(Above: click to enlarge).Every day the pond is charmed by the sight of people deep in the art of embracing contradiction.
It's an essential skill. This morning for example Tony Abbott studiously explained that the Andrew Bolt matter was political oppression of a champion of free speech (and never mind that he got his facts wrong), while the Facebook page abusing aboriginal people with "controversial humour" was merely an issue of problems with social media which will be sorted by the opposition. (his weasel way with words will turn up here in due course, or sit in the archives for 09/08/2012)
And then there's the sight of Facebook itself, ostensibly fervent champions of free speech, ducking and weaving and dodging and refusing to exercise its right to free speech by refusing to respond or to say anything about the page, before it was eventually taken down.
Of course United States' citizens are accustomed to the sight of Obama dressed up as a witch-doctor or chomping on water-melon as part of mainstream political discourse and so don't have a clue about a page they might well have found unexceptional.
It's just sending up blacks? But that's a daily sport here...
The United States rarely has a clue, except perhaps when a crazed gun man runs amok in a Sikh temple.
Then there was the bizarre sight of Paul Sheehan falling into a frothing, foaming, fainting frenzy at the prospect of listening to Sir David Attenborough, as outlined in Lining up for some quality time with king of the jungle.
Sheehan routinely keeps the company of climate denialists, is big on fracking the entire countryside, and rarely speaks of the wonders of the bush. It seems you have to be in the jungle:
What we hold most precious in our world?
Here's hoping Attenborough spends some time contemplating climate science, and repeating the things he said in Frozen Planet, which got him charged with sensationalism, as you can read in David Attenborough is accused of climate change sensationalism by Lord Lawson.
Attenborough denied the charge in Frozen Planet was not alarmist about climate change, but carried on about the polar bears - routinely an item of fun in skeptics' heaven - in his personal plea about global warming here:
Polar animals are already reacting to the changes. We saw the evidence for ourselves when we accompanied a Norwegian team from the University of Svalbard who were making their annual check on the health of polar bears. The bears' condition has been steadily deteriorating as the ice, which they need when hunting seals, diminishes. And cubs born to underweight mothers are much less likely to survive their first year.
In a classic case of not being able to hear, and focussing on the medium rather than the message, Sheehan rabbits on a number of times about Attenborough's beguiling voice. Will Sheehan pay any more attention if Attenborough covers climate change in the flesh?
The loss of sea ice in the north affects not just polar bears but the whole planet. The frozen Arctic Ocean acts as a huge reflector, bouncing 85 per cent of the sun's heat back into space. This keeps the polar regions cool and moderates the whole of the earth's climate. But when the ice vanishes, the dark sea water that replaces it absorbs the sun's energy, so its temperature rises. This is why the Arctic - a region the size of North America - is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet. As a consequence, increasing amounts of meltwater are now flowing into the polar sea. This could eventually disrupt the flow of ocean currents around the planet that transfer heat around the Earth and are critical in maintaining the climates we've known for centuries. The implications of that are hard to overstate.
In a classic case of not being able to hear, and focussing on the medium rather than the message, Sheehan rabbits on a number of times about Attenborough's beguiling voice. Will Sheehan pay any more attention if Attenborough covers climate change in the flesh?
The loss of sea ice in the north affects not just polar bears but the whole planet. The frozen Arctic Ocean acts as a huge reflector, bouncing 85 per cent of the sun's heat back into space. This keeps the polar regions cool and moderates the whole of the earth's climate. But when the ice vanishes, the dark sea water that replaces it absorbs the sun's energy, so its temperature rises. This is why the Arctic - a region the size of North America - is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet. As a consequence, increasing amounts of meltwater are now flowing into the polar sea. This could eventually disrupt the flow of ocean currents around the planet that transfer heat around the Earth and are critical in maintaining the climates we've known for centuries. The implications of that are hard to overstate.
The things we hold precious! Does that include the planet?
Well, there's your post-modern ironic Thursday cackle. (You don't really need a link to Sheehan on climate science do you? Do you really want to mix the cackle with post-modern nausea?)
It's not so much the love of climate science denialism that Sheehan exudes, it's his Whitman-esque capacity to embrace his contradictions.
Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes. (thanks Walt, but should you feed Sheehan's megalomania?)
Then there was a splendid piece about the "emperor has no clothes" or more to the point, John Coates donning the garb of see-through hypocrisy, to be found in Richard Hinds' Hard to win medals when turn-Coates takes breath away:
...at London 2012, there is unlikely to be a moment more utterly gobsmacking than the Australian Olympic Committee president John Coates declaring the key to an improved performance by Australia was to make sport compulsory in school, and to thus increase participation rates.
What made Coates's comment so jaw-dropping was it involved a backflip that, on the gymnastics mat, would have scored a perfect 10. This was the same John Coates whose organisation seemingly exercised every political muscle in its successful attempt to bury the findings of the Crawford Report into government sports funding - a report that, among many sensible suggestions, strongly advocated the restoration of physical education in schools.
That's just the start of Price's demolition of the AOC and Coates. Let there be more of it. The pond could read a piece a day on the stench that emanates from AOC poobahs and the Olympics ...
What made Coates's comment so jaw-dropping was it involved a backflip that, on the gymnastics mat, would have scored a perfect 10. This was the same John Coates whose organisation seemingly exercised every political muscle in its successful attempt to bury the findings of the Crawford Report into government sports funding - a report that, among many sensible suggestions, strongly advocated the restoration of physical education in schools.
That's just the start of Price's demolition of the AOC and Coates. Let there be more of it. The pond could read a piece a day on the stench that emanates from AOC poobahs and the Olympics ...
What else? Well there was the grand sight of News Corp posting a hefty loss on its newspaper business:
News Corp, billionaire Rupert Murdoch’s media company, reported a $1.46 billion fourth-quarter loss after writing down the value of Australian newspapers and other parts of its global publishing empire...
Advertising falls at Australian and UK newspapers continued hit profitability in publishing - the core of the company's publishing spin-off.
A billion plus loss for the billionaire's company, but naturally The Australian was more concerned with a minor blow-out in the cost of the NBN, and the report in The Australian, News Corp makes Q4 loss on publishing writedown (not paywall affected at time of writing) couldn't bring itself to mention newspapers by name. Somehow it was "publishing businesses":
News Corp reported a $US1.55 billion ($1.46 billion) loss for its fiscal fourth quarter on a multibillion-dollar writedown, primarily of its publishing businesses, most significantly those in Australia.
"Publishing businesses"! In Australia! No mention either of the bleeding obvious implication:
Chief operating officer Chase Carey suggested there were substantial costs still to be cut out of the Australian business, saying this would happen in coming months after the overhaul of management in the first half of 2012.
Yep, there'll be more pain for the mob that spend the first half of 2012 gloating at Fairfax's misfortune ...
And all this before you even get down to a genuinely weird Australian eccentric like Greg Sheridan scribbling his heart out in Three things I hate about Uncle Sam (behind the paywall, and aren't you lucky you know how to google, or better still, couldn't be fucked googling):
It would be difficult anywhere in the world to find a newspaper columnist who loves America more than your correspondent does. From John Wayne to Diet Coke, from the Cosby family to Ronald Reagan, from the Mars probe Curiosity to Martin Luther King, from Abraham Lincoln to I Love Lucy to iPads and the internet, I love it all.
Uh huh. Wayne, diet Coke, Lucy (perhaps Sheridan identifies with gormless Desi Arnaz).
No mention of Colbert, Stewart or Seinfeld, but being Sheridan, there's no expectation of taste.
We get the idea, he just loves America, and sings his love like a Berstein-Sondheim song, but to hit you with a spoiler, the three things about the US that upsets Sheridan are its gun culture, its health system and litigation culture, and finally "the new American vulgarity."
Say what? Could it be that Sheridan is actually going to slag off the dire impact of Fox, and the right wing radio shock jocks, run rampant and out of control these past few years, coarsening the debate and cultivating a kind of Tea Party frenzy of stupidity, fear and loathing?
... finally there is the new American vulgarity. Most Americans are not vulgar. Most are neighbourly, kindly, decent. Many are church-going, positively courtly people. But in recent years a toxic combination has taken hold of public culture.
Uh huh. It's sounding good for creationist-loving, rabid, gay-bashing Texans.
This is a left liberal desire to shock bourgeois sensibilities, an ideological determination that there be no standards of restraint in public morality and a commercialised crassness in popular working-class culture that produces hybrid monstrosities such as Jerry Springer, Jersey Shore and the wildest excesses of daytime TV's parade of domestic dysfunction. It coarsens American life. So now the US has been warned. Get cracking, Fix it up.
It's a left liberal desire to shock bourgeois sensibilities? It's Springer and Jersey Shore, and not the whole studio of comedians that populates Fox (and not just at The Simpsons). It's got nothing to do with the way the Republican party and its affiliates have left the centre and trotted off into a crazed la la land of fear, loathing and hatred for mild-mannered liberals?
The most astonishing thing? People pay to subscribe to The Australian expecting to get informed comment. And instead they're served up Greg Sheridan.
If that doesn't give you a post-modern ironic laugh on a Thursday, what will?
Cue Noel Coward, sing us a song:
... I like America,
I have traveled far
From Northumberland to Zanzibar
And I find America-okay.
I've roamed the Spanish Main
Eaten sugar-cane
But I never tasted cellophane
Till I struck the U.S.A.
All delegates
From Southern States
Are nervy and distraught.
In New Orleans
The wrought-iron screens
Are dreadfully overwrought.
Beneath each tree
In Tennessee
Erotic books are read.
And when alligators thud
Through the Mississippi mud
Sex rears its ugly head.
But-I like America,
Every scrap of it,
All the sentimental crap of it
And come what may
Give me a holiday
In the good old U.S.A. (you can find the rest at various lyrics sites)
I have traveled far
From Northumberland to Zanzibar
And I find America-okay.
I've roamed the Spanish Main
Eaten sugar-cane
But I never tasted cellophane
Till I struck the U.S.A.
All delegates
From Southern States
Are nervy and distraught.
In New Orleans
The wrought-iron screens
Are dreadfully overwrought.
Beneath each tree
In Tennessee
Erotic books are read.
And when alligators thud
Through the Mississippi mud
Sex rears its ugly head.
But-I like America,
Every scrap of it,
All the sentimental crap of it
And come what may
Give me a holiday
In the good old U.S.A. (you can find the rest at various lyrics sites)
And speaking of American vulgarity, here's Colbert doing over Republican Steve King.
Now you might think Colbert's part of a left liberal conspiracy to inspire a new vulgarity in the States, but at least he's not as fucked in the head as King and Greg Sheridan and Fox:
Unable to easily find a link and the details are hazy but I remember a Greg Sheridan article in the Weekend Australian around the mid-1980s wherein he extolled the virtues of Rugby League as character building, working class and Catholic as opposed to effete elitist Union and pointless AFL. So character building and worthwhile in fact, that it should be compulsory in schools nationally.
ReplyDeleteTwo classics of the Sheridan oeuvre which mention rugby league are How I lost faith in multiculturalism
ReplyDeletehttp://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/how-i-lost-faith-in-multiculturalism/story-fn59niix-1226031793805
and
Equality for women in war is lunacy
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/equality-for-women-in-war-is-lunacy/story-e6frg76f-1225775215427
The first one achieved the distinction of being sent to the Joint Standing Committee on Migration with this note attached:
I support the comments in the media article below and the attachment that confirm that muslims in Australia who place their beliefs and evidenced iniquitous and degenerate culture above OUR Australian Statute Rule of Law can NEVER be tolerant law abiding Australians and therefore by consequence are a threat to ALL other law abiding Australians and the Australian nation with the values bequeathed us by the ANZACs of Kokoda for our grandchildren and their grandchildren.
From the self evidenced bigotry exposed by the Australian media, these criminals should be evicted from Australia on the basis that those who have applied for Australian citizenship and or residency affirmed and or swore an oath that they would comply with Australian Statute Law knowing that they were deliberately committing statute criminal perjury by making a false declaration. (it's easy to google this)
That's only a little less articulate and coherent than the Sheridan piece that inspired it.
The second contained a poignant cry of man love for Canterbury Bulldogs:
The wilder shores of feminism, which seek to eradicate all differences between men and women, have never been inhabited by normal people. Let me give you an example. I follow rugby league, physically the most demanding of sports. In my team, the Canterbury Bulldogs, a couple of weeks ago the halfback Brett Kimmorley suffered a depressed fracture of the cheekbone. He has multiple fractures and a titanium plate, held in by six bolts, has been inserted into his face. In 10 days or so Kimmorley will play for the Bulldogs, probably against Parramatta, and may tackle the human wrecking ball Fuifui Moimoi.
Part of my admiration for Kimmorley is admiration for his physical courage. Other sports require courage too, but rugby league requires it in this stark and brutal way. I do not want to see women playing in the National Rugby League. No doubt you could find some single Amazonian woman, out of 11 million Australian women, who could do it with no greater risk of injury than the blokes. But why would you? What purpose would it serve? It would be madness. Yet the SAS, infantry rifle companies and the tank squadron, because they deal in instant life and death at close quarters, are infinitely more demanding than rugby league.
The pond makes no point about Sheridan being a bearded scrawny type, constantly anxious about having sand kicked in his face on the beach by Islamics (or on railway stations or at cricket matches). Nor his love of Israel, a country which somehow manages the lunacy of having women in combat roles.
Instead it's marvellous to see a man so full of contradictions given a keyboard.
Presumably Sheridan stopped supporting the Bulldogs once Hazem El Masri started to score all their points and the Israeli army once it allowed women to fight. Who knows, all the pond knows is that thugby league followers are frequently more addle-brained than the professional footballers they admire ...
It can't be knocks to the head, so perhaps it's the meat pies or the sausage rolls.
Could be the tomato sauce. Rugby League, Saviour of Mankind and I do mean Man. And how generous of Uncle Roop to provide a sheltered workshop for all these folks suffering under such a weight of delusion.
DeleteForeign Correspondent this week has a story about some Viet vets doing some good works of reconciliation. One of them told how he was present after action when an interpreter (presumably ARVN) tired of extracting information from a wounded villager, so shot him. No-one was able to object to this war-crime, and our ex-soldier pinpoints that incident as the beginning of decades of suffering with PTSD.
ReplyDeleteOur Sheridans would heartily deplore that kind of robustness, since it's pretty certain a decent bout of torture (Sorry, I mean, water-boarding) would have got something out of the captive.
I'd like to hear Brig Greg on what he knows about the preferred "interrogation" techniques being deployed by the Indian security & military.