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Who Hates Me?
Jul. 16th, 2005 08:57 amBelieve it or not, but there are people in this world who would happily rage against me with anything they could get their hands on. Happily they are mostly cyber-ragers, armed only with their wits.
A bloke called Jim Duffy is the latest one. I'm still not sure that it's not some elaborate scam to get my goat, but it takes a lot to upset me, so I'm more amused than anything else.
A brief bit of background might be in order. One of the great shames of Australian citizenship education is that there is a vast ignorance on constitutional and governmental matters, especially when you go back to the days of Federation, now over a century ago. It was famously pointed out in a government television campaign that Australians were more likely to know the first President of the USA than the first Prime Minister of Australia, and a recent referendum to remove the Queen from the Constitution failed, mostly because the voters felt that if there was going to be a President, then they should vote for him (or her) just like Americans do.
Anyway, about ten years back I attended a Senate Occasional Lecture on some obscure constitutional subject, and discovered that I knew very little indeed about our constitutional arrangements. In the interval I corrected this remedy. attending a great number of lectures, seminars, conferences and so on. I have all the books on, by and about the heroes of Federation, such as Alfred Deakin, Henry Parkes, Robert Garran and so on. Catherine Helen Spence is a favorite of mine - she nominated herself as a delegate to one of the Constitutional Conventions of the 1890s and failed to gain enough votes to be elected - a pity, as amongst all the middle-aged, bearded, Anglo-Saxon founding fathers, we very nearly had a founding mother, and CHS was a woman with a great heart and a brain to match. Here in the Australian Capital Territory we use a variation of the voting system she proposed for proprtional representation over a century ago.
I attended the 1998 Constitutional Convention in Canberra as a member of the press gallery, and I took a great deal of interest in the referendum campaign afterwards. You could describe me as a constitutional junkie, and at one stage I was probably the only joint member of the Australian Republican Movement and Australians for A Constitutional Monarchy. The one because I think we should gracefully remove the Queen from our affairs, the other because the monarchists had the higher quality of speakers at their meetings, and tended not to be quite so dogmatic as the republicans. Good people in both camps and I enjoyed their company.
Anyway, the upshot of all this is that I have a good idea of what I'm talking about on constitutional matters, and when I started editing Wikipedia, I noticed that the articles on Australian Government weren't quite the thing.
It's an odd thing, but the view that the Queen is Australia's head of state is not universally accepted. The Prime Minister says it's the Governor-General, for instance, as do a great many other folk. Wikipedia priding itself on presenting a neutral point of view, I edited the relevant articles to include the diversity of views and discovered that there were those to whom the Queen meant a great deal, and if it meant inflating her vestigial role in Australian affairs, they would do so. to the death.
Don't believe all you hear about Wikipedia being a bastion of politeness and objectivity. It ain't. What goes into the articles is determined not by objective fact and reference to good sources, but by who can get the most people to push their views.
Jim Duffy, whose wikiname is jtdirl, I've mentioned before, and here is the result of his discovery that somebody else had popped their head up to say the same things I was saying. He was roundly condemned for his attitude and his illegal block of an innocent editor, but failed to see anything improper in his conduct. I particularly liked his comment that I travelled extensively and could present myself at sites around the world pretending to be somebody else. Good heavens! If only I had the time when travelling. It's all I can do to keep up with LiveJournal and BookCrossing.
Anyway. Must dash off now - got to go get the latest Harry Potter!
A bloke called Jim Duffy is the latest one. I'm still not sure that it's not some elaborate scam to get my goat, but it takes a lot to upset me, so I'm more amused than anything else.
A brief bit of background might be in order. One of the great shames of Australian citizenship education is that there is a vast ignorance on constitutional and governmental matters, especially when you go back to the days of Federation, now over a century ago. It was famously pointed out in a government television campaign that Australians were more likely to know the first President of the USA than the first Prime Minister of Australia, and a recent referendum to remove the Queen from the Constitution failed, mostly because the voters felt that if there was going to be a President, then they should vote for him (or her) just like Americans do.
Anyway, about ten years back I attended a Senate Occasional Lecture on some obscure constitutional subject, and discovered that I knew very little indeed about our constitutional arrangements. In the interval I corrected this remedy. attending a great number of lectures, seminars, conferences and so on. I have all the books on, by and about the heroes of Federation, such as Alfred Deakin, Henry Parkes, Robert Garran and so on. Catherine Helen Spence is a favorite of mine - she nominated herself as a delegate to one of the Constitutional Conventions of the 1890s and failed to gain enough votes to be elected - a pity, as amongst all the middle-aged, bearded, Anglo-Saxon founding fathers, we very nearly had a founding mother, and CHS was a woman with a great heart and a brain to match. Here in the Australian Capital Territory we use a variation of the voting system she proposed for proprtional representation over a century ago.
I attended the 1998 Constitutional Convention in Canberra as a member of the press gallery, and I took a great deal of interest in the referendum campaign afterwards. You could describe me as a constitutional junkie, and at one stage I was probably the only joint member of the Australian Republican Movement and Australians for A Constitutional Monarchy. The one because I think we should gracefully remove the Queen from our affairs, the other because the monarchists had the higher quality of speakers at their meetings, and tended not to be quite so dogmatic as the republicans. Good people in both camps and I enjoyed their company.
Anyway, the upshot of all this is that I have a good idea of what I'm talking about on constitutional matters, and when I started editing Wikipedia, I noticed that the articles on Australian Government weren't quite the thing.
It's an odd thing, but the view that the Queen is Australia's head of state is not universally accepted. The Prime Minister says it's the Governor-General, for instance, as do a great many other folk. Wikipedia priding itself on presenting a neutral point of view, I edited the relevant articles to include the diversity of views and discovered that there were those to whom the Queen meant a great deal, and if it meant inflating her vestigial role in Australian affairs, they would do so. to the death.
Don't believe all you hear about Wikipedia being a bastion of politeness and objectivity. It ain't. What goes into the articles is determined not by objective fact and reference to good sources, but by who can get the most people to push their views.
Jim Duffy, whose wikiname is jtdirl, I've mentioned before, and here is the result of his discovery that somebody else had popped their head up to say the same things I was saying. He was roundly condemned for his attitude and his illegal block of an innocent editor, but failed to see anything improper in his conduct. I particularly liked his comment that I travelled extensively and could present myself at sites around the world pretending to be somebody else. Good heavens! If only I had the time when travelling. It's all I can do to keep up with LiveJournal and BookCrossing.
Anyway. Must dash off now - got to go get the latest Harry Potter!
