Move over cane toads, vegetarians are the new environmental curse.

It seems to be popular once again to claim the environmental and ethical benefits benefits of meat eating. This morning I find myself reading Mike Brown on the poor long suffering mice that vegetarians kill. http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/ordering-vegetarian-meal-there-s-more-animal-blood-your-hands. And how livestock on Australia’s otherwise “unusable” rangelands is a good thing.

Really, I wonder if these people have thought through what they are arguing? Maybe Mike hasn’t been to outback SA or Qld, so he hasn’t seen the devastation caused by sheep and cattle grazing. Tim Flannery has had an extensive go at sheep farming being the major source of trashing the SA landscape. He also argues that habitat clearance and food competition by sheep has had more impact on small mammals than predation by cats. And we know everyone loves to bag out cats as the environmental scourge of the nation. Phenomenal amounts of inland Qld are bare paddocks with cow prints in the dust. Then you can wander into far northern Australia, where feral cows, pigs, horses, buffalo and donkeys run amok. And even those still within the confines of stations, well, those stations don’t look like pristine habitat anymore do they? Northern Australia is currently undergoing a mass extinction of small and medium sized mammals similar to that which has already occurred over central Australia and groups like Australian Wildlife Conservancy have a particular focus on the north for this reason and rehabilitate former stations. Livestock animals clear vegetation, spread weeds, trash waterways, spread diseases, compete for food with native animals, their hooves disturb our fragile topsoils and if you are worried about their health as well, they aren’t the fattest and happiest looking animals, because it’s still a bloody harsh environment out there.  Rangeland grazing remains hugely problematic

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Then there’s the carry on about all the negative effects of grain farming. Now, I’m not going to defend mass grain farming as being a wonderful thing. But, since when did meat eaters stop eating grains? It’s not the sole province of vegetarians. That sausage or hamburger needed some grains, as did the bun you ate it in. Have some pasta with your bolognaise? Some rice with your beef korma? Aside from this ridiculous omission, I think you might notice that not eating meat correlates with more consumption of vegetables, legumes, pulses, nuts and seeds, not grains. And all those poor anthropomorphised mice. Mice are a pest animal that are killed. Sheep and cattle are pest animals that are bred, then killed. And how cute are little lambies? Does that interfere with your enjoyment of Sunday roast? I don’t think so.

Arguments against ethical choices so often seem to invoke a pointless slippery slope. Yes, it sux that mice are poisoned. Does that somehow delegitimise any attempt at more ethical and environmentally sustainable eating? Well, no. It seems to be expected that once you take an ethical stance, you have to live up to everyone’s interpretation of every possible related issue. What about the poor lettuces???? Some people would have us all be breatharians for making the slightest objection to their comfort zones. But actually, you don’t have to be. It’s ok to draw lines of what you consider reasonable for you, your situation, your ethics and the environment. Eating a few grains does not devalue not eating hooved animals totally unsuitable for grazing the Australian environment. Animals which are still rounded up using helicopters, transported via roads, contributing their own share of carbon emissions, then slaughtered in those rather horrible things called abattoirs.

I’m hardly the strident vegan I was in my youth. Mike does have a point about kangaroos. Kangaroos are culled across Australia and dumped in pits. Most of the roo that is used is exported or turned into pet food. Ok, so pets have a rather large environmental impact and sustainable pet food is a good thing, but we really are killing a lot of animals for little return here. When done according to the RSPCA approved guidelines, kangaroo harvesting is humane and sustainable. Then there are emus. We cull them as pests as well, when we should really consider them a suitable source of meat for Australian conditions. Then there are all the feral rabbits, goats, camel and buffalo. We already kill them. We should actually use them instead of growing still more animals to eat. If we are going to eat meat, hoofed animals should be on the way out even when they are range grown, let alone intensive animal farming. People need to get over the idea of eating Skippy. If you can eat Babe, Peppa and Clarabelle, what’s the difference?

Reading about Ebola is heart breaking.

I've been reading a bit about the Ebola outbreak the last few days. You can have this vague idea in the back of your head that there's an extremely rare but devastating illness in West Africa but the actual reality of it not hit home. West Africa is a long way away, the numbers still sound kinda low, but when you look a little closer, there are over now 7000 confirmed cases and they suspect the actual number of cases to be 2-3 times that. Each person is infecting about 2 others. The fatality rate is about 70%. Those are really overwhelming figures.

Then there is the lived experience of these people. They are nursed in isolation facilities and most will die a gruesome death, vomiting, diarrhea, bleeding and multiple organ failure, with only strangers in spacesuits with them. Or they are amongst the uncounted cases in the community, cared for mostly by women at home, who are almost inevitably going to be infected themselves as the virus spread through the body fluids that will inevitably be everywhere.

And this is all in some of the poorest areas of the world. Sanitation is limited at the best of times, and this is not one of them. Health care services are limited and completely unprepared to deal with this outbreak.  Wars, corruption, civil unrest and so forth make it more difficult to access care or have built mistrust in government systems.  In short, the virus couldn't have picked a better place to ensure its own survival. My heart also aches for the health care workers in these places. Many, especially local workers, would not have the equipment available to protect them, or the knowledge of the risk before it was too late. They too are dying in large numbers.  Special facilities have been set up to provide care, but it is a small fortune in equipment, water and chemicals to contain the virus within them. But not only does West Africa need money, equipment and chemicals, it needs health care workers. These people not only face the risk of catching Ebola, but also watching the tragedy of it. Imagine caring for a population who are suffering terribly and 70% of them will die within days. The strength of these people is amazing, but supportive care can reduce mortality to 30%. That's a huge difference that medical teams can have.

In the face of all of this, the richer world has been slow to act. Even now, with countries sending medical staff and military assistance to build treatment centres, Australia is offering only a small amount of money. We carry on about burkas, conduct terrorist raids for toy swords and send military troops and equipment to Iraq, but only a few million to control a humanitarian crisis spiraling out of control. Even if you only wanted to be selfish about it, Ebola is spreading at such a rate that it will become a crisis for more than just West Africa. A much bigger global threat than terrorism. More people have died in Liberia in the last few months than in the Sept 11 attacks. But hey, it's all happening to black people in Africa right now, so who cares?

I'm uncomfortable with my shared discomfort with conservative nutcases.

I hate admitting I have anything in common with a bunch of conservative nutwits, but I have a problem with burkas. Yes, I know that there are a bunch of different veils associated with Islam, but I am being slack and just using the term-du-jour for my convenience. It's not really au fait amongst the left at the moment to criticise religious veiling, but when it boils down to it, I have a problem with any cultural/religious dictation of what women should and shouldn't wear. I'm not terrified it is a security risk and I am appalled at a bunch of privileged white and mostly male people attempting to further ostracise a minority group for political sway. This does not however, change my concern about cultural regulation of women. Yes, I know there are women who choose to wear a veil. Choices always happen in a context, and women are great at self policing. We have been conveniently helping cultural norms keep us within an acceptable range for a long time across many cultures and religions. Women also choose to wear makeup, shave their bodies, obsessively diet, have plastic surgery etc etc. That doesn't change the common theme of the controlling of women's bodies. Whether they have to be covered up or enhanced, we are still telling women what is and isn't OK about them. And there is a common theme of focusing on women's sexuality. Women are covered up in order to protect men from their sexuality or women are dressed up in order to show off their sexuality. But not too much. Because then they are asking for men to lose all control and assault them. It's all bollocks.

I'm struggling to think of an internet selfie campaign that I haven't had a problem with, but I am currently uncomfortable with the #WISH one. Part of it is the nature of "selfie activism".  It's very easy to take a photo and bung it online and feel all gooey inside but, has anything really changed? The other is around what sort of things become popular selfie campaigns. Call me cynical (ok, I accept I am actually cynical), but they all seem to be ones in which you can rather participate in without really doing anything confronting. No make up selfies was full of cute pictures. Women against feminism was full of cute pictures. And WISH is full of cute pictures of women in scarves. The interpretation of the hijab is all quite flexible (and indeed it seems to be in the muslim community as well, which does seem like a good thing) where you grab your favourite scarf and drape it attractively over your head. We don't see women putting a full black or blue veil on. And I see a few men posting selfies saying they are also in solidarity. Where are their hijabs?????  Surely there is no less pointlessness in men wearing women's religious head wear than non-islamic women wearing it? I accept this is all well meaning and maybe some women are feeling less ostracised by the number of women posting photos, but I'm wondering where are the selfie campaigns in solidarity with victims of domestic violence, acid attacks, female genital mutilation ... oh wait, they won't make for cute pictures.

#confusedcatsinsolidaritywithhijabis Sorry, i couldn't resist.

Can we please stop carrying on about women having more babies for their buck?

I seem to have been subjected to a few conversations with otherwise intelligent and caring people lately that espouse "all these young girls are having babies for the money". These sort of stereotypes really annoy me. For starters, did anyone do any counting? Despite the dramatically greater financial support for single parents these days, substantially less young girls are having babies now than 30 years ago.  There were less than a third of the number of births to teenage women in 2011 than there were in 1971. Because, surprise surprise, we now have more choices to manage our fertility and many teenagers are exercising those choices as well.

So what of the young women who are having babies? They aren't exactly from Presbyterian Ladies College. Have a look at what education and respect for women's rights does for birth rates. After 10 years of working with young women in early intervention programs and out of home care, however, I did not encounter one who chose to have a baby for the money. Their reasons are far more complex, and indeed, far more tragic. They spoke about wanting someone to love and that would love them. Coming from abusive and dysfunctional families, they wanting to make their own family in order to have what society told them families should be. When no one had been able to give them consistent love and care, their baby would be the one that loved them, that needed them. About wanting to have a valued role in our society. When they struggled with school or finding work, young girls saw being a mother as the remaining acceptable choice for women in our society. And about sexual experiences in which they did not feel able to exercise choice. You don't really want to know about what many of these girls have endured. It seems simple to just say no or use contraception, but when you come from a family that abused you, prostituted you out, failed to protected from predatory behaviour, told you you were bad and disgusting or instilled in you a deep sense of your inherent worthlessness because they were unable to care for you and left most of you basic needs unmet, well, saying no or exercising any control in any emotional situation is just a gazillion times more difficult than for those of us with a balanced sense of self and history of being respected for our needs and bodily integrity.

Sadly, the outcomes for many of these girls, and babies, if they do have them, are often poor. However, I have seen a few that have gone on make vast improvements in their lives and parent well and even those whose children had to be removed from their care obviously loved their babies. But regardless of this, it is just so disrespectful to these girls to label them as money seeking baby factories.

Wear whatever bloody bikini you want #fatkini

Society has a long history of telling women what they should and shouldn't look like.  The fatkini is being flaunted as a rebellion in which fat women are finally allowed to show some flesh. My problem starts with how this is still promoted with calls to beauty. That fat women can look good in a two piece bathing suit. It remains stuck in a world where women have to look beautiful. And the fatkini itself is high waisted and often front panelled in order to cover and control a woman's belly. We still get the message that it's not OK to have a belly. Personally, I don't care what you look like in whatever you wear. That really should remain a matter of personal taste. I like or dislike what both women and men wear and how they look over the full range of sizes. That doesn't mean they don't have a right to look or dress like that. It's no business of anyone else's how you look. Worry about your health if you are going to worry about anything. Is your waistline over 80cm? Check out http://tinyurl.com/lvmvs32. You won't die from people disapproving of how you look, but there's a lot of suffering to be had in diabetes, chronic heart disease or kidney failure.

Fat men turn up on beaches in red speedos. If you want to wear a hot pink g-string bikini to the beach this summer, I don't care what size you are and whether people think it's "beautiful", just go for it. If you are swimming or jogging in it, all the better.

#Equality is such a popular word

I suspect that equality is the PC word for all those people out there who complain feminism has made the world too PC. Everyone loves it. They happily espouse that they are all for equality, even that they are "equalist". I love a good made up word, but I think that "equalitarianist" would be a much better one. It's socially acceptable to say equality. That appeals to ideas of fairness we hold, which is of course not unreasonable. But it is an outrageously narrow focus of what is considered in this discussion of equal and people carry with it a view that feminists somehow don't want equality, but dominance. Or concessions to keep up when the world really is about “merit”. If one really thought our cabinet reflected the most meritorious of the LNP, one would have to wonder how women in the LNP even manage to put their shoes on the right feet. But Tony was actually right – for advancing his agenda, he choose the most capable ministers. If he could find enough women or indigenous australians or people with disabilities to participate in his reconstruction of 1950s Australia, he might well use them.

This obsession with the word equality, however, gets on my goat. I keep hearing people saying women are equal now. I don't have any problem with feeling equal to men. Indeed, like a lot of people, I actually have a fair dose of feeling superior to quite a lot of other people. But it's not really about how I feel. Of course there is a place for fighting for the liberal feminist ideals of equal representation/wages etc, which seem to be what people mean when they talk equality. These have probably seen more progress than any other feminist values because they are congruent with capitalism. Equality in representation in a capitalist world probably does have more trickle down effect for women than capitalism does for the poor, but, to co opt that bloody word, until I see equal numbers of those equal men and women earning equal wages in positions of power equally likely to wear dresses and make up, I'm afraid that the social agenda on women hasn't changed much. It just takes the acceptable end of debate and ignores the rest.

These fairly simplistic versions of equality still highlight the discrepancies, but so much of the policing of women is fixed in ideas in our society. We all participate in the perpetuation of discourses of what is normal and acceptable. I struggle when otherwise intelligent, capable, independent women tell me they wear make up and shave their legs because they like it. Change their name to their partner's because they want to change it. Inordinate other not-so-little things. When I see similar numbers of men and women choosing to do these things because they like it, I will accept that there is no social pressure in that choice. In the meanwhile, I'm afraid it's just too convenient that women intrinsically like preening themselves to an ideal suiting social expectations, committing them to time consuming and not always healthy regimes and going through a tedious process of redocumenting their lives to someone else's name.

I don't think feminism is really about equality. It's about freedoms and rights. Freedom to be/do/look/act how we want. To make our own choices. The right to be safe to do so. To be accepted and valued. All with respect for other people's similar freedoms and rights. This applies to all genders, sexualities, abilities, races etc. This of course involves a massive shift in social norms and expectations, but nothing resembling meaningful equality will result without it.

Besides, these people saying we already have equality either lack basic observation skills or basic maths. 

Bring out your #metadata

When all this furore over metadata started up, I wasn't clear on what it was. So I found out. I should offer these highly technical research skills to our govt, they obviously need it because what was rather immediately obvious is it was basically everything Tony said it wasn't. It takes real talent to be that wrong. And real arse to do it in public and continue on as if you hadn't made a complete arse of yourself.

What I keep wondering every time they talk about security and terrorist risk, is really, just how scared of terrorists do they think I should I be? A medium security threat. I feel like maybe sending forces out into the streets was necessary for a "medium" security threat. How high do these security threats go before we put defenses out on the street? This is starting to sound like British climbing grades.  Medium, high, really bloody high, preposterously dangerous, honestly, we are are fucked, here they are coming for us now?

But no, what we actually have is 25 or so people they think have been fighting in Afghanistan or somewhere who have come back to Australia. 25 out of 23 500 000 people. I'm just going to round that up for the sake of late night maths. It's about 0.000001% of the population. And the best way to protect us all from this enormous number of people? Metadata retention. For all 23 500 000 of us. Actually, I find it quite amusing that they might try and find anything useful out of my metadata. Like the companies that buy my credit card information. Good luck predicting what I'm going to do from all that.

But really, when they carry on about threats in Australia, I just can't get worked up about terrorism. Know how many people have died in Australia ever from terrorist attacks? Um, none. I'm not worried about being eaten by a shark either, and for something that's already really bloody unlikely, that's still a heck of a lot more likely than in a terrorist attack. Do you drive or work? Don't do it! 109 workplace deaths already this year. 153 road deaths in Vic alone. It's hazardous. Acutally, 58 Australians died getting out of bed in 2011. Don't even get up. You can still produce all that metadata from bed anyway, so you'll be safe from terrorism. I expect the new Direct Action Plan on climate change will be metadata retention. The govt knowing you wasted 5 minutes of your life on my blog will save the planet.

It's easy rousing #womenagainstfeminism

I mean really, there's actually nothing radical about getting narky about feminism. It's been a popular past time for, well, more than a century. And there's nothing new in what #womenagainstfeminism are saying. I just seem to have heard it all before somewhere. It's all a bit dull though, hearing again, we are all man hating, sex hating and ugly.  Do they notice in the same lines the criticise feminist for tarring all men with the same brush, they, um, do the same thing to feminists? We have hairy legs and think men are dirty. Hang on, dirty? That's a new one. I must have missed that though. Which feminist theory espoused that one? I'll have to check with @SenatorAbetz. Still, I guess some men are dirty. At least some of the time. So am I in fact. I was goddamn grotty camping all last week. And I do have hairy legs. I think they look pretty good actually, my hairy legs. Is it feminist to think my hairy legs are spunky? I think I'll set up a sexualised photo of my legs with a few clichés on it:   I need feminism because otherwise I wouldn't have an excuse to post raunchy selfies of my hairy legs.

Back on topic, I'm saying it's easy because it's a well trodden line, to put down feminists. We're not seing #womenagainstcapitalism or #womenagainstchristianity or #womenagainstneoliberalism, all of which have in varying ways tried to control women, the poor, homosexuals, differing races and cultures just to name a few. Quite a lot more than feminism ever has done.  Why not #womenagainstanteaters? I don't need anteaters because I choose to walk on two legs, eat mango and don't need to oppress those poor insects.

Taking a stand against these things goes against the status quo. OK, maybe not the anteaters. Taking a stand against feminism, however, doesn't.  Of course, we could all jump up and say, but look I love men too. And sex. I wear pink tutus and ride unicorns. But aside from feeling like it's just pandering to these preexisting ideas yet again, it's also pointless. If anyone cared to look, they would see that there are feminists with male friends and partners all over the place. There are feminists enjoying sex and loving their bodies. There are feminists sharing responsibilities and pleasures and hardships with men as well as women.There are feminists who actually are men. Some of them might even be dirty. There are also non-feminists who don't like men or sex or sharing. Some of them have hairy legs too. And bump into the occasional dirty man. Honestly, I can't quite get over that one. All feminists must think men live in mud. All that clothing is just covering a highly cultivated layer of filth. Sorry, really, what I was trying to say is that the world is full of difference. Telling people with set ideas things that conflict with them is a great way only of talking to a brick wall.  We have been not just telling, but living in people's faces as a whole variety of feminists with different tastes, ideas, interests, ways of living and sexualities for that 100 or so years as well, and people just don't want to notice. They want to maintain the myth that we are manhating, hairy, sexually frustrated beasts trying to recuit all women to our cause and take over the world and maybe enslave those dirty men whilst we are at it.

Great. I'll get working on it. I could do with a house slave.