Saturday, January 16, 2016

The fact is, so many reptiles are slaves to intellectual fashion, and intellectually are not dissimilar to Oscar the Grouch ...

(Above: a lovely tribute and a malediction from Pope this day, and more of the truly essential Papist here, much better than the pious proverbial hope that Malware might live in interesting times).

It was hardly unexpected that the Nick Ross matter would run dead in the mainstream media.

The reptiles of Oz, much given to ABC bashing, did nothing but reprint, at length, an ABC denial.

Oh sure the story bobbed up in the Murdochian empire's attempt at a liberal feint, news.com.au, as Former ABC journalist claims the public broadcaster gagged him to not upset Malcolm Turnbull. And it turned up in a few foreign locations, as in the Daily Snail, Journalist claims ABC 'gagged' him because of his support for the National Broadband Network, and in the Huffing and Puffing Post as Ex-ABC Editor Nick Ross Claims NBN Coverage Gagged To Please Malcolm Turnbull.

But Fairfax, the key reptiles and naturally the ABC, have run dead on it.

Sure there might be a bit of an odour for a few days, of the kind you always get with roadkill, but in the end, the NBN is fucked, so move along people, nothing to see here, just worship at the helm of the chosen one, who so handsomely did the fucking ...

Why is there an irony in this?

Well as always, the pond has to look no further than prattling Polonius, trawling for trade, thanks be unto Google ...



Hmm, that just reminded the pond of how Indonesia's failure to stop the boats led to recent tragic events.

Strange no one in Murdoch la la land has made the connection to the rightness and justness of the wall puncher's policies ...

Never mind, here's the thing. Confronted with Nick Ross making all sorts of accusations about the ABC, what does prattling Polonius do?

Publish a piece which in the most arcane way attempts to link a retired ABC journalist with ZDF's coverage of recent events in Germany.

Talk about a comprehensive mix of the senile and the stupid, though that's to underestimate the capacity for paranoia and for the tying together of gossamer threads into a vast conspiracy to present an alternate world ... though if anyone infests an alternate world, it surely must be Polonius, and his prattling history lessons ...

Here's how it's done ...


There we go again. It seems that the people who work in the bunker in Surry Hills are amongst the left-liberal intelligentsia that dominates Western media.

How else to understand that the reptiles that infest the bunker work for Chairman Rupert, who controls a goodly slice of the tree killing and digital domains at work not just in Australia, but also in the USA, where Faux noise, books and a Hollywood major get added to the mix, and in the UK - hey guvnor, want a phone tapped?

If that's not dominating western media, what is? QED, the reptiles are bleeding heart members of the left-liberal intelligentsia ...

Oh go jerk a chain in the dunny out the back, as we used to do in Tamworth in the old days ...

What's particularly pleasing is the way that Polonius is inclined to other rhetorical flights of fancy ... for example ...

The fact that so many left liberals are slaves to intellectual fashion ...

That's a fact?

In whose lunchtime?

It's as stupid as saying ...

The fact that so many died in the wool BA Santamaria fellow travelling Catholics are slave to the stultifying intellectual fashions of the Vatican circa 1955... the year of the split, and we're not talking a Sonia McMahon dress here ...

Never mind, you get the drift about dressing up prejudices as "facts", when they couldn't pass down a Cologne alleyway on a dark night, even when dressed up as a "factoid" ...

But this is the way things work. If you're a moderate Islamic, you're constantly berated for failing to speak out on a 24/7 basis against barking mad fundies; if you're a "self-declared feminist", you need to go around declaring 24/7 that you deplore assaults in Cologne and Rotherham and anywhere else violence against women can be pinned on foreigners that the commentariat deplore.

Of course if you also happen to mention that being called a witch might be an issue, at that moment you can be denounced as a harpy fright bat with flapping arms and floppy thighs and a big bum and how funny and witty that is ...

But enough, because the pond must also admire the smooth segue. Note how the master slips from berating uppity irritating feminists to a mention of Kerry O'Brien, who dared to scribble a book about Keating ...

And so we move on to the history lesson ...


Of course there's an extraordinary set of statements in there, especially as the right, in Australia, and elsewhere, in the 1960s and 70s, and later, had a record of supporting extraordinarily appalling governments in Vietnam (Ngo Dinh Diem, anyone), Chile (Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte, anyone), Greece (Regime of the Colonels, anyone), Iran (the Shah, anyone), and so on and so endlessly forth ... with many of the follies later coming back to haunt the world (Cambodia, anyone).

Yes, when it comes to extraordinarily stupid statements of the 'check the mote in your own eye' kind, Polonius is up there with the best.

Ah, but contemplating all those regimes (and thinking about all the others until tedium and ennui set in) means the pond has temporarily lost its train of thought.

The pond understands that it's terribly unfair that O'Brien might think Australia is unfortunately adept at running gulags, because ... well, we are adept at running gulags with a brutality that might surprise your average manager of Soviet gulags ... but please, exactly how do ZDF and Kerry O'Brien run in parallel?

So glad you finally asked so that prattling Polonius might deliver the coup de grace...


Yes, there it is ...

The retired ABC presenter's position is not dissimilar from that of the journalists at Heute ...

So that's how the game is played ...

Not dissimilar ...

Please, add your own airy wave of the hand.

That's how to do a smear.

Not dissimilar.

You know, if you play this game right, you might be able to construct an elaborate column, with rhetorical flights of fancy, which concludes triumphantly that Sydney Institute columnist Gerard Henderson's position is not dissimilar from that of Pope Pius XII during the second world war ...

Relax, it doesn't have to mean anything. It's just the casual art of the casual smear ... and the more arcane the better.

Well the pond is always willing to tug the forelock and follow the master.

The blathering prattling Polonius's position on the Nick Ross matter is not dissimilar from that of the journalists at Fairfax, the ABC and the rest of the House of Murdoch ...

Unfair, stupid, meaningless, an irrelevant comparison, a juxtaposition of oddities, a desperate attempt to defy Sesame Street's game of One of these things is not like the others ...

Or is it?

After all, Polonius could have prattled about the ABC and its censoring ways ... yet he chose to write about a retired ABC journalist, gone from the scene.

Sinister and weird, or what?

Oh dear, such are the ways the pond wastes the increasingly valuable, rapidly diminishing days of its life ... and worse still, on a wretchedly slow, dysfunctional, frequently broken broadband service that would produce rioting in the streets in Singapore if it existed there ... (hey Optus, Singapore's broadband speed now 10th fastest in world).

And so to a Steve Bell cartoon, just for a change of pace, and more Bell here with an explanation, in case you missed the heartbreaking viral photo...




10 comments:

  1. " Gerard Henderson's position is not dissimilar from that of Pope Pius XII during the second world war ..."

    But what then are we to make of 'The Pope's Jews'
    http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/feb/09/hitlers-pope-pius-xii-holocaust

    Should we expect that secret Vatican documents will be found that exonerate Polonius ?

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  2. Only Henderson could make a whole article about what somebody didn't say.

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  3. Superb Bell, that. And the Rowe.
    Who'd give Mr Slope in Barchester Chronicles a run for his money?
    In fact, put Gerard's head on that rootin' 'roo and we may have our Renaissance Man, right there.
    Please remind me, DP, has anyone offered a portrait of Gerard for the Archibald? Shhhhh, though! Don't want to agitate the awkward cartoonist.
    Now the mind wanders, perhaps too far. Would Gerard be in favour of a freshened reprint of Mein K? Any thoughts, please hold them till I've got more into Snyder's 'Black Earth'. As for "Hitler's Pope" Snyder writes Andrei Sheptyts'kyi [metropolitan of the Greek Catholic Church] was the only Christian churchman of such high rank to act decisively against the mass murder of Jews.

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    1. It's a real "he said, she said" fest, isn't it. On the one hand Cornwell is basically convinced that "Pacelli ... primarily was interested in advancing Catholicism in general and enhancing papal power in particular."

      Now that'd be a real 'breaking news' item, wouldn't it. No other pope has ever been accused of that, has he.

      On the other hand: "Gordon Thomas has found primary sources … He has tracked down family members, original documentation and established what really was a universal perception prior to the 1960s. He's shown what the people at the time – victims, rescuers and villains – all knew: that Pius XII was a great supporter of the victims of the Holocaust."

      So, what could you or I or even the historically wily DP say about that - have any of us read the books or examined the Vatican records ? On the other hand I'm just a wee tad suspicious of exculpatory material that has taken 50 or more years to emerge from the Vatican. RomCath history is full of that kind of rubbish dating from the fraudulent Donation of Constantine - and the propaganda about Constantine's putative christening - on into the modern era. We all remember the behaviour of the Catholic Church in South America in fairly recent times, and not mentioning Spain and Portugal, at all (see Cornwell's point up top).

      And I'd be more than a little suspicious of a justification of the time taken along the lines of: "The church thinks across centuries. If there's a dispute for 50 years, so what?"

      Anyhow, I'm certainly not going to decide the issue one way or the other, I'd just eyeball good ol' Pell Mell and wonder if that is what good solid "Pope material" looks like.

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  4. Another view of the "Cologne incident" by Laurie Penny at New Statesman.
    I’ll be blunt. I think some people out there are very excited by their conception of ‘Islamic’ violence against women. It allows them to enjoy the spectacle of women being brutalised and savaged whilst convincing themselves that it’s only foreign, savage men who do these things. If hearing that makes you angry, if it makes you want to smash my bitch face in and tell me I’m a whore who deserves to be raped to death by ISIS, then congratulations, you’ve just proved my point.
    The point is that misogyny knows no colour or creed, and perhaps it’s time we did something about that. We’re used to a society where a basic level of everyday sexism, sexual violence and assault is accepted. So if you're saying this act of violence isn’t entirely different from all of those, and if you’re saying that refugees should be treated the same as European citizens, you must be saying that everyone should get a free pass to treat women like walking meatbags, right?

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    1. Thanks for sharing that.
      I guess Laurie Penny is one of those feminists that Polonius says have been completely silent on this issue? :)

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    2. Thanks for the link, UC. Opened my eyes about a few things.

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  5. Oh would that so many BA Santamaria fellow travelling Catholics had indeed died in the wool that Bob pulled over their eyes, and spared us the DLP, neither democratic nor labour.

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    1. And not much of a party either if Sen. Madigan is any guide.

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  6. "Gerard Henderson is executive director of the Sydney Institute"
    Says ail all really, he's a fucking nobody hoping for a promotion.

    And I noticed today that the abysmal Rebecca Weisser now is employed by the abysmal Rowan Dean.

    Faaark!!

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