Facts can get you fired.
Tim Blair The Daily Telegraph May 29, 2022
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Thank God that’s over. With the federal election done with, Australians can now resume our crucial national project — pretending that everything we know to be objectively true simply isn’t. It’s an enterprise beyond the scale of the Snowy River hydro-electric scheme, or perhaps even settlement and federation themselves. So let’s get to it, people. It is of vital national importance that we immediately recommence telling ourselves: men can get pregnant; reducing Australia’s carbon dioxide emissions will make a significant difference to the global climate; the ABC needs more money; nuclear energy is dangerous; art requires government funding; renewable energy is reliable and cheap; the Pacific Islands are sinking — and it’s our fault; women can have penises; electric cars are both affordable and practical; and Kristina Keneally really is going to keep living in Western Sydney after getting absolutely rinsed by independent Dai Le in the seat of Fowler.
Actually, scratch that last one. Despite promising that Western Sydney would be her new home whatever the election outcome, Keneally was photographed back on posh Scotland Island just a couple of days after the election.
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And then Keneally told the Sydney Morning Herald she was undecided about her future location plans, adding a fantastic Covid excuse for that spectacular defeat.
Keneally lost, she claimed, because “harsh lockdowns engendered an understandable sense of parochialism that the community had been left behind by both major political parties”. Whatever helps you sleep, Kristina.
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Still, it’s probably unfair to single out Keneally for criticism during this age of delusion — which, of course, reaches far beyond our own shores.
“Do I think some women were born with penises? Yes,” British Labour MP Stella Creasy told an interviewer last week.
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She’s wrong on the basic biology, but that didn’t stop Creasy from launching into a curious shoe-based gender theory that for sheer lunacy rivalled Keneally’s lockdown election hypothesis.
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“That brings up all sorts of questions about what is a woman in terms of gender,” Creasy, a mother of two, mused.
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“What does it mean to live as a woman? I wear flat shoes. I’ve got terrible bunions. Is someone going to tell me that living as a woman means you have to wear high heels for two years?”
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Nobody is saying that. In fact, it’s likely than in the entire 6 million year history of our species nobody has ever once specified a 24-month high heel requirement in order to qualify as a woman.
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A couple of X chromosomes might be handy, though.
Back home, the ABC’s funding squealers have calmed down a little following the election of their organisation’s party wing. Give them a little time, however, and they’ll soon be demanding more, more, more money.
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The sky’s the limit at the ABC, in everything except ratings.
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The Australian recently reported that the underfunded, down-to-their-last-cent ABC has recently increased its spending on advertising, promotions and audience research to $289,000 a week — a rate of more than $15 million annually.
No mob that is genuinely low on dough would spend that much on non-essentials. And that’s just the point.
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The ABC is so loaded that $15 million per year represents not even 1.4 per cent of the ABC’s annual budget.
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Note, also, that the ABC is ideologically opposed to advertising — unless you’re paying for it.
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It’s dangerous to tell the truth during a time of aggressive self-deceit, as Stuart Kirk, the global head of responsible investment at international financial firm HSBC Asset Management, is now aware.
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Kirk recently told a conference that climate change isn’t the economic threat many financial institutes say it is.
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Among his many sound points, Kirk noted that big banks claim “we are doomed” and “threatened with extinction”, but then recommend stocks that are not expected to turn a profit until the next decade.
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Kirk’s main message, wrote Brazilian journalist Leandro Narloch, was “that apocalyptic predictions ignore the extreme human capacity to adapt and solve difficulties. If the risks of climate change are confirmed, they will open up new opportunities for entrepreneurs to do what they do best: earn money by solving our problems.”
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“He merely said,” the Wall Street Journal reported, “what many in his industry believe but are too timid to say: Climate change poses a negligible risk to the global economy and bank balance sheets …”
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“Credit to Mr Kirk for exposing the hubris of the regulatory climate emperors even as his superiors shrink in fear.”
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Kirk’s superiors didn’t shrink for long. Stung by a furious response to Kirk’s speech from climate evangelists — former UN climate boss Christiana Figueres described it as “abhorrently outrageous” — HSBC suspended the 25-year financial sector veteran.
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That’s where we are at, people. Expressing a contrary opinion on what the financial impacts might be of the weather 100 years from now is so frightening that you may lose your job.
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Facts can get you fired.
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In a sane world, nominally conservative politicians would address this.
But don’t expect much from various chicken Liberals and nervous Nats, who have seen the electoral advantages of adopting a post-truth position and are calling for the Coalition to follow that path.
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If you can’t beat them, their logic goes, join them — in a culture of wilful deception.
