Understanding one’s mistake

I would have thought in this country of ours that telling a few people where to get off occasionally was not a crime, but the sad thing is to see a once-great newspaper like the Herald buckle to the bullies.

Mike Carlton quoted in 'Mike Carlton resigns from The Sydney Morning Herald'.

Here's the problem, Mike Carlton. Your responsibility is to improve the discourse in the country via the paper you write for. You chose to respond to emails in the way that you did, just like you chose to resign when you were only looking at a suspension (and possibly with pay).

For a journalist and commentator as practised as you to so misunderstand the potential consequences of one's own actions should be shameful. Of course, that's assuming you really don't know what you were doing.

There's an alternative possibility here. There's the possibility that you know exactly what you were doing. That you published a purposefully antisemitic piece because you knew it would get coverage. There's the possibility that you responded in a way that your employer deemed inappropriate because you were looking for an opportunity to become a martyr for some bigoted cause.

The language you used in your comments above imply a conspiracy: an outside force controlling the management and editorial decisions of the paper. That's what you mean by "bullies", isn't it?

Either way you don't look good. In one scenario you are weak and reactive and in the other you are dedicating yourself as an instrument of evil.

Also, in 'this country of ours' we used to tell people where to get off in imaginative plays on the English language. As a man of letters you should relish in that rather than resort to vulgarity. Go and read some of Paul Keating's hansard entries and get back to me.