Wednesday, November 29, 2017

In which the pond does its Devine duty ...



The pond approached this day's Devine reading with a heavy heart and much reluctance, but in the end felt compelled to do its Devine duty ...

Whenever the matter of men arises like a priapic force of nature, the Devine routinely goes barking mad ...

Even the google headers were confused ...


At the moment of course liberals of The New Yorker kind are doing their best to grope - or should that be cope? - with the reality that sexual abuse isn't a party political matter of left or right, but something that turns up across an offensively broad spectrum, as here, which ended this way ...


Well yes, though that last line should probably read "The Democratic Party should be better than that", because it surely hasn't been in the past. The pond can remember having discussions about power imbalance when slick Willy was in his prime...

But that's the engaging thing about liberals, they do hand-wringing and they acknowledge issues.

The Devine? Well there's the Devine right to howl at the moon to consider first ...


Where to start? Well clearly the Devine is an avid NY Times reader, and so rushed off here to be shocked and outraged.

Sadly, lost in the Devine's confusion is the reference to perhaps one of the most famous of ancient Greek plays and what Freud made of it, though the piece itself makes it clear enough ...

Acknowledging the brutality of male libido is not, of course, some kind of excuse. Sigmund Freud recognized the id, and knew it as “a chaos, a caldron full of seething excitations.” But the point of Freud was not that boys will be boys. Rather the opposite: The idea of the Oedipus complex contained an implicit case for the requirements of strenuous repression: If you let boys be boys, they will murder their fathers and sleep with their mothers.

Well yes, these notions have been swirling around for thousands of years, and with no solution, especially when there are Devines always hanging about handing out white feathers ...

Perhaps there's no point in expecting the Devine to take matters calmly when she's intent on jumping the shark and nuking the fridge, and somehow leaping from Harvey, slick Willy, Don Burke, the Alabama judge and lots more caught up in the recent fuss, so that she can bizarrely conclude that innocent little boys are being demonised ...



Of late the comments section for Devine pieces has shown a notable tendency not to toe the Devine line, as with this pair ...



And Swaggie was there to enjoy the irony ...



Now this would be more than enough irony for the pond's irony meter for the day.

Splash on the vitriole and move along there little doggies ...



But the pond is a glutton for punishment. Is it any wonder that some have noted a masochistic streak and suggested a role as Christ in a Filipino re-enactment of the crucifixion?

You see,  many political dinosaurs have, of late, been running around like headless chooks, tortured at the way that One Nation ruined things for that peculiar fowl, the Queensland LNP, in the recent state election ... as the count keeps winding on and on ...

Poor George of the deep north has been howling for a bank royal commission and demanding that Malware veer sharp right and become One Nation lite to stop the rot ...

It's been a total nightmare for the hapless LNP, having banked on a sure thing win, and then found themselves coming up short ...

So how does the Devine handle it? Well by flipping it over like a short order cook ...



Yes, suddenly a slim win in Queensland is the stuff of Labor nightmares, when the real Labor nightmare was the good chance that they might have gone down the gurgler ... and they still might have to wear the egg of doing a deal ...

This must be some sort of taste thing, because the pond never had much time for eggs easy over, not when there's a succulent yolk to be enjoyed ...



Dump the whole sorry mess?

How about fix the whole sorry mess, and dump Malware and the onion muncher?

But no, the Devine has hooked her wagon to the Malware horse, and by golly she's going to flog it ...



And there you have it. The nightmare for Labor turns out to have been a perfect storm for the right side of politics, with silly Matt Canavan doing his T-Rex impersonation, and the Devine sounding more like Humpty Dumpty every day ...

'There’s a nightmare for you!’ 
‘I don’t know what you mean by “nightmare,”’ Alice said. 
The Devine smiled contemptuously. ‘Of course you don’t — till I tell you. I meant “there’s a nice knock-down nightmare for the Labor party!”’ 
‘But “nightmare for the Labor party” doesn’t mean “a nice knock-down perfect storm for the right side of politics,”’ Alice objected. 
‘When I use words,’ the Devine said in rather a scornful and haughty tone, ‘they mean just what I choose them to mean — neither more nor less.’ 
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ 
‘The question is,’ said the Devine, ‘which is to be master — that’s all. And masterful men are the best masters. Let's not have any demonising of innocent little boys, you naughty, spiteful little girl, you and your pepper...’

Oh dear, the pond has over-dosed on splashes of Devine and quite gone off the rails. It was probably that meme doing the rounds that gave the pond an acid flashback to the Tamworth show, whereat the pond won many plastercast prizes without working out the CBR ...


Thank the long absent lord there's only one gobbet to go ...



What? More left wing than Ben Chifley?

More left wing that the Queenslanders calling for a Royal Commission into the banks? Well it's not nationalising them, but maybe that'll come ... as agrarian socialists do what they must do ...

Is the Devine blind to the charms of the northern cockies? Is agrarian socialism so undervalued these days?

And whatever happened to all that talk of sycophantic Bill?

The Prime Minister had had quite enough of his rotten start to the parliamentary year, and, as he unloaded on the nearest target – Opposition Leader Bill Shorten, who he portrayed as a social climber sucking up to billionaires – Malcolm Turnbull's colleagues couldn't get enough of him. "We have just heard from that great sycophant of billionaires, the Leader of the Opposition," Mr Turnbull began, responding to accusations by Mr Shorten that he was cutting family payments to pay for a $50 billion hand-out to businesses and banks. (Fairfax here).

The most left-wing government in history will somehow be run by that great sycophant of billionaires?

The pond hopes it's around to see it, and meanwhile will wrap up the Devine rant for the day with a cartoon from David Rowe, who is apparently fond of a spot of gardening, with more Rowe here ...


Will there be no end to this demonising of innocent little boys? What next, Australian cartoonists storm the United States in search of prey?



1 comment:

  1. "What? [Shorten] More left wing than Ben Chifley?"

    Umm, actually probably not even as "left wing" as Andrew Fisher. A short summary of Fisher's achievements courtesy of Wikipedia:

    Fisher returned as prime minister after the 1910 election, which saw Labor attain majority government for the first time in its history. Fisher's second government passed wide-ranging reforms – it established old-age and disability pensions, enshrined new workers' rights in legislation, established the Commonwealth Bank, oversaw the continued expansion of the Royal Australian Navy, began construction on the Trans-Australian Railway, and formally established what is now the Australian Capital Territory.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Fisher

    Mind you though, having been born in Scotland and not migrating to Australia until he was 23, Fisher would have been a 'dual citizen' but for the simple fact that there was no such thing as Australian citizenship back then. So Fisher shared with most of the inhabitants of Australia the one and only 'belonging' that they were all entitled to: being a loyal subject of the British Monarchy.

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