Comments on: Rundle: Hoax a telling blow to the Right’s cred

By: Tara Bean

Tara Bean — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 10:00:00 +0000

Great analysis Guy.
And for those who endured the self-righteousness of Windshuttle’s nit picking and watched the right wing media’s quick embrace of his thinly veiled ideological driven agenda, the hoax is well-placed and revealing.
And entertaining. It beats the cricket.

By: John

John — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 10:00:00 +0000

I find you description of today’s Australian article by Colebatch to be quite misleading. You allege his argument was: “The gist is that the hoax was nothing other than a few misdirected footnotes and a false bio — more like a dud cheque than a genuine hoax in Quadrant editor Keith Windschuttle’s words. “

This is not the central argument made by Colebatch, who in his article explained why the Quadrant episode was different from the Ern Malley hoax and the Sokal affair. You may not agree with his reasoning, but setting up a straw man and then crowing about how easily you knocked it down really is a bit silly, and is also lacking in basic honesty about what your opponents are saying.

I recommend to all a very good article on this topic, published today in On Line Opinion by Graham Young. Read it here- http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=8387

By: Dr Harvey M Tarvydas

Dr Harvey M Tarvydas — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 10:00:00 +0000

An excellent analysis. You clearly know what makes men tick and how the job is done.
Success at producing quality like this analysis depends on knowledge. You have a background of the necessary and good ‘psychology’ instincts.

I wrote a number of responses to the Windshuttle stories so if you read them you know I like our like minds but I do not have your journalistic background.

By: MalB

MalB — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 10:00:00 +0000

I noted with fascination Guy’s portrayal of Windschuttle’s pedigree - “advocating the revolutionary potential of LSD in the 60s, media studies as “radical pedagogy” in the early 70s, was enthusiastic for Pol Pot peasant-style revolts in the late 70s (“the oil is almost gone — soon the Aborigines and poor whites will rise up” he wrote in Nation Review in the late 70s) and re-emerged in the 90s, after the global collapse of the left, as a man who thought there was no Tasmanian genocide, that the White Australia policy was a left-wing plot, that John Steinbeck made up the Great Depression and that the British Empire could not have been cruel because its officers were Christians.” and could not help wondering about the changes people go through in their lives. How many radicals (Windschuttle, Costello, Nelson) become conservatives when they “grow up”?There is no point to this random wondering other than to say to Guy - go easy on these people because we might just see you editing Quadrant in around 20-30 years.

By: Julius

Julius — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 10:00:00 +0000

John and Coleman have skewered Rundle already, who ought to be realising that his piece says more about him than about Windschuttle. Precisely because I share some of what are supposed to be the prejudices that “Sharon Gould” appealed to in Windschuttle I think I would have been very keen to follow up the only important and surprising information in the article, namely the CSIRO’s supposed dropping of the research. It would have been for that reason that I would have looked at footnotes which would have been shown to be false. But there is nothing of the Sokal or Ern Malley hoax in it. The scientific research described was not only not such as to alert an ordinarily educated layman to a lie but it wasn’t even impossible or meaningless as a description of scientific research programs. Mind you Windschuttle has enough enemies amongst his old comrades on the left that he needs to watch his back better than he has done this time round. Another small point: Windschuttle obiously published it for the reasoning rather than the factual premises underlying the reasoning so treated the facts with indifference, presumably because he knew (or believed, correctly I suggest) that another set of facts could be found and substantiated to support the thrust of the article even if not as sensational as the CSIRO behaving in the extraordinarily craven way depicted. At least that is my suspicion about his failure to arrange for the footnotes to be checked. It is a more commonplace explanation than one which is given in portentous terms of Windschuttle’s ideological fixations.

By: guy rundle

guy rundle — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 10:00:00 +0000

My critics in the comments section are all in error or have missed the point.

John claims that I have misrepresented Colebatch's defence of Quadrant. Ninety per cent of Colebatch's article concerns the Sokal and Ern Malley hoaxes - the only time he specifically discusses the Gould hoax is to bleat about Quadrant being a small underfunded magazine. At no point does he face the core truth about the Gould hoax - that Quadrant willingly and unquestioningly published an article accusing the CSIRO of bowing to public pressure, and relying for its argument on some hard science, without even the most informal check of the facts.

Coleman doesn't seem to have understood my point about people selecting facts that suit them - Windschuttle obviously believes that climate change, GM protest etc is irrationalism, and thus he never bothered to scrutinise the facts in an article supporting it. I'm not suggesting that Windschuttle invented the CSIRO 'facts' - Wilson/Gould did. Re-read Margaret Simons's overview and my article Coleman, you simply haven't understood the events as they occurred. A little too quick resorting to the comments button?

Julius, in defending Windschuttle basically agrees with the criticism of him - he didn't bother to question the facts because they 'looked' real, that an editor should have checked the CSIRO report, and that facts don't matter anyway because it was an opinion piece, which is, well, pretty postmodern.

Great work gang. You're really holding the line...

With friends like that, Windschuttle doesn't need enemies, although to be fair, in his life, most people he's associated with have been both....

By: coleman

coleman — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 10:00:00 +0000

This is not very logical, Guy: first you say that the central sin of the hoax text is making a false claim:

“At the core of the Wilson/Gould hoax was this — that at the centre of an article, purportedly about how public fears stifle scientific progress, and as its key piece of evidence for this assertion, was a CSIRO research programme THAT HAD NEVER EXISTED. “

a little later, however, you assert:
“The CC-sceptic, pro-GM etc push, in the form Windschuttle gives it, is a sort of right-wing Lysenkoism, in which facts are selected for their usefulness to a previously established politics.”

You can’t have it both ways: inventing “facts” is not selecting them. But perhaps you were so keen to crow over the “humiliation” of KW that you didn’t even read over what you’d written. Publishing opinions in a hurry, surely not.

By: Mikey

Mikey — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 10:00:00 +0000

I can’t help having a big burst of non guilty pleasure at Windschuttle coping one in the neck. For years he’s made a name for himself combing through the footers of others and now a massive hah hah blew up in his face.

It couldn’t happen to a nastier person. Kudos to those involved.