tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1462488453822156883.post648609644066154242..comments2024-03-29T18:03:45.643+11:00Comments on loon pond: In which the pond takes a break, but not before giving Moorice, Bella and Lloydie their due ...Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1462488453822156883.post-1481960503277667792019-03-29T17:14:27.853+11:002019-03-29T17:14:27.853+11:00I am visiting the Pond in the same way I check the...I am visiting the Pond in the same way I check the fridge when I am bored - still no snacks!<br /><br />Anywho - - - over at Crikey, Keane touches on a subject of projection when discussing Pauline Hanson. He quotes Richard Hofstadter “their enemy is on many counts the projection of the self”.<br /><br />"That’s also an apt fit for Hanson: a serial complainant about misuse of welfare by various minorities, she has leached millions off taxpayers via the electoral funding system; accusing Muslims of perpetrating a “halal scam” on Australians while the party exploited its own candidates for profit; attacking Muslims as violent and unable to fit in while Ashby and a former One Nation senator brawl in Parliament House and smear blood on the walls; now, accusing others of conspiracies and foreign influence in response to her own party’s secret conspiracy to secure foreign support"<br /><br />Well it's an apt description of almost anyone that scribbles opinion for Murdoch. Groupthink, Marxist indoctrination, identity politics and so on coming from a group that fall into lockstep behind the Master without any reference to fact, logic or ethics.<br /><br />Hofstadter's essay is here: https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/5/<br /><br />Page 5 reads like a checklist for our regular subjects.Befuddledhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16201490489888639207noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1462488453822156883.post-72329120247242407242019-03-28T12:40:14.015+11:002019-03-28T12:40:14.015+11:00Who am I writing to? Like almost everyone on the w...Who am <b>I</b> writing to? Like almost everyone on the wide, wide world of the web, myself, of course. I assume the Moorice and the Oreo are too, although getting paid for their troubles probably makes it sweeter. <br /><br />Unbelievably, some people <b>still</b> talk about the Oz in terms of "...of course, I disagree with the stance quite often, but the quality of the journalism makes it worth reading." If those people read Dorothy's take-downs from time to time, they might be dissuaded from that peverse notion. But don't take my "serious" reponses as an indication that I take Mo & O seriously. I take them exactly as seriously as it amuses me to do so in the moment - I found rummaging around corporate bio's (and finding the have a similarly short shelf-life) more amusing than reading Moorice's article which had prompted the exercise.<br /><br />I don't think it's a one size fits all though - I think the Bromancer, for instance, really believes what he writes, and thinks he's doing that "quality journalism". Dame Groan, probably, as well. Moorice, Polonius and Nattering Ned are just angry old men shouting at clouds, so who can tell? The Caterist, Dame Slap, the Oreo? I'm pretty sure for them, it's just about getting a paw in the till - "I can believe six impossible things before breakfast - as long as I get paid enough to do so". <br /><br />I'm not sure that "pity" is the right word, but I feel some minor twinge of something from people like the Oreo - her employer will fold in a few more years, leaving her jobless in a market with nothing to set her apart from thousands of other Deliveroo writers and all the academic attractiveness of Andrew Wakefield.FrankDnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1462488453822156883.post-3445669825347603022019-03-27T16:45:00.445+11:002019-03-27T16:45:00.445+11:00My distinct impression, FD, is that you are taking...My distinct impression, FD, is that you are taking Moorice and The Oreo way, way more seriously than they could ever justify. I always wonder just who they could possibly be writing to - who would ever take seriously a single word that they spout ? Other than the professional reptiles, of course.<br /><br />It'a a kinda basic question: are they preaching to the converted or do they seriously hope/believe that they are converting the preached to ? Or could they just not give a damn as long as they continue to be paid.GrueBleennoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1462488453822156883.post-75219069619568815652019-03-27T12:33:48.281+11:002019-03-27T12:33:48.281+11:00What is Moorice arguing - that businesses should a...What is Moorice arguing - that businesses should act <b>un</b>ethically? That they should exhibit no social responsibility? That social responsibility has no brand value? That approach pre-dates even the "robber barons" of the late 19th century, and takes us back to the good times when you could make toxic "food" for fun and profit, house your workers in slums to keep them on the hook, make <b>them</b> choose between adequate safety and a living wage (like paying them per ton of coal extracted and forcing them to choose whether to forego earnings by unproductive activity like erecting pit props), or simply enslave them, unashamedly. Good times, I guess...<br /><br />But I was more intrigued by the assumption behind Westacott's position, and Moorice's regurgitation of it, is that government <b><i>should</i></b> run like business. It's not argued, as such, just assumed. Of course, governments run by or like businesses have always been hugely successful (and nice to everyone). <br /><br />In the final analysis, businesses measure one thing - money - and winning votes at an AGM requires only pandering to a few big players, the mum-and-dad investors being irrelevant. While that model probably is quite appealing to Moorice, no one would mistake it for democracy. Government is <b>not</b> one-dimensional, trading off obligation and aspiration, short- and long-term advantage (national or political), social good, financial good etc. It's just a whisker more difficult to balance the competing factors to deliver what the shareholders will regard as "good" performance.<br /><br />Anyway, while Uncle Rupert may have been at the helm of NewsCorpse since Gutenberg "invented" movable type, Corporate Australia is hardly the model of stable leadership that Maurie and Jen would have you believe. I sampled 50 companies from the ASX 200 (the first 50 alphabetically, which should be pretty random). Mean tenure is distorted a bit by a few Menzies-length reigns, so I looked at median tenure as CEO - for the 50 I looked at, the median was 2.375 years. The median tenure of Prime Ministers during this wildly unstable period since 2007 was 2.25 years. <br /><br />That means the typical CEO lasts a massive six weeks longer than the typical Prime Minister has during a period described as "shambolic". On the other hand, countries that have been run "stably" by JenMo's standards? Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Iran, Sudan, Belarus...sure, stability has really helped them to be economic and social world leaders. The longest serving head of an actual relatively-uncorrupted democracy is Angela Merkel.<br /><br />I know, I know, the pond don't need no steenking facts....FrankDnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1462488453822156883.post-1682343262190388642019-03-27T11:19:55.855+11:002019-03-27T11:19:55.855+11:00As long as the heroine of that particular story kn...As long as the heroine of that particular story knows her place, and doesn't try to break free from her 'dreadful destiny', GB, it will indeed be a wonderful sermon.Mercurialnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1462488453822156883.post-31594170320570112772019-03-26T14:46:07.079+11:002019-03-26T14:46:07.079+11:00Since DP is apparently off on one of those "f...Since DP is apparently off on one of those "family thing" furloughs, I thought I might post a bit of reading matter to fill in the time. This is another extract from Eric the Pinko's immortal classic, 'The Road To Wigan Pier'.<br /><br />Eric starts with thoughts arising from his stay in the sleazy, dirty, badly run and overcrowded boarding house and old and dirty un-refrigerated tripe shop owned and operated by husband and incapacitated wife, the Brookers:<br /><br /><i>But it is no use saying that people like the Brookers are just disgusting and trying to put them out of mind. For they exist in tens and hundreds of thousands; they are one of the characteristic by-products of the modern world. You cannot disregard them if you accept the civilisation that produced them. <br /><br />For this is part at least of what industrialisation has done for us. Columbus sailed the Atlantic, the first steam engines tottered into motion, the British Squares stood firm under the French guns at Waterloo, the one-eyed scoundrels of the nineteenth century praised God and filled their pockets; and this is where it all led - to labyrinthine slums and dark back kitchens with sickly ageing people creeping round and round them like blackbeetles</i> [ie cockroaches].<i> It is a kind of duty to see and smell such places now and again, especially smell them, lest you should forget that they exist; though perhaps it is better not to stay there too long.<br /><br />The train bore me away, through the monstrous scenery of slag-heaps, chimneys, piled scrap-iron, foul canals, paths of cindery mud criss-crossed by the prints of clogs. This was march but the weather had been terribly cold and everywhere there were mounds of blackened snow. As we moved slowly through the outskirts of the town we passed row after row of little slum houses running at right angles to the embankment.<br /><br />At the back of one of the housed a young woman was kneeling on the stones , poking a stick up the leaden water-pipe which ran from the sink inside and which I suppose was blocked. I had time to see everything about her- her sacking apron, her clumsy clogs, her arms reddened by the cold. She looked up as the train passed, and I was almost near enough to catch her eye. She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen.<br /><br />It struck me then that we are mistaken when we say that 'It isn't the same for them as it would be for us,' and that people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the slums. For what I saw in her face was not the ignorant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what was happening to her - understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe</i>.<br /><br />Oh wau, what an unstinting paen of praise for "Western Civilisation". Perhaps we could get the Ramsay folks to preach a classroom sermon about the wonder of it all.GrueBleennoreply@blogger.com