The subtitle of this book is how we ended up greedy, narcissistic and unhappy. It doesn’t sound cheerful reading! But it is absolutely brilliant. Liddle is a superb writer – humorous, observant, and biting. He does not write from a Christian perspective but there is much in here that I could resonate with. One warning – one of the weak points about the book is the regular use of the ‘F word’….
if you don’t want to read the whole thing then I’ve identified 25 characteristics of our generation that he speaks about. I’m not saying that I agree with every single one of them, but it certainly makes for fascinating reading and provokes to thought. Enjoy!
1) The Selfish Generation –
“I, and my generation, seen by contrast feckless and irresponsible, endlessly selfish, whining, avaricious, self-deluding, self obsessed, spoiled and corrupt and ill. We are the generation that spent the small but hard earned inheritance we got from our hard-working parents (mine went on that most irresponsible and selfish of all our new and expensive freedoms, divorce lawyers), and are now busy spending the money we should be leaving to our kids.” P.9
2) The Lost Generation –
“It is hard to argue against longer life expectancy, greater affluence, safer workplaces, the freedom to escape from a hopeless marriage, the rights of women to be treated equally, and so on. But a certain moral code has been lost along the way, which has contributed largely to our country becoming close to bankrupt, a nation of broken families clamouring about their entitlements siring ill educated and undisciplined kids unfamiliar with the concept of right and wrong, where there is an ever diminishing sense of community and belonging, a perpetual transience, if you fancy a cheap oxymoron.”p. 10
“peace has made us complacent, freedom has made us irresponsible, affluence has made us acquisitive, comfort has made us neglectful of others, and security has made us – oddly enough – tremblingly insecure.” Page 11
3) The Proud Generation
“This is what happens when we are freed from the requirement to be humble, to bow down, to accept that we are deeply flawed and are inclined – when liberated from the suspicion that someone powerful and vengeful and probably bad-tempered is watching everything we do – to behave rather badly, and with a consuming arrogance. We build things to praise ourselves, and then, having finally abolished God, we become a God to ourselves. We become gripped by intimations of our own brilliance.” Page 15.
“It is no coincidence that this rapid erosion of deference to an omnipotent, unseen other has occurred in tandem with the growth of institutionalised self obsession, self-pity and public emoting.” Page 18
4) The Heartless Generation
“It is undoubtedly true that as orthodox religious belief has retreated, so we have become more nakedly individualistic, more inclined to be immune to the needs and requirements of our fellow men. I suspect there is a correlation.” Page 20
5) The Greedy Generation
“credit, as it exists in its ubiquity today, is a con trick perpetuated upon the poorest and the most vulnerable in society. It doles out an illusory wealth which has, over the decades, disguised the extent to which the incomes of the richest and the incomes of the poorest have become ever more polarised, the trickle down that never really happened and was never really expected to happen, if we are being honest. The poor get their shit stuff, for a while, until it is repossessed along with their oldest daughter, and maybe they forget that they are earning only 1/200 of the salary – excluding bonuses – of their chief executive, whereas 40 years ago they be on about one 20th as much as the boss.” Page 30.
6) The Impatient Generation
“This waiting is the thing my generation no longer does, is no longer cool with. It does not wait for anything. It does not see why it should. Life’s too short, isn’t it? Paradoxically, life was rather shorter back when people did way – still they waited.” Page 34.
7) The ‘Flexible’ Generation
“Flexible, then, as understood by Mr Starkey, is a synonym – a euphemism, if you like – for xxxx cheap. The reason British businesses employ Eastern European labour is that they can pay them 3/5 of xxx all and get away with it; it is nothing to do with a reluctance on the part of the British worker to shift his indolent fat arse and travel a few miles for a job. The Poles and Slovaks have very low overheads here, and a much lower cost of living back home. They don’t have families to support in this country, by and large, so they work for less. Have you noticed how minicab fares haven’t risen much recently, or sometimes gone down? You can probably work out why that is when you listen to the drivers accident.” – Page 42
8) The Homeless Generation
“And back at home moving, always moving; having an investment only in the baldest sense of the word, in the mortgage. Having no investment in the community you live in, and the people who live around you, because you’re always ready to move on again, to buy bigger and better, and thus trouser more almost wholly imaginary money. As a consequence, the poorest of us – an ever-growing proportion – are forced into private-sector lettings, because there are no council houses left.” Page 49.
‘’ we replaced the communal with the sopilistic, the acquisitive and the narcissistic.“. Page 51.
9) The Blameless Generation
“We are, as Richard Hoggart put it in The way We Live Now, riding a wave of relativism – ‘the obsessive avoidance of judgements of quality, or moral judgement ‘; there is no blame to be attached to anything anyone does; we should not judge, we should not blame. And so, of course, as a consequence, people come to expect not to be judged and not to be blamed. People who cannot work because they are ‘disabled ‘by, say, alcoholism or obesity, but who nonetheless have several children to support, do not remotely blame themselves for giving their kids an awful life – they blame you, and me, and society. And they will demand, as a right, a larger house, and therefore a larger bill for you and me to pay, because the notion that they should look out for themselves a little bit either has not occurred to them, or has occurred to them but appals them in its apparent callousness.” Page 59.
10) The Atomised Generation
“This moronic fugue, this howling – that I have been transgressed, or I am a victim, or I demand redress, or simply and exultantly LOOK! I AM! – is the conscious expression of a society which, underneath, is fractured into a million different parts and no longer has any sense of itself as a cohesive whole, and therefore with a concomitant moral responsibility to others. What we have instead is an infinitely atomised morass of acquisitiveness and complaint and insularity and braggadocio”. Page 64.
“In a sense, the free market, and this perpetual demand for choice, is another expression of our modern individual narcissism, and our insularity: we alone know best.” Page 183.
“The thesis is that choice has made us happier. This control we now have has given us better lifes. Has it?” Page 185.
11) The Generation of the Sixties and Eighties
“from the 60s we acquired the insistence upon self-expression and the overthrowing of a conservative social agenda in favour of one in which, after a fashion, anything went and was beyond all reproof. A reaction, of course, against the buttoned up, constrained and often absurd stoicism of the preceding generation. And as those free-living and endlessly expensive baby boomers get older and wealthier, so their individualistic demands drove them to the political right. From the 1980s we received the human right to be endlessly, pointlessly acquisitive, to look after our own interests and XXX the needs of the rest, to deny – a la the prime minister of the time – that such a thing as society even existed.. “Page 64.
12) The Divorced Generation
“beyond that, though it was a betrayal of my boys. Having made the decision to have children, I should have stuck with it. But I didn’t; my personal happiness seemed to count for more than anything else.” Page 75.
“The loosening of the divorce laws, and the swift removal of stigma from those who have been divorced, came from the top down. It was designed to enable the more affluent in society to continue to pursue that most compulsive of post-1960 pastimes, serial monogamy.” Page 76.…
Like so much socially liberal legislation presented to the electorate as a wonderful means of acquiring those most liberal of things, freedom and equality, divorce reform benefited only the well-off, by and large. It was legislation designed to enable the affluent to XXXX around with impunity, (no fault, remember!), And hang the rest. Hang the kids. Children from broken homes make up 80% of the population of Britain psychiatric units……. Whoever the 1971 divorce format was brought into ‘enable ‘, it was certainly not the children. It was not the children, and it was not the poor.” Page 77.
13) The Sexualised Generation
He talks about the 1970’s and Gary Glitter singing to 14 year old girls – ‘Do you wanna touch me?” What do you think he was referring to…?
Part 2 here
You have more patience than me. Four f***s in the first chapter and I stopped and handed it back to the library.
Reblogged this on Talmidimblogging.
There may be hope for him.
If I remember correctly, while at radio 4 he did a series on, belief, faith, with much vacillation but said he felt somehow drawn, with avery diluted affinity to the CoE.
I too do not like the bad langauge. There is a harshness to it that makes me internally wince but it is the language of the day, of unbelievers, to be looked beyond , turn a deaf ear to in the hope of an opportunity to offer the transformative gospel. Having said that I’d change channels on the TV, or mute, or not watch in the first place, if forewarned. In my pre Christian it wouldn’t bother me. It does now.
I occasionally read his articles in the Sunday Times (ST), which I invariably appreciate, as it challenges the spirit of the agein all its manefestations, and the language is greatly moderated. In fact I’m not sure how he gets them published as they go against the flow of much editorial ethos of the ST.
By and large I agree with this:
“This waiting is the thing my generation no longer does, is no longer cool with. It does not wait for anything.”
Except for one thing. That is marriage and having children. The age at which people get married and the age at which they have their first child is much later than it used to be. Of course, for some, marriage is not a prerequisite of having children and they never get married. But travelling, having a career and a good time are now considered to be more immediate needs than getting married and having children.
Hello Pr David
Congratulations on your work with ScoMo and Anthony Albanese yesterday. It is wonderful that ScoMo seems sincere to you and not just all “image”. Thanks so much for your work that is already helping this country. You have covered a lot of cities in a short space of time – more than many Aussies would cover in a lifetime! I am looking forward to your impressions of Tasmania some time soon.
This blog post on divorce, etc, reminded me of something that has been troubling me for a long time that I would like to share here. It relates to a person of my acquaintance, the minor Australian writer and blogger, Philippa Moore (now Philippa Schoon), whom I know through mutual friends. Philippa Moore who spent many years as an expatriate in London, before returning home last year.
Philippa Moore presents a different problem from that which is discussed in this post: she married relatively young (for a member of Generation Y) but divorced within about five years. She discusses her divorce in this opinion piece she wrote for the Huffington Post:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/getting-divorced-in-my-20s-made-me-a-better-person_b_9360484
We can see from the piece’s title that she actually thinks her divorce was a beneficial experience in the long term. 🙁
Some key quotes from her piece:
“My expectations were very unrealistic (probably unfair, too) and I adopted a very passive role in my young marriage. Keeping my husband happy was my priority, even at the expense of my own needs. And it was 2002, not 1950.”
“I felt I was a walking contradiction in many ways — heartbroken over my failed marriage and deeply ashamed of what I felt it said about me; yet excited about the freedom and possibilities that the end of my marriage opened up for me.”
“… as time went on, I became proud of it — both of the fact I’d got out of a marriage that wasn’t working early (rather than sticking it out for another 20 years and then leaving), and of the person I became because of it.”
” I learned to love my own company and to meet my own emotional needs rather than seek external validation all the time…”
“You write your own happy ending.”
These quotes clearly show the fundamental flaws in Philippa Moore’s worldview: she rejects the idea of marriage being about staying together through good times and bad and instead sees it as part of a quest for happiness, she rejects the idea that the female should have a passive role in the relationship and the precept of male headship and she ultimately comes to believe the delusion that true happiness comes from within and that we determine it ourselves, rather than from the Most High Source of All Happiness.
Philippa Moore’s views ultimately lead, sadly, to a kind of hedonism as can be seen in her blog posts.
She and her second husband, Tom Schoon, are also “woke” to the point of self-parody, as can be seen from their frequent Tweets. They tick all the boxes: pro-gay, feminist, vegetarian, environmentalist, Leftist, Hawke-Keating-supporting economic rationalists (yet simultaneously anti-Thatcherist-I have no idea how they resolve that contradiction!), pro-Greta, anti-Trump, atheistic, Remainer, anti-Scottish/Welsh independence, #MeToo supporting, yoga-practicing, hypno-therapy indulging(!), Guardian reading, etc, etc, etc…
https://mobile.twitter.com/tomschoon/with_replies
https://mobile.twitter.com/philippa_moore/with_replies
I am definitely not saying this to laugh at them or to be condescending, though, just merely to point out the spiritual blindness of our times that they exemplify. We must not judge and Philippa Moore did have a difficult childhood : her father was a local celebrity breakfast radio host on a commercial FM station, which would have put some degree of pressure on her. Worse, her mother – according to many people who know her – is a contradiction who overindulged her children yet could be a pushy/overbearing bully too. These factors led to Philippa having to battle bulimia for a while and other neurotic behaviours such as hoarding. 🙁 Her second husband, Tom, also suffers from a bad anxiety disorder. One of Philippa’s younger sisters, Liz, was also affected and ran off the rails badly, becoming pregnant outside of wedlock whilst also quite young. 🙁 Philippa also had an unhappy time attending a Roman Catholic school in her childhood, so she did not encounter true religion there.
Continued….
Good evening, I read the Latte Years recently. As a book it does as promised and shows how losing weight doesn’t automatically lead to happiness. Her attempts at reinventing herself are a bit selfish as others point out and I can see where she is influenced by Liz Gilbert as other comments here point out. Overall the book is so-so. Reading about extreme political statements and relations on here give her story a lot more context though. In re-evaluating it I am a bit more positive about the book because I understand more about where she has come from, how immsture she is and the challenges she has faced as the daughter of a local radio personality. Her politics are horrible but she seems to be earnest about making the world a better place even though she goes about it in a very stupid way. Her heart seems to be in the right place evrn though I disagree with her. It is kind of you to pray for her.
Overall *** out of *****
You can Australia Day to the neverending list of things your friend Philippa is ‘woke’ about. She just retweeted this link to a Guardian article about ‘the theft of a nation’:
https://mobile.twitter.com/jemmabirrell/status/1353618314057064449
She is clueless.
… And cheering on the transgender Sarah Parry for his (I refuse to say “her”!) Australia Day Award:
https://mobile.twitter.com/philippa_moore/status/1353898064260415489
I notice Philippa’s feminism doesn’t seem to extend to congratulating Margaret Court though. It seems the sisterhood has its limits! Philippa probably thinks Sarah Parry is more of a true woman than Margaret Court is!
She must be the most woke person I’ve ever encointered online!
Since she is such a big fan of Liz Gilbert, I wonder if she will emmulate her and leave her “true love” and second husband for a woman, too, just like Gilbert did. That may be really unfair of me but I wouldn’t put it past her, since she has evidently embraced the gay/trans culture so very enthusiastically, it makes me wonder. 🙁
The trouble with all these people is that they make theie woke politics so widely known, I genuinely fear for their safety when the pendulum swungs back the other way and the inevitable backlash occurs. Philippa may just be an over-opinionated and somewhat eccentric pain in the neck journalist now but what happens to her when reactionaries have had enough of all this woke nonsense? She is making herself a target. I hope they don’t hurt her and people of her ilk, I really do.
I hope she “wakes up to herself from her wokeness”, but she’s entitled to her opinions, I guess.
As for Liz Graham, I actually found I know someone from Tassie who knew her once! Its a small world. No definitely no saint and she was always making eyes at all the boys apparently and was very flirtatious with them. She eas also a bit of a loudmouth and something of a tomboy in her youth but overall a kind person and yes, very vulnerable and neurotic which tallieswith what people say below. She lacked self-discipline and dedication more than anything in my friend’s view but was a decent girl overall.
My prayers for them both. I certainly don’t bear any ill will towards Philippa, annoying and dangerous though her opinions are, nor towards Liz Graham. God bless them anf keep them both safe.
In summary, the reason I am writing this is to show attitudes that exemplify those of at least some of the young today and how the sad, dead-end path of self-indulgence and the selfish Epicurean/hedonistic attitudes and woke SJW activism that Philippa has gone down is ultimately a dead-end. It derply troubles me that this relatively intelligent, articulate young woman has become lost in so much selfishness even as she searches for happiness and understanding in life.
I therefore want to encourage readers to pray this heartfelt prayer that Philippa Moore and her husband and sisters will turn to Christ and realise that true, selfless happiness is truly found only in Him and not in the pleasures of this world. May they leave behind shallow, materialistic pleasures and find a life of self-sacrifice to the Lord and to each other is the only true life of love. May God grant them wisdom and maturity and lead them to His salvation through faith in His Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord – via the one true religion through faith alone by His grace alone.
In Jesus’ name,
Amen.
Further to my comment a while ago encouraging prayer for these young people, I wish to add something else I saw today.
Tom Schoon retweeted this militant vegan comment today. Sadly, it is not satire; the extreme fringes of the vegan movement actually believe this:
“Life of this little piggy has much higher value than the lives of all hunters, butchers, poachers & animal farmers combined
Change my Mind.
#wednesdaymorning #WednesdayWisdom #WednesdayMotivation #Bacon #cheese #pork #steak #bbq #Hamburger #pizza #dinner”
There is a photo of a piglet accompanying the tweet.
Original source, which Schoon retweeted:
https://mobile.twitter.com/CholesTroll/status/1207323364748091392
Even allowing for the fact that Tom Schoon is suffering from a mild mental illness (and his wife Philippa Moore is somewhat eccentric) this is disturbing on multiple levels and shows just how twisted the morality of the secular liberal far left has become. Perhaps someone should play the vegans who wrote the original tweet at their own game and sue them for discrimination by promoting animal rights over human rights.
I don’t believe Schoon himself is dangerous but, in the worst case scenario, some nutter in the vegan movement could be incited to kill farmers to prevent them sending livestock to the abattoirs. After all, that is what the mindset behind this tweet is endorsing: the idea that an animal’s life is worth more than a human’s.
This is the depth to which the secular humanists can sink in their search for a godless morality; a total twisting of values and norms of morality.
Schoon and his wife, the Tasmanian writer and blogger Philippa Moore, might be extreme cases, in taking this kind of thing seriously but they are not alone. They need our prayers more than ever now as they truly have lost their moral compass in their strange mix of hedonistic lifestyle and far left misanthropy. Please pray they will come to Christ before it is too late and leave their sinful lives and twisted, sick value system behind.
Dear Lord God, Please enter the lives of Philippa, Tom and their families and save them. Highlight to them the sinfulness of their lives and bankrupt moral system and lead them to salvation. In the name of Christ Your Son, our Lord, Amen.
Thank you so much for writing this. I will definitely pray these prayers for them. I am concerned for Philippa Moore, both because of the content of her writing for newspapers and blogs and her book and because I, too, know her as a person and I know how fragile and emotional she is. However, I also know how her “woke”/uber-liberal journalism and blogging is contributing harm to our society, undermining the sanctity of marriage, gender norms, sexual ethics and the basic tenets of morality. In this she is as culpable as every other Huffington journalist and gender-is-a-social-construct academic out there today and setting a terrible example for other impressionable young girls who may, I fear, end up making the same mistakes she is making by following this pied piper of blogging up the garden path to a dead end.
I have known Philippa’s parents for many years. I am aware that many people don’t like Sylvia because she is so overbearing and very aggressively protective of her children – I have witnessed her do that myself and it has disturbed me to see it – but I have always personally got on well with her. I know a lot of people accuse her of being a bully. Apparently she even chased off one of Liz’s potential suitors, which is a shame. Overall though, Sylvia is just misunderstood by most people. She does have a good heart and means well. I don’t think she realises how hard and aggressive she often comes across and how many people she has sadly alienated as a result. She is my friend, though and I am proud to call her that.
Liz was in a bad way for a long time in her late teens and early twenties – she went badly off the rails – but I think she is somewhat better these days. She fornicated a lot and became very egotistical. I saw her mistreat and alienate people. Rebekah was always the most levelheaded of the children.
The biggest problem is that Sylvia spoiled them as children – they were allowed to do things we wouldn’t dream of, such as, to give one example of many, rummage through their mother’s handbag as teenagers without her permission and not even receiving the slightest rebuke from her for this kind of behaviour. Myself and other mothers were shocked by this kind of thing.
The children were all attention- seekers and desperate for people to like them. They lacked self-esteem in my view, especially Liz and Phil.
I do think it is a big mistake for Philippa Moore to have become a public figure. Some of her writing has shocked and disgusted me. She did have psychological problems in her childhood as she notes in her memoir, The Latte Years, and has always been mildly eccentric or “unique” as she herself readily admits. On the one hand, she is an attention-seeker and shameless self-publicist ( https://www.pressreader.com/australia/mercury-hobart-magazine/20160129/281852937591028 ) and, on the other, she is psychologically fragile. Her use of the media to promote herself and her book is demonstrative of this. Whenever her writing is criticised she is quick to play the victim card (https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2017/may/22/when-tweeters-attack-why-do-readers-send-authors-their-bad-reviews
) and denounce her critics as “trolls” and “bullies” even going on SBS television to discuss this ( https://www.sbs.com.au/topics/voices/culture/article/2017/08/01/how-stand-online-bullies
) yet she and Tom have been perpetrators of bullying themselves.
Philippa was a very sweet girl when she was young but I have been disturbed by the changes in her since she moved back to Tasmania. None of the changes are for the better. She is a very selfish person now. I personally think Tom has been a bad influence in her though she was heading down a hedonistic and selfish path even before she met him according to her writings in the Latte Years.
Her writings promoting divorce as a liberating experience seem more like an attempt at self- justification for the failure of her first marriage than anything else but I really don’t know what happened there as I have only read her side of things. Her public promotion of divorce and attacks on traditional gender roles ( https://mobile.twitter.com/philippa_moore/status/1227790502814085125 ) though subconsciously betray the selfishness inherent in her work. ( https://www.huffpost.com/entry/getting-divorced-in-my-20s-made-me-a-better-person_b_9360484) The Latte Years is all about SELF. Self-realisation, self indulgence, etc, trampling over societal norms along the way. I suspect part of her liberalism may also be her trying to ingratiate herself to the literati. ( https://books.google.com.au/books?id=Ic6EDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=latte+years+philippa&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwin3LX0kfPnAhXe_XMBHTIXAQoQ6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&q=latte%20years%20philippa&f=false )
As well as promoting divorce, in her columns and on her award-winning blog she has constantly promoted a sordid lifestyle. For instance, there was her notorious column for Cosmopolitan magazine on “50 Shades of Grey exercises” ( https://bit.ly/389L9Kq ) and blog posts on immoral sex and other personal matters (before she married Tom). I had to stop reading her blog because I was so disgusted by it. In The Latte Years though she admits that there was an element of naivety here too as she did not anticipate her discussion of her sex life would be turned against her by other bloggers and trolls. Besides openly committing sexual sin and promoting her lifestyle choices to others, there was no sense of decorum in her blog posts that private lives should be kept private. Pure smut. 🙁
She is now pursuing a feminist political activist line as well, embracing every Leftist/Woke cause imaginable ( https://www.ebrd.com/news/2014/new-ebrd-gender-video-premieres.html ) with her Tweets and Guardian/Huffpost writings. She is so woke that, on her current blog, she even acknowledges the traditional custodians of the land she is on! ( https://www.philippamoore.net ) Despite this, like many Leftists, she has never been to an Aboriginal settlement in her life and knows nothing if their real needs or the rorts of Aboriginal “industry” and the “stolen generation” fraud. Tom sees fit to pontificate about Aboriginal affairs on Twitter (‘”Anyone who climbs Uluru is showing a total lack of respect”‘) despite having lived in Australia for only three months(!) at that stage. Breathtaking arrogance that left me appalled, I am afraid. ( https://mobile.twitter.com/tomschoon/ )
You have outline all of their other extremely woke views above. You point out the inconsistency of Phil being a fan of Hawke-Keating whilst she and Tom Schoone despise the Tories and Thatcherism. I don’t understand how they synthesise these views either since we all know Hawke-Keating ‘economic rationalism’ was just rebranded Thatcherism. Phil was also cheerleading for a Bill Shorten victory on Twitter, even though his would-be treasurer, Chris Bowen, had repeatedly stated in the media that he wanted to continue Keating’s disastrous reform policies. Making it all the stranger, in the Latte Years, Phil acknowledges that the disastrous Keating-exacerbated 1990s recession cost her family their home, forcing them to move to the countryside (Cygnet). Her parents are fairly-diehard Labor supporters though so she would undoubtedly be influenced by them.
In terms of religion, I think her parents are very much nominal Catholics. I have never discussed such sensitive topics with them, though, so I am not certain of their beliefs. Her Dad, the 7HOFM radio announcer Richard Moore, did attend a Presbyterian-run school when he was in Africa for a stint as a child though. Phil herself attended a Catholic all- girls school (where she was extremely unhappy) and then the elite Friends Quaker School. By her own admission on her blog though, religion classes bored her and she was not particularly interested in the Bible, sadly although she is an intelligent person, a member of Mensa, top TCE student, studying for a doctorate, etc. Phil’s first marriage took place in an evangelical Anglican Church but I think she only picked this because her grandparents were married there. I believe she had to attend the Alpha Course before she was married and the minister whom I spoke to after the wedding seemed lovely but I think Phil only ever became a nominal Christian at best, if that. Certainly her views now, promoting divorce, homosexuality, a “woman’s right to choose” etc and experimenting with casual sex and masturbation between marriages are the antithesis of traditional Christianity. Philippa Moore has also dabbled in some occult practices including consulting a clairvoyant, hypnotherapy and practising yoga.
Tom Schoon is openly atheist as well. Actually, Liz was tending to grow in religious conviction from her time working at Tasmanian Catholic kindergartens and preps. I don’t really know how firm her convictions are though. She needs a lot of prayer in her life as well so that she will grow in her faith. Please pray for her. It touches my heart deeply to see Liz grow in faith after the difficulties and mistakes and arrogance of her adolescence and twenties.
Ultimately, I am struck by the sadness of the whole situation. Phil was a sweet but vulnerable and naive child who has through experiences grown into a rather unpleasant and selfish adult. She was always an emotionally fragile person who took things personally so I don’t know how many of the incidents in the Latte Years (school bullying, sexual harassment, internet trolls) were serious incidents in reality but they were clearly serious to her in her fragile state of mind. That and a sadly domineering, overprotective mother probably led to the eating disorders and other psychological problems. Philippa now sees release from her problematic childhood in a self-indulgent, hedonistic lifestyle with her second husband, Tom, of travel, fine food, alcohol and sensual indulgence, sexual experimentation, freedom from traditional gender constraints and a “liberating” divorce. She thought she could gain life experience and wisdom through smut in places like San Francisco and London. Unfortunately, she has found support for her views amongst her fellow Twitterati and in the Leftist media for which she writes. What really worries me though is what will she be left with when she finally realises how hollow her new lifestyle really is and it all falls through. Also, it saddens me deeply that she promotes such selfish living and rejection of Biblical norms through her columns, her book and her high-profile blog and Tweets. Although very intelligent, I don’t think she is very critically-minded: she just swallowed all of the feminist and gender politics twaddle she learnt at uni without questioning any of it. She does not see the agendas that lie behind these things. It is also sad to note she and Ton have been guilty of online bullying themselves, something they are quick to decry in others.
I also continually worry about her mental health. Since Philippa Moore has been in such a fragile place mentally before, I don’t know if courting the media and trying to build up a high profile in literary circles and the public gaze is the best path for her. Also, although she is clearly happy with him, I don’t know if Tom is a good influence on her or if he is just dragging her in an even more extreme leftist, hedonistic position. I realise he has a mild mental illness but his whole uber-leftist lifestyle is doing her no favours.
At heart though, I still want to believe that Philippa Moore is still the good kid I knew when she was young and that she has just gone down a bad path more through naivety than anything due to her sheltered upbringing and bad early experiences out in the world, a world she is still trying to make sense of. Though she promotes sin and destructive social behaviours and there is an air of self-entitlement to some of her writing, I don’t think she is in the same class as most uktra-woke Guardian/Huffpost guest contributor hacks. Being back in Tasmania away from London will be good for her, hopefully. I will therefore pray earnestly for her and Tom as you wish us to do and would strongly urge others to do so as well because I am really worried for that kid. She needs love and support, not condemnation, and desperately needs faith in her life. She is intelligent enough that she would listen to anyone willing to help guide her onto a better path for, despite her claims in her writings and her book that she has found herself, it is evident to me that she is still a very lost person. She would not listen to me but I hope someone she encounters will help give her guidance with her struggles and questions one day. It is a very slim chance but Phil, if you do ever read this, I know you are a very sensitive person so please don’t take offence at anything I have written above. Please know that people love you and are praying for you.
Thanks for commenting on Philippa Moore and her book. I read ‘The Latte Years’ recently and, subsequently, some of her news opinion pieces and I was appalled by her anti-Christian attitudes to marriage, divorce and sex. Definitely not the kind of writings I would want my daughter to read.
Honestly, the impression I got was that she is a spoilt, immature brat, albeit a very insecure one, and the comments above about her mother reinforce that view.
I just looked at her Twitter account and I saw this recent Tweet, which seems to sum up her hostility towards Christianity:
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Droplet FireVanessa STAY AT HOME Tiger face Trophy
·
Mar 28
There’s no hate like Christian love.
9
15
303
Philippa Moore
@philippa_moore
Replying to
@Miss_vee_bee
Perfectly put.
5:21 PM · Mar 28, 2020·Twitter for iPhone
2
Likes
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I wonder where her hatred came from? I don’t know whether to feel sorry for her or repulsed by her views. I will definitely pray as you suggest.
There is so much self-entitlement and self-righteousness in her loony leftist articles.
On another note, yes, I am so glad Scott Morrison is our Prime Minister in this pandemic situation! We certainly dodged a bullet with Labor’s election loss. The way Shorten used the Beaconsfield mining tragedy to build up his national profile, I hate to think how he would have exploited this crisis to further his ends if he were our national leader. Even more frightening would be if Paul Keating’s puppet Chris Bowen were treasurer given the way Paul Keating bungled his handling of the 1990s recession. Whatever their shortcomings (indecisiveness being they key one) Morrison and Frydenberg are doing a great job given the circumstances.
If nothing else, it is obvoous that the parents didn’t give them any spiritual guidance – or if they did, Philippa and Liz rebelled against it.
I can’t imagine a kid not being taught how to pray or have Bible stories and other Christian literature being read to them at night to develop a love for the Scriptures or being taken to Sunday School. I feel so sorry for kids deprived of all of that. Their backgrounds would be so different from mine. It is upsetting to think people like these girls *might* have been so spiritually impoverished. Going to a Catholic school as their only real source of Christian education would have led to a distorted view of faith, I imagine. Anyway, I hope that wasn’t the case but we know it is a reality for so many kids brought up in atheistic homes these days. All my love to Philippa and Liz.
Hi! I’m from Tassie and i knew Philippa Moore when we were young too so I can relate to this. Yes now she is a wordsmith/journo/academic she has drunk the political correctness/identity politics kool-aid completely. 🙁
What I find most ludicrous is the way that Philippa played the victim card in that SBS interview on bullying linked above. In truth she was a bully herself when we were younger. As other people have noted the Moore family are fairly notorious around Hobart. Her mother, Sylvia, bullied children. Her nickname was the ‘Lioness’ because she was so defensive of her own children but bullied other peoples kids. We were all terrified of her when we were at school she was so overbearing and aggressive, determined to always get her own way. She was sort of like a stage mother but instead of pushing her kids to achieve she mollycoddled and spoilt them and overindulged them. I guess that is how they ended up neurotic, politically correct snowflakes.
Liz Moore the sister (now Liz Graham, married to Gene Graham a triathlete and electrician) was a neurotic, bullying, rude person too. I thought Richard Moore the father, a minor celeb radio announcer, was okay until Liz Graham was given an ‘Apple for the Teacher’ prize (an Apple computer) in a competition by his radio station (7HOFM). It was blatant nepotism and minor corruption. No where did they declare she was the radio station presenter’s daughter when she won their comp. 🙁
Anyway I read Philippa Moore’s book, Latte Years, and felt dirty after I read it with all the talk of immoral sex. It also had some bizarre claims like she thinks had been sexually propositioned by an older girl(!) at her all-girls Catholic school (she isn’t sure what happened now as she has had some weird hypnotherapy to repress the memory). Whatever happened the parents found the diary and confronted the school principal. However they then enrolled her three younger sisters in the he school. If something that bad had happened surely the parents would have pulled them all from that school?!
On her Twitter page I saw this absolutely blasphemous birthday card from her parents:
https://mobile.twitter.com/philippa_moore/status/1265189347969515522
I understand it is some kind of meme from the TV show ‘Gavin & Stacey’ (I have never watched it) but surely Philippa Moore realises how offensive it would be to Christians to put in the public sphere on social media. Someone so concerned about political correctness and not offending others is unconcerned about the deep offence to people of faith. As usual there is breathtaking hypocrisy among the identity politics crowd.
Philippa Moore retweeted this statement too so she endorses liberal authoritarian censorship for others but does not mind who she offends herself:
https://mobile.twitter.com/mingzhuhii/status/1270874503275413504
One of the most disturbing tweets of all though is this one. Philippa is using the Kew tragedy in which four police officers died to promote identity politics:
https://mobile.twitter.com/philippa_moore/status/1253579537687822337
To me, that is just gutter politics on Philippa Moore’s part and when I saw that I lost any and all respect i had for her.
Philippa Moore also tweeted several times during the Geoffrey Rush case, assuming he was guilty and was furious when he was found innocent. She has also retweeted posts accusing Trump of sexual assault which claim that having credible witnesses is as good as being found guilty. Look, I know as well as the next person that the legal system is deeply flawed and even corrupt but here Philippa Moore is blatantly rejecting the presumption of innocence until proven guilty. It is another step towards Liberal Authoritarian tyranny.
Anyone from Tasmania who has met Philippa Moore knows she is a mildly eccentric person. However the types of views held by her and the other members of the identity politics crowd are more than just eccentric: they are dangerous. Calling for censorship, rejecting the presumption of innocence, reverse racism in assuming white males are guilty, and various other statements she has made would logically lead to the undermining of democracy.
Her soapboxing over COVID-19 shows a breathtaking naivety with regard to economics as do her comments on the so-called ‘Stolen Generations’ industry and indigenous affairs.
Unlike most of the commenters on this site, I guess, I am a former Leftist. I actually had a lot of time for the Old Left with it’s focus on economic equality and social progress. They have now completely alienated me and I have lurched to the Right because of the New Left’s identity politics, bullying and espousal of authoritarianism. Philippa Moore is a typical representative of this new Left. How much she believes what she writes and how much of it is just her getting on trendy bandwagons like BLM, the Stolen Generations, etc, I cannot tell.
London calling… London calling… Hello there!
I recently read The Latte Years hoping it would provide answers to some questions I had. It didn’t really but perhaps, to be fair, I was too old for the book (which seems to be aimed at people in their late teens/early twenties). In fact, it really surprised me because some of the thought in it seemed so superficial. I was expecting something with a lot more insight and depth.
I am not sure if Philippa Moore is a good writer or not because the other thing that annoyed me about the book is that it is written in an extremely colloquial, “chatty” style. I prefer more polished, formal prose.
Anyway, I didn’t know what to make of the author at first. I’ve been reading through her Tweets linked above to get a better sense of her and I can see she is a crank.
I have many Leftist political sympathies myself but her SJW pontificating about subjects she clearly knows nothing about is truly grating. Perhaps that comes from her father being a radio broadcaster as I gather from the discussion above.
Her parroting of groupthink Identity Politics positions also makes her seem bereft of original thought. She just takes standard SJW Leftist ideas and drives them to bizarre extremes. Are these her real convictions? If not, is she promoting these views in an attempt to ingratiate herself with the literati? It shows the worrying poverty of thought on the Left of politics today.
If they are her real convictions then, as I said above, she is a crank. I guess those with a loud-enough voice and a platform in the media are those who are most noticed these days, though.
I also agree that the birthday card tweet is truly offensive. It gives more insight into Philippa Moore and her parents than her book does, in a way she has clearly not intended.
Cheers. Thanks for reading.
Hello, I’ve read The Latte Years as well. To me it had a few useful moments but a lot of the book felt very self-indulgent with endless discussions about holidays and rants against internet trolls.
I’ve just looked through Philippa Moore’s Twitter account and I agree, she is a fruitloop. 🙁
I didn’t get as much of a sense of this from the book, probably because it doesn’t try to engage with political topics as much. That said, a lot of the book makes more sense now in light of the comments above about her mother being an overbearing bully and her father being in the limelight. That kind of environment growing up wouldn’t help someone with underlying mental health problems. To that extent, I genuinely pity her.
However at some point people have to take responbiilty for their own actions. Philippa Moore’s Twitter pontificating actually reminds me of something I recently read about Adolf Hitler – he’d always go for the most extreme solution to any issue he encountered. Philippa seems like that, too, albeit a Leftist version – introduce censorship for books that are not politically correct, treat [white male] people as guilty until proven innocent in courts of law, etc. She seems to see the world in extreme black and white terms with the Letists/progressives always right and conservatives, especially white males, always wrong, to the point where she seems out of touch with the real world. Reading a whole bunch of Tweets in a row felt like entering a bizarre alternative reality. She has been really taken for a ride by the whole SJW crowd too. She clearly isn’t over the mental issues. Yes, it is bizarre too she is so fixated on her Trolls yet she has no problem with the Australian Labour Party’s policies losing her parents there house when she was wrong. She is still a one-eyed Labour supporter! Why so vengeful against one yet so forgiving and blindly adhering to another. Also why so much support for Aboriginal sovereignty but opposition to Scottish independence and support for BetterTogether? She also has no problem with her English parents-in-law exploiting the Welsh and undermining their culture by moving there on retirement. I bet they didn’t try to learn the Welsh language. Aboriginal culture is all important and worth protecting at all costs though. I just can’t fathom the double standard.
Anyway, it is very sad to read her mixed-up world views and obvious mental health issues that are obviously continuing to this day, judging from her Tweets and journalistic articles
You can even tell from Philippa Moore’s book that her mother is very pushy and overbearing by the way she forces Philippa to undertake ballroom dancing lessons and reads her private journal behind her back. What kind of mother would do that?! Sounds like she was pressuring her daughters to marry young as well. She seems to be the root cause of at least some of their neuroses. 🙁
“… retweeted this statement too so she endorses liberal authoritarian censorship …”
As someone said on Twitter this mornin in response to Guardianista like thisg, “If the left wing were sure of their position, they wouldn’t feel threatened by people reading and talking about other views. Why do they feel they need to demonise their opponents?”
Hi, I’m an Aussie.
I read the Latte Years recently. I’m not sure what to make of the book – it does have helpful tips but it seems overall quite… selfish and hedonistic. It is all about *self*-improvement but there is nothing in there about doing things for others. Philippa Moore finds herself through overseas trips, new experiences and so on but how much effort was put into saving her marriage? Did her husband really hold her back that much?
I’m glad the book didn’t really touch on her politics at all. I’ve been looking through Philippa Moore’s Twitter feed to see if it was as leftist as you were all saying. It has confirmed what you said. I don’t think I’ve ever read any social justic warrior or political correctness wannabe as extreme and bias as her.
First though to address the point raise by Peta, yes Welsh and Scottish have a more solid case for independence than Australian Aborigines because they were loose tribal groupings. They considered they belonged to the land rather than owners of the land. They were nomadic neolithic tribes and were not at the stage of establishing sovereign states. That is where the (controversial!) British concept of Terra Nullius came from. Hence, I think it is valid to support Scottish and Welsh independence but oppose ideas like an Aboriginal Parliament, indigenous courts with tribal justice and the Aboriginal flag and so on. It is harder to see things in reverse though as Philippa apparently does – support Aboriginal sovereignty but not Scottish or Welsh independence.
With regard to Philippa Moore’s broader focus on Aboriginal rights, I do have some links to the Aboriginal community: my Aunt through marriage is an Aborigine and she wants absolutely nothing to do with the Aboriginal welfare claims. She believes in working honestly for a living. She is also adamant the ‘Stolen Generations’ claims are a fraud. Children were taken from drunken and child abusing parents. They would be dead now if they were not in foster care yet they turn around and sue the government for being ‘stolen’. Two kind, compassionate people I know who have worked in Aboriginal remote communities say the same thing. One noted they were naive to the scale of fraud that could be perpetrated until they discovered the Aboriginal welfare industries and the stolen generations scams.Sadly this rort does nothing to help actual Aborigines in real need.
Some of Philippa Moore’s other recent Tweets that struck me as particularly bizarre are these ones:
(retweeted):
https://mobile.twitter.com/LordofWentworth/status/1292986169156702208
So we should ask hard questions of Dutton and Scott Morrison but not of Daniel Andrews? Yet whose state has the catastrophic COVID problem?!
Pro-gay stuff (fairly run of the mill but how about letting Polish people decide how their own democracy should be run?)
(retweeted)
https://mobile.twitter.com/TJ_Knight/status/1291371460473294848
https://mobile.twitter.com/philippa_moore/status/1277210948416094208
Wow, Philippa Moore thinks the two girls in Queensland are “persecuted” because of their skin colour. No, dear, it was because they went into the state after coming back form a hotspot where they held an illegal party, lied on their passports, were members of a criminal gang and knowingly undertook actions that could have spread the pandemic. Unbelievable!
https://mobile.twitter.com/democracycolour/status/1289042027221409792
https://mobile.twitter.com/DebKilroy/status/1288690999972093956
She also thinks the people in public housing were being “persecuted” by being locked down. No, dear, it was to protect the general public.
https://mobile.twitter.com/philippa_moore/status/1279981795077787651
Philippa seems like a typical bourgeouis/Chardonnay socialist with absolutely no idea about how the working class really think or what their values are yet she is so prepared to pontificate on their behalf. Her comments mixing sport with politiics (a pet hate of mine) which I have not published here drive me crazy as well.
She does seem to genuinely have a fragile grip on reality. I’ve no idea if that is because of her identity politics outlook or if she is not fully rational. It is quite frightening. Reading her Tweets is making me reassess her book, though – was her husband really that bad? Were her trolls, former friends and school bullies really that awful too or was it all part of her mindset and mental fragility? I really don’t know now. What I do know is that her tweets other than the identity politics stuff seem to promote self-indulgence, a holier than thou attitude and a self-serving lifestyle. It has been a wake-up call that there is no true happiness to be found on her pathway.
Hello, I’ve been following this thread for some time. It is finally time to weigh in with my two cents’ worth. I once knew the Moore family. I was good friends with Liz Graham (nee Liz Moore) when we were younger. As has been discussed above, Liz was a really nice person until she went off the rails in her late teens/early twenties. I remember one time I went to speak to her at an event and she deliberately turned her back on me to speak to some of her new friends. I have never felt so utterly humiliated as I was that day. 🙁
I lost touch with her after that. I know she married the electrician Gene Graham, with whom she had already had children. I know later Liz was working at Saint Therese’s Primary School in Moonah and then at John Paul II Primary School on the Eastern Shore as a kindergarten/prep teacher. Whether that means she now has some kind of religious faith, I don’t know.
With regard to the subject of this discussion, Philippa Moore, though, I didn’t know her that well but I met her several times. I didn’t really know the two younger sisters in the family. I knew the mother, Sylvia, and I actually got on reasonable well with her but I can definitely see why a lot of people don’t like her. Some people in our group called her “Mrs Negative” behind her back. I don’t know to what extent she is the cause of her children’s issues, though.
On the occasions I met Philippa Moore, sometimes she came across as really friendly and caring but other times she seemed standoffish and aloof and wouldn’t speak to you. The sad thing is I once had a very bad problem in my personal life that was causing me a huge amount of pain. For various reasons, Philippa Moore was the one person I could have turned to for advice and help with it. I honestly did like her as a person and I respected her opinions. She was the one person who could have helped me and advised me with this deeply painful personal problem. Because she was so standoffish, though, I felt like I couldn’t build the rapport with her yo confide in her, so I never told her about my issue.
However, I didn’t realise she was going through so many personal problems and psychological issues of her own at that time until I read The Latté Years, so I guess it really teaches me I shouldn’t judge people. It is a real shame, though, because I would have liked to have been friends with her and I feel we could have both helped and guided each other with the problems we were going through.
Admittedly, she was always mildly eccentric (in her tweets nowadays she says she has so many books that she even had a pile stacked in the loo when she was living in her London flat!) I am worried now though that her extreme identity politics has given her a warped her sense of reality, judging from her histrionic Tweets and her journalistic articles. I also worry about her Tweets endorsing things like the Dark Mofo pagan/occult arts festival in Hobart. Her politics is so dangerous and extreme, blinded as she is by seeing everything through the toxic identity politics paradigm. I do worry about her mental health. I only hope her second husband, Tom (whom I have not met), is supporting her and not feeding her this toxicity. His owns Tweets seem fairly extreme left too. The sad thing is that they are spreading these views on to others like a contagion through their social media posts and her journalism. I just hope her outlook improves with time as I sincerely wish her only the very best in life and wish to remember her as she was on those few occasions when she showed kindness and warmth and empathy towards me.
Here are some things I forgot to mention earlier.
Liz Graham had a really bad stress fracture in her back when she was in her teens. Ee all supported her through it and she was such an appreciative, kind and empathetic girl, it was really hurtful and sad when she changed, abandoned sime of her old friends and ended up in a bad way morally. I hope she is in a better place now spiritually.
One thing I didn’t make really clear before was that I feel a certain degree of guilt regarding Philippa Moore. I really wish I had confided my terrible problem to her. She might then have talked to me about her issues and we could have worked through them, avoiding some of the pain she relates in her book. I just didn’t know her well enough and there wasn’t that rapport there. I wish I had pushed through her standoffish, aloof behaviour a bit more and earned her trust. My issue was so personal though I would have found it difficult to confide but for some reason I instinctively trusted Philippa, even though I didn’t know her that well.
I feel so sorry for her now, being sucked into a vortex of ridiculous identity politics, militant cynical feminism, extreme leftism, pagan interests like Dark Mofo and Yoga and selfish living. I wish I still knew her so I could talk to her and – more importantly – listen to her. I just hope her second husband, Tom, can support her and guide her but he seems to be very much wrapped up in feminism and identity politics himself so I hope it is not him who is acting as the bad influence, goading her on down this path. Anyway, I simply wish her all the best in life and wish I could have been a friend to lean on in her dark period. I am probably frustrated too that she never reached out to me because she knew I had some skills and knowledge that could have helped her achieve some of the life aims she later achieved in her book.
For some reason, I still feel certain she would have probably helped me out to the best of her ability if I had confided my problem to her or she would have at least pointed me in a better direction. Like I said, I always instinctively trusted her, even though we didn’t really know each other well or develop a friendship.
That’s all. God bless.
Thanks for this discussion. I am a former Tasmanian so I hoped the book would talk more about people and places I remember as well as its “self-help” focus on Philippa Moore’s personal journey. Unfortunately, it lacks that Tasmanian “atmosphere” in my opinion.
Thanks also for indicating she is Richard Moore’s (of the Cooke & Moore breakfast radio show on 7HO FM) daughter. The book makes more sense when you know that context.
To be honest, I had a really strong negative reaction to the book. It seemed very superficial in places and I felt a revulsion for some sections, especially the use of the f-word and also the sexually explicit discussions. The way she spoke to her first husband in some of their arguments was revolting. I know this book is about her journey from an happy life as an obese, unfulfilled young woman trapped in an unhappy first marriage but the way she goes about depicting things, she is airing too much of her dirty linen in public.
It is interesting that many of you who know her say she is a bully while “Wildflower” had a different view and could see her kind, empathetic side. To be honest, I could see traces of both facets of her personality in her book. Some parts of it seem very hypocritical, too – she craves love and acceptance from others but at the same time she seems to be very judgemental of the people she meets. Reading through her blog and Tweets, I see this same judgmentalism, especially of white males. She is prejudiced and racist while at the same time decrying others for their prejudice and racism.
I can’t remember now whether it was in her book or her blog or a tweet but she also commented on men she encountered at uni who were unattractive because they had nervous tics – at the very same time that she is lamenting people judging her because of her obesity instead of looking at the love-starved person inside! I think it is exactly this kind of hypocrisy from some women that has led to the rise of the “incel” and “forever alone” online communities of angry young men who are sick of being mocked and rejected gor superficial reasons. Her attitude is of the type that is fueling these communities.
Philippa Moore does come across as very self-entitled in the book and on her blog, especially when she laments early on that she had never been overseas. I know plenty of very hard working, honest Aussies who have never had a chance to go overseas in their lives – poor Aussie working-class battlers who lacked the money or opportunities through no fault of their own, yet here she is lamenting her lack of travel when she was in her twenties! Even if her father was a relatively well-off radio host, raising four daughters would take a lot of income I imagine, anyway and even after that many young couples cannot afford to travel. After all, it was Philippa Moore’s choice to marry young.
Also, the way she describes it in the book, as soon as she falls out of the young love/initial infatuation stage, the marriage falls apart. She expects to stay wildly in love forever, yet we all know love alone is not the foundation of a marriage. Admittedly, the way she describes it, she seems to have made more effort than her husband in turning up at marriage counsellor appointments and so forth but really neither side seems to put that much effort in. Really she comes across as a spoilt, utterly selfish brat who wants a “fulfilling” career and life of travel despite knowing her husband’s. different desires. Again, she chose to marry him yet. She fails to support him emotionally while he seeks work in Melbourne and criticises his lack of initiative in their profanity-laced arguments, there for all to read. You do end up feeling somewhat sorry for the husband. He has no voice in the book so you cannot hear his side of the story and his wife is failing to support him though the richer and poorer, through good times and bad. This is apparently the first time Philippa has faced the consequences of long-term youth unemployment that so many Aussies have endured. At times, she is condemning herself with her own words, though this is clearly mot her intention. Perhaps it is a subconscious admission of guilt on her part?
As I said, I had a very strong negative reaction to this book. Honestly, even though Philippa Moore and I are about the same age, at times I felt like I wanted to put her across my knees and give her a good, hard smacking for being such a spoiled, overindulged brat.
If I ever have a son I hope he’ll have the commonsense to avoid such a self-obsessed, selfish woman.
At the same time, though, I recognise that her ego, though large, is very fragile. She does seem to have a kind of persecution complex too, lashing out at school bullies, internet trolls and so on. Why not just ignore them? To go on SBS to complain does seem very extreme. Indeed, the very fact that she felt compelled to do so tells me the trolls have won in her case because she is still obsessing over them.
Furthermore, white males are a target for vitriol in her tweets, just as her ex-husband is in her book. It seems her fragile ego makes her want to lash out histrionically at everyone she perceives as an “enemy”.
With regard to her politically-themed social justice tweets, it is hard to know if she really believes what she is saying or if she is just trying to ingratiate herself with the literati or academic in-crowds, as some have suggested. I thought Donald Trump’s tweets were bizarre until I saw hers! She is the same thing, just at the other end of the political spectrum.
I have no idea if they reflect a psychiatric problem or if she is just trapped in an echo chamber with other extreme left identity politics tweeters and Guardianistas. Her tweets are comparable to some of the more extreme and bizarre Guardian “Comment is Free” opinion pieces I’ve read online though, and equally unhinged from any kind of reality. It seems to me that many of these SJWs egg each other on to more and more extreme positions in their echo chambers. They are fine for talking big around the kitchen table or down at the pub but dangerous extremism whenever they are voiced in parliament.
In fact, I am becoming more and more frightened that loony left-wing extremists like Philippa Moore will produce a massive far right backlash sooner rather than later as people turn around and rail against her favoured minorities such as gays. More and more of the silent white majority that I encounter have had enough of being bullied through political correctness, identity politics and feminism. The pendulum will swing hard and fast. It is coming soon.
This discussion made me curious about Latte Years, so I’ve had a look at the book to make up my own mind.
Having done so, I largely agree with what people are saying here. Philippa Moore is really hard to relate to. Maybe that is because I haven’t been through a divorce myself but more likely it is just that she seems so… spoilt and flighty. Perhaps that facet of her personality, and the eating
disorder she documents comes from the pressure of having a local celebrity for her father.
A lot of the lengthy descriptions of holidays and complaints about trolls in the book seemed really self indulgent, too.
I could understand what people were saying about her mother spoiling her – letting her get married so young is prime evidence of this. Telling the whole world about her arguments with husband no. 1 as her marriage fell apart isn’t… classy at all either. (And, yes, the foul language was disgusting too.)
There is also immoral behaviour (a one night stand, remarriage after divorce, etc). The sexual immorality in the book says a lot about her parents and the way they raised her.
That said, the book was an easy, light read. The chatty style was a bit obtrusive but it had an easygoing style, even when she was describing some bizarre and disturbing moments (such as her claims of being sexual propositioned by an older girl at school and the hippie with the gun and the sock puppet on a bus in San Francisco.) Unfortunately the tone is also overly emotional in places and, yes, she does come across as “histrionic” as other people have said above. She is telling us how she wants us to feel. Show, don’t tell. Because of her use of over-wrought emotional language, parts of the book make it feel, perhaps unfairly, like she is writing a propaganda piece against her ex-husband and her alleged “trolls”. There iscan rlement of vengeance and spite in her writing. She is clearly the type who holds onto grudges. That said, the part about the trolls was sad since they were all purportedly good friends she had made in the Melbourne females’ blogging community who then suddenly turned on her – allegedly for no reason – and proceeded to attack her and her family. It just shows how dangerous it is to try to make friends over the internet.
I did a search and I saw written elsewhere a serious complaint though – Philippa and her husband tried to get revenge on someone they *thought* was trolling them but the person they accused (no name was given) was seriously ill at the time and their father had cancer, had been in ICU on life support and was on chemo. If I undestand things correctly, the person caught out Schoon trying to do something to them and discovered it was because Schoon had thought they were a trollbut decided not to take any action. It shows how risky it is to try to take matters into your own hands without knowing the facts.
Anyway, one thing I thought about Philippa Moore’s early life was that maybe she’d have been better off in a government school. She clearly wasn’t happy in her first all-girls school so it might have been better for her if she hadn’t won the scholarship to the superior school. A working class government school might have made her a bit more… grounded… and given her more… perspective… on her problems which were obviously a very real, very big deal to her and clearly gave her all kinds of psychological hang-ups. Maybe if she had spent more time with kids who had really severe problems she might have realised she was relatively well-off with a supportive family, strong academic ability, financial security through her dad’s radio work and so forth. She strikes me as somebody who is very intelligent but also very emotionally immature and lacking in… good old-fashioned commonsense. A working class government school would have either helped her to really overcome her problems or it would have exacerbated them and left her a nervous wreck if she had encountered full-scale school bullying for the first time.
Reading through her tweets, yep, it is definitely political correctness gone mad. Again a government school might have helped her actually relate to the working class, encounter Aboriginal kids and understand their real world problems and help her to understand why the majority of poorer people vote for right wing conservatives. Instead she is just preaching away to other liberal elites just like herself in her little Twitter echo chamber. She. Just. Doesn’t. Get. It. At. All.
It is interesting that feminists like Philippa Moore all oppose violence against females – unless that female is still in the womb. Philippa Moore, of course, wholeheartedly supports the abortion industry as a “woman’s right to choose”. The double standards are breathtaking. Apparently Philippa is also a member of Mensa, which just goes to show that one can be intelligent without having a single shred of wisdom.
I am also very disturbed these “liberals” all want warmonger Biden to win over Trump. Trump is a crank but Biden has Iraq, Syria, etc. on his grimy hands – so much for liberals –
even Philippa’s beloved Guardian admits that:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/17/joe-biden-role-iraq-war
https://www.wral.com/fact-check-did-biden-support-wars-in-iraq-serbia-syria-and-libya/19257083/?version=amp
https://www.google.com/amp/s/static.theintercept.com/amp/joe-biden-iraq-war-history.html
Do they really think Biden will be better than Trump? So far, the “only” real war mongering from Trump has been the potential for creating a new US civil war, though I have recently read some American comentators who feel that is inevitable, no matter who wins the election. Let us hope that prophecy doesn’t come true. I think the worst case scenario would be some kind of insurrection or civil war and the winner of the presidential election – whoever that may be – trying to unify the nation against an external “enemy” such as China. Let us not forget it was Obama who turned Philippa Moore’s own Australia into an advance US base against China in his “pivot to Asia” and who increased extrajudicial drone killings. The Left is just as discredited as the Right in my eyes.
Also there are the documented incidents of Biden bullying voters when asked hard questions, such as those pertaining to his son’s role in the Ukraine. Philippa hates bullies but she is, of course, wholeheartedly behind Biden.
There is an element of violence in their Tweets, too: Tom Schoon endorsed Antifa, of all groups, in a Tweet and, in one of her Tweets, Philippa praises a WWII female spy who strangled a Nazi with their bare hands, so I guess they think violence is okay if it comes from the Left. 🙁
Furthermore, one of Tom Schoon’s cartoons showed a certain right wing politician decapitated. It was so disturbing I felt tempted to report him to the police, so there is violence in their hearts.
Philippa Moore wants her book to help and aid others but, honestly, the result is the blind leading the blind.
Since this review has been fairly negative about her book, I want to end with the fact that, despite everything I have said, I did come away sort of liking Philippa.
Having read the book and her tweets, although I find Philippa very hard to relate to, I do feel like I know her a bit and I really wish I could befriend her and Liz Graham, because they clearly need caring people in their lives and, more importantly, just an ear to listen to them and empathise with them about their problems and give them some support. I think Philippa seems like someone who needs compassion rather than rebukes. She seems like someone who needs empathy and craves attention from friends she can trust. The book is her attempt to help others who have been through similar problems to herself. She is trying to show them how she remade her life. It just seems a pity that her remade life seems so… materialistic and superficial.
Parts of the book do seem like she is still crying out for help herself though, that she is seeking sympathy and a shoulder to cry on and someone to guide her. As someone above said, she seems to have a very fragile ego, so she needs friends who can help her gain strength. (I have probably already been too judgemental about her in this post.) I just wish I could reach out to her and help her. She probably wouldn’t take kindly to unsolicited advice from a stranger though.
Instead, I will do something even more important and effective: I’d like to pray for Philippa Moore and her family since they do seem lost and need help. I will sincerly pray for them that they find Christ and are converted. I can see empathy in Philippa as User “Wildflower” has pointed out. I can see it in her tweets for Aborigines, racial minorities and the marginalised. It is just that she is going about things in such a naive, gullible way. She is obviously sensitive to the point of neurosis as well about trolls, bullies and her need for love, yet I can also see her bullying side in the tweets, attacking men, criticising all and sundry, ripping into her ex-husband in the book, seeking tevenge on minor slights by trolls and holding on to bitter life experiences like her unhappy school years and her divorce: Dear Sovereign and Loving Heavenly Father, I pray she can let go of these part hurts. I agree with other people that the birthday card was deeply offensive, so I pray her parents and her new husband come to Christ as well. I also hope and pray she can obtain some good friends who are trustworthy confidants who will give her good advice to help her through life’s challenges.
I also pray for her sister, Liz Graham. It is so sad to read Liz Graham was previously a fornicator and had pregnancies outside of wedlock, and mistreated her friend, too. I found her Facebook page and I saw she takes the Lord’s name in vain on some of her posts there, too. It is very sad. 🙁 Hopefully Liz has come to some knowledge of Christ as a Roman Catholic and repents of her past sins. I now pray that Liz builds on her new knowledge of Christ and leaves Rome for a less heretical and corrupt and idolatrous Christian denomination, where she can grow to maturity in faith and come to the understanding that salvation is from faith alone. Hopefully Rome will be a stepping stone to better things for her in a Lutheran or Calvinistic/Presbyterian/Puritan/Biblically-faithful denomination for her spiritual welfare and salvation. Who knows? Maybe God will make Liz instrumental to bring her sister and her parents to faith. Let us pray that is so. I sincerely mean that. I do think Liz Graham and Philippa Moore are somewhat lost and need guidance to find spiritual life and Liz, in particular, seems to be receptive towards the Gospel of our Lird Jesus Christ. I hope and pray they are both saved in the end and have fulfilling, loving Christ-centred lives while they are here on earth. I want nothing but the best for them. I pray Philippa Moore and Liz Graham will feel the presence of Christ in their lives and that He will protect them and guide them and keep them safe, spititually and phydically, and reveal His love to them.
Dear Sovereign Father in Heaven,
I earnestly pray that both of these girls and their sisters, husbands and parents have happy, Christ-filled lives free from the burden of their past mistakes and come to saving faith. Through Christ Your Son, Amen.
To change the subject, some of you mentioned Wales above. Well, to go back to the original topic of this discussion, I saw that Rod Liddle was in trouble in Wales recently:
https://nation.cymru/news/sunday-times-columnist-criticised-for-joking-that-the-welsh-language-causes-covid-19-to-spread-quicker/
I don’t think I am curious enough to read his book as well. Philippa Moore’s tome was enough for me at the moment. I will get to Liddle some time later on.
“I am also very disturbed these “liberals” all want warmonger Biden to win over Trump. Trump is a crank but Biden has Iraq, Syria, etc. on his grimy hands – so much for liberals…
Do they really think Biden will be better than Trump? ”
Exactly! Trump may or may not be insane but I will always be grateful to him for derailing the Project for a New American Century if nothing else. He has [temporarily] halted the expansion of America’s Middle Eastern oil wars as well. If/when Biden is elected next month, it will be back to “murder as usual”, I fear.
That is a lovely prayer for these lost souls, too. May God grant it an answer.
Yes, now that the USA presidentual election is all done & dusted bar the lawsuits, I agree with all these comments.
If I were an Iranian, I’d be very frightened right now, especially since Biden has appointed Cheney as an advisor:
* https://mobile.twitter.com/WahidSakaKhan/status/1325156126560804864
What is really sad about Philippa Moore and her husband Tom Schoon is that they do not even want Trump supporters to be their friends or follow them on social media at all.
* https://mobile.twitter.com/philippa_moore/status/1323589676645543936
Tom even went so far as to draw a cartoon about it:
https://mobile.twitter.com/tomschoon/status/1323594473381638145
That attitude just seems so alien to me. I have friends with various different political beliefs and I do not judge them on them. It seems very shallow to me. How can you build bridges with people of different beliefs if you shut down all dialogue with them? It is so sad to let politics determine your friendships.
I found this other cartoon by Tom worth commenting upon because I find it quite striking in its naivety. I would have drawn the imprisoned US as a dragon rather than as an innocent butterfly:
* https://mobile.twitter.com/tomschoon/status/1319746681127120897
It seems like Philippa & Tom are keen to import US-style cultural wars here in Australia, which is the very last thing we need.
Heh – I had to shake my head at this. Philippa is offended by some poor old man’s obituary because his nickname dated from the days before political correctness. Not even the dead can find peace and escape the thought policein our brave new world:
https://mobile.twitter.com/philippa_moore/status/1344784302198804480
🙁
That said, it touches my heart how much sympathy and love you are showing Philippa on this forum by praying for her and showing so much genuine concern. There is so much warmth and so little mocking here. Christ be woth you – and her.
I too will pray for Philippa and her sister Liz.
@Meghan Sparkles
“Philippa is offended by some poor old man’s obituary because his nickname dated from the days before political correctness. Not even the dead can find peace and escape the thought policein our brave new world:
https://mobile.twitter.com/philippa_moore/status/1344784302198804480 ”
So this poor old man died at *Christmas time* and Philippa Moore and her ilk think the newspaper should censor the suffering, grieving family’s obituary because it offends their sensibilities… 🙁 That tells me all I need to know about Generation Snowflake – no real compassion for anyone, just concern about virtue signalling and their own precious feelings. 🙁 Absolutely disgusting.
It is ironic, too, that Philippa Moore is so offended by a word when her own book, The Latte Years, and her blog posts frequently contain f-words and blasphemy that would offend vast swathes of the public. A real case of the pot calling the kettle black. I feel sorry for her if she does have problems as suggested below but I just can’t stand her sheer hypocrisy.
Her sister may have run off the rails and fornicated, etc but I sort of feel sorry for her to some extent if she has a sister like this who is sucha spoilt brat and so devoid of genuine compassion that she whinges about the obituary of an elderly man who died at Christmas time because a single word offended her PC sensibilities. Poor Liz.
That said, I should add I will join you though in praying for Philippa and Liz. They need prayers, love and support.
Further to my last post, this latest Tweet by Pastor says it all:
“David Robertson @theweeflea
One of the great dangers of the Trump demo farce is that the reaction to it will be so hysterical that it will be used to justify curtailment of basic civic liberties. RE hysteria-just heard a US political commentator on ABC say that this was a worse breach of security than 9/11!”
Plus there is the hypocrisy of Tweets by left-wingers espousing violence against Trump remaining up. wonder if these peolle wil protest if/when Biden starts the next Middle Eastern war, or will they give him a free pass, just like they did Obama, Iy
Anyway, I don’t know if Philippa will appreciate your prayers but hopefully her heart will soften, especially as she gains the wisdom of age and maturity. I stronglsuspect Liz Graham would really appreciate your heartfelt concern and love for her, though. I hope she comes to know and trust Christ, if she hn’t done so already. She needs a lot of reassurance and love in her life. Please continue in your prayers for Philippa and Liz.
Yes, this says it all about Trump and those who condemn him, I fear:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-01-10/us-toxic-politics-started-long-before-donald-trump-arrived/13042856
What short memories people have to forget how bad George W. Bush and Bill Clinton were. As awful as Trump is, he pales into insignificance compared to them. He is just the logical destination at the rnd of the road they paved.
To change the topic, it is lovely you are all praying for Philippa and Liz Graham.
“Furthermore, one of Tom Schoon’s cartoons showed a certain right wing politician decapitated. It was so disturbing I felt tempted to report him to the police, so there is violence in their hearts.”
Yep that cartoon is disgusting. If Trump is blocked for inciting political violence, Schoon should be too. If the police ever saw that cartoon he would go down.
Liz Graham was no saint when I knew her. Maybe she has changed. Either way it is really great you guys are praying for her. I think it is terrific of you. I hope Liz Graham gives her life to Christ and is saved, I really do.
I’ve just looked at his Twitter feed. Yes, that cartoon is disgusting. Overall, he seems like just a typical arrogant liberal/’woke’ North Londoner though. Okay, maybe a bit more woke than most.
My friend and I will pray for him and Philippa and Liz Graham too.
I just looked at his blog too – immature, foul-mouthed waffle –
– https://tomschoon.wordpress.com/2011/02/21/who-the-hell-is-tom-schoon/
I definitely think his decapitation/Jabba the Hutt cartoon is illegal. Then again, Charlie Hebdo ran this similar image and got away with it –
– https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/06/08/charlie-hebdo-runs-image-decapitated-theresa-may-front-page/
🙁
If anything, I feel sad about these lost souls and their spiritually bankrupt lives. Like I said, I’ll pray for him and Philippa and poor Liz Graham.
I’ve just been looking at his cartoons. Aside from the decapitated politician, he seems to focus on very juvenile, scatalogical humour.
See these items for example.
* https://www.instagram.com/p/CIRP294j_cC/
* https://www.instagram.com/p/CHYkiv4Dr_t/
* https://www.instagram.com/p/CDZ3tNwD7lB/
He and his wife do both seem rather immature for their ages. They are both nearly 40 from what I gather yet he is drawing this kind of childish cartoon and she is making preposterous posts on her blog and Twitter on social justice and politics. I’ve just had a look at Liz Graham’s Facebook too. Hard to say if she is a Christian or not nothing there to say either way but, yeah, some profanity is present.
I will definitely pray for Tom and Philippa and Liz Graham too. God bless.
Ta Hills Hoist. yes, I agree, the cartoons and blog posts (from both of them) show a real poverty of thought and immaturity, doesn’t it? I find it really sad, more than anything else, to be honest. 🙁
I’ve looked at Liz Graham’s website. The profanity is very disappointing but she seems like a likable person. I hope Tom and Philippa get there some day too. I feel lile I know them a bit now having read all their posts, tweets and Philippa’s journalistic articles so I want the best for them.
It is good everyone here is praying for these people. This story of these lost sheep / wokesters seems to have either really touched people or really annoyed them, given the number of responses! So many prayers for them, from people who know them and people like me eho don’t is really touching too. What an incredible outpouring of love and empathy and concern for these souls!
I just hope Christ makes Himself known to Philippa, Tom and Liz Graham and really touches their lives and blesses them because they seem to be wading in spiritual poverty right now and looking for answers in all the wrong places judging from their blogs and tweets and fb posts and it IS upsetting to see. Hence I join the other people on here praying for the spiritual welfare and salvation of Pand T and Liz Graham. May they enter into a personal relationship with Jesus and come to really know Him. May God bless them throughout their lives and save them all. In the name of Christ, Amen.
I agree the catoons are very immature and in poor taste. They look like something a 14 year old would do, not a grown man but please remember he has, by his own admission, been suffering from a mild mental illness (an anxiety disorder) so that might have something to do with it so one should go easy on him.
G’day,
I just finished reading The Latte Years. Thanks for this discussion about the book. I read it because I hoped it might give me some advice for dealing with a personal issue. It did touch on the issue but didn’t go into enough depth to help me adequately, unfortunately. The authoress, Philippa Moore, does come across quite personable at times in the book but, at other moments, she does come across as a bit of a spoilt brat, so I can see where other reviewers are coming from.
I have just read through her Twitter feed, though, as others have looked at. My goodness, there are some crazy, extremist politically correct views in there. It is loony even by loony leftist standards. She is a bit of a nutter. 🙁
None of this came across to me in the book, perhaps because it doesn’t touch on politics at all. Some of the things Philippa Moore is saying on Twitter are really shocking though – it shows how much the left has declined these days. For a supposedly intelligent person she doesn’t seem to have much in the way of original thought on there: she is just regurgitating groupthink and taking it to more extreme levels.
What really annoys me though is when these identity politics types whinge about the historical “privilege” of white males. Which white males exactly? The Scottish, Welsh or Irish, exploited by the English for so long? The Czechs or the Poles, oppressed by the Nazis and then by the Communists? The Covenanters, Waldensians, Albigensians, Huguenots, Armenians, Exulanten and Jews of Europe, all of whom faced horrific persecution and genocide? The Prussian peasants, under the rule of the Junkers? The Russian serfs, oppressed by the Stars and then by the Bolsheviks? The cockneys, living in some of the worst slum conditions on earth in the East End of London up until after the Second World War. That doesn’t leave many White males who were truly “privileged”. I also agree that the comment about feminists having no regard for exterminating unborn baby girls: spot on!
It seems like Philippa Moore is projecting her own feelings of guilt onto all whites: after all, she really is privileged if her father is a celebrity Radio guy, she attended a private school and is now doing a ph. D. She seem to also be projecting her bad experiences with her first husband onto all men. If her mother is as overbearing as you all say and “wore the pants in her family” when Philippa was growing up, that would explain a lot too.
I guess it does show she at least has compassion for the poor and minorities, even though she is going about it in a very misguided way. She is obviously very idealistic too; it is just that her ideals of a politically correct world are repugnant and are completely out of touch with reality and, especially with the views of the working class and outer suburbanites whom she ( arrogantly) blames for voting against their own best interests in re-electing the Morrison Government.
I also found one phrase in the book very telling: it was where she talks about how she and all of her sisters were constantly craving attention. Perhaps they felt a little neglected by their parents or it might explain why she is so publicity-hungry now as an adult. All the other insecurities she documents in the book obviously wouldn’t have helped her either. As has been noted, I am uncomfortable with the smutty sex in the books and the recreations of dialogue from arguments with her ex-husband. She bears her soul a little too much here, in my humble opinion. For someone with her education level and skills, I don’t think the book is particularly well written either, though that is subjective. It just seems a bit too informal and artless. It is an easy, quick read though with its chatty style and asides to the audience.
At the end of the book, she claims to have found herself but, honestly, from reading her tweets, she still strikes me as very much being a “little girl lost”.
As others have said though, despite all of this, she comes across as a very likeable person. Some of you have mentioned reaching out to her and I can understand this impulse because I feel empathy for her too. You feel like you know her a bit from reading the book. I would be very cautious about actually doing this though for a number of reasons:
1. She is obviously Super sensitive (which can be a strength in some people). The way she clings to the fact she was trolled years ago on her blog and had such a fixation on a school bullying g incident that she thought she needed hypnotherapy to block the memory(!) shows how sensitive she is. She could easily take things the wrong way or twist them. I’d hate to be falsely accused of being a troll or bully by her. (For what it is worth, I was bullied far, far worse than her at school over a very prolonged period but I have mostly got over it and moved on in life).
2. Despite the claims in her book that she has overcome her problems, her tweets are telling that she still has issues. They are so extreme.
3. Also as others have noted, she and her husband seem to have a pathological hatred of conservative politics, to the extent he supports Antifa and drew a repugnant cartoon along with all of her well-discussed views above. Some of that stuff on their Twitter feeds is definitely borederline illegal/hatespeech. Weird she is still so much in lockstep with the left after Hawke-Keating’s bungling cost her family their home and ran with UK Tory deregulation and privatisation policies(!)
At any rate, it is sad because I do feel a kind of affection for Philippa Moore having read the book and got to “know her” a bit from learning of her life but I think her emotional/psychological instability and… immaturity, I guess… would make me fearful of reaching out to her in any way over the internet to help her in case she mistakenly or twistedly took it as “trolling” or “bullying” and made a false accusation. I think she is a potentially dangerous person who could easily misconstrue attempts to help her. She is also liable to take criticism too personally and lash out at people, given the pathological hatred of her ex-husband, bullies, trolls and critics on display in her writings and the allegations she has bullied others herself in the posts above. Best to leave it to her own family to look after her and hopefully guide her in a good direction. I am not on social media myself anyway, so I can’t contact her. In my humble opinion though she does need some psychological help or counseling though, which is so sad. I can see there is an empathetic, idealistic kind-hearted girl in her but one who is very sensitive and damaged and prone to lashing out at what she perceives to be injustices in a world that doesn’t live up to her expectations and constantly wounds her sensitive soul. My heart earnestly goes out to her while at the same time I utterly repudiate her extremist, loony left views. I just wish her well and hope she finds healing and a good path in life. You can tell there is a good person inside her who just can’t cope. All my love to her. She is obviously an altruistic person in that she has written the book about her problems in an attempt to help others going through similar experiences. Perhaps she needs to be more outward looking and less insular and do some charity work – that might help her understand the needs of minorities like Aborigines and the poor better and help her gain more perspective on her own issues. (This isn’t to belittle her problems either – they were obviously very painful to her and suffering is suffering,, no matter what).
At any rate, Philippa Moore is clearly a very damaged person. Although her views are appalling and quite frightening and dangerous, I want to reiterate I felt a lot of empathy for her too and some connection. Philippa is a loveable human being and I wish I could reach out with my heart to her or even put my arms around her. She is a vulnerable idealistic dreamer and clearly needs a lot of love and support in her life. I wish her all the best and it has been a sad journey to read of all her problems. I send her my deepest love.
As for the original subject of this post, Rod Liddle, I really don’t know him. He definitely isn’t a household name here in Australia. His book definitely sounds like it would appeal to me though, so I will check it out! Take care and cheers. Really glad I found this site.
I read TLY recently, too. I agree with the other commenters that it is average-ish at best. I neither encourage nor do I discourage people from reading the book.
Having said that, I have just been looking through Philippa’s tweets and she is completely craaaaaaaaaazzzzzzzzzzzy!!! Seriously, she has the most “woke” outlook I have ever come across. Again, as others have noted, Philippa doesn’t really engage with politics in TLY, so you don’t realise from that book just how extreme her views are.
I have recently been reading the Noble Liar book (about the BBC) and Philippa reminds me of the elitists in that book who won’t listen to the opinions of others – stuck in an echo chamber for too long and lacking the humility to listen to anyone less learned than themselves. If nothing else, these two tweets prove what a huge opinion of herself Philippa has:
https://mobile.twitter.com/philippa_moore/status/1309994781678792704
https://mobile.twitter.com/philippa_moore/status/1275200160880967680
Some of her latest re-tweets are attacking Rowling. She has to jump on the bandwahon of course:
https://mobile.twitter.com/AncientLitDude/status/1307798800011059202
and supporting late term abortions (this one originated with the Deputy Chair of the ABC, no less):
https://mobile.twitter.com/kirstinferguson/status/1314382867259039745
Again, referring to the Noble Liar, many feminists today cannot conceive that there is a whole branch of feminism opposed to abortions. After all, feminists’ stance towards life has always been dubious- it was the feminists like the Pankhursts who started the white feather campaign to shame men into fighting in WW1.
Philippa is also offering tweets in tribute to the late feminists Susan Ryan and Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Again, on pro-life issues, RBG did much to push abortion rights forward in the US and allow women into have active roles in the military.
Anyway, I thought Dr Kirsten Birkett’s book, Essence of Feminism, had just about killed off feminism in Australia, after she exposed just how intellectually bankrupt the whole movement was. Philippa seems to be well behind the times. I would love to see someone the facial expressions of someone as woke as Philippa were she to read that book, especially as it was written by a female who started out with the intention of writing a defence of feminism! I doubt Philippa could even try to write a convincing rebuttal to Birkett’s book.
In a much older Tweet, evidently before Ellen fell from grace, Philippa attacks a “homophobic” pastor for expressing mainstream Christian views in a critique of the television star:
https://mobile.twitter.com/philippa_moore/status/555502667930554368
What I probably find most concerning though is that Philippa is basically a mouthpiece for elitist global culture, merely echoing the more extreme impulses of liberal ruling culture (as expressed, again, in the Noble Liar book). She clearly has influence in a number of spheres: as a prize-winning blogger, as a social media influencer, as a freelance journalist, and in literati and academic circles, the latter two of which having long been dominated by the Left. Her father’s influence in media circles through his radio career undoubtedly helps her too. Elitists like Philippa claim they want to help the poor and various “marginalised”/”oppressed” special interest groups but, in reality, they seek to control them by using the censoriousness political correctness to limit what can be said and thought, since what the working class poor really think is often diametrically opposed to the liberal keftist culture of the progressive elitist class. Philippa and her ilk do virtue-dignalling by speaking up on behalf of the poor but they do not want the poor to speak for themselves because they would hate what they would hear if they really stopped to listen. They would rather keep the working class locked up in a gilded cage. This is a far cry from the Old Labor of, say, George Lansbury in Britain, or John Curtin or Joseph Lyons in Australia, who you sense really did genuinely want to better the lot of the poor and actually listen to them. The Philippa Moores of this world fear and disdain the culture of the Australian outer suburbanites and make no effort to listen to them.
Likewise, in his latest Tweet, Philippa’s husband, Tom Schoon, rejects democracy because the Brexit vote didn’t go his way:
https://mobile.twitter.com/tomschoon/status/1315948627462770688
The working class majority is no longer to be trusted with a voice, in his view! This is the same person who endorses Antifa.
Just to end this very serious post on a lighter note, here is a little bit of weirdness. According to this book I found, Tom Schoon was !allegedly once caught up in ghostly events at a supposedly-“haunted” theatre in Wycombe!
https://books.google.com.au/books?id=sOY6AwAAQBAJ&pg=PT70&dq=tom+schoon+wycombe&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjPvaCxgKfsAhX78HMBHTc_DAkQ6AEwAHoECAIQAg#v=onepage&q=tom%20schoon%20wycombe&f=false
Very strange people indeed.
All of these tweets are terrifying. I hope these people are just outliers. If not, and the liberal elite really are becoming this authoritarian, society is in huge danger. TYhe talk of censorship, guilt until innocence is proven and rejection of democracy show just how totalitarian the mindset of some of these leftists has become. Truly frightening.
On a happier note, I just had a look at the story of that supposedly-“haunted” theatre. Schoon and his friend must have been smoking something very funny that night!
“Elitists like Philippa claim they want to help the poor and various “marginalised”/”oppressed” special interest groups but, in reality, they seek to control them by using the censoriousness political correctness to limit what can be said and thought, since what the working class poor really think is often diametrically opposed to the liberal keftist culture of the progressive elitist class. Philippa and her ilk do virtue-dignalling by speaking up on behalf of the poor but they do not want the poor to speak for themselves because they would hate what they would hear if they really stopped to listen. They would rather keep the working class locked up in a gilded cage.”
Yes! I was just reading this:
“People wanted a hand-up, not handouts. Working-class people are not beggars. They have an innate sense of what is fair and what is earned.
The modern left needs to change its goals. It needs to speak to the people it professes to serve and deliver what they say they need. Instead, the left is entrenched in the new woke agenda that is alien to the working class. Orwell wrote that the working class likes the idea of socialism, but cannot stand socialists. This still rings true today. The working class today still needs help in the form of a hand-up to level the playing field. Some of this help will look the same as 100 years ago, and some will look different to fit the needs of our world today.
A popular left today would stand for improving employment rights for people in the gig economy, and improving education for children, including offering a greater choice of schools. There should be more of a focus on technical education and less on university. Adults should be given support to change careers to better-paid jobs with more security. Low-skilled immigration also needs to be reduced to stop pressure on wages. And we need more emphasis on personal responsibility and citizenship.
My advice to the left would be to spend less time trying to buy people’s votes and more time talking about what real working-class people care about and need.”
Sorry, I forgot to give the attribution. That quote came from here:
https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/01/20/the-tragedy-of-the-left/
I’ve come here after reading Philippa Moore’s book too. I think my reaction is even more negative than yours. I really didn’t liked it. I thought it was VERY vulgar and crass. I had a really negstive reaction to all the bad language, sex and the way she aired her dirty linen.
Reading the posts above is a real eyeopener into Philippa as a person.
In the same tradition as the rest of you, I’ve just been reading through her recent Tweets. Philippa seems to think lesbian marriage is “joyous” and “gorgeous”:
* https://mobile.twitter.com/philippa_moore/status/1323877945186816000
This is even though she felt so disturbed after allegedly being sexually propositioned by an older girl at her school that she claims she needed hypnosis years later to overcome it.
I can understand what you are all saying about her mother too. Philippa says here that her mother loved the book:
* https://mobile.twitter.com/philippa_moore/status/676534737146638340
If a child of mine wrote a book boasting about one night stands and other secual activity, told the world about personal matters about her divorce and filled the text with f-words I would be so angry and embarrassed and ashamed and I would give her such a piece of my mind. I can see why you all think she is a spoilt brat if her mother endorses such shocking behaviour and even seems proud of it!!! It shows how atheists truly live in a different world rrom us Christians.
As for Philippa’s politics as expressed in her tweets, two quotes come to mind:
“Political correctness is fascism pretending to be manners.” — George Carlin
“The sin of nearly all left wingers from 1933 onwards is that they have wanted to be anti-Fascist without being anti-totalitarian.” –- George Orwell
I think that really sums up my views. I had a low opinion of Philippa from reading her book and now I am genuinely sad to say I have an ecen lower one. Like the rest of you, I will pray for her.
G’day guys. I know Richard Moore well + I am sure that in his own way he’d really appreciate you praying for his daughters.
Richard Moore is basically a decent guy overall. I am disappointed in him for that tasteless birthday card, though. There is no excuse for something as offensive + blasphemous as that even if it was just meant to be a private family joke. 🙁
It is a pity that Richard doesn’t use his media influence to evangelize. In the old days, they’d occassionally have Monsignor Philip Green from the Tasmanian Catholic Diocese come on the 7HO on Sunday nights but not any more. Someone like Richard Condie or Richard Humphrey from the Anglicans or David Jones from the Tassie Presbyterians would be ideally suited. Sadly there are so few Christians in the media industry.
Regarding Richard’s kids, I know Philippa has caused him a lot of worry over the years from her bulimia + other struggles and eccentricities when she was young to the hardline, nutty SJW politics she spruiks now. Richard’s an old Laborite himself but Philippa’s identity politics is too much even for him. Of course she has some media influence now through her blog, tweets, books + articles. I suspect a bit of it might be about Philippa trying to come out from her dad’s shadow. It must be challenging to grow up with a dad who is a local identity and a mother who is, as others here have testified, very overbearing and aggressive one moment and smothers her kids with love + mollycoddles them the next. Like Philippa says in her book, her mum + dad tried to rule her by fear + that probably wasn’t the best way to handle someone like her + might explain why she’s soon loony left now. Being spoilt and overindulged one minute + fearful of mum’s tantrums and rants the next, it is no wonder she turned out the way she has.
I personally had some run-ins with old Sylvia down the years but then again so have most people. I don’t think there is anyone who hasn’t felt her wrath at some stage or another. To be honest she treated me like dirt once but she was like that with most people so I definitely wasn’t the only one to cop it from her. I don’t think she had much self-awareness of how bad she was but she sure did alienate people.
Sylvia wasn’t a Christian as far as I know. It just seems weird thinking that one day a notorious local fixture like her won’t be around any more + won’t be there to annoy us in the afterlife unless she repents + gives her life to Jesus. It is hard to comprehend what the loss of local identities like that, even notorious ones, would be like for a closeknit little community like we have in Hobart.
Philippa is a bit of an enigma beyond her personal problems and politics. I wanted to be her friend but I was a bit wary of being too close to the kids because of the way the mum was + also Phil’s eccentricities made me a bit wary because I was suspicious, perhaps unfairly, that maybe she was one of those kinds of people who would suddenly turn against their friends.
In general, my experience tallies with those of other people above – sometimes Philippa was kind and full of empathy + sometimes she was cold + distant + would snub people. I really understand “Wildflower” above who wanted to be her friend + help her. Phil is very intelligent but at the same time naive + her trumpeting for political causes she doesn’t fully understand doesn’t help her case at all. I can really understand + empathize with Wildflower’s experiences.
Richard actually had another wife before Sylvia. He + his first wife had a child together. Unfortunately it had spina bifida + learning difficulties + the pressures of raising this child -as is so often the way – very sadly led to the divorce Richard + his first wife. Tragically, the daughter died in the early 2000s in her twenties. One thing I find really strange is that Philippa never acknowledges her half-sister at all in ‘The Latte Years’ or in any of her blog posts. In one blog entry, Philippa even says she doesn’t know how she’d cope if any of her sisters died but there is no acknowledgement at all that she really had lost her half-sister. Her attitude seems so strange about that. I can’t figure it out at all.
Philippa is quick to jump on all these leftist bandwagon causes from gay + trans rights to Aboriginal welfare + Stolen Generation malarkey but won’t even publicly acknowledge her disabled half-sister or at least that is the way it seems. I hope I’m doing her an injustice here.
The other sister you mention here, Liz (now Liz Graham, married to a man named Gene Graham), is a sad case too. She was very extroverted like Phil – perhaps even more so – but desperate for attention + love. If Phil was in her dad’s shadow, Liz was in Phil’s. She was not as academically gifted so turned her attention to support but was so mollycoddled + overindulged by her mum she never developed any self-discipline at all. She was a real piker. 🙁
Unfortunately Liz went completely off the rails later on + ended up in a really bad way. It was so sad to see. I think part of it was her rebelling against her mother + part of it her desire for acceptance + love + desperate desire to have kids of her own as soon as possible.
Again, I can really relate to Wildflower’s post here. Liz eventually drove her friends away + hurt them incredibly in the process. It was so sad to see. She became a fairweather friend even to the person who loved + cherished her the most + ended up turning on him + driving him away. It is a pity because a marriage to a stable, loving, supportive friend, which he had been, would have done her the world of good. Instead she completely broke his heart.
I don’t think she has ever even spoken to him again + he went downhill mentally as a result or so I’ve heard. Anyway she ended up with Gene Graham instead + I don’t think the other young guy ever married after being so badly treated by his “friend” Lizzie. I don’t think she’s ever reached out to him or apologised. Young girls don’t seem to realise how much hurt they can cause young men that lingers for decades afterwards. It is something she will have to resolve one day. I don’t know, maybe she wasn’t even aware how much he loved her when she snubbed him + drove him away despite all the little kindnesses he showed her despite her mother’s meddling. Sometimes young girls are strangely oblivious to such things.
I think a lot of it was her mother’s toxic influence again. It was so sad to see this sweet little kid self-destruct so badly + hurt + alienate so many people who had tried to help her + treat them so rudely. I know there are some friends she still won’t even talk to even today, so much animosity did she build up back then. 🙁
At least she never went in for loony left wing politics like Philippa + I definitely wouldn’t call Liz Graham an SJW. In fact, she seems to me to be largely apolitical.
As for the rumour above that Liz Graham has become a Christian since working as a kindergarten/prep teacher at some Romanist schools, I realky don’t know. I fervently hope she will be saved but judging by the amount of blasphemy in some of her FB posts, I don’t think it seems to be the case that she has converted yet, sadly. I think she is a good person at heart but has had a messed up childhood and was a prodigal daughter for a while. She desperately needs Christ in her life so please pray for her. She is still a fairly vulnerable person desperate to be loved beneath her extroverted exterior imho.
Anyway, with all these dramas + troubled lives and forays into extreme politics, some of us like to think, in lighthearted moments, that Richard Moore’s daughters are Tasmania’s answer to the Mitford sisters. 😉
On a serious note, thank you again for praying for them + discussing your fears + concerns for these girls. I only hope with time + maturity they may grow to know Christ + look back on the follies of their early days with repentance + have far happier futures. I wish them only the best + an abundance of love + happiness in this life + salvation for the next. The same goes for the mother, Sylvia, too, though, imho, she is the source of many of their problems. Anyway that’s all I know about the family. Please keep your prayers up for them + may God work miracles + make himself known in their lives.
A very merry Christmas to all readers of this site.
“It is a pity that Richard doesn’t use his media influence to evangelize. In the old days, they’d occassionally have Monsignor Philip Green from the Tasmanian Catholic Diocese come on the 7HO on Sunday nights but not any more. Someone like Richard Condie or Richard Humphrey from the Anglicans or David Jones from the Tassie Presbyterians would be ideally suited. Sadly there are so few Christians in the media industry.”
When I lived down in Tassie, I remember Bob Curé was a Christian but he died, didn’t he? It is a pity there aren’t more Christians in radio like him. 🙁
They made the worst possible choice in Monsignor Green, since he was later jailed as a paedophile. 🙁 We can’t blame them for that though since those people disguise themselves so well. 🙁
Thanks for your insights into the radio industry in Tasmania.
Yes, I am continuing to pray for Philippa and Liz Graham. God bless.
I have to admit I was questioning why you were all fussing over this writer, Philippa Moore, so much, then I just took a look at her blog. My goodness, this has to be the biggest load of rubbish I have ever read:
http://www.philippamoore.net/blog/2018/3/12/belong-to-nobody-but-yourself?rq=feminism
a.) Artists (as she apparently considers herself to be) need to be selfish?! Good grief. Tell that to say, Elizabeth Gaskell, who was a fine writer, and gave so much of herself to the poor or to John Bunyan or any of the Gospel writers for that matter.
b.) She wants to belong to no one but herself so she won’t taken on her husband’s surname? What happened to the idea of wives submitting to their husbands? Typical offensive feminist twaddle.
I don’t know, there is something about her ideas that seems very “off”, even more so than with most typical feminist bloggers. I can’t quite put my finger on what it is though – maybe a superficiality or emptiness in her thought or her complete rejection of Christian ideas in favour of new age stuff like yoga and mindfulness meditation? Maybe it is because it is all based in such an antichristian ideology/worldview that is so alien to “those of us who are in this world but bot of it”? I don’t know but something doesn’t quite add up with her and it makes me uneasy. Yes, we should pray for her and hope she finds Christ and invites Him into her life, I agree. Alternatively, maybe she is just gullible if she swallows feminist ideology and Stolen Generations hogwash/indigenous welfare industry. Sometimes the smartest people can be the ones most lacking in commonsense, or as that old Aussie saying goes, “b. baffles brains”.
As for Liz’s unrequited love, it must havebeen heartbreakingly sad for him to have been treated like that by her but perhaps he had a lucky escape from that family. Liz seems like a nice person who was desperate to be loved but lost her way but if Philippa and her mother Sylvia are like this perhaps he had a lucky escape. If he was a Christian, the Bible is fairly clear you should only be yoked to another Christian anyway and it sounds like Liz is still on the path to conversion, even now many(?) years later. Anyway, I will certainly pray for Liz and her father and mother, too.
Things like that Philippa Moore blog post really get to me though. I will probably lie awake tonight worrying that there are people in the world who think like this, even though I know there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. I just hope she doesn’t go about using her platform to brainwash our kids. 🙁
Apologies for all my typos and grammatical errors last night. I shouldn’t type when I’m tired. I’ve had a bit more of a read through that blog and I think I “get” Philippa a bit more now: she is a person with absolutely zero tolerance for personal criticism and is constantly rationalising it. For example:
“When people told me I was ‘loud’, that sent me the message that I needed to shut up. That I was too much. That what I had to say wasn’t important, no one was interested. That making too much noise – taking up too much space – was not a good thing and I would be more acceptable, and more likeable, if I were quieter. Funnily enough, I don’t recall the boys I knew being told they were too loud (but that’s another story).”
(I’m sure the boys were but anyway…)
“But this time, I feel less afraid of the smackdown, because it’s probably about time I accepted that I will always be too much for some people. Choosing to live my life with the volume dial turned right up will likely trigger someone else’s insecurities at some point, but I’m finally in a place where I know that isn’t my problem. ”
So she is projecting it outwards now “as someone else’s insecurities” because she doesn’t like personal criticism…
“Loud means using my voice, however I want to use it. I owe that not only to myself, but to the women who came before me and didn’t have a voice. And to all the women in the world who still don’t have one. ”
Finally, she turns it into a feminist political manifesto! It is very eccentric but I can see a kind of logic behind it as a defence mechanism. She really is kidding herself if she isn’t still insecure though.
http://www.philippamoore.net/blog/2017/9/26/reclaiming-loud?rq=loud
In this one, she gets “triggered” because a waiter or waitress makes an innocent, cliched remark when asking if she’d ljke a dessert. To quote:
“The server asked us breezily, “any of the sweets? Or are you going to behave today?”
Those words rang in my ears all day.
Not because I was angry. Or confused. Or sad. Maybe I was all those things. But I think I was more curious than anything. Why is that an acceptable thing to say? My friend didn’t even seem to notice the question. We just said no and continued our conversation. But if I had ordered a cake, would that have meant I was MIS-behaving?
It got me thinking about the belief system – that is so ingrained in our (white Western privileged) culture – that assigns moral value to food and food behaviour. Where some foods are “good” and others are “bad”. Where if you make a healthy choice you’re “being good”. Where if you’re slim it is assumed you have self control and if you’re overweight, you do not.
I have spent the past decade actively trying to free myself from that system.
And in the process, I have realised how much our (white Western privileged) society rewards people for conforming to the idea that you have to be slim to be successful and happy (I was one of them!) and shames and punishes those who don’t.”
However, here is they key part:
“The confidence that came with the achievement was so incredibly flimsy, still so heavily reliant on external validation. All it would take was one card to be pulled out for the whole house to come falling down, which is exactly what happened.”
So, yes, she is an extremely insecure person and she is trying to move away from that but the way she is doing it is just so u usual. Once you look past all of the feminism codswallop and politicall correct cliches that litter her posts like references to “white Western privileged” you can see what she is (badly) trying to say.
http://www.philippamoore.net/blog/2019/10/31/are-you-going-to-behave-today
Yhere seems to e a lot of anger in her too, even at trivial things from being triggered as per the above discussions of “being good” regarding dessert or being told off for being too loud, to her talk about waking early here in this article on occultic Buddhist meditation:
http://www.philippamoore.net/blog/2017/5/8/vlpmjjkeo634wiy7doytdnq8wa4ewq
She also seems intent on invalidating the opinions of people who don’t agree with her feminist views:
“All the uproar from critics and trolls spewing forth that this film has “ruined” their childhoods and “women aren’t funny” rings truly hollow if you actually bother to see the film.”
Of course, if people invalidate her views, she sees it as a personal attack.
http://www.philippamoore.net/blog/2016/7/22/i-aint-afraid-of-no-ghost?rq=ghostbusters
Overall, I profoundly disagree with her on most of the topics I’ve rrad about since I started perusing her blog but I at least understand her niw and there is a logic to her eccentricity. The question and challenge is how do we evangelise to someone whose outlook and worldview is so profoundly duffere t to our own and si far outside the msinstream, even in feminist circles, that she is likely to be triggered by something as inocuous as being told she is being too loud or if she is going to be good or have dessert today? Such a vulnerable insecure person, who is in denial about her insecurity and deflects it outwards by projecting it on to others or into poliyical statements, profoundly needs Christ in her life and a lot of live and reassurance but how do we reach someone like her? I will pray about it and for wellbeing that she may know Christ loves her. She only needs to be valid in His eyes.
One more point:
She does raise an interesting issue: she was criticised when being young for “being too loud” (presumably because she is disrupting classor interrupting other people a lot) but she sees it as a suppression of her natural personslity and she has obviously harboured grudges or at least mulled over things like this a lot over the years.Between things like this and an overbearing, dimineering, mollycoddling mother, uou can sort of see why she has turned into an SJW. It does all make a kind of sense now as I said above. She feels suppressed and thinks all women are suppressed but she is blaming white male patriachial society for it when her voice has really been inhibited by her own hang-ups and total lack of self esteem. I’d so like to reach out to her but I wouldn’t know whar to say in case I “triggered” her. As I said above, I will pray over this.
Just to expand further on my points, I guess she has inherited the gift of the gab from her radio announcer father. I am a very, very quiet introverted person, so I had the opposite problem from her at school: teachers were often telling me I needed to speak up more. I don’t dwell on it decades later though! I can sort of understand her point though – she is a naturally loud and extroverted character and will never really be quiet just as there is no way I could ever become a talkative, extrovert. However, we also need discipline in life. If she was talking over people, chatting too much in class or not letting other students or the teacher get a word in we obviously need guidelines and boundaries to make our community function and tell her when abd where tallking are appropriate! She seems to have taken it with a grudge and felt she has repressed her own personality for decades by trying to be quiet. Furthermore, she is now trying to use that as a symbol for speaking out for all “silenced” and repressed women, which is just frankly ridiculous. A radio announcer’s bourgeois daughter attending a private school and told to be quiet is hardly a persecuted, margi alised figure, despite what she may think. As I said above, I can sort of understand why she is projecting her sensitivities and vulnerabilities outwards though as a form of self-protection and identifying with the marginalised and wishkng to take political action. It is all about protecting her extremely fragile self-esteem as far as I can tell.
I can see too if she has been overindulged and spoilt by her overprotective, domineering mother, that would leave her with a fragile sense of selfworth top. Perfect way to raise a snowflake. No wonder she married her first husband very young if she was seeking selfworth and had a desperate need to be loved. Putting all kinds of inappropriate stuff in the public domain like her sex life details and information about her divorce were probably also about seeking self-validation by hoping the public would be on her side. The attacks by trolls, although probably minor, would have also hurt deeply someone with so little self-worth. Her success as a writer and blogger hasn’t helped her self-esteem and her breakup from her first husband would have been crushing.
Now though she is projecting her vulnerability outward onto white male society, even though it is primarily the mother’s fault. I do ferl very sorry for her but I don’t know how to reach such a person who is so hnusual, so resentful of society and so easily triggered. I just know she needs a lot of live and warmth and support and she desperately needs Christ in her life. I sincerely wish her all the best in loving warmth this Christmas and hope all goes well for her next year and into the future.
It sounds to me a lot like she has a persecution complex, from her bizarre fixation on her teachers telling her to be quiet in class, to the bullies at her school, to the falling out with her first husband to the internet trolls, to the inability to handle criticism. Like you say, she then extrapolates from it and thinks she is on a par with all the persecuted and marginalised peolle in the world. Honestly, I feel very sorry for her because she clearly isn’t completely well. I hope her family looks after her. All my love and prayers for her too this Christmas.
I’ve read The Latte Years. I’ve just been looking at Philippa’s blog. Yeah, I agree it seems like she may be mentally ill to some degree. 🙁 🙁 🙁 In fact, some parts of Latte Years make more sense with that in mind. Poor girl, all my sympathy to her. The book also makes more sense, as someone mentioned above, knowing her father is a radio presenter.
This post from her blog is particularly illuminating:
==> http://www.philippamoore.net/blog/big-magic
In it she talks about meeting one of her heroines, Elizabeth Gilbert, the lesbian who wrote the New Age self-help book, Eat, Pray, Love. Says it all really, doesn’t it? 🙁 Of course, in EPL, Gilbert initiates a divorce from her husband (this was before she ‘became’/came out as a lesbian), travels the world and explores hedonism and then eastern spirituality, just like Moore does, so it is easy to see why she would look up to this piece of trendy, New Age fluff.
I don’t know a huge amount about Gilbert beyond that but, as you can see, Moore’s blog post references ‘Big Magic’, ‘Enchantment’ (which she doesn’t actually define anywhere) and a [pagan] Celtic prayer starting with the line ‘I honor your Gods’.
‘She told me, and the room, that our only job is to serve our creativity.’ Not to serve others? Not to serve God? So Gilbert’s (and Moore’s) god is their own creativity? It sounds so empty and bankrupt. A creative outlet is definitely very important but to mske it the centre of our lives sounds so utterly superficial and antuchristian. She reiterates the point later on, telling us she obeyed this advice from Gilbert: ‘I also now live a life where my creativity and writing are at the centre of it, the focus of every day.’
However, Moore also says, ‘most of us just want to connect with others, and feel seen and heard.’ Maybe this is what she (and others there) need. Are the churches failing people like her in this regard?
At the end, she indicates a belief in a kind of predestination but it sure isn’t Calvin’s Biblical version: ‘I know, without a doubt, that everything is unfolding exactly as it should’ before she closes with ‘Thank you Liz Gilbert, and the Universe, for that turning point’ so it seems she is a pantheist too.
You know, this typifies something I’ve noticed increasingly in recent times: the liberal lefties elites are moving away from the materialist/secular humanist/atheist philosophy of Marx and his descendants and they are dabbling in neo-pagan ideas more and more instead. They are desperate for some kind of spirituality but they look to these trendy, whacky ideas to fill the vacuum. They are really going back to Crowley and his descendants in the New Age/hippie movements. I wonder how these Leftists feel about the fact that many of the stranger Nazis (Hess, Himmler, Rosenberg, Darré, Martin Bormann, etc) were also avid proponents of neo-paganism? In their hatred and rejection of Christianity, they are actually repeating the mistakes of their ideological arch-enemies in the NSDAP! It is a truism that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Anyway, having pointed out what Moore apparently believes from her blog post, I do think it is probably best not to talk about her too much more on here. From her stranger/more extreme posts and Tweets, like those people cite above, it does seem like that she may be mentally ill so I think we shouldn’t be overtly critical of her here or discuss her too much because, even having read her book, her posts her Tweets and the background comments here, we clearly do not know everything about her life, her mental history or her faith journey as it currenyly stands. She is certainly ‘extreme’ in her views, even by Leftist standards and it is a pity she has a relatively loud voice on social media to influence others since I profoundky disagree with her on most issues and esoecially the way in which she takes things to ridiculous extremes. I hope her family care for her and are aware of what she posts as some of it is quite concerning. I wish her only the best but, yes, I definitely think people shouldn’t talk about her anymore on here since she seems to be unwell as far as I can tell.
Hey, looking at Philippa’s blog post and some other writings about Liz Gilbert, something occurred to me: isn’t Liz Gilbert just ripping off and rehashing what the “Storm und Drang” literary movement believed circa 300 years ago? They believed in a pantheistic god and that geniuses such as some writers and certain people with strong wills were mediums in touch with the demonic forces of nature and could use their wills on those around them to build up or demolish.
Nazi ideology was layer influenced by these ideas.
As she’s an aspiring writer, it is really surprising that Philippa Moore doesn’t seem to recognise Gilbert is plagiarising the Storm und Drang literary movement’s idea of the demonic and just repackaging it as “Big Magic”. It was as ridiculous and blasphemous an idea back then as it is now, by the way.
Thank you all for praying for Phil and Liz Graham.
I thought I should add a few more thoughts:
1. I do really like the positivity in these posts and that you are praying for Moore and her family.
2. Having read her book, I agree many of her problems seem trivial but they did obviously impact on her. Even though her bullying seemed mild by government standards it has obviously had a long term impact on her. Likewise the fact she was fretting about never finding a boyfriend when she was in her early twenties, reminds one of the angsty teens on
==> https://www.reddit.com/r/foreveralone
Compare that to the real, long term lonely and unloved on:
==> https://www.reddit.com/r/fa30plus
and you’ll immediately see the difference.
The other complaints, like the concerns about trolls and teachers her telling jer off for being too loud also seem to reflext a distorted view of reality where her problems are very real to her but blown out of proportion in anyone else’s eyes.
3. Despite all of this, I will be reading her next book when she finishes it. I am genuinely concerned about her mental and spiritual well-being and I want to see how her journey progreses from here.
I am really glad I found this blog. It is touching you are all so concerned about her and are willing to pray for her well-being. The other articles on here are so thoughtful too and align well with my own beliefs.
I will pray for Philippa and her sister Liz, too.
“I also found one phrase in the book very telling: it was where she talks about how she and all of her sisters were constantly craving attention. ”
“One of Philippa’s younger sisters, Liz, was also affected and ran off the rails badly, becoming pregnant outside of wedlock whilst also quite young. 🙁”
Hi. I know the Moore family. I think Liz Graham was so desperate for love and attention that she became pregnant young before marriage with her first child, Toby, because she wanted something to love and be loved by. It is just a pity she we t about things the wrong way.
Liz was always very insecure and had a deep yearning for people to like her. She was very talkative and extroverted but that mainly came about through nerves and her desire to be loved and accepted by the people she met I think. She had a very vulnerable core and her rxtroversion was a façade to mask her lack of self-esteem. In short, Liz is loud but vulnerable and just wants people to like her.
I blame the mother, Sylvia, for making her like this. The sad thing was, Luz Graham WAS a likable, caring, sweet kid when she was young. She was so insecure she didn’t realise how much people really did like her. It is a shame she has made such a mess of her life in some ways. Then again, she is a caring mother and qualified teacher, so dome other aspects have been successful.
As for Phil, yes, the comments on here sum things up nicely. She can be a kind, caring person at times in her own way, though, I want to stress. I wish I could have built more of a relationship with her but I didn’t meet her very often and later of course she left Tasmania and lived in London after her first marriage imploded. I would have liked to have been her friend had I known her more.
Thank you so much for praying for Phil and Liz and showing so much concern about them. I know Liz needs love and support in her life and I think she would be grateful that people cared enough to be praying for her salvation and spiritual well-being. She just ended up in a bad way when she was younger and didn’t realise who her real friends were. Anyway, she is much better these days, IMHO.
Please continue to pray for Phil and Liz that they might know Christ’s love and be saved. I also hope that Liz reaches out to all her perceived “enemies” she hurt when she was younger and reconcile with them. She is a decent person and needs to mend bridges. In truth, no one hates her.
Anyway enough of that. Thank you again and continue to pray fervently. I just want salvation for Phil and Liz and for Liz to know she is loved by Christ and that she has more friends than she knows. I hope she reaches out and reconciles with those she and her mother have hurt too, in order to build bridges and heal past pain and hurt. She nedds to seek people out and undo past hurt and she may find she has more friends and is more loved than she ever knew.
Thank you again for your concern for the Moore girls on this forum, folks. Thank you so much for praying earnestly for Phil and Liz.
*
Please ask for forgiveness of your sins, repent and turn to Christ and put your faith in Him. Please accept Christ as your Lord and Saviour, dearest Phil and Liz. Dear Lord, please work in these precious girls’ lives and save them both! Amen.
Thank you all for your prayers and very kind words. I knew Philippa and Liz Graham when they were young and they could sometimes be very kind people. Please continue to keep them in your prayers. They were both knsecure in their own ways, especially Liz Graham whom I knew the best of the sisters. God bless.
““I am also very disturbed these “liberals” all want warmonger Biden to win over Trump. Trump is a crank but Biden has Iraq, Syria, etc. on his grimy hands – so much for liberals…
Do they really think Biden will be better than Trump? ”
Exactly! Trump may or may not be insane but I will always be grateful to him for derailing the Project for a New American Century if nothing else. He has [temporarily] halted the expansion of America’s Middle Eastern oil wars as well. If/when Biden is elected next month, it will be back to “murder as usual”, I fear.”
Good afternoon. Now that the dust has settled and Biden is in power, this is from Breitbart, a source I normally wouldn’t quote from but I think it is a fair reflection. It is how I, too, feel about Trump’s legacy:
“Thanks to President Trump, the Republican Party he inherited has been transformed into something infinitely better by way of his ideas and principles.
The Old Republican Party, the country club party in the sway of war-mongering neocons, the Chamber of Commerce, cheap labor, outsourcing, and being suckers for free trade, is dead.
The Old Republican Party, the white shoe party in sway to big business, opposed to private unions, uninterested in the working class, and eager to lock up every criminal for life, is buried.
[snip]
The Old Republican Party, the one that blindly defends and idolizes the corrupt CIA and FBI, is in the wind.
The Old Republican Party, the one that blindly supported things like the Patriot Act, has departed.
In just five years, the Republican Party had become the party of the working class, of backing private unions members… The party fighting for civil liberties and against the suicide of free trade. We’re the party standing side-by-side with legendary labor leader Cesar Chavez to stop illegal immigration. We’re the ones opposing endless wars, the corporatizing of America, Big Mergers, Big Consolidation, the Military Industrial Complex, the Prison Industrial Complex.
In just five years, we’re a whole lot closer to Rand Paul than Dick Cheney.
What changed is that some 50 to 75 million of us have now seen the light on all or most of these issues, and that’s Trump true legacy.
He deprogrammed us from the Globalist Cuck Cult of GOPe.
It wasn’t just Trump’s ideas. It was the results. Before the China Virus hit, we all saw the results. We stayed out of foreign wars and America didn’t collapse. The wealth gap shrunk. Wall Street did well, and so did Main Street. Everyone’s wages grew. Everyone got jobs. For decades The Free Trade Cult warned of rising prices with trade wars and tariffs. Didn’t happen. We were told America couldn’t be energy exporters, there was no way to stop illegal immigration, that if we didn’t worship at the cult of globalism, inflation would kill us. And on and on and on…”
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/01/21/nolte-president-trumps-true-legacy-will-be-his-transformative-ideas/
Hi Alex
I’m an Aussie. Yeah, I feel sick with worry that Biden is going to resume increasing US militarisation of our country:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-01-22/biden-military-defence-plans-darwin-north-australia/13079294
It will provoke a worsening regional arms race with China. Note the local business owners are rubbing their hands with glee: tgey are no better than traitors to our country, in my opinion as they are evidently only interested in worshipping the Almighty Dollar that business from the American personnel will bring in.
They are no better than those people demanding businesses and borders stay open at the height of the COVID crisis, no matter the risk it posed to the vulnerable and elderly.
****
Further to my previous remarks, it also paints a huge target on Australia’s back if the Yanks and Chinese ever do decide to start lobbing missiles at each other.
Still, I shouldn’t worry so much as it is unchristian of me since Jesus advised us:
“You’ll hear of wars and rumors of wars. See to it that you aren’t alarmed. These things must take place, but the end hasn’t come yet.” – Matthew 24:6
Afternoon. I read Latte Years recently – It is okay but I dont understand why some people on other book review sites rave over it – I was going to write a brief review here but I decided to look at Moore’s other literary output like her journalism and blogposts instead – I spent several hours pouring over them – it is really funny – she is obviously very intelligent since she is a member of MENSA, won scholarships and studying for a Ph. D – but she is also completely daffy, going to fortune tellers and believing in new age stuff like Liz Gilbert’s books and seminars and writing trashy commercial junk like the 50 shades exercise guide – her liberal totalitarian politics are really frightening to me too – it is hard to make her out – at any rate it is very good and kind of you to pray for her and her family and her sister Liz.
Thanks for this thread. I’ve come here after reading Moore’s blog philippamoore.net just now. Some of the things she is saying really disgusted and angered me. I was going to comment on her site but you need to login with a Google or Facebook account to leave a message, and I have neither. I haven’t read her book and I’ve no intention of doing so. Her blog is full of rubbish about being spiritual is listening to your soul, the universe is trying to tell us something (with COVID) and so on and a disgustingly ignorant book review I won’t even go into in which she (arrogantly) presents her personal political and moral opinions as if they were facts. A horrible ego trip.
Hello Sammy, yes I agree it is full of New Age twaddle like this quote she takes from an Irish poet/philosopher:
“All holiness is about learning to hear the voice of your own ”
and this outright pantheistic quote from another poet:
“Now praise the sky and praise the light within each person under the sky. It’s okay to be unsure. But praise, praise, praise.”
http://www.philippamoore.net/blog/2017/3/31/stand-up-and-face-the-east
By the arrogant book review, did you happen to mean this one?
http://www.philippamoore.net/blog/2019/7/13/william-an-englishman-a-book-for-its-time-and-ours
As someone involved in peace work, I found her snarky remarks against pacifists very offensive. Then again, I’ve heard them all befote and she is just talking in cliches. She’s not bringing in any new thoughts. It is obvious she has no real understanding of pacifist ideas and philosophy though. (The book she is critiquing is talking about socialist pacifists though, not Christian ones so their philosophy is obviously going to be frequently at variance with ours, still sge is not contributing any original thought here, just snide, unbecoming remarks).
The one striking thing is that the book she is critiquing is about the First World War. Philippa seems to think it was a valid, justified war, an idea which few of even the most ardent just war theorists agree with these days.
Philippa went to a Quaker school after leaving the Catholic girls’ school at which she was so unhappy. At first, I thought she may have written this snarky review as an explicit, bitter rejection of the Quakers’ philosophy.
However, I then found another entry on her blog and things began to make more sense:
http://www.philippamoore.net/blog/2018/3/8/deeds-not-words
So one of her heroines is the notorious suffragette, Emmeline Pankhurst – not Pankhurst’s pacifist daughters, Sylvia and Adela, who were rejected by their mother…
Emmeline Pankhurst of course took a prominent role in the “White Feather” campaign which aimed to shame men into volunteering for the army in World War One.
The “great” suffragette and her followers intimidated and bulliee men into killing – and dying – for them.
Unfortunayely for ultra-liberal left loonies like Philippa, cancel culture can cut both ways it seems, because a group of fathers wants Emmeline Pankhurst’s statue removed as it is not appropriate to honour her because of this very issue:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1328958/Emmeline-parkhurst-statue-ww1-bullying-fathers4justice/amp
😉
It is also striking that Philippa also mentions International Women’s Day in the same post. I am sure she is aware it was a Soviet innovation.
Another post that vaguely honours the military is this one:
http://www.philippamoore.net/blog/2017/4/25/anzac-day-1949
It features a quote from the Tasmanian Greenie Richard Flanagan, a promoter of the Stolen Generations fraud, no less.
It pains me to say this but I am realising more and more what an evil young woman Philippa Moore is. 🙁 The pagan and pantheistuc ideas she is promoting to her social media followers, her derision and shaming of pacifists and encouragement of men to fight, like her heroime Emmeline Pankhurst before her, her frequent use of blasphemy, her bitter attacks on her ex-husband “Glenn” and her fear of male dominance, her promotion of sexual liberalism (in her book and her 50 Shades article) , her belief artists must be selfish and make an idol of their own creativity, at the expense of others and her promotion of SSM, abortion, transgenderism and other deviancies and her dabblings in the occult (clairvoyance, yoga, hypnotherapy) move her well beyond the realms of a misunderstood, vulnerable, damaged but lovable young woman into something much more wicked and corrupt. It seems like she enjoys trying every kind of evil as she searches for her path in life.
Please, please, please pray that she may come to know Jesus and be saved! I am very worried for her.
I pray she will come to know Jesus’ love and that He will open her eyes. She doesn’t realise how much God – and other people – love her.
I agree she desperately needs prayer. I will pray for her.
“her belief artists must be selfish and make an idol of their own creativity, at the expense of other”
Well, we’ll see how she feels about her philosophy of just looking out for number 1 and putting her creativity above everythkng and everyone else when her parents grow old and inevitably get sick and need her care and support over the next decade or so. I sincerely hope this doesn’t happen but I think she might be in for a really hard life lesson to wake her up to herself. 🙁
Thanks, Dave. I have to admit I lost my temper a little before. It is just that I was really upset to see Philippa tecycling the same tired, old, long-debunked arguments against pacifism and doing so in such an arrogant, self-righteous way.
Her promotion of pantheism and new age thought to her audience of impressionable young womenis very concerning and upsetting too. Nevertheless, I shouldn’t have called her a loonie leftist. Name-calling doesn’t get anyone anywhere and she is as entitled to her opinions as anyone else.
It does intrigue me, though, that someone so resolutely leftist in other areas evidently believes firmly that Britain’s participation in the Great War – the epitome and summation of all imperialist clashes – was justified. She seems well out-of-step with her fellow ‘woke’ leftists on this particular issue. I presume it is because of her admiration for Emmeline Pankhurst but that that is pure speculation
I am glad to see the talk of bringing down Pankhurst’s statue. If all those other statues are toppled, hers should be too. What is good for the goose is good for the gander and Emmeline Pankhurst undoubtedly goaded many, many young men to their deaths with the White Frather campaign, to say nothing of soldiers shot on the other side by the people she shamed into serving. Pankhurst’s actions were utterly disgusting, I’m afraid.
As for Pholippa, she is obviously intelligent as a member of MENSA and well-read but I speculate that maybe she is nartowly read. She obviously hasn’t read much pro-pacifist literature that rebuts her claims and I suspect she hasn’t read much anti-feminist literature to challenge her views either. Someone upthread mentioned Dr Kirsten Birkett’s Essence of Feminism and that would be a great place to start…
She’s not adding much new about these issues on her blog/Twitter otherwise, because, in my humble opinion, she is just rehashing the same tired old cliched groupthink arguments, which is not really becoming of someone aspiring to have a doctorate and be a writer/journo of note. That’s my two cents’ worth, anyway.
I just wish I could reach out to her. Thank you for praying fir that poor, mixed-up girl. I will continue to do so as well. She has so much potential to contribute good to the world and make a real difference eith her talents and intellect so it is desperately sad and frusrrating that she is wasting her skills and imperilling her soul with New Age/pantheist rubbish, occult activities and wokeism. I hope and pray she finds Christ at the end of her journey, I really do. I repent again I used some harsh eords against her. I wish her nothing but the best in life and hope she feels loved after her angst- and pain-filled younger years. I wish there was a way to communicate this to her so she would know she is loved even by those who critique her political positions and opinions. She clearly needs a lot of support and guidance. I will keep on praying for her that she may know the love of people around her and that she and Liz Graham may come to know – and be filled with – Christ’s love for them.
I think “discernment” is the other skills she needs to develop. For a journo/academic, she seems very rewmady to swallow whatever people like Liz Gilbert, the Aboriginal Welfare Lobby, the gay/transgender lobby and the New Age crowd serve up. I think her intentions are good and that she genuinely doesn’t understand how she is being used and causing further damage to others by popularising these frauds amongst her blog’s young(?) audience. Therefore I pray she will develop wisdom and the power of discernment as she grows in maturity. Once again, I wish her and Liz Graham only the best and pray that they will come to know Christ and that He will fill those girls’ lives with His love.
Hiya, glad I found this discussion. I read TLY a while ago and I’m glad to see my thoughts by and large correlate with yours. Here’s my review:
REVIEW
THE LATTE YEARS
AUTHOR: PHILIPPA MOORE
REVIEW DATE: February 10th, 2021.
The TLY is a memoir/self-help book that also functions as a bildungsroman as the book depicts PM’s growth from a very naive and immature young lady to a somewhat-less immature young lady and experienced world traveler. Her stated primary purpose though is to show how happiness, self-acceptance and self-realisation do not come immediately after a drastic loss in weight. PM struggles through a fiery and tumultuous first marriage and divorce before exploring the world and relocating to London in an effort to find herself and fulfil her dreams.
The book is written in a colloquial, informal style with occasional asides addressed directly to the audience. This style grates at times but makes for a quick and easy read, even with lengthy, seemingly self-indulgent, digressions frequently intruding throughout the narrative. PM’s use of humour, while not especially witty, also gives the book a lightness of tone, even when dealing with serious issues. As a result, the book is a simple, fast-paced read for its target audience of young women potentially going through weight and marriage struggles but, unfortunately the answers it provides are often simplistic and naive and the reader gains the real sense that PM is far from the end of her journey of growth and self-discovery and still has much to learn about the world and herself. It is more of a snapshot in time and shows how far she has traveled from her initial troubled and deeply unhappy state of mind.
In terms of characterisation, PM generally comes across as a pleasant, likable person albeit one with a streak of real bitterness, and self-righteousness that shines through clearly at times as if she has not overcome her past as much as she would like the readership to believe. At other points, her extreme sensitivity is, by turns, endearing and sympathetic, making one want to give her a huge hug, and annoying, making one wishing she wasn’t so self-absorbed and apparently oblivious to how well she has it in life compared to those less fortunate than herself.
One of PM’s weaknesses is her apparent inability to give a sense of location and atmosphere to her book. Her hometown of Hobart, Tasmania, could be any small town anywhere but perhaps that was her intention in trying to write a book with universal appeal to young women anywhere. However, this approach does raise questions: since we don’t hain much sense of place from any of the locations PM visits, whether they be Melbourne, San Francisco, London or elsewhere, is it the act of traveling independently that helps her or something about these specific locations? What valuable life lessons does she take away from each location? The book is more focused on her inner journey than external locations so the act of traveling seems more important than any particular location or any specific people she meets.
PM is also a very weak writer when it comes to symbolism or metaphor. Her book is quite straightforward, she tells us what her objectives in writing it are and proceeds to tell us her life story and how she achieved happiness. In this sense, it is a highly commercialized book and lacks artistic merit – apart from one very intriguing thing: throughout, we gain a sense that PM is an unreliable narrator. We know from early on , she has had mental health battles tied up with her self-consciousness and body image. Just how much of what she is telling us in the book really happened and how much of it is an oblique set of recollections, distorted by her confused memory? It is a fascinating question.
Further to this, PM reveals at one point she has had hypno-therapy to bury some painful memories. She then attempts to dredge these memories up and tell the readership what “probably” happened but we are left unsure if this is really the case. The question is left unresolved. This raises intriguing questions though: is a memoir “valid” if the events in it may not have happened or they are related in a way that is not a reflection of the reality of what occurred? I would argue “yes” because this is what happened in PM’s mind. She makes no claim to be writing an unbiased account. It is her subjective experience of what happened to her which led to her growth, whether or not these things really happened. It is what she perceived happened in her confused, subjective state and how these perceptions influenced her and helped her grow as a person and (somewhat) overcome her mental health battles and body image struggles.
Related to this, it is interesting to “read against the grain” and consider the viewpoints that are marginalised and without a voice in this text: was her ex-husband, Glenn, as bad as PM makes out? Why didn’t he go to marriage counseling? Why did he become angry and frustrated with her? What was going through his mind when he struggled to find a job in Melbourne and became allegedly apathetic and demotivated? Why did he even fall in love with PM in the first place? We gain the sense he is older than her (I can’t recall if the book says this is the case), so why did this somewhat-more mature man pick this girl who turned out to be wildly unsuited for him? Was he a bad judge of character or was he taken by surprise when she came out of her shell and became more assertive and feminist? Did he know about her past mental health and body image struggles and her ambitions and dreams when he married her?
Likewise, PM’s internet “trolls” have no voice which leads to more questions: why did her “friends” in the Melbourne women’s blogging community suddenly all turn on her, apparently of one accord? Did she do something to upset or offend them? How did they obtain her parents’ email address? Why did they troll her when she was at the airport? Did they know she’d be traveling that day?
We can also read against the grain and infer a lot about her parents from the little PM tells us: why did they think it was right to read PM’s diary? Why did her mother think it was right to snoop through her wardrobe? Why did she suddenly pressure her daughter to attend ballroom dancing classes without her daughter’s consent while her daughter was struggling with body image and self-estem issues? The parents come across as intrusive and overbearing, as does Glenn, at least from PM’s account. It is little wonder she yearned independence to find herself after having had so little freedom in her life. One gets the sense that her parents contributed to her mental health issues rather than helping her through them. PM also notes they tried to rule through fear, which did not help her with the mental struggles she was facing.
To change the subject, PM talks about sex at times in her book but it is left undisclosed whether her blogging about sexual topics, experiments with a one night stand or experiences with her first husband helped her growth or not. One of the problems with the book overall is the lack of moral judgement, too. PM does not state whether sexual experimentation, divorcing her husband, and attacking opponents are good things or not from an objective moral standpoint. She views everything through the prism of whether it provides her with happiness and self-realisation.
She mentions going to church for pre-marriage counseling with a minister and , later on, marriage counseling before her divorce but we know nothing of what moral lessons she learnt from these other than that she always made the effort to turn up and her husband didn’t. Her whole moral prism is centered around her happiness and self-fulfilment, both in terms of marriage and self-fulfilment as a creative writer. There is apparently no objective morality in her world. There is also apparently no thought of others or the wider community, leaving an uncomfortable void. An adherent of the Kantian categorical imperative she is not!
Whilst Philippa is, by and large, a likable figure despite this disturbing selfishness, at other times, she does come across as privileged, self-pitying and (extremely!) over-sensitive and thin-skinned. She complains about her lack of travel experience when she is still only in her early 20s and the bullying she experiences at school, though her experiences sound very trivial to any poor kid from a working-class school. She appears to be comparing herself only to her peers at her peers at her private school, which is probably fair enough if this is the only world she has known but makes her seem out-of-touch and spoilt for readers who do jot emanate from such a privileged middle-class bourgeois background. Her over-sensitivity to everything grates after a while and makes one wonder how bad her trolls and her husband really were or if she is just over-reacting to trivialities. The only time she seems to let go of her myopic vision and talk about the impact of wider issues going on in the world and impactinv people other than herself is when her family is impacted by the 1990s recession and lose their house. There is no talk of Philippa ever reaching out to others by doing volunteer work or charity to look beyond herself and find happiness and self-realisation by hiving to others and helping those less fortunate, which would also have given her some more perspective on her own life. Any lessons learnt about charity at her church schools and pre-marriage counseling apparently went unheeded.
Perhaps I am somewhat wrong to focus on her apparent selfishness though, since she states she has written the book to help other young women who may be going through what she experienced so there is at least a degree of altruism there. It is just unfortunate that she does it all by talking about herself and how things impact on her, with no regard to how her own actions and attitudes might impact on others.
Ultimately, my thoughts go back to the husband she left: could she have ever realised her dreams of travel, self-realisation and creativity married to him? Did she really try to put effort into saving her marriage? Why did she marry so young? The way she puts it, it sounds like she was using it to boost her self-esteem because she felt unattractive and unlovable up until Glenn showed an interest in her but she was only in her late teens/early twenties by this point, so she was hardly in “Forever Alone”/incel territory yet. What did she contribute to the marriage to help Glenn with his own self-esteem/unemployment struggles? Did her parents pressure her into marrying young or did they disapprove? Did Glenn ever really understand PM and her needs and desires? Was he willing to accommodate her? Would she have been willing to let go of some of her dreams as a self-sacrifice to help her husband? If not, why did she leap in and marry so young – immaturity and desperation to be loved or desperation to lose her virginity as she mentions at one point? Did she have any idea what marriage would involve or was she purely driven by selfish desires and impulses and could she have only found true happiness by leaving her husband and traveling alone to find herself as a person, a creative and a writer? Did she never think of this before she leapt in and married the first man who fancied her? Has she really found happiness now or will she continue to be a restless seeker and leave her second husband and current lifestyle at some point? How can she be happy when she pours out bitterness towards her ex-husband, her Melbourne trolls and her school bullies and former teachers? Why is she trying to dredge up memories repressed by hypno-therapy? Has she really moved on? What if she fails to find success as a writer? What if she fails to find happiness in her inner quest of self-realisation and all her experiments with yoga and putting her creativity first come to naught? What will she turn to then?
All of these questions remained unanswered and it makes TLY a somewhat unsettling book. Has PM truly found happiness or is it as illusory as the other perceptions in her mind? That is the real question TLY raises. If not, what path will she take next?
I just want to add a few more points I neglected to mention in my book review yesterday:
“How can she be happy when she pours out bitterness towards her ex-husband, her Melbourne trolls and her school bullies and former teachers? Why is she trying to dredge up memories repressed by hypno-therapy? Has she really moved on?”
One of the most fisturbing things about the book is thrre is no mention at all of forgiveness by PM to those she perceived have done her wrong. That is probably why she still seems bitter in some passages. It would, I think, help her to let go and move on, if she could just bring herself to forgive and forget. She seems to have a lot of burden in her heart and this would help her lighten it.
Note my review only looked at her book. I did not draw on other sources like her blog, her tweets or her other articles. Therefore, I did not touch on her political views either which I find… wrongheaded… at best, judging from the quotes on here.
Please also note I am from Tasmania originally. I did meet PM a couple of times at university when I was studying literature but I did not really know her at all, hence my interest in reading her text. Her younger sisters, Rebekah, Claire and Elizabeth, were also known to me at one time. They are hardly the little angels some of you make them out to be, very sadly. None of this impacts or influences my review of PM’s book in any way, though.
Thank you for praying for this family. They were not Christians and they do need a lot of love and support.
That book review is amazingly good, DL! It is rly thought provoking. U have a gr8 deal of talent as a writer & analys!
A beautiful review. Very profound and thought-provoking.
Thanks, Jean. I felt like I should add some more comments… The couple of times I spoke to Philippa Moore, she seemed like a nice girl and I would have lkked to have made friends with her but I was wary because her mother had treated me badly, a theme I see is common from the comments above… I am sorry to see the way that Philippa has turned out with her leftist woke political views, her anti-Christianity, her feminism and her anti-pacifism because I stand firmly opposed to all of those things.
It is a real shame brcause in other ways, she and I have so much in common: both of us grew up in Glenorchy, Tasmania, both love writing, both love traveling around Europe, both of us rop achoevers at high school, both of us unoversity scholarship holders, both suffering from low self-esteem, both loving cooking, both loving running, etc… On some levels there is a real connection between her a d I and I wish we were friends but then I consider her anti-religious views and her politics and we are poles apart… It is interesting that people like Philippa and I, with similar backgrounds and interests could end up with polar opposite workdviews and putlooks on faith, polotics and issues. I wish I could connect with her and discuss these things, I really do. As others have said, though, it is probably best to leave her alone to deal with her own personal demons in her own qsy. I wish I could help her though. Her book gave me insight into her personality and her difficult childhood so I feel empathy for her despite her dislike of me and people like me.
Also:
The answer of what Philippa needs in her life is so glaringly obvious but it is apparent from her writings she cannot see what is staring her in tte face. 🙁 🙁 🙁
I wish more than anything I could help her but she’d have to realise I am her friend and not her enemy. 🙁 🙁 🙁 As stated above, I wish I could reach out to her. I wouldn’t know what yo say though.
As I said above, I feel like she and I are two sides of the coin, so similar in so many ways and yet so different.
Apologies for all of my typos in the post above. I am quite appalled at myself. My only excuse is I am borrowing someone else’s phone while mine is being repaired and I am not accustomed to typing on it.
Yes, the similarities between PM and I are quite uncanny. In addition to all of the points I listed above:
1. We both enjoy gardening:
2. We both love studying history;
3. We have both worked as freelance editors (although you wouldn’t know it in my case from those typos!);
4. We are both published authors.
Our political and religious views, though, are polar opposites. To be honest, I find some of her morals quite shocking and repugnant. 🙁 It is disturbing to see how she views the world and lives such a hedonistic life.
I just wish her all the best and hope she finds what she is looking for in life and I wish I could help her in some way and be able to talk to her as a friend.
I am really glad I came across this discussion. It is so good of you to pray for her and her sisters.
That’s a brill book review! That is one of the most thoughtful I have read.
DL, regarding their spiritual well-being, it is hard. As other people state above it can be hard to fulfil the Great Commission when you are dealing with a situation like this. Philippa could turn on you or misunderstand what you are saying, especially since you say you didn’t know her well and you had bad relations with the rest of her family and since she is unusual and bery woke/uber-liberal judging by her posts and tweets, very sadly . Then again, since you have similar interests and backgrounds and you obviously care about her, maybe you could build a rapport with her and help her.
My advice is to pray about what is the best thing you can do to help Philoppa. Also, even if you don’t directly approach her for the reasons outlined above, continue yo lray for her since that is the most important thing of all. Also pray for the other sisters you mentioned, Rebekah, Claire and Liz Graham. God bless.
That is a great book review, @DL. I was going to write one too but you said it all. I am from Tassie too and knew some of the Moore sisters. You have written a fair representation of them and a dispassionate analysis of Philippa’s book. Well done!
It is sad to see Philippapushing bizarre, e treme left views these days. I went to a Christian school – I will pray for them all and especially Phil and Liz Graham (it is her birthday today – Feb 13).I wish they could know God’s love for them.
@DL – that book review is very good; nay, IT IS AWESOME!!!
Everyone else thanks gor talking about Philippa Moore and her insidious political views that she promotes via her blog, nrespaper and magazine articles and social media. Isn’t it interesting that the people like Philippa who complain most loudly about ‘bullying’ turn around and become bullies themselves using the weapons of liberal leftism to batter, censor and dilence their opponents?
Thank you all for your kind words about my book review.
Dave, I will follow your advice and pray about what to do. I don’t think PM would appreciate me contacting her but I will think about how best to help her and her sisters, irrespective of how they ever treated me. I will definitely pray for PM, Liz Graham and co. either way, since they have clearly lost their way. God bless you all on this site too.
Yes, prayer is the best answer.
Here is an article from the Australian published two days ago on the likes of Philippa and her kind:
“How the Woke Became Our Most Feared Zealots”
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/the-mocker-how-the-woke-became-our-most-feared-zealots/news-story/94e523062cd08c6cd7dcda0e7d1ffb9b
Yes, pray for this girl and her sisters since they need help. As you say, don’t intrude on her life if you think you would be unwelcome. Just keep her in your prayers and God will work miracles in His own way, in His own time. Like you say, you have a similar bavkground and interests to her and you feel she and you are “two sides of the same coin” but you are clearly a person of faith with very different attitudes and outlook, so there is clearly hope as she too grows and matures, she and her sisters will come to the same conclusion as you that there is a God and the Christian path is the right one. If you realised this, she and her sisters can too if and when God draws her to Him in His love.
Keep praying – you obviously gave affection for them despite the way they mis-treated you. God will answer your prayers and look after them and save them. God bless.
Thank you, Jean. Your answer is very thoughtful and helpful. I was thinking along the same lines but you have fleshed it out more. Yes, I will pray for them but not contact them
Peri_vs_the_Sixth_Doctor (great username!), thank you for your kind words, too. Yes, I won’t contact PM but I hope one day she will reach out to me and find a friend. Meanwhile, I will pray unceasingly for her and Liz Graham for God to save them and keep them safe in His care. Thank you for all your help. God bless.
I know Phil too and I like her. I agree that she can be a kind, witty, warm person and a great friend but then I see things like those mentioned above – her callous attack on the obituary of that poor old man who died over Christmas – how would his family feel about that!?! – her rant against pacifists, her calls for censorship, and her militant leftism – and I feel like I don’t know her at all.
DL – you and Phil are two sides of the same coin but turned out very differently in terms of outlooks and beliefs because I assume you donn’t have a domineering, controlling mother like her and you probably didn’t grow up in a spoilt ‘privileged’ middle-class environment with a celeb dad and private schooling and a lot of younger sisters to compete against for affection. I don’t think any of these things helped in Phil’s case in her younger years so she does need compassion and understanding but she probably also needs a firm rebuke for her lack of morals of which bullying over that eldrly man’s death at Christmas is the absolutely nadir. :(It is probably vest not to reach put to her since she might view this as harassment especially if you have had a rocky relationship with her family in the past and the mother might cause problems for you too. Better to keep your distance as other people have said.
That being so, it is still lovely of you to be so concerned about her welfare though that you are willing to pray for her and for poor old Liz Graham. You are very kind. I think Phil and Liz Graham would appreciate your obvious concern and love for them if they knew about it. Keep up your prayers for them. xxx
I’ve been lurking on here for a while & thought I should finally speak up. I knew Phil in London. She’s a warm, caring, funny person but she is also (as she’d say herself) unique. She definitely has a different way of seeing the world. I find a lot of her blig posts, tweets and social media comments appalling too & there’s definitely a lot I don’t agree with in terms of her politics & opinion pieces. I think she did have a pretty tough childhood at school & home & didn’t realise how pretty or likable she is at that time so a lot of her neuroses grew out of that period & to her credit she’s overcome heaps of them which is gr8. I don’t believe in censorship so she should be allowed to have her say no matter how silly or dangerous some of her ideas r or we’d be just like her wanting to censor non-woke stuff. Her heart’s in the right place though I believe but she’s just naive sometimes & still a bit like a little girl & I think some of her self-proclaimed self-centeredness in terms of being a creative spirit & her hedonism is more of a defence mechanism than anything else (I could be wrong though but I hope not). The many kind and warm comments on here showing concern for Phil r gr8t. It is also rly sweet of you all 2 b praying for her & your concern & love for her rly shine through, even amongst those of you her family has upset or insulted one way or another. I think she’d be rly touched 2 know how much people like DL care about her because in spite of her extroverted front she still doesn’t have much self esteem underneath at times I fear. I think she rly would appreciate your concern, DL, in her own way & would be touched u still care about her even if some members of her family somehow treated u badly in the past. Probably good 4 u not 2 contact her directly though – just pray & maybe 1 day she’ll reach out to you & get in touch. Let her take the initiative if she wants 2 I think. U r clearly a lovely & compassionate person. U show that by caring for her even rftr being mistreated by her family. I think she’d respond in kind 2 your kindness 2wards her. Bless you. Thank u all for praying for her. U r kind & inspiring people. Happy birthday 2 Liz Graham 2. Phil mentioned her 2 me. God bless & cheers.
roflol-re: your screen name, I LOVE it by the way. Poor old Phil would despise good ol’ 6 since he is the most misogynistic Doctor of the lot with the way he treats long-suffering Peri. 6 and 3 (and arguably 1) are the most anti-woke, blatantly chauvinistic of the Doctors. Phil would be gritting her teeth in horror watching any of those old episodes.
She wouldn’t like 10 and 3 either because of their pacifism and strong criticism of the armed forces (even when 3 was forced to work for the military he spoke out against them – that’s where the show’s pacifism was really born).
I guess she’d like the current one as the first female Doctor and because 13’s personality is a bit like Phil’s-she definitely reminds me of her at times and the episodes are a lot more preachy and “woke” at the moment, with 13’s intergalactic liberal SJW crusades and the anti-Trump episodes. There is still a pacifist element in a lot of episodes though that would rankle with her, though. Thank goodness Phil doesn’t have her own time machine. She’d be censoring and blotting things out and changing history to suit her woke agenda left, right and centre. 😛 Sorry, I’m just trying to add some humour to lighten up what has been a very serious discussion about her woke articles.
Heh-if Phil is like the 13th Doctor, I guess that means Liz Graham is vaguely like Ace -or at least, she’d like to be. Bit of a tomboy, likes sports, warmhearted on the inside, first job was as a waitress, flirting with all the boys in her youth, etc. Just lacks Ace’s drive and initiative.
I am also thinking the classic Doctor Who Phil would most approve of would be 7:
1.Does an anti-Thatcher satire (Happiness Patrol)-check!
2.Self-identifies as a hippy (Greatest Show in the Galaxy)-check!
3.Has a strong female companion who became a feminist icon of sorts (who happens to violently hate Nazis and racists as shown in Remembrance and Ghostlight and is not afraid to physically lash out at them) and has some vaguely lesbian overtones (Survival abd Ghostlight)-check!
She’d probably like 2 as well:
1.Does a militantly anti-pacifist story (The Dominators)-check!
2.Surprisingly little sexism for the 1960s (just the occassional joke about Victoria’s skirt length)-check!
3.Surprisingly little racism for the 1960s (apart from, arguably, Toberman in Tomb of the Cybermen)-check!
4.Story that portrays hippys in a positive light (the two guys in the Ice Warrior)-check!
They’d be the two most woke classic Doctors in my estimation so I could see her lapping them up. 😀 😛
Okay, that’s enough tomfoolery from me!
(I hope that put a smile on someone’s face, after all of this extremely serious analysis of Phil’s journalism and blog articles.)
I’ll never watch the Seventh Doctor again. 😛
I agree-that is an AMAZINGLY good book review, @DL. I do think sometimes Phil plays the sympathy card in her book-and she also settles scores with her ex and bullies-but overall I know it is a fair account of her life. She is someone who desperately craves love, support and attention.
It is touching to see how caring you are with your natural empathy for Phil and your concern for her and Liz’s physical and spiritual wellbeing. I’m sorry some members of their family treated you badly-they don’t always value warmhearted, caring and true friends. 🙁 It is lovely you are committed to praying for Phil and her sisters, including Liz Graham and you have their welfare in the forefront of your mind. Phil’s an atheist with new age hippy leanings but I think she’d appreciate the gesture and so would Liz Graham. Yeah, don’t contact her but keep praying for her and Liz Graham and co and maybe one of them will reach out to you one day of their own volition. I will pray for Phil and Liz Graham too.
By all means continue if you wish to do so, but I feel like this topic has been discussed to death now. I think the best thing is for those of you down in Tasmania who know Philippa to be loving, Christian role models to her and lead by example and help her where you can. The rest of us who have contributed to this discussion should continue to pray for her and Liz Graham. God bless.
Thanks Jean – just to let you all know that I am closing this very lengthy thread down now! Hope you have benefited from it….and please take Jeans advice…pray