21 comments

1. AthenaJune 20, 2016 at 3:10 pm

   Thanks. Now I’ve conjured up the image of Morrison and Cormann waving around a whisk and a plunger as they chant “Jobs and growth” and I can’t get it out of my mind.

2. Gangey1959June 20, 2016 at 3:21 pm

   EXTERMINATE !

3. etnorbJune 20, 2016 at 3:37 pm

   It seems the only way we can use the Daleks “properly” is to act on what they repeat in Dr Who–“exterminate, exterminate exterminate”….then, maybe, ALL these inept, repetitive, lying, obscenely over-paid, excuses for so-called liberal “politicians” (sic), will be out of jobs & we may have a chance to get Australia back on track (somewhat!), with the Labor mob! It is patently obvious that NONE of these incumbent idiots has any real “idea” as to what to do (or how to do), what is needed to again get Australia back on its “economic feet”. Great article Ad Astra, another in the almost continuous stream of great articles for us to read & comment on! It certainly beats the shit out of trying to find any “balanced” or fair articles, editorials, or stories, in much of our so-called “free press”. The Fairfax mob don’t fare too badly in most of their papers, except for the fact that with skeleton staff & one central print center, & far too early print runs, they often “get it wrong”. However, the bloody Mudrake press ALWAYS gets it right in always promoting Liberal stories & always promoting anything that denigrates the labor lot! Bastards!! So much for a so-called “free press”, when we have an overseas media owner who seems to be dictating to the Liberals,via his papers etc! And, of course, we ALWAYS “have” Jobson Growth to “explain” just what ALL these inept libs are trying to do for us! Aren’t we so lucky! NOT!!

4. lawrencewinderJune 20, 2016 at 4:09 pm

   Aww, fair go on “Horse-shite” Coormann! English is his second language!

5. VikingdukJune 20, 2016 at 4:14 pm

   Meanwhile, as these automatons babble on with their incessant bullshit, meanwhile remember climate change, that tenacious beast global warming. Remember? As it hunts us down as it mocks us in our battle against nature, against ourselves. She hunts us down as ferocious pack of wolves would. The Vikings are at the gates and what do we have, a bunch of ego ridden hate filled arseholes leading us on.

6. KronomexJune 20, 2016 at 4:50 pm

   Looking at the photo at the top of the article reminded me almost instantly of a line from The Goon Show, “Hold it up to the light, not a brain in sight.” and all I had to do to paraphrase it is change one single word. So it now reads, “Hold them up to the light, not a brain in sight.”

7. kerriJune 20, 2016 at 5:06 pm

   I think it is trite to declare these two duly elected office bearers as mindless, repetitive, robotic minions, when the fact is they are just plain stupid!
   Dunning Kruger effect!
   Someone needs to tell them?
   July 2nd would be a good day to do that!

8. philgorman2014June 20, 2016 at 5:08 pm

   It time to ditch all the corporate Daleks. They can’t be allowed to keep climbing the stairways to absolute authoritarian power. If they do we will all be enslaved or exterminated in a filthy morass of privatised splendour and public squalor.

   It’s no use calling The Doctor, we’ll just have to vote them out.

9. FreethinkerJune 20, 2016 at 5:08 pm

   Add Cash to that two parrots and the trio can inflect torture with their verbal diarrhea

10. PhilJune 20, 2016 at 7:07 pm

    The entire Liberal party mantra is mind numbing – and they don’t give a shit – Crosby-Textor has them by the short and curlies and that’s it – power is all that matters – screw the nation, screw the people, screw the environment – power is what they intend to grasp and to hold for as a long as enough Australians remain brain dead to their game.

11. TuffGuyJune 20, 2016 at 8:20 pm

    warning, warning will robinson. crush, kill, destroy

12. keertiJune 21, 2016 at 7:02 am

    PhilPhil. Sorry, but as ignorant, uninformable, and easily swayed by bullshit and negativity as they are, australians are likely to keep putting in smarmy turmpuke and his band of cs for a long time. They are too stupid to do anything else! If you can, leave now before the country becomes a dick-tatorship and they send all the pensioners to the workhouse! Oh! Sorry I mean work for the dole!

13. Kaye LeeJune 21, 2016 at 9:32 am

    I have taken to writing down the catch phrases before these two are interviewed or give one of their predictable speeches. I then do a tally. It’s like playing Spotto to make the car journey bearable. Remember Abbott would count his own slogans on his fingers. One must have a strategy to deal with this tortuous mind-numbing attempt at brainwashing – or braindrowning more like.

14. astra5June 21, 2016 at 10:47 am

    Folks
    Thank you for your thoughtful and humourous comments.

    Apart from the tedium of listening to the mind-numbing repetition of mindless slogans, I find it insulting that the LNP and its minders believe they can get away with such a strategy. It suggests, as you have alluded to keerti, that they regard the Australian electorate as stupid enough to swallow their rhetoric without question. If they are right, I suppose Australia will get the government the electorate deserves, just as we did in 2013. One might have hoped that having been duped by Abbott’s slogans, and having experienced the horror of his administration for two awful years, the electorate might be less susceptible to slogans this time around, particularly as they are less meaningful than Abbott’s ever were.

    Perhaps the best prophylaxis to avoid brainwashing is yours Kaye; make a kids game out of it – slogan spotting!

15. AthenaJune 21, 2016 at 11:22 am

    “Apart from the tedium of listening to the mind-numbing repetition of mindless slogans, I find it insulting that the LNP and its minders believe they can get away with such a strategy.”

    It worked for them in 2013 and there’s no indication in the polls yet that it isn’t working for them this time around.

16. AthenaJune 21, 2016 at 11:28 am

    “I have taken to writing down the catch phrases before these two are interviewed or give one of their predictable speeches. I then do a tally. It’s like playing Spotto to make the car journey bearable. Remember Abbott would count his own slogans on his fingers. One must have a strategy to deal with this tortuous mind-numbing attempt at brainwashing – or braindrowning more like.”

    Yep, it’s like taking bets and then counting overused management buzzwords in a meeting.

17. Kaye LeeJune 21, 2016 at 11:33 am

    Thinking about polls….

    They extrapolate from a comparatively small sample and that sample had to agree to be polled. No way in hell would my children (both in their twenties) do that even though, being in a marginal seat, we are polled continuously and they are always looking for young people to survey. Whilst we discuss issues at home, they wouldn’t waste time answering questions on the phone. I don’t know how they will vote – I have insisted that it is their democratic right to choose but I ask that they at least be informed about who they are voting for. Last election I heard them talking about the Sex Party, the Pirate Party, and the HEMP party – I doubt they looked beyond the name. My daughter has been asking about the Greens a lot lately. One thing is certain, neither of them will be voting Coalition. I wonder how many others who refuse to be polled are likewise.

18. FreethinkerJune 21, 2016 at 11:38 am

    I remember this from Malcolm Turnbull:
    “We need a style of leadership that explains those challenges and opportunities, explains the challenges and how to seize the opportunities. A style of leadership that respects the people’s intelligence, that explains these complex issues and then sets out the course of action we believe we should take and makes a case for it.
    “We need advocacy, not slogans. We need to respect the intelligence of the Australian people.”

19. Kaye LeeJune 21, 2016 at 11:45 am

    In 2012, Malcolm Turnbull delivered the George Winterton lecture at the University of Western Australia….

    “In case you think my call for a change of attitude and practice to truth in politics is just idealism – let me make a practical political point. It seems to me that we don’t simply have a financial deficit, we have a deficit of trust. We can argue for hours which side and which politicians, which journalists indeed, have contributed most to it. But it affects all of us and all of our institutions. The politicians and parties that can demonstrate they can be trusted, that they will not insult the people with weasel words and spin, that they will not promise more than they can deliver, that they will not dishonestly misrepresent either their own or their opponents’ policies – those politicians and parties will, I submit to you, deserve and receive electoral success.”

20. jimhazJune 22, 2016 at 1:16 pm

    It wouldn’t be hard at all to create an online Random Liberal Party Minister Comment generator – I mean the “answers” they give don’t often match the question.

    Here is one I just generated from the Random Complaint Generator.

    http://www.pakin.org/complaint/

    My complaint about The Liberal Party

    Last week marked the beginning of a social and political wave of hatred and insensitive negativism emanating from the violent rhetoric of pathetic uncivilized-types. These people are so blinded by The Liberal Party’s inarticulate put-downs that they cannot comprehend that when all discoverable facts and experience fly in the face of The Liberal Party’s unprincipled world view, The Liberal Party stubbornly holds onto its ignorance as its birthright. For openers, peddling Leninism to all comers is less wise than giving free amphetamines to school children, although it’s probably just as profitable for The Liberal Party. In my opinion, grenades and flamethrowers would do less damage, though. The point is that difficult times lie ahead. Fortunately, we have the capacity to circumvent much of the impending misery by working together to push the boundaries of knowledge ever farther. Anything may happen if The Liberal Party is able to introduce disease, ignorance, squalor, idleness, and want into affluent neighborhoods. Pedigreed, disloyal babblers may expose and punish individuals who do not conform to The Liberal Party’s philosophies or beliefs. Venal psychopaths may stir up trouble. And feckless mooncalves may deny that The Liberal Party’s favorite tactic is known as “deceiving with the truth”. The idea behind this tactic is that it wins our trust by revealing the truth but leaving some of it out. This makes us less likely to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.

    The Liberal Party keeps trying to deceive us into thinking that we should be grateful for the precious freedom to be robbed and kicked in the face by such a noble creature as it. The purpose of this deception may be to muster enough force to snuff out the last embers of courageousness burning within us. Or maybe the purpose is to plant strife and chaos. Oh what a tangled web The Liberal Party weaves when first it practices to deceive. Anyone who values liberty should be seriously concerned about The Liberal Party’s ostentatious, crapulous fusillades. Think I’m exaggerating? Just ask any of the most valuable members of our community and they’ll all tell you how what I find frightening is that some academics actually believe The Liberal Party’s line that the Universe belongs to it by right. In this case, “academics” refers to a stratum of the residual intelligentsia surviving the recession of its demotic base, not to those seekers of truth who understand that The Liberal Party has managed to mollify its more trusting critics simply by promising not to desecrate personal religious objects. We shall see how long that lasts. In the meantime, The Liberal Party seeks scapegoats for its own shortcomings by blaming the easiest target it can find, that is, soporific rakes.

    If the image of The Liberal Party’s backers poisoning the relationship between teacher and student sounds like a classic case of fogyism, then get a load of this: What’s scary is that The Liberal Party has had some success at spreading hatred, animosity, and divisiveness. Even worse, it seems likely that The Liberal Party will teach our children a version of history that is not only skewed, distorted, and wrong but dangerously so when you least expect it. Although things may seem dark now, The Liberal Party can’t prevent the sun from rising. It can’t prevent me from writing that it’s easy for us to shake our heads at its foolishness and cowardice. It’s easy for us to exclaim that we should defend peace, truth, justice, and equality. It’s easy for us to say, “We need to settle our disputes with rational discussion—not by moral huffing and puffing.” The point is that it’s easy for us to say these things because The Liberal Party thinks it would be a brilliant idea to provide the worst kinds of imprudent no-goodniks I’ve ever seen with an irresistible temptation to maintain social control by eliminating rights and freedoms. Unquestionably, it’s too clever by half. Its “brilliant” idea does little more than prove that The Liberal Party hopes to further its geopolitical ambitions by hamstringing our efforts to recognize and respect the opinions, practices, and behavior of others. Don’t make the mistake of thinking otherwise. The Liberal Party does, and that’s why there is a problem here. A large, feral, high-handed problem.

    Unlike The Liberal Party, when I make a mistake I’m willing to admit it. Consequently, if—and I’m bending over backwards to maintain the illusion of “innocent until proven guilty”—it were not actually responsible for trying to discourage us from expressing our conceits in whatever way we damn well please, then I’d stop saying that The Liberal Party’s anal-retentive half-measures are meticulously designed to keep the population unaware, uneducated, dumbed down, and focused on stupefying activities like video games. The intention is to prevent people from noticing that The Liberal Party has been corrupting our youth. The Liberal Party gets its cause-and-effect relationships all mixed up. Or, to express that sentiment without all of the emotionally charged lingo, The Liberal Party uses highfalutin terms like “syncategorematically” and “formaldehydesulphoxylic” to conceal its plans to fragment the nation into politically disharmonious units. In this scheme of its, a mass of grandiloquent words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. We become unable to see that The Liberal Party demands that we make a choice. Either we let it bury our heritage, our traditions, and our culture or it’ll smear and defame me. This “choice” exemplifies what is commonly known as a “false dichotomy” or “the fallacy of the excluded middle” because it denies other alternatives, such as that The Liberal Party says that wars end only when a goodhearted, newly enlightened tyrant heeds the advice of transnational peace activists. At least we can’t accuse it of hiding its prejudices, I suppose. Of course, it would nice if The Liberal Party were also to confess that its behavior is rarely more refined than that of a banana-eating jungle monkey. To cap that off, it has not increased our safety, security, or happiness by separating people from their roots and cutting their bonds to their natural communities. All it’s increased by doing that is the girth of its bloated ego.

    The Liberal Party is growing increasingly adept at bowdlerizing all unfavorable descriptions of its invectives. The steady drizzle of depressing data continues: I have in front of me a document that indicates that some day, The Liberal Party will form the association in the public’s mind between any theories it disagrees with and the ideas of hate and violence and illegality. Before that fatidic time arrives, we must let all of The Liberal Party’s potential victims know that The Liberal Party seems to have trouble constructing a grammatically correct sentence. That’s the current situation, and if you have any doubt about the reality of it, then you haven’t been paying close enough attention to what’s been happening in the world. Given The Liberal Party’s current mind-set, you, of course, now need some hard evidence that The Liberal Party confuses demagoguery with leadership and undocumented conspiracism with serious research. Well, how about this for evidence: It has been telling people that a book’s value to the reader is somehow influenced by the color of the author’s skin. This story has been uncritically swallowed and regurgitated by many half-informed, heartless slicksters who find pleasure in believing it. No, I can’t explain it either. However, I can say that The Liberal Party’s premise (that it would never dream of requiring religious services around the world to begin with “The Liberal Party is great; The Liberal Party is good; we thank The Liberal Party for our daily food”) is its morality disguised as pretended neutrality. It uses this disguised morality to support its ideas, thereby making its argument self-refuting.

    If alcoholism were an Olympic sport, The Liberal Party would clinch the gold medal. The Liberal Party accuses me of being lubricious whenever I state that it is the type of organization that would shoot you just to see if its gun worked. All right, I’ll admit that I have a sharp tongue and sometimes write with a bit of a poison pen, but the fact remains that The Liberal Party has boasted publicly that it intends to spew forth ignorance and prejudice. It’s one thing for such toxic ideas to be conceived in the clandestine meeting places of international terror organizations but quite another for them to be promoted as The Liberal Party has, out in the open. This development lends credence to my claim that The Liberal Party’s helots often reverse the normal process of interpretation. That is, they value the unsaid over the said, the obscure over the clear.

    The Liberal Party may have modernized the appeal and packaging of its proposals, but censorious proposals are censorious proposals regardless of how they’re presented. I support those who devote their life to education and activism. It is through their tireless efforts that people everywhere are learning that The Liberal Party should stop protesting against its weaknesses and shortcomings. Rather, it should forgive itself for them and seek to strengthen itself by facing its unconscionable fears. Then, perhaps, The Liberal Party would stop developing mind-control technology. The Liberal Party keeps repeating over and over again that gloomy vermin are more deserving of honor than our nation’s war heroes. This verbigeration is symptomatic of an excessive love of blackguardism and indicates to me that when I’m through with The Liberal Party it’ll think twice before attempting to give rise to incorrigible riffraff.

    The Liberal Party hates people who bring meaning, direction, and purpose into our lives. It wants such people nabbed, grabbed, and thrown out of the country. The Liberal Party is known for drawing unsuspecting Drawcansirs into the orbit of conscienceless, temulent ivory-tower academics. This is not only a grotesque betrayal of the principles that The Liberal Party itself claims to uphold but a clear demonstration of how now that I’ve been exposed to The Liberal Party’s annunciations I must admit that I don’t completely understand them. Perhaps I need to get out more. Or perhaps The Liberal Party can’t possibly believe that it is a model organization. It’s disorderly but it’s not that disorderly.

    The only way that The Liberal Party could convince me that lying is morally justifiable as long as it’s referred to as “strategic deception” would be to feed me stupid-flakes for breakfast. To fully understand that, you need to realize that The Liberal Party follows a dual code of morality—one morality for its fellow hideous jobbernowls and another for the rest of the world. This is why if I wanted to brainwash and manipulate a large segment of the population, I would convince them that human rights can best be protected by suspending them altogether. In fact, that’s exactly what The Liberal Party does as part of its quest to cripple its critics politically, economically, socially, morally, and psychologically.

    In a vain effort to exculpate itself, The Liberal Party has been proclaiming to the world that it has done no wrong. Rather, it was its pickthanks who have been infiltrating and then dominating and controlling the mass media. I suppose the next thing it’ll have us believe is that it is meddlesome to question its theatrics. For some strange reason, The Liberal Party is worried it’ll be disenfranchised and shunned by eccentric geeks, period. Now I certainly do not want to sound discouraging, but The Liberal Party is interpersonally exploitative. That is, it takes advantage of others to achieve its own mentally deficient ends. Why does it do that? We should be able to look into our own souls for the answer. If we do, I suspect we’ll find that it has been diminishing society’s inducements to good behavior. That’s just a tiny facet of what all of us will face if we let it spawn delusions of emotionalism’s resplendence. In summary, it is my prayer that people everywhere will join me in my quest to stop The Liberal Party’s encroachments on our heritage.

21. jimhazJune 22, 2016 at 1:25 pm

    …and one for the conservative party as the generator is American.

    My complaint about The Conservative Party

    When I began writing this letter, I had the notion that I would write about something positive and optimistic instead of going on about how deranged The Conservative Party is. Unfortunately, I couldn’t think of anything particularly positive to write about. So, instead, I’ll just tell you that The Conservative Party acts with animus against those who lead us all toward a better, brighter future. It is first necessary, however, to make clear which facts are not in dispute. There is little dispute that The Conservative Party tries to make its diegeses more palatable by wrapping them in rhetoric about the need to protect the interests of the disadvantaged and the downtrodden. There is also hardly any dispute that The Conservative Party’s functionaries have been running around recently trying to manipulate public understanding of statism. Meanwhile, The Conservative Party has been preparing to send the wrong message to children. The whole episode smacks of a carefully orchestrated operation. If you ask me, The Conservative Party would have us believe that we should abandon the institutionalized and revered concept of democracy. Not surprisingly, its evidence for that absolutely offensive claim is top-heavy with anonymous sources and, to put it mildly, it has a checkered track record for accuracy. I, not being one of the many superstitious cozeners of this world, avow it would be more accurate for The Conservative Party to say that I used to assert that it was a termagant louche-type. However, after seeing how The Conservative Party wants to subject us to the overweening yapping of pea-brained bottom-feeders, I now have an even lower opinion of it. In fact, I’d even go so far as to say that The Conservative Party has quite a clever technique for concealing its intent to develop a Pavlovian reflex in us, to make us afraid to take a no-nonsense approach to dealing with backwards goof-offs.

    Specifically, its technique is to delve into philological discussions about comparative abstractive norms whenever the conversation veers too close towards revealing that we must soon make one of the most momentous decisions in history. We must decide whether to let The Conservative Party make terrorism socially acceptable or, alternatively, whether we should reverse the devolutionary course that it has set for us. Upon this decision rests the stability of society and the future peace of the world. My view on this decision is that The Conservative Party fully intends to censor by caricature and preempt discussion by stereotype. But that’s not enough, not for it. The Conservative Party will additionally do anything and everything needed to further its crotchety cause, which is why I insist that many people think of its snooty epithets as a joke, as something only half-serious. In fact, they’re deadly serious. They’re the tool by which wily sluggards will defile the present and destroy the future before the year is over. A second all-too-serious item is that The Conservative Party tries to make us think the way it wants us to think, not by showing us evidence and reasoning with us but by understanding how to push our emotional buttons.
    In public, The Conservative Party promises that it’d never defend colonialism, serfism, and notions of racial superiority. In private, however, it secretly tells its lieutenants that it’ll do exactly that. I think we’ve seen this movie before: It’s called Business as Usual for The Conservative Party. Others may disagree, but I maintain that if I recall correctly, The Conservative Party’s cause is not glorious. It is not wonderful. It is not good.

    Sciolism has served as the justification for the butchering, torture, and enslavement of more people than any other “ism”. That’s why it’s The Conservative Party’s favorite; it makes it easy for it to palliate and excuse the atrocities of its underlings. If The Conservative Party truly believes that it’s a living bodhisattva of peace and nonviolence, then maybe it should enroll in Introduction to Reality 101. Even if our society had no social problems at all we could still say that we need to look beyond the most immediate and visible problems with The Conservative Party. We need to look at what is behind these problems and understand that The Conservative Party’s innate love of interventionism occasionally shows through its mask of anti-interventionism. Still, I recommend you check out some of The Conservative Party’s conceits and draw your own conclusions on the matter. For the purpose of this discussion, let’s say that The Conservative Party is as mordacious as the sky is blue. Am I being unduly harsh for writing that? I think not. When the religious leaders in Jesus’s time were wrong, Jesus denounced them in extremely harsh terms. So why shouldn’t I, too, use extremely harsh terms to indicate that The Conservative Party treats serious issues callously and somewhat flippantly?

    My love for people necessitates that I fight the good fight. Yes, I face opposition from The Conservative Party. However, this is not a reason to quit but to strive harder. Like many dangerous, childish miserabilism enthusiasts, The Conservative Party is a hater. But it worse than other haters. It wants to put its hatred into action and organize a whispering campaign against me. This worries me because The Conservative Party is not just judgmental. It is unbelievably, astronomically judgmental.

    Yes, you heard me right; there is a proper place in life for hatred. Hatred of that which is wrong is a powerful and valuable tool. But when The Conservative Party perverts hatred in order to blame our societal problems on handy scapegoats, it becomes clear that it says it’s going to put our liberties at risk by a stuporous and purblind rush to alter, rewrite, or ignore past events to make them consistent with its current “reality” as soon as our backs are turned. Is it out of its dotty mind? The answer is fairly obvious when you consider that I don’t believe that its conjectures are all sweetness and light. So when The Conservative Party says that that’s what I believe, I see how little it understands my position.

    My opinion of The Conservative Party hasn’t changed ever since, ages ago, I heard it say something about how matters of racial justice should enter a period of “benign neglect”. The point is that The Conservative Party talked nonsense then, and it talks nonsense now. The only thing that’s changed is that every time it spouts some nonsense about how we can all live together happily without laws, like the members of some 1960s-style dope-smoking commune, the effect is that its trained seals become even more loyal to it. Sociologists refer to the phenomenon of increased devotion to an untoward theory at the very hour of its destruction by external evidence as “cognitive dissonance”. I call it proof that the concepts underlying The Conservative Party’s inaniloquent, hidebound jeers are like the Ptolemaic astronomy, which could not have been saved by positing more epicycles or eliminating some of the more glaring discrepancies. The fundamental idea—that the heavens revolve around the Earth—was wrong, just as The Conservative Party’s idea that Machiavellianism is a sine qua non for mankind’s happiness is wrong.

    The Conservative Party’s attendants have been waxing stridently about solipsism, The Conservative Party’s blanket statements, and why The Conservative Party should turn the social order upside-down so that the dregs on the bottom become the scum on the top. Meanwhile, I have been sparking a powerful student movement that will fight for justice everywhere. What do I hope to achieve by doing such a thing? I hope to achieve widespread recognition that The Conservative Party’s homilies are not an abstract problem. They have very concrete, immediate, and unpleasant consequences. For instance, I personally have a New Year’s resolution for The Conservative Party: It should pick up a book before it jumps to the paltry conclusion that voyeurism is absolutely essential to the well-being of society.

    Here’s an idea: Instead of giving The Conservative Party the ability to slander those who are most systematically undervalued, underpaid, underemployed, underfinanced, underinsured, underrated, and otherwise underserved and undermined as undeserving and underclass, why don’t we demonstrate conclusively that its ignorant attempts to debunk myths often lead to the perpetuation of them? If we do, we’ll then be able to tell you things that it doesn’t want you to know. Some of you are probably wondering, “What would The Conservative Party’s response be if someone suggested that The Conservative Party has distorted, perverted, and profaned perennial wisdom to such a degree that I’d classify it just a few degrees below utterly discourteous?” I don’t pretend to know the answer, but I do know that I, hardheaded cynic that I am, am convinced that there will be a strong effort on The Conservative Party’s part to contaminate clear thinking with its obstreperous expostulations before long. This effort will be disguised, of course. It will be cloaked in deceit, as such efforts always are. That’s why I’m informing you that it distresses me deeply that The Conservative Party’s nitpicky, illiterate understrappers can cast votes that count just as much as mine. But let’s not lose sight of the larger, more important issue here: The Conservative Party’s filthy declamations.

    The Conservative Party’s crass plaints form an “ideology” in Marx’s sense. That is, they represent a system of ideas designed to cloak, rationalize, and defend an unjust set of relationships. For instance, The Conservative Party’s ideology denies that if we don’t do something soon, there’ll be no stopping The Conservative Party. To meet the challenges of this decisive hour we must fight tooth and nail against The Conservative Party. That’s the best way to spread the word that if it can overawe and befuddle a sufficient number of prominent individuals then it will become virtually impossible for anyone to provide ordinary people with the theoretical and methodological tools needed to critically analyze its mind games from a sociological perspective. I believe, way deep down, that you might be wondering why I strive so hard to advocate concrete action and specific quantifiable goals. It’s because I enjoy working for a purpose, especially a purpose that’s a great deal more profound and more important than the selfish pleasure of an individual reward. It’s reward enough for me to know that I’ve helped so many people see that while The Conservative Party is out siphoning away the more beautiful and fragile parts of the human soul, the general public is shouldering the bill. Sadly, this is a bill of shattered minds, broken hearts and homes, depression and all its attendant miseries, and a despondency about The Conservative Party’s attempts to mobilize support for the special interests that dominate state and private activity.

    I’m inclined to think that I’m no psychiatrist. Still, from the little I know about psychiatry I can undeniably say that The Conservative Party seems to exhibit many of the symptoms of Asperger’s syndrome. I don’t say that to judge but merely to put The Conservative Party’s ill-natured pronouncements into perspective. Unfortunately, I can already see the response to this letter. Someone, possibly The Conservative Party itself or one of its satraps, will write a morally crippled piece about how utterly insipid I am. If that’s the case, then so be it. What I just wrote sorely needed to be written.