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Thanks to the grammarians who replied to the last post. Not the Last Post, pedants.
There are other perplexing grammatical issues washing around bollocksville at the moment. Can someone - probably not that Pauline nong - explain what 'doubling down' means. It's yet another awful yankism that we seem to have adopted. The SMH is the guilty party, In an article concerning three federal ministers' wanton disregard for the separation of powers, it stated, "Fellow crossbencher David Leyonhjelm also doubled down on his criticism after last week labelling the judiciary as "dear little daffodils"." So can someone reach out to me going forward? We're awash in bullshit.
I don't mean the orange buffoon and fake news, I mean the obfuscation of language in the pursuit of an agenda. Superfluousness in language that is at best nonsense and at worst conveys the sense that it's OK to just go right ahead, blather on using more words than necessary to make yourself a little important. Lose the message in the dross. Maybe your target audience won't understand anything through the crust of ordure. Some examples:
This morning's news feeds were full of the appalling treatment of juveniles at the hands of the Northern Territory's Department of Corrections, exposed by the #4Corners team's smart journalism. Journalism that does its job - scrutiny in the public interest.
When will the Four Corners team do a story on the asylum seeker detention centres on Manus and Nauru Islands? Since when has an Australian government - both sides now - been allowed by the electorate to actively block scrutiny of its appalling treatment of the most marginalised for electoral gain? We are so fucking complacent, aren't we? The neoliberal agenda is making us inured to the torture and suffering of others if it serves to make us feel more worthy. If your worth to society is indexed to your worth to the economy there's something fundamentally wrong with our value set. It is the conservative agenda to highly effectively funnel money to the already rich at the expense of the less rich. That's why marginalised white Australians gravitate towards the spectacular stupidity of the racist politicians who get air time because media owners require everyone to be scared consumers - good for business. And you have to be scared of something - terrorists, gays, Muslims, lesbians, people of colour, Aborigines, Asians, women - I don't know - anything but 'white male' pretty much covers it. While we're at it gut Medicare because we want medicine to become a nice little earner for our corporate mates. Poor people can get sick and die bankrupt. The violence is both a smokescreen and a trigger to keep us frightened rabbits in the spotlight of relentless, ten-second attention span, highly biased media scrutiny. The violence sells and lets intellectually dishonest politicians serve their own shaky, paranoid agendas by labelling everything 'terrorism'. Unless the violence is perpetrated by while males, of course. Feminism has taken a bashing too; domestic violence is bound up in it. So it has come to this - a fake-tanned misogynist white supremacist toupee stands a chance of becoming the next President of the United States, Australia elected bigots who are getting most media time under a sell-out Prime Minister, refugees are being tortured in our name, children are being abused by our government departments, Muslims are being villified for - well - being Muslims, alleged Christians are so hung up on sex and bashing gay people it's hard to see where their Christian values went. As we're letting it happen. We've lost our sense of the 'fair go'. It's gone. |