- Ettin
- Oct 2, 2010
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Can't wait to hear about the journalist that infiltrates the Rapist Jamboree and ends up in a sad bar with five pasty twenty year olds
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Feb 1, 2016 23:48
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ADBOT LOVES YOU
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May 14, 2024 23:35
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- Ettin
- Oct 2, 2010
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Uhlmann's latest article for the Australian goes from "people were mean to me on Twitter" straight into cultural Marxism conspiracy theory 
quote:Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.
Repressive Tolerance (1965) — Herbert Marcuse
It was a liberating experience. In a morning moment of madness I had decided to tweet into the maelstrom of media rage created by former prime minister Tony Abbott’s decision to fly to the US to address the Alliance Defending Freedom.
It had been prompted by an interview where an American tolerance commissar opined it was appalling, in a democracy, that people opposed to abortion and gay marriage were allowed to air their toxic views.
This progressive truth was so self-evident it went unremarked by the interviewer.
My clear intent was neither to defend Abbott’s world view nor his decision to speak to a cabal of “reactionary” Christians on the hand-grenade topic “the importance of the family”. It was simply to say: “Once upon a time journalists believed in free speech …”
It seemed an unremarkable intervention. It wasn’t surprising that there was a social media storm in the Twitter teacup because its obsessives are always stewing over something. But that defending free speech could be cast as a crime against tolerance screams something very disturbing about our times.
That some who lit torches with the mob were journalists says a lot about the state of the media. These reporters have appointed themselves the prefects of progressive verities. That is disturbing because when journalists parade as pointers to moral true north then check your bearings, we have drifted badly off course. Yet I had naively hoped that free speech was one of the few things on which journalists in a democracy could agree: neutral ground in the culture wars. I had long feared this was not the case and so it proved.
And that was liberating: a Damascene moment of self-discovery. I had become a radical by standing still. For in an age where being a revolutionary is traditional, then being traditional is revolutionary.
There was another insight. We had reached a historic inflection point. Nearly 90 years after Antonio Gramsci began writing his letters from Benito Mussolini’s prison, Marxism’s long march through Western institutions was reaching its end.
From his cell Gramsci wrestled with why workers in the West weren’t rising up to cast out the ruling class, as Marx predicted they would.
Gramsci pitied them because, he deduced, they were victims of false consciousness.
They had been brainwashed by a vast array of religious, intellectual and cultural institutions into believing their interests and the state’s coalesced.
“The state is the entire complex of practical and theoretical activities with which the ruling class not only justifies and maintains its dominance but manages to win the active consent of those over whom it rules,” he wrote.
It seems never to have occurred to Gramsci that the workers recognised Marxism for what it was: a prescription for a tyranny so profound it sought to colonise people’s minds.
But if the people wouldn’t buy a bad idea, there was one eager market: Europe’s intellectuals. Gramsci proposed they begin a grinding “war of position” to take the commanding heights of the bureaucracy, universities and the media. Once there they would scrub the landscape clean of Western values.
“Cultural policy will above all be negative, a critique of the past; it will be aimed at erasing from the memory and at destroying,” he wrote.
As social projects go, this wasteland was a tough sell, but neo-Marxists are nothing if not dogged. They built critical theory as a vehicle for change and began the deconstruction of the West.
Frankfurt School academics fleeing Adolf Hitler’s Germany transmitted the intellectual virus to the US and set about systematically destroying the culture of the society that gave them sanctuary.
America’s freedom of speech was its achilles heel. Critical theorists were given university pulpits and a constitutionally ordained right to preach, grinding its foundation stones to dust. Since 1933 they have been hellbent on destroying the village to save it.
When Herbert Marcuse wrote Repressive Tolerance 50 years ago, the hope that his ideas would become mainstream was a distant dream. But, if they did, he had developed a plan for reversing the polarity of freedom.
Marcuse cautioned his disciples not to be so foolish as to afford the courtesy of free speech to their opponents.
“Certain things cannot be said, certain ideas cannot be expressed, certain policies cannot be proposed, certain behaviour cannot be permitted without making tolerance an instrument for the continuation of servitude,” he wrote.
Tolerance is the totem of our age, a bumper sticker of virtue. Yet hidden in its many meanings is the doublespeak of defining what will be taboo. It is now considered tolerant to demand silence from nonconformists.
When the Tasmanian Anti-Discrimination Commission says the Catholic Church has a case to answer for robustly defending its views on marriage and the family, then we have seen a glimpse of the Marcusian future. And it is just one gust of the gale buffeting a society hollowed out by its intellectuals.
I hoped to remain indifferent to the inevitable change in marriage laws. But that will be impossible if those who cast themselves as oppressed seek to become oppressors. If offending the new ruling hegemony is prohibited then I stand with the right of the minority to disagree.
Stripped of their fashionable clothes, what’s striking about the tolerance police is how similar these new moralists are to the old. They pursue heretics with an inquisitor’s zeal, blinded by the righteousness of their cause.
In A Man for All Seasons Thomas More’s son-in-law William Roper declared he would knock down every law in England to get at the devil.
“Oh?” More says “And when the last law was down and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat … I’d give the Devil the benefit of the law, for my own safety’s sake.”
Chris Uhlmann is the ABC’s political editor.
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Feb 20, 2016 01:58
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- Ettin
- Oct 2, 2010
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So it turns out that the energy requirements to shoot someone to the sun are a lot more than what you would think. Its much cheaper to shoot them in a random direction away from the earth, and in this time of budget emergencies, we all need to tighten our belts and save money where we can.
What if his craft eventually runs into some aliens and they think Dutton is a typical human? Best to shoot him into the sun to avoid an XCOM situation, I feel
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Feb 20, 2016 09:09
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Feb 1, 2016 23:48
