“… Hey, speaking of mistakes, Steve, did you know that youre registered in the Greens with a ph in your name, but on the electoral roll you have a v? Just sayin… ”

http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/56373/20070222-0000/larvatusprodeo.net/2006/07/13/australias-new-chief-scientist-a-conflict-of-interest/index.html

That had me spooked at the time although I endeavoured to indicate otherwise subsequently on that thread.

Anyway, I’d like to think Kath is a overly exuberant hothead who occasionally exercises poor judgment than a wantonly malicious individual. Given my own occasional failure to self-regulate I can empathize with her

Of course, in this latest incident, the fact that Wilson has perpetrated a successful hoax still allows her to be attacked. She is a hypocrite who wrote poisonously about me… because I perpetrated a hoax. She somehow thought that she wouldn’t be outed, despite knowing my history. She is a conspiracist of the first water, as Andrew Norton has exposed (he dug up one of her nutty pieces at LP using the National Library’s ‘Pandora’ archive). She has also placed Margaret Simons in a very awkward position.

These things, however, are separate from the hoax, which although not as funny as Ern Malley or as well-constructed as Sokal, was nonetheless successful.

I really do not give a stuff about this.

way back when Windschuttle accused several historians of dubious reputation of falsifying evidence through their footnotes.

When someone noticed that several of his footnotes were a bit sus he threatened legal action.

He has a glass jaw.

As I said people would do a lot lot better reading Brunton

Um, yes I do. Weathergirl submitted a nominally veracious article for publication under a false name and was successful in the fraud. Windschuttle should have checked her out more carefully. But a literary hoax is meant to have oomph as iconoclasm vis-a-vis the target’s oeuvre or Weltanschuung. Wilson’s effort doesn’t lay a glove on Windshuttle’s work – which remains one of the most definitive smack-downs against the Turtleneck Left in the history of Australian letters. She isn’t Ern Malley’s toenail.

you obviously do not know of what has happened with Windschuttle.

some people found HIS footnotes were faulty and he threatened legal action.

But on a more serious note, I’m beginning to feel sympathy for Kath Wilson. I fear she has damaged herself far more than Windschuttle, especially if she wants further gigs as a journo.

Her motives were pure but her judgement was askew.

when James McAuley and Harold Stewart succeeded in their grand Ern Malley hoax of the avant-garde. (The avant-garde will not call it a hoax. That would be to admit they made fools of themselves. So they must find a new word for it. Michael Heyward called it “an affair”. Bennie calls it a “con”.)

A real hoax would have been some rightist conspiratorial expose of Port Arthur. Wilson was too untalented to pull that off so she wrote a fraud piece instead. Windschuttle’s demolition of leftist Aboriginal “history” stands, untouched.

CL is wrong about Windschuttle. Ron Brunton is the person who has showed up the falsities about the ‘Stolen Generations’. He wrote some very good papers when the IPA had credibility.

Windschuttle is hard to take seriously. Whilst I have sympathy for his take on history anyone who shows up people with poor or even false use of footnotes should not threaten legal action when someone takes aim at his footnotes.

He is though a poor editor

It was a policy decision by the duumvirate to make it easier to manage trolls.

BTW, this is my first time having to register to comment on this hitherto free-to-comment blog and the phrase jump-thru-hoops comes to mind, in a way that I did expect Pierce Brosnan to emerge from said submarine to give me my new secret password. Come on guys, what’s it all about? If I’m captured will I have to eat my password in case The Enemy logs on and – shock horror – posts a comment?

Love,

the Local Friendly Oppressor.

Of course, nothing has been learnt from the whole exercise with both Windschuttle and weathergirl doing what comes naturally to inflexible ideologues.

Sadly, science reporting in the media is the loser, as always.