The Windschuttle hoax - replete with irony

I haven’t seen any evidence to suggest that Quadrant is particularly keen about either side of the GM argument, while the article seems to barrack for both sides simultaneously.

Indeed, if Quadrant’s contributor’s agreement is anything like On Line Opinion’s and requires an author to vouch for the accuracy of their piece and indemnify the publisher against misrepresentations, then the hoaxer has committed not just a breach of trust, but fraud, and should be liable to the publisher, making the hoax even closer to hacking.

The affair is replete with irony.

It was exposed by journalist and academic Margaret Simons in the eJournal Crikey!. I have a lot of admiration for Crikey!, but whatever virtues it might have, scrupulous accuracy is not one of them. I used to joke that its financial model was blackmail. There used to be two reasons to read Crikey!: to see whether you have been defamed, or to see whether the defamation you sent them of someone else has been published. Either way subscribing to it was a matter of survival for the political and chattering classes, and much of what it carried totally, or substantially, untrue.

It has changed under current management, but it is still not what one would call a “journal of record”.

Then the affair was given currency on the front page of The Australian, an organ which has been a strong supporter of Windschuttle. Subsequently they carried a defence of Windschuttle by Helen Dale, who once pseudonymously won a literary prize. This has also been described as a hoax, which is about as accurate as saying that Swift’s A modest proposal is a hoax.

The hoax is modeled on the Ern Malley affair. This is ironic because this was perpetrated by two Australian poets - Stewart and McAuley. McAuley went on to become the founding editor of Quadrant, the magazine that has been hoaxed this time.

Finally, the affair was amplified by just about every left-wing blog in the country, and defended by a number of right-wing ones, even though they all, with some very few exceptions, regularly publish material which is wrong.

For me the greatest irony of all is that so many of the intellectual class in this country fail to see that Windschuttle’s predicament is their own and that the joke is on them (including the hoaxer).

And this irony proceeds from the widespread idea that particular individuals, and groups, have a monopoly on truth. The corollary of this is that one must always be right, and to be wrong in any one particular is fatal to your intellectual standing. That makes the maintenance of intellectual respectability practically impossible and leads to stubborn refusal to accept any improvement or corrections to one’s ideas, because that would mean that you had been less than right in the first place.

It also makes proper intellectual argument impossible, unless you believe that everything there is to be known is known now, and completely. In which case close the science laboratories, and retire most of the publishers. We only need to keep the intellectual world on maintenance from hereon.

When we founded On Line Opinion it was because we perceived the need for a neutral ground where people could express ideas without having those ideas automatically rejected because of the point of view that On Line Opinion was thought to espouse. If you published in Quadrant, you were “obviously” a “fascist”, and if you published in say Meanjin, then you were “obviously” a “socialist”.