Getting a small group of people to shut up is as easy for women as it is for men. A stern matriarch is as effective as a bloke with a deep voice in bringing a classroom to order or an extended family to hush in preparation for whatever speeches they have gathered to hear.
But getting a large group of people to shut up? That’s a man’s job. Stalin, Mao and Hitler — three of the most impressive practitioners in history — follow a long line of blokes going back to Qin Shi Huang (259BC-210BC) who possessed the particularly male skill of being able to intimidate entire populations to keep their stupid ideas to themselves.
The readership of George Orwell’s 1984 would today not extend beyond nerdy sci-fi book clubs if the author had decided to call the chief villain Big Sister.
The reason for this is in the immutable characteristics of the two genders (which have survived despite the transgender lobby’s ferocious attempts to redefine them). No matter how hard they try, women just can’t pull off the unequivocal, intimidating authority of men. As Jordan Peterson says, “Women, on average, are higher in agreeableness than men. That’s the primary personality difference between men and women.”
Agreeableness is just another word for not being censorious. Women, to their eternal credit, will almost always prefer to talk things out. Men, meanwhile, are on average inclined to seek authority based on a threat of physical violence should things not go to plan. Australian comedian Carl Barron summarises it brilliantly in this comparison between the disciplinary styles of mothers and fathers.
Which explains why the introduction today of the under-16 social media ban in Australia has been such a dismal failure. We should have known this from the start. It was devised and implemented by a couple of Karens: eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant and Communications Minister Anika Wells. And despite their lofty ambition to show the world how modern censorship is done, it’s clear in hindsight that their hearts were never in it.
It’s already being reported that kids are getting around the bans by shifting to different apps, using makeup to fool facial recognition software or simply using their parents’ logins. What isn’t being reported is an abundance of kids putting down their phones and meeting down the playground instead. As if that was ever going to happen.
Grant and Wells almost certainly knew that kids would ignore the restrictions but their agreeableness precluded them from making the rules too draconian for the poor darlings. I mean, it’s tough enough being kid already without some government bureaucrat threatening you with a fine for talking to your friends, right?
ABC TV host James Glenday opened an interview with Inman Grant this morning with a plain question: “Today’s the day. Are you seeing this working? Are you seeing kids being booted off social media?”
Inman Grant replied that it was an “absolutely momentous day… [blah blah]… to make this a success for our kids … [blah blah] … of course there will be teething issues … [blah blah] … but the way that we’re looking at compliance and enforcement is around systemic failures … [blah blah blah].”
I couldn’t have put it better myself. The new restrictions place vague requirements on certain social media companies to ensure kids don’t use their services. (Curiously, the most dangerous platforms, which are magnets for troubled kids and pedophiles alike, are exempt from these laws.)
The objective seems to be to place the onus of excluding kids onto the platforms, branding them in the process as the villains in this story, and then use the legislation to drag the companies simultaneously through the legal system and the court of public opinion should it ever suit the interests of the government or its friends in the mainstream media. Also, normalising government oversight of everyday conversations is good practice for when the government receives orders from its overlords to shut down debate altogether. In case you haven’t noticed, almost every government in the “liberal” West is increasingly implementing various forms of censorship.
Grant has already announced that she won’t be renewing her contract when it comes up in January 2027. She’s been on about $450,000 a year for the past decade, thanks to us mug Australian taxpayers, so an early retirement is definitely an option for her. But if she wants to globalise her deplorable legacy, there will be plenty of offers from the countries that have already announced they too would like a suite of restrictions on social media that emulates and even expands upon Australia’s pioneering work. If the globalists get their way, North Korea will eventually need to hire Inman Grant just to keep up.
As for Wells, she’s busy fighting fires on so many fronts that she barely has time to even think about this social media distraction. In a softball interview, also on the ABC today, she said her responsibilities as Minister for Communications went way beyond worrying about what sites the kids were using; she was also focused on ensuring there was no repeat of the emergency-hotline outage which led to three people dying in September (under her watch, of course). She was also being harangued by other journalists about her extravagant travel expenses. It’s so difficult being in such high demand!
“I have three different portfolios and have countless requests to be in different towns and cities to do all different things. I could probably live every day three times over and not get to all the requests,” she said, sounding like Lady Gaga complaining about a hectic tour schedule.
If the government was really serious about getting kids off these platforms, it would have given the job not to a couple of trepidatious Karens but to a man who blends decisiveness with resolute execution. Sadly, none was available, but Prime Minister Anthony Albanese chimed in anyway.
Today was “one of the biggest social and cultural changes that our nation has faced,” he said, adding that the social media reforms were “profound” and “will continue to reverberate around the world in coming months.”
Actually, nothing changed, except the world was reminded, yet again, that Australians are compliant under an authoritarian government, and the only thing saving the country from degenerating into a fully communist totalitarian state is the sheer incompetence of its leaders.
