Crikey Mikey! False Dichotomies!

Mikey has recently hooked me up with a three month full-subscription to Crikey!

Latest missive from Crikey contains some pretty dodgy crud. Sorry Crikey. I still love some of your stuff

Said crud is a political meter measuring Australian blogs from left-to-right in preparation for the 2007 Federal Election. The fuzzy logic of the meter considered, I still think it rests to heavily on a false dichotomy (or a left-center-right trifurcation); that Left and Right are at all discernable poles.

Warning: The remainder of this post contains a depiction of Muhammad and adult concepts. If likely to be offended, don’t read.

If you go over to An Onymous Lefty, you’ll see Jeremy pointing out some pretty good points after he became the 10 Marxes benchmark for Crikey’s blogospheric political bias meter.

“I’m scathing regarding abuse anywhere around the world – it’s not as if I condemn Guantanamo Bay whilst endorsing North Korea. And that critique is against anti-democratic and authoritarian behaviour. Is opposing that really an exclusively lefty approach?“

 (An Onymous Lefty, 2007)

The awkwardness of equating left with progressive and right with conservative aside, I know quite a number of conservatives that categorically share Jeremy’s position on these types of matters. Either oppose anti-democratic and authoritarian behaviour or be right-wing? That’s a false dichotomy people. You can be both.

Then there’s a rather odd characterisation of Tim Blair.

“Blair — whose day job is editing the opinion pages of The Daily Telegraph — holds a special antipathy for Tim Flannery, and relishes picking holes in the logic of the climate change lobby.”

(Crikey!, 2007)

Now this is a bit of a one-sided statement. Picking holes in the logic, well at least Tim enjoys trying to and sometimes he hits; not everyone in the climate change lobby gets it right all the time. Conspicuous by its absence in Crikey’s descriptions of left leaning bloggers picking at holes in the reasoning of conservatives; indeed, Jeremy Sear is far more prolific at citing logical fallacies than is Tim Blair.

There is of course nothing particularly left or right about picking holes in people’s reasoning. Just as there is nothing particularly left or right about global warming. The right may have a tradition of associating with academic fraud/science fraud (such as practiced by the tobacco lobby, creationists and so forth) but the natural sciences are still politically disinterested, at least in terms of left and right.

I’ve seen lefties misquote evolutionary biology theory that they have never actually read. A lefty academic included. Heck, you are far more likely to get a lefty reading crap like ‘The Zen of Quantum Physics’, but conversely lefties are far less likely to read Ken Ham. No political pole has a monopoly on science fraud, or scientific error. It’s all far more complicated.
So there is nothing uniquely right wing when Tim Blair makes this boo boo;

“Meanwhile, Australia’s allegedly endangered ski fields seem to be doing just fine:

    Victoria’s Alpine region is experiencing the best lead-up to the ski season since 2004, with heavy falls overnight …

“This is great considering it’s two weeks away from opening weekend,” [Mount Buller Resort marketing manager Amber]
Gardner said.

Remember, our planet is just five years away from climate change catastrophe.“

(Tim Blair, 2007)

Now the weather Blair cites may falsify the “global warming lobby” mistake he targets earlier in the post, but in driving home the inference at the end of his post, an inference about climate, he has enacted a classic denialist fallacy. There is a huge difference between the localised/short term phenomena that is weather and the long term phenomena that is global climate.

It’s a terminal mistake that underlies the “medieval warm period” myth; a myth born of cherry picked regional weather (for which Soon had to admit that his data was insufficient to draw conclusions). In any case, this mistake may just be Blair’s sense of humor at work; but you can’t characterise this as relishing poking holes in flawed logic.

But like I said, there is nothing particularly right wing about any of this. Just like there is nothing particularly right wing about blasphemy.

“Like all good blogs, goes where others fear to tread, controversially posted the infamous Prophet Mohammed cartoons.”

(Crikey! 2007)

Pfft…

Holy crap Crikey! Am I right-wing now?
(This is supposed to look like Muhammad, not Iain Hall)

There is nothing particularly right wing about irreverence for religion or for enacting blasphemy. Heck, I most likely have enacted enough blasphemy to last several of Tim Blair’s lives. When I was 14, I was on the receiving end of a blow-job, obviously out of wedlock. In a rural Baptist Church.

Indeed, I faked being Christian (to the guys and the grown-ups) just to hang around the girls (most of whom had no such illusions about my religion or lack thereof). You’ll be happy to know that I behave myself better these days.

Now we may have different reasons for our irreverence; let’s face it, Blair’s publication of the cartoons was a hyped up publicity stunt enacted with negligible threat from Australian Muslims, whereas my purpose is to point out that such blasphemy isn’t uniquely right wing. Back when I was 14, I can assure you I wasn’t thinking about what to write on a blog two decades in the future when I said “yes” to receiving fellatio in an uber-fundamentalist Church.

Still, these are minor quibbles. None of this us uniquely right or left, just like on many issues, stances are rarely uniquely right or left or indeed one of two positions. Just because I (or other lefties) didn’t jump when some conservatives demanded that we depict the prophet doesn’t mean that we don’t have a penchant for blasphemy as well.

I think Crikey’s problem is a common one. Where one may identify generally as right leaning/left leaning, an loose approximation based on some notion of deviation from the norm, Crikey is cherry picking characteristics and measuring them against stereotypical orthodoxies.

But what orthodoxies? Classical Marxism? Post-modern left? Paleoconservative? Straussian Neo-conservative? Without going into the huge diversity in and between these “orthodoxies”, we have more than two poles. Crikey’s meter is already broke.

Of course, these four poles aren’t poles; there is no black and white, it’s all grey and peers in either direction from some nebulous center differ in their positions on various issues. Unless they live in some very narrow totalitarian state or a restrictive religion, these individuals won’t even recognise an orthodoxy.

“Leftist orthodoxy”, where “Leftist” is a specific perjorative (differing from the terms “lefty” and “left leaning”) is a term that gets bantered around a fair bit to imply the existence of some scripture of the left that people varying degrees to the left of centre adhere to. Where is this scripture? Again, what orthodoxy? (Also, why doesn’t the term “rightist” get proportionate coinage? That’s just weird.)

Really, this should make one thing clear about the poles/orthodoxy of the right and left. They both/all share a common property; THEY ARE FICTIONAL!

Criticisms of “The Leftist Orthodoxy” (and of “The Rightist Orthodoxy” if you can ever find them) are simply acts of tilting at windmills. Similarly, the poles of Crikey’s bias-meter are equally incredible.

Thanks for nominating me for a trial Mikey. It’s fun!

~ Bruce