Great post on the use of the word "tolerance" from Steve Edwards (via Gareth Parker).

You've probably heard already that tossing off can lead to a longer, healthier life due to a decreased risk of prostate cancer. But not many people know that it's not just literal lizard-gallopers who benefit. Metaphorical pud-pullers reap the rewards as well! Take former PM and current "National Treasure" Whitlam, for instance. He's one of the most stupendous intellectual wankers in our history. And he's still hale and hearty thirty years after his fantasies were realised (briefly, thank fuck). Then there's his former nemesis and present fellow traveller Malcolm Fraser, who regularly joins him and many others in sate-funded circle-jerks.

And while we're on that Gough subject: It's recently been revealed that pop idol and celeb Tim Freedman avidly follows in his ageing idol's figurative hand-slaps (scroll down to Tuesday's post). If history is any guide, in twenty years this wanker will also be deemed a "National Treasure". Crikey, even his most famous hit has a masturbation theme.

The Sydney Mourning Feral reports that Ken Park is being screened at secret locations around the city. Kind of funny, really. You've got to ask, what was the point of banning it, then busting up the screening (and also protesting the ban) in the first place if this was sure to happen (er, which it was... because it did)?

But then, the Government censors had to stand by their decision and send the coppers around to show (albeit just once) that they were serious. Otherwise they all would've looked like a bunch of total wusses.

It's the ones who risked arrest by defying the ban who looked particularly silly. They knew it would be freely available. They even said so at their attempted screening. So, in that case, why protest? Pretty dumb when you think about it.

I mean, there are heaps of laws that people disobey all the time (the one against jay-walking for example). But nobody arcs up about them because it's not worth the effort to do so. We just go on breaking 'em and the cops just go on turning a blind eye. So, same with censorship. Was the fiasco in Balmain a week or two back really justified?

I know this may seem an odd thing for an anti-censorship zealot to say. But my attitude is: So a bunch of tight-arses in Canberra managed to ban a film. They'll do it again a few months down the track. By the time Howard goes (perhaps a decade from now if the present is any guide) another twenty films will have been banned. So what? It's not the end of the world.

The censorship we really need to address is the far more pervasive, destructive force of political correctness, which has already retarded the emotional and intellectual development of a significant proportion of an entire generation, and could do far more damage if left unchecked.

But back to the secretive screenings: One wonders what the appeal is for all these new viewers. I personally think it's that assorted plonkers and squits can now kid themselves that they're doing something weally, weally couwageous under the jackbooted reign of Herr Howard - kind of like being in the French Resistence. Bet some of them even wore berets to the screenings! (Why not? You see them doing so on the streets of Newtown all the time.)

Heard about these Moreton Bay figs getting removed to make way for some on or off-ramp near the city, and the subsequent furore. But why are the ferndies arcing up about it? I would have thought that being a tree smack bang in the middle of all that smog and noise and concrete and metal would have been a truly shockin' existence, hardly conducive to botanical, er, self-actualisiation. Surely, any true greenie progressive would have seen the mass chop as a kind of leafenasia, wouldn't he?

Tim Blair's latest Bulletin column has this pithy paragraph: "A lot more addicts would probably visit Sydney's heroin injecting rooms if they were allowed to smoke there. Just a thought."

Although this bizarre state of affairs may be due mainly to bureaucratic pettifogging, it still illustrates a wider truth: The same people who push for smack legalisation are out to ban tobacco. What a cack!

I had an experience related to a similar double standard while doing a comedy show over in the west. Because the theatre I was using was sponsored by Smoke Free WA I had to sign a form saying that smoking would not be endorsed in any way in the work (I kid you not!). So, not only did real, living breathing people have to cease puffing in the theatre (fair enough I suppose) but the fictional characters on stage had to as well. (Or, if they didn't, the actors had to use fake durries, and pretend to get cancer and die or something.) This was pretty funny, because luvvies and theatre-goers are more heavily into fag-puffing (and bong-suckling and booze-guzzling) than any other demographic there is.

Not only that, but the bar at the theatre had these beer coasters with a Smoke Free WA logo on them (I've still got one somewhere). So the anti-nicotine lobby was not only not condemning aclohol, it was actively endorsing its consumption!

They might as well have broadcast radio ads saying, "Don't smoke, but have a beer on us... Keep your lungs pure at all cost. But your livers? Ah, fuck 'em!"

But back to the injecting rooms: For the fluff, smoking tobacco is not on, because of the immense corporate power of Big Tobacco. But smack, being a cool, anti-establishment drug, is worthy of tolerance.

My guess is that if the fluffs ever do get their way and the heroin industry does become fully legalised - and subequently corporatised - then they'll will want it banned for that very reason. Then legalising tobacco (forbidden due to their efforts) will be the next big cause for them.

Leftism. It's not just different strokes for different folks. It's different standards for different folks, depending upon what "mainstream" folks are doing. That is, fluffs see what most people endorse in a free and democratic society and selectively advocate the opposite no matter what.

Malcolm Knox surpasses himself in another bizarre anti-American rant in today's SMH. It's loaded with vitriol and bitchery, but no evidence, reason or logic whatsoever.

Perhaps the funniest part is the one implying that the US is less democratic than Iraq. He writes that Saddam "certainly wasn't a leader with 100 per cent electoral approval, as he claimed, but then in a free election he'd still likely have won more votes than the 24 per cent of Americans who voted for George Bush".

Gawd.

I once saw a very amusing photo of some bong-suckling ol' hippy in a San Francisco demo with a placard which read, "At least Saddam was elected". That was funny enough. But then, you'd expect to see such idiocy at a gathering of the loony left. Now, that sentiment is being expressed in the opinion pages of a major newspaper.

What next? The WTC attack was a CIA frame-up?