A very smart 'smart bomb'

From the pen of Marilynne Robinson:

“A successful autocracy rests on the universal failure of individual courage. In a democracy, abdications of conscience are never trivial. They demoralise politics, debilitate candour, and disrupt thought.”
Here, her pen, in the manner of a “smart bomb”, homes in unerringly on the heart of the matter. It says all that needs to be said.

http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2008/4/the-death-of-adam-essays-on-modern-thought-by-marilynne-robinson

The truth behind the 'Apology'

Reading this very erudite and insightful article http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/qed/2011/04/the-shadow-state about the 'Shadow State', i.e. the reality that lies behind modern Western (mostly 'labor' but increasingly infiltrating the 'liberal' mindset as well) government's 'spin', I felt compelled to recount the final paragraphs in the hope that you  might be inspired to read the entire article.

For their part, progressives claim insight into the mind, and judge behaviour accordingly. Mass opinion is a socially constructed artefact, fashioned by the imperatives of an economic system, more particularly “late capitalism”. The contents of mass culture are broadly predictable in line with ruling class interests. The unreconstructed masses are not autonomous beings, but pawns of cultural determinism. Taken as a given, the economic order will generate racism, misogyny and homophobia for the benefit of a privileged few. Lapses from “correctness” fuel the machinery of oppression. This becomes a social issue, an opportunity to “educate” society in the cause of “cultural change”. Whether a person actually feels sorry, or deserves to be made a spectacle, is of no consequence. The apology is a show for public consumption. 

Formed over time by biblical and liberal influences, English common law never countenanced apologies, except in mitigation of sentence. The law had no business peering into men’s souls; in any event, forced apologies are a sham. Common law penalties were exacted on an offender’s person or property, but not their mind. “Thought crime” was unknown. Only in the case of political crimes, or open dissent from a regime’s legitimacy, do forced apologies figure, and typically in authoritarian societies. They are less about contrition or genuine feeling than conformity with the ruling power.

I did, but now I don't!

Say what you like about the inanities of the Internet (and I have railed against it!) it has nevertheless given a voice to many who otherwise would have been rendered mute by the extreme bias currently exhibited by a new generation of main-stream-media journalists.
What Andrew Bolt and his cohorts have done,(whether you like them or not) and done remarkable efficiently, is to highlight the almost unbelievable hypocrisy exhibited by so many highly published commentators. It appears that the post modern aversion to 'truth' and the subsequent approval given to an 'honest' adoption of bias has indoctrinated a new generation of journalists (who are 'trained' in the post modern social laboratories of today, i.e.the university) into acting as propagandists rather than reporting mere 'facts' which they hold to be ideologically malleable.
Consider how this 'reporter of the facts' changes her opinion when faced with what is considered the epitome of political correctness:

In 1997, columnist Jill Singer argues for the display of Piss Christ:

We ... need to understand the value of artistic freedom.

In 2006, columnist Jill Singer argues against the display of Prophet toons:

Who wants a totally uncensored media run by those devoid of judgment, taste or social responsibility?

UPDATE. Mark Steyn:

In the Western world “artists” “provoke” with the same numbing regularity as young Muslim men light up other countries’ flags. When Tony-winning author Terence McNally writes a Broadway play in which Jesus has gay sex with Judas, the New York Times and Co. rush to garland him with praise for how “brave” and “challenging” he is. The rule for “brave” “transgressive” “artists” is a simple one: If you’re going to be provocative, it’s best to do it with people who can’t be provoked.

Such are the vagaries within the art world and the main-stream-media.

Art: shock/schlock

I have just finished reading Michael Connor's excellent essay on his visit to the latest Art schlock 'museum', the MONA in Hobart Tasmania.  http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2011/4/mona-s-brutal-banality

It is a marvellously droll expose of the decline of Western civilisation as expressed through the visual arts.
I loved it! And had a good laugh at some of the Duchampion inanities he exposed,e.g:

The surroundings make the objects displayed into art. If you placed a bouncing castle in one of these spaces and lit it well it would gain the same response from visitors: a quick glance as they hurry on to see what’s next.

So true...much of today's art relies heavily on context to make its impact, particularly the context of a 'religious space' or a tortuous and/or largely incomprehensible, pomo jargoned  'essay' on the artworks genesis/intent.
I also enjoyed his subversion of the scatological offerings on view:

An alarm rings, and keeps on ringing. I’m not sure if it’s art, or a fire alarm. Then there is an announcement repeated over and over: “Emergency, evacuate immediately.” I wonder how they reacted in the poo room.

Connors article encapsulates  the decline I have witnessed as a front row viewer and participant in the visual arts for over 4 decades and his writing manages to capture the amusing vacuity at the centre of so much art made with the express desire to 'shock', and yet which fails miserably to do so given that the 21st century audience is over-exposed to so many forms of decay and disillusion. As he states, they(the artists) have lost touch with the audiences they are trying to impact.

Much of the reason for that loss goes to the success of the very social engineers so championed by these 'elites', the new 'multicultural' and 'tribalisation' experiments which have partitioned western society into enclaves many of whom demonise all the 'others', all done in the name of 'inclusivity' of course (perception over substance).  This lack of 'popular' insight is reflected in the ridiculous decisions being made by members of the judiciary in sentencing criminals because these members of the 'law tribe' have also become disconnected to the populace at large. The aberrant behaviours of elite sportsmen shows a similar disconnect as does the insistence by members of the political elite to imposing crippling and insane new taxes on the wider population, the latter done in the name of 'Australia's good' of course.

Unfortunately the wider population has become so indoctrinated by these social constructs that short of a cataclysmic shift in worldview (such as a war, revival or great depression) history appears to support the perspective that society will continue along the same path until the civilisation collapses.

I am re-reading Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's 1984 (amongst others) to gain some perpsective of what the future may hold and it frightens me.

Media bias exposed

If you ever had doubts about the main-stream-media bias toward left-wing ideologies you need to look no further than the current media blackout in both America and Australia.
The former regarding Obama's chaotic administration and his hypocritical involvement in an undeclared war against a middle east dictator...sound familiar? Of course the MSM and Obama's Democrats were scathing in their condemnation of Bush's involvement in toppling Saddam, but according to the blogosphere, there is nary a negative word about the current crisis (which is a pathetic failure BTW) within the MSM in America. In fact it is said that Obama instructed the media to ignore the situation, an accusation that if true undermines everything we have ever believed about the 'free press' and exposes how deeply the neo-Marxist, post-modern deconstructionist worldview has infiltrated the media.
In Australia, the leftoid media response to the Bess Price/Larissa Behrendt debacle has been one of deafening silence. If you don't read the Australian newspaper or online blogs such as Miranda Devine or Tim Blair you wouldn't even be aware that the indigenous community was embroiled in a major controversy due to the inappropriate and disrespectful tweets Larissa Behrendt made about Bess Price over statements made on the ABC's Q&A program. No reportage even by the ABC on whose program the incident took place.
AS Miranda says:  "If a man had written that bestiality tweet - or if I had, or my colleague, Andrew Bolt - the outrage would be murderous ... and rightly so." YET BARELY A PEEP!!!Makes you think doesn't it?

More people of integrity need to infiltrate the field of journalism and the university's where journalism is taught. We need to take back the organs of information dissemination from the socialistic, civilisation killing ideologues. We must WAKE UP TO THE IDEOLOGICAL WAR that is being waged against the West, often by stupid, naive and idealistic morons who are their own worst enemies, because it is the very people who betray a civilisation who become the conquerors first victims...think Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot etc.

UPDATE 21.4.11

IF you get your news only from the Fairfax press, you would have missed one of the most damaging scandals yet to have rocked Aboriginal affairs.

The story received front-page treatment in News Limited newspapers, especially The Australian, when it broke on April 14, and for the following five days. Several television and online forums canvassed its consequences. But Fairfax editors regarded it as such a threat to their world view they imposed a nationwide ban on the story. Not a word about it appeared in the pages of The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Australian Financial Review or The Sun-Herald

the education morass

The following brief extract is from an article by Jo Nova showing how 'consensus' is manipulated. Unfortunately the same indoctrination is happening throughout the education field. Even the schools I do relief teaching at (and who should know better) follow the proscribed line handed down by Canberra and when an alternative is presented, the class teacher sulks and students complain that the information comes from their text books...unfortunately this is true. The education department is complicit in the manipulation of this information and should be held to an account...unfortunately I cannot see such a development happening in the near future, the rot appears too deeply entrenched.

The bottom line is that virtually all climate research in Australia is funded from one source – namely, the government department which has the specific task of selling to the public the idea that something drastic and expensive has to be done to the structure of society in the name of mitigating climate change.  And if you think that government agencies shouldn’t be in the game of social engineering, then you are way behind the times.  Over the last two years more than 100 million dollars was distributed by the (department of Climate Change) DCC for exactly that purpose.

So there can be no doubt that climate-research grant recipients know perfectly well that scepticism concerning the climate-change story does very little for their careers.  One therefore wonders a bit about the much-vaunted consensus of the global warming establishment regarding climatic doom.
Surely there is no way a whole scientific discipline can be subverted, either consciously or subconsciously, by crass materialism?  Well, maybe not in the long term.  But if past experience is any guide, the sorting out of a problem of vested scientific interest can take many decades.  At the moment, climate scientists are trapped in the coils of a disaster theory sold prematurely to the world at large.  They are supporting the theory with long-term forecasts about an atmosphere-ocean system whose behaviour in many respects is inherently unpredictable.  On the one hand, public discussion of the uncertainties associated with the ‘main conclusions of the science’ must be discouraged, and on the other there is a need for sufficient uncertainty to justify a continued flow of research funding.  In short, they are in a right-royal mess of political correctness.

Practical vs PC

I read with interest this intelligent and comprehensively practical article on disaster management by the unfairly maligned Wilson Tuckey: http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2011/4/towards-a-sane-policy-on-natural-disasters.

My earlier blog All hail erudition quoting Theodore Dalrymple's musings on why left-wing commentators seldom offer reasonable counter-arguments but usually focus on ad hominem attacks, illustrates rather cogently why practical personalities such as Tuckey, Pyne and Katter are demonised, mocked and humiliated by the incumbent political poseurs and ideological morons whose life choices and management skills generally fall into the abysmal bracket.

Unfortunately the political landscape seems populated by these limp wristed, mealy mouthed spin merchants rather than the straight-talking man-of-action, practical personalities that all countries need to advance and  prosper. Why? Because everyone has been scared (.)itless by political correctness.

Dare I speak the obvious! We have far too many policies dictated by radical, impractical, ideologically driven feministas and their sychophantic, Germaine Greer channeling, male eunuchs. We need to re-establish some sanity back into the political debate, practical solutions for real, at-the-moment issues (like medical research) not problems that might occur a thousand years from now. We need truth to re-establish a stronghold in education, politics, the media and the entertainment industry.

Rise up you moral majority, cast off the PC chains and make your presence felt.

Distopian Dreamers

This hapless bunch of useless blowhards; the ALP/Green coalition, plan to halve their (aka taxpayers) contribution to medical research...an arena that Australia has proved remarkably successful in, and an area that helps many people in the present time period, so that they can increase their donations to a  world-wide scam that cannot even promise will help people in a thousand years time.

The mind boggles!

Ideologies have consequences

I appreciate Andrew Bolt's well reasoned article about the scandal at the ADF Academy:  http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/column_one_girls_tears_do_not_excuse_this_attack_on_our_military/

The article informs and exposes without excusing the boorish behaviour of all the participants. It illuminates the fact that there is always much more to any story these days than the main-stream-media usually let on about, because of their collective bias towards left-wing socialism.

I particularly like the mention of the fact that these cadets had only been at the academy for 10 weeks and were in the process of being separated from their 'outer-world conditioning'. It is something that both amuses and infuriates me, that so many pontificating hedonists rabbit on about our freedom to engage in all sorts of immoral behaviour but when the consequences of such immorality hits the fan, these same 'pundits' scream foul play. The stark hypocrisy is staggering!

The conclusion Bolt draws about this whole episode being linked to the acknowledged social engineering being undertaken by this government and how Defense Minister Smith is using the episode to further a more sinister agenda is rather disturbing. I served in a front line Infantry battalion and I most certainly would not have liked to have had a female alongside me, and not because I harbour any misogynistic tendencies, but rather because I acknowledge the truth that women are different to men, that they are (generally) physically weaker, emotionally more sympathetic and that I have been taught to respect those differences.
And before the ideologues attempt to eradicate those differences and the motivations that generations of males have deferred to, let them understand the consequences, and therefore do not complain when desensitized males take their  newly acquired lack of respect into the domestic environment.

But lets face facts, ideologues do not actually care...its all about perception not reality! 

Judge the Judge

On Sunday the 10th April Miranda Devine blogged about a situation at a school in Ulladulla where an enthusiastic chaplain has impacted some young folk for the better and how the left-wing has reacted to the situation.
Retired high court justice Michael Kirby has written a letter to the school principal demanding an accounting for her allowing such activities to occur, an action which raises the obvious question: Who gives this retired public servant the right to demand anything?
It is little more than unbridled hubris from a common and garden seditionist who used his position to change and corrupt the law because he believed that it was a judges 'right' to not only interpret the law, but to remake it in his own image as well. A worldview that set him at odds with his colleagues on more occasions than any one else in his profession but which earned him the recognition and fawning obeisance so frequently showered on those who champion the civilisation killing ideologies of the extreme left.
Besides which he is known as a champion of 'gay rights' a worldview which is currently being vigorously promoted in schools around the country, causing children to be 'proselitized' one might even say!
We live in a society that is crumbling as we speak, one does not have to cast a wide net to find examples of thuggery, bullying and or plain bastardy to know that manners and ethical behaviour are on the decline.
C.S.Lewis wrote an essay where he examined the unfortunate tendency amongst 'progressives' to 'geld the stallion and then bid him procreate'. We attack the philosophy which has given Western society its values and then bemoan the lack of values exhibited by our children.
Miranda sums up her blog with:

Even before this concocted scandal, the school chaplaincy program has been under sustained attack from aggressive religion-hating secularists who are testing its right to exist in the High Court and in an Ombudsman’s investigation.

But aren’t there more pressing problems in education than a peaceful girl and a boy who believes in Jesus?

Has Kirby ever written a stern letter to the principal of a school which is graduating hordes of students who don’t know how to read or write? Or to a school where children have been preyed on by pedophile teachers?

I daresay Kirby has a vested interest in the day when the latter becomes legal!

Pay back is coming

Notice how it is all of those 'public servants' whose jobs are safely ensconced in the tax payer's bosom, that have the 'hots' for global warming and thus paying the carbon tax!
Most are ideologues whose salaries rise with the cost of living or are so wealthy that they seek to assuage their guilty consciences by buying the new age religions 'indulgences'.

As per usual it is the poor mugs who pay and pay until it bleeds or the next election arrives...can't wait.

Facts vs Fantasy

Statistics that make you wonder whose side the main-stream-media are on:

The Daily Telegraph UK listed a telling statistic last year. "It is not Jews, Christians, or even Americans who are leading the pack with regard to Muslim Genocide but rather other Muslims.  Some 11,000,000 Muslims have been violently killed since 1948 of which 35,000 or 0.3% died during sixty years of fighting Israel.  The truth is that 90% of the 11 million were killed by fellow Muslims."

You wouldn't know it by reading (most of) the daily newspapers around the world.

The Organisation of the Islamic conference's (OIC) website has a category called "Islamophobia Observatory."  It lists perceived cases of Islamophobia around the world.  All the while ignoring the glaring statistical rise in terrorist attacks by Muslims.  The Religion of Peace website tracks deadly terrorist attacks.  Currently, the number of terrorist attacks committed by Muslims since 9/11 stands at 17,005.  The breakdown for February 2011 was 134 jihad attacks, in 20 countries, against 5 religions, killing 565 and critically injuring 1058.

Numbers don't lie.  Yet, the OIC, the UN, and Obama continue claiming what a peaceful religion Islam is while portraying Jewish "settlers" as the biggest roadblock to peace.  Just as "Islamophobic" Americans are being set up as the biggest roadblock to a peaceful existence for Muslims in America.  Such logic would be laughably absurd if the consequences weren't so deadly.     

Joseph Goebbles, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda once said,  "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

How much does truth stand for in the West today? Why has there been such an attack on truth?
The fact is that facts are facts, what matters is how and in what context you choose to report them. That ultimately is what determines whether your aim is to manipulate, confuse or inform.

All hail erudition

I do so enjoy the erudition of the honourable Theodore Dalrymple. In the following quote he succinctly renders impotent the labyrinthine secret contortions of political correctness:

“Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist
societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to
persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it
corresponded to reality the better.

When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies,
or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for
all their sense of probity.

To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed.

A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”

Theodore Dalrymple - in an interview in FrontPageMagazine.com (August 31, 2005)

To the uninitiated, the communist threat has not disappeared with the break up of the Soviet union, it cannot because its motivating agent is a spiritual rather than an physical entity, it merely changes its shape.