Civility and logic from our righty friends

By Ant Rogenous
Cross-posted at GrodsCorp

Anyone silly enough to bother with Timmeh Blair’s blog nowadays might have noticed this fatuous little dig at a recent post by Kim at Larvatus Prodeo.

Let’s contrast that with the overwhelmingly lovely, heartwarming and not-in-any-way-despicable behaviour of several of his good mate Andy’s BoltStrokers™ over here, commenting on the news that Gough Whitlam is in hospital. 

Pompous git will only be missed by the Labor nostalgics.
kevin of Armidale

  

Um, who cares? He was wasted space as a politician now he’s wasting space in a hospital bed. The sooner these overinflated egos are off the public nipple the better.
Craigresides of Newbridge

   

Nothing trivial I hope - this bastard ruined my Australia.
An Australia I lost a father and a grandfather to in trying to save it from external tyranny only to be betrayed from within by this…
Hell will be too good for him.
Lawrie of Sydney

   

May he suffer the long and painful death that he and his ilk have inflicted on Zimbabwe in supporting terrorism in Rhodesia.
Mournful of Brisbane

  

If it is terminal, it is 38 years too late to help any one.
Parlirama of Dural

 

Thank heavens for “conservatives” — politics would be a filthy arena without their shining example to guide us all.

 

WELL FANCY THAT

By Jeremy

Tim Blair has heard of the words “civility” and “logic”.

And, although I don’t want to jump to conclusions here, knowing OF the words, he may conceivably have even uncovered what they mean.

So you were all quite wrong. Put THAT in your pipe bong and smoke it, lefties.

It’s not “soppy”, it’s beautiful

By Jeremy

I’m sick of people putting Andrew Bolt down. The guy’s a RESPECTED POLITICAL COMMENTATOR who occasionally writes PROFOUND AND NOT IN ANY WAY TRITE OR CREEPY monologues on life.

The man pours his heart out and you cynical beasts mock him for it. Shame on you.

CHORE DRAMATISED

By Jeremy

Timmy Blair is awash with excitement over finally being able to hose down his car:

Having been banned from car-washing for so long, I didn’t even know if our place had a tap somewhere out the front (it did). Nor did I know how neighbours might react to blatant car-based hosing…

Wheeling my car out for its first hose wash since 2003 involved some risk. Remember, a fellow was allegedly murdered in Sydney last year for watering his lawn. I positioned the car so I’d have a good line of sight up and down the street.

Riveting stuff. And it is drama with a message, too. If there’s a villain in this piece - and given the plaintive laments against killjoys stopping children playing in sprinklers, clearly Blair thinks there is - it’s apparently Tim Flannery, for forecasting dry dams if governments didn’t restrict water use. They did, and the dams in Sydney didn’t dry up, which apparently means he was wrong about everything and it’s time to stop letting him punish the children.

Down with “responsible” people making us take precautions to prevent us actually running out of water in this dry continent. Damn their black hearts!

I certainly hope Melbourne’s water authorities take up Timmy’s call and once again let us play fast and loose with OUR water this summer. Who cares that our dams are less than 30% full - I’m prepared to take the chance that it’ll suddenly start bucketing down before we run out. Aren’t you? Why do you hate children so much?

UPDATE 25/6: Timmeh’s comment responding to this post was gobbled by the Akismet spam filter, not moderated as he has suggested. Apologies for not monitoring the spam folder 24/7.

Bolt triumphant

By Jeremy

With a petty little jibe about it being the “final insurgent holdout”, News Ltd typist Andrew Bolt revels in the New York Times reporting that

Violence in all of Iraq is the lowest since March 2004. The two largest cities, Baghdad and Basra, are calmer than they have been for years. The third largest, Mosul, is in the midst of a major security operation. On Thursday, Iraqi forces swept unopposed through the southern city of Amara, which has been controlled by Shiite militias. There is a sense that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s government has more political traction than any of its predecessors… American military commanders are seeing a new confidence among Iraqi leaders.

Andrew concludes that this must be a slap in the face for those critical of the war.

Okay, the figures are only positive compared with the chaos which followed the American invasion in 2003. Sorry, intervention. Sorry, militarily-enhanced goodwill visit. Yes - “Calmer”! “More political traction”! Things aren’t absolutely rock-bottom any more! We’re on the way back slowly towards things in Iraq being not vastly worse than we made them by going in in the first place!

And remember, Saddam’s dead now! You didn’t love Saddam, did you?

See, if you set the hurdles our side has to overcome down so low that you can practically slide over them, and exaggerate them for the other side (they only win if the entire country of Iraq is literally vapourised into nothingness!), you can define the debate so that it’s very difficult for us to lose. No matter how badly we screw up. No matter what we do. No matter that the central issues in this debate are the not entirely inconsequential questions of in what circumstances should our governments take us to war and to what levels of accountability (if any) will we hold them afterwards?

So forget all your concerns about the wisdom of going to war, about the thousands who’ve died on our side and the countless more on the Iraqi side (seriously, we’re not keeping a genuine count), about the ridiculous sums of money it’s cost, about how it let Al Qaeda off the hook in Afghanistan… THAT’S NOT THE POINT ANY MORE. Why are you people still on about our horrendous mistakes? Why can’t you focus instead on our minor achievements? And our minor achievement in Iraq is that it’s moving away from “catastrophe”. Take that, critics.

Well, I salute the Coalition’s minor achievements. If only I had such low standards as Andy in what I expect of our governments in respect of when they decide to go to war - if all I required was the certainty that they were going to blow up some people we could probably be certain were likely to have been bad guys (or at least live in the same town as some bad guys) - I guess I’d have been cheering much sooner.

As heard in Bolta’s office this morning

By Ant Rogenous
Cross-posted at GrodsCorp

“Hold all my calls, Bernard.

“Oh, and hand me my apologetics hat — it’s going to be a long day.”

Bolt’s shame

By The Editor
Cross-posted at GrodsCorp

Andrew Bolt has spent the last couple of weeks valiantly defending Channel Nine’s bigot-in-residence, Sam Newman, against an overwhelming tide of public opinion. Bolta doesn’t like they way them evil lefties at the network have told Newman he can’t return to The Footy Show unless he attends counselling for his wimin-hatin’ ways. According to Bolt, Newman is being brainwashed and “re-educated” by teh left.

It is absurd to now have people hauled off to reeducation for sayings things to which some powerful others take exception. Not just absurd, either, but deeply concerning.

Andy conveniently leaves out the simple fact that Newman doesn’t have to attend counselling — he can tell his bosses at Channel Nine to go fuck themselves if he so desires — but he must attend counselling if he wants to continue appearing on The Footy Show. Most other TV personalities would have been escorted from the studio for lesser offences than Newman’s, and certainly wouldn’t be given the dozens of chances over a decade that Newman has had. If anything, he should be incredibly thankful for the chance of continued employment.

But Bolta doesn’t get any of that because he’s too busy being infuriated by how terribly shameful it is for Newman to have to attend counselling.

This “counselling” of wrong-thinkers as if they were diseased is not just a grave insult but a kind of authoritarianism best left buried with the KGB’s psychiatric hospitals for political dissidents.

Evil, evil PC-brigade leftists. But just when you thought it couldn’t get any more farcical, Andy tries to ramp up the guilts by referring to an unrelated injury of Newman’s that requires the use of crutches, and makes this bold statement.

Pictures like this, of Newman hobbling to his deprogramming, should shame us all:

No it shouldn’t.

Name just one!

By Jeremy

In his asinine attempt in today’s Herald Sun to portray those filthy un-Australian child-hating artists as being “conformist” groupthinkers, Andrew Bolt returns to the idiotic “name just one” attack we’d sadly thought a thing of the past:

WANT proof our artists think in a pack, and not for themselves? Then see their reaction to the photographs of Bill Henson.

Henson is now being investigated by police for taking sexually suggestive pictures of a naked 13-year-old girl.

In the two weeks of this controversy, Henson has been damned by politicians, priests, talkback hosts, columnists and the public, in poll after poll.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd rejected his pictures as “utterly revolting” and NSW Premier Morris Iemma called them “disgusting”.

But has a single artist, a single gallery owner, a single curator, a single arts critic said the same, and demanded Henson’s photographs be withdrawn from display and sale?

Answer: Are you kidding? The reaction from artists has been utterly, eerily unanimous in his support.

Oh Andy, it’s good to have you back. I’m not going to bother retorting to the stupidity of the facile line of argument you’re running (politicians and right-wing talkshow hosts who run with the pack are “independent thinkers” but artists who disagree are “conformist”), because it’s not important. What’s important is that we once again get to enjoy the “name just one” refrain you made such a compelling theme of your ultimately amusingly contradicted anti-stolen generation theories. We thought after you’d been forced to up the numbers in your classic demand of Manne you might have learned the dangers of “name just one”.

But you didn’t!

We can’t wait to see where else you apply it.

In fact, having a look at your current blog page, let’s see how you could add it to your other funny little posts:

• “Warming faith defied in Parliament”: How about - “not a single member of Parliament could contradict him with half the command of the issues and the evidence”! (No, wait, you did in fact write that. Sorry, you’re way ahead of me.)
• ““Liar” is no way to win votes”: How about - the water crisis is Labor’s fault for not building any more damns, and every water expert agrees with me. Name one who doesn’t! Just one!
• “Obama wins, and McCain must worry”: How about - There are no good people out there named Obama. Name just one!
• “More unfashionable speech banned”: How about - Canadians haven’t been able to enjoy free speech on the subject of abortion in years. Name just one instance where they have!
• “Rudd’s dodgy dagwood dog”: How about - there’s no such thing as a “dagwood dog”. Show me just one!

Alright, I’ll stop there.

Your homework for this week - try out The Andrew Bolt Game (TM). The aim is to disingenuously pop “name just one!” into as many discussions as possible. See how quickly people who are momentarily at a loss for words, stunned at having to waste time finding an example for something that is patently self-evident, recant their previous views and agree with you. It’s amazing!

Slushy happiness?

By The Editor

You know Timmeh’s brilliant argument that if it snows in one place around the world on a given day or if a city experiences a week of unseasonably cold weather then the theory of climate change is comprehensively disproven?

Well this argument makes his climate change one look positively scientific.

Refugee advocate Marion Le is furious over plans to auction items from the Baxter Detention Centre.

“…It was a place of humiliation, degradation and torture and obscene treatment of children.”

Among items for sale: a slushy machine.

(Quote edited by TBBWP)

Putting aside the fact that slushy machines most commonly live in 7 Eleven-style convenience stores and they are the most soulless places on Earth, it’s rather disingenuous of Blair (for a change) to suggest that the presence of a slushy machine in a detention centre somehow lessened the trauma for its residents.

I mean, it would take waaaaay more than a slushy machine in the corner of the Daily Telegraph offices to make them a nice place to be.

I’ll tell you what’s revolting…

By Jeremy

…Tim Blair snidely suggesting someone would “tolerate child abuse” on the basis that they don’t see naked children as sexual objects.

Pissweak, Tim. Shame.

Also - what the hell is wrong with the sanctimonious moral majority conservatives who see an artist’s photograph of an unclothed adolescent and think “Aha! Sex!”? What a truly bizarre and disturbing thought to have. Weirdos!

God, I dread to think how they view kids’ clothing catalogues and nappy commercials. I suppose they must get some kind of sick thrill out of them. Please, guys - seek help.

PS If you really want to see “revolting”, read some of the appallingly misogynist and vicious comments from Timmy’s readers that have passed “moderation” on this particular News Ltd-hosted blog post (and the original timblair.net post it links to).

UPDATE Andrew Bolt’s column today on the subject is as miserably dishonest as you could get away with in a mainstream newspaper, commencing with this outrageous and unsupported claim:

THERE must be excellent reasons to let an artist strip and photograph a 13-year-old girl so rich men can hang pictures of her bared breasts over their beds.

Bolt repeats the claim that Henson “stripped” the model in a few other posts on his blog, as well. The suggestion that the photographer actively removed the clothes of an adolescent is, of course, a product of Andrew’s terrifying imagination, and unsupported by any evidence he’s ever presented - but what a way to start whipping up the outrage!

Andrew’s argument boils down to this:

Surely we should judge the pictures, then, not so much by the intention of the artist but by the effect on their audience.

Andy replaces one silly subjective test (what the artist thinks) with another (what some random audience member might think). How about we judge whether art needs to be banned on its actual content instead? The determining factor shouldn’t be whether minority sickos out there see an image of a naked adolescent and think of sex, but whether an image is clearly about illegal sexual activity or not.

Now, based on that article, Bolt apparently sees the Henson photographs and thinks of sex. I find that disturbing. In any case, whatever paraphilias people like Andy secretly enjoy - and people can have paraphilias about anything whatsoever - the solution is counselling for those people, not a futile attempt to try to remove anything they could conceivably sexualise in their own heads.

Grow up, people. And Andy, you might want to reconsider that “stripping” claim.