Compliance? Now there's a concept for a Sunday meditation ... it must be a sign ...

(Above: you have to see it to laugh, or to cry, YouTube it here).


The pond copped a speeding ticket some time ago.

Not to worry, it was worth it. Get the Merc out on the highway, looking for adventure, Aryan blonde hair blown this way and that by the pure Victorian mountain air, the autobahn sturdy and made for speed, the tar receding behind like a George Miller dream ...

Oh shoot, did we lose a windscreen to that gravel rash? What, we lost the entire suspension on that pothole deeper than the road to hell? And all for 5k an hour over the limit?

Oh just scrub the whole wretched fantasy, but wait there's one redeeming point to the whole sordid, sorry affair.

You see, we sent off our payment Civic Compliance Centre in Victoria, and we just loved the notion. As always, wiki was standing by to let us know about all the CCC's in the world, but they still haven't woken up to the CCC Vic, which is sad for the bureaucrat who dreamed it up.

Imagine. He or she might have spent a week or a month dreaming it up, or it might have come to them in the witching hour in a cosmic flash of genius. Like an apple on the noggin! CCC! Compliance!

Compliance has such a lovely resonance and not just because it's so redolent of the hero in 1984 altering the records so that they could comply with the party's ongoing version of the past fashionable at any one moment:

Acquiescence. You will obey. The act of complying with a wish, request, or demand for money with menaces and threats.
A disposition or tendency to yield to the will of others, particularly to avoid a week in the clink.

It would have been completely inappropriate to call it the Revenue Centre, or the Hungry Pollie centre or Pay or Else centre.

Be mealy mouthed when collecting the cash.

And this being a Sunday, what with tithing and collection plates, it set the pond to contemplating other mealy mouthed verbiage ... and naturally the meditation immediately led to religion.

The New York Review of Books has just got around to reviewing Lawrence Wright's Going Clear (outside the paywall for the moment, here) and in it is a reminder that cults are always adept at generating a new set of terms for allegedly new concepts.

Hubbard loved to devise words like "enturbulate" and the cult's goobledegook is full of double speak. You can't be an initiate into ultimate mysteries if there's three fifths of fuck all that's mysterious about it. (And you can almost feel the fear in the reviewer at the thought of the ratbags in the "church" noting her various heretical thoughts about the church and its abuse of process to get itself tax-free. What a scandal it is, what a nonsense, how soon before every religion is tithed by the taxman fro the damage they cause).

Meanwhile, the Islamics have been at it again, this time at the University of Melbourne, as you can read in Academic calls for end to 'ritualised humiliation' (behind the paywall):

At the entrance to the lecture, attended by The Australian, signs directed "sisters" to the back of the theatre, and "brothers" to the front. Asked whether seating was segregated, a male attendee said: "It usually is here, yeah." 
During the event, which had a predominantly Muslim audience of about 250, a small number of men sat in the "women's" section and were not prevented from doing so. No women sat in the "men's" section.

Again compliance. Every where a sign, long-haired freaky people need not apply. It reminded the pond of another set of courses in another time and place:

Sheesh, they even colour-coordinated it. Blue for the bros and pink for the hos, or should we say uncovered cat meat (will someone explain to them sign-makers that pink, as a more decided and stronger colour, is much more suitable for boys, while blue, being delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl. Oh dear, stereotype switching, gender chaos, wiki it here).

The interesting word abuse here is the notion that calling men 'brothers' and women 'sisters' will get you off the hook.

But it doesn't bro, nor should it get the University of Melbourne off the hook. If you want to hire university facilities for lectures on jihad, they should conform to anti-discrimination rules; if you want to send the sisters to the back of the hall, do it where you won't be seen, in a private space where bigotry and prejudice can run wild and free.

Now the resulting furore only engaged the likes of the Bolter, who used it to berate leftists. What a pain the man is, and yet what a suck when it comes to the papists and the Xians.

The Australian, which had a couple of bites at the story, and Tony Abbott had a little trawl in Abbott condemns Melbourne University over sex segregation at Islamic events. (also behind the paywall).

You can understand why - Abbott's desperate to get rid of his 'ditch the witch' routine of the dark old days, and it's a measure of Islamic stupidity that they can make him sound like a statesman when he blathers on about supporting the fundamental principle of gender equality (except when doing anything and everything from the gutter to to the bog swamp to ditch said witch).

It also brought out a few academics as with Jennifer Oriel keeping the story alive in the lizard Oz with Melbourne's hypocrisy on gender naive (outside the paywall) and Sheila Jeffreys speaking to the Oz (that must be the first time this pair have agreed in awhile):

"There needs to be great outrage about this," Professor Jeffreys said. "It is a Rosa Parks moment . . . Making women sit at the back in lecture theatres is sexual apartheid. This is a new practice in Australia, whereas apartheid against black Americans was an old practice. But it should be challenged strongly so that it goes no further. 
 "Religious ideas that so blatantly make women into second-class citizens are not worthy of respect. They should not be allowed to undermine people's justified rejection of discrimination against women."

Naturally there was a resounding silence in many areas, most notably the Labor party. But it added to the woes of the big universities in recent weeks, what with the University of Sydney scrabbling to get out of the Dalai Lama email hole it dug for itself ...

Actually separating men and women isn't a new practice, not that being old practice should allow you to get away with anything.

In the old days, both Catholics and Protestants separated men and women for services, and even built matroneums as a way of housing the women.

The Lutherans in South Australia kept it going within the memory and experience of the pond, women on one side, men on the other, and apparently you can still see it in fundie protestant services in Europe.

Some like to defend it as no more than custom or tradition, a bit like women being made to wear a hat is the same as being asked to cover your face completely (oh the shame if you couldn't rustle up a hat and had to wear a hankie attending a Catholic service, but that shame never quite matched the shame invoked if called uncovered meat). Naturally men went hatless, perhaps so god could mess with their minds more easily.

In the past few decades this sort of nonsense has been beaten out of most Catholic and Anglican services, though no doubt some would love to bring it back, along with the Latin.

Which brings us, as it usually does, to the Sydney Anglicans, and this week to the thoughts of Phillip Jensen, waxing lyrical and sorrowful about The Man I Thought Was Dead, arising from the news that George Beverly Shea a Billy Graham singer who came out to Australia for the 1959 Billy Graham Crusade had died at the age of 104. Not a bad run, and in his day not a bad singer of sentimental religious stuff in a way that seems to have pinpointed the banality of Jensenist musical tastes (please, no opera here, here no opera).

Apart from the usual laugh - Jensen trots out the standard line of what kind of rock performance is it without sexualised aggression? in a way designed to make the pond aggressive, but not in a sexual way, not with a Sydney Anglican, no never - it reminded the pond that back in the day Billy Graham and his crusades also copped a few notes about religious separation, as late as the 1980s, as you can read in the Spokane Chronicle here. They used to hold prayer rallies for men ... and for women. In the Islamic way ...

It's easy to see where questions might arise about different treatment for men and women in the Billy Graham Crusade.
In April, the men's prayer rally was held in the Opera House and Tom Landry, the famous Dallas Cowboy coach, was the speaker. Tickets for the event, held in conjunction with the Mayor's Prayer Breakfast, cost money. City leaders attended and the Pledge of Allegiance was said by an Air Force colonel.
The women's prayer rallies were held this week in two local churches. There was no attendance cost and the guest was Bonnie Barrows Thomas, whose main claim to fame is that she is her father's daughter ...

By golly did that produce a little hasty back-tracking and feminist flim flam ...

And yet here we are in the new millennium and the Sydney Anglicans are getting sentimental about an old Crusade singer while ensuring, with their very own peculiar form of sexualised aggression, that women are kept in their place beneath the glass ceiling.

Islamics and Sydney Anglicans unite ...

The pond could go on at great length about the Sydney Anglicans but was pleased that as a result of the site's makeover - more like a combover - the search function is stuffed, and various bits of data have fallen off the peg. Vengeance is mine, saith the long absent lord ...

So let's just settle for one joke arising from Michael Jensen's piece, Is God's justice primitive? (warning,  reading this tosh might make you violent).

... in Romans 13, Paul specifically tells Christians not to seek retribution, because that belongs to God. God himself has justice in mind – which is extraordinarily liberating for the imperfect business of human justice, and for the business of living with injustice. Any Christian who finds in the cross permission for violence – especially against the Jews, which has unfortunately occurred - is an unfaithful Christian.

Translation: you've seen how the long absent lord dealt with Her Son. Talk about the hanging judge, talk about the mean Matriarch, more like a Tarantino or Gibson splatter fest than a de Mille flick...

So you don't have to do anything about revenge and payback to the Jews for killing Christ, because She's got justice in mind ...

She's hired Samuel L. Jackson and she's going to kick the shit out of them ... or some such thing. Now you can feel liberated and hug a Jew, but remember justice deferred is just another way of saying justice is a'coming ...

In the interests of mercy, we've decided to ignore Cardinal George Pell, whose idea of relating to women is to dedicate his life to chastity, and who in his last published post in the Sunday Terror showed marked confusion about Margaret Thatcher, explaining in one breath how she went too far and shocked him, and in the other how Europe needs more Margaret Thatchers, perhaps because Pell likes to be shocked, and to go too far, or perhaps because it'd be a delight to have Maggie help him fit the old cilice ...

Oh yes, it's a mercy not to go there.

So who to blame? Well all this started because the CCC, well ahead of the KKK in the alphabet, got the pond thinking about compliance, and signs ...

Be compliant to this mob of assorted religious floozies and ratbags, and their outrageous attitude to women (and gays and innocent secularists)?

Why the pond would rather pay a substantial fine ...

And the sign said, "Everybody welcome. Come in, kneel down and pray"
Sisters to the left and righteous blue brothers to the right,
 But when they passed around the plate at the end of it all, 
I didn't have a penny to pay 
So I got me a pen and a paper and I made up my own little sign 
I said, "Thank you, Lord, for thinkin' 'bout me. I'm alive and doin' fine." 
Wooo! 
Sign, sign, everywhere a sign Blockin' out the scenery, breakin' my mind 
Do this, don't do that, make sure you comply ...
Can't you read the sign? 
Sign, sign, everywhere a sign 
Sign Sign, sign

Repeat ad nauseam until fatigue and a desire to sleep sets in ...

(Below: found here).