One Nation doesn't exist

Embed from Getty Images

Recent polls for federal politics have seen One Nation rise in the polls to become the default Opposition, displacing the Liberal/National coalition. Discouragement with the ability of the Coalition to deliver on anything that the public wants have led the public to deliver a protest vote to One Nation of such a proportion as to make them the prospective alternative government.

The theory that Pauline Hanson could be our next Prime Minister has a number of problems, not least of which is the fact that she would have to shift from the Senate to the House in a specific seat. One of the other main problems is the requirement of an alternative government to provide options for a full shadow cabinet. Perhaps it is forgiveable in the short term, given ON's current Parliamentary members are so sparse compared to their poll numbers. Structurally, though, the problem came to a head this week in the wake of Hanson's "monoculture" rant during her National Press Club address. Three polls this week showed Labor clawing back three points from both ON and the Libs, and Hanson's personal ratings dropping by a lot more. That's enough evidence to judge that there's a real shift in electoral judgement.

(Sorry for the throat-clearing prose telling you what you already know... it's painfully habitual, from my journalism training. I haven't yet learned how to just dive in with spicy takes like a true blogger, even after all these years. I will put it in italics in future, so you can skip it.)

There is no such thing in Australia as a "monoculture". When pressed, Pauline Hanson threw up the names of Paul Hogan and Norman Gunston as examples of the culture she likes. Paul Hogan, to his eternal credit, answered by calling Pauline Hanson a "pelican". This peculiarly Australian insult is not particularly well-defined, but I see it as being this: a weird white bird with a big mouth, stinking of fish.

Right-wingers can't identify any part of Australian culture they like. They may mention Dave Hughes, but they don't like his comedy, just when he gobs off about taxes on socials. They can't even bring themselves to cite Barry Humphries, who was a similar late convert to scrofulous right-wing whinging but wore womens' clothing so that's right out. A similar thing is happening in America right now, where even Milli Vanilli rejected Donald Trump.

The next argument I get on this point is that Australian culture is actually our freedoms and laws. Bullshit! If Pelican meant democracy, she would have said democracy, not culture. What these idiots actually hate is Muslims, so they pretend Sharia law is going to crawl from under their beds and enslave their children.

One Nation's polling numbers were the softest yet seen in Australian politics. It is a protest vote, not serious. At the first moment when Hanson's silliness endured a skerrick of critical scrutiny, it was shown to be contentless.

Does that mean ON can't win an election? Clearly not. Trump got elected twice. The party may get into a power-sharing arrangement with the Libs in Victoria later this year, if current poll trends hold up in November.

It does mean, nevertheless, that ON can't govern. Its fervent cultists think that is a feature, not a bug. I have faith that a significant majority of voters don't want to burn everything down DOGE-style, but would prefer to see leaders who can solve problems instead of creating them.

Leslie Nassar 1973-2016

No one has a bad word to say about Leslie Nassar, now that he is dead. (See Helen Razer at Crikey for a more traditional obituary.) He is a man made famous for saying bad words about other people, so this is unusual. Those who were lucky enough to know him, work with him or follow him on social media through his long and storied career know that when he cut you, it's because you deserved to be cut. For everyone else, the word I'm seeing most often to describe him and how he acted towards others is "lovely", which brings to mind the way Paul McDermott calls someone a "lovely feller" in a soft voice, like he's reciting The Sentimental Bloke. That is perfect.

I got to know him in the year 2001, when I joined the community of an epochal computer games forum called PlanetCrap. He went by the nickname of szcx back then, IIRC because he preferred those keys to the usual wasd configuration when playing shooter games with a keyboard. Most of the denizens of that forum were European or American, with szcx and I just about the only regular Aussies. I first met him in 2002, which is where I took the above picture. In that community, he was always an intelligent and nice influence, but could take the fight up to trolls and villains as much as anyone when the need arose.

Even back then Leslie was liable to get into trouble. He went to Portland, Oregon for work on a visa sponsored by his employer, but went over the border to Canada to try to renew it after his employer lied to him about his status... only for the Canadian authorities to dob him in to the US Department of Homeland Security for overstaying his visa, and get him shipped to a detention centre in Seattle. After three weeks of incarceration and what amounted to torture, he was deported to Sydney. Hopes that he might emigrate to the US to join his American partner were dashed for a long time.

As a man to meet and talk to, you wouldn't meet a more agreeable conversationalist. He was always interested in what you were doing, empathetic to your life's trials and tribulations, and obviously had a mind as quick as the latest computer chip, and sharp as the blades he shaved his head with. He was very well connected, though of course later he burned some of those bridges with the @fakeStephenConroy controversy that saw him gain his first taste of instant public notoriety but then get blackballed nearly out of the digital industry when certain Telstra executives held a grudge against him. Thankfully, he landed on his feet with a contract with Victoria Police, which meant he had to move down to Melbourne where he lived a stone's throw from my place in Brunswick.

We hung out more in those times. By that stage his first daughter had arrived, who turned out to have a one-in-a-million syndrome similar in some ways to Downs, meaning his family needed lots of quality medical help which at the time would have been outrageously expensive in America in the pre-Obamacare era. Even if he could get a visa and/or citizenship, the cost of supporting his child made the thought of moving to America out of reach.

America's loss was Australia's gain. Many other people know more about his work at the ABC setting up podcasting, at Q&A with TweeVee TV and the viral sensation that was @DeptOfAustralia and I'm sure that history will be well documented elsewhere. I knew him by that point as a friend and business mentor, at a time when I really needed both. As such, he was a constant source of positivity and a perfect foil for radical ideas, even when his own family was under threat from external forces and the danger of his professional radicalism was so present in his personal life. His fearlessness was not false bravado. He could speak with authority on how to construct a life as an anti-Telstra tech terrorist, something I shared with him in my business.

Leslie's death hits me particularly hard because he was a fellow traveller in life. He is the same age as me, and we both built young families later in life after long periods as lone wolves. I only wish I was nearly as talented has he was, in both a technological and comedic sense. I am only pretending to be an ubergeek, really, and when I try to run some of the same sort of funny material as he does, I tend to come off as a nasty smartarse whereas he could always make it sound like it was from the heart (because it was). He may have been a boy from the working class suburbs of Adelaide, but he always had more class than most of the rest of us put together.

It sounds like Leslie's latest project, Wrangling Cats, was more of a lifestyle business. He had finally got to move back to America, in Idaho where his in-laws lived, and it seemed like he had figured out his life and what made him happy and secure. That is what makes it all the more tragic, that his life was taken away so senselessly by a 20-year-old kid driving home drunk on a Saturday morning (whose life has also been ruined now, BTW). There were more than 30,000 road deaths in America last year, about 10 deaths per 100,000 of population. The equivalent figure for Victoria, where we have spent so much energy minimising deaths like these, is around 3.5 per 100,000. Leslie had so much more to give, primarily as a father and husband. What a waste of human potential.

He is survived by his wife and three daughters of eight, three and one years. If you would like to donate to a fund for his family, his most recent business partner set up a GoFundMe page. It's the least any of us can do.

The coming Australian recession...?

I buried my prediction of the first Australian recession in decades in a post back in May, because I wasn't quite sure it would come to pass. Today, in the light of the most recent quarter having growth of a measly 0.2%, Fairfax runs an Ian Porter piece laying out the reasons for believing that the recession will come in the next year or two, which boils down to the delayed effect of the Abbott decision to cut off assistance for the car industry and its subsequent withdrawal from the Australian economy.

The timing is interesting electorally, because the process of up to 200,000 automotive workers losing their jobs is due to be completed in 2016/17, with a full Abbott term due to finish in November 2016. We are already in some hinky territory with the Chinese slowdown, albeit currency devaluation has solved a lot of problems for our exporters and there's probably more room to drop below the current ~70c.

The last budget was a cash splash so large that it caused many pundits to think it was priming the Keynesian pumps for an early election, yet the economy is barely escaping contraction as it is. Far from a budget emergency, now we have a growth emergency, which will be followed by an employment emergency. Hockey hasn't really got any more gears to shift up fiscally, so when the automotive fecal matter hits the Centrelink air circulation equipment, the job of stimulating the economy is going to fall to the RBA, which has only 200 base points to play with and would only be forced to burn them under great duress given the housing market is already hubba-bubba-double-trouble. Then we hit the zero lower bound, and we're cactus in a Mad Max Fury Road scenario.

This is playing out a bit like George W. Bush's last days, where all of his dud decisions culminated in a massive economic and political collapse. Just as Dubbya is now seen as a contender for the worst US President in history, Tony Abbott is shaping up to be the worst Australian Prime Minister in history if these doomsday detentes come to pass. All we could do was sit back and enjoy the hot licks from the Doof Warrior.

#Gamergate, #cuckservative and racism against Adam Goodes

View image | gettyimages.com

There is a line that can be drawn, a lineage that can be traced, between a number of recent primal screams emanating originally from shadowy ranks of white male recidivism.

• The #gamergate movement, which is a reaction by openly misogynist males against what they see as attacks against the identity of white male gamers, started by a cadre of hardcore drongos on sites like Reddit, gaining momentum as it gathers up tenuously related non-sexist criticisms of game industry and media elites, gradually building into a mob where the majority are not sexist, but the masses give credence to the movement started by a vocal and unrepresentative minority.
• The #cuckservative movement, which is a reaction by openly white supremacist males against what they see as attacks against the identity of white male American conservatives, started by a cadre of hardcore drongos on sites like 8chan, gaining momentum as it gathers up tenuously related non-racist criticisms of conservative political and media elites, gradually building into a mob where the majority are not racist, but the masses give credence to the movement started by a vocal and unrepresentative minority.
• The mass booing of Adam Goodes, which is a reaction by openly racist males against what they see as attacks against the identity of white male Australians, started by a cadre of hardcore drongos at AFL games, gaining momentum as it gathers up tenuously related non-racist criticisms of sporting and media elites, gradually building into a mob where the majority are not racist, but the masses give credence to the movement started by a vocal and unrepresentative minority.

In all three cases, there is a core of horrible people who perform anti-social acts with stated justifications that any reasonable person would find abhorrent, but the majority of participants in this anti-social behaviour use the argument that they don't share the horrible beliefs of the fringe members of the group, thus they shouldn't be tarred with the same brush.

In any large political grouping, there are going to be fringe elements inside the "big tent". Nationalist skinheads vote Liberal, feral communists vote Labor, and these actions are perfectly acceptable and do not invalidate the party's platform as long as the minority doesn't dictate policy. In the case of these extra-institutional movements, however, the actions that the majority take are the same as the hardcore. How are we to tell the difference between those with criminally anti-social motivations and those who have "normal" reasons for acting like morons?

Unfortunately, this dilemma doesn't seem to worry many of those in the majority who are acting as useful idiots providing cover for the extremists. I have been involved in some very heated discussions trying to argue such people around in the case of the Goodes crisis, and I am sure the same kinds of conversations have been happening all over, both on and off the Internet, in the past week. It's a smorgasbord of bad arguments defending the indefensible, as Russell Jackson only skimmed the surface of the other day.

One of the many ways we are lucky to have been born in the Lucky Country is that despite all the talk of multiculturalism, we are largely still a very monoculturally Anglo-Celtic society, and aren't forced very often to confront our own prejudices like this. You only have to look at America where hatred towards Hispanic immigrants and black urban youth is dominating mainstream political discussion, or in England where UKIP only grows in popularity, or Europe where a member country like Hungary can fall under the grip of an openly fascist regime and barely an eyelid is blinked. In comparison, we lost our minds for weeks on end when a man asked a question on a TV program. Our privilege as Australians, let alone white Australians, is almost too massive to comprehend.

The glue binding all these movements together is identity politics. The extremists are white, male and western, and the people they are trying to recruit to their thinly veiled anti-social reactionary causes share much of their identity - this demographic has been labelled in various countries as "frat", "bro", "lad", "chav" and "bogan". While the majority may not profess to share the extremists' politics, the functional differences between them and the fringe are blurred if they take part of the same activities.

In this context, it is supremely difficult to educate a certain type of young white man about the nature of his privilege, because so much of his self image is bound up in believing he is right about everything, even those things he actually knows very little about. Hopefully it's not going to take a tragedy for these otherwise intelligent, empathetic and compassionate citizens to see the light.

Short Kicks: Je suis occupé

Not much time for blogging as work has me flat out like a lizard drinking, having launched CricketFan as the first addition to the FanSports Network (which had previously only consisted of FanFooty) and shortly to officially add FanLeague. Time for some short kicks!

- The Charlie Hebdo story has been done to death elsewhere. I had a blog post brewing in my mind which would have mentioned the word "arsehole" about 250 times, because my opinion is that the fact that some Islamist arseholes blew some French arseholes away for being arseholes has drawn a predictable response from libertarian arseholes in their seemingly unstoppable campaign to Let Arseholes Be Arseholes should not mean that non-arseholes should give in to any of the arsehole-aligned factions. I was also going to draw some allusions between the childishness of Charlie Hebdo and the English tradition of Private Eye and Viz of publishing obscenity as a kind of white privilege - back in the 1960s they might have been fighting a real battle against power and privilege, but by now that sort of thing is just kicking down. That post will never be written now, as I haven't the time. I'm sure you're all sad about that.

- What is Henry Ergas doing writing about Islamism? He's an economist of some renown (or some previous renown). His competency is not acting like every other hack political commentator. I know Krugman freelances a lot in his columns, but at least he maintains some semblance of aloofness from the culture wars.

- Saw the third Hobbit movie. Was disappointed that the film rather squibbed on the fate of the gold. There was an opportunity for a Pikettyesque narrative about the 99% rising up against the elite to bust open the trove of hoarded wealth and kickstart a new era of prosperity with some good old-fashioned redistribution. Instead, we were treated to a string of sequences of the mayor's sidekick Alfrid acting all craven and covetous, over and over, as an impossibly crude parody of the bourgeoisie. It was a middling attempt at lowbrow humour, a classless dig at the middle classes of Middle Earth.

Iggy Azalea, straight outta Mullumbimby

Via the Herald-Sun today comes news of Iggy Azalea, the girl from Mullumbimby trying to become the next girl-next-door Britney Spears type but with a twangy voice like Nicki Minaj and the street message of M.I.A. She has the #2 song in America right now with Fancy, though she's a far cry from Wally de Backer. The video is boilerplate Spears, portraying female pop artist as desirable virginal cheerleader schoolgirl, but the music is more beat-heavy for the clubs as is the modern trend.

Should one pay any attention to the lyrics in such a song? Yes, because millions of girls will sing it to themselves and each other, reinforcing its message. That message is pretty standard rapper stuff about how hot she is, how she's in the "Murda Bizness" (!), how she's about to blow up as a star despite the haters, etc etc. The bridge is what caught my attention:

Trash the hotel
Let's get drunk on the mini bar
Make the phone call
Feels so good getting what I want
Yeah, keep on turning it up
Chandelier swinging, we don't give a fuck
Film star, yeah I'm deluxe
Classic, expensive, you don't get to touch
Ow...

Now, I could easily imagine Iggy (or collaborator Charli XCX) writing that after getting put up at a plush hotel by their label Virgin/EMI like any other kid who just got signed by a major, and it's grist for the mill for a rapper to be boasting about living the glam lifestyle... but when it's an Aussie white girl singing it, it boggles the mind a bit.

As the rise of gangsta rap in the 1980s coincided with the excesses of the rich fuelled by Reagan-era profligacy, so this song is part of a confirmation of New Gilded Age conspicuous over-consumption. Azalea makes it explicit by referring to "bringing '88 back", when maximum air was in Reagan's bubble just before the '89 crash. I look forward to seeing whether she has anything of substance to say in future songs.

Elder Scrolls Online's Dodd-Frank economy

I am always fascinated by the market economies built inside multiplayer computer games to exchange virtual goods among players, and the recently released Elder Scrolls Online (ESO) has some interesting twists on usually accepted norms.

As a MMOG (massively multiplayer online game), ESO follows in the footsteps of Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot and World of Warcraft (WoW), as well as more recent iterative efforts like Guild Wars 2 and Diablo 3. In all of these games, the fantasy milieu of swords, staves and sabatons has to include a way of crafting and trading the tools of the medieval swashbuckling trade in the fictional world of Tamriel.

Without going deeply into the history of such things, the crucial point here is that in the most successful of these games, WoW, the economic system had evolved to a point where there was a universally accessible "auction house" (AH) for ethereal items which acted in much the same way as globalised stock markets do in the real world. You could put your imaginary halberd up for sale on the AH in WoW and if it was priced competitively, it could be sold in a matter of seconds to one of millions of customers browsing newly listed goods in real time. An analogy can be drawn with the high frequency trading systems on the "real" Wall Street, which have revolutionised the financial sector in recent years. The HFT systems behind the AH were developed over many iterations, to streamline the processes and ensure the broadest and most efficient market possible.

Now comes ESO, which seeks to reverse some of these innovations as discussed in the fanbase's Tamriel Foundry forums. Instead of a global AH, trading is only possible face to face, or in guilds of a maximum of 500 members. You can only be a member of five guilds, so instead of millions of potential trading partners, you can only max out at 2,500. In addition, instead of the best items in the games being rare drops from powerful boss monsters which would drive demand on the auction house, each and every player can conceivably make the best items themselves by spending time levelling up their own crafting skills.

Why would Zenimax, the developers of ESO, seek to turn back history like this? The reaction of one ESO player to the whiners illustrates the reasons:

What’s hilarious too is the fear mongering from the AH banker wannabes.

“This will ruin the game” “the game will be unplayable!” ect ect.

REALITY CHECK: No auction house in favor of trading and crafting means PLAYING THE GAME IS THE MOST REWARDING ACTIVITY and sitting around and flipping items (ie not really playing) IS NOT.

Get that through your wow heads. You don’t deserve to be rich sitting in town like a silk swaddeled merchant, if you want to be rich you have two options:

1. Do something! Go be an adventurer.

2. Create something! Be a master crafter.

Or do both,

The adventurers drive the economy needing gear, they supply mats and demand. The crafters foster the economy by creating gear, they supply mats demand and items.

Where does a AH flipper fit into this system exactly? They don’t. They are a parasite that creates nothing but inflation and raises the price (workload) for both crafters and adventurers through the illusion of convience, which is easier to click through but costs twice as much gold, ie workload on the real players.

If you want to sit in one place and click through one menu while creating nothing but more work for other players you do not deserve to be powerful or rich, you deserve to be ostricized for the parasite you are.

This economic design by Zenimax reminds me of the Dodd-Frank reforms on Wall Street after the global financial crisis, which were passed to put a handbrake on the speculators who caused the crisis. You could argue about how successful Dodd-Frank has been, but we're talking here about intention. Just as Dodd-Frank was an attempt to encourage economic actors to abandon speculation in favour of investment in the "real" economy of making things, ESO has carefully planned its guild trading system to reward those who play the game of fulfilling quests, slaying monsters and storming keeps, rather than the meta game of playing the markets.

That is not to say trading is dead in ESO, far from it. The meta game now, such as it is, is to find the best trading guild - or perhaps in the longer term, to find the best guild for player versus player combat which nurtures its master crafters for the benefit of the rest of the guild. This kind of mercantilism is possibly more genuinely medieval than the HFT systems of WoW, but will it hold up over time? Only those playing in Tamriel have the power to complete that destiny.

Elysium: Obamacare 2154 (spoilers!)

Neill Blomkamp may deny that his movie Elysium has modern political parallels, but he is not kidding anyone. There are so many allegories with the modern fight over Obamacare that the audience can't help but make them on their own. The year is 2154, the Earth is exhausted yadda yadda, and the rich have retreated to a spaceship in a low earth orbit called Elysium, which has universal healthcare that is even better than that bulldust they have in Star Trek. Matt Damon plays Obama Max, not so much Mad Max as Rad Max. He gets irradiated working in a robot factory, the doc gives him five days to live, and is forced to agree to break into Elysium by going all Johnny Mnemonic on his boss by downloading his brain, but not before getting all Universal Soldiered up with a spiffy new exoskeleton. Serendipitously, his boss is about to start a coup on Elysium and has the virus in his brainstem that will shut it down, like in ID4 but looking more DOS than iMac. Jodie Foster is Delacourt, the Francophone Rumsfeldian head of security on Elysium, who is engineering the coup while wearing some killer business skirts. Sharlto Copley is Kruger, Delacourt's Afrikaaner muscle who steals most scenes he is in and causes considerable mayhem.

So, I was trying to work out which characters were which, if we're drawing the extended analogy here. Max is Obama, obviously, with Delacourt as the Beltway faction of the Republican Party trying to not only maintain their privilege, but secure rule for decades to come through subversion of democratic process. I'm not sure we can pin the Delacourt role on any single politician - John Boehner is more like the hapless President Patel. Perhaps she is a portent for Marco Rubio? Unfortunately for Delacourt and the GOP, however, Kruger is the Tea Party. It doesn't end well for Delacourt, and if life imitates art things aren't going to turn out the white way for the Republicans. Then again Max doesn't get a sweet ending either, though I guess Obama's presidency has an end point regardless.

Wagner Moura as ghetto gangster Spider also enlivens the spectacle, in a performance that I grew to like over time, and he and the other non-whites in the cast playing ghetto characters (with a fair few redshirts who buy the farm) represent the rainbow coalition of demographics behind the Obama presidency. This is not just about healthcare but also immigration, the echoes are too loud to ignore.

As for its general merit, I don't think you can say Elysium is technically or artistically groundbreaking. It doesn't stray very far from Blomkamp's last effort, with many action scenes in dustbowl townships that could have been the Soweto-analogues of District 9. As with many recent sf films, though, it is slick and competently executed from start to finish as a production, and most importantly it is grand entertainment in the spirit of Aliens and Terminator 2. We are getting movies that look as good as those last two several times a year now, which is a great thing and is a major reason the cinema in general, and sf in particular, is so strong at the moment. Finally: Afrikaaners make the best villains!