Shannon Legg

Antitheist humanist.
Standing on the shore of the cosmic ocean...

[Mikkel ☭ 🏴🚩 @mikkel_314]

Salvador Allende died 53 years ago today after the US backed coup in Chile.
RIP

[Alan Watts @AlanWattsDaily]

You have to adjust to facts: you can’t have a nation, you can’t have a society, in which everyone is always occupied in intellectual and computational pursuits. A few people have to be around who know how to handle the material world in a gracious way. And for these people we provide only regretfully, as an afterthought.

[Ronni🧂Salt-WhoWroteGunnawahYeahThatOne @RonniSalt]

So, let's recap, shall we?

This week the @PressClubAust managed to:

* cancel at the last minute, the questions and subsequent presence of renowned journalist Margo Kingston, who’d travelled over 2 days to Canberra to ask her question of Pauline Hanson – and yes, they were questions initially requested and organised by the Press Club itself 9 days ago.

* cancel the press gallery membership of long-term journalist, Greg Jericho, allegedly because he works for the @TheAusInstitute. Although Greg has been employed by the Aust Institute for 4 years, his membership cancellation only came yesterday after he publicly called out the Canberra press gallery - which is of course a highly fortuitous coincidence and not at all connected to his criticism.

* somehow allowed a person or persons unknown to enter the Press Club premises and put up a 3 metre wide electronic banner, without anybody in the Press Club noticing them doing it. How several people enter a private club carrying something that large, then proceed to wire it up on an open stage and nobody at the premises noticed in any way, is yet another display of the NPC’s staggering incompetence.

* release an unnecessarily detailed, high-school level statement about said banner incident, a statement that reeks of defensiveness and hysteria, while also prejudicially naming an alleged culprit and arguably sinking to the bottom of the barrel in terms of the journalistic standards it supposedly represents. Read it below and remind yourself that people who work with words for a living wrote that.

* allowed the speaker, Pauline Hanson, to defame one of their own - a journalist from the Guardian who dared to ask a hard-hitting question - by calling her "trash". This was only weeks after calling the same journalist a "nasty bitch". Mirroring, Trump’s “Quiet piggy” incident, the journalist's alleged colleagues all sat mute, as did the moderator, Tom Connell from Sky News during the abuse. No rebuke, no blow-back, no support for their fellow journalist, standing alone under Hanson's hissing vitriol. Just pusillanimous silence.

The National Press Club outdid their already dubious reputation this week, spraying themselves in a spectacular shower of self-inflicted shit – wall to wall, dripping effluent.

Australians currently suffer some of the most timid, captured political journalism in the western world, and if the actions of the #NPC this week are the metric, then we can all see why.

What a national and international embarrassment of an organisation meant to serve as a vital democratic institution and a cultural conscience – and one that has offered us neither.

.

[All The Right Movies @ATRightMovies]

Incredible "STOP WAR" poster by Barbara Galińska

[Saganism @Saganismm]

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

— Frank Herbert, Dune

[Saganism @Saganismm]

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”

― Voltaire

[Shannon Legg @shazbollah]

I never thought I'd say this, but now I know which moon face I prefer.

[Margaret E Atwood @MargaretAtwood]

Hi kids .. #HandmaidsTale (the book not the series!) has just been banned in #Edmonton…don’t read it, your hair will catch on fire! Get one now before they have public book burnings of it.

[Canada Hates Trump @AntiTrumpCanada]

MANY PEOPLE ARE SAYING THE LINE TO PISS ON HIS GRAVE WILL START IN CANADA. IT’LL BE TREMENDOUS, PROBABLY THE GREATEST LINE IN HISTORY. AND WE’LL BE EATING A LOT OF ASPARAGUS, THE FINEST ASPARAGUS, SO BIG, SO STRONG. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER. CHT 🇨🇦

[Shannon Legg @shazbollah]

@TheCinesthetic

[nincatalog @nincatalog]

30 years ago, @nineinchnails released the follow-up remix album to #thedownwardspiral, #furtherdownthespiral

The int'l version release features unique tracks: Self Destruction, Part Three, Heresy (Version), Ruiner (Version), Hurt (Live), and Reptilian (JP Release only).

[Shannon Legg @shazbollah]

@AusRationalist

[nine inch nails @nineinchnails]

20 years of With Teeth

[Shannon Legg @shazbollah]

@ChavuraStephen @aaronsmith Welcome to Gilead, Oz style 🙄

[Shannon Legg @shazbollah]

@roweafr @FinancialReview Don't come the raw prawn with me!

[Shannon Legg @shazbollah]

@AusRationalist @ABSStats

[NASA Webb Telescope @NASAWebb]

These dots are gas giant exoplanets captured by Webb's camera - the clearest infrared look we've gotten yet! Webb also detected carbon dioxide and heavy elements in the planets - evidence they may have formed in the same way as Jupiter and Saturn. https://t.co/WZYEYzQPYC

[Alan Watts @AlanWattsDaily]

Man seems to be unable to live without myth, without the belief that the routine and drudgery, the pain and fear of this life have some meaning and goal in the future. At once new myths come into being—political and economic myths with extravagant promises of the best of futures in the present world. These myths give the individual a certain sense of meaning by making him part of a vast social effort, in which he loses something of his own emptiness and loneliness. Yet the very violence of these political religions betrays the anxiety beneath them—for they are but men huddling together and shouting to give themselves courage in the dark.

[Alan Watts @AlanWattsDaily]

The desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. If I want to be secure, that is, protected from the flux of life, I am wanting to be separate from life. Yet it is this very sense of separateness which makes me feel insecure.