In a begrudging effort at “net presence” or, obesity
It is bound to remain out-of-date at all times other than those when I have a book due to the publisher.
Sep ’15
Malcolm Turnbull’s cabinet appointments not good for women | Crikey
Turnbull’s Ikea catalogue moment: The 21st century cabinet | Daily Review
Comment: Don’t blame skinny models for anorexia | SBS News
Tony Abbott’s worst 10 moments as prime minister | Crikey
Razer: Not the Boy Next door is not your usual home grown crap | Daily Review
Comment: Brave, #SoBrave and The Project’s gooey TV | SBS News
Helen Razer: Tony Abbott’s Syrian refugee decision political cunning | Crikey
Razer on the refugee crisis, the banality of evil and futility of ‘compassion’ | Daily Review
How To Stop Caring — Medium
Australia bombing Syria to win Canning byelection | Crikey
Razer: beauty, the market, and the lies of the ‘makeup free revolution’ | Daily Review
Aug’15
Australianising American news satire | The Saturday Paper
Helen Razer: civil discourse is nonsense | Crikey
Razer on Romance writers: These broads have no time for nonsense | Daily Review
Helen Razer: Mark Latham is the Kim Kardashian of Labor | Crikey
Melbourne Writers Festival: Helen Razer’s picks | Daily Review
Razer: Don’t look for moral guidance from sport stars – or sport writers | Daily Review
Helen Razer: gay marriage good for the Liberal Party | Crikey
Razer: The GOP, Donald Trump and other period dramas | Daily Review
Growing berries | The Saturday Paper
Helen Razer: Bronwyn Bishop, Tony Burke travel scandals overblown | Crikey
Razer on MKR’s legal push to have Hotplate turned off | Daily Review
Jul’15
Helen Razer: Sharman Stone’s women quotas idea is potty | Crikey
Razer at the ALP Conference: why Labor can’t stage manage itself | Daily Review
Mr Robot’s fresh take on hacking | The Saturday Paper
Helen Razer: Jimmy Barnes’ Reclaim Australia facebook post out of proportion | Crikey
Amy Schumer review (Arts Centre, Melbourne) | Daily Review
Razer on the outrage economy: see no evil, tweet no evil | Daily Review
Helen Razer: NRA’s gun control message about Australia ridiculous | Crikey
Razer on the so-called lost innocence of that hot liberal daddy, Atticus Finch | Daily Review
Halal Food Labelling | Crikey
Razer: state sanctioned gay marriage is defeat by assimilation | Daily Review
Helen Razer: report on Muslim radicalisation misrepresented by media | Crikey
Jun’15
Top Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson: the simpler baby of Auberon Waugh and Benny Hill | Daily Review
Helen Razer: Tony Abbott’s ‘evil’ invocation and ISIS | Crikey
Razer: Gen X is culpable for its offspring’s online vulnerability | Daily Review
Helen Razer: Julia Gillard’s advice to Hillary Clinton on sexism | Crikey
Razer: Katy Perry, naked yoga and ridding yourself of the flab of social order | Daily Review
Razer on price hikes, Rachel cuts and the Herald Sun | Daily Review
Helen Razer: Fred Nile’s gay QandA a useless program | Crikey
Magna Carta is meaningless – Late Night Live – ABC Radio National | ABC
Razer on Caitlyn Jenner’s Vanity Fair makeover: so what’s not to like? | Daily Review
Helen Razer is against same-sex marriage because marriage itself is the problem | Crikey
Razer on Australia’s Top Model: the only reality show that refuses to lie | Daily Review
May ’15
Into the rainbow with the Muppets | The Saturday Paper
Helen Razer: tampon tax a distraction, GST should be rolled back | Crikey
Razer: when great art happens to terrible people | Daily Review
Helen Razer: Western liberal feminism is wrong about capitalism | Crikey
Helen Razer: the Mad Men finale and the loss of nostalgia | Daily Review
Helen Razer: Pete Evans and the Paleo cult are tools of capitalism | Crikey
Razer: lads’ mags and bad girls aren’t the problem | Daily Review
The Butterfly Foundation, awareness campaign on eating disorders | Crikey
The Royal birth and serving up the lie of normal parenthood with a McFlurry spoon | Daily Review
Apr ’15
Helen Razer: penis emojis banned by Instagram | Crikey
Razer on hoaxes from Ern Malley to Belle Gibson (the Quinoa Demidenko of our times) | Daily Review
Broad City set to become this decade’s Seinfeld | The Saturday Paper
Helen Razer: Mental Health Commission report shows services lacking | Crikey
Razer on Madonna: being and nothingness and the material girl | Daily Review
Razer on Dallas Buyers Club and co-opting gays for profit | Daily Review
Helen Razer: Woolworths Anzac Day campaign appropriate | Crikey
MICF: Rich Hall 3:10 to Humour review | Daily Review
MICF: Suren Jayemanne Eat Praline, Die review | Daily Review
MICF: Luke Heggie You’re Not Special review | Daily Revie
Dallas Buyers Club: how the gays have been co-opted for profit | Crikey
MICF: Paco Ehard in Worst. German. Ever review | Daily Review
MICF: Dave Bloustien The Tinder Profile of Dorian Gray review | Daily Review
Razer on the Daily Show’s Trevor Noah and the ‘lunatics’ calling out his unfunny tweeting past | Daily Review
Helen Razer: Jeremy Clarkson and Top Gear the end of an era | Crikey
Mar ’15
Razer: how the ‘offence debate’ misses the point of comedy | Daily Review
Paleo is a Stupid Cult and it is Killing People | Crikey
The Appearance of Feminism | Sheilas
Lamenting The Hoopla as the media eats itself yet again | Daily Review
War of the weeds | The Saturday Paper
You, not your iPhone, are the gravest threat to your kid | Crikey
Razer: X Factor is not your moral guardian | Daily Review
Q&A’s false democracy | The Saturday Paper
Razer: how Zoolander was a cultural hero in dark 2001 | Daily Review
Helen Razer: Tony Abbott attacks United Nations for lecturing | Crikey
Razer on Mark Latham’s Harden Up prescription for the depressed chattering class | Daily Review
Razer: On “Acceptable” art and hiding Shakespeare’s racism | Daily Review
Helen Razer: negative gearing should go, renting is just fine | Crikey
Razer: beware of false gods and American presidents | Daily Review
Feb ’15
Razer: Abbott govt plays distraction politics with AHRC report | Crikey
Metadata retention: Stay awake – it will affect you | Daily Review
The era’s popular feminism has all of the revolutionary form and fibre of week-old custard. But, stomach
those tens of you drawn to my shitty opinions already know this and so let’s not pretend that today’s “feminist” approbation for the Pirelli calendar is any kind of surprise. And, thumb
let’s not spend unnecessary minutes in the service of the obvious and ask those news sites that call the Pirelli calendar “feminist”, “feminist” or, in the case of an actual feminist news service, “irrevocably feminist” to “get fucked”, “get fucked” or “get irrevocably fucked”.
I have given up the tedious work of trying to revoke the irrevocable and if ten bajillion tedious western liberal fuckers want to “celebrate” the fact that a fucking tyre manufacturer has printed pictures of women in modest dress after a half century of printing pictures of women in nothing but a cupful of jizz-moistened sand, let them. Let these global village idiots believe that the marketplace of images can be civilised. Let these new sisters believe that the only way out of a maze of images is by complicating the maze with new images. Let “feminism” think that the register of its success is to swap the appearance of bikinis with the appearance of conspicuous success. Yes, yes. You’ve done well banishing those whores from the pages of a trade pub. Let’s celebrate a new kind of whoredom! Let’s hope that the privileged men who receive this high-end soft-porn will pull their puds to the rhythms of female empowerment. And maybe a Maya Angelou poetry recording.
Look. I can’t be arsed explaining again to a dozen people who already agree with me that changing the look of the commodity doesn’t change the terrible power of the commodity. Or how “diversity” in images is no more evidence of freedom than a diversity of supermarket choices. Or, that we in the west rationalise airstrikes on nations because they “cover their women up”, yet we see this same modesty in ourselves as cause for celebration. Have The Terrorists Won? No, the idiotic ideology of the west, which informs popular feminism, has won.
Shite. If you can’t see that this calendar is just more of the same paralysis, you can fuck right off to a more “empowering” place. A place where the lie that the gender pay gap can be cured by turning real porn into success porn. A place where the hearts appended to your #brave selfie are a currency of belonging. A place where Fashion Week is full of #makeupfree plus-size models whose mild divergence from a previous image of perfection will suddenly stop family violence, or whatever. I don’t know. I no longer care to follow the “argument” of contemporary feminism which seems chiefly concerned with horrible violence and tedious culture and how these two things are somehow intimately connected. I think I stopped bothering at about the time a “piece” of “feminist” “writing” that concerned Miss Piggy appeared. Apparently, the way she hits Kermit is “problematic” and not sufficiently representative of the true nature of family violence.
I would say that moral guardianship is not the work of the Jim Henson Creature Shop, but those people who believe that this are “irrevocably” munted. Instead, I will say something that I have been saying to myself lately: moral guardianship is not the work of corporations.
So, this is no direct complaint about the Pirelli calendar, the positive “feminist” response to the Pirell calendar or even the cynicism of companies that know very well that acts of liberalism, such as honouring women or supporting same-sex marriage, is excellent marketing.
Actually, I suspect that many companies don’t even see their sale of empowerment as a market obligation anymore. I suspect that many companies, such as Apple which build extraordinary wealth on tax evasion and documented labour abuses, genuinely believe that they’re doing the Right Thing. And we believe that they’re doing the Right Thing. Certainly, I have at times allowed myself to believe that the “frictionless” capitalist Bill Gates is doing the Right Thing by using his wealth to fund very practical immunology programs. But, this happy view of mine was only made possible by forgetting (a) the terms of trade which permitted Bill Gates to amass so much wealth are those that very directly produce poverty and, in many cases, disease and (b) it is not the responsibility of private individuals or corporations to decide who to save.
Bill Gates was not elected. Cutting the remaining shred of red tape that binds us to democracy is not so much a “frictionless” act as it is fascist. We did not appoint this leader of industry. He was elevated to his current social influence by the fact of his business influence. And this is not to say that he is not a man of good intentions and it is not to say that his programs are ineffective or that he is a cowboy inoculator jabbing the citizens of dependent economies with homeopathic fiction. He probably takes good medical advice. I’m sure Mr Pepsico takes good advice from dietitians in his nutritional philanthropy, even as he continues to piss subsidised sugar water into the mouths . Maybe Pirelli consulted with Important Feminists before deciding to celebrate the Beauty Within. Who knows? Corporations involved in this perverse moral exchange of cultural and financial philanthropy for profit can think whatever they want.
The point is what we think. And if we continue to think, as we do, without serious question. that Bill Gates can stand in for the state or the WHO or that Apple’s good intentions can stand in for the fact that it rarely pays tax and sources labour from the prisons of capital or that Pirelli can stand in for women’s achievement, then perhaps we deserve to be smeared in the jizz-moistened sand of our desert future.
Lately, I have been quite troubled by the language of “disruption”, of the dream of social order fisted by the frictionless invisible hand. Those who speak it freely from the back of an Uber—another company that has done away with the tiresome social business of paying tax—are absolutely convinced that the “sharing” economy, the frictionless and decentralised market which appears to connect people but actually builds big edifices of corporate wealth, is also a just economy.
I do understand that innovation is a good thing. I know our state institutions are far from ideal. But I don’t buy the idea that private enterprise can do the work of the state—or even, in many cases, the work of innovation— better. Of course, companies that extract profit from the bodies and minds and hours of labourers can often be more “efficient”, but only by very specific measures. And, fuck me, even if they could produce good or better social outcomes—let’s imagine a world where Pirelli advances the lot of a gender it has hitherto showered in jizz–what fucking business is it of business to do state or moral business? I DID NOT APPOINT THESE PEOPLE.
We have no trouble telling the government to “get out of my vagina” etc, yet we seem to very easily afford Pirelli the privilege of governing tits; that they’ve elected this year to cover the tits up is neither here nor there.
The business term “disruption”, which often means flouting those bothersome rules of the state like paying icky tax, now extends, as business terms often do, to the culture. We look to companies to immunise the poor feed the hungry and, now, empower the women.
I have written these thoughts in great haste and I would like to have more deftly drawn a connection between the hidden greed of Silicon Valley—and an upvote to Julian Assange for calling this ideology as poison and as dangerous as that of extreme Islamism—and the hidden tits of Milan. But I will just say, as I so often do, that you are probably a prong. And so is anyone who believes that “innovative” or “empowering” private enterprise will save the world.
The era’s popular feminism has all of the revolutionary form and fibre of a week-old custard. But, rx those tens of you drawn to my shitty opinions already know this and so let’s not pretend that today’s “feminist” approbation for the Pirelli calendar is any kind of surprise. And, viagra
let’s not spend unnecessary minutes in the service of the obvious and ask those news sites that call the Pirelli calendar “feminist”, “feminist” or, in the case of an actual feminist news service, “irrevocably feminist” to “get fucked”, “get fucked” or “irrevocably get fucked”.
I have given up the tedious work of trying to revoke the irrevocable and if ten million tedious western liberal fuckers want to “celebrate” the fact that a fucking tyre manufacturer has printed pictures of women in modest dress after a half century of printing pictures of women in nothing but a cupful of jizz-moistened sand, let them. Let these global village idiots believe that the marketplace of images can be civilised. Let these new sisters believe that the only way out of a maze of images is by the production of new images. Let “feminism” think that the register of its success is to swap the appearance of bikinis with the appearance of conspicuous success. Yes, yes. You’ve done well banishing those whores from the pages of a trade pub. Let’s celebrate a new kind of whoredom! Let’s hope that the privileged men who receive this high-end soft-porn will now pull their puds to the rhythms of female empowerment.
Look. I can’t be arsed explaining again to a dozen people who already agree with me in any case that changing the look of the commodity doesn’t change the terrible power of the commodity or how “diversity” in images is no more evidence of freedom than a diversity of supermarket choices. If you can’t see that this calendar is just more of the same paralysis, you can fuck right off to a more “empowering” place. A place where the lie that the gender pay gap can be cured by turning real porn into success porn. A place where Fashion Week is full of #makeupfree plus-size models whose mild divergence from a previous image of perfection will suddenly stop family violence, or whatever. I don’t know. I no longer care to follow the “argument” of contemporary feminism which seems chiefly concerned with horrible violence and tedious culture and how these two things are somehow intimately connected. I think I stopped bothering at about the time a “piece” of “feminist” “writing” that concerned Miss Piggy appeared. Apparently, the way she hits Kermit is “problematic” and not sufficiently representative of the true nature of family violence.
I would say that moral guardianship is not the work of the Jim Henson Creature Shop but those people who believe that it is are “irrevocably” munted. Instead, I will say something that I have been saying to myself lately: moral guardianship is not the work of corporations.
So, this is no direct complaint about the Pirelli calendar, the positive “feminist” response to the Pirell calendar or even to the cynicism of companies that know very well that acts of liberalism, such as honouring women or supporting same-sex marriage, is excellent marketing.
Actually, I suspect that many companies don’t even see their sale of empowerment as a market obligation any more. I suspect that many companies, such as Apple which build their extraordinary wealth on tax evasion and documented labour abuses, genuinely believe that they’re doing the Right Thing. And we believe that they’re doing the Right Thing. Certainly, I have at times allowed myself to believe that the “frictionless” capitalist Bill Gates is doing the Right Thing by using his wealth to fund very practical immunology programs. But, this happy view of mine was only made possible by forgetting (a) the terms of trade which permitted Bill Gates to amass so much wealth are those that very directly produce poverty and, in many cases, disease and (b) it is not the responsibility of private individuals or corporations to decide who to save.
But, you know, Bill Gates was not elected. We did not appoint this leader of industry. He was elevated to his current social influence by the fact of his business influence. And this is not to say that he is not a man of good intentions and it is not to say that his programs are ineffective or that he is a cowboy inoculator jabbing the citizens of dependent economies with homeopathic fiction. He probably takes good medical advice. I’m sure Mr Pepsico takes good advice from dietitians in his nutritional philanthropy, even as he continues to piss subsidised water away. Maybe Pirelli consulted with Important Feminists before deciding to celebrate the Beauty Within. Who knows? Corporations involved in this perverse moral exchange of cultural and financial philanthropy for profit can think whatever they want.
The point is what we think. And if we continue to think, as we do, without serious question Bill Gates can stand in for the state or the WHO or Apple’s good intentions can stand in for the fact that it rarely pays tax or that Pirelli can stand in for women’s achievement:, then perhaps we deserve to be smeared in the jizz-moistened sand of our desert future.
Lately, I have been quite troubled by the language of “disruption”. Those who speak it freely from the back of an Uber—another company that has done away with the tiresome social business of paying tax—are absolutely convinced that the “sharing” economy, the frictionless and decentralised market which appears to connect people but actually builds big edifices of corporate wealth, is also a just economy.
I do understand that innovation is a good thing. I know our state institutions are far from ideal. But I don’t buy the idea that private enterprise can do the work of the state—or even, in many cases, the work of innovation— better. Of course, companies that extract profit from the bodies and minds and hours of labourers can often be more “efficient”, but only by very specific measures. And, fuck me, even if they could produce good social outcomes—let’s imagine a world where Pirelli advances the lot of a gender it has hitherto showered in jizz–what fucking business is it of business to do state or moral business?
We have no trouble telling the government to “get out of my vagina” etc, yet we seem to very easily afford Pirelli the privilege of governing tits; that they’ve elected this year to cover the tits up is neither here nor there.
The business term “disruption”, which often means flouting those bothersome rules of the state like paying icky tax, now extends, as business terms often do, to the “culture”. We look to companies to immunise the poor feed the hungry and, now, empower the women.
I have written these thoughts in great haste and I would like to have more deftly drawn a connection between the hidden greed of Silicon Valley ideology and the hidden tits of Milan. But I will just say, as I so often do, that you are probably a prong. And so is anyone who believes that “innovative” or “empowering” private enterprise will save the world.
The era’s popular feminism has all of the revolutionary form and fibre of a week-old custard. But, remedy
those tens of you drawn to my shitty opinions already know this and so let’s not pretend that today’s “feminist” approbation for the Pirelli calendar is any kind of surprise. And, let’s not spend unnecessary minutes in the service of the obvious and ask those news sites that call the Pirelli calendar “feminist”, “feminist” or, in the case of an actual feminist news service, “irrevocably feminist” to “get fucked”, “get fucked” or “irrevocably get fucked”.
I have given up the tedious work of trying to revoke the irrevocable and if ten million tedious western liberal fuckers want to “celebrate” the fact that a fucking tyre manufacturer has printed pictures of women in modest dress after a half century of printing pictures of women in nothing but a cupful of jizz-moistened sand, let them. Let these global village idiots believe that the marketplace of images can be civilised. Let these new sisters believe that the only way out of a maze of images is by the production of new images. Let “feminism” think that the register of its success is to swap the appearance of bikinis with the appearance of conspicuous success. Yes, yes. You’ve done well banishing those whores from the pages of a trade pub. Let’s celebrate a new kind of whoredom! Let’s hope that the privileged men who receive this high-end soft-porn will now pull their puds to the rhythms of female empowerment.
Look. I can’t be arsed explaining again to a dozen people who already agree with me in any case that changing the look of the commodity doesn’t change the terrible power of the commodity or how “diversity” in images is no more evidence of freedom than a diversity of supermarket choices. If you can’t see that this calendar is just more of the same paralysis, you can fuck right off to a more “empowering” place. A place where the lie that the gender pay gap can be cured by turning real porn into success porn. A place where Fashion Week is full of #makeupfree plus-size models whose mild divergence from a previous image of perfection will suddenly stop family violence, or whatever. I don’t know. I no longer care to follow the “argument” of contemporary feminism which seems chiefly concerned with horrible violence and tedious culture and how these two things are somehow intimately connected. I think I stopped bothering at about the time a “piece” of “feminist” “writing” that concerned Miss Piggy appeared. Apparently, the way she hits Kermit is “problematic” and not sufficiently representative of the true nature of family violence.
I would say that moral guardianship is not the work of the Jim Henson Creature Shop but those people who believe that it is are “irrevocably” munted. Instead, I will say something that I have been saying to myself lately: moral guardianship is not the work of corporations.
So, this is no direct complaint about the Pirelli calendar, the positive “feminist” response to the Pirell calendar or even to the cynicism of companies that know very well that acts of liberalism, such as honouring women or supporting same-sex marriage, is excellent marketing.
Actually, I suspect that many companies don’t even see their sale of empowerment as a market obligation any more. I suspect that many companies, such as Apple which build their extraordinary wealth on tax evasion and documented labour abuses, genuinely believe that they’re doing the Right Thing. And we believe that they’re doing the Right Thing. Certainly, I have at times allowed myself to believe that the “frictionless” capitalist Bill Gates is doing the Right Thing by using his wealth to fund very practical immunology programs. But, this happy view of mine was only made possible by forgetting (a) the terms of trade which permitted Bill Gates to amass so much wealth are those that very directly produce poverty and, in many cases, disease and (b) it is not the responsibility of private individuals or corporations to decide who to save.
But, you know, Bill Gates was not elected. We did not appoint this leader of industry. He was elevated to his current social influence by the fact of his business influence. And this is not to say that he is not a man of good intentions and it is not to say that his programs are ineffective or that he is a cowboy inoculator jabbing the citizens of dependent economies with homeopathic fiction. He probably takes good medical advice. I’m sure Mr Pepsico takes good advice from dietitians in his nutritional philanthropy, even as he continues to piss subsidised water away. Maybe Pirelli consulted with Important Feminists before deciding to celebrate the Beauty Within. Who knows? Corporations involved in this perverse moral exchange of cultural and financial philanthropy for profit can think whatever they want.
The point is what we think. And if we continue to think, as we do, without serious question Bill Gates can stand in for the state or the WHO or Apple’s good intentions can stand in for the fact that it rarely pays tax or that Pirelli can stand in for women’s achievement:, then perhaps we deserve to be smeared in the jizz-moistened sand of our desert future.
Lately, I have been quite troubled by the language of “disruption”. Those who speak it freely from the back of an Uber—another company that has done away with the tiresome social business of paying tax—are absolutely convinced that the “sharing” economy, the frictionless and decentralised market which appears to connect people but actually builds big edifices of corporate wealth, is also a just economy.
I do understand that innovation is a good thing. I know our state institutions are far from ideal. But I don’t buy the idea that private enterprise can do the work of the state—or even, in many cases, the work of innovation— better. Of course, companies that extract profit from the bodies and minds and hours of labourers can often be more “efficient”, but only by very specific measures. And, fuck me, even if they could produce good social outcomes—let’s imagine a world where Pirelli advances the lot of a gender it has hitherto showered in jizz–what fucking business is it of business to do state or moral business?
We have no trouble telling the government to “get out of my vagina” etc, yet we seem to very easily afford Pirelli the privilege of governing tits; that they’ve elected this year to cover the tits up is neither here nor there.
The business term “disruption”, which often means flouting those bothersome rules of the state like paying icky tax, now extends, as business terms often do, to the “culture”. We look to companies to immunise the poor feed the hungry and, now, empower the women.
I have written these thoughts in great haste and I would like to have more deftly drawn a connection between the hidden greed of Silicon Valley ideology and the hidden tits of Milan. But I will just say, as I so often do, that you are probably a prong. And so is anyone who believes that “innovative” or “empowering” private enterprise will save the world.
The era’s popular feminism has all of the revolutionary form and fibre of week-old custard. But, buy cialis those tens of you drawn to my shitty opinions already know this and so let’s not pretend that today’s “feminist” approbation for the Pirelli calendar is any kind of surprise. And, click
let’s not spend unnecessary minutes in the service of the obvious and ask those news sites that call the Pirelli calendar “feminist”, clinic
“feminist” or, in the case of an actual feminist news service, “irrevocably feminist” to “get fucked”, “get fucked” or “get irrevocably fucked”.
I have given up the tedious work of trying to revoke the irrevocable and if ten million tedious western liberal fuckers want to “celebrate” the fact that a fucking tyre manufacturer has printed pictures of women in modest dress after a half century of printing pictures of women in nothing but a cupful of jizz-moistened sand, let them. Let these global village idiots believe that the marketplace of images can be civilised. Let these new sisters believe that the only way out of a maze of images is by the production of new images. Let “feminism” think that the register of its success is to swap the appearance of bikinis with the appearance of conspicuous success. Yes, yes. You’ve done well banishing those whores from the pages of a trade pub. Let’s celebrate a new kind of whoredom! Let’s hope that the privileged men who receive this high-end soft-porn will now pull their puds to the rhythms of female empowerment.
Look. I can’t be arsed explaining again to a dozen people who already agree with me in any case that changing the look of the commodity doesn’t change the terrible power of the commodity or how “diversity” in images is no more evidence of freedom than a diversity of supermarket choices. If you can’t see that this calendar is just more of the same paralysis, you can fuck right off to a more “empowering” place. A place where the lie that the gender pay gap can be cured by turning real porn into success porn. A place where Fashion Week is full of #makeupfree plus-size models whose mild divergence from a previous image of perfection will suddenly stop family violence, or whatever. I don’t know. I no longer care to follow the “argument” of contemporary feminism which seems chiefly concerned with horrible violence and tedious culture and how these two things are somehow intimately connected. I think I stopped bothering at about the time a “piece” of “feminist” “writing” that concerned Miss Piggy appeared. Apparently, the way she hits Kermit is “problematic” and not sufficiently representative of the true nature of family violence.
I would say that moral guardianship is not the work of the Jim Henson Creature Shop but those people who believe that it is are “irrevocably” munted. Instead, I will say something that I have been saying to myself lately: moral guardianship is not the work of corporations.
So, this is no direct complaint about the Pirelli calendar, the positive “feminist” response to the Pirell calendar or even to the cynicism of companies that know very well that acts of liberalism, such as honouring women or supporting same-sex marriage, is excellent marketing.
Actually, I suspect that many companies don’t even see their sale of empowerment as a market obligation any more. I suspect that many companies, such as Apple which build their extraordinary wealth on tax evasion and documented labour abuses, genuinely believe that they’re doing the Right Thing. And we believe that they’re doing the Right Thing. Certainly, I have at times allowed myself to believe that the “frictionless” capitalist Bill Gates is doing the Right Thing by using his wealth to fund very practical immunology programs. But, this happy view of mine was only made possible by forgetting (a) the terms of trade which permitted Bill Gates to amass so much wealth are those that very directly produce poverty and, in many cases, disease and (b) it is not the responsibility of private individuals or corporations to decide who to save.
But, you know, Bill Gates was not elected. We did not appoint this leader of industry. He was elevated to his current social influence by the fact of his business influence. And this is not to say that he is not a man of good intentions and it is not to say that his programs are ineffective or that he is a cowboy inoculator jabbing the citizens of dependent economies with homeopathic fiction. He probably takes good medical advice. I’m sure Mr Pepsico takes good advice from dietitians in his nutritional philanthropy, even as he continues to piss subsidised water away. Maybe Pirelli consulted with Important Feminists before deciding to celebrate the Beauty Within. Who knows? Corporations involved in this perverse moral exchange of cultural and financial philanthropy for profit can think whatever they want.
The point is what we think. And if we continue to think, as we do, without serious question Bill Gates can stand in for the state or the WHO or Apple’s good intentions can stand in for the fact that it rarely pays tax or that Pirelli can stand in for women’s achievement:, then perhaps we deserve to be smeared in the jizz-moistened sand of our desert future.
Lately, I have been quite troubled by the language of “disruption”. Those who speak it freely from the back of an Uber—another company that has done away with the tiresome social business of paying tax—are absolutely convinced that the “sharing” economy, the frictionless and decentralised market which appears to connect people but actually builds big edifices of corporate wealth, is also a just economy.
I do understand that innovation is a good thing. I know our state institutions are far from ideal. But I don’t buy the idea that private enterprise can do the work of the state—or even, in many cases, the work of innovation— better. Of course, companies that extract profit from the bodies and minds and hours of labourers can often be more “efficient”, but only by very specific measures. And, fuck me, even if they could produce good social outcomes—let’s imagine a world where Pirelli advances the lot of a gender it has hitherto showered in jizz–what fucking business is it of business to do state or moral business?
We have no trouble telling the government to “get out of my vagina” etc, yet we seem to very easily afford Pirelli the privilege of governing tits; that they’ve elected this year to cover the tits up is neither here nor there.
The business term “disruption”, which often means flouting those bothersome rules of the state like paying icky tax, now extends, as business terms often do, to the “culture”. We look to companies to immunise the poor feed the hungry and, now, empower the women.
I have written these thoughts in great haste and I would like to have more deftly drawn a connection between the hidden greed of Silicon Valley ideology and the hidden tits of Milan. But I will just say, as I so often do, that you are probably a prong. And so is anyone who believes that “innovative” or “empowering” private enterprise will save the world.
The era’s popular feminism has all of the revolutionary form and fibre of week-old custard. But, gonorrhea
those tens of you drawn to my shitty opinions already know this and so let’s not pretend that today’s “feminist” approbation for the Pirelli calendar is any kind of surprise. And, let’s not spend unnecessary minutes in the service of the obvious and ask those news sites that call the Pirelli calendar “feminist”, “feminist” or, in the case of an actual feminist news service, “irrevocably feminist” to “get fucked”, “get fucked” or “get irrevocably fucked”.
I have given up the tedious work of trying to revoke the irrevocable and if ten million tedious western liberal fuckers want to “celebrate” the fact that a fucking tyre manufacturer has printed pictures of women in modest dress after a half century of printing pictures of women in nothing but a cupful of jizz-moistened sand, let them. Let these global village idiots believe that the marketplace of images can be civilised. Let these new sisters believe that the only way out of a maze of images is by complicating the maze with the production of new images. Let “feminism” think that the register of its success is to swap the appearance of bikinis with the appearance of conspicuous success. Yes, yes. You’ve done well banishing those whores from the pages of a trade pub. Let’s celebrate a new kind of whoredom! Let’s hope that the privileged men who receive this high-end soft-porn will pull their puds to the rhythms of female empowerment. And maybe a Maya Angelou poetry recording.
Look. I can’t be arsed explaining again to a dozen people who already agree with me that changing the look of the commodity doesn’t change the terrible power of the commodity Or how “diversity” in images is no more evidence of freedom than a diversity of supermarket choices. Or, that we in the west justify airstrikes on nations who “cover their women up”, yet we see this same modesty as cause for celebration. Shite. If you can’t see that this calendar is just more of the same paralysis, you can fuck right off to a more “empowering” place. A place where the lie that the gender pay gap can be cured by turning real porn into success porn. A place where Fashion Week is full of #makeupfree plus-size models whose mild divergence from a previous image of perfection will suddenly stop family violence, or whatever. I don’t know. I no longer care to follow the “argument” of contemporary feminism which seems chiefly concerned with horrible violence and tedious culture and how these two things are somehow intimately connected. I think I stopped bothering at about the time a “piece” of “feminist” “writing” that concerned Miss Piggy appeared. Apparently, the way she hits Kermit is “problematic” and not sufficiently representative of the true nature of family violence.
I would say that moral guardianship is not the work of the Jim Henson Creature Shop but those people who believe that it is are “irrevocably” munted. Instead, I will say something that I have been saying to myself lately: moral guardianship is not the work of corporations.
So, this is no direct complaint about the Pirelli calendar, the positive “feminist” response to the Pirell calendar or even to the cynicism of companies that know very well that acts of liberalism, such as honouring women or supporting same-sex marriage, is excellent marketing.
Actually, I suspect that many companies don’t even see their sale of empowerment as a market obligation any more. I suspect that many companies, such as Apple which build their extraordinary wealth on tax evasion and documented labour abuses, genuinely believe that they’re doing the Right Thing. And we believe that they’re doing the Right Thing. Certainly, I have at times allowed myself to believe that the “frictionless” capitalist Bill Gates is doing the Right Thing by using his wealth to fund very practical immunology programs. But, this happy view of mine was only made possible by forgetting (a) the terms of trade which permitted Bill Gates to amass so much wealth are those that very directly produce poverty and, in many cases, disease and (b) it is not the responsibility of private individuals or corporations to decide who to save.
But, you know, Bill Gates was not elected. We did not appoint this leader of industry. He was elevated to his current social influence by the fact of his business influence. And this is not to say that he is not a man of good intentions and it is not to say that his programs are ineffective or that he is a cowboy inoculator jabbing the citizens of dependent economies with homeopathic fiction. He probably takes good medical advice. I’m sure Mr Pepsico takes good advice from dietitians in his nutritional philanthropy, even as he continues to piss subsidised water away. Maybe Pirelli consulted with Important Feminists before deciding to celebrate the Beauty Within. Who knows? Corporations involved in this perverse moral exchange of cultural and financial philanthropy for profit can think whatever they want.
The point is what we think. And if we continue to think, as we do, without serious question Bill Gates can stand in for the state or the WHO or Apple’s good intentions can stand in for the fact that it rarely pays tax or that Pirelli can stand in for women’s achievement:, then perhaps we deserve to be smeared in the jizz-moistened sand of our desert future.
Lately, I have been quite troubled by the language of “disruption”. Those who speak it freely from the back of an Uber—another company that has done away with the tiresome social business of paying tax—are absolutely convinced that the “sharing” economy, the frictionless and decentralised market which appears to connect people but actually builds big edifices of corporate wealth, is also a just economy.
I do understand that innovation is a good thing. I know our state institutions are far from ideal. But I don’t buy the idea that private enterprise can do the work of the state—or even, in many cases, the work of innovation— better. Of course, companies that extract profit from the bodies and minds and hours of labourers can often be more “efficient”, but only by very specific measures. And, fuck me, even if they could produce good social outcomes—let’s imagine a world where Pirelli advances the lot of a gender it has hitherto showered in jizz–what fucking business is it of business to do state or moral business?
We have no trouble telling the government to “get out of my vagina” etc, yet we seem to very easily afford Pirelli the privilege of governing tits; that they’ve elected this year to cover the tits up is neither here nor there.
The business term “disruption”, which often means flouting those bothersome rules of the state like paying icky tax, now extends, as business terms often do, to the “culture”. We look to companies to immunise the poor feed the hungry and, now, empower the women.
I have written these thoughts in great haste and I would like to have more deftly drawn a connection between the hidden greed of Silicon Valley ideology and the hidden tits of Milan. But I will just say, as I so often do, that you are probably a prong. And so is anyone who believes that “innovative” or “empowering” private enterprise will save the world.
The era’s popular feminism has all of the revolutionary form and fibre of week-old custard. But, order
see those tens of you drawn to my shitty opinions already know this and so let’s not pretend that today’s “feminist” approbation for the Pirelli calendar is any kind of surprise. And, here
let’s not spend unnecessary minutes in the service of the obvious and ask those news sites that call the Pirelli calendar “feminist”, “feminist” or, in the case of an actual feminist news service, “irrevocably feminist” to “get fucked”, “get fucked” or “get irrevocably fucked”.
I have given up the tedious work of trying to revoke the irrevocable and if ten million tedious western liberal fuckers want to “celebrate” the fact that a fucking tyre manufacturer has printed pictures of women in modest dress after a half century of printing pictures of women in nothing but a cupful of jizz-moistened sand, let them. Let these global village idiots believe that the marketplace of images can be civilised. Let these new sisters believe that the only way out of a maze of images is by complicating the maze with the production of new images. Let “feminism” think that the register of its success is to swap the appearance of bikinis with the appearance of conspicuous success. Yes, yes. You’ve done well banishing those whores from the pages of a trade pub. Let’s celebrate a new kind of whoredom! Let’s hope that the privileged men who receive this high-end soft-porn will pull their puds to the rhythms of female empowerment. And maybe a Maya Angelou poetry recording.
Look. I can’t be arsed explaining again to a dozen people who already agree with me that changing the look of the commodity doesn’t change the terrible power of the commodity Or how “diversity” in images is no more evidence of freedom than a diversity of supermarket choices. Or, that we in the west justify airstrikes on nations who “cover their women up”, yet we see this same modesty as cause for celebration. Shite. If you can’t see that this calendar is just more of the same paralysis, you can fuck right off to a more “empowering” place. A place where the lie that the gender pay gap can be cured by turning real porn into success porn. A place where Fashion Week is full of #makeupfree plus-size models whose mild divergence from a previous image of perfection will suddenly stop family violence, or whatever. I don’t know. I no longer care to follow the “argument” of contemporary feminism which seems chiefly concerned with horrible violence and tedious culture and how these two things are somehow intimately connected. I think I stopped bothering at about the time a “piece” of “feminist” “writing” that concerned Miss Piggy appeared. Apparently, the way she hits Kermit is “problematic” and not sufficiently representative of the true nature of family violence.
I would say that moral guardianship is not the work of the Jim Henson Creature Shop but those people who believe that it is are “irrevocably” munted. Instead, I will say something that I have been saying to myself lately: moral guardianship is not the work of corporations.
So, this is no direct complaint about the Pirelli calendar, the positive “feminist” response to the Pirell calendar or even to the cynicism of companies that know very well that acts of liberalism, such as honouring women or supporting same-sex marriage, is excellent marketing.
Actually, I suspect that many companies don’t even see their sale of empowerment as a market obligation any more. I suspect that many companies, such as Apple which build their extraordinary wealth on tax evasion and documented labour abuses, genuinely believe that they’re doing the Right Thing. And we believe that they’re doing the Right Thing. Certainly, I have at times allowed myself to believe that the “frictionless” capitalist Bill Gates is doing the Right Thing by using his wealth to fund very practical immunology programs. But, this happy view of mine was only made possible by forgetting (a) the terms of trade which permitted Bill Gates to amass so much wealth are those that very directly produce poverty and, in many cases, disease and (b) it is not the responsibility of private individuals or corporations to decide who to save.
But, you know, Bill Gates was not elected. We did not appoint this leader of industry. He was elevated to his current social influence by the fact of his business influence. And this is not to say that he is not a man of good intentions and it is not to say that his programs are ineffective or that he is a cowboy inoculator jabbing the citizens of dependent economies with homeopathic fiction. He probably takes good medical advice. I’m sure Mr Pepsico takes good advice from dietitians in his nutritional philanthropy, even as he continues to piss subsidised water away. Maybe Pirelli consulted with Important Feminists before deciding to celebrate the Beauty Within. Who knows? Corporations involved in this perverse moral exchange of cultural and financial philanthropy for profit can think whatever they want.
The point is what we think. And if we continue to think, as we do, without serious question Bill Gates can stand in for the state or the WHO or Apple’s good intentions can stand in for the fact that it rarely pays tax or that Pirelli can stand in for women’s achievement, then perhaps we deserve to be smeared in the jizz-moistened sand of our desert future.
Lately, I have been quite troubled by the language of “disruption”. Those who speak it freely from the back of an Uber—another company that has done away with the tiresome social business of paying tax—are absolutely convinced that the “sharing” economy, the frictionless and decentralised market which appears to connect people but actually builds big edifices of corporate wealth, is also a just economy.
I do understand that innovation is a good thing. I know our state institutions are far from ideal. But I don’t buy the idea that private enterprise can do the work of the state—or even, in many cases, the work of innovation— better. Of course, companies that extract profit from the bodies and minds and hours of labourers can often be more “efficient”, but only by very specific measures. And, fuck me, even if they could produce good social outcomes—let’s imagine a world where Pirelli advances the lot of a gender it has hitherto showered in jizz–what fucking business is it of business to do state or moral business?
We have no trouble telling the government to “get out of my vagina” etc, yet we seem to very easily afford Pirelli the privilege of governing tits; that they’ve elected this year to cover the tits up is neither here nor there.
The business term “disruption”, which often means flouting those bothersome rules of the state like paying icky tax, now extends, as business terms often do, to the “culture”. We look to companies to immunise the poor feed the hungry and, now, empower the women.
I have written these thoughts in great haste and I would like to have more deftly drawn a connection between the hidden greed of Silicon Valley ideology and the hidden tits of Milan. But I will just say, as I so often do, that you are probably a prong. And so is anyone who believes that “innovative” or “empowering” private enterprise will save the world.
The era’s popular feminism has all of the revolutionary form and fibre of week-old custard. But, malady
those tens of you drawn to my shitty opinions already know this and so let’s not pretend that today’s “feminist” approbation for the Pirelli calendar is any kind of surprise. And, prescription
let’s not spend unnecessary minutes in the service of the obvious and ask those news sites that call the Pirelli calendar “feminist”, sovaldi sale “feminist” or, in the case of an actual feminist news service, “irrevocably feminist” to “get fucked”, “get fucked” or “get irrevocably fucked”.
I have given up the tedious work of trying to revoke the irrevocable and if ten bajillion tedious western liberal fuckers want to “celebrate” the fact that a fucking tyre manufacturer has printed pictures of women in modest dress after a half century of printing pictures of women in nothing but a cupful of jizz-moistened sand, let them. Let these global village idiots believe that the marketplace of images can be civilised. Let these new sisters believe that the only way out of a maze of images is by complicating the maze with new images. Let “feminism” think that the register of its success is to swap the appearance of bikinis with the appearance of conspicuous success. Yes, yes. You’ve done well banishing those whores from the pages of a trade pub. Let’s celebrate a new kind of whoredom! Let’s hope that the privileged men who receive this high-end soft-porn will pull their puds to the rhythms of female empowerment. And maybe a Maya Angelou poetry recording.
Look. I can’t be arsed explaining again to a dozen people who already agree with me that changing the look of the commodity doesn’t change the terrible power of the commodity. Or how “diversity” in images is no more evidence of freedom than a diversity of supermarket choices. Or, that we in the west justify airstrikes on nations who “cover their women up”, yet we see this same modesty in ourselves as cause for celebration.
Shite. If you can’t see that this calendar is just more of the same paralysis, you can fuck right off to a more “empowering” place. A place where the lie that the gender pay gap can be cured by turning real porn into success porn. A place where the hearts appended to your#brave, #sobrave selfie are a currency of belonging. A place where Fashion Week is full of #makeupfree plus-size models whose mild divergence from a previous image of perfection will suddenly stop family violence, or whatever. I don’t know. I no longer care to follow the “argument” of contemporary feminism which seems chiefly concerned with horrible violence and tedious culture and how these two things are somehow intimately connected. I think I stopped bothering at about the time a “piece” of “feminist” “writing” that concerned Miss Piggy appeared. Apparently, the way she hits Kermit is “problematic” and not sufficiently representative of the true nature of family violence.
I would say that moral guardianship is not the work of the Jim Henson Creature Shop, but those people who believe that this are “irrevocably” munted. Instead, I will say something that I have been saying to myself lately: moral guardianship is not the work of corporations.
So, this is no direct complaint about the Pirelli calendar, the positive “feminist” response to the Pirell calendar or even the cynicism of companies that know very well that acts of liberalism, such as honouring women or supporting same-sex marriage, is excellent marketing.
Actually, I suspect that many companies don’t even see their sale of empowerment as a market obligation anymore. I suspect that many companies, such as Apple which build extraordinary wealth on tax evasion and documented labour abuses, genuinely believe that they’re doing the Right Thing. And we believe that they’re doing the Right Thing. Certainly, I have at times allowed myself to believe that the “frictionless” capitalist Bill Gates is doing the Right Thing by using his wealth to fund very practical immunology programs. But, this happy view of mine was only made possible by forgetting (a) the terms of trade which permitted Bill Gates to amass so much wealth are those that very directly produce poverty and, in many cases, disease and (b) it is not the responsibility of private individuals or corporations to decide who to save.
Bill Gates was not elected. Cutting the filament of red tape that binds us to democracy is not so much “frictionless” as it is fascist. We did not appoint this leader of industry. He was elevated to his current social influence by the fact of his business influence. And this is not to say that he is not a man of good intentions and it is not to say that his programs are ineffective or that he is a cowboy inoculator jabbing the citizens of dependent economies with homeopathic fiction. He probably takes good medical advice. I’m sure Mr Pepsico takes good advice from dietitians in his nutritional philanthropy, even as he continues to piss subsidised water away into the mouths of diabetics. Maybe Pirelli consulted with Important Feminists before deciding to celebrate the Beauty Within. Who knows? Corporations involved in this perverse moral exchange of cultural and financial philanthropy for profit can think whatever they want.
The point is what we think. And if we continue to think, as we do, without serious question. that Bill Gates can stand in for the state or the WHO or that Apple’s good intentions can stand in for the fact that it rarely pays tax and sources labour from the prisons of capital or that Pirelli can stand in for women’s achievement, then perhaps we deserve to be smeared in the jizz-moistened sand of our desert future.
Lately, I have been quite troubled by the language of “disruption”, of the dream of social order fisted by the frictionless invisible hand. Those who speak it freely from the back of an Uber—another company that has done away with the tiresome social business of paying tax—are absolutely convinced that the “sharing” economy, the frictionless and decentralised market which appears to connect people but actually builds big edifices of corporate wealth, is also a just economy.
I do understand that innovation is a good thing. I know our state institutions are far from ideal. But I don’t buy the idea that private enterprise can do the work of the state—or even, in many cases, the work of innovation— better. Of course, companies that extract profit from the bodies and minds and hours of labourers can often be more “efficient”, but only by very specific measures. And, fuck me, even if they could produce good or better social outcomes—let’s imagine a world where Pirelli advances the lot of a gender it has hitherto showered in jizz–what fucking business is it of business to do state or moral business? I DID NOT APPOINT THESE PEOPLE.
We have no trouble telling the government to “get out of my vagina” etc, yet we seem to very easily afford Pirelli the privilege of governing tits; that they’ve elected this year to cover the tits up is neither here nor there.
The business term “disruption”, which often means flouting those bothersome rules of the state like paying icky tax, now extends, as business terms often do, to the culture. We look to companies to immunise the poor feed the hungry and, now, empower the women.
I have written these thoughts in great haste and I would like to have more deftly drawn a connection between the hidden greed of Silicon Valley ideology—and an upvote to Julian Assange for calling this ideology as poison and as dangerous as that of extreme Islamism—and the hidden tits of Milan. But I will just say, as I so often do, that you are probably a prong. And so is anyone who believes that “innovative” or “empowering” private enterprise will save the world.
The era’s popular feminism has all of the revolutionary form and fibre of week-old custard. But, sick those tens of you drawn to my shitty opinions already know this and so let’s not pretend that today’s “feminist” approbation for the Pirelli calendar is any kind of surprise. And, let’s not spend unnecessary minutes in the service of the obvious and ask those news sites that call the Pirelli calendar “feminist”, “feminist” or, in the case of an actual feminist news service, “irrevocably feminist” to “get fucked”, “get fucked” or “get irrevocably fucked”.
I have given up the tedious work of trying to revoke the irrevocable and if ten bajillion tedious western liberal fuckers want to “celebrate” the fact that a fucking tyre manufacturer has printed pictures of women in modest dress after a half century of printing pictures of women in nothing but a cupful of jizz-moistened sand, let them. Let these global village idiots believe that the marketplace of images can be civilised. Let these new sisters believe that the only way out of a maze of images is by complicating the maze with new images. Let “feminism” think that the register of its success is to swap the appearance of bikinis with the appearance of conspicuous success. Yes, yes. You’ve done well banishing those whores from the pages of a trade pub. Let’s celebrate a new kind of whoredom! Let’s hope that the privileged men who receive this high-end soft-porn will pull their puds to the rhythms of female empowerment. And maybe a Maya Angelou poetry recording.
Look. I can’t be arsed explaining again to a dozen people who already agree with me that changing the look of the commodity doesn’t change the terrible power of the commodity. Or how “diversity” in images is no more evidence of freedom than a diversity of supermarket choices. Or, that we in the west rationalise airstrikes on nations because they “cover their women up”, yet we see this same modesty in ourselves as cause for celebration. Have The Terrorists Won? No, the idiotic ideology of the west, which informs popular feminism, has won.
Shite. If you can’t see that this calendar is just more of the same paralysis, you can fuck right off to a more “empowering” place. A place where the lie that the gender pay gap can be cured by turning real porn into success porn. A place where the hearts appended to your#brave, #sobrave selfie are a currency of belonging. A place where Fashion Week is full of #makeupfree plus-size models whose mild divergence from a previous image of perfection will suddenly stop family violence, or whatever. I don’t know. I no longer care to follow the “argument” of contemporary feminism which seems chiefly concerned with horrible violence and tedious culture and how these two things are somehow intimately connected. I think I stopped bothering at about the time a “piece” of “feminist” “writing” that concerned Miss Piggy appeared. Apparently, the way she hits Kermit is “problematic” and not sufficiently representative of the true nature of family violence.
I would say that moral guardianship is not the work of the Jim Henson Creature Shop, but those people who believe that this are “irrevocably” munted. Instead, I will say something that I have been saying to myself lately: moral guardianship is not the work of corporations.
So, this is no direct complaint about the Pirelli calendar, the positive “feminist” response to the Pirell calendar or even the cynicism of companies that know very well that acts of liberalism, such as honouring women or supporting same-sex marriage, is excellent marketing.
Actually, I suspect that many companies don’t even see their sale of empowerment as a market obligation anymore. I suspect that many companies, such as Apple which build extraordinary wealth on tax evasion and documented labour abuses, genuinely believe that they’re doing the Right Thing. And we believe that they’re doing the Right Thing. Certainly, I have at times allowed myself to believe that the “frictionless” capitalist Bill Gates is doing the Right Thing by using his wealth to fund very practical immunology programs. But, this happy view of mine was only made possible by forgetting (a) the terms of trade which permitted Bill Gates to amass so much wealth are those that very directly produce poverty and, in many cases, disease and (b) it is not the responsibility of private individuals or corporations to decide who to save.
Bill Gates was not elected. Cutting the filament of red tape that binds us to democracy is not so much “frictionless” as it is fascist. We did not appoint this leader of industry. He was elevated to his current social influence by the fact of his business influence. And this is not to say that he is not a man of good intentions and it is not to say that his programs are ineffective or that he is a cowboy inoculator jabbing the citizens of dependent economies with homeopathic fiction. He probably takes good medical advice. I’m sure Mr Pepsico takes good advice from dietitians in his nutritional philanthropy, even as he continues to piss subsidised water away into the mouths of diabetics. Maybe Pirelli consulted with Important Feminists before deciding to celebrate the Beauty Within. Who knows? Corporations involved in this perverse moral exchange of cultural and financial philanthropy for profit can think whatever they want.
The point is what we think. And if we continue to think, as we do, without serious question. that Bill Gates can stand in for the state or the WHO or that Apple’s good intentions can stand in for the fact that it rarely pays tax and sources labour from the prisons of capital or that Pirelli can stand in for women’s achievement, then perhaps we deserve to be smeared in the jizz-moistened sand of our desert future.
Lately, I have been quite troubled by the language of “disruption”, of the dream of social order fisted by the frictionless invisible hand. Those who speak it freely from the back of an Uber—another company that has done away with the tiresome social business of paying tax—are absolutely convinced that the “sharing” economy, the frictionless and decentralised market which appears to connect people but actually builds big edifices of corporate wealth, is also a just economy.
I do understand that innovation is a good thing. I know our state institutions are far from ideal. But I don’t buy the idea that private enterprise can do the work of the state—or even, in many cases, the work of innovation— better. Of course, companies that extract profit from the bodies and minds and hours of labourers can often be more “efficient”, but only by very specific measures. And, fuck me, even if they could produce good or better social outcomes—let’s imagine a world where Pirelli advances the lot of a gender it has hitherto showered in jizz–what fucking business is it of business to do state or moral business? I DID NOT APPOINT THESE PEOPLE.
We have no trouble telling the government to “get out of my vagina” etc, yet we seem to very easily afford Pirelli the privilege of governing tits; that they’ve elected this year to cover the tits up is neither here nor there.
The business term “disruption”, which often means flouting those bothersome rules of the state like paying icky tax, now extends, as business terms often do, to the culture. We look to companies to immunise the poor feed the hungry and, now, empower the women.
I have written these thoughts in great haste and I would like to have more deftly drawn a connection between the hidden greed of Silicon Valley—and an upvote to Julian Assange for calling this ideology as poison and as dangerous as that of extreme Islamism—and the hidden tits of Milan. But I will just say, as I so often do, that you are probably a prong. And so is anyone who believes that “innovative” or “empowering” private enterprise will save the world.
The era’s popular feminism has all of the revolutionary form and fibre of week-old custard. But, mind those tens of you drawn to my shitty opinions already know this and so let’s not pretend that today’s “feminist” approbation for the Pirelli calendar is any kind of surprise. And, health system
let’s not spend unnecessary minutes in the service of the obvious and ask those news sites that call the Pirelli calendar “feminist”, anemia
“feminist” or, in the case of an actual feminist news service, “irrevocably feminist” to “get fucked”, “get fucked” or “get irrevocably fucked”.
I have given up the tedious work of trying to revoke the irrevocable and if ten bajillion tedious western liberal fuckers want to “celebrate” the fact that a fucking tyre manufacturer has printed pictures of women in modest dress after a half century of printing pictures of women in nothing but a cupful of jizz-moistened sand, let them. Let these global village idiots believe that the marketplace of images can be civilised. Let these new sisters believe that the only way out of a maze of images is by complicating the maze with new images. Let “feminism” think that the register of its success is to swap the appearance of bikinis with the appearance of conspicuous success. Yes, yes. You’ve done well banishing those whores from the pages of a trade pub. Let’s celebrate a new kind of whoredom! Let’s hope that the privileged men who receive this high-end soft-porn will pull their puds to the rhythms of female empowerment. And maybe a Maya Angelou poetry recording.
Look. I can’t be arsed explaining again to a dozen people who already agree with me that changing the look of the commodity doesn’t change the terrible power of the commodity. Or how “diversity” in images is no more evidence of freedom than a diversity of supermarket choices. Or, that we in the west rationalise airstrikes on nations because they “cover their women up”, yet we see this same modesty in ourselves as cause for celebration. Have The Terrorists Won? No, the idiotic ideology of the west, which informs popular feminism, has won.
Shite. If you can’t see that this calendar is just more of the same paralysis, you can fuck right off to a more “empowering” place. A place where the lie that the gender pay gap can be cured by turning real porn into success porn. A place where the hearts appended to your #brave selfie are a currency of belonging. A place where Fashion Week is full of #makeupfree plus-size models whose mild divergence from a previous image of perfection will suddenly stop family violence, or whatever. I don’t know. I no longer care to follow the “argument” of contemporary feminism which seems chiefly concerned with horrible violence and tedious culture and how these two things are somehow intimately connected. I think I stopped bothering at about the time a “piece” of “feminist” “writing” that concerned Miss Piggy appeared. Apparently, the way she hits Kermit is “problematic” and not sufficiently representative of the true nature of family violence.
I would say that moral guardianship is not the work of the Jim Henson Creature Shop, but those people who believe that this are “irrevocably” munted. Instead, I will say something that I have been saying to myself lately: moral guardianship is not the work of corporations.
So, this is no direct complaint about the Pirelli calendar, the positive “feminist” response to the Pirell calendar or even the cynicism of companies that know very well that acts of liberalism, such as honouring women or supporting same-sex marriage, is excellent marketing.
Actually, I suspect that many companies don’t even see their sale of empowerment as a market obligation anymore. I suspect that many companies, such as Apple which build extraordinary wealth on tax evasion and documented labour abuses, genuinely believe that they’re doing the Right Thing. And we believe that they’re doing the Right Thing. Certainly, I have at times allowed myself to believe that the “frictionless” capitalist Bill Gates is doing the Right Thing by using his wealth to fund very practical immunology programs. But, this happy view of mine was only made possible by forgetting (a) the terms of trade which permitted Bill Gates to amass so much wealth are those that very directly produce poverty and, in many cases, disease and (b) it is not the responsibility of private individuals or corporations to decide who to save.
Bill Gates was not elected. Cutting the remaining shred of red tape that binds us to democracy is not so much a “frictionless” act as it is fascist. We did not appoint this leader of industry. He was elevated to his current social influence by the fact of his business influence. And this is not to say that he is not a man of good intentions and it is not to say that his programs are ineffective or that he is a cowboy inoculator jabbing the citizens of dependent economies with homeopathic fiction. He probably takes good medical advice. I’m sure Mr Pepsico takes good advice from dietitians in his nutritional philanthropy, even as he continues to piss subsidised water away into the mouths of diabetics. Maybe Pirelli consulted with Important Feminists before deciding to celebrate the Beauty Within. Who knows? Corporations involved in this perverse moral exchange of cultural and financial philanthropy for profit can think whatever they want.
The point is what we think. And if we continue to think, as we do, without serious question. that Bill Gates can stand in for the state or the WHO or that Apple’s good intentions can stand in for the fact that it rarely pays tax and sources labour from the prisons of capital or that Pirelli can stand in for women’s achievement, then perhaps we deserve to be smeared in the jizz-moistened sand of our desert future.
Lately, I have been quite troubled by the language of “disruption”, of the dream of social order fisted by the frictionless invisible hand. Those who speak it freely from the back of an Uber—another company that has done away with the tiresome social business of paying tax—are absolutely convinced that the “sharing” economy, the frictionless and decentralised market which appears to connect people but actually builds big edifices of corporate wealth, is also a just economy.
I do understand that innovation is a good thing. I know our state institutions are far from ideal. But I don’t buy the idea that private enterprise can do the work of the state—or even, in many cases, the work of innovation— better. Of course, companies that extract profit from the bodies and minds and hours of labourers can often be more “efficient”, but only by very specific measures. And, fuck me, even if they could produce good or better social outcomes—let’s imagine a world where Pirelli advances the lot of a gender it has hitherto showered in jizz–what fucking business is it of business to do state or moral business? I DID NOT APPOINT THESE PEOPLE.
We have no trouble telling the government to “get out of my vagina” etc, yet we seem to very easily afford Pirelli the privilege of governing tits; that they’ve elected this year to cover the tits up is neither here nor there.
The business term “disruption”, which often means flouting those bothersome rules of the state like paying icky tax, now extends, as business terms often do, to the culture. We look to companies to immunise the poor feed the hungry and, now, empower the women.
I have written these thoughts in great haste and I would like to have more deftly drawn a connection between the hidden greed of Silicon Valley—and an upvote to Julian Assange for calling this ideology as poison and as dangerous as that of extreme Islamism—and the hidden tits of Milan. But I will just say, as I so often do, that you are probably a prong. And so is anyone who believes that “innovative” or “empowering” private enterprise will save the world.
The era’s popular feminism has all of the revolutionary form and fibre of week-old custard. But, store
those tens of you drawn to my shitty opinions already know this and so let’s not pretend that today’s “feminist” approbation for the Pirelli calendar is any kind of surprise. And, let’s not spend unnecessary minutes in the service of the obvious and ask those news sites that call the Pirelli calendar “feminist”, “feminist” or, in the case of an actual feminist news service, “irrevocably feminist” to “get fucked”, “get fucked” or “get irrevocably fucked”.
I have given up the tedious work of trying to revoke the irrevocable and if ten bajillion tedious western liberal fuckers want to “celebrate” the fact that a fucking tyre manufacturer has printed pictures of women in modest dress after a half century of printing pictures of women in nothing but a cupful of jizz-moistened sand, let them. Let these global village idiots believe that the marketplace of images can be civilised. Let these new sisters believe that the only way out of a maze of images is by complicating the maze with new images. Let “feminism” think that the register of its success is to swap the appearance of bikinis with the appearance of conspicuous success. Yes, yes. You’ve done well banishing those whores from the pages of a trade pub. Let’s celebrate a new kind of whoredom! Let’s hope that the privileged men who receive this high-end soft-porn will pull their puds to the rhythms of female empowerment. And maybe a Maya Angelou poetry recording.
Look. I can’t be arsed explaining again to a dozen people who already agree with me that changing the look of the commodity doesn’t change the terrible power of the commodity. Or how “diversity” in images is no more evidence of freedom than a diversity of supermarket choices. Or, that we in the west rationalise airstrikes on nations because they “cover their women up”, yet we see this same modesty in ourselves as cause for celebration. Have The Terrorists Won? No, the idiotic ideology of the west, which informs popular feminism, has won.
Shite. If you can’t see that this calendar is just more of the same paralysis, you can fuck right off to a more “empowering” place. A place where the lie that the gender pay gap can be cured by turning real porn into success porn. A place where the hearts appended to your #brave selfie are a currency of belonging. A place where Fashion Week is full of #makeupfree plus-size models whose mild divergence from a previous image of perfection will suddenly stop family violence, or whatever. I don’t know. I no longer care to follow the “argument” of contemporary feminism which seems chiefly concerned with horrible violence and tedious culture and how these two things are somehow intimately connected. I think I stopped bothering at about the time a “piece” of “feminist” “writing” that concerned Miss Piggy appeared. Apparently, the way she hits Kermit is “problematic” and not sufficiently representative of the true nature of family violence.
I would say that moral guardianship is not the work of the Jim Henson Creature Shop, but those people who believe that this are “irrevocably” munted. Instead, I will say something that I have been saying to myself lately: moral guardianship is not the work of corporations.
So, this is no direct complaint about the Pirelli calendar, the positive “feminist” response to the Pirell calendar or even the cynicism of companies that know very well that acts of liberalism, such as honouring women or supporting same-sex marriage, is excellent marketing.
Actually, I suspect that many companies don’t even see their sale of empowerment as a market obligation anymore. I suspect that many companies, such as Apple which build extraordinary wealth on tax evasion and documented labour abuses, genuinely believe that they’re doing the Right Thing. And we believe that they’re doing the Right Thing. Certainly, I have at times allowed myself to believe that the “frictionless” capitalist Bill Gates is doing the Right Thing by using his wealth to fund very practical immunology programs. But, this happy view of mine was only made possible by forgetting (a) the terms of trade which permitted Bill Gates to amass so much wealth are those that very directly produce poverty and, in many cases, disease and (b) it is not the responsibility of private individuals or corporations to decide who to save.
Bill Gates was not elected. Cutting the remaining shred of red tape that binds us to democracy is not so much a “frictionless” act as it is fascist. We did not appoint this leader of industry. He was elevated to his current social influence by the fact of his business influence. And this is not to say that he is not a man of good intentions and it is not to say that his programs are ineffective or that he is a cowboy inoculator jabbing the citizens of dependent economies with homeopathic fiction. He probably takes good medical advice. I’m sure Mr Pepsico takes good advice from dietitians in his nutritional philanthropy, even as he continues to piss subsidised sugar water into the mouths of a world that is becoming insulin resistant. Maybe Pirelli consulted with Important Feminists before deciding to celebrate the Beauty Within. Who knows? Corporations involved in this perverse moral exchange of cultural and financial philanthropy for profit can think whatever they want.
The point is what we think. And if we continue to think, as we do, without serious question. that Bill Gates can stand in for the state or the WHO or that Apple’s good intentions can stand in for the fact that it rarely pays tax and sources labour from the prisons of capital or that Pirelli can stand in for women’s achievement, then perhaps we deserve to be smeared in the jizz-moistened sand of our desert future.
Lately, I have been quite troubled by the language of “disruption”, of the dream of social order fisted by the frictionless invisible hand. Those who speak it freely from the back of an Uber—another company that has done away with the tiresome social business of paying tax—are absolutely convinced that the “sharing” economy, the frictionless and decentralised market which appears to connect people but actually builds big edifices of corporate wealth, is also a just economy.
I do understand that innovation is a good thing. I know our state institutions are far from ideal. But I don’t buy the idea that private enterprise can do the work of the state—or even, in many cases, the work of innovation— better. Of course, companies that extract profit from the bodies and minds and hours of labourers can often be more “efficient”, but only by very specific measures. And, fuck me, even if they could produce good or better social outcomes—let’s imagine a world where Pirelli advances the lot of a gender it has hitherto showered in jizz–what fucking business is it of business to do state or moral business? I DID NOT APPOINT THESE PEOPLE.
We have no trouble telling the government to “get out of my vagina” etc, yet we seem to very easily afford Pirelli the privilege of governing tits; that they’ve elected this year to cover the tits up is neither here nor there.
The business term “disruption”, which often means flouting those bothersome rules of the state like paying icky tax, now extends, as business terms often do, to the culture. We look to companies to immunise the poor feed the hungry and, now, empower the women.
I have written these thoughts in great haste and I would like to have more deftly drawn a connection between the hidden greed of Silicon Valley—and an upvote to Julian Assange for calling this ideology as poison and as dangerous as that of extreme Islamism—and the hidden tits of Milan. But I will just say, as I so often do, that you are probably a prong. And so is anyone who believes that “innovative” or “empowering” private enterprise will save the world.
physician
but not always in a reasonable form." "Get this cunting hat off me."” width=”229″ height=”300″ /> “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.” “Get this cunting hat off me.”Are you a broken flagellant who hopes for a poverty of income? Would you like to work with hundreds of clients who will pay you tens of dollars for thousands of words? Great, you should consider becoming a news writer and start looking forward to direct engagement with an audience and, sometimes, an editor whose idea of critique is “lol, no”.
If it’s real pain and total financial ruin you seek, though, you should definitely start a small progressive news company. Specifically, a small progressive news company that has lofty editorial commitments like, say, commissioning young writers whose views may not be of the usual order. That way, everyone, including advertisers, will sooner or later hate the fuck out of you for your failure to appease a market of predictable pussies. When you do this thing, the thing a progressive audience says it wants but rarely does, and you publish a risky opinion, you can enjoy (a) a boycott and (b) total and immediate erasure from the public memory of anything good you ever did.
The Australian outlet New Matilda has published some truly extraordinary work. It’s also squeezed out a good deal of pointless turds and can tend to run roughshod over news standards. But, given that our publicly traded media companies excrete a far greater volume of unethical dookie, we can surely give a business like NM more than one free pass.
Nope.
On Monday, a young writer called Jack Kilbride had a fairly rotten piece posted in NM. I don’t know the guy or his byline at all but I imagine, even without the intense focus that followed publication, that he will soon suffer an extended guilt hangover for this ordinary work. It’s just not very good.
To cut a long and probably familiar story short, Kilbride suggests that tedious empowerment kitten Emma Watson is the right kind of feminist and that more “aggressive” tactics, particularly those by writers, have failed to bring forth the glorious roller derby revolution.
Personally, I don’t give one blind shit that another author has offered another prescription for feminist activism. It’s not Kilbride’s preference for nice girls that rankles me, but his delusion, shared by many of his critics, that feminism should be currently concerned with how to act and not how to think. Feminism is currently all action—name your abuser, love your curves, check your privilege etc.—and no thinking and about the only time I get really shitty with Karl Marx is for the eleventh thesis which is about the only thing “lefties” of the present remember from his colossal body of work.
That’s the one which says, “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” I.e. don’t think, act.
This is etched on Karl’s gravestone, which is a bit rich for a guy who once wrote to a colleague that he’d prefer it if the revolutionaries of Europe would just hold off storming palaces until he had finished writing Capital. And, if, at this point, you’re thinking “I’ve never read Marx, you wanker. And I don’t need to”, well (a) if you’re a serious leftist, you do need to and (b) if you’re a casual leftist, in some sense, you already have. But only the really easy bits. Like “don’t think, act”.
This influential thinker had plenty of pigfuckingly good ideas, but the eleventh thesis doesn’t even make the top ten. I mean, obviously, you have to do something at some point, but Marx himself did nothing but think. He lived and worked in a dire little London sty choked by poverty and he enrolled his beloved daughters, two of whom perished by disease, in his great project. Grappling with the dense logic of Hegel, describing a complex of events that begins with the commodity and never ends and trying to eject oneself from the background of bourgeois morality takes time. It takes a household. It takes a life. Whatever his epitaph, Marx thought. He didn’t act.
And, I am not saying that we can often hear the rusted gears of “scientific socialist” thought turn over at New Matilda; certainly Kilbride’s faith in a UN awareness campaign is about as red as average piss. I am just saying that this outlet has produced some genuinely good thought and if you don’t believe me, you have never read Amy McQuire.
Honestly, this young writer—who is currently taking a break from journalism, my several irate emails to her notwithstanding—is exceptional. Her talent is very natural and her understanding is profoundly social. She says very difficult things that are terrible medicine to take. So do others at NM. It’s one of the few places emerging writers can administer pain. Where else, outside the academy, in Australia, can we reliably read the strong leftist claims made by young writers that identity politics is an anti-intellectual framework, that white people are inevitably constituted as racist subjects, that Noel Pearson is a neoliberal in the garb of empowerment?
Look at this piece by Michael Brull. It’s the tits. While every other well-meaning young progressive in Australia was bending over backwards to uphold the rights of Zaky Mallah to speak on Q&A, Brull was one of the few who dared say what was, in fact, broadly known. Mallah was not a good reformed boy who prized liberal values. He was an open supporter of al-Nusra. In the progressive enthusiasm to embrace all our Muslim brothers and sisters, we white folks valorized someone from whom the overwhelming majority of Australian Muslims craved nothing but distance.
Where, if not NM, will a new generation of leftist writers come to learn their craft and test their ideas on our patience? Tell me? Where is that other place that a pinko embryo can earn a few bucks in the service of critical thought? University newspapers, whose value has been diminished in any case by Facebook, are often full of mild liberalism and cultural “critique” (here’s a picture of my vagina!) and even if a young writer defies the odds and gets to Fairfax or the Guardian, actually leftist thought is rarely welcome. And, even if we do encounter the occasional leftist in these pages—that is, someone who thinks that there is something more at the foundation of injustice than people’s bad, illiberal attitudes—they’re still not working within a leftist environment. And, bugger me, we need these nursery schools right now.
So many other young Australian writers I read take “progressive” to mean nothing more complex than “being nice”. They might mention a few buzzwords like “neoliberalism” or “intersectionality” or “Monsanto”, but their prevalent message is one that is itself very liberal in nature. Compare the stuff you might read at one of the big-time feminist sites of a publicly listed company, for example, to the work of McQuire. She feels no need to place herself at the centre of a text and she doesn’t seem to care for “calling out” particularly bad behavior in others. (Although, I seem to recall she’s given me a serve at some point. It was one of the rare good ones, I think.) In other words, she is not a liberal individualist in her style or in her thinking and even though, clearly, she is a gifted writer who would have “made it” in any case, NM was the place where she came to public attention. They published her.
So, NM provides a forum for actually leftist thought—and, at some point, could we remember that there is a distinction between thinking and acting; writers don’t have time to do both. And, yes, it fucks up. And, yes, it’s great fun to get on the internet and scream at someone “you’re everything that’s wrong with the patriarchy” and, yes, that article was pants. And, jeez, so moralizing and lacking in the intensity of thought, if not the luxury of editorial scrutiny, that so many things on NM have been.
But, fair fucking go. All this talk of boycott is insane. And this readiness to confuse a masthead with every opinion appended to it is baby gaga. And this impatience with one courageous, underfunded, pleasantly nutso publication for its failure to jerk you off in the way that pleases you fastest is egoistic.
Yes, it was a shit piece. But, again, it was only just as prescriptive about feminine behavior as the campaign it criticizes. (What is better about “you should speak out” than “you shouldn’t”? Both conventions are going to be impossible, or harmful, for many to follow.)
Apart from all the usual muck about “don’t pile on” and “consider other ideas” and so on, the thing that troubles me most about the hate bukkake I have seen showered on New Matilda is that few seem to see the value, or understand the labour involved, in producing thought.
But, this is probably because you can’t be bothered to read Marx. He explains this relationship quite well. Because he had time to think and the space to fuck up. Let’s give New Matilda that. I’d much rather have it around.
40 thoughts on “Don’t Act, Think. On loving New Matilda.”
OK so you don’t want others fapping over soft porn (previous piece) but you like them to fap over NM, and don’t like threats that it might be taken away because of knee-jerk derpcisions and lynch mob tactics…. which we all know from reading Huck Finn are terribly unfair.
Fair enough.
The only problem I see is, that if everyone is off thinking ALL the time then nothing really changes in the doing sectors of communities. It’s normally not the thinky highly educated types who are the problem when it comes to feminism or indeed social progress. They get it, some get it so well they decide instead to be evil shits and exploit their knowledge of it to manipulate people and become super evil capitalist machines who chew peoples lives up like candy while themselves floating off their sweaty backs in the lap of luxury… doesn’t mean they don’t get it – they just don’t give a shit about others and all the lectures and thinking in the world is not going to make them nice when instead they can have their 5th luxury car. Capitalism isn’t nice and either are people who strongly believe in it, so that’s a lost fraction of the intelligent community and not worth talking to. You can’t make people grow a heart. It’s those pesky thuggish doers who need prodding though, the ones who don’t like to think or have never been given the opportunity to see alternative perspectives. So sometimes someone thinky needs to appeal to their non-thinky targets in a more active way rather than to school them with pontification which will be as lost on them as ethics are to a capitalist.
In short, both are needed, but I don’t think you need to do both. If some people feel comfortable doing both then good for them, and if some people are just good at doing, and not so great at reading Marx, well good for them.
We all have one shot at life and we aren’t all blessed with the same skills and abilities. My belief is that because of this diversity in skills and ability and the absolute pointlessness in our actual existence, a multifaceted approach to change is the only way to approach anything that needs large social change in order to improve in our lifetime. Lets face it, we are a mass of rudderless idiots, no one approach is going to be enough. Perhaps NM didn’t deserve the kick in the pants… but perhaps it will make them play harder and smarter and edit with more diligence. Fear of failure can cripple some but it can spur on others. It may have even plucked them out of relative obscurity and extended their readership. Gotta love it when a boycott backfires and just gives rise to more support for the target.
Think away Helen – but reflect on whether your thinkiness is really causing change and enlightenment or whether it’s just providing entertainment for sycophants and MRAs with nothing to beat off over because they are out of twitter victims this evening? That in itself is not a bad thing, but in a way it does put you in the drivers seat of some powerful capitalist abilities should you ever decide you are going to stop all the free blogging and just work for $$$$. The fact is news papers are going to have to shake it up to engage with politics not readers. People get their politics more easily from media packages, their favourite song, that funky youtube clip with the whacky dreadlocked hippy that shouts at tractors (ok that one’s half made up, I’ve never seen him shout at a tractor, but you get my point).
Sure, sometimes people go too far but calls for boycotts are so run-of-the-mill these days, I wouldn’t let this one bother you considering it probably just made them more known.
Nowhere did I say and nor would I ever say that I didn’t “want” people masturbating. I do not make moral injunctions. This is just a rule of mine.
Actually, if you read the previous piece, you’ll find that I am, if anything, mourning the end of masturbation.
My comments about risks to the future of New Matilda are based on some knowledge. If it pleases you to think this outrage will only do the organisation good, please do so. But, I can tell you that it’s unlikely to be the case.
To encourage me to think about whether or not my “thinking” causes change is peculiar in a piece about this very topic.
I understand that many people wan’t Action Now and I understand that many people, some of whom have commented in this thread, believe that the only worthwhile thinking has been done by scientists and that people who think about the social and the political are wasting their time.
I’d say this is a very specious reading of history.
“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.” Keynes agrees with me. I don’t know how anyone could think that discourse has no effect. But, sure.
If you guys don’t think NM has anything of value to say, that’s fine. For mine, it’s one of the best places to read on the affairs of Aboriginal Australians. That it has been seriously shaken by this stupid overreaction deserves consideration. The argument “I don’t like it” or “what are you doing about the world anyhow and what’s the point in thinking?” don’t really feel very useful here, to me.
There are 3 straw men in there where you argue against a point I haven’t made, so it doesn’t really give me anything to reply to since it’s not a debate I was having; But I do so enjoy your enthusiastic embrace of masturbation, so I’ll give you a gold star anyway.
‘The proposition is simple: if we want a place for the left to talk, let’s not quash one of the very few remaining’
Why don’t YOU fucking write for it if you’re so eager to support burgeoning leftist media. This is well within your skillset. Or are you completely full of shit?
In order to shut you and your proletarian honour up (and, mate, I came up poor, too, but I don’t go on about it because I don’t like identity politics) let me address your concerns:
>Well, you’re right of course; there should be nurseries for lefty journalists. But what of that? There should be lots of things for lots of things etc
I am simply asking readers, many of whom were very open in their wish to close a publication down, to desist.
a) No, you didn’t grow poor. Not really.
b)You’re asking me to support a shit online journal because it’s left wing.
‘What? A market doesn’t “care” because a market cannot. This is fundamental to all socioeconomic understanding, both left and right. You either think, like Smith, that the invisible hand is benevolent or you think, like Marx, that it will fist the working arse. Or, like Rand, you think that the arses it fists deserve it. And, please, spare me the liberal nonsense about people “caring”. Morality doesn’t make good societies and economies. Good thinking and good gearing does’
My meaning was that the market cared that commodities were not shit. Please spare me your liberal Arts understanding of markets and economics in general–you do realize that these are mechanics outside of philosophy, right? If you want to have a discussion about speculation, sure, I can take yo to school. Bring it on. You’ll need more than what old man Bernard has to say to keep up with me however,because if he’s 30 years behind the times ( he is), then you’re about 160. I doubt you could even understand some of the ways I’ve made money through trading.
‘So young people have it easier than boomers, do they? This is despite the wage to house price ratio rocketing, the higher level of unemployment, the lack of access to free education, the dwindling of social equity? You may have personally experienced hard yakka but for the very large majority of boomers, wealth (made possible not just by their MARVELLOUS work ethic alone but a series of policies and social programs) is a given’.
Of course they have it easier. They have access to subsidized education, healthcare, a range of welfare services, cheap and readily accessible technology, information and interconnection undreamed of by the boomers. They’re also not getting sent to die in bullet fire in the jungle via a lottery system. This idea that the standard of living has decreased since then is complete fucking balls.
‘Good. Don’t explain it. Incidentally, this notion that women never themselves worked in large numbers in backbreaking conditions is idiocy’
I never said they didn’t, you fucking nutcase. But now I will–women have never worked physically as hard as men because they can’t, and aren’t expected to. It’s one of the perks, I guess, of which there does admittedly seem to be very few.
‘And, please, spare me the In My Day We Ate Gravel and Were Glad to Be Beaten for Dessert. Hard labour, and any kind of suffering, does not produce a better kind of person and you might do well to update your concept of alienation, which is as possible, if not more complete, in the (just as underpaid) knowledge industries as in a factory’
Something else I never said. What I said is that until you’ve done real work, you don’t really understand alienation, surplus value, and exploitation in a marxist sense generally.
Now, I know you might THINK you do, but you don’t. You are, how I can say this….weak. In the kind of work environments have experienced, you would have been proverbially killed an eaten. The fact that you would even try and make a case for intellectual labor exploitation being equal to that of manual just exposes you as the tantrum throwing psuedo-marxist primadona that you are. Your understanding of exploitation comes from books. It’s ad hominem, and you;ve never really lived it. Hell, I’ve never really lived it–not compared to some chinese guitar factory worker. ‘I don’ get payed enough to write articles! I quit!’ You grew up blue collar, huh? Bullshit. I take one look at you and know you’re a three dollar bill.I’d wager both of your parents were professionals or academics.
‘So, you would rather that there were no space for intellectual labour and suggest that if we all returned to the factory floor to which we have now consigned our comrades in developing nations that theory would just emerge form the cogs of machines? As you offer, do not make me fucking laugh’
No, what I would rather is read something genuinely intellectual, and I would rather that people produced whatever is they’re payed to produce according to some standard of quality. And fuckoff; the people in developing nations aren’t your comrades. What the fuck do do for them? How are you helping a sweatshop worker by sitting in an office writing bullshit while drinking powdered soup which is probably produced by a part of the conglomerate which owns the sweatshop?
‘Get a grip, mate. We need thinkers. To detonate the very conditions you describe. And, if you believe that these matters are not worth discussing and can all be resolved by the sniff of sweat from a hardworking Aussie, then follow your nose and don’t bother to comment while daring to call your “it’s all the fault of young people today” leftist’
I’m not saying it’s fault of young of people, I’m saying they’re fucking idiots.
And we do have thinkers. They’re called scientists. They’re responsible for the standard of living you currently enjoy. Here’s what social theorists have done to materially improve the comfort, and quality of human life:
Fuck all.
Maybe you should take a trip to liberia and perform public speeches–let’s see if that stops the spread of ebola.
Fucktard.
If it pleases you to imagine my great past privilege, please do so, Mark Latham. And, if you are comforted by the thought that nothing that was not written down by a scientist ever had an impact on the world, please enjoy your narrow rationalism.
I don’t think we have much to discuss. If I am arguing for the space for discourse and the need for discourse and you are arguing for the fact that it is only manly men who change labor conditions from a factory floor (one that no longer meaningfully exists in developed nations), we have nothing to say to each other. I believe political and economic thought influences the world. I believe the IMF, an ideological institution, influences the world. You don’t.
I trust you have enjoyed throwing about your gendered insults and slapping me down as a girly little sook in silks.
Well, I took a wingding over to New Matilda.I am convinced that half of the contributors were making necklaces from spray-painted, dry macaroni and dental floss two years ago. Fuck me drunk; that thing is awful. Sorry Helen, I love your work but in the words of prop forward now turned politico Glen Lazarus, You can roll a turd in glitter but it’s still a turd’. That might not be verbatim. It was something to do with turds and glitter anyway.
I wouldn’t say I’m boycotting because it’s wank (It is a BIT wanky, though) but because it’s quite shit, and in an age of planned obsolescence and rampant inanery in general, my reserves of forgiveness for shit things has been fracked to depletion.. I can no longer be C’maaaaarned. Here’s my meaningless opinion (at least you’ll be spared it on Crikey as a result):
New Matilda is kind of like the journalistic equivalent of Debb instant mashed potato; it’s completely fucking awful prima-facie, but the more you consider it, the more absurdly shitty it becomes. What kind of person is it that can’t be bothered to make real mashed potato? It’s not a fucking croquembouche tower or a mojito set in liquid nitrogen, is it? And why do we even need instant mashed potato anyway? For example, instant ramen noodles make sense to me.There’s a need, and that need is adequately served. I admittedly get through a ten pack of mi goreng a fortnight.and I know I’m not alone. And for all my Brethren, I want you to know that both love and respect you.
But who gets home from a long day having languished under the condescensions of some leggo man, some total ape of slavery, too tired/irate to cook anything good and thinks ‘Man, I just don’t want to do anything other than curl up on the couch in front of the latest pirated episode of the walking dead and a steaming three pound bowl of Debb instant mashed potato’?
Have you tried deb instant mashed potato? I had to, just to know. It comes in flakes like soap, and you add boiling water to it until becomes a kind of glutinous pap with a scent which is exactly delicate enough to be perverse, and reminds you of that unfortunate sea cumber you plucked from its rockpool, glistening obscenely out of it element, on a grade 5 field trip and squeezed too hard until it spat threads that stank.
Here’s what happens next–you get intrigued. You look at the label. It tells you that potato only constitutes 87% of whatever the fuck deb is. There’s other stuff in there you’d expect; milk, salt, sunflower oil, etc–but none of this accounts for the thread stink. That just leaves one: Emulsifer 471.
So you do a brief 2 hour perusal of health science articles on google scholar, which tells you that a lot of the time, emulsifier 471 is basically just phyoplankton. And sometimes some zooplankton, too.
‘Oh No. Jesus. good lord no’ you utter as you shrink saucer-eyed from the PC screen, your one palsied hand slowly lifting from the keyboard to touch your face, before you start to wonder what kind of gottliebien monster figured out plankton’s application as a food gelling agent, what kind of system sanctions its use as one, and by what method are they harvesting said plankton for use. Maybe they are scraping it from the teeth of balene whales. Nets are too big. It can’t be nets.There is something basically violating and obscene about it that somehow both eludes articulation and your ability to rationally identify, and therein condemn the fact. It’s really fucked up, you’re sure of that–but you can’ really say why. You have been raped by a ghost.
And new Matilda is like that, really; it’s immediately bad, but it has profound depths of badness that expand with deeper contemplation.
You have read NM for the purpose of assessment in an afternoon and not in the context of news and broader discussion over time and made this decision.
Moreover, you seem to have missed the point about its function as a nursery school.
Is this writing as good as that in Granta? No. Are its thinkers as committed as those were at Arena? No. This is because it is written for five cents by people, including the publisher, who all have other jobs.
When I was young, I was able to write for newsletters and small papers that gave me space to think and the indulgence of forming my ideas. I was also able to do a totally non-vocational arts degree. Young people of the present left have no such luxury. What they have is New Matilda. Even Overland has become quite a liberal document with its focus on rights and sensitivities. Although, of course, I’d rather have Overland around.
So, Yes. You might look for five minutes and think “this is shit”. But, I can assure you that it’s not all shit and that it occasionally produces non-shit is a fucking miracle.
Even it it were all shit, we need shit. We need places for young or new leftists to work out their crap. None of us comes fully formed. FFS. Think about the conditions of labour.
Well, you’re right of course; there should be nurseries for lefty journalists. But what of that? There should be lots of things for lots of things, and in a civilized, just society organized along lines other than capital competition, and populated with a benign, intelligent and ethically motivated species that favored social equity over its trivial gratifications, there would be.
*looks out window*
Not here yet, by the looks of things.
If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.
Here’s what I think:
Your generation, when it was coming up, knew there were standards of quality to be met, and cared about meeting them.And they were made to care, because people cared. Ditto my generation.The market cared. As a young, inexperienced professional, neither of us would have expected to get any serious play until we were legitimately good.
The millennials neither have to meet such obligations or possess whatever sensibility it is that makes one psychically obligated to want to meet them. They are, as a trend, boring, uncreative and Artless. As a result, what is today considered innovation and enterprise would have, even 15 years ago, been considered kitsch, throwaway fadism and trash. As little as fifteen years ago, 50 shades of grey would have been no more in the public radar than any run-of-the-mil mills & boon airport romance. As little as fifteen years ago, a restaurant that served nothing but cereal would not have been suffered by the market to exist. The kinds of Art, services and cultural artifacts that now represent the bulk of what is consumed is, excuse me–fucking awful.
I give you exhibit A. Below is a link to the most popular print store on etsy. The prints themselves are of animals wearing hats and mustaches. They are superimposed over pages randomly torn from encyclopedias.
https://www.etsy.com/au/listing/206302311/such-dapper-much-dandy-shiba-inu-dog?ref=shop_home_active_2
There is also something wrong when of the largest independent journal online in Australia (Crikey) posts reviews of Pixar films, and rates those films highly. That is like a food critic reviewing a snickers bar. It is ridiculous. Another entitled, talentless gen Y hack who has arrived at his position through nothing more than the virtue of being born and some abstract idea of what it means to be a socalist.
The stupider people become, the shittier goods and services become, and the more shitty goods and service become, the more they pervade the market. And the more they pervade the market, the more they become the norm. And the more they become the norm, the less that quality gods and service are consumed. And the less quality goods and services are consumed, the less they are produced, until, finally, we end up with 50 shades of grey as the most successful book ever written and restaurants that serve fucking cereal. It’s actually difficult to imagine how much shittier. Maybe the next generation of restaurants will serve toast and somebody will re-write the hungry hungry caterpillar and it will win the Pulitzer.
Lastly, on the issue on ‘labor’ conditions of these young writers, seriously–give me a fucking break. They are, to someone like me, from a true blue collar underclass background, simply whiny, entitled little pussies who have learned what it means to be leftist through words, but not experiences, safely concealed from the actual reality of industrial oppression by postcodes and privilege. Armchair marxists. Sympatico Marxists. Sham Marxists.You want to know how became a Marxist?Through having done really bad, really hard fucking work in really fucking terrible settings. In fact, unless you’ve worked in a factory, or have had to pour concrete after wheeling it up ramps in 40 C heat and 90% humidity, or have been payed 13 dollars and hour after tax destroy your back loading trucks, you don’t know what surplus value and alienation really mean. And you don’t know what real work is. Period. I say this as someone who has done all those things before going on to tertiary studies and becoming a professional in the ‘intellectual labor’ sector. The buddhists have a saying; the mind thinks, but the body knows. And that’s a truth not accessible to those who have not experienced the body knowing. No matter how bad, no matter how hectic things have ever become at the office, whatever duress that is is not a fucking PATCH on the kinds of days I have had as an unskilled/skilled laborer. But it’s more than that; the way this kind of work shapes your mind, reality ..It would take volumes to describe this. Perhaps one day, I’ll try.
If I can add something unrelated:
I do not think there is anything better in existence for teaching young men the value of women than working a really, really hard, really low payed job that results you being considered shitkicking worthless scum. I’m not going to explain that. But it’s true.
I’m sorry Helen, but socially, holistically, organically, psychologically, getting payed peanuts to write shitty, cliche vacuous lefty arguments in an air conditioned office surrounded by forgiving, sensitive PC people is not in the same ballpark as getting payed peanuts to function as a beast or burden in a tin box while surrounded by men with hearts of stone who measure your worth by no other metric by how equal you are in relation to horrible, backbreaking tasks. Do not make me fucking laugh.
Sorry New Matilda. You either do it, or don’t waste my time.
Look. You’re clearly having a marvellous time posturing as the voice of working class reason, but, FFS.
The proposition is simple: if we want a place for the left to talk, let’s not quash one of the very few remaining.
In order to shut you and your proletarian honour up (and, mate, I came up poor, too, but I don’t go on about it because I don’t like identity politics) let me address your concerns:
>Well, you’re right of course; there should be nurseries for lefty journalists. But what of that? There should be lots of things for lots of things etc
I am simply asking readers, many of whom were very open in their wish to close a publication down, to desist.
>Your generation, when it was coming up, knew there were standards of quality to be met, and cared about meeting them .And they were made to care, because people cared. Ditto my generation.The market cared
What? A market doesn’t “care” because a market cannot. This is fundamental to all socioeconomic understanding, both left and right. You either think, like Smith, that the invisible hand is benevolent or you think, like Marx, that it will fist the working arse. Or, like Rand, you think that the arses it fists deserve it. And, please, spare me the liberal nonsense about people “caring”. Morality doesn’t make good societies and economies. Good thinking and good gearing does.
>The millennials neither have to meet such obligations or possess whatever sensibility it is that makes one psychically obligated to want to meet them.
What? You’re blaming individual morality for an ebb in social equity and wealth equality that has been ebbing for 40 years? I think if we have to blame an individual, it might as well be Milton Friedman. This tendency to blame bad individual morality and not even bother to trace its origins to documents written in quite plain English is lazy. Miss Millennial had nothing to do with Reagonomics.
>I give you exhibit A. Below is a link to the most popular print store on etsy. The prints themselves are of animals wearing hats and mustaches.
Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini was a hit song in your day. What of it?
>There is also something wrong when of the largest independent journal online in Australia (Crikey) posts reviews of Pixar films, and rates those films highly.
Wall-E is and should be compared to the best of Chaplin and Keaton. If you fail to understand the extraordinary craft of this film, you are not only out of step with most critics (even those your age) but you’ve really fucking missed out.
>end up with 50 shades of grey as the most successful book ever written and restaurants that serve fucking cereal.
Jonathan Livingstone Seagull was a bestseller in your day. What of it? See also: the Bible, Atlas Shrugged.
>And you don’t know what real work is.
So young people have it easier than boomers, do they? This is despite the wage to house price ratio rocketing, the higher level of unemployment, the lack of access to free education, the dwindling of social equity? You may have personally experienced hard yakka but for the very large majority of boomers, wealth (made possible not just by their MARVELLOUS work ethic alone but a series of policies and social programs) is a given.
And, please, spare me the In My Day We Ate Gravel and Were Glad to Be Beaten for Dessert. Hard labour, and any kind of suffering, does not produce a better kind of person and you might do well to update your concept of alienation, which is as possible, if not more complete, in the (just as underpaid) knowledge industries as in a factory. Further, the ABS lists shop assistant as the most typical job in the nation. Many of the young people who work in this sector have their bodies ruined by the hard and fast profit geared companies of the future. Your argument is: our jobs hurt more and so we were better. This makes no fucking sense. Unless, of course, you are prescribing a labour camp to fix the brats of today. If you think you are a leftist, you might want to read some fucking Marx.
>I do not think there is anything better in existence for teaching young men the value of women than working a really, really hard, really low payed job that results you being considered shitkicking worthless scum. I’m not going to explain that. But it’s true.
Good. Don’t explain it. Incidentally, this notion that women never themselves worked in large numbers in backbreaking conditions is idiocy.
>I’m sorry Helen, but socially, holistically, organically, psychologically, getting payed peanuts to write shitty, cliche vacuous lefty arguments in an air conditioned office….
You don’t know what and whom you’re talking about. Do a little research before describing New Matilda thus.
>surrounded by forgiving, sensitive PC people
No. They’re not.
>not in the same ballpark as getting payed peanuts to function as a beast or burden in a tin box while surrounded by men with hearts of stone who measure your worth by no other metric by how equal you are in relation to horrible, backbreaking tasks. Do not make me fucking laugh.
So, you would rather that there were no space for intellectual labour and suggest that if we all returned to the factory floor to which we have now consigned our comrades in developing nations that theory would just emerge form the cogs of machines? As you offer, do not make me fucking laugh.
If you cannot see the value in the future for thinking nor care to look at your own past, made materially better by Marx from his home which was every bit as “PC” and as “air conditioned” as you think New Matilda’s is, well, you know. First as tragedy. Then as farce.
Get a grip, mate. We need thinkers. To detonate the very conditions you describe. And, if you believe that these matters are not worth discussing and can all be resolved by the sniff of sweat from a hardworking Aussie, then follow your nose and don’t bother to comment while daring to call your “it’s all the fault of young people today” leftist.
This analysis is not particularly good.
Chris Graham has basically admitted that this was an experiment to see how much vitriol the author would cop, little more than an exercise in trolling the NM readership. An editor using an obscure and inexperienced writer as cannon fodder to create drama clicks has a distinctly capitalistic feel, so maybe Graham has a future at HuffPo or even the Murdoch empire.
For all the hyperbole about the awfulness of Kilbride’s piece, it actually represents one of the tamest “attacks” you are ever likely to see on the internet. If this is the big, mean Patriarchy in action then women should feel safe. It was like someone thrashing the Eiffel Tower with a garden hose.
I need no convincing that the Kilbride piece was tame. I said as much here. My only critique is that it was a poor piece of mild liberalism. I said this. I explicitly said that the reaction to it was ludicrous; particularly when those offering this critique had performed the identical thing.
While Graham may have “basically admitted” to the publication of what we both agree was a tame piece to test the wildness of its audience is not a “fact” (if screenshots of people’s personal musings on Facebook could be said to be facts) on which my “not particularly good” analysis rests.
The substance of my “not terribly good” analysis is in the title of this post and in most every par that follows. And that is, that the reaction to the piece (which again, we both agree was tame, which seems at odds with your assertion that Graham believed that it was wild) is not the same as action. That action and thought are different things.
So, disagree with me by all means. But, disagree with what I actually wrote. Or, you know, just react to what you think I wrote as every other point-scoring doody-head on the dumb, self-important internet is wont to do.
For fuck’s sake. Why fucking bother writing. No one fucking reads it.
You are arguing with assertions not made. #SoBrave
I have read this again and all I see is an abridged biography of Karl Marx, some puffery for writers you like, interspersed with witless rantings.
Oh Helen…this has made insomnia, stupid awake in the fives, totally worth it. Ta.
Nothing justifies insomnia!
Single white male reporting in to offer my thanks for a great article.
I am a lefty who has not read Marx but did however learn all by myself that kitchen cabinet and qandq are disgusting filth propaganda.
I don’t have much money but I recently subbed to new internationalist in an attempt to be less ignorant.
Best wishes Helen, you are really good at writing and I hope you keep on doing it. Thank you for pointing me towards Amy McQuire.
Hey FtT. This is far from perfect, but it remains a decent introduction. http://oyc.yale.edu/political-science/plsc-118
There’s 150 years of Marxist interpretation that follow Capital, But, it’s best to start with Karl.
Fuck you’re good.
No, Luke. I’m not. I am just what passes for “good” in a sewer of open, liberal misunderstanding.
I agree that Amy McQuire is very very good. Her article on Kitchen Cabinet was one of the best I’ve read this year.
It was glorious.
As a white male it’s good to see all those typing classes weren’t lost on you! Personally, i would have gone with “very good” instead of “pigfuckingly good” but that might just be my deeply ingrained right-wing hate of change talking.
You haven’t fooled anybody. Clearly you’re a lesbian social worker of the left who enjoys crossfit and words with friends.
“Pigfuckingly good” has now entered my every day parlance.
That and “hate bukkake”.
Obviously I liked some of the language not related to fornication, but I don’t want to come across as some kind “thinker” and blow my cover as one of the cool kids.
Fuck em all and come and play poker with me
I’m not smart enough to articulate why I agree with this but I do.
It’s because you’re a white man, I imagine.
Please. CISman.
Obvi.
The eleventh thesis is total pants so, of course, it’s what is remembered.
The caption accompanying the photo of The Man in this piece is, for mine, his finest work
However, for gems like:
“But, fair fucking go. All this talk of boycott is insane. And this readiness to confuse a masthead with every opinion appended to it is baby gaga. And this impatience with one courageous, underfunded, pleasantly nutso publication for its failure to jerk you off in the way that pleases you fastest is egoistic.”
I read Razer
This is only because you are a straight man of the right.
Helen, I fucking love you. If you ever need a Mummy you know where I am.
Look, Diane. You’re obviously a straight white right-wing man. These are the only persons who agree with my right-wing agenda.
Busted. It was the bow-tie that gave me away right?
Oh thank you. And for your Daily Review piece. I think Amy is fantastic and I feel very good about supporting her and pissing off Ruby Hammad who is currently going full gonzo against Amy.
The current thought leaders (aka circle fapping echo chamber famanists) shit me in so many ways. Be it the laxity in thought. The shallowness and reductivist approach to theory. The complete disregard for anything outside their own egos. Youre a better person than I for keeping your critique above personalities, particularly as those personalities are usually the first to deride you and other writers outside the tent. Keep it up HR.
Isn’t McQuire marvellous? And she’s about twelve, so obviously, I loathe her personally for as much as I admire her work. She doesn’t have any business being that smart.
1. NM is admirable but fucks up sometimes
2. Don’t boycott it if it fucks up
Fair enough. However you imply a 3.
3. Don’t get annoyed by anything it publishes
That’s neither realistic nor acceptable.
Did you read this piece? Did you read the bit where I said that it was the calls for boycott were foolhardy and that the piling on drives not only thought but an actual publication to non-existence? How do you conclude that there is this third imaginary proposal that emanates from those others? Where is the evidence for this in the text?
I mean. Fucking seriously. There were many calls for boycott. This is documented. And at no point do I say that idiots shouldn’t speak their idiot minds. But, they should be mindful about the labour and the outlet that they’re imperilling.
I was very clear about this.
Hate bukkake! Bloody hell, Razer.
I clicked dictionary but it didn’t show up, I wish I’d stopped right there!