Missing Link

THIS IS the treachery I was talking about: First, the nice letters -- then your link is taken away without explanation.

Dear Arlene

I am very sorry to see what those utter pr*cks, Beck, Blair and Bolt, have done with their repulsive horde of monkeys. Bullies and thugs, the lot of them.

I very much want to write something condemning their behaviour at Pure Poison, but am concerned that to do so would make things worse for you. I suspect you'd rather I didn't provoke the hornet's nest to descend into further abuse.

But you have my support. Being a target of such vicious people is both upsetting and a massive compliment. Imagine being someone who those three approved of. THAT would make a person question themselves. Whereas being someone they feel the need to bully - you must be doing something right.

All the best.

Regards,

Jeremy Sear.

and there is this too.

Hi Alene,

I'm Jeremy Sear's Fiancee'. I noticed that the usual suspects like J F Beck and Tim Blair have been attacking you (no doubt partly because you showed public support for Jeremy). I just wanted to let you know that I thought the post you wrote in response was very brave, and the only reason I'm not posting this on your blog is because I'm conscious that would make things worse.

Also, I'm fairly sure that "Spot the Dog", one of your followers, is J F Beck. I'd suggest you block him if you can. I know you can't stop him from reading, but if he knows that you're on to him, it might give him pause. I can't prove that it's him, but we're fairly sure it is.

I'm sorry you have to go through this. I cop the same thing just because I am Jeremy's Fiancee. Unfortunately these people are terrible bullies. I think your response is the right one. Don't publish the comments and then just ignore them. I can't promise they'll get bored and go away because god knows they haven't let up on Jeremy, but you'll definitely feel better about it.

Sorry to blather, just wanted to let you know that it's not all sucksville out there, and they're a pack of bullies not worth the worry.

Keri

And then, after Jeremy wrote this, "I very much want to write something condemning their behaviour at Pure Poison, but am concerned that to do so would make things worse for you" what do I find?


Jeremy has gone ahead and written about me anyway, questioning my very existence!

You can tell from the note that Jeremy believed in me, a faith that gave strength to my blogging and stiffened my conviction. But it didn't last. By the time he had published that Pure Poison post, this is what he was saying about my blogging. It was an "assinine gotcha".

As Margo learned, they would sell their own mothers.

Me And Margo

I HAVE been thinking a lot about Margo Kingston, how she was “disappeared” and how much she and I have in common.

Surely you remember Margo and the pioneering work she did at the Sydney Morning Herald’s Web Diary, which set the standard for instant online commentatory? She was everywhere, covering every topic, from the Bali bombings to the latest advances in military technology. If you tuned in to Radio National there was a good chance of hearing her analyzing the issues of the day with Phillip Adams. To hear them chat and brandish the rapier banter was a joyful celebration or erudition and acumen, the brightest minds in Australia. Same with the Lateline, where Margo was a fixture,  the ABC’s go-to person for any issue that required deep thought and independent analysis.

And where is Margo today? Gone. Vanished. Flushed away.

She was the voice of progressive reform, in thick with the cream of the media elite. She was one of them, one of us, one for the record.

Mark Scott was editor in chief and helping to make Fairfax what it is today, just as he is now transforming the ABC with features like the Drum. Margo commanded Scott’s entire respect. How could it be otherwise when he made her the public face of his company’s internet efforts?  Her roots with colleagues were deep. There were the common views and deep empathy that united Margo with star columnist Paul McGeough, a bond she told us was cemented amid the revelry of budget night in Canberra and sparked and flamed through any number of mutual interviews.

And what happened? Well, as I have only just discovered, you can only maintain your place in the progressive pulpit while “friends” find you useful. Margo could withstand Tim Blair’s ridicule with an admirable stoicism, but her public profile could not withstand the treachery of her mates, who cast her aside when a feverish urgency once they recognised, or thought they recognised, that she had become a liability. So much for the love they proclaimed..

There was nothing wrong with Margo’s views and insights when she was being prominently featured in the meeja, as she liked to jokingly call it. But when the weight of Blairite abuse and Boltian disdain became an encumbrance, phhhhht, no more Margo. There were years in the limelight and, after that, irrelevance and exile in Byron Bay, where Valentines Day cards from Scott, Adams, McGeough and so many others never find their way into her letter box.

I thought the Left was a synonym of solidarity. Now I know better. The Left are bastards.

Where Do I Go To Get My Humanness Back?

THIS time last week life was full of promise and brimming with friends, including all the news ones I was making through this blog. It seemed to me that, finally, there was a certainty and solidity I cound count on - a community of sympathetic souls who shared the same vision. Tolerance, acceptance, decency, trust.

Amazing, isn't it, how you can be flung so quickly from champagne to plain old pain?

The abuse was to be expected, I suppose, once Bolt and Blair had whipped their bogan brigades into a frenzy of hate and villification. That hurt, and it hurt again and hurt even more just a few minutes ago, when I steeled myself to look in the comments tray and found hundreds - HUNDREDS!!!! -- of messages waiting to be moderated, many questioning my sanity. They had been building up for a week, festering like a pocket of pus under the epidermis of the internet, and when I looked they exploded across the screen and bathed my eyes in rancid poisons.

Even my very existence has been called into question. We all know about the curse of otherness and the permission that grants the bourgeois, brick veneerial bigots to dismiss and degrade anyone who does not share their quarter acre sensibilities. Now I am less than "the other". Call it sub-otherness, if you like. Or if you want to use old fashioned words,  just say that my situation is the result of cowardly treachery by supposed allies.

Now that is low, so low, and while it was to be expected from the rancid right, can I tell you how much more pain was inflicted by the those who swore that we were all comrades marching toward the common goal? For 24 hours this blog was the destination for visitors following links that Jeremy Sear posted at his site. Then the trouble began, the abusive avalanche commenced, and the link was gone.

How can we stand together, Jeremy, if we are not prepared to be hanged together?

I know I said I would not blog again, but I can no longer stand by that promise. I have been betrayed  by so many people. Now I demand that the guilty to explain themselves.

That's It

McCARTHYISM is alive and well in Australia. Dissent and be damned, ridiculed, vilified. If it had not been for the dozen warm and generous emails from supporters and sympathisers, I would not even be posting this. I am not a professional writer or public figure. Is it fair that I should receive more at least 80 comments urging me to see a shrink, drop dead, get help, have a bath, eat meat, drown Sparkles or have a threesome with Bob Brown and a moose?

As I have said, I am not publishing those comments. There is enough ugliness in the world without giving hate another pulpit.

In fact I am not publishing anything more. Period.

Go and abuse someone better equipped to return the abuse in kind. Am I weak? Probably, but to abused by so many, to be lynched and silenced by intimidation and an avalanche of mob mentallity abuse, that is too much for me.

No more posts from me. Go and torment someone else, you animals.

Thanks to those who shared words of comfort and support. I won't mention you by name because the horde will only switch its venom to your sites. And also thanks to the good people at the Drum for their support and editting of my expose of Kristina Keneally and that "moose" comment. It is a little glimpse of what might have been and now never will.

Ridicule Me, Please

OK, I have some problems with my private life. The panic attacks, the fear of leaving the house, a constriction that can make it almost impossible at times to talk on the phone, especially to strangers. So I'm damaged goods.

Fine. Terrific. Have a good laugh if that is what floats your boat. And if you come from Tim Blair's blog that is exactly what you will do. I am just here to be ridiculed apparently by the schoolyard bullies. I look at Sparkles asleep on the pillow by my desk and I shudder. These people are the sort who would torture you for the "fun" of it, Sparkles.

I won't ask for pity or sympathy. But what I will do is refuse to post their vile comments. I put up a number of critical and insulting ones before I twigged, wondering where the sudden deluge of jokes and remarks was coming from. So I looked in the traffic stats category and, yes, they were all being directed from Murdochvania, where the media vampires suck the goodness out of any effort that doesn't sit right with Count Rupert. I guess I am getting the "Margo treatment" because that is what he did to her year after year. Well thanks for that, Tim. To me it is the highest praise.

They could have come here to debate the issues and argue their case. Instead like ringwormy jackals they only want to tear down and destroy and ridicule and laugh and scoff.

What i can do is refuse to post any more abusive comments. The ones that are there now will remain as exhibit A in the prosecution case against people whose humanity can only be measured with a microscope.

Let that record stand.

Uncle Sam Circles The Drain

IT's a pity that it had to happen when the US has the brightest and bravest President in the country's history, but the historic inevitability of America's decline could never have ebeen avoided. Yes, it will be tough for Americans as things go from worse to absolutely horrible, but life was pretty terrible for the Japanese after Truman dropped atomic bombs on two largely undefended cities full of women, children and other civilians.

What the Japanese came to realise is that they had a responsibility to hold their government and Emperor accountable, and this is a concept that, up until now, has been totally alien to Americans' thinking. Now smarter people are catching on, even those who write for the corporatist media.

Yes, America deserved it -- as a million slaughtered Iraqis would say if they had not been killed in a nakedly nasty war of conquest for oil.

Read the link and celebrate the imminent downfall of a despot's reign. Just spare a thought for the average American living in the wreckage of imperial dreams.

Soon we will be sending them food parcels and our cast-off clothes. Can hardly wait!

Melissa Fyfe's Promotion. Great News!

In relation to the previous item about Andrew Bolt's attempts to intimidate and browbeat Fairfax management into silencing reporters like Phillip Coorey, it seems it isn't working. Not working at all!

The good news is that the magnificent Melissa Fyfe is being promoted from reporting on state politics for the Sunday Age to covering the federal sphere. At a moment in time when progressive forces need to be mobilised and regimented in support of the carbon levy (not a tax), it is a fantastic thing to see one of the best reporters in the country bringing her insight and perspective to Canberra. There is one Green, the brave and courageous Adam Bandt, in the House of Reps, who faces every day a barrage of negativity from the Murdoch-dominated press gallery. At least now, with Melissa in town, he will have a reporter who can cover his actions and initiatives with a fair, open-minded devotion to spin-free journalism.

And the bad news?

At a moment when the reactionary party controls both houses of state parliament and the state of Victoria is sliding rapidly back into the moral corruption and cronyism of the Kennett Era, the best reporter of the lot will be moving to hundreds of kilometres away from the action. Can we expect Melissa's replacement to keep turning over  Big Ted's rocks and revealing the sordidness underneath? She did it again this weekend with her revelation that the Bailleau  Goverenment has been intinidating the scientists at Melbourne University in order to rig the results of its ridiculous "test" of using cattle as a means of averting bushfires. Yeah, like cows eat gum trees or something.

As we all know, and I include Melissa in this, it is climate change that is making the bush go up in flames, as her daily Age colleague Adam Morton helps the scientist David karoly explain if you click the link.

Congratulations, Melissa. The IQ of the Canberra press gang is about to go exponentially!