- The Guardian
- Issue #2180
Reasonable (person)
The good thing about people who are reasonable is that they think exactly what the person using the expression ‘reasonable person’ thinks. Nine journalist Chip Le Grand spoke for ‘reasonable people’ everywhere when he said that no reasonable person wanted a repeat in Melbourne of the violence in Sydney. The demonstrators in Sydney who were attacked by the police didn’t want the violence in the first place, but nobody, reasonable or not, seems to have explained this to Le Grand.
Conflict/War
Both terms are both true and untrue. Nine Media calls what the Israelis are doing a ‘conflict,’ which makes it sound much milder than it is. Media outlets often call it a war, making it sound like a battle between roughly equal sides. Either way, the effect is to ‘both-sides’ an ongoing genocide.
Context
The thing about context is that it’s real, but also includes the whole world. Whoever is using it as an alibi gets to say which parts of the context matter. NSW Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon has had a tough time lately trying to make the unhinged violence of the NSW Police look reasonable. During an evening of what looks a lot like outright assault, police roughly dragged away a group of Muslim men who were praying. The video footage looks pretty clear; the men are praying, the cops grab them and pull them away.
Lanyon’s job was to both apologise and not apologise. So he apologised “for any offence taken,” meaning he’s sorry if any Muslims felt upset about an attack on Muslims praying, but that it’s up to them to choose to feel upset. He added, “but it needs to be taken in context that we were moving a violent and aggressive crowd.” For the Muslims involved the context would be that they were just praying and the cops didn’t have to rough them up.
Social cohesion
Lately this vague and weaselly word has been having a real workout. ABC journalist David Speers says Australia has “long prided itself on strong social cohesion and being far from global conflicts.” Anyone who thinks this country has freedom of expression and a proud history of protest is wrong. If you ask Speers, what we really feel proud of is cohering and being a long way from most wars (not that that stops us from sending young people to kill and die in them).
Royce Kurmelovs calls social cohesion “a polite euphemism for white Australian anxiety about race relations and a clumsy tool for social control.” How much social control the expression achieves is debatable, but it’s certainly clumsy.
Values
Values are weaselly because they’re vague and hard to oppose. Appealing to values is a great way to tell a group of people you’re on their side without spelling out exactly why. Also if you support values, it means anyone who opposes you must be anti-values, which sounds very bad indeed. Newly-appointed Liberal Party leader Angus Taylor says he wants a return to Australian values. He hasn’t said what those values are. He also hasn’t said how Australia strayed from them. Our values are apparently threatened by something called “bad immigration,” and immigrants who want to change Australia. Angus also wants to change Australia by going back to values he won’t spell out, but that’s okay because he’s not an immigrant.
