While we’re on the subject of corrupters and/or incompetents in the mainstream media has anyone else picked up on the story of the awful Lachlan Murdoch pulling the pin at NewsCorp?
There will be as many theories about this around the traps by everyone from the NewsCorp arselickers to Murdoch runs the world conspiracy theorists. One can’t help but feel that NewsCorps shareholders are those most likely to have demanded his ouster.
Apart from the cock-ups listed on the link above Lachlan baby has been responsible for defacations in the nest that have cost even more money as well as others which have caused NewsCorp considerable embarassment
The SuperLeague debacle was most probably sold to shareholders as the error of callow youth since it appears to have got out of hand due to an adolescent “Who’s the alpha male?” contest between Lachlan and PBL heir apparent James Packer.
However the later OneTel poop was dropped in conjunction with young Jim so that must have caused some interesting fur to fly around the boardroom.
Students of Australian media dynasties will know that unlike Victorian English ruling families the goods don’t automatically pass to the eldest male, they frequently go to the single child of the most recent wife. At the time Rupert may have thought the purpose of this marriage was to secure his Chinese interests but it seems Wendy may have had a different plan.
Nevertheless no one ever considered Rupert to be anything less than pragmatic which must be why he is using Lachlan’s departure as a way to reassure an Australian public concerned that their media sector has fallen under the control of the US. The Murdoch flagship the London Times goes on to say:
A strong affinity with Australia is thought to have played a part in Lachlan’s decision. He is understood to have had significant concerns about last year’s decision to shift the legal headquarters of News Corporation from Australia to the United States.
The same article isn’t afraid to attempt to normalise this schism by revealing other breaks in family unity:
Lachlan is not the first child of Rupert Murdoch to walk out of a job in the News Corp family. Five years ago Elisabeth, his elder sister, resigned as managing director of BSkyB, saying that she wanted to “alter her lifestyle and be in control of my own time” as she was about to have a third child.
It’s hard to say if the Times blather will work as young Lachlan hasn’t always endeared himself at home in Oz.
It may be a climbdown from the NY gossip pages.
W’ere badly in need of an Orson Welles lest anyone begin to feel sorry for the isolated old man without his sled.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Jul 30 2005 8:24 utc | 104

slothrop,
for what it is worth I like your literary references.
On the prostitution discussion, I would like to add that in Sweden pimps and johns breaks the law while prostitutes do not. Pimps has long been out-lawed (not that they have not existed anyway) and a couple of years ago buying sex became forbidden, after much debate. I was concerened at the time that the deabte was very little focused on the situation of prostitutes and much focused on the effects on the norms of society.
Anyway, a few years on and it is obvious that it has changed the norms of society. Though sex not being much of a scandalous subject in Sweden, more of a private matter, high-ranking males (a couple of judges, at least one highranking police and so on) getting convicted of buying sex has become very much a public matter. Johns are (and also has been) considered sleazebags (and now criminal sleazebags) in the public discourse, yet earlier it was not know (and was considered a private matter) who was a john.
And DeA, missed you on the robustus-thread, I suspected you had read much more of both MacKinnon and Dworkin. As a sidenote: the references the Macdworkin was shorthand not slander, at least that was my use and perception. How we could bake two different philosophers to one cake? Well, I told you you were missed.
And on the subject of good, feminist reading, I always enjoy Emma Goldman. Angry, intelligent, clear and unfortunately still very applicable.

Posted by: A swedish kind of death | Jul 30 2005 10:57 utc | 106

@fauxreal, I do think you’re reaching a wee bit here. what I in fact suggested, or was trying to suggest, was an objective social-justice-based standard (exploitation, lack of control of outcomes, etc) that might be applied to view the porn industry in the same light as any other sweatshop industry, and thus to redefine “pornographic” not according to the random eye of any beholder — mine or anyone else’s — but according to established leftist/human rights principles and based on verifiable material conditions. Follow the money, in other words.
as for your cites — Paglia, Califia, and the ACLU? really? not a very impressive counterargument, imho, unless you’re registered Libertarian 🙂
Paglia imho is only one or two steps up from Coulter, a media darling of the resurgent Right who established her anti-feminist and misogynist credentials early on: she was the gal who said that “if it had been up to women we would all still be living in grass huts,” which must have made Larry Summers’ day 🙂
And then there’s good ol’ Pat Califia, the well-known lesbian sadomasochist activist and writer who later became so discontented with her femaleness that she changed genders and is now Patrick Califia? well that’s one way to escape from sexism, I guess — switch sides…
There are far more reputable intellects who have differed with the legislative approaches to the porn industry and its abuses. There is imho a serious and legitimate critique of the approach that MacK and AD tried, but media circus performers like Paglia and Califia to me don’t qualify as serious contributors. And sure, anyone can pull extreme quotes from AD’s writings — also from Monique Wittig for that matter, or Hakim Bey or any other raving visionary philosopher/poet. That’s what such people exist for, to articulate the extrema, to take theory to its logical conclusion and past. We could cherry pick some juicy — and maximally offensive — quotes from Califia’s writing, come to think of it. Another articulator of extremes.
The ACLU, now that is a real mixed bag. I respect their principled stand on first amendment issues in many cases — they distinguished themselves with honour back in the McCarthy era and occasionally during the COINTELPRO years. However they have also sided far more consistently with commercial or profitable “free speech” than with noncommercial individual free speech — they are far more likely to defend a Larry Flynt, shall we say, than a woman who’s been busted for spray painting feminist grafitti. And far more likely to defend the “right” of men to consume images of women than the right of women not to be consumed in this manner.
I remember the case that changed my feelings of trust and admiration for the ACLU to a more wary stance towards them — I still think they do good work in many cases, but I do not trust them as defenders of women’s rights.

The defendant, Douglas Oakes, photographed his l4-year-old stepdaughter posed “Playboy-style” on a bar, wearing only bikini pants and a scarf, her breasts uncovered. The photographs were taken without the knowledge or consent of the child’s mother. When the girl saw the prints she ripped them up and buried them, but Oakes forced her to dig them up. The girl then told her mother, who filed charges against Oakes under a Massachusetts law intended to ban child pornography. She also filed for divorce. Oakes was convicted and given a ten year sentence, but the conviction was overturned by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. The case is currently under appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The American Civil Liberties Union, determined to weaken and ultimately overturn all child pornography laws, asked The Naturist Society and the American Sunbathing Association (ASA) to submit an amicus brief for the appeal. The ASA, the largest and most established nudist organization in the United States, has spent $15,000 on a friend of the court brief challenging the Massachusetts law.

IMHO the ACLU was well and truly on the wrong side here, siding against an abusive stepfather against a teenage girl.
I find the argument that legislative intervention in trafficking and abusive pornographic production methods (the two are closely related) is pointless until we eliminate poverty (and presumably all other forms of injustice?) …somewhat curious. After all, if we eliminated poverty and other forms of injustice we would not need labour laws either, as no one would ever have to stay in a job that was dangerous or where they were poorly treated; we would not need laws governing domestic violence or child support, as no woman would ever be trapped in an abusive marriage due to lack of financial or child support options; hey, we would hardly need any laws at all if we had already levelled the playing field and eliminated poverty and injustice!
Waiting to intervene in abusive situations until we have fixed poverty and injustice seems to me a shirking of our responsibility to women and teens and children who are being exploited right now — whether in sex sweatshops or garment sweatshops. It is the age-old argument of the trad male Left — pipe down, girls, your issues will be addressed after the Revolution. In the sweet by-n-by.
By all means let us reduce poverty as much as we can, but let’s also go after the SOB who takes naked pics of his girlfriend and then posts them all over the Internet without her consent. I really think we could do that without taking any gay person’s favourite smutty books away from them 🙂
For example, we could take a market-based approach — introduce a new propertarian legal principle that the ownership of any nude or sexualised portrait image resides with the person photographed, not with the taker of the photo or the reproducer or distributor. Women could then sue the hell out of pimps and pornographers for distributing images of them without consent or fair earnings distribution. It would put the female subject (or any gender of subject) back into the transaction as an agent with legal rights in the matter, not as a mere commodity being transferred between (usually male) producer and (usually male) consumer. Take that, Levi-Strauss! me, I would prefer obviously a less market-based, less monetist, more rights-based approach, but there are many options…
I think we can consider and define such interventions on a human-rights basis and thus dodge the fatal confusion of “offensiveness” with “abusiveness”…. as an aside, I have often idly wondered why it is that we see first-run big-budget movies which include in the trailers carefully worded guarantees to the effect that “no actual animals were hurt during the making of this film.” I would like to see the day when all porn flicks, photo spreads, etc. bear a similar label assuring me that “no actual women were hurt during the production of this material” — and giving me and the actress/model/prostitutes the right to sue if this claim is false. Sometimes it seems like we care a lot more about the well-being of animals of both genders than of humans of female gender…
Personally I was never that convinced that the MacK/Dworkin legislative proposal was the best possible strategy. In fact I’m rather attached to freedom of speech in principle. We’re all exercising it vigorously here, which is a Good Thing (NOT TM). But I think when we consider Freedom Of Speech as a high-flying concept, we have to consider the same two words that we have to consider when we talk about Free Trade and Free Markets — for whom? Whose freedom, and whose speech?
Defending our collective “right” — based on 1st Amendment absolutism — to consume endless reams of sweatshop porn, regardless of the cost to people used in its production, seems to me perilously close to “The American Way of Life is Not Negotiable.” It gives me a nervous feeling.
And with that, since the differences being expounded here appear to be irreconcilable, I think I’ll let my part of the debate lapse. The literature’s out there. The curious can go read for themselves and see whether Strossen’s Defending Pornography makes more sense to them than, say, Not For Sale or For Adult Users Only or (video) The Shocking Truth. Or Bob Jensen’s haunting essay “Blow Bangs and Cluster Bombs”. [I still think Strossen reminds me of Friedman and that ironically brings me back to Comrade Slothrop’s comment about the failures of petit-bourgeois feminism… the substitution of identity politics for class-based analysis perhaps?]

Posted by: DeAnander | Jul 30 2005 21:38 utc | 108