Their ABC

Eric Lawson writes: Re. “Brown studies: meet the appointee who wants to sell the ABC” (Friday). Tony Abbott and his 37 spin doctors must be losing their touch. When they appointed ABC haters Brown and Albrechtsen to the panel that oversees appointments to the ABC and SBS boards how come they overlooked Gerard Henderson and Andrew Bolt? And how about Chris Kenny and Alan Jones? Maybe next time — if the ABC and SBS are still there when the time comes.

Enough with the running of the bulls

Geoffrey Heard writes: Re. “Follow Friday: @fiskeharrison on running with the bulls” (Friday). The event is stupid anyway, but to have some twit making an eBook about it is even more stupid, and to have a huge promo for the book in Crikey is bordering not only on mentally deficient but also insanity! How many times has this idiot event been covered,  and what vainglorious rubbish has been heaped upon it as a great test of the mettle of a man? Let’s be clear — it is the kind of stimulation that adrenalin deficient individuals need to get the kind of thrill the rest of us get in childhood from taking on the big slide at the playground. Can we get over this childish stuff and get on with talking about people and things that have some substance, real meaning, and require real courage — like Crikey usually does. Helen Razer should take her blade to this.

On the Socialist Alternative

Niall Clugston writes: Re. “Cuts and cracks at SAlt” (Friday). I don’t know who Crikey’s tipster on Socialist Alternative is, but he or she seems to be living in a fantasy land.  The reference to “the violence-chic that sometimes bubbled up in the student Left in the 1990s and 2000s, when Italian autonomism and gunplay was all the rage” conjures up visions of the Black Panther Party and the Symbionese Liberation Army.  Nothing like that happened on Australian campuses in that period.  Rather it saw the extinction of various left-wing groups, including the International Socialist Organisation, from which Socialist Alternative emerged.