The motive game
One of the more noxious "contributions" to reducing public debate to a battle of "my motives are more pure than your motives" is the wiki Sourcewatch.
It is based on the premise that people's motives really matter (apparently trumping any concern for intellectual worthiness in content) and are explained by the sources of their funding. As long as that funding is private funding (public funding gets a pass) and they are not virtuous "progressives". So Sourcewatch on the Evatt Foundation entirely ignores the fact that it is union funded.
Compare Sourcewatch on the Australia Institute with Sourcewatch on the IPA or CIS. All three bodies receive corporate funding. But the Australia Institute are "good progressives" so gets a simple descriptive entry. The IPA and CIS entries get the full loaded language, their corporate funding is stressed while Board members, staff (and former staff) are identified, so you can track these wicked people and their nefarious networks.
It is not a neutral "wisdom of crowds" wiki, it is a selective enterprise based on conformity by sneer. The response "but you can edit the wiki" presumes that one accepts the basic premise of the enterprise. If acceptance of the basic premise is not ideologically neutral (as it's not) then folk who do not share the premises are not going to bother, leading to strongly skewed selection processes.
It is part of a larger game. The Progressivist Ascendancy come to dominate public funding of intellectual and cultural activity (arts funding, humanities and social science academe*, public broadcasting and school curriculum) by selling a sense of belonging to the moral elite of "decent folk" and so are opinion bigots who will not share. For, of course, failure to agree with them is a sign of just not being a good person: and if one accepted the legitimacy of dissenting views then your own stop being such a wonderful sign of being a good person.** And so legitimate concern for intellectual quality just has this natural result that ...
Any attempt to set up privately funded bodies then gets constantly sneered at by exercises such as Sourcewatch. Rednecks have no speech rights hate speech legislation adds in another angle to attack dissent. Commercial publishing (at least in Oz) is similarly dominated by such moral preening.
Politics and the media (particularly the tabloids and talk-back) remained contested spaces. So dissenting activity there is both reviled and cited as a sign of the "Right" having plenty of say. Indeed, one even gets ludicrous literature playing to a sense of being a heroic and beleaguered minority claiming that one is being "oppressed" by Andrew Bolt, Christopher Pearson and Alan Jones.*** Folk who automatically attack the motives of those who dissent getting all outraged that anyone might attack their motives.
Intellectual debate in particular in Oz is not in a healthy state. And Sourcewatch does its bit to keep it as one-sided as possible. It is sociologically revealing, but little else. Please don't quote it at me, I am so not interested.
ADDENDA But even having such contested spaces is apparently outrageous. So Guy Rundle thinks that -- because of the election result -- The Australian should clean out its contrarian (such a redolent word) and thus boring columnists, Robert Manne thinks the Howard appointees to the ABC Board should resign while the ABC's Jon Faine thinks said election result provides a good reason for the Herald Sun and the Australian to have a "cleansing" of their "notorious" columnists. Because, as Rundle, Manne and Faine showed from 1996-2007, it is so important for the media to be in step with the elected government.
ADDENDA 2: Noel Pearson really gets it: Howard was equally engaged in cultural war. He understood the excesses of leftist political correctness yielded the Right huge cultural advantage, which meant his refusal to apologise was an electoral plus. As with so many cultural battles of that decade, progressive contempt for Howard in respect of Aboriginal history and policy only increased Howard's standing. The Teflon with which Howard for so long was coated was made from the spit of his opponents. The more spit, the more Teflon.
*Economics is an obvious exception, so its validity as a discipline gets attacked from within academe far more than other disciplines do.
**A nice example of this is given in Mark Lopez's excellent The Origins of Multiculturalism. When assimilation was official policy, the assimiliationists appointed some multiculturalists to the advisory bodies because they had interesting ideas. Once the multiculturalists took over, the assimilationists were driven out. Naturally so, because assimilation was "evil" and one had to support multiculturalism to be a good person.
***In a sense they are so oppressed of course. The more contested their ideas are, particularly the more the pretensions to being a moral elite are mocked, the less value such have as status buttresses. Bolt et al attack their most prized public asset.
It is based on the premise that people's motives really matter (apparently trumping any concern for intellectual worthiness in content) and are explained by the sources of their funding. As long as that funding is private funding (public funding gets a pass) and they are not virtuous "progressives". So Sourcewatch on the Evatt Foundation entirely ignores the fact that it is union funded.
Compare Sourcewatch on the Australia Institute with Sourcewatch on the IPA or CIS. All three bodies receive corporate funding. But the Australia Institute are "good progressives" so gets a simple descriptive entry. The IPA and CIS entries get the full loaded language, their corporate funding is stressed while Board members, staff (and former staff) are identified, so you can track these wicked people and their nefarious networks.
It is not a neutral "wisdom of crowds" wiki, it is a selective enterprise based on conformity by sneer. The response "but you can edit the wiki" presumes that one accepts the basic premise of the enterprise. If acceptance of the basic premise is not ideologically neutral (as it's not) then folk who do not share the premises are not going to bother, leading to strongly skewed selection processes.
It is part of a larger game. The Progressivist Ascendancy come to dominate public funding of intellectual and cultural activity (arts funding, humanities and social science academe*, public broadcasting and school curriculum) by selling a sense of belonging to the moral elite of "decent folk" and so are opinion bigots who will not share. For, of course, failure to agree with them is a sign of just not being a good person: and if one accepted the legitimacy of dissenting views then your own stop being such a wonderful sign of being a good person.** And so legitimate concern for intellectual quality just has this natural result that ...
Any attempt to set up privately funded bodies then gets constantly sneered at by exercises such as Sourcewatch. Rednecks have no speech rights hate speech legislation adds in another angle to attack dissent. Commercial publishing (at least in Oz) is similarly dominated by such moral preening.
Politics and the media (particularly the tabloids and talk-back) remained contested spaces. So dissenting activity there is both reviled and cited as a sign of the "Right" having plenty of say. Indeed, one even gets ludicrous literature playing to a sense of being a heroic and beleaguered minority claiming that one is being "oppressed" by Andrew Bolt, Christopher Pearson and Alan Jones.*** Folk who automatically attack the motives of those who dissent getting all outraged that anyone might attack their motives.
Intellectual debate in particular in Oz is not in a healthy state. And Sourcewatch does its bit to keep it as one-sided as possible. It is sociologically revealing, but little else. Please don't quote it at me, I am so not interested.
ADDENDA But even having such contested spaces is apparently outrageous. So Guy Rundle thinks that -- because of the election result -- The Australian should clean out its contrarian (such a redolent word) and thus boring columnists, Robert Manne thinks the Howard appointees to the ABC Board should resign while the ABC's Jon Faine thinks said election result provides a good reason for the Herald Sun and the Australian to have a "cleansing" of their "notorious" columnists. Because, as Rundle, Manne and Faine showed from 1996-2007, it is so important for the media to be in step with the elected government.
ADDENDA 2: Noel Pearson really gets it: Howard was equally engaged in cultural war. He understood the excesses of leftist political correctness yielded the Right huge cultural advantage, which meant his refusal to apologise was an electoral plus. As with so many cultural battles of that decade, progressive contempt for Howard in respect of Aboriginal history and policy only increased Howard's standing. The Teflon with which Howard for so long was coated was made from the spit of his opponents. The more spit, the more Teflon.
*Economics is an obvious exception, so its validity as a discipline gets attacked from within academe far more than other disciplines do.
**A nice example of this is given in Mark Lopez's excellent The Origins of Multiculturalism. When assimilation was official policy, the assimiliationists appointed some multiculturalists to the advisory bodies because they had interesting ideas. Once the multiculturalists took over, the assimilationists were driven out. Naturally so, because assimilation was "evil" and one had to support multiculturalism to be a good person.
***In a sense they are so oppressed of course. The more contested their ideas are, particularly the more the pretensions to being a moral elite are mocked, the less value such have as status buttresses. Bolt et al attack their most prized public asset.