That one time the CIA overthrew the Australian government and there was a fascist police state in Queensland

by Wholesome Rage | 16 May 2018

So here’s a bunch of fun stuff I’ve been learning about recently; I was born in New South Wales and moved to Queensland as a teenager, so I’ve never actually known its history or had as much of an interest in this state as I should.

This was my mistake.

Queensland is fascinating for the 1970’s, when it went from being one of the most left-leaning states in the world — known to some as the ‘Red North’ — to being our most right-wing nationalist in the country, a veritable joke to the rest of the country and seen as a bit of a banana republic. We grow a lot of bananas, certainly.

So what happened?

The CIA and British Intelligence used Queensland as a staging point to overthrow the Australian government.

No. No, really. 

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Annihilation and the Nature of Pretentious Media

by Wholesome Rage | 9 May 2018

I just saw Annihilation and, I must profess, I didn’t like it very much — except for the last fifteen minutes or so, and the bear. Aside from those parts, though, it made me think again about the problem of pretension in media.

Let me be clear: my criticism is not against media trying to ‘be smart’, or media that makes the viewer work to analyze what it media means. Not at all. I value media trying to say something more than anything else. In fact, I would even argue that it is even more important for a movie to try to say something than it is for it to entertain.

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Hills and Silicon Valleys

by Wholesome Rage | 2 May 2018

Income disparity and inequality are hard to comprehend a lot of the time. There’s one place, though, where it’s catastrophically evident, and it’s California’s East Coast.

California has money. The GDP of California in 2015 was around 2.5 trillion (2,500,000,000,000) US dollars. In the same year, Canada’s GDP was only 1.5 trillion with the same population.

But if you stood in the office of the man who just paid $60 for an orb of raw water, you could watch a teenager get gunned down for wearing the wrong colours in the wrong neighbourhood.

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