigree of the writers) and it suffers from it.

The problem with Solo is change. Drama is built on two things: conflict and change. While Solo has conflict (if I’m being generous), what it doesn’t have is change. It is missing one of the most fundamental elements of storytelling.

Writers are taught that there are two kinds of change - the Everyman and the Superman. The everyman is someone like Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. He is the embodiment of personal change. At the start of the tale he’s a grumpy old man with no love in his heart but over the course of the story, through personal trials and revelations, he becomes a better person. He hasn’t changed the world but he has changed himself.

The other end of the spectrum is the Superman, best embodied by, well, Superman. Superman is always Superman. He doesn’t change. He’s the paragon of truth, justice and, depending on the time period, the American Way. He’s the same character at the start of the story that he is at the end. Maybe we reveal more about that character, or why he is that character, but he is always that character. The important thing though is that while Superman doesn’t change, he changes the world. Things are different for everyone at the end of the story. Superman defeats Zod. He saves the world. People know about aliens from Krypton etc. Nothing is the same - the universe at the end of the film is different to the one at the beginning and things can never be the same again.

And therein lies the problem with Solo. It has neither of these elements.

We already know Han Solo. We met him in 1977 in a Mos Eisley cantina. When we meet him he’s a jerk. He’s a smart arse jerk, perhaps even a charming jerk, but he’s a jerk. He’s cynical and jaded and interested only in his own self interest. Over the course of the film, and more so during the events of Empire and Jedi, we learn that Han is actually a decent person. He’s a loveable rogue with a heart of gold who overcomes his selfish cynicism to become a freedom fighter and hero of the rebellion. It’s a good character arc, we like watching Han change. We like watching him grow. It’s a large part of why the original trilogy was so compelling.

Contrast that with Solo.

At the beginning of Solo, Han is a loveable rogue with a heart of gold, who risks his life to save his girlfriend. At the end of the first act he’s a loveable rogue with a heart of gold who risks his life to save Chewbacca. During the second act he’s a loveable rogue with a heart of gold who risks his life to save his crew. At the climax of the film he’s a loveable rogue who risks his life for everyone and gives up a fortune to help the rebellion because...reasons.

He does not change at all. Not a bit. He is exactly the same character that he was at the start. Of course somewhere between the end of Solo and the start of A New Hope, Han has a complete about face and turns into the roguish dick that we’re familiar with, but we don’t get to see it. We don’t know what drove him to that point.  The problem with Solo is that through the entire film he’s the character that we know from the end of Return of the Jedi. In comedy parlance it’s a callback to a joke that hasn’t been told before.

This could be forgivable if Han had actually done something through the course of the story. If he’d taken the Superman path, but he doesn’t change anything there either. At the start of the story the Empire and the cartels rule the galaxy, good people are forced to do bad things and his lady love is snatched away from him. At the end of Solo the Empire and the cartels rule the galaxy, good people are forced to do bad things and his lady love is snatched away from him, though this time for a less believable reason. Nothing has changed.

All of this is bad storytelling. By ignoring the basic fundamentals of writing a story we end up with the dross that is the new Star Wars franchise. Solo was bad. The Last Jedi was bad. In all likelihood the next episode will be bad. Because Lucasfilm, and by extension Disney, doesn’t care about storytelling. They don’t give a rats about weaving a narrative, all they want is an opportunity to push merch.

Which is a shame because Solo offered such an amazing opportunity. It could have been a rich and fulfilling tale about the genesis of one of the most iconic characters in cinema history. It could have been amazing. But it wasn’t.

Show me how Han became the man he is in A New Hope. Show me why he’s cynical and jaded. Show me what happened to him to turn him into the man who walks away from the rebellion with his cash reward and why it means something that he comes back.

Show me Han as a street rat forced to join the Empire to escape life in the slums, just like Solo. But then show him in the Empire. Make him believe in the Empire. Instead of an offhanded reference to him being demoted for insubordination have him be a model officer. The ideal Imperial. Show him as a xenophobe who truly believes that aliens like wookiees are inferior to humans. Show me that he thinks that it’s right that they’re enslaved, that in his mind they’re no better than beasts. Then show him getting to know the wookies. By being forced to interact with them his worldview is challenged and ultimately shattered. He changes. He realises that the Empire is evil. He knows that he has to get out. He rescues some wookies, though he can’t save everyone. He becomes an outlaw. He has nowhere else to turn so he uses his skills as a pilot and an officer to become a pirate, a smuggler. A damn good one. Maybe he finds others like him, idealists who wish to fight the Empire. He joins them for a time but they’re defeated. Or they betray him. Regardless the result is that he realises that fighting for a cause is futile, that the only way to make in this galaxy is to look out for yourself and make the best with the hand that you’re dealt. Belief is just a fast track to pain.

That sets him up to become the character we meet in A New Hope. That shows change and growth and development. It’s a character arc. It’s drama. It is interesting, which is something the Solo: A Star Wars Story was not.

The new Star Wars films are terrible. Not because they’re too different from the films we grew up with, not because they’re too similar to the films we grew up with or any of the other reasons that the apologists concoct - they are terrible because they are poorly written and poorly made. That much is fact. You are free to enjoy them, of course, enjoyment is a deeply personal thing, but that doesn’t mean they were well crafted.

[thedamiansmith]

Making Amends

In the wake of the latest mass shooting at a United States school, and almost certainly not the last, comes the inevitable madrigal of “thoughts and prayers” for the victims, as well the also inevitable refusal to make any significant changes to curb these tragedies in the future.

The merits and efficacy of gun control are clear and undeniable and I shan’t be reiterating them here  - others will do so, and rightfully, but I wish to take this debate in a different direction.

The implacable argument from the gun cult is ever the same. The 2nd Amendment of the United States Constitution. The right to keep and bear arms. I won’t be debating the semantics of the amendment and the obvious anachronisms of such legislation.

I want to talk about the American Constitution itself.

The US Constitution is treated as an almost holy text by most, if not nearly all, Americans. The document itself is viewed as the apotheosis of legislature, divinity made manifest in the form of a set of laws. This document is the standard upon which all others might be judged, and they will be found wanting.

One cannot question the Constitution. Is its perfection not immediately apparent? Is this not the document that made America the greatest country on earth?

Even in the opening scene of The Newsroom, where journalist Will McAvoy gives a scathing assessment of the state of America, its dubious claims to be the ‘greatest country in the world’ and the follies of blind patriotism, even in this excoriating analysis McAvoy describes the Constitution of the United States as “a masterpiece”.

But is it? Is it really?

Is even Aaron Sorkin drinking the kool-aid?

Can a document that enables regular and predictable mass murder of innocent people really be a “masterpiece”? Can a document forged by dissidents and soldiers during a violent rebellion ever be considered a “masterpiece”?

But Americans seem - not even unwilling - but unable to see such a document as flawed. As anything less than perfect.

The fact that such a document even has amendments should cast some aspersions on it. The US constitution has been amended twenty-seven times. 27 times it has been revised. It has been found wanting in the past. Why should it not be examined again?

Contrast this to the Australian Constitution.

Australia was not founded in blood or fire or war. It was founded through democracy. We voted ourselves a nation. Our constitution was able to be drafted, revised and planned. It was not the hasty result of a cessation of hostilities but of a nation with the time and freedom to think about its future.

Consequently the Australian Constitution has been amended only eight times.

Once to slightly alter the terms of senators. Twice to clarify the issue of state debt. Once to extend federal control over social services. Once to extend voting rights to territories, once to set a retirement age on federal judges and once to clarify casual vacancies in the senate.

Relatively minor things really.

Oh and once we amended the Constitution to recognise the rights of the Indigenous population.

That this was not in the original document is a stain that the nation will forever have to live with, but it is a recognition that the document was flawed and the nation was called upon to revise it.

Which we did. Resoundingly.

We saw something wrong and we fixed it.

The US Constitution could use some of that introspection right now. Americans in the past recognised that the conditions under which the document was drafted left some glaring holes and these were patched with amendments.

Once to recognise the freedom of speech. The infamous “2nd amendment”. Quite a few about trial by jury, the law and the conditions upon which those laws can be enforced. Truthfully everything from the 4th to the 9th really should have been in the original draft.

But necessary they were.

The Constitution was never intended to be something so deified as to never be scrutinised or updated. But that’s what it has become.

It needs to be looked at again. It needs to be updated.

The Second Amendment is a relic of a bygone era whose time perhaps never even existed in the first place. It is an anachronism at best and at worst a blight which sours America’s perception in the larger world.

The Constitution can be changed. The Constitution should be changed. There’s even a precedent within the Constitution itself. The 21st Amendment exists solely to repeal the 18th.

There’s nothing that says the 28th can’t exist to repeal the 2nd.

The only thing stopping it is this unnatural reverence that the United States has for an amendment drafted in the year 1789. 25 years before the fall of the Holy Roman Empire.

Australia’s last mass shooting was in 1996. Since there was no provision in the Constitution mandating the right to firearms preventative legislation was passed at a government level. There was never even a need for a plebiscite. As such Australia has not had a mass shooting in just under 22 years.

America’s last, before today’s events, was 27 days ago.

Maybe it’s time you were willing to take a look at that Constitution again?

[thedamiansmith]

Why I Truly Hate The Last Jedi

To forestall any conjecture and either sate your curiosity or warn you off entirely I’ll preface this post with a summary up front - Star Wars: The Last Jedi is one of the worst films I have ever seen. And beware for thar be spoilers ahead.

I hate it. I know that’s a strong word and one I’ve used wantonly in the past, but in this case I can’t think of another more accurate. I hate the film. I don’t merely dislike it. I find the very fact that it exists offensive. My life is worse for having seen it.

The film has drawn no small measure of controversy. Fans and critics alike seem polarised, they either love it or hate it, with not a lot of middle ground. Ergo there has been no small measure of discussion on this controversy. It’s this discussion that has driven me to add my own two cents to the melee, because at no point have I seen a post that grasps the problem at hand.

The discussion over why people dislike the film is dominated by a false dichotomy: there are those that didn’t like it because it was too far removed from the films that had come before and there are those that didn’t like it because it was too similar to the Star Wars films of old.

Whilst arguments could be made over why The Last Jedi is similar to the Star Wars of old or why it is far too different (a view I personally hold), this entirely misses the point. Regardless of where it sits in regards to the pantheon of Star Wars, The Last Jedi is, in and of itself, a terrible film.

Independent of the franchise it represents The Last Jedi is a clunky, ham-fisted, under-written and over-directed, unmitigated shit show. At its best it is clumsy and at its worst it is infuriating. If I had to sum it up in a word I’d call it “stupid”. The decisions that director Rian Johnson has made with the film just don’t make any sense.

I don’t say this lightly. I have a powerful suspension of disbelief. I’m willing to forgive most plot holes, I’ll quite creatively retcon even the most glaring oversight and content myself with my in-universe explanation (my favourite film is Pacific Rim after all). The Last Jedi doesn’t allow this. It is a 155 minute bombardment on your ability to disbelieve.

The film starts off strongly. In a bold move it opens with a joke and surprisingly it pays off. Poe Dameron’s prank call of General Hux is genuinely funny. I’ve been a professional comedian for over a decade, I know all the tricks, I can see behind every curtain, I despise most attempts at comedy and that bit made me actually laugh out loud. That is no small achievement.

Dameron then shows off his piloting skills in a daring X-Wing raid on the Fulminatrix in a visually impressive action sequence. At this point the film showed promise. This was flashy and exciting and what I wanted the movie to be. Then it did something unprecedented in a Star Wars film – inertia. Dameron’s X-Wing turns 180 degrees yet preserves its forward momentum until it fires the engines. Actual sound science in a space battle. My excitement at this point was at fever pitch.

And then the stupid starts. And once it starts it never stops. Whilst I was incredibly excited after five minutes, by the ten minute mark I was scratching my head. At twenty minutes I was heart-broken. By 40 minutes into the film I was ready to walk out, the only thing driving me forward was the morbid curiosity of seeing just how much worse it could get. The answer was “a lot”.

I’d like to go into every dumb point in detail, and I have for my own benefit, but the document is currently another 2000 words of dot points and I don’t think anyone has the time to read it (another time perhaps). Suffice it to say that from about five minutes into the film it appears that every character makes the dumbest possible decision they can.

For the sake of brevity I’ll only dive in depth into the two most glaring cases in the film.

First is Luke Skywalker. Everything to do with Luke Skywalker. When we meet Luke it’s at the same point as the close of The Force Awakens, with Rey handing him his father’s lightsaber. After a long moment of silent tension Luke then throws the lightsaber away without a word. All of that buildup for what comedians call a “pullback reveal”. Weak. In case you missed it this is the directorial cue that the audience should be willing to break with the past Star Wars films. Isn’t Rian Johnson subtle?

What follows is an entire act of Luke being an obtuse dickhead for no reasonable purpose. At this point I was still willing to give the film the benefit of the doubt. I’d reasoned that Luke was being purposefully asinine to test the patience of his pupil – as Yoda had once done to him. As the film progressed it became apparent that this level of subtlety was not in play, Luke was just being an ass. What becomes clear is that Rian Johnson has completely abandoned the character of Luke Skywalker and bludgeoned him into an amorphous shadow that he can shoe-horn into his own narrative.

None of Luke’s actions in the film are consistent with the character we’ve come to know. Upon the destruction of his Jedi temple and the deaths of his students he has not come to Ach-To to commune with the Force on some vision quest, he has come to run away from his problems in a way that is completely inverted from the idealistic hero of the original films. The young Jedi who rushed to confront a Sith Lord in order to save his friends is now willing to abandon the entire galaxy to a powerful Dark Jedi because...reasons.

We are then treated to a bit of back story over what happened to Luke’s Jedi academy. When he sensed the growing power of the dark side in his nephew, Ben Solo, he contemplated murdering the boy in his sleep. Luke Skywalker, who walked fearlessly into the Death Star in order to redeem a Sith Lord who had murdered the entire Jedi Order, who had gladly decided to die rather than murder a beaten opponent, this is the same person who would, if only for a moment, consider killing someone in cold blood because they might one day fall to the dark side?

So we’re to believe that in the space of a few decades Luke would abandon every principle he held.

That Luke was willing to kill his own nephew to prevent the rise of a powerful Dark Jedi is one thing, but then when Ben gives himself over to the Dark Side and becomes Kylo Ren, Luke runs away and hides. He was willing to murder his own kin to prevent this from happening, but now that it has he’s not going to do anything about it. Rian Johnson shows here that not only is he abandoning the character of the old Star Wars films, he can’t remain consistent within his own script.

Mix that in with a multitude of scenes of Luke being a grumpy old man, a needlessly rude hermit and, for some unknown reason, graphically milking a space manatee and this entire arc is just offensive.

The clumsy and futile handling of the character of Luke Skywalker is one of the major reasons why The Last Jedi is a terrible movie, but as Yoda once said “there is another”.

Canto Bight.

If you’ve seen the film then you know what I’m talking about, but if you haven’t then I’ll try and paint the scene for you. I say try (I know, I know, “do or do not”) because it’s difficult to get across how jarring and incongruent this sequence is.

The Resistance fleet is on the run. They can’t escape to hyperspace because they will be tracked by the First Order, who will only catch them and destroy them. So they’re flying through space, just out of effective weapons range of the First Order, just staying alive. However the clock is ticking. They’re running out of fuel. They can’t run forever. Why it takes fuel to continue in a straight line in space is never addressed (perhaps the fuel is needed to run the shields? Look I’m throwing you a bone here Rian) nor is the fact that the First Order doesn’t switch from using plasma weaponry which has an effective range to some kind of kinetic weapons which don’t, or just send their fighters ahead. Nor are we treated to a reason why all ships now seem to have the same speed even though every film prior to this shows a mixture of both fast ships and slow.

So Poe Dameron decides to send ex-stormtrooper Finn and random engineer he just met Rose off on a mission to find someone who can get them onto the Supremacy and shut down the hyperspace tracking to let the Resistance escape. Does that sound convoluted? That’s because it is.

So Finn and Rose find themselves on a shuttle travelling to the planet of Canto Bight to find a slicer, instead of using that shuttle and others like it to evacuate the stated 400 Resistance members who need evacuating because of reasons. 

And in an instant we go from the incredibly dark and tense pursuit of the last of the Resistance fleet to...a 1930’s style casino! That’s right, everyone is in their best three piece suit dancing the Charleston as if Finn and Rose have just hyperspace jumped into the Great Gatsby. When are then treated to some tell-don’t-show moralising from Rian Johnson on the nature of greed and war before Finn and Rose indulge in a chase scene through space-Marrakesh on space-camels while being pursued by the space-police before they are rescued by Benecio Del Toro’s character DJ who will of course suddenly but inevitably betray them.

If you thought the pod-racing scene from The Phantom Menace was tedious and pointless then Rian Johnson would like you to hold his beer.

How should this scene have played out instead?

Rose: Finn can you sneak us on board the Supremacy to shut down the tracking system? Finn: Yes, I used to be a stormtrooper, I know a sneaky way in.

Rose: Great, for a second there I thought we’d have to go on a pointlessly wacky side adventure where a drunk leprechaun fills BB-8 with coins.

There, I just shaved 30 minutes off the longest running Star Wars film in history.

Of course the stupidity doesn’t stop there, but it does perhaps peak. The rest of the film from then on isn’t offensive because how dumb it is, but because it is just plain seeks to offend. It is Rian Johnson firmly and proudly raising the middle finger to anyone who is a fan of the franchise.

The previous film, The Force Awakens, raised a number of questions. The film was written and directed by JJ Abrams, a man who is more adept than anyone at creating intriguing mysteries without ever bothering to answer them (the magic numbers from Lost spring to mind). The greatest questions springing from The Force Awakens were “who are Rey’s parents?” and “who is this immensely powerful Dark Jedi, Supreme Leader Snoke?”

In the two years since the release of The Force Awakens the internet has been ablaze with conjecture over these questions. Fans were rabid in their search for answers to these major plot points, enjoying crafting elaborate theories as to where the franchise could take these storylines. Hearkening back to the days of “is Darth Vader really Luke’s father?” or “is Darth Sidious really Senator Palpatine?” this conjecture is at the heart and soul of what it is to be a fan of Star Wars.

This is also something that Rian Johnson blatantly and vehemently resents.

It is one thing to chastise fans for the means by which they choose to enjoy the films, though that is bad enough, but it’s another thing entirely to sabotage the middle film of trilogy to punish those fans for being fans.

The mystery of Rey’s parents is answered with a throwaway line by Kylo Ren that they are junkrat nobodies who sold her. Reasonable enough I suppose, and perhaps even the same direction I would have taken the plot line, though perhaps with a bit more exposition. But I can’t get over the feel that this was never the intended arc for Rey’s character, that this is a backlash for the fan speculation over her parentage.

However if the reveal of Rey’s parents was a subtle rebuke by Rian Johnson for the over-zealousness of the fan base, then the Snoke reveal is Rian dancing around naked, swinging his dick at them while waving a giant sign saying “go fuck yourselves”.

Halfway through the film Supreme Leader Snoke is killed off by his student, Kylo Ren. After some impressive displays of his powers with the Force, after the reveal that it was he who had manipulated Rey AND Kylo Ren with his incredible power, that he had engineered proceedings exactly to his machinations in a way that the Emperor could only dream of, he is abruptly killed. No heroic sacrifice, a la Darth Vader. No impressive fight sequence a la Darth Maul or Darth Tyrannus. No exposition. One minute he’s alive, the greatest threat the galaxy has ever faced, the head of a bigger and badder empire. The next minute he’s dead, never to be spoken of again, as if he never existed in the first place.

Not even the most die-hard new trilogy apologist could argue that this was ever the intended direction for the character. That an entire film and a half would be devoted to this great and powerful evil only for him to be written out with the in-universe equivalent of “Note: Poochie died on the way back to his home planet”.

No, this was a deliberate move by Johnson. This was his objection to the speculation on the character and the nature of Star Wars fans. This was his personal revenge against people actively enjoying the intellectual property instead of passively receiving whatever the film-maker threw at them. He took an important character and story arc and threw them into the fire, writing himself and any future directors into a corner in the process, simply because he wanted to engage in an act of petty revenge and onanism.

And this is the man who has been given the green light to develop his own trilogy.

These are the most glaring examples of idiocy and clumsiness in The Last Jedi. The rest of the film is merely bouncing from one scene to the next with events happening because the plot needs them to happen. The whole venture feels like they went ahead and filmed the first draft. As if at no point a second party has looked at the script and said “why are they doing this? It doesn’t make any sense”.

And even though I’ve gone into such detail on a couple of major issues with the film, that’s probably the main problem with the film. It doesn’t make any sense. None of the decisions made by any of the characters make sense. They all seem to do the dumbest thing possible because that will generate the most drama.

Rian Johnson has obviously read the rule of storytelling that says to create drama you take your characters and challenge them. That you put them in a tree and throw rocks at them, as it were. But he doesn’t know how to do it. He doesn’t know how to make it look natural. So he just clumsily engineers situations where the characters are faced with adversity brought about through their own stupidity or the stupidity of others.

The core of this problem isn’t limited to The Last Jedi. It was present in The Force Awakens and numerous other films as well – the new Hollywood trend of the “writer/director”. Not every writer is a director and not every director is a writer. Some can do both and do it very well – Tarantino for instance is a brilliant slashie. But you can’t skimp on the writers.

The Last Jedi is a brilliant spectacle. It looks amazing. The use of lighting and shot selection to convey story is wonderful at times, if a little heavy handed at others. But the whole film is a delight to look at. It’s just a shame that the story, the core of it, is so very, very poor. It is the result of a director saying “we need to do this and this, go from point A to B to C” without knowing how to accomplish that as a storyteller.

The whole film is an exercise in what could have been. The Force Awakens wasn’t brilliant by any stretch. But it was a lot of fun and it introduced a lot of rich plot lines which begged to be expanded on, deeper mysteries that would have been fun to unravel. Imagine the wonder and excitement we could have had if the next instalment of the story was given to someone who knew  what to do with them instead of an obdurate madman hell bent on his own “artistic vision” and driven by a need for petty revenge. If this had been a solo film, without the rich history and lore that burdens Star Wars, it might have been amazing. The terrible storytelling and massive plot holes might never have occurred if such a stubborn director hadn’t been forced to work within confines of a universe not of his own.

But such wasn’t to be. Unlike Gareth Edwards, who created the utterly brilliant Rogue One in an even more restrictive narrative confine, Rian Johnson proved incapable of budging even an inch and the result is a film that is an utter mess and a waste. It makes one nostalgic for the glory days of The Phantom Menace and Jar-Jar Binks, which was until 14.12.17 the worst thing to ever happen to Star Wars.

I think about how much I hate The Last Jedi and I wonder why. I wonder why this movie hurts me so much more than the prequels did, why the disappointment is so much more gut wrenching. It’s because of what it could have been.

The prequels were George Lucas’ baby. It was his universe, his product and he was going to make it his way. That way might not have been the right way, or even a good way, but it was his. Nobody could fault him for doing what he wanted with his own creation. We all knew the man’s ambition outpaced his ability. His greatest excesses were held in check by his ex-wife, Marcia, and when they divorced there was nobody stopping him from doing dumb things like racist aliens, cannibal teddy bears and a 40 minute love letter to NASCAR racing.

But it was his house and he could paint it whatever ugly colour he wanted to.

This new trilogy was supposed to free us of that. We had an opportunity to build on the world he created and take it in new and exciting directions. We had the opportunity to put it into hands more competent than those of George Lucas, thankful for what he created but more thankful for gracefully stepping back.

Instead Disney decided to go in the other direction. They decided to keep Star Wars in the hands of an intractable autocrat and the result is more of the same. A film more notable for its potential and its failings than for its ability to deliver.

But still while that accounts for my disappointment in the film, and for my crippling depression as a result of it, but it doesn’t account for the hatred. I truly do hate The Last Jedi.

The reason being that these new films have wiped the slate clean. They have rendered null and void all of the former Expanded Universe, what is now known as Legends.

In the wake of Return of the Jedi in 1983 there was a great demand for more of the Star Wars universe. What became of the characters? People demanded to know. What was happening in the rest of the galaxy? What other stories were never told? What else was possible?

Writers and storytellers began to fill the void. Some of them weren’t weren’t great, others were laughably bad, but most of them were incredible. Most of them were incredible stories set in the Star Wars universe.

I grew up on these stories. I read and re-read nearly all of the Expanded Universe books, handed down to me from a benevolent uncle who fostered such imagination.

Timothy Zahn’s cuttingly amazing Thrawn trilogy dared to imagine what became of the Empire after the Battle of Endor. Beaten and broken they faced defeat and retreat until they were revitalised by a new villain – Grand Admiral Thrawn, an alien whose intellect and tactical brilliance was fuelled by an appreciation of art. The Thrawn trilogy proved the be the skeleton from which the new canon trilogy was built, although without the panache of Zahn’s writing, while the character of Thrawn was so iconic, so brilliant, he was adopted into the new canon.

The X-Wing series took a background character but fan favourite, Wedge Antilles, and put him front and center. These novels were rollicking tales of the fighter pilots so iconic of Star Wars, with their laconic wit and dashing bravado, racing from one impossible mission to the next. If you enjoy Poe Dameron in the new films (and who doesn’t?) then imagine an entire series of people just like him. The death of Han Solo in The Force Awakens never really resonated with me but decades later the death of Ton Phanan still gives me chills.

There were so many stories of Luke’s attempts to recreate the Jedi Order. His Praxeum on Yavin IV where he tried to mentor students as young and as brash as he once was, all while wondering if his own brief training was enough to prevent him from creating the next Darth Vader. This Luke was wise and caring, confident yet humble. A true servant of the Force who would never have imagined murdering a student in his sleep but would have done all in his power and more to prevent him ever falling in the first place.

These are the true tales of Star Wars. These are the real continuation of the story. And now all of them have been cast aside, destroyed by the myopic treatment of JJ Abrams, who never wrote a story beyond his first movie, and Rian Johnson who never gave a shit about anything other than his “artistic vision”.

That is why I hate The Last Jedi. Not only is it a terribly written story, it is by its very existence an erasure of all of the good stories that came before it, the ones crafted by competent writers who cared for the subject matter. Not building upon what came before but utterly rejecting it out of spite.

It isn’t a matter of whether The Last Jedi was too far removed from the old Star Wars movies or whether is was too similar to them. That doesn’t matter. All that really mattered was that it was a good story. Which it most certainly wasn’t. It was terrible. And if this film was the audition by which Rian Johnson received his own trilogy then I truly mourn the Star Wars saga, for it is in the most unsafe of hands.

For those wondering, because this is what the reviewers all seem to do, this is my ranking of the Star Wars films:

The Empire Strikes Back

Rogue One

Return of the Jedi

A New Hope

Revenge of the Sith

The Force Awakens

The Phantom Menace

Attack of the Clones

The Last Jedi

[thedamiansmith]

Don Burke, Asperger’s and He Who Soweth The Thunder

Sigh.

So here we are again.

Yet another celebrity accused of rampant sexual predation and the excuse of “the Asperger’s made me do it”.

Don Burke’s claim of recently self-diagnosed Asperger’s Syndrome is dubious at best. Not that I doubt his claim – the man has made a career out of talking passionately and exhaustively about plants and soil compositions, he’s certainly ticking a couple of boxes. It isn’t for me to cast Asperger’s as it were.

No, it’s the timing of this revelation that evinces suspicion. “Recently diagnosed Asperger’s Sydnrome”, as though he had seen the impending storm clouds of controversy and tried to head them off with a trip to Dr Nick Riviera’s Hollywood Upstate Clinic of Excuses.

As if the first step on the mitigating sexual harassment fallout flow-chart is “claim to have high functioning autism and that you don’t know any better”.

But that’s the thing isn’t it? As someone on the spectrum, speaking on behalf of those on the spectrum, we do know better. It seems to be the rest of society that doesn’t.

There’s a constant societal misconception that people with Asperger’s are social buffoons, misreading the cues of interaction and not knowing when they’ve offended someone. Don Burke has seen the hideous caricatures of The Big Bang Theory and The Good Doctor and thought that he had found the perfect excuse for being overly hands on with women.

“Oh I just like touching people’s naughty bits, I didn’t know it was wrong”. Sure Don.

Whilst for most the experience of autism is a subjective one, there are some commonalities where I feel I can express a consensus. Such as touch.

Being touched. Touching others. Feeling skin-to-skin contact with another human being can be difficult. The social obligation of handshakes and hugs are tiring, visits to the hairdresser and the dentist can be nothing short of an agonising hell akin to something by Hieronymus Bosch.

No one, and I mean no one – not even my mother – can touch my neck. Doing so will send me into a meltdown that could take days to recover from. That’s the kind of thing we’re talking about here. Does it make sense? No. Is it completely arbitrary? Absolutely. Does it sound like something that would specifically predicate you towards inappropriate sexual behaviour? I don’t think so.

In fact rather than giving me sexual superpowers my autism has made sex and sexuality quite difficult. I am 33 years old, I work in show business and even had a brief stint as a model, and although I can recite Pi to a hundred places, I can count the number of sexual partners I’ve had on one hand.

I’ve not once initiated a relationship. I’ve never even asked anyone out. Having Asperger’s means that you’re never quite sure of the rules of social interaction. You never know if you’re crossing a line or accidentally offending someone. So you tend to withdraw. You don’t dance across that line with abandon, you’re exceptionally careful. Rather than blithely barrel through life offending people without fear of consequence, you instead exercise great care and play it safe. You try and be polite, non-confrontational and boring.

Like how an alcoholic won’t have a single drink, I won’t make a flirtatious comment. Because I’m not sure where the line is.

I’m good with numbers, but I can’t count the times I’ve missed out on a chance with an exceptional woman because I was too frightened to make a move. Because I didn’t read the signals she was sending me, or wasn’t certain enough to risk acting on them.

I’m not complaining. The women I have been with have been amazing people. They are the ones who have noted the issues I have due to Asperger’s and realised that they would need to be extra overt in their courtship. That they would need to make the first move, that they couldn’t be subtle about it. I will be eternally grateful to them for that.

Even the act of sex itself, when it does happen, is a trial. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy it immensely. But for the entire time you can’t immerse yourself fully into the experience. There’s a constant nagging voice in the back of your head critiquing your performance. Is she enjoying it? Is she comfortable? Are you doing it right? You’re not doing it right. Maybe you should be more vocal. No, be less vocal. Maybe you should make more noise? No that’s weird, don’t do that. Should I have my eyes open? No that’s creepy. Closed then? No, she’ll think I don’t find her attractive. I’ll just look at the wall. She just closed her eyes – that’s bad right? It’s bad. You’re bad. You’re doing it wrong. She’s not enjoying herself. Maybe you should just stop. Wait she said don’t stop. Does that mean keep going? Or is she just saying that to make you feel better?

If we have a reputation for lasting longer in bed, there’s your reason.

That’s a brief insight into what it’s like living with Asperger’s. Into how we view relationships, sex and personal space. I ask you, does this sound like Don Burke?

Are we the kind of people that would, to quote a world leader, “grab ‘em by the pussy”?

Is Don Burke autistic? That’s not for me to say. Is he a sex offender? That’s also not for me to judge, though the outlook isn’t great.

Is autism an excuse for sexual harassment?  Absolutely not. Don Burke can no more claim that as a reason for his actions any more than the Beatles can be blamed for the actions of Charles Manson.

His comments were ignorant and grossly offensive. They reveal a man perpetuating a negative stereotype in a desperate attempt to salvage his dignity.

In my 33 years I have never, not once, sexually harassed a woman. Or a man. Or anyone of any gender they choose to identify with. Since the Don Burke story broke I’ve been inundated with aspies sharing similar stories and the same outrage. Perhaps that is the true superpower of Asperger’s Syndrome – being immune to the compulsion towards sexual predation that seems to be have reached epidemic proportions.

Or maybe after having worked with manure for so many years, Don Burke is full of it.

[thedamiansmith]

Deus Vult

This season’s Game of Thrones is proving to be an object lesson in storytelling. Good writers, especially fantasy writers, know that you can have a deus ex machina - as long as you earn it. It needs to be foreshadowed properly, and it can’t violate the rules of your universe, but you can have one.

The Game of Thrones (not A Song of Ice and Fire) writers don’t seem to be aware of this rule and are copping the appropriate amount of criticism for it.

Contrast the latest episode of Game of Thrones with Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.

In The Two Towers there is the climactic scene near the end of the movie where the heroes are facing certain death. They’ve fought bravely through the night against overwhelming odds, but now they’ve been forced to retreat to the Hornburg. The Uruk-hai are battering at the gates and it’s only a matter of time before they breach. So Aragorn and Gimli convince the remaining forces to rally and ride out in one last charge, for death and glory.

As they ride into certain doom, dawn breaks and with it they see, on the hill and basked in the light of the rising sun, Gandalf and the Rohirrim. These riders then charge into the suddenly panicked mass of Uruks and the day is won.

A deus ex machina, yes, but does it feel like one? No. Because Tolkien/Jackson (I believe Jackson’s version is better) earned it. They set it up right and it didn’t violate the laws of the universe. Here’s why:

Along the way to Edoras the Fellowship encounter Eomer and the Rohirrim. This sets a limit of geography - the riders simply can’t be too far away.

Then after the evacuation of Edoras and before the battle of Helm’s Deep, Gandalf states that he’s going to find Eomer. This foreshadows his return. He doesn’t seem to appear out of nowhere, we know where he’s gone and that he plans to come back with reinforcements.

Gandalf also makes a point of mentioning that he rides Shadowfax, the king of horses. This adequately explains why he is able to catch up to a mounted force and bring them back in time.

Finally Gandalf states to Aragorn ‘look to my coming at first light on the fifth day. At dawn, look to the east’ then, lo, at dawn on the fifth day Gandalf arrives with the first light from the east. Just as the Big G foretold.

All of it was established so all of it feels right.

Compare this to the latest episode of Game of Thrones.

Technically it was exactly the same thing that happened. The heroes are cornered by a savage, mindless horde, bent on their destruction. They face certain doom and yet still, like heroes, they bravely fight on, determined to go down swinging.

Then all of a sudden Daenerys and her dragons appear. And just in time too - what good fortune it is that they showed up when they did, just after the minor characters died but just before anyone with pre-show credits faced the blade.

What remarkable timing!

There’s a reason it feels cheap - because it wasn’t set up properly. It violates the laws of the universe. It’s fine to have magic and fantasy, but it needs to be consistent with itself.

It was clumsy. The heroes recognise their predicament and send for help. Gendry goes running back to the Wall. Then Davos sends a raven messenger asking for help. That raven then flies halfway across the continent to Dragonstone. Daenerys jumps on her dragons and then shoots off back to the Wall and makes it just in time for supper.

Even all of this would be somewhat plausible if the preceding 6 seasons of the show hadn’t made a point of telling you how bloody long it takes to get anywhere. Jon spends months going north of the wall and months getting back. Bran took years to get to the Three Eyed Raven. Gendry spent years rowing a boat from Dragonstone to King’s Landing, long enough for it to become a meme.

It violates its own rules.

This season is all about cool for the sake of cool. Events are happening for narrative purposes and the canon is being shoehorned to make it fit. Dany can travel to the Wall in minutes because it makes for a cool entrance. Euron can ambush a fleet out of nowhere because the script says that has to happen. Highgarden and Casterly Rock and Dragonstone all seem to exist in some sort of superposition where they’re on different sides of Westeros yet also within an afternoon stroll of each other.

And so it all feels tacky.

Sure it’s dramatic. It’s cool. It’s a lot of fun to watch. But to call a spade a spade, it’s lazy storytelling.

As Grandpa Tolkien showed, you can have your deus ex machina if you lay the pieces down early. If you earn it. Gandalf tells you what is going to happen and how he’s going to make it happen. And it works.

Robert Jordan at Dumai’s Wells had a similar deus ex machina rescue which he set up by having specific character traits that led to that point, as well as an army of wizards with magic powers who were trained in previous books to provide that exact, specific rescue.

Terry Pratchett, in his beautifully unique way, introduced the concept of ‘narrativium’ to the Discworld - a magical force that manifested whenever a specific plot point needed to be advanced.

That’s what good storytelling is. That’s where David Benioff and D.B Weiss failed. They’re a product of television, not literature. They deal in flashy visuals and big explosions, they don’t concern themselves with such literary nonsense as narrative cohesion.

That being said, I liked it. Dramatic last stands. Dragons breathing fire. Heroic last stands. Dead men with flaming flails. That’s some majorly cool shit.

But I’m also a writer. And when you’re a writer, at some point along the way, you lose the ability to enjoy stories. All you see is the code. And when you see poorly written code you can’t help but stay up until the small hours of the morning writing a blog about it.

[thedamiansmith]

We gotta see the Penguin: Origin 3 player ratings

QLD  1. Billy Slater – is simply all that and a bag of crisps. Brilliant. Hopefully Darius Boyd was sitting at home, scribbling notes about how to be a good fullback.

2. Valentine Holmes – 3 great finishes for tries. Still looks more nervous under the bomb than Dresden circa 1945. It took NSW 210 minutes of football to figure this out. Laurie Daley – supercoach.

3. Will Chambers – obviously in the team as some attempt to keep the game fair. Constantly got in the way. In the way of NSW, in the way of his team-mates, in his own way...

4. Michael Morgan – remember Harvey Keitel’s character in Pulp Fiction? The Wolf? That’s Morgan.

5. Dane Gagai – my pick for player of the series going into the game, the judges agreed. Who signed him again? Oh that’s right.

6. Cameron Munster – there were some question marks over whether Munster was going to be up to the job. These people are not familiar with Craig Bellamy’s Jurassic Park style cloning facility where he spliced Billy Slater’s DNA with that of some kind of football playing frog. Queensland uh uh uh finds a way.

7. Cooper Cronk – dropped the ball when about to score a certain try, so there’s that. Also put in one of the greatest attacking kicks in the history of attacking kicks. So there’s that.

8. Dylan Napa – did his job I guess? He plays for the damn Roosters, what do you want from me? Still looks like Jake Busey.

9. Cameron Smith – nothing needs to be said.

10. Jarrod Wallace – it’s always special when a prop scores a try, especially because it’s nearly universally some sort of cosmic accident when it happens. Started grinning like Hodor when he saw the tryline wide open. Good for him.

11. Gavin Cooper – there’s probably some joke I can make about barrel making but it’s late.

12. Matt Gillett – punishing in defence and attack. The best a man can get indeed.

13. Josh McGuire – There’s a lot of Dishhead Dowling in McGuire and that’s either a backhanded compliment or a cloaked insult. I can’t tell which. Runs hard, tackles hard, gets himself hurt, a bit Martin Lang as well.

14. Ben Hunt – was wisely kept off the field until the game was wrapped up.  A very shrewd move by coach Walters, we know what this guy is capable of in crunch moments.

15. Josh Papalii – like The Rock if The Rock ate another The Rock.

16. Coen Hess - ‘Rudolf’ as I’ve come to call him is just as brutal and efficient as his namesake. Too far?

17. Tim Glasby – when he got the ball on the half volley and started trundling for the try line we were all thinking it: is this the next Danny Nutley? Unfortunately Glasby doesn’t have the Nuts turn of pace. Ask me some time about the time Danny Nutley was the second leg in a double at the SFS…

NSW

1. James Tedesco – you know that ad that he’s in where he sets off the museum alarm system and then sizes up the security before the screen cuts to black? The end of that is that he trips in the first three seconds and then spends the next 45 minutes being beaten in a back room with a phone book before being sold off to work in the engine room of a Yakuza operated black ops whaling vessel...this analogy has gone too far but you see what I’m getting at. The guy’s a muppet.

2. Brett Morris – I never, ever thought I would see the day when Brett Morris was far and away the best player on a NSW team. Next thing you know Donald Trump will be President.

3. Josh Dugan – I’ve been hard on Duges for a long time, but that’s only because I want to see him develop. After my criticism of his last game he did in fact learn how to pass. Only it was forward and to a Queenslander, but baby steps. Shine on you crazy diamond.

4. Jarryd Hayne – remember in 2009 when Hayne was the best player in the comp? Let’s all remember him for the player he was and not the abomination he has become. The Michael McIntyre of rugby league.

5. Blake Ferguson – when Valentine Holmes went over the top of Fergo for his third try you could see Blake gesturing to his team as if to say ‘it’s not my fault – I didn’t pick me’.  Daley should have trusted his judgement.

6. James Maloney – how this jackboot dilettante won two premierships is beyond me and has forever tarnished my enjoyment of rugby league both as a sport and a concept. The best microcosm of his career was late in the game when the Blues were trailing but still in the game and Jimmy put in a pinpoint kick – to Alfie Langer.

7. Mitchell Pearce – Pearce again astounds me with his incredibly accurate kicking game. It was somewhere near the 30th minute before he missed a Queensland back and accidentally found the turf. Otherwise he was like the Legolas of picking out the QLD backline.

8. Aaron Woods – like Styx or Warrant or any other 80’s hair metal band – a crushing lack of talent and ability disguised by a flowing coiffure.

9. Nathan Peats – let’s remember that time when his father, Geordi Peats, played in Canterbury’s 1993 Minor Premiership team…

10. Andrew Fifita – more like Andrew FiFATa. Yeah that’s what I’m going with. A real flat track bully, looks great when things are going his way, a useless thug when they’re not. Won’t turn a game that you’re losing, just helps you win more. Ran for more than 800m, which is something, however only 12 of them were forward.

11. Boyd Cordner – seeing this man in a Blue jumper is inspirational. I mean if he can become captain of the NSW Origin team then I might just have a chance as well. Crippling ankle injury and all.

12. Josh Jackson – to quote Andre 3000 ‘Sorry Josh Jackson. I am for real. Never s’posed to make the Blues side, you’re the one who’s getting penalised’

13. Tyson Frizell – More like Tyson Fizzle. Amirite?

14. David Klemmer – If the players in this Origin series were the cast of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark then David Klemmer is the bag of sand used to weigh down the trap. A heavy, amorphous mound that is ultimately unable to perform the one simple task it was given.

15. Wade Graham – kinda like Joe Pesci in Casino, well meaning but his volatile temper makes life worse for everyone.

16. Jake Trbojevic – He still goes alright. Could possibly trade some of his consonants for some of Josh Papalii’s vowels.

17. Jack Bird – the year is 2008 and thanks to Family Guy season 7, episode 2 ‘I Dream of Jesus, everyone is talking about how the bird is the word. Well it’s 2017 and the Bird is definitely no longer the word.

[thedamiansmith]

The Curious Incident Of The Bigot In The Senate

I’ve been reluctant to comment on Pauline Hanson’s noisome remarks regarding autism and schooling. Like wildfire her vacuous bigotry requires oxygen and I am loath give her the attention she so desperately desires.

However there are times when one must stare into the abyss.

I have what was once known as Asperger’s Syndrome, now coalesced into the all-encompassing autism spectrum.

I’m one of what Hanson calls ‘those people’.

I’ve built my career around being on the spectrum, on destigmatising a condition that doesn’t render you inferior - just different. I’ve tried to make myself an example of achievement, that being on the spectrum doesn’t limit you and can in fact empower you, that you can be ‘normal’ if you want to be but more importantly that there’s no need to be normal at all.

And in this capacity it is incumbent on me to retort.

I also went to a public school. One with something of a reputation. A school that stands to gain a lot from the Gonski program.

School was a brutal experience. Aside from the regulation systemic bullying there were the problems stemming from lack of funding. Our classes would regularly contain over thirty students, sometimes two to a desk.  Half of our classrooms were temporary demountables, lacking heating in the winter and pushing 35 degrees in the summer.

Hardly ideal conditions for learning in the formative years of your life.

In this post-apocalyptic hellscape of a high school were students held back? Were students denied the attention because of the disruption of their peers? Of course they were.

Were the students causing these disruptions the ones with special needs? Absolutely not.

In my experience it wasn’t the special needs students who were the problem at all.

The problem was the idiots.

The racists, the xenophobes and homophobes, the kids who were terrified of anything different, who translated that terror into anger and violence.

Does this sound familiar Senator Hanson?

The disruptions in maths class did not stem from an autistic tantrum. A child with autism can find comfort in numbers, in the honesty of mathematics. He doesn’t yell and throw paper demanding to know when he’ll need to use algebra in ‘real life’ (hint: it’s always). That was left to the so called ‘normal kids’.

No class was ever cancelled because of an autistic child not grasping the fall of the Wiemar Republic, however there were classes cancelled because a group of boorish thugs stole a muslim student’s taqiyah and passed it around while chanting ‘we grew here, you flew here’ (the student in question was born in Randwick).

No science class was held back for an autistic student needing to ‘feel good about himself’ but a biology lesson resulted in a class wide detention when a student was pelted with sheep hearts because his peers suspected he might be gay (he wasn’t, he just participated in Rock Eisteddfod).

So from my admittedly anecdotal experience is it the special needs students who are holding the rest back? No. It’s the ones who were weaned on ignorance and hate who were the problem. The ones who’s parents praised One Nation during its first inception, before Pauline Hanson’s myopic monomania had resolved into a weathervane for things she’d read on Breitbart.com that morning and leaned more towards a general hatred for the greater humanity.

But now, more than ever, there is a pressing need for those with special needs to actually feel...special. Because when they look at Pauline Hanson they see a bully winning. They see that the student who doesn’t get the point of the lesson and vindictively disrupts the rest of the class can grow up and become a senator.

I’ve never held back anyone’s education. I value knowledge and learning above all, I encourage it in everyone. But our students are being held back by those that don’t prize learning, those that see education as a chore and a prison sentence and lash out at anyone seen to be enjoying the experience.

Those like Pauline Hanson.

So take it from me Senator Hanson. Autistic kids aren’t a detriment to the standards of education in this country. I should know, I lived it. But if I ever need an opinion on dropping out of school at 15 because of unprotected sex you’ll be the first person I call.  

[thedamiansmith]

They Broke My Watch

I haven’t done one of these in a while, so here we go for another round of “why I hate the NSW Blues”. Here’s my player ratings from Origin II:

NSW 1. James Tedesco - injected some spark but was substituted early for the more reliable Ron Palmer and failed to make an impact on returning 2. Blake Ferguson - one half of the left edge "Booze Brothers", touched the ball less times than there are bottles in a pack of Bacardi Breezers 3. Josh Dugan - some solid attack and defence, his game is progressing nicely. Will be devastating if he ever figures out how to pass the ball 4. Jarryd Hayne - the man, the myth, the legend. The most influential player on the park. Scored a try and thought he was superman, then apparently went home. Butchered a try by not passing to Brett Morris, butchered a second try by passing to Josh Morris in seat 32A. Had a hand in everything, usually to drop the ball or let in a try. Hayne Plane? More like the MH370. I never thought there'd be a more overrated player than Willie Mason, Jarryd, take a bow.   5. Brett Morris - Yeah he goes alright. Extra points for playing outside a rank imbecile.   6. James Maloney - some deft touches interspersed with some astonishing stupidity. As effective in defence as the honesty system. Blues should have been docked 2 points for his stupid beard. 7. Mitchell Pearce - hands down the most accurate kicker in the competition. Can find the opposing fullback with the accuracy of a tomahawk cruise missile. Still not half the halfback his father was.   8. Aaron Woods - Looks like Khal Drogo, plays like Joffre Baratheon 9. Nathan Peats - was brought in to provide a more dynamic running game out of dummy half and who knows, maybe we'll get to see it one day.   10. Andrew Fifita - man of the match in game one, so naturally he had to have a break this time around. Looked lost without some criminal element written on his wrist band to inspire him.   11. Josh Jackson - a good, solid toiler. I'll spare him the insults everyone else is rightfully copping.   12. Boyd Cordner (c) - I was genuinely surprised he was named as captain. And surprised that he was in the side. And that he is a professional footballer. The rugby league equivalent of a christmas present from a relative you rarely see - well meaning but ultimately a useless dust collector. 13. Tyson Frizell - See Josh Jackson 14. David Klemmer - Harambe or King Kong. A big, dumb animal that doesn't know how he got where he is and doesn't know that what he's doing is wrong. 15. Wade Graham -  I presume his selection was some kind of Faustian deal with the Devil, where he makes the team but everything he does falls apart. This is the most reasonable theory. 16. Jake Trbojevic - showed some exceptional work with an outside in pass that caught the opposition napping, presumably because Queensland were trying to read the name on his jumper.   17. Jack Bird - I honestly cannot recall him playing. The stats have him for 19 minutes and 3 runs, but I'm sure that's well within the margin for error.

QLD 1. Billy Slater - I never saw Clive Churchill play, but Slater is the best I have ever seen.  2. Val Holmes - Brilliant finish for the first try. Then the 'Flanno' polish kicked in and he dropped more pill than Michael J Fox at a pharmacy  3. Will Chambers - Never in position and saw the sideline more as a suggestion than an actual limitation. Did his side the favour of wiping himself out, allowing a more competent centre to carry Queensland to victory.   4. Darius Boyd - Played a strong game at center while taking notes from Billy Slater about how an actual fullback plays the game.   5. Dane Gagai - targeted heavily by NSW, weathered everything they sent at him and scored two tries. My man of the match. Here Laurie Daley demonstrated his tactical genius by targeting the competent winger instead of the idiot on the other edge.   6. Johnathan Thurston - the best player in the game. Played with one arm behind his back just to make it fair.  7. Cooper Cronk - the third best player in the game.   8. Dylan Napa - Queensland have adopted the NSW strategy of 'pick an imbecile from the Roosters' with the same result. Overall poor game. Only plus side is he looks a lot like Jake Busey and he was good in Starship Troopers and The Frighteners.  9. Cameron Smith (c) - second best player in the game. 10. Jarrod Wallace - Played a strong game in the style of Martin Lang - "if you can remember anything about the game afterwards, you didn't play hard enough" 11. Gavin Cooper - a strong, solid second rower. I bet NSW wish they had one of those.   12. Matt Gillett - see above  13. Josh McGuire - after Gagai the best player on the park. Tackled everything that moved and some things that didn't.  14. Michael Morgan - a true match winner. If I had to criticise him I'd say he looks a bit like Sean Spicer.   15. Coen Hess - Didn't really see much of him but when I did I noticed he looked like a young Dolph Lundgren, circa Universal Soldiers. Thumbs up.   16. Tim Glasby - Some players are just made for Origin. Tim Glasby isn't one of them.   17. Josh Papalii - Looked out of breath when he ran on to the field for the first time, like Axl Rose running to the mic in Winnipeg in 2010 and being unable to get through the opening bars of Welcome to the Jungle. Like Chinese Democracy, too little, too late.  

[thedamiansmith]

Out of Left Field

Trickle-down economics used to be known by another name, in a time before the ‘mad men’ of laissez-faire capitalism branded it the must have accessory of a first world country. It used to be known as ‘Horse and Sparrow’ economics. The reasoning being that if you fed a horse enough oats then eventually, by sheer weight of averages, its dung would contain enough undigested oats for a passing sparrow to feed on.

It’s a shame this analogy has been lost to the greater public lexicon for it so aptly describes the state of the world and the growing rise against it. The mega-rich taking a huge, steaming turd on society in general, leaving us proles to sift through it to find enough sustenance to live on.

How long did they think this would last? How long before these disempowered fecal sifters took stock of their lot, stood and dusted themselves off and said “enough”?

How long were they to dangle a shiny penny in front of our faces and beguile us with faustian promises? If you keep your head down and don’t ask questions then we’ll let you believe that one day you can be like us. We’ll allow you to dream that you’ll be given a seat at the table and all it will cost is your dignity. And as we trade it all away we’ll tell you it’s for your own good, you could never be trusted with it in the first place. Give it all to us, we’ll take care of it, we’re smarter than you, it’s safer in our hands.

How long did they think this was going to fly?

And so the navel gazing of the fourth estate in the wake of the British election is baffling. The predicted Tory tsunami never appeared, the great lurch into fascism faltered and the pundits wonder why. They see the success of Jeremy Corbyn and they frown and poke at the tea leaves in their cup and wonder how their precognition failed them. Why did Labour do so well? Why was Corbyn so successful? Why is it that a message of hope and equality, of a better world for all - not just certain lobby groups - why did this captivate the public so?

And there’s the rub. The concept of equality, of fairness, of the belief in the basic decency and dignity of humanity, is so foreign to them that they can’t even comprehend it. The very notion that there is enough to go around for everyone and that everyone equally deserves a certain quality of life is such anathema to them that they literally cannot process the thought of it. Because it is so antithetical to the narrative that they are trying to present to keep everyone in line. The so-called ‘just world’ fallacy where the rich are rich because of some divine right and the poor are poor because of gross personal failings and everyone gets what they deserve.

We as a society are, slowly but with great momentum, starting to see through this lie. This is not a just world. We are not apportioned lots in life, arrayed like chess pieces and bound by some arcane rules. It’s an old aphorism that at the end of the game the king and pawn go back in the same box, but somewhere along the lines we remembered that the king and the pawn also come OUT of the same box too.

For all of this narrative what has the far right delivered us? Has the privatisation of a public service ever benefited the public? Does deregulation result in a better service for the consumer or does it benefit the provider? Have the liberties we’ve abandoned in the name of security kept us any safer?

Have we as a people had our fill of oats? Or are we starting to see it for what it is - a pile of horse shit?

[thedamiansmith]

Royal Flush

Was there ever a better example of the necessity of an Australian republic than yesterday’s farce with the Governor-General?

No I’m not talking about how he railroaded the Australian democratic process at the behest of the Prime Minister to recall parliament to vote on Turnbull’s doomed Schutzstaffel  ABCC bill - farcically declaring it essential to the health of the Australian economy in the same way that the horn is essential to the health of the car. They both do nothing more than provide a distracting noise. 

No, I’m talking about the other thing. He didn’t shake Tanya Plibersek’s hand.

The Cosgrove apologists have leapt to his defense like good little myrmidons, parroting that there is no protocol dictating that the Governor General should shake the hand of the Deputy Leader of the Opposition, case closed, the defense rests. 

However they fail to point out that the inverse is also true. There is no protocol that the Principle Knight of the Order should NOT shake the hand of...well anyone with their hand extended. There was nothing compelling him to shake Mrs Plibersek’s hand, certainly, but there was nothing forcing him not to. And he took the low road. 

There is no formal protocol dictating that one should hold the elevator for someone running for it, or that one should vacate a seat on the bus for someone more in need. You do it because you’re not a dick.

But in being such a dick Sir Peter Cosgrove has, however unintentionally, perfectly discharged the duties of his office. He was representative of the monarchy in their absence - haughty, disdainful, out of touch and out of place.

An anachronism best left in a past we’d rather forget.  

Our head of state is not an Australian. It is not the Governor General. It is the Queen of Australia (who, incidentally, also happens to be the Queen of England). Ergo the person ultimately in charge of our nation, with the ability to bypass the democratic process and dissolve both houses of parliament, is the Queen. 

The Queen, a person whose only function in life is to suckle at the public teat, a constant drain of significant resources for no tangible benefit. A PT Barnum side show of wasteful decadence for the public to gawk at, like a thousand year long episode of MTV Cribs, except the only difference is if Lil Wayne has the power to veto a constitutional democracy. 

The royals are nothing more than a legislative rubber stamp that provides column inches for tabloid magazines and smashes bottles of champagne on cruise ships while predating on pretty young women to churn out their next generation. The uterus formerly known as Kate Middleton was once a woman of hopes and aspirations, now rendered nothing more than a gestation pod for royal parasites, like John Hurt in Alien.  

You wouldn’t want Bec Hewitt nee Cartwright to be the Australian head of state, yet there’s functionally no difference between her and the present royal family. 

Which is exactly why Australia needs to be a republic. This shambling relic of a bygone era should be entombed alongside every other cringe-worthy aspect of our past that we should be embarrassed about, like the White Australia policy or Peter André. None of them have a place in a modern, progressive society. 

And to Peter Cosgrove, my thanks. Your petty, schoolyard psyche of Tanya Plibersek may yet prove to be the greatest boon to the republican movement since Magna Carta

[thedamiansmith]

Tabletop Blaming

(This post is a direct reference to this article, which I suggest you read now, and the accompanying video, which I demand you watch now. The video is spectacular, you can’t write better comedy than this.)

When Emperor Palpatine was thrown into the core of the Death Star Tony Abbott was ousted as Prime Minister, members of parliament, like most of us in our living rooms, took to dancing on tables in spontaneous celebration, like the final scene of the rejigged Return of the Jedi.

Well it’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt, in this case Assistant Infrastructure Minister Jamie Briggs who emerged the next day in a wheelchair like Dr Strangelove, and somewhere among the hootin’ and a hollerin’ a marble table from the Prime Ministerial Suite was smashed.

Aren’t you glad the adults are back in charge?

So someone else’s property (in this case the Commonwealth’s) was broken. What would be the appropriate next step for the Liberals to take? It’s the same for everyone, from a “six and out” backyard cricket slog through a neighbours window to an accidental fender bender in a crowded parking lot, the process is the same: admit fault, apologise and offer to pay the damages. That would be the adult thing to do.

Except we’re dealing with the Liberals here and there’s nothing adult about them. Instead of an offhand mea culpa and an insignificant cheque from a Cayman Islands holding account, they instead implemented “The Formula”

“The Formula” is their answer to everything, no matter the scale or significance. From trashing a AAA economy to breaking a piece of office furniture in a post coup d’etat kegger, the process is always the same:

1: Do something stupid and destructive

In this case it was needlessly destroy a marble table. Previous examples have included defunding the SBS and ABC, attacking Medicare and fibre to the node.

2: Deny it

“The table was damaged” Senator Bernadi “Well if the marble was in bits, I’d say it was smashed” Senator Wong “Damaged” Senator Bernadi “I’d hate to speculate unnecessarily, so let’s just refer to it as a damaged table” “Well I might refer to it as smashed, but that’s fine...because I think you can only really smash marble” Senator Wong “You could chip it” Senator Bernadi “You could chip it”

(In response to Senator Wong’s claims that the table was “smashed”) “We haven’t established that, what we've established is that an item of furniture has been damaged”

3: Try to mitigate it with semantics and look like you’re conceding while actually stubbornly holding your ground

“I just hate any inflammatory rhetoric to work it’s way into this committee today” Senator Bernadi (yes, THAT Senator Bernadi)

“It’s damaged...well they could be chips...large chips” Senator Bernadi “When does a chip become a chunk? That’s what I want to know” Senator Wong “Semantics we can argue, we can have a Senate Inquiry into that” Senator Bernadi “Let’s just go with damaged”

4: Blame the victim

“Was there any evidence of a natural weakness in the stone?” Senator Bernadi

“(There was) clearly a structural weakness...” Senator Bernadi

5: Spuriously claim expertise in the field being debated

“I studied geology...” Senator Bernadi  “...in year 12 and I can tell you it’s a structural weakness” 

(I find that hard to believe considering one of the first topics one studies in geology is how rocks are more than 6000 years old)

6: Blame the whistleblower for leaking it in the first place

“The hearing boiled over when Senate President Stephen Parry suggested that cleaners had broken a "duty of confidentiality" by reporting what they saw in ministerial offices.

Senator Wong replied: "So it's the cleaner's fault for telling people that ministers have been souveniring bits of marble? Are you going to go after the cleaners?"

"Are you seriously telling the committee, Mr President, that your primary concern is the cleaner's conduct in this?"

Parry: "No, I'm not saying that Senator Wong. What I'm saying is how can we rely on evidence, anecdotal evidence when it would be the duty of cleaners not to report matters that they sight on ministers' desks."

Wong: "I will place on record that I think it is an extraordinary thing that a presiding officer is concerned about what the cleaners have done here and not about the fact that Commonwealth property has been treated in this way."

7: When all else fails, try and pin it on Labor

“I’m sure there was a hair crack previously” Senator Parry “There’s also chips and cracks in the side of it” Senator Wong “That would be long standing damage, perhaps from the previous occupant (Rudd/Gillard)” Senator Bernadi

So there it is, “The Formula” applied to full effect in the Upper House. No matter the issue, small or large, the process is always the same, applied with tired predictability and fatuous inanity.

So why focus on damage to a marble table? It’s petty and ridiculous. Well so is the Liberal Party. Their response to this issue is the same as their response to any other. The only variables that change are the size and the ramifications. The insouciance and contempt remain the same. Australia, we are all the table.

[thedamiansmith]

I come here not to mourn Abbott, but to bury him

(Ahh the difference between my last post and this!)

Tony Abbott is no longer Prime Minister of Australia. Let that fact sink in. Tony Abbott is no longer Prime Minister of Australia.

This sentence carries with it the same sense of solace as “the cancer is in remission”. Jubilant news to be sure, and a relief, but not without the knowledge that for a time there was a lethal, malignant tumour growing inside you.

We should not shy away from this. Tony Abbott’s stewardship of this country was a cancer. His, for want of a better term, “leadership” was a fetid cyst on this nation and like a cancer he had to be excised with a blade. Only time will tell if we will make a full recovery. I fear the damage may have been too great.

The circumstances of Abbott’s political demise were so deliciously karmic it bordered on the orgasmic. The man that clawed his way to the leadership by a single vote over Malcolm Turnbull, who cried that the “Labor circus” of instability during the Rudd/Gillard wars was over and “the adults are in charge” was knifed by the very man whose corpse he stepped over (2nd rule - Double Tap). The irony is so rich and thick you can spread it on toast.

And yet, in the few days since the coup, the apologists have crawled from the gutters to soften the memory of the worst Prime Minister in Australian history. First Turnbull, in his victory speech, then amazingly Bill Shorten who as leader of the opposition should have had his freude very schaden. Since then has been the typical menagerie of mainstream media telling us that Tony Abbott “wasn’t that bad”.

He was. He was that bad.

Let us never, ever shy away from that fact. Tony Abbott is a petty, vindictive, deceitful, despicable and craven little beast who was, categorically, the worst politician this nation - perhaps any nation - has ever seen. A bellicose imbecile who thought every problem could be solved by punching it.

A junkyard mongrel that had to be put down.

Abbott swept to power on a bevy of promises he had no intention of keeping. At the time of his political demise had had racked up 42 broken election promises. He pledged prudent and responsible economic management, yet delivered the rare double of producing some of the most crippling austerity measures the country has ever seen while, amazingly, tripling the debt. He took the previous government’s sound economic platform and ran it so far into the dirt it began to hit magma. He pledged that “the adults were in charge” and it was the time of “stable government” and produced only childish name calling, three word slogans and internecine bickering.

In fact Abbott only really delivered on two fronts. He scrapped the carbon tax and, debatably, stopped the boats. His only real accomplishments in the office of Prime Minister were the accelerated destruction of the environment and an exponential increase in human suffering. What a guy.

In his almost-term as Prime Minister he went from lunatic attack dog to downright scary jack booted fascist. He moved quickly to clamp down on any dissenting opinion, either from errant broadcasters who weren’t sponsored by his corporate overlords or the blithe dismissal of social media as “digital graffiti”. If you did not tow the party line you were an enemy of the state.

A man who presided over offshore concentration camps for people who don’t look like us.

A man who, until he was torn down by overwhelming public protest, thought it would be a good idea to have his own private militia acting as a gestapo in Melbourne, checking people’s papers on the off chance they might be brown or gay or Labor.

A man who declared war on a foreign nation, who in one of his final acts as Prime Minister declared an air-war bombing campaign on foreign soil, solely because it would benefit him politically.

But above all else, and chief among his sins, Tony Abbott is just a bloody idiot. Downright stupid. And we let him run the country for a time.

I won’t go over it again here. I can’t. His idiocy knows no bounds and it is well documented and often repeated and I...I just can’t endure it one more time. For all of Malcolm Turnbull’s faults - and they are legion - it was refreshing seeing him give his first press conference as Prime Minister. Because not once did he stutter. Not once did he struggle for something to say. Not once did he mispronounce a word or use the wrong terminology or mix a metaphor. He didn’t repeat himself. He didn’t repeat himself. I say again, he didn’t repeat himself. Abbott used the term “death cult” 346 times in his tenure as PM, I couldn’t bear a 347th.

But if there is one thing I can credit Tony Abbott with, and it is only one small thing, it is that he brought people together. People from all over this country, from all over this world, from all walks of life, were bound together by their hatred of Tony Abbott. It is so common, so rife, that is has replaced the weather as a safe topic of conversation with a stranger. “Hi” you might say to a stranger “isn’t that Tony Abbott a dickhead?” and be almost guaranteed a decent level of reciprocity.

I know hate is a strong word. I try not to use it. But I can’t think of a term better suited to my feelings for Tony Abbott. I hate the man. I hate who he is, I hate what he stands for, I hate what he has done and I hate that he ever existed. The fact that he has been ousted as Prime Minister means that, somewhere in this universe, is the smallest, most microscopic fraction of justice.

So goodbye Tony. I gain great solace from the fact that you are forced to sit out the remainder of your hopefully short political career silent on the back bench. It is my hope that you will be forced to sit there long enough to watch everything you fought for, everything you care about, everything you hold dear, torn down and shattered and cast to the winds. Because that is nothing less than what you have done to me and what you have done to this country.

In parting Tony, here’s a final three word slogan for you:

Go to hell.

[thedamiansmith]

The Dark Knight(hood Fiasco)

Tony Abbott is the Prime Minister of Australia. As much as we might try to deny this fact, as much as we may chafe and resent it, Abbott is the ruler of this land. He is our democratically elected leader.

The hard truth is that, while Abbott may not be the Prime Minister Australia needs, he is certainly the one that we deserve.

Because like Abbott, a frightening number of Australians are just like him. Racist, mysognist, homophobic, xenophobic, chauvinistic, myopic, selfish, bigoted and frankly, somewhat stupid.

So they made Abbott, the apotheosis of all of these traits, their chief.

Have you ever wondered why Abbott supporters seem, well, a little bit dense? When you read their comments on social media and news sites they lack a basic command of language? Why there are a plethora of spelling mistakes even though the website will boldly highlight them and these people still hit enter anyway? Why their ideas seem poorly conceived and not at all thought through to the end?

The links between social conservatism and low intellect are scientifically proven and many of Australia’s less educated and less intelligent have fallen straight into Abbott’s net.

It used to be sport. One could jump on Facebook and spend many a fun afternoon browsing through the Tony Abbott fan pages, indulging in onanistic schadenfreude at their less cranially empowered countrymen. A quick glance produces such gems as:

"To all the counter-protesters, just remember the old saying: revenge is best served on a cold dish"

I remember the old saying a little differently.

"You lefties are rude, smug and thing (sic) the world was evolved around you. Its not. I'm sure you don't want the demons coming out of your closet."

You guys really know how to murder an aphorism.

"Hahaha I bet these isises are not celebrating Christmas with Tone on their tail unload on em big fella"

I bet they’re not. Especially not considering they’re of a different faith.

"I don't want it to the point where for our safety we need to mark Muslims to identify them but they are making it hard on themselves"

Perhaps some sort of star on their chest?

"ABC stands for Un-Australian Bulldusters and Liars Company"

UBLC surely?

Or the perennial favourite:

"100 years ago we taught these Arabs a lesson at Gallipoli. They seem to have forgotten it with the way they're carrying on in Syria"

There’s a few things wrong with that one. I don’t even know where to start.

All in good fun right? But as the old saying goes (and as it actually goes) “it’s all fun and games until somebody gets hurt”.

Well we’ve reached the point where somebody is getting hurt. Many somebody’s actually. And it needs to stop.

First was this article about Sarah Hanson-Young’s inspection of Manus Island, when posted on the “I’ll stand by Tony” Facebook page met with a furious response.

Were the conservatives upset that a sitting senator, investigating the Government’s offshore gulag, was spied upon by government agents? Were they outraged that reports in which the conduct of the staff at said gulag was called into question - reports that indicated racism, abuse and torture - were destroyed before being seen by the public? Were they at all concerned by this obviously fascist suspension of human rights and common decency?

No. Of course they weren’t.

They were outraged that Sarah Hanson-Young had the gall to question the dear leader and his offshore detention program. There was anger and vitriol and bile, but none of it directed towards the blatantly inhumane practices in Nauru. No, it was all at Sarah Hanson-Young, a senator doing her job.

“Everything she does should be gone over with a fine tooth comb, a not to be trusted person. Ugly inside.”

Well at least she got the saying right.

“OH PLEASE the Greens need to treat us as having more intelligence than they allege! This woman is a danger to our country!! What on earth is she doing handing out her business cards to allleged refugees?? Can’t wait until the next election and she is voted OUT!!!!” 

I’ve been through the article a few times, I even did a cheeky “ctrl-f” and I still can’t find any mention of business cards.

“Please Sarah go home and bake some cookies or do something around the house like gardening, anything to get your mind off these asylum seekers. Compared to where they came from (if their home is as bad as they claim it is) they are safe here and are well fed. I must say what it shown on TV these people need some lessons in housekeeping and cleanliness, they are very poor housekeepers!!!”

I...I don’t even...

“Sarah two dads has business cards???? Business cards mean a business venture. I wonder how much money changed hands between these illegals/people smugglers and SHY?????” 

Again with the business cards!

“Fecking hell someone put this stupid dumb ho out of her misery.”

Boy that escalated quickly.

“Spied on by men? Talk about being in fantasy land, only a creature desperate for a feed would be watching her.”

Chicks huh?

“The downside of democracy having to put up with fools like this. Stalin would've just headshot her.”

Because I think it was Plato who said “democracy is for dumb lefties mate”.

But in all seriousness, in an article where it was revealed that a senator was spied upon and damning documents were destroyed, the responses were hateful and misogynist attacks on the senator herself, in defense of the crimes committed.

Australia, these are your countrymen.

Then there was this article. In it Dr David Isaacs, a pediatrician (and more than one Abbott supporter failed to recognise the distinction between “pediatrician” and “pedophile”) who worked in Nauru, defies the government’s fascist crackdown on whistle-blowers and risks imprisonment to deliver a damning report on the detention centre. He details the abuse, the self-harm, the racism, the hate, the rape and most tellingly, relates the story of a six year old girl who attempted to hang herself after being raped.

When this was posted on another pro-Abbott Facebook page the comments were in the same vein. I will not repeat them here, nor ever again, because such things should not be given oxygen. They should never be spoken by anyone with a shred of human decency or even a fragment of a human soul. Because these people, these supporters who will “stand by Tony Abbott” are evil. Nothing better encapsulates the concept that philosophers call the “banality of evil” better than the responses to this article.

Again there was vehement outrage. Were these people outraged about Australia having an offshore concentration camp? No.

Were they outraged that there was systematic abuse and torture of the detainees in this concentration camp? No.

Were they outraged that a 6 year old girl was raped in this concentration camp? No.

Were they outraged that said 6 year old girl attempted to kill herself by hanging herself from a wire fence after being raped in the concentration camp? No.

They were outraged that Dr Isaacs had the temerity to bring these crimes to the world’s light.

These people called for Dr Isaacs head. Literally, they were calling on him to be beheaded in the name of the state. They called for him to be imprisoned. They called for him to be thrown in a jail (sic) with the worst of society, the rapists and the murderers, and for the key to be thrown away. More than one Abbott supporter said that the state should be saved the money for a trial and that a bullet to the back of the head, like they do in China, would be more appropriate.

These are the people that vote for Tony Abbott. These are the people that Tony Abbott represents.

I worry that at the point where illegal imprisonment, torture and the rape of children doesn’t cause you to question the path your nation is on then we are truly lost. I worry that until the course of action reaches its logical conclusion, which it has in the past quite dramatically, that people will not realise the evil until it has well and truly placed its Hugo Boss jackboot firmly on their own throat.

I worry that despite all my efforts this will be in vain. That such people will never see the danger. Will never have their minds changed until it is too late. But still I have to fight. As useless as it may seem at times, I have to fight. I have to keep trying. Because if I don’t I will have been just as complicit as those who actively support this regime and the atrocities it commits. Because if I don’t then Tony Abbott will be the Prime Minister I deserve as well.

[thedamiansmith]

Lost in La Mancha

“Just then they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills that rise from that plain. And no sooner did Don Quixote see them that he said to his squire, "Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished. Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them. With their spoils we shall begin to be rich for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless." "What giants?" asked Sancho Panza. "Those you see over there," replied his master, "with their long arms. Some of them have arms well nigh two leagues in length." "Take care, sir," cried Sancho. "Those over there are not giants but windmills."

In 1605 the Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra published one of the most famous pieces of literature in human history: El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha or The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, or more simply, Don Quixote.

The story is of a Spanish noble who is so enamoured with the idea of romantic chivalry, of knights and dames and kings and queens, of god and quests, that he loses his mind and starts confusing the world for an elaborate fantasy realm of his own construction.

In the book’s most iconic scene, Alonso Quixano (Don Quixote) suffers a particularly delusional bout of insanity and mistakes a series of windmills for giants. Seeing it as his ordained duty to slay such monsters, he charges them with his lance, coining the now famous term “tilting at windmills” which has come to mean “confrontations where adversaries are incorrectly perceived, or courses of action that are based on misinterpreted or misapplied heroic, romantic, or idealistic justifications. It may also connote an importune, unfounded, and vain effort against confabulated adversaries for a vain goal”.

I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

To quote the opening to Captain Planet “our world is in peril”. Climate change is real and it is happening. We already have a consensus. The jury is in and the verdict is not pretty. The world is quite literally ending. The most conservative climate change studies give us a handful of years to change our ways before all hope is lost. The more pessimistic studies posit that the point of no return has already passed us by.

We’re stuck right now in what scientists refer to as the “Holocene Extinction Event”. Entire species of flora and fauna are dying off at rates not seen since...well since the last extinction event. Climate change has happened before. Five times actually, and each time it’s bad news for the dominant life forms on the planet. In the last extinction event, known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene, the dominant form of life was the dinosaurs and look how things worked out for them.

The fact is that we’re in an extinction event right now, and right now we’re the dominant form of life on the planet. As the 8-Ball would say “outlook not so good”. We’re standing on the precipice, looking at the end of the world. It is a very real possibility.

(There’s an interesting corollary to this as well. Let’s say the world does end. That the shattered remnants of mankind are forced to scratch an existence in the hellish wastes of the post-apocalyptic Thunderdome. The broken vestiges of humanity, tribal and feral, all technological relics from the before-times lost to them, try to rebuild what once was. They set about to restore civilisation.

Only they can’t.

You see, we’ve mined out all of the more accessible fossil fuels. There’s no more coal on the surface. There’s no convenient oil wells any more. We’ve drained them all dry. The only reserves we have left on his planet are those that we need modern technology to acquire. So even if mankind were to survive the extinction event, they would have no way of returning to anything anywhere near the Industrial Age. Because the resources to fuel that expansion aren’t there any more. We callously burned them.)

This is literally our last shot.

So we need to start changing our ways, and fast. We need to cut carbon emissions and implement renewable energy. One of the more effective forms of renewable energy is wind farming. We set up some big-arse windmills somewhere and natural convection drives them, generating power. We can conjure energy literally out of thin air. We can harness nature herself to power our iPods. In fact last week the Netherlands generated 140% of their national power requirements through wind farms alone.

With no side effects. No greenhouse gas emissions, no negative impacts on health. As a matter of fact there is no legitimate science linking wind farms with any adverse health effects.

So we have a magic bullet here. A solution to the problem that could potentially end humanity. Surely no one in their right mind could be against that, right? Exactly. No one in their right mind.

The Abbott “government” have proven time and time again that they are NOT in their right minds. Far from it. In fact they are actively opposed to wind farms.

And why? Because they don’t like the way they look.

Because that’s an entirely legitimate reason to doom the entire world to destruction. Aesthetics.

Now I personally don’t have a problem with how wind farms look. I like them. All sleek and bright, they look like some pristine vision of a utopia where mankind has learned to live in harmony with the environment. To me they look like hope.

But even if they didn’t, I wouldn’t have a problem with it. If they were ugly as sin itself, I wouldn’t want them gone. If every arm on those windmills was a 40 meter high erect penis, just some tumescent cock, veined like a shillelagh, throbbing and spurting as they idly turned in the wind, I wouldn’t have a problem. Because if those dicks were what stood between having a world to live in and not, then rev up those cocks. It’s much, much prettier than the alternative.

It’s all about the bigger picture. The long game.

Which brings me back to Don Quixote. What we have here is a prime minister who is quite literally, quixotic. He is, in a very real sense, tilting at windmills. So mired in the grip of his own fantasies that he has lost sight of reality.

For 400 years Don Quixote has been a label for someone who has taken leave of their senses. Someone who has become so lost in the pursuit of their own gains that they have become insane.  A term for someone engaged in a “vain effort against confabulated adversaries for a vain goal”.

The tale of Don Quixote is equal parts dark comedy and tragedy, a cautionary tale of the perils of suspending rational discourse in the pursuit of personal ideology. It was never meant to be an instructional playbook in how a 21st century government can put their fingers in their ears and ignore the fate of the world in their own pursuit of mammon, lost, as it were, in La Mancha.

"I don't see how you could be righting wrongs...because you've turned me from right to wrong, leaving me with a broken leg."

[thedamiansmith]

Race Hate Videos For Dummies

So I’ve been watching, with mounting horror, the rise of the “patriot” movement in Australia. They’ve been active of late, hitting Youtube hard, proselytizing their special brand of cognitive dissonance and unabashed racism to anyone unwary enough to click through. 

These videos, from various “patriots” of all walks of life, nonetheless show a number of similarities across the board. 

The production values are never what we might call “studio” - the sound is terrible and they all look like they were lit with a desk lamp. 

They all feature a bogan with an Australian flag and a sudden appreciation for the art of improvisation - that you can’t just jump in front of a camera and speak without using a lot of umms, ahhs and repeating yourself. We performers are professional for a reason. 

None of them seem to have a complete grasp of the English language, or indeed syntax, sentence structure or in many cases, coherent thought. 

There is a despicable lack of education, logic, information or any form of critical thinking at play here. If you make a claim you need to be able to back it up with facts - that’s the rules. You can’t just make shit up and expect that to prove your argument - you need to prove it yourself. Otherwise you look like an idiot. I know your idol, Tony Abbott, plays fast and loose with the facts himself, but trust me, he looks just as much the dickhead when he does it as you do.

But here I am, a professional writer and performer, criticising civilians who don’t know any better. What I should be doing, as a good human being, is offering to help. So with that in mind, I thought I’d put together a list of a few things you “Great Aussie Patriots” can do to spruce up them race hate videos of yours and really drag the punters along to your curb stomping parades.

Here’s my Top Ten Ways To Vagazzle Your Race Hate Video:

10. “Muslamic” is not a word. You’re either going for “Muslim” or “Islam”. You can’t really have an each way bet on that one.

9. You guys don’t really seem to know what political correctness is or how it works. See political correctness means not being a dick to someone because of their race, gender, ethnicity, religion, sexual preference or other means by which they identify themselves. It is not “the fancy way what politicians talk”. Also “we’re not politically educated, so political correctness doesn’t apply to us” is not a valid defence. That’s like saying “I’m not a lawyer, so I can’t be convicted of murder”. 

8. If you start a sentence with “I’m not racist, but” then you’re probably a racist. If you start a sentence with “I’m not a racist, but” and your Facebook profile picture is the confederate flag, you’re definitely a racist.

7. Occupational Health and Safety laws are not a left wing and/or Islamic conspiracy.

6. Not all “leftys” are “pot-smoking dole bludgers”. In fact people with left wing views tend to be better educated, enjoy higher paying jobs and have an overall better quality of life. People with right wing views, according to science, tend to be the ones who are...how shall we say...less intelligent and work more menial jobs. The guy with the swastika tattooed to his head though, he IS on welfare. Because no one is employing Charlie Manson 2.0

5. Islam has, contrary to your beliefs, produced things other than violence. I know, I was shocked too - they’re not all about killing 100% of the time. They were responsible for sciences such as maths and astronomy and chemistry. The words “alcohol” and “coffee” are Muslim and by the looks of these videos, you’ve had too much of one or the other. Maybe you should have a lie down. As a matter of fact the word “mattress” is Muslim too. It’s almost as if a lot of English words are Arabic in origin or something. 

4. If you walk through Lakemba wearing a bikini or an “Australian shirt” you are not “guaranteed to be murdered”. In fact a great many Australians manage to not be murdered in Lakemba each and every day, as you can see right here. See Lakemba, the so-called “Muslim capital of Australia” isn’t even predominantly Muslim. If you’re going to be murdered in Australia, it’s statistically more likely to be by an Australian, in the Northern Territory. 

3. When citing sources you can’t just say “it’s on the internet”. That isn’t a source. The internet is not a source. Specific things on the internet are sources, but you can’t claim “the internet told me so it must be true” and more than you can say “some guy told my mate Nugget’s uncle’s cell-mate” and have people believe it.

2. Not all Muslims are in ISIS. ISIS does not represent all Muslims. This is not some left wing conspiracy, you haven’t stumbled on to some airtight syllogism, it’s just not correct. ISIS is a radical militant faction who claims to follow the Islamic faith while doing the opposite. It happens a lot actually. See you claiming that all Muslims are ISIS is kind of like saying that all Christians are these guys:

You know these guys were Christian too:

You see where I’m going with this? Calling all Muslims ISIS is like saying that all Australians are vicious, cold-blooded psychopaths because of great Aussie patriots like this guy:

or this guy:

or worst of all this guy:

The actions of a radicalised element do not represent the greater whole, y’dig?

And finally, number 1. Numero uno. The most important tip I can impart on you people:

1. The word “Australia” has the letter “L” in it. It’s “Australia” and “Australians” (oss tray lee an). It’s not “Straya” and “Strayan”. If you’re going to fight so passionately for your country, then for fucks sake you should at least pronounce the name correctly.

There you go you great Aussie patriots. A few tips and tricks from someone in the industry on how to make your video manifesto look a bit more professional and help you look like less of a gibbering imbecile. Shine on you crazy diamonds. 

[thedamiansmith]

Anchors Aweigh

I always get excited when my two passions, politics and applied psychology, mesh together in such a delicious fashion, like two Lego bricks of the same size that once connected will never be torn apart. Today is just such an occasion. Buckle up Dorothy, we’re going on an adventure.

There’s a phenomenon in psychology known as the “anchoring effect”. It’s used quite often in sales and marketing, what one might refer to as the oldest trick in the book - born of the time the first two cavemen gathered together, one to rook the other over an overpriced sheepskin. (If the universe were possessed of a sense of humour this would be the etymology of the term “fleecing”)

Anchoring goes something like this: You walk into a shoe store, intent on purchasing some quality footwear. There, in the display, is the finest pair of boots that you’ve ever seen. These are perfect, solid construction, beautiful design, the gloss so shiny you’d swear that the sun glints in rainbows off the buckles. Why with these boots you’d stand ten feet taller and stride leagues in every step. But alas, on the boots is the price tag: $100.

Surely such boots are worth a hundred dollars, a mastery of the cobbler’s art that they are. But you can’t afford that much money. The salesman notices you salivating over these boots and he inquires if he can help you. You reply that you’d love to purchase these boots but, alack, you cannot countenance that much money for shoes.

“Ah!” exclaims our podiatric peddler “but I have some good news for you! There’s a sale on today! These boots, they are not $100 at all! They’ve been marked down to $50, but with this and that and the other I’ve not had a chance to change the sign yet”.

$50! For these boots? Now that is a bargain. You can afford them after all. Sure you’d not planned to spend anything over $30, but these boots...and half price at that...how can you resist? So you buy them. You hand over the $50, pleased with yourself that you scored such a wonderful bargain. And the salesman? As you depart the store he counts out his money and remarks to his colleague how it never ceases to amaze him that he can sell so many $30 pairs of boots for $50.  

My friends that is “anchoring”. The brain tends to adopt the first number it encounters as a point of reference, regardless of how accurate or relevant that number may be.

In many situations, people make estimates by starting from an initial value that is adjusted to yield the final answer. The initial value, or starting point, may be suggested by the formulation of the problem, or it may be the result of partial computation. In either case, adjustments are typically insufficient…that is, different starting points yield different estimates, which are biased toward the initial values.

“Judgment Under Uncertainty” by Kahneman, Slovic and Tversky

This is also known as the “Door In The Face Technique” made famous in a 1975 study by Catalan, Lewis, Vincent and Wheeler. The researchers asked a group of students to volunteer as camp counselors two hours per week for two years. Categorically they said no. The researchers followed up by asking if they would volunteer to supervise a single two-hour trip. Half said yes. Without first asking for the two-year commitment, only 17 percent agreed. The math, my friends, never lies.

Start with an outrageous figure that no one will ever agree to. Then your next offer, even if it isn’t remotely fair, will seem reasonable by comparison and people are scientifically proven to be far more receptive to it.

So where does the politics come into this? I’m glad you asked.

This “anchoring” is what the Abbott regime, with their fiscal muppet and Rich Uncle Pennybags tribute act Joe Hockey, have pulled on us with the 2014 and 2015 budgets. To use Abbott’s favoured boxing parlance, a one-two punch. Jab with the left so they never see the uppercut rocking the head back from the right.

We’ve been over the 2014 budget. It was the most profligate, fiscally irresponsible, socially regressive, humanly repressive, caste-based pogroms ever unleashed upon the Australian people.

Which was kind of the point.

There was an outcry. The public took to the streets in their hundreds of thousands. The people took to the airwaves and even the press, so long either a silent partner or prominent cheerleader for the Abbott regime, were forced to take notice.

The cuts to pensions. The cuts to the SBS and ABC. The cuts to science and art and industry. 6 month waiting periods for the dole. Slashed funding to pensions and parental leave. The “earn or learn”, “lift or lean”, “treat ‘em mean, keep ‘em keen” glib catchphrases. The loss of contracts. The broken promises and broken dreams and anguished screams of the disadvantaged.

This will not do, we cried in protest. This evil will not come to pass.

Fast forward 12 months to the 2015 budget, released last night. And lo! What a difference a year (and nosediving opinion polls) can make. Gone is the sweeping austerity of a “budget emergency” and in comes a more fair and equitable balancing of the books.

Or is it?

No, friends, we’ve been anchored. The door is firmly in the face and we’ve all of us been rooked. Last year they put a $100 sign on a $30 pair of boots. This year they’re charging us $50 for them. The pill is just as bitter, only this year they’ve added enough honey to keep us from asking questions. So let’s have a look shall we?

Young unemployed will have to wait four weeks instead of proposed six months to access the dole. What a back down! Have they somehow acquired souls in the last year? Not at all. Four weeks is still 3 weeks longer than the current system.

Do you see how the anchoring works here? 6 months, that’s outrageous! But four weeks? That seems reasonable in comparison - as long as that comparison isn’t the current system.

Disadvantaged families will receive $327.7 million extra over four years to help vulnerable and disadvantaged kids access childcare. Who can argue with this? Disadvantaged kids! But this is just the sugar coating to the fact that stay at home parents will lose access to childcare rebates and paid parental leave has been cut for 80,000 mothers and a $1 billion hatchet job by stopping women accessing work and government PPL schemes

National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy refunded for two years at $300 million. In a backdown of their hardcore “we hate science” policy the Liberals are funnelling $300m into science. Except that this isn’t new money that they’ve decided to invest - it’s just a partial repeal of the original funding that was scrapped last year.  

So we see that this is anything but a backdown on any number of issues. The Liberals have not been cowed at all. We see their agenda has not stalled in the slightest - this has been the game plan all along. It’s just been camouflaged by the absolute haymaker that Hockey and co. threw last year.

If this budget, the true agenda that the Liberals have been pushing all along, had been released last year it would have been met with just as much rancor as the 2014 budget did. It is just as fiscally reckless and soullessly evil. But because last year was such a monumental, titanic farce, this seems mild in comparison.

That’s because you’ve been anchored. They’ve just played the oldest card in the deck, it’s up to you to call the bluff.