Thursday, April 10, 2014

Bugger all wit, bugger all wisdom this lightweight Thursday ...

How offensive does it get on a daily basis?

Well there's always the wit and wisdom of Bob Carr.

Back in the day they could only get 122 pages out of the wit and wisdom of Billy McMahon:


It is, of course, a noble tradition in Australian publishing, though they could only get 96 pages together for this one:



'If homosexuality is a fashion statement, it is a very dangerous fashion statement. '

Don't keep it in the family Bob. You tell 'em Bob...

Meanwhile, the reptiles at the Daily Terror are having a field day with Bob Carr, but for once, who can blame them?


All the same, the pond was deeply shocked and horrified.

No, not that Carr was in charge at the time that Eddie Obeid began his rise to infamy, or that Sydney copped Olympics rather than infrastructure during his reign, or that Carr could conflate first class PJs with the unfortunate fate of Palestinians in the middle east, or that single-handedly Carr has done more to tarnish the Labor party than a gaggle of faceless Liberal heavyweights - all that was to be expected - but that the Terror should use the quaintly English word "tosser", instead of the honourable Australianism, "wanker".

Sad to say, the cane toad Currish Snail committed precisely the same thought crime:


Both words come from across the sea, of course - the whole bloody language did - but "wanker" has always been the Australian word of choice.

As usual, even in a worthy cause, the Terror and the Snail manage to dishonour Australia. Luckily for them, Bob Carr manages to dishonour Bob Carr and the Labor party without raising a sweat ...

As always with Carr, the pond has mixed feelings. Contempt that he immediately broke his promise to hang around in the Senate - politicians are so used to lying they expect people to see a broken promise as just another day's business - mixed with fear and loathing. Imagine if he'd actually hung around in the Senate, instead of strutting around like a plucked peacock ...

Can anyone come close to Carr? Well credit and a big shout out to Joe de Bruyn for doing his level best and handing the reptiles an EXCLUSIVE:



Do a Greg Hunt if you like on the rabid Joe, here, but the best the pond can say is that it seems like Joe and the Bolter would find a lot in common, and perhaps should set up a political party together. Go double dutch if you like:

De Bruyn has come under scrutiny for voicing his conservative views while being secretary of a trade union and holding a position on the National Executive of the centre-left Australian Labor Party. He has repeatedly voiced opposition to abortion, and to legalising same sex marriage. At a quarterly SDA members meeting in February 2011, de Bruyn moved a resolution against gay marriage, without giving any members a chance to speak or vote on the issue.

Yep, that's honest Joe's idea of democracy in action.

Meanwhile don't propose a cup of coffee to Joe. He'd probably see it as a manoeuvre for factional advantage ...

Dinosaurs the lot of them ...

But, you say, all this is well known, and it's the pond's job to do a Randy Stone and cover the wanker right wing commentariat for the daily pond ....



Ah, those were the days of OTR, and more on Randy - who was in fact never randy - here ... though he could always spot a wanker at ten paces.

Speaking of wankers at ten paces, the pond reserves a particular hostility, fear and loathing for people writing about the private lives of others in order to churn out a bit of cheap copy.

Cue the wretched Paul "Magic Water Man" Sheehan, scribbling away:

Sheehan shows no sign in Peaches Geldof's life not so peach keen of having met Geldof, even in passing.

The usual style for that sort of colour piece goes something like: I once saw John Lennon standing on the corner of west 54th and Broadway, and the intimate contact made me determined to set down the full story of John Lennon the man I knew ...

How low does Sheehan go? Well he starts off quoting the resident doctor on ITV's This Morning program, courtesy of the good doctor's thoughts as they were refracted in the tabloid Daily Mirror.

Now there's journalistic research at its finest.

Now leave aside the reality that you could, if you wanted to stroll in this particular gutter, by heading off to the Mirror on the intertubes. Pause instead to wonder why the Fairfaxians would bother to print - nay to feature - this sort of common gossip clucking and tut-tutting, except as the lowest form of click baiting trolling village green twaddle.

Does Sheehan have any novel or interesting insight to offer into Geldof, her life or her death? Nope, because it's all cobbled together from a cursory compounding of news files, which the pond won't bother to reprint here.

What's just as offensive as Sheehan's foray into Geldof's life are the life lessons for young women that he draws from it. How hypocritical does the stench get?

Scrutiny: then there is the new pressure from social media, the peer scrutiny, the semi-public profile, the capacity to project a public image. 

See, it has nothing to do with ghouls like Sheehan checking the runes and the tea leaves, it's the social media, and peer scrutiny, and the semi-public profile, which is presumably a bit like being semi-pregnant.

And then there are the other generalisations:

Image: the images presented of feminine beauty have never been more oppressively and unforgivingly outlandish. The freakish body type of the tall, thin, leggy model is presented as the feminine ideal. These images are often airbrushed or photo-shopped or film-edited into even more outlandish unreality.

Oh indeed, indeed. The pond simply can't think of or imagine another time when women might have been objectified:


Mummy, mummy, where did all the pubic hair go?

Perhaps Sheehan fancies himself as being in the grand tradition of Norman Mailer, though when you look at it, Mailer had a few issues:

Mailer did not actually kill any of his wives (unlike the French philosopher Louis Althusser, who strangled his), but he stabbed his second wife twice in the neck and his fourth accused him of beating her. His fascination with hyper-masculinity drew him to boxing; it also resulted in tragedy when Mailer was instrumental in securing the release of a convicted killer, Jack Abbott, who then stabbed a waiter to death. (here)

Hmm, perhaps it's time for the pond to extrapolate from Mailer's life to make a few gross generalisations about men.

Sorry, that would mean interrupting the generally grumpy Sheehan's stream of drivel:

Weight: a fetish with weight is reflected in the great majority of women being dissatisfied with their appearance according to numerous social surveys. It is reflected in the current mania for hard exercise among many young women (and young men, for the same reasons).

Oh indeed, indeed. Where could all that have come from? Why the mania is completely preposterous:


Hmm, is that a lump in the lycra, or is the PM just pleased to see the photographer?

I know, I know, the pond is wilfully misusing a Mae West quote.


But West had other quotes, ones that nailed the likes of Sheehan to the wall:


Or in the case of Sheehan, what they write:

Excess: the number of young women who are bulimic, anorexic, self-harming, binge-drinking or taking illicit drugs is, collectively, as high as it has ever been.

Now that sounds impressive, for a nanosecond, as if actual research has been done, statistics compiled and analysed, findings reviewed and cited ...

And then you pause to contemplate what Sheehan is actually saying.

Excess, in one form or another, collectively, is as high as it has ever been. Or presumably, contrariwise, as low as it has ever been, or perhaps, if we're inclined to avoid the little or the big end solutions, collectively, as median as it has ever been ...

It's gibberish, just like all the other gibberish that saw Sheehan seize on Peaches Geldof's life to dump on young women ...

Yep, it's a proud tradition that goes back to Exodus and no doubt was alive and well before that:

Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live ...

As for why anyone would want to read the preening Bob Carr, or the second hand regurgitated insights of Paul Sheehan - with about as much substance as the mound left by a dog after it's eaten a little Tamworth grass - remains a mystery to the pond ...

But that's the lightweight out of the way for the day, and time to get on to a serious matter.

Yes, that hagiographic serial knob polisher and philosophical fellow traveller Tim Wilson has been out and about in recent days, explaining just why he can vary his views on free speech according to the days of the week, and a change in the direction of the wind.

Hot air works that way.

You can waste precious minutes of your life, if you like, reading Free speech, the public service and civilising behaviour - "Sigh" - if only for the pleasure of observing the many contradictions inherent in the argument, which seems in a nutshell to amount to this:18C bad; making sure public servants toe the line good...

Apparently it's all part of a "voluntary" code of conduct, if you understand "voluntary" to mean sign this, or piss off and go starve or try to live on the dole ...

The pond could never quite believe that Wilson had let loose on Twitter his real idea of freedom of speech. It all seemed like a bad dream, or an internet meme:

(found here)

But it seems Tim "send in the water cannons" Wilson really did tweet it, and now expects his maundering hagiographic knob polishing defence of the government and the Bolter to be taken seriously.

Which makes the pond ever so grateful that there are cartoonists like Pope to send up the rambling, prattling, prating, blathering, chattering, jabbering, gabbing, gabbling, babbling idiots as they go about scribbling their drivel ...

And that's the very last lightweight hypocrite for the day.

Call in the Pope, the one that resides in Canberra, and more of the Pope that's better than the Roman papish pope, here:




13 comments:

  1. I see SBY has conceded defeat in the Indonesian elections, but no mention of this in the Oz papers.

    http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2014/04/09/sby-admits-defeat.html

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    1. Interesting result Anon and even more interesting times when the presidential election comes around, but the MSM is off on a junket, so you can't expect focus, just more hagiography ...

      Delete
  2. I fully expect Carr to continue taking the piss in his media conference. He should draw similarities between the crap he came out with in his memoirs and the idiocy that is the Abbott government. Abbott has set the scene, Carr is just living up to expectations.

    If he doesn't at least do that, what little respect I had for him will disappear.

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  3. Dorothy, do you own a copy of the "The Wit And Wisdom Of Ronald Reagan"?
    http://www.discogs.com/No-Artist-The-Wit-And-Wisdom-Of-Ronald-Reagan/release/1421098

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    1. Better yet, you can listen to it here on YouTube, perhaps while reading the book version.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KijbZjYR39c#t=158

      The 2'57" is jammed full of witty remarks, one liners, put downs and wry Norman Rockwell philosophical insights.

      Delete
  4. There really is a US film coming out that argues that the earth is the centre of the universe. 'The Principle', which describes itself as "destined to become one of the most controversial films of our time", argues the long-debunked theory of geocentrism – where the Earth is the centre of the Universe and the Sun resolves around it – is true and Nasa has tried to cover it up.


    http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/star-trek-actress-kate-mulgrew-tricked-into-narrating-controversial-geocentric-universe-1444051

    I'm not sure if this isn't meant to be a wind-up (or something from The Onion) , but mind you the producer has said in the past that nobody can prove six million Jews died during the Holocaust and there is a conspiracy between the Jewish people and Satan to rule the world.

    http://galileowaswrong.com/

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    1. Great fun Anon. Poor old Lawrence Krauss explained his appearance on Slate and then lordy lordy they put up the trailer

      http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/04/08/lawrence_krauss_on_ending_up_in_the_geocentricism_documentary_the_principle.html

      "So, for those of you who are scandalized that a film narrated by a well-known TV celebrity with some well-known scientists promotes geocentrism, here is my suggestion: Let’s all stop talking about it from today on. This will be the last thing I intend to write about it. Note I have avoided mentioning the name of the film. I objected to even embedding the trailer, but my Slate editor insisted on including the video.
      I recommend not wasting time watching it. If you haven’t heard about it, as I expect most people haven’t, then you are losing nothing by not knowing it.

      If others bring up the film, the best thing we can do is tell them to not to waste their time or money either watching it or talking about it. Maybe then it will quickly disappear into the dustbin of history, where it belongs."

      Too late. It sounds like as much fun as Noah ... though Noah may be more scientific ...

      Delete
  5. George Brandis:

    “But I must confess frankly that, as the minister within the Australian system with responsibility for homeland security, the more intelligence I read, the more conservative I become. The more deeply I come to comprehend the capacity of terrorists to evade surveillance, the more I want to be assured that where our agencies are constrained, the threat to civil liberty is real and not merely theoretical.”


    http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/09/the-more-intelligence-i-read-the-more-conservative-i-become


    He would say that. He’s just another neoconservative and this lot are aided by the Murdoch press that propagates deceptions and as Machiavelli wrote,” One who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived”.

    Anyone wanting an insight into their game of politics should get a hold of the BBC documentary film series The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear. It illustrates the Brandis’s of this world and their use of fear for political gain.

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    Replies
    1. You have to end civil liberty to save civil liberty, HB, and remember war is peace ...

      Delete
  6. Hi Dorothy,

    Many thanks for your tireless work. There is nothing much I could add to yet another well executed skewering of the loonacracy but I did think this might add a bit more grist to your mill.

    http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/global_warming/Science-or-Spin-report.pdf

    Ciao

    DiddyWrote

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    1. Excellent link DW. The pond has been inclined to play in the shallow end of the pool with Colbert and Stewart. Unfortunately nothing will stop Faux News or its demonic overlord ...

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  7. I don't hear the calls of 'freedom!" from the righties saying anything about the plight of Peter Greste.

    Where's Tim Wilson? He's too interested in sucking up to Blot.

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    1. The Bolter must have heard you. Or perhaps he only noticed because Sky News noticed, and you should provide links within the empire to promote all the outposts of the evil empire...

      Delete

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