Great article! Australia is most certainly riddled with "absurdities".

This lady sums all that is wrong with virtue-signalling, cowardly Australia and the West in general, with none of the usual blather and padding we are subjected to by many contributors.

The main problem with our universities is their rapid & on going expansion. 30 years ago it was bad enough, they had reached the bottom of the barrel, with some poorly educated people being recruited to academia. Today they have started digging under the barrel to find someone to put in front of the huge bank of students.

I was pretty horrified to find, after I got out into the real world, that my favourite professor was not all that well informed, & was a long way from up to date. However, compared with some I have dealt with recently, he could be considered brilliant.

Fortunately many are only at uni to get the bit of paper required by the human resources department, & the employer will teach new graduates what they need to know. I wonder how many buildings have to fall down, before this Improves?

And spoken by one of the aforementioned, I believe, dumbed down intellectual. Now displaced as a purveyor of informed public opinion by the very public she seems to trash?

Yes, there are trolls who regularly patrol public opinion pages, many with assumed identities often originating in places like Saint Petersberg!?.

The economically illiterate have squandered mining booms one and two. Dismantled Cooperative capitalism dismantled at every opportunity. In a nightmare where the inmates have taken over and running the asylum?

Thus we see the bush and small rural and regional towns dying on the vine and our best and brightest and their better ideas offshored to get a hearing/development!

Think, we were once the third wealthiest nation on the planet and a creditor one at that and from a time when a family home was affordable along with energy

We've come a long way since the seventies and all of it downhill as publicly owned, publicly paid for, income earning infrastructure was purloined and sold off by the economically illiterate for very short term political outcomes and at the nation's detriment. We could have and still can do so much better!

Particularly if we can get shot of those who just know all the reasons it can't/won't be done. And that can't happen while the elite continues to believe they know best and our parliaments are controlled by rank self-interest and powerful vested interest and their "intellectual" lackeys?
Alan B.

Yes Al. What is happening in the West?

Could it be, a young mother plunges to death from a cliff, clutching her three year old child, gripped in despair and seeing no future worth the effort for herself and her child?

Was the cause the power bill, huge rents and inadequate jobs?

Or could she recognise all too clearly, the unlikely event for her and her child, to join the hedonistic elite in their inner city bubble: A bubble where the life of a Koala Bear exceeds the worth of her own and the child, who's life she took from this world, when she jumped?

Had she agonised for too long on the consequences of her own single mother, who fought the same Everest of hopelessness on a single mother pension. Persecuted by a mean-spirited welfare regime, overseen by the same arrogant elitests; those elitests who gather in the halls of power, to muse over cost savings from welfare budgets for whites, while squandering billions on an even more impoverished race of Aboriginals.
(And crying for clean air, for themselves and Koala Bears, as the power switches of the poor are turned off permanently).

The good thing about increasing poverty levels Al, is the voice grows louder by the hour!

Dan

Some of the most stupid people I've dealt with over the years have been highly educated !

*...Some of the most stupid people I've dealt with over the years have been highly educated !...*

And Individual, some of the dumbest are uneducated.

What that says is simply, the correlation between degrees of practical sense and intelligent outcomes, are not tied together with education necessarily.

In the end, success in life comes down to; "it's not what you know but who".

It's the social circles in which a person moves which supports progress. It is the resources attributed to the individual which will add to success; but just a cursory look at the billions poured into the "Aboriginal Industry", one wonders a bit about that conclusion.

However, no theory of success is hard and fast.

Luck plays a big part, as you point out. Chaos theory.

However, when the elite class begin considering the fallacy of "deservance", as Hillary Clintons famous line did, by condemning the opposition underclass to the status of the "deplorables", we have ourselves an exposed problem to deal with!

What we end up with is the circular firing squad. "Nach Hitler uns"...after Hitler, ourselves!

But the inevitable bitter pill for the unwashed to swallow is, life continues unchanged Ad infinitum.
Money eventually overpowers intelligence, and the status of both remains unconnected.

Dan

Western Society has forgotten the values that got us to where we are and is giving way to the hysteria of identity politics and political correctness.

Some think those values lost are 'Christian values';
(I'd argue it's not about whether or not one believes in God but an erosion of some of the core ethics that underlie Christianity)

But more importantly I think it's also an erosion of non-secular ethics as well.

The Socratic Method and The Harm Principle to a large degree make religion obsolete;
Except for believing (or not believing) in God which itself should be a personal matter.

Being insipid in the extreme is the new aspiration of intellectuals !

The inspired Individual...

Inspirational people are in a long cue on top of Mount Everest, awaiting their turn to climb the last three hundred feet before the oxygen runs out.
But should we say, "what a way to die"!

Inspirational people support their heros, by emulating their heros achievements, (Donald Trump devotees).

Is inspiration necessarily a bad thing though? Looking carefully for our own OLO example of the inspired, look no further than "Al B".

Dan.

Dan