Wednesday 7 December 2011

The new reality

The Stephen Conroy debacle in Parliament illustrates how emotionalism triumphs over reason in today's politics. This is the PoMo philosophy of 'caring' writ large, where it is more important to be seen to be caring than to actually be caring.
This wearing of your heart on your sleeve gained its apotheosis during the Princess Diana's death debacle where the Queen had to show her mourning to the crowds in order to be accepted as truly mourning.
No more of that stiff upper lip nonsense in this new 'caring' age, we need to be metro-sexual, green, soft, and pliable.
Just like the  mujahidin camped outside our front gates; I don't think!

It’s the Case of Conroy’s Curious Tears - and how tragically easy it is to become an overnight hero of the Left. Stephen Conroy is the Communications Minister, disliked by Labor’s Left for being a faction boss of the Right. So it astonished many to see Conroy cry at Labor’s national conference on Sunday. Even wilder, he cried as he spoke against Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s plan to sell our uranium to India.
Gillard has reason on her side, of course. India is a democracy and an ally. Our uranium would be used only for electricity generation in a country very short of the stuff.
Anyway, we already sell uranium to China, which is not a democracy and, unlike India, has helped ugly regimes develop nuclear weapons.
Then there’s the jobs we’d create, the cash we’d earn and the friendship with India we’d repair. It’s a no brainer. So what on earth was Conroy’s argument against it all?

Stand by: He’d had an uncle who’d worked at Windscale, a nuclear reactor in Britain which in 1957 - six years before Conroy’s birth - had a fire.

Here’s how Conroy put it. His now-retired uncle was “involved in all the cover-ups” of the Windscale fire. which released Iodine-131 into the atmosphere. “My family remembers when they came and took away all the milk for months because you couldn’t drink it,” an emotional Conroy declared. His cousins and another uncle still worked in the nuclear industry and his uncle had said: “If you’ve got a choice, don’t be in it.” For this rationalisation of unreason, Conroy got a standing ovation and was dubbed a “Left wing idol”, which shows how much the Left prefers tears to thought, fantasy to fact. Scary.

First, a question. If Conroy’s family thinks the nuclear industry is so horrific, why do some of them still work in it, more than 50 years after Windscale? Why is it OK for them to earn a buck from nuclear, but not OK for Australia?



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