Category: Culture

Family Last: Why I’m not voting 1 for Family First despite being a Christian

A well meaning friend, perhaps unaware of my position on Family First, suggested that I become Facebook Friends with Queensland Senate Candidate Wendy Francis. I have met Wendy (a few years ago), I used to play football (soccer for the luddites) against her son. Anyway. I added her. She seems like a decent, hard working, Godly Christian lady, I’ve no doubt she’s a great mum. I’ve got no doubt she’s a Christian. I’ve got no doubt she’s moral. And I’ve got no doubt she’s intelligent. But I won’t be voting for her. She’ll probably end up somewhere above the Greens and the Australian Sex Party on my ballot paper (I like numbering the senate paper completely. I’m a politics geek. Sue me.). And here’s why. I don’t think she’ll make a good politician. Pretty much by her own admission. If you want a godly, motherly, intelligent amateur holding the balance of power in the senate (which might happen) then feel free to vote for her. I won’t judge you.

She’s been busy on Facebook posting 101 reasons to vote for Wendy Francis. Here are some examples.

#13 I’ve never had media training and I don’t know how to avoid or fudge questions.

#88 I really don’t know quite how to be a politician and I rather suspect I should stay that way and those who vote for me would agree

#71 In a campaign featuring robotic candidates controlled by media minders I’m a fresh contrast. It’s time for un-politicians!

My big problem with the Family First campaign (and its epitomised by Wendy’s appearance on Sunrise) is that they completely lack any form of nuance or any sense that they’ll be, if elected, governing for everybody. Not just the people who vote for them. What they say is fine (almost) coming from the mouths of lobbiests and special interest groups. But this sort of comment from her Facebook profile is just a little scary: “Atheist Prime Minister & atheist Greens with senate balance of power equals the wrong road for Australia”.

I can’t help but think that if she had media minders, or thought like a politician, she may have avoided situations like this.

“legitimising gay marriage is like legalising child abuse”

Comparing anything that’s clearly not in the same category of child abuse to child abuse is like comparing things to Hitler. We have a pretty solid definition of child abuse to work from – and we have myriad victims of child abuse in our community who must feel somewhat slighted by the idea that children with two loving parents are being placed in the same category.

Christians hate it (I know I do) when atheists suggest that Christian parenting is child abuse. So why would we, as Christians, use similar language to describe family structures we disagree with. Even if it wasn’t her who posted the message (and she says it wasn’t, but that it was a staffer) it’s the kind of amateur hour thing she seems to be proud of (based on her points above). And she didn’t distance herself from the sentiment in subsequent interviews. A little media training and political nous goes a long way.

Something can be bad for a child without it being child abuse. This lack of nuance is appalling. Is she saying that any child without a father is suffering abuse? Does it follow that any mother who leaves her husband and becomes a single parent is also an abuser? Or is it only if they leave their husband for another woman?

I sympathise with her position on same-sex couples adopting. But I think it’s a much more complex situation than can be adequately argued or justified on Twitter in 140 characters or less. Is it better for a child to have loving gay parents than no parents? Probably. As soon as you concede that point you’re on the back foot. Coming out with emotive tripe that seems designed purely to cause scandal is a ridiculous political strategy designed only to resonate with the lowest common denominator of Christian thought.

My biggest problem with Family First is that they almost completely fail to empathise with the people they oppose. Christians, by the grace of God and our parliament, enjoy incredible freedom in our country. This kind of “we speak for the majority so we’re going to prevent any minorities being represented” mentality is just scary. You know what happens in cultures that oppress and silence minorities. They start sending them to death camps. There. I made a Hitler comparison.

Politics has famously been described (probably by Churchill) as the art of compromise. By being definitively “non-compromising” and “non-political” you’re essentially saying that you don’t care about the outsider. The people who don’t hold your views. That’s not what being a senator, or being a Christian, is about.

August 10, 2010

Peter Jensen on politics

This interview with Peter Jensen on the current election is worth a listen. I’m surprised it hasn’t been spoken about more in the blogosphere this week. Perhaps it’s not controversial enough. It’s from Sunday night.

Q: Do Christians necessarily vote from the viewpoint of faith, do you think?
A: Yes we do. And fortunately in Australia it’s perfectly possible, even across the range of options, to vote from faith and to vote differently. You can not say to a Christian in Australia “you must vote for such and such a person. It’s a matter of balance. You’ll work out which way you want to go.”

He discusses Gillard’s atheism and its impact on Christian voters frankly. He discusses Abbott’s faith and its impact on voters with equal frankness.

August 10, 2010

Butterflies and Vampires

The sparkling vampires of Twilight have long annoyed vampire purists. Nowhere in the history of vampire mythology have vampires been said to sparkle like fairies.

But an enterprising student of science has made a connection by observing the behaviour of vampires in the realm of Twilight. Vampires are unusually strong for their size. Like insects. They feed on blood from other animals. Like insects.

Here are some of the important connections you’ll need to make to fully accept this brilliant conclusion:

“What about vampires’ superhuman abilities? The Tiger Beetle is technically ‘the fastest running land animal’. The strongest animal is the world is the horned dung beetle. Insects also have incredible vision; most see colors invisible to humans and bees see in color at five times the speed we’re able. Vampires and other insects don’t breathe like we do, nor do they possess a human heartbeat. As an added bonus, invertebrates are notoriously hard to kill.”

Accepting all these factors led this particular blogger (and I confess I am convinced also) to conclude that vampires are in fact butterflies.

“Vampires are gorgeous, metamorphosis is a key part of their development, and they are natural experts at camouflage and mimicry. Some butterflies have even been observed feeding on blood.

Why do they sparkle? That’s easy: Vampires, like butterflies, are covered in tiny iridescent scales.”

And thus, the sparkling that has annoyed me so, is completely feasible as another step in the evolutionary scale of these larger than life insects.

August 10, 2010

The Life and Deaths of Jack Bauer

24’s Jack Bauer is a particularly deadly adversary. In just eight days he managed to kill 266 people.

This website collated the kills using the following criteria:

  1. Jack must be the one who causes the death.
  2. The death must be confirmed with video evidence.
  3. Jack must cause death, not just serious injury.
  4. The death must have occurred on the TV show; kills from novels, comics and games are not included.

And also recorded the following statistics:

  • Jack has killed 266 people on screen. Of these deaths, 210 were the direct result of gunshot wounds (79%).
  • Jack killed, on average, 1.4 people per hour over the whole run of the show, or 1 person every 44 minutes.
  • Jack killed the fewest people on Day 1 (10).
  • Jack killed the most people on Day 6 (50).
  • Jack killed the most people in a single episode in “Day 6: 5:00am-6:00am” (14).
  • Jack has killed more people between 10:00pm and 11:00pm than he has in any other hour (29).
  • Jack has killed fewer people between 8:00am and 9:00am than he has in any other hour
  • Jack has killed at least one person in each of the 24 hours in a day.

August 9, 2010

My Christian Values Election Scorecard

Simone posted her scorecard yesterday. Here’s mine. I hope it brings a little perspective to what can be an overly manipulative procedure. I probably should have included a column for Jesus. Click the image to see a bigger version.

August 8, 2010

Men at work: would you like to punch your colleagues in the face?

Apparently that’s normal. 60% of men who took part in a global survey said they would. If they could.

Via here.

August 8, 2010

Could these be the two best movies I’ve never seen?

Ninja Terminator

…and Revenge of the Ninja

August 7, 2010

How Would Jesus Exercise

While you’re waiting for my next installment of “Help Lord — the Devil wants me Fat” you should get into spiritual and physical shape with this workout – Christian style.

August 7, 2010

Wikipatrol with Nicholson Baker

Nicholson Baker wrote the Mezzanine (the book I reviewed yesterday). He also wrote this article about Wikipedia, where he details time spent protecting obscure articles from deletion. A worthy cause.

He thinks Wikipedia is worth protecting because its checks and balances work well…

“Some articles are vandalised a lot. On January 11 this year, the entire fascinating entry on the aardvark [7] was replaced with “one ugly animal”; in February the aardvark was briefly described as a “medium-sized inflatable banana”.

This sounds chaotic, but most of the time the “unhelpful” or “inappropriate” changes are quickly fixed by human stompers and algorithmicised helper bots. Without the kooks and the insulters and the spray-can taggers, Wikipedia would just be the most useful encyclopedia ever made. Instead, it is a fast-paced game of paintball.”

Except sometimes these bots and human stompers want to stamp out whole articles. That’s where Baker and a team of anti-deleters step in…

“At the same time as I engaged in these tiny, fascinating (to me) “keep” tussles, hundreds of others were going on, all over Wikipedia. I signed up for the Article Rescue Squadron, a small group that opposes “extremist deletion, having seen it mentioned in John Broughton’s invaluable guide, Wikipedia: The Missing Manual. And I found out about a project called WPPDP (for “WikiProject Proposed Deletion Patrolling”) in which people look over the PROD lists for articles that should not be made to vanish. Since about 1,500 articles are deleted a day, this kind of work can easily become life-consuming. I was swept right out to the Isles of Shoals [13]. I stopped hearing what my family was saying to me – for about two weeks I all but disappeared into my screen, trying to salvage brief, sometimes overly promotional but nevertheless worthy biographies by recasting them in neutral language, and by hastily scouring newspaper databases and Google Books for references that would bulk up their notability quotient. I had become an “inclusionist”.”

It’s a tremendous article. Read it.

“Still, a lot of good work – verifiable, informative, brain-leapingly strange – is being cast out of this paperless, infinitely expandable accordion folder by people who have a narrow notion of what sort of curiosity an online encyclopedia should be able to satisfy in the years to come.”

August 7, 2010

Radiohead on Ukelele

If ukelele covers are your thing then you should check this out. Amanda Palmer plays Radiohead.

August 7, 2010

Book Review: The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker

I picked up this book (via the Book Depository. At $12 it’s a bargain) after seeing somebody mention it in passing in a thread on a forum somewhere in the Interwebs. It intrigued me.

Not a lot happens. It documents an hour in the life of Howie, a cubicle jockey. The hour is his lunch time – and perhaps more appropriately his coming and going from the office to buy new shoelaces. The only tension in the narrative is the exploration of the tension in his shoelaces.

This may not sound like your cup of tea – but he digresses in a fascinating manner in to realms of thoughts and tangents that feature insights into the minutiae of life – everything from the aforementioned shoelace dilemma (and the correct method for tying one’s shoes) to office bathroom etiquette. It’s a steady stream of consciousness account. It’s good stuff. I’ve not read a piece of fiction that has resonated more deeply with my personality and quirks for a long time… do you find yourself running your hand over different objects in your path as you walk – in a bid for some sort of tactile interaction with your environment? I do. I always have. I wasn’t sure if it was normal until this book discussed such behaviour.

Here’s Wikipedia’s synopsis:

“Baker’s digressive novel is partly made up of extensive footnotes, some several pages long, while following Howie’s contemplations of a variety of everyday objects and occurrences, including how paper milk cartons replaced glass milk bottles, the miracle of perforation, and the nature of plastic straws to float, vending machines, paper towel dispensers, and popcorn poppers.”

And here’s a quote from the book itself (not my favourite, just one I found online).

“I stood, rolled my chair back into place, and took a step toward my office door, where my jacket hung all day, unused except when the air-conditioning became violent or I had a presentation to give; but as soon as I felt myself take that step, I experienced a sharpening of dissatisfaction with the whole notion that the daily acts of shoe-tying could have alone worn out my shoelaces … still, I reflected, if it were true that the laces frayed from walking flexion, why did they invariably fray only in contact with the top pair of eyelets on each shoe? I paused in my doorway, looking out at the office, with my hand resting on the concave metal doorknob, resisting this further unwelcome puzzlement.”

August 6, 2010

How to win (most of the time) rock, paper, scissors

Here’s a handy infographic/tutorial for winning Rock, Paper Scissors against inexperienced or very experienced players.

“Males have a tendency to throw rock on their first try, inexperienced RPS players will subconsciously deliver the item that won previously, and paper is thrown least often, so use it as a surprise.”

Via FlowingData.

I prefer to throw a little psychology into the mix – I just tell the person, honestly, what I’m going to play. And then it becomes a question of trust. Then, sometimes I cheat. Because cheating is the best way to win.

August 3, 2010

Letters to Lindsay

Lindsay Lohan has just been released from prison. She spent the last few weeks there for being an idiot. Incarceration is boring – but when it comes to celebrity incarceration it opens up whole new realms of possibility. We suddenly know exactly where the celebrity is at all times – we have a captive audience for our celebrity stalking. One man, Greg Rutter, took this opportunity and ran with it – he sent Lindsay a postcard each day of her imprisonment. And he blogged them.

They were mostly non-sensical. Which, when you think about the recipient, makes perfect sense.

“Writing is rules. Whether it’s about word choice or sentence length or subject matter each writer has decided on rules they have agreed not to break. Me? My rules are too many. I won’t use the word “penultimate” because I think it sounds pretentious. I’ll just write “next to last” instead, and problem solved. But why is “pretentious” allowed but “penultimate” not? Because those are just the rules.”

August 3, 2010

YouTube Tuesday: The End Time Anthem

It’s been a while since I managed to post a YouTube Tuesday video this early on a Tuesday. But please, take a moment to enjoy this end time prophecy/hymn/anti-Obama rant. It’s helpfully subtitled. In case you’re watching it in a library.

Via Mike on Facebook.

August 3, 2010

DIY Sous Vide

I don’t know what Sous Vide tastes like – but I like the cut of this jib – apparently sous vide cooking is all the rage (using temperature controlled water to cook stuff). I think I’ve seen similar methods on MasterChef. Anyway, Sous Vide cookers will set you back lots of money. A better alternative is to use a beer cooler and little sealable baggies.

So says Kenji Lopez-Alt – the guy who reverse engineered Maccas fries. Here’s an appetite whetter:

“Here’s how it works: A beer cooler is designed to keep things cool. It accomplishes this with a two-walled plastic chamber with an air space in between. This airspace acts as an insulator, preventing thermal energy (a.k.a. heat) from outside to reach the cold food inside. Of course, insulators work both ways. Once you realize that a beer cooler is just as good at keeping hot things hot as it is at keeping cold things cold, then the rest is easy: Fill up your beer cooler with water just a couple degrees higher than the temperature you’d like to cook your food at (to account for temperature loss when you add cold food to it), seal your food in a plastic Ziplock bag*, drop it in, and close your beer cooler until your food is cooked. It’s as simple as that.”

Read the whole thing at Serious Eats.

August 2, 2010