Yo dudes, get down wit it, time for some negativity vibes ...

(Above: Chris Rock, and you'll pay more than sixty five bucks to see him drop the word, unless you head off to this puff piece for the play on YouTube, here, where the beeping and the bleeping suggests the team might be wanting to avoid death threats).

America has the best of it, or depending where you sit, the worst of it, but we can always rely on valiant locals to try to topple the damned Yankee monopoly of anger, hate and rage in politics and political debate.

Take Tim Blair - please someone anyone take Tim Blair at a knockdown price - as he scribbles furiously Of Cate and Hate.

It seems the poor possum received an email from a PhD student at the UWS offering to write a 'climate change for dummies' opinion piece for the Daily Terror, and it sent him into a frantic frenzy of fear and loathing.

By golly, did he take the bait, the hook, the sinker, the line, and quite possibly the angler:

“I’m targeting this paper,” she continued, “because, no offence intended, the readership may be in need of some simple material to assist them in understanding better the debate.”

But then the PhD student made an even more enormous and vexing mistake. She mentioned bogans:

“The question of climate change has long been a vexed one for the bogan,” it began, before presenting a theory about Cate Blanchett’s carbon tax ad: “This confused the bogan to the point of madness, as it was unable to reconcile the fact that its celebrity deity was asking it act against its own interests.”

Lordy, did that provoke a dummy spit.

Somehow Blair took this kind of undergraduate joke as "driving climate believers to new levels of hatred", involving (yes yet again, it's not just Paul Sheehan blathering about class war) a descent into a plain class war between self-appointed intelligent folks and the common morons/bogans they despise.

I don't know about you, but it seems to the pond more like a descent to the bottom to discover who most lacks a sense of humour - Tim Blair or Andrew Bolt.

Blair gets so agitated he starts to babble about the use of "it" and about Cate Blanchett taking frequent flights to Vanuatu, and even hapless Cate making a whimsical remark in the theatah about a fog machine generating carbon emissions, seen only by celeb-loving culture vultures able to fork out sixty five buckets a ticket.

Oh lordy, and then there was Tony Martin, purveyor of low-brow jokes, trying to prove he's become intelligent by sneering at carbon denialists and sending up bogans (what next, Paul Hogan making bogan jokes), and worst of all, in a brain-damaged voice.

On and on goes the frenzied rant, and then irony of irony, a lecturer in architecture - one Dr David Nichols - is dragged out from the closet, or is that the cloisters, to deliver a sad commentary on this awful shift in language, and worst of all, the text comes from that holy writ of socialists, the Fairfax press:

"People don’t talk about the working class any more,’’ he told Saturday’s Age. "They aren’t able to say they despise the poor. But people feel free to talk about despising bogans. What they’ve done is create this creature that is a lesser human being to express their interclass hatred.

“Something that is an innately inferior and diminished version of a human, like a Neanderthal."

But let's face it.

What the fuck would he know? He's a bloody academic, a hoity toity upstart, most shocking of all with an actual PhD, who for all I know might attend the odd concert or two, and fork out sixty five bucks for the ticket and think nothing of it (um, it'll cost you A$205 to sit next to Blair in the grandstand on a Sunday during the Australian Grand Prix - perhaps you'd better go on Thursday when it'll only cost you fifty smackeroos).

You see, what you have to understand is these academics are cry babies and pussies and wimps and weaklings and mamby pamby types:

... on the weekend we discovered that it only takes a few emails to scare climate scientists clean out of their laboratories. “It’s completely intolerable that people be subjected to this sort of abuse,” said the Australian National University’s Professor Ian Young, who claimed that scientists had been moved to a safer location due to what he described as death threats.

“Academics and scientists are actually really not equipped to be treated in this way,” he said.

Yes, and what's a rough equivalent to a death threat? A glassing, a shot to the kneecap?

Nah, it's getting called a motherfucker in a rap song, with astericks, because it's such a shocking word:

Well, that’s not the message we got from their climate rap. “Perhaps,” replied reader George Rock, “they shouldn’t call people motherf**kers if they don’t want to fight.”

Quite so.

Quite so. There's nothing like killing someone for the idle use of a word, so that the insulting wretches can learn that sticks and stones and magnum .44s, at one time the most powerful handgun in the world, will indeed hurt you, and name calling will bring it on ...

Hasta la vista baby, armageddon time, and so forth and etc.

Funnily enough, back in the day when the feds moved to protect Godwin Grech - remember him? - Blair was suitably appalled by the notion of such potential threats:

The Feds know their lefties well. (here).

And of course he was shocked when someone from The Guardian proposed calling in John Wilkes Booth, or Lee Harvey Oswald or John Hinckley Jr. in the matter of George W. Bush (here). Typical death-threat lefties.

And so on.

To understand this kind of approach, you have to have a fine capacity to distinguish between bureaucrats, politicians and climate scientists when it comes to death threats, and an appropriate fair minded use of them to keep the malcontents in line.

Perhaps you also need to understand the mind set of enthusiastic bloggers and their cheerful readers, who think using 'motherfucker' is a suitable reason for bunging on a do and taking someone out?

And so to the wrap up ...

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to finish reading that note from the PhD at UWS. I’ve put aside the whole night to do it, because it has big words that I don’t understand.

What? Like 'dummy' and 'bogan' and 'where's ya sensahuma', or why the notion that the use of 'motherfucker' suddenly permits, even enables death threats?

If that's the case on a daily basis half of America should be experiencing death threats, since the word and variants (mofucker, mutha) are amongst the most common forms of American discourse (the urban dictionary here), and not just amongst blacks and rappers.

Blair of course has an army of 'bots, who storm across the intertubes, like a bunch of locusts, laying waste to any heresy in a way that would make a spam hacker with a set of 'bots gasp in admiration.

What's the bet a few sites will feel the heat of irrational 'you're a pile of shit' comments, dressed up in best bogan scientific thesis style (with or without mullet and rat's tail, sir?), as more than a few have noted Blair's strange ways. Cue Deltoid:

Notice that he's not even bothering to pay lip service to the notion that maybe there is something wrong with sending death threats? (here, and for a delicious serving of Piñata full of stupid, here).

Talk about a rabid, feral, lathered up, soap and cut-throat razor rant ...

Second thoughts, let's not, let's talk instead about Gerard Henderson, who always seems positively polite, a genuinely desiccated coconut up against the Murdoch ferals, and who's at it again in Nod to greats would supplement Abbott's negative energy.

Clearly the supporters of Dr. No are experiencing anxiety about the notion that Tony Abbott might be exuding negativity, because Henderson spends a painfully long time explaining how Abbott's unapologetic negativity is working tremendously well, but ...

After celebrating the wonders of Dr. No's negativity, towards the end of the piece Henderson discovers that the 'greats', being Menzies, Fraser and Howard - yep, suddenly Fraser is back in Valhalla - all had a few positive lines in their campaigns for governments.

Henderson's recommendation? That Abbott dig Work Choices out of its grave in the back yard as a way of appealing to small businesses and welfare recipients who want full-time employment.

Yep, an industrial relations debate is just what Tony Abbott needs.

The ever-helpful Henderson - never mind that the relentless negativity is working a treat - also strangely feels the need for Abbott to run a couple of positive lines, and consider placing some young Coalition backbenchers on the front bench, and even consider preferencing Labor ahead of the Greens, and then rounds it all up thus:

He may defeat Labor on a totally negative attack but a few more positive lines would help the Coalition on the long road to 2013.

Uh huh. Here's a positive line:

Tony Abbott: If Australia is greatly to reduce its carbon emissions, the price of carbon intensive products should rise. The Coalition has always been instinctively cautious about new or increased taxes. That’s one of the reasons why the former government opted for an emissions trading scheme over a straight-forward carbon tax. Still, a new tax would be the intelligent skeptic’s way to deal with minimising emissions because it would be much easier than a property right to reduce or to abolish should the justification for it change. (here)

Apparently Abbott's flirtation with a carbon tax turned up on this week's Q&A, wherein Christopher Pyne did his best to dance with the angels on the head of a pin while explaining it away, but life's too short to watch Pyne's gyrations. Enough already ...

The best treat of the week so far?

David Burchell, the Duffster and his cohort sagely explaining how the new anger in politics was all the fault of the wimpy, whingeing, cry baby Greens (David Burchell: Anger, politics and the new media).

As if the relentless negativity of Tony Abbott - officially approved by Gerard Henderson - had nothing to do with it, and neither did the scribbles of the likes of Tim Blair.

And just a while ago the Duffster confessed to a love of The Cure, and tried to get tickets to their retro concert and even played a track, Fire in Cairo ...

Burn like a fire in Cairo
Burn like a
Fire
Blaze like a fire in Cairo
Blaze like a
Fire
Flare
Burn like fire
Burn like
Fire in Cairo

Now there's how to do humour ... why not propose next week that they play Killing an Arab, just for the fun of it.

Oh the joys of listening to ABC cardigan wearers go about their work ...