In which the pond broods on Godwin's Law and the pathetic tragic figure that once was known as Kim Williams ...

(Above: photo by Dorothy. Spread it where ever Godwin's Law is admired and ignored).


Now the pond was out and about yesterday, on the town so to speak, and some important business arose from it, so feel free to play amongst or with yourselves for a moment ...

You see the pond came across the Decaux street sign - featured above - on Macquarie street in Sydney, and just wanted to make sure that anybody googling any of these combinations of words might some day be lured to that picture. Here we go:

Daily Telegraph Australia ... Daily Terror Sydney ... Daily Telegraph not the UK though it's just as bad ... psychotic ... psychosis ... overblown ... hysterical ... neurotic ... massive over-reaction ... Murdochian madmen ... mad as a cut snake ... layabout journalist tossers ... abnormal ... sick in the mind ... batty ... raving ... bizarre ... cracked ... crazed ... cuckoo ... daft ... over-the-top ... paranoid ... mental ... rabid ... preposterous ... weird ... unhinged ... derailed ... fatuous ... demented ... non compos mentis ... nuts ... certifiable ... off their rockers ... over the edge ...  unbalanced ... unhinged ... of unsound mind ... ... did we mention paranoid ... maniacal ... frenzied ... fearful ... irrational irresponsible ... loony ... Daily Telegraph Australia ... Daily Terror Sydney ...

Oh wait, we've already got loony covered, because here you are on loon pond.

But that should do it. Anyone googling "weird paranoid Murdoch hacks" will hopefully find this fine streetscape example.

Alerted by a correspondent, the pond was going to start the day's proceedings, by noting how a wretched Stephen Conroy had failed to appease his party's alleged base by refusing to toss a measly $1.4 million at community radio, while busy throwing a permanent reduction in license fees at the big commercial TV broadcasters.

The pond once regularly appeared on community radio -  they paid nothing, and they certainly got an equivalent value from the pond's performances - but if it was an inglorious career, the same can't be said for the many others who got their start and kicked on from community radio.

Community radio caters for the different, the alternative, the niche and the other, and provides useful content. Put it this way ... between any community radio program ever and listening to Alan Jones, there's only one choice and it isn't Alan Jones.

It's good value for diddly squat cost, and to dump all the cost of the enforced digital upgrade on sponsors and subscribers is mealy-mouthed and mean.

When in Melbourne, the pond always listens to RRR - not to do so might see the pond denied entry to Brunswick and Smith streets - and services that promote rural communities or read books and newspapers for the blind offer niche programming that the big end of town couldn't give a stuff about.

Yet here's Conroy dissing the weak, driving them further into greenie land.

Yet here also is the Daily Terror doing over Conroy in a way that's certifiably insane.

The pond is torn.

Conroy - especially with his great big filter for everything - was a fool, but does the Daily Terror have the first clue how their over-the-top reaction makes them seem beyond the valley of the fruitloop?

And they've posted their lunacy all over town.

What could possibly be said about Conroy, after it's been alleged he's joined Stalin, Mao, Kim and Co?

What's even worse, Conroy showed a sense of humour about it:

“Well I’ve said before that people shouldn’t buy The Daily Telegraph for its political commentary. They should buy it for the sports pages. And I think The Daily Telegraph proves again why that remains a truism.” (AM, Stephen Conroy defends media change package).

Do the hacks inside paranoid Murdoch ever get out and read an alternative view of what they did? You know, the castle where the inmates run the asylum at the behest of an aging despot and drop paranoid advertising dung in the street?

Now mUmBRELLA contended that it was a borrowed campaign (These people believe in controlling the news cycle ... but where'd they get the idea from?)

But here's the thing. This anti-Leveson UK  press campaign doesn't feature Leveson or any British politician. It isn't personalised, it doesn't play the man, it plays the ball, albeit in a totally over the top way ...

The Daily Terror is a boofhead rugby league culture.

It plays the man to get the ball.

The rag's idea is to knock the head off the man, maybe with a coathanger or a right cross to the jaw, then pick up the ball and run with it. Because who wants a referee, when all the rag wants to do is to tell the referee to fuck off ...

What was even more shocking was that mUmBRELLA claimed that the Terror ad wasn't a breach of Godwin's Law, because they left Hitler out of the ad.

A link to the wiki here is provided, but long ago there were codicils and commentaries that made plain that referencing mass murderers like Mao and Stalin were covered by the law:

Occasionally Stalin is referenced, often by people who are aware of Godwin's Law but want to convey a similar message; in this case, this might slip into the Commie Nazis trope. Some people will be topical and use Osama bin Laden or slavery (especially America's brand of it) as the canonical ultimate evil. However, any of these can also be seen to have violated Godwin's Law, since the point remains: comparing your argument to a clear and non-debatable atrocity is simply bad debating, since it implies that the opposition has no redeeming qualities whatsoever, and is obviously insensitive to real-life victims and their descendants. (Godwin's Law)

Naturally Crikey was all over it, with Bernard Keane pointing out the shame of Kim Williams, who as head of News locally is directly responsible for the Daily Terror. The buck stops with him, which is to say that the buck doesn't stop at all:

Since he’s taken the big chair at News Limited, however, it’s almost as if the spirit of Harto has possessed Williams, turning him into a caricature of a News Corporation exec. Thus have we lost one of Australian media’s best and brightest. 
 In his hysterical reaction to the rather tame, and possibly unpassable, media reform package released by Communications Minister Stephen Conroy yesterday, Williams has wrecked whatever remaining credibility he had on the issue of media regulation.
(The Stalinist nightmare of the media regulating itself)

Tame and possibly unpassable, and yet Williams has allowed the Terror off its leash. Why they lock up people who let cross bull terriers roam the streets.

There were other Crikey stories, most of which referenced the bizarre Daily Terror campaign, and as always First Dog was the dog on the spot! (Remember you only get your First Dog fix on the day by being a subscriber who goes here):

First Dog in his defiant breach of Godwin's Law - inspired of course by the Daily Terror - portraying Andrew Bolt as a Gauleiter angry about free speech and Gina Rinehart taking a Fairfax journalist to the courts to reveal her sources - was referencing another Crikey story, Fairfax journos fire up over Rinehart but Bolt stays silent.

Apparently some journos expect the Bolter to fire up over Rinehart's actions:

McKenzie (The Age's Nick McKenzie) is calling on rival publications and free speech advocates such as Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt, who was found guilty of racial vilification in 2011, to support Ferguson publicly. “Andrew Bolt has learnt first-hand what it’s like to have one’s journalism restricted by a court and how time-consuming it can be. There is not a journalist in the country who wouldn’t be concerned about this,” he said. 
 Fairfax’s national business editor Mark Hawthorne queried on Twitter why Bolt, a prolific blogger, has kept silent on the issue. Bolt hosts a Sunday program on Channel Ten — Rinehart, who is known to be a fan of his work, is a major shareholder of the network.

As if the Bolter was a man of principle, who believed in what he said and wrote, as opposed to a self-serving, self-seeking hack.

But, but, but, Billy goat how would the dear boy stay in with Gina and keep his show on Ten, and be able at night to sob into a nicely dry red, with plum and tobacco overtones, and a rich blackberry tang, while listening to Puccini's Tosca and mourning the treachery and betrayal that leads to tragedy?

Speaking of which, one of the reasons the pond was out and about in town was to attend Joyce Yang's playing of Tchaikovsky's piano concerto no. 1 in B flat minor, opus 23.

Now the Tchaik is a very old warhorse, but it was also on the very first LP the pond ever purchased with its own pocket money (and that in a house where both parents were tone deaf and completely uninterested in music).

Yang gave it a right old pounding, but without the florid Lang Lang touches that were trotted out the last time we saw it done at the Opera House.

It turned out that there was a very good reason that the SSO had previously never programmed another Tchaik work, Fatum (or Fate) and Dvorak's Othello overture never did much for the pond, but the band bunged on a full-throated do with Respighi's Feste romane (sssh, don't mention Mussolini) - though with the greatest respect, could the pond propose to Canadian Charles Olivieri-Munroe, an enthusiastic and expressive conductor, that the age of Glenn Gould is over ...

It was a jolly night of music-making, but by golly it got off to a bad start as the pond came across this on Circular Quay:

What's amazing is that people wonder why there are people out there who think wearing a T-shirt labelling Julia Gillard a psychotic bitch is the order of the day, and someone's idea of conducting a political debate.

Look at the psychotic media they read ... and the visual dung they spread in the streets.

Kim Williams? Didn't he once like classical music? And now he works for the evil empire? There must be something wrong with classical music.

Sad to say, anyone who googles Joyce Yang and crazed Murdoch media harlot Kim Williams might come across this page and its crazy images.

Thank the absent lord there's not that much chance of it happening, not for the sake of Kim Williams, who long ago sold his soul, and who thereby does honest harlots a profound disservice, but for Joyce Yang, who hails from SouthKorea and knows what it means to have a genuinely psychopathic leadership living next door ...