BoltWatch

Dedicated to those who can tell the difference between A. Bolt and a nut.

Where Andrew Bolt's Deranged Polemic ... Gets What's Coming To It

Sunday, April 29, 2007

Bolt 29/4: "If only cars could run on hypocrisy" and "Truthiness of untruths defended"
Andrew's apparently started watching (at least parts of) both The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.

I think he's missing much of the point, though. He enjoyed Lewis Black's mockery of celebrity global warming "advice", as you'd expect, but doesn't seem to have been quite so keen on anything else from that episode. (The demolition of the imaginative Baghdad wall plan, for instance.) And he's apparently seen enough of Stephen Colbert to pick up on his first Wørd segment entry, "truthiness", although he appears not to be aware who and what precisely was being satirised by it. ("And what about Iraq? If you think about it, maybe there are a few missing pieces to the rationale for war. But doesn't taking Saddam out feel like the right thing?")

Still, I'm all in favour of Bolt directing his loyal readers to both shows. Patronising though this sounds, exposing the denizens of his forum to some common sense through satire could only be a good thing.

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- posted by Jeremy @ 2:51 PM |

Bolt 29/4: "Getting on the Wik of Smearpeddler"
Andrew doesn't like Wikipedia at all, thrilling at Andrew Hansen of The Chaser asking founder Jimmy Wales -
"how do you feel about the fact that when I looked you up on Wikipedia this morning I changed your page to say that you were a teenage drug lord from Malaysia?"

Says Andy - "an excellent question", subtly calling Wales a "smearpeddler" in the heading to his post.

I doubt Wales had reason to be too bothered - Hansen's vandalism would've been reverted almost before he reloaded the page. Like with a thirty-second edit to David Beckham's entry out of which a News Ltd colleague of Bolt's (who not at all suspiciously just happened to be check it in that brief window) squeezed a whole article in MX the other week. The speed at which these "Look! I vandalised Wikipedia! See how broken it is!" attempts are cleaned up ironically tends to demonstrate the strength and resilience of the system.

Still, News Ltd journos really seem to hate Wikipedia. I suppose what galls them is that when idiots write stupid things in Wikipedia, they're corrected by sensible editors very quickly; when News Ltd journos write idiotic drivel it gets printed into newspaper form and laughed at for days.

Maybe Bolt really doesn't like his own entry, although I'm not sure to what in particular he could object. It might be the lack of referring to him by his laughable preferred title of "Australian's Most Controversial Columnist". Maybe it's the lack of adulation for his Brave Stand Against The Global Warmenizer Religion. Or perhaps he's just pissed off that one of the links leads here.

Still, if Wikipedia really was a set of "smears", I suspect Andy's entry would look very different.

ELSEWHERE Andy should check out Conservapedia.

"Members of the Armed Forces continue to protect Americans, even the ungrateful ones", it declares on its front page, in a neutral and encyclopaedic fashion.

Unlike Wikipedia (which its authors appear to hate even more than Bolt does), Conservapedia aims to overcome its rival's "liberal bias", down to such crucial areas as ensuring that all spellings are the proper, God-fearing American ones. As it notes, sadly, "Wikipedia often uses foreign spelling of words, even though most English-speaking users are American."

I understand that starting a Liberapedia might actually prompt the Rapture.

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- posted by Jeremy @ 12:14 PM |
Monday, April 16, 2007

Bolt 16/4: "Green cheers: Go, Osama, go!"
One of Andrew Bolt's little tricks for bashing the Green party in Australia is to ascribe to it the views of any lunatic around the world who calls him or herself "green", or their organisation a "green party".
More confirmation of the hatred hiding in the heart of the Greens, this time from a Canadian Green Party candidate, Kevin Potvin, who celebrates the al Qaida attacks on September 11 in which 3000 civilians died:

The thing about political labels is that anyone can use them to describe themselves, whether accurately or not. There are plenty of countries calling themselves "democratic republics" which are nothing of the sort. The word "socialist" has been used as a self-label by some of the more fascist regimes in history. John Howard's conservative Liberal party has little in common with "liberals" as known elsewhere in the world.

And as for the word "Greens", well, apart from the interest in environmentalism indicated by the colour, it's even more vague. You could have green luddite conservatves, or (as here in Australia) green social and economic progressives. Hell, "green" doesn't even necessarily have anything to do with environmentalism - it could represent a catholic party in Ireland. It means something specific here in Australia, because there is a Green party; but that's not the case around the world.

Which is, of course, why Andrew Bolt likes to bash green groups in other countries - in anticipation that it will influence his readers to punish the Greens in Australia. The notion doesn't make any actual sense - it'd be like punishing the Liberal Party of Australia for something said by some "liberal" group in the US - but it probably does have an effect.

Bolt's readers aren't sitting there distinguishing between some Green Party candidate in Canada and the Greens in Australia. They're being repeatedly encouraged to view the whole lot as the same - some menacing global conspiracy to, what, make them live in caves or something. And after long enough reading Andrew Bolt columns, what will stick in their brains from this story is the message from the heading - that the Greens who'll be asking for their vote at the end of the year somehow support Osama Bin Laden!

It's probably an effective technique, but it's pretty dishonest.

PS If Andrew really wants to ascribe extremist views to the mainstream of a political movement and see who has "hatred hiding in [their] heart", he should have a read of A Western Heart staff writer Tiberius' work.

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- posted by Jeremy @ 8:42 AM |
Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Bolt 10/4: "Drug king's associates set to clean up on your cash"
Bolt thinks it's rather daft offering a $1 million (ONE MILLION) reward to whichever of Tony Mokbel's dodgy former colleagues will turn him in.
And if these “associates” of a drug boss speak they’ll get a Tattslotto of your cash, which will be invested in ... what?

I agree with him.

What? Yes, not everything Bolt says is nuts. He's quite right about this - a million dollar reward is a stupid idea. It's the cogs in the machine of justice completely losing sight of the bigger picture (the "war on drugs", presumably) in their desperation to win one particular battle. It's passionate warriors in this fight being so outraged at one villain escaping that they're willing to create some new villains in order to get him. (They should join the CIA.)

Anyway, a perfectly sensible post from Bolt.

And while we're on the topic of Bolt occasionally not being a stupidly inflammatory polemicist, what else has he said lately that you agree with? Let's see if BoltWatch today can be a celebration of the times when Andrew Bolt puts aside the spittle-flecked invective and writes something worthwhile.

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- posted by Jeremy @ 7:36 AM |
Friday, April 06, 2007

Bolt 6/4: "Kinder to our Christians"
Bolt's piece today is a silly bit of "why's everyone so mean to Christians" rubbish.

Let's start with his wonderfully representative examples. What've we got to show all this oppression? Well, "Marilyn Manson ripped up a bible" (the first time Manson has ever done anything offensive to anyone, I'm sure). And Sinead O'Connor ripped up a picture of the Pope on television (to protest the Vatican's attempt to cover up sexual abuse by priests) in 1992. And, in an example not fifteen years old - Bolt mentions the American artist who recently made A NAKED CHOCOLATE JESUS (I have no idea why this is offensive. Didn't the Romans usually crucify people naked?) before it was taken down as a result of death threats.

These isolated examples aren't what Bolt's really talking about, of course - he's complaining that when "christian" right-wing politicians try to implement their faith as government social policy by which the rest of us have to live, people (surprisingly) object. And that this somehow oppresses Christians.
Ask Tony Abbott, the Health Minister and a Catholic, whose reasoned arguments on an abortion pill were sniggered away by a slogan on a gloating Greens senator’s T-shirt: “Get your rosaries off my ovaries.”

YET it seems the cheap-shot sneers of intolerant atheists...

That wasn't a "cheap-shot sneer", Andrew. It was a fair point - Abbott, a politician who declared that he was opposed to abortion, wanted to take charge of the government approval of an abortion pill. Surely Australian women are entitled to have the matter investigated by someone with no clear barrow to push on the subject - as a health issue and not a religious one. ("Reasoned arguments"!)

Let's be very clear about this: you're oppressing someone if you stop them practising freely what they believe. You are NOT oppressing that person if you simply object to their making YOU practise what they believe.

His other complaint is that the people objecting to Christianity being imposed on them don't make the same protests about Islam. Eh? Why? The obvious response, in line with the above, is - no-one's seriously threatening to make Australian laws in accordance with Islam. If they do, then we'll be up there fighting against them in a second.

I do like the unconscious irony of the way Bolt put it -
So when I see a Western artist mock Christ, I see an artist advertising not his courage but his cowardice – by not daring to mock what would threaten him more.

On an unrelated topic, but similar line of argument - Andrew, why did America invade Iraq and not North Korea? Even if Iraq had had WMDs, at least it was somewhat contained. How much more of a threat was (and is) North Korea, with its nukes pointed at the US west coast?

It wasn't "cowardice" by "not daring" to deal with "what would threaten [them] more", was it?

It’s this blatant double standard that may finally have shamed some of the usual jeerers into showing Christianity a little respect.

Christianity is shown plenty of respect by the majority. But that doesn't mean we have to lie down for those who think it should rule over the rest of us.

And it doesn't mean that artists shouldn't explore the impact of religion in our culture - which, in Australia, means exploring Christianity more than most other religions, because it's the dominant one. When religion strays into politics, it doesn't get to cry "help help I'm being repressed" just because people argue with it.

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- posted by Jeremy @ 6:54 AM |
Thursday, April 05, 2007

Bolt 4/4: "Up front on women"
Andrew Bolt is worried that if we have female service personnel at the frontline, we will not be able to cope with their being used as hostages. His evidence -
Turney is one of 15 Royal Navy sailors kidnapped by Iran on March 23 as the British searched for smugglers. Britain insists its sailors were in Iraqi waters. Iran claims they’d actually crossed into its own territory, which is lucky for a regime threatened with sanctions over its nuclear program and needing a bargaining chip.

...this use of Turney is working. The image of a fearful young mother, reduced to writing the slogans of her barbarian captors, has transfixed the British press.

The Sun bleeds for this “hostage mum”. The Belfast Telegraph declares: “Only the capture of Prince Harry could have been more damaging.” And a Sunday Mirror columnist concludes: “Don’t put mums in the firing line.”

That's terrible. We must prevent women from serving in dangerous places because columnists will write columns arguing that we should prevent women from serving in dangerous places.

Or, to put it another way, we must bow to the wishes of hardline fundamentalist regimes that stone women for adultery by adopting some of their misogynist philosophy. (Which fits with the neo-cons' "we must fight the enemies of liberal democracy by abandoning liberal democracy" theory, I suppose.)

The funny thing about this "clash of civilizations" is that in its current form it isn't a clash between liberalism and religious fundamentalism. It's a clash between one brand of hardline conservatism and another brand of hardline conservatism, with liberalism as a convenient whipping-boy of both sides.

It's depressing that people like Bolt can run an "abandoning liberalism in order to save it" line and not be laughed at.

ELSEWHERE: Grodscorp makes the point more succinctly.

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- posted by Jeremy @ 11:03 AM |
Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Bolt 4/4: "Fan mail for Hicks"
Wow, that was surprising.

Andy quotes positively from Jim Schembri's idiotic attempt at "satire" in today's Age and concludes:
I think he’s summed up the lunacy.

Well, he's summed up the juvenility of writers like himself and Blair, anyway.

Question - do you think Andrew Bolt has really succeeded in convincing himself that advocates of the rule of law are somehow "fans" of Hicks? That anyone who thinks retrospective charges are unjust (even Howard's on record saying this) is somehow a "terrerist" lover? Could Andy really be that stupid? Or is he just dishonest?

(Full retort at AnonymousLefty.)

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- posted by Jeremy @ 9:16 AM |

Portions of any work of Andrew Bolt are taken from his webpage at http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/, are copyright Andrew Bolt, and are reproduced on the basis of the "fair dealing for purpose of criticism or review" section 41 of the Copyright Act 1968. Other material is copyright by its various authors, which sort of goes without saying really.