With that in mind, we thought it might be worthwhile to take a look back each week and see who was winning the Outrage Olympics this time last year. Which stories are still with us, and which ones vanished without a trace? Who forgave and forgot, and who maintained the rage?
TV personality Charlotte Dawson had the nation talking on August 30 after attempting to commit suicide. Dawson had endured "eight hours of unrelenting abuse on Twitter"; her feed was littered with abusive messages she had retweeted like "Go and hang yourself, you utter waste of oxygen" and "PLEASE DO THE PLANET A FAVOUR AND GO HANG YOURSELF". Dawson's hospitalisation finally convinced us that words can hurt, and no celebrity was ever bullied on Twitter again.
The Shire, Network Ten's much maligned rip-off of Jersey Shore set in Sydney's Sutherland Shire, was mercifully axed. There was much rejoicing, and network bosses finally got the hint that Aussies wanted quality programming like Celebrity Splash, Reef Doctors and SlideShow.
Coles was heavily criticised after an ad for cleaners at one of its Tasmanian stores stipulated "no Indians or Asians... please". In retrospect, giant "NO INDIANS OR ASIANS... PLEASE" signs outside Coles stores would probably be less offensive than the advertising they've come up with instead.
Tasmania's House of Assembly outraged homophobes by passing a bill that would allow gay couples to marry; the bill went on to be defeated in the Legislative Council in September. There's a good chance it'll all be a moot point in a few weeks anyway.
The United Nations firmly rejected Julia Gillard's newly announced plan to process asylum seekers on Manus Island; luckily, Gillard was later deposed and a more compassionate solution was reached.
Stateside, Republican Senate candidate Tom Smith suggested a woman who was impregnated by a rapist faced a similar situation to one impregnated out of wedlock. Smith later walked back his comments, but lost the election anyway; fellow Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin, who made even more controversial comments about rape a week before Smith, also lost by a wide margin.
(Meanwhile, Republican VP nominee Paul Ryan exaggerated how quickly he could run a marathon, but nobody outside the Huffington Post and Ryan's much faster brother took any real offence to that.)
A man armed with an automatic rifle and a handgun killed two people in a supermarket near New York before shooting himself. This didn't receive as much coverage as similar tragedies (I mean, Jim Carrey didn't disown any movies over it or anything), but following shooting rampages the month before at a Sikh Temple in Wisconsin and a cinema in Colorado, it added momentum to calls for tougher gun laws that peaked with the Sandy Hook massacre in December. Alas, a bipartisan Senate amendment fell over at the first hurdle in April, proving that inaction equals tragedy plus time.
Fortunately, aliens aren't any more proactive than we are. It's been a whole year since Black Eyed Peas singer Will.i.am debuted a single on the surface of Mars, and the Red Planet still hasn't retaliated.
In China, a political dissident convicted of state subversion based on evidence provided by Yahoo! was released from prison after serving a 10-year sentence. The whole incident just highlighted that people in China don't enjoy the same freedoms we do in the West, and that Yahoo! isn't as trustworthy as Google.
A UN Security Council meeting was convened to discuss the pressing issue of Syria, but it turns out they needn't have worried, as Syrian president Bashar al-Assad assured the media that, "despite several mistakes, there is a strong bond" between his regime and the Syrian people.
Finally, Guardian columnist George Monbiot asked his readers to mark August 28 2012 in their diaries as the day the world went mad, citing as evidence that a record Arctic ice melt had been overshadowed in UK headlines by debate over a third runway at Heathrow Airport.
One year later, however, and we've got our priorities in the right order.
