Hold onto your hats, GrodsReaders. I’m about to say something shocking.

Andrew Bolt is right.

Dear victim: don’t upset the racists

…Victoria Police now issue this advice:

INDIAN students will be taught not to speak loudly in their native tongue or display signs of wealth such as iPods when travelling on trains at night, as part of a strategy to crack down on violent robberies.

Some restrictions on their attackers may actually be a better strategy, but once again we find it’s easier to police the lawful than the feral.

Damn straight. Why should a whole section of the community alter its behaviour just because its members are frequent victims of crime? Bolta’s right when he says it’s the perpetrators that should be made to change their behaviour. But despite Andy’s headline, one racist blogger is upset.

Strange that the police say nothing about the attackers? Not really. Past reports indicate that the attackers are mainly Africans. And we mustn’t under any circumstances let anybody know how dangerous Africans can be, must we?

Oh, TingTong. No surprise really given your past comments about them dumb blackies.

In The Sunday Age news(sic)paper yesterday I scanned a sensational headline: “Net blamed as 10,000 kids turn to crime”. Now, that’s an impressive claim — that a tool for communication has caused ten thousand young people to commit crimes — so I was keen to see exactly how this could occur.

First par.

ABOUT 10,000 Victorian children aged 10 to 14 have been cautioned by police, arrested or ordered to appear in court in the past year, as a surge in youth crime continues.

So that’s where the 10,000 figure came from. Second par.

Victoria Police say the escalation in juvenile crimes — ranging from break and enters to drug offences and assaults — is being fuelled by children’s growing exposure to sexual and violent images on the internet.

Big claim with no evidence to back it up yet. Fourth par.

The head of the police youth affairs office, Inspector Steve Soden, said too many children were viewing inappropriate content on the internet and this, coupled with boredom due to a lack of community services on Melbourne’s fringes, was behind the alarming rise in youth crime.

On what exactly is Inspector Soden basing his claim? And that’s a fairly explosive “coupled with”. There was no mention of community services (or lack of) in the headline of the story and the lack of community services is, on the face of it, much more likely to be “fuelling” youth crime than the intertubes. So what’s with the sensationalist “internet is evil” angle of the story?

Maybe there’s more information about how the internet is evil in the rest of the article. Just give me a moment to read it.

…

Nearly there.

…

Um, there’s not a single mention of the internet after the fourth paragraph. That’s thirteen whole paragraphs out of seventeen that fail to back up the suggestion made in the headline. There are, however, references to drug abuse, binge drinking, dysfunctional and abusive families, unemployment, school retention, sexual abuse and homelessness. But nothing about the internet. Just the two references in the first four paragraphs of the story.

To be fair, the headline technically and correctly states that the net has been blamed by at least one person for 10,000 kids turning to crime, but isn’t it a bit disingenuous to run with “net blamed” when “social conditions blamed” would be much more accurate, given that they are “blamed” for youth crime five times more than the internet in the story?

Nice job once again, Sunday Age.

It has always been my contention that footballers are muscle-bound mannequins with the ethical and intellectual capacity of Rhesus monkeys, overpaid and glorified beyond all logic and social value; that football clubs are clusters of selfish, misogynistic, homophobic ego with some gold paint slapped on the outside by PR suits; and that most footballers’ wives are vacuous, moribund clothes-horses whose moral compass hasn’t pointed ‘North’ since they were about 12. And these stories from the past four days do nothing to dampen my faith:

1.Alex Fevola, who back in December 2006 said “her marriage to football star Brendan was over”, has a preening, Wynettesque essay in today’s Herald Sun, so hideously erratic and self-obsessed that wouldn’t sound out of place if you read it on some 14-year-old’s Myspace. According to Alex, Brendan has done very little wrong (pissing on a wall was “insignificant”) and, like, he’s a good footballer and, like, a good dad so get off his case, okaaaay? No mention in Alex’s whine about Brendan jumping a bar in Ireland to belt some guy who refused to serve him. And nothing about his fly-in-fly-out fuckathons with similarly-smitten bimbo Lara Bingle (Alex seems to have developed amnesia since then).

2. Sam Newman, only a few weeks back from a Nine-imposed hiatus from The Footy Show for sexist denigration of a female journalist, opens his heart to tell viewers of his desire to ejaculate on a member of the Tasmanian state cabinet. Worse, he then insults everyone’s intelligence by trying to explain it away as something else, while Nine says that Newman has “done nothing wrong”. Newman’s mate Neil Mitchell will undoubtedly be on-air tomorrow defending him (Mitchell describes Newman as a “cutting-edge comedian”, further proof that the 3AW ego-for-hire couldn’t tell his arse from his elbow, whereas Newman seems to have mistaken his knob for his cerebrum.)

3. Fisherman-with-microphone Rex Hunt is up in arms when the media comes calling in relation to a road rage incident Hunt was allegedly involved in. “I couldn’t care less what people think of me” says Hunt, while refusing to deny that he was involved in the clash where a cyclist received a possible broken finger. Back in 2006 it was revealed that Rex couldn’t care less what his wife thought either, when his ‘cash-for-gash’ exploits (one of Newman’s quaint terms) were exposed in the media. Rex was less camera-shy in 2005 when he was punched by some teenagers in Byron Bay and wanted to share his pain, annoyance and social commentary with the world. Yibbedy-yibbedah.

4. Former Richmond player Andrew Krakouer cops 16 months in the slammer after a vicious assault outside a nightclub, where he kicked his victim in the head repeatedly. If Andrew wants advice on prison life he could call his dad Jim, who served nine years for attempting to smuggle amphetamines across the Nullabor back in the 1990s. When Krakouer Snr. was paroled in 2004, he was feted by the football media as a man trying to rebuild his life and become a good father and role-model to his son. Don’t think it worked somehow.

There are exceptions to every rule and there certainly are to this one. But throw others like Wayne Carey, Gary Ablett, Jeff Farmer, Ben Cousins, Daniel Kerr, Alan Didak, Dean Brogan, David Dench et al into the mix and it becomes apparent that while AFL footballers past and present make up 0.04% of the population, they seem to generate a much greater proportion of crime, scandal and social disruption. The odd thing is that nobody seems to be acknowledging the fact or asking why.

Now we all know that polls and surveys are the tabloid media’s stock-in-trade; they love them as much as Ant loves his Fleshlight gags. But basing whole stories – or worse, a sweeping coverage of a significant issue – on a single survey is lazy, unimaginative and fundamentally dangerous. Today the Herald Sun is running a spread on the ’findings’ (ie. whatever controversial stuff it can extract) of a recent survey of serving Victorian police officers. A precis of some survey results can be downloaded here (note the filename). In short, the survey expresses a need for greater police numbers (fair enough) a need for more men in the force (the ratio of female officers has soared to 23 per cent!) and a lack of confidence in chief commissioner Christine Nixon (she’s a woman too, you see).

And how many serving police officers responded to this optional survey? A total of 3459, or 30 per cent. That’s right, 30 per cent. This posturing, fulminating attack on the hierarchy, composition and methodology of our police force is based on the views of less than one-third of its members. Out-bloody-standing.

There’s a good portion of police members in Victoria hark back to the days of ‘Squizzy’ Taylor, larrikins and pushes, when policing was more simple and criminals were confronted head-on. Courts were strict, prisons were brutal, the coppers were a paramilitary group who took on villians en masse and knocked ’em all over the heads with truncheons. Policemen were tough because they had to be, so the force was gruff, insular and - because it was ugly business with no place for ladies – it also became strongly misogynistic. Thankfully those days are over and the police force has become far more professional and community-minded, a fact that some police members are yet to come to terms with.  In offering this survey as evidence of the state of our police force, even though it reflects the views of 30 per cent of all police, the Herald Sun is pandering to the views of a dubious minority and inviting panic, paranoia and a loss of confidence in Victoria Police itself.

I now invite the Herald Sun to commission an independent survey of all its employees, where they will be asked questions about their working conditions, processes, application of journalistic ethics and, importantly, confidence in senior editorial staff and Uncle Rupert. And if a disgruntled minority at the Herald Sun – and believe me, there is one – come to dominate the survey, will the organisation report this as representative of a crisis in its own ranks?

Aussie values are so superior to everyone else’s that we’re soon going to demand people sign up to them in order to get a tourist visa. There are the quintessential Aussie values like mateship, a fair go, low interest rates, relaxedness and comfortableness; but there are some other less obvious Aussie values like a respect for the sanctity of human life and for human rights. Or at least I’d hope that those would make it onto any self-respecting Aussie values checklist.

Some would argue that these represent our Way Of Life™.

You see, here in Australia we don’t sentence criminals to the death penalty no matter how terrible the crime. We don’t believe that the State has the right to take any life in retaliation for any crime. In Australia we don’t believe in torture, no matter how important the information potentially being held. We believe in fundamental human rights, including the right to freedom from State-sanctioned murder and inhuman interrogation.

But our leaders’ resolve crumbles in the face of that faceless threat: terrorism.

Our morally flexible Prime Minister calls for the death of Bali bombers yet appeals for clemency for Australian drug smugglers in Indonesia on the grounds that Australia is opposed to the death penalty.

Our morally flexible Prime Minister calls for the “coercive” use of sleep deprivation as long as it doesn’t cross the invisible and undefinable line into torture. This may or may not be related to the fact that this “coercion” has already been used on Australian citizens in American detention camps with Australia’s knowledge and implied consent.

Our fear of terrorism has created a social environment where our morally flexible Prime Minister (and others) can make statements like these with no discernible public backlash. The arguments of Howard and Amnesty International member Philip Ruddock recently seem to be: torture is okay if it’s used against terrorists, and then it’s “coercion”, not torture.

Oh, and speaking of Amnesty International, Phil:

Is sleep deprivation a form of torture?
Amnesty International calls on the USA and all governments to prohibit the use of sleep deprivation and any other forms of torture, or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment as interrogation techniques.

It’s been noted many times before that if we let the terrorists (citizens of Terroristan, population: unknown) affect our Way Of Life™ they’ve won. If, in order to defend ourselves against the terrorists we begin to allow abuses of human rights that we formerly defended, we are fundamentally changing our Way Of Life™. Join the dots.

People like Andrew Bolt, upon reading this argument, would call me an “apologist” for the terrorists. They would say that my weakness in standing up to the forces of evil is what will let the terrorists win. But seriously, if in order to win we lower ourselves to the level of those we oppose, is our victory worth it?

From time-to-time during Howard’s reign there have been periods when my hatred of John Howard dulls. I mean, who can maintain the rage when the most prominent thing he’s said in two months is “I’ll donate $2000 to every motorist who converts to LPG”? But it’s times like these when the old feelings return. I’m ashamed of my country’s leadership.

People like Andrew Bolt, upon reading the above paragraph, would bemoan the “hate-riddled left and its politics of shame”. Andrew Bolt can fuck off.