A better class of student elections
As we enter the annual student election cycle, the Labor students over at Melbourne University have raised the bar for student union election campaigns, if their website is anything to go by.
Stand Up! from Stand Up on Vimeo.
As an earlier campaign manager for the Stand Up ticket, this year’s campaign has the appearance of being top notch.
I wish the ticket well, and hope that the rest of their campaign is as slick as the website.
(Note: This election comment is published by A White 132418.)
the boy who could fly
I will draw your attention to this opinion piece in today’s SMH, by Nick Wood, NSW young labor’s left whipping boy, burgeoning Gouldian, frequenter of my favourite coffee shop (thanks for Googling Nick, yes we are faceless and we are watching you). I particularly enjoyed his recounting of the health minister’s homily on the perils of binge eating:
A “training school” run by NSW Young Labor last year, one of the Right’s annual recruitment events, featured the Health Minister, Reba Meagher. Neglecting to focus on policy issues, she… informed those attending of the need to pursue power above all else. She later regaled the new members with tales of the perpetually disgraced NSW minister Joe Tripodi vomiting from a car window after eating too many “twinkies”.
The image of a (presumably) young Joe Tripodi blearily wiping wind-blown chunks of vomit off his face with the back of his hand, straining out the back window of a cream-and-rust 1981 Honda Civic packed to groaning with guffawing pimply proto-hacks of the NSW right on the way home from a party function, is now with me forever. Bless.
So creepy you can carve it.
I too have dreams of eating a meal with Oprah.
Oust Iemma
The Australian reports that the NSW Labor Party hard heads are preparing to oust Iemma.
Mr Iemma is standing firm in the belief his party has no alternative to him. But senior ALP figures were adamant: “We will find one.”
In my view, Iemma is seriously compromised and will not be able to win the next election.
Can comrades in NSW comment on how it looks north of the border?
yes.
Anyone who has worked at media monitors or spent any time engaging in community activism knows this:
Dr Berry said that some kinds of social participation were good for the community but not necessarily for the individual. For example, people who were involved in community activism reported worse mental health, as did those who rang radio talkback shows and wrote letters to the editor.
I don’t believe that this is causal, although many people within the Left are prone to consider that being a ‘caring’ person is a very stressful past-time. Rather, lonely and unwell people are attracted to trying to ‘make a difference’ in non-committal ways requiring little research or forethought. The difference between dialing up at 7am to rant at/with Alan Jones about teh immigrants, and chanting FUisms in a band of seven people outside the US embassy to protest Globalisation, is marginal; the fact that the former is an activity of the elderly and the latter an activity of the young is largely reflective of mobility issues, willingness to brave public transport, and degree of access to a platform of dissemination within the mainstream media.
I have for many years felt that I would make a wonderful elderly person. One’s elder years, I feel, are a golden time where the sorts of behaviour that would otherwise be attributed to antisocial tendancies can be waived off as an endearing sign of age; I have long had plans to wield a shillelagh at small children and live bra-less an a mu-mu eating cake mix out of a bowl. I will make constant crank calls to whomever I please, and because technology will have by that time caught up with my dreams, I will be able to do this in full holographic representation, nude, my rubenesque belly painted up with lurid slogans.
This post has been brought to you by arleeshar’s stream of consciousness.
You Tube Special: Fainting Goats
In which I break my blogging drought to post an amusing You Tube clip.
Greenpeace tells it like it is
In the course of my travels, I came across this banner on the Greenpeace website.
Bless you, Greenpeace. I can’t stop laughing.