Chutzpah is characteristically seen as a Jewish thing. But if Chris Uhlmann’s latest column for The Age is any indication, the happy-clappies are getting into the act, too.
In the sadly declining op-ed pages of the old grey groaner, Uhlmann has one of those pieces that were current 20 years ago, lambasting the environmental movement as a new religion, a cult of nature, apocalyptic, etc.
He believes this to be a religion of despair, not hope, and kicks off with a comparison with the Shakers, the 19th-century Christian movement that practised celibacy and eschewed child-having as they waited for the end-times.
Chutzpah, as I say, because as we all know, Uhlmann is one of those, a would-be priest, underpinned by religiosity. He tilts at wind turbines as frequently and successfully as that other Christian knight Don Quixote, and believes that the wellsprings of post-war Christian society were poisoned by the Jewish Marxist intellectuals of the Frankfurt School.
So he’d know apocalyptic cults. And his timing is magnificent, the article landing the same day as a joint communique by 11,000 scientists urging the world to take drastic action to avoid climate catastrophe. What Uhlmann described as religious in nature — reducing meat consumption, rewilding farmland — is exactly what these scientists describe as that which needs to be done.
So it’s the usual thing. These people defer to science whenever they (or God forbid their kids), get sick, moving heaven and earth to get the best specialists, the new treatments, etc. But when catastrophe is diagnosed on a global scale, suddenly it’s a religion.
Religions that offer hope do better than those that offer despair, Uhlmann advises the global climate emergency movement, showing just how little he understands it.
We have hope, but it is hope out there in the world, hope that is implicit in action. It’s people like Uhlmann that are so desperate for the sweet, sweet drug of hope that they seek it out first, willing to conform their beliefs to whatever will offer it.
He doesn’t even understand his own religion: an apocalyptic cult that faced annihilation by an empire, and eventually became it. He doesn’t understand the Shakers, whose radical insistence on plainness of style, in furnishing and architecture, contributed to the rise of an egalitarian sensibility. If you want to see what the Shakers became, check out IKEA, and the implicit idea that a table is a table is a table.
But above all, Uhlmann doesn’t understand that some of us are resilient, and can face the prospect of disaster, and its avoidance, without the need to have a god to save us. Hoiked out of the ABC and into a Nine run by fellow clappy Peter Costello, Uhlmann’s presence on the pages of The Age represents the further decline of the paper, and the decline of the right into myth, tilting at windmills, and checking the wells for poison.
Chris Uhlmann, a news limited devotee whose only purpose in life seems to be to spread the word of his master rupert the black prince of media darkness, when will these journalist slaves of the mad right start to realise the are the prime cause of their own demise as more and more turn off the written and television media to seek the truth and switch off the propaganda and brainwashing currently swamping the news cycles, just like peter, they cry wolf just once too many and we all know what happened to peter.
While Rupert would be pleased with the way things are going at what was once Fairfax , the Nine News network (or whatever it’s called these days ) is not part of his evil empire.
He’s a classic shill.
I remember when, a few years ago, Dutton was trying to deport the baby of a family that had become sick in immigration/concentration detention. There were protests taking place against the removal at the Queensland Children’s Hospital. Uhlmann went on one of the breakfast shows and said that the protesters should be quiet so that Dutton could sort out the problem without drawing attention to it – the implicit promise was, I take it, that if people quietened down, the family would be dealt with more fairly, but without the deal being broadcast to people smugglers. Or something.
That any journalist would fall for whatever Dutton’s office was feeding Ulhmann in that instance is appalling. That Uhlmann didn’t believe what he was saying and was merely broadcasting the message he was fed is, I think, far more likely.
That’s a fairly roundabout way of saying I’m not surprised that once again he’s come up with a resolutely boot-licking take on an issue where the civic voice is making things problematic for our political overlords.
Thank Dog somebody was able to read and report Uhlmann’s drivel for us, and save us the anger and frustration – what a deluded dingbat he is.
His disappearance from the ABC is the nearest thing to heaven we Auntie supporters will ever experience.
Nicely put Fairmind.
Uhlmann has apparently been pressed into service as Nine’s opposite number for Blot on the Landscape. He has even stolen Blot’s tediously repeated argument. As if the world, or Australia, need 2 self-important right wing slayers of logic and reason. I struggle to believe that either actually believes all the vitriol they spew forth. But I know they know the effect and that makes this sort of argument truly evil.
Those 11,000 scientists are obviously at the core of the cult.
If Uhlmann had a medical problem & consulted 100 specialists in the field & 3 of them said he’d be fine but the other 97 urged urgent treatment, which way would he jump?
He would do what the rest of the trendy people do – become a vegan and consult a naturopath.
So 80’s
No, as a Catholic, he’d pray to whichever saint was deemed patron of his ailment to intercede.
My husband and I were only discussing the difference between a religion, a cult and climate change.
He claims to be an atheist (that too is a religion) and I claim to be agnostic (which means I really don’t know).
With religions of any sort, the existence of god or not, takes an act of faith because ignoring church doctrine there is no proof and thus an atheist will say, see, there is no god. There is no proof of no god either and as such it takes an act of faith for either set of beliefs. It takes an exceptional leap of faith to follow a leader, such as in a cult, with the only path to salvation riding with one person.
Climate change is real because all of the science tells us it is real. Research after research paper, extensive modeling, ice core drilling in Antarctica, the science is in! So no it does not take an act of faith to accept climate change is real.
Then we get to the real deniers, who will do anything except accept the science. They dither and attempt to divide to divert attention away from what they are up to. I have seen it in my own family with a couple of cattle and sheep properties in far western Queensland.
My daughter, drops her head and says “It’ll break!” as if it an act of faith that this will happen.
She almost melted into a fury when I got someone to look back over the property rainfall records and graph the good years, drought years, average years and look at the cycle over the last 150 years.
As the good years are getting shorter and the droughts are getting longer and drier than ever before.
If every body just accepted the science, we in Australia, would not have the nastiness and the religious fervor of denial to contend with. As has been said numerous times, if this 3rd term term climate change denying government, ever actually does something that did not directly benefit itself, we might all have a chance.
Lazy stupid Bars……, And for what befits us I think the answers are with us.
He couldn’t consult more than two specialists. Any more, and they’d be what he considers a cult.