Round midnight my wife will be home and will put up in these columns a piece on the events of Sunday and Monday and Tuesday which I got by agreement to Unleashed by Wednesday afternoon and they rejected because it was ‘several days late’ and ‘added nothing to our understanding of the events of the day’. This is the third piece in a month they have rejected but not told me they had rejected after asking for it or asking to see it and I suspect them of ill feeling or dementia.
See above.
Name:
Great to hear that a new article on Unleashed is forthcoming, Bob. I got my way through Year 12 in part by reading your articles on politics throughout the year. Is there something special about the content of this new article?
An ode to Aussies.
As long as you haven’t criticised anyone who is female gay or black you should be all right.
Surely you don’t believe in all this left-wing right-wing Labor-Liberal nonsense. How many of any persuasion would knock back a top job with murdoch, or satan for that matter? The lefties are the worst with their self-righteousness and infinite self-belief.
I remember an entertaining speaker who used to frequent the Domain in Sydney in the 60s and 70s. Overblown rhetoric, hilarious egotistical paranoia, he had exaggerated arguments about anything and everything. He had bad teeth and a pommy accent, you must have seen him.
Can’t be easy, making a living just with words.
Satan would make a shit boss, I wouldn’t work for him.
I’ve gone from a Liberal boss to a Labor one. Guess which one has a more developed awareness of human resource issues. Go on, guess.
The Liberal boss of course. Labor people couldn’t sell tickets in a brothel.
The Liberals couldn’t understand what it is to be human even if they are one.
My Labor boss was just telling me how she’s sold $4 million worth of what we’re not-for-profit selling this week alone.
My Liberal boss was really good at bullshitting. No one believed a word he said but he executed bullshit with skill and charm. I feel a bit sorry for the poor bastard, he must miss me terribly. Drowning in a sea of blanched, dull witted suits.
This is not true of Peter Collins, Chris Puplick, The Hamers, Fred Chaney, Jim Killen and Malcolm Turnbull, all of whom I know, or knew, well.
You shouldn’t say such things. You really shouldn’t.
And the elder Baird was a nice guy. But you are a conservative by taste too whereas my view is that these things aren’t harmless anymore in this day and age and adherence to delusion is a political act with real consequences.
Meanwhile, some cultural conservatives are just there by default and it has no actual affect on them at all.
But the ideology, as it stands in the current form, does not allow for the full breadth of experience. It shuts down the basic human functions. I have Liberal mates, good mates, but they don’t follow the ideology. When you wear that hat, it leads you down a bad path whoever you are. It’s a nasty ideology which if you follow, leads you to do nasty things.
I just have to wonder - is there a line and where is the line? To what extent can a good person do bad things and still be good? Or at what point are they to be forgiven if they are not sorry?
A good question Reader1. Napoleon trounced all over Europe, and probably caused the deaths of millions, yet he is still regarded as a great man, and one who changed the world for the better.
I suppose the verdict of history needs to balance up the good against the bad.
We may note too that history is written by the victors, and even so Napoleon is highly rated.
Webster.
Just then, I went about to seek a Bob Ellis opinion piece about the recent debacle (the sh#tfight) and was saddened to see there was no such piece. Your opinion would certainly have added something to our understanding. Without such we are all left with, at best, an opaque understanding of the plight of Labor at this sorry juncture.
Write on Bob, you have your readers and they are legion.
See above.
Save the good stuff for the books.
At random from my favourite Ellis book, Two Weeks in Another Country” regarding Thatcher:
“What was missing in her biography was any hint that she understood any fraction of her own neurosis. Or any backward looking capacity for asking What If? If the toilet had been indoors, and not such a trauma to go to in the dark, in front of the neighbours”……….
………..”What was disturbing about her, and in the end horrifying, was her passionate capacity to insist in her own mind that her own background-uptight, puritan, penny-grubbing-was the kind that everyone should have, and that her conclusions from it were the ones that everyone should reach. No deviation;this is the word, I have spoken. I know.”