Catsidhe

Amanda Vanstone¹ and Brendan O'Neill² talk about Greta Thunberg


Oh dear sweet baby Jesus on a topheavy quadbike in a thunderstorm, I don't think I've heard such a load of tendentious, arrogant circle-jerking and question-beggary in my life.

"And we're querying the degree to which Greta Thunberg is being used by other people. It's a serious question."

No it's not, you supercilious twerp. It's not a question at all. It's been a taken as an axiom that she is from the very concept of the conversation, and everything you two have been furiously agreeing with each other about³ is based around that assumption. "Given that Greta Thunberg is being used by other people, and given that it's a bad thing to use Greta Thunberg, is it a bad thing that Greta Thunberg is being used by other people? Discuss."

Then there's a load of "isn't it unfair when the other side keeps using the 'won't someone please think of the children' argument and I look like a monster when I use my usual rhetorical technique of withering, bullying sophistry on them, and that's taking advantage of children, won't anyone please think of the children." Because it can't possibly be that people have opinions and the right to express them before the age of eighteen, it must be because the Evil Social Marxist Conspiracy in teh ABC is putting them up to it in order to make you look bad.

Oh, and pleading for "won't someone please think of the welfare of Greta, who is delicate and fragile and autistic and has mental health issues and let's just go ahead and imply that young people aren't able to have agency, autistic people aren't able to have agency, therefore Greta must be someone's hand puppet, why are you being so mean to Greta."

Brendan O'Neill said that. Brendan. O'Neill. Said that. The Brendan O'Neill who called her a "millenarian weirdo". The Brendan O'Neill who complains about her "monotone voice"⁵ and "dead eyes".

Oh, won't someone think of the children, indeed.


Is this egregious nonsense the best that the Right has to offer as intellectual justification for itself? This ad hominem, petitio principii, ignoratio elenchi,⁶ incompetent sophistry. Because as an English Essay in year 10, this would get a "1/10, see me" in red pen, and an urgent referral to the school counsellor.

And the next Right Wing intellectual gatekeeper who says one word about "Virtue Signalling" on the Left is going to get a lot of tightly focussed anger and no mercy in the slightest, because I have utterly lost my ability to pretend being able to even with that lazy, ignorant, vacuous, hollow, hypocritical sneer.


And also note very carefully where I said "the Right". I do not mean "conservatives", because I know conservatives who are deeply thoughtful and insightful in debate, even where I disagree with them. (You know who you are.) These people are not "conservatives": they are Right Wing Culture Warriors of the first order, each and every one of them worse than any of the examples on the Left they like to point at accusingly. They are hypocrites and sophists, and if I were to say that they aren't even self aware enough to understand the depth of how fractally wrong they are, that's the charitable option, because the alternative is that they do know, and knowingly and deliberately spout this not-even-wrong poison on purpose.⁷


But what really got me furious at this was that in every word, and behind every assumption, they are taking even the possibility of agency away from Greta Thunberg, on the assumption that it is impossible for an autist, let alone a young one, to have any. And that ableist bullshit is something which cannot be allowed to stand.

(And in answer to the strawman Vanstone and O'Neill preemptively raised in answer to this point, no, it's not that you're not allowed to say that an autist is wrong, it's that you two are trying to claim that she's not even capable of putting forward an opinion: you aren't arguing against her argument, you are attempting to nullify her argument: you are trying to make her argument not have to be answered, purely because she is autistic. That is the definition of ableism, and that is the definition of ad hominem, and that's the high point of your exercise in intellectual masturbation.)

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[1] Former Federal Liberal minister for keeping foreigners out, and not the worst Liberal Immigration Minister in living memory but only because all her successors seem to have held a "yeah? Well hold my beer and watch this" attitude to the job, leading to the current incumbent, Dutton.

[2] A sort of Renaissance Horrible Excuse for a Human Being, making him overqualified for the Center for Independent Studies.

[3] including, but not restricted to why adults are right about everything, why people under 18 years old are entitled to their opinions but shouldn't ever actually have the right to express them, why children having agency will lead to them being "entitled"⁴, that and why it's a bad thing that you're not allowed to give kids these days a "clip across the ear".

[4] presumably: entitled to having agency, which is a bad thing if they should disagree with people like Vanstone and O'Neill, but a good thing if they are a member of the Young Liberals.

[5] I dunno, as an autistic 16 year old making speeches to large groups and international gatherings in her second language, I don't think she's doing too badly myself, but then I'm also autistic and presumably don't have the right to an opinion either.

[6] and just, I don't know, look up a list of logical and informal fallacies and check off the ones which aren't present in that discussion.

[7] Which is to say, I have in mind a list of people who I very much suspect to be exactly that sort of populist authoritarian⁸

[8] Some people say that "populist authoritarian" is a good start for a definition of "fascist". (When followed by such details as public subsidy and support of citizens in good standing; no support for and arbitrarily punitive measures of severe strictness against unpersons non-citizens or citizens not of good standing; a restrictive and shrinking definition of who counts as a person citizen of good standing; expanding militarism and militaristic fetishism; and the manipulation of elections to ensure a predetermined result, up to and including bribery and threats of violence. So at least we're safe on that last count. Guess there's nothing to worry about, then.) I couldn't possibly comment. That name you're thinking right now, I didn't say it.

Shorter Rick Perry (at the end of the article): Gay people don't have Human Rights. My Invisible Friend said so.

What do you do when your much-vaunted rally to show the ‘deep’ and ‘widely shared’ feelings of the astro-turfing lunar-Right demagogues, racists, and neo-MacCarthyites only attracts the usual core crowd of Useful Idiots, hangers-on and other such sad desperate wanna-be Liberal candidates loonies? (Ask for thousands of ‘Real Australians’, get a handful of LaRouchites, “Fuck off were full” stickers, and truckies who may or may not have been paid to go... do you think that might say something, right there?)

Simple: make shit up. As usual.


But that's OK: Tony Abbott still like to pretend he's the True Voice of Hardworking Average Aussies, and will continue to do so until just before the next election when he'll will be thanked for keeping the seat warm and very firmly dumped from the leadership for being a gross embarrassment to the principles which the Liberal Party are supposed to stand up to, or even to Howard's perversions thereof.

Barnaby Joyce will probably continue in Parliament, but he will also continue to laugh when everyone else does, not quite able to understand that we're not laughing with him.

And Alan Jones? He will continue to be Alan Jones, and I can think of no worse punishment.

On “Our” ABC:

A simmering conflict between The Australian newspaper and the Greens has become open warfare, with Greens leader Bob Brown accusing the national broadsheet of a vendetta against his party and telling it to "grow up".

Yeah. “accused”:

Greens leader Bob Brown has accused The Australian of trying to wreck the alliance between the Greens and Labor. We wear Senator Brown's criticism with pride. We believe he and his Green colleagues are hypocrites; that they are bad for the nation; and that they should be destroyed at the ballot box.

I love how the word “accused” implies that there's any doubt. The Australian's explicitly declared editorial policy is to see the Greens ‘destroyed’. As Jeremy Sear wrote in Pure Poison at the time:

Well, there you are. You can take pretty much everything The Australian says about the Greens in that context: they are not interested in giving them a fair hearing, or listening to what they have to say, or presenting their arguments for public assessment: they want them “destroyed”.

Everything you read about The Greens in that paper can now be almost completely discounted by that fact. You can only conclude that if there’s a smear, they’ll run it. If there’s a positive story, they won’t. If there’s a way of presenting the Greens’ policies in the most damaging, least accurate light, that’s how they’ll be presented. The Greens will not be given fair opportunity to respond to critics’ claims about them (including the asinine ones made in that editorial). It will be relentless, one-sided, hostile propaganda.

Anyone who seeks to rely on The Australian for information should be aware that whatever they’re told about the Greens will be subject to the most extraordinary, deliberate bias, with the express purpose of having them “destroyed at the ballot box”.

And when the Greens call The Australian on it, it's all about Brown's “accusation”. (Sure, they mention that editorial. Once. In paragraph 15 of 21. That should cover it, right?)

I'm sorry, what was that about the ABC's “Left wing bias”, again?

Former immigration minister in the Howard years, Philip Ruddock, has called it [the Supreme Court decision that refugees under Australian control actually have rights under Australian Law] "a diabolical" decision that will present the courts with a case load they will struggle to handle.

Thus telling you everything you need to know about Ruddock, and by extension the entire Howard regime approach to refugees.

Is that man still a member of Amnesty?

Matt Taibi at Rolling Stone magazine:

Vast forests have already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it's going. But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I've concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They're full of shit. All of them.

For those of you inclined to not read because you think it's all abuse on those noble Teabaggers, just hold your nose and read it anyway. Because it gives evidence and reason why these people are ignorant, hypocritical idiots. Like this bit:

Scanning the thousands of hopped-up faces in the crowd, I am immediately struck by two things. One is that there isn't a single black person here. The other is the truly awesome quantity of medical hardware: Seemingly every third person in the place is sucking oxygen from a tank or propping their giant atrophied glutes on motorized wheelchair-scooters. As Palin launches into her Ronald Reagan impression — "Government's not the solution! Government's the problem!" — the person sitting next to me leans over and explains.

"The scooters are because of Medicare," he whispers helpfully. "They have these commercials down here: 'You won't even have to pay for your scooter! Medicare will pay!' Practically everyone in Kentucky has one."

A hall full of elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing against government spending and imagining themselves revolutionaries as they cheer on the vice-presidential puppet hand-picked by the GOP establishment. If there exists a better snapshot of everything the Tea Party represents, I can't imagine it.

Oh, and all of you who have found deeply meaningful and important reasons why Muslims don't have the right to do legal things in places you don't want them to? Like set up a community center in a building they own?

I'm sure your reasoning is sound, but please understand that you have come to the same conclusion as the sort of people for whom not even a dead muslim is safe enough. No really, you've no doubt come up with a wonderful rationalisation, but you're standing amongst people who really do just hate and fear Jews Blacks Mexicans refugees Muslims.

Surely that alone must make you stand back and wonder...? Nah. Who am I kidding.

The self-awareness seems to stop with the smug Q.E.D. (And the canonical imputation of smugness and hypocrisy and making-shit-up-to-make-one's-self-feel-better to liberals and the Left.) Saying that the once-known-as Cordoba Center is a mosque (it isn't), and it shouldn't be built because it hurts Fox News' feelings (it didn't when they interviewed Rauf when it was first proposed), and it shouldn't be built because it's just too close to Ground Zero, is just so much bullshit. Because if that were true, then there wouldn't be any trouble building mosques anywhere else, would there? Would there? Is California too fucking close to Lower Manhattan? And claiming that "dur nineteen hundred thousand percent of Americans (who subscribe to the New Republic) don't like it based on what they've heard from my lies about it hurr der derp," is more than meaningless. Lots of people went to the Nuremberg rallies too, fucker. For God's sake, if you want to not be compared to Nazis, stop acting like them.

Just admit that you hate and fear Muslims, that it's an irrational thing bordering on pathological hysteria, and that it might as well be Jews you're shrieking about. Or Gays. Or Gypsies. (Oh, wait, that's happening in France.) Or Catholics.


I'm going to go think about something else now, before I have an aneurysm.

So the wanna-be fascists and assorted Useful Idiots of Corpocracy are busy telling us, over and over again, how Nationalised Health Care is not just wrong in practice, it's wrong in theory, and it's just plain morally wrong. They warn us of encroaching socialism, they complain that Britain's NHS is increasingly inefficient (of course, it would be crass to point out that the rot really set in when Thatcher set about rebuilding it in her own Darwinist image — where the NHS suddenly had to compete against itself, thus killing all community and social concern — and hammered by the genially incompetent Labour, who removed everything which still worked).

They say that the Tea Party protesters are all kind-hearted humanitarians, just looking out for the little guy. Well, except insofar as they're almost to a man arguing vehemently against their own best interests, which doesn't make me give too high an estimate for the average IQ at a Tea Party rally. And the next time some Libertarian douche tells you that Libertarians are kind hearted and give to charity and care for their less fortunate neighbours, yeah, you can go ahead and call them a fucking liar to their face.


And the next time a Corporatist Useful Idiot tells you that the US system does not have any endemic problems, and that people get good care out of the compulsory Private Health Insurance model, yeah, you can call them a liar to their face as well. Because the Insurance Companies are not contributing to the Health Care system, they are parasites upon it. Their concern is not the health of their clients, and if it ever was, it has not been for a very long time: they are Corporations, and their legally mandated first and only concern is to their shareholders. To this end, they make really good profits if it is a legal requirement for everyone to give them money, and even more again if they can manage to find a way to never have to pay any out.

The US system is one of the least efficient Health Care systems on the planet, and if you were to plot outcome/cost, it would probably end up bang in the middle of the Third World. Sure, if you've got the cash, you can get the best care on the planet. And if you've almost got the cash, then you can enjoy your recovery on the streets with your homeless family. And if, like the vast majority of Americans, including those mindless idiots at the Tea Party rallies, you don't have the ready cash, well then I hope you like dying on that street, because the emergency rooms are long since filled up and overflowing with all the other people who can't afford to see a proper doctor or afford hospital admission.



The only reason we have it so good in Australia, as far as I can figure it, the only reason, is because the Insurance Companies have competition: single payer public hospitals and public subsidy of doctor's visits in the form of Medicare.

And of course, those Insurance Companies claim that it's ‘uncompetitive’ to have actual competition (they'd much rather have the US Oligopoly situation, where it doesn't matter how much you treat your ‘clients’ like human landfill, the other guys are all exactly as bad). And the usual Useful Idiots from the IPA and CIS and Sydney Institute come out and pretend that this lie is not a lie.

Fuck that. We do not need, we do not want a US-style clusterfuck to happen to our Health Care System. And if we want to avoid a UK-style clusterfuck to happen, we need to undo all the Howard-era and Thatcher-inspired managerialist and pseudo-competitive crap now, before the rot becomes unrepairable.

There is hope for the Australian system. I'm not sure there is hope for America.

It is a crime to be gay in Uganda. It is deemed to be such a serious crime to be gay that it can be punished with life imprisonment.

But this is not enough, it seems. You see, if being gay is, in its own right, serious enough to warrant life imprisonment, then what do you do when some is gay, and HIV positive? ‘Aggravated’ gayness, if you will? Simple. You take the next logical step, and punish it with death.


That bill would also make it illegal to discuss homosexuality, or even for a landlord to rent to a homosexual person. When asked about this monstrous denial of humanity, a minister is reported to have said

“We are really getting tired of this phrase human rights. It is being abused. Anything goes, and if you are challenged? 'Oh, it's my right'.

“Anal sex? Human rights. Robbery? Human rights. All sort of nonsense? Human rights.”

And beyond the sheer monstrousness of this in its own right (and a vague wondering why this hasn't led the news reports here...), I have two points to make.

First is that this is an entirely logical extension of the fundamentally broken thesis that some people have less rights than others. And while not being able to marry is not within many orders of magnitude of this, it is on the same continuum. The arguments are basically the same.

And second: the argument is being made that this is a push led by religious politicians from another country. When I say that, I bet most people will automatically think of Wahabbist Saudi Imams. And they'd be wrong: the trail leads to fundamentalist Christians in Washington.

The problem is not Islam, or Christianity, or even necessarily religion: the problem is small minded xenophobic fucks who have it on good authority that God hates the same people they hate, and it's a sin to think about it too deeply. That it's a sin to think.

They are the enemy, whatever they're wearing, whatever language they're ranting in, whatever name they give to the imaginary friend they abuse to justify their prejudices.

Pyne you fuckknuckle, the question was whether people who are so outraged about Stern Hu (and rightly so), that is, you, might not be hypocrites when their concern is compared with that they showed to the human rights of David Hicks, ignored and reviled for years.

To turn that into an attack on the hypocrisy of the Left? That's just the most mindblowing act of stomach-churning sophistry I've seen, and that's while you're sharing a podium with that vile toad Akerman.

Well done. Just don't come anywhere near me, you smug, arrogant, virulent little turd.