Catsidhe

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

Take it, Krusty:

"It's a joke! When you look at me like that, it's a joke! (Oy!)"

Someone left the asylum door unlocked again.

It's difficult to tell what John Roskam is burbling about here, but I think I can summarise what passes for an argument:

• The Liberals were going to lose no matter how hard they had fought the ‘Culture Wars’.
  
• Some have argued that they should stop fighting, but they are wrong, because:
  
• The Left (in a sampling representative of the entirety) is calling for Stalinist purges: a ‘de-Ba'athification’ of Australian Society, if you will.
  
• “There are two reasons why a conservative government should intervene in cultural issues.”: (That is to say; for conservative read ‘Liberals’ (which arguably they aren't in any meaningful way), but that non-conservative (read: Labor) governments should not intervene in any way whatsoever, what do they think, they have a mandate or something?)
  • The public (read: the people who go to the same barbecues as Roskam) care. (That they might care about the other side from Roskam is not to be countenanced.) And
    
  • It's not actually a Culture War, because it's not about Culture. It's about Money. Money which should be carefully spent only on the right (indeed, the Right) culture. Remember, kiddies, it sounds like grown-ups talking if you talk about careful use of money, rather than the real agenda: making sure that Lefties don't get a goddamned cent, the filthy commies.
• Curricula are a legitimate political subject, because whether a Leftist black-arm-band propagandist or a Rightist clean-cut rational superman gets to write the syllabus is more important than making it meaningful and accurate.
  (actually, in the Real World, neither is true, because the syllabus is the result of dozens, hundreds of people working towards the teaching of a subject leading to understanding of the issues involved as well as the bare facts — as facts are sterile without meaning to support them, but obviously Roskam couldn't see the Real World with the Hubble Telescope.)
  How sad that many of the prime fighters on Roskam's side in that field have been so keen on coming up with a theory and then going on a search for evidence that fits. Then turning around and accusing the entire rest of academia of that exact practice. Windschuttle, I'm looking at you.
  
• The ABC is a legitimate battleground, because it is paid for by the government, and therefore has a responsibility to leave half or more of the population without representation on TV screens. That the commercial channels all subscribe to the Right and broadcast its propaganda almost continually is not sufficient argument for even token balancing by the ABC. Andrew Bolt doesn't get enough airtime, in other words, and Phillip Adams gets too much.
  It is not “purely a creature of civil society”, whatever the hell that is supposed to mean, and therefore it is entirely right and proper that it be headed entirely be Howard sycophants and cheerleaders of Roskam's ilk. If the filthy Left were to get its hands on it again, then the ABC might be used to push a social agenda, and that would be outrageous! ... if it were the Left doing it, of course. Actually, I'll come back to this.
  
• It is entirely right and proper that the Right should vet every exhibit in the National Museum, because mentioning the ridiculous slander that Harold Holt was taken by a Chinese submarine (and how, precisely, does this theory help Labor?) was more Leftist propaganda, warping the minds of the populace, and not documentation of the sort of paranoid conspiracy theory put about by the anti-Labor opposition at the time.
  
• University Professors are all, of course, lazy Stalinists with sinecures (actually, where do these sinecures exist, exactly? None of the academics I work with display any tendency to sit back and rely on their Howard-Hatred to get them through: they're too busy desperately applying for the next grant and writing papers to keep their publication count up, without which they will be fired.) Government ministers passing research proposals off to such fair-minded people as Paddy McGuinness, on the recommendation of such rational observers as Andrew Bolt, who then proceed to turn the thumb on research proposals that they could not possibly understand, overriding recommendations of committees staffed by people who do, based on ideologically based misunderstandings of the titles clever use of time by only reading as far as necessary, is merely sensible reining in of an out-of-control academic industry, and not any sort of ideological censorship of research they simply don't like the sound of. I mean it's not like there needs to be any right of appeal, or even to tell the applicant why they were rejected, after all.
  
• Further, the universities weren't hit hard enough, because whatever Howard did, there were still University professors who publicly disagreed with him. I mean, how dare they? Right-wing thinktanks whose existence is to shout down anyone who disagrees with Howard and his ilk? Perfectly alright. Why should anyone else be allowed a say? If you're paid from the public purse, then you have a beholden duty to side with the Right. And if you are paid from a private purse, then you have the bought-and-paid-for duty to side with your employer. Who will most likely be of the Right. Or you can join the Australia Institute, haha.
  
• “Invariably his opponents came from one of three sources: the ALP, the ACTU or the universities.” It's amazing how such a simple sentence neatly implies that there was not, is not, nor could possibly be, any independent rational opposition to Howard and his great rational plans for Australia remade in his image. The Greens do not exist in Roskam's world. Nor, it seems, do those millions of people who are not members of the Labor party, yet voted for them anyway.
  
• “Anyone who verges even slightly from the accepted wisdom of university staffrooms ... is unlikely to gain preferment.” And Roskam's sample size is what, again? None? When was the last time he actually spoke to an academic who wasn't actively frothing about how he was robbed, robbed, in his last performance review, they all hate him, they're all Marxists, you know, and Stalinists, and Masons, it's all a conspiracy to keep people like him out of his rightful place as Dean, a conspiracy!!!.
  Whereas, back in the real world for a second, academics' preferment is based on two things: how much money they bring in to the department/faculty/school, and how many papers they and their team churn out (for which the government bases part of the federal grant to the university, and thus reduces again to money). When you start talking committees and positions like HoD and Dean, then of course politics starts playing a heavy part, but you have to have a power base on the money side, and from then on it's how well you play politics... what personal views you might have become subsumed in that. No, it couldn't possibly be a result of any normal healthy process. If there is a preponderance of Lefties in any organisation, then it must be pathological. If the Right weren't so preternaturally rational, you might call it an article of Faith.
  
• Right-wingers must be supremely good to get advancement over a Left winger. There is no other explanation, it is all a conspiracy to keep the Right out of power. This is why the ABC board is so heavily stacked with Howard sycophants. This is why ARC grants have to be vetted by P.P. McGuinness. It's so unfair to Rightists that Leftists had to be systematically replaced with the Ideologically Correct. Any attempt to remove any Rightist is the result of an Ideological Cleansing, completely different from the process which put them there in the first place.
  
• And besides, it's all just healthy debate, right? No hard feelings? It's not like we tried to expunge the Left from any positions of power wherever we could or anything, it's all the healthy free exchange of views. Why should we have less of a say, just because we spent so much time and effort cheerleading for someone so thoroughly rejected? We tried to change sides when the result couldn't be ignored any more, that's gotta count for something, right? Are you still there? Anyone?
  
  Please?
  

And the thread running through all of this is the thought that the Right has the right, the duty, to fight for what they want, and to deny the anyone of the Left any say whatsoever. And then, in a massive display of chutzpah, they turn around and start screaming blue murder that they are being viciously repressed. Why, a couple of people have suggested that they might prefer that Albrechtson and Windschuttle weren't on the ABC board, the horror! Jackboots on the streets! Stalinist thoughtcontrol!
Wait, did someone mention Ramona Koval? Why should eleven years of systematically attempting to exclude anyone not of sufficient Rightness from strategic positions of power have anything to do with it? And anyone who tries to point out that obviously it wasn't a successful attempt gets a slap across the back of the head for completely missing the point.

It's been a couple of weeks, and some people have said that after eleven years of the blatant stacking of public positions with cronies and sycophants, they might prefer to see some of those formerly useful idiots go back to their day jobs. And how do they react? By completely losing the plot and summoning the spectre of death squads and thought control.

I don't want John Roskam to lose his dayjob. I don't want Andrew Bolt to either, or Albrechtson, or Windschuttle, or McGuiness. I even, despite what they keep saying I'm saying, want to keep seeing them publish commentary. If nothing else, it is now possible again to be amused at their frothing, rather than appalled and terrified. (When the Communist party are out of power, they're funny, like a kitten attacking a rottweiler. When they're in power, they're horrifying; the lunacy which once amused now potentially has power over your life.) What I don't want is Paddy McGuiness having a veto over what will be researched in this country. What I don't want is Windschuttle and Albrechtson having power over my last televisual refuge of sanity. What I don't want is for my daughters' syllabi to be determined on politics, rather than pedagogy and accuracy.

Roskam is arguing furiously against the situation he eulogises: one ideology only having an ear in government. That is precisely what the problem was with Howard, where half the population, more, was dismissed as irrelevant idiots. And now Roskam, and Bolt, and the others, are all terrified that now they are in that discarded half, and are desperately pleading to still be relevant.

Despite their rantings, they will still be allowed to write, and publish. And their writings still have a greater distribution network than those of the Left. And they still get to talk on the Left bastions as well.

The Right haven't been excluded from public debate. They're merely being asked to keep to their share of it. For once.

Quickly running through some bookmarks, I have a quick look at what Peter Faris QC is up to.

It turns out, he has become even more of a complete frothing lunatic.

Why did the Liberals lose? Was it Workchoices? Was it the accumulation of lies? Was it arrogance? Was it simply having been in power for too long?¹ Might, just maybe, Labor have won in their own right, rather than merely accepting the default after the Liberals dropped the ball?

No:

“The entirely predictable landslide to Labor has occurred because the Liberals became a soft-Left political party. They not only moved to the centre, they crossed the centre line.”

The problem was that the Liberals became all Socialist, apparently. You may be wondering as to the evidence of this world-gone-mad occurrence, but you don't need any: Faris, from his lunar right viewpoint, saw the Liberals, such as Downer, Ruddock, Costello, and of course, Howard, as so insufficiently rabid as to practically be communists. And they lost not because Labor joined them heading right, but because they were joining Labor, heading left.

Or, in other words, Faris has been smoking something which really didn't agree with him, and it has set off the Delusions again.

It's only a pity that he has turned off the comments in his blog. They used to be good for some laughs, being typically even more insane than the usual offerings on the alter of Andrew Bolt. It seems that either someone said something too batshit insane for even Faris to countenance, or else the few dedicated Lefties who tried to argue with him finally had him yell shutupshutupshutup! and put his fingers in his ears permanently.




[1] This is John Roskam's view: the Liberals lost (that Labor might have won is not to be countenanced) was partially because of Workchoices, which he has belatedly realised was never popular at all, but mainly because people got bored of having Good, Just and Right people in their rightful place in charge power. That's right, it wasn't the Liberals' fault: it was those ungrateful masses, but they'll learn, oh yes. And the Liberals' only proper response is to go further to the Right.

There, at least, Roskam and Faris join up again.

The Federal Minister for Cerebral Aneurysms, Julie Bishop, has declared that it is unacceptable to ask people even to think about an area in which controversial (and widely unpopular) legislation has been imposed, even if that legislation is not actually mentioned. If the Government has passed a set of Industrial Relations ‘reforms’, then it is ipso facto Union propaganda to even consider the effect of legislation on employee conditions.

Yes, you heard it from the mouth of one of the most humourless androids in Howard's cabinet (and that's an achievement), that it is not acceptable to think about what the government has done. Because Thinking leads to Questioning. And Questioning leads to Disagreement. And Disagreement with the Government is Sedition. And Sedition is Terrorism. A law says so, it must be true.

But we shouldn't be thinking about what social damage has been done by Howard and his gang of thugs. Not just because thinking is not acceptable, but because money is the only meaningful measure. If you can't sell it, it's beneath notice.

Kevin, when Pauline Hanson praises you, do you think that this might be a sign that your position is really fucked up?

I mean, you cut the number of African refugees, in favour of Iraqi and Burmese. And fair enough, no-one disagrees with that. It might even be considered praiseworthy.

But you don't stop there, oh no. You have to go for the CEC vote, and open up your mouth to blurble about how the real reason was because of how those niggers uncivilised Africans (really, they're like murderous children) are the direct cause of a wave of Crime.

You know, like how Liep Gony got himself beaten to death by white guys. He was obviously asking for it, wearing a short skirt in that neighbourhood at night.

Hell, why should evidence that this is not true get in the way of blaming the victim? Oh no, you have something better than mere data — you have unverified anecdotes! That's much better than evidence!



For gods' sake, John, call the damned election so I can vote you and your ignorant, racist thugs the hell out of my life.

It's amazing, really. John Ratbastard Howard opens his mouth, and pure shit dribbles out.

( Out with the scalpel again: “PM says AWA study wrong” )

For gods' sake, John, call the damned election so I can vote you the hell out of my life.

First, an entrée to whet your appetite for narkiness:

NSW makes 'quantum leap' in infrastructure spending

And I believe it. If a government is going to spend money on something that can't be described as ‘pork-barrelling’, I fully expect any increase in expenditure to be the smallest increase possible.

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A question: why is it that when some dropkick self-proclaimed “Mufti” with seven followers and a chip on his shoulder says something mindbogglingly stupid, it is a direct reflection on the entirety of Islam, but when a bishop does so you can't say the same about Catholicism, let alone Christianity.

I mean, seriously, that's completely insane — and he is a bishop, officially ordained and backed up by the oldest theocratic state in the world, Vatican City. And if we were to make any wider allusions to the mental state of Roman Catholics, we would be castigated from one end of the letters page to the other. And rightly so.

But one tinpot dickhead in suburban Allah-knows-where says something much less insane (although still unpleasant), and the entire “Muslim community” is held responsible. Not even recognition of the difference between Sunni and Shi'a, yet. I mean, this Catholic Bishop said this stunningly stupid thing, why hasn't the Anglican Synod taken responsibility for condemning him and stripping him of power?

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For Gods' sake, call the election and SHUT UP!

‘"I defend all of those campaigns, they do provide information, the guidelines under which they're being conducted are the same guidelines that the former government had," he said.
[You remember, the guidelines which Howard spent so much time decrying as obscene and over-the-top at the time]

"I think it's perfectly legitimate to provide information."’
[Information about ‘how much we love you’, and ‘how much we've done for you’, and precisely how much you should be grateful to us. As well as our campaign to keep you scared of everything.]

For the love of all that's holy, John, call the damn election so I can vote you the hell out of my life.

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The democratically elected leader of a sovereign nation gave a talk at a University the other day. He was greeted in a somewhat less than civil manner.
By a hypocrit.

All you frothing lunatics out there, calm the hell down. Ahmadinejad is not what I would call a nice person either. I wouldn't particularly enjoy living in Iran any more than you would. BUT HE IS NOT HITLER!! He doesn't even come close.

You want mini-Hitlers to hate? Robert Mugabe, how's that for one. Or the Junta in Burma. (Aside: “Hoon-tah” dammit, not “Djun-tah"!!!1! ABC, I'm looking at you!)

Everyone who is buying into this hysterical bullshit about how EEEEEEVILL Ahmadinejad is, is drinking the Kool-Aid which is leading directly — do not pass go, do not collect $200 billion — to the invasion of Iran.

And when that goes pear-shaped, and it will, it will be at you that I will be pointing and calling out as having helped it happen.

Money not motivating factor behind lease signing: Brough

Mal “They're like children, honestly!” Brough has signed a 99-year lease deal with Galarrwuy Yunupingu over his people's traditional land. Money was not a part of the negotiations, says Brough, only the opportunities available to his people.

Well, yes. But don't make the mistake of thinking that Yunupingu went into this bright-eyed and optimistic. As is usual with Propaganda, the kick in the tail is not omitted, but is buried in the penultimate sentence, where it is hoped no-one will get around to reading it. Quote:

“He is being given the option of compulsory acquisition under the Northern Territory intervention or signing over to a 99-year lease.”

That's a hell of a ‘choice’, isn't it? Yunupingu signed that lease under extreme coercion: sign, or lose your lands altogether. Sell your birthright to the government in return for the right to continue living there, or else we'll take it anyway, and you, and your people, are fucked.

Yes, I can imagine the discussion about the opportunities available to Yunupingu's people: be a shame if we were forced to turf them off our land once we are forced to evict you. 'Course, if you signed this little piece of paper, none of that need happen, does it?



And, of course, the ABC displays its Stalinist left-wing bias again, sucking up to the left-wing bleeding hearts like it always does, making things so unnecessarily difficult for the Government.

Wait, what?



That dull drumming sound you hear is me beating my head on the desk. Again.

ISPs try to tell the government to shut up and listen for once. It doesn't seem to work.

You see, the article head is absolutely correct: “ISP-level filters 'unworkable'”. They are precisely as unworkable as they were the last time some ignorant dropkick suggested this. And the time before that. (Wasn't it Beazley that time?) And the umpteen dozen times before that.

Maybe we should propose some sort of plebiscite which legally prohibits from proposing complicated and ultimately futile technical ‘solutions’ to undemonstrated and unprovable non-problem, when they can't even spell the name of the technology in question, let alone understand the simplest part of it.

If Senator Coonan wants to stand up and embarrass herself in public like this again, she should have to pass a test first, demonstrating a basic comprehension of, say, the ISO 7-layer networking model (details of where the model fails, and how, not required but give extra credit), and a quick description of how TCP/IP works (in terms of handshaking and conversations: packet diagrams give extra credit).

I really have had it up to here with people who don't know what I do — who would need several years of intensive training just to understand how very little they do understand — and yet feel the need to tell me how to do it. There's a lot of it about.

Pointy Haired Bosses are everywhere. Especially in Parliament.

( finally, in closing, ... )