Category: Incentives Matter

I don’t want to talk about it

Billy/ / Australia; Frontier Nation, China Flu, General, Incentives Matter, Legacy Press (c)

….how you broke my heart.
If I stay here just a little bit longer
If I stay here, won’t you listen to my heart?
Oh, my heart

Here’s an unscientific test; do you personally know anyone who has died in the last two years? Lets limit the scope to someone who you’ve spoken to at least once in the last five years.

Same question, but someone who’s had an unexpected medical condition or diagnosis?

How about suicides or suicide attempts?

Does it feel like the number of people falling in these anecdotal categories has increased recently? Does it make you ask any questions?

Maybe it’s not just anecdotal:

Excess deaths 13% higher.

Suicide rate per capita 9% higher in “world’s most locked down city”.

Have you seen unusual stories like this recently?

21 year old dies suddenly.

If you only consume news from the traditional sources, you might not have seen this highlighted or given much attention:

Rich countries are having more excess deaths than poorer countries. Who had that on their 2023 bingo card?

The lack of journalistic curiosity to not write more articles on this is bordering on being a superpower.

What was the significant factor impacting the rich countries that poorer countries didn’t have? Was it four letters starting with a lower case m?

I don’t know, but perhaps someone might have a look into it? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

How is 13% excess mortality not yesterday’s, today’s, tomorrow’s headline? In what universe is that not the lead story until we learn the reasons?

How are the faces and names of the public health officials of Victoria and their political masters not being plastered over the media until the excess suicide rates have been explained and addressed?

How many times do editors need to write “died suddenly” before they suspect there might be common causes?

Bill’s Opinion

Something is happening here. Let’s be charitable, let’s call it embarrassment. The people with the final decision rights on what story runs each day are embarrassed at how utterly wrong they’ve been on the seriousness of Covid, the morality and effectiveness of lockdown policies and the broken promises of “safe and effective” vaccines.

They bought and regurgitated the government talking points without question. They sent journalists to press conferences with questions such as, “Premier, should you have locked us down earlier and harder?”, or “Minister, shouldn’t you be considering jail for the unvaccinated?”.

It’s a little embarrassing to now admit how completely disastrous and devastating that position has been to the public health, both physically and mentally.

So instead, they are spiking any pieces daring to suggest the Emperor is wearing no clothes.

How do I know this?

The article above about the poor kid in Queensland was written by Alex Blair. I was going to berate him for his lack of curiosity (sub news category “health problems” really?), but then I looked at his Twitter feed. Oh, he’s curious enough all right, he’s just not getting that curiosity published by his editor.

It’s the same story for Frank Chung. Very carefully edited news articles, but his Twitter feed is more free with the questions.

It’d be fascinating to read Alex and Frank’s spiked articles. Perhaps there’s a book’s worth.

As that famous pederast, John Maynard Keynes, once said, “When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?”.

Well, in the case of editors of our main news outlets, we have the answer; plug our fingers in our ears and sing La La La La.

What goes on?

Billy/ / Australia; Frontier Nation, General, Incentives Matter, Whither Government?

….in your heart,

What goes on in your mind,

You are tearing me apart,

When you treat me so unkind.

R. Starky.

Tap tap. Is this thing on?

Recently, my commute has involved significantly less public transport and worse, less walking from the pool to the home office. Hence I am finding fewer opportunities to write here and my consumption of podcasts has increased.

A pleasant diversion from my usual Chem Trails, Pizzagate, lizard invasion podcast themes has included a couple of good astronomy channels.

I’ve heard some interesting discussions on the Drake Equation and Fermi’s Paradox, where the speakers have been wrestling with the juxtaposition of the magnitude of the number of possible life-bearing planets yet the deafening silence emanating from them.

So… possible scenarios;

  1. We’re alone
  2. We’re the only intelligent life
  3. Intelligent life is so incredibly rare we may never meet or even exist simultaneously
  4. We’re like animals in a zoo, observed by a vastly more advanced civilisation

There’s precedence in human history for scenario 4…. it is similar to how we treat the inhabitants of North Sentinel Island.

What a terrifying concept it would be to learn we are being watched by a civilisation that might solve our energy, health, longevity problem and perhaps remove many of our triggers for deadly conflicts…. yet they don’t lift a finger.

If you were a child on the North Sentinel Island, and at this very moment you became aware that in the same world you were living, there were hospitals, dentists, pain relief, cures for diseases that may have recently killed your family, education, warm clothes, supermarkets full of nourishing food, candy and Xboxes, etc, would you be happy with the alien zookeeper’s decision to keep you in the Stone Age on North Sentinel Island?

Let’s give the child a name, so we might think less abstractly; Sebastian.

How do you think Sebastian would feel once that knowledge of a safer, less precarious life was gained?

Hard to know, but I’m going to guess anger is up towards the top of Sebastian’s list.

And yet, here we are, leaving Sebastian to the mercy of situations we solved as a species hundreds and, in some cases, thousands of years ago.

But, of course, the North Sentilese are a unique case, right?

We generally prioritise the well-being of children in remote and isolated communities. It’s morally the right thing to do, if we know we can vastly improve their physical well-being and longevity.

Or, is it a lot more common than we’d like to admit?

Australian life expectancy is 81 years (male) to 85 years (female), unless one is living in very remote Aboriginal community, in which case, it’s 66 and 70. 15 years difference.

It’s not completely comparable to the North Sentinelese, but it’s analogous.

In the meantime, a lot of airtime and Canberra hours (they’re like normal hours except they cost YOU money) are being expended on a campaign called The Voice from the Heart, which may culminate in a referendum laster this year.

What is the campaign lobbying for?

We call for the establishment of a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution.

Ok. Any more detail on what legal form that might take, maybe what it means practically to aboriginal people or even the taxpayer?

If you can find something more, good luck.

In fact, one of the main members of the campaign has explicitly said we shouldn’t concern ourselves with the details.

Well, that’s ok then.

Bill’s Opinion

I will admit to two changes of opinion with this. Firstly, I was against it, because it looked like another lipstick on a pig solution that wouldn’t address the health and well-being of all the Sebastians living hundreds of miles from a modern hospital.

Then, after some discussion with a good friend who is close to the campaign, I thought “why not?”.

Now, I find myself wondering about Mary Kane and her son, Charles Foster. She knew she couldn’t provide for him on the farm and, once gold was discovered, she arranged for his education and well-being away from their remote community.

Perhaps we should use The Voice discussion to have a conversation about the morality of choosing not to bring Sebastian into town?

Rosebud.

Are you a “blue collar worker” in Australia?

Billy/ / Australia; Frontier Nation, Economics, General, Incentives Matter

Are you worried about your job security or wages growth relative to your domestic outgoings?

Did you vote Labor (sic) at the last general election?

If you answered “yes” to both of those questions, consider the possibility you’re a bit of an idiot.

Don’t get me wrong, my opinion is that voting is a diversionary tactic to prevent us from forming lynch mobs and distributing instant righteous justice to politicians.

However, voting for a party that was always going to open the immigration spigots just as the country was hitting 40 year highs in inflation is nothing short of an act of self-harm. Do you practise bulimia too?

Perfect economic storm to hit Australia 2023.

To be fair, the article is written by Leith van Onsolen, a man even more famous than me for predicting 17 of the last zero housing crashes in Australia, so caveat emptor. The difference between us is, the economy isn’t my career expertise unlike LvO.

At the same time as the economy will slow in response to the RBA’s aggressive monetary tightening, Australia’s labour supply will grow sharply in 2023 on the back of record-high net overseas migration (NOM).

A key reason why Australia’s unemployment has fallen to its lowest level since 1974 is because Australia lost hundreds of thousands of migrants over the pandemic. Therefore, many of the jobs created went to unemployed Australians rather than migrant workers.

Record high net overseas migration is going to cause economic stress for Australian workers?

If only there was a lever someone, anyone could pull to influence that. Bueller, anyone?

Bill’s Opinion

Since becoming an Australian citizen, I have never exercised my right (legal duty, actually) to cast a vote. I’ve simply not appreciated the false choice offered me.

The “unaparty” choice became all the more apparent in Covid time when the only difference between the two major parties was who would lock us down earlier and harder.

If I were to vote though, I’d be highly suspicious of a party claiming to be for the working class whilst overseeing a return to immigration at exactly the same time a four decades record slowdown and interest rate shock arrives.

There is one member of the Australian left who gets it though; (National) Socialist, Sally McManus, head of the ACTU.

Do editors have a duty of care?

Billy/ / Australia; Frontier Nation, General, Incentives Matter, Legacy Press (c), Me, Myself, Mary Madigan

Remember Mary Madigan, the “writer” for Mammamia who was upset someone managed to lose excess weight, then posted pictures of herself in lingerie and was further upset by the response by rude strangers?

Well, she’s been busy and written another quality column, this time suggesting people with dogs need equivalent time off from work as parents.

In our previous post about her, we suggested the editors were encouraging mental health problems for the purpose of macabre public entertainment:

…..the editors of the publications paying for these columns are encouraging negative health outcomes by printing it. Perhaps the editors are analogous to the circus ringmasters introducing the freak show exhibit.

This hypothesis is firming up to be a strongly-held view.

What on earth do you think the public response is going to be to daft OpEds like Mary’s current offering?

Anyone who has ever met a human or logged on to social media could predict the heap of abuse that is going to be piled on to her from angry parents and people who strongly feel she should have her personal faults criticised.

The consequential cost to her mental health is not zero. Has the editor factored this into their decision to commission and publish her article? How robust is her personality?

Bill’s Opinion

Just because it’s possible for everyone to write their innermost thoughts and emotions for the world to read, doesn’t mean we should encourage it.

So far, the only articles Mary has managed to get published all have the common theme of her exposing ridiculous opinions devoid of reality. She’s being allowed to publish a diary of mental health issues for our entertainment, in effect.

It might be argued she’s a conscious agent provocateur, like Richard Littlejohn or Katie Hopkins, and she has a robust enough sense of self to cope with the opprobrium. Take a look at the comments section beneath today’s offering if you dare.

But what if she’s not? This seems like a dangerous game Kerry Warren is playing, let’s hope nothing goes wrong for her.

Wendyball’s revealed versus expressed preferences

Billy/ / Australia; Frontier Nation, Cultural Marxism, Economics, General, Identity Politics, Incentives Matter

As I regularly tell my kids, don’t listen to what people say, pay more attention to what they do.

The Wendyball World Cup is about to kick off in Qatar. Millions of dollars will be spent on mysteriously expensive, nasty nylon replica national shirts, manufactured on the cheap in Asian factories.

If the merchandise supply chain of the competing national sporting bodies has no modern slavery issues, perhaps we might look at the labour practices of the host nation, Qatar.

According to the Guardian, reprinted by SBS, perhaps 6,500 foreign workers died in the construction of the stadia, infrastructure and general upgrades in the country.

To be fair to Qatar for a moment, the Guardian wouldn’t be my go to media source for any story involving integers greater than ten, as they spent the last three years trying to convince us a bad cold had a case fatality rate equivalent to the Black Death.

So let’s split the difference; say, about 3,000 died. What did they die of? Cardiovascular and respiratory issues. i.e. heatstroke. Unsurprising considering it’s still 35 degrees in the middle of the night there.

Also, the Qatari labour laws give employers rights over the workers that would make a Medieval king blush. Employers can prevent immigrant labourers from switching jobs and can cancel residency permits. Don’t like the working conditions? How about I send you home to Bangladesh tomorrow?

The Qatari treatment of the Wi-fi password people also falls well short of the western standard of acceptance and celebration. It’s illegal to be homosexual in Qatar.

So, as you can imagine, the international outrage has been intense and the coordinated responses have been significant and tangible, in line with earlier precedents such as those against the 1980 Moscow Olympics following the Russian invasion of Afghanistan or the global response to South Africa’s Apartheid regime.

A reminder of those two precedents; 66 countries boycotted the Moscow Olympics in 1980 and South Africa had pariah status on the international sports stage for several decades. In fact, the boycott gifted New Zealand their first rugby World Cup win in 1987.

So, as we’ve mentioned, equivalent boycotts are currently planned in response to, effectively, working to death several thousand dirt poor men from the sub-continent and jailing gay men and women.

Well, when when say boycotts, what we mean is the cities of Barcelona and Paris aren’t going to put up a big screen in a park. Spain and France are still sending their teams.

Australia have gone much further than most countries though, as you would expect from a country never shy to bask in the cheap glory of virtue signalling; the team made a video condemning Qatar.

Some commentators have described this as “powerful”. Obviously, it’s not as powerful as staying home and sitting the competition out, but we are sure the next batch of Bangladeshis to be worked to death this month appreciate the thought.

Although it’s fair to accuse the Australian wendyballers of not really caring enough about dead Asians or jailed homosexuals to skip a World Cup, they at least can’t be called hypocrites; it looks like Football Australia haven’t yet got round to filing a statement declaring their supply chain is free of slavery issues. (To see quite how pointless the register is anyway, read our previous post about it).

Interestingly, the domestic football code, Australians Rules Football, has filed one. It’s obviously a lot easier to be sure you’re clean if you don’t get to play overseas.

FIFA is headquartered in Switzerland. My preferred search engine isn’t showing a Swiss government modern slavery register. Hands up who isn’t surprised.

Bill’s Opinion

Remember all those players kneeling on the ground in countries around the world after the death of Saint George Floyd? That was because something something black lives.

What colour are Sri Lankan, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Nepali and Indian construction workers after a 12 hour shift in 50 degree heat?

We don’t take directions from the moral compass of soccer players for a very good reason. They are happy to spend a hashtag here and half an hour to make a video there, but missing out on a pay day is a cost they aren’t prepared to pay.

Oh, and ironically, Football Australia has a policy and protocol about playing in extreme heat. Shame it doesn’t apply to the building of the stadia the team plays in.

It’s 2022, perhaps “the science” should take a long holiday

Billy/ / Australia; Frontier Nation, Evolution in reverse hypothesis, General, Identity Politics, Incentives Matter

The end of ‘just eat less’? Science doesn’t see being fat as a ‘choice’

Many members of the public have come to believe that being fat is a choice. But scientists hold a radically different view.

ALL scientists or just the lardy ones?

Magda Szubanski knows she is overweight. She has tried to eat less and move more. Because that’s what society says to do, and because she is “not a stupid person”.

Not a stupid person. Anyone who’s read her Twitter account might have a word or two to say about that assertion.

Her new TV series, Magda’s Big National Health Check, explores the damage done by “diet culture” and the limits of individual responsibility for health problems.

Paging Sailor’s First Law of Female Journalism, can Sailor’s First Law of Female Journalism please report to the office?

“The obesity epidemic’s root cause isn’t individuals going, ‘I’m going to lie on the couch and eat delicious food’,” says Jane Martin, president of the Australia New Zealand Obesity Society. “What’s happened is people are being shaped and nudged every step of the day.”

Standby, we’re about to find out it’s someone else’s fault.

Rather than individual choice or a collective collapse in willpower, modern science points to the effect our environments have on warping our food and exercise choices – away from health foods and towards highly processed, highly profitable junk. Some scientists are sceptical we are truly making “choices” at all.

Wonderfully circular, that argument, probably like the person who first thought of it. We don’t have individual choice because our environment has an effect on our choice? I’m still hearing “choice” in there.

And there’s growing recognition that treatments that focus on the individual, such as diets, are not the full answer.

Ok, so what’s more likely to get you to shed a few kilos, taking individual responsibility or waiting for the entirety of society to make a pivot for you?

The “individual choice” narrative does suit one group in particular, says Martin: food companies, which have spent years pushing it. “Those big corporations love to put it back on the individual,” she says. “It suits them, because where are the solutions? Not with the individual, but with government.”

Lobby group reliant on government funding thinks the solution to their problem is in the hands of the government.

Where does The Australia New Zealand Obesity Society get its funding?

Council members and ANZOS sub-committee members receive no remuneration for their work on behalf of ANZOS, and a large proportion of the operating costs for the ANZOS is derived from members’ subscriptions. The work of the Secretariat and the large-scale national projects conducted by ANZOS are funded by donation. Donations are accepted as educational or research grants and all financial contributions are subject to defined regulations and audit procedures. Financial support is solicited from a variety of health, community, government and commercial organisations.

“A large proportion” is from members’ subscriptions? Really?

However; The Society has over 250 members throughout Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Region. Full membership costs $165. I bet the $41,250 a year barely covers the pastry bill at the annual conference they hold.

It’s funded by government grants.

We digress. The article has the usual arguments about genes and metabolism being a factor. And then there’s this doozy:

A careful study shows we are just as active as people living in the 1980s. If anything, we’re using more energy to move because we weigh more.

Brilliant. Fat people aren’t lazy because they have to carry more weight around than the rest of us.

Let’s give the last word to Jane Martin:

“What you see from the industry is it’s all put back on the individual,” she says. “This is how industry has shaped the discussion because it works for them to put the individual in the frame.”

Bill’s Opinion

“Officer, it’s not my fault I was speeding; Big Automobile and Big Construction conspired to make the car pleasurable to drive and the road flat and scenic”.

Buying luxury beliefs on a credit card

Billy/ / Australia; Frontier Nation, Identity Politics, Incentives Matter

“Luxury beliefs”, according to Rob Henderson, are those that “tend to be disastrous for poor and middle-class communities (and) have become the modern equivalent of buying expensive clothes or hiring servants. It’s a way of showing off your wealth and signaling your status to fellow members of the upper class.”

This only works, of course, if one has the wealth to flaunt in the first place.

If your salary relies on continuing working for an organisation already crippled by debt, luxury beliefs are surely some of the first expenses to be ditched, along with the premium Spotify account and those two takeaway coffees every morning?

Netball Australia lost $7m over the last two years and was facing down $4m in loan repayments at the end of this year that it was unlikely to be able to make.

Australia’s richest person offered a $15m bail out, which would have solved the major problems and kept dozens, if not hundreds of employees secure.

The problem is, Gina Rinehart’s father expressed an offensive opinion in the 1980s.

Gina didn’t say it, Gina most likely doesn’t feel the same way at all. Gina’s father said it. Gina’s father died 30 years ago.

A week or so of negative stories in the media about players being “uncomfortable” with the new sponsorship resulted in the sponsorship offer being withdrawn.

Unless a replacement sponsor is found, support and administration employees will be fired. Grassroots resources for children’s sport will be cut.

Because of some words said by a dead person.

Of course, there was a simple solution to all this unpleasantness; Gina Rinehart could have simply said the words she was ordered to say, then she would have been allowed to donate fifteen million dollars of her own money to a sport.

“She (Gina Rinehart) could have apologised for her father’s comments, distanced herself from them and told us that she doesn’t believe those things. Instead, she pulled her money out.”

Say the words, Gina. Say them, now.

Bill’s Opinion

I’m pretty sure one or both of my parents said a racist thing once in 1976.

I’m not apologising on their behalf.

I also don’t donate to charities if they reward me by negatively briefing the media about my family.

It’s funny how incentives work, isn’t it?

Hang on a minute, what just happened?

Billy/ / General, Incentives Matter, Whither Democracy, Whither Government?

One moment the UK had switched Prime Minister and Chancellor to candidates who’d clearly signalled their intent to implement many of the pledges from the 2019 manifesto plus a more Hayekian growth strategy, the next moment, the Chancellor has been fired and the Prime Minister now has the look of a hostage reading out the demands of their kidnappers to camera.

The “demands” are incredible too; the u-turns from the previously announced policies are bad enough, but they’re also reversing policies implemented by the same governing party only three years ago. It seems trivial to deny the request for a fully-fuelled jet plane and pilot.

The new Chancellor is an incredible sight to behold too; only 3 months ago he was the Prime Ministerial candidate promising the most tax cuts, yet finished lucky last in the competition. Today, he’s increasing taxes and is the de facto Prime Minister; Truss can’t sack him now, that’d be five Chancellors in a year, not even the Tories could stoneface bluff their way out of that.

How the hell did we get here?

So who is this new power behind the throne?

Jeremy Hunt.

The family are old money, landed gentry. He did the usual Charterhouse then Oxford, route to Westminster via a few failed businesses and one successful one.

He was a Remainer in 2016. During the Covid nonsense, he was THE most rabid Zero Covid/Lockdown Larry/Vaccine Mandate authoritarian voice in the UK. Go back and watch some interviews from the time, they’ve not aged well, particularly the one about his sister being locked up in Beijing.

As we’ve seen in the last 3 months, he’ll do and say anything to gain power. And has.

In summary, the very worst example of the tabala rasa model of power hungry politician; “….those are my principles, and if you don’t like them…well I have others”.

So, that’s the power behind the throne.

Or is it?

Here’s Mrs. Lucia Hunt:

Lucia Hunt was born, raised and lived most of her life in China.

One doesn’t need to be a xenophobe to ponder whether the spouse of the most powerful politician in Britain being from, and still having many close relatives living in China raises an issue of national security.

There is likely zero chance the agents of the CCP haven’t already tried to influence Mrs. Hunt in some way, either directly or by inference.

How do we know this? Because ALL Chinese emigrants are in some way under the influence of the Chinese security agencies, as CNN has pointed out:

While it remains unclear just how many of these students are on the radar of law enforcement, current and former intelligence officials told CNN that they all remain tethered to the Chinese government in some way, even if the vast majority aren’t sent to the US to spy.

When you leave China, you do so with the full knowledge you’ve left behind people for whom you are still responsible.

Bill’s Opinion

There’s so much about this last month in British politics that’s utterly insane, perhaps everyone is shell-shocked and can’t think clearly.

You don’t have to be a Klaus Schwab WEF conspiracy theorist to start to have serious doubts about the integrity of the systems and institutions at the heart of the UK government.

There doesn’t even need to have ever been an explicit conspiratorial preference stated for us to have got to this place where an empty vessel with a citizen of an enemy state as his spouse is now running the country. Soft long term influence and utter incompetence would have got us here too.

Let’s face it, love or loathe Blair, he was the last competent human in the job. Since then, the office of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland has been a series of declining quality not seen since the Police Academy movies.

And here we are, like Don Logan sitting on the plane wondering why he allowed himself to be grinfucked into leaving.

(The embed video function isn’t working. Click this link to YouTube).

There were three in the bed, and the little cuck said….

Billy/ / Australia; Frontier Nation, Cultural Marxism, Evolution in reverse hypothesis, Gender Politics, Incentives Matter

Paging Desert Sun, could Desert Sun please come back to the interweb? This really is his subject area, not mine:

Sexologist Tamica Wilder opens up about living with boyfriend, husband and kids (h/t the Ryan Long Boyscast podcast).

A leading Australian sexologist has opened up about living, until recently, under the same roof as her husband, their two sons, and her boyfriend.

Which makes one wonder who the leading Australian sexologist is?

On this week’s episode of the Parentkind podcast, Tamica Wilder – who is based in the Byron Shire…. Of course she is, where the fuck else in Australia would she be living?

When I met the father of my two kids, one of the first sentences that came out of my mouth was, ‘Yes, I want to be with you, and it won’t be just you’,” the 37-year-old recalled.

The father of her kids must smile wryly at that shared memory.

“I was very clear from the beginning of our relationship that I had polyamorous or open-relating values, and that was something that was a non-negotiable in terms of my relating style.”

“Relating style”…. That’s a new synonym for a much older adjective we’d all recognise.

“And so that kind of flung us into a whole world of not fully understanding what that meant at the time, and it really seemed like the more freedom and agility we gave each other, the closer and closer we became.”

(Bold mine) Let’s come back to this in a while, shall we?

….Tamica met Rob* at a 2018 festival in northern NSW, Australia. “I met this person who’s my partner now, and I came back home to the father of my kids, and I told him all about this person that I’d met. And I’d said, ‘I’m not willing to not see this person again. There’s something there with us, and it’s a thread that I want to follow,’” she said.

“Hi honey, I’m back from the festival and I got you a present!”

“And so [Rob and I] kept relating, long distance, for a while, and then he eventually moved down to Melbourne and into our family home.”

Which sounds rather like, “let him move in or see your children half as much as you currently do”.

It was also important, she explained, that she, Rob and Harry have “lots of conversations”.

As the Boyscast points out, those must have been almost as bad, if not worse, than letting Rob bang your missus.

You can skim through the next ten paragraphs of bullshit justifications for shagging around until you get to the money shot:

Ultimately, she moved with her two sons up to the Byron Shire, where they now live together with Rob.

How’s that the closer and closer we became thing goin’ for ya?

Bill’s Opinion

The common theme one finds with articles trying to normalise polyamory is that they always finish with one or more parties getting no sex and/or evicted.

It’s analogous to articles bemoaning the lack of true socialism.

But, apparently, you’re the closed minded bigot for thinking monogamy and the family unit are the best societal solution for humans.

Lutruwita, a rose by any other name?

Billy/ / Australia; Frontier Nation, General, Incentives Matter

The Australian Aboriginal tradition is an oral one, handing stories down over generations. Current scientific opinion suggests this has been unbroken for perhaps 50 to 60 thousand years.

That’s an amazing and globally unique situation; literally everywhere else has been invaded and the local population replaced at least once in that time period, or the geography was discovered much later in in the human timeline. The Maoris only arrived in New Zealand around the lifetime of Scotland’s Robert the Bruce, for example. That’s potentially a 58,703 year difference for two landmasses only a fortnight’s sail away.

The problem with oral tradition is the same as one we all recognise from the school yard game we used to call, in the olden days before the Thought Police, Chinese Whispers; the message changes radically over the generations of telling.

Over a landmass the size of Australia and a timeline measured in thousands of years, that means anyone who claims there’s a name for this or a cultural reason for that, are likely cherry-picking or unintentionally selecting the very last one. That’s probably fair enough; perhaps few people currently living in Scunthorpe, England pause to wonder or have any utility in knowing what the town was called prior to the Viking invasion of 865AD either.

In Australia in 2022 however, such nuance doesn’t conform to The Narrative, so we end up with articles such as this, challenging us to hit up Wikipedia every fifth word (I joke; Wikipedia has drunk the KoolAid too).

TL:DR, a 200 year old doll, discovered in Matlock, Derbyshire, has links to an Aboriginal girl for whom there are some written records. The article concludes she had a tragic life. More on this later.

Perhaps the first thing that might leap out at you in the article is the traditional name for the island of Tasmania which, let’s be honest, you wouldn’t have answered correctly if it came up in last night’s pub trivia quiz. The SBS article, however, uses Lutruwita first and puts Tasmania in parenthesis last as if it were the minority vernacular. You know, I know, they know, nobody outside of a government-funded department ever uses this name for Tasmania.

Do you know something else? It’s highly unlikely anyone ever described the island of Tasmania by this name before the perfidious English arrived either. I propose this hypothesis for two reasons:

  1. The chances any human ever reaslised Tasmania was an island prior to Captain Cook arriving trends very close to zero; any tribal member straying past their ancestral grounds risked death or worse. Maybe knowledge could be stitched together to form a view of all points of the compass, but really there’d be no practical use in passing that knowledge down, so I bet it didn’t.
  2. The official bodies tasked with agreeing the correct new/old/dual names for places in Tasmania are verrrry silent on how they came up with Lutruwita. They’ve got reasons and history for specific place names, creeks and hills. The entire island, not so much. Example one, two, three

Once one realises the article is being a little loose with the truth, there are narrative clues everywhere. The heavy use of parentheses is a big flag telling you that you’re uneducated and need to get onboard with The Narrative.

For example, an historic job title, Protector of Aborigines has the parenthesis explainer; (using the offensive misnomer). Did you get the memo that Aboriginal is acceptable but Aborigine is offensive? The woke dictionary, Merriam-Webster hasn’t yet either, but they’ll probably get round to it once they’ve finished redefining “woman”.

There’s more pushing of The Narrative in the article too. I’m reticent to pick on the individuals named in the article but there’s unasked questions we might have been offered answers to, to suage our suspicions of narrative cherry-picking.

Artist Janice Ross, for example, claims affinity with Mithina because their lives were similar. How were their lives similar? Well, Mithina was taken from her family for reasons unstated, “adopted” and used as slave labour, then sent to an orphanage and died at 18 in mysterious circumstances. Whereas Janice was adopted, again, for reasons unstated and, frankly, sounds like she’s alive and well in her 50s.

The inference we’re being asked to make for Janice is that she was part of The Stolen Generations, a government policy to remove mixed race children from Aboriginal mothers and integrate them into the white community.

It’s a bit before my time, but I’m going to take a guess that the reasons children were taken in to care over those Stolen Generations years were not all the same.

They probably ranged radically between a bizarre version of white supremacy that can somehow reconcile bringing mixed race kids into the “white” gene pool, through to obvious safety cases where the child needed to be moved out of harm’s way to prevent a tragedy. We’re not told Janice’s specific circumstances.

It seems most likely that either scenario was motivated by altruistic feelings, albeit neither passing the 2022 morality test. It seems unlikely anyone in history ever thought, “We hate this race of people so much for who they are racially, we’re going to adopt some of their kids and let them marry ours”, regardless of the morality of the “adoption” process followed. Historically, racist invaders tended to, I dunno, murder every last one of the enemy instead.

The SBS article doesn’t tell us why Janice was adopted nor how loving or abusive her adoptive family were. This seems like important and relevant information to the claim of affinity with the child, but also to simply square the obvious inference being made towards a known modern cultural issue.

Both claimant and journalist knew the context when they spoke/wrote. Why not resolve the hanging questions? Probably for the same reason the keyboard keys ( and ) were given such a heavy workout in writing the article.

Bill’s Opinion

Surprisingly, Bill Maher has a quote to perfectly explain this absence of journalistic professionalism by Sarah Maunder:

Being woke is like a magic moral time machine where you judge everybody against what you imagine you would have done in 1066: And you always win.