Gorilla Salad posted:

The police officer does not need a warrant to search you in a public place if they reasonably suspect you:

........

are in an area where a lot of violent crime happens (they can use this fact to show they have reasonable grounds to search you)

@CUhlmann posted:

The obsession with @BriggsJamie knee is why, very soon, only tedious teetotaling twats will inhabit politics. At least he's interesting.

Solemn Sloth posted:

ewe2 posted:

According to a tweet this article was removed from an edition of the Age on police request and Julian Burnside managed to get a copy:



Australia™

freebooter posted:

Wait, hang on:


What the gently caress? Isn't that, like, anywhere in a major city? Who gets to determine what counts as "a lot" of violent crime?

freebooter posted:

Wait, hang on:

What the gently caress? Isn't that, like, anywhere in a major city? Who gets to determine what counts as "a lot" of violent crime?

SynthOrange posted:

Well gently caress, looks like some of the terrorists got in by posing as refugees. 'Told you so's are probably going to start flying around. :\

SynthOrange posted:

Well gently caress, looks like some of the terrorists got in by posing as refugees. 'Told you so's are probably going to start flying around. :\

Birb Katter posted:

Pauline Hanson is calling for a royal commission into Islam.

SynthOrange posted:

Well gently caress, looks like some of the terrorists got in by posing as refugees. 'Told you so's are probably going to start flying around. :\

Gorilla Salad posted:

From the image thread:

Jonah Galtberg posted:

fuuuuuuuck you Chris Uhlmann

quote:

As many Muslims praised Europe’s acceptance of war-fleeing Syrians compared to Gulf countries’ lack of compassion, a situation where the West is seen as a savior rather than an enemy is undesirable for ISIS.

Instead, ISIS seeks to create a unified, uniform enemy to facilitate the spread of the terrorist group’s message and the pinpointing of its targets.

An article called “Eliminating the Grayzone” in ISIS’ English-language magazine Dabiq highlights this mode of thinking. In it, the group calls for dividing the world into two groups: The camp of Islam (represented by ISIS) and the camp of the West.

For this to happen, the author calls for the elimination of a grayzone where Muslims and the West coexist. He gives Muslims the option between “apostatizing to the infidel version of Islam in the West or migrating to the Islamic State.” He states that the aim of the Islamic State is to “further the division of the world and destroy the grayzone everywhere.”

The purpose of the attacks in Paris wasn’t solely to inflict fear in the hearts of the French but also to antagonize them by fueling their hate towards Islam and Muslims, thereby furthering their vision of the elimination of the grayzone.

quote:

It doesn’t want a Europe with “Refugees Welcome” signs plastered over its streets and squares but rather for it to be filled with anti-Muslim protests.

Vladimir Poutine posted:

This is not a well written article, but I thought this was an interesting point:

quote:

The purpose of the attacks in Paris wasn’t solely to inflict fear in the hearts of the French but also to antagonize them by fueling their hate towards Islam and Muslims, thereby furthering their vision of the elimination of the grayzone.

http://egyptianstreets.com/2015/11/14/the-importance-of-an-anti-muslim-europe-for-isis/

Vladimir Poutine posted:

This is not a well written article, but I thought this was an interesting point:


http://egyptianstreets.com/2015/11/14/the-importance-of-an-anti-muslim-europe-for-isis/

gay picnic defence posted:

Yeah, this goes back a while. It's just as true of the far right in the west too, they want (not as openly as ISIS) to eat away at that group of westerners who are happy to coexist with muslims until you have just the two opposed camps. The two extremes are just feeding off each other and I think it will take some exceptional global leadership to avoid both parties achieving their goal.

ewe2 posted:

Yeah its MAD part two, the religious sequel to the Cold War. Unfortunately it's just too good for global "leadership" to resist, it's like control freak endorphins. 40 years of my life (and 10 years before that) went to that bullshit and now god (take your pick) knows how many years of yours.

It's practically self-justifying on both sides too, just a few slippery slope arguments left on the western side to manage expectations and it will be as natural as the sun coming up and the bombs raining down. Normally the political justifications do eventually die, but this is a far worse mix of racism and religious intolerance ensuring that no one wins for a very long time. Once they stop asking why, it'll be why not.

quote:

Even in today’s era of irregular warfare, the fine art of collecting human source intelligence has in large part become lost thanks to the relative comfort afforded by partner relationships and advances in intelligence technology. This reliance has been coupled with the tendency to lean on practices and procedures that reduce the risk of seeking out and engaging potential human sources.

Gorilla Salad posted:

I'm not saying things were perfect, by any means and I know how easily this sort of thing can sound like 'get off my lawn' There were still things like the Gulf War and Woomera - Keating brought in mandatory detention in 1992. And marriage equality wasn't even a thing. But what was lacking was the, well I can only call it, the open cruelty which defines so much of the current political discourse.

Cartoon posted:

I've mentioned it before but it goes entirely to the point that our governments (Australian, US, UK et al.) aren't actually taking this seriously.

http://www.businessinsider.com.au/the-us-needs-better-humint-to-beat-isis-2014-9

Cartoon posted:

I also find it very rich, despite my sympathy for the victims, that the French are claiming that this is some kind of a Rubicon for them as if they had nothing to do with colonial oppression and fermenting the disaster in Syria and many other muslin areas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Mandate_for_Syria_and_the_Lebanon

Solemn Sloth posted:

So they have found the smoking gun of a passport on the attacker which passed through Greece as a refugee in October.

Can someone explain to me why attackers would be carrying their passports unless they explicitly wanted the attack to be blamed on refugees?

Solemn Sloth posted:

they explicitly wanted the attack to be blamed on refugees?

Vladimir Poutine posted:

There was a decade of optimism in mainstream culture in the west between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1991 and 9/11 in 2001 that basically got to the point where a lot of popular culture started using aliens and the paranormal as threats in plotlines instead of foreign policy badguys. For people like me in their 20s and early 30s the contrast between now and the climate we grew up in is really jarring.

Cleretic posted:

Isn't France basically just the most racist goddamn country in the EU? I mean yeah, tragedy that it happened at all, but kind of unsurprising that it specifically happened there.

quote:

Shortly after advance tickets went on sale for the new Star Wars film, entertainment industry bible Variety ran with one of the more amusing headlines: “ ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ Tickets Mostly Bought By Older Men.”

In this context, “older men” – who comprised 70 per cent of the Force Awakens ticket buyers – constituted an average age of 34. The data, tabulated by Movio, found that this demographic typically attended the cinema at least once a month, in groups, and were usually drawn to “tentpoles”: the big summer, Thanksgiving and Christmas blockbusters. They engage in cinemagoing, in other words, like the roaming packs of teenagers you might see at your local megaplex of a weekend, clutching head-sized promotional buckets of popcorn and fizzy drinks.

And it was teenagers who had also sprung to mind, a month earlier, when the “Force Friday” release of The Force Awakens merchandise – children’s toys, for the most part, not “adult collectables” – had left many older Star Wars fans disappointed. In a doleful screed for pop culture site iO9, Germain Lussier complained that his local Toys “R” Us store had sold out of themed Lego and Funko Pops items shortly after the midnight release. It was difficult not to hear the voice of a petulant child in the essay, giving added piquancy to Star Wars creator George Lucas’s 1999 comments that “the movies are for children, but [the adult fans] don’t want to admit that”.

Is Star Wars’s overwhelming return to the general consciousness, along with the relentless roster of superhero movies and young adult franchises that also dominate the cultural conversation, contributing to a rise of eternal adolescence?

Has critical thinking been usurped by a gee-whiz generation that thinks, as The Lego Movie theme song put it, “Everything is awesome”?

In his essay “The Death of Adulthood in American Culture”, the New York Times film critic A. O. Scott reflected on pop culture’s “erosion of traditional adulthood”, and remarked that Hollywood’s embracing of comic book and YA franchise pictures “advance an essentially juvenile vision of the world”. “Comic-book movies, family-friendly animated adventures, tales of adolescent heroism and comedies of arrested development do not only make up the commercial centre of 21st-century Hollywood,” Scott wrote. “They are its artistic heart.”

And while “essentially juvenile” films have existed since Hollywood’s inception, it has only been in the past decade or so that such films are expressly marketed to adults as well as children or families. The “adult collector” market is now as big a cash cow as the kid-focused merchandising divisions that sell Avengers-branded party hats.

The children who experienced the birth of modern blockbuster marketing in the 1977 lead-up to Star Wars are now the adult men and women lining up to buy Lego playsets celebrating the film series’ seventh instalment. As otherwise gainfully employed adults turn their basements into replicas of the Death Star or Starship Enterprise, it is difficult not to feel that we are hurtling, somehow, towards a cultural crisis in which grown-ups will become adult babies. There are echoes of this, at perhaps a different end of the spectrum, in the debate about content advisories and trigger warnings.

Are we losing the ability to engage with the world on a meaningful, adult level? Has critical thinking been usurped by a gee-whiz generation that thinks, as the Oscar-nominated The Lego Movie theme song put it, “Everything is awesome”? You might find answers at the annual San Diego Comic-Con International, where about 200,000 people gather inside the cavernous Convention Centre halls and the issue of whether or not fans deem certain films’ “sizzle reels” to be awesome can make or break a summer blockbuster.

Star Wars’s marketing operates at a similar volume to the campaigns waged by superhero film production house Marvel Studios, whose announced output, combined with that of Fox, Sony and Warner Bros, will extend to at least five further superhero movies released each year until 2020. The overwhelming presence of such franchise movie-making – and its perceived hand in drowning out the possibility of films that don’t involve existing intellectual property – prompted Alan Moore, author of highly regarded graphic novels and comics such as Watchmen, to remark last year that superhero movies constitute a cultural catastrophe.

“This embracing of what were unambiguously children’s characters at their mid-20th century inception seems to indicate a retreat from the admittedly overwhelming complexities of modern existence,” he told culture blog Slovobooks. “It is, potentially, culturally catastrophic to have the ephemera of a previous century squatting possessively on the cultural stage and refusing to allow this surely unprecedented era to develop a culture of its own, relevant and sufficient to its times.”

Not only does this cultural ephemera overwhelm the collective consciousness, it is telling the same simple story over and over, and we don’t seem to mind. Almost every blockbuster film unfolds in the same fashion: modern Hollywood screenwriting draws its “story beats” from screenwriter Blake Snyder’s story structure bible, Save the Cat! The book took mythologist Joseph Campbell’s classical monomyth or “Hero’s Journey”, and expanded it into a story-by-numbers guide that has been widely embraced by studio filmmaking.

In 1977, the same year that Hero’s Journey example par excellence Star Wars was released, academics Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence proposed the American monomyth, a variation on its classical predecessor: “A community in a harmonious paradise is threatened by evil; normal institutions fail to contend with this threat; a selfless superhero emerges to renounce temptations and carry out the redemptive task; aided by fate, his decisive victory restores the community to its paradisiacal condition; the superhero then recedes into obscurity.”

Watch any number of modern blockbusters and you will notice a pattern of events that proceed, like clockwork, in the aforementioned order. This may lead to a withering sense of deja vu in some viewers, but it is this very predictability that seems to attract the modern “kidult” en masse.

The people born around the time of the original Star Wars release have grown to inherit an adult world in which the “having it all” embarrassment of riches they were groomed to dream of is itself a fantasy – instead they navigate crippling student debt, lack of job security, a crisis in housing affordability and an increasingly deranged political climate. All this is framed in a globalised economy that makes those in charge seem more distant, unknowable and powerful, and exhibits a house-of-cards fragility where misjudgements made on the other side of the world deliver economic shockwaves beneath their feet. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that so many of today’s adults seem keen to hang on to the optimism of adolescence – not to mention its action figures – delivered in simple narratives in which heroes triumph against readily identifiable enemies and everything turns out fine.

While we might be better served, spiritually and existentially, by watching a film that encourages deeper thinking about the human condition than what Captain America and his cohorts can provide, escapism in its purest, dumbest form reigns supreme. As Hugh Jackman’s opening song and dance routine at the mid-GFC Academy Awards put it, “I know I need to see The Reader/ I even went down to the theatre but there was a line/ of all the people watching Iron Man a second time.”

I’m certainly not immune to the seductive powers of modern blockbuster mythmaking, or marketing. I was midway through investigating a pair of “screen accurate” boots for a Force Awakens costume, to be worn to the midnight premiere, when a friend sent me an email. The attachment was the Force Awakens poster accompanied by a newly inserted title, “CONSUME THE MERCHANDISE” and tagline, “BUY THE TOYS, BUY THE CLOTHES, BUY THE FOOD” repeated, ad nauseam. The cast’s faces had been Photoshopped to resemble the alien creatures from They Live.

That 1988 film, John Carpenter’s searing anti-capitalist satire of modern mass media, revealed, by way of people putting on magic sunglasses, the ruling classes as revolting aliens who subliminally whip the masses into a frenzy of consumption. Discussing They Live in his documentary The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, cultural critic Slavoj Žižek zeroes in on the dark centre of Carpenter’s film: “We are addressed by social authority not as subjects who should do their duty – sacrifice themselves – but as subjects of pleasures: realise your true potentials, be yourself, lead a satisfying life.”

That may be the key to the ever-greater appeal to adults of the simple Hero’s Journey storyline. The original Star Wars’s narrative arc captivated audiences specifically because of those notions of self-empowerment – watch Luke Skywalker realise his true potential – just as its new sequel will in 2015. The new female hero, Rey, played by hitherto unknown Daisy Ridley, will play into the post-Lean In era of liberal feminism. Break the intergalactic glass ceiling and buy the T-shirt.

But if kidults are pining for some sort of golden adolescence, seeking to perpetuate it through devotion to formulaic hero stories, they may face a rude awakening. We can watch people in a galaxy far, far away realise their true potential – or in Gotham City, or Panem – but in reality few of us will ever enjoy such pleasures. Especially if our lives are spent in darkened rooms watching X-Men or lamenting the unavailability of promotional toys.

We might be tempted to lament the fact future cultural critics may think the 21st century was all about the Marvel Cinematic Universe or Star Wars reboots – a sort of prescient Mrs Waldo from Under Milk Wood wailing, “Oh, what’ll the neighbours say, what’ll the neighbours...” But the true cultural catastrophe could be that the ideology of eternal adolescence and its hero myths set us in pursuit of a lie.

quote:

The attachment was the Force Awakens poster accompanied by a newly inserted title, “CONSUME THE MERCHANDISE” and tagline, “BUY THE TOYS, BUY THE CLOTHES, BUY THE FOOD” repeated, ad nauseam. The cast’s faces had been Photoshopped to resemble the alien creatures from They Live.

BBJoey posted:

wow......... f*cking deep, man........................ really makes u think..........................................................................

Les Affaires posted:

From Saturday Paper yesterday: