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You must need an attitude adjustment

By Peter West - posted Monday, 20 July 2015


A series of items in the media caught my attention. It seems that everybody these days can be accused of being anti-this or anti-that.

ITEM 1.

Last week Jarryd Hayne, a footballer who has played both in Australia and the USA, was accused of making anti-Jewish comments.

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Frankly, I'd be pleased if most of the footballers I see on TV can speak more than five words of English and make any sense. Usually the idea seems to be to interview them after they have played a game, when they can barely catch their breath. I must resist calling the tedious State of Origin football match the Origin of Species game, though I note that Papua New Guinea police want to ban live broadcasts of it because of the number of people killed in arguments.

As the song says, where's New Guinea? That's in Queensland!

Perhaps those people to our north are anti-NSW? It's horrid to think that they don't like our Beloved Blues, held up earnestly by the daily press in Sydney like saints with haloes. But we must move on.

ITEM 2.

In the same week, there was turmoil among Canadian Libertarians. I was all agog to read this exciting message:

The Libertarian Party of Canada is in turmoil following the bizarre suspension of Lauren Southern, one of the party's most visible and popular candidates, at the behest of a small group of aggrieved feminist activists.

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Members and candidates are now in open revolt amid concerns that the party has been co-opted by a small group of left-wing culture warriors whose socially authoritarian agendas are alien to the majority of libertarians and toxic to the general public

Left-wing culture warriors?Socially authoritarian? Toxic to the general public? George Orwell would be licking his lips after having found such bizarre abuse of the English language. Isn't it wonderful that even the Libertarians don't like someone who has the wrong ideas! We have to stand somewhere, I suppose, and I admit that I have written myself about the extraordinary number of ads on TV making men out to be fools and clowns.

Maybe one day they will cancel ads for being anti-male. But we shall move on.

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About the Author

Dr Peter West is a well-known social commentator and an expert on men's and boys' issues. He is the author of Fathers, Sons and Lovers: Men Talk about Their Lives from the 1930s to Today (Finch,1996). He works part-time in the Faculty of Education, Australian Catholic University, Sydney.

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