An enterprising hoaxer – claiming to be acting in the tradition of Ern Malley – has published a spurious article on a scientific topic in Quadrant with the aim of demonstrating that Keith Windschuttle would print “outrageous propositions” which accord with his ideological disposition. The article was also designed to lampoon Windschuttle’s mode of historical research. You can read the story – by Margaret Simons – at Crikey.
Update: There’s more from Simons at her blog Content Makers.
Update: Windschuttle responds.
Update: Robert Corr on Windschuttle and footnotes.
Update: Tim Lambert posts at Deltoid and links to a range of other commentary and discussion.
Update: John Quiggin is interested in Windschuttle’s own hoax:
Just before this, I was thinking about another hoax, namely the repeated promise of a Volume 2 of The Fabrication of Australian History. When Volume 1 came out back in 2002, Windschuttle promised further volumes on an annual schedule, covering Queensland and WA. Since Queensland in particular was the focus of Henry Reynolds’ main work, and since the evidence of numerous massacres seems incontrovertible, this promised volume was central to Windschuttle’s claims of fabrication. The promise was repeated year after year, but no Volume 2 ever appeared, and the “research” supposedly already undertaken has stayed out of sight.
Then in February 2008, Windschuttle published extracts from a Volume 2, promised for publication “later this year”, but now on a totally different topic, that of the Stolen Generation. His target this time was Peter Read, an eminent historian who’s done a lot of practical work reuniting Aboriginal children with their birth families. It’s 2009, the promised volume hasn’t appeared, and there hasn’t been any reference to it on Windschuttle’s site for some time.
The real hoax victims here have been those on the political right, who’ve repeatedly swallowed Windschuttle’s promises to refute well-established facts about Australian history “later this year” and who are now getting their “science” from his discredited magazine.
Update: Counterknowledge, Skepticlawyer and Andrew Norton.
Update: Some more links in a post at Overland.
Update: I think some of the point of the hoax – that it was specifically directed against Keith Windschuttle because of his obsession with damning others for errors in footnotes – has been lost in all the wash up. Jeff Sparrow in Crikey refocuses discussion on the central point.
Update: At Club Troppo, Don Arthur thinks he may have an answer to the question – “Who is Sharon Gould?”
Update: A quick post responding to some misconceptions in the Troppo comments thread.
Update: Katherine Wilson has been revealed to be the hoaxer, and Margaret Simons examines the sequence of events, with something of a focus on the journos v. bloggers angle.
Update: I’m having a bit of a debate at Simons’ blog Content Makers with her on some of the inferences she’s drawn about blogging and journalism from all this.
Update: There’s more from Simons at her blog Content Makers.
Update: Windschuttle responds.
I actually felt kinda sorry for Windschuttle, even if I think the hoax was somewhat funny and ironic, right until I read his response — wherein he eschewed admitting fault and defending his conduct and went STRAIGHT for Simons with a blowtorch.
I know we’re not meant to blame the victim, but perhaps the WAY he responds to incidents such as this is the reason such incidents occur.
In any case, The Australian will charge straight for the throat of ‘Sharon Gould’ and no other paper will care. Windschuttle will remain respected in his own circles and ridiculed in every other. Nothing will change.
It might give people a comeback on blog threads about postmodernism and the culture wars though when Sokal is invoked!
Very amusing, but meanwhile, in the real world…
Yeah snap Marg. Nice work. This guy deserved it and now he’s acting all defiant like. What a wank.
I think its case of Wind meets Petard. I gather Windy was laughing at the Sokal hoax po-mo publishers for not udnerstanding primary school science well enough to spot a clear hoax.
Plus his famous footnote fetishism appears to dissolve when the case suits him, ideologically.
Geeze, the MSM (I include Crikey in that description, they’re part of Fairfax now aren’t they?) are really getting into this hoaxing lark now, aren’t they? First it was The Oz with their Patrick White Manuscripts Not Accepted by Publisher! scandal, now this. It’s almost as if they’re trying to get some kind of counter-cultural cred by this sort of thing.
But does Sharon Gould have an Order of Lenin?
Crikey’s not part of Fairfax, TimT.
“It might give people a comeback on blog threads about postmodernism and the culture wars though when Sokal is invoked!”
i guess it’s a question of what the comeback is. if it is to somehow dismiss the sokal hoax, that would be pretty silly.
Oh this is too perfect. One wonders how Messrs Carter, Kininmonth et al are feeling right now.
Oh yes, this will be a red rag to the righties, I look forward to the collective head explosions splattered all over the usual outlets.
I’m not so sure about that. There are too many obvious parallels with the Patrick White hoax they ran themselves.
just priceless … Windschuttle promotes and publishes the most outrageous claims and unchecked articles in Quadrant and this happens. oh the irony.
It’s pretty unlikely that those who took Quadrant seriously in the first place will have their minds changed by this, but I suppose it would be nice if they did. I mean, it’s not a refereed journal (and neither was Social Text when it was hoaxed by Sokal, I might add), and is widely understood to promote only certain agendas, so I don’t know that anything new has been demonstrated here. Anybody who has read Windschuttle’s own prose with any sort of attention will already be aware of his intellectual shortcomings.
I dunno, much as I hate Windschuttle, isn’t this just as vapid and meaningless as the Sokal hoax? It’s like people making up bullshit on wikipedia that lasts for a couple of weeks and then claiming that the whole concept is invalid.
If anyone ever believed quadrant was a source of real information, they need to get their heads checked. At least in Sokal’s case it was a peer-reviewed journal with ostensible standards.
Hoaxing can be such a juvenile, tit-for-tat type of criticism. To put any stock in it only lowers you to the level of the hoaxers. Certainly, when done with a splash of brio and jocularity it can be amusing, and Windschuttle is certainly an idiot. But to take it as seriously meaning anything replicates the original error of mistaking something fictional for something real.
why was the sokal hoax vapid and meaningless?
Social Text wasn’t peer reviewed (though I believe it became so later). It was a deliberate editorial policy to facilitate the publication of unorthodox scholarship.
“unorthodox” meaning meaningless? why is peer-review the key to the meaning of the hoax?
Because there’s a higher bar set for reviewing and checking submitted articles. Had Social Text been peer reviewed, the obvious step would have been to refer Sokal’s article to someone competent in the fields of science it purported to be about for an assessment. Having been associated with editorial stuff myself with journals in sociology and cultural studies, I’m sure that would be the mode of proceeding if an article purporting to critique scientific knowledge were submitted.
Marty, I’m responding to partickg’s assertion that Social Text was peer reviewed.
It’s an important point: without a peer review process, the editors are more likely to be at the mercy of those submitting articles. The whole point about Social Text is that it was a soft target. Those who read it already did so with a grain of salt, knowing the editorial policy. If Sokal had hoaxed a peer reviewed journal, that would have had much wider implications.
sure, that changes the standard, and who is the target. it doesn’t make the hoax meaningless. nor vapid.
From the Diary
Well, there’s an element of bad faith involved, marty, and I think that holds true for the Windschuttle hoax as well. It was open to Sokal to set out what he thought the epistemological problems were with whatever sort of scholarship he wanted to contest, so that his critique could be advanced positively, and his own ideas contested. Of course, had he done this, any article he wrote would have received nothing like the same amount of attention and publicity.
Didn’t say it did. I’ve commented elsewhere on this blog that the hoax on Social Text is something that can teach us a lot.
bad faith, yes. very mean, yes. but neither meaningless nor vapid.
and your last sentence makes clear exactly the purpose. same here. windschuttle obviously isn’t expected to have his articles peer-reviewed. the standard is much lower for a magazine like quadrant. but honestly: does anybody really believe that this current hoax is devoid of meaning?
Marty, how about you address your comments to patrickg, who actually took the position you object to (ie. that the Sokal hoax was vapid and meaningless)?
sorry, klaus k. i’m not sure of the protocol in a forum such as this. i thought it was clear to what i was objecting: the flippant dismissal of the sokal hoax. mark responded with what seemed a similar diminution. so, i responded to mark. i don’t mean to drag this conversation somewhere that others don’t wish.
The Sokal Hoax can be rebutted, if not dismissed, because Sokal’s point, misses the point to some extent. Notwithstanding the fact that in Sokal and Bricmont’s book, which expands on their point, they are just as bad on the mathematics as they accuse Lacan of being, and sometimes worse. If you want a reference to this, read ‘The Knowable and The Unknowable’ by Arkady Plotnitsky which contains a detailed mathematical, scientific and philosophical rebuttal to Sokal and Bricmont’s epistemology.
As for any sort of assertion that “scientific journals are claptrap free” I bring you the strange case of M.S. El Naschie – http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2008/11/the_case_of_m_s_el_naschie.html
I will happily admit however that my schadenfreude at Windschuttle’s predicament is purely on an ideological level – his politics are odious, and the climate denialists he nourishes in his cheap paper rag are profoundly anti-scientific. I bought the issue this morning and read the offending article over lunch. It reads like the confused piece of unscientific thinking it actually is. It is hilarious that anyone is deluded by it, but then, it’s hilarious that anyone’s deluded by the climate denialists on almost any scientifi ground they choose to peddle their denialism, and that would be the same editor in both cases.
Social Text was not peer-reviewed.
Cheers marty. Yeah, it was pretty clear after all. The nature of a stunt like this is that it tends to polarise, and I’m just wary of positions being conflated. Mark’s position was different to patrickg’s, and to my own.
Marty, I think both hoaxes are in a certain sense meaningful, but I don’t really want to get too caught up in discussing the Sokal hoax – I’d want to remind myself of some of the details, and I lack the time this afternoon, I’m afraid.
thanks klaus k. also there was a bit of cross-posting. i did indeed get confused of who was saying what and when.
tyro rex, can you tell me where sokal and bricmont are bad on the mathematics? also, i would have thought that the merits or problems with their book were quite disitinct from the meaning of their hoax.
In the parlance of the webbernets:
HA HA HA OH WOW.
hi, mark. sure, no problem. and i’ll now resist any further refighting of any sokal battles. i just came here from crikey/simons, and was taken by surprise.
Another hoax in the great tradition of Australian ratbaggery.
And played on one of the greatest puffed-shirts of them all.
Eeeexcellent, Smithers.
No probs, marty – and you’re more than welcome to discuss Sokal with anyone who wants to join in – just indicating I won’t be for the aforesaid reasons of time.
Happy to be corrected, Mark!
I don’t think this will affect Quadrant much. As someone pointed out on Content Makers, it’s not a peer reviewed journal, and it will continue to have a stable of good writers like Ryan, R J Stove, Frank Devine, et all, who it publishes. I used to subscribe to the magazine and the majority of the material it does publish on scientific and academic concerns is usually of the opinion-column style.
In fact, Quadrant will probably see a lift in sales because of this hoax.
No worries, TimT!
And were there any Pandas involved?
Now that I come to think of it, there are one or two more points worth mentioning.
Why should the author of this hoax article remain anonymous? Sokal admitted to the hoax; so did Macauley in the Ern Malley case; and even in the Australian ‘Wraith Picket’ scandal the individual reporters and the literary editors of that paper were identifiable and took responsibility for what happened. This seems rather cowardly. Indeed, in remaining anonymous, the ‘Sharon Gould’ author casts suspicion on every freelance writer who is unpublished and/or unfamiliar to editors of major journals like Quadrant, etc.
In the case of published op-ed columns like this one, there is a good reason why authors identify themselves: they take responsibility for the arguments that they make. Where does the ‘Sharon Gould’ author really stand on the arguments that she/he raised regarding GM food, science reporting in the newspapers, etc? In not identifying themselves they are abusing the privilege of space and time to argue ones opinion allowed to all published writers in journals of opinion such as Quadrant.
This anonymous person should show some guts and identify themselves.
Yawn…whata bunch of nothing. Right-wing ideologues ignorant of science and report anything that fits their preconceptions!! Dog bites man!!
A quick check of the references, cited by the hoaxer on their Diary site, about the supposed evils of ‘teh GMOs’ shows a dodgy website containing content that has been compressively rebutted in the peer-reviewed literature. And this is some of the ‘science’ that the naughty Winschuttle didn’t scrutinise.
Unsurprisingly, Left-wing ideologues ignorant of science are just as likely to report anything that fits their preconceptions. Another dog bites man!!
The hoaxer has done precisely nothing to improve the state of science writing in the media, and many good sites, such as Deltoid, Pharyngula etc., have done a far better job of directing attention to the deficiencies in MSM reporting.
Admittedly, Winschuttle’s snarky reply does almost make the whole effort worth it, but I’m fairly sure that wasn’t what the hoaxer was trying to achieve.
Some idiot will most likely make up a similarly anti-GMO or pro-AGW screed dressed as science and get it published in Green Left Weekly as revenge.
So what?
a report of the hoax is now on The Australian website (sorry: i don’t know how to include links).
“argues for the insertion of human genes in to food crops, insects and livestock.”.
I must say, I think it’s hilarious. I occasionally attempt to read “Quadrant”, particularly the denialist articles, (and usually fling it at the wall three pages in) so it’s rather pleasing to see someone make a fool of Windschuttle.
Sorry for any confusion caused Marty, Klaus etc. I got mixed up with Social Text, I came across it when it was peer-reviewed and assumed that had always been the case.
In that case, however, I stand by my ‘vapid and meaningless’ call doubly. I found the Sokal (and by extension) this stunt to be meaningless in the context that it didn’t prove anything.
Publications like these don’t fact check rigorously, especially on topics they know little about. If you sculpt an article that ticks a lot of their boxes, they will tend to publish it. Is this a newsflash to anybody?
Both these publications, as already pointed out, hardly represent themselves as objective purveyors of news or even research bastions.
I call it vapid and meaningless because you can do the same to any publication/media you care to name – heck journalists, and academics sometimes do it for you! It proves little, except perhaps that we as readers care more about confirmation bias and content than quality.
Everyone is fallible, and having worked in publishing myself and skated on some thin-to-nonexistent ice, it’s honestly not so easy. As Tyro points out, people publish non-hoax bullshit all the time. We should railing against that, not this fairy tale stuff, sculpted only for the purpose of trickery.
Nexus 6: Windschuttle has made a habit of criticising others for sloppy research and lack of credulity when faced with claims that fit their ideological prejudices.
Here, he’s demonstrated the same characteristics in spades.
I’ll leave the debate about “logical leaps” to the humanities types, but the claims about inserting human genes into food crops should have set Windschuttle’s BS detector off, and he should have checked more thoroughly or consulted an expert in the area. He didn’t, and now he’s got some rather smelly rotten egg on his face.
Robert, I see what you mean, but the hoaxer claimed this wasn’t primarily about embarrassing Winschuttle per se (not that there’s anything wrong with that – he deserves it).
Hoaxer:
The hoaxer is as guilty of ‘hypocrisy in knowledge-claims’ as Winschuttle.
It’s quite easy for a small journal to publish factual inaccuracies. Most Australian little magazines don’t have the resources for fact checkers. The peer review model is not necessarily well-suited to a literary journal (how do you peer review a piece of literary non-fiction, say?), and in any case it’s difficult to expect overworked academics to deovte huge amounts of time to reviewing other people’s articles.
That being said, the Quadrant hoax has legs because Windschuttle built his reputation on putting the worst possible construction on other writers’ mistakes, insisting that they accepted poor scholarship because of their ideological blinkers. Which, of course, is precisely what’s happened here.
As hoaxes go, this was a lame one.
1. Margaret Simons writes a GMO article that could have been written by any number of genuinely pro-GMO shills. Margaret Simons is guilty of a lack of creative imagination.
2. Quadrant accepts a shoddy piece of work that confirms the editors’ prejudices. This would appear to be standard operational procedure for Quadrant.
The best hoaxes cause their victims to do something uncharacteristically stupid. Simon’s hoax caused quadrant to do something characteristically stupid.
primarily in their treatment of irrational numbers. i don’t want to go further into it without plotnitsky as my reference because i’d be far worse at explaining it from memory than either them or lacan.
well, no, seeing as their contention was that certain branches of humanities borrowed terms from mathematics without understanding their “true” meaning. (this also opens them up to the attack that they don’t understand Lacan’s meaning, either).
also, and it’s beginning to irk me considerably, the idea abounds that science’s epistemological framework is as “true” as its facts are. let’s not bandy about the bush, science is the most powerful tool that we have for understanding, exploring and explaining nature but its epistemological framework (its metaphysics if you really want) need not be invisible and that it can also sometimes be flawed and require critique and adjustment.
There’s a great, if very difficult reading, explanation in Plotnitsky of the philosophical implications explicitly developed in Neils Bohr’s concept of “complementarity” in quantum physics and it’s epistemological implications.
But I digress completely away from Windschuttle. Needs more pointing and laughing.
Also I’m very interested to learn what is meant when those rightists accuse people of being “constructivists”? Do they explicitly reference epistemology here? Or does it have some other meaning in their circle?
Hmmm, your reflexive pinning the blame on Margaret Simons while simultaneously dismissing the hoax as “lame” strikes me as protesting just a little too much, Katz. Or should I say “Sharon”.
patrickg, i think it becomes largely a question of facts: how ridiculous was the sokal article? what is a reasonable standard to expect from the journal in question? ditto, the current hoax. i think i would disagree with you on the facts. to that is also added the question of the status of the hoaxee: are they an innocent, or are they fair game?
tyro rex, sure i understand your unwillingness to quote on the fly. i’m also not convinced by what you say, that whatever mathematical errors they made have the import you suggest (though they’d look pretty silly). but i’m still very interested if you can eventually dig it up.
Whether or not my name is “Sharon”, I “blame” Simons for nothing except not making the most of her opportunity to expose Windy as the lightweight that he is.
Maybe they’ll interview Windschuttle on the 7.30 Report?
Katz, I was jokingly insinuating that you were the mysterious hoaxer. Sadly, it appears I wasn’t funny, though.
Seconded.
Also, on Sokal, Deleuze and infinitesimals
Mark – It might give people a comeback on blog threads about postmodernism and the culture wars though when Sokal is invoked!
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Interesting.
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The article in question starts out citing the Sokal hoax, caustic wit. I haven’t read the whole thing but it appears to pretty much makes the same point as Sokal…
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Patrick G – I dunno, much as I hate Windschuttle, isn’t this just as vapid and meaningless as the Sokal hoax?
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…Which was not vapid and meaningless.
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Saying something doesn’t make it true. For thousands of years societies were run by people who required who bamboozled the majority with of variety hocum twaddle and ritualistic cruelty including human sacrifice. No doubt mythology and ritual also have their beauty but that’s besides the point. Science provides us with reliable information – facts. And the reason that it does is because of its rigors. The use of science by ideologues whether neocon or po-mo or what have you is pernicious.
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I am somewhat amused that it occurs to people almost instantaneously not to reflect on these matters as evidence of their own cognitive dissonance but as ammunition with which to inflict harm on those with a competing yet equally skewering CRM-114 problem.
I think it has added weight as a hoax, Katz, as Windy is on the record bagging an ed who published a hoax piece claiming, inter alia, “gravity is a relative concept”. He claimed a junior science knowledge should have allowed the eds to spot it.
Splicing human genes with crops? come on! Windy has been exposed as a complete gasbag. I like it.
The thing is Quandrant prints a lot of rubbish, an author admitting he deliberately wrote rubbish is only news because other keep quite.
Splicing human genes with crops?
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I think this is not only plausible but has already happened and on a mass scale.
This is the real point, isn’t it, and is what makes it different from all the various other hoaxes invoked here: the pertinent words are ‘hoist’ and ‘petard’. Max Harris was a wronged innocent by comparison.
I’m torn about this one because on the one hand I think any form of entrapment is ungenerous at best, but on the other hand Windy had it coming to him in spades. No wonder the word Schadenfreude is being bandied about.
Splicing human genes with crops?
already done… not sure about in production, but already done numerous times in labs.
I think this whole thing is funny, mainly because of the target. Doesn’t prove much apart from the fact that most magazines can’t afford people to fact check every submitted article. As someone mentioned before, the people it will hurt are new authors trying to get something published.
Tricking him is the way to deal with his publications? Seems pretty childish, and it could happen to any of us.
I admit, I myself was concerned when I received a spam warning email the other day, but it was so plausible:
Of course it’s in production. Here’s the prototype. And how else do explain all those people who buy Michael Savage’s books.
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The prototype was originally designed to have superhuman intelligence:
Oh well. Perhaps if they hadn’t crossed a human with a corn on the cob. They did cross it with a potato and a yappy little dog and got something that looked like Alan Jones.
Already done? Is it? I dunno, not my field – but either way, it would surely raise a red flag to any editor.
Unless of course the author was flattering his/her ideological proclivities.
just as vapid and meaningless as the Sokal hoax
Viz, not very much of either?
I think it’s an excellent hoax, and not before time. It illuminates what was previously not blindingly obvious to everyone: that Quadrant is just another magazine with no special claims to objectivity or lack of bias. Given that Quadrant exists to provide exactly that it’s a bit of a dent in their self-image. So Windy’s approach of simply denying that it happened is the only useful one – if he accepts the hoax as is then he’s admitting that he publishes ideological garbage just like all the people he attacks with such fervour.
Yeah, what PC said at 64. I was amazed that in young Keith’s reply he actually tried to draw a distinction between “genuine” hoaxers and “hoax” hoaxers. What the…?
Jeff – Most Australian little magazines don’t have the resources for fact checkers. The peer review model is not necessarily well-suited to a literary journal
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Yeah and this was true of Social Text as well. The rigors of science don’t apply in the humanities because there’s a limit to how far you can pin an idea down as solid because unfalsifiable. You can’t prove, no matter how hard you try, that Shakespeare was even a good writer. There’s no way of doing it. You can however demonstrate unequivocally that Einstein was a good physicist.
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That doesn’t render literary or political journals sans value but it does demonstrate that there are inherent differences in the fields and knowledge in one doesn’t equate with knowledge in another. As a practitioner of a field in which facts are pertinent – ie history – Windschuttle’s fucked himself. Especially, as you say, considering the foundation of his reputation.
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There are some things in the new physics that will appear to be commensurate with [insert whatever passes for 'postmodern' today] philosophy. Biology may display similar superfluous resemblance to Windschuttle’s views of the good life. But if you don’t know biology or physics it’s really best to consult someone who does. And often people trained in the humanities don’t seem to’ve acquired this habit of reminding one’s self what one does not know.
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But altho’ I haven’t more than peeked at Windschuttle’s texts he seems to me to make some good points about ideologically infused historians and then proceeds to be one himself.
This kind of thing is not funny! This is no laughing matter. A cherished institution of the right-wing intelligentsia has been made to look stupid…..the usual suspects at the back of the classroom STOP SNIGGERING!
Bugger: if Quadrant has to start checking their articles for things like facts and logic, it’ll be a much, much thinner magazine.
Does anyone know who funds Quadrant nowadays? It used to be funded by Kerry Paker (and the CIA), didn’t it? Is it still kept afloat by the Pakers?
And what’s the point of Quadrant in 2009? I mean, in the the cold war days, it had a perfectly respectable raison d’etre: anti-communism. Things have gone downhill sharply since Robert Manne left. Its only reason for existence nowadays seems to be to prevent an apology to the stolen generations.
I’m just wondering what would have been the impact if the article had appeared as a ‘guest post’ on a blog site, no particular blog in mind of course.
And it has been a weird day has it not?
The Windschuttle thing, the ‘Vatican’ [sort of] thingy about the pill and our esteemed mate Johnny getting Bush’s Congressional Medal.
Our cups runneth over with ….
Headcase?
Or, more significantly, Headcase-who-edits-a-well-connected-intellectual-magazine-without-a-single-science-degree-holder-who-can-provide-free-advice?
FFS, if the people at Meanjin or whatever thought something was amiss with a scientific piece submitted to them they’d just email the bloody thing to someone like Tim Lambert. It’s 2009! Perhaps that’s were Keefy screwed up–Tim Blair is Oddrant’s science adviser.
Maybe it was one of his disgruntled fans wot did it.
“Oddrant”
Heh.
The other thing, of course, is that, while Windschuttle might not have the PM to launch his editions these days, he still has a lot of powerful backers, including the nation’s only national newspaper (cf the Oz’s very soft report on the Crikey story).
In that respect, whatever (largely self-inflicted) embarrassment Windschuttle might endure in the next days, the hoax is much less vicious than the Ern Malley caper organised by Quadrant’s founder. Ern Malley’s now mostly remembered as a bit of a giggle but it was perpetrated on the very young editor of a pretty low budget poetry magazine. In its aftermath, Max Harris was spat on in the streets, faced criminal charges and eventually lost his journal. None of those things will happen to Windschuttle. He will just look like a bit of a fool.
It also (arguably, anyway) retarded the development of Australian modernism for a generation. Ern Malley, I mean.
Quadrant is also, of course, funded by the Ozco to the tune of $50,000 per year.
Max Harris also got caught up in a ridiculous obscenity trial, of course.
Oh, no! I just went to the Quadrant website and they even mentioned “Judeo-Christian heritage”. It seems no right-wing journal is complete without it. I don’t speak right-wing intellectualuese, so what does it mean? Obviously the Judeo part could have stopped the pogroms and the Nazis if only they’d said: “Mate, what about the Judeo-Christian heritage thing?”
Do they just cut and paste slabs out of National Review or Commentary?
“Judeo-Christian” appears to be shorthand for “even though Christianity is responsible for 98% of historical anti-Semitism, and even claimed Jews killed their God, TEH ISLAM is nonetheless to blame, for not being part of that proud collective heritage.”
Er, first paragraph Windschuttle, last three Nickws
From what I’ve read of Keith Windschuttle, he’s not a pleasant individual. So anything that pricks his bloated self-importance and exposes him as a bitter and twisted ideological ratbag first (and reputed academic second) must be applauded.
With my journalist’s hat on, though, it’s not much of a story though is it? The hoax piece is just a little obscure for anyone to sum up on the evening news in five paras. Ninety nine per cent of the population hasn’t heard of Windschuttle. And nobody reads Quadrant anyway.
Update: Robert Corr on Windschuttle and footnotes.
Mr Denmore @ 87 – the same could be said about the culture wars per se. 99% of people don’t give a stuff. As I’ve said before, Bob Carr got one thing right when he said that Howard starting to believe all those yahoo commentators were the genuine voice of the pople was the beginning of the end.
It won’t take much forensic text analysis of that tract and crossmatching with online cached text surely, to locate the blog Margaret Simons says has been ‘deleted’ … and identify the hoaxer …
dk.au @ 59, that’s an interesting link you provided. At this stage of the evening (and with about half a bottle of red under my belt), I’m inclined to think that Sokal is right, and Deleuze is incomprehensible (if not just plain wrong), but I’ll revisit it tomorrow just in case I’m misreading the article. Infinitesimals, IIUC, got totally sorted by Weierstrass’s rigorous definition of limit, and are no longer a problem either mathematically or philosophically.
As to constructivists, a couple of years ago I toyed with the idea of getting a Dip Ed so I could embark on about my 8th career, as a maths teacher (excellent post-retirement income stream, I thought), and I encountered something called “constructivism” in educational theory. I’m not too clear on the details, but it sounded nothing like how I’d ever learnt anything, and struck me as being a bit like post-modernism (at least as parodied by RWDBs), but without the intellectual rigour. Maybe that’s what “Quadrant” is talking about.
Incidentally, from the same issue of Quadrant, the title of this article should be filed away next time Windschuttle is quoted in one of those “kidz can’t spell – pomo has ruined education” beat ups:
http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2009/1-2/memories-of-catholic-schoolday-s
Then we have:
“Already done? Is it? I dunno, not my field – but either way, it would surely raise a red flag to any editor. Unless of course the author was flattering his/her ideological proclivities.”
Not so, Lefty. I’m a BSc (Melb) with a long-term interest in bio-ethics. I can’t slog through Quaddy nowadays until I’m pissed and in a deep hot bath, but I keep buying the damned thing every month anyway, probably to have my prejudices anti-confirmed. I frowned a few times reading this article, thought idly about Googling around a bit..but nothing screamed ‘hoax’, nor even, particularly, obvious authorial vested interest, loudly enough to kick me out of the steam. GM crops are one of those new science issues that get just as much grief from the agri-commercial status quo dough as from us screeching luddites, at least here in Oz. Besides – the second ‘science’ article in this issue is an anti-prenatal screening pitch. Not sure exactly how there’s ideological consistency from an editorial PoV there: one article an apologia for the brave new world of genetic God-play, the next a strident appeal against it.
As for the human-corn strain, well, it’s not really all that implausible in itself, given that the ‘hoax’ article presents it in the context of an essentially accurate and so at least ameliorating riff on human/non-human genetic overlap. More to the point – since the real ‘hoax’ point of this article is about exposing editorial bias, rather than scientific Beadling About – is the way the supposed ‘red flag’ bit is run up as having been nipped in the cob on ethical grounds long before it was past some non-specified lab stage:
…which throw-away manner of reportage – extracted from an annual company report, no less – can, as anyone who reads pop-science journals knows, cover a multitude of feasibilities, intentions, plans, failures, projects, feints, share pump-priming and collegiate cock-flashing…ie it’s the commercio-science equivalent of Carny spruiker white noise; cocktail circuit gossip for Geeks. I reckon most scientific generalists like me will probably, like me, have mentally flick-passed this into the ‘maybe/maybe not’ file, at least temporarily. Because it’s a bit moot anyway, really: the stepping-stone point of the ‘human-corn’ (and the other two human hybrid examples cited) was to set up this (my bold):
And ‘Sharon’ then goes on to point out further that the way the MSM often portrays the investors in a sinister ‘vested interest’ light which obscures the actual science is antithetical to, or at best, a diversion from, accurate and fair reportage of ‘science issues’ overall, because it doesn’t give the actual science a fair unencumbered go. Now it’s this combination, these twinned bits of (attempted) ‘agent provocateur’ work which are supposed to constitute the ‘Gotcha!’ moment: behold the once-liberal little magazine’s latest editorial ideologue, so quick to publish an article pivoting on such an ‘obviously’ illiberal epistemological outrage. He’s approving of loading reportage in such a way as to keep the stoopid masses higgerant, ignore their opinions, bias the vested interest outcome…for shame!
Trouble is, it’s not a ‘Gotcha! moment at all. In fact what ‘Sharon’ argues in that last section is anything but hoax-fuel. The progressing history of empirical science is strewn – almost predicated on – exactly the main epistemological points being made here. The article is after all not purporting to be about genetic crops; it’s purporting to be about scare campaigns and science reporting. It’s an article about science epistemology and how science progresses (or doesn’t). And as such I can’t find any reason to be outraged by those fairly unremarkable (epistemological) conclusions the ‘Sharon’ sock-puppet so smugly – recklessly – pretends to draw, expecting all hell to break loose among the right-thinking.
If you can put aside the GM crop examples themselves, which is what any reasonably open-minded scientific person aware of their own biases (like me) might tend to do, just by way of excluding potentially-erroneous data, then you can quickly see that the essence of this article isn’t ideologically biased at all. Try substituting AGW examples for genetic crop examples (I hope Windy does). Is it scientifically right to give equal weight/air time to uninformed public opinion, which lags way behind expert opinion, when seeking to report new scientific empirical truths? Would it be right to fuzzy the reportage of the science of alternative energy sources – nuclear, say – with a disproportionate focus on the vested financial interests behind it? It bites all ways, depending onm where you stand on a scientific issue.
So where does that leave this ‘bias-exposing hoax’? If your main gotcha ain’t really a gotcha at all…is it like some of Malley’s poems actually turning out to be pretty good?
Well, it’s a whole chapter in Plotnitsky’s book, and a far too rich argument regarding the basic outline and history of number theory to reproduce here, even with the book in front of me. I will put across a small quote from it and leave it at that, lest Sokal and Bricmont manage to completely derail the entire thread;
Arkady Plotnitsky, “The Knowable and the Unknowable: Modern Science, Nonclassical Thought, and the ‘Two Cultures’”, U Mich. Press, Ann Arbor MI, 2002. p120.
Quadrant receives taxpayer funds through the Australia Council. If the publication were funded through NHMRC or ARC this would be tantamount to fraud or academic misconduct. Will the AC apply similar standards in this instance?
Given Quadrant’s past association with funding controlled by the US CIA one wonders if Windshuttle can pull an old favour and have the boys in the panama hats find the culprit … by fair means or …
Maybe time to go underground Sharon or hire some muscle and out yourself.
If I get time (thesising is still going on at a furious pace) I will write something on this. Maybe eveb for Quadrant, if KW’s game
.
I will make only one suggestion: hoaxer, if you’re reading this, out yourself. I failed to out myself back in the day and the reaction was much worse as a result. People think you’re pulling their chain and unwilling to take responsibility for pulling their chain. I speak from experience.
That aside, I’ll try to read all the relevant material and write something at our place in due course.
Have to agree with moz: this is useful if only for cutting down an intolerably arrogant and pious Tory down to size, and publicly and humiliatingly so. Well done, I say.
As for comparisons with Sokal: large portions of the Sharon’s Quadrant piece are capable of being true or untrue. They consist of actual sentences of intelligble English. Not so with Sokal’s Social Text piece, which contained large tracts of material that was quite literally nonsense. I know which I’d rather have unknowingly published.
Lefty E, I must say your response to being shown, how should I say this, overly confident in your amateur scientist credentials is especially weak. I mean, you scoff at human genes in agriculture, get told it’s already a reality, and then assert that only the ideologically blinkered could believe it. Granted, on the evidence before us Windscuttle wouldn’t have a clue either, but then he ain’t a’scoffin on that point.
BBB
Well, no evidence was provided, BBB, by any commentator here. So I wasn’t “shown” anything, in point of fact.
And certainly, if I were editing a current affairs journal rather than blogging – I might go research it.
Not Windy tho!
Hmmm, having read it through, all of Sharon’s piece is lucid. Scratch the qualifier ‘large portions’ and double underline ‘actual sentences of intelligble English’, and recast the para to fit. The contrast between Quadrant and Social Text is greater than I first thought. Windschuttle could justifiably say: “What a git I have been shown to be. They’ve proved I will publish untruths. Still, I’ve never been an editor of Social Text. I’ve never published stuff that is not even wrong. That’s something to be proud of, isn’t it?” And we could say: “Sure Keith, whatever gets you to sleep.”
BBB
Well, I had a quick google, and I was wrong: rice has been engineered with human genes for some time. So, mea culpa!
However, as you’ll see here, this is not really the nub of the hoax in any case:
“The hoaxer wrote that “buried” in the footnotes of a scientific paper was the remarkable story that the CSIRO had been deterred from commercialising a great breakthrough in genetic engineering “because of perceived moral issues among the public”. The paper exists. So do its authors. But it is not about genetic engineering, and as those familiar with scientific publications know, such papers never have footnotes.
Windschuttle didn’t check the paper or ring the CSIRO. He says: “We’re not a science journal.” But in any case, he doesn’t believe Quadrant has to check the facts in its articles. Though he has flayed historians for small errors in obscure footnotes in the past, he doesn’t believe his handling of the article falls short of his own standards. “I am not the author in this case. I’m the editor.”
And this is sweeet: http://www.theage.com.au/national/conservative-bible-falls-for-furphy-20090106-7b6m.html?page=-1
But Lefty, when they get an actual geneticist to chime in, he confirms Windschuttle’s perspective more or less entirely:
“Geneticist Rick Roush, dean of the University of Melbourne’s school of land and environment, said the article seemed plausible but some of the claims made little sense.
“It’s hard to put your finger on any one thing that’s wrong, but the sense of it is wrong,” he said.”
An apparently seasoned genetic scientist can’t point to an obviously wrong thing in the piece. Hardly damning of Windschuttle, is it? By contrast, Manne suggests he can spot the errors a mile away. Now that speaks volumes, and not about the university dean, or Windschuttle.
BBB
Well, BBB – I gather it was Windy who suggested a non-scientific journal ed should be able to spot such claims a mile off.
In any case, the geneticist’s remarks are neither here nor there regarding the CSIRO claims in the hoax.
Let face it, Windy didnt check a thing. The great footnote fetishist of OZ history! I agree it wouldnt be so good a hoax ….on anyone else. But on Windy – its gold.
… all imaginary and complex numbers are, by definition, irrational, since, not being real numbers, they cannot be represented as a ratio of two whole numbers, which is always a real number. (This fact is sometimes forgotten, including by Sokal and Bricmont, but, it appears, not by Lacan, whom they criticize for confusing irrational and complex numbers.)
But rationality and irrationality were originally defined as applying only to the real numbers, because no-one knew jack about complex numbers. When “i” was discovered, it was up to mathematicians to define whether i was rational, irrational, or neither. Gauss found it convenient to define i as a honorary integer, and thus used “whole complex numbers” (a + bi, where a and b are integers). People call them Gaussian integers, and there also are such things as Gaussian rationals (where a and b are rational). They’re a countable set, like the real rationals, and so there isn’t too much problem filing them as “rational”. The remainder of the complex numbers would be complex irrationals.
Of course, Gauss could have been mistaken. One could define all complex numbers a priori “irrational” and leave it at that. However, I think that waters down the definition of irrationality, and thus muddies its usefulness. For example, how many digits do you need to write down an irrational number? Shouldn’t it be infinite? Well, yes … except for i and 1 + 2j and 3/5 + 4/7j and so on. It doesn’t make sense.
I think Lacan was mistaken.
This really is hilarious. Having first invented the distinction between real hoaxes and hoax hoaxes, Windy now reveals that 15% of untruth is truth. Or something:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/quadrant-falls-victim-to-its-own-reasoning/2009/01/06/1231004021054.html
More:
Shooting the messenger
Deep throat says our lives are in danger
Ive trolled all the blogs and comments but Im at a bit of a loss as to what the point of it all is.
It seems to me that aside from this false talk of peer review, all that has been achieved is that Windschuttle has been shown as a sloppy editor of a small circulation publication. I mean we already know he can be a hypocrite. So from where I sit it all looks a lot like simple idealogically driven dicredit. Elevated and given more words than it is really worth by Margaret Simons
As for this dodge being of Sokal of Malley proportions… pleeeeze
“A real person wrote that article.”
That is pretty funny. I think I will steal it.
Anyway, GB touches on a interesting point. Check out this appalling garbage from the December issue:
“That is, the main reason why they [atheists] have the freedoms to engage in atheistic proselytising is because of the Judeo-Christian heritage of the West. Freedom to believe in various religions – or no religion – is one benefit of Christianity. So too is the freedom to attend different types of schools, to hold to contrary views, and to enjoy freedom of conscience. All these benefits flow in large measure from the very Christianity which these atheists so deeply deplore.”
http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/muehlenberg/2008/12/destroying-the-foundations-of-the-west
The piece never recovers, in fact it gets worse and worse as you proceed. Only a cretin could write such rubbish. And yet it gets good billing at Quadrant. So we see that Quadrant has apparently fallen for the greatest hoaxes of all, at least in the West, being the unholy trinity of the fairy tale of Judaism, the fairy tale of Christianity and the fairy tale of their benign influence on the world. The credulity evident in the Sharon episode is as nothing compared to this. I don’t want to deflect attention away from the primary subject of this discussion, but let’s put the little idiocies in the context of the big and important ones just for fun.
BBB
Anything with the title “Destroying the Foundations of the West” is 99% sure to be garbage, BBB, even if (to flip Windy’s criteria around) it accidentally contains 10 to 15% of non-garbage. Though it is a truly awful article.
Pure comedy gold, Quadrant:
Some more rigorous reasoning from the same source:
http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/qed/2008/12/on-vikings-and-victims-white-guilt-in-context
The latter point supported by all the many temporarily weak Western Europeans taken as slaves by the many temporarily powerful Western Europeans over the course of… oh, wait.
I honestly had no idea it was this bad. I’ve never bought Quadrant. I think I had in my mind that it was some idiosyncratic but serious journal for aging arch-conservatives. Now I see that it is not the least bit serious at all.
BBB
According to The Australian, it’s a “respected right-wing journal”. I’d hate to see their idea of a right-wing journal undeserving of respect.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24882024-601,00.html
Tyro Rex, thanks for the Plotnitsky quote.
“… all imaginary and complex numbers are, by definition, irrational, since, not being real numbers, they cannot be represented as a ratio of two whole numbers, which is always a real number.”
I appreciate that this is merely a snippet. But, in brief, Plotnitsky is: a) nitpicking; b) wrong; c) confusing; d) wrong. (The main issue is (b)).
To begin, he is nitpicking, because it is quibbling over the practical definition of an irrational number. It is merely a question of usage, not of misunderstanding.
Secondly, Plotnitsky is wrong, because the standard (and most useful, and probably the only useful) definition of “irrational number” is a *real number* which cannot be expressed as a ratio of two whole numbers.
Thirdly, he is confusing, because the expression “imaginary and complex numbers” suggests that he is referring to two different types of numbers. it is arguably true, but not in a way that warrants plotnitsky’s use of the expression (at most one refers to a subset of the other). The terms “imaginary numbers” and “complex numbers” are best thought of as synonyms, which is how they are generally used.
Finally, Plotnitsky is wrong when he says that complex numbers are [necessarily] not real. 3 is a complex number, just a rather special one.
even if plotnitsky misfires here, i’m sure there is much that is contentious about sokal’s and bricmont’s book (though if it were the mathematics in it, i’d be surprised). and, this does not indicate whether or not lacan knew what he was talking about, nor whether sokal-bricmont were fair to him. But, on the little evidence here, Plotnitsky’s knowledge of mathematics is weak.
I’m happy to continue this discussion. but i think you are probably right, that it is better not to clog this thread with a tangent to a tangent.
Folks, you’d be most welcome to discuss this stuff on the open thread:
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/01/03/saturday-salon-173/
Update: Tim Lambert posts at Deltoid and links to a range of other commentary and discussion.
I guess this wonderful silly season contremps raises several interesting points.
When it comes to fact-checking, Quadrant is less reliable and self-correcting than a decent blog.
Whoever staged this is very very good. Have you read the article in question? It’s spot on in tone, tenor and first glance plausible detail. Bioinformatics! It’s for real, natch. I look forward to his or her future work with great interest.
If Dr Sharon Gould’s article had been published elsewhere with conclusions inimicable to Keef’s world view, how closely do think he would have fact-checked it by way of preparing a rebuttal?
This is going to be the most fun the Australian Blogosphere has had in many a long time.
I bet until now few have really thought about the benefits of using tobacco plants as biological factories to help inculculate medicinal blood clotting agents. Talk about breeding swords into ploughshares.
And this will damage Oddrant’s credibility how? It’s a dull and sluggish dead tree-based 20th century provincial reactionary circle jerk, written for and read by a fast-dwindling collection of old and unwireed farts.
Probably could use a good controversy to put it back on the radar. They should cut Dr Sharon Gould in on a percentage of the escalating ad rates generated by their suddenly spiking readership.
Umm..maybe Keef planned this all along.
“Another was modification of malaria mosquitoes so they carry genes which produce human antibodies in their gut; thus rendering their bite less dangerous.”
Not a bad idea at all. We already have the bioengineering chops. Few remember that Australia mounted one of the most successful biowarfare campaigns ever.
Seen a wild rabbit lately?
“This is going to be the most fun the Australian Blogosphere has had in many a long time.”
Then the Australian Blogosphere should probably get out more, Nabs.
Anyone who’s bothered continuing to read Quadrant, in stubborn hope, since the newly-bereaved Paddy Mac lost his sense of humour and started progressively turning it into his personal vanity publishing shit sheet, already knew that it’s long been happy compromising whatever claims to anti-ideological liberalism it once to that end. We all hope the current loaded nonsense-heavy is just a passing phase, but it didn’t need a hoax to tell anyone who’s stuck with it in spite of the nonsense that it is loaded-nonsense heavy just now, thank you very much, sock-puppet ‘Sharon’, not. And anyone who has followed the ebb and flow of the debate over Windy’s footnote pedantry and ducking and weaving re: his own will already know that his instinct is to seek out the weakest possible version of his intellectual opponents’ argument, rather than its strongest, which would be the true liberal instinct (and should have been everyone’s here on this ‘hoax’ article). Manne himself has already demonstrated in a long exchange in Monthly Windschuttle’s own less-than-perfect handling of scholarly detail and methodology.
But the way you respond to cheap-shot ‘Gotcha! tosh of the kind everyone who cares pinged as Windshuttle’s game years ago is not by resorting to it yourself. If this ‘Sharon’ has a problem with the ideological direction being taken by Keef’s Quadrant, why not pitch him a straight article taking the fight up to it honestly?
The writing and intellectual world’s are already awash with smug irony, authorial counterfeiting and silly undergrad pissing contests. For all its manifest bias Quadrant’s one of the few little magazines around that still publishes long and unironic articles from writers outside the full-time academic writerly pool in this country, not to mention short fiction and poetry – and a relative lot of all of that, at that. So apart from the dubious blogosphere fiskarama entertainment value here – see above, and I thought Fisking went out of fashion online half a decade ago – then this achieves nothing beyond the further erosion of the epistemology of public debate, and maybe the lousy abuse of the editorial hospitality of yet another of the (fast-dwindling) number of Australian editors still willing to pay Australian would-be writers for their words, by one such writer who hasn’t even got the guts to do it as themself. Pardon me if I don’t see any reason for triumphalism from an Oz writerly PoV.
To Jack Robertson:
tl;dr
“tl;dr”
Hi Rob…ah, a bit out of date, but I see from this new-fangled Interweb’s splendid new-fangled ‘Google-er’ facility that this means ‘too long, didn’t read’. Rhetorically, an oldie but a goodie – tho’ goodness me, this new-fangled Interweb Lingo is a splendid new twist, ain’t it!? A time-saving revolution! OK, well, good-o, Mr Corr. Fine. And why you’d waste ‘any’ time at all responding to something you haven’t even read is your biz. Tho’ those few seconds might have been better spent buying one of those Quadrant t-shirts that read: ‘I’ve never read Quadrant because I don’t like it’.
Listen, cockhead, don’t play fucking blog-thread tactical games with me, got it? Been there, done that, can do it better than you, Rob. So if what I write really is ‘too long’ to nick a few minutes’ worth of your precious Gen Net Info-Age Up The Writerly Revolution Bruvva! sensibility, ntm your dazzling twenty-something social life, all good and well. But kindly scroll quietly down and go on your merry way without lobbing your lame attempt at the online literary equivalent of the teeny brat sitting eating worms in the corner, exclaiming loudly every other minute: ‘I said: I’m NOT TALKING TO YOU!’
Fair enough? When I post, which is rarely, I post honestly and in good faith. If you don’t want to waste your time on an exchange with a poster you think space-wasting and irrelevant…don’t encourage them by picking one. ie, or alternatively: fuck off and stop wasting my time, Rob.
It could have been so much better as a hoax. The hoaxer (according to media reports) says “So neatly did my essay conform with reactionary ideology that Quadrant, it seems, didn’t evencheck the putative author’s credentials”.
But this doesn’t make sense, because the main controversial claim – the human DNA should be used to genetically modify food – would, far from conforming to ‘reactionary ideology’, be opposed by most conservatives and ‘reactionaries’ (along with a good section of the left).
For the hoax to work, it needed to be a climate change denialist piece.
As it stand, all it shows is, as other commenters have pointed out, that opinion magazines don’t employ fact checkers or use referees. That’s hardly a revelation, and confirmed by the publication of numerous dubious articles by real authors.
Trackback.
A few thoughts at this stage.
What Nabs said.
I’d also remind folks that the Ern Malley poems were rather good – some of them anyway; with a few obvious giveaways that an editor dying to find Australia’s new modernist poet blinded himself to.
As others have noted though … the closer scrutiny this episode prompts may reveal the whole mag is a hoax.
Marty, you see this is the problem with quote-mining. Plotnitsky is not wrong. Far from it. The quote I gave you was immediately preceeded with the sentence “We now call fractions and whole numbers rational numbers. Rational numbers together with (real) irrational numbers … are called real numbers”. sS I said, there is a whole chapter on this subject and Lacan’s use of i and criticisms of it. Bear in mind the work is not a popular book on the science wars, and nor is Plotnitsky a Lacanian or anything like that. It is a piece of rigourous philosophy. Much more rigourous than Sokal is capable of (or me, for that matter). Enough from me on this topic, you will have to read the book.
Word, Jack. At least to the first post.
Amusing as I find this hoax (which I still think is pretty puiddling compared to other examples of hoaxes on this thread), and delighted as I am to have a severe attack of schadenfreude while reading about it, the most disturbing revelation so far is that rice is crossed with human genes and grown. I eat lots of rice.
Others have said this or something similar: the thing about the footnotes is what tickles me the most, given the way Windschuttle tried to concentrate on very minor (mostly transcriptional) errors in footnoting to attack arguments of academics he didn’t agree with.
Jack, that second comment’s a magnificent example of stoush, and with beret raised I salute you (though I think Rob had a point).
There we go, Adrien: an example and an object lesson to to the both of us.
Jack Robertson, I must say I’m with you on the tl;dr thing in spite of your, erm, intemperate manner of response. I often don’t make it all the way through a long comment myself, but I feel no compulsion to mention the fact. More to the point, tl;dr is a statement about oneself, not the writer/writing — it ought to be tlfm;dr at the very least. Or, as I used to say to my students: It’s not that it’s ‘boring’, Narelle, it’s that you are bored.
Seconded also and more to the primary point is Nabs’ comment about the quality of the Malley poems. There’s a fine, fine line to hoaxing, as to parody; it has to be sufficiently plausible and close enough to the real thing to fool its victims.
Or, as the conductor of the Portsmouth Sinfonia once remarked, ‘Somehow the closer we get, the funnier it is.’
Totally agree with Jack Robertson.
Seen a wild rabbit lately? Absolutely. There are tons of them in the Adelaide Hills and Barossa where I live. Although in all fairness, some of them might be hares, rather than rabbits
Update: Counterknowledge, Skepticlawyer and Andrew Norton.
Update: John Quiggin is interested in Windschuttle’s own hoax:
“If this ‘Sharon’ has a problem with the ideological direction being taken by Keef’s Quadrant, why not pitch him a straight article taking the fight up to it honestly?”
errr … because it wouldn’t get published? The point is that we know good emperical evidence that Quadrant publishes rubbish. Until now we have only be able to infer that.
Update: Some more links in a post at Overland.
To Jack Robertson et al, how many people do you think Alan Sokal enrolled in his vague, if amusing, anti-pomo crusade because of his hoax vs. simply putting forward a good faith article explaining his problems with their perspectives?
Hoaxes are events that seem to quickly escape from the original intent of their authors and feed into people’s existing prejudices and schemas.
I wonder how many of you actually read that David Demeritt piece linked above? It raises serious questions about Public Engagement with Science (itself an academic sub-discipline) that, ironically, many of those who espouse ‘liberal’ ideals seem unwilling to engage with.
chinda63, I saw thousands of bloody rabbits – cute little baby ones – (wished I’d packed the rifle) last time I went up to Robertstown, and heaps more when I went to Mt Gambier for Christmas. Definitely not hares, they were much too small. There used to be a hare on my block at Robertstown but I haven’t seen it for months.
Tyro, thanks again.
your extra included sentences don’t help plotnitsky much, if at all. i can easily explain why, but i think we both agree (and mark certainly agrees!) that this is not the forum.
i know this a snippet, and you may know plotnitsky enough from elsewhere to know or trust that he is not wrong on the mathematics – and right to criticise bricmont/sokal, which was the original question. but i don’t. and, though you have no way of knowing this, i do know my mathematics. notwithstanding that the book may be great philosophy, i stand by my criticisms.
in any case, for my own interest, i’ll grab plotnitsky’s book when i have a chance. thanks for bringing him to my attention.
as a final tanget to a tangent to a tangent, i think the el naschie case that you raised is very interesting. an important point is that it was mathematicians who revealed the mathematical claptrap, that the claptrap was not self-sustaining. but there is much more in el naschie to ponder over. (not here!)
Kersbrook Forest Road is littered with the corpses of baby bunnies and hares at certain times of the year. Personally, I can’t quite bring myself to deliberately take them out when one crosses my path (I instinctively swerve and/or brake), but I always go “DOH!” after the fact. Damn that pacifist in me!
I wasn’t that impressed with the hoax. There is an article in the same edition on climate change which was considerably poorer quality than the hoax article.
Update: I think some of the point of the hoax – that it was specifically directed against Keith Windschuttle because of his obsession with damning others for errors in footnotes – has been lost in all the washup. Jeff Sparrow in Crikey refocuses discussion on the central point.
My apologies, Jack, for my flippant comment earlier. I do in fact read your
monologuescomments, because there is often a point buried in them somewhere.It’s just that LP has a comments policy for a reason, and that policy says something about brevity and its alternative. At the risk of triggering another episode, I’ll sum it up with another initialism: if you want to post excessively long comments, GYOFB.
That article of Jeff’s at Crikey that Mark linked to at #141 is really excellent, a must-read. No stupid point-scoring, just an amplification of the central issue.
OH what a BEAUTiful MORning…
BWAHAHAHA!!! That was worth the click. Bless you, “Sharon Gould”.
“There’s a fine, fine line to hoaxing, as to parody; it has to be sufficiently plausible and close enough to the real thing to fool its victims.”
That’s true enough, Pavlov’s Cat, and as with satire, the ingredient that is too often missed in these parodies and hoaxes is authorial tenderness. To make a hoax ring true while also advertising its own deeper point (without the need for heavy-handed intellectual pro and con outriggers, like us all here), the hoaxer has to deliver it drenched in deep affection for that which they reckon is under threat from the cant and excess they hope their hoax will expose: the kind of deep affection which will carry on through the punchline, to defuse the more ungenerous aspects of hoaxing as an intellectual tactic. A good Gotcha! is all-inclusive; come the denouement there’s a little bit of chiding, as well as a little of space for mea culpas, for and from all – the only real winner on the day, as they say, being the footy.
So hoaxers need to construct their hoax in such a way that their targets – in this case Quaddy and Windy – remain standing. Chastened, yes, looking a bit silly, sure…but not destroyed. Otherwise it’s just more partisan warfare, better done via honest toe-to-toe slugging. Andrew Norton was spot on up there: to be ‘honest’ this hoax had to be on AGW. That would have made both aesthetic and ‘hoaxy’ sense. As it stands it was a bit of a fudge, I reckon. Very uncool. Bit forced, bit too much tongue-lolling ground-work needed, bit inelegant. And without point if all that happens is everyone’s position is hardened, which seems to be the case so far, while a few sacrificial mugs cop a walloping. Maybe a lot of modernist verse was indeed 2nd-rate clunkery and posturing bollocks, but…well, Max Harris never really recovered, did he. Poor bugger. Were his literary sins so vast that he deserved that? Are Windy’s, really?
Yes, ta for the nod (with…ahem…stylistic caveats) on the ‘tl;dr’ thing. Liam’s right enough, Rob probably has a point. One day I will learn to write short. And I am an expert in over-reacting to whiffs of condescension. Still. Bob’s an ugly stoush-hardened little blog-spud from way back. And there’s too much irony about altogether, these days. Me, I like to play the straight man. Boring, but you can share in the guffaws accorded the Stars’ punchlines as egg drips down your face, content in the knowledge that without you the jokes wouldn’t make sense at all.
Maybe Windy and the Quaddy boys feel a bit like that sometimes.
…is what I want on my next business card.
(And you really ought to consider blogging JR).
I identified the hoaxer here – but there is a tiny possibility I’m wrong.
Others are saying it’s Katherine Wilson. She’s very anti-GMO (has written about it), anti-Quadrant (has written about it) and does pieces for Crikey so would know Marget Simmons.
If it is her – that’s not a good look for Crikey.
“Sharon Gould’s” effort was a hoax, but a fairly rudimentary one.
It was hardly a parody because her article was virtually indistinguishable from the dross ladelled out by genuine GMO shills. GMO shills have already had the self-parody gene spliced into their DNA, proving that you can improve on nature.
For a hoax to be great it has to pass the test of the most searching enquiry of its victim. The essence of the great hoax is that it defeats the very best intellectual defences of its target.
Windy’s crime in this instance was inattention, not self-inflicted intellectual blindness.
I’m fairly confident that Windy does suffer from self-inflicted intellectual blindness and would like to see it exposed with a rally great hoax.
“…if you want to post excessively long comments, GYOFB.”
Grumble, grumble, yes, point taken, Bob.
Like the new lean and green look, btw.
Not that I really care all that much, but what was Windschuttle before he became a neocon? I’ll take a stab and say he was a Trot (usually you can spot ‘em a mile away), but he could have been a Maoist.
It’s always amusing to see ex-radicals from the fruity Left take level-headed social democrats – emphasis on that last word – to task. Somehow the grown-up Left is responsible for all the youthful nonsense of these neocons.
hey down&out and marty – into the open thread – http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/01/03/saturday-salon-173/
GB @ 149,
“Somehow the grown-up left is responsible ….” etc., etc.,
In the same way Labor is responsible for its Rats? So people like erstwhile Emo Man are all the ALP’s fault?
So tl;dr is an ideology after all.
.
Too long didn’t read ‘ey? Sounds like the ideology of our times. There’s no attempt by subscribers to this ideology to organize themselves or even make themselves known. Tl;drism is the Bokononism of Corporate technocracies. To tl;drists political parties are mere granfalloons.
.
Ern Malley was a great poet and illustrates well the new egalitarian poetic avant-garde. Anyone can be Lord Byron you just need a groovy coat, a bad attitude and a bunch of sentences that are stuffed with esoteric adjectives, broken into bits, peppered with fancy punctuation and shouted thru a microphone because that means it’s deep man.
Liam – There we go, Adrien: an example and an object lesson to to the both of us.
.
Don’t worry man. No-one can use the Spanish Civil War to bore the shit out of people like we can.
It could not have happened to a nicer bloke. What a hoot.
Jack Hackett
I see Skeptic Lawyer has moderated my comments out of extistence … sigh. It seems to be a characteristic of right wing blogs. I see a few forthright defenses of the QUadrant and Windshuttle by rightwingers here so perhaps it is the case that like Windshuttle the rightwing bloggers fail to practice what they preach.
I see Skeptic Lawyer has moderated my comments out of extistence
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I’d be extremely surprised if that wasn’t on account of discourtesy and/or perhaps the will to prevent (yet another) Demidenko row.
.
I think the reaction to this brouhaha by the right in some places illustrate that the left don’t have a monopoly on forcing reality to fit the theory. It doesn’t illustrate that the left are more open-minded at all.
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You do fail to mention that Skeptic endorses ‘Dr Gould’s’ hoax and only advises her to out herself.
Oh all right, all you bloody bunny spotters, yes there are still lots of wild rabbits about.
I was trying to make a point, albeit rather clumsily, about Australia’s use of myxamytosis and calicivirus to throttle the rabbit plagues we used have. Obviously we still have substantial population but nothing like the days when you’d come home and find a whole colony in the lounge room with their feet up on the table, drinking all your booze and messing with the TV remote settings.
Anyway, am now looking forward to giant, genetically-engineered mosquitoes carrying human antibodies and with lasers strapped to their heads.
Anyway, am now looking forward to giant, genetically-engineered mosquitoes carrying human antibodies and with lasers strapped to their heads.
.
Me too. About damn time.
“I’d be extremely surprised if that wasn’t on account of discourtesy”
But we’ll never know will we … sigh …
Maybe the neoconservative movement, which has swept the globe the last 30 years, is one big elaborate hoax….and maybe the joke’s on us.
Maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow and it’ll all have been a bad dream.
The discussion is moving right along, people are noticing the hoax is rational when compared to some of the other rubbish published.
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/01/windschuttle_hoaxed.php
Quiggin has gone further, he thinks Windschuttle is the Hoax.
http://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2009/01/07/the-great-windschuttle-hoax/
“Maybe the neoconservative movement, which has swept the globe the last 30 years, is one big elaborate hoax….and maybe the joke’s on us.”
Are you suggesting a kind of monkeys + typewriters = x where x in this case is total rubbish? If so we must find that room … to the idiot mobile!
Nabakov, how fast does calicivirus spread?
100km hour on the open road, and 60km an hour in built up areas.
It’s a country joke, sorry.
I liked Jeff’s article, but I feel it still fundamentally misses the point (or you could argue I am…).
Wwindschuttle takes umbrage with the footnotes in a phd about Tasmanian indigenous people.
Anonymous hoaxer writes an article on genetic engineering with dodgy footnotes, pitched and written to trick Windschuttle into publishing it in his small, crappy magazine, years later – which he duly does.
Does this somehow rebut his (shitty) arguments about the phd? Does it exonerate that research and damn his? Or prove that what Windschuttle says or thinks about any given topic is somehow invalid?
I honestly don’t so. I know Jeff spells it out (FOOTNOTES! ARGGGHHH!) but jesus, is that the only thing in common? Talk about a long bow, Robert Waldo couldn’t draw that puppy. Millions of published things have footnotes. One is an article, one is a phd; one is for a magazine, one is a phd; one is history; the other is science, so on and on.
I honestly don’t feel that it _proves_ anything. Weirdly, I feel it’s almost ad hominem. Windy’s typically bellicose and shysterish response doesn’t help matters; but to paint this as some kind of victory for the left is pretty Pyrrhic I think.
Patrick G: if you’re writing a thesis, footnotes can, at a stretch, be funny (she says, scurrying back to the thesis).
I cut all the footnotes out of my thesis. I decided they were a bit wanky and indulgent. But I like reading others’!
John Quiggin says
‘I agree with Tim Lambert (who gives lots of links) that the article sounds reasonable by comparison with the nonsense commonly published on scientific topics by Quadrant’.
I agree.
But this means Margaret Simons’ point on Crikey that ‘Keith Windschuttle, the editor of the conservative magazine Quadrant, has been taken in by a hoax intended to show that he will print outrageous propositions’ is not correct. The Gould article is not full of outrageous propositions. In fact I haven’t been able to find any ‘outrageous propositions’. Some errors yes, but even there not many.
So much as I dislike Windschuttle’s views and corrupt academic practices, the Gould article is not (unfortunately) a ‘gotcha’. Many other editors would have been fooled by it. The only poetic justice is the point that Jeff Sparrow makes at Crikey, that Windschuttle believes mistakes by academics putting views different to him on matters like Aboriginal massacres are unacceptable, but here he has made a mistake, and he considers (as I do) that it is acceptable.
Update: At Club Troppo, Don Arthur thinks he may have an answer to the question – “Who is Sharon Gould?”
Given that Epigenes is a lunar crater, I’m a little puzzled as to why the editorial failure of basic fact checking is in any way excusable. It raises something I puzzle over frequently – why do we excuse poor research and poor writing if it is labelled as opinion? If opinion is not based upon fact, or logic, then surely it is belief. Writing as opinion attempts to scuttle past the most basic of journalistic requirements of verification and objectivity – if it is not factual, presumably it can only bolster or engender belief. If this sort of sloppiness on Windshuttle’s part can be passed of because Quadrant is a journal of opinion, it does delicately undermine the integrity of its writings and contained opinions.
Well done Shane; second cousin Glenn would be proud.
Who cares who it is? Best laugh Ive had in weeks!
But epigenes are also something else.
Update: A quick post responding to some misconceptions in the Troppo comments thread.
Good on you, Mark. As I commented over at my place: while Simons admits she did know about the hoax beforehand, I doubt in the extreme she would be so silly as to manufacture a news story with another Crikey writer. Katherine Wilson also hung LP out to dry with all her post deletion palaver and her SOP at Crikey was to carry on about GM crops in between having a go at me for pulling a hoax.
The irony is delicious.
Hmmm, we don’t know for sure it’s Kath Wilson, SL. But I’m sure Margaret Simons is telling the truth about what transpired.
That Gelati in Coogee only consisted of 10 to 15% feces I am reliably informed by Sharon.
@95
“I failed to out myself..”
That’s a nice bit of circumlocution for inventing a family history out of whole cloth and parading around in Ukrainian national dress. Almost as good as Windschuttle’s – I’d be embarrassed if I was the victim of a hoax, but luckily for me it’s only a fraud.
“…in between having a go at me for pulling a hoax.”
Oh FFS, Helen, enough. You weren’t a hoaxer, you were an honest youthful literary chancer whose circumstantial opportunism and fantastist chutzpah got a little out of her control. If it makes you feel better – and relevant every time one of these tedious things pops up – to rewrite history as if you were knowingly and cunningly duping the ethno-huggin’, PC Lit Crowd wankers all along, then go for your life. But it’s bulldust, as you know, and I’ll call it every time as such, because it is a lousy and ungenerous retro back-hander to the (many) ‘Lit Crowd wankers’ who did support and side with you at that time. Myself included in my own small and obscure way. Because the ‘Lit Crowd wankers’ are no such thing, generally: they’re underpaid, overworked lovers of the literate life who give wpould-be writers like us some faint outside chance of doing what we love for an actualliving (same goes for Quadrant editors, whatever their politics), who are up against it enough in this joint already without copping unfair contrived abuse and underminings from the likes of you (or any would-be writer). By and large they weren’t the cause of your woes, so stop punishing them still by pretending you duped them for reasons more noble than the usual (and more than most excellently justifiable) writerly desperations and ambitions.
Look, I’ve never read THTSTP, but crap or genius, I thought you were treated appallingly. I can’t begin to think what it must have felt like to pull off a critical hit then have the rules bent on you like that to kill your writing career. I admire enormously your capacity for getting on with your life and your academic achievements since and I hope you haven’t finished with fiction forever. You’re clearly an interesting and intelligent person and an elegant writer. When you’re not threatening defamation or flapping your libertarian credentials about like a self-affirmation flag, you can also be very funny.
But THTSTP wasn’t a ‘hoax’. It was something more interesting and much more understandably human. Be content with that.
GB at #150: Keith Windschuttle was never a Trot or a Maoist. He was worse: a card-carrying political economist.
He’s not neoconservative, either, I wouldn’t think. Nothing “neo” about it.
…
“Not a good look for Crikey”: skirting the line of propriety’s rather the point of Crikey, isn’t it? This is the same site that used to publish Christian Kerr as “Hillary Bray”, remember.
Jack Robertson says: “But the way you respond to cheap-shot ‘Gotcha! tosh of the kind everyone who cares pinged as Windshuttle’s game years ago is not by resorting to it yourself. If this ‘Sharon’ has a problem with the ideological direction being taken by Keef’s Quadrant, why not pitch him a straight article taking the fight up to it honestly?”
Jack, is that a serious question?
Like some others I have been waiting for W to come up with Vol 2, but not with much hope that it would ever appear. The reason is that I knew that W would not be able to meet even his own rather weird and selective tests for denying massacres in particular, and Indigenous history in general. Being much later in time, this history is much better documented. No ducking and weaving there.
Someone above has made the point that W had ‘hoaxed the conservatives’.
Not so. He merely whistled and danced to their tunes. The Howard Government used W’s ‘academic cred’ to help justify one of the most destructive decades in any Federal Government’s treatment of Indigenous policy.
I feel sorry for W. like he feels sorry for the destructive policies he helped justify.
Dear mr windschuttle,my father mobuto sese seke who passed away some time ago has a sum of $23,540,000 in the bank of nigeria in lagos.
I need a partner in the west to help me access this money,please provide me with all your bank account details and you will receive half the money.
This is not a hoax.
Oh yes, Jack. But I’m enough of a libertarian to not care about the fact that I made money. I have no concern with making money. If it’s any consolation, I made rather less money than I’d have made if I’d turned the same talent to derivatives or bond trading.
As you’ve probably guessed, I’m a firm follower of the P.T Barnum school of entertainment: there’s a sucker born every minute.
However, WG’s issue was with the hoaxing, which is why I addressed that matter only. And her hating on hoaxers, coupled with her hatred of me, suggests a hypocrite if nothing else.
Re the fraud perpetrated on Keith Windschuttle and Quadrant here’s my assessment, to counter the perfervid lefty analysis of Margaret Simons and the Crikey gang.
1. Looking at the fraudulent article it looks to me like the fraudster went to a lot of trouble to confect this bonbon. So I’m not sure if many editors of journals would have checked every citation to uncover the lie buried deep within. Would the ABC? Would Crikey with its myriad suspect contributors spouting their partial points of view? Did the climate change errors perpetrated by Hanson get checked before publication such as the recent temperature fraud/error re Russian temperatures, late in 2008?
2. Here Simons/Crikey et al are gloating over a fraud perpetrated against a target and taking the sides of the fraudster. Is Simons a supporter of Norma Khoury, Helen Demidenko’s fictional perpetration, or perhaps of Bernard Madoff or the Project Wickenby tax avoiders who falsify their records to evade tax? Is Simons a supporter of crimes generally or only against “people not like us.”
3. The ethics of this stinks from a journalistic sense also. Would a journalist with knowing of an upcoming murder, or a Bernard Madoff scam, or Bilal Skaf’s plans that day in Sydney, wait until it’s done to respect the source? Would Simon s hold back an expose of Tony Mokbel or HIH or Skase to enjoy it being perpetrated?
4. I think that Windschuttle should take comfort from this. After all he exposed the scientific frauds perpetrated by various famous historians in the aboriginal genocide fraud. This should if anything confirm his desire to expose fraud and confirm that we are all disadvantaged by fraud. It should also teach him to have a science editor to head off such frauds.
5. Re the reports of Robert Manne laughing about this, nothing would surpriser me from that bilious hating quarter.
So, Simons and Crikey, sit down and think about the larger issues involved before you get moist and hot about the pleasure you’ve just had watching an assisting in an unethical act.
“After all he exposed the scientific frauds perpetrated by various famous historians in the aboriginal genocide fraud.”
Just an aside, ‘ange’: historians aren’t scientists, even though there are aspects of history that are similar, and I don’t believe any of the serious ones claim to be. And as far as I know, none of those targetted by Windschuttle’s critique have attempted to make scientific claims. It seems you’re conflating separate but related points (although, FWIW, I can see how the hoaxer has led you there, which is another issue).
Fraud is a criminal act, Ange.
Do you intend to make a formal complaint against the persons you named?
If you don’t, you too are complicit in this perceived crime and you have revealed yourself as a moral coward.
#181 awesome.
Liam, I’m not sure if Windschuttle considered himself a Trot or a Maoist, but he was definitely out on the far left when he was a “political economist” (not an economist, note – in fact he got into a celebrated stoush with the economists over at Sydney Uni, who did not at all like his chosen title). He’s the classic convert, seeking the same comforts in the bigotry of his new religion as he sought from his old one. Hence the need to burn heretics and unbelievers.
Economists as a group suffer enough for their own manifold sins without having that turkey considered a member of their priesthood.
Yes, precisely, DD; his faith was in his academic discipline rather than in organising discussion groups to talk about the Fourth International or the Selected Quotations. You’ve put it better than I did.
And I know just enough about the political economy battles at USYD in the 1970s with Stilwell et al. to know that Windschuttle hasn’t changed *some* of his attitudes at all.
…
I’m at work, forced to use IE6 (spit), and the comment numbering doesn’t appear. Would someone point out comment #181 to which Laura’s referring?
The thing I can get past: Windy didnt even google the author.
In my mind, that makes him more than prey to own ideological preconceptions – he’s a hapless slave to them.
Good to the Culture War RSL up in arms. HAAAHAA!
dd, when Windsock was a Marxist in the 60s and 70s he was close, personally and politically, to Bob Gould, Hall Greenland and Sylvia Hale, who were trotskyists at the time (Bob Gould still is, Sylvia Hale isn’t and is now a Greens MLC in NSW, not sure about Hall Greenland. Gould and Greenland reportedly remain on friendly personal terms with Windsock despite the yawning political chasm between them these days.
Liam, Comment #181 is a Bank of Nigeria in Lagos email addressed ‘Dear Mr Windschuttle’.
He might have; the author set up ‘her’ own legitimate-looking website, apparently. Or perhaps he just doesn’t know how.
Cheers PC. That was pretty cute.
Paul, if Bob Gould remains a Trotskyist, it’s only in the sense of temperament. He’s been a Labor Party member for ages (disclaimer: shared a branch with him before I moved house).
I’m enjoying the ant’s nest over at certain blogs over this. Im sure Sharon Gould would be too!
You know, if Windbag had written a piece called “the occasional sloppiness in footnotes of Australian history” id almost feel for him.
But he didnt – he accused academics who did patient work over years of “fabricating” their claims.
He’s a vicious little character, without much of a sense of professionalism and I have delighted in his comeuppance, whch is thoroughly deserved and overdue.
Above all the Gould hoax shows him for what he is: a sad little ideologue who has no interest in academic rigour until he disagrees with an authour – and who will accuse his opponents of fraud rather than honestly engage them in debate.
But oh, he’ll publish without *the slightest scrutiny* if a piece flatter his view and agenda.
Well done Sharon, whoever you are.
ange, I’ve never thought of Manne as a bilious hater (although I’ll concede he doesn’t much care for Windschuttle). Could you justify this claim?
The online Australian appears to have outed Katherine Wilson as the hoaxer whilst taking credit for it too. mmmmm
I’m a wee late to this, but thank you Jack Robertson for your posts. I particularly like that you don’t post a 1 or 2 liner that apparently is amazing wit to the author and possibly others but is mostly lost on me. Nor do I have to hit dictionaries, urban or otherwise in order to decipher.
In fact, your posts only require one read – I mean that as praise – other posts require a dozen reads in an attempt for me to work out what’s going on. Love the flair as well.
If I was more gifted with a command of the language, I would attempt to ease you into considering posting more often here, and/or possibly even reactivating your blog I saw so briefly after discovering this internet blog hoot-roar early 2008. (Please assume I am so blessed, and that I just did what I just said).
Katherine Wilson has outed herself, if you arent already aware: http://www.crikey.com.au/Media-Arts-and-Sports/20090108-Outing-Sharon-Gould-Crikey-reveals-.html
As a close relative of hers (in-law), I can assure you all that the story about her extremely advanced state of pregnancy is 100% true.
She therefore may cease participating in any follow-up debate at any moment, at a time outside her control or choosing.
Update: Katherine Wilson has been revealed to be the hoaxer, and Margaret Simons examines the sequence of events, with something of a focus on the journos v. bloggers angle.
I’m not sure it’s accurate to say that she outed herself, Lefty E. It seems much more the case that she was unwillingly outed by others. Indeed, Margaret Simons is now busily re-framing the outing process as some sort of blogosphere vs. MSM investigatory contest over which she was apparently adjudicating and awarding points. Bizarre………
Well, she released Simons from their confidentiality agreement this morning, Geoff.
So Margaret Simons reveals that she has always known the identity of the hoaxer. In passing, she brags that journalists beat bloggers to the discovery of the hoaxer’s identity.
So what? It looks like bloggers were far more interested in the significance of this event in understanding the status of Keith Windschuttle who is (god help us) one of Australia’s most prominent public intellectuals, than in indulging in celebrity spotting.
It seems that some journalists found “Sharon Gould” on an Age blog linking to an article on GMO written by Katherine Wilson. These journalists hypothesised, correctly as it turned out, that the coincidence was too strong. To make it plain, Katherine Wilson invented the persona “Sharon Gould” to link to her (Katherine Wilson’s GMO article.
There’s nothing wrong with a bit of creative self-promotion.
However, one wonder about the sincerity of the following email sent to Margaret Simon by Katherine Wilson:
Did Katherine Wilson really think that someone (even journalists) wouldn’t google up “Sharon Gould” and put 2 and 2 together?
Here’s what you get when you Google “Sharon Gould” and GMO:
Perhaps Katherine Wilson should have signed herself “Sharon Stone” instead.
@200 Geoff, I pretty much agree with that. I don’t think Simons’ frame makes a lot of sense in this context, and I’ve said why at her blog in this comment – which is currently in a moderation queue:
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/contentmakers/2009/01/08/who-killed-sharon-gould/#comment-199
I also think the ethics of the hoax are at best questionable – as I commented above before we knew the identity of the hoaxer, there’s an element of bad faith in any such submission – that’s the case wrt Sokal and that’s the case wrt Wilson. I’m also – like a number of people on this thread – a bit puzzled as to why the GM angle made sense for the purpose of exposing Windschuttle. GM stuff is hardly a left/right dispute, and I don’t think the selection of this topic worked to expose Windschuttle’s ideological biases – the stated intention. As people have said, submitting something on climate change would have been more to the point.
If Wilson didn’t want to be identified, the GM stuff was also poorly chosen in that it’s a big clue to her identity.
Well, well – I used to like weathergirl.
Sure Katz, and Mark, those points are worth discussing.
I just want to say: I’m not going to get involved in her defence in any capacity other than a commentator (my associations are disclosed above), and I certainly wont take anything said personally, so feel free to let the debate roll.
I only say this so people wont hold back because Im a regular here, or something. Not that you would! But it may be worth saying clearly anyway.
That said, I’ll make just one point: Katherine has a lot of research expertise on GMO issues. She isnt especially well-versed on climate change issues; or not more so than anyone else around. So, its neither here nor there as to what might have been a ‘better hoax’. Some comments to that effect seem to imagine that one can convincingly hoax on any given issue. Of course, when you think about it, that’s not actually so, fo any given individual.
Aside from that, Im sure Katherine will say whatever it is she wants to about this, in due course.
But, Lefty E, isn’t the point of exposing Quadrant’s discussion of science to produce an ill-informed ideological rant? I’d have thought a lack of expertise on climate change would be just the thing!
I also think she’s exposed herself to a significant backlash – Windy’s theme about “fraudulent journalism” might be nonsense, but he understands how to play the PR game and he fights dirty. I worry that she is going to end up quite damaged professionally by this, and while she and I have had significant differences, I certainly don’t want to see any harm come to her.
That takes me back to the questions I’ve been posing – isn’t it better – ethically and for one’s own self interest – to eschew this sort of method of proceeding?
Dave McCrae @#197, thanks ever so much. Priceless encouragement, greatly appreciated. (That collective n-o-o-o-o-o-o-o you can hear is, OTOH, the sound of a 1000 long-suffering LeProdders aghast…) Cheers.
Col Billabong @ #180:
“…why not pitch him a straight article taking the fight up to it honestly?”
Jack, is that a serious question?
Yup. Like I said, I prefer to play the straight man. Look at the fucking mess that’s developing, sir. Now we find out that Lefty E’s comments on this thread were…ahem…
moreless than they seemed. Great – eff you very much, Lefty, @ #7, 61, 68, 76, 78, 82, 97, 99, 100, 102, 124, 171, 190…next time you’re going to run inside tag on a graft let me know and I’ll politely avoid conversing with you. Unlike ‘Sceptic’lawyer I don’t see readers in terms of their potential sucker-dom and feel stitched up when others clearly do. Unless it’s honest fiction they’re plonkin’ before me, in which case I crave credible suspension of disbelief more than most and will add my own readerly oomph to the con with gusto and great hope. Honestly, Lefty: a bit rum to go panto on your hosts like that…Meanwhile, Colonel, look over at Crikey, where Margaret S is fast making a mealy-mouth meal of propping up the works with caveats, modifiers, ah-buts, safety nets, hey-listens..all the usual ‘just doin’ my job’ crap that makes so much contemporary journalism such an epistemological hustle. It’s a real shame, this: weathergirl as a blogger I liked a lot, because she was frank and up-front and eschewed cheap games. And Simon’s straight-up-and-down ‘Content Makers’ I admired enormously, precisely because she too played it straight, taking the points she wanted to make right to the dragon’s lair: no games, no insinuations, no passive voice tippy-toeing around Meeja Names, no clever-clogs ironic winking and nodding…she stared down the specific things in current journalism that troubled her. Pulled the game apart, and its Big Dicks, without either flinching or being gratuitously nasty for the sake of shifting units. She used concrete language, direct sentences, hard verbs, clean voice. And she said what she thought, loud and clear and in print, without irony. (God, does the world of non-fiction writing need less irony. Most mistake either sarcasm or equivocation for it anyway.)
That’s all any writer – of non-fiction – can do, Billa. And if the ‘other guy’ doesn’t ‘play fair’ – if he won’t publish you (when you maybe deserve it), or twists your words, or loads debates…well, too bad. At least you’ve got the consolation of having tried honestly. Getting your views into the public domain via subterfuge is not getting your views into the public domain at all.
heh!
Well, thats it from me – I’m just a regular here, not a spokesperson on the issue. I might leave off this one for today, citing conflicts of interest. There may yet be more from the hoaxer herself on all this.
Or maybe not!
Actually, Lefty Elitist, just having re-read #198, it’s not clear that you were aware your sis-in-law was the hoaxer until now, either…so my humble apologies if I jumped to a lousy conclusion there, dude.
Aaaargh! I hate ironic games…
Sure, I was talking it up Jack – mind you, thats because I like the hoax. I stand by each of those comments.
I had no role in it. I just knew who the hoaxer was throughout. So what? I dont think it’s about who it was.
But sure, apologises for non-disclosure, said the pseudonym.
Though Im not sure how knowing the author is relevant to my views on the hoax, expressed above.
Aside from that – what I said 2.04pm.
Mark (and others), while it’s correct (sort of) that a climate change hoax might have been better in many ways, the problem is that Quadrant has already descended to unconscious self-parody there anyway. Ms Wilson could have written something utterly outrageous and demonstrably false, and it would have been printed and defended to the death by Windschuttle, as well as being completely indistinguishable from the rubbish he already prints.
OK, maybe so, Lefty. Take you at face value, eff knows why. I guess the hoax was done and dusted when you jumped on board.
Still just feels a bit…squiffy to me, but. Especially since you now say you’re bowing out for a bit on…conflict on interest grounds.
David @ 218 – maybe so, but I’m still not really getting how the GM issue demonstrates Windschuttle’s ideological blinkers.
Update: I’m having a bit of a debate at Simons’ blog Content Makers with her on some of the inferences she’s drawn about blogging and journalism from all this.
The hoax was done and dusted by the time I learned of it Jack. Which was only a few days before everyone else.
But I did know throughout this entire thread who the hoaxer was, yes. I accept responsibility for whatever squiffiness that embroils me in.
But for now – no, Im just a tad worried I cramping the thread’s style by being the rellie of someone people may want to support, or criticise. Thats why I off till tomorrow.
And… I only returned to explain that!
Exactly, Mark. Just because someone is capable of hoaxing a particular publication through mischievous use of their expertise doesn’t mean they ought to, or that in so doing they will reveal very much at all. If all you have is a hammer, perhaps you should put it down and find somebody with a screwdriver, rather than just going ahead and hammering in the screw. (I’m not sure if that’s as elegantly expressed as it could be, but the image of the hammered screw fits for a number of reasons).
klaus k, OT I know, but there’s a wonderful computer programmer’s award for the ugliest (self-disclosed) hack of the year. It is a sculpture of a hand holding an adjustable spanner, and using it to pound a screw into a block of wood.
“isn’t the point of exposing Quadrant’s discussion of science to produce an ill-informed ideological rant?”
But was it really about making a point about Quadrant’s discussion of science or even, as Andrew Norton claimed, GMOs?
Quadrant’s crusade is usually against ‘political correctness’ and it claims that government policy is too distorted by such a political correctness which is promulgated by the Left for whatever nefarious ideological purpose: see for instance the guff on ‘white guilt’ that someone drew attention to earlier in this thread.
The most strident and public campaigners against GMO have come from groups like Friends of the Earth (including Wilson herself). So Windschuttle gets a piece that argues that perfectly good, defensible research in a government instrumentality is scuppered largely because of political correctness and the hegemony of the crazy, activist, greeny, bleeding heart Left triumphs again! What could better fit with his worldview?
So he sends it into print, without bothering to check its accuracy on this fundamental point (that is, the scuppering of the research due to political correctness; not the research itself). And how could he have checked its accuracy on this point? By simply doing what he accuses academic historians of failing to do: checking the footnotes.
His modus operandi has been to say that certain academic historians are deliberately loose with things like footnotes and sources when it comes to pushing an ideological line that they’re partial to. Kath’s hoax simply exposes the possibility that such a critique could be levelled at Winschuttle himself.
Cool, Lefty – best wishes to your sis-in-law, by the way, hope all goes well with the next project!
klaus @ 217 – yep, I agree. I’d also note that the mode of proceeding (hoaxing, followed by inevitable disclosure of identity) assists Windy in turning the story around and taking the focus off himself. And that was always going to be the case. Reading Simons’ posts, it seems as if Wilson thought that “Sharon Gould” would remain robust as a pseudonym, but I’m inclined to agree with Simons that this was never on the cards. But the way the story has developed has led to it being more about Katherine Wilson than Keith Windschuttle. I can’t see how that helps either her or the point she was trying to make.
Lol, David @ 218. I love it! I was going to say something high-minded and clever-sounding about ‘iconoclash’, but that award has nailed it (or should that be ‘screwed’?)
His modus operandi has been to say that certain academic historians are deliberately loose with things like footnotes and sources when it comes to pushing an ideological line that they’re partial to. Kath’s hoax simply exposes the possibility that such a critique could be levelled at Winschuttle himself.
That’s it, nailed it (with the proper hammer), the long and the short of it, in a nutshell, and any other cliches I can muster.
But Helen, hasn’t such a critique already been levelled at Windy many, many times already? And furthermore, does sucha critique actually address Windy’s claims at all?
Anthony @ 219 – thanks for that – that’s the best explanation of the point of picking the GM stuff I’ve seen. Having said that, I wonder whether it translates that well into the digestible soundbites this story was always going to end up morphing into as soon as it hit the MSM and Windy fought back.
I still think ethically and personally, this may not have been a good move by Wilson.
And I also continue to argue that posing a critique of Windschuttle in a positive and upfront fashion is a better mode of proceeding, rather than through hoaxing. Having said that, it’s been done a hundred million times before, and wouldn’t attract publicity. But that too can be a double edged sword. Who really cares about Quadrant these days – before all this?
Well this blogger vs MSM angle dug up by Margaret is a bit childish. I actually had my suspicions on the identity on Tuesday (of course I can’t prove that now but never mind) but couldn’t be bothered confirming my hypothesis till yesterday and as is apparent thought it so unimportant that I didn’t even bother to write a blogpost on it and simply posted my theory as a comment on an Open Forum. Also again she fails to differentiate between bloggers and commenters. Actually so blase was I about this that I speculated in my capacity as a commenter, ironically.
No, the hoax reveals that Windy was nothing more than negligently loose with things like footnotes and sources.
That’s good enough for a run of the mill hoax. A really great hoax would have been to persuade Windy to be deliberately loose with things like footnotes and sources.
Such a hoax would have been admirable.
From her blogpost which you addressed, Mark
Journalists are still of some use, after all. It’s the slowness of the medium that holds them back
Heh heh, and I could just as accurately say it’s the fact that we non-journo bloggers have other jobs which don’t relate to finding scoops that the ‘fastness’ of our medium may be negated by time constraints in posting about the latest soap operas afflicting traditional media like Quadrant
@224
Yes but there is a difference between “levelling a critque” and confronting the accuser with hard evidence. I reckon the point was made on the first day; first the the revelation that the hoax had worked and then Windy’s pathethic riposte. I mean how can he claim any cred after an explaination like that goes on the public record. It will make his “Fabrication” whack a mole mallet look like a limp piece of asparagus.
BTW @219, excellent.
I’ve got a book that Windschuttle wrote about unemployment when he was on the Left. I only ever skimmed it, but I think the gist of it was that unemployment would only be solved with the creation of socialism. There’s nothing like a convert.
But on the point I made earlier, why does Quadrant continue to outstay its welcome? Small literary-political journals usually have a some urgent thing they’re fighting against. For instance, Partisan Review once had much the same purpose as Quadrant: anti-Stalinism. But Partisan Review folded not long after communism fell, its work done. So why does Quadrant stagger on? It’s hard to argue that in 2009 political correctness is out of control, or that radical leftists are seriously influencing our economic, environmental or foreign policies. Where’s the dragon to slay?
Isn’t it time that the Australia Council or whoever keeps Quadrant afloat finally put it out of its misery?
Reading all these responses tells me that Windschuttle is regarded as a lightweight except for his unforgivable ability to get up numerous noses. A contradiction here?
Some – possibly lots – of the material in Quadrant wouldn’t fall into the classification ‘literary-political’, GB. It’s true that it was traditionally an anti-communist magazine, but now the interest it holds seems to be much more ‘literary’ than ‘political’ – hence the preference given to regular writers like Peter Ryan, Frank Devine, etc, who will more often than not choose to focus on subjects of general interest, not current political affairs.
I don’t know if the money Quadrant receives from the Government is that much. By the standards of Australian literary magazines its probably the most independent, since all other major ones (Meanjin, Southerly, Overland) operate through the English department of a university.
Ha! I managed to get my hand on a copy – the one and only copy in the Highpoint (Maribyrnong) downstairs newsagency. How disappointing – deep in Aspirational Godzone territory and noone wanted it except one latte-sipping chardonnay-quaffing greenie pinko like me. Windy might even be able to afford some better-looking specs from the sales spike from this issue. I’d be tempted to think he was the hoaxer himself if she hadn’t been outed already.
Be sure to check out the poetry Helen, I notice there were some pieces in there by John Whitworth, who’s always good value. IMO Quadrant is the number one Australian poetry magazine. I’m going to probably buy a copy tomorrow.
Tim T, the few recent issues of Quadders I’ve looked through – not, as it happens, acquired as per Helen from Knifepoint (Maribyrnong) – reveal it still as a very political magazine. An interesting contrast would be Arena Magazine which has survived in one form or another for around 40 years without either government subsidy or institutional support. Perhaps ten years ago I would have compared Quadders with its soft-liberal rival Eureka Street and pointed out that both got by on the subsidy and institutional subscriptions of vast, wealthy, multinational organisations: BHP in the former case, and the Jesuits in the latter
In Gould’s article/fraud, what were the outrageous propositions? That the public and politicians aren’t always up on the science? That their perceptions and ethics shouldn’t affect public policy? That the media are more interested in power than scientific truth?
The fraud proved/showed nothing, apart from left-wingers are childish and pathetic. And Crikey editors love their little pranks.
To suggest Windschuttle was Sokaled is ridiculous, if you read Sokal’s article. One of the things Sokal argued was that pi was a male construct which was probably wrong. Sokal’s article was clever, witty, intelligent, biting. Golud/Wilson is just … nothing.
Mark suggests that no-one cares about ‘Quadrant’ any way in post 225. Gould/Wilson does. Mark may not care .. but who cares what he cares about?
Now the Wikipedia article on Sokal’s hoax mentions Windschuttle and the outrageous proposotions in Wilson’s fraud (It is not worthy of being called a hoax).
OK, I challenge you left-wingers who bepseckle and besot crikey.com: what were the outrageous propisitions?
That should be: propositions
Meanjin recently became an imprint of Melbourne University Publishing and before that was independent, though for a while associated with Melb U’s Australian Centre. The English department tried and failed to take it over about 15 or 20 years ago; it has never been associated with the magazine.
Well, they’ve certainly got Les. But I would be intrigued to hear, TimT, what other magazines you’re comparing it with. What would you rate as numbers 2, 3 and so on?
Well, Id probably go Angry Penguins next
“…we non-journo bloggers have other jobs which don’t relate to finding scoops that the ‘fastness’ of our medium may be negated by time constraints in posting about the latest soap operas afflicting traditional media like Quadrant”
Yes, good point. The moment the story broke, MSM journos were being told to drop everything else and handed cab vouchers and photographers. While the local blogosphere just googled away in their spare time driven by their corporate history knowledge of the milieu. And got there at about the same time if not sooner.
And did I not say this would be the most fun the Ausblogistan has had in a while?
Also, John Cleland stop fannying around trying to turn your molehill of a point into a mountain of Venus.
And I join with others in pointing to comment 219. Why didn’t weatherwilson make that point that clearly? Then she wouldn’t have looked so much like someone with an inflatable hammer taking on a loose screew.
“IMO Quadrant is the number one Australian poetry magazine.”
So what exactly is number one Australian poetry these days? I’m kinda outa touch here.
And speaking of poetry – Haiku scrum down!
The silly season
Genetically modified
Seedy footnotes sprout
Look! Look! LOOK! LOOK! LOOK!
Keef’s right-windy; Quaddy’s crook
Other news: cooks cook
Re the Fitzroy organic veggie farmer PhD fraud perpetrated on Keith Windschuttle and Quadrant
1. Looking at the fraudulent article the fraudster went to a lot of trouble to confect this bonbon. So I’m not sure if many editors of journals would have checked every citation to uncover the lie buried deep within. Would the ABC? Would Crikey with its myriad suspect contributors spouting their partial points of view? Did the climate change errors perpetrated by Hanson get checked before publication such as the recent temperature fraud/error re Russian temperatures, late in 2008?
2. The left commentariat are gloating over a fraud perpetrated against a target and taking the sides of the fraudster. Do the commentariat support Norma Khoury, Helen Demidenko’s fictional perpetration, or perhaps Bernard Madoff or the Project Wickenby tax avoiders who falsify their records to evade tax? Are Crikey/Simons supporters of crimes generally or only against “people not like us.”
3. The ethics of this by Crikey/Simons stinks from a journalistic sense also. Would a journalist with knowing of an upcoming murder, or a Bernard Madoff scam, or Bilal Skaf’s plans that day in Sydney, wait until it’s done to respect the source? Would Simons hold back an expose of Tony Mokbel or HIH or Skase to enjoy it being perpetrated?
4. Windschuttle should take comfort. After all he exposed the scientific frauds perpetrated by various famous historians in the aboriginal genocide fraud. This should if anything confirm his desire to expose fraud and confirm that we are all disadvantaged by fraud. Unquestionably, however, it should also teach him to have a science editor to check identities on contributors to reduce fraud risk. It won’t eliminate fraud or rubbish content but it will reduce the outright identity fraud.
I’m pleased that the reporting on the outing of this fraud on January 9 is more balanced, even that of the Spencer Street Soviet of The Age. I think that there’s a recognition that the fraud by the Fitzroy organic veggie farmer PhD raises many ethical issues (and how appropriate that such a person should figure centrally in a Crikey story – Fitzroy thinking for a Fitzroy crowd).
What are the takeaways:
1. Windschuttle and we all need to recognise that every writer is a potential fraudster liar and deceiver, not just history professors like Lyndall Ryan and Stuart Macintyre (why, even Robin Williams of the ABC with the notorious ‘global warming will cause the seas to rise 100 metres’ fraud might cause the ABC to check its facts or the veracity of its content makers)
2. Windschuttle should do a stronger identity checking on his Quadrant contributors in the future.
3. Margaret Simons and Crikey should consider their journalistic ethics, or else we’ll all let them shill for crooks conmen and fraudsters. Margaret Simons who writes in a blog pretentiously called the Content Makers, sort of a Crikey media Watch, should think long and hard about her role and her moral position in this.
Yes, because upcoming hoax on a magazine read by a small subsection of disaffected conservatives / upcoming murder = exactly the same.
To make one comment, Mr
WorthingAnge, like #184, may be regarded as a misfortune; to make two by copying and pasting the original one (#248), looks like carelessness.I was thinking about Quadrant in comparison to Southerly, Meanjin and Overland, PC… I think they’re the main poetry publishers in Oz now? Other examples would be the small publishers (Geoff Lemon’s recent addition to the market, Harvest, for instance) and those mainstream media sources like The Oz and The Age which sometimes have a poem in their Saturday arts pages… but don’t run poetry often enough for it to have a style. (The MSM, when they do publish poetry, seem to be mainly interested in getting credit for publishing it in the first place, and for supporting ‘Important’ Australian authors – ie, those few poets who have made a big name for themselves.)
Quadrant’s poetry has always struck me as being the most readable and interesting of the lot… they strike a good balance, in my opinion, between populism/entertainment and high-culture, and from my reading of them I’ve become acquainted with a number of interesting poets – apart from Les Murray himself, of course, ie -
Andrew Landsdown
John Whitworth
Geoff Page
Jamie Grant
- and a number of others whose name escapes me.
I’ve definitely read most deeply in Quadrant and am not really able to talk deeply about Southerly, Overland, Meanjin, etc. But one of the reasons I started reading it in the first place was the appeal of the poetry.
Thanks for the info about Meanjin, clearly I’m not up to date on who owns what, when.
Best wishes to Katherine Wilson with her delivery. NFM
Are the comments about Australian historians in Ang-e @ 248 defamatory?
Just idiotic, I’m afraid, Paul.
Maybe an_ge is a hoax.
John Cleland, you ask “…what were the outrageous propisitions [sic]?”…or was that “proposotions”?
First, the Right is always blaming the Left for a lack of rigour and for the erosion of standards in scholarship and education (apparently that doesn’t extend to spelling).
The other thing that makes this prank good is that it skewers one of the Right’s favourite contentions – that greenies wield enormous power. How many columns has Miranda Devine written accusing greenies of stopping hazard reduction burns? The real reasons preventing HR burns are often prosaic and have nothing to do with environmentalists (who more often than not actually support HR burns). But facts wouldn’t stop the Right.
Ron Collins: there’s no contradiction. Windschuttle may be a ightweight, but he is a lightweight with influence. He was appointed to the the ABC board, after all – for no other reason than that we had a vindictive PM who took every opportunity to knee the Left in the groin (how’s that for childish and pathetic, John Cleland?).
Laura @ 253 – seconded.
TimT: what, no Jan Owen? Pam Brown? Alison Croggon? (Not that Quadrant would touch the last two, or they it.) To say nothing of les grandes dames Rosemary Dobson and Fay Zwicky.
Not that I’m making a point or anything.
If you look at Quadrant’s home page you will see that almost every single item featured there has been conceived and written through the lens of left-hatin’. Left-hatin’ of a particularly simplistic and bilious kind seems these days, indeed, to be its chief raison d’être. I am astounded that you seem unable to see this; it was only when I actually went to their home page when I realised how bad — and how ludicrous — it had become. The work of the page-dominating Michael Connor in particular appears to me to be half crazed. (And fully crappy.)
Nabs, the poetry pooh-bah has got to still be Les Murray (Quadrant’s poetry editor and by far the best thing about it in spite of his odd politics), regarded internationally (if not here, where choppy cross-currents of ideology and intramural envy prevent it) as one of the two or three best living poets in English. Or at all. Random book-opening:
And it was such an open house:
You stepped from the kitchen table’s
cards and beer, or a meal of ingredients
in the old unmixed style, straight
off lino into the gaze of cattle
and sentimental dogs, and beloved
tall horses, never bet on. This was
a Turf house: that is, it bet on men.
Men sincere and dressy as detectives
who could make Time itself run dead.
Lots of other literary mags seem to be pretty virulently anti-right-wing, though. It’s the nature of Australian literary culture, it seems; probably has been that way since the times of the squatters vs. the miners. Thankfully there seems to be very little of this right-left split/battle in the poetry itself.
I have noticed Jan Owen’s poems, have never noticed Fay Zwicky’s work. I’m not sure if Rosemary Dobson has a significant history with the magazine, I’d always associated it more with A D Hope and, of course, McCauley.
I’ve seen Jennifer Maiden’s work in there frequently. And it was also from Quadrant that I first learned about Mary Gilmore, and I still would like to read much more of hers.
I haven’t read it lately, but I don’t think Windschuttle will have toyed much with the verse editing. Can’t vouch for the rest of the magazine post Windschuttle editorship, I certainly don’t think he was the right choice for editor. Under McGuinness, at least, they would publish occasional pieces by prominent centre-left figures. Latham got published by them – also Bill Hayden.
Sorry, TimT, should’ve made the point more clearly, which was that Quadrant is a bastion of masculinity. Few women would submit poems to it in the first instance. It’s a bit like the all-male blogs, chickens and eggs and so on. Create an environment hostile or repellent to women, and, astonishingly, women will stay away in droves. Also, most women writers, indeed most writers, are to the left of centre. And there’s a reason for this.
Yeah, funny that. Perhaps it’s because so much right-wing rhetoric is so virulently anti-literature, anti-arts and anti-intellectual. Just a hunch.
Besides, I’m not sure that ‘Oh but the Left is worse’ is a helpful response here. You argued at 233 that Quadrant was more ‘literary’ than ‘political’ and I was responding to that by saying TimT, you’re dreamin’.
Tim T wrote at 233:
“By the standards of Australian literary magazines its probably the most independent, since all other major ones (Meanjin, Southerly, Overland) operate through the English department of a university.”
For what it’s worth, Overland doesn’t operate through the English department of a university. It is housed in a Victoria University building but that’s all. But we’re open to offers …:-)
What I would argue, going into that final point in more detail, is that although Quadrant does have politics, it is not primarily a political magazine. I’ve noticed quite a few examples of non-political writing in there over time – be they poems, or personal reflections, or memoirs, or just general essays. The magazine does return to certain political points and views, yes, but generally speaking if I wanted to read a political magazine I would go to other magazines. I go to Quadrant for matters of literary interest. I treat the other magazines I mentioned in the same way. It’s a distinction that works, for me at least.
Also, most women writers, indeed most writers, are to the left of centre. And there’s a reason for this.
Indeed, it’s the unspoken assumption on the part of just about every other writer/person interested in the arts that I encounter that if I am interested in the arts I will be left-wing that has helped to push me to the right.
All I can say is, go to that linked home page and have a detached look at what’s on it. Or go to the Quadrant Manifesto and read the dot points; would you seriously argue that there’s anything here that’s ‘not political’?
But you’re making no distinction between politics and ideology. What is your definition of political? Writing — language — is a carrier of ideology by definition, whether it’s overtly ‘political’ or not. All statements come from a point of view, articulated or not. Even just choices to talk or be silent are choices partly grounded in world view and the ideologies thereof.
But that doesn’t make Quadrant a literary magazine. You’re confusing your own motivations with what’s actually in the magazine. I mainly go to The Weekend Australian so I can read Mystic Medusa, but that doesn’t mean I think the Weekend Oz is about astrology.
… Oh, wait.
By the broad definition of politics, anything and everything is political. Yes. That’s true. “The personal is political”, if you like – that is true. But you could use the same argument about various other definitions as well. Take Blake’s definition that ‘everything is holy’, then obviously every publication, including this one, is religious. Or by the broad definition of economics, everything is economic – therefore Southerly is an economic publication. And so on and so forth – there are any number of categories that could be used here.
I don’t, however, think that the use of those broad categories are always particularly helpful in making finer distinctions between different publications.
If I really wanted a political magazine then I’d be going to something like – say – ‘Policy’, or ‘Foreign Affairs’. Quadrant is a good deal broader and more generalist in focus than those magazines.
Pav, I agree about Murray’s indisputable greatness but I strongly disagree that you can conveniently parse his poetry from his politics. It’s not so much that I think his political gripes – battily inconsistent (in the nicest way) though they be – make his poetry ‘better’. They don’t: the weakest stuff in a collection like ‘Subhuman Redneck Poems’ are manifestly those where he’s venting most specifically. But without his reactionary-contrarian politics to rub against his poetic sensibility, there’s no way he’d get close to reconciling so musically and originally the two most powerful creative impulses in white Australia, which are a) the yearning for the ancestral home(s) we all left, and the b) the hunger for the one we haven’t quite settled into yet.
I think the same case can be made for Quadrant in general: without its politics over the years, you wouldn’t get quite the same general literary tenor. It’s true that it’s gone feral of late, well past the point where contrary political church-farting gave its wider content oomph and juice and spruce and ‘voice’. But editorial phases come and go, and to me this hoax has the real feel of kicking yesterday’s boogie-man.
Let’s face it: if you really wanted to make a biting satirical point about Keith Windschuttle’s despicable influence over the cultural politics of the last decade, then it’d be Chris Mitchell at The Oz you’d be more honestly trying to hoax, wouldn’t it. That’s where the epistemological leverage really came from. So: any working Aussie journalists or would-be Aussie freelance writers up for it, then?
*crickets*
Good thing I never said you could, then, eh? In fact at #164 I am arguing the exact opposite.
I think you’re being a bit previous with your cricket noises. And some of us are just not hoax-minded; I for one find it ungenerous, as I said a long way up-thread. Besides, if you think it ought to be done, why don’t you do it yourself instead of sneering at other people for not?
TimT, if it makes you happy to believe that Quadrant is not a political magazine then God forbid I should try to make you unhappy.
I agree with Andrew Norton and others that the hoax could have been better. Not necessarily by confining itself to Climate Change, but by being about something Quadrant had campaigned on, as well as containing more outrageous errors of fact.
That said, I think it has a couple of benefits. The one is exposing Windshuttle’s hypocrisy, as has been well set out above.
The other is that from now on everything science related in Quadrant will be read through the lens of this event. Sure beforehand everyone who knew the first thing about Climate Change knew that Quadrant was party to deliberate fraud, but quite a few people still treated publication there as meaning something. From now on that will be a lot harder. Journalists will treat science related things there with more caution. Unless the standard rises even a modicum of caution will be all it takes to see them for the rubbish they are.
A more minor benefit is that when trolls link to Quadrant articles we won’t have to bother explaining why they are rubbish in detail, we can just say “can you provide something from a publication that checks its sources”
In Diary of a Hoax, Wilson writes:
(I nearly wrote how important that this [genetic engineered mosquitoes carring antimalarial antibodies] was with climate change, and the consequent rise in mosquito populations, but then I remembered, Quadrant, that you’ve long been a refuge for climate-change deniers.)
It’s a shame it didn’t occur to her to change that to a passage about how important this is given the shocking DDT ban started by teh evul Rachel Carson, a false meme which has been bandied about by the right wing for aeons (and which has been refuted over and over again, but which continues to rear its ugly head.)
“Good thing I never said you could, then, eh?”
OK, fine, not looking for a fight but if you want to prickle up and wave your default school-marm haughtiness at anyone with the temerity to Impugn Your Infallibility On Literary Matters…well, sorry, Doc – yes you did say that, unless you want to split hairs (tempted to say like Windy, but I won’t):
“Nabs, the poetry pooh-bah has got to still be Les Murray (Quadrant’s poetry editor and by far the best thing about it in spite of his odd politics).”.
Throw-away or not, that’s an explicit aesthetic sensibility that sees something inherently incongruous about Murray’s political views and his poetic output, or at least some kind of human discontinuity. You’re saying his poetry’s great, his politics ain’t. You’re allowed to have that view. You might be right. I think Murray’s politics are an inherent part of, and inherently expressed by, in, alongside, drive…his poeticism. I don’t think he could be ‘the best thing’ about Quadrant without his odd politics, and that he manifestly is should be cause to ask whether his politics are really ‘odd’ (batty, as I put it) at all, rather than inserting that (lazy? careless? shorthand? defensive?) prophylactic ‘in spite of’. You might as well say Dorothy Porter was great in spite of her feminism…it’s condescending and superior…this ‘cherry-picking’ the ‘good’ bits of an artist’s artistry…rife in Oz arts community…conservative artists suffer most…hoomph…spiral into critical mediocrity…harrumph…so, well…anyway, I think you DID say that, Pavlov’s Cat. So ix-nay on the Wordy Ice Glare From Teacher thanks, love. (Just talkin’ blog-thread tattics, Pavvers, I’ve noticed it’s one of your faves to subtly re-write your own drafts as stoushes progress like this…the No-No-You-Misunderstood-Me Progressive Shuffle…but anyway, I digress.)
*Pokes tongue*
So. Anyway. Apologies. You didn’t mean what I thought you meant. Sorry, PC, wrong end of the stick. OTOH…when somebody of inferior literary talent misunderstands what I write, why…I naturally prefer to sternly admonish myself for poor expression alone. I see it as a kind of Lit Noblesse Oblige, I suppose. Maybe it’s different for you successful working writers…
*pokes tongue again*
As for this hoax stuff, well, we’re of exactly the same mind. No. I don’t think anyone should hoax Chris Mitchell, either. But…sneering? You thought that was sneering? Harden up, Doc!
*runs away, not picking fight*
Spare me the ad fems, which are in any case bullshit. Of course you are looking for a fight, but you’re not going to get one from me.
I used to read Arena Magazine for the film reviews: the great tag team of Pavlov’s Cat and Christos Tsiolkas. Those were the days.
Further to Pav’s point about the political nature of Quadrant’s writers (259) and besides the truly puzzling writing of Michael Connor (is that the best they’ve got?) I see what must be Peter Ryan’s fiftieth abusive attack on Manning Clark since the early 1990s. Give it a rest man. How pitiful.
Jack R @ 270: Just how passive aggressive can you get?
Also, your interpretation of Dr Cat’s statement is only one of several that could be borne by that sentence. You say it’s explicit that she’s noting an incongruity. I don’t reckon it’s obviously so at all. All that is clear from that sentence is that Dr Cat doesn’t share his politics, but does appreciate the poetry. She’s not actually offering an explicit thesis on the relationship between the two. Hence her appreciation is ‘in spite of’. Your point is implicit in her aside, at best, not explicit as you suggest.
You really don’t like it when someone who’s obviously neither a fool nor a troll is cheerfully unimpressed with your more pompous lit world certitudes, do you, Kerryn.
You’re wrong about Quadrant and Murray and the political/literary mix there-in and if you were half as serious about and interested in Australian writing as you relentlessly pose here-abouts, you’d realize how stupid and small-minded the rubbish generalisations you started prattling from around #261 really are, If they were farted out by a ‘RWDB’ you’d rightly ice them into next week with your Pompous Gun.
“…that Quadrant is a bastion of masculinity. Few women would submit poems to it in the first instance. It’s a bit like the all-male blogs, chickens and eggs and so on. Create an environment hostile or repellent to women, and, astonishingly, women will stay away in droves. Also, most women writers, indeed most writers, are to the left of centre…”
Really? Maybe your circle of friends. Maybe among those who merely pose as writers. Maybe among writers that don’t include journalists, commercial writers, popular ones, kids’ writers, conservative writers…otherwise, what nonsense.
“Perhaps it’s because so much right-wing rhetoric is so virulently anti-literature, anti-arts and anti-intellectual.”
Again, maybe the stuff you choose to read. Selective reading, selective interpretation. Get out more, mate.
“…it was only when I actually went to their home page when I realised how bad — and how ludicrous — it had become.”
Only then, was it? Get yourself one of those t-shirts, too, then, PC. Really, you’re writing angry, and it’s making you look stupid. And passive-aggressive my arse, klaus. I really wasn’t picking a fight and they weren’t ad fems, they were slightly annoyed bristling-chidings in response to Kerryn’s not entirely a-typical up-herself airy dismissal of my very valid point that the real culprit in Windschuttle and Quadrant’s lousy influence over ten years was not them as such, but the MSM, especially The Oz.
But hey – mine on forfeit, Pav. Take ‘em any way I can get ‘em.
Good to see you back Jack. I love your work, as you know. And you well may have a point but who can see it through all the sexism? You forget to mention your “slightly annoyed bristling-chidings” were also loaded with gendered stereotypes.
She points to the sexism which prohibits women getting published in Quandrant and you
respond with what? Sexism. A dried up school teacher pursing her lips at you? Man its so lazy to to hit out using negative stereotypes which connote the opposite of what a woman should be in a patriarchal universe – fecund, youthful, stupid – which is what the well worn school marm outfit does. It points to female lack.
You should restate your point without it. Then maybe I could get to it without the school marm thing bloodying the water.
Hi Casey, thank you very much for the generous nod despite what you regard as the sexism. We all know how these little dirt-pissings tend to swing on the weight-of-blog-mood. I suspect I’ll need all the kind words I can get hereabouts.
Look, there is a fundamental disconnect in this sudden and stupid little flare-up that I’ve struggled with often during internet exchanges with intelligent bolshie women. I’ll try to articulate it in a sec. I think it’s highly apposite to the whole Quadrant hoax, and especially Windy’s editorship (which is explicitly shifting the Culture War into the arts realm), and the last score or so of posts focusing on Qaudrant’s art-politics mix, and Pav’s assumptions about art and lefties. I stand by my comments. Not sexist, Case, IMHO.
But for now I have to put my two-year-old to bed. Honest.
Okay Jack. I will be interested to read it!
Seriously, Jack, what exactly is your problem with Dr Cat? From where I’m sitting you’re coming out of nowhere and having a go at her with close to zero provocation, on this thread at least. Why don’t you start your own blog about how little you like her style, and then you and Greenfield can circle-jerk there until the cows come home.
“You really don’t like it when someone who’s obviously neither a fool nor a troll is cheerfully unimpressed with your more pompous lit world certitudes, do you, Kerryn.”
What about talking about the arguments instead of spraying us all with bile? Ignore my substantive challenge to your interpretation for some more ad hom – you clearly don’t want to be taken seriously, and you won’t be.
Bile, Klaus? Jesus.
Pavlov Cat at #259:
“If you look at Quadrant’s home page you will see that almost every single item featured there has been conceived and written through the lens of left-hatin’. Left-hatin’ of a particularly simplistic and bilious kind seems these days, indeed, to be its chief raison d’être. I am astounded that you seem unable to see this; it was only when I actually went to their home page when I realised how bad — and how ludicrous — it had become. The work of the page-dominating Michael Connor in particular appears to me to be half crazed. (And fully crappy.)”
Then this, po-faced and with her earnest Lit Crit hat on (you want passive-aggressive???):
“Nabs, the poetry pooh-bah has got to still be Les Murray (Quadrant’s poetry editor and by far the best thing about it in spite of his odd politics…”
Then: “Sorry, TimT, should’ve made the point more clearly, which was that Quadrant is a bastion of masculinity. Few women would submit poems to it in the first instance. It’s a bit like the all-male blogs, chickens and eggs and so on. Create an environment hostile or repellent to women, and, astonishingly, women will stay away in droves. Also, most women writers, indeed most writers, are to the left of centre. And there’s a reason for this.”
klaus, Les Murray isn’t the sometime pizza delivery boy at Quadrant. He’s a long-term contributor and the literary editor. He could resign any time if he shared Kerryn’s view of its merits (‘in spite of’ his poetic presence). He could refuse to allow his poems to appear. He could demand Michael Connor be sacked. If you’re going to have a go at Windschuttle’s editorship – or contributors (as seemingly ‘half-crazed’) – fine, but you can’t conveniently separate them, or the magazine’s politics and ethos and creative sensibility, from Les Murray’s poetry, just because Les Murray’s poetry is indisputably Great. Editors and the writers they select make magazines, and wrt Quadrant, Murray’s both.
I made (what remains) my key point in the first instance delicately, politely, and after gritting my teeth for a fair while, through those rank generalisations and the casual abuse of Quadrant’s literary merit – fairly ignorant, it would seem, as Kerryn doesn’t appear to be a regular or long-term reader (I could be wrong). I made my key point via the common ground that Pavlov’s Cat and I clearly share in unabashedly admiring Murray’s poetry. That point was and remains that maybe, just maybe, the non-orthodox (for the Oz serious lit world) politico-literary characteristics that Pavlov’s Cat obviously regards as generally antithetical to serious fictional/poetry writing (ie apart from the ‘in spite of’ anomaly that is Les Murray)…could in fact be an inherently important contributing characteristic to/of it. I find it staggering that Pavlov Cat doesn’t once stop to ask herself why Australia’s, and I think (perhaps like her) the world’s, best English language poet finds being Quadrant’s literary editor highly amenable to, or at worst not incompatible with, the proper exercise and expansion of his talent.
She’s very explicit in those generalisations about writers and the left, and literature and ‘right wing rhetoric’, Klaus. Most writers are lefties? Well, Les Murray isn’t, and he’s our best by a country mile. What does that say about…well, lots. But mostly the prevailing close-minded assumptions in this provincial joint about what an ‘artist’ is and is not supposed to look like.
I don’t like Quadrant’s current political slant all that much either, but I’ve been reading it since I was young and it was about the only slice of available grown-up writing, at least where I was. I’m very loyal to it, and anyone who thinks the way Pavlov’s Cat does about it, or seems to, without having read it much, but simply because they think one side of politics has a monopoly on ‘art’ is stupid. Especially when it comes to new fiction and poetry. Quadrant has been and remains a great supporter of both.
As to my bile, klaus – my unprovoked bile – well, it was actually neither. Whether you or Pav or anyone else thinks it was doesn’t matter. Go and have a sook together the pair of you, if it helps.
No-one here is remotely obliged to take me seriously.
It was bile, actually, and most unbecoming
I find it a little sad that someone interested in growing organic food (to avoid chemically stressing the body) hasn’t been more careful, timing-wise, to avoid chemical-stressing her unborn child with cortisol etc. I would not like to be sharing poor Wilson’s bloodstream at the moment!
Mingle before ya bingle, Jack.
I didn’t even read it and I’m on Pav’s side. Because I know she’s reasonable an unlikely to have provoked …whatever you did.
Incidentally, I’d have read it, but it offends my 3 paragraph rule.
Is that serious or a joke Hindmarsh, I can’t tell. And in the absence of Wilson posting about this, who’s to say it’s stressed her at all? It’s just Windy and Quadrant, and she’s got a kid to worry about; bigger fish and all that…
patrickg if she didn’t want to be outed, and wanted to remain anonymous, of course her identity getting out will stress her out. I do think it’s sad – in all seriousness. We are all familiar with the sickening sensations that stress produces – with hindsight I’m sure she would have left it all for quite few months rather than, as I said, put stress chemicals that could well be more damaging to an organism than minute amounts of chemical from supermarket veges … !
Hindmarsh, if you’re trying to be helpful, I’d try harder if I were you. Same applies if you’re trying for snark.
And Jack R, I think your comments have been a bit personalised wrt Dr Cat.
I’d remind everyone of the comments policy.
Incidentally, I’m interested in what critical reasoning lies behind the claim that Les Murray is “the best”? I’m not necessarily disputing that, because I’ve never read his stuff – Australian poetry not being my thing – being more partial to turn of the 20th century stuff – but these sorts of assertions surely need grounding in a critical vocabulary and a measure of value – otherwise they’re surely just subjective expressions of personal preference?
Heh.
Actually, Mark, I think David Foster is even better than Les and I don’t much like a lot of his politics either. Shocking, innit. I’d answer your question, and I do have a number of detailed arguments to make about literary merit and Murray’s poetry, but God forbid I should actually hold forth within my own area of professional expertise, thereby identifying myself as pompous. Or something. Who knows.
I’m going to back off a bit, and I apologise for my hostility last night. I stand by my criticisms, but I’m not helping in expressing them as I have.
As to Murray’s literary merit, I would really like to know what you have to say Dr Cat. I have read a fair chunk of his stuff over the years, and it really sparkles with intelligence and I have, as often as with any really great poet, had my breath taken away by it. But I haven’t ever sat down and tried to systematically express what is so good about it.
One way of looking at this is the concept of the ‘ratbag writer’ in Australian literature, which is addressed by Susan Lever in her Dorothy Green Lecture of 2005 (I’ve linked to the JASAL issue).
“Incidentally, I’m interested in what critical reasoning lies behind the claim that Les Murray is “the best”? I’m not necessarily disputing that, because I’ve never read his stuff – Australian poetry not being my thing – being more partial to turn of the 20th century stuff – but these sorts of assertions surely need grounding in a critical vocabulary and a measure of value – otherwise they’re surely just subjective expressions of personal preference?”
Heh. So I’m thinking that, “I dunno, I just like his stuff,” won’t cut it?
Projection.
“I didn’t even read it and I’m on Pav’s side. Because I know she’s reasonable an unlikely to have provoked…whatever you did.”
I know she’s reasonable too, Lefty. Reasonable people can be unreasonable. And ‘I didn’t even read it and…’? Parodic grin or not, QED. By the way, I’ve been mingling for the whole thread.
Hi Laura, no, it’s not bile, although it may well be unbecoming. So is to call a fellow writer ‘half-crazed’, probably. But whoever said debate had to be becoming? I was going to explain to Casey the ‘disconnect’ of which I spoke earlier by partial reference to that time at Sarsaparilla I was forced into a groveling apology (to try to avoid being shown the door) because some participants took exception, playing the same bile card (‘angst’ was your word, I think) to a few mildly rude things I said about that poor, down-trodden, struggling writer Ian McEwan, only to have even my apology bespoke-bowdlerised to suit moderation biases. I was going to point Casey in the direction of the pathetic pile-on thread on TV reviewing at the same site, where a professional writer who had the temerity to defend himself against ad hom attacks with some blunt rhetoric of his own was accused of all sorts of sexist nonsense.
I was going to explain how, if Pavlov’s Cat actually bothered to read Quadrant she would see that many of her assertions – especially about women writers being repelled by Quadrant – just aren’t true. Maybe a certain kind of woman writer that scores her stamp of legitimate approval, but read the damned thing for more than one or two in-the-news blog-seconds before making the kind of sweeping – and undermining – claims that have been underway since this hoax story broke. (That goes for David bloody Marr in today’s Herald.) Read it for any length of time and you might have seen Sophie Masson defending the integrity of the Lit Council a few issues back, against the kind the over-blown ‘anti-PC’ attack of the kind none of us really much like of late. Read it and you might see any number of articles, poems and stories submitted by women and published over the years. Read it, all you anti-sexism types, and you might note the anti ‘genetic meddling’ science piece by a woman alongside the pro-GMO (hoax) one in the current issue, for example. But look, even though I’ve done so there’s not really a point, is there. That disdainful ‘heh’, Kerryn, is what spells ‘pompous’, not that pouting strawman ‘commenting in my area of expertise’. You’re not interested in my PoV, you think I’m probably a twerp and a sophisticated troll, and that’s fine.
Mark, your site, your rules. Sorry for over-stepping the bounds of decency, or pushing it. It seems to be a habit. ‘Pologies again to you Kerryn, too, if you don’t regard that as passive-aggressive game-playing too, and if you really do think my attacks were ad fem (which you said you did), or sexist (you Casey reckons but I doubt you do). But if you throw words at Quadrant and specific Quadrant writers like ‘repellant’ and ‘ludicrous’ and ‘half-crazed’ and ‘wholly crappy’, and then make pretty offensive (to conservative women writers, just for starters) flow-on assertions about how so much ‘right-wing rhetoric’ is ‘anti-literary, anti-intellectual and ant-arts’…well, you’re not exactly inviting high tea. FWIW I wouldn’t blow time space or – most important – painstakingly grafted thread-kudos/good(ish)-will on one recklessly rude binge if I thought fierce engagement with this arisen hoax sub-topic and your professional views on it weren’t well worth the risk of making a bothersome fool of myself. Again.
Thanks for the space, as ever, LeProd. I’ll give it a rest. Maybe take klaus’s advice and get my own space. Again.
Let me make some observations from the bilious (hah!) green copy I have with me at this very moment. I’m hoping to be able to sell it on Ebay at a profit if it becomes an artefact of literary interest.
There are a couple of women in the current issue: Sophie Masson, a Deirdre Little against prenatal testing, and a book review and some poetry by historian Phillipa Martyr, who they really seem to like, I think because she doesn’t disrupt the deep hatred and fear of women which appears to run through some of the published poetry. Here’s one:
I have no dog in the JR-vs-Dr. Cat fight (entertaining as it is), but as a person very much concerned with English-language poetry I’d be quite interested in PC’s at-leisure apologetics for Les Murray, tho’ I reckon it deserves its own thread.
Have tried in vain to get hold of hard-copy Murray in the States (I’m still a pre-Amazon, brick and mortar book buyer) — is there a good Murray website?
I don’t think politics is a particularly useful lens for evaluating poetry, but if you insist on it I’d remind you that in 20th-cent. English, RW-leaning poets (Yeats Eliot Pound Stevens Larkin to begin) crush leftists like a bug. In the era post the demise of O’Hara Dickey and Schuyler, I’d say that American poetry (at least) has suffered greatly from the tiresome presumption that Poetic Feeling is congruent with Leftist Sympathy (Rich Graham Brooks Angelou? It is to laugh).
Like I say, I don’t keep score in that regard; my point is that neither should you.
Nonetheless, I look forward to a PC-led examination of L Murray, if that can be arranged.
JPZ, what I actually said, and all I actually said, on this left/right/writers subject was ‘most writers are to the left of centre’. By which I stand, though I suspect it may be truer in Aust than in the UK and/or the US. Last time I looked, ‘most’ meant ‘more than 50%’. Having already said that I think Les Murray and David Foster are the two best writers in the country, I’m not really in need of reminding that many great writers are not lefties and I bet nobody else is either. And FWIW I think Christopher Hitchens is an astonishingly good writer as well.
So I’ve never believed that Poetic Feeling is congruent with Leftist Sympathy, and having been in great heaps of strife with my academic peers more than once in the past for saying so, I now find it hilarious that I’m having to defend myself from the other direction. For this I blame people who wildly misrepresent and distort what other people have said and then accuse them of wriggling out of it when they protest.
As for a Les Murray appreciation (not ‘apologetics’, thanks; the connotations are not good, whatever the strict definition may be), have a look at the quite disturbed nature of the personal insults and grotesquely misogynist — nay, Greenfieldesque — stereotypes at #270 and #275 in particular and then ask yourself whether you’d come back for more of the same.
Poetry in the current issue of Quadrant continued from #293:
Four out of the 17 poems published in this edition are by John Whitworth, which dilutes the Australian content by nearly one-quarter for poetry (I know that’s nitpicking, but 17-18 poems multiplied by six editions per year minus a hefty slice of non-Australian publishing doesn’t seem to make Quadrant a very fruitful avenue for emerging poets. Murray shows a predilection for males born around WWII (Whitworth, Colebatch, Kocan.)
Here’s one by Whitworth:
For passive-agressive expression of dislike or even sheer terror of women and feminism, it would be hard to find a better example.
(Of course, gangs of men on the streets roaring rugby songs would in no way be intimidating.)
Peter Kocan exhorts the “matchmaking powers” to
Which seemed creepy enough, but infinitely more so when I looked up his biography.
I think if you’re a a poet under sixty years old who doesn’t want to toe a culture-wars line you’d be better off starting your own magazine.
Les Murray’s own website http://www.lesmurray.org has a good number of his most celebrated poems on it. Good ones to start with are Comete, The Mitchells, The Instrument, Flowering Eucalypt in Autumn, and my favourite, The Sleepout.
An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow is on that site too, not to my taste but classic early Les.
I do not know if these poems are online but The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever and The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle are also wonderful introductions.
Thanks Laura — I look forward to checking out an artist whom I’ve heard so much about. (FWIW I’m a huge fan of ‘Cloudstreet’ not just as a novel but also as an encyclopedia of the distinctive quality of Australian English; that book positively sings).
Dr. Cat — yes, appreciation is much better than apologetics; I’m just a lazy, lazy man. I take your larger point about ‘majority’ and so on; tho’ I’d say the plain fact that you have to fight to swim upstream with yr opinion is a fact worthy of note, a dog that didn’t bark as it were.
Far be it from me to ask a writer to do work for free, but any thoughts you have on Murray would be welcome any time, since you seem to have given the matter a good deal of careful consideration. I’ll trade you a take on O’Hara for a take on Murray.
I note ange has made a reappearance, but without either adding anything to the conversation or responding to my request for some verification that Robert Manne is a bilious hater. C’mon ange, put up or shut up.
My comment, fwiw, @ 287 was actually addressed to Jack R – with regard to the claim that Murray is “indisputably Great”.
What a delicate sook you can sometimes be Pav.
“…quite disturbed nature of the personal insults and grotesquely misogynist — nay, Greenfieldesque — stereotypes at #270 and #275 in particular…”
Here’s the sum total of my ‘disturbed personal insults and grossly misogynist stereotypes’:
1. ‘Your default school-marm haughtiness’.
2. ‘Ixnay on the Wordy Ice Glare From Teacher thanks, love.’
3. ‘…not entirely a-typical up-herself airy dismissal of…’
If you reckon those three lines deserves yours then 100+ years of feminism is a farce. As I said, harden up, Pav. Or get out of the kitchen.
Because let’s have a look at a few of your take-it-as-read casual ad hom disdaineries, flung the Quadrant crew’s way in the posts that preceded a) my first (#269) tentative attempt to suggest you were being a bit unfairly and conveniently dismissive of the central role played by both Quadrant’s and Murray’s ‘political oddity’ in its literary place in Oz, and in his personal creative life; then, when that was haughtily and schoolmarmishly dismissed (there’s no other apt description, sorry, too bad, and if Pav’d been a bloke I would have written something like ‘default Blimpish loftiness’)…b) only then, my ‘Greenfieldesque’…well, whatever. According to your becoming thread-style and mode: Michael Connor’s writing seems ‘half-crazed’ and ‘wholly crappy’. Quadrant’s ‘left-hatin’ is of a ‘particularly simplistic and bilious kind’; the mag is ‘bad’, ‘ludicrous’, it’s an environment ‘hostile or repellant to women’…
Fine, but who do you think writes the thing – computers? Those are ad hom attacks on writers, far more direct and nastier in tone and bile than mine on you, Kerryn. And Les Murray is the LITERARY editor of this magazine. If it truly is a writerly environment that is ‘hostile or repellant’ to women poets, or women generally, then it Just. Don’t. Fly. to play cutesy ‘in spite of’ games neatly parsing Poet Les The Acknowledged Genius from Lit Ed Les the ‘best thing about’ that…well, how did it go…women-hostile, women-repellant, sexist little magazine. I know it’s the assumed critical methodology and has been for decades to differentiate writers’ writing from their writing selves, their politics, their personalities, their beings, their lives…me, I don’t think you can do it without being condescending to writers, and writing, in the extreme. And usually people try to do it for exactly the kind of awkwardness-dodging reasons as I think you’re guilty of here: to avoid seriously wondering whether this or that part of the artist’s being that you happen to find disquieting…might be an inherent and legitimate foundrying and expressive part of their art, in other words, of Life.
But whether my point is getting closer to making sense to you, or more accurately grasping (echoing) what you really actually meant yourself, or in fact said in the first place…it doesn’t matter now. I’ve already apologised once for apparently ‘misconstruing your words’; half-heartedly, yes, because I didn’t think I had, and I think that counter is a rhetorical tactic you use too often. You’re doing it again now, and you’re also wholeheartedly straw-manning what I’ve written, with all that ‘god forbid I should actually…’ and ‘shocking innit…’ palaver. It’s clear to me that you don’t want to chat on any relative basis other than me squirming far below your upturned blog-snoz, so I’ll get the message and off the fuck out of your stately bloggy orbit. It’s a pity. Like everyone here I look forward to any thoughts on Murray you may care to share.
But one thing: don’t fling adjectives like those exquisitely-wounding ones above and then expect the writers on the receiving end not to dish a bit out in return. You know exactly what you’re doing when you select ‘repellant’ and ‘half-crazed’ (and, for me, ‘quite disturbed’), instead of, say, merely ‘unpleasant’ and ‘crazy’ (and ‘over-heated’, say, or ‘offensive’, or ‘grandstanding’, or ‘boring’). Or feel free to lob them around all you like, Pav, but when you get my return – a very mild one, leavened with attempts at chiding good humour that may not have worked but were sure as shit obvious as such – don’t start blubbing about ad fems, and especially don’t start making accusations of quite disturbed misogyny and sexist stereotyping. Nasty, damaging, girl who cried wolf spite, KG.
Laura @#281, well, no (he sighed); no, it wasn’t bile. So we’re stuck, too. Let’s both move on, likewise. (Mmm…unbecoming? Sure, Laura, maybe. Hey, see Pav’s stuff above, too. But no-one ever said discussion ever had to be becoming, did they.)
Helen @#292, ‘Projection’. True enough. True enough, especially now. In fact tactically I kicked myself as soon as I pressed submit on that one. But yeah I’m really pissed off now, Helen. I spent five career-crimping (maybe aborting) years trying to help parry genuine sexist filth from real sexist pigs alongside Margo Kingston without descending into the bog of return-fire ad hom abuse myself (as she insisted we eschew), while a good many of the ‘too cool to fight’ feminist Ozbloggers lately popping up around this joint wafted hither and fro in the prevailing breeze, wringing their dainty becoming blog-hands and not giving her much online sisterly solidarity when she could really have used it. Why? Because like WG she was a bit OTT at times, too. So why wouldn’t I be angry at a cheap – a really underhand ‘pssst, lookout, girls, cyber-stalker alert!’ – blogosphere dismissal like Pav’s, just because maybe I pushed a few buttons. ‘Quite disturbed’? Sorry, but stick it, Kerryn. (By the way, Helen, some of your take on Quadrant’s current female writerly content I’d agree with, but it really only shows that your idea of how a ‘female writer’ is supposed to write is different from Quadrant’s current editorial line).
So. Who wants some real (passive-aggressive!) sexism? Real sexism in this context being, say, a bit of cynical whipped-dog hand-wringing blokey-PC platitudinous oh-please-forgive-me-and-readmit-me-to-the-realm-of-the-palatable-and-right-thinkingsphere.
Mark @ #287: ‘Jack R I think your comments have been a bit personalised wrt Dr Cat’.
Fair enough, Mark. Your site, your judgement call. I’m very sorry about those comments, Pavlov’s Cat. I’m also very embarrassed and mortified that you found them disturbed and misogynistic. I meant them to be no such things. They were supposed to be a bit chiding, a bit annoyed at being dismissed so lightly, a bit stirring, if briskly, even narkily, so. But re-stating genuine points of interest and relevance. Obviously my problem with tone returneth. I’ll give it a rest for a while. Again! Thanks as ever for the space, LP.
I call bullshit on Jack’s offering of ‘thanks’ for the space: more false humility from where I’m sitting. And on second thought, maybe Dr Cat is right to be reticent about offering her assessment of Murray’s poetry.
I think everyone who’s interested should follow Laura’s link at #298 to Les’s own site and have a look around (and a listen; there are sound files of him introducing and reading some of the poems). JPZ, here’s a favourite of mine and one I’m fairly sure that you would like — among other things there are a couple of great Americans echoing in it:
The Sleepout
Childhood sleeps in a verandah room
in an iron bed close to the wall
where the winter over the railing
swelled the blind on its timber boom
and splinters picked lint off warm linen
and the stars were out over the hill;
then one wall of the room was forest
and all things in there were to come.
Breathings climbed up on the verandah
when dark cattle rubbed at the corner
and sometimes dim towering rain stood
for forest, and the dry cave hunched woollen.
Inside the forest was lamplit
along tracks to a starry creek bed
and beyond lay the never-fenced country,
its full billabongs all surrounded
by animals and birds, in loud crustings,
and something kept leaping up amongst them.
And out there, to kindle whenever
dark found it, hung the daylight moon.
Oh bloody hell — sorry Laura, I was so busy falling over myself to follow the link that I missed your reference at the end to The Sleepout, or didn’t make the connection till I’d stumbled over it there for myself. But I’m not surprised at the convergence — it’s a really wonderful poem no matter what angle one is looking at it from.
What have ya got?
Another reason (one not confined to female contributors) that’s put people off submitting to ‘Quadrant’ is the political intrigue of its CIA seed-funding origins, some see the magazine as a prisoner of its history.
The poetry in the current issue of Quadrant consists of 4 poems by Philippa Martyr, 2 poems by Jan Owen, and 1 poem by Jennifer Compton, as well as 3 poems by Peter Kocan, 2 poems by John Whitworth, and 1 poem each by Rober Frenkel, Hal G P Colebatch, and Geoff Page. That seems like 7 poems by women and 8 poems by men.
In comparison, the poetry in the current issue of Meanjin consists of 1 poem each by Anne Elvey, Pauline Reeve, and Meredith Wattison, as well as 1 poem each by Iain Britton, David Brooks, Danny Gentile, Philip Hammial, Evan Jones, PiO, Peter Porter, Ron Pretty, Alex Skovron, and Mark Tredinnick. That seems like 3 poems by women and 10 poems by men.
I have no idea what the actual content of all these poems is and this is only a sample of the two most recent issues of these publications. Maybe they’re unrepresentative – I have no idea (for god’s sake, I don’t read Quadrant!). But is there any actual evidence for this statement…
From the number of poems and the genders of their writers in one issue of each, as you give them here, no there’s not. Mind you, (a) the amount of actual space taken up by said poems has not been factored in, and (b) I’d make a distinction here between the poetry and the magazine as a whole. The only real way to gather reliable evidence for this statement would be to ask a cross-section of women writers whether they would submit material, poetic or otherwise, to Quadrant, and why or why not. If I were making such a statement in a book (or in a journal article, one with good, reliable footnotes), no doubt I would have marshalled some evidence. For a blog comment on the fly, it didn’t seem necessary.
Also, I’m not sure why you have brought upMeanjin or what point is being implicitly made by that, but if one wanted to keep looking at this question of gender-friendliness from the comparative-numbers angle, here are some more stats: the editors of Quadrant since its foundation in 1956 have been called James, Donald, Peter, Roger, Robert, Padraic and Keith. Those of Meanjin since its foundation in 1940 have been called Clem, Jim, Judith, Jenny, Christina, Stephanie, Ian and Sophie.
I love statistics. I love the way they go boinging away from you whenever you try to prove something with them.
Les Murray – Indeed another heroic personagge who illustrates well the Epic Climb of ‘Straya up the mountain of civilization…
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To a cave somewhere short of the middle.
Pavlov’s Cat,
I only mentioned Meanjin as a point of comparison. By which I mean, for example, if 80 per cent of poetry submissions are by female poets, and this is reflected in 80 per cent of poems published in Australian literary journals being by female poets, but only 47 per cent of poems published in Quadrant are by female poets, you could still argue that something is amiss in the poetry section at Quadrant. Meanjin was only standing in as an example of those other Australian literary journals.
I don’t have any firm views on the claims you make about poetry and Quadrant – there’s no way I know enough about the magazine. All I was doing was indicating that the poetry included in the most recent issue of Quadrant seemed at odds with your claims, especially when compared to the most recent issue of Meanjin. It’s not great evidence, of course, or should I say it’s very weak evidence – but I’m not the one making the strong claims.
And even though I haven’t provided any reliable statistics of my own (as I admitted in my initial comment), in my view well-established, good statistics are things that should be valued. If you really wanted to provide reliable evidence about whether women would submit poems to Quadrant or not, and why or why not, you almost couldn’t get by without them.
I too value statistics, and only meant to point out that they can be used to prove almost anything depending on the criteria by which they are gathered.
I’ve wondered before what non-Australians can understand about a poem like The Sleepout.
Also, the last issue of Quadrant I examined in the flesh had a contribution from Patrick McCauley, one of Australia’s most Boltish poets – enough to make me decide to buy The Economist instead
Another thing I’ve wondered (indirectly related to the Quadrant thing) – when you peer review an article, are you supposed to check all the footnotes? Because I have peer reviewed several and certainly haven’t scrutinised every footnote in each one….
That’s not the job of the peer reviewer who has been sent the piece (with identifying details stripped off) so they can assess whether it is suitable for publication. Every footnote is, however, meant to be checked at some point once it looks likely it will be published.
In law journals (I have edited two, the UQLJ when I was in Australia and now the Oxford University Commonwealth Law Journal over here), all footnotes in each article are checked. First, to ensure that the citation is correct; second, to assess whether the author/judge/source in question has been fairly cited (ie, that’s what it said); and third, to guard against citations drawn from dodgy sources (either unauthorized law reports, or material that is not peer reviewed itself).
There are some exceptions to the ‘non-peer-reveiwed rule’, usually in the form of The Economist and The New Yorker, both of which — although very popular — are extremely carefully fact-checked internally.
I can’t figure our why someone would pay money for a copy of Quadrant, when back issues of Encounter can be read at the library for free.
Anthony way back at #272, cheers. And in terms of using our time well, we’d all be much better off reading Christos’s new novel The Slap than we are talking about Quadrant.
Re: Post 89 and David Irving’s mini-spray on social constructivism in education. Did David never talk with his neighbour about a maths problem when the teacher’s back was turned; did he never do science experiments in a talkative, productive group; and, did he never participate in outings, excursions or field trips? These are all constructivist experiences in which the solitary learning of the individual becomes concrete through action and involvement with others.
Good points, Laurie. Constructivism has a few different meanings, and the way it is used in education is clearly distinct from its uses elsewhere. A lot of teaching techniques that I’ve found very useful can be put under that heading.
This was not a hoax or fraud.
This is a case of nom de plume.. As was Malley, Demi etc.
possibly enhanced plumage
no geniuses were involved, no paradigms shifted.
Windschuttle was a lecturer which ranks him amongst the most fallible in Australian society.. A conformist thinker. Manne is also a sock puppet stuffed with cash.
Carry on bushranging ye schwabs
Also Robert Manne is a hoax name.. His parents changed their surnames upon moving to Australia.. In fact, it is not just a family secret of ours but the name Australia is a false construct.
Re Laurie’s recent comment – no, I’m nearly 60, so education for me didn’t involve much conversation with other students or too many excursions.
Constructivism has a few different meanings
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AAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Adrien, what’s the problem?
Care to elaborate Adrien?
Constructivism in pedagogy is distinct from social constructivist positions in social science. I take it you already know that given your extensive engagement with educational research and theory.
Care to elaborate?
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Methinks you’re inviting me into the Mandelbrot Labyrinth for a bit of taxonomical gymnastics. Wherein I will be led to the Minotaur who will dodge the sword by claiming the definition of this or that term has changed in the last 30 seconds and refusing to clarify terms for the next half-minute. One is allowed to do certain things like, for example, talk of Universals, if one is licensed to do so, like an oft-quoted fella name of Jack. But should someone else do it, someone who is not licensed then it’s illegitimate.
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Clever game y’see.
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Use a word and we say: “Well it doesn’t mean that or it means a lot of different stuff and dictionaries are simply tools of phallo-capitalist oppressive discourse.” And of course when cornered and asked to defend some point: aka so and so is/is not a [insert favourite ism here] there’s the tendency to resort to passata-sotto and claim it’s just a flesh wound.
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Well could I prise de fer and how. But I have an appointment at the weekly JPF meeting. We are the people who act, we don’t just talk and I have a motion to move. Typically, talk of isms fills me with the urge.
Of course I should add to be fair that altho’ often words have many meanings and sometimes (when used by those who are not authorized) no meaning. Other words have too many meanings and we should cut some off.
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Especially #4.
Adrien, constructivism is a term associated in educational theory with Piaget. Further, social constructivism is used by educational researchers interested in the theories of Vygotsky.
Neither of these has anything much to do with social construction (sometimes also called constructivism) as it’s understood in the social sciences – which is introduced as a concept by Berger and Luckmann in 1966, who were actually influenced by the social phenomenology of Schutz (who should also be familiar to those who’ve read Habermas).
As far as I know, these different uses of similar terminology developed independently and refer to totally distinct philosophies. If the two do meet, it is probably only in the heads of second year education students confused by the similarity between terms (and possibly wikipedia authors – I haven’t had a look). My argument here is, to the best of my knowledge, totally uncontroversial. Any teachers/educational researchers want to confirm that for me?
Klaus
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I believe I made some very serious points. But it’s probably better to provide a link to the research institute which most influences me on these matters do that you know exactly how serious I am.
There’s also Constructivism of course, which was the only one I knew of until a few days ago
I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself Adrien.
Nick, I was also going to mention Constructivism in art.
I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself Adrien.
But on a more serious note. Does your cat actually enjoy being covered in food dye?
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Cheers Klaus.
Sokal on Argyros [footnote 61 on p. 134 of "Beyond the hoax"]
…. Argyros goes on to say “Linearity tends to be deterministic in a Laplacian way. Even if a linear system evolves, its evolution is discrete and sequential. Therefore, the time of linear systems is eotemporal, succession without preferred direction.”
(Sokal adds): Every one of these statements is wrong. The dichotomies linear/nonlinear, deterministic/stochastic, discrete-time/continuous time, time-reversal-invariant/time-reversal-noninvariant are COMPLETELY UNRELATED; all 16 possible combinations are possible.
(Sokal comments further on Argyros’s other mathematical errors and wonders why Gross & Levitt esteem Alexander Argyros’s maths above that of N. Katharine Hayles.)
My poem ‘The Girlie Gangs’ was not meant to be anti-women at all. It was really about my daughters and their friends. Probably Australian ladies don’t behave in that way but I’m talking about the wild west of Kent in England. The point about the rugby songs is that girtls didn’t use to do this sort of thing but now they do and bloody good for them. As I live in a household where the only other male is a cat (or at least he was once) so I mind my Ps and Qs.