Some good stuff in the Herald today.

A criticism of the PM’s nonsensical use of language by Phillip Coorey.

At first, Rudd stunned his assailant with a burst of trademark jibber jabber that was supposed to pass for explanation.

Then the coup de grace: “Now we must cut our cloth to make sure it fits and that applies to the totality of the budget.”

Miranda Devine gives the anti-roo-culling lobby a big serve. I’m sick of this too.

The Australian philosopher Peter Singer, Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, has built an international reputation on his view that upholding human exceptionalism is “speciesism, and wrong for the same reasons that racism and sexism are wrong. Pain is equally bad, if it is felt by a human being or a mouse.” He has suggested the animal kingdom be divided into “non-human persons”, such as apes and dogs, and “human non-persons”, such as old or defective people.

The animal rights revolution, for which Singer has been the intellectual spear-carrier, is summed up in the quote of Ingrid Newkirk, co-founder the animal rights group PETA: “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy. They are all mammals.”

It is nothing less than a revival of the ancient quasi-religion of animism, which bestows souls on animals and has marked some of the most primitive, brutal hunter-gatherer societies on Earth. It obscenely channels away from humanity the limited resources of public compassion and social justice.

Artists as martyrs? I agree with Paul Sheehan.

Because pederasts and child sexploiters have had a dream run in our society. A subculture of pedophilia among gays, an epidemic of child sexual abuse in the Aboriginal community, and a multimillion porn industry on the internet have all been protected variously by privacy laws, artistic licence, freedom of expression, and Aboriginal rights. What these rights have done is mask, exacerbate or even rationalise a significant and growing problem.