Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Note to Exclusive Brethren

If you're so desperate to influence conservative politicians, how about lifting your ban on voting?


Just a thought.

Meanwhile, rule of thumb: every time Danna Vale is involved in something, you can pretty much be sure the story is going to be weird. She shares with Pauline Hanson the true nutjob's talent for conflating issues that have nothing whatsoever to do with each other. Remember her theory during the Ru-486 debate about how Australians were aborting themselves into a nation of Muslims?

Then there was her climate change denial manifesto, in which she made an interesting appeal to empiricism:



once upon a time, the consensus was that the earth was flat, and nobody ever did any investigation because everybody agreed that the earth was flat. However, that doesn't mean that it was true.

Indeed. The distinction between scientific consensus and flat-earth incuriosity is a fine one, to be sure, and certainly not one I would expect the likes of Danna Vale to grasp right away. Although if she thinks "nobody did any investigation" is an accurate description of climate-change science, she is even less acquainted with reality than I had previously supposed.

So now it turns out that Danna is hobnobbing with the Exclusive Brethren, I couldn't be less surprised. I would say that I hope it discredits her enough to get her thrown out, but it doesn't seem that garden-variety lunacy is much of a barrier to being elected in Hughes, and Vale has a margin of 8.55. But when the likes of Howard and Amanda Vanstone are rushing to dissociate themselves from you because you're giving extremism a bad name, it's probably time to rethink your platform.

1 comment:

Diego Luego said...

The Exclusive Brethren led by a Sydney family, the Hales, have been accused of interfering in elections in at least four countries, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US - despite forbidding it's own members from voting.

It appears to be a nepotist sect the leadership (called the Elect Vessel) being handed from father to son.

Their money trail is rather obscure, but they are able to come up with large sums (hundreds of thousands of dollars) to promote far right policies - no questions asked.

Election material produced on their behalf often lacks the legally required authorising name.