Brendan O'Neill, child beauty pageants, and the London rioting explained ...

(Above: guess which one is Brendan O'Neill. That's right, he's the one on the left playing dress ups).

In recent times, the world down under has been blessed with an abundance of opinions from Brendan O'Neill as he does his tour of the colonies (much to the joy of minions of Murdoch, as they celebrated the tour with Contrarian whose code of freedom rages against Left-Right rigidities).

There he was scribbling furiously about the suffering of Rupert (Right rolls over and lets political correctness censor the world), next thing you know he's on Q&A, and before you can draw breath, he's over at the ABC's The Drum, raging in Well done pageant-haters, without a care in the world about the way his own rough-hewn countenance was put up alongside a young barbie doll.

Apparently pageants for very young girls aren't anything to do with the ambitions and frustrations of stage mothers (oh lordy, the stage mothers I've met in my time), but rather the desire of children to play dress-ups.

In the usual topsy turvey world that O'Neill inhabits - what am I against? what have you got? - it's all in the mind:

Indeed, the great irony of the anti-pageant fury is that it is not the princess-obsessed mums who are sexualising these pink and fluffy girls, but the protesters. Where most normal people who look at a girl in a pink dress and over-the-top make-up simply see a child who likes dressing up, and who will return to her humdrum life once the pageant is over, the pageant-bashers see SEX, a little whore, a walking, talking temptation for the predatory paedophiles who apparently lurk in every street and alleyway in Australia.

Now I could understand this if we were talking about a nude girl, since after all, nudity is natural and harmless. But the whole point of these dress-ups is to turn very young girls into a kind of miniature, idealised view of adult women, using all the tricks and ploys of adult make-up. Lipstick, eye liner, rosy cheeks, blonde curled hair and so on and so forth.

Not that this particularly troubles the pond - after all, we're on Bill Henson's side, even if he's a tad too arty and unbogan for O'Neill - but if you miss this point - the use of an adult sexual veneer on the young, involving all the standard signals which made Lolita such a compelling read, sunglasses and all - you must be pretty thick.

So as far as sex and sexuality is concerned, O'Neill seems as sexually sensitive and aware of sexual signals as a block of red gum.

The whole point of child beauty pageants, like dog and cat shows, and other forms of human eccentricity, including but not limited to dressage contests, is that they are truly weird, and form a rich vein of source material for documentary film-makers tired of cane toads and chickens (but can we ever get enough of Mormons in chains?)

Often, perversity, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder - and it takes a pretty perverse mind to behold a six-year-old girl having fun and to think, "She looks like a prostitute. She might get manhandled by evil men."

Yep, Brendan O'Neill has all the sexual acumen of river-hardened red gum.

Now for a final shot across the bows from that hardened gum, good enough for a chopping block:

So, well done pageant-haters - you have successfully turned a small beauty contest in Victoria that would only have been attended by a tiny minority of mums and daughters into a national, furiously-debated symbol of childish sexuality and paedophiliac temptation run riot. Tell me - who are the really messed-up people in this debate?

Would it be wrong to say that Brendan O'Neill is really, truly fucked in the head? Or at least the most mindless, messed-up person in the debate?

Well we wish his children a long and successful career in child beauty pageants.

And here's hoping all the contestants avoid the fate of JonBenét Ramsey.

Perhaps we can look forward to a stream of articles by O'Neill supporting the right of boys and men to dress, think and act like metro-perfumed, heavily made up, bubble headed boobies ...

Funnily enough, O'Neill opened his piece thus:

It is remarkable that in a world walloped by economic recession, when there are wars, uprisings, carbon controversies and assaults on liberty, people can muster up the passion to protest against a beauty pageant.

To which one wag responded:

By a bizarre coincidence, I was just thinking that it's odd that of all the causes you could have championed, you chose beauty pageants for children.

Oh dear, naughty wag. Now you've gone and done it.

That's an open invitation for O'Neill to scribble Less political rebellion, more mollycoddled mob, about the London riots, for The Australian.

In this piece, O'Neill expends much energy and many words bashing away at, inter alia, the welfare state, which has nurtured a generation that has no sense of community spirit or social solidarity.

Yes, if only the young rioters had become involved in child beauty pageants to give them a proper sense of community spirit and social solidarity.

It seems the rioters are "welfare-state mobs", a generation that's been suckled by the state more than any generation before it (and never you mind the actual welfare state of the nineteen fifties in Britain).

It seems the mighty endeavours of Margaret Thatcher to change Britain have been utterly ruined and undone, and welfare statism is rampant, with David Cameron's cuts to the budget just another example of how welfare statism is on the rise.

Well we recently talked about Paul Sheehan and psychological projection, but how's this for a comprehensive state of psychological fear:

The march of the welfare state into every aspect of urban, less well-off people's existences, from their financial wellbeing to their child-rearing habits and even into their emotional lives, with the rise of therapeutic welfarism designed to ensure that the poor remain "mentally fit", has undermined individual resourcefulness and social bonding. The antisocial youthful rioters are the end-product of this antisocial system of state intervention.

Uh huh. Talk about giving the rioters an easy out. It was the antisocial system of state intervention wot done it guv'nor. I blames the therapeutic welfarism of the welfare state for me anti-social tendencies...

By golly, there's an urgent need for child beauty pageants in the UK.

The funniest thing? O'Neill pretending that anarchist libertarian rioting and looting has arisen from the welfare state, as opposed to the more natural tendency of anarchist looters to riot and take what they can as a way of showing their individual resourcefulness and capacity for social bonding with other anarchist rioters and looters:

You don't have to be a right-winger with helmet hair and a niggling discomfort with black or chavvy yoof (I am the opposite of that) to recognise that this violence is not political, just criminal.

Uh huh. So what was all that political yabber about?

Surely crime and criminality is the ultimate expression of individual resourcefulness? And if you can get a socially bonded gang together, why you might get to rule Sicily.

After all, Australia was originally built by people who preferred to steal a loaf of bread ...

Now in the normal course, when considering these matters, a responsible commentator, perhaps one on the ground, who has seen what's happened, talked to the people involved, tracked the people who are arrested and charged, their addresses and their motivations, considered the situation from all sides, might contemplate a number of factors, present a number of theories ...

Oh enough with all that childish complexity, and cardigan wearing chatter. For the monomaniacal O'Neill, it's just full bore on one pet theme:

These riots suggest that the welfare state is giving rise to a generation happy to shit on its own doorstep.

Well that takes care of any suggestion that it might have been a fair mix of out of towners happy to shit on other people's doorsteps, and loot what they could find ...

This is not a political rebellion; it is a mollycoddled mob, a riotous expression of carelessness for one's own community. And as a left-winger I refuse to celebrate nihilistic behaviour that has a profoundly adverse affect on working people's lives. Far from being an instance of working-class action, this welfare-state mob has more in common with what Marx described as the lumpenproletariat.

And there you have it, the point where I broke down, despite all the ugliness and pointlessness of the riots and the meaningless destruction, into a helpless, hapless laugh.

O'Neill as a left-winger given to Marxist analysis, and getting agitated about the Welfare State? (We felt the need for boldness).

And it gets richer with a comparison to the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon:

In very different circumstances, we have something similar today where the decadent commentariat's siding with lumpen rioters represents a weird coming together of sections of the bourgeoisie with sections of the underworked and the over-flattered, as the rest of us, "the labouring nation", look on with disdain.

The decadent commentariat? The disdainful Brendan O'Neill part of the "labouring nation"? Oh stop it, stop it, the laughter's killing me ... All those keyboard calluses.

Really, it's a pity George Orwell is no longer with us, even if he left us with Politics and the English Language:

Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase -- some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, decadent commentariat, veritable inferno, mollycoddled welfare state, or other lump of verbal refuse -- into the dustbin, where it belongs.

Oh okay, George we added in a few words, but if only you were around to throw Brendan O'Neill and his all out assault on the welfare state into the dustbin.

Funnily enough, there were people stupid enough in the comments section to take O'Neill at his own word:

As I live and breathe - a sane left-wing opinion. I didn't think lefties had it in them. I will accept wisdom from anywhere, left or right.

As I live and breathe, there are people stupid enough to accept O'Neill's abuse of the English language and concepts like "left" and "right", and his scourging of the welfare state from an allegedly leftist position ...

About the only leftist position O'Neill adopts is to abuse the cops forced to deal with the situation:

There is one more important part to this rioting story: the reaction of the cops. Their inability to handle the riots effectively reveals the extent to which the British police are adapted to consensual rather than conflictual policing.

Reading that, you might be inclined to forget that this all started with Mark Duggan being killed by a bullet to the chest by police, and then a crowd of protestors facing down some baton-wielding cops (Rioting for 'justice' in London).

I guess that's what we'd all call consensual policing, right up there with the consensual policing copped by Jean Charles de Menezes (Man Shot Dead by British Police Was Innocent Brazilian Citizen).

Back to O'Neill's cop bashing:

It also demonstrates how far they have been paralysed by the politics of victimhood, where virtually every police activity gets followed up by a complaint or a legal case. Their kid-glove approach to the rioters only fuels the riots because, as one observer put it, when the rioters "see that the police cannot control the situation, [that] leads to sort of adrenalin-fuelled euphoria". So this street violence was largely ignited by the excesses of the welfare state and intensified by the discombobulation of the police state. The riots tell a very interesting story about modern Britain.

Actually, if you want an interesting story on the discombobulation of the police in the UK, you might be better off reading Threat of cuts brings added pressure to overstretched police forces. Full credit to the politicians involved.

If you're routinely abused by politicians, pay and perks and numbers slashed, and you routinely cop abuse from all sides, including the likes of 'leftist Marxist' O'Neill, along with all the rioters and dissident looting, pillaging, burning youths on the streets ...

Personally, the last thing the pond would want to be is a London bobby ... too much danger, too little joy, and bugger all in the way of love or pay. Well, who'd be a copper made to stand in the street to deal with violence or assault by motor vehicle in the streets of Brent ... (here).

And then there's the top brass moths singed recently by getting too near the flames of the Murdoch media empire.

As we noted, the love affair between leftist Marxist-quoting O'Neill and arch leftie socialist freedom loving Rupert Murdoch is sickeningly sweet to see - No job is lonelier than defending Rupert Murdoch. Yep, there's nothing like giving Rupert Murdoch's organisation a clean bill of health for corrupting the police force, causing a top down cleansing, and then bashing the cops for their incompetence ...

We remain ever so hopeful that O'Neill will shortly announce that he's leaving the antipodes to show the UK police how to take off the kid gloves. No doubt he'll be on hand in the streets, to handle the riots and rioters, by dealing out shit in fine bovver boy style, and never mind the odd mollycoddled innocent victim who might get blown away.

Or perhaps on his return to London - he is returning, isn't he - the mollycoddling cops might show how they deal with mollycoddled, curdled 'leftie' commentators by taking him out the back next to the dustin bin and giving him a good dust up ...

We can only dream.

There's just one final question. How soon can he fuck off out of here?

And one final note. We certainly wouldn't want to mention unemployment, poverty, recent budget cuts, wealth disparity, the recent royal 'let them eat cake' marriage, or the forthcoming Olympics, as fine an example of panem et circenses as can be found these days ...

But for some strange reason, in his rant about the welfare state, O'Neill didn't blame soccer, and football hooliganism. Nor did he mention the internet or Face Book (perhaps that's reserved for Susan Greenfield).

How strange, since we all know that soccer, and perhaps the new social media, rather than child beauty pageants or the welfare state, are the real reasons for the decline and fall of Britain and Europe ...

There, top that for simple-minded, stupid analysis, Mr. O'Neill ...

Oh wait, you've already done it.

Now let's give a slightly re-worded Gerard Henderson the final word on O'Neill in The Drum:

This was just one of the many improper and unprofessional contributions by British commentators in the Australian domestic debate in recent years. Just imagine what the same journalists would have said if, say, George Bush had written to Kevin Rudd with gratuitous advice on child beauty pageants. (the original Gerard Henderson David Cameron Brit bashing here).

(Below: the beginning of training for the riots).