Of Murdochs, possums, Gary Johns, and the evil anti-human secularist humanists ...

There's an amusing set of insights and speculations by Nick Possum into the mindset of Sean Castle in a recent edition of City Hub, which can be found online under the header Bearing 'Christian witness' in the state elections.

The Possum spends a little time on Toongabbie Christian School - always standing by, ready to receive government handouts - and even went to the trouble to download the staff application form, which suggests applicants need to be 'active' Christians, able to give a written account of their 'Christian conversion and experience':

And there’s this: “What do you think about the theory of evolution and its relationship to what the Bible teaches?” That’s the creationist question. It’s designed to weed out folks who don’t believe the world was created in six days around 4004 BC or thereabouts.

In short, Sean Castle worked for a mob of obscurantist, religiously-bigoted, fundamentalist whackos – the perfect milieu to foster what followed.

Sean Castle? Well he's the guy involved in the Pauline Hanson electoral fraud case arising from the recent NSW election, and he's already a footnote in the mainstream media. The Possum doesn't get any closer to understanding Castle's actual motivations or deciphering the outcome he might have been hoping to achieve, but he ends his piece thus:

Hopefully Castle won’t escape prosecution for the nuisance he’s caused – let alone for disgracefully impugning the reputation of the two electoral officials. He’s still listed on the staff of Toongabbie Christian School where, in the words of the ‘vision statement’ he’s no doubt bearing “ …Christian witness, through life example and missional endeavour, to our local community and the world.”

Meanwhile, we look forward to yet another editorial in The Australian explaining why it's imperative that private schools of the Toongabbie kind can score splendiferous grants from government.

City Hub is a throwaway rag, and recently the Possum has been promoted to page 3, suggesting that there's even fewer correspondents to hand in the Alternative Media group. His latest outing - about Nathan Tinkler's attempt to take over the Newcastle Knights football team, in Nathan Tinkler's life is far too complicated - also features a tasty footnote to the recent home invasion involving former NSW Treasurer's Michael Costa's wife and kids.

Now the Possum is sometimes inclined to eccentricities, but he's always entertaining in a brushtail way, and he's free - if you can be bothered to bend down and pick up a copy dropped somewhere convenient to inner city urban elites - and the paper provides one of the few alternatives to the wall to wall suburban throwaways owned by Rupert Murdoch and News Corp in old Sydney town, where rum and the lash and developers still rule.

And alternatives deserve support, because otherwise you end up with the hubris and condescension of urban elites scribbling for the mainstream press about the evils of urban elites, and the hypocritical contradictions get too much to bear.

And you can also end up with a monopolistic, self-serving, self-seeking control of information, and scandals like The News of the World news that Murdoch's OZ papers forgot.

What's most astonishing about recent events surrounding The News of the World is not so much the misdeeds that took place in the first instance, but the disgraceful, sordid, extensive, over many years nature of the cover-up, involving police and politicians as well as Murdoch newspapers. You can find a handy summary of events here, at Crikey, with convenient links, but don't go racing off to the local Murdoch rags for an expose.

Instead if you look down the opinion pages of today's Australian, it's business as usual, leading off with Gary Johns and the header Anti-human Greens won't usurp Labor. Well I guess bashing the Greens makes a break of Johns' usual job of bashing the Labor party ...

Anti-human?

Right at that point it's a difficult task to click on and read futher, because that sort of dehumanising rhetoric is exactly the kind used by all kinds of ratbags to strip the enemy of their humanity.

It's a meaningless and offensive concept, but then Johns specialises in being meaningless and offensive. Naturally he joins the Indian Minister of Health in deploring homosexuality:

Each and every homosexual man or woman understands the family is the best known means for heterosexual couples to procreate and raise children. Without it, there is no humanity. The family as a human institution is under enormous pressure in the face of the great and positive forces of women's equality, but its purloining by homosexual couples in the name of equality is a step too far. The Greens will choose niche equality over family every time.

Uh huh. Great how Johns feels free to speak for each and every homosexual man or woman and their understanding of the world. Strange how these wonderous heterosexual institutions seem to have the odd homosexual in the nest. Wondrous how 'niche equality' somehow gets opposed to 'family every time'.

But it's this which takes the cake:

The Greens delight in the threat of global warming. They delight in stopping the genius of capitalist economic development in the service of humanity. In the face of environmental threats they retreat and hope they can turn off the machine.

Roll that one around in your mouth like a robust Coonawarra red.

The Greens delight in the threat of global warming?

Of course the alternative line, which can be led at random, is that the cardigan wearing, latte sipping, inner urban elite greenies are just a bunch of cowardly, cry baby, scaredy cat, mamby mamby, hysterical chicken littles running around like chooks with their heads cut off, confronted by the threat of global warming which isn't a threat at all, because it's a conspiracy of grant-seeking scientists. To misquote Churchill, some chicken, some neck, some delight in the destruction of humanity ...

And then if you feel like rolling a nice passionfruity NZ sav blanc around in the mouth, try this fruity Johns' closer:

If it (the Labor party) wanders down an anti-humanist path in search of green votes it risks its major-party status. Be wary, comrades: environment in the service of humanity, yes; the rest of the Greens' anti-humanist agenda, never.

Oh yes, by golly, just like the old testament, and man (forget that naughty Eve) having dominion over the earth and its creatures.

But did it jump out at you? Anti-humanist agenda?

Of course in any other tirade about the greenies and their tree-hugging ways, we'd be copping a blast about their evil secularist humanist (and perhaps atheist and socialist) agenda.

To so wilfully misuse and abuse concepts and words suggests Johns is the very worst of thinkers - which is to say not much of a thinker at all, just ready to throw anything to hand at greenies, including the kitchen sink and gays - and yet he cops a regular spot in The Australian to offer up this kind of nonsense:

Labor toys with population policy, it toys with gay marriage, it toys with euthanasia and it toys with animal rights. But if, at the margin, there is a choice to be made between people and nature, it will, if it knows what is good for it, remain wedded to a human conception of history.

Well at least they don't toy with words in a way that's mind numbingly silly.

A human conception of history? What the fuck does he mean, as Johns bangs on like a dunny door in a gale? Gay marriage can't be a human conception of history? Does Johns have any idea of history, or even for that matter the role of homosexuality in ancient Greece?

Even his defence of nuclear plants plunges Johns into existential absurdity, as he attacks Bob Brown for attacking recent events in Japan:

He (Brown) seems to forget that 10,000 people were killed by nature, none so far by the human-created radioactivity.

Uh huh. Well there's a knockdown argument for humanist-created pro-humanity radioactivity and never mind the design faults in the plants or the behaviour of the plant operators, or the thousands of lives affected by exclusion zones ...

Let's just set up 'nature' as the fall guy, as if anyone's arguing that tsunamis can somehow be halted King Canute style, as a way of distracting from the behaviour of the nuclear energy industry, which being human can be regulated and judged and changed for the better.

Well the good news is that major advertisers in the News of the World, including Ford, Halifax and T-Mobile have pulled their advertisements from the rag, and can I just swear to the long absent lord that any paper that carries the blatherings of the anti-humanist Gary Johns will receive no support from the pond.

Anti-humanist, you ask, surely that's a tad unfair? Surely Johns shrieks of flawed humanity?

Come now, let us turn to an impeccable authority, one Kevin Andrews, scribbling furiously for Quadrant, The Greens'Agenda, in Their Own Words, as he explains how the secularist humanist atheist agnostic socialist Marxist Leninist greenies are shortly about to ruin the world for lovers of bicycles and bicycle races. And, it almost goes without saying, at the same time they will do down the wondrous Judeo-Christian religious and ethical principles that see us all steer clear of eating shellfish, as they carry out their sick, perverted secular humanist agendas ...

Now there's a knockdown example of the evils of cardigan wearing atheistic humanism, but you know, somehow we'd rather bend down and pick up the Possum, and have fun reading about the strange ways of teachers at the Toongabbie Christian School ... and when you read a column in The Australian deploring the way independent schools of this stripe receive government funding, then truly the anti-Christ, or at least Satan's spawn will have returned to stalk the earth.

In the meantime, don't expect much in the way of sense, just a lot of gibberish, meaningless abuse, and misleading misuse of language and concepts in pursuit of fly-blown conservative thinking ...

Or perhaps you could read Matthew Norman at The Independent:

This is an amorality tale of systemic corruption as insidious, deep-rooted, all-embracing, diseased and destructive as any known to a modern Western democracy. To understand how it came to this — how prime ministers and our premier police force became the enablers of News Corporation’s abundant wickedness — you must go back several decades. When Margaret Thatcher made her Faustian pact with Mr Murdoch in the 1980s, granting him his every heart’s desire in return for his unwavering slavish support, she hastened the creation of the monster we see revealed in all its gruesome hideosity today.

Indeed. Gruesome hideosity.

Almost anti-human.

(Below: an oldie but a goodie, from years ago, when the scandal was still bubbling away beneath the surface and the cover up continued apace).