Pixelated Semantics

A schizotypical inventory

We are all hostages today

Found a new word this morning, "dittoheads". Defined at the very worthy Word Spy as a "noun. People who mindlessly agree on an issue or idea because it fits in with their ideology or because they are followers of the person who put forth the idea in the first place." Sounds like the kind of behaviour that causes Australians to want to elect Man of Steel, whose stage management of the current Irak hostage scenario has been breathtakingly hypocritical and dangerously politicised. In the last 24 hours we have gone from maybe having two Aussies kidnapped but all "88" citizens in Irak being accounted for to "working to account for 27" Australians in Irak. Michael Ware on the ABC's 7.30 Report last night sounded like a very intelligent man trying desperately to alert us to the realities of the situation, being a journo in country with first hand experience of the insurgency from both sides. Hence his analysis that "Australian interests are legitimate targets" due to our involvement. The domestic political grandstanding of Howard and his dittoheads, and the unethical PR manipulations accompanying (they don't negotiate with terrorists but have put hostage negotiators on standby, having it both ways) may provide electoral fodder for the ignorant, but for most of us, the prevailing conservative ideology has made us real targets, clear and simple.

Update: as if to underline these earlier concerns, Man of Steel has made a press statement on the response to the imputed hostage-taking, probably intended to appear as a clarification or rebuttal, but instead is a fine demonstration of semantically-challenged politicing. It refers to Opposition Leader Mark Latham's point that the Government has committed an "outrageous breach of the caretaker conventions" by not consulting the Opposition on national security during an election campaign. Man of Steel plays spin doctor by emphasising it is still "not even known if there are any hostages" - though last night's media were pretty sure about running backgrounders on private security contractors in Irak, and presumably a Defence negotiation team would not be off to the Killing Zone without an exact mission. [That would be the negotiations a government conducts when it's not negotiating, by the way.] And then he proceeds to deliver a response surely optimised for maximum confusion:

"As I speak, everybody is hearing that. I am not keeping anything from the Opposition in relation to that... This involves the movement of a group of people, the movement of which was contemplated in the circumstances which might be now transpiring in a decision we took in August... In those circumstances there's nothing in the caretaker conventions that requires us to get the permission of the opposition to do that."

Think carefully about "the movement of which was contemplated in the circumstances which might be now transpiring in a decision we took in August" - in the best interpretation of this thoroughly mangled english I can arrive at, several weeks ago a plan was approved to conduct hostage negotiations while telling the public this would not happen. Howard is telling us that he does not want to tell us the facts, a highly deluded appreciation of leadership in the face of growing discontent, one might observe.

Item posted by AutoEditor at 10:07 am ::