Tag: Andrew Bolt
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The price of opinion
Gina Rinehart, for all that she inspires consternation, does not strike me as a particularly deep thinker. The poetry is a giveaway. We laugh, but it does tell us something serious about the person who wrote it. For instance, consider this extract: Is our future threatened with massive debts run up by political hacks Who…
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Unhinging the Bolt
I’m going to contradict myself on Andrew Bolt. In a previous post, I defended Bolt’s right to free speech, as have so many others, in the face of his court case. At the time, my esteemed nemesis, the Slightly Disgruntled Scientist, came to a different view. Since the judgement, I find myself changing my mind, and…
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Enforcing enlightenment
I agree wholeheartedly with Jonathan Holmes’ article (and his April 4 episode of Media Watch) on Andrew Bolt. There are probably a few essays now floating around expressing a similar sentiment on Bolt’s run-in with the Racial Discrimination Act. Australia doesn’t have an institutionalised right to free speech (except political speech, as narrowly implied by…
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Bolt’s climate comedy
Any appearance of Andrew Bolt on the ABC’s Insiders programme is bound to result in at least one deranged pronouncement on the conspiracy that is climate change. (This is something of a shame, because on other issues discussed on Insiders he does often approach sanity.) In the closing comments, Bolt had this contribution to make:…
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Climate control
For someone who rails so vehemently against global warming “alarmism”*, Andrew Bolt sure seems to be alarmed about hypothetical fatalities attributed to air conditioning failure during blackouts. Bolt states: “Just how many died because power blackouts knocked out their airconditioning is not known.” It’s not known, of course, because nobody has reported it happening, not…
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Conroy and Bolt on filtering
The ABC’s Q&A programme spent about 30 minutes last night pondering Senator Conroy’s mandatory Internet filtering plan… well, idea, because it’s increasingly clear that “plan” is too strong a word. Conroy was, frankly, an embarrassment. To be honest, most of the questions put to him were not especially articulate, but Conroy made a mockery of…
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Blog politics
I used to think that left-vs-right was an ideological battle that consumed American thinking far more than Australian thinking. However, having indulged in glimpses of Andrew Bolt’s blog and his adversaries at Pure Poison, I’m not sure that we’re really any better. Theoretically, “left” and “right” define a spectrum of economic policy: left for socialism,…