There are people who should know better who seem to be unclear about the nature of democracy.
I’m thinking of The Australian’s star turn Chris Kenny, who today tweeted that the US women’s march was “undemocratic” and an act of “mass petulance.”
(I’m sorry I can’t re-post his tweet. Kenny and I entered into an exchange of views and he blocked me. Gutted.)
Kenny appears to be claiming that in a democracy an elected leader is owed unquestioning allegiance from those who did not vote for him or her. He also seems to be arguing that protest is undemocratic. Both these assumptions demonstrate an appalling ignorance as to the nature and purpose of democracy, whose definition Kenny and his ilk are apparently attempting to renegotiate.
In pre -Trump times I would have largely ignored Kenny, except in relation to canines, however, in the new world order alternate facts, post truths and just plain old lies have to be challenged, otherwise we’ll all end up being ruled by giant babies excreting giant piles of reeking faecal matter.
I’m not a woman who is inclined to identify with other women just because we all have vaginas. Neither am I likely to exult that I am proud to be a woman, because I can’t see any merit in an accident of birth. However, President Trump’s attitude to women and the Republican Party’s determination to strip women of hard-won reproductive rights stirs in me a profound identification with my sex, and the difficulties that are peculiar to us because of our sex, and I’ll wear a pussy hat in a march any time as an indicator of where my loyalties lie.
Kenny’s dismissal of the global protests of millions of women as “mass petulance” encapsulates the reasons we march. Kenny does not have to fear enduring a backyard abortion because Roe v Wade is overturned. Kenny does not have to fear the lack of resources to see him through a pregnancy because his health care has been terminated. Kenny does not have to tolerate being paid significantly less than his female counterpart for doing the same job.
Kenny cannot deal with being the subject of television satirists, so quite how he would cope with the myriad daily insults and abuses heaped on women just because we have vaginas, I can’t begin to imagine.
Kenny apparently believes he is justified in “standing up for [his] rights” when he feels abused, but women are not. It’s undemocratic when we do it. It’s a human right when he does it.
Sorry Chris. You won’t be remembered as the journalist called the dog f**ker who stood up for his rights. We’ll just remember you as the dog f**cker, with a big serve of petulance on the side.
No Place For Sheep 
Problem is the likes Kenny, Trump and government in this country are great at dishing it out but have skins so thin, can’t tolerate any type criticism let alone abuse.
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His rights? Their media advisors taught them to hijack the terms of the left. This pigmy is all for freedom of speech.. as long it’s a lame unfunny Bill Leak cartoon. Take to the streets and they’re terrified. Let’s scare em more!
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Yes, Drifter, this is no time for being nice.
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Nor is it just raped refugee women or women in general that Kenny, following his master Murdoch’s voice, would be after.
The local Centrelink nastiness is a small example of what fascists have in mind across the globe for everyone but the insider elite.
They want a world pain with a handful, themselves, with the power of god.
They would be pitiful if they were not capable of so much harm to so many others.
Hobsbawm was right, people eventually do forget the lessons of history..the first half of last century is now too far away from the mindset of a neurotic, lazy, diverted and vitiated modern western public with no idea of what may be round the corner for it also.
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I’ve noted the age of some of neo fascists, PW. They are alarmingly youthful. They likely neither know nor care the havoc their ideology has caused in the world.
As for the slothful western public – they care so much for reality television they’ve allowed life to become one. Wasn’t there a movie about this? With Jim Carey?
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It is reactionary. Its adherents are people who cant engage with women people of different races, in fact a whole category of ” others”.
It can’t cope with any frustration of its subjective wants, it becomes shrill when instant gratifications is forestalled. It is very “nazi” as a result of its lack of self reflexivity, its conditioning against self comprehension and the work of adjustment.
Rather, it has been taught to force the world to conform to its nebulous and ill formed concept of a flawed and self centred and self involved ideal based on dislocated fantasy, eg some thing very “Conquistador”.
Ok, it’s the way they have been individuated and socialised in isolation from reaity at home at private schools etc, involving processes that applies to all of us to some degree…it is the way society has reproduced itself against reality for some time, mediated by expectation played off against possibility within reality. The danger is that a technology explosion destroys its relation to social cohesion present in earlier times and instead constitutes a threat first revealed in the industrialisation of genocide represented through the Nazi holocaust.
Indeed, the elders; Murdoch, Trump, the Koch bros etc have bequeathed, in lieu of true of parenthood, a group of people you described recently on another subject as “replicants”.
Chris Berg, Tudge, Porter, Lachlan Murdoch, Michaelia Cash, Rowan Dean, represent the IPA types who consist the new SS, machine like creatures who will put into practice the monstrosities envisaged by their elders without the slightest concept of the evil they do, beyond the child-like glee of children puling the wings off
flies.
Fiona once commended “Handmaids Tale” to me as a fair guess to traits and aspects of what may emerge from this flight from reality that comes of the disjunction between socialisation and change derived of unexpected technological advance. We haven’t moved out of, or have fled back to, the familiarity of a cognitive jungle in sync with our instilled limitations rather than sensed life as some thing positive to be explored through the potential freedom granted by technology. Our generation has become anachronistic within its own lifetime.
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Do we recognize the US system as a democracy even though only 43% of their population actually voted, can trump really claim to be the elected President?
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Every adult citizen is entitled to vote. Except the ones in gaol or asylums, I think.
They aren’t required to vote, unlike the arseholes here who don’t even express a preference when they are legally bound to vote.
Trump is, grudgingly, legitimate. So too were Hitler and Mussolini, by the lights of their countries systems.
We’ll just have to wait and see.
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Why have I stopped reading The Australian? I used to feel I had a duty to find out what the ratbag right was thinking, but I’ve eased my craving for contact with their minds.
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Hitler gained power in similar circumstances. The difference here could be the tens thousands out in the streets the next day.
I suspect the more the people protest, the more likely Trump is to go ahead with his outlandish policies. His ego will prevent him from reconsidering. Suspect he is a man that main aim in life is to get even.
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Florence, I think revenge is a powerful motivator for Trump. He especially wants revenge on Obama, who humiliated him.
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We don’t need to read it to know what they’re thinking. That’s how predictable and conservative they are Barry.
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A great serve – Bang! Game and truly, outmatched – he (Chris Kenny) has not got the wit or insight and can only, crow all day long, parading his lack of insight, obtuseness, and extent of being un-evolved as a member of the “human” race, (without a member), I am smiling at the words served in your post, in the last paragraph, in particular.
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Crikey, so many articles I can hardly keep up! but then maybe 2016 was just a taster for what we’re in for in the external assaults department this year/-;
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I believe it is also revenge that drives Abbott. It was after Turnbull refused to give Abbott shadow ministry that began his run for leadership. It is said that Turnbull told Abbott he wasn’t up to the job. Abbott is more interested in bringing Turnbull down than being PM, Well that is my observation.
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Like you I don’t think an accident of genetics is much to gloat about or be proud of in particular, although it is strange to think I am a matriarch of a largely female immediate family – 1 daughter, 3 grand daughters and 2 great grand daughters v 1 great grand son.
My girls are strong and gutsy and all know how to stand up for their rights, but not because they are women, because that is another accident of genetics, we are bred tough.
Kenny and his gen x ilk of spoilt brats though are best ignored, they are ignorant little nobodies who know fucking nothing about anything.
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Jennifer, please don’t blame it all on poor old Mr Kenny. Personally, I have no love for him when he said Trump would never win the White House a month before the US election because Donald fingered a woman. Did it ruin Donald’s election chances? Not on your Nelly. It made him even more wildly popular! Starlets expressed outrage for sure, but underneath their bleating protestations, I being a student of women, knew instinctively that women, if they were truthful (and we all know they’re not) love nothing more than being groped by a real man for it quickens their heart and makes them feel alive and relevant and in blushing good cheer. Friendly groping, Not sexual assault.
Donald being a real man, enjoys a bit of groping when he even grabbed a really pussy in the Republican Party. Exhibit A: https://i2.wp.com/www.commonsenseevaluation.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Picture-Leaked-Of-Trump-Grabbing-A-Pussy.jpg
So to cut it short, Chris Kenny was banishing from the Frank Longshank household. No more would his thin unradio-like voice, a nasally thin reedy voice that would never echo in my Noosa lounge-room, wafting over the lulling sounds of ocean waves. Nope, his nightly pompous show on SkyNews was banished for ever. His articles in The Australian remained mostly unread by Frank.
So in this magnanimous spirit of reconciliation, allow me to correct your discussion about the spontaneous women’s march in Washington, the original impetus for my post. Nothing could be further from the truth that women were capable of organising this massive march. Have you ever seen women organise anything enmasse or even read a map without a man to direct them and help drive them out on buses? Me neither. Your readers demand the truth and Frank will not deny them a shining moment of clarity.
The women’s march was indeed democratic and Kenny was wrong to say this. But it was not organised by women. They were used as pawns by the evil billionaire George Soros and his Open Society Foundation who fund groups like GetUp! His money penetrated 56 Women’s groups the same way Trump groped his beauty queens. Soros fingered them into action, onto buses and onto the streets of Washington. His aim was to use women like cattle up a gang plank and into the media abattoir, as props in a spotlight no different than marshalling grazing cattle into a stock yard or as a visual pageant, to protest the democratically elected Trump regime, which I’m very fond and supportive of.
In fact, while Donald likes to make a dollar and a grope the odd attractive bikini clad beauty, Soros likes to grope women en-masse, using his influence, the way old men past their erectile peak do and forcing them to put on ridiculous head-dresses and look like a bunch of stupid twats. Which they unwittingly do look like, as this photo from the event reveals.
Exhibit B: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C2vQHclW8AAwj2c.jpg:large
I would urge readers who take issue with Frank to read the New York Times article and make up their own mind:
http://nytlive.nytimes.com/womenintheworld/2017/01/20/billionaire-george-soros-has-ties-to-more-than-50-partners-of-the-womens-march-on-washington/
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That’s the Frank we know and love. And my gratitude to the fascinating article by a muslim lady who ADMITS in the Washington Post, of all places why she voted for Donald Trump: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2016/11/10/im-a-muslim-a-woman-and-an-immigrant-i-voted-for-trump/?utm_term=.8f9587066202
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Vintage Frank.
dq, it IS twaddle.
But it is vintage twaddle, of an order rarely witnessed.
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Who is this Frank and from whence did he come”
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“from whence” is a tautology.
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Thank you, It should have been “from whither”
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From an asylum near Noosa. Sometimes he gets access to a computer when Nurse isn’t watching. He left his doggy droppings all over Bob Ellis’ blog for years. He amused Bob, in a like fashion to watching a dog hump someone else’s leg.
🙂
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Twaddle.
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