Paul Barry vs Andrew Bolt; socialism vs capitalism

This morning on The Bolt Report, Bolta gave ABC identity Paul Barry a whack. In last week's episode of Media Watch the cadaverous finger-wagger had disclosed his own outrageously excessive salary, paid for by the long suffering Aussie taxpayer, daring the conservative to do the same. Today Bolt gladly revealed the amount he received from the same source: a big fat zero. This eloquently showed those lefty accusations of Bolta's "hypocrisy" for what they were: a beat-up based on a false premise. There's no value in comparing apples with oranges, after all.

Bolta pointed out that Barry didn't include the amount of money he'd earned from book sales, etc. If he had, the comparison might have had some validity. It would have been apples vs apples, then.

I thought this was an important point. Barry does make money from the free market. He is a best selling author after all, a fact he proudly states in his Twitter profile.

And there's absolutely no doubt that the extra exposure the ABC show affords him bolsters his market value greatly. Being so well known and, ahem, respected, he can sell more books and charge higher fees for subsequent media projects than if he operated solely in the private sphere.

And that is very unfair in my opinion. Barry, along with so many other posturing pinko parasites at their ABC, gets the best of both worlds. He is outrageously over-rewarded using money taken from those who have no say in the matter. In effect he promotes himself at our expense, not his own. That's one thing. But the very fact that he uses the very bully pulpit we are made to fund to sulk about the size of the pay packets of his ideological enemies is too galling for words.

Bolt, along with Akerman, Devine, Kenny and others, have earned their place in the market. Sure, they are extremely well compensated for their work. But if they don't keep producing content that engages and sells, their fees drop commensurately. And they may even wind up losing their jobs completely. That's capitalism.

Sure, it's brutal. And you can sneer that this process rewards the "lowest common denominator". But you can't deny that it has a certain justice to it. 

Bolt is paid well because he's worth it. Paul Barry, a journalist so sloppy in his approach that he can't even accurately type in a person's Twitter handle, has piles of other people's cash thrown at him because he dutifully parrots the PC party line. Not only that, Bolt is undeniably prolific. He produces more quality content in a week than Barry and his team of sneering hipsters can create in several months.

Time to privatize the ABC. Then Barry and his fellow travellers will have to learn to make it in a free market in which merit and hard work are rewarded, rather than slavish adherence to outmoded ideology.

James Delingpole on The Bolt Report

James Delingpole is one of several prominent climate change skeptics. They're all having a great time showing what bunkum these predictions about "dangerous climate change" are. But Delingpole is persuading more people than the others, I think.

There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, he's younger than most well known climate change skeptics (and looks younger than his years, too). That confounds warmists in the meeja, who repeatedly cast the climate change issue as a generational battle between whippersnappers who care deeply about the future of the planet and greedy old farts who don't give a rat's. When they see Delingpole younger folk who would usually be happy to go with the warmists' generational narrative experience a bit of cognitive dissonance and start looking into the whole thing anew. When they do that, they're much more likely to become skeptics.

Secondly, he's very witty and amusing. He has a knack for encapsulating the crazy desperation of the catastrophist fear mongers with humorous metaphors. Take the one that he uses quite late in this interview with Andrew Bolt. In it, he equates their attempts to outdo each other with a poker game. It's both very funny and bang on the money.

Geoff Clark on his Bolt case motives

One thing that's always creeped me out about the advocates of political correctness is how easy they find it to say the complete opposite of what is clearly the truth. They say it unblushingly, with a straight face. It's sad, funny and scary all at once.

A perfect example of this is the line that the silencing of Andrew Bolt is "not about free speech". Of course it's about free speech! His enemies were appalled and angered by what he was saying (and how he was saying it) and so they all got together in a concerted effort to muzzle him. And they succeeded.

One of the complainants, Geoff Clark, had the spectacular gall to say not only that his action was not an attempt to curtail free speech in Australia, but this as well: 

"It creates debate, there's nothing wrong with that debate, provided it's not harmful or offensive."

Got that? Intimidating someone into silence (and making an example of him, which Clark admits was part of his motivation in this revealing interview with Neil Mitchell) creates debate. So, less is more, night is day, and two plus two equals five. 

That aside, when Clark is demanding that there be more civility in this debate that he so clearly and sincerely wants to encourage, a reasonable person might find it a little odd that he would characterize his victory in this way:

"The sword of justice has struck, and cut off the head of the serpent. Let's hope it doesn't grow two heads."

Firstly, I think that calling someone a serpent (or more specifically, a serpent's head) might be perceived as "offensive" by most people. 

And forgive me for my lack of cultural sensitivity, but it just doesn't seem to make any sense. Geoff, how can the serpent you so sincerely wish not to silence keep debating you when it has no head?

Really, mate. Just be honest about what you're trying to do. You might actually earn a little genuine respect then, instead of just achieving compliance through fear and intimidation.

Dennis Glover on The Bolt Report

Just watched The Bolt Report. One of Bolta's guests was the Labor speechwriter Dennis Glover. He's obviously an intelligent and articulate bloke but he kept making the classic Labor mistake: When confronted by working people's genuine frustration with the Government, Laborites never take it for what it is, but claim that it's only because the shock jokes have been winding 'em up. This is a condescending attitude that is deeply held in the party, and one of the main reasons they are in such deep, deep doo-doo. The more they express this contemptuous view of working class people, the worse their situation gets.

Really, they have to stop treating the electorate as utter nongs who can be "ginned up" by the Alan Joneses of the world and accept that Aussies can think for themselves and are bloody angry about they way they've been treated. Once Labor shows these people some respect and accepts responsibility for their own dire situation they may actually start to recover in the polls.