Don’t Act, Think. On loving New Matilda.

In a begrudging effort at “net presence” or, obesity hahaha, read “developing social capital”, salve which is what overpriced fuckers are calling self-promotion these days, I have made a page which lists my recent writing.

It is bound to remain out-of-date at all times other than those when I have a book due to the publisher.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

copilot-women-201411-1416317659585_miss-april
I would like to say these tits made a strong visual statement that buoys my earnest point. HA BUOY MY POINT WITH TITS

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.

 

copilot-women-201411-1416317659585_miss-april
I would like to say these tits made a strong visual statement that buoys my earnest point. HA BUOY MY POINT WITH TITS

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.

 

 

copilot-women-201411-1416317659585_miss-april
I would like to say these tits made a strong visual statement that buoys my earnest point. HA BUOY MY POINT WITH TITS

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.

 

 

copilot-women-201411-1416317659585_miss-april
I would like to say these tits made a strong visual statement that buoys my earnest point. HA BUOY MY POINT WITH TITS

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.

 

 

copilot-women-201411-1416317659585_miss-april
I would like to say these tits made a strong visual statement that buoys my earnest point. HA BUOY MY POINT WITH TITS

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.

 

 

copilot-women-201411-1416317659585_miss-april
I would like to say these tits made a strong visual statement that buoys my earnest point. HA BUOY MY POINT WITH TITS

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.

 

 

copilot-women-201411-1416317659585_miss-april
I would like to say these tits made a strong visual statement that buoys my earnest point. HA BUOY MY POINT WITH TITS

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 salefeminist” 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.

 

copilot-women-201411-1416317659585_miss-april
I would like to say these tits made a strong visual statement that buoys my earnest point. HA BUOY MY POINT WITH TITS

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.

 

copilot-women-201411-1416317659585_miss-april
I would like to say these tits made a strong visual statement that buoys my earnest point. HA BUOY MY POINT WITH TITS

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.

 

copilot-women-201411-1416317659585_miss-april
I would like to say these tits made a strong visual statement that buoys my earnest point. HA BUOY MY POINT WITH TITS

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.”

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