In this article I am going to introduce the idea of how state funding of the arts is undermining the culture of our nations, and indeed our social well-being, but first I am going to share a couple of my favourite pieces of artwork and then introduce you to some examples of “art” that I’ve come across in museums that receive at least some public funding or have art from artists who received public funding.

There are three things necessary for the production of good art: creativity, effort/suffering and beauty.  These three things are immediately self-evident whenever a person observes a piece of art.  If you need an arts degree to appreciate a piece of art, then the Emperor has no clothes on and you are actually looking at a piece of junk.  When I think of the price tags on some of the pieces I am about to show you, I also think fraud.  Appreciating art is something every human being with empathy and sensitivity can do naturally.  Before I start giving you examples of how bad and degenerate modern art has become, here are a couple of examples of excellent artwork.

The Accident by William Geets (1899)

This painting is wonderful on many levels.  The selection of colours is aesthetically pleasing by itself, so the eye is immediately enticed to look at this piece before it has even focused on what is there.  The people in the piece are fantastically interesting to examine as they come from a complete spectrum of medieval society.  Through the decoding of the gestures and facial expressions of the people one can piece together a narrative of what is happening off the frame.  We see a young nobleman preparing to attempt a rescue by diving into the water, so there is a plot and much activity in this scene as well as conflict: should he attempt to rescue the drowning child or is it better not to risk more lives?  The architecture of the buildings is complex and interesting as well.  Consider also that this is a painting and it took a lot of time and effort to create this scene purely from imagination.  Thus we have beauty, creativity and effort all combined into one.

I could spend hours, if not days, examining this picture and every time have a new interpretation of what is actually happening in this scene.   I can feel my wisdom increase as I think about the significance of every single detail in the picture.  This is good art.

This piece is a sculpture called “The Burgers of Calais” by Auguste Rodin.  It is about a historical event that occurred in 1347 during the Hundred years’ war.  It is a very moving work depicting six leaders who, for the love of their fellow townsmen, have voluntarily chosen to surrender themselves to certain execution in exchange for the sparing of the people whose well being they were responsible for.  The six men are accepting their fate each in a deeply moving and personal way as they trudge across the field to be executed by King Edward III.  However, the Queen was so moved by their selflessness that she convinced her husband to spare the lives of these brave men.

This is good art because it has a narrative, because it is beautiful, not for the depiction of suffering, but for the depiction of sacrifice and love, it is aesthetically pleasing to the eye, it is also inspirational and it took enormous skill and effort to produce.

Now that you have seen what good art actually is, I hope you will quickly recognise what bad art is:

This is a canvas of the Virgin Mary.  She is African and those are cut-outs of women’s anuses and vaginas from porn magazines glued onto it, she has a naked breast hanging out of her dress.   The colours are sickly yellow to me, but I know some people like yellow so maybe it is not a total aesthetic disaster for everyone.  But there is no real narrative or deep insight to be found in this picture.  To me it is an infantile scream for attention through the deliberate creation of a physical incarnation of offense directed at Christians, and all who lay eyes on it who do not hate their heritage.  I hate even putting it here because the artist is clearly emotionally five years old and is begging for someone to pay attention to them.  Good or bad attention is does not matter, this person just wants attention for themselves and their ego, I also suspect that they have an axe to grind against European civilisation, and infantile hatred is ugly.

This is not something I would ever put on one of my walls.  It is lacking in skill, aesthetics, subject matter and interest.  It is called ‘Angel’ but there is nothing in this picture vaguely symbolic about angels, yet if you are interested Google the artist and read his explanation of the title: it was along the lines of being that it reminded him of bookshelves that might contain books with stories of angels in them.  If you can take what he says seriously, you are lot less incredulous than I am.  If I did want to put this on one of my walls, I might pay $50 for it and that is saying something because of all the examples of bad art I will show you this is the only one I would ever consider buying at all.  Something tells me if I “accidentally” threw up on it I’d have to pay a lot more than $50, even though my vomit would probably be more interesting to look at, and depending on what I ate for lunch, more expensive to produce.  I have no precise idea for how much this piece would go for in an auction, but based on the price of other works by this artist we are talking a six figure sum of money.

Nude by Stuart Ringholt

Here we have an example of how lustful sex is again being used to offend and degrade human dignity.  This picture is hideously ugly.  The artist who created this sees nudity by itself as art, I have this image of him flicking through a porno with pictures of men’s faces stuck on women’s bodies and him thinking himself sophisticated for doing so.  However, nudity and porn are polar opposites aesthetically, something every artist should understand, the fact that he called this a “Nude” is a calculated offense against those who are aware of the distinction (depictions of naked people with in an expression of lust are pornography, if they have any other expression it is called art.  Pornography is often said to be degrading to women as it depicts them as pathetic needy creatures and validates this as an acceptable aspect of female identity, whereas a nude woman expressing pride is empowering to the embodiment of mature womanhood).  The orientation of the body is not one of elegance and grace that can be found in true nudes, but of craven sexual hedonism found in porn.

Another interpretation is the confusion of the transexual or bisexual living in conflict between their body and their spirit, but I am simply not convinced the artist has successfully pulled this off for a number of reasons, but chiefly because the ugliness is still degrading.  Therefore I would call this an immature piece or a specialist piece more fitting for a museum that specialises in such works, not something that should be considered healthy, normal or representative.  Not that I would want anyone to decide what was healthy, normal or mainstream for other people, but government funding denies people the choice of what art they believe if healthy, normal and appropriate for them.  People should decide with their wallets what art they enjoy, not with their taxes.

Sadly, the public who have been convinced that they are too simple to offer a valid opinion about art because they do not have an arts degree, are highly likely to believe that their opinion on this is not important because someone with more authority than them spent their money on it for them.  This work should perhaps be put in a museum of perverted and degenerate art to help educate the public as to how to recognise ugliness and offense because you would never find this in the vast majority of people’s homes, almost only in a public art gallery, because no human being wants to fill their house with perversion, except the perverted.

Arse End of the World by Juan Davila (1994)

Burke and Wills are two heroic figures in Australian history and folklore.  This work can only be described as a calculated hateful attack on the dignity of the Australian people.  Imagine if someone painted a picture of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson fucking raccoons and sodomising each other?  That is how I feel when I look at this painting.  I know the author wanted to make me feel like this, but he also wanted me to feel ashamed and disgusted with being Australian.  In that regard, he has completely failed.  I am proud of my heritage and I well aware of the complexity of the interpretation of Burke and Wills as heroes or not.  To publicly shame and humiliate this artist might be too good for him.  Better to just ignore him into obscurity and poverty.  Unfortunately, public money is being used to support and promote artists like him so my freedom to ignore him has been taken away from me.  Imagine if artists only got paid based on how many “likes” they got for their art?  Imagine the improvement in the quality of art that would take place if this was the case?

This is a cast of a suicide bomber made out of chocolate.  The artist made a remark about how calm and at peace he seemed.  I have to wonder if the artist’s sympathy with a deranged mass murderer is an indication of his own hollowness as a human being?  Firstly, this is simply a cast any forensic pathologist might be able to do for you, no impressive artistic skills required.  Secondly, the implication of the peace and tranquillity a suicide bomber feels after committing mass murder is creepy and disturbing, especially if you have the empathy to wonder about his victims and their families.  I appreciate that understanding how mentally deranged suicide bombers truly are is important, so this piece might serve a valuable point of reflection or even education for teaching children about this, but that is not the primary job of art to do.  Again, I am going with attention seeking, not a genuine interest in stimulating people’s minds.  Especially since anyone with enough experience around corpses will tell you: all people look calm and tranquil when they are dead.  Including this man’s victims.  The decision to make it out of chocolate might seem interesting, but consider this: if you stuff up with marble, you have got to start again.  If you stuff up with chocolate, you can fix it up easily.  Again, we do not see evidence of real technical skill, creativity or beauty.

Now that you witnessed some of the works and artists your tax dollars are helping to prop up and promote, I hope you are ready to read this.  Across the Australian Commonwealth our governments are collectively spending just over $6,650 million annually on the arts and culture.  The European Union expends almost 150 billion Euros annually propping up the arts and culture.  I could not find any figures on the amount the USA expends on the arts and culture but I would imagine it is considerable as well.  These figures do not include money spent on education, purely for artistic and cultural programs, but consider how much money goes to universities as education funding only to produce more art and artists like these?

Let me be clear, the government is taking your money and giving it to people like these artists so they can humiliate, embarrass, demoralise and mock you.  Ever wonder why you find it so hard to pinpoint what your culture is as a white English speaking person as compared to other cultures?  It might because bad artists are getting paid to make you think your culture is disgusting, ugly and contemptible.  You might also have had so much of this ‘art’ shoved down your throat that you do not want to even feel a part of your own culture or heritage.  I suspect if you spent some quality time looking at good art, instead of the rubbish I just showed to you, you would feel a lot more comfortable calling yourself a person of European descent with a proud European heritage.

I know compared to other things the government wastes other people’s money on, the art and culture budget might not seem like it is a significant amount of money, but artworks generally are not that expensive to produce so the money can be redistributed by government to inflict enormous harm on the industry.  This harm can be seen in the examples of bad art I just showed you.  These works should not be on displayed in any galleries that can not survive from their own sources of income from charging visitor’s admission.  People given a choice when paying for something will not choose ugliness over beauty.  It is only natural and aesthetically healthy to desire beauty and to reject ugliness.  I do not mind private collectors displaying them in their private museums, but that is the thing.  Art is a private matter, not a public one, so the government should stay away from it entirely.  Especially from their funding of schools and universities.  The spread of ugliness and the decline of beauty is important when one considers how pleasurable and inspiring beauty is, and how ugliness leads to depression and anxiety.

Apart from the brainwashing and the indoctrination universities do to young people, they also carry out a program of supporting artists they considered worthwhile:  Basically anyone who is related to a politician or a university employee, and is pro-depression and anti-liberty.  This creates a protected market where we have producers (the artists) making products they know people will buy (with taxpayer money) regardless of whether they are good or not.

However, the majority of the public want to buy interesting, exciting, positive and uplifting artwork.  That is what they were going to spend their money buying, before it was taxed out of them.  However, the artist, if given the money and freedom to produce art he wants to produce, is going to produce depressing, self-loathing, meaningless and mediocre work because that is what happens if you spend too much time looking inward living the lifestyle of the entitled narcissist.  Looking inward tends to result in discovering how imperfect and wretched you are, because pride comes only from successful interaction with the real world, not the inner one.  Consequently our artists are all suffering from “body image issues” of the soul and it shows up in the depressing rubbish they make.  If they at least created a painting with high technical skill, even if it was meaningless, the personal accomplishment of their high technical skill would make them feel better about themselves.   So do not let the artist have this kind of ‘artistic freedom’.  He needs to struggle and work hard to earn a living like everyone else, not be coddled like a helpless child.  It is for his self-esteem that he must struggle because it is only by overcoming ordeals that we develop self-esteem.  Do not give the artist a blank check otherwise all you are going to get from him is his excrement smeared over a canvas.

Another point that bothers me is that taxation affects everyone but not everyone wants to spend their time appreciating art, so they are effectively collecting money from everyone and giving it to a small proportion of the population just so they can pursue their hobby.  Their hobby is giving their friends and relatives other people’s money to produce rubbish.  I do not pay taxes to support other people’s hobbies.

This article is just the beginning of a series I would like to write about how the arts have been perverted by the government into something toxic to human dignity and public welfare.  I will be making it a point to visit more art galleries and museums to collect more examples and evidence of this degeneration and hopefully spread more awareness of this problem.  If you read this article and agree that modern art is a horror that must be resisted then please share this article so that more people can learn about this and my sincere hope is that more people will actually go out and discover real art for themselves and, apart from buying good art from real artists, together we can pressure the government to stop wasting our money on people who do not deserve it.

I was initially excited about seeing Cloud Atlas, a three hour long movie set across six time periods with interweaving plots created by the same people who made the Matrix.  Sadly, after 30 minutes into the movie I realised I was watching a left-wing propaganda movie with following themes:

1. Only white people can be racist.
2. All white people are criminals, rascals, idiots, cowards, thugs, annoying, sexist and bullies unless: 1) they are homosexual, 2) into race-mixing, 3) they’re devoting their lives to serve another race.
3. Non-whites possess superior athleticism, intelligence, fortitude, wisdom and courage.
4. “Our lives are not our own,” this theme is expressed as a casuality argument, but also as a collectivism argument for self-sacrifice for other people to justify murder, revolution and world war.
5. Past-lives and reincarnation are real, embrace Buddhism and killing people isn’t really that bad anymore.

One of the selling points for the movie is that the six plots are interweaved with each other, however the plots don’t actually meet up in a signficantly meaningful way.  The only link is that the protagonist is meant to be the same person reincarnated each time, however, the protagnists don’t actually have anything in common except a birth mark.  What the movie actually is is six 30-minute short stories retelling the same story over and over: white people suck and you need to sacrifice your individuality to the collective good of people who don’t care about you as an individual.  It’s really quite pathetic that they thought simply jumping from one storyline to another would make the movie clever and interesting.  If they’d just shown the 6 episodes in order I think everyone watching it would be forced to question if the movie was worth spending the money to watch.

Episode 1: Adam Ewing’s Odyssey

Evil white people(/men) count: 5  (Reverend Gilles Horrox, Haskell Moore, Dr. Henry Goose, Ship’s Captain, Ship’s first mate)

Evil non-white count: 0

Redeeming quality of the one ‘good’ white man (Adam Ewing): He helps a stowaway black slave who convinces him via socialist guilt trip by making him hold a knife to his throat and making the absurd claim that if he doesn’t help him to get free he is just as guilty as if he’d killed him himself.  At the end of the episode it is revealed that Ewing’s wife is an asian woman decorated to look ‘white’ but in fact this proves a very important point: racial differences are deeper than skin, eye and hair colour.  She doesn’t look even remotely like a white woman and whenever I see someone do this I think to myself “if blackface is racist for a white because it mocks black people, then surely it is racist to put European features on an Asian as this mocks white people?” Anyway, the ‘good’ white man redeems himself by becoming an abolitionist because he ‘owes’ black people his life, his wife and the well being of his future family.  That’s some sacrifice to pay a debt he never had an obligation to take on in the first place. Are you feeling the white guilt yet?  If not, stay tuned.

Memorable scenes: A woman making it clear at dinner that all (white) men are sexist pigs and throws a hissy fit when they won’t talk about her issues and walks out.  A black man makes a joke about how he doesn’t like “white” meat and we see the white man pee his pants while making a statement that the black man is so physically superior to him that if he wasn’t joking he could kill the fragile white man.  A bunch of drunk, stupid white sailors saying ‘nigga’ all the time while a black man astounds them by proving to be an expert sailor… because apparently black sailors weren’t common back then (yes, the creators need to do some research here and acknowledge that black people back then did many impressive feats like own and sell their own people as slaves on sugar and cotton plantations).  Then we see white sailors planning to kill the ‘nigga’ with no explanation given at all before or afterwards, because that’s what white people just do isn’t it?  The fact that every atrocity committed against non-whites by whites was planned and directed by a central government that tyrannised and enslaved their white populations as much as the non-white populations just seems too much for the writers to contemplate apparently.  No the problem is racial not ingrained government sociopathy.

Episode 2: The Sorrows of Young Robert Frobisher

Evil white people count: 4  (Vyvyan Ayrs, Hotel Manager, Tadeusz Kesselring, the university staff knocking on the door)

Evil non-white count: 0

Redeeming quality of the one ‘good’ white man (Robert Frobisher):  Despite being mentally unstable, irresponsible, hedonistic, a compulsive liar, callous, prone to vandalism, conceited and parasitic he is a good man because he is homosexual.  That’s right fellows, a mountain of character flaws can be all forgotten and your villainous character presented in a positive light so long as you’re gay because that means you have victim cred.  Once again we see the left-wing philosophy of measuring a person’s worth not on the fruits of their labour, but on how down-trodden they are percieved to be on the social heirarchy.

Memorable scenes: Dinner party where it is made clear that because the conductor is German he is automatically a Nazi-who-wants-to-kill-six-million Jews.  Frobisher just casually fucks his employer’s wife without a shred of moral scruple because the poor woman was suffering being married to a geriatric millionaire.  Oh that poor woman, choosing to marry money instead of for love, it was merciful and generous of Frobisher to fuck her.  Good thing his gay lover didn’t get jealous because then he might have done something wrong but since he didn’t get jealous (that we know of) it’s ok, he’s a good person for committing adultery.  Mind you, adultery as a minor offence comes up frequently as a theme in this movie, just saying.  Of course, the young Jewess marrying a much older man for his money and estate actually does nothing for Jewish stereotypes so maybe the creators of this film were trying to tell us something else as well?  The line, “You won’t do it, your kind never do,” when referring to a homosexual could also be interpretted as, “heterosexual men are the only ones capable of murder.”  Finally, a talented composer with a devoted lover, kills himself calling it ‘courage’ even though he is running away from the law and the consequences of his own actions… I don’t care that he was gay, he was still an arsehole, however which way you want to look at it.

Episode 3: Luisa Rey, A Strong Independent Nobody

Evil white people count: 2 (Bill Smoke,  Lloyd Hooks)

Evil non-white count: 0

Redeeming qualities of the two ‘good’ white man (Rufus Sixsmith, Isaac Sachs):  Sixsmith had an asian neice and was gay.  Isaac fell in love with a black woman and was Jewish so not technically ‘white’.

Memorable scenes: The oil companies build a nuclear reactor designed to explode to promote the oil industry… seriously, if I wasn’t so appalled by this point in the movie I would have burst out laughing at how ridiculously obvious this piece of left-wing propaganda was.  An entire plane full of people are killed just to get at one person and this is blamed on the PLO by the oil companies… WTF?  Whatever they were on when they wrote this stuff it must have been good.  Despite sinking so far under water that the pressure burst the windshield of her VW Beetle, Rey’s superior physiology somehow allowed her to swim back up to the surface safely.  Lloyd Hooks made a sexist or dumbass remark every time he opened his mouth to drill home the point that white people suck.  Ironically, instead of succeeding in making Luisa Rey look like a strong independent woman, what comes across is that she’s actually a nobody who is still living in her father’s shadow; because that’s the only thing that is actually going for her the whole time because otherwise she’s pretty damn stupid and dependent on another black man (who was friends with her father as well).  Bill Smoke shooting a dog and making racist remarks is just par for the course at this stage of the movie so of course he is killed by an Asian woman (illegal immigrant) with a meat tenderiser, but we’re given the impression that this murder is completely justifiable because after all, he was just another evil white guy.  I hate violence against animals, especially domesticated animals, but a racist remark and killing a dog does not make murder with a meat tenderiser ok, unless he is white.  Oh, and a black woman speaking Chinese?  Wow!  That so made sense… not.  (I like how some directors think putting random things like this into a movie somehow makes it magically ‘sophisticated’ nowadays, wit is a dead art form clearly).

Episode 4: The Cavendish Affair

Evil white people count: 12  (Dermot Hoggins, Timothy Cavendish, Denholme Cavendish, Nurse Noakes, Nurse James, Georgette, Highlander, the three thugs, the children of the ‘inmates’)

Evil non-white count: 0

Redeeming quality of the one ‘good’ white man (Timothy Cavendish):  Technically Timothy Cavenish is supposed to be the white heterosexual male with a redeeming quality, but I just couldn’t find one unless it was in being utterly pathetic?  He is cowardly, unscrupulous, cheats with his brother’s wife, involved in organised crime gangs, has no self-control generally, is narcissistic, greedy and callous.

Memorable scenes: This was set in the UK so consequently almost every white person had to be evil or in some way loathesome or pathetic, the exception being a few minor characters who aided in the escape, but the episode did end with a drunken pub brawl so maybe not.  The scene with the gangster Dermot Hoggins killing the critic was hilarious, but by this point in the movie I had already figured out exactly what was going to happen and so I found it entirely predictable.  The line “I’m your brother,” (and so therefore you owe me) could have been taken straight out of Atlas Shrugged but clearly it wasn’t because it was used in exactly the opposite way Ayn Rand was getting at.  That said, all six of these episodes are actually plagiarised from other author’s works and the only novelty in the story is how they supposedly interlink.  Creative! /Sarcasm.

Episode 5: Somni-451, The Slave Who Becomes A Slave

Evil white people count: 3  (Seer Rhee, the only two employees of the Fabricant corporation seen in screen)

Evil non-white count: 1? (Not possible to tell because all of the soldiers wore masks making it impossible to tell their ethnicity, presumably to avoid being racist and to make it fine for Hae-Joo Chang to be a cold blooded killing machine).

Redeeming quality of the one ‘good’ white man: No good white people featured in this episode.

Memorable scenes: This whole episode is a copy and paste job of Blade-Runner with a page or two from Soylent Green thrown in randomly.  Clap-clap-clap.  However, it was highly disturbing because the characters don’t have any free will, once they know the ‘truth’ they lose all free-will apparently and must slavishly carry-out a suicidal act of rebellion that precipitates a world war killing almost everyone and destroying almost everything and thus setting the stage for episode 6.  Yes, apparently starting a world war that kills everyone is just something you have to do sometimes when the truth pops into your life, and there’s just no moral abiguity about it.  Furthermore, the revelation is about individualism and self-determination, it’s about a new moral code that prevents other people from acting independently because their lives don’t belong to them and they must now serve this one ‘truth’.  Somni doesn’t seem to appreciate the irony of becoming a freed slave only to become a political slave afterwards, but she’s not actually that bright if you listen to what she says.  Neo Seoul is probably every Korean’s worst nightmare for the future of their people and country, I’m curious to find out how Korean audiences will react to this movie, by walking out of the cinema and demanding a refund I hope.  What really pisses me off is once again, the evil corporation who makes these clones (fabricants not replicants) is foreign (the ship) and the employees of this company are all, you guess it, white!  Including a white woman who kills and guts a Somni clone.  You can’t make this stuff up, white people are the most evil race in history, the Koreans could never have done this to themselves could they?  No, white people had to be behind it all!

As for Somni’s revelation, “Our lives are not our own, from womb to tomb, we’re bound to others, past and present. And by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future,” that’s a very shallow and wishy-washy idea that is used by left-wing dictators all the time.  Mind you, I noticed it was from ‘womb’ and not from ‘conception’, coincidence?  Fuck you, Dave Mitchell, I own my own life, I have personal soverignty and the right to self-determination.

Episode 6: Zachry and the Asian Whore-Goddess

Evil white people count: 8  (half a dozen cannibals (Kona), young Zachry (he apparently lacked courage in rescuing his friend from a dozen heavily armed cannibals?!?!), Old Georgie)

Evil non-white count: 0

Redeeming quality of the one ‘good’ white man ():  He race mixes with a black woman and somehow manages to suppress his bloody white urge to murder defenceless people just for her but not for a white villain.

Memorable scenes:  A tribe of whites asking a black woman about fusion power and looking incredibly stupid, actually this scene was hilarious because it was just so diametrically at odds with reality it was all too obvious what the creators of this film were trying to tell their audience: you white people didn’t earn your technology, wealth, power, intellect and prestige, it just magically landed in your hands and it could just as easily be handed over to non-whites who would patronise and humiliate you with it.  Interestingly, when a white child gets sick the black woman from a high-tech society can’t interfere, but if you want to take the comparison back to the real world the black people should be bending over backwards giving the whites food, clothing, medical supplies, education and weapons just from the kindness of their own hearts, but instead, the blacks here contribute nothing to white civilisation just as they do today.  Ironically, the primitive white tribe in the movie depicted as superstitious morons still actually possessed more technology than sub-saharan Africans ever achieved before whites came to the continent.  That’s right, Africans didn’t have the wheel, metal working, two-story houses and failed to domesticate even a single animal species.  Every single piece of technology Africans have today was invented by non-African (mostly white) people and generously provided to them but white people are still evil and this movie just can’t stop drilling this point in as even Zachry’s hallucination/demon is a white guy dressed up as a British gentleman (he was actually called ‘Old Georgie’!  Subtle!) urging him to commit murder.  When Zachry killed the white cannibal it was almost like a spiritual revelation of him killing the evil white cannibal man inside of him allowing him to ascend to another planet to live in paradise.  To top it all off, the whites are worshipping an Asian prostitute as their goddess, a goddess of collectivism – the very ideology that white people, and only white people, have fought endlessly against throughout their entire history, this was symbolic of the spiritual defeat of the individualists against the oppression of the collectivist who argue that “your life is not your own.”  Of course, if you’re a white person who was educated in a public school you probably don’t know anything useful about your history and heritage to get why this was so insidious.

Final Count

Final count of white villains: 29

Final count of non-white villains: maybe 1? He wasn’t really a villain now was he?  Anyone who kills dozens of people and destroys large sections of a city just for one ‘fabricant girl’ can’t really be that bad can he?

Moral of the story: white people are greedy, vicious, stupid, arrogant, callous and murderous, but only through race-mixing, homosexuality and suppressing their individuality to the non-white collective can they be saved.  While all non-whites are exceptional people.  “There is a natural order to this world, and those who try to upend it do not fare well,”  this natural order is presumably meant to be whites reigning supreme, they were in the first episode when this phrase was uttered, they were extinct as a people by the end of Episode 6 along with all of their achievements and culture, with the survivors living in high-tech African style huts on an alien world.  Wishful thinking for the future?

Fuck that shit, we white people don’t need non-whites.  We never have needed them.  If white people stopped buying stuff from non-whites and stop selling and giving non-whites anything then let’s see just how well non-whites do without us.  I suspect once billions of Africans and Indians begin to starve to death and China descents into a bloody civil war some people might wake up to the fact that the evil some white people do is far outweighed by the good that most white people do in the world and that white folk as a whole do not deserve to be subjected to propaganda movies like this that denigrate them and are pushed onto their children to break their pride and self-respect.  This anti-white racist mentality needs to stop, because once white people are gone the world will not be a place you want to live on anymore.

This is dangerous territory if not handled correctly.

Some companies feel that because having a social media presence often doesn’t cost them a lot to get off the ground when compared to the traditional advertising forms, there doesn’t need to be the same stringency around

Applebees (Photo credit: Steve Dinn)

process and content that they do when they set the rolls of film or presses in motion.

SURELY by now, companies have a grasp on the fact that, yes you can pull your TV ad, yes you can pull your press ad, but that playing in the digital space these days is a lot more risky if you’re not 100% confident on your content and strategy. Let’s face it, everyone has some form of screen-grab these days on their desktop, even if it is in basic Microsoft Paint. On mobiles there are screen capture features which do exactly the same job on the hoof. Yet companies are still of the mindset that once they pull something from the internet, that it is gone forever.

Wrong.

People are seriously resourceful, and wit’s not surprising how quickly they will pick up on a brand blunder.

Applebee’s are a great case in point. Take this example. Recently there was a waitress who was fired from Applebees for posting a photo she took of her receipt. The receipt was from her customer, and was that of a pastor who wrote,

” I give God 10%, why do you get 18%? “

in reference to a tipping request from the restaurant to tip staff 18%. She was fired having been told she breached terms of her contract. Right now I’m not bringing that into question, the US has a tipping policy to top up low wages, and that is another discussion entirely. Neither am I bringing into the fact that the pastor has painted himself out to be a bit of a stingy bugger when he’s in a profession of supposed selfless help. (The Pastor issued an apology, and that is completely aside to my point of this article).

Applebee’s Receipt, taken from News.com.au:  http://www.news.com.au/technology/biztech/us-restaurant-applebees-commits-social-media-suicide/story-fn5lic6c-1226570581548

What I am questioning is what followed from the Applebee’s management/staff or whoever was behind the following.

Applebee’s claimed the waitress violated not only her contract but the privacy of the customer. Interestingly however, other receipts (with full customer names visible) were posted on Facebook when the reviews were good. These were removed soon after (what I’m now referring to as) the ‘God incident’. Double standards much?

Social media users of course, loving the underdog, stuck up for the fired waitress, and gave Applebee’s a piece of their mind on the Applebee’s brand Facebook page.

Interestingly enough, I’m sure that had they put in place an emergency style PR strategy, no doubt the damage could have been contained and even turned into their advantage. Instead it seems that someone (I was about to judge them as a new start/intern/over eager and sleep deprived 20 something with a serious love for their job, but I’ll not quite go there) decided to respond to all the comments through the middle of the night, 3am, 5am etc, suggesting it was ‘because they cared’ rather than they were being employed at this time.

Now, wading through what ended up being over 10,000 comments in response, particularly in the middle of the night, with (what I am assuming) was no PR consultation, is like walking into a lion’s den, with a Lady Gaga’s meat dress on and shouting ‘dinner!’…. Come on, they seriously cannot have expected this was to end well…!?

Users were hooked on the hypocritical nature of the sacking, considering full customer names on receipts with written comments were posted previously on the page, and then removed this around the time of this incident.

Applebee’s Facebook Page Screengrab courtesy of news.com.au http://www.news.com.au/technology/biztech/us-restaurant-applebees-commits-social-media-suicide/story-fn5lic6c-1226570581548

If that wasn’t enough, Applebee’s decided to hide or delete negative comments.

Gun. To. Head.

Not to be recommended in the social space when you are inviting criticism in the first place by playing the space, but then especially a bad move in the midst of this PR crisis.

Some trolling ensued which I won’t go into, but I think at this point you get the idea.

Social. Media. Suicide. (and 101 how you get into the content of memes)

In this particular example, the pastor is the one given the meme treatment,referencing another popular meme.

Out of interest, I just checked the page…… and IT’S STILL GOING……(in and around some menu updates, which frankly have soured from the below posts)

Author’s screenshot of Applebee’s Facebook page

Author’s screenshot of Applebee’s Facebook page

It’s not just restricted to Facebook, either. Blogs have gone up tracking the fiasco, while the hashtag #BoycottApplebees has gone viral on Twitter:

#Boycottapplebees hashtag on Twitter has gone viral.

So here we have a company, large enough to know better, who are employing old school, poorly judged tit for tat style management of an incident that required some tactful PR reconciling.

We’re not all perfect, and hey, the social space is pretty cutthroat these days, but we can all learn something from this. (Well, lots actually, but let’s just focus on one thing…)

It’s not that we shouldn’t comment freely, it’s that businesses should be aware of how the social space operates, and how to manage it if they are to avoid social and quite probably career suicide. You are inviting comment from the world, and need to be prepared to handle it in the best possible way. The days of hiring social interns to form your entire social media department are well and truly over unless you want to be walking the fine line Applebee’s just did,…..and that’s what’s happens when things go horribly wrong.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to read more of the comments on their page…..

Source:

• News.com.au | Applebees Commits Social Media Suicide

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• Applebee’s Overnight Social Media Meltdown: A Photo Essay (bizaboutbiz.com)
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• Applebee’s fires server for sharing receipt on Reddit (prdaily.com)
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• Local Applebee’s waitress canned after posting pastor’s tip comment online (kmov.com)
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You can now say you’ve won as many Tour De France Titles as Lance Armstrong. Image courtesy of wikimedia commons project

Earlier this week, Lance Armstrong gave an interview to Oprah Winfrey, and in a move that surprised nobody, finally confessed to using performance enhancing drugs throughout much of his cycling career. The United States Anti Doping Agency have pursued Armstrong so zealously, not because he is a simple drug cheat, but because they allege he was the mastermind of a sophisticated doping ring.

Armstrong is accused of coercing his fellow teammates into using performance enhancing drugs, and burying anyone who refused to go along. Armstrong has aggressively defended his reputation, suing anyone who spoke out against him, including a former team assistant Emma Reilly, who tried to expose him as early as 2003.

Armstrong’s crimes are inexcusable, and he certainly deserves to be stripped of his Tour De France titles and his Olympic Bronze medal, but what of the other athletes who were reluctantly drawn into Armstrong’s schemes?

Business Insider compiled statistics on the Tour De France competitions in which Armstrong was active. The results are damning.

“21 top-3 finishers from 1999 to 2005 were doing it, and 36 of 45 top-3 finishers from 1996 to 2010 were doing it. Take a look at this paragraph (which was slipped into the introduction of the report without much comment) in the USADA report:

Twenty of the twenty-one podium finishers in the Tour de France from 1999 through 2005 have been directly tied to likely doping through admissions, sanctions, public investigations or exceeding the UCI hematocrit threshold. Of the forty-five podium finishes during the time period between 1996 and 2010, thirty-six were by riders similarly tainted by doping.

So in a 15-year period, there were only 9 riders who managed to succeed without cheating, according to the USADA.”

Cycling isn’t the only sport affected. Olympic officials have retroactively stripped eleven athletes of fourteen medals from they Sydney 2000 olympics for drug use, including several from Track and Field Star Marion Jones.

Marion Jones was tied to BALCO labs, a clandestine drug ring responsible for supplying performance enhancing drugs to track and field stars, NFL players and Major League Baseball players including Barry Bonds. There can be no doubt that professional sports are rife with performance enhancing drug use, but the simple fact that it is widespread isn’t sufficient to allow it. Let’s take a look at some of the other major arguments for allowing athletes to use performance enhancing steroids.

We Already Allow Athletes to Purchase Performance Enhancing Technology

There are many ways to get performance boosts, but few that make me feel as squeamish as this. Image courtesy of Wikimedia commons

Perhaps the most compelling argument for keeping performance enhancers banned is to allow a level playing field for all athletes. Armstrong’s case has shown us just how widespread drug use is in sport, and it would be very hard to fault an emerging athlete who was lured into drug use simply to make sure he remained competitive. Despite this, designer drugs can be incredibly expensive, and many athletes simply will not be able to afford them.

If we are to keep drugs banned for this reason, we would also need to ban a variety of other training tools available to athletes. Armstrong confessed to using EPO, a drug that assists in delivering oxygen to muscles, which is a godsend for endurance athletes. Of course, there are other ways to hack your body to improve oxygen delivery, including expensive altitude training.

Even more broadly, money provides access to better trainers, better facilities– and in sports like cycling– better equipment. To be consistent and fair to athletes across the world, we would need to cap team budgets.

Professional Athletes Already Damage Their Bodies in Pursuit of their Sport

In 2011, former NFL player Dave Duerson comitted suicide. As part of his final wishes, he was adamant that his brain be donated to NFL’s “brain bank” so it could be used to study the effects of long term head injury on the brain. He wasn’t the only one, Junior Seau did the exact same thing. Junior was found to have brain abnormalities indicative of chronic traumatic encephalopathy or CTE. According to wikipedia, symptoms of CTE include disorientation, confusion, vertigo, headaches, poor judgment, overt dementia, slowed muscular movements, staggered gait, impeded speech, tremors and deafness.

It’s not just athletes in contact sports that are at risk of injury. The average career length of a professional athlete is between 3-5 years When scientists did a study of professional tennis players they found

A 1989 Danish study  suggested that elite male tennis players suffered 2.3 injuries per player per 1,000 playing hours. Of these, 45% were upper limb injuries, 17% shoulder, 67% the result of overuse, 14% strains, 17% sprains, 2% fractures and 5% blisters.

Given professional athletes can almost certainly expect to have their careers cut short by permanent injury, and that many performance enhancing drugs aid in short term recovery from injury, it is supremely naive to assume athletes will avoid performance enhancing drugs simply because they come with risks.

Allowing Drugs in (some) Competitions Will Allow Us To Keep Others Clean

The International Federation of Bodybuilders allegedly disallows performance enhancing drugs, but does not test competitors. For athletes that want to compete without using performance enhancing drugs, they turn to “natural” bodybuilding organisations such as the International Natural Bodybuilding Association. I see no reason why we couldn’t allow parallel organisational bodies for other sporting events. There could be a “natural” and “open” cycling or football governing bodies. Anyone caught doping in a “natural” event is subject to existing sanctions, and those that choose to compete in a sport that allows doping would be given access to better medical and harm minimization advice.

Given that our testing authorities are in a constant arms race with the dopers, letting these athletes compete in a separate, regulated environment may be the only way to effectively manage their influence on professional sport.

Related articles

• Lance Armstrong confesses to Oprah Winfrey: My mythic story would have been impossible without doping (independent.co.uk)
• Armstrong confession vital – Millar (bbc.co.uk)
• Armstrong says sorry for doping (bbc.co.uk)
• Hacking your body: Lance Armstrong and the science of doping (theverge.com)
• National Sport: USADA call on Armstrong to testify (coventrytelegraph.net)
• Armstrong left it ‘all on table’ with Oprah (nbcsports.msnbc.com)
• CEYC Poll Indicates Lance Armstrong’s Confessional Hurts Young Athletes Hardest (prweb.com)

It is clear that the DVD rental market is suffering at the hands of legal online distribution channels—such as iTunes and Netflix (coming to Australia soon … or maybe not)—and illegal online downloads.

Blockbuster, the world’s biggest movie rental company, filed for U.S. bankruptcy in 2010 due to the pressure put on it from alternative distribution methods.

Image Credit: Thunderchild7, Flickr 

So why are Oovie (soon to be renamed as Hoyts Kiosk) and Video Ezy Express playing in the DVD kiosk space? Well, firstly, Oovie added over $1 million profit to Hoyts’s balance sheet this year. While these DVD rental vending machines are still relatively new, they are popular.

Some of the busiest locations (like the one at Vogue Plaza on Chapel Street, South Yarra) rent in excess of 70 DVDs per day! At $3.50 per rental, that’s nearly $250 per day in revenue. And for a kiosk style business, the overheads a quite low. Rent for a 2m × 2m block of space is significantly less than shops with large floor space. There are no staff wages to pay. And, once you have the system set up, it’s basically self sufficient.

Because of these operational benefits, DVD kiosk’s offer two benefits to consumers: price and convenience. New release movies are priced at $3.50 per night at Oovie, half the price of conventional new release movie rentals. The service is quick and easy, with no membership required. Customers simply swipe their credit card and keep the movie for as long as they desire (keep in mind rentals cost $3.50 per day).

Customers can also rent and return these DVDs to any of the thousands of locations Australia-wide. Common locations for kiosks include shopping centres and supermarkets. In fact, Oovie has a strategic alliance with Woolworths who loves hosting them because they bring in extra snack purchases for the supermarket giant.

Earlier this year, Franchise Entertainment Group (FEG)—parent company of Video Ezy, Blockbuster and EzyDVD operations in Australia—invested $15 million setting up Video Ezy Express, their DVD kiosk offering.

This is likely in response to slowing DVD rentals through traditional video stores. Analysts predict hundreds of video stores to be closed down over the next few years under the pressure of new distribution methods. Understandably, FEG is future proofing their retail business. But surely FEG must know the physical distribution of film media is slowing and moving online? They have had years of experience retailing DVD rentals to consumers in which to observe this trend. Unless, there’s a hidden strategy behind these DVD kiosks …?

It does seem Hoyts has a hidden motive behind Oovie. Hoyts is pursuing DVD kiosks to gain market share which they will attempt to parlay into subscribers of their forthcoming Hoyts Stream service. But this seems like a pretty risky strategy.

Video Ezy Express’s long term strategy? Who knows.

The future of film entertainment is clearly headed in the direction of streaming movie services or on demand digital downloads (possibly both). The expansion of Australian 4G mobile networks and the National Broadband Network (NBN) are sure to make Australia a prime choice for these kinds of services.

In a 2011 interview with Oovie’s co-founder Ian O’Rourke, the question was asked about what effect digital downloads would have on Oovie’s business model. O’Rourke agreed that “… all entertainment will [eventually] end up being downloaded … [but] it will be a few years before there is mainstream adoption of video on demand. We’re capitalising on a window that’s open at the moment.”

At least Oovie realises their business model is likely to dry up soon. FEG managing director Paul Uniacke’s opinion of the digital downloads model is that: “It’s not profitable.” What do you think? Are DVD kiosks too little, too late? Or, is there a bigger strategic move at play here? How much longevity is left in this market?

• Guest Repost by Adam Jaffrey of AdamJaffrey.com
• Originally published at: http://adamjaffrey.com/blog/2012/10/14/the-future-of-dvd-rentals/

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