Friday, February 6, 2009

Tim Blair, Tortured Logic, Torturing Heat, Drunken Sailor Economics and Tautologies of the Mind

A conversation between two loons, me being one of them:

Agitated loon: "Gee it's been kinda hot lately, kinda funny don't you think?"
Calm and collected Dorothy: "Nah, heatwaves just come and go."
Agitated loon: "Don't think it might have something to do with global warming?"
Insightful Dorothy: "Nah, it's just hot."
Agitated loon: "But the apples, they're melting on the trees in Victoria. And the bushfires ..."
Forceful femdom Dorothy: "So what? They're Victorian apples. No fucking balls.  You got some overheated fervid imaginings going on on your pinko leftwing brain? The statistics tell us we're cooling, and mebbe about to enter an ice age."
Agitated insulting loon: "But aren't you just a dumb fuck blogger without a science degree Dorothy?"
Eerily calm Dorothy: "What the fuck, you dumb fuck. I read Piers Akerman and Michael Duffy and Tim Blair. They keep me in touch with the real science."
Agitated loon: "But aren't they just dumb fuck newspaper columnists without science degrees?"
Penetrating Dorothy: "Are you some kind of lame dick commie pinko greenie pervert?"
Agitated loon: "But the science says ..."
Voice of reason Dorothy: "Fuck the science. Those scientists are just out to enhance their salaries at taxpayers' expense in a vast global conspiracy designed to ensure polar bears take over and rule Alaska in a furry dictatorship. Don't you know anything? I'm so worried for Sarah."
Agitated wretched loon: "Isn't that a little fanciful?"
Literary Dorothy: "Not as fanciful as believing stupid fucking scientists when you have modern heroes like Piers and Mike and Tim tilting at the windmills of truth like genuine Don Quixotes. You loser, you drop kick greenie worshipping Bob Brown suck."
Agitated losing it loon: "But your favorite paper, The Daily Terror, says that NSW will become the hottest place in the world on Sunday. (Loon walks stage left holding a tabloid rag up to the klieg lights imitating the sun, quoting) 'Not even the plains of Africa or the deserts of the Middle East will be as hot.'"
Placating Dorothy: "It's just a tabloid Murdoch rag written by dumb fuck journalists, what would they know?"
Unsettled loon: "But you said The Daily Terror was an impeccable scientific source, rarely footnoted but globally read by the best brains around the world. Even by some academics. Not that they manage to understand its rarefied content all the time. And it says it's going to hit 47 degrees."
Cosmopolitan Dorothy: "Talk farenheit you dummy, so stray American readers can understand your gibberish. Anyway, it's snowing all over Britain, so what's your point?"
Hysterical loon: "The worst snow in south east England for 18 years. Nothing is but what is not, our way of life is fallen into the sear, the yellow leaf."
Kindly soothing Dorothy: "It's winter there. And it's summer here. And when it's summer here it's always hot. Unless you live in Ingham, where it floods. Need I add the word glory? Now there's a nice knockdown argument for you."

(Loon runs screaming from stage, shouting something like we're all gunna fry, inaudible through bad voice projection to all but the front row).

Dorothy shouting after vanishing figure: "It's actually Rupert who's in the hottest place in the world. He's just dropped more than a few billion in a quarter. So now his hacks and hackettes will be the ones to fry."

Ah well, and you thought you were reading this to be informed, instead of a feeble satirical re-writing of Piers Akerman's masterpiece Waiting for Ice Age Costello, thereby turning it into literary dreck, complete with verbosity, and coarse, crude language. Profound apologies to the fat owl - no doubt this underground tome, typed Kerouac style on continuously unfolding toilet paper, will be staged Sydney style, in a fucking horse stable with no decent refrigeration or air conditioning because it's ideologically sound.

Sorry, don't know where all that came from. Must be the heat. Back to normal programming. 

Tim Blair at The Daily Terror has exactly the right answer to all this useless talk about the weather:

It's hot this weekend. So take off your shirt and lie down in the sun. You'll be surprised how cool you feel.

Oh wait, he's being comical. It's his way of sending up Kevin Rudd's stimulus package which manages to drop $4 billion on batts in the ceiling. A hugely restrained Tim manages not to make a joke about batts in the belfrey (bell towers atop churches, you heathens).

Fortunately he's soon back on song, talking abut "alleged" global warming.

If Rudd is serious about addressing climate change, which he described as "the defining challenge of our generation", he has the solution right in front of him.

The economic downturn, with a reduction in commerce and therefore emissions, should easily deliver a 5 per cent carbon cut. Probably more.

Instead, he's piling on $42 billion worth of emissions. We've reached a tipping point, as they say. Rudd has tipped against the "defining challenge". 

Now that's more like it. Let's look at the logic here. 

Climate change is a myth, but Rudd thinks it's real, so sending Australia into a long term depression is an ideal solution to his myth-making. But Rudd's stimulus package won't work in any way shape or form - you can't repair a global money meltdown by throwing $950 at Bing Lee, just as you can't cure alleged global warming by closing Australian coal plants.

So Rudd's embarked on $42 billion worth of emissions, except his stimulus package won't stimulate anything. So luckily we'll stay in a full blown depression, which is just as well, because if global warming were real, that'd fix it. Except it isn't, so it won't.

I'm a little confused. Let's run through that again. Okay, he's doing something when he should be doing nothing, because doing nothing will fix something that doesn't exist, except it won't fix anything because the something he's doing will actually produce nothing. Thereby fixing nothing, which means we're all like Rupert Murdoch, heading towards chapter 11.

Yep, it's called the tipping point, where contradiction and incoherence become the hallmark of a columnist who spends his words like a drunken sailor. 

Others might call it win win gotcha columnist writing, because what ever a twit like the Ruddster does, I win and he loses. Ah bugger it, let's just have a full blown depression for a couple of years. By the way, you can join Tim's column at Drunken sailor economics.(Then, if you're mentally tough, and know a hawk from a handsaw and only go mad when the hot summer winds blow north by north west, you can trip off to his blog to join his congregation of loons).

Funny, I don't remember Blair writing this kind of contradictory tosh when George W. Bush was socialising every bank in sight and pissing money against the wall in whatever way he could manage in memory of Ronnie Reagan's free spending ways. Or come to think of it, maybe I do. At least the contradictory tosh stuff.

But let's not go there. The Mayan mystica chocolate ice cream melted before I could get it into my mouth, and I must go remove the suspicious brown stains peppered around my crutch.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The play is very funny. It's a pity it's too late for the Melbourne Comedy Festival.