Paul Sheehan, and speaking of moral foundations ...

(Above: for a moment yesterday, the pond thought it was a young Paul Sheehan striding the streets bringing the truth to the hippies and greenies of Newtown. If you can't be bothered clicking to enlarge, the final point on the T-shirt program reads End Public Healthcare, along with an invite to Walk with me. Nobody was walking with him. But yes, once I can write my own scripts for drugs, I'm all for ending the licensing of doctors. Let them compete with the herbalists. As for the fingerless gloves*, aka glovelettes, says it all really).

Okay, now it's established that the streets of Newtown are full of strange sights, we can shift to the strange sight regularly offered each Monday in Fairfax rags by Paul Sheehan.

Awhile ago, the pond got into a fierce discussion as to which Sheehan column was the most problematic. Well what else can the chattering class do but chatter.

One with a keen sense of history promoted The Multicultural myth from 1996, which foreshadowed the book Among the Barbarians, which even Anne Henderson found too much to bear when she reviewed it in Crawlies in the crannies.

Another argued that his fine effort The Race War of Black Against White, which you can still find bobbing up all over the place on white power and racist web sites as essential reading was surely a top contender. You can still find it on Stormfront and similar sites dedicated to the neo-Nazi cause, and you can find it discussed here in Paul Sheehan's Dirty War:

It’s a wonder White people dare leave their homes each morning, besieged as they are by African American gangsters, Vietnamese triad members, Lebanese Muslim rapists and terrorists, not to mention an Aboriginal ‘feral underclass’ in Australian rural towns. And all of these sinister characters backed by governments who are at the mercy of ethnic branch-stacking and intent on imposing anti-White discrimination under the guise of multiculturalism. No wonder all the White folk are out there joining militias and voting for One Nation.

Sheehan isn't of course responsible for his readership, no more than loon pond is written by a loon for the diversion of loons. But he is responsible for pretending he's conducting insightful commentary when really it's always thinly disguised fear mongering.

So inevitably we came to his revelatory column about climate science, Beware the climate of conformity, in which he gave Professor Ian Plimer's work considerable momentum.

Lately Sheehan has gone quiet on climate science, and Plimer, and so talk inevitably turned to his most spectacular contribution to scientific thought, the celebration of the uncanny healing powers of Magic Water, which also showed Sheehan at his most adept in being provocative, while imagining he's allowed himself enough wriggle room for plausible deniability (Magic of water is overshadowed by mystery).

Others fondly remembered his efforts celebrating Lord Monckton (yes he's a lord of a minor kind, but lordy lordy, not much of a House of Lords lord), and his attempts at providing a "perspective" on the debate (Paul Sheehan spreads DDT hoax).

But truly the pond thinks that his fine effort in praise of yeast and bread (A flour blooms and a family classic is toast of the town) because it reveals Sheehan as a posturing ponce:

It was immediately obvious this bread was exceptional, with a crunchy, almost caramelised crust. Tasting that loaf, especially the crust, was a spiritual experience. I resolved to do something I had never done before. I wanted to shake the hand of the person who made this possible.

Yep, if the commentariat ever discovered someone writing that kind of prattling inner city elite foodie nonsense, they'd send the recalcitrant pervert to purgatory lickety split.

In the end the debate got nowhere - you can only think about Paul Sheehan for five minutes before the head begins to hurt, there are cries for aspirin, or a good stiff drink - and besides he's at it again today in Gillard in Trouble Over Asylum Seekers.

Now it seems we must add Afghanis to the ferals besieging white Australia, and never mind that Australia has been conducting a war this past decade in Afghanistan.

One of the most admirable skills Sheehan possesses is an apocalyptic doom and gloom vision, which exceeds even the doom and gloom of the Ancient Mariner as he stoppeth one of three to bring visions of disaster and despair. Perhaps Sheehan doesn't have a long grey beard, but he certainly has a glittering manic eye:

No matter what views you hold on the moral issue of how to respond to asylum seekers, it is all worse than you think, the worst of both worlds.

Actually from the smug viewpoint of a daily bread eater, I think the worst of worlds is the one inhabited by refugees fleeing war-torn countries, but there you go, what need of empathy in these troubled times.

Sheehan arrives at his cataclysmic point simply because an Indonesian sailor was acquitted of a charge of people smuggling in Campbelltown District Court, on the basis that the Captain was responsible, and that the sailor had signed on for fishing, not for people smuggling.

Where you might find this a fair exercise in Australian justice - perhaps even something of a triumph, or simply an example of a clever defence team doing their job while hoping they're still available if you ever need a lawyer - better get a lawyer son, better get a real good one - Sheehan finds an apocalypse of expense (the cost of the trial, the cost of the airfare returning the man to Indonesia), and then begins to build even more on the apocalypse.

He does so in classic devious Sheehan ways:

Some Afghan refugees have funded their passage to Australia via the drug trade, which is pervasive in Afghanistan, whose economy is sustained by foreign aid, military aid and the narcotics trade. Some Afghan refugees are former or current drug addicts, and some are former drug dealers.

Yep, no names, no data, no actual proof, just a mysterious "some".

Some Afghan refugees might want to come to Australia to flee the efforts of the western military alliance, including Australia, to brutalise the country for a decade, some might be honest upright citizens wanting a new home, and finding its charms, as expounded by Australian troops nostalgic for their homeland, irresistibly attractive.

Some might want to go to a land where they can freely practise their worship of the FSM in a style not permitted in their homeland. Some might be women and children not content with relentless persecution. Some might have family or friends already adjudged genuine refugees ...

Yep, you take your "somes" according to your personal prejudices, and of course Sheehan has a track record of personal prejudices when it comes to immigration, and the fate of long suffering whites and Christians, and so spends the rest of the column berating the Gillard government, with a penny-pinching attitude worthy of Ebenezer in Kidnapped (we thought we'd go with the Scottish stereotype today, not the Dutch or the Shylockian one):

More than $5 million has been paid out in compensation to asylum seekers injured while in detention centres.

...The government has spent tens of millions of dollars on charter flights and commercial flights shuttling asylum seekers between Australia and Christmas Island, and between the growing network of detention centres.

... The rate of long-term dependence on Centrelink payments among successful asylum applicants has remained very high, a financial cost not included in the cost of the asylum seeker program.

Yep, if you want a man to make sure they're watching over costs, counting every begrudged nickel and dime, while going into raptures over the spiritual experience of a loaf of bread, Sheehan is your man ...

Naturally it all builds to the apocalyptic desire for the federal government to be voted out in an election hopefully to be "held soon", and naturally Sheehan blames the independents, strangely heaping in Craig Thomson with poor old Ton Windsor and Rob Oakeshott, for preventing this from happening.

And then he builds to a triumphant last bray:

On this moral foundation stands the Gillard government.

Uh huh. Well here at the pond, we like to think that Sheehan stands on the moral foundation of his past columns. You know, glass houses, stone throwing, all that sort of thing ...

Make of that what you will, but we're off to Stormfront for our daily dose of fear and loathing ...

And now back to the beginning and our valiant street warrior:

*Fingerless gloves are usually leather and have a distinct appearance. Much like rocker jackets, they are sometimes worn by people who wish to display a certain sense of rebellion, recklessness, "toughness" or general disregard for the standards of society (such as John Bender in The Breakfast Club. (here at the wiki on gloves).

The Breakfast Club! Yep, that's what the wiki says. Apparently the man stalking the streets of Newtown is as wild and rebellious and as reckless and as tough as a character in a John Hughes movie!

Zowie wowie, maybe I can be as wild as a character in Pretty in Pink.

I wonder if Barry Manilow knows he raids his wardrobe?

(Below: eek, maybe it was Paul Sheehan. Or at least another liberty warrior soul mate of like mind, flag at half mast and the world doomed).