Category: Rants
Bipartisanship on Marriage Quality Bill(s) | Tuesday 2 June 2015
Just a quick one today. Maybe if we all vote for each other’s all at once we’ll create a kinder gentler polity singularity.
Peta Credlin and the Emperor Abbott’s New Clothes | Thursday 29 January 2015
Click through for NSFW version.
Je suis Charlie | Thursday 8 January 2015
I can partially understand the backlash to the #jesuischarlie hashtag based on the fact that some of the cartoons published by Charlie Hebdo, especially on their covers, are quite racist and seem unworthy of solidarity.
I have said (in the past, not just now) that I would not have published the Jyllands-Posten (or simply “Danish”) Mohammed cartoons, on the basis that the harm done in the broader sense (and I’m not talking about the riots, I’m talking about the potential dehumanising of a minority) didn’t really balance out the flexing of the freedom of speech muscle. The ethical scales didn’t bear it out and furthermore, some of the images just seemed in poor taste for no good reason (the Mohammed with a cartoon bomb for a turban is a shining example of this).
Some of the cartoons/covers since then I would have published (the “Love is stronger than hate” cover published after their offices were fire-bombed, the more benign portrayals of the prophet that simply poke fun, etc), some I wouldn’t (like the pregnant Boko Haram abductees as welfare leeches – something someone brought to my attention today on Twitter).
For me, #jesuischarlie wasn’t – and isn’t – about saying, “fuck yeah, publish with impunity, racism and hate speech SHOULD be published”; it was about saying that when someone believes you can be shot for your speech, we are all in the firing line.
Cartoonists and satirists in particular, but writers (and artists and *shudder* content makers) too – we can all offend. And while we should be mindful of that offence we should not be fearful of it.
Nous sommes Charlie not because we all support those cartoons and articles which maybe punch down (on the islamic minority) rather than up (at the broader institutions that perpetuate isolation of that minority), but because maybe we say the wrong thing one day in our exercise of free speech and we piss off the wrong person. There but for the grace of many gods/editors go I.
Obviously a lot of this is self-evident, and I’m mostly working through this myself to get it down and out, because I understand those who are rightly offended by the Charlie Hebdo covers.
But je suis Charlie nonetheless.
On Le Lievre and cartoon shorthand | Saturday 9 August 2014
As a working mum cartoonist, I have been paying particular interest to the twin controversies over this past fortnight of Glen Le Lievre’s cartoon in the Sydney Morning Herald and Bill Leak’s cartoon for the Australian; both on the conflict in Gaza.
Glen Le Lievre, Sydney Morning Herald, 26 July 2014.
The Le Lievre cartoon is the one that interests me most (and not just because of the resulting rolling outrage which eventually led to Mike Carlton’s meltdown and resignation over the supporting article) because it hinges on what I generally tend to think of as “visual shorthand”.
What I mean by “visual shorthand” is tropes (or even memes, but not in the way we tend to think of them online) that are recurring devices that we use to convey meaning in the quickest way possible for the reader.
Think of things like using an old-fashioned phone for someone making a call (better yet, the red phone if it’s the President), a wired earpiece on someone in a black suit to convey Secret Service, the White House or Parliament House in the background, someone holding the scale of justice (or that whole subset of judgemental cartoons of people on the scales of justice)… all of these things are there to do the hard work for both the reader and the cartoonist in terms of meaning.
They work (generally – it’s always a shame when they don’t) because we understand them implicitly thanks to our cultural baggage – and a good cartoon uses them as building blocks.
It doesn’t matter that most phone calls haven’t happened on rotary phones (or even home phones) for years – it tells the story in the quickest way possible for the reader (even if it may – in the case of drawing Parliament House in the background of a cartoon – be more work for the cartoonist). This is the same logic – on an even more lizard-brain level – used by icon designers for smartphones and those boffins who give us logos.
We see it perhaps more readily in the visual shorthand that builds up around politicians and other public figures as they appear more and more frequently in our newspapers. I’d be surprised if anyone’s got a snap of Tony Abbott in his red speedos since 2012, but I’ll be damned if cartoonists (myself included) don’t love drawing him in them, accompanied with his famous appendages (the ears).
Similarly, Joe Hockey made the unfortunate mistake of confirming the suggestion he was a Shrek lookalike on Kerri-Anne Kennerley’s morning show in 2007, and some seven years on, this is still one of the defining characteristics cartoonists like David Pope, Mark Knight and Broehlman use to draw him.
Mark Knight, Herald Sun, 24 July 2014.
Where all of this becomes problematic, and often too reductive, is when we get to issues of foreign affairs and particularly race.
One old chestnut is China; great big ol’ fat panda China.
Karl Wimer, 2008
Glen Le Lievre, Sydney Morning Herald, 1 August 2014.
Bruce MacKinnon, 13 February 2012.
(Getting saucy in that last one there)
While the final cartoon there at least puts a face on the Chinese government, to my mind this kind of visual shorthand is problematic. It’s generally doesn’t bother to delineate between who is in power, it portrays the country as an unstoppable but bumbling and confused mass. And it takes away any responsibility from the ruling government by putting the blame on the concept of China rather than the decisions of real people.
Ironically I think it is potential allegations of racism in drawing leaders like Li Keqiang that scares cartoonists into using these tropes.
Worse still is Russia, which as been a bear for over three separate centuries and three systems of government (not to mention decidedly different regimes within each of those periods). Here’s a Punch cartoon from 1911:
Leonard “Craven Hill” Raven-Hill, Punch, 13 December 1911.
And one from 1978 by Purlitzer Prize winning cartoonist Edmund Valtman:
Edmund Valtman, The Hartford Post, 24 August 1978.
And just this year:
John Cole, The Scranton Times-Tribune, 4 March 2014.
Which brings me back to Le Lievre’s cartoon. It’s understandable that Le Lievre considered the Star of David as legitimate shorthand for Israel. I think that the Sydney Morning Herald apology gets this bit wrong in suggesting:
in using the Star of David and the kippah in the cartoon, the newspaper invoked an inappropriate element of religion, rather than nationhood, and made a serious error of judgment.
The flag of Israel bears the Star of David. While it is a holy symbol that was used, yes, to tag and shame the Jewish people under Nazism, it is also the fundamental element of the “brand” of Israel.
Glen Le Lievre, Sydney Morning Herald, 26 July 2014.
A cartoon on Israel will likely use the Star of David as shorthand in some form. I think that’s inevitable, and I think that categorically ruling out that idea is needlessly defensive. Further, Jeff Sparrow’s piece this week for Crikey points out there’s also a problem in suggesting that conflation of judaism and the nation of Israel is unfair when the country offers right of return and Netanyahu often claims to speak for the Jewish people in addressing Israel’s national concerns.
What is more problematic is the stereotypical old Jewish man on the couch. The large nose, the coke-bottle glasses, and, yes, the kippah. Using a stereotype to represent a nation or a people is hard to defend as anything but racist.
There is no bear or panda for Israel, just a century of horribly stereotypical representations of Jewish people that have more often than not been used to disenfranchise, discredit and ridicule. I don’t doubt Le Lievre’s suggestion that he made the connection between a photo of old Jewish men on the hill watching the bombing and someone watching TV and ran with it, but the visual shorthand he used for “jewish person”, beyond the Star of David and kippah were the same ones that a cartoon like this (telling Germans not to buy from Jewish shopkeepers) used in 1929:
So how do you make that same criticism of Israel Le Lievre was seeking without falling into those tropes?
The person that should have been on the top of that hill in the cartoon, leisurely changing the channel on Gaza, is a cartoon Netanyahu.
When in doubt, put a real face on the target of your criticism.
Budget cuts, Fairfax cuts and the Commission of Audit | Monday 12 May 2014
I should note in posting this: I’m a Fairfax subscriber.
I love the Age, for all its modern flaws. Most of my favourite cartoonists are Fairfax employees and I think a lot of the nation’s best journalism comes from its mastheads.
But, but, BUT: I do think they’re basically taking exactly the wrong strategy in trying to head off their woes – all successful news sites that have arisen/survived in the past 5 -10 years have retained their talent, accentuated their expertise and minimised their news aggregation.
Cutting the the things that make the paper worth buying (or the site worth visiting and paying to access) – the senior (expensive) journalists, the Walkley winning photographers, the quality control of subs which mean people trust your copy – is a surefire way to continue to ride the horse into the ground. It’s short-sighted.
With third-year journalists allegedly planned to replace senior journalists, as a Master of Journalism student I should be delighted at the space being created for my generation to enter the industry. My fear is that in making these myopic decisions (and choosing to announce them on a Thursday before the budget), management is wringing out the last few pennies from Fairfax’s share price before putting the bolt in the head… rather than riding out the hard parts of the slow move to profitability in the long term.
There will be no senior journalists at Fairfax in five years time at this rate.
UPDATE: I also have a cartoon up at Crikey today on the Budget and the new Australian Border Force.
Some thoughts on Satoshi Nakamoto and “doxing” | Saturday 8 March 2014
Whether or not Satoshi Nakamoto is the turtle-faced man that journalists have been chasing around L.A. is (now that story has broken) not a particularly interesting debate.
The namesake of the mysterious Bitcoin creator certainly has a reputation among those who know him that fits, and the right military contractor/mathematics genius background to be the person who designed the code for Bitcoin. Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto doesn’t seem likely to confirm that he actually is the Bitcoin creator any time soon.
What’s interesting is the collision between some very good traditional journalism by Leah McGrath Goodman at Newsweek – going through employment records, checking name databases, interviewing associates – and the hacker subculture term “doxing”.
As Junkee pointed out, one of the major sources for the story – Gavin Andresen – is not happy that Goodman released Nakamoto’s name and gave a solid enough background story for Nakamoto that other journalists quickly established where to find him.
I’m disappointed Newsweek decided to dox the Nakamoto family, and regret talking to Leah.
— Gavin Andresen (@gavinandresen) March 6, 2014
The question is whether McGrath Goodman actually “doxed” Nakamoto, or was simply doing her job in revealing the name, birth year and general location – not address, not social security or banking details – and existence of the (potentially) real creator of Bitcoin – and whether that in itself is even a problem.
As the Wired piece on “doxing” covers, there’s a malice implied in the act of “doxing” that doesn’t appear to be the thrust of McGrath Goodman’s piece. She details the problems of working with a difficult subject, and then apparently gets clearance from those around him to reveal the details of their on the record conversations about his background and behaviour (used as corroborating evidence).
Is there a legitimate public interest in knowing who Satoshi Nakamoto is? If Bitcoin is to shape financial markets, and if Nakamoto has the alleged stash of over $400 million worth of Bitcoins that Newsweek suggests, then yes. There’s a valid argument to be made that it’s in the public interest to know the identity of someone who could flood the market and crash Bitcoin at the flick of a finger.
That ability also brings up legitimate questions about the legitimacy of Bitcoin as an alternative currency, which is obviously a concern given the currency’s constant fluctuations in the past 12 months.
Do the risks associated with revealing Nakamoto’s identity to the public (and, following that, a hungry media) outweigh the public interest? What are the risks?
Some at Reddit seem to think that he could now have a legitimate fear for his safety – or even life – given his alleged wealth. That seems rather inflated – the risk doesn’t seem any more founded than any other person with wealth’s name being known.
Nakamoto’s personal peace and privacy seem to be the only real things at risk. And that is a legitimate risk.
I would argue that the benefit to the public interest outweighs that small risk – which seems mostly to be the risk of other journalists chasing Nakamoto en masse through the streets of Temple City.
It’s a very different level of risk to the recent Grantland article on the “mysterious” Dr V – outed by journalist Caleb Hannan as a transwoman during the course of an article about a golf putter. The identity of Dr V as a transwoman was the key factor in the ethical problems with that article, and the revelation of Dr V’s trans-status was both unnecessary for the article and posed a potentially high immediate risk to Dr V’s personal safety – given attitudes towards trans-people in some sections of the community – and mental health.
The sore point here for those calling “dox” is that the whole purpose of a cyptocurrency is to both exclude government bodies and allow the anonymous transaction of currency – it’s why revealing the alleged identity of Nakamoto is such a big deal to some.
On this, it’s worth noting that Satoshi Nakamoto appears to have been, for all these years, semi-pseudonymous at best.
Did McGrath Goodman “dox” Satoshi Nakamoto? Based on her intent, I don’t think she did. But I also don’t think that matters.
Joel Fitzgibbon is worried about his poor $140K pa constituents | Wednesday 27 March 2013
Poor Joel Fitzgibbon is worried that some of his constituents could be adversely affected by a potential new government tax on superannuation for high earners.
That’s fair enough, I mean, these constituents are probably doing it tough. Salt of the earth, and all that.
”In Sydney’s west you can be on a quarter of a million dollars family income a year and you’re still struggling,” Mr Fitzgibbon told Fairfax Media.
”Coal miners in my electorate earning 100, 120, 130, 140 thousand dollars a year are not wealthy.”
Oh. Oh, okay. But Joel’s not completely against the idea of taxing the “very very very high end”, but just not those “ordinary people” earning up to a quarter million dollars per year.
The No Advantage Test and the Gillard Birther moment | Monday 26 November 2012
This is Australia. Today.
Of course, if you’ve been paying attention to political news today, the annexing of the mainland and the horrendous conditions at Nauru were all forgotten as we got to the important story of the day: Julia Gillard’s time at Slater & Gordon and the AWU “slush fund” scandal.
Oh wait, haven’t we already had this exhaustively covered? Didn’t Gillard do a knock down drag-out press conference on this back in August? Oh but there’s new information, or there’s another bleat from the same players. Who knows?
Peter Hartcher said on this afternoon’s Hack that the very thing that made the allegations worth investigating was Gillard’s press conference to “put it to bed”… It’s a kind of odd circular logic: “We’ll keep asking you questions about this until you answer them, and when you answer them, you give the issue validity and thus there are questions to be answered”. Bernard Keane’s excellent piece on the perpetual motion machine of press gallery circle jerking sums up this logic very well.
And that’s not even getting into Mark-Baker-level crazy.
Julie Bishop’s narrowing of the target to simple questions of judgement as a human being even if laws were not broken seems to be the slimmest of margins to call a political opponent on, and one that you’d think her leader would not be so keen on.
But at the end of the day, Gillard probably is best to follow Hartcher’s skewed logic: she should probably just shut about it. Echoing Bishop’s conspiracy theories back to her in Question Time will probably do more than opening the doors for another hour or so press conference.
If Credlin and Bishop are going to continue hanging around with that comically large folder, that argument is probably going to look pretty solid.
Goodnight.
IRL trolling and outrage overload | Monday 24 September 2012
Cartoon appeared earlier today on MargaretGees.com.au
Yesterday my friend Tom and I went to the State Library to see the FreePlay exhibits in the Experimedia room. It was interesting, but not as exciting as I think either of us were expecting.
After making our way through the small collection of independently and student games, we walked out to find a different kind of game starting on the Library steps. A group of atheist activists (I’ll delineate them here as “activists”, because I’m an atheist myself) were holding up placards saying “Islam is false”, “atheism = peace” and “Don’t just believe. Think!”. It started as maybe three or four people, but I don’t believe anymore than ten of them ever actually showed up.
We shook our heads and walked away. Tom was especially annoyed. “That really pisses me off,” he said, shaking his head, “I mean, people who are just here to antagonise. It’s stupid and I can’t see how it adds anything to any discussion.” [Note: Tom read this and added to his reaction, see end of piece]
I agreed. We bumped into some people he knew who were involved with the more serious side of FreePlay – discussions on game development and online communities – and they seemed similarly perplexed.
“Why are they even here?”
It seemed the activists had planned on rebuffing an Islamic protest that never happened. You know, because sensibly muslim leaders ask their community not to participate in any protests after the Sydney events.
There were a few jokes; “Oh, so the atheists came but the theists didn’t? The agnostics must be still making up their minds” etc.
Then we heard about the skin-heads and nationalists who had also turned up to be a part of the merriment. These guys were apparently the main show, given no islamic protestors seemed likely to appear. We couldn’t see many people there that would really answer to that description. A few guys draped in flags, a few black hoodies with athletics tracksuits. That seemed to be about it.
Strange bedfellows, red-blooded nationalists and supposedly rational atheism activists.
Overall the press, and people who just seemed to be interested in recording the odd event (myself included, however I stayed away from the tiny amount of colour and movement), completely outnumbered the actual protestors. You can see it a little bit in this photo from the Herald Sun, which captures that small amount of colour and movement on the day (when one seemingly moderate muslim guy turned up to tell a few nationalists to pull their heads in):
Courtesy Herald Sun
But the whole scene looks a lot less intense (and gives a better idea of the onlooker/press to participant numbers) when you see it from the angle I captured it:
The police stopped Tom and I as we made our way around the outside of the Library lawns in an odd moment of racial profiling. This is something, as middle-class white guys we would never usually have to experience. But I was wearing a black Crystal Castles t-shirt, which to a middle-aged cop probably seemed a little menacing, and we were both loitering around the library lawn, and Tom was… well, Tom looked like a well-dressed hipster. Actually, we both did, really. But we were white guys who were walking the periphery of the protests and we seemed to be interested.
“Where are you boys headed?”
“Uh [we haven’t been stopped by suspicious cops since we were teenagers] um… we’re headed to get some lunch.”
“Not going up around the Library for the protest?”
“Uh, no, uh… actually we were just joking about how stupid we think this whole thing is.”
The cop stopped for a second and looked at us. He seemed to be working out whether we were actually two awkward guys looking for some lunch who were just horrible at telling the truth in the face of authority, or equally bad liars there to crack some skulls. He cleverly decided on the former pretty quickly.
“Alright, just make sure you don’t hang around the lawns. Would hate to see you guys get injured if anything serious happened.”
But nothing serious ever happened. And here’s why:
The police response was phenomenal. Obviously determined not to let the same thing happen in Melbourne that had happened in Sydney, there were divvy vans, many cars, circling AFP cars and (you can’t see it in this photo, but the’re at the back of the garage there) horses for mounted police.
Overkill? Sure. But it worked.
As we started to leave, we paused to watch a group of five guys with shaved heads and black jackets with SS badges stop at the corner and look up at the steps. They seemed to quickly take in the whole picture – the police flanking each corner of the lawns, the squad cars patrolling, the divvy vans still running on Swanston Street just waiting for cargo – before muttering to each other and dejectedly slinking off.
And I guess that’s it. Some sensible caution from the Islamic community and an extremely visible police presence turned a small group of antagonists into shadow boxers trying to land a punch on an opponent that refused to even enter the ring.
Maybe that’s just Melbourne; measured or just too hipster to care?
No, we’ve got private school boards to get angry about.
—————————————————
Update: From Tom, on the atheist activists:
“You know, I think what pissed me off is that atheists shouldn’t be jerks. I mean, obviously we’re as likely to be jerks as any other person, but I guess I feel something akin to what Christians probably feel when they see westboro baptist: frustration and anger that the most visible face of the subculture are clearly morons. Nobody’s surprised that white supremacists are arseholes; it’s basically in the job description. Atheism, though, is supposedly an enlightened or intelligent worldview. Carrying “atheism is peace” right next to “Islam is false” in a week when embassies are burning in Muslim-majority countries is about as bloody stupid as it gets.”
Sunday Rant – Risk, the community rating and insuring smokers
“Damn, I wish I wasn’t paying for kids with diabetes.”
The current push by the private health insurance industry to raise premiums for smokers is not about the community good of passing on health costs to smokers. Nor is it about reducing the cost of health insurance for “working families” by protecting them from higher premiums to pay for nicotine addicts.
It’s about fundamentally changing the way our current private health insurance system works, and potentially opens the door to a US-style risk-based insurance system.
Many people’s ideas about private health insurance come from American tv and movies. In the US, health insurers act more like life insurance providers (or even car insurers). They weigh up the costs of insuring you – do you have a pre-existing heart condition? Do you have a family history of cancer or heart disease? Have you ever had a mental health episode, or does you family history suggest that you might?
All of these things are factored into your premiums in US health insurance. Which means many of the people most likely to benefit from insurance were traditionally priced out of the market or denied coverage altogether.
If you’re a champion of the free market, then the ability to discriminate based on the risk associated with insuring a client is part of the merit of the system. In a country where there is essentially no safety net (at least compared to the Medicare system in Australia), and thousands of eligible people regularly apply for access to Medicaid but are turned down because of lack of funding, I’d argue this is governmental negligence.
This is a debate the US is currently going through. Now that the “Obamacare” bill has passed, a whole sector of the private health insurance industry in America looks set to fail: the brokers who confirm or deny coverage for the HMOs. This is because the new legislation makes it essentially impossible to refuse coverage (note: but not discriminate on premium).
Australia’s system is very different. A health insurer cannot bar you from cover based on a pre-existing condition. They cannot even charge you a higher premium based on pre-existing conditions.
This is because Australian health insurance is based on the principle of community rating. This means the cost of the risks associated with insuring people with pre-existing conditions or other risks (think sportspeople, those who don’t exercise, low income, obese and, yes, smokers) are distributed across premiums.
As a healthy, fit person who exercises for at least 30 minutes a day, eats 2 serves of fruit and 3 serves of vegetables, eats 2 serves of fish and no more than 5 eggs a week, has a low/high sodium diet (depending on the research paper), drinks only moderately, regularly exercises their brain, gets 8 hours sleep a night, has no family history of anything untoward and has had protected sex with a small number of partners, I can hear your indignation from here at having to pay for all these risky layabouts!
The upshot for you, my obscenely healthy friend, is that you can be insured at any stage of your life and get the benefits of health insurance in Australia. It also means that should you have a succession of ailments or discover a pre-existing condition once you are insured that you were not previously aware of, the health insurer cannot change your premiums. Despite the fact you are now an established risk, and a burden to your fellow insurers.
There are only two ways that the insurer can “discriminate” against you (I put this in inverted commas, because it applies to all members of the fund and is only technically discrimination). Your fund has the ability to make you wait a standard 12 month waiting period before they will cover you for pre-existing conditions (if you were not previously insured) and also to make you wait up to 2 months before making your first claim (regardless of the condition or service it is for). Most funds either automatically waive the 2 month claim waiting period, or regularly offer to waive it as an incentive for new customers.
The other way is through Lifetime Health Cover loading. This is a 2% loading for every year after the age of 30 (starting at 31) that you do not have insurance that is applied once you take out insurance. The ins-and-outs of LHC loading are boring and take a long time to train to new people working in PHI, but essentially it’s an incentive for you to insure early and often (and offsets the risk of older members who turn up later in life to be insured and thus have an overall burden on the community rating).
So what does this have to do with cigarettes?
Well, if you wish to discriminate based on the current societal health devil, you need to change the private health insurance legislation to allow insurers to discriminate based on a risk. It’s that simple – the current legislation does not allow for discrimination.
To discriminate against smokers means changing the fundamental way private health insurance in Australia works, and its legislative underpinning. The community rating would need to be scrapped for a risk-based system. And this means insurers could discriminate on all kinds of risks to offset the burden to all premium paying members across the fund.
This is beyond working out a process that deals with what is considered a smoker, how you police whether someone begins smoking again, whether they get reduced premiums if they quit, etc.
In the short-term, changing legislation to discriminate against smokers may be of benefit to healthy individuals, couples and families. But creating a risk-based health insurance industry in Australia would more than likely increase costs in the long-term for the average person or family. In the US, a Department of Health and Human Services study found that up to 129 million people under the age of 65 had some kind of pre-existing condition that would be classified as a risk. Even without the demography that’s one third of the population’s premiums affected by pre-existing conditions.
I couldn’t find a single article before the case was overturned discussing private health insurers’ bid to charge additional premiums for smokers that mentioned community ratings or described how health insurance in Australia actually works – only this lone article (pro-changing to a risk-based system) in the Sydney Morning Herald from 12 April this year. In a country where many educated people still associate Australian health insurance with the practices of US HMOs, having the facts on what a change like discriminating against smokers in private health insurance will actually mean for their hip-pocket and their health is fundamental to citizens having an informed discussion on the issues.
Do you want to be insured like a car? I sure don’t.
UPDATE:
I should probably note that I worked in Health Insurance for 4 years from 2006 – 2010 at Australian Unity, both in the retail fund and at GUHealth, their corporate health insurer. Rohan Mead, the company’s CEO, was quoted publicly on the smoking issue after the plain packaging win this week.
This is Australia. Today. 
