Getting in the Cage

October 25, 2016 / Kris Hateley

Todd Sampson is a very successful guy. I like Todd Sampson. I enjoy listening to him on the Gruen project or Gruen planet or whatever it’s called now. Sampson’s a well-known documentary maker and when I first saw the advertising for his latest work entitled Body Hack I was keen to have a look.

The premise of Body Hack is that Sampson places himself in extreme situations and or lifestyle environments to determine the limits of the human body. It seems an interesting premise. I was somewhat sceptical yet intrigued to see what the talented Mr Sampson could do with this.

That enthusiasm lasted until the first and only episode I watched of Body Hack. This episode saw Sampson training to be an MMA fighter. After two weeks Sampson would then enter the ring for a ‘real’ fight with a MMA fighter.

Those of you who are somewhat knowledgeable about combat sports are probably right now laughing. The more knowledgeable the person, the harder they are laughing. The fight itself was a fairly obviously sham. Sampson ‘lasted’ into the second round. His opponent barely looked interested.

I’m not super knowledgeable but I have read a very good book on the subject which I will recommend. This book is entitled The professor in the cage: Why Men Fight and Why We Like to watch. In it, the author, Jonathon Gottschall, takes authenticity to heights perhaps unmatched.

The book begins with Gottschall regaling the reader of his current situation. He’s a fairly unsuccessful academic employed by a university. He’d like to get fired. He imagines that taking up the most brutal combat sport on the planet might just achieve that.

By the end of the book Gottschall had survived his first and I believe only officially sanctioned MMA fight. It did not get him fired. He did quit to further pursue his literary career. It was difficult to arrange the fight due to Gottschall’s age and relative lack of experience. Gottschall trained for two years. He lost his bout in under a minute.

Gottschall’s book though is so much more than a simple tale of a man training to be an MMA fighter. The authors tale is interspersed with historical anecdotes about the history of combat sports and the people who watch them.

It can be at times a difficult book to read. In particular, what I learnt about the types of fights our less evolved ancestors arranged between animals was confronting. Research Bull baiting for example, it’s truly awful. If you can think of a way in which humans could torture an animal for entertainment, it has probably been done somewhere.

There is also a lengthy section on the practice of duelling and why people assigned so much value to their personal honour. Before you consider such things consigned to history remember that the inmates in our prison systems have a well-developed honour culture. It’s evidence that we haven’t really changed much. People’s behaviour is often a result of circumstance.

Perhaps most interesting are Gottschall’s views on the ‘civilizing’ nature of rule bound fighting contests. He suggests that conflicts can help people work out small conflicts before they become larger. Another use is to thrash out a hierarchy.

He talks at length about an Amazonian tribe in which two rival tribes competing for space meet up and take turns hitting each other in the chest until one side has no men left standing. In this way they can determine which tribe is strongest without having to fight an actual war.

It's an intriguing thought in a book which contains many. Whilst Gottschall does seem to have become a cheerleader for the MMA the book balances this with some uncomfortable human truths which educate the reader. The uncomfortable parts are what elevates the work from slightly gimmicky memoir to compulsory reading. Again I recommend it to you.

Comment 0 Likes

The Crap Constituency

October 11, 2016 / Kris Hateley

There is fresh blood in the corridors of parliament. According to one recently elected One Nation Senator there is a new stench permeating through the Australian Taxation Office. “It starts with toilets and ends up costing us our Australian way of life” exclaimed Pauline Hanson recently.

Waleed Aly feels that Hanson’s quote is the political quote of 2016 (1). He may well be right. It certainly is a cracking opening to a blog post. I’d recommend reading the rest of Ali’s piece, my effort will certainly pick up on some of the points he discusses.

The nation is still somewhat reeling from the knowledge that we somehow elected numerous One Nation Senators. Despite strongly disagreeing with One Nation’s political views I don’t think that the situation is some kind of unmanageable disaster.

One Nation espouses many policies which strain incredulity. Zero net immigration, unless your Muslim in which case you will never be let in. One can only wonder how you can ‘prove’ someone isn’t a Muslim?

Given our aging population, and the corresponding reduction in our tax base that will increase as the population ages, I’ve no idea how a zero net immigration policy can result in any other than the gradual reduction in services and living standards of all Australians.

If zero net immigration doesn’t trash our economy One Nation’s review and revoke existing trade agreements policy should finish off the job. After all, foreign goods and services are all hugely over-rated. We can just make everything better and cheaper over here can’t we. Can I get a hell yeah!

Last, my personal favourite, the introduction of citizen initiated referenda. One wonders if there is a need for politicians if our citizens can simply do all the legislating. House of Review I hear you say? Clearly over rated. Who needs to worry about all those details, it’s not like we’re changing the law.

It’s particularly frustrating that some commentators seem to be suggesting that this phenomenon is somehow new. It’s like Clive Palmer never existed. It’s like One Nation hasn’t wielded political power in the past.

In the recent past there has almost always been some type of small party pursuing a limited agenda. For quite some time that was the Democrats. The Greens began as a party of protest. It took twenty years before they gained a semblance of political power when the Democrats fell out of favour.

What seems to have changed is that the current smaller parties seem less reasonable. Their solutions seem more extreme. They offer simple solutions to complex problems and those solutions are often based around a populist approach.

There is however a kernel of truth in the concerns of the people who voted for One Nation (2). There is genuine fear in the community about the links between Muslims and terrorist organisations who identify with the Islamic faith. There are concerns about globalisation and loss of local manufacturing jobs. One Nation, offers a solution to these concerns.

Even though the solution itself would not fix the underlying issues it gains traction for two simple reasons. One, it’s what people want to hear. Two, there is a significant portion of the electorate which is ignorant enough to believe in the solution and pissed off enough with the repeated failings of the mainstream parties.

Both mainstream political parties have failed utterly to address these concerns. In some cases, they fail to acknowledge them at all. The end result is larger groups of people who are pushed to explore an extreme solution because the extreme voices are the only people talking about the very real concerns of some voters.

It seems as if the mainstream parties have forgotten that we live in a democracy and because of this, half of the voters will be of less than average intelligence. Those voters, the crap constituency if you will, are susceptible to flawed solutions. It’s up to the major parties to consistently explain why simplistic solutions such as banning all immigration are neither appropriate or effective.

Tom Elliot has an interesting solution (3). He suggests a fixed period of benign dictatorship. I tend to agree with Elliot’s view in that if the period of this ‘dictatorship’ was limited to just five years the outcome couldn’t really be much worse that the partisan bickering which has become the norm.

Elliot’s solution also requires Australian’s to agree on the core issues which need to be addressed. Seeing as Australian’s can’t even seem to agree on something as basic as a plebiscite on marriage reform I’m pessimistic about our chances of agreeing on the countries core problems.

I don’t think a dictatorship however benign is the answer. As I’ve said a number times now I not convinced the current make-up of the Senate is unworkable. Despite a sluggish start it seems the government is in fact governing quite effectively.

They have been able to strike a remarkably bipartisan deal with the opposition to pass most of their proposed budget changes. The amendments insisted on by the opposition were quite reasonable. It was a good first step on what I fear will be a long path towards budget repair.

If the government is to continue to be successful it will need to accept that some of One Nation’s agenda will need to be addressed. I very much doubt we need a royal commission into Islam yet some kind of authority tasked with educating people about Islam might provide some useful outcomes. At the very least it would force local Imams to better explain their positions on contentious issues such as sharia law and how they envisage it interacting with our existing secular legal code.

The government will also have to accept that some of the Greens agenda will need to be addressed. Transitioning from an economy powered by finite fuel to a sustainable one is vital to our nation’s future prospects. We’d all like to protect the vast natural resources of our nation. The Government needs to buttress this vision with pragmatism to make the kind progress which is important to Australia’s long term, overall sustainability.

What the government must not do is pander to one of these extreme parties in the same way that the Gillard government pandered to the far left after the 2010 federal election. If they fall into that trap the opposition may be tempted to indulge in some of the same questionable tactics which the Liberal Party under Abbott regularly rolled out.

That kind of negativity doesn’t help anyone. It’s no way to govern. We should remember that good government is often accompanied by good opposition. If Labor is to return to government the path back is through the centre. It’s as much through those in the constituency who are a little less educated as it is through those more educated.

Embracing all comers. Pushing back on those who would marginalise people who are a little different. That’s the Australian way of life. Listening to the disenfranchised, explaining why the simple solutions won’t work and offering inclusive solutions are the best way to flush the toilets on those who actually threaten our way of life.

Comment 0 Likes

Blank Faces

September 19, 2016 / Kris Hateley

A staple of the ‘B’ grade slasher movie is the chase scene. The hero is pursued by a somewhat competent assailant who never quite seems to catch their intended victim. I’m still trying to process the fact that a scene reminiscent of a low budget thriller played out not that long ago in a town not that far away.

On Monday 29 of August 2016 local police received a report of a dead body in bushland just outside of the town of Kalgoorlie. When the officers arrived they found the corpse of a fourteen-year-old boy and a stolen motorcycle (1).

Over the course of the police investigations they ascertained that the boy had been run down by a Nissan Navara which was linked to the owner of the stolen motorcycle. A fifty-five-year-old man was charged in relation to the incident. He was charged with manslaughter.

It’s important to recognise that at this stage all of the facts surrounding this incident are not public knowledge. There may very well be sound reasons as to why the man was charged with manslaughter and the charge may be upgraded in the future.

The fact that the driver did not immediately report the crime does little to support the view that the boy’s death was accidental. Despite this we should wait until the full facts are known before forming any firm opinions on the defendant’s motives.

The townsfolk of Kalgoorlie however did not wait. When word reached them that the defendant was not charged with murder they converged on the town. A riot ensued in which many police officers were injured.

It could have been far worse if not for the actions of a few residents. An eighteen-year-old girl provided us with an iconic moment as she stood arms outstretched in front of police trying to calm the crowd (2). The actions of this girl, who was related to the boy killed, serve as evidence to us all that we can bury hate for the greater good of all.

What I find most remarkable about this incident is what happened next. Remarkably little happened next. A month on and there is no commentary. It’s like it hasn’t happened. There are no in depth articles discussing the underlying issues surrounding this tragedy. No politicians exclaiming never again to the sound of snapping camera’s.

The boy killed was of Aboriginal heritage. The driver was a white male. I wonder if we would be talking more about this incident if the boy killed was white and the driver of the vehicle Aboriginal? Such thoughts leave me uncomfortable as the hardest of truths often do.

I’m confident that if it was a white boy killed we’d still be talking about it. There would be no all too comfortable silence. There would be calls for an investigation to determine ‘just how this happened’. Government politicians would be launching enquiries. Opposition politicians would be blaming the government. So many snapping cameras.

How depressing is it that the death of a white kid would be more likely to spark a debate about racism that the death of a black kid. Black kids are dying. Even when they are living they are doing so at a much reduced standard than other Australians.

In the following days we saw a small number of opinion pieces published. Andrew Bolt contributed one particularly unhelpful piece (3). Mr Bolt chose to focus on the fact that a cartoon published a few weeks ago depicting Aboriginal people which some people found offensive was in fact accurate.

Bolt is, somewhat tragically, right. The cartoon was highlighting the fairly widely accepted fact that many aboriginal children grow up without much support from their fathers. Seriously though what is the worse aspect of this child’s death Bolt? His father not knowing where his son is or a person running over a young boy?

Meanwhile no one could escape the fairly consistent online bleating that’s been going on over an incident which many are suggesting is racist. On a day where the members of his book club were asked to dress as their favourite hero a young white boy dressed like his favourite footballer. As the footballer in question had dark skin his mother coloured his skin dark brown (4).

Many people have suggested that in colouring her son’s skin to a darker shade it is offensive to people with darker skin as it is reminiscent of Blackface (5). Whilst darkening one’s skin was an element of Blackface it is deeply misguided to suggest that it’s as simple as some boot polish.

Blackface is not offensive because of the colouring of a white person’s skin. It’s offensive because of the types of racial stereotypes it perpetuates. These stereotypes include the slightly simple but happy plantation worker, the wise old uncle tom and my personal favourite Zip Coon the dandified freed slave.

These stereotypes solidified negative attitudes against people with darker skin. This assisted to both directly and indirectly oppress dark skinned people. It continued well into the twentieth century. Even when the application of make-up stopped the stereotypes have persisted.

Well known director Spike Lee has addressed this consistently over the past decade. Lee notes that while the boot polish is off, the only thing that’s really changed is that the actors portraying these stereotypes are now dark skinned. Just consider how many movies you have seen, particularly historical dramas, where a black actor plays the part of a simple rural type? The wise old uncle tom has morphed into the mystical negro.

Now consider the actions of the mother of this young white boy dressed as the black footballer he idolises. What negative stereotype is that perpetuating? What dark skinned person is he mocking or demeaning? Who would be offended at a young boy idolising them? Certainly not the footballer (6). No stereotype is being perpetuated by this young boy and no one is being mocked or demeaned. For that reason, the boys costume is not offensive.

Those criticising the young boy and his mother are so keen to get on the outrage bandwagon, so keen the get on the right side of history and exclaim ‘RACIST’. All the while these same people say precisely nothing when a black child dies under the wheels of a ute driven by a white man. The same people have no comment about the alcohol and drugs rife in aboriginal communities. No comment about the disproportionate sexual abuse suffered by aboriginals. Nothing to say about the ancestors our ancestors slaughtered.

What do you think history will actually say about these people's behaviour?

I suspect future historians will recognise those criticising this young boy and his mother for the simpering idiots which they are. They will talk in condescending tones about how these poor ignorant people didn’t know any better. They will note that those more concerned with re-posting the image of the moment on Facebook than discussing the underlying racial tensions in Australia are themselves racist.

Addressing the imbalance between the lives of the traditional owners and those descended from the colonials is not simple. That does not mean we should shirk from this challenge.

Can you imagine what it would be like? To live in a country which used to be yours but which isn’t anymore. To be told that your way of life is wrong. To be forced to live in a way which runs counter to your deeply held beliefs. We have outlawed their way of life. It’s enough to drive someone to drink.

We could simply ask how the traditional owners want to live. How they want to contribute. We might not like the answers. We will have to make sacrifices. I think that’s what it will take for genuine progress to be made. If we are not willing to sacrifice, it’s all meaningless platitudes.

I’m not perfect. I am sorry. In the past I’ve said things that reinforced negative stereotypes. I’ve referred to Aboriginals using language that is offensive and unhelpful. As I’ve matured that’s stopped. I won’t do it again because I want to raise my son to respect people. I want to live in a society where I’m not worried about a riot because someone’s child was run over.

If I want that I need my son to understand that what the people who colonised Australia did was wrong. I want him to be able to talk about these issues. I want him to want to help. If I can’t lead by example, then how can I expect him to be that person?

The man who ran down that child in Kalgoorlie had a father. A father who might not off been there. If he was around perhaps should have spent some time talking to his son about the difficult issues that surround race. And no time at all sledging someone who just wants to look like their idol for a day.

Comment 2 Likes

The Sexism Test

September 01, 2016 / Kris Hateley

I like to read views that I am not familiar with. I work hard to actively seek out articles and pieces of writing that do not agree with my own views. For this reason, I make a point to regularly read articles posted by the Daily Life website.

There are times when the writers at Daily Life draw some very keen insight. I’ve found my views challenged and I’ve shifted my stance on some issues based on what I’ve read there. Unfortunately of late I’ve noticed that regular columnist Clementine Ford seems to be unravelling.

I say unravelling as while I don’t agree with many of Ford’s views in the past I’ve found her writing to be amusing and generally well put together. Of late though, it just seems to have lost focus and at times descended into farce. One of those times is here (1).

To surmise this is yet another article when Ford expresses outrage that a Facebook page about an event which she supports was trolled. The page is no longer up so it’s difficult to sensibly comment about exactly what was said and by whom.

The biggest issue I have with her article is that it fails what I refer to as ‘the sexist test’. This test is simple. If you take a comment, and reverse the gender of the person which the comment is about, would the comment then be considered, or still be considered sexist.

Ford’s piece has so many brilliant examples. Ford says ‘If you've ever wanted to gain a keen insight into the fragility of the male ego, all you need do is cast your eye over the outrage expended on women-only events’. I can only wonder if Ford would apply the same logic to the outrage regularly expressed by feminist authors on male only social groups. An article published on Mamamia entitled Meet Man Business (2) is an example of this.

Ford concluded her piece by noting that zero fucks were spared and that ‘Instead, merriment was had by way of laughter, sunshine, cake and the child-like fun of running joyfully through sprinklers of male tears’.

If a male author spoke of running joyfully through sprinklers of female tears it would quite possibly be the last thing that guy ever published. That’s beside the point. No one should be writing about joyfully running through anyone else’s tears.

It’s not just the gender which can be tweaked to cause some of the content published on many left leaning websites like Daily Life to wander into the absurd. For example, consider some of the commentary around refugee’s or Islam.

It’s not uncommon for those on the conservative side of politics to say something which suggests that people who are Muslim are more likely to engage in terrorist behaviour. Those on the left will then respond with name calling, labelling conservative commenters as bigots or racists. In my view the efforts of both sides in situations such as these are tremendously unhelpful.

Consider this article published on Traveller (3). The author suggests that she would not want her unaccompanied child to sit next to a man on a plane. To give the author some credit here she freely admits that her view is sexist. Even so, the author engages in the same questionable generalisations the right wanders into when discussing Islam. No one is calling her a sexist or a bigot.

Further pushing the authors view into the ridiculous is the widely accepted research which indicates that in the case of child sexual abuse the perpetrator is far more likely to be known to the victim as opposed to being a stranger. Such facts render the authors stance somewhat paranoid.

The widely accepted facts around the perpetrators of child abuse has not stopped many airlines deliberately avoiding seating children next to male passengers. Can you imagine the outcry on the left if an airline decided to refuse to allow Muslim passengers because they were more likely to be a terrorist? You don’t have to be that imaginative. Simply mention profiling.

For the record I don’t believe Tracey Spicer is sexist. I don’t believe most conservative hawks are racist either. They are examples peoples who judgement is compromised because they are afraid. Before we criticise we should ask who hasn’t made that mistake from time to time. If that was my choice would I be any less fearful?

What I can’t stand is hypocrites who are far too often willing to shift the goal posts defining what is reasonable depending upon whatever agenda they are propagating. Unfortunately, Clementine Ford is engaging in this type of behaviour more regularly.

More unfortunately her work is harming efforts to further gender equality as work like the article discussed here are so easy to lampoon. As someone who supports gender equality it’s tremendously disappointing.

If we are serious about effecting meaningful change, we should strive to view others views in the most charitable way. This is most important when examining a viewpoint that we disagree with.

For this reason, I acknowledge that Clementine Ford has recently been subjected to a much higher than normal level of personal abuse delivered via social media. I’d suggest that it has impacted on her judgement. I suspect such treatment would impact on most people’s judgement. I hope that it doesn’t continue to do so in the future.

Comment 1 Likes

Nyd Designs

Getting in the Cage

The Crap Constituency

Blank Faces

The Sexism Test