Chronicle of an abomination

I promise this post won’t be an inane whinge about the evils of social media. That would be terrible and a waste of everyone’s time. The reason for the headline however is that social media keeps giving more and more. More what, you ask? It’s giving more reasons to take the medium with a sceptical cast of the eye because it just jumped the shark.

How could something that’s already completely broken – and I’m talking about the poster boy for degeneracy, the platform formerly known as Twitter – get even worse and, in fact, practically cease to wield any power at all because it’s reached beyond the unforgivable into the heretofore unchartered realms of parody.

It’s truly jumped the shark.

“This must be bad,” I hear you say. And I say to you: “It’s so enormously terrible that there’s no mountain high enough to allow you to get up the slope and see just how enormous the terribleness is.” It’s that bad.

Many moons ago when I was still noodling about in Blogville, dreaming of writing the most awesome film script to accompany my failing to be an influencer, I came up with the idea of a paramedic who, during the day, strains every muscle and mental ligament in an effort so save lives. But at night he’s an online troll, someone who seems to have so little concern for the wellbeing of his fellow man or woman that he drives someone to suicide. The screenplay would elaborate all the details, cross all the “i”s and dot all the “t”s, so that you would get a visceral impression – in the same way that Samuel Richardson three hundred years ago did for the unfortunate Pamela – of the man in question.

Something like evil.

Worse because cloaked during work hours (night shifts included for those who were thinking to trip me up with an interruption) with the mantle of the bringer of succour and the bearer of beneficence.

A veritable demon.

Well, I sat on this idea for years without ever working up the wherewithal in the talent department to make a start on a script. But it was unnecessary because in the meantime life had caught up with my dreams and had delivered a guilty party in the form of a medical doctor and user of X who in his regular downtime writes the most appalling troll-like tweets. A man who works in a hospital. Who no doubt saves lives. But who despite all his virtues is a degenerate troll. A bringer of suffering and mental anguish. A stoker of hatred. An abomination.

And what’s more a man who, when he was brought up on related charges in the court of X wrote two tweets in his own defence and then unceremoniously DELETED THEM!

Who will write the summons to appear before this esteemed court. Who will sit in judgement on this corrupt doctor, a man who uses the most extreme language to achieve his no doubt estimable because progressive goals. Who else but ME!

Even before the poll the Voice felt like a lost cause

Author's note: I wrote this on 9 October, in the week leading up to the Voice poll on 14 October.

Australians are being asked to alter their birth certificate with very little information. I know, I know the trolls have been making this point for a long time and it’s time to move past it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. If you watch Netflix you’ll see how deeply people feel about family ties. I watched a TV show about a doctor who inseminated hundreds of women without their consent with his own sperm, the children of those procedures – carried out in a fertility clinic in Indiana – are rightly outraged by the liberties the physician took with their paternity, making himself a kind of divine vessel in the process of ruining other people’s idea of who they are. In the case of the Voice it strikes me that part of the problem arises from a similar place linked to the very identity of voters. A legislated Voice is like a passport, you can even let yours expire and then reapply for another one. But in order to do so you need a birth certificate at least. The Voice vote is like asking someone to change details on their birth certificate.

What?

If you had to alter your birth certificate to change the name of your father, how would that make you feel. Would you feel as though you’d been lied to, cheated, deceived? Or would you simply say “So what?” and move on blithely? I don’t know about you but this seems like a big deal.

The problem for Albanese and his ministers is that if you start describing how the Voice will work you’re going to get bogged down in distracting detail. I understand completely their need to keep the debate limited to “Yes” and “No”. When the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) was forced by the media to get involved in the short-lived “Tick” and “Cross” debate they simply refused to be drawn out on the matter, saying again and again (and again in ads) that voters are being asked to simply write “Yes” or “No’ on the ballot paper. The AEC understands that even to talk publicly about the confusion created was to continue sowing confusion, so they aborted the juggernaut as quickly as possible and the media obediently moved on. 

That’s not to say that everyone moved on, by no means. Many people out there in La La Land believe that they’re being conned and that they’re having the wool pulled down over their eyes. But we don’t need to worry about the fringes. It’s the middle we’re concerned about, the majority 80 percent who count.

Even given this section of the population there are many diverse viewpoints in play, and it’s within this cohort that the arguments about detail will continue to be important right up to polling day. I’m writing this on 9 Oct so polling day is still in the future, but according to opinion polls the Voice is looking unlikely as a going concern. Not to say that opinion polls are all that important, we know that people routinely lie to pollsters for various reasons, but still the impetus seems at the moment to be behind the “No” position. Given that the most likely reason people will have for voting “No” is the lack of detail – it’s an issue unaligned with any particular political position, after all – I think that the lead-up to 14 Oct has been mishandled by the government. It seems to me that having Nathan Cleary come out in favour of the Voice is the Voice’s “jump-the-shark” moment, the moment when you hear the wind whistling through the eaves just before the tornado hits. I fear for the Voice. It sounds like a lost cause to me.