Sea-lioned over a photo of Gina Rinehart

This is a photo of a woman in Australia who apparently needs no introduction; Gina Rinehart is the world's richest woman and one of the biggest players in Australian mining. This is the face that you always see when people complain on social media about fuel subsidies for mining companies. Apparently it's a big issue with a lot of progressives. I wish I had a dollar for every time I have seen this woman's photo next to a socmed appeal for the government to eliminate the mining and agriculture fuel subsidy. It must be annoying for some people to contemplate. It certainly annoyed someone yesterday after I said on socmed that not all mining companies are giants like Gina Rinehart's. It annoyed him so much that he went away and found a news story from 2014 stating that 80 percent of mining in Australia is owned by multinational corporations.

I mean, that's enough right there to get you slavering like an overstimulated green monster-from-hell. You just want to eliminate the fuel subsidy so bad that you practically wet yourself out of frustration and rage. Multinational corporations? You can hear the aggregate response in the progressive spaces on socmed screaming bloody murder at the notion of multinational corporations getting something from the government WHEN IT'S AS CLEAR AS THE NOSE ON YOUR FACE THAT THEY MAKE MEGABUCKS AND DON'T NEED ANY GOVERNMENT HANDOUTS! And they take their profits overseas so none of it ever gets near the cobweb-infested pockets of low-paid and hardworking Australian hospitality industry staff. The poor things.

The problem I think here is that while the mining industry might be 80 percent owned by multinational corporations by value, in terms of the number of companies operating in the sector it's likely to be more like 20 percent. I would say that the overwhelming majority of mining companies operating in this country are small, privately-owned Australian enterprises, many of which rely to a large degree on the fuel subsidy in an industry where profits are often very rare. Small players in mining might go for months and months, if not longer, without any income at all.

But my contention was dismissed off-hand by the sea lion because I had NO CITATION. Although I have written a number of stories on mining in the past and so have rubbed up against the industry in the form of its smaller fry on numerous occasions I chose not to dignify his response with even the vaguest reference to this information and simply told the fuckwit to "rack off". The poor chap almost shat himself. He had been unfailingly polite throughout the exchange, he countered, and how dare I abuse his good nature with my callous verbiage. I had been relentlessly sea-lioned by this crap-headed piece of gangrenous doodoo for the time it took to do half-a-dozen tweets and I had had enough. I told him. I did.