Pixelated Semantics

Good robots gone bad

The federal government's strategy leading into the next election year seems to be racism, xenophobia, nationalism, and even more racism: a grab bag of bigotry that's currently being both dog-whistled to extremists and peddled to moderates as necessary. When lies can be accepted as 'not deliberate' and past campaigns are recycled into new distortions for the same ends while dissent is silenced, the desperation and ideological sterility of these fake 'moderates' is close to the surface.

Arguably one of the clearest examples of 'dog-whistling' to extremists is today's pronouncement from Man of Steel that he doesn't 'regard the people that followed [Pauline Hanson] as being racist' - an expression calculated to bring the Hansonites into the conservative mainstream by tacitly accepting their extremism, while giving the appearance of moderation to others and ignoring the very reasonable perception of racism in Hansonism (and in the conservative government's conduct of immigration and multicultural activity) from the other 50% or so of the country that has a different view.

Item posted by AutoEditor at 8:56 am ::