Media

Waiter, There’s a Flighty Lefty in My Soup

A funny thing happened to me at the pub not long after May 21’s election. I was having dinner with a friend and there was another couple, a man and a woman (can I even say that these days?),  at a nearby table. For some reason, probably to do with drugs and/or alcohol, the woman came over to our table, introduced herself and gushingly told us all about her life, her business and the various properties she owned. Apart from incorrectly assuming that I and my male companion ‘were an item’, her effusive barrage of interruptions to our meal was at the same time intriguing, amusing and yet mildly annoying. What was even more intriguing was that she mentioned with evident self-approval that she gets all her news, information and opinions from the ABC. “Isn’t it a great TV station!” she enthused.

As the rather lopsided ten-minute encounter progressed she also exclaimed, “Wasn’t it a great election result!”. When I replied, “Albo only got 32 per cent of the primary vote”, she responded with a quizzical look and “Are we on the same page?” I replied with a smile “probably not”.

 “Well you can f*** off then,” she snarled before stomping away. Did I ask for any of this with my pub dinner?

Clearly I was not the comrade-in-arms with whom she fancied waxing lyrical, another connected soul fighting the good fight. While taken aback by the vehemence of her dismissal, I wasn’t too surprised. For the most part, while conservatives are happy to discuss and debate, perhaps eventually agreeing to disagree, socialists are not. It’s either their way or the highway, and soon after, the firing squad. That’s the real difference. Those of the Left are so self-assured in the belief their ideological worldview is beyond challenge, and its necessary implementation upon the entire populace long overdue, that everyone else has to be wrong — and not just amicably wrong but disagreeably in error and therefore deserving of punishment. As has often been said, the Right thinks the left misguided but capable of being brought unto the light by the application of rational argument and ;patience. The Left, by contrast, believes the Right is flat-out evil and must always be treated as such.

Ideally, democracy finds its basis in facts and in truth, not in mind-numbing propaganda, but what is dished out to us now, through both the mainstream media and our crumbling education system, is propaganda driven and inspired by ideology. I never thought to see the day when direct, straight-out lies would be told on the nation’s principal taxpayer-funded television news network. Alas, such instances are par for the course.

It’s not the news presenters themselves who retail the lies, most of the time anyway. Rather, it’s the people they choose to interview who do the dirty work for them. Take Graeme Innes, the former Disability Discrimination Commissioner, who stated on ABC News24 in late April that “there is no scientific evidence at all that trans women have any advantage over other women, and if they do it’s only because they might have bigger hands or bigger feet, which is the same as any advantage that any other woman might have”! My jaw fell to the floor.

Innes’ statement is the exact opposite of all the scientific evidence which does in fact exist, contrary to his blanket denial. Has he never heard of testosterone? Mr Innes denies what all reasonable people know — that ‘trans women’ have a significant biological advantage over biological females in the swimming pool, on the pitch and in all the other fields of athletic endeavour. Yet the ABC allowed Innes’ nonsense to go to air unchallenged. How does the national broadcaster continue to get away with presenting unchallenged a point of view at odds with the facts while also denying air time to all and any who would refute it?

Another whoppa being peddled by all and sundry at the moment is the one about Aborigines having “the oldest living continuous culture in the world”. The promoters of this line — our new PM prominent amongst them — seem oblivious to the irony that it would be equally true to say it is a culture which made remarkably little progress, if any at all, over that extended period. As Keith Windschuttle notes today, Aboriginal ‘culture’ of today bears no resemblance whatsoever to what it was 250 years ago (and thank goodness for that). Most of what passes as Aboriginal ‘culture’ is in fact the creations of the last 50 years. Yet these lies continue to feed the likes of our garrulous fellow diner who, as an avid ABC fan and devoted Q&A watcher, boasts that she cannot get enough of that stuff. I’m guessing it makes her feel so warm and good to be inside the cubbyhouse with all the other correct thinkers, her kind of people.

Something that continues to elude me and other conservatives alike, and to defy any explanation at all, is why the Coalition over the last nine years made no attempt to stop or at least balance the taxpayer-funded myths about gender, Aborigines and climate peddled so relentlessly by the ABC and SBS? Why, if only by neglect, did the Abbott/Turmbull/Morrison governments foster and perpetuate the spread of misinformation and division? While many seem fully aware of the Labor endorsement of all the above-mentioned scams, the Coalition will stand condemned for doing nothing but write the cheques that have sustained the flood of false-but-approved narratives.

Who will clean up the mess and when? Or is it now too late for that?

Dr David Barton (a white Celtic-Irish man) is a writer, researcher and social commentator who lives in Central Victoria

24 thoughts on “Waiter, There’s a Flighty Lefty in My Soup

  • rod.stuart says:

    “Why, if only by neglect, did the Abbott/Turmbull/Morrison governments foster and perpetuate the spread of misinformation and division?”
    Why indeed.
    Could it have anything to do with the fact that Greg Hunt was previously the “Director of Strategy” for Klaus Schwab? Or perhaps the mysterious relationship that Scomo appears to have had with the same scumbag?
    Schwab boasts that his nefarious organisation has “penetrasted” the cabinets of dozens of countries. Could Australia be one of the “penetrated”?

  • Katzenjammer says:

    60,000 years of indigenous cuisine with no soup.

  • STD says:

    David I wouldn’t worry yourself in regard to Graeme Innes , Disability Commissioner or not- the man is a rissole.
    And as for trans women being on par with real feminine women, he might need to touch base with Ken Henry.

  • STD says:

    Sorry David, it was somewhat remiss of me- this was a nice light piece to finish the day- thanks.

  • padraic says:

    I thought the science was that we all came out of Africa long before the Aborigines came to Australia and developed their culture, and as far as I know African culture is still thriving. Some of the rubbish about “oldest living culture” doing the lefty rounds just shows what dills they are when it comes to rational thinking and truthfullness.

  • Daffy says:

    OTOH, imagine if they moved away from the middle east after the Babel event and didn’t have an old culture at all. That might explain the lack of an iron smelting activity. Or maybe not.

  • STD says:

    David these flighty lefties- perhaps there is a relation to the fruit fly Bactrocera tryoni or for further investigation fruit bats- and could it have been due to the allure of well indentured teasing- alphabet soup!
    By the sounds of things your patriarchal reluctance to embrace all things ridiculous ( the moment)led to your premature demise and downfall and as such all bets are off.

  • Adelagado says:

    “Innes’ statement is the exact opposite of all the scientific evidence….. Yet the ABC allowed Innes’ nonsense to go to air unchallenged.”

    Innes is blind (literally) so, of course, anything he or any other disabled person says goes unchallenged on the ABC. Same goes for Aboriginals, migrants, women, gays, lefty activists, …. basically anyone who isn’t an able bodied straight white man.

  • RB says:

    It looks like fashion, a way to separate the great unwashed from the good and worthy. If you consider some weird ideas like skin colour not defining a person you are part of the former…obviously.
    It also is a lovely way to get us all thinking about inanities rather than noting the endless stream of BS.

  • RB says:

    rod.stewart. Is Ming the Merciless them the mysterious “they”? Or just another scam artist? I read somewhere he has siphoned off something in the order of 200 mill Euro in the last few years.

  • Doubting Thomas says:

    I think the Coalition’s persistent failure to take on the ABC and the other leftist media is pretty much an acknowledgment of the incontrovertible fact that it’s a lose-lose situation. Whenever it’s even been threatened in the past, every leftist in the community, and far too many of the otherwise uncommitted, coalesce into a hysterical claque that drowns out any reasonable discussion of the issues.
    No conservative government needs the inevitable aggro.

  • cbattle1 says:

    Karl Marx, writing within the context of the Industrial Revolution, philosophised that whoever controlled the means of industrial production, would therefore also have control of society. If we are now living within the context of a post-industrial, information-based society, then whoever has control of the production and disemination of information, shall then have control of society. The conservative side of politics do not appear to have considered this idea, or have been living within a naive historical bubble and think that nothing has changed and nothing will change! But, since the dawn of civilisation, culture has evolved via a kind of “punctuated equilibrium”: Periods of stasis giving way to revolutionary change. The failure of the Coalition to understand the impact that the ABC, SBS and NITV can and are having on society, or the failure to act if they do understand, will surely lead to the demise of the conservative side of politics, and a progression towards a left-of-centre Australia.

  • lestkelly says:

    I have recollections of viewing either an ABC or SBS documentary about a decade or more ago where a team of museum scientists undertook a dig in an outback Australian cave that had a history of Aboriginal habitation. They excavated down something like six feet into the cave floor documenting what they found – mostly charcoal from camp fires and animal bones and teeth etc. They stopped at about six feet where they declared their finds to date back up to 50,000 years.
    My recollections are that up until that dig, most commonly Aboriginal claims were 30 to 40 thousand years habitation.
    It isn’t the matter of years habitation that amuses / concerns me, but the claim that associates present day “culture” with an archeological dig, and that ancient culture never saw the need to invent an alphabet to record their history.
    .

  • John-Tassie says:

    Padraic see Nature scientific reports 13 March 2017 Nagle et al page 2 re the phylogeny and geographical (asia to Oz) of Australian aboriginal mtDNA (female line) current and very old lineages. Reference 40 my 2002 paper outlining the Tasmanian data.
    “we all came out of Africa long before the Aborigines came to Australia and developed their culture, and as far as I know African culture is still thriving”
    In the woke world, those of us interested in the DNA heritage of mankind are known as “vampires” – a bit outdated as we use buccal swabs and petrus bones now.
    John in Hobart

  • sirtony says:

    My readings suggest that there seems to be possibilities of human habitation in parts of Australia dating to 60-70,000 years B.P..

    The earliest human remains we have uncovered (Mungo Man) date to around 45,000 B.P. This was discovered in the 1970s and before that the supposition was that modern humans arrived around 20-25,000 B.P. Evidence beyond about 60,000 years B.P. is very sketchy.

    Each of these discoveries is taken to “prove” some unbroken culture which is held to be a good thing. However, when large scale genotyping of aboriginal Australians, New Guineans, island Southeast Asians and Indians was undertaken, it found ancient associations between these groups with divergence times estimated at about 36,000 years ago. Further there is evidence of substantial gene flow between the Indian population and Australia well before European contact, estimated to have occurred during the Holocene about 4,200 years ago. This is also approximately when changes in tool technology, food processing, and the dingo appear in the Australian archaeological record, suggesting that these may be related to the migration from India.

    There is nothing intrinsically worthy of an Aboriginal population cut off from the rest of the world for millennia. We respect the Maori aboriginal population of New Zealand who arrived some time between 1250 and 1300 C.E. We don’t need to keep this assumption of an unbroken and unchanged culture stretching back to the earliest humans in Australia to validate concerns for the welfare of any group in modern Australia.

  • lestkelly says:

    Well said sirtony:
    “We don’t need to keep this assumption of an unbroken and unchanged culture stretching back to the earliest humans in Australia to validate concerns for the welfare of any group in modern Australia.”

  • 27hugo27 says:

    Mr Barton , your dining experience is one i’m very familiar with and which confirmed that the left do not do self-awareness , or irony for that matter. Am constanly amazed (and amused) that these types can proclaim loudly their politics and opinions and expect those within earshot to agree with them .and become shocked and abusive when challenged . Emotion trumps reason every day . The average dinner party is the best litmus test when , as conservatives we “Read” the room ,looking for minefields to avoid lest we be ejected for dissent and try to get our points across as politely as possible , but the leftys, do-gooders, virtue signallers can always smell blood in the water and will attack on cue . My wife often tells me to hold my tongue , but will also back me up if pushed – and it’s usually the women who are steering the conversation on any topic sadly.

  • Ian MacKenzie says:

    The claim of “the oldest living continuous culture in the world” gets repeated over and over but is simply untrue. It is untrue as there are older cultures in Africa where modern humans have been living at least four to five times longer than in Australia. It is also untrue as the pre-1788 Aboriginal culture no longer exists, as Keith Windschuttle has pointed out in “The Voice and the End of Traditional Aboriginal Culture” in Quadrant. In fact the lives of Aboriginal people today are dominated by the same Western-derived culture as the rest of us. Even those in the remotest communities live in western-style houses, drive western-invented vehicles, watch western-style sports on western-invented TVs and eat food produced by western-style farming, improved by western science. Having vague family traditions of a Dreamtime or feeling an affinity for the land, doesn’t make you Aboriginal, anymore than being Buddhist makes you Indian, or liking chocolate makes you Aztec. So Aboriginal culture isn’t the oldest, it isn’t living, and it isn’t continuous. It is just another culture, like many others.

  • pgang says:

    Anybody witness Bolt and Sheridan piling onto Trump last night? What a joke, especially Sheridan, who can’t see any evidence of election tampering in 2020, because for him the right person won and that’s all that matters (81 million ‘votes’, lest we forget). I used to respect Sheridan’s journalism, but he’s proven to be just another globalist sycophant.
    Anyway if this is the best we can expect from the ‘conservative’ punditry in Australia, it doesn’t matter what the ABC presents.

  • Simon says:

    @Doubting Thomas “I think the Coalition’s persistent failure to take on the ABC and the other leftist media is pretty much an acknowledgment of the incontrovertible fact that it’s a lose-lose situation”

    -I really don’t think that’s the case, DT, though it may be wishful thinking on my part.

    If you recall, that worm of a man we elected in 2019 was elected in part because ordinary people don’t want the woke agenda. And deSantis in Florida is an example of another leader that can defy MSM, big-tech and even Disney.

    We just needed somebody with a pair, and we got a eunuch.

  • 27hugo27 says:

    Pgang – didn’t see it, but not surprised. Sheridan in particular a disgrace and refuse to read him in the Oz for years. To not even question the veracity of the election shows a special brand of denial – and for what? Trump’s mean tweets!? Seems like he wants to be liked by the ABC. All his credibility disappeared when he caught that disease TDS.

  • Jackson says:

    Hugo, you said: “…it’s usually the women who are steering the conversation on any topic sadly.”
    Only if you let ’em, Hugo.
    That’s a bit of a parable for the state in which the West now finds itself: that for a bloke to express himself or his opinions other than in the persona of a “male ally” is to be condemned as a card-carrying patriarchal dinosaur and purveyor of toxic masculinity. We have reached the point, I think, where the only thing necessary for the triumph of Matriarchy is for good men to do nothing.

  • PT says:

    Dead right Padriac! The “bushman” (or !kung or “san” if you prefer) have been living in their region many times longer than the aboriginals have lived in Australia, even with the most “generous” estimates!

    Perhaps what they’re saying is that the aboriginals were too stupid to advance beyond the Palaeolithic! So it’s really an insult!

  • padraic says:

    Thanks John-Tassie. I checked out the reference and it seems that your research shows that the Aboriginal population was isolated from the rest of the world – apart from a migration from India – for a very long time, because of Australia being an island continent and hard to reach from elsewhere because of the simple forms of water transportation. I don’t understand exactly what is meant by “the oldest living culture in the world” – continuous or otherwise. Most cultures are old and continuous and changing – so what’s the big deal? – apart from using that as an excuse to form a separate polity within Australia or even worse, controlling the majority of us as if we have no claim to live here. Those of us whose families have been here for generations love the land and our country and have a special attachment to it just as much as contemporary Aborigines.

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