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Random Notes - Idle ThoughtsRandom Note #187,641 — Astroturfing and how you are being mercilessly spun and have no idea
Do you sometimes get the impression that you’re being poked, prodded, pushed, snowed and spun, that something or things don’t add up? That you’re being fed a lie or a line? The gay marriage debate is a case in point.
When on holiday recently I got absorbed in a new book called “The Smear: How shady political operators control what you see, what you think and how you vote” by Sharyl Attkisson. The main focus of the book is on what’s known as astroturfing (ie) fake grass roots organisations or front organisations that spin like a whirling dervish. They’re everywhere and most people have no idea they’re being spun. Worth taking 10 minutes to checkout Sharyl Attkisson and her TEDx Talk. As Sharyl Attkisson says towards the end of her talk, once you understand what’s going on it’s like taking off your glasses and wiping them and putting them back on. Everything all of a sudden becomes much more clear.
Labor supports a backdoor route into Australia — Editorial, The Australian
Labor said this problem could not be fixed. But it has been. This uncompromising policy targets the greater good of protecting lives, maintaining the integrity of our borders and immigration system, and restoring fairness to our refugee intake. The logic behind it is relatively simple: deny people-smugglers the product of passage to Australia and the business model is broken. Mr Shorten and other Labor MPs say they understand this policy and want to continue it. Yet they cannot help chipping away at it. If they effectively endorse medical treatment as a backdoor route to get to Australia and remain here, they will create doubt about the nation’s resolve and create incentives for misadventure on Manus Island and Nauru.
Random Note #167,932 — Bill Shorten
Bill Shorten’s fireside, relaxed, casual, talk about Cooks statue should fool no one. He pretended to strike the same relaxed, comfortable and casual, laid back, chatty pose when the prospect of a plebiscite was first floated.
Then switched his posture. It’s indicative of someone who just sniffs the breeze, goes with the flow, where he thinks the votes are and stands for nothing.
A total fake, phony and fraud. He’s trying to project the image of man of the people carrying the sacrifice, the hefty burden of public life and matters of state on behalf of his people. The father of the house, home from work with his protective arms around the family.
The Lincoln or Churchill of our time of difficulty that he helped create.
The Silliest Generation — Victor Davis Hanson
The general essence is a focus on the most smug, self absorbed, self basting, and narcissistic generation ever.
“…Apparently, proof our generation’s genius is that no one in the past had a clue how to build an iPhone or do a Google search—or even make a good Starbucks Teavana shaken pineapple black tea infusion. Yet given our own present lack of humility and meagre accomplishments, we have combined arrogance with ignorance to become the smuggest generation in memory. Ours is an age that passes easy judgment on prior generations by sandblasting away the mention of those deemed unsuitable in the past, often by our present and sometimes laudable standards of morality—but without much concession to the cruel physical landscapes and poverty of the past or our own shortcomings that will be all too clear to subsequent ages.
If we’re going to start pulling down statues this one of Al Grassby, the Godfather of the toxic policy of multiculturalism should be the first to go.
Had to happen — Gone with the Wind is Gone with the Wind — ‘Gone With The Wind’ Pulled From Memphis Theatre After Being Considered “Insensitive”
One of Hollywood’s iconic films is under some serious scrutiny in Memphis, Tennessee. The city’s historic Orpheum Theatre is pulling showings of Gone with the Wind after the 1939 classic was deemed as “insensitive.”
Random Note #194,831 — Free Speech, Political Correctness and Noam Chomsky
This is the essence of political correctness and nasty, aggressive groupthink (pick any current agenda) and the progressive left, have been aggressively pushing it for many decades. One of the main advocates and protagonists and regarded as the Godfather of leftist thought for the last 60 years or so and the author of more than 100 books, is Noam Chomsky who wrote in The Common Good, 1998:
“..The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the systems are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of debate..”
Sound or feel familiar?
Chomsky also wrote in the same book: “the best defence against democracy is to distract people.”
That too should strike a chord.
Leftist activists have become obsessed with what divides — Janet Albrechtsen, The Weekend Australian
I recall when reading the Mark Lopez book The Origins of Multiculturalism in Australia, 1945 to 1975 when it was first publish back in 2000 how it firmed up my suspicions and thinking on this toxic policy and where we were headed. To many of us this was all so obvious and predictable. Even the clinical but clunky, bureaucratic name itself had something of the feel of a laboratory, rat treadmill experiment about it. It was always just the disguised, skirted scaffolding erected around the superstructure of the nation to bring about the ultimate demolition of Australian identity, culture and society and I’m amazed that more people couldn’t see past the rich, vibrant, colourful fabric of multiculturalism, beyond the dance, the dress, the cuisine and now the bollards. That’s right the bollards. They too are part of the legacy of unbridled, turbocharged multiculturalism.
Stan Grant — A drive by historical and cultural arsonist
Stan Grant reminds me of a historical and cultural drive-by arsonist who casually flicks the cigarette butt out the window into the long dry grass in full knowledge that it would be a dog whistle to the anarchic activists, vandals and revisionists to foment trouble whilst remaining above the fray as he drives on.
Random Note #167,957 — Unlearn Truth
Unlearn Truth—Think about that for a minute. Say it slowly. Masticate and mull It and let the idea swim around in your cerebral cortex. The admission in that statement is that what you are to unlearn is indeed, the truth. It must be, because it suggests that you unlearn it. So the question becomes one of, if you’re going to unlearn truth, what are you going to replace it with or is the idea simply to leave an empty space, leave it vacant to become rundown, overgrown and filled with junk? If Sydney University and others are serious and are now in the business of deviating from the essence of their core mission and redefining or “unlearning truth” with post truths and alternative truths or facts, or nothing at all, governments should begin to unfund the universities.