A typical writers' festival "debate"

Or indeed typical ABC debate - get three people who all hold exactly the same "right" opinion and get them to agree with each other, or disagree about just precisely how the other side is wrong. That baaing sound of writers debating  Andrew Bolt Thursday, May 21, 2009 at 12:07am     The Sydney Writers’ Festival holds an ABC-style “debate” on global warming: David Spratt, co-author of Climate Code Red, Dr Sharon Beder, author of Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism, and Deltoid science blogger Tim Lambert discuss the state of the climate change debate today with Overland editor Jeff Sparrow.   Are the big polluters changing their ways or simply greening their public image? Who are the main climate denialists? What kind of action do we need, and how close are we to achieving it? That’s a “debate”? RWDB checks the biogs of the speakers. Not one is a climate scientist, not one is the author of the biggest-selling book this year on global warming, and not one is outside that narrow spectrum of opinion ranging from Marxist to green zealot.   Why are these people so very, very scared of a debate? Is it that they worry they’d lose?   Link   Of course, during the Great Terror of John Howard the usual topic of "debate" was how these brave souls were being silenced by the fascist tyranny enveloping the country.   Despite said fascist tyranny usually putting up quite a bit of the money to run these intellectual wank fests.   But intellectuals being silenced is a serious matter for a free society, and I'm glad they informed us all about it through their endless series of radio and TV interviews (usually on the network funded by the aforementioned fascist tyranny), magazine articles and books they had published during this deeply dark and shameful period of our history   Tossers.

Posted via email from Garth's posterous