How could the pond pass on a chance to further ruin the University of Melbourne's reputation, with the able help of the Lynch mob?

 

The pond could have held over the Lynch mob until tomorrow, what with it being just a two minute outing - so the reptiles say - and with just one visual distraction, and it being truly pathetic, as only the Lynch mob could manage.

But the pond doesn't like to pass up a chance to sully the reputation of the University of Melbourne as soon as it appears ...

The header: Creatives lose the plot as writers’ festivals trade debate for ideological comfort; When the artistic left begins to recoil from the speech codes it long enforced, it signals a cultural tipping point.

The usual caption for the usual irrelevant, and in this case decidedly ancient snap: The crowd at Adelaide Writers Week in 2023. Picture: Kelly Barnes

Realising this snap was a folly, the reptiles updated the story with a splendid collage by Emilia, featuring figures likely to draw a visceral response from the hive mind ...

Consider the pond shocked and terrified ...well done Emilia. Each time the pond thinks the remnants of the lizard Oz graphics department couldn't get more wretched, it always surprises and delights.

As for the Lynch mob's verbiage?

Now as the pond recalls the chain of events, it was the board of the Adelaide Festival that recoiled from hearing a Palestinian speak, and so enforced long standing speech codes - never a word to upset the Zionists - and so a cultural tipping point was reached.

See how the Lynch mob tries to flip it, resorting to of all people, mass murderer Henry Kissinger for comfort:

With Iran on the verge of a revolution, how does our creative elite choose to honour the moment? By resolving itself into a dew over an unreadable author’s withdrawn invitation to speak at a writers festival.
Henry Kissinger joked that the reason intellectuals are so hateful is because the stakes are so low. Could they be lower than an exclusively progressive roster at the Adelaide Writers Week? Good people such as Julie Szego have called time on the hypocrisy built into these love-ins. They have become forums advertising not the “Inclusivity, creativity, sustainability, trust and celebration” that the Adelaide organisers claim “drive our passion”, but the monoculture in which they and their speakers and audience all seem to move.
Writers festivals should be arenas for contestation and debate. The world has thrown up enough issues in recent weeks. Regime change in Venezuela. Renewed fighting in Ukraine. A brutal civil war in Sudan. The possible collapse (please God) of the Iranian theocracy. Big, huge, turning points in history.
What was on the agenda in Adelaide? None of that. The parochial obsession of progressive voting city-dwellers framed it all. Soft-left, green, a bit of crime writing, women’s empowerment, Indigenous art, decolonisation, ending the patriarchy. There is a default posture on kindness but no sense anyone can handle a debate on important issues of the day. Indeed, that they must be protected from them.
When the artistic left starts to question the wisdom of speech codes, which many have spent decades abetting, you know we are at a cultural tipping point.
Nearly 200 of the booked speakers withdrew their labour when the Writers Week board got cold feet, a month after the Bondi Beach massacre, over the invitation of author Randa Abdel-Fattah.
How many writers protested on principle when Nina Sanadze, a Jewish-Australian sculptor with pro-Israel sympathies, was doxxed and bullied by Palestinian activists in 2024? I suspect, few to none. They are not protesting for their artistic freedom so much as demanding the hegemony of their own politics.
There would have been no boycott had the board uninvited a conservative author. We will never know because they are never invited. Liberal and Nationals-leaning creatives just rarely appear at these gatherings. Tony Abbott, with his new book, Australia: A History, was to be an exception this year and it would have made for a terrific debate.
I chaired a panel at my local rural book festival a few years ago. It was organised, as were the whole three days, around appeasing every Labor-Green metro concern. I pushed back some on the anti-nuclearism and anti-natalism of the audience. I was jeered. They had not come to debate. They had paid their money to have their world views refracted and confirmed by speakers elected for this task.
I’ve spent a lot of time at book festivals. They’ve been especially prone to the Great Awokening of recent years. Crime novels are about as risque as they get. Regional towns, which tend to be more LNP-leaning, must appease metrosexuals by making them safe zones for their assumptions. Only progressive fashions – and the correct opinions about them – get an airing.

Sorry, that reference triggered the pond's usual contractual obligation ...

He is what he is, and all the pond can do is note it.

And then it was back to the listicle ...

From climate change to stolen land, these festivals have a quasi-religious quality. No heretics allowed. Rural conservatism, the threat of power lines and wind turbines defacing our landscapes? Not a word.
Imagine the headline: “Activist authors hate Israel – demand right to say so.” Hardly novel in the current moment.
The Israelophobia of some of the writers deserting Adelaide in summer, as they did Bendigo last winter, is dispiriting and hypocritical.
Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne.

So much whataboutism, so deeply pathetic, and the onion muncher is the Lynch mob's great white dope?

University of Melbourne, consider your academic reputation defamed yet again ...

Meanwhile, if we must do whataboutism, whatabout ...

Now students, stage a revolution and troop to Adelaide to hear the Lynch mob speak. You'll be guaranteed to be part of a big crowd ...