Psychotic Left

The Left needs to get real
Monday, June 11, 2007

Janet Albrechtsen

SOME fights deserve a few more rounds. So let’s go another round with the one started so magnificently by The Australian (Reality bites the psychotic Left) challenging the psychotic Left to take a reality check.

Like a tired actor who plays the same role over and over again, hamming it up each time, the leitmotif of the Left lacks a certain sparkle. They line up like drones to tell us that debate has been stifled this past decade. Bookshelves in your local bookstore are groaning under the weight of tomes written on the subject.

Perhaps these evangelical intellectuals on the Left think that if they say it often enough, it will become the received wisdom. They could not be more wrong.

The more they say it, the more they remind us of their own irrelevance.

A few years ago, it was historian Stuart Macintyre in his book The History Wars moaning about the “weapons of mass destruction” employed by certain commentators and historians to challenge Australian history.

Weapons such as careful research and a preference for facts over fiction. Imagine the audacity of Keith Windschuttle checking original sources and finding some academics had fudged facts. Meanwhile, Australian history moved on to a healthier debate where the politics of shame no longer dominated.

Then came Robert Manne’s Do Not Disturb where leftists claimed that conservative politics was cheapening our democracy and creating social and ethnic division. Were the conservatives not aware that multiculturalism and other sacred “isms” were not policies or ideas to be challenged so much as articles of faith?

We’ve had Silencing Dissent by Clive Hamilton and Sarah Maddison whose title says it all. And now there is more of the same from David Marr and his Quarterly Essay titled “His Master’s Voice - The Corruption of Public Debate under Howard”.

By any measure, if this is silence imposed by an authoritarian Howard Government, the Left need to go back to their dictionaries. While they are there, they may want to flick back to the “narcissism” word.

If you had to sum up the state of thinking from left-wing intellectuals, this word does the job. Their unrestrained intellectual vanity leaves no room for debate. So self-absorbed are they in their own genius, so obvious is their own correctness, disagreement is not merely wrong but immoral.

Those on the other side of the political divide are not just misguided. They are evil. They are, said Dennis Glover in his contribution to the debate, “right-wing thugs”.

These guys are bruised by two facts: there are now more people challenging left-wing orthodoxy (and they don’t like it one bit); and fewer people are listening to their left-wing diatribes (and they really hate that).

To be fair, Glover managed to pin down part of the Left’s problem. He said that too many progressive journalists ceded ground in the culture wars when they stopped writing about ordinary people. These progressives have taken up a field way off to the Left where they decry capitalism and affluence, ignoring what matters in mainstream debates.

But it goes further than that. They stopped writing about issues that affect ordinary people because they stopped thinking about those issues. Instead, they talk down to ordinary people. Marr’s latest fulmination is filled with depictions of Australians as too lazy to care about our political culture - “more subjects than citizens” - apparently living under some mesmerising hex imposed by Howard.

Unwilling or unable to confront the arguments from opponents, they claim some conservative conspiracy is tricking mainstream Australia and trying to keep the Left out of debates. It’s a neat way of avoiding one’s own intellectual irrelevance. When they start to acknowledge their own intellectual shortcomings and their disdain for “ordinary” Australians, perhaps debate will become richer.

The market for ideas - the West’s most precious achievement - works best when ideas are tested by worthy opponents. Each side keeps the other honest. Through that intellectual argy-bargy, good ideas triumph and silly ideas are sidelined.

Neither side should be heard to whine that the other hits too hard. Unfortunately, the Left still seems to want the ring to itself. That kind of sums up the strength of their positions.

Over to you…

http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/janetalbrechtsen/index.php/

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Editorial: Australians deserve a moderate mufti

On the mufti: Muslims in Australia deserve much better than Taj Din al-Hilali, and so it is with a profound sense of relief that we note that his inglorious reign as grand mufti of Australia and New Zealand has finally come to an end.

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Leftist Insensitivity must not be Criticized

Leftists are lightning-fast to perceive and condemn insensitivity in others. But what happens when it is the Leftist that is being insensitive?

In Australia, a Leftist university student under the guidance of Leftist professors made a "comedy" film that ridiculed disabled people.

Insensitive?

It would be hard to imagine anything more insensitive. So what happened?

Nothing.

So two conservative professors at the university concerned wrote an article expressing their disgust. They began their article: "A time comes when you have to say: ``Enough!'', when you can no longer put up with the misanthropic and amoral trash produced under the rubric of postmodernist, post-structuralist thought.

In other words, they correctly identified Leftist amorality as the reason the disgusting film project had been approved. So what happened then?

Did the university finally admit fault and apologize? Not at all. The two conservative professors have now lost their jobs for six months -- for daring to criticize Leftist trash. Details here and here

The head of the university concerned and the man behind the firings is Prof. Peter Coaldrake.

You can ring him to tell him what you think of him. His cellphone is 61 418 642 375 (0418 642 375 if you are ringing from within Australia).

His Office no. is 617 3864 8086 and his home no. is 617 3252 4388. The 61 in the preceding nos. is the country-code for Australia.

To make an international call you may have to dial some other number first. Coaldrake's email is p.coaldrake@qut.edu.au I am not going to say any more now as I want to encourage readers to use their time to make themselves heard about this.

The victimized professors are very upset by the way they have been treated so need all the help they can get.

h/t : TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL