David Marr, headkicker

The commonplace ALP apologist is the political equivalent of a football fan who sports a Collingwood Always sticker on his car window. Every (alleged) boorish act performed by Tony Abbott as an undergraduate provides insight into the man preparing to be our next prime minister, while Julia Gillard’s time in the far-Left Socialist Forum is dismissed as inconsequential. Ditto the Slater & Gordon business. David Marr would agree with them, but his “Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott”, Quarterly Essay 47, represents something more than the work of a Labor hack. There are even a few passages in his portrait of Abbott that could be considered not only fair but almost generous. David Marr is no Labor Party stooge. He is, however, a ruthless, steely-eyed ideologue of the Left.

The article can be read in full at the following link:

http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/qed/2012/09/david-marr-headkicker

The Big Bang Theory

Living in an apartment in Los Angeles are two physicists, Leonard and Sheldon, both of whom have jobs at the California Institute of Technology. Two of their co-workers, aerospace engineer Howard and astrophysicist Raj, also spend a lot time at the apartment. All four possess the most brilliant intellects, and yet in their early thirties they remain avid fans of sci-fi, fantasy, and comic books. This is the setting for the television programme The Big Bang Theory.

The article can be read in full at the following link:

http://spurmag.net/2012/09/03/the-big-bang-theory/ 

Modern-day Anti-Semitism and the Campaign for Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS)

Dear Protester,

 Allow me to introduce myself. I am a passer-by who gave you the evil eye last week outside an Israeli-owned business in Rundle Mall. I was on my way to a second-hand bookshop; you were banging your drum in support of the Campaign for Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS). A word bubbled up inside of me, as I frowned in your direction, and that word was “anti-Semite”.

How Obama is Fashioning Post-America

Not until the first week of June did it dawn on America’s liberal-leftist mainstream media, which constitutes the virtual entirety of America’s mainstream media with the exception of Fox News and various populist radio stations, that The One might only serve the one term. This is not how the fairy tale was supposed to end. Two Time magazine writers, Mark Halperin and Elizabeth Dias, lashed out at Matt Drudge’s “media freak show” website Drudge Report, accusing it of being a “circus” posting items scornful of “Obama and Vice President Joe Biden and their wives”. Drudge Report had even given prominence to Edward Klein’s “virulently” anti-Obama tome, The Amateur, just when Klein was being “barred from major TV appearances and mostly ignored by the mainstream media”. Anti-Obama polemic apparently has no place in the public domain during an election year.

The article can be read in full at the following link:

http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2012/9/how-obama-is-fashioning-post-america

Freedom Wars

“Everything’s the opposite of what it is, isn’t it?” the songwriter Harry Nilsson mused. I cannot think of a more appropriate way of describing the contrasting views of today’s progressives and conservatives on the issue of freedom of speech.

The article can be read in full at the following link:

http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/qed/2012/08/freedom-wars

The Principled Pragmatist

David Ben-Gurion’s political philosophy, according to Shimon Peres, was surprisingly pragmatic for someone so principled. Ben-Gurion’s capacity for compromise literally put Israel on the map and his facility for honourable compromises goes a long way to explaining the current dynamism of “The Start-Up Nation” despite its location in such a belligerent neighbourhood. He understood the risks of a Jewish state, but not the extent to which Arab leaders (Palestinian and otherwise) would exploit and deceive their own people to pursue rejectionism, a cause made redundant by the 1948–49 Arab-Israeli War.

This article can be read in full at the following link:

http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2012/7-8/the-principled-pragmatist

The Delusions of Modern Progressives

Roger Scruton’s conservative thinking might be labelled “High Toryism for Common People”. While his work has much of its genesis in English traditionalism, Scruton’s 2005 memoir, Gentle Regrets, is hilariously scathing of those who carried its banner in the second half of the twentieth century. This former grammar school boy turned against the Left after witnessing the 1968 student uprising in Paris and the arrival of “institutionalized nihilism”, but found little solace in his subsequent engagement with the British Conservative Party. Horrified at the inanity of upper-class Party stalwarts whose attachment to Tory doctrines in the mid-1970s was less a reasoned exercise than an “inherited disability”, Scruton nevertheless refused to accept Thatcher as the solution to moribund Toryism. Instead of enlisting as an intellectual Conservative, Scruton became a conservative intellectual, a particularly thankless and unpopular vocation in the 1970s.

The article can be read in full at the following link:


http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2011/4/the-delusions-of-modern-progressives