‘Documentary a biased set-up’: bitter Dark Emu feud turns personal

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By matthew denholm
Tasmania Correspondent
@MatthewRDenholm
7:38PM July 31, 2023
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In an explosive reignition of the Dark Emu debate, social anthropologist Peter Sutton has attacked an ABC documentary as a “biased set-up” and Marcia Langton as “misusing her extensive power”.

A new documentary, The Dark Emu Story, made by Blackfella Films for the ABC, examines debate around Bruce Pascoe’s landmark book, which questions the hunter-gather tag assigned to the First Australians and points to Aboriginal sowing and harvesting of plants.

Professor Sutton, who co-authored a leading critique of Pascoe’s book, said he was invited to take part in an “even-handed” documentary, only to have key remarks left out and Professor Langton given a “platform” for “an abusive and disrespectful tirade”.

However, Professor Langton hit back, accusing Professor Sutton of “breathtaking arrogance”, a “completely unwarranted” attack on her, and being unwilling “to debate historical records”.

Professor Sutton, co-author with anthropologist Keryn Walshe of Farmers or Hunter-gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate, accused Blackfella Films of “bad faith” and painting him and his colleague as “racists”. “The film is biased towards one side of the debate, the side of Bruce Pascoe,” Professor Sutton told The Australian. “At several points it turns into propaganda.

“This is the opposite of the much-stressed independence and even-handedness that Blackfella Films promised in our pre-filming discussions. It becomes a puff piece for Pascoe. Worst of all, the film depicts us as racists by association with right-wing shock jocks. Marcia Langton associates us with the colonial anthropology of 100 years ago. The film was a set-up. A case of bad faith.”

Professor Sutton, a social anthropologist and linguist who has spent 50 years studying and recording Aboriginal languages and mapping Indigenous cultural landscapes, said Professor Langton had “turned on the community of scholars who have long both nurtured and learned from her”.

“In the film, she tries to hijack a debate about the precolonial economies and technologies of the old people and turn it into a personal battle in the great race war,” he said.

“She parodies modern anthropologists as if time had stood still in 1914 … But Langton’s political rage does not entitle her to misuse her extensive power and high profile, especially in an effort to prop up Pascoe’s work by denigrating her colleagues. But misuse it she does.”

Professor Langton, an anthropologist and geographer who has produced a large body of work in political and legal anthropology and Indigenous culture and art, accused Professor Sutton of “lacking collegiality”. “It is clear that he feels justified in publishing an entire book with Keryn Walshe which contains a great number of errors and interpretations that I do not agree with, and which many others do not agree with,” she said.

“His problem is that he refuses to accept any criticism of his work – not mine, nor anyone else’s; his arrogance is breathtaking. My objections are with the core of his ideas, which originate in 19th and early 20th century scientism … It is clear that he feels justified in completely ignoring all critique.”

Professor Sutton said the film, directed by Indigenous writer and director Allan Clarke, became a “sympathy drive for Pascoe”, descending into “schmaltz and bathos with violins playing in the background”.

“But it’s not the failure of the film as an attempt at documentary that most concerns me here. It’s how the film suffers terminally from an overdose of viewer-bullying from Langton,” Professor Sutton said.

An ABC spokeswoman said: “The ABC applied the documentary to legal and editorial review before it was broadcast, and is satisfied the filmmakers delivered a program that informed, educated and entertained our audience.”

Blackfella Films and Mr Clarke did not respond by deadline.

I know who I regard as credible, and it ain’t Marcia Langton.

Cassie

Just to be very clear, the comment I posted had zero to do with you and it was clear that you were singling out the nasty piece of work, and not 1.2 billion people. I even made emphasis in a subsequent comment to highlight this.

You made a comment about that individual. Turtlehead decided to topper that by 1.2 billion which was what I was highlight.

I don’t know about this blog – I don’t come here that often – but it is apparent from his comments on C.L.’s blog that Ed has a visceral hatred of women (especially conservatives and those in the Liberal Party), unless your name happens to be Brittany or Katy Gallagher or other Labor types.

Okay then, but calling out over a billion people ugly liars doesn’t reach your disgust level then, which is my point.

C.L.s blog raising the issue “Do we have to display the Aboriginal and T.S.I. flag while announcing the deaths of AUSTRALIAN servicemen?”

Bruce Lehrmann will lodge a multimillion-dollar claim for compensation against the ACT Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions as the territory government examines what are expected to be serious adverse findings against chief prosecutor Shane Drumgold.

If you’re prepared to endorse the summary execution of 3,300 people (half of whom were killed by “unknown assailants”), you are probably not above fudging drug crime statistics.

The toll has been estimated as high as 30,000 or more.

Perhaps if the offending comments didn’t appear in the first place, Dover, the opportunity to repeat them would be limited.

Say you’re not making shit up again* for self serving blowhard reasons. Say it ain’t so. Not tonight.

Citation required.

Trans

I wouldn’t reverse those two enlightening comments if I were you.

are you working it out yet Dover?

this is the possibly the most idiotic thing I’ve heard all year

A fact that certain interest groups do not readily accept, when a first nations has been slung out of the pub.

Most definitely citation required.

So, first grow a dick & balls, then be here when next we’ve reason to sling out a first nations.

Use your people skills on the ensuing …er… situation. Call ’em a few names, like you do in here – should work?

Regarding the health & reputation of the blog, I believe it’s important to consider patterns, rather than isolated incidents.

Most of us who are human have moments of frustration or exasperation.

LOL, Muds, you’re such a one trick pony.

Would regurgitating such frustrations or exasperation several times fit in as patterns or just “collectively” as isolated incidences? I’m only asking because you know I believe you’re as straight as the Eyre Highway in these matters.

Driller

So, first grow a dick & balls, then be here when next we’ve reason to sling out a first nations.

Oh so someone needs to grow a dick and balls and get over to the motel quick pronto to see it in action?

But, it still doesn’t satisfy the citation required to provide evidence to your assertion. As in the past and not some time in the future.

Use your people skills on the ensuing …er… situation. Call ’em a few names, like you do in here – should work?

You mean like dago? That should work down here too. To use your old axiom (sort of), try that here bloke, and you’ be arse kicked back up to the Queersland border with a foot in your fat mouth.

That will never get old.

That’s been marked for the comment of the year. It’s a shoe in for the asshat of the year award. Not given every year either. The comment has to earn it first like the Nobel.

I’ve mentioned before that regular people shouldn’t take this gerbil warming anxiety simply as amusing. It’s quite real. When you see Greta Thumbnail acting hysterically about gerbiling, don’t discount this as she and countless others have been brainwashed to believe it and they’re absolutely panicked. This facet of mental illness is very, very real.

Read on. In the WSJ today the report is that people are suffering severe mental illness from this scam.

Climate Change Obsession Is a Real Mental Disorder
Alarmist stories about the weather, not the warm air itself, are behind the left’s anxiety and dread.

By Allysia Finley

July 30, 2023 1:54 pm ET

A heat reading at Furnace Creek Visitor Center in Death Valley, Calif., July 16. Photo: ronda churchill/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The media wants you to know it’s hot outside. “ ‘Heat health emergency’: Nearly half the US at risk,” CNN proclaimed last week as temperatures climbed above 90 degrees in much of the country.

If heat waves were as deadly as the press proclaims, Homo sapiens couldn’t have survived thousands of years without air conditioning. Yet here we are. Humans have shown remarkable resilience and adaptation—at least until modern times, when half of society lost its cool over climate change.

“Extreme Temperatures Are Hurting Our Mental Health,” a recent Bloomberg headline warns. Apparently every social problem under the sun is now attributable to climate change. But it’s alarmist stories about bad weather that are fueling mental derangements worthy of the DSM-5—not the warm summer air itself.

The Bloomberg article cites a July meta-analysis in the medical journal Lancet, which found a tenuous link between higher temperatures and suicides and mental illness. But the study deems the collective evidence of “low certainty” owing to inconsistent study findings, methodologies, measured variables and definitions. The authors also note that “climate change might not necessarily increase mental health issues because people might adapt over time, meaning that higher temperatures could become normal and not be experienced as anomalous or extreme.”

Well, yes. Before the media began reporting on putative temperature records—the scientific evidence for which is also weak—heat waves were treated as a normal part of summer. Uncomfortable, but figuratively nothing to sweat about.

Yet according to a World Health Organization report last year, the very “awareness of climate change and extreme weather events and their impacts” may lead to a host of ills, including strained social relationships, anxiety, depression, intimate-partner violence, helplessness, suicidal behavior and alcohol and substance abuse.

A study in 2021 of 16- to 25-year-olds in 10 countries including the U.S. reported that 59% were very or extremely worried about climate change, and 84% were at least moderately worried. Forty-five percent claimed they were so worried that they struggled to function on a daily basis, the definition of an anxiety disorder.

“First and foremost, it is imperative that adults understand that youth climate anxiety (also referred to as eco-anxiety, solastalgia, eco-guilt or ecological grief) is an emotionally and cognitively functional response to real existential threats,” a May 10 editorial in the journal Nature explained. “Although feelings of powerlessness, grief and fear can be profoundly disruptive—particularly for young people unaccustomed to the depth and complexity of such feelings—it is important to acknowledge that this response is a rational one.”

These anxieties are no more rational than the threats from climate change are existential. A more apt term for such fear is climate hypochondria.

The New Yorker magazine earlier this month published a 4,400-word piece titled “What to Do With Climate Emotions” by Jia Tolentino, a woman in the throes of such neurosis. “It may be impossible to seriously consider the reality of climate change for longer than ninety seconds without feeling depressed, angry, guilty, grief-stricken, or simply insane,” Ms. Tolentino writes.

“A couple of years ago, reading a climate report on my phone in the early hours of the morning, I went into a standard-issue emotional spiral thinking about it all,” she recalls. “We had also recently had a baby, whose carbon footprint likely already exceeded that of entire villages in Burundi. I was playing whack-a-mole with my consumer desires.”

Ms. Tolentino goes on to describe how climate therapists can help patients cope. “The goal is not to resolve the intrusive feeling and put it away” but, as one therapist advises her, “to aim for a middle ground of sustainable distress.” Even the climate left’s despair must be “sustainable.”

It isn’t difficult to notice that today’s snowflakes consider hot weather aberrant, similar to how they perceive normal feelings such as anxiety or sadness. But there’s nothing normal about climate anxiety, despite the left’s claims to the contrary.
Read More Life Science

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Progressives may even use climate change to displace their other anxieties—for instance, about having children. A mental-health reporter for Vox recently wrote about climate stress, and how “some people even grapple with the existential question of whether to have children because of the human toll on the planet’s resources.”

Displacement is a maladaptive mechanism by which people redirect negative emotions from one thing to another. Ms. Tolentino relates how one patient she interviewed realized through deep reflection that “he’d sometimes used climate anxiety as a container for his own, more intimate problems.”

Climate hypochondriacs deserve to be treated with compassion, much like anyone who suffers from mental illness. They shouldn’t, however, expect everyone else to enable their neuroses.

Oh, and has anyone got some high quality building site banter for me?
The plumber is coming tomorrow and he loves good banter.
I just can’t do it right, though.

Oh, and has anyone got some high quality building site banter for me?
The plumber is coming tomorrow and he loves good banter.
I just can’t do it right, though.

Engage him in a discussion about waterproofing.

Yes, you.

Huh, but isn’t it you? Blowharding, bignoting, bullshitting, being a fraud, making strange assertions and then getting bitchy about being asked to provide a few crumbs of evidence. Even one crumb.

It will.

In an ideal world, shouldn’t that read as, “It has”. That is, you have provided evidence for your assertion?

You’ll think of more apt words – your people skills & good manners will guide you to some appropriate terminology.

Have you ever tried self awareness? Of course you haven’t because a lonely old psychopath doesn’t.

You haven’t got what it takes.

Perhaps, but you should try your own “pub test” and come down south. Start the blowharding and bignoting bullshit and when those strangers don’t believe your nonsense, try out the dago reply. It would work. As I said, you’d have a boot going up your arse, it would hang out of your mouth as you arrived back at the Queersland, before you could say, “help mummy”

As I said, you’d have a boot going up your arse,

You haven’t got what it takes.

You’ve initiated talk of personal violence, and doubled down by alluding to it multiple times. Are you trying to get this blog noticed?

listen to these clowns.

they cant do or say anything useful or thoughtful

They’re noted for many things.
Edifying comments are not among those things.

It’s like I’ve logged into a Barbie group.

I’ve seen more maturity exhibited by a yard full of speyed cows.

JC Jul 31, 2023 10:53 PM

And that is the big mouth backpedalling.

Long overdue.

The lack of god oracle respect here really is astounding.

I’m confused, does that mean nobody has groganed in their duds yet?

Hey Sal.
Did you see the latest polling on public figures in the UK?

Crikey, that’s not genre I’ve ever paid any attention to*, or was even aware of.

(* nor am I ever likely to)

Salvatore, Iron Publican

Jul 31, 2023 11:01 PM

Hey Sal.
Did you see the latest polling on public figures in the UK?

Crikey, that’s not genre I’ve ever paid any attention to*, or was even aware of.

Well, maybe you should.
Do you think Prince Andrew is on his way back?
Surely the Firm will forgive and forget, eh?
I mean, a 14 million pound compo payout wouldn’t sour things would it?

Well, maybe you should.

No.

Do you think Prince Andrew is on his way back?

His way back to where?
Why does he interest you so?

You may not be up to date, Chilla is the King.
(Happy to help)

Knuckle Dragger

Jul 31, 2023 11:02 PM

Hundreds of years from now, historians will conclude that the failure to recognise the genius of control panel switch manipulators resulted in the fall of western civilisation.

very droll

and derivative

writing code to switch off at max temp and on at min temp

v hard

and flipping baffles for air flow

tough as man

ai will never replace it

… still not flogged out yet?

They may have changed hands.

An absolute must see!

Catturd ™
@catturd2

This is awesome.

KD

I have to say, that has been one of the best performances I’ve seen in quite a while. Man, you have talent. Not quite God Oracle talent of course. You can’t beat building site quick lip.

Meme

The problem with Bazzball is that sure it is a slog fest, but what is the equivalent with the ball .

The beauty of Bazball is that it frees up plenty of time for rain breaks.

To give the Poms credit, though, they have played like Aussies imagine they play, and have single-handedly revived interest in Test Crickit.
We haven’t seen anyone bat like that since Adam Gilchrist.

We’ve got a … Watto … on the phone.

Ford Will Lose $4.5 Billion On EVs This Year, Up From $2.1 Billion Last Year

Today I had to go to control panel in Windows 11 to trim my SSDs because for some reason that isn’t happening automatically even though I ticked the box. Microsoft is the beginning of the end!

Microsoft takes ticked boxes as a serving suggestion only.

Indolent

Ford actually went past earnings expectations by reporting income of 70 odd cents a share.

The market expects Ford and other to lose money on the EV side as they uptool for this segment.

Settling privately = a full admission of guilt?

To a civil standard, totally.
14 million quids worth of totally.

You sure you want to run with this?

Absolutely.
Now mummy has been carted down The Mall on the gun carriage, Randy Andy isn’t suing anyone.
Especially not for the underage girl trafficking stuff.
And I think he has drawn his last bail-out from The Firm’s coffers.

You sure you want to run with this?

Absolutely.

You’ve never been involved in litigation.
Lucky you.

He is becoming Miss Haversham of the home counties and will be sighted every five years or so during some rainy carpark opening if he behaves

He is 1000% farked, in other words.

Not even car park ribbon cutting.
Counting the deer at Balmoral is his thing for the next ten years, at least.
His movements might be curtailed somewhat anyway.
He would be very, very foolish to even think about traveling to the US.
What odds a sealed indictment awaits should he set foot in the US?

low traffic?
lack of commentators?
contributors can’t be bothered?

Well, liven things up with a bit of worksite banter, God Oracle.
Doesn’t have to be your best material.
Just a bit of warm-up stuff.
Come on.
You know you want to.

Trans, you’re so judgy this evening.

I recently read big bro threw him out of his big house and into a cottage like home.

I think Randy Andy didn’t have anything like the ready cash to pay the girl out.
That would be a way of King Chuck taking it out of his hide.
Hey, I wonder if Randy fell below the minimum balance at Coutts and got turfed, like Nigel?

…you working it out yet?

Why, what did you shove in?

Sancho Panzer
Aug 1, 2023 12:01 AM

OK, let’s talk about summink interesting.
How about HVAC PLC programming?
That should sell.

Good idea.

I never understood this one.
We had Google HVAC Thermo wall units called Nests installed in the US. I can’t understand why Google would enter that sort of market. What’s possibly in it for them? It’s really neat, I can control the temps from here.

Andy Pandy sold his continental shack for 20 million quid, & paid 12 million to the little slapper.
He’s now regretting this & was last heard of considering his options re clawing it back.

To enter the deal in the first place he was either a supreme dumbass, badly advised, or totally & completely inexperienced in such matters & badly, very badly, misled by the bowler hats – possibly with Mu-mah subtly prodding him in the wrong direction.

Nobody cares much anyway.

You’re such a little bitch at times

Whoops, a bit of the pillow talk between Heckle & Jeckle has made it out onto the blog.

Discretion, please – we’re not that interested in what you two get up to. Just make sure you remember whose turn it is to wear the pyjama shorts back-to-front.

as the constipated Clerk said, “I think I’ll work this one out with a pencil”.

Alas he couldn’t budget.

Reported he might have netted 5 mill out of that.
I am guessing The Firm tipped in 10 meg minimum.

He’s rooted then.
Pheasant & game patrol at Balmoral is his gig for life.
He shouldn’t complain, millions are worse off & would swap with him in a heartbeat.
Plus he’s still got his health, the bracing country air will be a tonic for his bitterness.

Andy Pandy sold his continental shack for 20 million quid, & paid 12 million

Not quite correct sums there champ.

to the little slapper.

Are you sure you want to go there?
I mean, she lives in North Queensssland and, who knows, she might fancy owning a back-packers.
If the freehold was yours to lose, that is.

Not quite correct sums there champ.

Scroll up, champ.

I mean, she lives in North Queensssland and, who knows, she might fancy owning a back-packers.
If the freehold was yours to lose, that is.

Please explain, champ.

Hey Driller

Who is “Driller”?

Who is “Driller”?

Motel owner, who you appear to know quite well.

Did you hear about this sordid story?

No. Tell us more.
This isn’t the first case of a Victorian moving to mighty Qld & bringing their Danistan ethics with them.
It won’t be the last either, alas.

Sorry KD.
No Murphy miracle.
Gone for 18.
9 down.
54 to get.
Hazlewood and Carey.