That’s a rap Acting NSW Police assistant commissioner Jason Weinstein said this week that police would contact streaming platforms and ask them to remove music that incites violence or criminal activity — their target being drill rappers, who they say are inciting gang violence with their lyrics. We look forward to a) free speech warriors getting up in arms at this explicit state censorship, and b) similar campaigns targeting Guns N’ Roses for their thoughts on “immigrants and f*ggots”. Or perhaps Nick Cave romantically smashing Kylie Minogue’s head in with a rock (or his many other loving depictions of murdering women) might attract their attention? I heard Johnny Cash shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, and John Lennon would rather see his girlfriend dead than see her with another man.
Speaking of incitement to violence, Yusuf Islam (erstwhile maudlin crooner Cat Stevens) demanded in 1989 that Salman Rushdie be killed for writing The Satanic Verses. It’s almost as though the presumption that art leads directly to real world harm is selectively deployed, for reasons we couldn’t possibly speculate about.
Stoker the fire Just when you thought there could be no more baffling choice for an ex-Liberal politician to grace The Australian Financial Review‘s op-ed pages than Alexander Downer (or maybe Pru Goward’s musings on Marxism), who should come barrelling over the horizon but Amanda Stoker. At least with Downer and Goward there is a length of service in politics that gives the patina of legitimacy. Stoker is a one-term culture warrior whose appointment as assistant minister for women despite her track record — and ongoing actions — was the kind of hock of spit in voters’ faces that saw women turn away from the Coalition in droves in 2022.
What could she conceivably write about except the topic of her first column, which boils down to “as someone who has just lost their seat, I have quite a few thoughts on how to win elections”. Further, according to Stoker: “In Queensland’s Senate contest, I received the highest individual below-the-line support of any candidate, despite not running a [below-the-line] campaign.” Utter tosh, says psephologist Kevin Bonham: “She was fifth on BTLs, way behind Hanson, Watt, Allman-Payne and McGrath.”
Tik follows tok Last week, Crikey asked the question “Can the Chinese government access Australians’ TikTok data?” based on BuzzFeed News reporting that US staff of the app’s parent company ByteDance knew that their Chinese counterparts were able to do so. The answer, we proffered, was yes. Today we got confirmation. Liberal Senator and opposition spokesman for cyber security and countering foreign interference James Paterson shared a letter from TikTok Australia that confirmed that Chinese ByteDance employees can access Australians’ data — although they promised that the Chinese government had never asked for nor received data from the company. That’s a nice sentiment but ultimately not a very reassuring one, considering that a 2017 Chinese law requires businesses and individuals to help with “state intelligence work” if asked.
Bolton from the blue He may look like Colonel Sanders’ straitlaced older brother, or a befuddled inventor from a old Disney movie, but John Bolton is actually most high-profile for being Donald Trump’s war-crazed national security adviser for a characteristically brief and bizarre period. Before that, he held various roles in Republican administrations going back to the Ronald Reagan era. Today, speaking to CNN’s Jake Tapper with bracing candour and no hint that it might be a slip-up, Bolton simply could not let Tapper get away with implying you didn’t have to be a genius to plan a coup. Bolton, after all, has first-hand experience:
While the unself-conscious admission of having helped the US overthrow foreign governments may seem shocking, we suppose anything else would be an admission of failure in Bolton’s life’s work. He has variously campaigned for regime change lead by the US military in Iran, North Korea, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Venezuela, Cuba (via unsubstantiated claims of weapons of mass destruction, no less) and Yemen.
