It was with some disbelief that I watched ABC TV coverage of One Nation leader Pauline Hanson’s quick trip to the Great Barrier Reef last week.
Accompanied by that renowned and reasoning mind, Malcolm Roberts, Hanson’s trip was designed to *prove* that claims of coral bleaching are highly exaggerated, stupid. Look: it’s perfectly fine.
The two senators’ (yes, they are senators in our government and we laugh at the US for Trump) claims are based on Hanson ripping out a few stems of healthy coral and waving them triumphantly at the slavering cameras. That she was diving some thousand kilometres south of where the most serious bleaching occurs hardly seemed to matter.
However, the point of this post is not to argue against gross stupidity, always a thankless task. Gross stupidity should be ignored, in my opinion, as it will not respond to anything that does not wholly support its position. You cannot change grossly stupid people. You may well interpret this as an elitist comment, and I don’t fucking care. By my definition intelligence requires a capacity to listen, weigh evidence, and if necessary be capable of change. It is enabled and enhanced by education, but has nothing at all to do with higher degrees. One of the most grossly stupid people I’ve ever met sailed through university at the age of sixteen.
In our current zeitgeist anyone possessed of a modicum of smarts is verbally abused, even by our millionaire Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull (see, money doesn’t make you elite either, apparently) as being elite. Unless of course you’re a sportsperson, when being elite is a good thing. For the rest of us, the PM, following Donald Trump, has redefined the meaning of *elite* to describe anyone who doesn’t agree with him.
Be that as it may, what I want to know is, what were the ABC’s motives in giving this pathetic piece of theatrical trash a whole swag of time on the 7.30 Report? Reason tells me the show is watched largely by *elites* who will become enraged and complain, turn off the telly, bang their heads on the coffee table in frustrated despair before turning off the telly, or, if they have a gun, shoot out their screens which would have been my preferred method of dealing with yet another inundation of grossly stupid, unchallenged, bereft of facts and reason hyena vomit. Except I don’t have a gun.
I think I have a partial answer to my own question. The master plan is to make the ABC intolerable for anyone who does not agree with the government and other lunatics. Then it will be entirely co-opted as an arm of government propaganda, which it very nearly is. I am convinced of this after the recent removal of absolutely ace broadcaster Jonathan Green from Sunday mornings, along with the most original voice in media, First Dog on the Moon. To be replaced by the utterly colourless, utterly boring, utterly talentless but CONSERVATIVE, Tom Switzer.
How is it that conservatives, neo liberals and fascists are so astoundingly humourless and bereft of creativity? Rhetorical question.
Obviously, what is required here is a moneyed elite or elites who are prepared to fund alternative media that will contest the mind destroying drivel now served up nightly by the ABC. A home for the talent the LNP government is, like all good fascists, doing its best to silence. I do not believe in gods, but I am praying for this outcome.
In the meantime, we should all unceasingly point out to whoever will listen that fact-less hyena vomit is not *balance*, or anything like *balance.* It is fact-less hyena vomit. It is making this country exceedingly dumb. And there is nothing fascists like more than a dumbed down population over whom they have absolute control.
By the way, here’s the latest on the coral bleaching. Not from hyenas.
No Place For Sheep 
Has to be the quote of the year, How is it that conservatives, neo liberals and fascists are so astoundingly humourless and bereft of creativity? Rhetorical question! (exclamation mine).
Precisely my argument for a long while. It is in their DNA, that’s why they are conservative. They hate change, love the status quo, tradition, the old school (and I mean that literarily), don’t rock the boat, short hair for boys and pony tails for girls.
The problem is that there are so fucking many of them. Most of the population are conservative at heart, when it comes to the crunch, when the economy and my way of life is threatened. The swing to the right, almost a global phenomenon, is evidence of this. Lord of the flies mantra, Kill the pig, kill the pig, is alive and well.
What’s really bad about the Hanson-Barrier Reef thing is that people will agree with her and blindly believe that all is well. It’s more convenient than accepting the truth-Al Gore all over. They’ll still do it when the acidic ocean is eating their front door and waves are lapping over the window sill.
Enough!
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Yes – and the fact they’ve all now come out of the closet has translated into them no longer being ashamed of their nonsensical views. They’re doing fine living by them thanks very much. Is this economic development’s ultimate achievement perhaps? Relaxed and comfortable?
One thing I’ve never understood though – if conservatives don’t like change then why is it that it is overwhelmingly this cohort which favours the removal of body hair… and inasmuch as this is the case should we be worried that going by the above photo Tony Abbott has evidently lapsed in this regard? What’s the world coming to?!
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Oh hell, not body hair again
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“How is it that conservatives, neo liberals and fascists are so astoundingly humourless and bereft of creativity? Rhetorical question.”
Whilst an answer may be uncalled for, it amuses me to answer it. Humour and creativity require imagination and a degree of empathy, characteristics sadly lacking in the rightists.
About the only rightist comedian is Barry Humphries; but a close examination of his humour shows typical rightist traits – “look at those silly people over there doing silly things” admittedly done very well with acute observation.
Creativity? The fascists stole all their ideas and mantras from elsewhere, took them to absurd degrees and of course needed expungement after the suffering of millions became intolerable.
And so it goes.
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Sadly for Hanson she doesn’t seem to understand that the closer you get to the Equator the hotter it gets and the more damage is done. As the effects of Climate Change progress the 1990 words of Dr David Suzuki ring in my ears. He had a public address meeting in Townsville in 1990 warning us that if we didn’t act fast enough the effects of climate we are now seeing would eventuate. Just yesterday a report from eminent scientists was released noting that the GBR was in severe strife. There are currently 70,000 jobs attached to the reef that could be lost if something is not done soon.
Renewable energy is the key, I practice what I preach, we have had a 3kW solar system since 2010. If a lot more Australians do not switch to renewable’s soon I fear another Cat 5 cyclone is only weeks away in North Queensland.
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I met with Steven Schneider in the 1980’s during the CFC debate when the liberal senators argued that it didn’t matter if we killed the ozone layer because we had to support the chemical making companies.
They both boasted they used to walk through sheep dip, I stood up in the public gallery and called them fucking morons before being rudely ejected – I worked for a Democrat senator at the time.
The two WA senators died within a year of each other from the dioxin in the sheep dip which caused their cancers.
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Well, there’s a cautionary tale, Shaun. I often think the only way politicians will take these things seriously is when they or their loved ones are directly & intimately affected.
Too many of them seem to have no capacity for living as if we are a society, they act as if we are a mass of unconnected individuals
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The ABC is white trash media.
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At least the 7.30 report on Pauline Hanson’s diving trip caused me to care about what was on 7.30, which, night after night just leaves me uninterested. Despairing is a better reaction than the usual boredom interviews with weedy pop singers generated by Leigh Sales. Perhaps the ABC should replace this program with yet another QI episode.
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7.30 featuring trash? That’s news?
🙂
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No, it isn’t DQ, but it has finally gone too far.
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Hanson and Malcolm Roberts with his conspiracy theories get an extraordinary amount of air time. They have a right to believe in any rubbish they wish but my 8cents a day should not be spent on promoting their rubbish.
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Is it still only 8 cents a day??
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Sign of the times. somewhere along the way we lost or ceded that ability to self determine, present in the past,. to shadowy influences who appear not to have our interests at heart and became sheep. Much is determined for us now in our lives, perhaps we have forgotten how to stand on our own two (four?) feet but where material deprivations or fear of them discomforted us once, now our lives are pervaded by a sense that whoever set us as we are will come to claim their due at an indeterminate time in the future.
There is that Kafkaesque sense that we have become Eloi awaiting the return of the Morlocks.
To cut us off from the information we need to determine our lives is something akin to starvation or castration. A savage pathology is in play here, something inverse to what lefties have understood to be “consciousness”. The oligarchy is unknowingly itself determined by inculcated insecurities that breed reactive control freakery, like a frightened animal lashing out in the dark and it shows in different ways in politicised religion, bureaucratic instrumentalism and capitalist commodification.
That it is irrational andinsecurity driven comes from the example of dumbing down through denialism and is like plucking you eyes out because your can;t accept what you see..so irrational and a recipe for disaster.
Does it get back to something Foucaultian,as I understand the concept, whereby the system has evolved beyond clubs and guns to a technique of control from the inside out, through inculcated social and cultural button-pushing manipulation, like rats in a Skinner Box?
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Here is a minor but instructive example of the mentality:
http://www.smh.com.au/business/workplace-relations/baird-government-replaces-local-employees-with-457-visa-workers-20161130-gt0p95.html
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