Saturday, August 27, 2011

Julia Gillard, feminism and scandals caused by dodgy blokes

Just a thought on this old scandal from Julia Gillard's days as a lawyer: As Bolta is at pains to point out, she didn't actually know she was being implicated in a scam by her then lover Bruce Wilson. But the fact that she was says a lot about how poor her judgement was.

And now, with Craig Thomson, she keeps stressing how much confidence she has in him. That message is clearly partly aimed at Thomson himself, so that he doesn't quit or decide to turn on Labor. But perhaps it's also got something to do with her really trusting the guy. Maybe she actually believes he did nothing wrong or is basically a good guy deep down who deserves her support.

Who knows? In any case she does seem oddly supportive of blokes whose morality clearly leaves a lot to be desired. And this is greatly at odds with her image as an empowered, independent, lefty feminist. These women love to see themselves as aware of and immune to the duplicity of dodgy blokes -- be that in relationships or professional life. Yet they seem to fall for these scumbags and their ruses repeatedly. It's actually really sad.

I've seen it happen to a lot of lefty feminists I've known over the years. Many of them get burned by tricksters who win their affections by striking the requisite politically correct poses. They kowtow to feminism and have all the right (or should I say, left) attitudes to gender relations in particular and politics in general. Yet more often than not they're just dirty dogs deep down.

I've actually come to the conclusion that the syndrome constitutes a kind of iron law. The more a woman spouts lefty feminist dogma about her virtue and good sense over pervasive male rottenness, the more likely it is she'll fall foul of exactly the kind of bloke she so condemns.

Friday, August 26, 2011

Richo nails it on Thomson, Gillard and Labor

Here's a good column by the legendary former Labor numbers man Graham Richardson. He's the guy famous for the line "whatever it takes". So if he's condemning the party's machinations, well, you know they've gone to a very smelly place indeed.

Speaking of which, Richo uses some powerful olfactory (and visual) imagery in his descriptions of Labor's predicament:

Then of course there is the Craig Thomson effect. This bloke is damaging the Labor brand every day he hangs around the parliament like a bad smell in a lift ...

Luck is important in politics. When John Howard faced defeat, the Tampa sailed to the rescue. I always believed that Hawke would put his hand down a sewer and pull out a $20 bill. I'm afraid Gillard would pull out something else entirely.


Hell, she wouldn't even have to leave her office to test the hypothesis. Labor has turned Parliament House itself into a sewer; a sewer now chockas with the stinking objects Richo alludes to.

The issue is beyond doubt. Labor is utterly unpolishable.

Sunday, August 14, 2011

Ian Rintoul on The Bolt Report

Just watched The Bolt Report. There was a short interview with Ian Rintoul, a full on leftie who wants a very soft approach to the whole asylum seeker issue. Bolta only asked him a few questions but his responses were revealing.

When Bolt ran the line that the people smugglers were clearly testing the Government's resolve regarding their Malaysian solution by including little kids in their human cargo, Rintoul sidestepped the issue. He was clearly reluctant to judge the people smugglers. In the leftie "mind" there's no such thing as criminality. It's all just social and economic forces, you see.

When asked how he felt about the fact that so many people had died at sea as a result of border control policies that were soft, but not as soft as he would like, he weaseled out again, and did some pretty expansive contextualizing. In a probably unconscious acknowledgement that the Government's approach had cost lives he said that he didn't think "the welfare of asylum seekers was on the Government's mind". Nor on Rintoul's it seems.

Basically, what Rintoul's advocating will result in even more deaths at sea. Yet that doesn't seem to bother him. Ironic considering he and his ilk keep quacking on about how "compassionate" they are.

Have a squizz at the interview and see if you can come to a different conclusion.

Friday, August 5, 2011

Sir Crispin Tickell on China, climate change and democracy

I often listen to the BBC World Service in the wee hours. One of the regular shows is called One Planet. It's hugely biased, but still quite interesting. One recent interview really caught my ear.

The presenter Mike Williams was taking to British diplomat and environmentalist Sir Crispin Tickell about China and its approach to climate change. Tickell's observations were revealing because he invoked several of the most beloved cliches and misrepresentations of the deep green Left. (You can listen to it here. Tickell starts about a minute and a half in.)

Of Australia he said that we are the biggest per capita emitter of carbon dioxide. The nation is "doing a great deal of harm, thereby".

This is just completely irrational. So what if each person here has a comparatively large carbon footprint? We are a small nation and the cumulative impact is negligible.

Tickell then said of our addiction to fossil fuels that "Australians are increasingly aware that they are dependant on what doesn't work".

Clearly, the opposite is true. We are increasingly aware that these methods (coal in particular) are "oldies but goodies". One of the reasons we're so resistant to the carbon tax is that the much hyped renewables are neither reliable nor affordable enough to replace what's been working very well for a very long time. And we've still got mountains of the stuff, so why not keep using it?

Like so many warmists, he also repeated this massive lie about China being an environmental exemplar -- "pioneers of clean, green growth" as he puts it. Williams didn't pick him up on this point, but accepted it, adding that having such a policy is easy if you're an authoritarian regime.

They then got onto the subject of democracy in general, with Tickell saying the Chinese really "aren't that bad" in this regard. Rather than accept that China is itself very undemocratic, which is clearly the case, he shifted the goal posts on what democracy actually means. 

And there's a classic interchange in which a clearly shocked Williams says: "You're surely not suggesting China is a democracy." To which Tickell replies: "I don't know what you mean by democracy." It's truly jaw dropping stuff. When you can stun even a BBC journalist into incredulity with such a take on tyranny, well you really must be "out where the buses don't go".

Tickell's whole attitude in this interview is a distillation of the classic warmist position. It's inaccurate, irrational, and well on the way to being totalitarian.

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Labor's poisonous culture reminiscent of the movie The Firm

As Labor presses on with its disastrous plans to inflict a spectacularly pointless carbon tax upon the good people of Australia, secretly skeptical party heavies are going insane with frustration in their climate closets. There are quite a few in the party who must desperately want to do something (knife Ju-liar, get her to dump the tax, or preferably both) to make the problem go away. But there's a truly flightening level of bloody-minded groupthink in Labor that is keeping them pinned down and silent, at least for the time being.

Niki Savva writes about one wretched soul whose life has been made utterly miserable by the carbon tax policy:

As despair sinks into depression, one cabinet minister recently revealed his desolation in a conversation with an acquaintance when he confessed political life had become near intolerable.

He acknowledged the carbon tax is destroying the government, yet they could not walk away from it. He could not see - or he was not prepared to admit it that openly yet - a way out and this only fed his frustration.

This prominent member of a government, which recites like a Gregorian chant the mantra that climate change is real, then admitted his grave doubts about the science. He didn't use the word crock, but that was pretty much what this secret deniers' camp follower was saying.


In an interview with Bolta she expanded on why the poor bastard couldn't break ranks and do the right thing. Doing so would ultimately bring down the Government, and he would become Labor's "king rat for all time". Knowing how much the party hates its "rats" (remember their loathing of Mal Colston, whom Robert Ray memorably derided as the "quisling Quasimodo from Queensland") you can understand why he's currently choosing silence.

While Labor isn't quite in the Mafia's league when it comes to reprisals for betrayal, it certainly does have some rather effective compliance methods in operation. I can't help thinking that this poor pollie's predicament is more than a little like that of the protagonist in the movie The Firm, based on John Grisham's book:

Mitch McDeere (Tom Cruise) is a young man with a promising future in law. About to graduate from Harvard Law School, he is approached by Bendini, Lambert & Locke, 'The Firm', and made an offer he cannot refuse. He and his wife, Abigail "Abby" (Jeanne Tripplehorn), move to Memphis, where The Firm is located. Avery Tolar (Gene Hackman) becomes his mentor at The Firm.

Seduced by the money and gifts showered on him, including a house and car, he is at first totally oblivious to the more sinister side of his company. Then, two associates are murdered. The FBI contact him, asking him for information and informing him that not only is The Firm mob connected but every associate that has ever tried to leave The Firm ends up murdered. His life as he knows it is forever changed. He has a choice: work with the FBI and risk being discovered by The Firm, or stay with The Firm knowing that at sometime he will get involved with laundering mob money and in the end go to jail when the FBI cracks The Firm. Either way he will lose his life as he knows it.


Of course the murderous criminality is not present in Canberra, but this miserable minister is clearly in a similar bind. He must either turn against his own party in the interests of the nation or obediently toe its line -- a line based on a mountain of lies. Either way he will lose his life as he knows it.

Spooky, isn't it. I can see a great political thriller being made about this bloke a few years hence. Can Tom Cruise do an Aussie accent?

Brendan O'Neill spikes Q and A mediocrities; enrages Twitter lefties

Saw Brendan O'Neill of Spiked on Q and A last night. He just slaughtered the leftie panellists! The look on Tanya Plibersek's face whenever he was speaking, particularly early on, was just priceless.

Plibersek makes my skin crawl walk. She really is the most vacuous, sanctimonious hypocrite in Labor. Considering how chockas that joint is with 'em, that's saying something. At her most smug she makes even Gillard herself look principled and substantial.

Of course Plibersek, Christine Nixon and even Stephen Mayne (who bizarrely endorsed the Government's creepily totalitarian line on the meeja) wheeled out the usual febrile anti-Murdoch cant. And O'Neill just sliced it to ribbons. They were clearly upset, and started supporting each other for comfort.

You often see this with lefties. Being the primitive, cowardly collectivists they are, they feel deeply threatened by just one person with his own mind. They then resort to nasty smears and insinuations that are always emotive.

A case in point was when Plibersek complained that O'Neill was verballing her, an act of verballing in itself. The transcript is not yet up and I don't have time to watch it all again, but there's a bit near the end where she says something along the lines of "you're saying it's okay to hack into phones", when he'd actually just made an explicit point of deploring the practice.

Not surprisingly lefties were all asquitter on Twitter. Too thick, slow and malicious to actually refute what he said with anything like a counter-argument, they just got nasty as they always do, often about his appearance. This little gem was retweeted by Leslie Cannold, one of our leading "intellectuals".

Of course there were several Nazi-themed smears. Mike Stuchbery lamely compared him to Oswald Mosely. Nothing O'Neill said was remotely fascist. On the contrary, he consistently endorsed more democracy, openness and freedom. The fact that his reasonable arguments made leftie tweeps squeal like stuck pigs and fire off such delusional analogies reveals the scary extent of their own sinister groupthink.