Tim Blair
The Daily Telegraph
October 26, 2015
LIKE most doctrinaire left-wingers, Wendy Bacon takes an unusual view of things. Last December, for example, the Sydney journalism academic gazed around the central business district and noted an exceptional reduction in traffic.
Impressed by this, Bacon jumped on Twitter and declared: “Clearing of cars in CBD gives you idea of how pleasant carless city might be (despite context).”
The “context” to which Bacon referred was, of course, the Lindt cafe siege. While most of us were gripped by the horror of an Islamic terrorist taking 18 frightened Australians hostage in the middle of our city, Bacon instead took the time to consider certain urban transport advantages.
Wendy Bacon She’s an odd one, even by the warped standards of her political allies.
She’s an odd one, even by the warped standards of her political allies. Lately Wendy has
A fellow Twitter user by the name of Monsterdome checked the provided link and came back with a question. “How does it highlight that, Wendy?” he asked. “The example given was of birthday chocolates withheld. Not exactly the Gulag.”
Wendy wasn’t swayed. “Chocolates is detail. They have served their time. Why treat like criminals?”
Besides Leftists, the only other people on earth who regard confectionary denial as criminal treatment are three years old and usually in front of me at the supermarket check-out yelling at their mothers. The modern Left has now sunk to the same emotional level as sugar-dependent toddlers.
Incidentally, that Guardian piece opened with the remarkable line: “New Zealand detainees on Christmas Island are so angry, hungry and traumatised they are allegedly considering rioting.”
Only famously polite New Zealanders could ever be so described. Riots are generally spontaneous affairs involving very little consideration. Possibly our Kiwi crims on Christmas Island have organised a riot committee, where the latest proposals for a violent insurrection are discussed over tea and “buscuts”.
The piece also claimed New Zealand Labour MP Kelvin Davis, a recent visitor to the Christmas Island detention centre, “was drug tested and escorted into an airless room where detainees were brought in two at a time for 30 minutes.” If true, this is rather more worrying than mere chocolate deprivation. People generally die after just three minutes in an airless environment. Leaving them there for half an hour seems extremely inefficient, at the very least.
Still, mass asphyxiation should quell those incipient riots. Well done, border officials. And well done to Davis, too, who for all his exaggerations actually did visit the detention centre before offering an opinion. This whole “visiting places and then talking about them” thing, also known as “reporting”, might catch on one day. Although, following the experience of Chris Kenny, you might ask why anyone would bother.
Kenny, a columnist at The Australian, spent several months negotiating with authorities before becoming the first foreign journalist in 18 months to visit Nauru, now home to about 600 asylum seekers. His visit coincided with the return to Nauru of Abyan, a 23-year-old Somali and alleged rape victim who was earlier flown to Australia for an abortion.
Abyan, not her real name, declined to have the abortion, according to the Department of Immigration. Given Nauru’s small asylum seeker population, it took little time for Kenny to find her and ask her side of the story.
Kenny and a photographer from The Australian dealt respectfully with Abyan over the course of two interviews in two days. She told Kenny that she still wanted an abortion but not in Nauru or Australia. She agreed to be photographed but not to show her face. When she’d finished stating her case, Kenny and the photographer left.
Kenny’s reward for his straightforward and illuminating interviews was to be attacked online by demented Leftists.
“The only journalist granted a visa to Nauru has been Chris Kenny, who with a police escort immediately went to beat down the door of Nauru rape victim Abyan,” claimed online rag Independent Australia.
This insane fantasy was immediately seized on as pure truth by Twitter’s idiot army, who accused Kenny of “barging in on Abyan with an armed posse”, “harassing a young refugee who’s pregnant” and of being “knowingly co-opted in (a) Nauru propaganda exercise.”
Labor MP Graham Perrett said Kenny was “obscene & insensitive & very close to criminal behaviour … what a grub.”
Bizarrely, the notion that Australian Federal Police officers were involved somehow became a Twitter truth as well. Kenny never saw a single such officer during his whole time on the island.
By the end of the week small signs of sanity began to emerge. Perrett withdrew his defamatory slur (“I retract & apologise to him for any hurt & embarrassment it caused”) and Independent Australia deleted its entire ridiculous article. Even the Leftist cranks at vice.com conceded that Kenny’s foes had overreached: “His article is far more reasonable than his many critics would predict (Abyan’s story is given significant room) …”
Yet these positive developments were overwhelmed by continuing waves of Leftist rage. Some people just can’t handle the truth. Just like those supermarket three-year-olds, they prefer sweet deception.
IDOL TALK FROM A BIG FAN OF MAO
MALCOLM Turnbull is still enjoying the golden early phase of his prime ministership, during which he can say remarkably stupid things and not be pulled up for it. Recently the Great Communicator told Fairfax that he wants to, as Fairfax put it, “change the culture; the culture of government, the culture of politics, the culture of business. Even the way Australia presents itself to the world”.
That’s a lot of change. And who might be Turnbull’s guide for these seismic shifts?
“He cites the founder of communist China, Mao Zedong, in a famous declaration attributed to him in the creation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 when he said: ‘The Chinese people have stood up!’ And Turnbull adapts it for Australia: ‘’Modern China is built upon an assertion of national sovereignty. And that is why we say to China, ‘The Australian people stand up!’ repeating it in Mandarin.”
Just by the by, Mao Zedong killed about 45 million people according to some estimates. Nice fellow you’re quoting there, Malcolm. And not for the first time. Back in 2011, Turnbull gave a speech at the London School of Economics:
“The economic success of modern China, whether manifested in gleaming new cities, fast trains and freeways, or in tanks and stealth fighter jets, is the fulfilment of Mao’s proud boast in 1949 from the top of Tien An Men. ‘Zhong guo ren min zanqilai le’ — The Chinese people have stood up. And so they have — and we are now all taking notice.”
At the time, The Australian’s Greg Sheridan wrote that Turnbull’s LSE speech and another to Asialink helped explain “why he was such a disastrous Liberal leader and why he should never be considered for the leadership again”.
“They contradict Liberal Party policy, they contradict Liberal leader Tony Abbott and Liberal foreign affairs spokeswoman Julie Bishop, and they show Turnbull as well to the left not only of his party but of the Gillard government, and indeed of Kevin Rudd,” Sheridan continued.
“They suggest Turnbull’s values and world view are in many respects outside the mainstream of his party, and on some key matters outside the mainstream of Australian life.”
Yet today Turnbull says exactly the same dumb things he was saying four years ago and now the media adores him for it. This might just be because, to paraphrase Sheridan, the media’s values and world view are also in many respects outside the mainstream of Australian life.
SMALL ACTS OF MICROAGGRESSION UPSET LITTLE MINDS
HAVE you ever committed an act of microaggression? Perhaps you have, and you don’t even know it.
Microaggression does not mean beating up midgets. Rather, “microaggressions are the everyday verbal, non-verbal and environmental slights, snubs or insults, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative messages to target persons based solely upon their marginalised group membership.”
That’s according to the University of California, Los Angeles, which also provides a list of microaggressive assaults. For example, if you say: “I believe the most qualified person should get the job”, what you’re really saying is: “The playing field is even so if women cannot make it, the problem is with them.”
Modern university students, the most pansified bunch of panic babies ever to stain this earth, are absolutely rabid for microaggression. Presumably this is because actual aggression, or even any approximation of it, has been completely removed from their timid little lives.
These students are so hyper-alert for offence that they can detect minute acts of microaggression with the same unerring precision as a electron holography microscope scanning for subatomic particles.
The latest microaggressive crime is, in fact, criticism of those screaming about microaggression.
“The phrase ‘politically correct’ is now a microaggression, according to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee,” US writer Peter Hasson reports. “The university also claims the word ‘lame’ is a microaggression that somehow both ‘ridicules and ignores the lives of amputees’.”
Kids, you don’t belong at university. You belong back in kindergarten, where everything is soft and the nice grown-ups never say mean things. Readers are invited to submit their ideas for dealing with these children. You are welcome to be as macroaggressive as you wish.
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