Scotty fails to act human, while Murdoch fights with Zuckerberg

 Scotty fails to act human

In Australia a 24 year old woman in a new job gets drunk at a work function. She goes to a 'safe place' to sleep it off and wakes up to find herself being raped - I think for legal reasons we have to say allegedly being raped here, but that seems to suggest that we doubt the woman's story, which we don't.

On the individual level, this story is shocking because, despite several senior figures saying they will support her and she should go to the police, she still has the impression that she is a problem to be fixed and that reporting the incident could damage her career. Her treatment is ultimately the result of a culture of misogyny that permeates the political culture.

At the broader level is the astounding revelation that a serious and degrading crime was committed and nobody thought to ask the question "How did this happen and how can we make sure it never happens again?" Seriously peeps! They thought it was OK to deal with this as a one-off event and gave no thought to making sure that people would be safe from this kind of violation in the future. If the victim had not had the courage to speak out then nothing would have been done.

And throughout all of this Prime minister Scotty From-Marketing proved once again that spending thousands on an empathy consultant was a complete waste of tax payers money. Explaining his decision to finally act on the scandal, Scotty explained "Jenny and I spoke last night and she said to me, you have to think about this as a father. What would you want to happen if it were our girls?" FFS! Do you really need to imagine it happening to your daughters before you realise it is wrong?

Anyway you can read some more about it in this summary by Michelle Grattan in The Conversation.

Zuckerberg vs Murdoch

There are many ways to try and make sense of the recent decision by Facebook to block Australian news posts, but one of the more interesting is to see it as a fight between 'old media' like Murdoch and Nine/SMH and 'new media' like Facebook and Google, with the naive Australian government caught in the middle.

There seems little doubt that Murdoch and the old media have been pushing the changes to Australian law that are trying to force Facebook to pay for content. Both sides are being inflexible and seem to be less interested in finding a workable solution than winning at all costs. It is not surprising that in this fight the mainstream media are painting Facebook as the bad guy so, just for fun, lets swipe past the confected outrage from Fox, NewsCorp, SMH, the Guardian and others and look at this interesting take from friendlyjordies.

What probably amazes me most in all of this is the number of supposedly well informed people I know who are complaining that they are now missing out on the news. If Facebook is your primary source of news that just maybe you need to reconsider how well informed you are. There is a Vietnamese saying "When the buffalo fight, the small animals get trampled" so let's all use this opportunity to start patronising some of the smaller independent news sources like:

•  The Conversation
• Michael West Media
• The Betoota Advocate

and one can still listen to the news on ABC radio. 

Elsewhere in the Solar System:

• a small but pretty cool robot lands on Mars.