Picture: Mick Tsikas/AAP
If the dreadful attacks on Christchurch taught us anything, it is that there is a global pandemic of destructive narcissism, anti-social personality disorder and histrionic personality disorder.
The first normal human response to events such as Friday’s attacks on Muslims going peacefully about their business, many shot dead while kneeling in prayer, is empathy and a deep sense of grief and sorrow.
This was callously interrupted by a wave of YouTube ersatz celebrities, self-serving internet warriors and egomaniacs dripping with conceit and intellectual vanity.
In the wake of the attacks on the Masjid Al-Noor and the Linwood Masjid in Christchurch, there has been a lot of blame apportionment that doesn’t pass muster by any sense of logic.
Presently, the attacker’s motives are not fully understood. While he prepared a 78-page manifesto and posted it online, it is an unreliable guide to his conduct without further forensic investigation of his life.
What we can conclude at this stage is the gunman was a terrorist, an ultra-nationalist, right-wing extremist. But even this obvious and self-evident truth is subject to bizarre scrutiny.
I have been writing about the risk right wing extremism poses to the community for some time. Australia has a long and unhappy history with right wing extremism from the paramilitary New Guard in the 1930s, the vicious anti-Semitism and exclusionism of the Australian League of Rights post-war, through to its bastard children fanning off into various extreme and ultra-nationalist groups like the United Patriots’ Front.
It never pays to take your eye off these people. To regard them as amusing clods who dwell on the fringes of society as well as on the extreme right of the political spectrum may hold some truth, but we should not underestimate the menace they pose to our communities.
It is not so much what they say and do in their eternal struggle for the spotlight and a whiff of legitimacy, but who is quietly listening and fervently clinging to very appalling word they utter in the background.
Rather than acknowledge and attempt to quantify the risk, we wasted our time and energy on dismal polemics about whether Nazism is from the right or the left.
We largely ignored the hate speech in our federal parliament after the 2016 double dissolution election foisted some of the worst people on the country into red chairs and gave them a platform.
It’s not just Anning’s disgraceful clawing for publicity. There have been many others. Back in March 2016, the ineligible One Nation senator, Malcolm Roberts, got to his feet and railed:
“If your Muslim Sudanese neighbour is engaging in female genital mutilation or your Syrian Muslim cafe owner is a terrorist building a bomb or maybe just the Afghan Muslims in the public housing flat next to you are molesting small children, chances are that you are afraid to speak out.”
The fact this garbage was largely allowed to go through to the keeper shows our political institutions are sick and our media too cynical to condemn. Rather, it was situation normal.
The hate speech doesn’t exist in a vacuum. If we really want to understand how events such as terrorist massacres occur but how they trigger our communities to resort to vitriol and ugliness in their wake, we need only look at the narcissists with their YouTube accounts who sit about drooling over bloody events so they can tell a world that seems to have lost its capacity for reason, what we should think.
Social media becomes a cesspit at times like this. It was the same after the Islamic State inspired Paris attacks in November 2015, the Islamist outrages in Brussels in March 2016 and the Manchester bombing in May of 2017.
Ambulances were still ferrying the wounded across Hagley Park to Christchurch Hospital when Melbourne-based YouTuber, Sydney Watson decided to pipe up on Twitter. She has 160,000 subscribers on YouTube.
“What is happening in Christchurch is SO wrong,” she tweeted. “But before I see anyone else say this is the result of “anti-immigration” sentiments – I’ll counter that this is the result of politicians making people feel unheard & marginalized. You push some people far enough, they snap.”
The massacre was less than two hours old when Watson decided she had the answer. In her twisted world, feeling “unheard and marginalised” is a precursor to shooting dead a three-year-old child and 49 others.
As night fell in Christchurch, up popped Gemma O’Doherty, an Irish ‘journalist’ and 9-11 ‘truther’, who decided she could sniff another one world order conspiracy from 19,000 kilometres away.
“Has all the hallmarks of a classic false flag operation,” she tweeted. “To incite fresh #IS attacks, create chaos and fear, allow the globalists take more control over people and remove freedoms a la 9/11. A professional job. The public are no longer fooled.”
O’Doherty went on to babble and continues to do so that calls for people not to view the shooter’s helmet cam footage of his attacks on the mosques were not due to the appalling nature of the mayhem and death he wrought, but because some fictitious One World government had descended from the grassy knoll to clean up the crime scene.
By then, the finger pointing on social media had well and truly started. Canadian ultra nationalist, Lauren Southern, was beset with angry tweets calling her complicit in the Christchurch massacre. She fired off a response early Saturday morning.
“I am utterly disgusted by those sending tweets along the lines of “Are you happy?” to right wingers. Would you send this to a Muslim that has never advocated violence on the day of an Islamic terror attack?”
I’d be happy to agree with her except for one thing. A quick flip through her twitter account showed she had done exactly the same thing albeit in another scenario.
On 24 March 2016, and in the wake of the Islamist terror attacks in Brussels, she tweeted, “I confronted a Muslim woman yesterday (in Canada). Asked her to explain Brussels. She said, ‘Nothing to do with me.’ A mealy-mouthed reply.”
These are just examples but all three have large social media followings. They are not peddling ideas or opinions, they are self-promoting for some grim lunge at fame. If shunned, they and others like them would wither into anonymity where frankly, they belong.
While most of us struggled to comprehend what had happened and why, we were being trolled by narcissists and look-at-me wannabes, pushing opinions that were driven by a desperate grab for publicity.
They can have their forums and their free speech. The rest of us need to develop the capacity to turn our backs on them.
This article was first published on 21 March 2019.
Watched Q & A for the first time in ages last night. The Libs have supposedly been campaigning to attract women to the party, and no doubt more women like Teena McQueen. What an embarrassment she is. How is it possible she scored the gig as VP of the party?? Somehow I don’t think she will be allowed media space in the upcoming election campaign.
posted elsewhere by some other
libs have a man problem….fkn ankles all of ém
I don’t the nsw vote has much relevance at a federal level but I’ve lost a bit of faith in polls over the years and think the coalition will not get as much of a hammering as is expected.
And I think a few of the Trump haters are feeling a little flat after the Mueller findings.
The Coalition will win the Federal Election, Milton am sure of that. Only the “Rusted Ons” and Party faithful will vote for Labor with Shorten as the head.
Shorten described recently by a well known Journo and Author and the “worst Labor leader since Arthur Calwell”.
Undisputable imho. Cheers
Yes, I see my earlier recent references on here regarding Labor leader Michael Daley’s tenuous hold on his position have been overtaken by even more recent events. He’s now in feather duster territory.
Its either a feast or a fiasco, depending upon whether you are “heartily sick” or wholesomely healthy.
Gladys and her Coalition now have the 47 Seats to form a Majority Government, Mr. Insider. Linked is the full Seat by Seat rundown on who won what.
An outstanding result imho
https://www.abc.net.au/news/elections/nsw/2019/results
Penny says:
March 23, 2019 at 10:48 PM
“I get heartily sick of Henry, CotC etc. pushing the conservative line ..”
Sorry about your discomfort Penny.
You may have noticed that Gladys B also gave the “conservative line” a bit of a nudge recently and this resulted in Labor’s NSW Opposition leader (for now) not feeling too flash either. So perhaps you may care to console each other.😉
cotc you can even win well. You cons are Worst losers and even worse winners. If falling over the line due to the oppo leader blowing it is winning, but the cons con goes on and on.
LOL I missed poor Pennys “bleat” Carl bless her life must be difficult. Cheers
“Special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election did not find that President Donald Trump committed a crime but also did not exonerate him, according to a summary of findings released this morning.
Mr. Mueller also found no evidence that any member of Mr. Trump’s election campaign conspired with Russia during the election.”
It’s on now to victory in 2020 for the Donald.
https://tinyurl.com/y5hxgazf
In exciting Space News, Mr Insider we see NASA has published Satellite photos of a powerful Meteor which appeared and exploded just above the Bering Sea on December 18 but went unnoticed until months later.
The explosion unleashed around 173 kilotons of energy, more than 10 times that of the atomic bomb blast over Hiroshima in World War II. We survived.
Thank you NASA for keeping watch on the Heavens for us and of course for the 6 successful Manned Moon Landings ’69-’72. Sadly still a few amusing “Flowerpots” dispute this but they belong to the Flat Earthers or Anarchists, or such, desirable Organisations indeed if one is 19 Shillings short of a Pound.
http://tinyurl.com/y3opezsy
The Esteemed, Foresightful and Erudite HDJ Blofeld IV Esq
Hello Henry. A note from my travel notes from some years back, when I visited the American Museum of Science and Energy v1.0 in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Originally the Museum of Atomic Energy, they held a lot of information that at the time, had just been de-classified. Oak Ridge was the site of the pitchblende mines where the bomb cores for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were refined and assembled.
Many people refer to large explosive events as being the equivalent of (x Hiroshima bombs). Truth to tell the Hiroshima bomb was a virtual dud. There’s some wonder it detonated at all. The Uranium 235 used had a high content of Pu – 240 (usually a stable isotope) and Pu – 239 (an unstable easily fissile isotope). This did not prevent the explosion but was a significant damper. In easier terms, it’s a bit like using wet gunpowder. The less stable Plutonium detonates before the Uranium , so the 61kg bomb core was torn apart by the pre-detonation of the Plutonium reducing it to below its critical mass. The total fissile material that actually detonated was about .91 kg, of which it is estimated only 770 milligrams was Uranium, a mere poofteenth of the bomb core. In terms of volume, that would be a Uranium disc about the size of a ten cent piece. Pu 239 has a mass of 19,860kg/M^3, so a lump of about 0.9 kg (the total fissile material converted) weighs (19860 / 1000 = 19.86) kg/cubic decimeter (a 4″ x 4″ block) so 0.9 kg would work out to be a lump of (19.86 * 0.9 ) = 17.87 cu cm , about the size of one quarter of a pack of 20 smokes. The entire bomb core volume was equivalent to approx 3 x 1 litre bottles of Coke or around 2 house bricks. The Oak Ridge uranium production was marred by the relatively high content of plutonium because it was refined in a cyclotron, not a nuclear reactor.
Very interesting read indeed dear Wissendorf thanks for that. We will be over in the US soon and if time permits may well visit that Musem, so much to see and do in the fabulous USA. Cheers
Oh dear, from your travel notes? Walter you are still full of it, after all these years.
The people of Hiroshima will be interested to hear that the bomb was a virtual dud.
enjoy yer flowerpotz
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-dx9KaTKxE
Morrison has been caught out at a cabinet meeting held in 2010 stating that every opportunity
Morrison should be taken to take political advantage for any anti-Muslim sentiment in the community.
He rejects the assertion but some of those present at the time said it did happen and still hold this view.
A similar tactic was used by the Liberals leading up to the 2016 Federal Election. Here is Laura Tingle (SMH, August 14, 2015) “A meeting of the National Security committee of the cabinet has, however, recently asked for a list of national-security-related things that could be announced weekly between now and the election”. A desperate government with no policies reverting to hollow scare campaigns. So sad. The Liberals have form on demonising Muslims since Howard accused them of trying to drown their children, being queue jumpers (there are no queues). carriers of AIDS, STD’s. I have amused myself watching Dutts, Morrison and Abbott, the greatest offenders, suddenly become all warm and fuzzy about Muslims. That alone is your proof!
Based on that lot of nonsense BASSY, you’ve been amusing yourself alright. And it hasn’t just been watching Dutts, Morrison and Abbott.
good job
http://www.contactairlandandsea.com/2019/03/10/hmas-ballarat-seizes-another-2tonne-of-hash/
Spare a thought for Therese May.
And was George M ever married to Glady’s B?