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Metta Bhavana, aka
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19 Apr, 7 tweets, 3 min read
Détournement ("rerouting" "hijacking") was a 60s subversive strategy invented by leftist Situationists, essentially to rewire an idea or art form, rendering it meaningless, or disrupting its message.This ad is alt-Right culture jamming, hijacking & mocking the message.
Space for a clear message on harassment, personal safety, respect and knowing boundaries has now been polluted and cheapened by this effort. That seems like a deliberate strategy. "Look, we tried. Made a vid," will be the refrain from right-wing men, keen to shed the "issue."
"Look," sleazy old men of the #YoungLiberals will say. "We even got down to 'their level.' The youth are so ungrateful." But are "young people" the "problem?" Would Andrew Laming watch this and change his upskirting ways? A YoungLib staffer refrain from hot icing the furniture?
This is gestural, throw a probably quite expensive marketing campaign at it stuff. Was it field tested with panels of the imagined target audience? Maybe we'll find out in senate estimates and once again marvel at the profligacy and out of touchness of those who rule us...
The supposed hip and "with it," "yoofish" irony used within this video and attached text resource, targeted at, but missing the "intended" audience, because it really isn't aimed at them, actually "reifies" or strengthens the very social practices it pretends to challenge.
Amber Schultz in Crikey (not paywalled) critically highlights this underlying alt-right messaging.

crikey.com.au/2021/04/19/mes…
"The initiative is funded by the Department of Education, Skills and Employment. It’s not clear which expert and advocacy organisations — if any — were consulted prior to developing the modules." Amber Schultz. And the ministers who signed off on it are... Hmmm... Nuff said...

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More from @MettaBhavana1

Metta Bhavana, aka
20 Apr
He's having a laugh.Keynes used the term pejoratively: "decisions to do something positive...can only be...the result of animal spirits—a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits..."
The emptiness of the political urge to just "have a go," is derided by Keynes as rash, "there is the instability due to the characteristic of human nature that a large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than mathematical expectations." Image
Just lay that Keynesian template over any of Morrison's plans and it fits. Compare the bungled vaccine rollout, a triumph of agitated animal spirits over carefully weighted assessment of benefits and probabilities.
Read 9 tweets
Metta Bhavana, aka
5 Apr
Let's discuss empathy. Empathy is hard wired into human beings. It's the result of our evolved societal bonding where we survived because we recognised mutual advantage in pair bonding, cooperative child raising and forging close interpersonal connections.
"Scientists recognise two kinds of empathy -- affective empathy and cognitive empathy -- and studies strongly suggest that babies experience both." parentingscience.com/do-babies-feel…
Newborns routinely become distressed when they hear other newborns cry. "Babies cry more when they hear the cries of a real infant" (Martin and Clark 1982; Sagi and Hoffman 1976; Simner 1971).
Read 12 tweets
Metta Bhavana, aka
5 Apr
As I say often, "in Australia it's normal," when dealing with Adam Creighton, to apply the George Costanza rule. If everything he says is wrong (and it always is!), simply saying the opposite means you'll always be right! #reversio #scienceinnit? #mettarulesforlivingwell
It is staggering, but not surprising, that someone so highly paid, so self-aggrandising, could be so utterly stupid, uninformed, incapable of actually Google checking the bleak and nasty history of racist voter suppression in Georgia. There is literally a library of information.
I literally highlighted and right-clicked a search for "history of racist voter suppression in Georgia." The results are infinitely detailed and sobering. Here's a good overview to pass on to @AdamCreighton (he's blocked me!) theguardian.com/us-news/galler…
Read 5 tweets
Metta Bhavana, aka
4 Apr
"Journalism" - not Twitter - invented the pile on, the public smear campaign, the rumours exaggerated as fact, the facts ignored, the appeals to primitive tribalism, racism and xenophobia, the invasions of privacy, all while claiming the status of a unique moral correctness.
Murdoch and the News Of The World didn't invent that kind of toxic business model. It has been a low bar for over a century. Ask Lindy Chamberlain. Ask anyone "of African appearance" in Melbourne, ask any Muslim, look at the front pages and editorial lines run by Murdoch.
Meanwhile, even as they claim unique moral correctness for their every action, some of them pursue and attempt to smear anyone they deem alien to their editorial stance, or who threatens their relationship with the regime they are cleaving to at the time...
Read 11 tweets
Metta Bhavana, aka
3 Apr
"A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." According to Gloria Steinem, Irina Dunn,Australian educator, journalist and politician, coined the phrase 1970 as a student at the University of Sydney, paraphrasing the old maxim, 'Man needs God like a fish needs a bicycle.'
Irina Dunn concurs: "I scribbled the phrase on two toilet doors, would you believe, one at Sydney University where I was a student, and the other at Soren's Wine Bar at Woolloomooloo, a seedy suburb in south Sydney. The doors, were already favoured graffiti sites."
'A needs a B like a C needs a D' was well-established. The Hartford Courant, December, 1898: "[Aragon, Spain] didn't need an American consul any more than a cow needs a bicycle; for it had no trade with America, and no American tourist ever dreamed of stopping there."
Read 4 tweets
Metta Bhavana, aka
5 Feb
"Philip Lowe, the Governor of the Reserve Bank, is trying to get wages up, but he can’t. Prime Minister Scott Morrison could get wages up but he is so deep in the habit of suppressing them that it’s an addiction."
🎯
Alan Kohler absolutely spot on here. Tanya Plibersek:
Philip Lowe is an economist with a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has been at the Reserve Bank for 40 years; Scott Morrison is a politician with a background in tourism marketing.
The economist now understands that you don’t get more jobs by cutting wages, but you do get economic wellbeing from higher wages, and you get those by increasing employment, so focus on jobs, not wages.
Read 4 tweets

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