Tuesday, November 03, 2015

One nation, one culture, one horse race ... or so the bien pensant cry ...



Wasn't the irrepressible Captain Flint in fine form yesterday (and more Rowe here) - as fine an example as any of the pond's thesis that when when you flip a Marxist you end up with a different form of fundamentalist ratbag - but the pond has other fish to fry, because last night it was transfixed by Media Watch.

Firstly the dog botherer wasn't mentioned; secondly the Terror's approach to reporting crime, Sensationalism Sells, was beguiling; and thirdly the Caterists, along with the parrot, scored another mention:

Nick Cater—a columnist on The Australian and former editor of The Weekend Australian—is also being sued by the Wagners in relation to the Grantham floods for comments like this made to Alan Jones in March: 
NICK CATER: ... it's very hard to escape the conclusion that if it was not for the quarry wall, 12 people would not have lost their lives that day ... — 2GB, The Alan Jones Breakfast Show, 17th March, 2015 
Cater made similar comments to Nine’s 60 Minutes, which led to the Wagners lawyer calling him a ratbag, vigilante and a fool. 
Cater has already defended his journalism in a long letter which you can find on our website , but he told us that he believes the legal action will have a: 
... chilling effect on investigative journalism. It will also prompt citizens without corporate backing to think twice before expressing honestly held opinions on talkback radio. — Nick Cater, Response to Media Watch, 2nd November, 2015 
[Senior Hydrologist, Dr Phillip Jordan acted as an expert witness that provided advice to the Queensland Floods Commission of Inquiry. He has responded to Nick Cater's claims] 
We prefer to think it will make commentators more careful to have real evidence before they shoot their mouths off. That’s what investigative journalism is actually about.

Epic stuff, and all this forms a fitting framework for the idle chatter that has filled the work of the bien pensant commentariat this week ...

Sorry, the pond knows that borrowing from French is the favourite Caterist word - later there'll be an easter egg search for its usage - but the pond finds it piquant to use the plundered verbiage in relation to commentariat columnists, in the sense defined by wiktionary:

Someone who accepts and/or espouses a fashionable idea after it has been established and maintains it without a great amount of critical thought.

How does this play out? Well at the start of the week, we learned that Rowan Dean, back in the day, deemed Cat Stevens a frigging musical genius. You can google it if you doubt the pond ...

Which says more about Dean than the pond ever dreamed or yearned to discover.

Of course it was all about the fandom's 'me, me, me' syndrome, whereby the artist is put on earth to satisfy the fans, and woe unto said artist if they develop peculiar ideas. (And let's face it, Cat Stevens did develop peculiar ideas, and did disgrace himself in relation to Salman Rushdie).

Dean wandered through a variety of mild secularism - describing an incident of torture very similar to one once endured by the pond at the hands of a very loopy nun - before ending up with this insight:


Same, same, same, in some mystical culture, as if the notion of "one culture" was a simple definitional issue.

There's another bit of music from way back when that describes Dean's vision of "one culture":




Of course the pond could have broken Godwin's Law while marvelling at "one culture" syndrome...






... by rattling off a bit about the unifying genius of German culture and how it might be defiled, but there's more than enough of that in Mein Kampf ...

But it's time to shift attention to the master bien pensant, who - despite the legal action against him - is still bravely fronting up to make the lizard Oz the rag that's known and loved around the nation ... by a select and falling few ...

Now for those who resolutely refuse to read the pond's carefully curated gobbets, there's a chance to have a coffee, but that will involve missing out on layers of irony ...


Now there is much to marvel at here, not least the notion that the inclusive approach has prevailed for centuries, as if the White Australia policy just vanished in a Caterist haze of delusions, as if the treatment of Aboriginal people involved an inclusive desire to give everyone a fair go, and as if standing up to sing a song to an absent Queen was the kind of integration many Australians yearned for ...

As for trust, that invaluable commodity essential to commerce and civility ... does that include taking legal action against blowhards?

Well the pond promised a certain level of irony, not least the bien pensant's assumption that his culture should be their culture.

But how pleased black activists must be that disputed views of history and of anthems and of who was here first must now be swept aside and national values shared. Speaking of such shared values, perhaps it's time for another Tasmanian genocide ...

But the pond digresses. It would be wrong to harp on about ten pound, or even vastly more expensive, Poms, and the notion that they are the ones to land here and to define shared national values ... because that's the only way there can be trust, and there will be no actions in the courts, such is the harmony in the land ... and hey nonny no, on we go ...


Of course integration here is code for "why don't they become like Caterists, perfect in every way, blended and united and integrated and melded and welded and moulded", which, considering the costs involved in certain court cases, offers that further layer of irony the pond promised.

And so to the final gobbet ...


And so gobbet haters missed out on the bien pensant easter egg hunt, with the words cunningly hidden in that last gobbet.

Of course it might only be the Caterists desire for an even deeper irony that this piece should culminate with a fulmination that suggests we should challenge the notion that nationalism might on occasion be akin to racism - remember, the White Australia policy never existed - along with confronting the pieties of cultural relativism, while celebrating the triumphalism that some cultures are more successful than others, which might lead some people off on a by-path to marvel at how the British were successful at exploiting vast areas of the planet, only to leave behind devastated countries and cultures when they were forced to retreat to their island state ... except when forming irritating diasporas that refused to integrate with any style or grace into their new cultural surroundings ...

It would of course be far to easy to reference again that chapter in Mein Kampf, Nation and Race, which is all about the way nationalism - in its extreme form - is more than akin to racism ... it is deeply and profoundly racist ...

Never mind, the pond learned long ago that it was different kind of egg - "the alien other, the Fenian menace"-  that's the way it was for Irish originating folk in the old days, and that Protestants and Masons and the English ran the show, and each wave of migration to this country has gone through the same sort of pecking routine, demanding that old cultures must be abandoned and newcomers must conform to banal stupidities, whether it be football, beer, barbecues or dumb horse racing ...

That's what happens when you keep the company of dull bien pensants, who think that there is one Australian culture - though they can never define it - and so the pond must revert to a life of three vegetables and meat overdone ...

Meanwhile, there is but one certainty. The notion that the pond must conform to a culture defined by Rowan Dean and the Caterists is the surest way to revive alienation in the pond, and bring on a dangerous radicalisation, such that when the pond is asked what it is rebelling against, the only answer can be, what are Dean and the bien pensant Caterists touting this week ...? And if they can manage that for the pond, what happens when others read their thoughts? Are they the ones tearing apart the fabric of this country.

Food for thought, as they say, and it was rather the same when the Captain was in charge, and seemed to think the entire country should be in the grip of his royalist delusions, and so thanks to Pope, and more Pope here, we end up where we started, with a migrant Pom flogging a head horse ...


Just on a hunch, the pond googled Nothing Leica Dame, and what do you know, Nothin' Leica Dane exists ... but that's enough of horses, and no the pond won't be watching the Cup, on the off chance that Rowan Dean and the Caterists will ...



10 comments:

  1. Those migrants must make the effort and some are more successful than others? Do we have to make any effort to integrate with them and thereby earn the benefits that migrants bring to a country? Nope these creeps seem to think that 'we' should just stand by with our arms crossed while 'they' struggle to be like us while genuflecting at our incredible superiority as white peeps who are so fckn good and successful that we didn't have to bother integrating with the people who lived here first.

    Do they understand that the descendants of earlier migrants have been less successful than others? The first migrant here on my fathers side was Sam Cook who arrived with the ability to write shorthand and because of this - so clever of him to know that this would be the skill that was needed and would ensure he was able to climb the ladder - he became the first managing director of the Sydney Morning Herald - you can google him and his interesting career - but despite having his genes I am not a success by Cater's standards, being a leaner and an unsuitable woman who did breed with a feckless man and both of us sucked at the teat of the taxpayer for years.

    Fuck they are arseholes with all their self-serving 'thinking'. That is why I try not to read the gobbets Dot. Every 'thought' they have seems to be focused on blaming others for not being as good as this mythical 'us' that does not include me as an Australian. Where the fuck did they get this idea that 'Australians' are like them?

    And it's so shameful and should be embarrassing for them, the way they reveal their own ignorance and their ignorance of their own stupidity - that must be meta ignorance - is not something that makes my day.

    Thank you for your comments on their stupid thoughts.

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    1. Wow. I would like to be your best friend, please. Well said!

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  2. It's called the "Dunning-Kruger" effect, Anon. So thick that they've no idea how thick they are...

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  3. I followed your link to what must be one of the few pieces of political good news going around - the welcome decline across the board of Murdoch's rags. Ta for that.
    fred

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    1. I wonder what the circulation of rags like the Terror or the Hun would look like outside the footie season (and not this week, of course)?

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  4. As you observed when you detected me lurking in Longmont Colorado, I recently travelled round the world for a bit of recreation and education. I spent just over a day in Singapore and was most impressed with what I saw in such a short time. So much so, that I did a Greg Hunt for a bit more information.

    Singapore recognises four languages and probably at least that many religions and cultures. It remains a secular state but in a nice bit of inclusiveness allows holidays for the various major religions and festivals. Now, how does that affect their progress to prosperity? Let's see now, on life expectancy at 80 years for males and 85 years for females, they're fourth in the world. On infant mortality they have the world's lowest rate. They've had an unemployment at or below 3% for most of the last 30+ years. They have more millionaires per capita than any other country, and (dear to the Caterists hearts) there's no minimum wage, and a home ownership rate of 80%. It provides prosperous living and housing of over 5.5 million people. Not bad on a piddling little island.

    What it does suggest is that Cater's hero Collier (any relation to Grace?) might have to widen his research a bit if he believes that a monoculture is the only way.

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    1. And all that while being over-lorded and bled by a family of autocratic robber barons and their minions in a single party political system. Just goes to show what a small island with very little military and no social welfare expenditure can achieve.

      Maybe we should all go live on Tasmania and see just what we can achieve.

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  5. The Cup, you say, DP? Jeez Leweeze, take it easy, my cognitive dissonance is thumping, already. I mean, last night's 4Corners presented evidence, along with a chain of logical thought, that any consumption of alcohol during gestation, especially the first trimester, risks outcomes of brain damage in the baby. So, shouldn't there be big signs at the Flemington gates warning young women?
    "Oh", you may say,"I went to the doctor and guess what he told me, Guess what he told me? He said, "Girl, you better try to have fun no matter what you do."" Sorry, wrong song. This particular GP has a financial interest in the wine industry, so he said "One or two won't hurt." So, you say, "OK, then, write that down on a prescription. OK?"
    A better idea would be to go to any female GP and ask if she'd risk alcohol during her pregnancy. I think I know the answer, which is that the medical profession is full of shit when it comes to preventing harms from alcohol.
    That 4Corners pulled out early, though. Should've asked those mums of FASD kids if they were still drinking and if their mothers consumed alcohol during their pregnancies. (I'm sorry - I mean, deeply, deeply sorry - if that offends. I'd write this under a better alias for consumption elsewhere, but we must consider the advertisers. Sorry.)

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  6. Has Cater fully assimilated yet or does he still have his British Passport?

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  7. I asked a while back for a ban on "confected outrage" (and look where that got me); I'd like one now, please, on "kumbaya", when used sarcastically by idiots. Thank you.

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