Chip Agonistes

Young Chip Rolley is owed a vote of thanks for reminding one and all that jumping to conclusions about other people, their likely actions and motives can be the height of presumptuous folly. If the Professor were sharing life and bed with Anne Summers, as does Young Chip, the week just passed would have presented a splendid opportunity to spend a lot more time at work, where the sound of gums gnashing -- and dentures grinding in the glass by the bed as well -- would be muted by distance. It cannot be happy times in the Summers household. If Chip has any sense he will not play too noisily with the pots and pans from under the sink. Poor Anne must be so irritable now that Saint Julia has been burned at the stake, she will have the smacking stick handy and be looking for someone, anyone,  on whom to vent her frustration.

Yes, Chip would have been well advised to spend more time at the office, but a quick glance at The Drum confirms that he has been avoiding his desk. No doubt he has secured a doctor's note for presentation to Mark Scott, explaining his absence as essential to the well-being of a disturbed senior  whose tortured brow needs constant mopping.

"Some chicken soup, my Little Love Prune?"

"Get it away from me, you testicle-dangler!"

"You must eat, my Anguished Angel. You simply must!"

[the sound of smashing crockery, followed by the thud of a solid object striking human flesh]

"How many times have I told you GI Joe is banned in this house and not to be hidden under the pillow. You have a perfectly good Tet Offensive Barbie in those nice black pyjamas  Tim Mathieson ran up on his Singer. And don't you dare play with the saucepans again."

Anne's delirium is understandable. She put all that effort into a just-published book decrying Tony Abbott's assaults on Gillard, only to see it rendered comically irrelevant by the misogynists of her very own favoured party. What is the poor woman to do now? If she promotes the book, it draws ironic attention to Labor's hypocrisy. And if she persists in calling on female members of the Rudd cabinet to quit, she'll have no gal cobbers whatsoever. It was all very well and good decrying a Liberal's hateful bias, but far from a good career move when it is the bruvvers' turn to order that their shirts be ironed.

Madness can be Anne's only refuge, Young Chip the sole safe object on which to vent her fury. Yet while Young Chip absorbs another recitation of the stock speech, "Great Moments in Abortion History: D&C Means You and Me", neglect is bringing on a crisis point at The Drum. Over the last few days, stories have been appearing twice on the homepage -- stories like this one, for example. Late last night, three other articles were double-listed.

Moreover, the wonderful post-Crikey zaniness that former editor Jonathan Green brought to The Drum has gone walkabout. No more Alene Compostas, not a sign of Bob Ellis doing to a web page what recent meals have inflicted on the front of his jumper. Not a trace of the fresh and approved opinionists of the sort the ABC sees as its sacred duty to save from lives of endless shuffling in those Centrelink queues. The best the site has been able to manage of late are  Daily Life and the Conversation re-treads, Clementine Ford and Ruby Hamad.

Get back to work, Young Chip. Your patient is beyond sanity and hope. And best of all, Mark Scott will let you play with the Ultimo cafeteria's saucepans.

The Drum's Lawyer-Support Scheme

THE DRUM, that grease trap for piffle which the ABC can squeeze in nowhere else, recently ran into a little trouble when a contributor was allowed to amplify Marieke Hardy's allegations against an entirely innocent blogger she accused of cyber-stalking. Drum editor Jonathan Green received a private, good-natured warning more than a month before the writ arrived that the column amounted to an open invitation to sue, but that warning went unheeded -- quite possibly because it was the advice of a conservative and, as such, had to be rejected as a matter of pinata-whacking principle. Given that precedent there is probably no point in alerting Green to any further potential liabilities his contributors incur when allowed to use the ABC's pulpit for slagging people they do not like. Still, as the ABC's payments to victorious plaintiffs are drawn on the public purse, attempting to save taxpayers the expense of another settlement is probably worth a shot. Here it is:

Jonathan: the warmist Clive Hamilton has slandered James Cook University's Bob Carter in a rant which has, just this morning, been published on your site. Here is the bit that would concern your editors, if you had any:

There is a direct Australian link in the Heartland Institute files. Bob Carter, an adjunct research professor at James Cook University, has a long-standing record of denying climate science. Now it is revealed that he is on the payroll of the Heartland Institute, to the tune of $1,667 per month for unspecified work. On his personal webpage, Carter declares that "he receives no research funding from special interest organisations such as environmental groups, energy companies or government departments," a claim that on the scale of truth matches his reporting of climate science.

Translated, the scientist Carter is no better than a propagandist for disputing the methods and findings of those other scientists whose opinions Hamilton finds more to his alarmist liking. Further, Carter is  accused, and accused blatantly, of being the low sort of person who would lie ("a claim on the scale of truth") in return for petty cash. Then add misrepresentation to the mix -- Carter is not paid by Heartland for "research", but as a source of expert opinion --  and what has just been published on the Drum amounts to an invitation for readers to hold Carter in contempt.

If Carter has not heard from lawyers already, it is a fair bet they will be in touch very soon.

UPDATE: While Hamilton demands the IPA reveal its donors, he was less keen on naming those who supported his own Australia Foundation. From the Silly in 2003:

"We don't schmooze and we don't lobby," he says. "We are not politically well-connected and we prefer it that way. We sometimes take up policy issues - such as private health insurance, the US-Australia free trade agreement, climate change and tax policy - but increasingly we inquire into social change."
Hamilton, too, is coy about benefactors but claims they do not attach strings to funding. He says the institute has a mixed group of board members whose opinions do not necessarily tally with research findings.

The Silly then goes on to list known Hamiliton backers -- "NSW Environmental Protection Agency, BP, AGL, the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) and Greenpeace". Whether Hamilton revealed these names or if they were uncovered by the reporter is not made clear.

Perthaps Hamilton would like to explain why those donors do not call his own credibility into question, especially the money handed over by the warmists at ACF and Greenpeace.

UPDATE II: Sinclair Davidson also has noticed Hamilton's reticence to discuss those who paid his foundation's bills.

Jews Suffer Most

IT IS NOT the Professor’s privilege to be Jewish, which would have required the mohel to come armed with a chainsaw, for such is the robust nature of Bunyip physiology. Still, while there is much appreciation for the sons of Abraham at the Billabong (and a readier affection for his more comely daughters), there are times when the utterances of prominent Jews cause great dismay. One such moment came this morning, courtesy of the National Times, which provides Vic Alhadeff, chief exec of NSW’s Board of Deputies, with an opportunity to mount the case for censorship. He doesn’t quite call it that, of course, preferring to write of the need for “responsibility”, but the thought of gagging objectionable commentary and comments is most definitely what lights his menorah.

And to be fair, you do have to be at least a little sympathetic. As Alhadeff explains, an entirely reasonable column he wrote for The Drum became a magnet for moronic anti-semitism. It can be found here and the comments, starting with the very top one, are genuinely shocking. Now Alhadeff might have complained that Jonathan Green, who presides over the ABC’s non-profit version of Crikey!, exercised no discretion in deciding what thoughts were aired on the taxpayer-funded site. And Green, for his part, might have countered that his site was fair and even-handed because the same thread also published many almost-as-noxious assaults on Catholics and Pope Benedict. That is, of course, the way the Drum works, habitually debasing even worthy articles with its core audience’s idiocy. One day, if the Drum survives the coming change of government, its funding should be moved from the public broadcaster’s ledger to that of the Health Department, as the best argument for its existence is that it provides a private diversion for snot-pickers, manic hair tuggers and mumbling ranters who might otherwise be out and about, much to the alarm of sane citizens.

But suppose Alhadeff’s notion of “responsibility” proved inadequate to the task of deep-sixing your more appalling examples of ratbaggery? And suppose, after that, the next logical and inevitable step was legislation to keep things nice. It would be introduced with the best of intentions, as most bad ideas always are, but what might we then expect?  Why Canada, of course, where gagging laws championed by Alhadeff’s Canuck counterparts have given Mark Steyn and others so much grief.

Could we count on journalists to defend the right to be offensive, stupid or both? Again, not if Canada is the model. Indoctrinated when not merely co-opted, journalists’ notions of truth, and their subjective appreciation of worthy truths, are for the moment on display daily in the Age, which is so committed to purity of thought it will not permit even a single conservative to sully its pages. That this preachy intolerance for opinions seldom heard in Fitzroy is a major factor in the newspaper’s decline worries those in charge not at all. They appear quite happy to cut their own throats so long as the newspaper's fade to black is set to the louder soundtrack of their enemies’ throttled gurgling.

Could we look to the courts for a champion of the right to be offensive? Why not refer that question to party-line hacks like Judge Mordy, who may well find you guilty of vilification and intolerance for daring even to put it.

That is what happens when we surrender to our self-proclaimed betters the power to determine good speech from bad: travesties built upon arrogance and the treachery of good intentions. It is why Alhadeff needs to read these thoughts and re-think what to him must seem as innocent as obligatory good manners. 

Or he could just consult Steyn, who several months ago noted the unintended consequences of a similar campaign to eradicate “ugly anonymity online”. Here is the nub: “It is bizarre that the [Canadian Jewish Congress] has found itself on the side of those who wish to silence the most effective defenders of Israel in Canada, but it is shameful that it has so little to say about these matters itself.” By “these matters” he means jihadist incitements to teach those sly Jews a real lesson. Draw attention to it, however, and various panels of speech nannies will be all over you with charges of incitement to hatred etc.

Alhadeff finds the Drum offensive. Perhaps he should demonstrate his disdain by declining to write for it – after, that is, penning a farewell column on the site’s deplorable editorial standards and supervision. See if you can get that published, Mr Alhadeff, and then think again about the ultimate victims of censorship.

Boycott The ABC

THERE is much to be said for Sinclair Davidson, of RMIT and Catallaxy, who seems a very sensible fellow. But there is one of his irregular endeavours which he really needs to renounce: writing for The Drum. He is not alone in this, as a small contingent of free marketeers, libertarians and conservatives also places its thoughts on Jonathan Green's taxpayer-funder iteration of Crikey!, the site he formerly edited and whose politics and journalistic standards, such as they are, must have been prime recommendations when he was recruited by the ABC chapter of the New Establishment. The argument could be made that Sinclair and others are doing their bit to remedy The Drum's daily demonstation of the liberal limbo -- low as you can go while leaning way, way to the left. Unfortunately, while it is always nice to see flashes of good sense in a madhouse, the token presence of reputable sorts at The Drum is counterproductive.

Sooner or later, unless climate change drowns Canberra in the meantime, we can expect to see Prime Minister Abbott  set about the ABC with axe, cudgel and, ideally, thousands of letters informing current employees of their need to find new jobs. This will come as a terrible shock to Jonathan Holmes, who will blame Alan Jones, and to all the other members of collective, who will not enjoy being reminded that "work" is what their viewers and listeners are doing while they enjoy three-month summers breaks. The move also will be denounced in the Fairfax press, where the locusts who have eaten the heart out of fairness, in-house intelligence and truth will have been looking to the ABC for their further, low-exertion employment.

To grasp why Sinclair's well-intentioned urge to reach the widest audience is so misguided, picture the scene as the Senate Estimates Commitee gives Mark Scott the rounds of the kitchen for his indulgence of ideology and inaccuracy. That will be the moment when Fred Hilmer's nephew reaches into his briefcase and produces a sheaf of articles by Sinclair and others. Look here, he will say, we are open to opinions of all varieties and this portfolio of rabid extremism proves it. What Scott will not say is that, as Sinclair almost noted yesterday, any example of conservative thought on The Drum is published not to promote civil discussion or rational analysis but as an invitation for the site's commenting audience to let the bile pour forth.

Full disclosure: Some months ago, Green invited the Professor to contribute, but his letter went unanswered. What would be the point of allowing oneself and one's thoughts to become tokens and, within minutes of publication, an amusement for cretins who have learned how to click the "comment" tab?

In a perfect world, shunning the ABC would not stop at The Drum. How long have Coalition voters bemoaned the ABC's leftoid bias? Yet every day, at least when the current affairs shows are not taking 12-week breaks, conservatives dutifully present themselves for hectoring by Virginia Jones-Holmes and all the other composite characters extruded by the national broadcaster's groupthink. Yet we never do a damn thing to stop it, other than whine.

Wouldn't it be lovely if, the next time Tony Abbott or one of his colleagues is summoned to an ABC studio, he and they simply let the opportunity go through to the keeper. It would, at the very least, put the ABC on the back foot for a change, obliging Scott to explain why his organisation is not fouled with bias. Lost opportunities to spread the righteous word? No, not really. The larger chunk of the ABC's audience, the bit on the port side of politics, is not open to argument or persuasion, while the right-thinking minority would cheer long-awaited evidence that its side's flag-bearers are serious about doing something more constructive than grumbling amongst themselves.

Realism says that it is too much to expect a politician to spurn a microphone, even one that distorts his words. But for the rest of us, boycotting the ABC should be an easy choice -- indeed, an obligatory one.  

Next At The Drum: The Softer Side Of Hitler

Dear Ruke,

Thank you for most considerate apology. Those atom bombs dislupt Emperor's plan velly much. No more digging on Burma Ra'way. No more work for Unit 731 biorogists. No chance for Rape of Nanking, Part II. Aussie POWs get fed at rast as well, that cause much glief, too.

Thanks again, Ruke. And thanks to ABC for pubrish fine sentiments -- and also to your teachers, who do such a rovery job of make you think correct.

Regards,

Your pal, Tojo

UPDATE: It is nice to see that the overwhelming majority of commenters see the author for what he is, the noxious embodiment of academic abstraction. Being the ABC, he does have some supporters., "Pedro" amongst them:


...I had a neighbor for some years who had been a commando in WW11 and was captured by the Japanese. He would not talk a lot about it but had survived Changi, the Burma Railway, and working in a Japanese coal mine. His summation was that as long as you did not make waves and were lucky enough to keep fit there was no real problem.

So yes Japan was no worse or better than the West during the first half of last century but as the winners we write the history even though it is obviously nonsense. The worst thing though is that its taken me 70 years to put together something in my mind approaching the truth.

So I say too lets apologise for the worst war crimes of the first half of last century - the atom bombing of Japan by the US and the bombing of Dresden by the poms.

The ABC, which has not had its budget cut,  is killing The Collectors (a Billabong favourite) and other shows in order to redirect cash to the sort of programmes and projects Mark Scott sees as more worthy, The Drum amongst them. That should tell the budgeteers of the incoming Abbott government everything they need to know.

Purple People Feters

IT IS not an expression much used these days, “born to the purple”, but it seems the moment is ripe to bring that ancient signifier up to date. Quite a few years before Alice Walker collected a Pulitzer for her tick-the-boxes chic-lit tale of a young black woman’s oppression by sexism and racism (always a winning double), the colour purple was a very special thing indeed. Extracted with great effort from a Mediterranean mollusk, the resulting dye was restricted to trimming the togas and tunics of Roman and Byzantine emperors and their heirs. If you were born to the purple, you were special – starting with the flunkies and flatterers who played midwife to that sense of presumptive entitlement and extending to lesser mortals’ endurance of the most bizarre behaviour. Appoint a horse pro-consul, knock up your sister or send legions to spear the waves in a war on King Neptune and the common folk would know and understand how the purple flash authorized the beneficiary to be as weird, arrogant and contemptuous of reason as the imperial fancy of the moment dictated. Generations of consanguineous mating did nothing to promote sanity as a palace trait, but it certainly conferred an expectation of unquestioned indulgence. 

 

Little people need no longer defer to imperial lunatics, but there can be no doubt of the pressing need to see the re-introduction of some purple-trimmed truth-in-labelling. Once again it would alert observers that nurture, rather than nature, has produced an individual whose access to nice jobs and the opinionisers’ pulpit is owed to pedigree, rather than cogency. There are many potential case studies. Dan Cass, who swans sometimes at The Drum, where Jonathan Green plays court eunuch to many royal pains, is one example.

Andrew Bolt dealt some months ago with one of Gibbering Dan’s errors of fact, in that instance his assertion that the loony who shot US Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (and many others, including a conservative judge) was “a right wing assassin”, rather than a dope-addled conspiracist with a bee in his bonnet about, of all things, the abuse of grammar. The Drum’s stable of writers produces a daily and endless ker-plopping of taxpayer-funded muck, so there seems little point in taking a further look at yet another specific example of its output. Much more interesting is Cass’ personal history, for it may help to explain one of the mysteries of the age: why those of so few gifts occupy such a secure place in the small, tight and forever incestuous world of the New Establishment.

It’s the purple, you see. Or rather, in this case, the green.

Start with young Adam’s paternal bloodline. He is, first of all, the son of Moss Cass, whom older readers will recall as the designated tree fancier in the Whitlam cabinet. Other clowns in Gough’s circus came to grief and saw their reputations suffer, but Cass the Elder was blessed with a kind portfolio, one that offered no temptations to confer with confidence tricksters in pursuit of Arab loans or, given that his personal secretary was not a Filpina hottie, for seeding the jojoba beans in another hubby’s paddock.

All Moss had to do was express his admiration for trees and tolerate being ignored by Tasmania, which kept right on flooding Lake Pedder no matter how hard he tried to pull the plug. Ineffectual and politically impotent, the then-Member for Maribyrnong’s only lasting achievement was to crank up the thermostat of alarm, which your proto-catastropharians and green fund-raisers found most congenial. Today, with the environmental movement so hot and bothered that a tax on exhaled breath is a pitched as essential to national survival, the current mood of righteous panic is Cass the Elder’s most enduring legacy.

All that tree talk and frustrated righteousness around the family table gave the adolescent Adam very little chance of growing up to be anything other than a scold. But the job opportunities, they were bonza. Who wouldn’t want Moss’ little boy on the payroll? All those family connections and political links! The kid’s swaddling clothes came hemmed with purple and a very royal green.

Barely in his twenties, he was, as the Drum thumbnail says, “the Australian Conservation Foundation’s official observer at the Earth Summit (UNCED) in Rio in 1992.” The bio doesn’t relate the rest of the story, that Brazilian authorities locked him up for being a pest – an option unavailable, sadly, to opponents of tortured writing. Still, it must have been a nice trip, and that jailhouse glamour can only have added lustre to his CV when dad’s great mate and ally Lee Rhiannon – yes, that Lee Rhiannon, then of NSW’s upper house – had a staff vacancy to fill.

So did Melbourne Museum, where the newly minted Melbourne Uni grad became, as Adam crows, “the youngest curator in Museum Victoria in 1996-7, appointed as Curator of Science and Society.”  

Onward and upward on the purple carpet our ardent Adam rose, perhaps never noticing that he was being borne on a billow of irony – the proletarian advocate who has nestled all his life in the bosom of the elite.

Not that Cass floats alone in that purpled firmament. Very often on Q&A, for example, there will be at least one panelist whose seat has earlier been warmed by a family connection. ABC and SBS favourite Waleed Ali shares his insights on one matter; his wife, Susan Carland, subsequently is invited to share hers on another. GetUp’s Simon Sheikh bangs the climate gong on Q&A; so does his shiksa, Children’s Climate Crusade careerist Anna Rose. The New Establishment, it’s quite the purple thing. Whether born into it or adopted, the happy few can rest assured that the stewards will never entertain an inquiry into the factors that grant so many of their favourites a rails run to microphone and bank.

It never ends. Indeed, the Drum, which often seems a crèche for kids of the well connected, is today helping another purple baby tap her birthright. This example is particularly arresting, not least because Parkville Asylum PhD candidate Mira Adler-Gillies’ reflections on the Arab Spring is a compendium of the empty clichés  that rattle around university common rooms and empty heads. (“structural challenge to a global dynamic” … “imperial crusades by the US” … “irreversibly altered the status quo”,   “worship at the altar of the free market” … “neo-cons steering the Bush crusade” … “the cult of the unfettered market” … “Cowboy intervention” … “the economic and political hegemony of the US” … “post-colonial imperialist interventions” … “there has been a paradigm shift” … “the future in the hands of the people”) Mira has youth’s excuse for scooping her thoughts from such a font of tosh. After all, uttering sacred mantras is a standard element of tribal initiations, and the delight with which she has assembled them speaks of a pride and eagerness to carry her spear in the Great Push Forward.

But how to explain The Drum’s decision to publish? Mark Scott’s bid to snaffle the Crikey demographic is, or alleged to be, run by adults. Upon receiving such a submission, did they not notice its hackneyed vacuity?  What they must surely have noticed, could not by any stretch have missed, was young Mira’s entry in the purple stud book.

The Adler part of her surname, well that is her mum, Melbourne University Press publisher Louise. The Gillies bit, that is the gift of none-too-funny John Howard impersonator Max. Well that is a prime purple pair right there, and their progeny’s intention to gain attention cannot have been hurt by a link that stands outside straight bloodlines. Ms. Adler’s deputy at MUP is Jonathan Green’s wife. Who knows, perhaps the Adler/Gillies and Greens chatted about their kids' hopes and opportunities at that "kill the pig" pinata-whacking on election night in 2007.

Some years ago, when the war in Afghanistan had a definite sense of mission and was going well, US intelligence experts rounded up many Taliban suspects and sympathizers by tapping sociology’s expertise to map networks of friends and family, clans and likely conspirators. Perhaps it is time for a similar to project to chart the links that bind the New Establishment – the former Labor flacks who preen on the ABC, the politicians’ partners (or siblings) who purport to provide unbiased commentary (or comedy), the sympathies that blind watchdogs to their cobbers’ errors.

It would make for quite a graphic, that finished chart – almost all the New Establisment’s purple arrows pointing very firmly to the left.

Eating And Beating

IN The Australian, Gavin Atkins writes of the Drum and its editor’s peculiar idea of balance. The article lacks an illustration, which is a pity because this picture of the spread Jonathan Green put on to celebrate Kevin Rudd’s 2007 election would have been perfect.

(Hat tip to Sophie Cunningham, who long ago flushed her Flickr snapshot of Green whacking a John Howard piñata at the happy gathering, but allowed the ABC editor’s celebratory chocolate cake to remain. Thanks, too, to Sophie’s life partner, Virginia Murdoch, for preserving the Howard pinata’s image in her own Flickr stream.)

UPDATE: Jonathan Green, what a class act! Not only a superb (and modest) pinata-whacker, the Drum editor puts Gavin Atkins in his place:

GreenJ Jonathan Green

@GavAtkins you're so right! commissioning you is scraping the bottom of the barrel!

3 hours ago

Funnier than a dead baby's doll.