Herald Sun internet historian, Andrew Bolt, today digs deep into his own personal wayback machine to explain, once again, how much he dislikes Marieke Hardy.
Marieke Hardy, the only 34-year-old Australian woman still in pigtails, is hired by the ABC’s First Tuesday Book Club as an expert in literary culture.
That alone tells us so much about the parallel decline of both our branch of that culture and the ABC itself. Here, for instance, is Hardy’s tweet on the Opposition Leader at his campaign launch:
“The most conservative instinct of all – the instinct to have a family’. Tony Abbott, I hope your cock drops off and falls down a plughole.
This now passes for sophisticated discourse among our fashionably educated barbarians.
And that’s just the beginning, as Bolt takes us on a hits and memories tour of things that Hardy may once have described as ‘Reasons you will hate me‘.
Bolta, quite incredibly, starts with a little bit of guilt by association by bringing up comments made at Hardy’s blog in 2008 as another example of sophisticated discourse among our fashionably educated barbarians. An extraordinary position to take considering his own ‘dilemma’ about the way he was being defined by the comments at his blog. It would seem that bloggers can only be held accountable for comments made at their blogs if their name is something other than Andrew Bolt.
Following this, Bolt revisits the juvenile nonsense that was ‘Pandagate‘ from 2004, failing to mention that he involved himself in what was essentially an undergraduate spat. I doubt that any of the protagonists in this little episode consider it a high point, but it seems amazing that Bolt would bring it up as an example of Hardy’s failings when his it was his own involvement that took a blog war to the pages of the Herald Sun. Does Andrew Bolt still harbour a grudge against Hardy because of the ridicule that he received due to his decision to inject himself in this petty quarrel?
I’d like to know where the line is drawn in the fight against barbarism in the refined, chesterfield lounge suite stuffed parlours that I imagine inhabit Andrew Bolt’s World of Fine Manners? Is it Hardy’s unapologetic use of swearing? Where would that leave Alexander “Kevin Rudd is a f****** awful person” Downer who claims to “use the f-word pretty freely”? Maybe it’s the sexually charged content of Hardy’s writing that upsets Bolt? Although he seems pretty happy to have Miranda “Rogering Gerbils” Devine as a co-worker, so perhaps it’s something a little more intangible? Perhaps all it takes to be a barbarian at the gates of Bolt World is the audacity to publicly disagree with Andrew or his friends?
Whatever turns out to be the defining characteristic of barbarism in Bolt World, professional schoolgirl Marieke Hardy seems to have it in spades.
24 Comments
Just more rank hypocrisy and drivel from the Boltverse™ and his hoard of grotesque Orc-like followers with their homespun ‘science’ and ‘wisdom’.
It’s OKAY when it comes from his or any other conservative’s mouth though. Devine in particular is always lecturing everyone else about standards whilst she does her B-grade hand-me-down Ann Coulter shtick.
Perhaps all it takes to be a barbarian at the gates of Bolt World is the audacity to publicly disagree with Andrew or his friends?
A purely rhetorical question, I take it?
His recent comment linking the modern-day left to the French Revolution puts Bolt firmly in his proper slot:
In the court of Louis XVI, powdered, bewigged, inhaling snuff through a curled nostril, firing off bon mots about the great unwashed, and bowing obsequiously upon sight of the king.
The culture wars continue.
@DBOP. This you call culture? Old jokes about yoghurt spring to mind.
Hardy barbaric? Bolt going off half-cocked again. She’s just a precious poseur.
“Fashionably educated barbarians”. Lolbolt!! How on earth could one even parody this???
Though I never normally bother I visited bolts site and posted:
“She sounds like the sort of person who would use a position of power, like publishing a blog in a biased paper to insight hate against minority groups. Clearly she doesn’t understand sarcasm and would only employ it clumsily. Indeed I bet that most of her posts are nothing but cherry picking selective quotes to distort the source and knowingly mislead her rabid audience. I bet her supporters mindlessly abuse all of those with dissenting views and that the majority of adverse posts are censored. Silly person!”
I might actually chase up and see if this is posted in the hun, and if irony is appreciated.
Are you sure that @andrewbolt isn’t writing the blog? Fortunatly most people aren’t intimidated by this sort of writing. Andrew has not come off well in his last few swerves at Twitter and I doubt this one will be any different.
Has Andrew directed the same sort of scorn towards Wendy4the senate?
I would like to remind our friend that barbarians were the ones who didn’t have orgies, marry their sisters or make horses Co-consel. I am happy to be a barbarian.
Doesn’t Bolt have the same journalistic qualifications as Mark Latham, ie none?
This constant reference to “barbarians” is telling. We have a very difficult dichotomy in the Bolt personality being exposed for all to see: on the one hand, the demagogic baiter of “elites” and “Leftist intelligentsia”; an anti-scientist who loves to arouse the masses with dog-whistle articles based on racial profiling. This is my definition of barbarianism.
On the other, the lover of opera and the effete connoisseur of obscure goat cheeses of Tuscany and pan-seared fillets of swordfish, who has specific reading for the beach or the study including such populist low-brow potboilers as Coriolanus, and Joseph Roth’s Essays from France, 1925-1939 and Steven Runciman’s The Sicilian Vespers.
He can’t have it both ways. The man is a posturer, and a fraud to both sides of the artificial line he himself has drawn to define his world.
He’s clearly running out of things to blog about.
This from a man who deconstructs passages from Ian Fleming novels.
Seriously, Bolt, if you’re not going to put yourself forward as a conservative-who-won’t-read-anything-more-common-than-Waugh then don’t mock anyone else for being into pop culture`n’crap.
“This now passes for sophisticated discourse among our fashionably educated barbarians.”
Because that’s where lefties put their sophisticated discourse. On Twitter.
@andrewbolt put identity of andrewbolt up on eBay (it has since been removed, quite rightly) I don’t think he is taking any threats seriously.
And pray tell what is “Our branch of that culture”?
Marieke must have received more page hits than Bolt this week? I can’t see how invoking the Streisand Effect is going to help him, though…
Tap!
Oh, wait. What were we talking about again?
In idiomatic or figurative usage, a “barbarian” may also be an individual reference to a brutal, cruel, warlike, insensitive person
So who else supports war, cruelly and insensitively attacks minority groups in a most brutal manner?
monkeywrench @ 11 nails the obvious contradictions. Well said.
I think Bolt has some explaining to do.
mw @11
“This constant reference to “barbarians” is telling.”
My assumption is that it’s not sue-able.
Nickws @ 13
Maybe Bolt prefers this type of art:
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/blooming_john/
As a fellow member of the Germanic and Anglo-Saxon opera-loving classes, I think I can safely say Bolt is full of it. As Mr Hitchens says: ‘Give him an enema and you could bury him in a matchbox.’
‘Barbarians’ refers to the bearded races outside the Greek world of which the aforesaid northerners are the prime example. Marieke Hardy sounds like she shares the ethnic heritage, but probably does a smaller line in beards.
Of course he is running with the ‘New Rome ‘ idea. So where’s New Constantinople?
“On the other, the lover of opera and the effete connoisseur of obscure goat cheeses of Tuscany and pan-seared fillets of swordfish, who has specific reading for the beach or the study including such populist low-brow potboilers as Coriolanus, and Joseph Roth’s Essays from France, 1925-1939 and Steven Runciman’s The Sicilian Vespers.”
Yet the anointed and un-barbaric one bags Sting (gasp…a LEFTY!!!) for reading brain-hurty books like Lolita!! Oh wait, Sting is pretentious because he’s an artist and Andrew’s not….well, of that type anyhow.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/column_johns_born_a_rambling_man/
I love the smell of projection and misogyny in the evening.