Tuesday, September 20, 2016

In which the pond spends quality time with the fundamentalist Hastie ...


What's remarkable about live streaming on YouTube is not that it exists - or is allowed to exist - but that it's a reminder of how dire 24/7 news services are in the United States.

The pond dropped in last night to check up on the latest mad bomber and was bombarded with misinformation; breathless, panting 'breaking news' ignorance which contained nothing breaking nor newsworthy; panellists shouting at each other; and those infamous walls of screens which sees prattling pundits stuffed into every corner of the coverage.

And then there was the relentless advertising, with a heavy emphasis on medical. There was supposed to be a mythical time when pay TV meant you paid to be free of advertising, but that's long gone, like King Arthur's court ...

Fox was the worst of it, but CNN was just as bizarre, while MSNBC was simply weird. It brought back the pond's drive across the States like a bad acid trip.

The whole experience was infantalizing, and after half an hour, the pond gave up ... only to be surprised this morning to discover the police had only arrested one perp when the coverage suggested that there was a major terrorist cell with a dozen or so active suspects at work ...

No doubt it would be the same if exposed to Sky or 24 here for any period of time, or Q and A for ten minutes ... though it has to be said that the pond feels the same after a few minutes contemplating the lizards of Oz.

They never give up ...


... whereas fully funded, fully religious, government funded chaplain activism has a place in every classroom ...

The reptiles seize on anything doing the rounds ...


And they faithfully regurgitate Q and A ...


By the time the pond had waded through this lot, it only seemed natural to cop a fundamentalist Christian lecturing the pond on the so and thus of plebiscites ...


Now the pond will admit to prejudicially thinking that Hastie is a bear with very little brain. I

n school he would have been the suck that turned up for cadets and fawned over the headmaster and done well at sports and been helped with his grades (please, here no headmistress, no headmistress here).

There are a few code words which denote this quintessential form of dumbness and none better than "Judeo-Christian", which has a limited history with many connotations regarding its original usage.

As always, the pond likes to do a Greg Hunt on these matters - you never know when you'll find walri in the south seas - and came up with this here ...

Once one recognizes that Christianity has historically engendered antisemitism, then this so-called tradition appears as dangerous Christian dogma (at least from a Jewish perspective). For Christians, the concept of a Judeo-Christian tradition comfortably suggests that Judaism progresses into Christianity—that Judaism is somehow completed in Christianity. The concept of a Judeo-Christian tradition flows from the Christian theology of supersession, whereby the Christian covenant (or Testament) with God supersedes the Jewish one. Christianity, according to this myth, reforms and replaces Judaism. The myth therefore implies, first, that Judaism needs reformation and replacement, and second, that modern Judaism remains merely as a "relic". Most importantly the myth of the Judeo-Christian tradition insidiously obscures the real and significant differences between Judaism and Christianity.

But enough of supersessionism, or even the White Australia policy, or even Hastie daring to drag in "our indigenous Australian cultures that have persevered", since one of the first charges made against Aboriginal culture was that it was inclined to polygamy and cannibalism and ...

Witiyana Marika is an Aboriginal elder and has two wives. A founding member of Yothu Yindi, Witiyana was raised in Yirrkala, a remote community in the Northern Territory. Witiyana says it is part of Aboriginal culture for men to have multiple partners in order to form larger clans and stronger families. He says the women are treated equally and says there were a lot of positives about growing up in a large extended family. (SBS here).

Dammit, enough of that Jack Thompson talk if you please, who knows or who cares how people chose to live their lives, because we have to get back to the conventional pieties of the fundamentalist Hastie ...


Now you don't have to be a fan of David Williamson's The Club to recognise that this is the most sublime form of nonsense.

The politics that are played in clubs, schools, businesses are the hardest of them all. 

The notion that they're somehow "pre-political" is so preposterous only a bear with a very limited brain would dare to use the term or peddle the glib notion ...


Now using words like "objective characteristics" are another sign of a bear with very limited brain, and if there were any doubts remaining regarding the pond's point, that woeful potted history of marriage in a par would surely remove them faster than a dose of Vanish, with bonus oxyaction ...

The pond has no idea why Hastie dragged up ancestor worship, when Greek hero cult might have got him better Greg Hunt returns, or an insight into how Romans wanted to avoid a Blair Witch situation with their returning ancestors...

How this was somehow linked to marriage and inherent ordering towards reproduction must remain a mystery, especially when Hastie might have hastily reverted to his favourite text for a little historical insight ...


Yes, the pond has run it before, but will probably run it again, much like it treasures that moment when John Howard pronounced that it was the business of the federal government ...


And as sure as the sun beams down on fundamentalism, Hastie will ignore what's gone before ...


The people's institution? So that's why there's so much divorce. Yes, the pond likes marriage so much that, like the Donald, it's tried it a number of times.

And so much for John Howard and it being something that "ought to be expressed through the elected representatives of the country."

As for Q and A ...


If only it would grind to a halt ... but it's going to be alive for month after wearying reptile month, with all sorts of rogues still lurking in the corridors ...


Say what? Yes, McCormack wrote that in a column for The Daily Advertiser in 1993. 

The disbelieving pond had to look it up and found it in Fairfax here ...

And then there are other loons roaming about in the wild ...


Well it is the Tropical North, and so very heated, which means it must be the right time for a Rowe cartoon, and more Rowe here ...





3 comments:

  1. Are we allowed to skip gobbets you've previously quoted Dot? Do they count as previous learnings?

    ReplyDelete
  2. oooh how about this from Hastie?

    "I believe in the power and resilience of culture, geography and pre-political institutions".

    But what does that gobble de gook mean to the uninitiated?

    And how is the geography of Europe relevant to this country. The imposition of white skin into this geographical space is clearly going to require some genetic manipulation when this sort of thing is available. The question is how to keep looking like the high point of evolution that is a Nordic he-man when black is the colour that nature and geography developed as appropriate for here.

    And culture? He is such a narrow minded little boy that he doesn't understand his own culture never mind the ignorance of claiming that the aborigines married in the same way as we wonderful white people did with a lifelong commitment to each other. If only he knew the sort of thing that people who don't wear a lot of clothes get up to.

    But really, do people really believe that traditional aboriginal life was like that set-up photo from the early days of our invasion in which the photographer put a man and a woman of similar age and a couple of kids of the appropriate age sitting in front of their nuclear family home?

    Where do these supposedly educated people get these outdated and discredited ideas from or maybe the question is how to they manage to hold onto them in the face of all the facts that are available now?

    Is it at the church on Sunday when instead of reading up on what Jesus said to do to your neighbour and then putting it into practice during the week, they brainstorm or riff on how to point and shout look over there! Those people are much worse than us!

    ReplyDelete

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