Tuesday, January 19, 2016

In which Bolterish introspection mingles with a Caterist parrot. Hint: boil bird and stone until done, throw away the parrot, and eat the stone ...


Oh dear, they refused to confirm.

So when did he stop beating his wife? Or perhaps we should put it another way ...



Yes, for the very few that care, the Graudian has the story that perhaps News Corp has finally decided that pissing a couple of million a year against the wall on a show that doesn't rate might not be the best of business models ...

Of course the Bolter remains defiant ...


Put that another way ...


The pond of course has suspected that the Bolter has been out of sorts, ill-disposed, alienated, withdrawn, emotionally isolated and disaffected.

That line about getting back to reading Enemies of Promise in Arnhem Land merely confirms it.

You can Greg Hunt Enemies of Promise here, to confirm that it is one long Etonian privileged autobiographical whine: 

The overarching theme of the book is the search for understanding why Connolly, though he was idely recognised as a leading man of letters and a highly distinguished critic, failed to produce a major work of literature.

You can see why the opera-loving Bolter might be depressed - waiter, a good red to accompany the soprano, if you please. At some point, it must all pall, even as the Bolter becomes a world recognised climate scientist and highly paid snake-oil salesman for the Chairman, yet as far from a decent major work of any kind as Johann Strauss II was from a decent symphony.

Hitchens ended his piece Arrested Development with this quote:

In spite of the slow conversion of progressive ideas into the fact of history, the Dark Ages have a way of coming back. Civilisation—the world of affection and reason and freedom and justice—is a luxury which must be fought for, as dangerous to possess as an oil-field or an unlucky diamond.

The Bolter has, of course, long been on the dark side, the side of Faux News and the hate machine, where even the mere mention of progressive ideas is likely to produce a conniption ... and yet, despite millions lavished on him, in vain, he now petulantly plans other ways to irritate the world, perhaps in hope of producing a pearl, but much more likely, simply to aid in the ongoing ruination of the oyster.

My will takes aim now at a double target,
Nor is the rebel's head the bigger prize...
Ah, to see the flames of those imperious eyes
Grow faint and languid with passion...
For him, the rope, and for the ABC, my arms ...

Or some such fiendish Scarpia plotting, but enough of idle, vainglorious Bolterish introspection and melancholy gloom, because today is Caterist day ...


... and it has to be said, that up against even the Bolter, the Caterists sound like mendicant twits heavily indebted to the generosity of Australian taxpayers to keep them afloat with generous subsidies and grants to institutes ....

Let us examine the infinite capacity of this bear with very little brain to reduce everything to the most crude, simple-minded binaries ...


It's a typical and revealing effort, not least that the Caterists seem to listen to RN and as usual borrow heavily from secondary sources...

And then there's the splendid irony of the Caterists - wall puncher devotees - talking of closed loops, as if the Caterists stunted capacity for chanting a mindless catechism of stale thoughts isn't a classic example of a closed loop.

And then there's the binaries, the Mercedes vs the Trabant, Walmart v. a toilet paper queue, as if everything in the United States was perfectly keen and peachy for the average working or lumpenproletariat stiff ...

Of such stuff are classic Caterist delusions and columns woven ... and he's just warming to the task ... how soon before the chanting monolith of massive mindlessness sing a song of "cultural elites"?


Because, it seems, it surely goes without saying, we're all better off in a pre-modern, colonial, Victorian industrial world ... where children such as Dickens might be sent off to make a living doing boot blacking, because where's the harm and look at the good it did him ...

Well, if the Caterists can revert to the Jacobins of the French revolution, why not deploy an equally stupid comparison with Victorian industrialism, even if the Caterists are merely parroting the inscrutable Scruton? 

Is it because parroting secondary sources is what a heavily taxpayer subsidised Caterist always does best ..?.

And so to the closer ...


Indeed, indeed. There in a nutshell is a complacent one, nicely subsidised and keen to preserve privileges and hierarchies. Fuck you Jack, I've got my subsidy, go fight for your own ...

Please allow the pond to construct an alternative boast.

"I am a good Capitalist," he boasts. "If you have a good taxpayer subsidised research centre, forget about the theory. Embrace the reality and laugh all the way to the bank."

Alternatively:

"Why is it, that after just a couple of years of the disastrous Tony Abbott, and an intellectual legacy that has, time and again, been exploded, the Caterist position remains, as it were, the default position to which dumbfuck members of the Murdochian commentariat automatically gravitate?"

Now we couldn't work in climate science in that brief quote, nor broadband, so please allow the pond to end with a Turnbullian meme ... which the pond suspects might have been filmed in the pit just outside the pond's home ...


Fuck this idle chatter about the Jacobins ... let's get agile ...

21 comments:

  1. So Bolt's reading "Enemies of Promise"? He's obviously feeling that his promise is unfulfilled and is looking for some tips.

    I've got a suggestion for him; "Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism" by Mark Twain. It's a much shorter read.

    http://www.textfiles.com/etext/AUTHORS/TWAIN/onanism.txt

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  2. In the comments, a very helpful thought from one reader:

    "caledonia1314 11h ago

    Has channel 10 thought about going up market instead of plumbing the depths? There is a potentially huge market out their in new and progressive programming for this as the other networks are biased at best and liars at worst.

    The network has tried everything else and their programme advisors have brought them to the point of bankruptcy. This inability to see or change in Australian business is serving nobody well."

    It's a salient point. As I understand it, young Mr Murdoch ran this idea. Mr Lachlan Murdoch who managed to act as an Executive Producer of sorts, while also unless I am wrong as a board member of the broadcaster too. What, as they say in the classics, could possibly go wrong?

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    Replies
    1. So, the Three MusQuitters (Lachlan, Gina and Andrew) have now all left the Channel 10 Rescue Zone - mission accomplished ?

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  3. Toss the stewed Galahs & eat the stone? Our bunch of soft-cock media "celebrities"!
    Here's how it's done, when there's something at stake.
    Poland invokes Nazi crimes in EU rule-of-law dispute.

    The constitutional crisis aside, PiS is also pressing ahead with a controversial media shake-up. In the first phase, it sacked directors of state TV and radio and began replacing them with loyalists. One appointment - Jacek Kurski, the new head of the TVP broadcaster - is a PiS hardliner who, in a 2005 election campaign, disseminated false claims that the grandfather of Donald Tusk, the now EU Council president, volunteered to join the Nazi army.

    Just what WE need - a thorough-going crackdown. Not likely to happen, though, with flannel-wavers like Frydenberg wittering away to Faine on 774 today.

    That cover for wprost.pl is a corker.

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  4. Scruton? Fuck him. Nice history of philosophy for beginners, not much chop otherwise.

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  5. Hi Dorothy,

    "Yet since the 2008-09 financial crisis, socialism is back in fashion."

    Only Cater could write a piece about the lack of self-reflection in politics and then blithely skip past the greatest global recession since WII with nary a pause.

    A bit of "black box thinking" about that financial crash and the myriad of others preceding it might bring some realisation as to its cause (hint: it wasn't socialism).

    Still there's none so blind as those who will not see.

    DiddyWrote

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    Replies
    1. Have you seen The Big Short DW? The pond would love to have a snap of the Caterists in a bubble bath with Margot Robbie as she tells the simpleton to get it and fuck off ...just for the aesthetics of course and not to remind the Caterists of their addiction to Neighbours as a form of economic analysis ...

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    2. " the Caterists ... addiction to Neighbours as a form of economic analysis ..."

      !!

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  6. Yes Scruton is very closely associated with all of the usual neo-psychotic psychopaths that rule the world, and their propaganda (stink tanks) too, some of which are either front groups or closely associated with opus dei (e.g. The "Ethics" and Public Policy Institute), and financed by all of the usual right-wing deeply psychotic families such as the Bradley's, the Coors, the Koch brothers,etc etc
    Or put in another way, anyone who is a "scholar" at the EPPI, the Heritage (lies, lies and more lies) Foundation, and the American Enterprise Institute, and once upon a time the Institute for Psychological Sciences (run by opus dei) is, by self-definition an outright fraud and crackpot.
    All of the above are also closely associated with and finance the ALEC, the purpose of which is to de-regulate and "privatize" everything.

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  7. Scruton is also sometimes featured in The American Spectator which is published by the same people who own the Regnery Press, which in my opinion is one of the principal propaganda factories for "catholic" fascism in the United States of Advertising, and by extension the entire world.
    Which is to say that one should assess any and everyone's philosophy and religion too, by the company that they keep.

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  8. It's not pining, it's passed on. This parrot is no more! It has ceased to be. It's expired and gone to meet its maker. This is a late parrot. It's a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. If you hadn't nailed it to the perch it would be pushing up the daisies. It's rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-parrot.

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    Replies
    1. then you will enjoy this:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOZV4BdL4Bo

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    2. No!

      I refuse to pursue that link as it is getting altogether too silly!

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  9. Leaving aside the question of how 'barren thinking' can be 'resilient', I'm astonished at Cater's lumping together of Sartre, Foucault (confession - he's a hero of mine), Said, Gramsci, and Zizek (sorry, can't do the accents in this font type). Excepting Said, the main thing they have in common is that they're European.
    As for the notion that they dominate almost every curriculum, faculty, university (etc. etc.) in the western world .... well, it's ridiculous, and I wish it were true. Does Cater have any idea what's happened to the humanities, in Australia at least? He'd be delighted.

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    Replies
    1. Oh dear Mish, that sounds dangerously like you expect the Caterists to make sense, when of course the primary purpose is a kind of surreal humour which could once be expected of the Marx Brothers and other vaudevillians ...

      It took hours for the Caterists to learn those names by rote, and then fling them all together higgledy-piggledy, making sure square pegs went into round holes and vice versa, and it's very awkward of you to suggest that these might be individuals with individual opinions, as opposed to a kind of blanket behemoth which has entirely ruined the entirety of western tertiary education.

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    2. I do apologise, DP, for that silly comment. Academic Mish escaped temporarily from confines and tried to actually engage with Cater's argument. She's not usually allowed out on Tuesdays. It won't happen again.

      Delete
  10. "... Foucault (confession - he's a hero of mine)..."

    Mine too ! His elegant display of the Earth's rotation via a massive pendulum, his early calculation of the speed of light and his discovery of eddy currents were all of great scientific importance.

    Umm, you did mean Leon, didn't you, and not that writer of French Academic fiction (reading Discipline and Punish indeed took great discipline and was a severe punishment).

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    Replies
    1. Cheeky, GB!
      I like both Foucaults, but especially Michel. I loved Discipline & Punish, and the Histories of Sexuality. I also really like his lectures and more informal talks. But that's my preference :).
      Discipline & Punish appealed to me personally too - when I first read it my brother had been in prison for a long time, and much of what I knew seemed to fit with Foucault's account. He was a long-time campaigner for prisoners' rights, too (Foucault that is, not my brother).

      You probably think I'm a pathetic fangirl now! I did wear a black armband when Gilles Deleuze died .....

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    2. Fangirl or groupie ? (Definitely not a gunsela :-) )

      Mais chacun a son gout, as les grenouilles would dit. I just find that I and the Frenchies occupy different universes: mine centres on empiricism and theirs on unstructured theory.

      But then, ever since Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, the French have gone their own mystic way. However, I cannot ever call them philosophers (ie who 'love knowledge'), there is basically just opinionated opinionism.

      Not that they (and in particular Foucault) get everything wrong, it's just that I'm not sure they ever get anything right either. Of course, YMMV as you have averred, so I'm happy for your experiences to be yours and for mine to be mine.

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    3. I thought philosophy was love of wisdom? Not quite the same thing as love of knowledge. But they do overlap.
      All good, though, in terms of differing views, GB. I love my French thinkers although I don't think they have all the answers. I'm sure you and I have many other things we can find common ground on :)
      (not a 'gunsela', no - nice one!)

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    4. The original Greek might be taken as 'love of wisdom' but by the time it passed through Old French and Middle English, it had become "1. the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence" at least according to The Bible of English (aka the Oxford Dictionary).

      And IMNSHO, most of what is called 'philosophy' is just opinionated opinionism (especially J-P Sartre et al :-) )

      Nonetheless, as you say, I am sure there will be things we can agree on, after our respective fashions.

      Delete

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