The politician who cried Orwell Crikey is a mature enough outlet to occasionally register serious points of difference between our correspondents. So it was this week when I detected a note of scepticism in my colleague Emma Elsworthy’s coverage of Coalition Senator Hollie Hughes. Hughes had said the proposed move to pre-install free-to-air broadcaster apps on smart TVs is an inevitable precursor to “a ministry of truth”. Elsworthy seems to find Hughes concerns a “yawn”.
Frankly, I couldn’t disagree more — the invocation of George Orwell is a perfectly sane and normal way to respond to the prospect of citizens turning on their televisions to find the ABC iView and 10play. This, I say without any exaggeration, is a condition that soon enough will cause something to be killed in the breast: burnt out, cauterised out. Something from which we could never recover.
Hughes added that Greens senators “kowtow and suck up to the ABC” because they want a job there. And who can deny the pernicious and growing influence of the Greens on Australia’s media? While over the years conservatives have had no-one to represent their views except Amanda Vanstone and Tom Switzer at the ABC, or Ross Cameron, Cory Bernardi, Peta Credlin and Chris Kenny at Sky News, where they’ve been joined by former Labor leader/anti-Labor campaigner Mark Latham, former NSW premier and malfunctioning parachute candidate Kristina Keneally and Labor hard man/grandee Graham Richardson at Sky News.
This is obviously dwarfed by the roughly zero former Greens MPs who have gone on to have their own show on a major broadcaster. (Ed’s note: we’re taking the “philosophy of zero” approach here, with zero as a representation of a vast and absorbing nothingness. Compared with that, two hosts on the ABC isn’t much.)
Weigh, weigh down We can’t add a great deal to this except to insist it’s a real thing that absolutely happened: on Sunday, Israel’s Jerusalem Post published a self-help health article about how Israelis can use the stress from the war to “lose weight”.
“How to use the stress from the Israel-Hamas war to lose weight,” read the headline. “Fears of rockets and missiles amid Israel’s war with Hamas putting millions of Israelis in a constant state of anxiety and stress. But you can actually use this stress to lose weight and stay healthy,” read the article’s accompanying tweet. Both have since been deleted.
Trial period There are times, watching the legal troubles afflicting former and possible future US president Donald Trump, when we in the bunker are forced to reflect with the same sudden existential melancholy of Lieutenant Kilgore in Apocalypse Now: “One day this trial is going to end.” What are we going to do when the sheer unyielding horror of it all is no longer leavened by moments like Donald Trump Jr asking a courtroom sketch artist after he had testified to “make me look sexy”.
Courtroom illustrator Jane Rosenberg told Insider that Trump Jr, after assuring his father’s civil fraud trial that he didn’t know anything about his father’s companies, approached her and asked for a flattering rendering similar to the one that financial fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried apparently received during his trial. Trump Jr then showed Rosenberg an image that made the rounds on Twitter last week, appearing to be AI-generated and not resembling any of the sketches publicly available regarding the SBF trial.
And this doesn’t even get to Trump Sr’s testimony on Monday — so periodically on-brand as to create a new persona altogether, peppering his answers with attacks on the judge and prosecutors and surreal additions such as “I’m not a windmill person” and “I have a castle”.
“At some point, maybe in my very old age, I’ll go [to Aberdeen, Scotland] and do the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen. Aberdeen is the oil capital of Europe, very rich,” Trump began to say, before Justice Arthur Engoron shouted “Irrelevant!” to which Trump softly replied, “It is.”
Once this is gone, we will have nothing to distract us from the pain.
No Times for Peterson One has to feel for The Times’ James Marriott. First, googling his name will get several pages of results concerning the melancholy indie rocker namesake before getting to his work. Worse than that, he’s the guy the paper sends to go see panels led by Jordan Peterson (republished by the Oz over here).
Over what he describes as a “long night with Peterson and his superfans”, Marriott details being assailed by the “uplifting small-c conservative life advice dressed up in grandiose philosophical mumbo jumbo” which is “the heart of Peterson’s appeal”.
Marriot writes sympathetically of the various attendees and concedes: “It sounded so reassuring that I sort of wish I believed it too.” However, he concludes, “Horrible cynic that I am, I couldn’t help but cringe when I was instructed to become ‘an individual willing to take responsibility for every level of being’ or told that ‘everyone is a divine centre of intrinsic value’. The line between Jordan Peterson and Gwyneth Paltrow is thinner than is commonly recognised.”
This is the feedback that a major conservative paper in the UK now gives Peterson. The same thinker a flurry of our representatives rushed to hang out with at the launch of the Alliance of Responsible Citizenship.
Cat in the hat came back To prove we in the bunker can sometimes be nice without having to be, here’s a lovely detail we picked up from ABC Sydney radio’s coverage of the Optus outage: a woman rang in to share that her cat told her the news…
the cat’s name is Karen
How does one ” Hate on” a person?
Do they sit or stand on that person and hate someone/something else?
Do they stand or sit on that person while hating them?
Can they use a picture, instead of the actual person being sat or stood on?
Why can’t they be satisfied with just hating the hated person?
And also what is happening to Australian English which causes people to use semi-literate Seppo terminology?
Your pronoun use is inconsistent. Initially, you deploy the singular impersonal pronoun “one”. Thereafter, presumably referring to the same hater, you switch to the 3rd-person plural “they”. Make your mind up, do try to be grammatically consistent, and if you’re living in a glass house, don’t throw stones.
Pedantry is indeed a dangerous game but it was still a funny comment .
Thank you for the correction AB.
But to the point, do you think “hate on” or plain old “hate” is more appropriate?
I’m on your side. And while we’re discussing things we’re definitely hating on top of, what about the practice of saying ‘I know, right?’ when a simple ‘yes’ would have sufficed?
It’s particularly galling when coming from those smartphone-using young persons they have now, who consider punctuation to be optional and who are in such a hurry they feel the need to abbreviate ‘your’ as ‘ur’, which, I might add, has got to cause much additional consternation for those who, despite it having been picked up by us pedants (everywhere) around 4,203,592,990 times, still haven’t worked out the difference between your and you’re… yet, still, anyway, either.
I couldn’t care less. I understood “hate on”, and I imagine you did too. If you understand what someone’s said or written, what’s the point of complaining about it?
To use a phrase often spoken by my Partner. “It’s the way they said it”.
But “they” didn’t say it. They wrote it, so your complaint was about a phrase devoid of any tone of voice or any other feature of spoken language. But somehow, although you plainly understood it, you found some unimaginable problem with it. Maybe you and your Partner could stand together and jointly take a look in the mirror? How about the substance of what “they” wrote? We haven’t heard much about that from you.
OK,OK, AB,
You Win.
It’s not a question of “win”. I didn’t set out to “win”. This is not a football match or a boxing bout. It’s a discussion forum. I simply couldn’t understand what relevance a journalist’s choice of words had to the discussion, especially in view of the virtual certainly that you (and I, and probably almost every other reader) understood precisely what the journalist meant.
So a journalist chooses a word or phrase which you or I wouldn’t. Big deal. As long as we both understand what they’re communicating, their word-choice is truly irrelevant. If their word choice causes actual misunderstanding, then there’s a justification for asking them what they mean.
But what I see countless times in almost every forum (this one, SMH Letters Column and comments, Guardian comments, everywhere), is people picking holes in others’ contributions, NOT because those contributions are unintelligible, but because someone simply doesn’t like the choice of words.
This phenomenon, which basically amounts to picky linguistic prejudice and pedantry, wastes so much time and space it does my head in.
We’re fighting an existential battle here, against climate-change deniers, right-wing dingbats who would subvert democracy, governments who refuse to address injustice, and yet we’re distracted by irrelevant side-arguments about the way people phrase their comments?
There has to be a better way. The main purpose of my opposition to linguistic pedantry is not so much that it represents one of the few kinds of prejudice that isn’t actually illegal and subject to criminal sanction, but because it takes our eyes off the ball and dilutes the real focus of our activism, namely to defeat the politics which threatens our democracies and in some cases our very existence.
Everyone has only so much time in their day, and if we waste time arguing about grammatical rectitude and word-choice preference, we dilute our opposition to the (very organised and dedicated) forces which threaten us.
“Hate on”, as used in the colloquial, does mean more than just “hate”. You can hate someone quietly on your own, but “hating on” someone is shared with others. It’s a synonym of bad-mouthing, denigrating, demonising or character assassination. You do it for an audience in the hope they will also hate the one that you hate.
You’re welcome.
Thanks Anne. At last, a sophisticated practitioner of English, who understands the nuances of the language and the different ways in which its speakers use it. All others, please, if someone deploys a word or phrase or grammatical construction to which you’re not accustomed, please consider first whether you actually understand the writer’s or speaker’s meaning. If you do, that’s great. If you don’t, then consider questioning it. But as for criticising writing or speech because you simply don’t like its form or expression, do try to get used to the idea that people have different ways of expressing ideas, and that’s usually just fine.
wotevah
The community choir in which I try to sing recently performed “Fix You” in public. At the time the song was written, Chris Martin was trying to fix his then partner Gwyeth Paltrow. One assumes it didn’t work.
Perhaps he should have tried fixing Jordan Peterson?
I believe the Hard-Ons were an Aussie band from way back. Hate-on is the same type of construction, innit?
By the way, I’m nearly fifty, and I vow to never become so ossified that I believe the language should’ve stopped evolving when I was 30. IKR works just fine.
Although what does bug me when I listen to some young folks, for instance on SYN, is how the problem of ‘like’ being meaninglessly injected has apparently continued to worsen in some circles since Frank Zappa’s now ancient ‘Valley Girl’. I heard some kids on SYN a couple of months back busting it out like every third word! I had to switch the channel. It’s supposed to mean ‘roughly’ or something, not ‘um’…
It’s not evolution that bugs me, more like devolution.
I didn’t die in three world wars so that these disgustingly young people could go around saying ‘literally’, when they mean figuratively. Death is literally too good for them.
“I heard some kids on SYN a couple of months back busting it out like every third word!”
Like, every third word? I see what you did there…
You want to kill people who say “literally” when they mean “figuratively”? Mate, do you have a mirror, perhaps in your bathroom? You know what they mean. If their speech and writing aren’t absolutely correct, just deal with it. And calm down.
Do try to listen to the substance of what young people say, rather than the form in which they express it. You might find your reading and listening are much less annoying. This will decrease your blood pressure.
I still quite haven’t figured out how Jordan Peterson is critical of the effects of Climate Change policies on third world countries and the poor, when to my mind they are the very people who will suffer the most from it’s effects. Genuine question. Maybe someone can help me.
Not really too difficult a question to answer.
To your mind, people in third world countries are the ones who will suffer most from the effects of climate change. To Jordan Peterson’s mind, only Jordan Peterson’s suffering matters. Selfishness and egocentricity are the chief virtues and empathy is something to be despised (assuming of course that such a thing even exists – bleeding hearts claim they have it, but they’re just saying that to get attention).
Is Jordan Peterson a:
a) climate scientist; or
b) scientist or engineer with insights into how to solve the climate crisis through a combination alternative energy or food sources, increased efficiencies, and solutions for mitigation?
If not, what’s he doing talking about climate change?
I believe it’s something to do with the lobsters, a topic on which he has some considerable expertise.
Though truthfully, in my own humble opinion, Jordan Peterson is not so much an expert on anything, more of a dead-set legend — on it all. Yes, expertise and experience, much talked up, much tossed around, like so much salad, which like salad is, are much overrated in my opinion.
I would rather get my home plumbing and renovation tips from Jordan Peterson, the legend. Did you know, he once had a plumber round to fix his tap and, after the plumber had left, Jordie inspected that tap and found upon it no fewer than 72 leaks? Now, admittedly it does sound a lot to a layman like he basically looked at this tap, which may have been leaking a bit and counted the individual water drops/drips it loosely involved, rather than really having identified 72 isolated yet improperly sealed locations, but I for one, am not questioning the great man, the legend, on this or any other topic.
Sounds like he could give Chuck Norris a run for his money
ARC with Peterson segues into the US right wing ‘intellectual dark web’ and it’s war on woke, LGBT etc., but seems more about ‘writers’ niggling or denigrating the centre and left to run protection for the nativist authoritarian right and giving a space for RWNJs or alt right wishing to appear ‘informed’ and centrist?
In the US they are also known as ‘Pinkerites’ after Steven Pinker with not just a conga line of high profile activist writers etc., but also well known outlets or NGOs with old fossil fuel support inc. whiffy Pioneer Fund, Spiked Online, a local publisher, Murray & The Bell Curve, Rebel Media, AEI and American Renaissance; astroturfing eugenics.
Here’s a link graphic on links… https://www.mergatroyd.org/pinker/pinker_connections_version3.pdf
No one would ever guess which US RW ‘libertarian’ fossil fuel oligarch donors’ network is in support of several entities….?
Oh God, Steven Pinker. Why does he feel like a man who was invented? Rather than born, as a baby, in the traditional way?
Some Crikey gratification, Charlie, how mature indeed.
The media outlets – lots of green and conservative links there worth
bashingmentioning – also worth mentioning Crikey as an ALP supporter? Not outlet per se – but certainly a supporter.