Bad racists, useful racists: it can get confusing
Optus job ad on Seek this week:
Preffered (sic): Candidates who are Anglo Saxon and live near to Neutral Bay.
Optus’s human resources vice-president Vaughan Paul responding after the ad was reported yesterday:
This error is completely unacceptable. We … will be investigating how this occurred with a view to taking disciplinary action against those involved.
Optus’s Twitter account yesterday just before the storm broke:
It’s #Fridaythe13th again! Superstitious or not, our friends @natgeoAU explain why the date scares us.
Pondering the hostility to Hungary’s freshly re-elected Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Tibor Fischer in Britain’s The Telegraph on Tuesday:
His government passed a Holocaust denial law, made Holocaust education compulsory and financed an Oscar-winning film about Auschwitz. His party has Roma MPs. It has offered student scholarships to Syrians and Iraqis. Orban’s election campaign has been characterised as anti-migrant. That’s misleading. His campaign was anti uncontrolled, illegal migration, and the EU dumping people who claim to be asylum-seekers in Hungary. He believes a country should have some say in who enters its borders, a view, I suspect, many voters in Europe would agree with. Why is his reputation so bad? The former communists, until recently the main opposition, have suckered Western liberals, the left and the EU’s left-leaning management into believing that Orban is evil personified. So skilfully that The Guardian ran a column suggesting that voters should support the neo-Nazis in Hungary to dislodge Orban. You couldn’t make it up.
You don’t have to. Cass Mudde in The Guardian on March 28:
I suggested the liberal democratic opposition … should form a tactical alliance with the illiberal democratic opposition, united in the populist radical right Movement for a Better Hungary or Jobbik … Liberals have a choice between remaining pure and facing the certainty of an illiberal state or “dirtying their hands” and at least fight for a liberal democratic future.
Everyone loves Tony. The Nine Network’s Today show, yesterday:
Host Ben Fordham: OK. When it comes to immigration numbers the big discussion point this week where a story appeared on the front page of The Australian newspaper that the Immigration Minister, Peter Dutton, had gone to the Prime Minister and also the Treasurer saying let’s lower our annual migration intake … Tony Abbott came out and said I think … what are you laughing about?
Josh Frydenberg: Well, Tony Abbott, I mean he is always going to try and cut across what the Prime Minister has been saying lately.
Fordham: Really?
Frydenberg: Yes, absolutely …
Anthony Albanese: You haven’t been paying attention.
The Sydney Morning Herald tackling the big issue yesterday:
Cinemagoers say it’s too stressful to snack during silent horror film A Quiet Place … Some cinemagoers have documented feeling too embarrassed, or even stressed, to make noise during the film. This is because the film is set in a post-apocalyptic future where humans are hunted by blind creatures with supersonic hearing.
Supersonic? Inigo Montoya to Vizzini in The Princess Bride (1987):
I do not think it means what you think it means.
The Oxford Dictionary defines supersonic:
Involving or denoting a speed greater than that of sound.
Try ultrasonic. The Oxford again:
Of or involving sound waves with a frequency above the upper limit of human hearing.