As Melbourne's Herald Sun correctly reports there was a great media war this week between old media and new media. Radio and internet. Old right-wing breakfast radio shock-jock Alan Jones had gone a bit far this time in his attack of the Prime Minister. Using social media one of the major replies came from journalist and academic Jenna Price.

Major online petition through Facebook and many interviews and comments into the mainstream media from Price also. This included her comments on Jones' radio station to one of his colleagues...

She said Jones' apology in the wake of his comments was "something like my own kids would make if they were trying to pretend they hadn't done anything bad".

Let's focus on that. The rest I couldn't care less about these days. Shock jocks offended people in the past and will in the future, Just As Now. Radio station PR spin saved men like Jones in the past, it will again, Just Like Now. Their media spin force up against Jenna Price and pals is like Darth Vader in a lightsaber duel with Donald Duck: Short and conclusive with a fragrant ion wiff of burnt pillows.

Much more interesting is the way Ms Price talks about her kids. It's socially acceptable enough to her and to her interviewer to go by without comment. That her children, teenagers if I recall, will conjure insincere apologies to her in order to get off the hook. To an ear like mine that reveals a great deal about her parenting credibility at home and what her children have been trained to do in case of being confronted with "anything bad."

Time to tie this in with Knight N Daze latest post about domestic wars.

I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.
And when you see your home as a war zone, the same things happen.
[...]
Your children, buckled and pleading, follow your instruction out of fear and apologise for being who they were born to be. You call it respect, and so will they and they'll forever confuse the two.

So very true. People cannot be soldiers and war if they have empathy. And that is why the Christmas Truce of 1914 had to be put down harshly. It is not possible to humanise your enemy, to feel for them, and also be able to hurt them. Quite the contrary, which is why Enemies of the State have been vilified in the past as Huns, terrorists, sambo, darky, wog, greaser, chink, gook, slope, camel jockey, nip, kraut, etc. Just as before, Just As Now.

When children learn to devalue others, they can devalue anyone, including their parents. For children to be using terms like those it shows that they have been trained. For children to be making false apologies out of fear in order to get away with something, especially if it's to their parent, it shows that they have been trained for war.

Knowing this and hopefully being at least a little convincing, I return to the beginning. Isn't it it an awful smoking gun that Jenna Price has said her children make insincere apologys to their mother?

Worse, she feels safe saying so in  public without rebuke. Probably quite correctly, this post excepted. The fact she has this domestic problem is even used as a debating point that depends on others having this problem normalised too. Sad state of Australian values.

Finally, an open question. What might her reception of the wayward Alen Jones' apology really represent now we know this about her family?