Red Rag

Going to Barry’s tonight to party hard. Barbecue and beers — and when we’re all drunk, a sing-song.

Christmas is usually a massive anticlimax. After months of decorations, advertising, sales and planning, it’s built up to be the biggest, most loving and caring and fun day of the year. And then it’s just another day.

For some reason, this year was different. I spent the day with my family without too much fighting, I managed to stomach turkey without feeling sick afterwards, and then my family drove down to Mandurah to be with Carita’s clan. And they got along with each other.

Whatever made my Christmas good this year, I hope yours was the same.

Clive Hamilton on Duty Free: “It’s hard to see why wealthy Australians should benefit from a tax break that’s not available to people who can’t afford to travel overseas.” Good call. (pdf)

The Shayne Breen article referred to in this post has since been published in The Age.

Alright, one more: “… taxing the wealthy, while it might irritate them, would be, if anything, a spur for them to make even more money, if that’s what it takes for them to keep more. … I feel quite comfortable saying that taxes will never result in any wealthy individual throwing up their hands and saying ‘That’s it! These taxes are so high, I’m just going to stop making money, it’s not worth it!’”

This is probably it from me for a couple of days. I’m off to the vigil mass now, and then there’s drinks tonight, a champagne breakfast, dinner at my house and then Rockingham tomorrow evening. Oh, and The Two Towers on Boxing Day. Can’t hardly wait! All the best everyone, glad tidings of great joy and all the rest. That goes for your friends and families, too.

The Windschuttle controversy is unlikely to subside any time soon. In fact, as more scholars have the chance to read The Fabrication of Aboriginal History and to evaluate the claims made therein, we’ll be flooded with columns and reviews. The Quadrant crew have already started their pre-emptive strike.

Miranda Devine teed off first by defending Windschuttle against Manne’s “soft plagiarism” accusation. Devine wrote that it was “obvious the section is a summary of pre-contact Aboriginal culture which paraphrases the footnoted sources.” Unfortunately, the academic responsible for the allegedly plagiarised work didn’t think it was obvious (my emphasis):

Now Professor Edgerton, while anxious not to be cited as upset by what Windschuttle has written, has cautiously entered the fray.

“It is true that Windschuttle several times paraphrases me in what could be seen as soft plagiarism,” wrote the University of California at Los Angeles academic. “But it is also true that Rhys Jones said some of this same sort of things [sic], as I cited in my book. Also, Windschuttle did quote me in one instance.”

He’s sympathetic to the Quadrant crew, so he tries to soften the blow, but it’s there. Windschuttle, the paragon of academic integrity, is a soft plagiarist. However, as Windschuttle apologist Roger Sandall has argued (and as Manne has admitted), “the textual similarities pointed to are irrelevant to the facts, interpretation, and general argument of his book.” True, but when you build your argument on allegations of shoddy footnoting, you’d better double- and triple-check your own referencing.
Read the rest of this entry…

The Fix now has an SMS Blog. Want to know how to do it? Interesting, but I hate phones.

Aw Geoff, please don’t go! Turn blogged off into a fiction-blog if you have to, but don’t leave us!

New research reveals that the poor are deterred from university by the cost. The Brendan Nelson Solution? Increase the cost. We wouldn’t want to mix with the plebs, would we?

An Irish republican anthem was voted the greatest song in the world — the Wolfe Tones’ A Nation Once Again. Cher’s Believe and Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody also made the top ten.

In a blow to scabs and bosses, NSW unions can enforce bargaining fees for non-members. The same thing’s happening in America, where it’s called a “fair share” fee. That’ll help fight the neo-traditional campaigns that next year will see.

A Sydney student nearly had his HSC English exam censored because it depicted “an asylum seeker, driven mad by imprisonment, fantasising about killing the Prime Minister, John Howard.” Apparently, it was treated as a “non-serious attempt” and wasn’t marked until his father and teacher intervened on his behalf.

I’m a bit worried that there’s such a thing as a bureaucratically-defined “non-serious attempt”. Why is that necessary? If it’s a non-serious attempt, surely it would get a very low mark anyway? And what about the time wasted debating whether or not to mark it? Actually, I’m just using this as a springboard to tell you about my TEE English exam. I made a “non-serious attempt” at one of the essays.

The question was something about genre and techniques, so I wrote about Dumb and Dumber. I devoted about two pages to the question of romantic subplots in comedy films. The thrust of my argument was that if you pay to see a comedy, that’s what you should get. If you pay to see a drama, that’s what you should get. And the one “ouch” passage that stayed with me after I left the hall was this:

Imagine if you went to Schindler’s List, and just when he was saving everyone it cut to a Nazi meeting where they were sharing Jew jokes. You wouldn’t like it, would you? So why do they insist on ruining an otherwise-decent comedy film with a sappy romantic subplot?

If I was marking it, I’d be writing “non-serious and offensive” across it, but for some reason it was marked and I finished on 96%.

Go figure.

I missed this article in last week’s Sunday Times — bigoted Liberal senator Ross Lightfoot is going to appeal against a decision that comments he made were in breach of the Racial Discrimination Act:

Senator Lightfoot said the decision to appeal was not based only on personal grounds.

“I think it is essential that I appeal because I believe you have every right to say what you believe, especially if you believe it to be true,” he said.

Senator Lightfoot said he did not know how long the appeal process would take but said he was determined to fight the decision regardless of the time it took.

As Ken Parish pointed out when Lightfoot lost the case, it would have been a lot quicker had he argued his point in the first place. The woman who filed the complaint finds it all a bit strange:

Ms McGlade says he should just accept the ruling.

“I do find it a little strange or even bizarre actually that this decision will be appealed by the Senator when he didn’t even turn up to the Federal Court to argue any case, and as my memory has it he put a letter to the court saying he refused to participate.”

It’s not surprising, really. This is a populist politician who is playing the classic Hansonite victim role perfectly — ‘the left-leaning courts and the Aboriginal industry are denying my right to free speech’. He’s now manipulated the system so that he can fight the original decision and emerge as a vindicated champion of the average Aussie, who just wants the right to speak his mind.

The court originally found against Lightfoot, and ordered him to pay costs of up to $10 000. For justice to be done, the appeals court should overturn the decision and then, in recognition of the waste of the court’s time and resources that he has caused, order him to pay as much again.