Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt vs. Crikey: Upscaling the blog wars or big yawn?
February 19th, 2009 by Kim | Published in Blogging, Media | 396 Comments
Skepticlawyer reports on the incorporation of various interlinked Blair/Bolt watch blogs into Crikey’s blog network [Crikey story here]. Tim Blair seems to have taken the bait Pure Poison laid for him.
Skepticlawyer comments:
One entirely legitimate attack that the MSM directs at the blogosphere is based on the latter’s pettiness and nastiness. Of course, they use a broad brush, and all of us are tarred. Sure, Crikey doesn’t quite count as MSM, occupying an interesting liminal space, but I’m not sure that facilitating this aspect of the blogosphere is the way for any media organisation to go. It may be one day, but not with this group of writers.
That’s an interesting point, though the MSM attack on the blogosphere is so predictable it hardly matters if it’s justified [and I won't comment on the merits of the various Grodscorp etc. blogs as they're not among my regular reading]. I will say that I think there is some public purpose served by attacking Bolt’s egregious twisting of the facts and logical black holes – because he’s so prominent as a climate change denier. I’m not so sure about Tim Blair. He seems to me to be stuck in something of a blogging timewarp – invent formula circa 2002, stick to it. What strikes me about Tim’s blogging is how little it engages with the Australian political debate. Bolt may claim to have a million hits a month or whatevs (and incidentally, on Bolt’s misleading measure – remembering a million “hits” doesn’t equate to readers, we were at 1049199 pages served in January). I’m puzzled, though, as to how many Daily Telegraph readers are interested in catfights between Blair and “lefty” bloggers and other minor public figures.
The blogosphere as Blair once knew it isn’t the small group of sites referencing each other all the time read by a tiny few. He seems to me to be writing more for his commenters a lot of the time rather than for a broader audience. How many people going to the news.com.au domain really care about Margo Kingston, Bob Ellis, or Marieke Hardy (or Jeremy Sear, and with respect given to all those people) and the others Blair takes pot shots add? … I should of course include “Lefty Kim” in that list… Or even know who they are? Crikey can “monetise” the value of the online politics aficionados who know the rules of this game, but what sort of audience reads Blair having a go at obscure lefties? I may, of course, be wrong. Perhaps there’s a huge audience. I’m open to correction on this, but if I’m not mistaken, Tim – who used to place so much stock on stats comparisons – no longer tells anyone anything about the size of his readership.
Elsewhere: Guy Beres.
Yeah, I think as it stands this is in danger of being a big yawn. Let’s hope at some point it gets away from the rather tiring he-said, she-said, ha ha chortle stuff and back onto discussing some issues of worth. I’m all for more discussion about the quality of opinion in the mainstream media (and beyond), of course.
Half a dozen comments in and you can see it’s a big mistake. The same people shouting at each other for zero effect. Doesn’t get anyone anywhere. Won’t last long.
Oh yeah baby, this should open a can of flying worms – flapping from all directions of the political compass.
Lets face it, there’s already a lot of angry people with too much time on their hands. And given the current economic state of chassis (thanx Sean O’Casy) there’s gonna be a lot more.
So let’s give ‘em something to do by further polarising local online debate. Keepin ‘em foaming in the shed and away from the real world. And yes as Kim pointed out it’ll be a shrinking bunch of beans in a pressure cooker of their own devising.
And if you’re gonna take head on hard-nosed, skilled and well-resourced professional opinionators like Bolt and Blair, you shouldn’t boastfully announce and line up your team in advance. And is it a dream time? Sadly No.
B1 and B2′s gonna make breakfast out of Jeremy and Grodscop because the latter will always be reactive amateurs in this game. And in the blogosphere you get to dictate your own benchmarks for success to your followers anyway. It’s anarchy out there I tell you!
Crikey should either go asymmetrical or as Kim observes, why even fucking bother. Unless you’re just looking for a stoush royale. The real battle for the hearts and minds that are gonna drive the next few decades is already being won well beyond bitchy and uberpartisan blogs who’d never attract real players in their threads. It’s all so 2004.
“dream time?”
Big sigh. Yes I meant
“dream team”
Though I reckon the end result will probably be frantically recast by all parties as a dream time.
Well, this particular stoush was ‘asymmetrical’ from the very beginning.
The original Boltwatch site was around from 2005, IIRC. It drew many readers who were not necessarily hardened partisans in the culture wars, but merely annoyed at Bolt’s shameless ranting.
The critique of Bolt’s blogs eventually expanded to include Blair. Two possible reasons for this are firstly, Bolt repeats himself endlessly. Many of his more contentious points have already long-since been refuted. Also, Blair and Bolt were referencing each other several times a month,m and have virtually the same opinions about everything.
I think Crikey has been brave to take a gamble on this blog. The MSM in Australia has long had a group of very loud, and very noxious right-wing propagandists. They’ve gotten away with plenty of stupidity over the years, and it’s good to see that at least some of it will be called into question.
Finally, surely it’s Tim who is the loser here. The critiques of his blog would continue irrespective of Crikey publishing them. Yet he’s being suckered into publishing responses to these critiques, all to the grunts, clicks and whistles of his winged monkeys.
Bolt is worth going toe to toe with as he is becoming one of the most important polemicists within an Australian political movement, ever. The man has a lot of influence with conservatives. He’s close to being a bargain basement Rush Limbaugh for rusted-on Lib supporters–not to mention Liberal MPs and party apparatchiks. (Though his power to sway the general electorate is pretty marginal IMO; I was amazed to read Judith Brett’s opinion that his Herald-Sun column was somehow part of the Howard strategy to hold onto marginal seats. If the Coalition thought aligning itself with this kind of agitprop can win swing voters in Deakin then they’re basically as silly as global cooling.)
Blair? The train has left the station for poor Timbaleena. One-line outbursts really don’t work on any level at all when the writer has been neutered, and Blair, unlike his more forceful buddy, has been neutered.
Meh, he wasn’t quite William F. Buckley to begin with.
*Holds up BIG YAWN sign*
As if Crikey had not already always been a bit too much about blokes hitting each other over the head with metaphorical blow-up penises like an X-rated version of the Three Stooges. This is not what I paid my $125 or however the hell much it was to resubscribe to Crikey. And so recently, too!
Well, Mystery Cat, you’re a feline after my own heart if that’s a reference to Sadly, No!
But S,N! is every bit as amateur as Grods. And the pieces there can be pretty obtuse, even if it’s all meant to be taken as easily-accessible, populist fun. (Nothing by S,N! is ever kept to a bare minimum, other than the `shorter’ takedowns. They never use 50 words when they can employ 500 instead.)
“Bolt is worth going toe to toe with as he is becoming one of the most important polemicists within an Australian political movement, ever.”
That is very true. But try to get anybody outside Victoria or anybody who doesn’t talk to people who read the Herald-Sun to understand that!
Of course, going toe to toe with him, does seem to contradict my usual advice to ignore him. But there it is.
Bolt will turn his attention to trees in the next couple of years. There’ll be bucket loads of tree cutting on the strength of his backlash after the fires. It’s no small matter.
What PC said.
And next time, if you only want to pay what Crikey is actually worth (that’s Andrew Norton’s line, not mine), wait for Nick Gruen’s annual Crikey subscription drive. Troppo, LP, Andrew Norton and Skepticlawyer ran it this year, which meant people only paid $55 for an annual sub. Nick always advertises it miles in advance, so it’s hard to miss.
I’d actually let my Crikey sub lapse, after realising how little of it I was reading. But then I signed up again to follow Guy Rundle’s terrific coverage of the US election … which is, of course, now over. Will be regularly skipping the Bolt/Blair bizzo, with all due respect to the bloggers involved.
I really like First Dog on the Moon, though.
I’d like to announce that GrodsCorp is closing down because entirely irrelevant, humourless bloggers don’t like us. It’s been an interesting journey, and I wish you all the best.
I think the Pure Poison thingie is a free blog, Dr Cat, not part of the pay for view newsletter.
Elsewhere: Guy Beres.
Also, what Behemoth said!
The difference between them is Bolt wants to change people’s opinion on his pet issues.
Blair’s blog is just his own personal blog that the Daily Tele asked him to host it there instead of his own host, because he gets a lot of traffic. I would make a fair guess Blair still gets more traffic than most Australian blogs combined. If you put LP and Bolt’s blog traffic together they’d probably be about what Blair gets, but his is mostly from the US, as he gets linked to frequently from places like Hot Air and Jules Crittenden (sic?).
But Kim,
That’s just a frigging stupid thing to say. “I saw it coming, so it’s not a valid argument”. WTF?
And on my public purpose point, I think wbb is right.
Somewhat less seriously, if Janet Albrechtsen had taken up Imre Saluzinsky’s bizarre suggestion that she run for Emo Man’s vacant seat, perhaps some scrutiny of her would be in order too. But most of the time, Planet Janet cunningly writes her own self-critique. Repetition as farce. Etc.
Stephen, that’s not what I said. Or meant.
What I mean is that the MSM “critique” has no real relationship to anything that happens on blogs. It’s just a standard set of tropes deployed regardless of referent. Christian Kerr etc. are going to write stuff calling bloggers “uninformed”, “self-indulgent”, “undergraduate” etc. etc. no matter what bloggers do.
And frankly, I think we should stop giving a stuff. If we ever did.
Kim, the link marked ‘Guy Beres’ doesn’t point at Guy’s blog, but something on the Qld election by Derek at Woolly Days. Don’t get me wrong, I like Derek’s stuff, but I suspect he’d like his election commentary placed elsewhere…
We really can’t find out, his blog’s traffic info is protected by Newscorp.
Anyway, I wonder why Blair quit Pajamas Media so early in the game, before anyone knew it would go belly up (not that they ever stopped paying their contracted bloggers.)
I’ve never read the man’s blog regularly, but didn’t he go a couple of years without running ads? Anyway, this is a good excuse to reproduce a quote from photographer Jim Lowney’s piece about the launch of PJ media he attended with Blair.
Yes, but when Rush says the things he says, he’s high on Oxycontin. What’s Bolt’s excuse?
As for Janet – if she ever ran for a seat, she’d win a lot of votes — all she’d have to do is promise to never again write another column! :-D
With regards to the influence of Bolt, this is something we discussed in this post.
I don’t know aout the rest of you but despite the odd allegation that some of Blair and Bolt’s followers sometimes harrass leftie bloggers (witness Anonymous Lefty being effectivly outed), hacked or have their employers contacted (did you know your employee is a leftie? This is what he posts in his off time…) I myself feel kind of uncomfortable about the same treatment being dished out to the right.
They will have to be very careful on this blog that they are only critical and don’t stray into harrassment. I’d hate to see this new blog as some sort of tool to try and curtail the free speech of Blair and Bolt (whose contribution is important to me because I disagree with most of what they say.) Also, will this new blog criticise the left just as much I wonder?
Also, is this is an extension of the culture wars surely the best example rather than engage in an endless mud sling is to do an Obama and talk about important things and not engage with the mudslingers in the first place.
Skepticlawyer comments:
One entirely legitimate attack that the MSM directs at the blogosphere is based on the latter’s pettiness and nastiness.
Oh please! Ever read Lawrence Money? Annabel Crabb? Jim Schembri? Miranda Devine? The list is endless… The MSM is nasty as.
Can’t understand what the problem is. It’s a free access area on the Crikey site, and if it helps to deliver much needed rebukes to the increasingly perceptive and relevant right wing intelligensia, good on them.
Yes indeed, Helen. There’s an interesting article in The Word magazine (UK) about this very tendency in the MSM, and just how far it can go. You could argue it’s worse over there, but I’m sure that we’re not far behind.
If three talented lads are prepared to wade through the sewer to fill me in on what I couldn’t stand to read, first hand, then it has to be a good thing.
SL @ 18 – thanks! I’ve fixed the link.
Exactly joe2. It’s a bit of an occupational health and safety issue over at Crikey, but it saves us the mental anguish.
I can just see the Worcover claim – Severe mental trauma caused by prolonged exposure to shit.
Yer, adrian, I was going to agree with you @24 completely but just got scared when you said …”to the increasingly perceptive and relevant right wing intelligensia,…”
It was a gag, right?
Did anyone watch Blair filling in during the non ratings period when the Regular Resident Right was off surfing at Portsea?
Seems to me he came across as a floundering vacuous oneliner who lost his way to an audition at “Laugh In”
Reminded me of the definition of a shlemiel.
“When a shlemiel walks into a room, it’s as if someone has left.”
Helen, indeedy — I’ve been a target of Lawrence Money’s venom, so I’m not suggesting the MSM are the sainted multitude in this respect — but no MSM journo, as far as I’m aware, has attempted to hack a rival newspaper’s website (as happened to both Jeremy Sear and Iain Hall’s blogs). No mainstream journo ever pulled the sort of stunts that were routine at TSSH. I’ve seen the media do some pretty toxic stuff, and have had one journo attempt to do a recognisably ‘blogospheric shit fight’ stunt on me (publishing my parents’ address on the front page of a newspaper), but I do recognise Margaret Simons’ point (made at some stage either here or at her own blog) that this sort of thing is unusual, and considered very below par behaviour.
I never thought I’d be defending the ladies and gentlemen of the press, but most of the time, even they draw the line at that sort of thing.
skepticlawyer – wasn’t TSSH actually run by a couple of journos?
One was an AAP stringer who claimed to have worked for the Herald Sun, but hadn’t. The other was a public servant — worked for Victoria’s Parks and Wildlife Service (I may have that name wrong).
biggest yawn ever
Omphalokepsis!
That would be ‘omphaloskepsis’.
But the point remains the same – as laura’s.
Judging by some of the comments here it seems that Pure Poison runs the risk of simile by playing the man rather than the ball.
Why not expand the focus of the blog to forensically critique journos/bloggers et al who use the techniques favoured by Bolt? Such posts are already dispersed throughout the interweb across a variety of blogs, so why not offer a centralised site of nitpickery where guest (expert) posters can point out flaws within articles/blogs they feel are of relevance?
despite the odd allegation that some of Blair and Bolt’s followers sometimes harrass leftie bloggers (witness Anonymous Lefty being effectivly outed), hacked or have their employers contacted (did you know your employee is a leftie? This is what he posts in his off time…) I myself feel kind of uncomfortable about the same treatment being dished out to the right.
Godawlmighty. I see what you did there. No-one is suggesting that the PP people (PPPs, heh) are going to contact their subjects’ employers and that kind of sh**t. Please don’t insult our intelligence.
I don’t think that the TSSH bloggers’ behaviour is meaningful in the context of the increasingly large blogosphere, any more than the behaviour of a couple of paedo****les or arsonists is meaningful in the context of the population of Australia, for instance. There’s been a lot of bad journalistic behaviour in the past. (“Now that your family is all dead and your pets and stock are incinerated, how do you feel [jabbing microphone]?”
I’m with Helen. TSSH is also part of that earlier incarnation of the blogosphere Kim’s talking about. I’d forgotten it ever existed.
Maybe you should post that suggestion on the actual blog in question, Alan? More useful that way.
That’s true, Andos.
I guess if my comment is worthy of note it will surface in some form over there. The web is nothing if not connective.
This is the kind of narrow, contained discourse that will make a heavy PhD thesis in 30 or 40 years. “A Place of Their Own: The topology of contestation in Australian political blogs, 2000-2010.” Chapter 4. “In 2009, the battle-lines were drawn again when a new blog under the “Crikey” stable was introduced to challenge the coalition of conservative bloggers…”
I like Tim Blair’s site because is good at poking fun at the Left. Good, clean, vicious stuff. And very necessary these days as the Left seems to be full of myopic triumphalism celebrating the defeats of Bush and Howard. (Anyone cared to look at the politics of USE, CIS & PRC recently?)
Blair has scored some noteable hits close to home. “Lefty Kim” was certainly smarting after Blair nailed her after she tied herself up in knots trying to
defendnot attack FGM.But this sort of thing is mostly an inside joke. Blog pissing contests tend to lose their appeal to those not invested in the personalities, one way or another.
I prefer to draw blood in blog wars by turning them into a compeition as to who gets the most and best confirmed empirical predictions. (Particularly on my fields of interest: psephology – election results, plutology – financial markets and anthropology – human nature.)
You can bitch about who said what to whom. But you cant argue with the scoreboard when the confirmed/refuted predictions are toted up.
So come on guys and gals, put your predictions about the polity, economy and society out there and let the most pre-scient man win.
“A Place of Their Own: The topology of contestation in Australian political blogs, 2000-2010.” Chapter 4. “
A companion volume to John Reed’s “The Ten Days that Shook the Blogosphere”
Maybe ten minutes.
A yawn. None of ‘em are worth reading regularly (imho)
circle jerk.
‘Tis true, Adrien. And what someone else (?) said: Do we really need yet another coterie of boyos slagging each other off and pretending this has political value? OTOH it could be said this lot and that lot deserve each other and are cultural, political and intellectual equivalents.
furious balancing
It would be a circle jerk were that anybody in the frame have the ability to get a hand on anything. :0)
Hmmm, a lot of ‘gate-keeping’ style rhetoric here, and from some people whose ideas, at times, can be no less cranky than anything that Jeremy and the Grodsters write.
What is the main crime committed at PP? An anti-intellectual debating style? Or the fact it hasn’t arisen out of the 70′s campuses or Nation Reveiw or the 80′s anti-uranium-mining fights?
(NB: Only the third sentence in the above para should be construed as sounding ‘agist’.)
I don’t think any of that has any particular pertinence, Nickws. I’m not sure anyone’s on any sort of ideological purity hunt here. And re – ageism – I’ve only got the vaguest clue what the Nation Review was and none as to what style of discourse it may have inspired… and I’m 41 and therefore not exactly a spring chicken… ;)
Having just spent a very unedifying half hour or so reading some of the comments thread ‘Pure Poison’ has inspired elsewhere, I think it’s the pointlessness of the “x said this to y and did this and that’s awful and our side doesn’t…” blah and the repetitive nature of the rhetoric employed by the same participants over and over again that makes it boring above all else. And while the substance of the critique varies to some degree, most of it is a mirror of the “gotcha” style of blogging Tim Blair specialises in. A lot of people seem to have a lot of their ego tied up in all this. That’s fine for them, but frankly I think it’s of very little value for anyone else.
That’s a longwinded way of agreeing with the much more concise assessments – “circle jerk” and “yawn”.
I agree with those who think Bolt’s climate change stuff has to be countered. But it would be far better to do so within the context of a discussion of climate change generally – from a political point of view. That’s my opinion, FWIW. Another blogger I spoke to today said “Crikey has damaged their brand”. I think there’s a fair amount of opinion out there that it’s traffic driven above all. That doesn’t mean that the authors of the blog aren’t – in their own minds – in good faith. I just think it’s politically rather misguided and very boring.
Yes, I shouldn’t have bothered with a lame Gangland-style poke at the PP critics (and I hated Mark Davis’ book when I read it–I thought it a shameless attempt by an older guy to appoint himself `defender’ of my cohort so as to provide himself cover for attacking people who held the media gigs he wanted in on!)
I’ve already contributed to one Poison Pen flamewar, so I must kick myself for running down a concept I genuinely hope is worthwhile. But this kind of thing is the future of political commentary on the net, it may change but it’s not going away–and even people here realise that there’s a ‘technological determinist’ element at work with what’s happening. But I just can’t accept that there’s a moral equivalence between PP and Tim Blair.
On a related note RE what I had to say yesterday: Andrew Bolt’s influence seems to me to be quite separate from the traditional Newscorp editorial powerplays. If he could support himself as an independent blogger and maintain his appearances on ABC TV, Ch 9 and commercial radio, he’d still be as persuasive a voice as he currently is, even without a newspaper column.
I hate the guy, but some small part of me wouldn’t mind seeing him break the traditional ‘MSM’ power structure.
Let’s face it, if it’s to happen during the next upturn in the business cycle (2010? 2014?) it’s not going to be done by genuine amateurs. And Crikey are too much a part of the permanent counterculture (sending Rundle to cover the US election–wot, they couldn’t get Dave Graney?) I’m afraid it might have to be the Global Cooling Beast who kicks the door in bigtime…
Mark, I think you are absolutely right that ozblogistan has — largely — moved beyond this triviality, and I’ve just cited you on that point over at our place. I really do think this kind of thing enables something that should have gone the way of the dodo. And yes, Crikey have damaged their brand. Can you imagine Graham at Online Opinion facilitating something like this? Not in a million years.
I think I’ll leave the last word on blog stoushing to Pierce Caronde Beaumarchin:
“It is not necessary to understand, or believe, things in order to argue about them.”
“Another blogger I spoke to today said “Crikey has damaged their brand”.
Sounds like a pretty sniffy opinion to me. And with more traffic, surely Crikey will be able to increase revenue from advertising; hopefully not its volume but a higher payment for it.
It’s a shame there seems to be so much animosity, lead by skepticlawyer, towards folks of a leftish bent, who have done the hard yards of blogging for years, getting a more high profile gig.
I wish them well on it and would suggest a more informed opinion about this new venture might be made when it has had a bit more time to run.
That was of course The Righteous, joe2, @55. Drat.
joe2 – but I think we are able to form a judgement, since it’s not really a new venture but just a rebadging of the sort of stuff that’s been done for a while by Bolt/Blair Watch etc.
Your question “what sort of audience reads Blair having a go at obscure lefties?” is a good one. However I believe you are missing the bigger point.
You are right that your average news read couldn’t care less about idiots like Irfan Yusuf, Antony Loewenstein etc.
However, Tim highlights their incompetence in the context that despite a well document history of errors and gross dishonesty, stupidity or poor ethics which should have seen them consigned to the scrapheap, these writers are still plenty good enough for Fairfax, ‘our’ ABC and (ahem) Crikey.
As I see it, Tim’s efforts are not so much an attack on the bloggers (which let’s face it, is child’s play) but on those ostensibly professional media outlets who associate with them and should surely know better.
My two links above are to a Google-based collection of JF Beck taunting Loewenstein and Yusuf. Surely after that many errors (which are easily proven regardless of your politics) any decent news outlet would form the conclusion that they aren’t worth the space. Instead, their politics suits those inside the walls of these organisations who put their political views ahead of any preference for accuracy or ethics.
Daniel:
“As I see it, Tim’s efforts are not so much an attack on the bloggers (which let’s face it, is child’s play) but on those ostensibly professional media outlets who associate with them and should surely know better.”
Presumably then you don’t have any problem with Pure Poison doing the exact same thing with respect to bloggers actually employed by professional media outlets.
Oh, for a return to the good old blogging days when Tim could destroy a blogger’s argument/opinion/reputation by pointing out an errant apostrophe.
FDB:
Mate, I don’t have any problem with anyone keeping an eye on the media (a task at which Media Watch has failed dismally). However, what I’ve seen so far from “Pure Poison” is little more than sliming. Hardly something likely to improve the national intellect.
I worry that a whole generation of young Australians get their news and political outlook from KochyMel and equivalents with the more politically inclined too uninformed to realise they are being manipulated by groups like GetUp. I would love to see a better quality of media in this country and I don’t think Crikey currently represents part of the solution.
As I said before, taking on B1 and B2 on their own turf is not going to work. Go asymmetrical.
Remember the one thing that made Tim Blair really lose it was Tim Lambert mirroring his site with moderation-free threads. B2′s complaints over that sounded just like every general in history starting with Cornwallis damning the guerillas/militia/resistance/francs-tireurs for not standing still so we could hit ‘em, damn their hides.
“Godawlmighty. I see what you did there. No-one is suggesting that the PP people (PPPs, heh) are going to contact their subjects’ employers and that kind of sh**t. Please don’t insult our intelligence.”
Um, there’s some pretty personal stuff aimed at Skepticlawyer on one of the posts, aimed at reminding her (and the professional world of google searches) of long distant follies. I was particularly disappointed to see that, having had numerous beers with Mr Sear where he talked about the nastiness of campaigns to ‘out’ him.
I like the man (hi mate, I know you read everything) but do agree with the earlier sentiment that stooping to the same level does not prove something against the nasties on the other side.
Overall, well, I started blogging like that and, like many others I know, gradually pulled back and looked at the nastiness, including our own contributions, and questioned its value.
Nothing has made me question my own politics more than seeing or experiencing vicious personal attacks from people who are meant to be on the same side, a side that is repelled by abuses of power and seeks more community and empathy between people (supposedly).
It attracts readers, hence the Hun sells well and Blair and Bolt are popular. But so does sticking naked women up on your page. I’m not sure it advances progressive politics.
Anyway, B&B do it, I guess their just adding balance, good luck comrades but it’s not my cup of latte anymore…
“They’re”.
Damn, hate that.
I suspect that if you rang up and asked nicely, they’d give it to you. Newspaper companies generally try to work circulation — and these days unique views — into any conversation with any potential advertiser.
When I worked in classifieds I had our circulation bureau figures at my left elbow.
Anyway, this is all about page views. That’s it, that’s all. Shit-stirring to improve readership is as old as publishing. There are probably slabs of clay with lewd comments about Homenfhotep that were doing a brisk trade a few thousand years ago.
You’re quite right about that, PC – you paid $125 for the daily email.
Hmmm, it’s interesting that Tim’s fan here has adopted Blair’s peculiar Sunrise phobia. I expect whingeing like that from older Lefties maintaining the rage against the Dirty Digger, etc, but it’s a strange vibe to get from a conservative (Bolt’s ranting against Eddie MacGuire is in the same vein).
Media studies people, you got some material for a possible journal article here…
“joe2 – but I think we are able to form a judgement, since it’s not really a new venture but just a rebadging of the sort of stuff that’s been done for a while by Bolt/Blair Watch etc.”
Things evolve and it makes a big difference to have a solid platform like Crikey. An estabished, talented, team is ready to work on the project with presumably a few bucks on the plate to bring it up, officially, from purely voluntary status. It would be great if it extends to a net media watch, beyond Bolt/Blair, but those guys get up to some pretty tricky manipulation and sadly it needs to be spelt out over and over.
By the way, the site, as Nickws reminds us about Media Studies, looks like a dream for teachers who want to show students a few things about shit detecting.
Nickws, the conservative intelligentsia, such as it is, comprises lots of old lefties. The targets may change when you switch from the far left to the far right but the party-line mindset stays the same.
Blair is a PJ O’Rourke wannabe, who in turn learnt his politics from the Yippies – keep it light, bright and trite, the Foucault-style playfulness. If you make a telling point, the wit cuts through and gives it extra force. If you’re found to be wrong, say you were only kidding and accuse your fact-checking interlocutor of having no sense of humour. Either way, you get to smirk.
Gosh, that’s a stark comparison, and a reminder of how trivial Blair is and how great a real journalist P.J. O’Rourke is. O’Rourke’s “Seoul Brothers” from around 1986 is one of my favourite pieces of writing of any form: funny, moral, and as substantive an account of political practice as you might find in Pierre Bourdieu.
For some reason this comes to mind:
As good an excuse as any for one of those Yes Minister irregular verbs:
I discuss serious issues with facts and reasoned argument;
You trivialise everything with superficial spin;
He is a devious manipulative leftie with a hidden agenda.
Mark – I think it’s the pointlessness of the “x said this to y and did this and that’s awful and our side doesn’t…
.
Both sides, or all sides (how many sides are there?) play the he said/she said game. Only certain individuals (on both sides don’t). If one side does it the other has to. Working out who’s originally to blame, of course, is a little less fun than sorting Israel/Palestine.
_
MH – …as substantive an account of political practice as you might find in Pierre Bourdieu.
.
I don’t recall Bourdieu ever really going on about political practice. Can’t recall a single skeric about actual political agencies.
“Bourdieu’s political interventions”
http://nowtimes.wordpress.com/2009/01/23/bourdieus-political-interventions/
“Bourdieu’s political turn”
http://tcs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/20/6/69
“it’s all so 2004″.
It was all said and said best, back in ’85. :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOGWbzUM-y8
“when you over something again and again and again and again:”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjSVRsoBYNY&feature=related
More power to Poison Pen (I guess that makes me an old Leftie). Run these lying toads down, every day and every way. Its time, and its happening elsewhere:
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/02/hiatt_will_on_global_warming_misinformation_talk_t.php
er, that would be Pure Poison
What strikes me as surreal about so many of the comments here is the assumption that the audience for independent blogs and independent media in Australia is established, and set in stone, that it is not getting bigger by the day, not finding new readers all the time. Just because so many of you have been hanging around the blogstream for the past four, six or eight years and are bored with a seeming repeat of ‘blog wars’ of the past doesn’t mean that there won’t be tens of thousands under 25 who won’t enjoy a bit of action. Probably two or three times as many young people will be start reading Australian news and politics blogs in 2009-2010 than all new readers in the years past put together.
A large part of that audience wants to see some action, wants to see bloggers trying to take each other down, failing as well, they want to see a bit of online biffo. Sure it might be boring now to most of you, but remember how exciting it was the first few dozens times you read brutal and cutting hack and attacks online, and marvelled at how you’d never seen anything like this in the mainstream media before?
Why would the next generation of online readers and blog virgins be anything different?
If anyone here thinks Grods comments or content is full-on has never read any a handful of the venom and sometimes hilarious rage in comments all over YouTube. Now that stuff can get truly toxic.
The mainstream media is dying not just because of the GFC, but because some tarty spill on a dim politician in The Australian or the Sydney Morning Herald or The Herald Sun can’t even come close to the cruel carnival served up by independent media. Look around, while newspapers die, independent news blogs like LP, Grods, Crikey, are seeing remarkable audience growth. The old media would strangle kittens to be able to claim similar growth in their markets.
And some of you want to tone it down, turn it down? Why? We’re about to enter one of the ugliest ages in civilisation, and people will need to vent, heavily, and will want to read those who can put into words what they cannot. Who can capture the shared disgust as well as the curiosity about the massive changes breaking out all over.
Newspapers, non-YouTube TV is not fit to get us all through The Shitty Years to come. Many of these new few million unemployed coming soon will need lots to keep them occupied and entertained, and this is where independent blogs will find the mainstream-sized audiences that will make them very valuable indeed when advertisers return online in droves.
I’ll predict that in as few as three years, LP, Crikey, Grods, and a few dozen other independent blogs will have successful-now newspaper sized audiences, and they won’t have to be brought up by Murdoch, and toned down, turned down, in the process to get find such audiences.
This is probably the most exciting age of media in this country since Sydney and Melbourne had six or seven city daily papers, in the mid-to-late 1800s. Our newspapers are not the be all and end all of news and opinion anymore, and they are only clinging on right now to setting the news agenda for most people.
I’ve heard blokes at a nearby building site laughing their arses off about something they ALL read on Grods the night before. Only two years ago, those same blokes would have been talking about a newspaper columnist, maybe, or Alan Jones.
Unlike three or four years ago, the new online voices are cutting through, getting through. And they’re not being read because they are polite and neat and too afraid to offend.
Turn it down? Bullshit. TURN IT UP!
Only those ready to get Ugly and tell the brutal truth will survive, the soft and wussy will be cast aside.
That last para sounds like you’re channeling Hunter S. Thompson, Darryl! ;)
A large part of that audience wants to see some action, wants to see bloggers trying to take each other down, failing as well, they want to see a bit of online biffo.
Some call it “dick-measuring”.
the soft and wussy will be cast aside.
I rest my case. You can be agressive and a good writer and observer of politics, life, the arts, whatever. If you’re not a good writer, pissing the furthest won’t make it so.
“…. they want to see a bit of online biffo.”
The call has been made. Where the bloody hell are you Liam?
MH @ 71, P.J. O’Rourke was a great journalist. These days, he’s a broken fucken record. I bought one of his more recent efforts (remaindered) a couple of years ago (CEO of the Couch or something) and still haven’t got past the third page. I didn’t mind his political and economic theorising being flat-out wrong as long as he was still funny, but now he’s just a tedious old man. (Actually, I shouldn’t say “old” – he’s my age.)
Mark @ 81 – Hunter S. Thompson was a god.
To be fair to O’Rourke, I think he was able to learn from his craptacular analysis in Peace Kills back in 2003 when he wrote that the NATO intervention into Kosovo was a ‘liberal failure’ compared to the ‘conservative success’ of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Or at least I hope he was able to learn…
Well – O’Rourke might’ve just got mugged by reality, but it would be a first.
Helen, you misunderstand me (unless I misunderstand you.)
I don’t think the pp writers are going to do those sorts of things. And I wouldn’t compare them to TSSH in the least. I’d just exercuise caution that they don’t whip up the same sort of misguided supporters as you might find on some of the blogs they critique. Or maybe I’ve been too indoctrinated with the whole ‘turn the other cheek’ thing.
Tssk, if you’re referring to my comment #38, yes, I was stating that the PP bloggers WERE unlikely to do “those sorts of things”. And far from saying they were going to emulate TSSH, I was saying rather the opposite. Unless you have me confused with another commenter.
What strikes me about Tim’s blogging is how little it engages with the Australian political debate.
This is not particularly surprising.. Tim Blair (along with Tim Dunlop and John Quiggin) started blogging before there was an Australian Blogosphere, and their blogs have always been skewed more towards engaging with American readers than Australian ones.
I’d be willing to bet that even today American readers make up a large proportion of Tim Blair’s readers, if only due to the fact that the vast US Blogosphere still include him as part of their daily linkage.
The perils of replying too early in the morning. I blame the lack of coffe. But I agree, I doubt they will indulge in the same sort of thing as TSSH. (I was unaware of them until they were gone and trying to get their site unarchived from Pandora for some reason.)
I expected you needed a good hot shower after that, tssk.
David Irving, it’s CEO of the Sofa, and my personal favourite amongst P J O’Rourke’s books.
Peace Kills, on the other hand, is the worst he’s ever written.
“That last para sounds like you’re channeling Hunter S. Thompson, Darryl!”
Well, I did discover Hunter S. Thompson at age 11 in the local library, after spending two months trying to wade through The Brothers Karamazov because Linus in Peanuts was reading it (“you just bleep over all the long names”). I only had to read the first few pages of Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas to know it was easier, and more fun, to write in a style like Thompson’s than it was to ‘channel’ Dostoyevsky. The Secret Agent, however, was a wild book to read at 12.
There’s probably any number of decent essays to be written about bloggers being influenced by Thompson’s most wild and loose flights of writing. I see Thompson’s influence everywhere online, in blog posts and comments alike. if he’d become a blogger in 1998, instead of an online columnist, I’m sure Hunter would have done it better than most.
Jesus, TimT, I reckon it’s unreadable. (I certainly haven’t managed to read it.) I must admit, though, my all-time favourite O’Rourke book is The Batchelor’s Companion. (It reminds me a great deal of my younger self.) A Parliament of Whores isn’t bad, either, although his economics is getting a bit loony right by then.
“I only had to read the first few pages of Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas to know it was easier, and more fun, to write in a style like Thompson’s than it was to ‘channel’ Dostoyevsky.”
I dispute that. They are both equally hard to imitate or even to just draw upon stylistically or conceptually. Exhibit A. The lack of any obvious successors.
What people forget about Hunter is that he was a professional journalist filing copy to deadlines long before he went full gonzo. And also that he did a lot of rewriting of his apparently spontaneous stuff to achieve the effects he was after.
And what people forget about Dostoyevsky is that he spent a big chunk of his life in the military. Y’know, I have no idea why that’s germane to this discussion. Oh well I guess realists do not fear the results of their study.
As you were.
Behemoth, perhaps I should have put it this way :
“more fun, to try and write in style like Thompson’s”
I agree, he was a superb journalist before he went to Las Vegas. The Great Shark Hunt is a solid collection of his earlier work.
I wasn’t reminded of Hunter S. by Daryl’s comment. But it was very well written. I wasn’t sure anyone was assuming that the blogosphere is set in stone tho’.
Adrien, I said the last para not the comment as a whole!
As to Dostoevsky, in some ways there’s a parallel perhaps between some of what we have under discussion here and the ‘grand inquisitor’ sequence from Brothers Karamazov!
Adrien, I said the last para not the comment as a whole!
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Yeah and… I just didn’t see it. Sorry.
You may have been too busy catching up on Bourdieu’s extensive collection of late political writings, Adrien, so I can only forgive you! ;)
You may have been too busy catching up on Bourdieu’s extensive collection of late political writings, Adrien, so I can only forgive you!
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Well not yet. I can’t find the bloody thing. But cheers for pointing it out. Darryl does have the uncompromising posture you find with Hunter S. but then so do Poppy Z Brite and John Lydon (reading currently). And etc.
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When Poppy Z Brite was a kid she used to rip out the naughty page of Naked Lunch go to Christian book stores and put them in bios of Falwell and Billy Graham. :)
I’ve actually never read Poppy Z Brite. Recommended?
As to the late Doc Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail is probably the best evah campaign book. But as Behemoth implies, what people forget is that there’s incredibly astute analysis in there and reportage – not just the features that have spawned a legion of imitators.
It may be slightly off-topic but I’m wondering how many people on LP liked Guy Rundle’s “Down To The Crossroads On The Trail Of The 2008 US Election”? I haven’t gotten around to reading the book as such just yet but that is because I’ve already read them as they are all of his Crikey reports. I thought they were great and made for very enjoyable reading.
Darryl Mason @ 93
I dunno, HST had a very erratic schedule by all accounts. Regular postings would have been few and far between compared to most blogs.
And comments would not have been allowed, otherwise he’d have been making threats of violence against every troll.
Mark @ 102
It is a good book, as is Generation of Swine; maybe now that the Torturer/Deciderer is safely out of the White House I can read Thompson’s Watergate book.
But the lack of any revisions to ‘Campaign Trail’ is annoying, as you’ll find in ‘Swine’ that HST’s anger at the Dem establishment had eventually mellowed (at one point in his collection of eighties columns he says, “people used to proudly go and vote for the likes of Fullbright”), while I’m afraid many low-information people who read and quote from the ’73 book don’t know the context of all this in Thompson’s life journey.
F’rinstance, anyone in this day and age who refers to Hubert Humphrey as “The Hube” should be given a quick kick up the backside and a copy of Robert Caro’s Master of the Senate to study.
” My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder’s jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
I submit to you that Hunter S. Thompson on song like that is up there with Hemingway and Fitzgerald in perfectly capturing the key melody of a certain time – and then, when they realise it’ll never happen again, getting rid of their head instead.
And some more Hunter.
“Let us toast to animal pleasures, to escapism, to rain on the roof and instant coffee, to unemployment insurance and library cards, to absinthe and good-hearted landlords, to music and warm bodies and contraceptives… and to the “good life”, whatever it is and wherever it happens to be.”
Spoken like a true Southern gentleman and a lousy member of normal society.
“…in perfectly capturing the key melody of a certain time”
“melody”!!!!!?!
I meant “threnody”
Fuckin’ autospell programs – project managed by people who think colloquial terminology is a problem not an opportunity. Turd recyclers the lot of ‘em.
@103 – I enjoyed reading Rundle’s US election reports as they appeared in Crikey. Does the book add anything or is it just a compilation?
Mark,
I think it’s just a compilation of all his Crikey reports on it. I got the book along with that Rupert book, Keating the musical DVD and First Dog calendar with the pre-Christmas Crikey subscription offer.
I wish I had got it instead of the Rupert book, Jacques. I really can’t be bothered reading about Murdoch!
Neither can I Mark, I haven’t even bothered to start on the Rupert book either. Those excerpts from the Rupert book in Crikey seemed mildly interesting but a whole book worth would just be too much for me.
FWIW, I loved that Keating! the musical DVD (having never seen the show live) and both my mother and especially my uncle absolutely loved it.
I’ve actually never read Poppy Z Brite. Recommended?
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I’m a fan of her articles. I’ve never been able to get into her novels. If you like stories about vampires and serial killers written by a pixie-sized Cyber Gothpunk who is self-describes as a ‘fag in a woman’s body’ (seriously). Well then it’s for you. I only rad one of her short stories: she calls Calcutta as the vagina of the world. One of those metaphors I’ll probably recall when I’m old and cranky like.
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I can’t find this Bourdieu book anywhere. There’s five libraries and a million bookstores within a half hour’s walk from my flat. All the bookstores say they have it but it’s not there. Why is that Mark?
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I suspect a colossal con. You just made it up and went into a conspiracy with all the librarians and bookstores to get me didn’t you?
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(A little Burroughsian paranoia)
I think it probably is! I’ve got an anthology of vamp stories edited by her lying around somewhere – must dig it out!
Oh yes. But Bourdieu’s ghost is in on it too.
Jacques @ 110 – if you do ever get a chance to see Keating! live, seize the day… it’s really quite fun!
I have to agree with whoever ti was (tssk and others?) above who expressed concern that this sort of supping with the devil is being done in ‘our’ name.
I find it hard to express accurately how incredibly distasteful I found the email I received this morning from somebody who writes for Pure Poison, asking about a post on my blog from last August, which I’ve since deleted, where in the course of a bit of complaining about the mental poverty displayed by a Fairfax columnist’s op-ed, it came out in comments that said columnist had some personal issues; Bolt somehow got onto it and took it up as part of his own vendetta.
This all happened about nine months ago and reflected well on nobody concerned, so what’s the point in digging it up now? I can only guess that the PP people are scrabbling about in search of mud to chuck. FAIL
I vaguely remember that, although I didn’t know you’d had to delete the post. That’s pretty rough.
I think you woefully missed the point of Scott’s enquiry, Laura, and your running on here to rant about it is incredibly petty.
Word, Jeremy.
Folks, this is Andrew Bolt in ‘empathy’ mode:
[angrysarcasm]My heart aches at just how beautiful he is when writing about the travails of people he disagrees with.[/angasm]
Some of the most brilliant people Ive ever met had had bi-polar disorder. Seriously.
Its not clear to me from the posts Ive read the the writer in question does in fact have that diagnosis – but its hardly a slur against a columnist, Boltwit.
In any case your diagnosis awaits – my guess is somewhere in the personality disorder spectrum.
Jeremy, the point of Scott’s pushy email was perfectly clear. He was looking for dirt to rake up and wave about, and didn’t care how old, stale, and sad it was.
Minding one’s own business is as foreign to you lot as it is to Bolt and his pals.
And Scott’s account at Jeremy’s link, of what was said, and by whom, in August, is wildly incorrect – not altogether surprising since I don’t believe he’s a reader of my obscure blog, nor would he perhaps recognise the screen names & real identities of the two people who confirmed certain statements.
The point is that he’s just as happy as Bolt to publish claims that are wrong.
I’m with Laura on this one. Jeremy et al: if you want to turn this into a leftist self-wedging exercise, just keep going on this track. It could be a very effective strategy for losing some rather smart people forever.
Going on what “track”? If you’ve read his post, Scott was looking at Bolt’s ongoing and rather personal campaign against Deveny – an entirely appropriate subject for comment. As part of that he was looking at Bolt’s entirely inappropriate remarks about what he thought he’d read regarding her mental health, based on a post by Laura that Laura has since deleted. It was entirely appropriate (and necessary) for Scott to contact Laura for her recollections regarding that incident, since she was apparently the source. He also contacted Deveny, who was happy to comment – particularly given that this isn’t “old” or “stale” (although it’s definitely “sad”); it’s ongoing.
Scott wasn’t looking for “dirt” to “rake up and wave about” at all.
Note that Laura is happy to complain here (and not on the post in question) about “facts” being “wrong”, but she absolutely refuses to say what’s wrong and how, either here or even via reply email to Scott’s original enquiry. “He’s just as happy as Bolt to publish claims that are wrong”? No, Laura – that’s why he sent you that email asking for further information. And if you were to specify how it is that you say he’s “wrong”, I’m sure he’d be happy to amend.
From your irrationally angry and spiteful response, I can only conclude that you are embarrassed about your role in this, wish it had never happened, and have decided that attack is the best form of defence. Unfortunately, your sanctimony on the subject is more than a little undermined by Deveny herself being happy to go on the record about the incident.
Scott’s piece was both fair, and appropriate, and Laura has made a right git of herself here.
A rather vicious and spiteful comment there Jeremy. Ironically, your sensitivity about this issue would seem to indicate that you know PP has acted stupidly in this case, but are unwilling to admit it.
You seem eager to make my case for me, so I’ll leave you to it…
Keep it civil, please, Jeremy. It’s always very unwise to assume you know others’ motivations, and that characterisation of Laura’s comments and intentions is definitely way outside the bounds of our comments policy.
Jeremy, I told Scott by email before he published that he had the wrong end of the stick entirely. That ought to have been enough to let any sensible person know that they had misunderstood. And truly mate, I’m not obliged to help youse with your dull, dull vendettas.
Guys, everyone knows Bolt is a turd, but only you feel the need to l-a-b-o-u-r the point. Why is that?
One of the ways Scott (and apparently you, Jeremy) have it wrong is that you all seem to think it’s something I said, when actually it is all derived from tangents that accidentally sprouted and blossomed in the comments. I closed these when anonymous blow-ins started using them to talk boring abusive shit unrelated to my post, and unpublished the whole thing when I saw various randoms were linking to it.
Get a life, lads.
Jeremy, I missed where you said this: “And if you were to specify how it is that you say he’s “wrong”, I’m sure he’d be happy to amend.” Coincidentally, I’ve just emailed Scott pointing a couple of things out that he got wrong so we’ll see.
You do realise that he never read the post or comments in question, but he seems to think he can paraphrase them? LOL
Pity you didn’t reply civilly to Scott’s email with your explanation for what happened, isn’t it?
This is what Scott says in his piece:
“The “confession” that Bolt linked to (no longer online) was a comment made by an anonymous person on an obscure blog alleging that Catherine Deveny had bipolar disorder, based solely on observations at one of Deveny’s stand-up comedy shows. I really wish I had a copy of that comment to reproduce but I can’t find one anywhere so my paraphrasing will have to do.”
How is that wrong? Comment on your blog, yup, that’s your current version too.
“Guys, everyone knows Bolt is a turd, but only you feel the need to l-a-b-o-u-r the point. Why is that? “
Because he continues to sprout this turdishness on news.com.au and with an entire page of the Herald Sun to himself twice a week. What, we should just ignore anything he does with that because we all “know he’s a turd” already?
“A rather vicious and spiteful comment there Jeremy.”
Yeah, well, Tim, I don’t enjoy our site being smeared gutlessly and entirely unfairly, without warning, where the smearer thinks we won’t see it. And how has PP “acted stupidly”? The post is a valid one, on a fair point, and Laura’s objection is our daring to do the right thing and contact her about it first.
There does appear to be some sanctimonious lefty wedging going on here, but it’s not from us.
“Coincidentally, I’ve just emailed Scott pointing a couple of things out that he got wrong so we’ll see.”
Again, what a pity that instead of replying civilly to Scott’s email before he finished the post, you decided to chuck a wobbly here instead.
Just because your friend emailed me Jeremy, I don’t have to explain things to him.
And one of the reason I didn’t is that his list of questions made it perfectly clear he’d already decided what happened.
“How is that [version] wrong?”
lol – how is it right? Am I meant to agree that my blog is obscure – well, maybe it is to you, fair enough, but in my eyes it is a totally reliable source. The same goes for the two people (known to me IRL) who independently offered their unsolicited accounts of what they’d heard said a writer’s festival workshop they’d attended.
Since you’ve nagged this much out of me, let me say what my view on the whole matter was, and is.
The column I read in The Age seemed unbalanced to me and I said so, more than half flippantly. Much as what most of Jim Schembri writes is f%$ked in the head. It’s a textual construct, the op-ed, one with well known and well understood conventions of saying stupid things to get a rise out of the reader, and nothing much can be inferred from it about the actual mental state of the author. Except in the case of Andrew Bolt, who is truly, madly, deeply head-f&%ked.
Also, I didn’t actually think The Age would publish writing by someone who wasn’t well, and more importantly, I didn’t believe they would publish abusive angry letters about the column from the public the next day, if the columnist wasn’t 100%.
So I wasn’t pleased when people began popping up saying things that indicated a possibility of an actual nervous breakdown and all that this implied about the irresponsibility of The Age towards its workforce. And I decided it wasn’t any of my business, nor anyone’s who was commenting at my blog, so I bumped the post and comments back to draft status where it will remain permanently.
Now go and find something constructive to do, there’s a good blogger.
Jeremy at 129 – “Coincidentally, I’ve just emailed Scott pointing a couple of things out that he got wrong so we’ll see.”
Again, what a pity that instead of replying civilly to Scott’s email before he finished the post, you decided to chuck a wobbly here instead.”
Yes, you have me there – I didn’t correct the errors in his post until after he’d actually posted it LOL
It’s interesting that Laura is being portrayed as ‘chucking a wobbly’, ‘ranting’, ‘gutlessly smearing’ etc. The tone of these comments suggests that there is only one way in which Jeremy can engage with disagreement. That may not be the case, but I’m not exactly being seduced by the prose in these comments to go and find out. I’m not a reader of PP, and I’m not about to become one on the evidence here.
“Just because your friend emailed me Jeremy, I don’t have to explain things to him. “
You lose the right to be all sanctimonious about any alleged “errors” when you don’t, though.
And your coming here to whinge about it behind his back was pretty contemptible.
Both surprised and disappointed by your conduct in relation to this whole matter, to be honest.
I did read the post and comments in question, as evidenced by my post at the time. I emailed Lucy in the hope of refreshing my memory, getting her side of the story, and getting a hold of exact copies of the comments to use in my Pure Poison post. As opposed to Lucy’s characterisation of my email as “pushy”, it was polite and it gave her a chance to tell me whatever she thought was relevant to the story. Unfortunately Lucy chose only to tell me that I had “wrong end of the stick entirely”, even though I was left to wonder exactly what the stick was and which end was the right one. It was clear from Lucy’s response that I was not welcome to ask any further questions. I’m happy for Lucy to reproduce our email correspondence here if she wishes.
As I said to Lucy in an email this evening, I’m more than happy to publish the comment(s) in question at Pure Poison if she changes her mind about providing them to me.
And for those people on this thread who don’t like Pure Poison: don’t read it.
We don’t, dude.
We go for the more obscure blogs with pictures of cats in outfits and stuff.
xx
And for those people on this thread who don’t like Pure Poison: don’t read it.
Well, he hasn’t. He’s basing his judgment on misrepresentations by third parties.
Me too.
Good work, Scott and Jeremy. Pure Poison rocks!
Bridge’s Pure Poison post links to the comment he can’t find. It’s here.
Pretty fucking classless to use someone’s mental illness as a beating club, PP boys, even if Bolta was as usual the one in the wrong.
But I must say I do relish the revival of inter-blog wars as a comments genre. Also, the revival of crikey’s reputation as a blog I wouldn’t piss on—it was getting altogether too respectable there for a year or two.
Thanks, Beck. I’ve updated the PP post with explanation.
“Pretty fucking classless to use someone’s mental illness as a beating club, PP boys, even if Bolta was as usual the one in the wrong.”
Which of course Scott didn’t do. Read the post again.
Laura @ 130 – I remember the post, and I think your handling of the issue was fair and sensitive in the circumstances. Sounds like PP was engaging in a big ol’ beat up. It’s a real pity that they had to drag you into it, and make spiteful comments in the process.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that this thread shall be the stuff of my new novel, The Prig and the Ponce
…Says a woman who links to JF Beck.
Jane Austen links to JF Beck?!? I will have to reassess my view of her
Sheezus, is that all you guys can come up with to criticise me? Yawn. It’s getting a little worn.
Jeremy, the difference between you and JF Beck is that JF has never judged me on who I have in my blog roll. Indeed, I linked to you at my old blog. No one ever tried to persuade me to take you out of my blogroll or suggested that reading posts by you tainted my opinions. And I would have told them to take a flying leap if anyone had told me anything of the sort.
I didn’t link to you when I moved to Skepticlawyer because I’m not inclined to link to someone who simply dismisses anything I have to say on the basis of my blogroll rather than the substance of my posts or my comments.
Are people supposed to contaminate each other by linking now? This has gone beyond “big yawn” to net paranoia…
Does Legal Eagle have to constantly defend herself on these grounds? Is this supposed to be some sort of public service blogging from the PP crew or eternal and endless snark directed at everyone who doesn’t agree with everything they say?
Just askin’… ;)
Are people supposed to contaminate each other by linking now?
Yep Kim, when your tribal identification is more important than the content of what you say, that’s how it works.
Look at Jeremy’s comments about Laura – that she “rants” is “petty”, has “made a right git of herself”, is “irrationally angry and spiteful”, that she has “smeared gutlessly and entirely unfairly, without warning, where [she] thinks we won’t see it.”
On that last pint, her criticisms were published on a major Australian blog, on topic to the thread at hand, and appeared in that little “latest comment” thingy up the sidebar there. Laura has already demonstrated her ability to hide shit on the interwebs should she chose to. The fact that Jeremy was here with his bucket of shit only four hours after her comment was made shows it wasn’t being hidden.
“on that last pint”
Oh dear me, I’ve given the game away ;) Should be point, of course.
For all its high aspirations, PP seems to have very quickly got itself into a continual pissing contest with Bolt & Blair. That’s a losing proposition, as Robert Manne found when he ‘debated’ Bolt on the stolen generations. It’s not that these guys have bigger dicks, just that their bladders get continual daily exercise.
Re #139: I wouldn’t piss on any blog these days – not good for you, or your computer.
pint !!
If a few of these folk relaxed with a pint, the snark might reduce.
This takes the prize: “And your coming here to whinge about it behind his back was pretty contemptible.”
Fact: persons come here and whinge/criticise/condemn etc “behind the backs of” all manner of persons. Examples include Messrs Costello, Howard, Tuckey, Rudd, Garrett, Bishop and the inimitable Viscount Turnbull. Then there are Mgr Gerard Henderson, the unctuous Robert Manne. the pitiable Bolta, the lurid Deveny, the Poison Dwarf, Clan Shanahan, Devine Junior, etc. LP’s constant fare includes “talking behind persons’ backs”.
So bloody what? Blogging is not Writing a Leter to The Editor. Those criticised do not have the power to determine the time and place of the critique. Or the word length. Or the writing style. It’s not “pistols at dawn”, chaps.
It’s guerilla raiding. If you don’t like it, too bad.
Re: electric-fence relief: sure, it tingles, but that’s how you know it’s working. And electric therapy helps cure all kinds of nervous ailments—just ask the quacks of the 20s and 30s.
I know from some experience that consumption of alcohol before blog commenting does not reduce snark. For better and for worse, it’s quite the opposite.
Jeremy, let’s talk indefensible blog behaviour. Linking to JF Beck is one thing, copying without permission and hosting the files of Pauline’s photographs is another. Especially when your co-blogger Scott has called their publication by the Herald Sun/Daily Telegraph “indefensible”.
So: “Guerillas, in there, pissed”
You sound like a fillum. Are you a fillum? nature-loving monkey fillum? Docudamentary? ‘Adult’ version?? Where the guerillas ‘make babies’. And prance around in junglaceous herbiform landscapes.
I allus thought that was where Ernesto “Che” the Chimp fell down. He couldn’t run along the high branches scratching his bulbous bum and screeching/chattering with a baby on his back. While toting his old rifle and chuckling in Argentinian.
You’re thinking of Quest for Fire, aren’t you?
EPIC WTF.
Gorillas in the Mist
Surely Jeremy wouldn’t be hoping that “pauline hanson topless pics” searches reached his distinguished blog? ;)
And, yeah, then there’s that other thing with practicing what you preach…
OT: full circle to the 2005 heaps-of-skulls post on LP, kindly linked to by Don Liam on the nostalgia-4th-birthday thread. Ernesto “Che” rides again.
“Sheezus, is that all you guys can come up with to criticise me?”
Not even close, but it highlights your inconsistency and hypocrisy when accusing me of “spitefulness”.
And there are many, many differences between me and Beck. I’m not obsessed with other bloggers’ private lives, for one.
“Surely Jeremy wouldn’t be hoping that “pauline hanson topless pics” searches reached his distinguished blog?”
Obviously not, since none of those words are found on that post.
I’m sorry, but showing just how far the Hun has fallen requires SHOWING WHAT THEY’VE DONE. That was their headline and photo, and that’s what I’m criticising. As it deserves.
Nice deflection from Laura’s unjustified smears about PP, though.
Can’t blog, can’t stoush.
Sheesh, not the topic of the post, dude.
All class. Mouthy and glass-jawed as an Australian test cricketer.
Man, how far has LP fallen.
Heh, infringement of copyright law is the one thing that makes Liam go all serious (apart from the dream of worldwide revolution, that is).
Didn’t see that coming.
(BTW. “Pauline’s photos”? They’re Newscorps, mate, just as everything we ever read will be once the widow Ms Deng merges the family firm with Google.)
Man, how far has LP fallen.
Yes, to a level where you apparently now feel comfortable commenting.
Hanson’s or Rupert’s, were the pictures Jeremy’s to host? Hey, he’s the lawyer, I’m just a smartarse on the internet. But let’s ask Jeremy’s co-blogger Tobias Ziegler about justifications for publishing them at all:
My italics.
Maybe you should go over there and comment where he’s likely to see it, if you think you’ve got some kind of “gotcha”.
” Much as what most of Jim Schembri writes is f%$ked in the head. ”
That’s not fair. His review of The Black Balloon was spot on.
Heh. We both know about Jeremy’s omniscient browsing habits. Incidentally, I’ve been looking forward to the day when there were lefty flying monkeys, I see that I haven’t waited in vain.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a meeting with Eddie, Della and Joe—we’re planning our own sanctimonious World Revolution run with two computers, a phone and a fax machine in the Labor Council building in Haymarket.
“That’s not fair. His review of The Black Balloon was spot on.”
Even Schembri has to get something right sometime.
And really the idea that you have to show the photos of Hanson to show how bad publishing them is, is ludicrous.
Hey, can those of us who haven’t got any real interest in this either way see the e-mail correspondence that generated this poor excuse for a stoush in the first place, so we can decide who is the bigger prat?
That’s pretty unfair to Laura. If she’d wanted us to see this ‘distasteful’ email she was slamming, if her little attack had any sense to it at all, she’d have quoted from it in her original comment. Clearly she had a good reason not to do so.
Stop picking on her.
Adrian, we don’t need anyone’s email for that. That’s measured by the poor quality of the excuses in the stoush. I’m giving it on points to:
There it is; to draw up a sanctimonious post about Bolta, Scott emails Laura about a now-deleted post, then refers pointedly to its deletion at Crikey. Then, Laura’s the sanctimonious one, and now I am.
Mister President! We must not allow a sanctimoniousness gap!
Nice summarisin’.
While I’m here and only going a little bit OT, Margaret Simons’ views are clear in her convincing argument about the original airing of the Hanson, or ‘Hanson’, photos: ‘ … we all may live to regret this stupid, craven act of publication.’ Her argument could conceivably apply to the blogosphere as well.
(FWIW, if it was me in those photos I’d be telling them to publish and be damned, along the lines of ‘And furthermore, I was hawt.’)
“Incidentally, I’ve been looking forward to the day when there were lefty flying monkeys, I see that I haven’t waited in vain.”
If this particular sub-species is going to increase in numbers, it may get rather unpleasant around here from time to time. No doubt it will be entertaining enough watching some of the locals shoot them out of the sky, but I’m still not convinced it’s a positive development.
Klaus, I’ve been wondering about the emergence of lefty online stooges for a while now. I welcome the horror, if only for self-discovery about the broader universe of human venality, in the style of Mistah Kurtz. As for me, the statement:
Might as well serve as initial review for any comment I’ve ever submitted anywhere.
Pints are good, Zoe, as are Shane Warne references ;)
Please, Liam, I’ve got stitches in my stomach and it hurts to laugh
So, Rightwing Flying Monkeys at LP = calling Kim an appeaser of ‘Islamofascists’, declaring she supports FGM.
Leftwing Flying Monkeys at LP = defending some rudeboy bloggers who’ve criticised Laura for deleting some information from the Internet, anyway why are the rudeboy bloggers so ‘naff? Gawd they’re all just mindless mobs anyway!
Though the good thing is we have more anecdotal evidence that Australia doesn’t have a ‘Leftwing’, just a collection of Lefts.
And it’s a line from a character called Bendigo Bertie, people. He allus had several during the workday, back during the pre-post-Fordist era. Foucault would no doubt have considered him rough trade…
Sounds like PP was engaging in a big ol’ beat up.
It appears that Deveney herself has commented on the post in question, which vindicates the decision of PP to publish it in the first place. The oxygen must be pretty thin on that moral high ground.
Really?
In what way?
Heh @ Liamista.
I must confess I really cant follow whats going on in this thread. Every time I hear about inter-blog stoushes I start noticing my hat needs counting. Something about Laura’s blog, some guy is angry about the deletions thereon, someone’s allegedly mental, Bolt’s involved… yawn.
Intra-blog stoushes are more my fare.
The post was about Bolt using his column (again) for a bit of professional character assassination, this time against Deveney. He’s done this several times before, most notably in relation to Andrew Wilkie, and the time he was booked for defamation. Given that he’s one of the most prominent media people in Australia, I’d have thought it reasonable for somebody to point this out. Obviously, if it’s not your cup of tea, nobody is forcing you to read it.
Now Deveney has turned up on the thread. If she thought it was merely a ‘beat up’ or muck-raking, she could have said so.
Somebody above said that it’s ‘Pretty fucking classless to use someone’s mental illness as a beating club’. Well, said person doesn’t have a mental illness, and doesn’t appear to think they were used as a ‘beating club’.
Didn’t stop some LP-ers from getting into paroxyms of self-righteousness, though.
PS let’s all cheer up with Penny Lane: The literal version .
After a restless and troubled sleep I awoke to find the singular and peculiar call of “Tekeli li!, Tekeli li!” thrumming in my fitful and waking moments. With sleep-clotted eyes I fumbled for the mobile phone. Then it dawned on me with a chilling shock of discovery which paralysed all my limbs that such technology remained inconceivable when employed the manner in which I must recount this narrative.
But yet despite that oozing and decaying collapse of the fourth wall, I still found myself haunted by a damnable eldritch refrain of “Tekeli li!” that echoed and echoed in my head. I wrenched myself awake from these dark and clotted nightmares only to realise I had not awakened at all but yet still unpleasantly conscious od what was happening around me.
A distant sound both strangely chitinous and chimimg with echoes of a peculiarly chilling flutter of moist rills and suckers entered my consciousness as we trod with steady pace through this dank and cursed thread bored, and indeed bored, underneath the thin firmament we call the blogosphere.
And then there in front of my disbelieving and startling eyes, I saw the unnamable writhing with unthinkable energies swarming and bubbling to give birth through the membrane of what we laughingly call reality. To give birth to the slavering idiot spawn of the senseless gibbering syntax-fumbling dark ravening Old Ones here to to feed our universe to the great Star Goat.
Breath by breath, scrabbling finger nail by nail I clawed my way out of this indescribable charnel pit and rose unsteadily to my blistered feet and turned back to see for the last time what no man should ever see again.
The most completely pointless blog stoush ever.
Was there ever any doubt, klaus?
I’m not sure the said “left wing flying monkeys” count as such. I don’t want to be interpreted as insisting on secret passwords to join teh hivemind or whatever, but isn’t it the case that some folks had a huge affective investment in disliking Howard which has now been projected on his epigones?
When actually I think it’s fair to say that the Bolts and Blairs have never been so irrelevant…
Jeremy, to be fair, does characterise himself as an *anonymous* Lefty. But whoever the rest of the Poison Pen or Pure Poison or Grodscorp crew or whoever they are are, well what’s their politics? Does doing “gotcha” stuff and a mindset that mirrors the discourse of your opponent actually constitute a politics?
Obvs, it’s a rhetorical question.
But, seriously, who knows? What’s “left” about “Blair is teh evil”
Gender analysis? What’s going on in international politics? Even the surface events of Australian politics? Etc… Let alone class analysis or any theoretical base.
Blair and Bolt do pointless personality based blah disconnected from any real political issues. And… ???
Like Lefty E, I’m also not up on the specifics of this *most pathetic stoush evah*.
Who is Catherine Deveny and how many ns does it take to spell her name correctly?
Who cares if *Bolta* makes some claim (completely obscure to me, because none of the alleged stoushers on this thread have ever clarified what the feck it’s all about) about some columnist in The Age?
Note – politics and bullshit in opinion columns are *not* the same thing.
So, what’s this one about? And why should anyone care?
Jeremy, to be fair, does characterise himself as an *anonymous* Lefty. But whoever the rest of the Poison Pen or Pure Poison or Grodscorp crew or whoever they are are, well what’s their politics? Does doing “gotcha” stuff and a mindset that mirrors the discourse of your opponent actually constitute a politics?
Yep, critiquing irrelevant morons like Blair is fairly pointless, but so far, there’s been plenty on PP that doesn’t ‘mirror the discourse’ of taloid columnists. I’m not sure what’s inherently wrong with bloggers offering counter-argument to some of the nation’s most widely-read columnists.
You get all sniffy about the lack of gender and class analysis, but when was the last time you saw these on the present blog, for instance? What are the politics of a site all-too-frequently concerned (or so it would seem these days) with social networking stuff and other ‘metacommentary’ on bellybutton fluff.
You’ve formed that view on the basis of what’s currently on the front page?
Let me make two points:
(a) We’ve got somewhat of a wider brief than “deconstructing the op/ed of the day”. For a long time, we’ve – in part because of what commenters have said – decided to consign a lot of that stuff to the “best ignored/too easy” bin.
(b) Similarly, because there’s a bit of an iterative culture here, we’ve noticed over the years that when we actually write a lot of stuff from a feminist perspective – OMG! It turns into a bullshit male stoush! – so, you join the dots…
I, and I think others on this blog, would be more than happy to fulfil your desire for more confrontational/provocative commentary. But we’ve sadly noticed that the posts with the biggest hits are the routine *Costello’s latest machinations* ones…
But, please, if you’d like to read stuff that’s a bit out there, and could relate and respond to that without saying *why don’t you talk about serious things like what Bolta is saying*, then it’s your choice…
Not kidding, dude. :)
One thing I think we have been doing well over the last little while is providing a serious space for commentary and analysis on the GFC, Climate Change and studies of science.
Again, it’s not *push the buttons* stuff.
Anyone, I’d argue, could write the “ZOMG! Gerard Henderson is so wrong!” or whatevs with half a brain in their sleep. But what does it really do? Beget another generation of dumbarsed culture warriors?
If you don’t like what we do, please come up with some positive and constructive suggestions. I think it’s fair to say that they’re actually taken seriously.
Or, you could always direct our attention to the best practice blogging you yourself are modelling – so we could link to it…
/Not being snarky
So what bit of “asymmetrical warfare” don’t the Pretty Poisoners understand?
Blair and Blot are hard-nosed experienced old media practitioners running their blogs with something of the same skill as Winchell, Lippman or Beachcomber. Entertaining and libel-proof commentary, innuendoes and smears.
The likes of Jeremy and co going up against B&B on the latter’s terms reminds me of a certain festering land war in Central Asia.
If the PP people are too slow-witted to think of how to leap-frog over B&B while crapping on them from a great height, then they throughly deserve even more of the eating shit coming their way.
Jaysus, just off the top of my drunken head right now, I can think of at least three ways to seriously fuck up a mainstream blog. Without code hacking and with no blowback.
I’d guess – time travelling and cyborg chicks with guns!!!
<img src="http://images.starpulse.com/Photos/Previews/Sarah-Connor-Chronicles-tv-17.jpg"
You’ve formed that view on the basis of what’s currently on the front page?
No, I’ve been reading LP for a while, and it’s been a long time since I recall seeing any class analysis, for instance. If you looked at much of the content over the past few months, it’d be hard to identify LP as a lefty blog, unless of the most anaemic sort. I’m not suggesting all blogs should be bare-knuckle polemic, but it’s seldom that you read a post here recently that stakes out a clear, lefty position on anything.
We’ve got somewhat of a wider brief than “deconstructing the op/ed of the day”.
Sure, but there’s plenty of that here too, which is partly why I’m mystified at the snobbery of some of the commenters above.
we’ve noticed over the years that when we actually write a lot of stuff from a feminist perspective – OMG! It turns into a bullshit male stoush!
Since when did a stoush become either ‘bullshit’ or particularly ‘male’? In any case, I’m looking at the 12 posts on your front page (a meagre sample, I know) and I’m not seeing too many feminist perspectives.
But, please, if you’d like to read stuff that’s a bit out there, and could relate and respond to that without saying *why don’t you talk about serious things like what Bolta is saying*, then it’s your choice…
Hey, there are more important bloggy taks in life than critiquing Andrew Bolt. What I’m saying is that LP ain’t doing them, and hasn’t been for a while, which is what makes much of the commentary above seem particularly petty.
There’s a global financial crisis on that’s sending the world into poverty. Australia is still at war, and plenty of other conflicts are happening around the world. Workchoices is still in effect. Lefty groups and individuals are marginalised, both in parliament, and in the street. And what do we get – ‘metacommentary’. And on stuff that was barely worth the commentary in the first place.
As for reading ‘stuff that’s a bit out there’ – well, where is it? There are loads of interesting ideas and theorists who’ve popped up over the past few years, to say nothing of those of the preceding decades whose stuff is stil vital and relevant. Perhaps I’m missing all the scholarly references to Badiou, Zizek, Chomsky, Derrida, etc.
I’m seriously not trying to be snarky. Please read my last comment for meaning. The absence of the said analysis is directly related to the way it’s been received in the past.
You might try to have another look at the post on social networking you dismissed before and look at the quote and the way “absence”, “presence” and “writing” and “technology” are figured. Remember – Larvatus Prodeo.
To the degree that we do get stuck in a bit of a rut at times, that’s fair criticism. But it’s important to remember as well the audience for the thing and the relationship and feedback loop with that audience.
There are a lot of blogs – and if you want links I can provide them – that discuss Badiou, Zizek, etc. They rarely rise above sort of “taking notes for my thesis” stuff. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. But this blog has rather a different purpose.
Fair enough. I recall that some threads from a feminist perspective were heavily trolled. And I don’t want to suggest that there’s nothing worth reading here. The coverage on the environment is good, and some of the comment on the GFC has also been good. In my comments, I had specific commenters/posters in mind.
I think it’s a shame that LP has backed away from stoushing on some feminist and other (broadly speaking) lefty issues. It’s good to see feminist positions defended against doubters, and it’s also enjoyable to read intra-lefty debates. That’s what I’d like to read here, and that’s what I think has been lacking of late. Obviously, you guys get plenty of readers, so many others must disagree.
PP could demolish LP and Fairfax digital with one captioned pic (not of Pauline Hanson’s alleged belly button):
Something kinda sexy about her:
<img src= "http://media.thedaily.com.au/img/photos/2007/09/05/missy-higgins_.jpg"
Thanks for the input, THR. I think after nigh on four years for some of us, it all risks becoming something of a task. We might need a bit of a respite to fire up again. Please bear with us. We always try to provide as much opportunity as we can for people to talk about stuff they want to raise.
“I’d guess – time travelling and cyborg chicks with guns!!!”
That good. Me like. Back Then. In the future.
And really THR, when it comes to blogs you get what you pay for.
Telling people what to do with their blogs to meet your preferences is as pointless as asking a cat to take your calls.
Girls. Guns. Bang bang.
Kiss. kiss.
I think it’s a shame that LP has backed away from stoushing on some feminist and other (broadly speaking) lefty issues. It’s good to see feminist positions defended against doubters, and it’s also enjoyable to read intra-lefty debates.
OK, THR, you come in and help with the defending. You take time to do the unpaid work of writing, linking and HTML’ing. YOU take some of the hits from unpleasant people who refuse to learn the first thing about feminism and need to be taught first principles again and again, and who think responding in anger and bullying and innuendo will shut us up. You develop a blog of your own and get up early in the morning to do spam cleanups and note comments before the working and family day. As Nabs said, you get what you pay for. You don’t pay me and I don’t have to answer to your whining. Just go and read another blog, OK!
*Glides back into the shrubbery, leaving groung frozen*
The Groke FTW!
OK, THR, you come in and help with the defending.
I take your point, but it doesn’t change the fact that this comments thread has had plenty of sanctimonious gits who were quite willing to put a boot into those who are writing, linking, teaching first principles to the hostile, etc.
OK, I’ll come back on and cop deserved criticism.
Jeremy and I have a history of having goes at each other and I know he gets just as much out of it as I do—I’m sure I’ll see him in the next Greens vs. Labor preferences how’syerfather—but I am sorry for having made the crack about flying monkeys at #170. It was indeed snobbish, and honestly, as a self-identifying kettle, I realise that there can be not un-potlike characteristics observed in the stoush.
Now then, I think we can all gather around together and agree that what the world needs now is more threads involving feminists and firearms.
My point is simple: it’s about strategy. What is the value in coming on here to take on Laura about her not helping out on something she’s not convinced is worthwhile in the first place? It’s a serious question. What good does it do for the PP agenda, let alone for putting forward a ‘left’ agenda? Clearly some of us aren’t convinced of the value of that approach at all.
“What is the value in coming on here to take on Laura about her not helping out on something she’s not convinced is worthwhile in the first place?”
klaus k, I would suggest that the reason for “coming on here” was a direct result of
Laura pointing to “somebody who writes for Pure Poison”, @ 114, for what she considered a “distasteful” email. Laura may have chosen to deal with this matter directly, with the person concerned or on the blog itself, but went for this venue.
No “aggenda” running but a direct reply to a perceived slight.
And further to my previous comment, I’d like to go back to first principles.
I’m always forgetting about that hivemind-images-only rule. My <img> was stripped.
It does represent an agenda, though, or rather a style linked to a strategy. I take it as given that Laura chose her audience quite deliberately because she had little faith in ‘dealing with the matter directly’. Jeremy’s response, whether you want to try to justify it or not – and it may be ‘just’ at some level – rather demonstrates her wisdom.
A direct reply does not have to be conducted in the style chosen.
Personally, I am quite impressed by what seemed to be the approach of Catherine Deveny to the Bolt nastiness….. just turn your back on it and not give the creep any energy.
It looks like a great effort to not respond, instinctively, to out and out bulldust, when in doing so would have been inclined to demean a whole group of people who she is actually not a part of. It’s sure moving in the grey area, between black and white, that Andrew never inhabits.
Personally, I give this stoush a “4″ out of 11.
Intra-left stoushes are kinda fun until someone gets offended about other people taking offence at their lack of leftism, or summit equally dreadful, and then there’s nought but tears on one’s oversized pillow. Just remember, kids: fratricide begins at home.
More chicks with guns, please.
P.S. the flying monkeys bit was a ripper, for all the
leftright reasons.Not flying monkeys. Nightgaunts. Bolta Bolta Bolta!
4/11 Fyodor?
You getting generous in your dotage?
Agreed that this is a massively stupid and boring stoush.
I just want to say one thing: I meant it when I said I thought the PP inquiry was distasteful, and I fail to see why saying so isn’t relevant to this thread (nor why it’s sanctimonoius, wobbly-chucking etc etc etc.)
What was distasteful about it was that the questions implied that Scott thought basically the same as Bolt – that saying someone had mental illness constituted a smear against them.
And to repeat my initial post, it appears to me that when you spend so long mooning over Bolt, Blair et al, you start to be influenced by their methods and assumptions. That’s borne out by the incredible way Jeremy chose to talk to me here.
The secondary issue – ie whether Bolt and Blair’s initial comments about Deveny accurately reflected what had been said by two commenters at my blog & whether those commenters are reliable people – is VERY secondary. My overriding feeling was that in view of the absolutely non-shameful nature of mental illness there was no good reason to be going into this again. Nevertheless, the fact is that the two commenters were and are totally reliable people, with no agendas, and Bolt & Bliar seem to have read them correctly.
It tells me all I need to know about Pure Poison that they seem to think that if you ask for information and don’t get it, you then have the right to go ahead and tell the story the way you’d like to to be. See my previous remarks about what happens to your sense of decency when you hang out too long with Bolta.
That’s what it is, really, right there. Becuase what’s indicated by that acceptance of terms, not to mention modes and strategies, is a set of shared values about some things at least.
*Glares meaningfully at THR, esp @ #196, who doesn’t seem to be aware of the link between aggression and testosterone*
Yo Laura, comments crossed.
What you said.
The suggestion that we’ve adopted in combating Bolt or Blair we’ve somehow adopted their character is offensive (and inaccurate) in the extreme, and that’s the last I’ll say on the matter on this thread.
I think the content at Pure Poison speaks for itself.
The suggestion that in combating Bolt or Blair we’ve somehow adopted their character is offensive (and inaccurate) in the extreme, and that’s the last I’ll say on the matter on this thread.
I think the content at Pure Poison speaks for itself.
Praxis, Jeremy: the way in which theory or ideology is turned into concrete political (or religious) activity.
In order to ‘combat’ right-wing opinionists hired to turn over the page rank meters of their papers with short aggressive pieces relying heavily on quotation, you’ve been hired to turn over the page rank meter at Crikey with short aggressive pieces relying heavily on quotation.
…
4/11 Capitonis Maximus? I think you’re making an argument about taste, which we both know is non disputandum. I love the smell of fratricide in the morning—smells like pottage.
Well, Pilleolus, if Mlle. Moderatrix would be so kind I might explain, in my thus-far moderated comment.
Can’t stoush this? Stop. Hogantime. Third Rule of StoushGym: all is stoush.
I eagerly await the judges’ reasoning behind the disgraceful 4, but I do note that the scale like all good measurements goes to 11.
Mate, I’m 2 Legit 2 Quibble.
Well, my low score for what it’s worth is based mostly on the quibbling, Monsieur Le Git.
As in, wasting so much valuable stoushing time stoushing about whether there should be a stoush, and if so is this here thing a stoush, and if so is it any good.
I mean, the first two questions should answer themselves, and the third kinda depends on the first two getting short shrift.
Scuse me while I krank this up to 11, and yell “four”:
I stoush alone [*dow, DOW, dow dow*]
yeah wit’ nobody eeeeelse.
And you know when I stoush alone,
I prefer to be by myself.
If there’s anymore stoushing to be done on this thread, do it in verse, I say.
Your error is easy to see,
You presume that you can oppose me.
Pure Poison is right.
Can’t you just see the light?
How happy then we would all be!
Your argument’s quite a train wreck.
It gives me a pain in the neck.
I could point it out,
But instead, I’ll just shout -
OH NO! YOU LINK JF BECK!
(etc)
It’s been a metastoush, and a particularly tedious one at that.
It’s on, TimT.
We compete, with comments euphonious
To get more and more sanctimonious.
By comparing the worst,
From the last to the first,
We’ll decide who the best comment phoney is.
There’s nothing so boring, so dread or so drear,
as to read a stoush where the point’s not clear.
There’s a wide boy here, and a wide boy there
Trying to show how clever they appear
But it’s all a rather hopeless charade
When their ideas are akin to a lump of lard.
So it’s lonesome away from your kindred an’ all,
As you type away while the wild telephones call,
But remember there’s nothing so dread or so drear,
As to read a stoush where the point’s not clear
It’s St Pat’s day and while everyones a wee bit snakey what we need is A Drop Of The Hard Stuff to turn it into a proper Irish stoush…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6k1lml4AvE
Shorter PP:
While you all prefer to be bored
There yet remain points to be scored
For Bolt never sleeps,
Nor does Blair count his sheep
While there’re lefties abroad to be skewered
Could one of those chicks with guns please shoot me?
I cant take the poetry anymore.
Please, just one shot.
You’re wrong. Not just wrongish. Plainly wrong.
Your wrongness was clear all along.
As your comment gets longer,
You get wronger and wronger
I’m right and your wrong, you wrong nong.
You call that poetry…
Verse is more terse
But describes it worse
You could call it shit
I think that would fit
Maybe drivel
Would be more civil
Said Laura late one morn’ in March,
‘My concern is that’s done in our name’.
‘Your petty rant,’ Anon’s retort,
‘Be poor form and for that I do blame.
Inform yourself, and other’s too,
for by Bolt we be not the same.’
But to this she pays but little heed
For to sup with the devil’s their game.
Let’s not judge others’ ideas of fun.
Instead, let’s improve what’s begun,
The ideal comment post is
LP’s apotheosis:
Missy Higgins, posed, with a gun.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5zrRz8iOTw
We’re serious journalist folks
Who email you regular blokes
With questions ‘n’ stuff
Till you’ve had enough
(Either that, or until Crikey croaks.)
With plaints both vexing and loud,
This thread has drawn quite a crowd,
So late in the day,
There’s little to say,
But OMG! WTF! LOL!
Anon: or this.
All that I hope to show you now
Is this: I am more left wing than thou.
Dear Casey, oh why? No verse for you?
And with you I agree ’tis bad.
But you must come to see it not nearly so wrong
As the meta- and stoushing here had.
Dear Casey, but why? Come join this exchange
One commenter here shall be glad
For whoever is missing, whatever is miss’d,
Your absence is felt much more sad.
A stoush needs the tension between
The patient, earnest and oscene
And whether you waffle
Or quip and then ROFL
Midget Hitler knows where you’ve been.
Doctor Cat’s maxim is: ‘Boredom be not
In the thing but instead in the Self.’
I take this to mean here, ‘We make our own fun,
By taking rhyme diction’ from shelf’.
This site has not practiced due diligence.
Especially the chicks with guns that didnt shoot me before I read Klaus’s verse.
Far.
Out.
Which one in particular? :P
Well all of them, but the one directed at me was particlarly devastating.
There was no qualification that it be good verse.
I was going for ‘making a bit of an ass of myself’, but will settle for ‘devastating’.
Why dont you do some Plath now?
Go on.
After all what do we have here on this post? We have: mention of mental illness, a woman mistreated, a bastard mistreating, feminists with guns, and me threatening suicide.
What more do you need?
You want me to come out of retirement? You must lure me out, in verse form.
I don’t buy a word of this story.
It lacks all support evidenti-ory.
If we had private money,
We’d hear none of this funny
FUCKING CRAP, SONS OF JOACHIM FIORI!
Here’s some Plath Lite while he’s working up to it.
The moon groans, whitely.
Those are ireful men,
she says,
brandishing their ire
like a kitchen knife
like a bottle-top remover
like a cake tester
like any one of those sharp kitchen girlie things:
a knife to the heart,
but treacherously, from the back.
They remind me of my daddy,
but everyone reminds me of my daddy.
I am the moon, of course.
I am a bit bonkers now
I am going a bit bonkers
with all these men
wanting a piece of me
to make a noise with.
I have a fever now,
and I have cut off the top of my thumb,
and I am extremely worried about my children,
and I am very very sad, also angry and vengeful,
because I am not a Scorpio for nothing.
Daddy, are you reading this?
It’s not about you.
Hm, in my browser at least I appear to have been censored by a box with an ad for Qantas in it.
It’s an improvement, actually. It was starting to look a bit too much like Archy and Mehitabel.
Ted Hughes didn’t
kill Sylvia Plath.
Sylvia Plath
killed Sylvia Plath.
Bastard. I hope you appreciate this.
Alright.
You really have quite a nerve
to rhyme so bad with such verve
and its just like a man
to think that he can
but only women see the narrative
its really quite apparitive*
so make like Plath in a rage
be a woman, take the stage
write in blood of the madness
driven by Bolta’s badness
emote dear Laura’s pain
Denounce mad Jeremy’s game
and the death that must come
from a plan thats so dumb
You dont have to be a poet
case in point, we all know it
If you go down to fight in a gutter
It will be you that looks like the nutter
*Of course there is such a word
Hope you are satisfied Klaus.
I better get good Plath for this.
I prefer Robert Lowell anyway if we’re talking suicidal poets, or even just poets.
A savage servility slides by on grease.
The moon groans, whitely
hahahahhahahahhahahahahahahaha
And ive only read the first line!
See
You’ve learnt nothing, boy de Nancy,
‘Bout schemes fiat and ponzi.
“FREE MONEY IS FRAUD!”
He shocked, we awed,
Then over the shark jumped Fonzi.
Oh Pavlov. Pavlov’s bloody Cat.
Is there an award here for brilliance in the field of Plath lite?????
You have outdone yourself. I kneel at the the cave that the grave ate. And worship.
Im crying Im laughing so much.
I jst SMSed this 2 say
ive been meanin to txt u all day
here’s a pic of me reading
yr txtual pleading
jst to prove that I am
who I say.
You’ll have to forgive my lack of familiarity with Plath, but how’s this for a start?
Thread (after Plath’s ‘Daddy’)
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, white thread
In which I have sat like a pixel
For a couple days, small and black,
Daring too often to breathe verse
Thread, I have had to kill you.
You died, given plenty of time—
Heavy like a bag of doorknobs
Ghastly thread, with one gray topic
Small as a mouse
And a head in the freakish blogosphere
Where it pours poor prose over you
In the servers off their beautiful conduits
I have sought to revive you,
Yes, you!
Etc
Memories of West Street and Lepke
Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-worming
in pajamas fresh from the washer each morning,
I hog a whole house on Boston’s
“hardly passionate Marlborough Street,”
where even the man
scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans,
has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate,
and is “a young Republican.”
I have a nine months’ daughter,
young enough to be my granddaughter.
Like the sun she rises in her flame-flamingo infants’ wear.
These are the tranquilized Fifties,
and I am forty. Ought I to regret my seedtime?
I was a fire-breathing Catholic C.O.,
and made my manic statement,
telling off the state and president, and then
sat waiting sentence in the bull pen
beside a negro boy with curlicues
of marijuana in his hair.
Given a year,
I walked on the roof of the West Street Jail, a short
enclosure like my school soccer court,
and saw the Hudson River once a day
through sooty clothesline entanglements
and bleaching khaki tenements.
Strolling, I yammered metaphysics with Abramowitz,
a jaundice-yellow (“it’s really tan”)
and fly-weight pacifist,
so vegetarian,
he wore rope shoes and preferred fallen fruit.
He tried to convert Bioff and Brown,
the Hollywood pimps, to his diet.
Hairy, muscular, suburban,
wearing chocolate double-breasted suits,
they blew their tops and beat him black and blue.
I was so out of things, I’d never heard
of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
“Are you a C.O.?” I asked a fellow jailbird.
“No,” he answered, “I’m a J.W.”
He taught me the “hospital tuck,”
and pointed out the T-shirted back
of Murder Incorporated’s Czar Lepke,
there piling towels on a rack,
or dawdling off to his little segregated cell full
of things forbidden to the common man:
a portable radio, a dresser, two toy American
flags tied together with a ribbon of Easter palm.
Flabby, bald, lobotomized,
he drifted in a sheepish calm,
where no agonizing reappraisal
jarred his concentration on the electric chair
hanging like an oasis in his air
of lost connections….
they told me to be a woman kempt
as precon for a woman kept
but I dreamt unkempt
they said it was open and shut
but I dreamt unhinged
they said I was dreamin’
but I dreamt and dreamt and dreamt
I was gentle to a straying pet
and scorned anon and yet
I dreamt
They cooped me up in lines and metres
tramlines, carriages, meters
A word’s but a token,
a glance sets me on fire
Less is more
more or less
Lessing’s mooring
the craft returns
to shore
– anon
What’s going on?
I’ll tell you what’s going on!
I met a traveller from the blogosphere circa 2005
Who said: “Two capslock’d and linkless columns of prose
Slaver in the MSM. Near them, on the op-ed page,
Half sunk, a pixilated visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and squad of flying monkeys,
Tell that its protected wikipedia page well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
the hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.
And on the byline these words appear:
‘My name is Opinimandias, Tool of Tools:
Look on my rants, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the sludge
Of that colossal cesspit, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away
to nicer places
Well, our work here is done.
Channeling Ogden Nash, On that Pint Point
Andy
Is dandy
But liquor
Is quicker.
Oh, well done all … but Laura, that was awesome.
Does my stoushiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I stoush like I’ve a BRUTAL AND PULVERISING ICE-AGE
At the meeting of my thighs?
Out of the link in my browser’s history’s shame
I stoush
Up from a past that’s rooted (in pain?)
I stoush
I’m a black ocean, in a non-racist way,
Yelling and spelling correctly (I say!).
Leaving behind threads of lipsnig’ring and fear
I stoush
Into a thread drift that’s wondrously clear
I stoush
Bringing the gifts that YouTube gives,
I am the dream and the hope of the spivs.
I stoush
I stoush
I stoush.
*Applause* to all poets, but especially Laura and PC. Skillz.
Er, yeah SL.
No shit.
I just read upthread and would now like to retract my palty poetical perambulations with prejudice.
It’s been a day! Poetry about Internet stoushes from yesterday are oldhat to those of us with cultural ADHD!
Bad poetry about bad sci-fi programmes is the now, the future!
“Dolly up S.Connor for the box,”
sez producer of a show, us contempt*.
“Make her pretty, no muscles, hair kempt!”
And for his worst element,
us low-info viewers must thank
a barely legal adolescent,
y’know, killing-machine fox.
(A cyborg designed for fanboy/girl wank.)
*I know “a show, us contempt” is from some really famous poet, perhaps David Lee Roth…
Laura, that’s as good as it gets.
the sands do indeed stretch far away to better places; one is here.
Tuff act to follow up there, esp. from Laura, but this one crept into my head and now it won’t leave… apologies…
How unpleasant to meet Mr. Stoush!
Who mispronunciates ‘fermez la bouche’!
With his strawmen, tu-quoques,
And cyberspace folkways,
Who gets pished and thrown out of the houshe!
With his pots and his kettles,
And his not-so-fine fettles,
How unpleasant to meet Mr. Stoush!
(Whether he’s being a douche or a dowsh.)
Though fault some of your points I just can not
Say Nick, is Summer Glau the ‘fox’ you mean?
If so, I must insist her better yet
Than just another nervous wanker’s dream
For Summer’s institition in herself
And mightily impressive in each scene
FDB,
you may retract your poetry, but chances are that Prof Bolta will seize on
“Does my stoushiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I stoush like I’ve a BRUTAL AND PULVERISING ICE-AGE
At the meeting of my thighs?”
as incontrovertible evidence that AGW is just not happening. Can you live with that? And what if columnists or bloggers make your verse infamous??
Good luck!
Excellent. Laura that was really good. Really good.
Further, “I’m a black ocean, in a non-racist way. ” is the poetic fragment of the week for me FDB.
Klaus, for the love of God, give it up.
I now realise that this moniker would have been wittier.
So, in the spirit of the stairs, I now lamely trot it out.
At your request Casey, no more verse from me on this thread. But is it so very, very bad? I must say, coming from you, that judgement is a little deflating…
Klaus K @ 279:
Yes, Summer ’twas perfect
in the late & well lamented
Firefly. Now? Dreck.
She’s forced to play unemotional,
but her finest work is _demented_.
Though, I must admit, my viewing of Chronicles
is somewhat less than optimal.
Please Klaus, I will have you know that I believe you are a deeply adequate poet. It is as an academic, that you glitter in the firmament. Its a fallacy that we have to have it all. Thats what I tell myself. Anyway, you should read my stuff. Its really really bad.
Casey, what on earth are you going on about? Poetry? What poetry? Me and Klaus are sci-fi critics! Don’t blame us if you look at out little prose pieces and see ‘eambic pantimetyr’ or whatever you call it.
Are you sure you’re not suffering from that condition Rusty Crowe had in ‘A Beautiful Mind’ where he thought he could see patterns where none existed?
Next you’ll be saying there’s other pieces of ‘verse’ on this thread, plus stoushes, perhaps even screenshots of actresses!
Faint praise here is praise indeed! I feel a sonnet coming on… no hold that, at the lady’s request :)
As to the other: I am a teacher, and that is all. At the moment I aspire to nothing more than time to read and money for books.
FDB, Birdie rip-offs — like the inspired Shane Warne references upthread — are always good.
Casey, as to your own verse, I don’t know: I saw some quite promising couplets up-thread, though I suspect they may have been handed over grudgingly and thus deprived of a possibly more pleasing rhythm.
I’ll get this in before the thread shuts:
He was always “Old Rice And Monkey Nuts”.
“Are you sure your arent suffering from that condition Rusty Crowe had in “A Beautiful Mind”? where he thought he could see patterns where none existed?”
Not me no. Never. But if you want to see patterns where none existed go over to Laura’s blog, where you will see something interesting. Laura, I suppose I should be commenting on your blog, but I cant believe you dressed your cats up like that. Even if they are the bridesmaids. Is that, like, um, how do they feel about that? They look like the Bennett sisters…
Ah now Klaus, if you knew my real name and what edition of Hermes, you just might see how bad it gets!!! Talk about Plath lite.
Oh I cringe, i crawl, I breaks against the wall – whenever I think of it.
Which I try not to. I thought it was brilliant until it got published. Oh why did they publish me? It was then I stared calling myself Casey.
Everywhere.
I think Albie benefits most from the addition of his little red bow, though Basil also gains an edge of sophistication which is all for the good. He is quite gentleman-like here. What can I say about Pudd? I suspect the relaxed attitude displayed here speaks of good character.
The column I read in The Age seemed unbalanced to me and I said so, more than half flippantly.
This is problem statement number one for mine. Through the ages women who express contrary to the norm, or even witty/sarcastic viewpoints have been characterised as mentally unbalanced or unstable as a way of dismissing their viewpoint. It continues to present day. Having been an LP reader for some months I am surprised to see such ‘logic’ applied and supported here.
There is also this: My overriding feeling was that in view of the absolutely non-shameful nature of mental illness there was no good reason to be going into this again.
As a health professional I can tell you that mental illness is still very much stigmatised in our society, and mental health patients who present at some health services are still made to feel shame for their ‘condition’. I won’t presume to know what your experience of mental illness is, but I’m sure you understand this. In short, discrimination and stigmatisation of people living with mental health issues is why Andrew Bolt’s belittling of Catherine Deveny’s supposed mental state, as well as her supposedly being ‘exploited’ by her employer carried so much purchase with his readership.
Nevertheless, the fact is that the two commenters were and are totally reliable people, with no agendas, and Bolt & Bliar seem to have read them correctly.
Except that Bolt and Blair didn’t. Catherine Deveny is no more bipolar than I am, and in any case, would it really matter if she were? Of course not. At the heart of this debate is the fact that two right wing journalists chose to rely wholeheartedly on anonymous blog posts as ‘evidence’ that a journalist who works at a rival media outlet was living with mental illness, and worse, being exploited by her employer for such reasons.
From suveying all the information supplied on the Deveny ‘affair’ on this thread over the past few days, in addition to my past experience with writers such as Andrew Bolt, I can only conclude that Crikey have behaved with diligence and rigour in exposing the shameful way in which a female journalist has been treated in blogland.
Ultimately this is a lesson for all of us: there are clearly unscrupulous bloggers out there who are willing to take what we as commenters write as gospel, and more importantly, will use that information to take shots at their commercial competitors. My guess from what I’ve seen is that female professionals will bear the brunt of this disproportionately than their male counterparts.
Casey, they truly love it. Oh the purring! It’s quite sickening. Pudd (pink ribbon) chewed his collar a bit but more in the spirit of seeing if it haz a flavour than anything else.
A published poet!? Consider my curiosity engaged. At any rate, if you’re anything like me you pretty much can’t stand anything you’ve written within a short period of it being ‘finished’, so your cringing and crawling doesn’t necessarily convince me ’twas no good.
A word, Rachel, lest it’s over your head -
all debate’s now in verse on this thread!
Well if they are purring about it, far be it from me to suggest that they look kooky. And once you get over the uniqueness of it all, they are the best looking bridesmaids I have ever seen, I have to say.
The thread was old, the links were cold,
The flying monkeys their wings did fold,
The polemics, all, as piss were poor…
When the Stoushing-Man came typing,
Typing, typing,
The Stoushing-Man came typing
Up to the old blog door.
He scanned o’er the “Recent Comments,”
But no comments there were recent.
No Bahnisch or Robert Merkel
Had posted anything decent.
He had thought to throw in his two cents,
But he had not even one wee cent.
He pondered bumping an old thread,
But that might make him a jerk;
So the Stoushing-Man went typing,
Typing, typing,
Yes the Stoushing-Man went typing
In his cubicle back at work.
A word, Rachel, lest it’s over your head -
all debate’s now in verse on this thread!
I’m quite happy to accept criticism of the points of my post, but facile rubbish designed princpally to insult rather than inform will be ignored. I’m not that kind of commenter TCFFO.
Rachel, have you read the op-ed in question? How would you describe it? I live in the suburbs, and it shat me to tears.
Laura,
It was one of my favourite Deveny articles – Kath n Kim or Slyvannia Waters is how I’d describe it. Is it evidence of mental instability? Of course it isn’t, and never should have been described as such.
I think you’re being a little sensitive over this; I live in a rural area whose MP is Wilson Tuckey and has been for decades. Imagine how Deveny would describe me and my fellow voting residents?
Rachel, you liked it, I thought it was pathetic crap, no problemo. There’s no love in it as there is in Kath and Kim, no actual curiosity about how other peple live as in Sylvania Waters, just a knowing sneer and a slap at a straw target.
To be straight with you, I would be overjoyed to be assured that she wrote all that stuff about the interesting over-activity of her mind on a totally even keel, because then I would feel that it could be fairly criticised on its merits.
But the essential question at the heart of this article Laura is does this constitute unstable mind? Your original post way back when seemed to suggest it did, and you’ve admitted as much on this thread.
Frankly, whether you and I resonate with Deveny’s words in that article means nothing. But you were prepared to question, however informally on your blog, her state of mind because of it.
For mine the facts in this are: Deveny is a female columnist; we know from history that women are frequently dismimssed as ‘unstable’ if they write about issues outside the beltway; people with mental illness are still discriminated against; you’ve deliberately chosen Deveny’s column to take issue with; plenty of male columnists write plenty of nonsense that seems to go un-noticed and un-commented upon, despite the fact it makes no sense and adds nowt to the advancement of socio-political life in Australia. If you wanted to fling ‘mentally unstable’ mud at anyone, why Deveny?
I’d posit it’s because she’s a female writer, and a very successful one at that, but would want to give you the benefit of the doubt in explaining your objection to that particular piece and why you would hang such a dubious claim about Deveny on it.
If you wanted to fling ‘mentally unstable’ mud at anyone, why Deveny?
You shoulda seen us go at Agony Arndt last week. (Not this blog, but some of the same personnel.) Miranda doesn’t get off scot-free either and Tim Lambert is on Jen Marohasy mockery duty. Oh and FP has our back with regard to Sam in the City and various other idiots. We divide up the work, you see.
Rachel, the column says things about, for instance, it being exhausting having the columnist’s mind. Do you see that if is or was literally true, then it’s not fair for me to criticise it, but if it’s said simply for effect, then it is fair to ask why we readers should care?
And that is where I shall leave it, since actually, I really don’t care; as might be deduced from the fact that I got rid of the original post when it started to be used as something for a whole lot of people who hate each other to go on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, about stuff that’s so riddled with wrong it’s past redemption.
And Rachel, may I respectfully suggest that I am fully committed to equal opportunity when it comes to being scornfully bemused by offensively bad writing and stupid ideas.
Sorry that wasn’t in rhyme.
Think it’s past my Grokey bedtime.
No I don’t. Being a wife, mother and trying to eke out some kind of career I too could be accused of being “exhausted having my mind” – certainly my husband would suggest as much! Does it make me mentally unstable? No. Do I have bipolar disorder? No. Would I be offended at someone speculating such when they don’t know me? Of course. As I said, it pays to be cautious in relation to our speculation about others.
What that column looked like to me was the classic dilemma of the columnist who is frantically scrounging around for a subject before deadline time. When in doubt, go meta: write about the problems (however you perceive them, or whatever you can dredge up) of writing a column. I know! I’ll talk about how lovably scatty I am! I’ve just read the column again and frankly it does look a bit deranged, but — and this is the important bit — clearly Deveny was talking flippantly about how deranged her mind was in order to be entertaining. Now who’s making light of mental illness?
As for the feminist angle, I don’t know how well you know the regular commenters here but most of the women on this thread have been reading around in feminist theory for a fair old while and have a pretty good idea of what we’re doing when it comes to gender-sensitive comments. Laura, like the rest of us, does not need to be taught how to suck these particular eggs.
“Do you see that if is or was literally true, then it’s not fair for me to criticise it, but if it’s said simply for effect, then it is fair to ask why we readers should care?”
I think Laura is making a crucial distinction here, and Rachel is muddying the waters again – with good intent, no doubt. Nevertheless, I don’t see the same clarity in her own appraisal of the situation, however agreeable her general ideas are.
OK seriously, I give up. I’ve googled to no avail.
TCFFO?
Maybe it’s time for a little recap…
Thread begins eons ago giving most an opportunity to direct some (undeserved) animosity towards PP for taking on Bolt and Blair, which is somehow seen as beneath Crikey (ha), or later stooping to the same tactics used by said B&B. (You’ve got to be joking!)
To a disinterested observer such as myself such criticism is misdirected at best – surely these idiots need to be taken to task.
Thread then morphs into acane discussion about an article published in the Age last year, which once again leads to much hostility against PP, once again hard to fathom. Also gives the opportunity for many to prove to few how clever they are.
Later morphs into an excuse to post truly terrible poetry, although the genuine poem amongst the dross should stand out like a beacon. In a discussion partly now about mental illness I am probably the only person who found an unfunny parody of a poet who did actually have a severe mental illness which caused her death, rather distaseful.
Later still Rachel makes some valid points, and is jumped upon by all and sundry, most of whom seem to end up missing most of those points.
In the end the last two lines of Robert Lowell’s poem probably best sum up my impression of the whole thing.
“jumped upon by all and sundry”? Really?
Now Jeremy was, arguably, jumped upon. I have some hostility towards what he has offered on this thread (see the subtle distinction there: ‘what he has offered on this thread’ ie not towards him, or even PP).
Oh, and Sylvia Plath (wherever you are): sorry if we offended you!
Apologies for the hyperbole, klaus k!
Also apologies for all the typos above. Pre-coffee typing not a good idea.
I leapt in rather quickly myself this morning. I see what you’re saying, BTW (and Rachel, too – though I second Liam’s query).
I remember when Lucy & Mickler’s book came out a few years back, I was much in favour of it, but similar objections were raised here to the ones I’m now directing at the PP crew. All hostility aside, I guess I feel like life’s too short for sifting through these things, and would rather we not produce more Henderson/Manne type life-long, archivally-infused uber-stoushes. But then, I’ve spent literally hours writing horrible verse for this thread now, so maybe that’s hypocritical.
As to the distinct point of how those involved might respond to people who feel as I do, well I still think it could be done better.
BTW Robert Lowell is great indeed. Thanks!
Thread delivered.
And de-livered.
Andes liver.
Red.
TCFFO = To Care For F**kwits Ordinarily ????
Liam, TCFFO = Too Cool to Fight Feminist Ozblogger
Did exactly the same thing last night, trying to work out what preceded that juicy-sounding FO at the end…
Oh. Too bad.
I was hoping for a particularly inventive curse.
Oh, me too. How sad.
I actually thought you were referring to Stoushing Man, Haiku. You really should have picked up on Zoe’s pseudonymania. You better check your sylph before you wreck your sylph, etc.
‘The suggestion that we’ve adopted in combating Bolt or Blair we’ve somehow adopted their character is offensive (and inaccurate) in the extreme’
I agree with Jeremy.
Jeremy Sear was just as nasty before he started attacking Bolt and Blair.
‘I can only conclude that Crikey have behaved with diligence and rigour in exposing the shameful way in which a female journalist has been treated in blogland.’
This happened six months ago. How is raking over it again responsible?
‘Ultimately this is a lesson for all of us: there are clearly unscrupulous bloggers out there who are willing to take what we as commenters write as gospel,’
Please provide the evidence that either Blair or Bolt did take the suggestion that she had a mental illness as ‘gospel’ truth.
‘you’ve deliberately chosen Deveny’s column to take issue with; plenty of male columnists write plenty of nonsense that seems to go un-noticed and un-commented upon, despite the fact it makes no sense and adds nowt to the advancement of socio-political life in Australia. If you wanted to fling ‘mentally unstable’ mud at anyone, why Deveny?’
That is a particularly puerile suggestion. Why should she be protected simply on the basis of her gender?
You have also provided absolutely no evidence that women with outre views have traditionally been more subject to allegations of mental illness than men.
More importantly, the article is an admission that Deveny believes that she is not capable of thinking straight and that she believes she has a drinking problem. Its possible that it is fictionalised in the style of gonzo journalism but you are naive to dismiss what she is saying. As a health professional, if you really are one, you ought to now that ignoring the warning signs of mental illness is dangerous.
*sigh*
Typical. Its all sylph, sylph, sylph with you people.
So says the concern troll. Deveny has said she is not bipolar, but g1, Laura, klaus k and others continue the pretense that Deveny is mentally unstable, knowing full well that Bolt has used this pretense as a slur against Deveny to get her sacked from her job. Your right-wing agenda of character assassination is truly contemptible.
Probably appropriate given the Sylphia Plathitudes en haut.
Anyhoo, let’s give it a lash:
What dire offence from Jer’mous causes springs,
What mighty stoushes rise from email’d things,
I sing–This verse to CASEY, Muse! is due:
This, even Laura may vouchsafe to view:
Slight is the subject, but not so the praise,
If She inspire, and He approve my lays.
Say what strange motive, Goddess! could compel
A well-blog’d knob t’ assault a gentle Belle?
Is there anyhing worse than a concern troll? Perhaps an attack of greenslime.
Lol and bravo, silkworm.
“More importantly, the article is an admission that Deveny believes that she is not capable of thinking straight and that she believes she has a drinking problem.”
g1 , nice work @325, introducing a drinking problem into the equation, as well. I am sure that if you worked harder you could read something else into that piece as well.
Was that sarcastic and really for Silkworm, or genuine and actually for Fyodor, Klaus?
Confused,
The Earthquake Zone.
Why did you find it distasteful in particular, Adrian?
The parody related to the genre of confessional poetry which has been so overused, that it becomes parodic code for the lived experiences of women. Plath was one of the poster girls of this genre, all the details of her life laid bare for the world to see in her very famous poetry which Pav brilliantly summarised in her poem. Plath herself has become so iconic, her poetry so well known, that the details of her life have transcended the woman and entered the stuff of legend. From here its one short step to playful parody. But there was no disrespect in it. Feminists are very territorial about Plath. Some have taken issue with her husband’s control of her estate and his decision to destroy some of her journals, which would explain some of her denser writings. Ironically though, fame came to Sylvia posthumously after Ted had her poetry published. The man we love to hate is the man who gave her to us in the first place.
But, as far as I know there is no diagnosed mental illness which led to her death Adrian. She had several breakdowns and suffered from severe depression. But as far as I know, there was no definitive diagnosis in her lifetime, only retrospective postulations. What led to her death might have been biological, or social – such as her father’s death at the age of 8, or her husband’s infidelities or her strained relationship with her mother. Certainly Ted Hughes traces it to her obsession with father in his final poems – from memory (and those poems in Birthday Letters are exqusite, if not a little biased). We will never know. It is also disputed as to whether she actually meant to die. There is evidence to suggest it was a parasuicidal attempt which went wrong. But that is also disputed. Suicide is often a mystery to even those closest to the suicidee.
Casey, I happen to know a lot about Plath and her poetry, having taught it for at least 5 years, and I suppose after you immerse yourself in the poetry, the poet becomes almost a real person to you.
As I said, it’s likely only me that found offense.
And you’re right, I should have used the word ‘probably’ in relation to her death.
Fyodor
Thanks and all, but rather that musing, I would like to approve your lays in future. That sounds far more interesting to me.
Please let me know. I will be back later in the evening.
Me too. Ive read much on Sylvia. There was no disrespect intended. So what did you make of Ted’s final poems?
Nice lash indeed, boxhead. You’re not often a poetical participant, but you do surprise.
I know, I know, I really should have identified the acronym immediately. It’s probably, I suspect, handle-blindness from too much sylph-abuse.
FDB: It was sarcastic, and for silkworm as addressed. I won’t be taking on Fyodor, because I don’t fancy being flayed alive by an evil clown.
Yep, awsum.
This Be The Thread
They fuck you up, ego and id
They may not mean to, but they do
They spur comments best kept hid
That add far too much of you
You were stirred in your turn
By old-style sneers and shady gloats
From trolls that often faked concern
And then went for unbared throats
Most commenters have no plan
And insights are off the shelf
Get out as early as you can
And don’t start any blog yourself.
Larkin’ about aside, I join with everyone else here who’s observed that Laura’s contribution at #269 is da bomb.
General Review of the Stouch Situation
Jeremy wants Bolta’s hide;
Laura thinks Deveney’s snide.
Pavlov’s Cat is Plath reborn;
Casey and klaus flirt and fawn.
Fyodor lives but in his stouch;
Nabs chimes in from his midnight couch.
With this the gist and sum of it,
What earthly good can come of it?
Oh, and Nabakov, this is for you:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmUfkyItPic
Sex on a stick. She turns me on more than anyone I have ever seen reciting poetry.
Very amusing, Case, but I fear you wouldn’t approve of my lays.
“Stouch” = the couch you leave out on the stoop*
* Don’t say I don’t look after you, Japerz.
I read “stouch” as the exclamation you make when you’re losing.
That said, I clicked on Paulus’ link this morning without first reference to the volume of the speakers on my computer. Any of my neighbours who didn’t know the first line of Larkin’s poem—certainly know it now.
Enter JEREMY, SCOTT and ANT ROGENOUS.
ALL: Double, double, toil and trouble!
Blogger burn, and comments bubble!
JEREMY: Old, diseased and filthy scandal!
Slander that’s too hot to handle!
Some old comment on a blog -
Toe of newt, and brain of dog!
SCOTT: Add some salt!
ANT: And pepper too!
JEREMY: Just to season up our brew!
ALL: Double, double, toil and trouble!
Blogger burn, and comments bubble!
‘g1 , nice work @325, introducing a drinking problem into the equation, as well. I am sure that if you worked harder you could read something else into that piece as well.’
Why don’t you read the article before commenting. The words really aren’t that long.
‘Deveny has said she is not bipolar’
So? Bipolar is not the only possible disorder and concern for her mental health is entirely reasonable given what she has written.
‘but g1, Laura, klaus k and others continue the pretense that Deveny is mentally unstable,’
That is a lie.
‘knowing full well that Bolt has used this pretense as a slur against Deveny to get her sacked from her job.’
Another lie. You have provided no evidence to support this slur against Bolt.
‘Your right-wing agenda of character assassination is truly contemptible.’
Firstly, you have no idea about my politics and Laura does not come across as having right wing politics at all.
Secondly, Deveny deserves criticism for the rubbish views she espouses in her poorly written articles. But there should be no shame invlolved if she has a mental illness.
“Very amusing, Case, but I fear you wouldn’t approve of my lays.”
Ok we will leave it there, but in the event that you change your mind, you should know that my standards are highly low. On a clear day, you can see Atlantis from them.
Clearly, m’lady’s standards lie in Lyonesse.
Nice puppet, Lance.
nice Larkins, Nabavov.
I agree with g1 where he/she writes: “… Deveny deserves criticism for the rubbish views she espouses in her poorly written articles.”
There is no need to ascribe mental illness.
The lady writes badly, and espouses harshly expressed blind prejudice. I recall the article where she opined that everyone who attends the Formula 1 Grand Prix should be shot dead. Many Melbourne residents loathe the F1 Grand Pricks: few would go as far as Deveny. OTOH must a person be mentally ill, to casually (jokingly?) advocate mass murder? The Editor left the sentence in. Would the Letters Editor leave such a statement in a published Letter??
Deveny occasionally writes whining stuff about her dear inner suburbanites being wonderful, and (outer) suburbanites being uniformly woeful. I agree with Laura: it shits me to tears. It’s juvenile, ignorant, intemperate. It doesn’t add to my enjoyment of the day, to know that a blind hater is being paid to churn out her bile.
I find male spillers of bile similarly annoying. It’s not Deveny’s gender, it’s her output.
Several posters have said, the newspaper just wants to cause a stir. Maybe true. If so: pathetic. There are other ways to gain readers’ attention: how about thorough investigative reporting, good book reviews, insightful background pieces, interesting interviews, startling photos, thorough national and international coverage?? The longer that list grows, the more diminuitive seem the outpourings of Deveny.
BTW, I’m not sure what we can do about the common use of phrases like “he’s MAD!!”, “the guy’s lost his marbles!”, “did you see Bolta’s column? He’s nuts!” when what we’re succinctly attempting to convey is our utter disagreement or loathing of an opinion, an argument, a vicious writing style, or whatever. I suggest we’re not purporting to give a medical diagnosis. We’re probably implying ” ‘Highly Disagree’ just doesn’t do justice to my reaction”. But this language is so common in everday useage.
Step 1: avoid it when blogging or posting ??
BTW, I’m not sure what we can do about the common use of phrases like “he’s MAD!!”, “the guy’s lost his marbles!”, “did you see Bolta’s column? He’s nuts!” when what we’re succinctly attempting to convey is our utter disagreement or loathing of an opinion, an argument, a vicious writing style, or whatever. I suggest we’re not purporting to give a medical diagnosis. We’re probably implying ” ‘Highly Disagree’ just doesn’t do justice to my reaction”. But this language is so common in everday useage.
Step 1: avoid it when blogging or posting ??
I share both your sense that the way we use ‘he’s mad’ etc is not all that good and your opinion that it’s meant to convey things other than actual diagnosis.
Don’t know about your step one – don’t know. But it’s a good constructive suggestion and as such I am almost overwhelmed with relief to read it.
BQ fail. Sorry.
Thanks Laura,
I just found this thread a very difficult one to think about, so I took my time. What I wrote (above) is painfully boring, long-winded and elementary. Embarrassingly so. I was underwhelmed after hitting the Submit key. You and the other experienced bloggers here are thinking at a higher level, and have obviously had to grapple with such issues often.
I applaud the fact that you unpublished the material in question. While the Boys swagger and fight, you reflected and then did a decent thing. Well done.
[OT now: there's some fine verses above, but your Opinimandias still gets a big bouquet. And I think it's because it takes me back to a Grade 6 or Form 1 classroom, many decades ago. Yes, they read poems to us, and some were damnably fine and haunting. {tears in my eyes now}]
cheers, Laura
Well I should fess up now and say I’ve been teaching it this week, so it was ready to hand. The Youth of Today agree with us that it’s a shivers down the spine sort of poem. They are really very receptive to anything that’s not too long.
*Nods vigorously*
Obvious concern trolling.
More concern trolling.
“Clearly, m’lady’s standards lie in Lyonesse”
Sir Lunch A Lot, you say that like its a bad thing. Which is kind of funny, what, with your predilections for married really really really white girls and other chicks that suck you into getting them pregnant while you are spaced out. That’s some interesting gig you got going there. And who the hell does Liam get to be if you are the lance of the lake?
Speaking of white, Im sure its time for another sauv blanc.
Silkworm, there is a pope thread you know.
g1@ 347. How you could possibly infer from the words… “It’s no wonder I drink” …that Deveny has a drinking problem? It is just plain silly, if not malicious.
And I did read the article before commenting, which is quite different to your weird work. You engaged in making things up that were never there.
“They are really very receptive to anything that’s not too long.”
Bit-size chunks are chewed and digested, but for the most part my students can’t or don’t cut anything larger up for themselves. I’m already having trouble this semester with putting some longer, detailed articles in the reader. Not difficult stuff for the most part, but so far they’re skipping the long ones where they can, and not finishing them otherwise. Teaching novels must be a nightmare.
If you give them the first chapter of The Maltese Falcon in a reader, they want to read the whole book! :)
Lunch-a-lot’s a fantasist. I’ll settle for Sancho Panza.
Il y a que tristesse en Lyonesse.
Hey! No fair! I thought the under-aged virgin I knocked up was actually the wife of my best friend! Plus she had my mum’s name and…erm…besides, we were on a BREAK!
Snap, fucking snap, baby. You can do the accent, for one thing.
Ah, Sir Lunch-A-Lot, the vassal with the pestle. Or is it the potion with the motion of the ocean?
It’s gotta be “Stousho Panzer”, Haiku. Achtung, b-b-baby, as Bono said at lunch the other day.
silkworm @358
You have absolutely no idea about my motivations or reasons for discussing this.
joe2:
‘g1@ 347. How you could possibly infer from the words… “It’s no wonder I drink” …that Deveny has a drinking problem? It is just plain silly, if not malicious.’
Rubbish. She is clearly saying that she uses alcohol as a form of self-medication for the mental health issues (whatever they may be) that she recognises that she has. Any professional will tell you that this is a warning sign that shouldn’t be ignored, if she is serious in what she writes.
‘And I did read the article before commenting,’
But what you wrote indicated that you either did not read the article or did not understand what you read.
‘which is quite different to your weird work.’
What an odd thing to write. I’ve never seen the word ‘work’ used to refer to a blog comment before and of course her article is quite different to my comment. My comment was not an admission of a fragile mental state for one.
‘You engaged in making things up that were never there.’
Another odd thing to write, of course things that are made up were never there. However, you are quite wrong as I have explained.
g1 has very astutely picked up that the use of the word ‘work’ when describing a blog comment is an early indication of underlying mental illness and/or work related issues.
Nothing escapes the forensic analysis that g1 can bring to the most seemingly innocent comment.
Love your work BTW.
Well spotted adrian. I’m not sure whether to go for a workforce motivator, editor or a shrink.
Or all of the above.
‘g1 has very astutely picked up that the use of the word ‘work’ when describing a blog comment is an early indication of underlying mental illness and/or work related issues.’
Now here is an actual example of someone engaging ‘in making things up that were never there’.
You are starting to sound like a really sleazy Willie Nelson, Sir Gal-I-Had. Of course, what you did was nothing new in Incestville, and all men secretly want to sleep with their mothers on kitkat breaks. Or sisters even. Your best friend who was married to the white chick that you bonked that got sent to the convent? He did a Byron and have you seen Mordred lately? At least your left behinds got the grail, so its just as well you are a fantasist and not a realist like Mr Panza.
I have always believed that Spanish is just a lazy form of Italian. (which, translated means, I cant understand what you said in Spanish you linguistic freak, so please rewrite it in Italian thanks, especially the word “Il” as the spanish tranlator just won’t tell me what it means). Sheesh. Im going to give up soon. You are way too much hard work – I’ll leave you to Liam and the gym. I used to think you were the same people once, but lets leave that subject alone.
…and Im thinking, if you put some French in that Spanish, that was such a devious, Lancy boy thing to do. I spent ages looking for ‘Il’ on those automatic Spanish translators.
Casey – reckon the Spanish translator will work best with Spanish text.
Man you put so much French into that Spanish didn’t you? So much French there really is no Spanish at all is there?. Why would Lancelot du Lac speak Spanish anyway. I blame Sanches Panza for this.
Do you even realise how much time Ive wasted on the automatic Spanish translators cause youse two flipped literatures like pancakes? Liam? Fyodor?
Oh no you didn’t.
Looking for the pillar of Lot’s salt?
Yes I know this now FDB. You could have told me an hour ago. that would have been helpful.
Heh.
I did start that comment quitie a while ago, but got called away from my desk to do some work.
Ah, los travails du trabajo.
Im so not looking that up. I dont care how curious I am.
It was a tri-tongue pun anyway, and I doubt Google Translate has the chops.
You hear that Google?!?! You got served.
That’ll teach you to do your street view driveby when my roses have been unpruned for 2 years.
Ouch! Banjo music?! Played by a hippy?! That one bit deep.
Speaking of bastards, they’re obviously both vulgar lazio by-blows. Personally, I prefer Italian to Spanish, but I’m biased.
Certo, signorina. Prego scusate il mio italiano goffo.
Molto diverso?
Yes, I get that a lot. Apparently, I’m not very credible as an independent persona.
There there, Sideshow.
I believe in you.
Poppin’ or lockin’?
Rollin’ or rockin’?
Make up yo mind
Or get coal in yo stockin’
‘g1@ 347. How you could possibly infer from the words… “It’s no wonder I drink” …that Deveny has a drinking problem? It is just plain silly, if not malicious.’
Rubbish. She is clearly saying that she uses alcohol as a form of self-medication for the mental health issues (whatever they may be) that she recognises that she has. Any professional will tell you that this is a warning sign that shouldn’t be ignored, if she is serious in what she writes.
As I read it, it was a joke. You know? Like lots of comically inclined personal US blogs really. They try to present themselves as hilariously bad, and it’s partly a takeoff of what David Rubie was saying about the sanitised presentation of self on the internet. It’s an American style of comic writing and might not translate very well to an Australian context. I read a lot of US blogs, and I’m very familiar with this kind of “voice”.
Whoa!
Just realised I cut-’n'-pasted in the wrong chunk of text up there.
Well, just imagine something terribly urbane and witty in place of the shit lyrics I was having a facebook convo with an old bandmate about*. Simple!
*Hey, it was the nineties. Everybody was playing in jazz-funk hip-hop bands, I swears it!
Ok. You are a linguistic freak*. Ho capito. Quella parola, tristezza, mi piace molto. I dont know why, I just love it. No wait, its coming to me. Its the Dolomites, its winter and someone asks “Ma perche tanta triste?” Slap. I still wonder what stung the most. The cold? the pain? who knows, but the faint outline of my fingers was pleasing.** Anyway, its not about me, its about you. So, parliamo di Tristano no?, e forse anche la trauma della nascita. Un altra donna bianca. Che noia Fyodor. Blanchefleur. Lets just caller “Pet” and be done with it.
Ok, so, e vero. C’era una tristezza profonda nel Lionessa.
“Little son, I have longed a while to see you, and now I see you the fairest thing ever a woman bore. In sadness came I hither, in sadness did I bring forth, and in sadness has your first feast day gone. And as by sadness you came into the world, your name shall be called Tristan; that is the child of sadness. After she had said these words she kissed him, and immediately when she had kissed him she died.”
As they always do.
Only women bleed.
Ok, I wont start. Again.
But you! The mother thing. Again?
(It’s wierd, yes, but even so, sei molto simpatico Lancylot)
*I speak Itanglish. Another vulgar by-blow, but from the Kingdom of the two Norton Streets.
**I so totally made that up. I just like writing like Danielle Steele.
FDB if you hadnae said anything, no one would have noticed (and they would have projected some kind of meaning on it) :-)
La Chemise: are you nothing but a Big Girl’s blouse??
Hey, it was the nineties. Everybody was playing in jazz-funk hip-hop bands, I swears it!
At least they got over it, FDB. The husbang has recently become wildly enthusiastic for the concept.
Exhibit 1
Exhibit 2
What am I to do?
“FDB if you hadnae said anything, no one would have noticed”
I guess I’ll choose to take that as a compliment. Thanks, Helen, for the compliment.
Zoe – “husbang”!11!!??!1??!!?![and so on]
That’s a hell of a word you got right there.
And look, a hell of a hubby too, if he can sustain a simultaneous love of Ponty ‘n’ tha Dogg[is that enough 'g' yet?].
He, he drops it like it’s prog.
Helen @382 you are absolutely correct to say that the Deveny comments, about drinking, were a joke. Just do not expect g1 to ‘get it’ or accept that Deveny has clearly denied, with nuanced consideration, at P.P.(see her quote below), that she has no mental health issues. She has been subject here and elsewhere to a very nasty personal attack for her writing. Like or hate her work, there is no need attack her like that, especially when the basis for bile is totally fabricated.
“What kind of intellectual lightweight would be as ignorant or unsophisticated about the human psyche to consider mental illness as weakness? Mental health is something that we all as individuals and collectively as a society need to take as serious as our physical health. We have to acknowledge it’s something we have to tend to and look our for in our friends, families and workmates. As a society we are extremely mentally unwell. And if anyone reads what I write, about being dyslexic, atheist, feminist…don’t you reckon I would have written about it by now if I was.”
How sad. Plath’s son commits suicide, 46 years after she did
http://www.smh.com.au/world/sylvia-plaths-son-commits-suicide-20090323-97lf.html?page=-1
You son’s eyes…. would become
So perfectly your eyes,
Became wet jewels
The hardest substance of the purest pain
As I fed him in his high white chair
Ted Hughes, “Life after Death”, Birthday Letters.
Thanks Casey. A beautiful poem.
Thanks Casey, what a gem of a poem to come from such a sad maelstrom. And now another suicide. Terrible.
Jesus Christ, you know how many comments the poison pen post got at Blair’s site? Three.
THREE.
Nobody cares, even Blair’s minions can barely be bothered to register PP’s existence, or Crikey’s, for that matter.
Yes you are right. We should always ask ourselves this. “What would Tim Blair do?” In fact, Im going to get a bracelet with “WWTBD?” on it. Im going to put it on my pencil case. “WWTBD?” Im going to put a note in the fridge on the Lindt chocolate “WWTBD?”.