Well said. I was reading my grand daughter "where is the green sheep" last night. The book relies on comparisons. Opposite "here is the thin sheep" we find "here is the wide sheep". Wide? What happened to fat?

Sells the opposite to thin is thick.

To the post I read this a defense of Spurr's comments not a cry out for privacy. Unless the author can articulate when private information is actionable or should be made public, which he has not tried to do.

Fantastic article. This is the first defence of Barry Spurr that I have come across. I fail to see how the leaking of these emails is any different to going through his private correspondence or recording his phone conversations. Its an outrageous imposition on his privacy and completely irrelevant to any public position he might hold. We all have views at odds with what the moral police might wish us to have. I suspect that if you could look into the thoughts of almost anybody in their sixties the vast majority would hold opinions very similar to Mr Spurr. Most of them only express these thoughts in private conversations as did Mr Spurr. To expose these for public ridicule is an absolute disgrace.

Spurr's emails were apparently to several recipients, Peter Slipper's offensive texts were to one individual thus by definition more private. O'Neill's Spectator and the rest of the right wing press had no compunction in claiming Slipper's transgression was worthy of exposure and that it made him unfit for the position of Speaker.

By the same standards Spurr's comments surely make him unfit to be used as an adviser or how appropriate the level of indigenous references in our curriculum might be.

What I find surprising about this is why Barry Spurr who is obviously a well informed learned expert on poetry and the English language even chose (or chooses) to experiment in "playfully stretching" the use of the English language in such a crass essentially unimaginative even unpoetic way.

seeing Bill Shorten promoting a perverted lifestyle while hiding behind the cloak of 'tolerance' reveals how sick our society is. For decades now the regressives have argued that one's personal life and views should not determine their public performance. Their hyprocrisy is again exposed by grubby self righteous hackers. Imagine if Gillards private life was hacked and exposed. Would not the left go ballistic. No one likes their dirty washing hung out for all to see however the hacking of woman willing to prostitute themselves being hacked is no worse than what happened to Spurr.

Where the author proclaims "act­resses' knowingly sluttish poses"

Would the author prefer behaviour more in keeping with Catholic Church traditions?

For example - priests buggering alter boys or worse? http://youtu.be/6eyQjsG0DRI

Or Australia's own monster, Cardinal Pell, now shifted to the Vatican where he can do less damage to the Church's reputation - becoming Pope?

runner's apologies not yet received.

Daffy Duck,
The more alarming issue is that a so called academic would be so dim witted as to use e-mail for risque communication, as with the celebrity photo scandal it's a case of adults who should know how to use computers and 4G phones in a safe manner but apparently haven't bothered to read the owner's manual.
As I tell my daughters, if you don't want anyone to read it or see it don't put it on an electronic device, there's no such thing as online privacy.

One other point, almost all the people McCarthy was "hunting" actually were Soviet agents, Spurr as far as we can tell hasn't been known for overtly discriminating against or disadvantaging people of other races or genders.

There has been a long line of actresses who have had photos "leaked". Only the gullible take these incidents at face value, as it seems reasonable to suspect that they were engineered by the actresses' publicists. They never fail to generate publicity and they raise her sex appeal. The actress pretends they were leaked to avoid looking trashy and to generate sympathy. It seems very unlikely that the pictures were genuinely hacked or stolen.

Professor Spurr gained nothing through the leak of the emails, so his case is genuinely different. He had a reasonable expectation of privacy and publicity about his racism has destroyed all chance that he could pursue his chosen profession.

plantagenet,

'runner's apologies not yet received.'

probably have less in common with Catholic church than you plantagenet. Had they weeded out those with an unnatural bent far less damage would of been done.

Thanks for the reply runner

I recommend several convict ships full of "bent" priests could sail, or row like galley slaves, from Australia and elsewhere, up the Tiber to the Vatican.

Cardinal Pell - being more like a harsh prison governor than a humble man of God - could then preside over them for eternity.

Cheers

Pete

I dunno Benk, a lot of those celebrities don't appear nude in films or magazines and a lot of the photos are kind of gross (yes I've looked).
Some of them appear to be shots the women have taken for reasons of hygiene or grooming "down there", in the same way you might otherwise use a hand mirror.
The good thing about the Spurr incident is that maybe, finally, White, sexually normal men will get the message that these days they have no business being in humanities departments or even attending university full stop.
It was bad enough when I was an arts student from 1986-88, I can't imagine why a young man would want to put himself through an arts degree in 2014, at least I didn't have to pay for my useless course.

There are two important differences between the Spurr incident and the photos.

First, so far as I know, the women did not seek to share their intimate photos with a group of friends to their mutual amusement. Second, they did not use their employer’s email system to distribute them.

We are all entitled to a firewall between our personal and public spaces. But in these two important respects it was Spurr who breached that wall. However malign and ideologically driven the leaking of his emails may be, he shares the blame.

Now it is my understanding, and supported by the news report from Sydney University http://sydney.edu.au/news/84.html?newsstoryid=14192 that Barry Spurr used his University e-mail account for these conversations. In doing so he would of course be in breach of the University policy on ICT Resources http://sydney.edu.au/policies/showdoc.aspx?recnum=PDOC2011/140&RendNum=0 where it clearly states:

"The University will not tolerate its ICT Resources being used in a manner that is harassing, discriminatory, abusive, rude, insulting, threatening, obscene or otherwise inappropriate."

He should also have been aware that he should not write anything he would not be prepared to say in public, because e-mails are not confidential.

Dear runner,

Here are the top 10 countries best mirroring your mindset.
Ghana, Jordan, Egypt, Palestine, Uganda, Indonesia, Tunisia, Malaysia, Kenya and Pakistan.

Here are the top 10 countries that are against it.
Spain, Germany, France, Czech Republic, Canada, Britain, Australia, Italy and Argentina.

http://pbs.twimg.com/media/B06tYjLCAAAvRNw.png

Why don't you move?

Any and all on-line activity, whether searching or commenting or posing or whatever, is wide open to scrutiny. Accept that such activity can, and often will, be posted in a public forum, if not read out in a court of law.
The Internet is NOT secret. It is an open book. Anyone who doubts this has not been paying attention.

SteeleRedux,

'Why don't you move?'

I suggest you visit your nearest mosque, tell them not to hide behind the Koran and accept same sex 'marriage'. Shorten being typical of those from cowards castle demonise anyone pointing out the hazards of risks involved in perverse sex and objecting to it being promoted to our kids and grandkids. Of course he along with the vast majority of regressives would be tolerant of the Koranic teaching or at best to gutless to confront it.

Slipper's emails were part of his sexual harrassment of an employee and were revealed in the course of complaints by the employee. Spurr's email broke no law. So your comparison fails Redux.

Perhaps Spurr should have been more careful in terms of which account he used, or whether he used email at all, but surely the university's policy doesn't mean that the university, or anyone else, has the right to make the email correspondence public to any greater extent than is required to rectify the breach of their terms and conditions.

And the fact that one should be careful what one puts in an email again does not confer the right on someone to expose your correspondence just because you weren't careful.

Apparently the emails haven't been revealed by one of the recipients, so they've been stolen by someone else.

Which must raise questions for the university, as the most likely hacker would be in their IT department.

What is most concerning in this case is that as far as I can tell Spurr was an exemplary lecturer and there are no complaints by students against him of racist or otherwise inappropriate behaviour. We convict people for what they do, not for what they might think. And this private correspondence has been used to undermine his contribution to a government review.

It will make others think twice before taking on any government work lest something in their background be used to ruin their career. New Matilda brings a new low to the term "gutter press".

"Slipper's emails were part of his sexual harrassment of an employee and were revealed in the course of complaints by the employee..."

That is simplifying that whole grubby episode...which is outlined more fulsomely here:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/08/james-ashby-v-peter-slipper-the-shameless-game-was-always-about-politics

"The sequence of events is well known. The sexual harassment claims against the Speaker were struck out in December 2012 by Justice Steven Rares. He found that the real purpose of the litigation was to bring down the Speaker and damage the minority government, and should never have been brought in the court.

That was subsequently overturned by a full court majority in February. It left us with two judges saying this was more about politics than the law, and two saying this was more about the law than politics. Contrary to spin from the Ashby camp, the full court made no findings of fact about his allegations. That was to be determined by a trial that never happened because the complainant withdrew from the contest."

And what about Brough admitting he urged Ashby to photograph Slipper's diary?

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/christopher-pyne-had-no-specific-knowledge-over-james-ashby-slipper-claims/story-fn59niix-1227051208133

"“You have someone that was previously a cabinet minister, who was wanting to be a member of the federal parliament again and is now a member of the federal parliament owning up to having encouraged a member of the staff of the speaker of the House of Representatives to steal the property of the speaker,” he said."

Loads of "interesting machinations" abound in that episode.

I like what Barry Humphrey wrote in The Australian on this matter: "HAS Australia gone slightly mad? I read in the London press of some poor professor in Sydney who has been persecuted and suspended for sending emails to a friend in which he employs outrageous vernacular epithets for race which would be offensive if they were not so clearly jocular.

His reported response to the storm in a teacup which followed this revelation is, unsurprisingly, bewilderment. How could anyone take such deliberate touretting seriously? The answer, I fear, is that there are a lot of Australians these days who are totally bereft of a sense of humour. The new puritanism is alive, well and powerful.

Not long ago some poor guy was actually prosecuted for saying that the Aboriginal welfare services were sometimes exploited by faux Aborigines, even though we knew it was true.

Recently, I announced that when I curate next year’s Adelaide cabaret festival I will ban the F-word, and there was a howl of protest, indeed outrage, particularly from comedians. What kind of comedians were they, do you suppose? Why, comedians with no sense of humour of course! Or comedians whose stand-ups would be meaningless if deprived of one over-used word.

We really ought to be aware of this malignant brand of cultural fascism, and restore our reputation as a funny country before it’s too late.

Barry Humphries, London, UK"

Great article!

Rabbi Gershom (960-1028 AD), decreed that a messenger may not open or read the letters they deliver. This was very progressive at the time, just like his other famous and widely-accepted decree that a Jewish man may marry only one wife (at a time) and may not either marry or divorce her without her consent.

Now on another aspect:

This is a war situation - the "New Matilda" people do not accept Mr. Spurr's power to influence the school curriculum to which their children are subjected. The reason they resorted to this crime was not pornographic: they wanted to achieve the goal of removing his influence over the curriculum, but were of the wrong view that "the end justifies the means".

We should however really ask ourselves how this is possible in the first place that someone unacceptable to you can influence the curriculum of your kids in school. In other words, how is it that a national curriculum is in existence in first place, rather than allowing parents to decide for themselves what their children are going to study.