Long may ratiocination triumph over relativism!

In it Roberts points out the uselessness of getting bogged down in statistics of body counts, instead of simply accepting the basic fact that numerous Aborigines were murdered by Europeans.

The numbers actually count, Paul. They affect the way events can be accurately assessed and characterised. Your language betrays your agenda. “simply accepting the basic fact” How can it be a basic fact if you aren’t interested in the actual facts? That approach to history is a joke, and that is what Windschuttle is fighting, as painful as it may be to those in denial.

“simply accepting the basic fact”

LOL. Well… one thing is accurate – your approach to academic rigour is “simple”.

So as LP is making pronouncements about where you/it believes various people lie on the left-liberal-conservative continuum, maybe it would be timely for LP to determine where it places itself on that continuum – particularly as while making those pronouncements you accept ads from corporate capitalists (some would label them corporate criminals!). Surely your position on the ethics of advertising reflects your personal value system which in turn feeds into your political persuasion. The only thing I’m not quite sure about is where the ‘you’ ends and the ‘LP’ starts.

Perhaps you’d be more comfortable addressing this question in a new thread. Personally, I’m interested in teasing out this tension between personal values and public practice; the commitment made by those of us on the left to social justice values versus the trade-offs we’re forced to make in order to survive in a capitalist society.

Nowhere is this tension (read hypocrisy) more overt than in the larger NGOs who will take government funds to do just about anything, whilst professing strong social justice values, appearing to reach out to the disadvantaged, the homeless, etc. The church-run welfare orgs are particularly, but not exclusively, guilty of happily sacrificing their professed principals in pursuance of the almighty dollar. If the corporatisied welfare/housing sector received the kind of forensic scrutiny on LP or generally in the blogosphere that is devoted to intellectual positions, as per (the earlier part of) this thread, a lot of stuff would come to light!

So to bring this post back into the tone of the discussion, the absence of strong socialist-inclined lobby groups over the past 15 years has led to the socially and economically disadvantaged being ground further into the dust. That – along with the decline of health, housing and other public services – is surely more a more important outcome than arguing over the entrails of Robert Manne’s political oscillations.

Finally, I can see why no other LP readers are bothered by the corporate ads. The kind of behaviour I’ve described above from NGOs has come to be par for the course. In our superficial, impoverished culture it’s okay to profess one set of beliefs whilst openly practising another. It’s now acceptable for social justice and human rights to be reduced to empty sloganeering. Think of how the global ‘make poverty history’ campaign amounted to wearing armbands! There’s a whole homelessness industry out there getting rich out of doing anything and everything for the homeless EXCEPT finding houses for them.

So I just think that while intellectual theorising nourishes the mind, it doesn’t feed the soul the way that authentic behaviour does – if it becomes one’s primary preoccupation it obscures the need for integrity.