(paraphrased from a bumper sticker seen this morning)
I will be happy when schools have all the money they need to educate our children and the military has to hold fetes and garage sales to buy bombs.
Why, as a society, do we get our priorities so completely backwards?
Some time ago I promised Nick that I would comment on the Rob Watts vs Andrew Bolt debate. Before reading this, go and listen to the debate.
“Debates” like this would suit Andrew Bolt down to the gound. While he likes to try to create the impression that he’s a brave conservative boldly stepping into the bearpit, he would love this sort of situation. Look at the terms: he gets to argue in favour of a vague assertion: that most staff and many students of universities are engaged in a left-wing “group think” that sees them all believing and saying the same things about the same issues. Quite a nebulous proposition, and of course he can cite various anecdotes to support this assertion. More on anecdotes later.
Of course, when it comes to his opponent, Rob Watts, if he attempts to make any generalisations about conservative columnists, we find that Bolt does not identify with those columnists. He will only engage over specific things he has written. So Watts has to defend all academia, but Bolt only has to defend specific things he’s written.
Looks like a pretty lopsided debate.
The “citing of anecdotes” I mentioned above is the core technique of many conservatives. One or more experiences are taken and a view formed that is then applied to all members of any specific group. This is garden-variety bigotry. For example, recently I read that John Howard still believes he was in the right over the children overboard saga because “they irresponsibly sank the damn boat, which put their children in the water”. I still recall his lemon-mouthed comment that “these people” were the sort of people that would throw their children overboard. He lumps every asylum seeker into a basket of “these people”, based on the alleged (and subseqently proven to be false) actions of a few of them.
This is a favourite technique of Bolt and many other conservative columnists: you don’t need statistics, studies or other scientific facts when you have anecdotes and/or personal experiences that can be extrapolated into sweeping generalisations. After all, things that happened to you or your friends are facts. You can’t question the validity of what someone experienced. Some conservatives seem to like anecdotes more than personal experiences - you don’t have to defend or justify anecdotes. But the real fact is that the experiences of an individual have nothing to do with the characteristics of a population.
Now it’s time for a game of Andrew Bolt Bingo.
Plunder Down Under - great story (which our few newspapers here are too scared to cover) by David Fickling of The Guardian on the incredible amount of water being wasted by some of our agricultural industries.
Well, he did it. Johnny succeeded in scaring the swinging voters into returning him for another four years over the fear of higher interest rates.
Quite sobering really for a hopelessly optimistic progressive like me. I suppose I just need to realise that elections in this country are decided by middle class swinging voters who care nothing about the real issues in our society, nothing about social justice, nothing about foreign affairs, nothing about the real fundamentals of our economy (and the need to increase exports). All they care about is their whopping great mortgages and they’re prepared to return the worst prime minister we’ve ever had in the misguided hope that it has anything to do with interest rates whatsoever.
I’m not just making this up. Forget all the rubbish in the papers and on the TV. All you have to do is have a look at the vox pops in the papers today that asked voters what they were concerned about. The most common response was “I’m not interested/don’t understand any of the issues, I just voted Liberal because mum and dad did/because I don’t want to pay higher interest rates.”
So well done, Johnny. Your scare campaign succeeded beyond your wildest dreams.