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Random Notes - Idle ThoughtsRandom Note — The Media, Cricket, Barnaby Joyce and George Pell (perhaps)
It was only five weeks ago that Barnaby Joyce resigned after being brought down in another hysterical, media pile on and another round of totally out of proportion, confected outrage and a beat up not dissimilar to that that we’ve seen in recent days over the cricket tamper-gate, shock horror, affair. And all because of a mid life crisis doing what millions of others from royalty down through politics, business and ordinary people from the suburbs have done when he ran off with a staffer and got her pregnant. No sense of proportion or perspective.
Decline and fall of the modern political class — Peter Van Onselen, The Weekend Australian
The question is, has the quality of political debate worsened in recent years or was it always this bad? The difference perhaps being that 24-hour news coupled with social media’s direct access to the political class simply exposes problems that always existed. We now see the sausages getting made where once such gruesome details were kept out of view. I lean towards the view that the body politic has worsened, courtesy of a narrowing of the gene pool of who goes into politics coupled with a throwaway consumer culture that has made the public and the media less tolerant of political failures.
Crickets Libertarian Debasement — Paul Collits, Quadrant
One big thing that has changed is the loss of perspective. This is sport. Losing wickets isn’t “tragedy”. Playing cricket isn’t “pressure”. Cricket is not life. But is should still be permitted to say deep things aboutlife. Indeed, it should be expected to do so.
What explains the sea-change that has occurred? There is no doubt that sport has been caught up the sheer awfulness of the corporatisation and the commodification of everything. The contemporary world is monetised to within an inch of its life. From farming – yes always a business but now thoroughly financialised – to government, to the administration of sport, to education. All this has happened to sport just at the time when objective, acceptable standards of behaviour — what constitutes agreed virtue, if you like — have been replaced by relativism as the world’s operating system. Hence the excuses that have rolled out this past week – they all do it, it isn’t really cheating, it doesn’t matter that much, let’s move on” – have currency in many of the institutions that matter, and this is the result of creeping post-modernism. What we have, not just in sport but everywhere, is an operating system where the very notion of virtue is under siege, where values are contingent.
Brilliant Writing, Essential Reading — We can’t even keep the national fence posts painted — Greg Sheridan, The Australian
The Australian affliction today is that our politics has lost all ambition for national development. The only ambition left is for redistribution and virtue signalling on contentious social issues. No leader is addressing the crisis in our political culture. If the Turnbull government should come to an end at the next election, one central question for our national culture would be: what national development have we got from six years of pro-business, pro-development, centre-right government? The Liberals came into office talking about northern development. In six years, what new town has been started in the north? From Brisbane to Cape York, all that water doing nothing. Apart from the narrow needs of some minerals projects, what has the federal government done for northern development at all? When the Coalition was first elected it talked at length about building new dams. What new dams have been built?
Random Note — The racism of The Greens
As we’ve seen in recent days and weeks their outrage over Peter Dutton’s reasonable suggestion concerning Australia accepting white farmers from South Africa as refugees, the Greens couldn’t get past the white bit and unleashed their inner racist.
Random Note — Rules for Radicals, James Morrow the C bomb and Tom Ballard
Rule 4 of Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals states that — “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules.
The cultural Marxists at their ABC are at it again. This time messing with the minds of your kids and ramming the “white privilege” meme down their throats. Screeching ABC feminists teach our kids about ‘White Privilege’ WATCH
Random Note — The ABC, public decency and Caroline Overington
It’s not about finger wagging or the nanny state. And it’s most definitely not about free speech as she tries to frame it. It’s about basic standards and decency in public and particularly on the public airwaves. Its about time and place. We can all be pretty sweary at times but I suggest most people cringe when it comes to the public airwaves.
Random Note — Ungovernable shit-holes. Why, of course. Why didn’t I think of that? What could possibly go wrong?
Having made their own countries ungovernable kleptocracies and shit-holes they want to franchise the concept to the rest of the world. Thanks but no thanks. What’s worse there are those in the West who think that this is a good idea and want to help them. “..Around half of people in Kenya, Tanzania, Senegal, and South Africa, and three quarters of those questioned in Ghana and Nigeria, want to immigrate to the U.S. or Europe, according to a study by Pew Research Centre published Thursday. Researchers found that it is not just poverty or terror (notably committed by Boko Haram [Islamic State] in Nigeria and al-Qaeda in West Africa) that is driving mass migration, but because Africans want to imitate their friends and relatives who have already successfully illegally immigrated to Europe…”
Random Note — Virtue signalling, debating and white privilege (whatever that is)
What we’re dealing with is nothing less than cultural Marxism, red in tooth and claw. The agenda is not only about creating a diffuse and diverse debating environment and embedding a permanent, ongoing, rolling apology for skin colour, but about totally vandalising, trashing, wrecking and hobbling those institutions not already marched through in the cultural Marxist long march. Today it’s nurses. Tomorrow it’ll be ambos and fire and rescue and other first responders. From there it will snowball and sweep all before it including our judicial officers, politicians and other public figures and institutions declaring their white privilege and incorporating it into the opening and closing proceedings of every thing from parliament and major sporting events like football grand finals, right through to suburban school assemblies and speech nights to sit alongside the fony, Ernie Dingo inspired, Welcome to Country