On my soapbox

A question of personal ethics

by frogpondsrock on February 25, 2012

in blogging,On my soapbox,plastic pollution,potential insanity,thinking out loud

I would never in a million years deliberately align myself  with a brand like Nestle. The evidence of poor corporate practice is far too overwhelming for me to ignore and the thought of supporting a brand like Nestle is anathema to me. I lump Nestle in with my other least favourite brand Monsanto and I try to avoid any purchase of their products. It can be quite tricky trying to work out exactly where their corporate tentacles are tangled. So you might find this post  an interesting starting point.

I am an adult living in a first world country and as such I have the advantage of being able to pick and choose my lifestyle choices.

I am standing on my soapbox today, NOT to make anyone feel bad, but to ask questions that bother me.

I am baffled by the silence from a large number of bloggers that attended the bloggers brunch yesterday. I  know that there were bloggers at this brunch who I respect and I am interested in their thoughts. Why the silence on twitter yesterday? Did you miss the conversation about Nestle on twitter? Are you still working out how you feel? Or did you respond and I missed it?

The bloggers brunch is now a familiar event in blogland. Bloggers get invited to a brunch. An air of exclusivity is maintained which make the invites to these events highly sought after. Brands representatives  turn up and throw buckets of freebies at the lucky bloggers and the blogger in turn goes home and tells their  friends and readers how wonderful said brands are.

Everyone is happy happy joy joy.

Except me.

Watching from the wings and tweeting my displeasure about the fact that Nestle was one of the brands at the most recent bloggers brunch held in Sydney yesterday, my thoughts were Nestle? Really? Then I thought that maybe people didn’t know about Nestle’s atrocious corporate record, so as the #bloggers_brunch tweetstream started to flow I tweeted this tweet using the #bloggers_brunch  hashtag.

Just to make things easy for the bloggers attending the brunch I tweeted a link to the Nestle Wikipedia page. The controversy and criticism section makes an interesting starting point.

By this time other people had tweeted their displeasure at Nestle being involved.

I was at work at the time so I wasn’t following the twitter stream too closely, but I was very surprised by the absolute silence from the bloggers at the brunch.

So I started to poke at the organiser a bit by responding to her Nestle tweets with rather provocative replies of my own.

Deathly silence.

poke poke poke

I am sure there are bloggers out there who don’t want to ripple the bloggy gravy train by saying anything negative about the wonderful brands who were at the bloggers brunch. And from some of the instagram photos the brands were very, very generous. But I do wonder, is a bootload full of plastic product and free samples of  milo and tim tams really worth that much? Is it that easy to become so caught up in the hype and power of  brand events that it doesn’t matter what companies are giving away the free stuff as long as it keeps on being free?

I would like to finish up by stating very clearly that it is not my intention to start throwing stones, or to make people feel bad. I am trying to start a conversation about how we consume, not just the products but the message from our corporate masters.

The message I get from all these brand events is one of  rampant consumerism an any cost and honestly people the planet cant really take much more punishment, but that is a post for another day.

{ 58 comments }

An Open Letter to Dick Adams Federal Member for Lyons

by frogpondsrock on September 6, 2011

in arseholiness,headfuck,On my soapbox,politics,real life

An alternate title to this post could well be Dick Adams staff don’t care about his constituents opinions.

Dear Mr Adams,

Yesterday I decided to ring your office in Perth, Tasmania and voice my concerns about the offshore processing of refugees.

Your own website Mr Adams clearly states that

My priority as the Member for Lyons is to listen to the community and work in the best interests of all my constituents.

As your local Federal Member of Parliament, please feel free to seek assistance from me if you have any enquiries in your particular area.  My priority is dealing with those issues that are directly related with Federal Government such as Centrelink, Veterans Affairs, Health, Immigration, Superannuation to name a few.  I know there are other issues that cross all government boundaries and I am happy to help with those as well.

So I felt pretty confident that I could ring your office, politely tell you that I was concerned about the offshore processing of refugees and then I could happily go about my business, secure in the knowledge that my federal member was listening to me.

What I didn’t expect Mr Adams was your female staff member to be extremely condescending and dismissive of my concerns. I did not expect to be rudely asked where I had received my information about the governments refugee policy. I certainly did not expect to hear a tone of condescension and incredulity when I told your staff member that I receive my information about current affairs via twitter.

Twitter? She scoffed, as if I had just said I received my news bytes via the fairy telegram service at the bottom of the garden.

That was the end of the conversation as far as the office lady was concerned, I could hear the derision and laughter in her voice as she dismissed me as another bleeding heart, lefty, greenie nutter.

And that stung.

Way to go Mr Adams.

I would like to remind you Mr Adams that it is the 21st century. It is also the 21st century in Tasmania.

I use twitter as my main means of information gathering about all world events.

I tweeted my displeasure at your offices condescension and dismissal of my concerns to my 1518 followers

Kim
just rang Dick Adams office to say I was concerned about offshore processing of refugees. Office girl was very dismissive of my worries.

 

My tweet was then retweeted by two twitter friends within Tasmania with a combined following of 4053 people.

You do the maths Mr Adams, three people in Tasmania with a follow count of 5571 people between them, tweeting the one message.

That is a lot of fairies at the bottom of a lot of gardens.

Yours in despair,

Kim Ponds Rock

Southern Midlands.

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I should publish the photos of the naked St Kilda players as well!

by frogpondsrock on December 28, 2010

in arseholiness,On my soapbox,politics,social justice

As an act of solidarity with the St Kilda Schoolgirl.

I have been following the #dikileaks saga very closely and my heart goes out to the girl in the middle of this whole nasty mess. A young girl who became pregnant to a St Kilda footballer and was told to piss off when she asked for help.

A seventeen year old schoolgirl.

Who met some football players when they held a footy clinic at her school.

She was 16 when, in February, several Saints players visited her high school in Melbourne’s south-east for a community event. A month later, she was at an athletics meeting in Sydney when the Saints beat the Swans at home. She waited with a friend by the change rooms after the game to see the players.

“They didn’t even question my age from the start because they recognised me from the school clinic. When we went back to the hotel room, [they asked] how old I was and I said ‘I’ll be 17 in a few months’ and they were like, ‘Oh, yeah, OK, that’s legal,’ ” she says.

Two St Kilda players were later cleared by police and the AFL of any wrongdoing.

Are any alarm bells ringing yet?

I have watched as the St Kilda players have held press conferences and talked about invasion of privacy, shame and distress etc etc.

A word to the wise boys, if you had kept your dick in your pants none of this would be happening.

I have watched as the St Kilda Football club have vowed to pursue this child for the next fifteen years.

I have watched as a hungry media pack have pursued a minor and managed to successfully portray this young girl as a predator and malicious troublemaker and I am angered and appalled at the way this girl’s reputation has been systematically destroyed.

The only journalist as far as I can tell that has asked any serious questions about the whys and wherefores of grown men having sex with a schoolgirl has been Derryn Hinch.

The St Kilda schoolgirl is just that, a 17 year old schoolgirl and I have watched in dismay as some very powerful grown men have tried to bully her into silence.

That is why I have weighed into this debate.

I can’t stand a bully and The AFL and the St Kilda Football club are showing themselves to be bullies of the first order.

Shame on you.

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The Weeping Sore, An Article by Richard Flanagan.

by frogpondsrock on December 19, 2010

in arseholiness,Grief,guest post,On my soapbox,politics,real life


The article has been removed because of copyright issues.

Bugger.

You can still read it here on the Tasmanian Times website. or here at the The Guardian.

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I hope they bite you!

by frogpondsrock on December 5, 2010

in Animal cruelty,blogging,On my soapbox

Yesterday I was standing in line waiting to buy some crayfish. I was talking to the woman in front of me and we were both watching one of the workers cook a crate of crayfish, that he then snap chilled and brought over to the counter to be bought by hungry locals. The woman and I were casually chatting about crayfish and favourite recipes, when I mentioned that I was buying live crays and that my husband was going to cook them himself. The woman looked me straight in the eye and icily said I hope they bite you!

She then proceeded to buy six good sized cooked crays and walked out the door.

It wasn’t until I arrived home and replayed the conversation in my head that the hypocrisy of the woman’s statement struck me. She was more than happy to buy cooked crayfish but was horrified by the fact that I was buying live crayfish. Her six crayfish had presumably been alive themselves only an hour previously. I wonder if when she ate them, they bit her?

Late yesterday afternoon I received a phone call from my daughter Veronica telling me  that one of her ducks probably had a prolapsed cloaca. The duck was obviously distressed and was bleeding  from her cloaca. In the course of our conversation we talked about the pain the duck must be in as well as the problems of the blood attracting predators overnight as well as the risk of the duck getting fly strike.

Veronica quickly killed the duck, dressed it out and then wrote about it on her blog.

We have become so divorced from the realities of where our food actually comes from in this western society of ours that sometimes I despair for our future. We are spoiled for choice and we shop in large supermarkets with the most disturbing thing being the incessant Christmas muzak. Children think that milk and eggs come from the fridge and we are never ever bothered by the thought that all those rows of plastic wrapped meat and all those bins full of frozen poultry were raised and then killed by someone somewhere.

As I am eating my Christmas dinner this year I will know exactly where the meat I am eating has come from and who has killed it for me because I will be eating roast duck at Veronica’s.


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