Category: Writing

It hurts my eyes every time it’s shown on TV. I don’t like how they have to squish together on those benches, either. Maybe it was designed in earlier times when there weren’t so many MPs.

From Phil Scott’s column on Same Sex marriage:

“So I have a plan. Before the next ALP conference, let’s each of us get out there and befriend one member of the public who has never met a poof or a dyke. It’s not hard. You just bowl up to some beige little person in the street and say, “Hello, I’m a deviate.”
“Oh really?” they answer. “I’ve never met one of youse before. Youse don’t look much like Carlton Kressley. Why don’t we grab a coffee and talk? I’ve often wondered when someone says, ‘Go fuck yourself’ if that is actually possible…” and so on.
Of course, you have to pick the right person. Lebanese boys in souped-up ’90s cars are out. They might think you’re after sex. Fifty per cent success rate apparently, but only if you get them alone.”

I’m all for being “anti-pollution” (as it was called when we did primary school projects in the 1970s, featuring many cut-out and pasted pics of dying fish in rivers and dead forests and stories about acid rain).

Miranda Devine points out: “Australia produces just 1 per cent of the world’s cardon dioxide emissions so if we were to shut down the country, the impact on the global climate would still be negligible.”

Thoughts about it keep coming back to hit me unexpectedly, like a nasty flick from a tea-towel. Those terrorists had been sold off as the “runts” of the family – sons sacrificed and their lives sold so their other siblings could use the money to get married. If the sold men hadn’t followed all the instructions, their families probably would have been killed. Maybe the cashed-up terror masterminds might have recruited their new soldiers as permanent team members, but no. So they’re rejected by their families and the terrorists and then told to shoot up everyone and they’ll “go to heaven”. The phone instructions were so chilling. Especially when the recruits were reluctant to set fire to the hotel because it has big TV screens and computers and two bathrooms and two kitchens – they were marvelling at riches they’d never seen before.

And the other recruits who kept delaying shooting their hostages – they kept putting it off repeatedly but finally went through with it as the mastermind on the phone kept ringing them back and haranguing them to go through with it.

Were the masterminds religious fanatics at all? They just seemed to be sociopaths wanting to instil fear throughout society. Resentful  rejects with lots of money which they used to buy vulnerable people and use their lives as fodder for sadistic power fantasies.

One of the recruits even asked the mastermind on the phone: “Have you done this before?” [killed people]. The mastermind says yes, and assures the recruit he’ll go to heaven. So sad and sick.

It’s at the Four Corners site for another week.