does anyone know what has happened to Gary and John? have they actually been dismissed? or are they back at lectures?

Hi there, I'm John Noonan, Mick's older brother, in Melbourne. Dad just rang to inform me of all the furore... and all I can say is ...WOW!
May I first point out is an absolute gentleman and would never exploit these people. Secondly, I have always thought Mick needed a break to further his career. This controversy is just absolutely fantastic for him! Thirdly, Mick, you now have a plethora of material for your thesis. Well done!
By the way, have you seen that latest ad where the disabled guy in a wheel chair is singing along to Radiohead. Now THAT is funny.
PS. And there's no need to sack those two guys,

This story having gone round the world before reaching Britain, I have interests in it at once as a friend of Gary MacLellan with family in Brisbane, as a grandfather of an autistic youth, and as a Catholic information scientist, i.e. from a background critical of Gary’s Marxism but a shared if technically deeper appreciation of history, psychology, truth and justice. Having studied all the previous comments, my impression is that they mainly miss or avoid the article’s opening remarks about the case being “the final straw”, explaining the subsequent attack on the Humean ethics of the QUT/neo-con establishment. Fraterperturbed’s final dismissal of this as a “whinge” is both loaded and perverse.

So, I wholeheartedly support John and Gary’s protest, directed at a product and not a student, and aimed not particularly at individuals but at their Machiavellian postmodern ideology: “tell the people what they wish to hear”. Those of “the people” in Australia who don’t understand the meaning of that would do well to study Bertrand Russell’s discussion of Modernism in his “History of Western Philosophy”, Humean and thus anti-Catholic though it is. Post-modernism is effectively Humean modernism reverting to pre-Socratic sophistry, going mad without Russell’s historical and logical appreciation of Platonic ideals and Aristotelian scientific judgement.

There is no point in inflaming the disagreement here: better to draw lessons from it. A unanimous ethics committee is surely a waste of time, since the whole point of democracy and even of post-modernism is that people have different points of view. This situation would not have arisen had Gary and John been on QUT’s ethics committee.

Will continue ...

Continuing:

Noonan makes an interesting defence: “My project seeks to empower the disabled, to give them a voice through comedy. … As a sessional staff member at QUT, I can think of nothing more deplorable than attacking a student’s incomplete research in a public forum.”

If close examination reveals the first statement here to be true (though it seems to contradict the abstract) then Gary & John would probably be able to agree that, while it is wrong (indeed Nietzschian, fascist, Nazi) to ridicule the disabled (or Catholics, or whatever), it is good (as G K Chesterton saw) for them to be able to make fun of themselves. My experience with Asperger’s syndrome suggests even the potential for this is missing in this specific case.

On the second point, I think it even more deplorable that Noonan should feel that, as a student, he is inferior to his professors, or likely to be professionally demeaned by having to change his mind in public. I’ve been a student (among other things) for seventy years, and am glad to have thoughtful comment from any source just as long as it is honest and intelligent.

What I have learned from my own studies is that manifestations of Humean illogic and immorality like Nazism, neo-con economics and postmodernism will continue until Hume’s arguments are confronted with the findings of post-1800’s communication and information science, including how logics are able to actually work. It may then be more widely realised that information is conveyed by form, not content, and objective truth applies to both traditional and moral logics, not propositions. The ‘or’ form can “compute true with no errors indicated”, the ‘and’ form (by means of a google-like search of a historical database of known errors) “indicates true when no errors are found” (but false when one or more are: this moral form being used to protect the logic from events – like dividing by 0 – which will undermine its truth). Hume can be excused for not realising this 270 years ago; we can’t.

I attend TAFE with students in their teens.

In my Design class is a young fellow with Asperger’s. He was criticised by a teacher for some print design mistakes. I think the teacher was unaware of the boy's condition. The student was then laughed at by the class. This hurt the student greatly until a girl student came over and asked the boy what the problem was. The boy said that he never got treated like this in his drama class. He explained he had Asperger’s and that he was fixated on theme parks like Dreamworld.

The girl had a relative with the same condition and she made sure the class never openly laughed at the boy again. The teacher seem to get the message too.

This is a condition with human consequences that many seem to have swept aside in an effort to push their own stereotypic view of the world.

Ian Curr

I agree with "agingstudent" and welcome “thoughtful comment from any source just as long as it is honest and intelligent”. Unfortunately, such comment is rare. To date, I’ve mostly encountered stupidity, misinformation and outright dishonesty. People seem quite happy to admonish me and my work without having seen a single frame of footage. They think my provocative thesis title and the heresay of two academics are grounds enough on which to judge me. Perhaps, if they were film reviewers, they would critique a movie based on the DVD menu page. Some, I suspect, haven’t even taken the disc out of its cover.