Some Ruminations on 'Green Left Weekly'

The other day I was waiting for my coffee, and having already read with interest the local free paper that was lying about in numerous copies (our MP in the NSW Parliament was picked up driving at three times the legal blood alcohol limit; he has apologised profusely), I flicked instead through a copy of Green Left Weekly that someone had left lying about.

I found, on perusing this paper, that it irritated me very much less than the average copy of the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald, a mildly left-of-centre paper that was mild enough to endorse Tony Abbott at the last federal election. I was thinking about why this might be the case, and have come up with several reasons.

Firstly, I have a weakness for people who are passionate about things, even if they are passionate about crushing all that I hold dear. There is something stirring in seeing anyone who really believes in what they are saying get up and voice an opinion in the face of opposition.  

Secondly, the things that Green Left Weekly concerns itself about are mostly concrete things, and this gives it more of a sense of proportion than one finds in the mainstream media.  Overwhelmingly, the articles concerned actual people with less money in their pay packets or not, or actual trees being cut down or not. There was hardly anything about those vacuous point-scoring sort of progressive issues on which the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald spends so much of its efforts.

Thirdly, the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald is, like the ABC, part of the establishment, and it speaks with the condescension of the establishment towards minority views, which is infuriating; Green Left Weekly knows it is the voice of a minority, and does not speak in this same voice. 

Fourthly, another consequence of being part of the establishment left-of-centre is that the writers of the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald live inside a bubble, where everyone they meet thinks the same way as they do, and they are never required to defend their tiresomely conventional views with rational argument. So their pieces are either devoid of rational argument, or employ it very badly. The writers for Green Left Weekly, being a minority, are accustomed to engaging in arguments for defending what they believe, and employing reason in doing so, and this shows in what they write. There was an article on the situation on Iraq which eschewed vitriol and hyperbole; which set out a proper argument; which employed rational thought; and which, though I disagreed with its conclusions, I thought made a better case than articles reaching the same conclusions I have read by authors on the libertarian right-of-centre.

The other day I was waiting for my coffee, and having already read with interest the local free paper that was lying about in numerous copies (our MP in the NSW Parliament was picked up driving at three times the legal blood alcohol limit; he has apologised profusely), I flicked instead through a copy of Green Left Weekly that someone had left lying about.

I found, on perusing this paper, that it irritated me very much less than the average copy of the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald, a mildly left-of-centre paper that was mild enough to endorse Tony Abbott at the last federal election. I was thinking about why this might be the case, and have come up with several reasons.

Firstly, I have a weakness for people who are passionate about things, even if they are passionate about crushing all that I hold dear. There is something stirring in seeing anyone who really believes in what they are saying get up and voice an opinion in the face of opposition.  I don’t doubt that that the writers at the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald believe what they are writing: and to an extent, perhaps, if exactly the same op-eds had appeared in a paper explicitly aimed at a leftist fringe, they would not bother me as much.

Secondly, the things that Green Left Weekly concerns itself about are mostly concrete things, and this gives it more of a sense of proportion than one finds in the mainstream media.  Overwhelmingly, the articles concerned actual people with less money in their pay packets or not, or actual trees being cut down or not. There was hardly anything about those vacuous point-scoring sort of progressive issues on which the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald spends so much of its efforts.

Thirdly, the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald is, like the ABC, part of the establishment, and it speaks with the condescension of the establishment towards minority views; Green Left Weekly knows it is the voice of a minority, and does not speak in this same infuriating voice.

Fourthly, another consequence of being part of the establishment left-of-centre is that the writers of Devil Bunny City Morning Herald live inside a bubble, where everyone they meet thinks the same way as they do, and they are never required to defend their tiresomely conventional views with rational argument. So their pieces are either devoid of rational argument, or employ it very badly. The writers for Green Left Weekly, being a minority, are accustomed to engaging in arguments for defending what they believe, and employing reason in doing so, and this shows in what they write. There was an article on the situation on Iraq which eschewed vitriol and hyperbole; which set out a proper argument; which employed rational thought; and which, though I disagreed with its conclusions, I thought made a better case than articles reaching the same conclusions I have read by authors on the libertarian right-of-centre.