I am astonished! How the hell can anyone serving with the Australian Defence Force in Iraq feel “ashamed[wtf!!!]” at not getting shot at or blown up?

If you are in a war then every day someone is not trying to kill you or injure you is a good day.

War is war. It’s not an action comic, it’s not a shoot-’em-up computer game. It’s real; if you get killed you stay dead, permanently.

Trying to count victory by the number of casualties you suffer yourself is downright stupid; we saw enough of that lunacy in the Viet-Nam War; it is only a cover-up for bad training and bad leadership – both political and military. In marked contrast, the ancient Spartans considered it a great victory if a war was won without a drop of blood being shed. Maybe we should be paying more attention to the ancient Spartan strategoi than to the armchair admirals and their silly theories in Washington and Canberra.

This is the second time this has happened, I unfortunately misidentified Tim Train’s comic post at Sarsparilla, assuming it to was the work of Tim Sterne.

IANA expert in the human mind, but I can readily imagine how a person who wants to believe can remember catalogues depicting children in underwear when the catalogue really only had kids in pajamas proximate to women modeling bras and things.

I actually have been following the Senate inquiry hearings. I thought this was one of the weakest submission points – it’s very general and second-hand – other submissions had actual magazines or talked about specific ad campaigns.

I just mention it because I suspect that the ‘kids in underpants catalogues’ might meme is a conveniently limited and narrow way of identifying what it is that pedophiles get off on. From personal experience (as the unwitting object of such attention) as well as observation I think there are few limits to what can be drawn into playing a part in sick fantasies.

Anyway, I’d have found this submission more convincing if it had presented some examples of the pictures. My impression is that the department stores have gotten a lot more nervous about including pictures of kids who aren’t fully covered up. They don’t feel confident that they can produce pictures of kids which aren’t sexualised, so they skip it altogether. I think in many ways this represents a victory for the pedophile way of seeing, since it’s being allowed to set the default.

In his submission, Mr Geary said that professionals working with offenders had told of clients’ “interest in, and use of, sexualised images of children within advertising and marketing”.

He quoted Royal Children’s Hospital Gatehouse Centre co-ordinator Karen Hogan, who said staff working with children and young people who engaged in sexually abusive behaviour had noticed “a marked increase in perpetrators using underwear advertising magazines for stimulation that are delivered to homes”.

“Males tell us that they are particularly interested in the children’s section and that they can use these magazines without detection as it is so commonplace to have this material delivered to their homes,” Ms Hogan said.

Victoria Police Forensic Interviewing of Sexual Offenders manager Patrick Tidmarsh is also quoted as saying such images encourage pedophiles.

“What sexualised/eroticised child images in advertising obviously do is provide validation for those considering further exploitation of children and sex as part of a pernicious descending spiral,” he said.

Just on the ‘Target catalogue’ thing. I read these things religiously – they are inserted into the local paper now, I suppose too many people have no junk mail stickers stuck on the letterbox – and they never show kids in their undies.