FOX News becomes a parody of itself: Reza Aslan edition

This is quite something. Eminent religious scholar Reza Aslan releases a book about the historical Jesus Christ. You'd think the FOX crowd would be interested in that, since they are all about Jesus on the "fair and balanced" network. But instead, Aslan is subjected to a 9 minute interrogation about how and why he could possibly write anything about Jesus, since he happens to be a Muslim.




 I have to say I found that hilarious, and it's a credit to Aslan that he persists with the interview, even if he does feel it necessary to talk as if to a child.

FOX also published an article slamming Aslan's book by John S Dickerson, an author and evangelical pastor, which is of a similarly breathtaking stupidity. Read it here.

The logic appears to be that you cannot trust a Muslim to write objectively about Jesus, since the Muslim religion is opposed to Christian teachings. Which of course implies that you cannot trust an atheist or agnostic either to write about Jesus either, since their rejection of Biblical doctrine is a form of anti-Christian hostility. So who can write objectively about the historical life of Jesus Christ? Well, I guess that just leaves Christians.

What German sounds like

I came across this via Facebook, here. It's quite amusing, if obvious, but what I found even funnier were the comments on Facebook about it.

Two common stereotypes about Germans are (a) they don't have a good sense of humour, and (b) they are angry. Cue hundreds of comments from indignant Germans saying "This is false! We don't sound like that!"

I'm not saying that this proves (a) and (b), but...

America killed Trayvon. Zimmerman only pulled the trigger.

George Zimmerman was today acquitted of all charges relating to the shooting death of Trayvon Martin. Did the jury make the right decision? Yes and no.

(Update: it's been revealed that one of the six jurors believed Zimmerman guilty of second-degree murder and two thought him guilty of manslaughter. For what it's worth, I think manslaughter would have been the correct verdict... but I don't live in Florida.)

With the information presented to them, within the context of the legal system of Florida, and the US more broadly, perhaps they made the only decision they could make. That is not the same, however, as justice being served. Zimmerman appears to have acted in a way that is fully in accordance with Florida law. So the real question is: What the hell is wrong with a state, or a country, that deems this to be legal?

While the exact details are disputed, here's what most of us can agree on in the case:


Zimmerman sees Martin walking through his neighbourhood, and believing his behaviour to be suspicious, follows him. Zimmerman is armed. Martin becomes aware he is being followed, quite understandably freaks out, and probably attacks him. Zimmerman shoots Martin as he feels (justifiably or otherwise) that his life is being threatened.


Of course, the same logic could be used to apply to Martin; if he attacked Zimmerman, it was because he felt threatened, as a teen, by an older man following him down the street. In other words, we have two people defending themselves against each other. I don't know if that is an actual thing.

Guilty or not, this incident could not happen without two highly problematic pre-existing conditions: the assumption that a young black man is by definition suspicious and threatening, and the right for a person to bear a deadly weapon and use it whenever they feel threatened.

It has been pushed by certain sections of conservative America that Trayvon Martin was indeed a dangerous thug, who probably was looking to rob a house in that neighbourhood, and whose attack on Zimmerman was in line with his thuggish personality. These are things we cannot know.

Likewise, some on the left have pushed the idea that Zimmerman had a racist grudge against black people. Again, I don't think that's something we can really know.

But let's ask this question: if a white male teenager was walking through that neighbourhood, stopping occasionally to look at houses, would Zimmerman have deemed it sufficiently threatening to "tool up" and pursue him?

That's debatable of course. But the big question for me is this:

If Zimmerman was not armed, or does not live in a nation under the sway of the gun lobby, does he even confront Trayvon Martin at all?

I say no. The gun George Zimmerman carried played a larger role that merely defending its holder. It defines the whole episode.

The gun gives the courage to play big-game hunter, and stalk the young man who he deemed to be threatening. The gun means that Zimmerman is more brazen about his pursuit than he would have otherwise been; he is indiscreet enough for Martin to spot him and confront him. And the gun means that when Martin confronts or attacks Zimmerman, Zimmerman does not feel the need to defuse the situation, or turn and flee.

Unfortunately, both lived in a place that gives legal justification for vigilantism, in a way that other Western nations do not. In any other Western country, someone worried that there is potentially dangerous teenager - so scary as to put you in fear of your life - roaming through the neighbourhood does not go confront that teenager, alone.

George Zimmerman instigated a situation which he had no business being in, then resorting to deadly force as soon as the situation looked bad for him.

Florida allows this kind of thing. Below is Florida's self-defence statute (emphasis mine):

A person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.

No duty to retreat. That passage makes it different from most other self-defence statutes around the world, which tend to treat violence as a last resort, to be used only after all other reasonable options have been exhausted or impossible.

Just say I'm in Florida, I'm armed, and I have the confidence that comes with carrying a gun, knowing that I can pull it out if I ever feel threatened. Where is the disincentive for me to avoid conflict with anyone I could potentially have a disagreement or altercation with?

This is an extremely dangerous legal precedent, especially now that this case has acquired so much publicity.

If you don't think there's something sick about the US justice system, have a look at these recent cases:

Jury acquits Texas man for murder of escort who refused sex

Florida mom gets 20 years for firing warning shots

This kid is amazing.

Don't quite get what's going on in Egypt? 12 year old Ali Ahmed breaks it down for you.

Johnny Depp plays Tonto in "The Lone Ranger". Is it just me, or is that a bit f*cked?

The remake of The Lone Ranger is out, and this picture tells you all you need to know about why I'm not going to see it, and why you shouldn't either.

I have nothing against Johnny Depp. He's a fine actor. However, Tonto is specifically a Native American character, and Johnny Depp is not Native American.

If this were a movie made in the 1950s, you could look back today and say, "Yeah, that's kinda racist and stupid, but that's just what it was like back then, just like how they got John Wayne to play Genghis Khan and so on." But this is a movie coming out in 2013. I cannot believe that no one involved in the making of this movie did not see the huge problem with this.

"Oh, but he's part Native American," I hear you say.

Listen, the dude is maybe 1/16 Native American or something. Maybe. He thinks his great-grandmother was Cherokee. I'm not an expert on what qualifies someone as Native American, but fuck it, I'm drawing a line - Johnny Depp is not Native American.

Now, hypothetically if Native Americans were some sort of extinct race of people like the Neanderthals and thus we had no Native American actors alive capable of representing what a Native American looks like, then I'd say fine, why not, let Johnny Depp play a Native American, 1/16 is about enough.

But there are a lot of Native Americans still out there, and some of them are actually actors trying to make it in the business. In that context, no, he's not sufficiently Native American.

Yes, there are Native American actors out there. None of them are big names on par with Johnny Depp. But then again, when they can't even get roles playing Native Americans, how are they meant to become big names?

There were a whole bunch of dudes in Twilight who would make a decent Tonto. I'm not talking Taylor Lautner, because his Native-ness is about as dubious as Johnny Depp's, but sheeeeet, he at least kinda looks the part so I'd even take him and his washboard abs at this point.

There's also Benjamin Bratt (Law and Order, Miss Congeniality), who's part-Peruvian rather than Native North American, but that's still a whole lot better than Johnny Depp. Plus he's kinda hot.

"But the film needs a big star," I hear you say, "and there's no Native American actor who is a big star comparable to Johnny Depp."

Hold up, the titular role in the movie is being played by Armie Hammer. Who the fuck is that? I had to google him, and it turns out that he's been in one movie that anyone's ever heard of (The Social Network). No disrespect to him, I'm sure he's a good actor. But let's keep it real here: no one, apart from those within Hammer's circle of family and friends, is going to be all, "Oh snap, we gotta go see The Lone Ranger, because Armie Hammer is in it!"

So think on this: the producers of this movie would be happy to give a huge break to a relatively little-known actor in the title role of The Lone Ranger, yet were not willing to give a similar break to a Native American actor in the other lead role.

You want a big star? Cast Brad fucking Pitt or someone like that as the The Lone Ranger, and give a Native American actor who people haven't really heard of a breakthrough role.

"But Johnny Depp is a great actor," I hear you say, "so shouldn't it be about who can give the best performance, rather than race?"

In that case, imagine if they gave the role of Abraham Lincoln in the movie Lincoln to Chow Yun Fatt, or Morgan Freeman, rather than Daniel Day-Lewis. Sure, that would be ridiculous, but those are two pretty fucking awesome actors right there, and that's all that counts, right? Right? But everyone just accepts that only a white guy is going to play Lincoln. And I totally agree with that, not just because Lincoln obviously was a white guy, but the whole narrative would not make sense if he was played by someone who wasn't white. Even if they pretended to be white by use of makeup and traditional white clothing.

In racial terms, there are two types of roles in film: ones where the race doesn't matter, and ones where race does matter. You could take the movie Flight and replace Denzel Washington with Tom Hanks, and it wouldn't really make any difference. But you couldn't get Tom Hanks to play the lead role in Malcolm X. (Though let's be honest, I'm sure someone in Hollywood would try.)

The role of Tonto is pretty much defined by him being Native American. Casting a white guy - even a slightly exotic-looking white guy with distant Native ancestry, maybe - is downright insulting.

There are very few roles available to Native American actors in the movie business as it is. No one is asking that any such actors be elevated to Will Smith-status if they don't deserve it. But in the one blockbuster flick in pretty much forever to feature a Native American lead character, producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Gore Verbinski had the opportunity to do something that wasn't even boundary-pushing, just logical... and they fucked it. With a stick. So fuck them.


So that's why you should not go and see this piece of shit movie. That, and the fact that it's got a 22% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.


By the way, if you think the questions in this argument are ones that I just imagined, go read the comments here.

Is "Game of Thrones" racist and sexist?

With the huge (and largely Piratebay-assisted) following that the HBO series Game of Thrones has gathered, has come increasing critique across the interwebz about its problems of representation. Namely, that it is racist, misogynist, and I've heard homophobic thrown out there as well. How justified are these criticisms?

The first distinction that has to be made is between the TV show, Game of Thrones, and the book series by George RR Martin, A Song of Ice and Fire, on which it is based. 5 books have been released, there are allegedly 2 more left to come, and the TV series has ended its 3rd season somewhere in the middle of the third book. I should state that I'm an avid fan of both show and book, so perhaps I take a biased view of these things, but so be it.

It's perhaps a cop-out for book fans like myself to respond to any criticism of the series by smugly stating, "You need to read the book, then you would understand". But it's simply a reality that show-only viewers have a more superficial understanding of what's going on in the GoT world than book readers, and it's common to read critiques from people whose interpretations are at odds with what is actually suggested by GRRM's writing. Many of those criticising the show are doing so from a somewhat limited perspective. They don't have access to characters' internal points of view as written by Martin, and they don't have access to the two and a half books worth of details that the show has not covered yet. Which is an important factor given that scenes and story lines can be interpreted in different ways.

But at the same time, the show needs to stand on its own merits as an artistic creation, not as merely a supplement to the books. So it is entirely valid to critique how certain issues are portrayed on the show without ever reading any of the books; when talking about certain kinds of people are represented, how it comes across is as important as how it might be intended to come across.


GENDER


Many of the feminist criticisms of the story return to the theme that by portraying a fantasy world that is so rife with sexual violence and other forms of misogyny, ASOIAF and/or GoT is therefore misogynist itself. As one article puts it,

I also recognize that there’s a difference between displaying sexism because it’s the time period and condoning said sexism. But this IS a fantasy, not history, meaning the writers can imagine any world they wish to create. So why imagine a misogynistic one?

or from this article,

Well, yes, 14th century Europe wasn’t a lot of fun if you were a woman, but nor did it have, for example, dragons, or magical shape-changing witchy-woo assassins. Westeros does, because Westeros is a fantasy world. If the creator of a fantasy series can dream up an army of self-resurrecting zombie immortals he can damn well dream up equal marriage rights, and if he chooses not to do so then that choice is meaningful

The world Martin evokes in his books is a brutal one, in which the poor, weak and powerless are constantly vulnerable to the predations of those whose power comes from noble birth, or physical strength, or strength of numbers. It is these dynamics which drive the whole narrative. So in such a milieu, would "equal marriage rights" and 21st century progressive liberal values really be a good fit?

It is quite shocking to see Khal Drogo force himself on a sobbing teenage Daenerys after their wedding; many would find it just as shocking that they later fall in love. How could any woman ever fall in love with a man who rapes her? Yet, we are applying 21st century values here; in a great many cultures, women were considered chattel and had little power to make choices about how they exercised their sexuality. Still today in many parts of the world, women and children are married off against their will, and thus the concept of sexual consent as we know it goes out the window. Yet despite that, many such couples probably do come to love each other, even if it could be considered a kind of Stockholm Syndrome. Of course, if what happened to Daenerys happened today in our society it would be an outrage and a crime, yet for much of human history it was just business as usual. (I should mention that in the books, their first sexual encounter is a bit more consensual, although it still wouldn't really pass muster in a contemporary court of law.)

The threat of rape frequently hangs over the heads of many of the other female characters too, while even those women in positions of relative power are merely treated as pawns, to be married off against their will to cement alliances. Sounds rough. But it's also one of the more accurate depictions of the the lot of women in medieval life that you will ever read in the fantasy genre. In any society engaged in war or civil war of the old-school sort (see the Balkan conflict, or civil struggles in Sudan, Liberia or Congo), women are raped in great numbers. Likewise with any society without strong rules of law. Women walking around dressed however they like and remaining mostly unmolested is something that is just not possible in most parts of the world. And even in the most advanced and ordered nations in the world, women still curtail some aspects of their behaviour because of the threat of sexual violence. So while some claim that GoT seems to celebrate sexual violence, I would argue that it's just being realistic about what goes on in lawless and war-torn places.

Yes, it's different to most other series and movies that you will see, which is why I think a lot of people find it so shocking. But that's because most other dramas and fantasies take place either in modern states, or stick to the more well-known cliches of medieval fantasy - noble knights of valour and so on.  The Lord of the Rings had a dichotomy between good humans, elves and dwarves, and evil orcs and goblins, but Martin's world has only humans (mostly). Yes, there are dragons and magic in his world, but compared to most medieval fantasies, those elements are very much in the background, at least at the start of the story. It's far closer to its HBO siblings The Sopranos or The Wire than it is to Merlin; it's a story about people and how they are shaped by power, violence, loyalty and self-interest. While some characters are clearly "good" and some clearly "evil", many don't adhere cleanly to either category. To quote Jorah Mormont in A Storm of Swords (book 3), “There is a savage beast in every man, and when you hand that man a sword or spear and send him forth to war, the beast stirs.” Protagonists inflicting violence upon each other is a staple of the genre, but few fantasy works offer an exploration of the violence inherent in human nature the way Martin does.

Feminists have been trying to tell us for years, quite rightly, about how oppressive and ever-present the spectre of male power and violence is towards women. I actually think Martin should be commended for reflecting this in his books, despite some feminists seeing the books or show as misogynist. To his credit, he creates numerous compelling female characters, some of whom struggle within the roles they are born into (Cersei, Catelyn, Sansa, Daenerys), and some who break out of the bonds society places on them (Brienne, Arya, Daenerys again). Around half the major (POV) characters are female, which is noteworthy in a genre that tends to be male-dominated. And as these are women and girls in a world beset by war and turmoil,   it would be unrealistic to avoid mentioning the threat of sexual violence.

Portraying a misogynist world entails depicting misogyny, but that does not equate to an endorsement of that perspective. And I fully get that for some people, that's just not going to make for pleasant viewing or reading, and thus I can't blame anyone if they decide it's not for them. As a male, perhaps my assessment of the existence of sexism is only worth so much; but I am yet to be convinced that anything in Martin's writing indicates or promotes an unhealthy view of women.

The show, however, is a different beast. The amount of nudity and sex on display is in my view excessive. I've had this argument with some other book-readers who say it is in keeping with the sort of world Martin has created, but I think they've pushed it too far. Martin's books are certainly not lacking for sexual content and bawdy language, but the writers of the TV show have seriously amped it up, perhaps in order to attract the lucrative "horny male" demographic. Which is why the SNL sketch poking fun at the nudity in the show is particularly hilarious.


I don't have a problem with sex and nudity when it's in context. But when the writers invent entirely new scenes (the ridiculous scene with Gendry and Melisandre sticks out for me), or modify scenes from the book, seemingly just to find an excuse to fit some exposed breasts into the shot, it's like they are channelling the teen sex comedies of the 80s.

Given the rich source material the show's creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have to work with, I think their penchant for portraying naked women is one of the drawbacks of what is otherwise a very good series; it's not like they need to use boobs and bums as a way to distract from a non-existent plot. As mentioned before, I don't have a problem with the show's portrayal of rape as a common phenomenon; but when this intersects with frequent rather pointless nudity, I can see why some people think it is eroticising sexual violence. The story lays bare the ugliness of patriarchy, but the visuals scream "Look! Check out the naked ladies!"
Trying to have it both ways doesn't work.


RACE

The GoT world centres on the continent of Westeros, which is based on western and northern Europe, particularly Britain. But the story arc of Daenerys Targaryen, a princess exiled in the Eastern continent of Essos, raises some issues about how the show represents non-white people. Essos is something like the Eurasian landmass; the Free Cities of its western coast seem reminiscent of Greece, while the  Southern coast (Qarth and Slaver's Bay) is similar to the Middle East in many ways. The Dothraki, whose warlord Drogo is gifted Daenerys as a wife, are clearly based on Central Asian pastoral peoples - the Huns, Turks and Mongols.

 Dany's story arc has a smell of four ugly racial tropes that are very common in popular culture.

1. Coloured people always viewed through white eyes: The story or storyline that is set in a non-white culture, yet it has to be told through the eyes of a white person, since the audience presumably can't relate to something that is only about non-whites. Examples are Cry Freedom (about the white friend of South African activist Steve Biko) or The Last King of Scotland (about Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, yet the lead character is a fictional white doctor).

2. Barbarians and proud warrior races: The non-whites are defined as "barbaric" or "primitive", rather than regular people with a range of normal motivations and feelings (this is in too many movies to count), and often belong to a "warrior race" which prizes strength and fighting prowess as the only way to earn honour and respect. See the Klingons in Star Trek (who tend to be played by black actors) and the title aliens of the Predator movies. Even within that series there are humans from warrior races too; Predator and Predators respectively have a Native American guy and a Japanese guy who stop fleeing and stay back to take on the aliens in single combat with a bladed weapon. (Of course they die, but at least they were "honourable".)

3. Mighty whitey: Taking the white-centric story even further... the white person finds themselves amongst a strange exotic culture, yet learns their ways and eventually manages to become respected by them, often becoming their leader or most awesome warrior. Examples include The Last of the Mohicans, The Phantom, Avatar, Dances with Wolves, The Last Samurai, and Tarzan.

4. White man's burden, or white saviour: In which white people, out of the goodness of their hearts, save non-white people from the terrible situation which they couldn't have got out of themselves. Examples are The Help, The Blindside, Gran Torino, Dangerous Minds, and the sitcom Different Strokes.




While you could argue that all tropes are at play here, I think it's also a little more complicated than that. To address those point by point:

1. Coloured people always viewed through white eyes: Danaerys is Westerosi, but has grown up around the Free Cities, and then her journey takes her further east into cultures she has never experienced before. All the cultures are presented as strange and exotic, and we never really get any insights on the inner life of these people, despite spending a lot of time around them. The focus is all about the white princess. They are permanently "Othered".
Except that the series is not really about them. Like it or not, the story is primarily about Westeros, and the people of Essos are very much a peripheral feature. This makes it different to Cry Freedom or The Last King of Scotland, which are films about black people, but told from a white viewpoint for no apparent reason.
The way Martin structures his narrative - each chapter presented from the point of view of one of the main characters - means that any other culture will seem strange, exotic and perhaps barbaric. The show to an extent has to reflect that. Daenerys is a young woman sold off against her will into a culture she knows nothing about that is very different from her own. To portray the Dothraki, Qartheen or the Ghiscari as being "just like regular folks" would not make sense in this context. In contrast to the Westerosi who speak the Common Tongue (aka English), most people on the show from Essos speak imaginary languages (Valyrian, Dothraki, Ghiscari), which again clearly defines them as different not only from the Westorosi characters, but from us, the viewers. But this is unavoidable, really, unless you want everyone in the show to speak made-up languages, which is just not feasible.

2. Barbarians and proud warrior races: The Dothraki are horse nomads who seem primarily occupied with fighting each other and plundering the settlements on the edges of their plain. They are referred to everyone else as barbarians and savages, and many of their customs celebrate violence and seem primitive by most standards. They like having sex beneath the open sky, only like doing it doggy-style, are quite frank about raping as one of the spoils of war, and consider it good entertainment when deadly brawls erupt at weddings.


Let's not forget: the people who are the obvious inspiration for the Dothraki (Huns, Turks, Mongols) made their mark on history through conquest. These are warrior cultures. Of course they weren't entirely that; throughout most of history, Central Asian nomads probably spent their time with rather un-warlike pursuits such as taking their livestock to graze, and making fermented horse milk beverages.  But these weren't what led to them conquering everything from China to Baghdad and Hungary. The nomads were brilliant at the art of war, and also employed tactics that were considered utterly foreign and frequently dishonourable by the "civilized" nations they fought against, and were renowned for their cruelty and terror. And unlike Europe of the time, the nomads lacked the stratification between warrior, peasant and artisan classes; most able-bodied men became soldiers in times of conflict, and thus the warrior ethos was more prevalent throughout their culture. It's also come to light recently that 1 in 200 men in the world have some genetic link to Genghis Khan and his family; let's assume this is more likely to have come through rape than Genghis being some kind of Casanova.

Martin does exaggerate these "savage" elements, to be sure, and the show does so even more - the line "There is no word for thank you in Dothraki" takes this too far as far as I'm concerned. But should a  fictional people based on some of the most feared and ruthless armies in history be treated as more well-rounded? I'm not sure, considering that they do not actually play a large role in the story. If not for their fierce war-making ways, they would have no place in the story at all since Daenerys' brother would have no need to offer her to them in exchange for an army. And at the end of the day GoT is not really about the Dothraki. If you want GoT to be about non-white people, of course you will be disappointed, but it doesn't claim to be that. Instead, go watch something like Sergei Bodrov's (admittedly impressive) 2007 movie Mongol, which portrays Genghis Khan as a great fighter, leader and romantic with no nasty side whatsoever. Martin writes from his own area of expertise - medieval Western Europe - and those outside that milieu are have only fringe roles to play. I think wanting to see a bigger and better-explored non-white presence in this story is a bit like wanting to see equal marriage rights and gender equality; that's just not what this world is meant to be about. It's like criticising The Sopranos because it didn't have any main characters who were Chinese. If you want to read that story, then maybe you need to go and write that story yourself.

Their portrayal as "savages" also depends on who they are being compared to. As mentioned previously, Westerosi society is portrayed as incredibly oppressive and cruel. To be sure, it professes nobler values, much as the West does today. Rape is regarded as a heinous crime... yet unguarded women are never safe. Slavery is considered an abomination... yet most of the nobility treat peasants like property anyway. The character of Sansa Stark seems to represent the readers' belief in the traditional fairytale fantasy notions of chivalry, charming princes and noble knights, until she is dealt a hefty dose of reality. Westeros has its own white "barbarians" too... the Iron Islanders, loosely based on the Vikings, do take slaves, and define their existence through their love of rape and pillage. They are actually worse than the Dothraki, since cities in Essos can mostly avoid Dothraki attacks by paying them in gold and slaves; the Ironborn's whole culture revolves around killing. And let's  not forget that in the same episode which introduces the Dothraki, we see Dany groped by her brother, and Jaimie Lannister push a child out of a window after being caught in the act of boning his sister. If the most shocking thing you get from that episode is how "primitive" the brown people look, maybe you are paying attention to the wrong things.

Also regarding the Dothraki; I've read some criticism that rather than being portrayed as a homogeneous population, they seem to be played by "miscellaneous brown people", which might encourage the view that all non-whites are basically the same? For example, while the book-Dothraki are described as having copper-coloured skin and almond-shaped eyes, Jason Momoa who plays Khal Drogo is Hawaiian, while the rest of the Dothraki look mostly like they are from the Middle East, while there are even a few people who are clearly of African origin in there as well.

What struck me initially as a lazy misstep is actually quite plausible on reflection. The Dothraki population absorbs a lot of slaves acquired from cities on the fringes of their domain, and many of those cities themselves acquire slaves from other regions. Even the Central Asian populations on whom the Dothraki are based were far from homogeneous. Given that the nomad way of life spanned such a huge swathe of the Eurasian continent, and was by definition likely to spread into new territories, the empires that arose incorporated a mix of East Asian, European and Southwest Asian phenotypes. A look at the people in modern Afghanistan or Xinjiang reveals this diversity. So while I don't know if it was by design or laziness, the casting of Dothraki as "miscellaneous brown people" is not as odd as it might initially seem. In any case, Jason Momoa as Drogo looks exactly as a Dothraki should, to my mind.

3. Mighty whitey: In some ways, Daenerys does fit this trope; as she travels through the foreign cultures of Essos, she acquires an army of non-white followers who revere her as the Mother of Dragons. But unlike Avatar or Dances with Wolves, she never really becomes accepted into any of the cultures she interacts with. She becomes khaleesi of the Dothraki, yet is abandoned and threatened with death after her husband dies. Indeed, everyone who doesn't become one of her followers seems out to kill her for the destruction she wreaks everywhere. Those who do follow her are mostly outcasts and freed slaves who don't have a lot of better options.

4. White man's burden, or white saviour: The final scene of season 3 did come off as clumsy - the lily-white Daenerys being hoisted above an adoring crowd of swarthy freed slaves. Real white saviour stuff; saving all those brown people from the other brown people, it was the sort of thing Americans who advocated invading Iraq and Afghanistan would be proud of. To me it was a major misstep, but again it brings us to a difference between show and book.

The books make clear that the slaves in Yunkai are drawn from all over the world, and are white, black and brown skinned (inspired by the slave trade of ancient Rome and the Middle East, which took slaves from anywhere they could). It doesn't look that way in the show. Logistically, one can understand why; most scenes in Essos are filmed in Morocco, thus the extras would be expected to have a fairly North African look. But even then, they seemed darker than I'd expect from Morocco, and it can't have been too hard for the directors to round up some white folks from the crew to diversify the crowd if they'd wanted to. At to that the drab brown clothing of the slaves, contrasting with Dany's pale skin and hair and blue outfit, it just doesn't look good.

Which makes me wonder if it was deliberate move by the producers, because for them to see that scene and not see what's wrong with it either means they are oddly deluded or they want it to be that way. Anyone who has been following the show knows that George RR Martin likes to subvert the traditional cliches of fantasy fiction, often setting up premises only to knock them down. The first season sets up a typical righteous hero, Eddard Stark, as the main character, until he is beheaded; a huge shock to the audience who presumed he would escape. Logically, we expect his son Robb to seek vengeance, which seems inevitable... until he meets a shocking end at the Red Wedding. So is it another case of the show's writers setting up a cliched premise (the white saviour) that we've all seen before, only to knock it down? *Mild spoiler alert*  For those who haven't read the books, things don't all go to planned after Dany liberates the slaves of Slaver's Bay. In fact, the Iraq and Afghanistan analogies are not far off. In many ways, it's an argument against well-meaning foreigners meddling in a country's affairs.

Another key point for me is that the "white man's burden" trope also relies on the white saviour being "good". No doubt Daenerys is one of the most popular characters, and she is seen by many followers as having the qualities of a just ruler that have been so lacking in Westeros. But is she a morally "good" character? Certainly, she tries to stop the Dothraki warriors from raping women, and becomes embroiled in the politics of Slaver's Bay due to her compassion for the masses of slaves. But at the same time, the trail of death and destruction she leaves behind is comparable to the legacy of Tywin Lannister (who is definitely not a "good" guy). Mirri Maz Duur understands the potential cost of Dany's ascendancy, and takes steps to prevent it; Dany burns her alive, proof that she can treat those who cross her with a ruthlessness that would do Tywin proud. And all this in order to satisfy her massive sense of entitlement (she constantly reminds everyone how she is blood of the dragon, and demands they respect her), in regaining the throne her father lost because he was an insane murderous tyrant. She no longer has any right to the throne (she's never even been to Westeros), if you consider that the Targaryens once took power by force and eventually had it taken from them by force. I think readers and viewers are smart enough to see that despite Daenerys' beauty and awesome girl-power appeal, she's someone who is motivated primarily by self-interest.

But whatever the intention, the show certainly peddles an image which is at very least racially uncomfortable, and not truly in keeping with what is suggested in the books. Reading them, I didn't get the feeling that there was some stark ethnic difference between Daenerys and the people she encounters in Essos. But fiction is like an ink-blot test in many ways; how we read it often says something about our own perspectives.

The deeply cynical view of human nature espoused by Game of Thrones is a hard one for a lot of people to handle, especially those who are used to more traditional fantasy. Humankind's capacity for cruelty in the quest to attain power is the central theme of the story, even if it may play out in different ways in different cultures or have varying degrees of openness. The raider-cultures (Ironborn and Dothraki) are fairly open about their penchant for sexual violence and slave-taking, while the urban/agricultural societies claim a higher set of values yet do not keep to them. To me, it's reminiscent of how we define the difference between our "Western" values and everyone else's. Our values are, at least in theory, more progressive and modern than we believe most of the world's to be, in the same way that the Islamic world, for example, sees its values as morally superior to the decadent West. But is either belief system any more than a thin veneer that masks all people's capacity for both nobility and brutality?



More like this...

Racial analyses of "Avatar"

"300" and racism

Australian buses, where all the best racism occurs

Another one of these incidents.

("Learn some manners.... stick that up your mother's c**t." Oh the irony.)

And this one a month ago...

A lot of people will use these sorts of clips as proof of what a racist country Australia is. But I think it's important to view these things in context. Drunk or mentally unstable underclass types on buses are not really representative of mainstream Australia. Of course, that doesn't make it any easier to bear if you subjected to this kind of aggressive racist tirade. Is it fair to draw links between this sort of behaviour and broader systemic examples of racism? To an extent. But it's a complicated picture. 

What bugs me in these videos is the relative lack of bystander intervention. It's understandable to a certain extent that a lot of people don't want to draw the ire of someone who is in an aggressive mood and thus potentially dangerous. But it's the silence that these types of people interpret as agreement. It's notable that the first action taken by the driver in the first video is not to warn the woman who is spewing invective, but to ask the target of her rage to sit down. I'm not sure how they operate on Sydney buses, but I've never known standing up on a bus to be a significant societal transgression. Unless perhaps you are the wrong ethnicity.

People who are amazing at utterly trivial pursuits, part XIV

UEFA on racism in football: good intentions, bad in practice?

European football's governing body seems to be taking a hard line on racism in the game. A good idea? Of course... you'd think. But I'm not sure UEFA has their priorities sorted.
From Football365:

Players who are found guilty of racist offences will be banned for a minimum of 10 matches under new UEFA proposals. The Football Association is to be urged to follow this lead and bring in a minimum suspension for any player found guilty of racism. UEFA general secretary Gianni Infantino confirmed the European body is to double its sanction from next season and that all national associations are to be asked to follow suit. In the two high-profile cases of racist abuse by players in England, John Terry was banned for four matches and Luis Suarez for eight games and Infantino confirmed that UEFA now believed those sanctions were not tough enough. Speaking at the Soccerex conference in Manchester, Infantino told reporters: "We are saying that it should be 10 matches - it has been five matches and we will double it. "We will also submit to the whole of UEFA's member associations asking that all our members employ the same measures as well at national level. "The fight against racism is something that's very serious and we have to make sure that there is correct action and not just words."  The UEFA chief also said there would be partial closure of stadiums for a first incident of racist abuse by fans and a full closure for a second offence. The UEFA sanctions will affect all matches in European competition from the start of next season. Infantino added: "We have to have sanctions and they must have a deterrent effect and what we are proposing is if a player or official is convicted of racism they should receive a 10-match suspension at least. "If supporters at a club are found guilty of racist abuse the first sanction will be a partial closure of the part of the stadium from which the racist abuse took place. "For a second offence there will be the full closure and a minimum fine of 50,000 euros." 

Now, I think the deterrent measures for crowd racism are a fantastic idea. The biggest racism-related issue in European football is crowd behaviour, particularly in Eastern Europe, and finally UEFA seem to want to tackle this. But this has been such an obvious issue for a long time, and precious little has been done about it, I'm sceptical about how well the new regulations will be implemented. It's easy to do nothing about it; the powers-that-be at clubs are experts at not noticing racist crowd behaviour unless it is directed at their own players, and it's a lot to ask referees to keep an eye on it during the game. And what constitutes a severe enough racist incident to incur punishment for the club itself? Perhaps a sole hooligan throwing bananas at black players does not warrant closing the stadium, but what about a section of the crowd making monkey gestures? The officials will have the difficult task of determining at what point racist behaviour goes beyond the realm of individual punishments and warrants collective punishment. Under these circumstances, there may well be an incentive to underplay the extent of it. Then there is also the task of interpreting what exactly constitutes racism, which brings me to the next point.

The proposed heavy ban against players for racism might sound good in theory. But the two examples of racism from the English Premier League recently show how problematic this can be. Both Luis Suarez and John Terry were shown to have used racially-charged language towards black players, but the contexts of each incident have enough ambiguity to make their guilty verdicts quite controversial, and show that a blanket punishment is not really the right path to take.

Chelsea captain Terry was shown to have called QPR's Anton Ferdinand a "f***ing black c**t", during trash-talk between the two during a game. Seems straightforward? Terry's account of the incident went something like this... (these are not the exact words, I'm just summarising)
Terry: [something unclear]
Ferdinand: "What, did you just call me a f***ing black c**t?"
Terry: "Say what? Are you saying I called you a f***ing black c**t? No I didn't say that."

I actively dislike Terry as a player and a man, but I'm not sure he was really guilty here.

Liverpool's Luis Suarez is another player a lot of people hate (due to propensity for underhanded tactics), but again, I'm not sure he is really deserving of the punishment he received. His racist comment was made during a heated exchange with Manchester United's Patrice Evra, a French player of Senegalese descent. Suarez is Uruguayan. So bear in mind that both players are conversing in English, which is not their native language. Suarez allegedly called Evra "negrito", meaning "little black person" in Spanish, but this term is not regarded to be especially offensive in South America. To throw another element into the mix, Suarez himself has a black grandparent himself. While Evra's and Suarez's stories do differ slightly, it seems very possible that Evra construed "negrito" as the rather more offensive "nigger".

Again, enough ambiguity to make Suarez's 8-game ban problematic, in my opinion. Words cannot be defined as racist simply on their own; their context determines how offensive they actually are. Which is why mandatory set punishments are a bad idea.

Ronny Chieng at the Melbourne Comedy Festival gala

Ronny Chieng is garnering some buzz in the Australian comedy scene. He arrived in Melbourne as a law student (he was born in Malaysia and raised in the US and Singapore) and only had his first stab at comedy at 2009. I think his act could still use a little polishing but there's a lot to like. This short bit at the Melbourne International Comedy is a nice taster.



It's about time we had more Malaysian/Singaporean comedians (I'm lumping the two countries together because they are culturally so similar). Anyone who has hung out with people from those countries will know that there is something about the accent and manner which is intrinsically amusing; indeed Ronny reminds me of heaps of people I know.

Why celebs marry young

Slate has an interesting article up, entitled "The Economic Logic of Marrying Young (If You're Miley Cyrus)". While most Americans, as with most everywhere else, choose to get married later and later, pop stars seem to defy that trend.

Once upon a time, men with high school degrees could obtain manufacturing jobs with solid wages and pensions that enabled them to marry and start families in their early 20s. Now, with the chances of nabbing a pension about as good as “winning the World Series,” as the Knot Yet study puts it, young blue-collar Americans can’t pay for a wedding, let alone a house and kids. But pop stars, of course, don’t have that problem. Nor do they, like middle- and upper-class women, need to worry about finishing college and working for several years before contemplating getting pregnant. They won’t be sacrificing a $10,000 annual bump in salary by marrying too soon; instead, they’re probably making more in their late teens and 20s than they’ll ever make again. And getting married might well help their brand. (Having a baby certainly will.) In other words, celebrities marry young not because they’re more mature than the rest of us (clearly) but because they have the means so much of America lacks. The move may be driven by youthful impulse, but it is also, in a strange way, logical. They’re just doing what so many of us would have (ill-advisedly) done as teenagers if we’d had loads of cash and legal independence from our parents: married our first loves.

I think that's partly true. But another reason is at least equally important, which I have observed in my time working with professional footballers, who also tend to marry young. A celebrity, particularly one seen as particularly attractive, gets to pick from the top of the dating tree. Someone in that position gets many more opportunities than the average person to hook up with someone, AND the perceived quality of those they are hooking up is higher. I say perceived quality, because celebrities get to date other celebrities, wealthy businesspeople, and people with model looks, which are societally-approved as high-calibre partner choices, even though those things are hardly guarantees of compatibility or nice personality. So if you are in the public eye and deemed to be attractive, you can have more access at age 22 to hot potential partners than the rest of us would have had by age 35. It's not surprising then if you decide that you have met the love of your life at 22. 

Of course, fast forward a few years, and you are still in the public eye and still married... those attractive potential partners are still around you. So it's no surprise that a lot of celebrity cheating and divorce goes on as well. It's not that celebrities are any worse than the rest of us at having relationships, it's just that they are presented with far more opportunities to screw them up.

On Pope Francis

So we have a new Pope. Pope Francis, also known by the rather cooler name Jorge Mario Bergoglio. And lots of people are unhappy that the new pontiff is not some shining light of progressivism. Pope Frankie is a conservative who staunchly opposes birth control, abortion and gay marriage.

And yeah, that's disappointing. But really, what do we expect? Of course a 76 year old man who has never ever had sex is going to have archaic views on sexuality. And no man is going to rise up to the head of an organisation like the Catholic Church without his peers ensuring he has the "requisite" views on those matters. So if you expect anything different, you probably just need to adjust your expectations. In opposing modern attitudes towards sex and sexuality, he's only doing what he's supposed to do as an upholder of the tenets of the Catholic faith. He's a dinosaur, but
being a dinosaur is a prerequisite for the top job. We should expect no less. Just as the new Pope is reputedly a champion of the poor; that's a great testament to the man's character, but at the same time, it should be a prerequisite of any man who claims to represent the ideals put forward by Jesus Christ.

What we ARE entitled to expect from him though, is to also uphold some other principles that the Catholic Church is meant to uphold, in theory. Primarily, that it's not acceptable to molest children, and it's not acceptable to turn a blind eye to those that do. This has been the most glaring failing of the Church in recent history, because it holds such a high standard on sexual morality for others when it comes to such trifling matters as masturbation and premarital sex, yet sets such a low standard when it comes to dealing its own priests' rather more egregious sins of sexually abusing children.

It's a shame that Frankie boy doesn't have more intelligent views on the nature of human sexuality, but I'm not particularly disappointed, because he's just following the official doctrine. And besides, most Catholics, at least in the developed world, are going to go on jerking off, having premarital sex and using condoms anyway. But I'm pretty sure there is nothing in the Bible that says it's okay to fuck pre-teen boys. So the bare minimum we should expect from the new Pope is that he puts an end to the culture within the Church of sheltering or excusing paedophilia.

I'd suggest he send out this simple questionnaire to priests around the world.


Question 1 of 1: You find out that a fellow priest has had sexual relations with a number of children in his parish. Do you:
A) Inform the appropriate religious AND secular authorities.
B) Recommend that he pray on the matter.
C) Have him moved to another parish.
D) High-five him and compare notes.

Score: If you answer is anything other than (A), then you are not qualified to be a human being let alone a priest.


Next up, I solve climate change and the Palestine situation in three easy steps.

"How Americans Live Today" - the awesome faux North Korean propaganda video

This is the video that had lots of news outlets thinking it was a real North Korean propaganda film about America. It's a hoax, of course. But despite being hilarious and ridiculous, it's believable because the North Korean government has a history of hilarious and ridiculous propaganda. So enjoy.

Pigeons and snow coffee : yummy.

Where are all the Asian men? (@ Peril Magazine)

I have another post up at Peril Magazine. It's about why Asian women significantly outnumber Asian men in some parts of Australia.

It should be noted that most groups of immigrants to Australia, including those from European countries, have a sex ratio that is either approximately equal or slightly weighted towards women by several percentage points. (Women tend to be more willing to move overseas for marriage; the greater expectation men face to be the breadwinner might be an obstacle in moving to a place with uncertain work prospects, as opposed to moving specifically for work.) By contrast, the figures from India, Bangladesh and Pakistan are unusually weighted towards males. Those likely represent cultures that are highly patriarchal; not only are there already more males than females in those countries due to higher mortality and gender selection at birth, but it would be more accepted for men to leave home to travel than women. But the figures for Japan, the Philippines and Thailand are startling; there are around twice as many women as there are men immigrating to Australia from those countries.

Check it here.

"Fish Spa", Chiang Mai, Thailand

Sit with your legs in a bath and use the internet while little fish nibble away your dead skin tissue. There are estimate to be around 3000 of these establishments operating in Thailand. However the practice has been banned in the US and recently the UK Health Protection Agency warned that it could potentially lead to transmission of blood-borne viruses. Is that just the nanny state in action, or a real health risk?

Why Asians don't vote Republican. It's not that complicated.

Interesting article and comments here about why the Republican Party has failed to capture the votes and imaginations of most Asian immigrants to the US.

As many have observed, many Asians come with a certain set of values that in theory would make them a shoo-in to vote conservative. Many Asian cultures, particular Indians, Chinese, Koreans and Japanese, are very aspirational, with strong beliefs in the importance of achieving status or material success through education and hard work. Yet these groups are some of the most solidly Democratic. Indian-Americans are the highest-earning ethnic group in the US, yet they are 4 times more likely to identify as Democrats rather than Republicans. Of the major Asian-American groups, only Vietnamese show a significant lean towards the Republican party. This is another example of how material self-interest is not always a dominant factor in how a group votes. Vietnamese are more working-class than the aforementioned groups, as unlike the others they have a foundation in the refugee experience rather than as skilled migrants. But that refugee experience seems to shape their voting patterns in a different way; having fled the Communist Party, they are drawn to the strongly anti-Communist Republicans.

But the Republicans are not merely the party of business and the free market. They are also the party of social conservatism, and therein lies the problem.

Bryan Caplan, focusing particular on Indian-Americans, thinks it's a matter of the Republicans showing them more respect, to the point of pandering. Right-wing race blogger Steve Sailer, in the comments, thinks it's the opposite: that white America needs to respect itself more, which will make groups like Indians and Hispanics want to associate with the white majority, rather than being drawn into the identity politics that are often characteristic of the Left.

But respect need not go as far as pandering. Asian-Americans are a group that will assimilate into the mainstream quite easily, given the chance. By comparison, the Repubs have a whole heap of historical baggage coming between them and African-Americans and Hispanics. Those groups are easily attracted by identity politics because conservative white America (for whom the Republicans are the mouthpiece) has constantly alienated them, even without trying. To win those groups over (especiall African-Americans), the conservative side needs to make serious gestures over an extended period of time, like an abusive husband trying to convince a departed wife that he's changed. But the Asian community does not have that same amount of historical baggage. All the Republicans need to do to win over a sizeable chunk of Asian votes is to show that they don't think there's anything inherently wrong with not being a white Christian.

Indians, for example, are largely Hindu, with Sikhs, Christians and Muslims making up the rest. Hindus assimilate into the mainstream more easily than Sikhs and Muslims, largely because their religion as commonly practiced does not make huge distinctions between believer and non-believer. But many don't feel at home in the Republican Party, largely because the party sees them as foreign and strange, and treats them accordingly. Muslims and Sikhs even more so. It is telling that the two Indian-Americans with the highest profile in the Republican Party have both converted to Christianity and Anglicized their names - Bobby (Piyush) Jindal and Nikki Haley (born Nimrata Kaur Randhawa).

I'm not a conservative and thus I can't say I want Asian-Americans to start voting Republican. But if the Republican Party can drag itself a little further out of its medieval xenophobic headspace in which the only good candidate is a Bible-thumping one, then it will start to see rewards. And that shift would be better for everyone.

From around the interwebs...

Links and tings.


Why do Russians film their car accidents?

Because they’re scared of scams and police corruption. Russia is one of the most corrupt countries in the world. And the glaring gap between rich and poor leads the latter to mount increasingly elaborate scams. For their own protection, drivers, the preferred targets of frauds, install cameras in their vehicles.

Quebec language laws spawn "Pastagate"

The offensive word? Pasta. Yep, as innocuous as the durum semolina-based product might seem, Quebec’s language police, the Office Quebecois de la langue française determined that “pasta is not a French word, and it’s appearance on a menu without an adequate translation violated Quebec’s Language Charter,” according to the report. Sticky wicket that one, because if you really want to nitty gritty the situation, how do you translate sandwich, pizza, taco, hamburger, pad thai or paella? Yeah, good luck with that.

A guide to driving in India without dying

At least six separate things happened on that first short drive to my hotel that, if they happened in the US, would have been the only thing I'd talk about for a week. In India, no one seemed to notice. In America if I, say, was driving with my family and drove into lanes of oncoming traffic and lane-split like a motorcyclist just to pass a 3-wheeler going 2 mph slower than the surrounding traffic, my wife would have finalized our divorce before I even got into third gear. By fourth gear she'd be signing the papers to have me committed, and I suspect I'd be in handcuffs by the first stop light. In India, nobody even bothers to dialate their pupils at these sorts of things.

Educating Indonesia

Indonesian educators and commentators have slammed the country's school system for placing more emphasis on rote learning than creative thinking. A culture of teaching anchored in obedience as well as a rigid approach to religious studies and assigned reading have been described as major problems. Education experts say less than half of the country's teachers possess even the minimum qualifications to teach properly and teacher absenteeism hovers at around 20 percent. Many teachers in the public school system work outside of the classroom to improve their incomes.

The more names change, the more they sound the same 

...names that start out as being restricted to boys sometimes later drift over into unisex usage—think of names like Dana, Jamie, or Drew. But Cassidy and her colleagues found that not all boys’ names were equally likely to drift. Names with very high male scores stayed firmly anchored in the masculine domain while those that scored as less male-sounding were more often appropriated as names for girls.

Why do British singers sound American?

Linguist Peter Trudgill tracked rhoticity in British rock music over the years and found that the Beatles’ pronunciation of Rs decreased over the course of the 1960s, settling into a trans-Atlantic sound that incorporated aspects of both British and American dialects. The trend also went in the opposite direction as new genres developed: American pop-punk vocalists like Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day took on a British-tinged accent to sound more like seminal artists such as Joe Strummer of the Clash. Contemporary singers continue to adopt various accents according to their genre; Keith Urban, who is Australian, sings country music with a marked American Southern accent.

Why we love some Asian cuisines and not others (@ Peril Magazine)

My latest blog post for Peril (Asian-Australian Arts & Culture Magazine) is about why some ethnic cuisines become so much more popular than others.

Yet it is also testament to the entrepreneurial spirit of certain ethnic groups who spread themselves around the globe and discovered they could carve out a successful niche in the restaurant business. Worldwide, few groups have done this as successfully as the Chinese, Italians, Indians and Lebanese. So it’s hard to talk about the success of the food itself without looking at the culture that produces it. The most successful culinary exports come from cultures that not only celebrate their own food (Italians being the best example of this), but also have a strong drive towards small business ownership. 

 Check it here.

My friendly neighbourhood

This is in Twin Waters in Queensland, right near where I just moved to. No doubt it will cause great consternation to the zero Muslims who actually live there. Unless of course it is out of concern that the Muslims will hurt themselves by jumping and diving.

2012 music roundup

This list is not in any order, and there's certainly some that I've forgotten. These are the songs that made an impact on my consciousness in 2012. I listened to a lot more chart music this past year, primarily because I joined a gym that played Channel V non-stop. And while that was a largely painful experience - 99% of music today is still aimed at helping moronic 19 year olds shake their azz and get with all the hotties at da cluuub - some good stuff managed to sneak in there too.


Gotye featuring Kimbra - Somebody That I Used To Know
Belgian-born Melbournian Wally De Backer, aka Gotye, notched up some impressive feats in 2012 - among them, the first Australian artist to hit number 1 in the US since Savage Garden, over 300 million views on Youtube, topping the charts in 23 countries, and apparently the most popular song ever in the history of the Dutch charts. Quite a feat for an "alternative" artist, whatever that tag means these days.


Kendrick Lamar - Bitch Don't Kill My Vibe
As someone who still remembers the Golden Age of Hip-Hop (aka 1988 - 1994, give or take), I pretty much hate every rapper who comes out these days. But Kendrick's all right. We can hang.


PSY - Gangnam Style
The first song ever to amass a billion views on Youtube, a worldwide phenomenon that had everyone doing the horse dance, making videos or their own versions (see the video below) and singing along to words in Korean that they didn't understand. Gangnam Style might be a sign of the weird times we now live in, but it is also the triumph of infectious pop music to overcome the barriers of culture and language.
While a whole lot of people are undoubtedly sick to death of hearing Gangnam Style and seeing its associated dances, this shouldn't detract from what is a pretty good song. Yes, on one level it is lowest-common-denominator dance music (it borrows liberally from LMFAO's Sexy and I Know it, which was clearly not designed for people with high IQs). But it functions on other levels too: a poke at the Korean establishment (even if non-Koreans won't quite understand that), and a complete reversal of many of the conventions that most pop stars play by.


Guy Sebastian featuring Lupe Fiasco - Battle Scars
The inaugural winner of Australian Idol back in the day, Guy Sebastian seems like a lovely dude, but he's also seemed kinda lame in everything he has released; a waste of one of the better talents to have graced that show. With Battle Scars, he has achieved the feat of actually recording something credible without sacrificing his pop instincts, and it is far and away the best thing the Malaysian-born and Adelaide-raised singer has ever . Lupe Fiasco's rap on the song is a nice addition because it doesn't seem tacked on like many rap-cameos do. In fact, the two vocalists blend so well together that they can be featured on Letterman as "Lupe Fiasco featuring Guy Sebastian" and it doesn't seem completely off.

Rudimental - Feel the Love
This British collective took a genre of music many of us had forgotten existed (drum n bass), dressed it up with jazzy trumpet solos and Stax-era soul touches, and somehow had a major worldwide hit. And then did it all again with Not Giving In. Who knew the world was crying out for this style of music? Both tracks have amazing videos too.


Azalea Banks - 212
(This is actually from the back end of 2011.) One of the dominant trends in popular music is the fusion of hip-hop with club music. This is hardly a new trend – back in the late 80s and early 90s there was a lot of this stuff going on, some of it pretty good – but it is ever-present at the moment. And much of it is pretty awful, to be frank, epitomized by the dubious likes of Flo Rida and Pitbull. A better example is Azealea Banks’ 212, which succeeds largely because it samples Lazy Jay's Float my Boat, which can stand on its own merits as an instrumental track, and is not as mind-numbingly populist as most of the big club-rap tracks around. But Banks' quirky personality is also a huge drawcard, and makes the video eminently watchable, while her fairly confronting lyrics take sexual braggadocio into dimensions rarely explored in hip-hop.


The Bamboos featuring Megan Washington - The Wilhelm Scream
Melbourne's top purveyors of deep funk give this James Blake tune a smoky, majestic makeover.


Solange - Losing You
Truth be told, I've never been a huge Madonna fan, and have cared little for the previous output of Beyonce's little sister Solange. So I'm not quite sure why I find Solange's Losing You to be one of my favourite tracks of the year, given that it sounds more like Madonna than anything Madonna has done in the last 20 years. I didn't even think much of it on first listen either, principally for its extreme Madonna-ishness... but once its hooks are in it doesn't let go.


Miguel - Adorn
In a similar vein to the Solange track, RnB singer Miguel gives a big nod to the 80s with his biggest hit Adorn. But in this case, he echoes late-career Marvin Gaye. A great example of how a track that is very obviously synthesised can sound sexy and soulful and not at all plastic; a "commercial" RnB track that is notable for its subtlety. Miguel's album is not all that, unfortunately, but he at least shows that his excellent track All I Want Is You from a few years back was not a fluke.


Carly Rae Jepsen, Jimmy Fallon and The Roots - Call Me Maybe
Worth it for the faces of The Roots as they play away in the background.


Frank Ocean - Thinking About You
It used to be that if you wanted to make proper soul music and avoid making stupid commercial RnB, the only way was to go retro, harking back to an era when people knew how to make proper soul music. Frank Ocean, like Miguel to an extent, is making "proper" soul while still sounding very contemporary. His album Planet Orange is one of the very best you'll hear this year. The revelation, in the lead up to the album release, that Ocean is somewhat less than 100% heterosexual, is a brave move for any "urban" artist. Had he been a white pop singer, of course, no one would have cared.


Chiddy Bang - Mind Your Manners
In hip-hop, a genre that revolves around being a badass, it's often forgotten that the music was once fun as well as cool. (The hip-hop fun test is whether you can dance to the track without making an "attitude" face.) I'm not sure how cool Chiddy Bang really are, but in Mind Your Manners they have a track that is fun and accessible without sounding horrible, which is actually quite hard to do.


Labrinth - Treatment
The charts are full of rock bands fooling around with dance and urban elements (guest rappers, four-to-the-floor beats, DJ scratches and electronic effects). Meh. When an urban/dance artist starts fooling round with rock, I expect it to suck. This doesn't.

Sunny... Yesterday my life was filled with rain

Okay so the reason I haven't posted anything for quite a while is that I have recently moved house. Not just to a nearby suburb, but to a whole different state. Queensland to be precise, and the Sunshine Coast to be more precise*. It's a trade off: I get marvellous warm weather instead of grim Melbourne unpredictability, but I lose the feeling of smug superiority that comes with living in Australia's most cultured and self satisfied city.

It's a temporary move, for either a year or two. My partner got a job offer up here that was too good to resist, so I quit my job, and undertook the 2000km drive northward during a heatwave, narrowly avoiding bushfires along the way. I also realised after driving the first 900km that my car registration had expired some days ago, and so I was risking a massive fine were I to be caught by the fuzz. But that's the way I roll, baby... Thug life.

The drive can be done in less than 24 hours if you are a particular hardcore mofo. we did it in 6. 6 days of driving is a long time to spend with your partner, and it can be the making or breaking of a relationship. It's also a long time to hold in a fart, if you are a gentleman and care about such small courtesies. The Sunshine Coast is not exactly the outback, but it is still too small-town for a city slicker like myself. It resembles my home town of Melbourne only in that it is in Australia and people speak English. In other respects, it is utterly foreign to me; there are no hipsters, and it's hard to get a coffee good enough for hipsters to approve of in any case. People love to leave their doors unlocked and car windows rolled down, which would normally be a sign of a friendly small town, yet seems highly bizarre behaviour in a town where every second dude has tattoos, missing teeth and walks around shirtless. I can now get mobile phone reception only if I stand up against the fence in my backyard and pray that the heavens are aligned in my favour.

On the plus side everything is pretty damn beautiful, life is pretty cruisy, and I now wear sandals everyday rather than shoes (see the aforementioned thug life). It's easy to love the beaches and scenic subtropical landscapes, and one day I may even come to love the hordes of bogans who populate this part of the world. And I am going to enjoy the walking-around-shirtless thing once I start hitting the gym real hard.

Moment that brought home that I was now living in a small town: 
Asking the lady in Maroochydore's only Indian grocery if they sold fresh curry leaves, and her reacting as if I'd just asked to buy a space shuttle.

Bogan kid's name of the day: 
Jacob, but spelled "Jakeb".

One of the great pleasures of the great bureaucracy that is the modern nation state is that local and state governments each have their own set of hoops that you have to jump through. So, lets just say like me that you have a car that is registered in Victoria (or was up until a week ago). That does not wash with our friends in the Queensland government, who determine in their wisdom that rather than just switching over to Queensland registration, I have to get a roadworthy check done before it is deemed ready to be registered here.
Or, lets just say that I am a qualified teacher, and that one of my subjects that I am qualified to teach is the Indonesian language. The Queensland government considers that to be hearsay, and wants to make me undergo testing and a special interview to prove that I am not just making this shit up and somehow fooled the whole Victorian education system.
Oh, the oppression. I'm out.

* I'm typing this on an iPad, and when I misspelled the word "precise", it autocorrected to "erectile". Just thought you'd like to know that.

Aceh is a cautionary example for Indonesia

Since the end of the three decades under military strongman Suharto, Indonesia has emerged as the most vibrant democracy in South East Asia. Yet this new freedom might prove costly to the character of a nation frequently held up as a beacon of moderate Islam. As we are seeing from the Arab Spring, some of the things that emerge after the fall of a dictator are not so nice. The absence of a tough-guy ruler in Indonesia has meant a rise in Saudi-funded Islamic fundamentalism and acts of terror, from bombings targeted at Westerners in Jakarta and Bali, to persecution of Shi'as and Ahmadis.

If Indonesians want a glimpse at a possible future of their nation, they need only peek over at Aceh, a province where Islam reigns supreme. The Acehnese have fought a long struggle for independence, against the Dutch and now against Indonesia, but their fight for self-determination might garner a little more sympathy if they didn't seem so keen to turn Aceh into SE Asia's capital of Islamic lunacy.

The administration of Lhokseumawe, Aceh, is planning to issue a bylaw banning women from straddling motorcycles, arguing that the practice is “improper” in a province governed by Islamic law. Lhokseumawe Mayor Suaidi Yahya said that women should sit sideways on motorcycles, with their legs dangling off to one side. The planned regulation had been discussed with many parties, including local ulema, Suaidi said in his 2013 New Year’s speech. The mayor said that the ban would restore fading local values caused by poor morality and make it easier to differentiate women from men when riding pillion. He said that the planned regulation could in fact uphold the dignity of women in the region.

Unspun has it right. This has nothing to do with what women wear or do, but everything to do with the idea that men are incapable of controlling their basic urges. And when you set such a low standard for men to follow, it's not surprising when they lower themselves to it.