Category Archives: So evil

Code of Silence

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I watched Code of Silence, a documentary on the abuse of women that seems to be an integral part of Rugby League. It was a horrible experience and it made me feel angry at just about everyone and everything:

  • Angry that these women were hurt, degraded, and then disposed of.
  • Angry that the players don’t seem to realise they have done anything wrong.
  • Angry that the coach says they are acting in the manner of all 20-something males (here’s a hint – they weren’t!).
  • Angry that the head of the NRL passes the buck to the clubs.
  • Angry that the clubs brush it off as a regrettable incident.
  • Angry that some women think it’s OK to dress like a skank and go to a club in order to ‘get laid’.
  • Angry that the league has to provide ‘consent training’.
  • Angry that the training seems to be a waste of time.
  • Angry that those morons (watch the documentary and try and tell me they aren’t…) don’t think there is anything wrong with picking up random women and forcing them into degrading sex acts with your whole team as long as you ”put them in a cab and [say] thanks” afterwards.
  • Angry that one of the victims thought getting drunk was an integral part of having a ‘fun time’.
  • Angry that the reporter pressed for detailed descriptions of the sex acts.
  • Angry at the Footy Show Guys for brushing the whole thing off.
  • Angry that they showed full-frontal male nudity on the camera for no good reason.
  • Angry at myself for ever having looked at pornography, which leads to guys thinking this kind of thing is acceptable.
  • Angry that some people think that these players are just “being naughty”.
  • Angry that the apoplogy wasn’t.

Watching made me feel sick, I don’t know how anyone could watch that documentary and see anything but evil. How do you even start to change a culture like this?

It needs a miracle.

Jesus, please.

RodeoClown: depressed.

Losing the War

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Is it possible to say precisely when a war ends? When I was a kid there was a version of the boogeyman legend that we repeated to one another constantly, in tones of delicious dread. Hitler had survived the wreck of Germany and was still alive on a South American plantation, plotting his revenge against the world. Even as we played at recess and argued about our favorite TV shows, we worried that he was lurking out there, maybe right outside the school’s fences, waiting for a chance to snatch at young Allied warriors. But there was a point — unrecorded, unknown, but still undeniable — when even this tottering ghost of the fuhrer became too old and weak to trouble the sleep of the world any longer. The rumor died, and took the last terrors of the war with it. Then the cool rumor kids were passing around was that the Holocaust was a hoax.

War ends at the moment when peace permanently wins out. Not when the articles of surrender are signed or the last shot is fired, but when the last shout of a sidewalk battle fades, when the next generation starts to wonder whether the whole thing ever really happened. World War II ended as war always ends — by trailing off into nothingness and doubt. Its final monument has never been seen by mortal eyes. It’s a phantom image at the edge of a rumor: an unmarked grave in the depths of the South American jungle where a weird and decrepit old man, half forgotten by the world, at last entered the lists of oblivion.

-“Losing the War”, Lee Sandlin

Set aside an afternoon and read through Lee Sandlin’s Losing the War. It’ll take a while, but you can read it in chunks, and it is worth taking the time to do so. It is a haunting, and frightening look at World War Two, and war in general.

RodeoClown: praying.