Your ABC?

It would be remiss of the pond not to note a recent outpouring by a valiant fighter for freedom of ideas and speech, still fighting the culture wars of the last century ...

Indeed, indeed. The revolutionary Mr Uhlmann ...

Now of course there are dangerous radicals bemused by other spectres ... you know the sort that read The New York Times and What Happened to Jane Mayer When She Wrote About the Koch Brothers ...

But it seems these lickspittle lackeys are just followers of the wicked Frankfurt School academics who have introduced a virus into the United States ...

Indeed, indeed.

Now some might be off enjoying The Psychologists Take Power (currently outside the paywall), in which sundry shrinks sell their soul and the capacity for effective torture to the military, our brave, intrepid freedom fighter must stand alongside the Catholics, bashing the gays, because after all, they've only had two thousand years of it, and we can never have enough gay bashing, can we ...

Ah the tolerance police. That just had to pop out like a hoppy toad, allowing as it does the lavishly tolerant to express their tolerance of the intolerant by labelling the tolerant intolerant the tolerance police ...

Or some such thing. What a joke, and so the usual language unfolds, whereby heretics, new moralism, righteousness and the inquisitor's zeal - all the standard language of the Catholic church - is deployed in new form, in exactly the same way as science is turned, by fiat and magic, into a discussion of the new climate science religion, with its moralism, righteousness and superstition ...

Can George Orwell be far from us at this moment, with words flung around with careless indifference?

Yet for all the concluding blather about William Roper, as silly a man as his father in law, Sir Thomas Moore, honoured by the Soviets for his communist-inclined Utopia, stripped of their history and pressed into service by a second rate playwright of the stolid kind, the pond saw this little outing more as a job application for the reptiles than as anything meaningful or useful or insightful ... though it did incline the pond to write like More wrote, as Rosseus, about Luther ... and  "throw back into your paternity's shitty mouth, truly the shit-pool of all shit, all the muck and shit which your damnable rottenness has vomited up".

But that's actually a little too direct and frank, when confronted by mealy mouthed humbug of the usual kind.

Instead it leaves the pond with only one question, as Chris Uhlmann signs himself, in this opinion piece, as the ABC's political editor, and presumably took reptile coin for so describing himself ... with not enough a disclaimer that the "opinions contained herein and disinterred are the opinion of the author's and not the ABC's".

Is this your ABC at work?

Congratulations if it is, but it isn't the pond's ...

Are such simple proprieties now lost forever?

Is this where journalists endlessly talking to other journalists, and journalists endlessly opining to other journalists, has finished up, and is this where the ABC now finds itself?

There was a time when journalists just shut and reported the thoughts and deeds of others.

There is now a time when journalists just never shut up ... never stop tweeting ... and never stop making themselves the centre of the story and of the drama ... too often dressed up in the guise that they're freedom fighters for truth, justice and liberty, when it might just be blather about the right of Catholics to sail on in their bigoted way unencumbered by anyone daring to make mention of their bigotry ...

This heroic pose probably goes with the declining relevance and usefulness of journalists, but golly gosh, it's tedious all the same ...