Labor split looms, cat saved from tree, the Left lacks a sense of humour …

The silly season tends to bring out the usual articles, but The Oz‘s authorised left-winger Nick Dyrenfurth has found a new twist — yes, the Left is humourless, though not always, but so is the Right (as witnessed by Miranda Devine’s mad article on Avatar as evidence of the Hollywood green conspiracy).

Overall, though, Dyrenfurth concludes that the Right are better companions:

Truth be told, though, I’d prefer to share a cold beer — or, dare I say it, an oak-aged chardonnay — with members of the right-leaning commentariat: [such as]… Tim Blair, opinion page editor and blogger at The Daily Telegraph in Sydney.

Great suck-up to an op-ed editor by a freelancer but does Blair want to have a beer with Dyrenfurth? Here’s the alcan-hatter from Blair’s blog in 2006:

AN ALTERNATIVE TO INDIVIDUALITY

What is it with Australian historians who can’t spell or write or think? Here’s Monash University historian Nick Dyrenfurth at Leftwrites:

“I had just returned from a day in Berlin punctuated by the spectacle of watching messrs Marx and Engels (the statue versions of course) descent into a ‘left tourist’ site at the so-called Marx Engels Forum …

Downtrodden I was then pleasantly suprised…”

After ripping the piss out of Dyrenfurth’s writing for 300 words, Blair concludes: “To hell with this. I should have bolded the entire post.”

Who is this Dyrenfurth, suddenly everywhere in the conservatariat clover? He’s a former Monash academic who caught a bad case of “Blue Angel” syndrome — where an ambitious young (usually leftish) academic, losing the buzz, suddenly realises that life offers little more than an endless series of pointless articles and acrimonious meetings, then arse cancer and death.

Not only is a rapid political shift made, but all former associations must be ridiculed. Thus in that post of 2006, Dyrenfurth was addressing the organisers Leftwrites, a blog set up by members of the far-left/Trotskyist group Socialist Alternative:

I was then pleasantly suprised to recieve news of this Left Writes endeavour. I really hope this venture is a successfull one — which forms part of the ongoing oppositional critique and perhaps more importantly the mapping out of a new Left politics …

Maybe I am foolish optimist but I think this political moment holds the promise not of conservative long term hegemony but of the seeds for a counter movement. There is a ‘far away train passing us by’ —  a popular yet dormant movement”… As much as some on this site might despise them, there is something in the writings of people such as Mark Latham and more recently that of Clive Hamilton who … (sic throughout)

As Private Eye says at the end of its Dave Spart columns, “contd. P94”.

The Chairman Mao style fraternal greeting to the toiling peasants of Leftwrites has been suspended — now he writes of his former comrades:

Anyone who has ever set foot on a university campus would have come across the tiny Marxist sect known as the Trotskyites … Nowadays, despite the smashing defeat of communism, you’ll find the Trots in attendance at each and every demonstration, screaming for adequate supplies of bamboo for Sichuan panda bears …

To go from urging a far-left website to pay more attention to Hamilton’s ideas in 2006, to making Imre Zaluz%*#!!zky-style sub-humour about Trots and pandas in 2010, is an impressive Windschuttle Shear — 0.3, if I recall correctly the formula for the rate of total ideological shift.

At this rate, Dyrenfurth will be editing Quadrant by 2015, and joining a reconstituted Orange People movement by the age of 50, omming his third age away in a commune outside Mildura.

At least he’ll have some company. Times can be tough, but advertising for someone to drink with in the op-ed pages of The Australian is epic fail, something to remember in one’s bleak moments.

Or better ones, eh Nick?