(...continued)

Puffing-up plumage has nothing to do with consciousness - it is plain silly, but feathering one's nest in this day and age is a sensible thing to do to protect oneself from the hostile western-society in which we live. Rebelling against the system can be done bare-footed if you are a Faqir, but a few $$s in the bank can do a fair bit to help in that process for anyone who is not yet fully enlightened.

"Our Australian government is not a government"

Everyone knows that, but why is it so?
- Because the elected people are of primitive, underdeveloped consciousness, because they are from a low caste, because they are Shudras who are not capable of taking the necessary responsibilities, this is why they blindly serve the interests of unethical capital for example, they are ignorant, they know not better. There is no shame in being there, we all go or went through that stage (sometime between living as a cow and living as a Brahamin), but then we should not be in leadership positions. So much for democracy - the blind leading the blind!
Traditionally, leadership was held by the Warrior/Leader caste (Kshatriyas), who were capable and responsible, who in turn revered and protected the God-people (Brahamins), who in turn bestowed their blessings on society. How different than today's society where Brahamins need to raise money to protect themselves!

I would humbly suggest that you may have a serious issue with responsibility. How else can responsibility be considered a negative trait??

As for the ABC, I accept that it is better than the others and happy to hear that it is self-reflective (something I cannot probably learn just from listening to ABC classic FM). As I wrote earlier, my problem does not lie with its contents, but with the fact that by listening to the ABC I become an accomplice to robbery, taxing people against their will for my entertainment.

Yuyutsu,

I think there's no point discussing it further. I find your position elitist and unacceptable, and your idea of taking responsibility, for yourself, a case of "pull the ladder up". The most common way for liberalism to defend itself from such charges is to retreat into religious mysticism in spurious defence. But this is just irrational rationalising.
I stand by everything I've said above, but I don't think you've really considered it.
Nothing new in that..

Having been bumped off the Drum a few times for what I thought were very innocuos questions I haven't been back since. The ABC should remember its origins occasionally - rural Australia created it!

I started with OLO because it reminded me of how The Bulletin used to be before Laurie Oaks emasculated it. The dear old Bulletin would print 5 or 6 pages of letters to the editor from ministers, shadow ministers on down to the garbage collector (a very admirable occupation I am sure :-). One ended up with some sort of cross section of "factual information" on any particular issue. So too with OLO - keep up the good work Graeme!

BTW - I now won't read any comments by Sqeers or Yuyutsu in the future - don't have enough time in this life to put up with this long winded banter. Thought... it would be nice on blogs to have an optional filter to remove comments from particular handles - jus' dreamin'.

JacobusZeno,

It would also be nice to be able to filter-out verbal snatches that contribute nothing to debate.
Twits should stick to twitter.

IMHO The Drum do an OK job. They put up just as much right wing claptrap as left sicle waving; contrarian fact free fodder and alarmist "won't someone think of the children" dribble; and some decent science based arguments as well.

Setting your sights on The Drum and using that as a yardstick for the performance of the ABC as a whole is not a good methodology.

I could cherry pick the statement above about Artic sea ice, point out that submarines are not used by the US navy for ice measurement and yell that the whole of OLO is biased.

Not a good method.

T.Sett, I agree.

However, about the cherry pick - US submarines still conduct operations in the Arctic.

If anyone is interested in what the US Navy is doing, I suggest you look here:

http://tinyurl.com/4tqq2ch

What is staggering (if not unsurprising) is that certain OLO’ers make up their own “facts” then claim when questioned that their source has “disappeared” – Hasbeen's comment on 24th February a typical case in point.