Forget that waxing and buffing, get a little dirt on your hands ...

The pond likes to learn a little new history every day ...

For example, it came as a surprise to learn that, while there were plenty of beards in ancient Greece, there were absolutely no bears.

It turns out that men indulged in daily waxings, and waxing studios littered the land. And the entire point of belonging to the Greek city state was to be able to afford gym membership, since what's the point of being waxed if you're not incredibly buff and cut?

Themistocles' battle with Xerxes came about because the vile, perverted Persians were against affordable gyms, and preferred decadent Goth personal decorations to a decent workout. Oh and it turns out Australian actors are most adept at re-enacting this history, because, like the ancient Greeks, they're incredibly cut and buff.

But you say, this isn't really history.

Well it seems the pond has as much of a grasp of history as readers of Andrew Bolt's blog. The pond couldn't believe it when alerted by a correspondent to this comment:

International Jewry is hell-bent on widening censorship laws all over the Western world. Some imam in western Sydney is not going to change that. And before Bolt start crying “antisemenism!”, may I point out that even Jews like Ezra Levant and Paul Gottfried have been pointing this out. 
But why would Jewry act in this way? That question raises some of the deepest and most uncomfortable facts that are hidden in twentieth century history. And it is precisely in order to keep these facts untouched, or “beyond discussion” so to speak, that censorship is pushed so intensely. Because when you start to untangle the common held view of events in the last century the very power complex that Jewry rely upon starts to disintegrate. 
Dr No of Sydney (Reply)

Indeed. And even more bizarre, it's still up there, and available online, as bold as brass. There's not much to say, except that clearly the moderator of the blog aspires to be Joseph Goebbels, and courtesy the Bolter's blog, the HUN is well on the way to being a modern Der Stürmer. No wonder they say 18C is useless ...

And when you roam through the rest of the cesspit, it's astonishing what else is on view that's worthy of a posting on Stormfront.

International Jewish conspiracies, international Islamic conspiracies, hapless persecuted white minorities ... what else you got?

But where does this paranoid fear and loathing come from?

Okay, the Godwin's Law swear jar is filling nicely, and soon enough the pond will be able to afford a post graduate degree course at the David Dukes' university. Here's hoping they can afford the Bolter as a senior professor ...

It's important to learn the mental toughness of a skinhead neo-Nazi, or a super buff ancient Greek, because at some point the hardened commentariat warrior will leave the HUN cesspit and stumble off to the reptiles at the lizard Oz for some light reading. 

Like this:

What is there to say about the ineffable stupidity of Gary Johns? Except to say that his trolling, click-baiting ways are like little boys in Lewis Carroll poems:

Speak roughly to your little Johns 
And beat him when he scribbles and he sneezes 
He only does it to annoy 
Because he knows it teases. 
I speak severely to my little Johns 
I beat him when he scribbles and he sneezes 
For he can thoroughly enjoy 
The pepper when he pleases

You see, the point about inner-city elites is that they're ridiculously, ostentatiously, sickeningly wealthy and 'leet (and probably buff and cut, what with all the waxing, and the gym work).

Johns seems to think they'd be better off weeding corn. So much for the clever country, bring on that NBN made of sealing wax and copper ...

You can read Ignore inner-city prattle, islander work scheme is a win-win, if you care to avoid the paywall, but only if you want to confirm that Gary Johns is indeed a bubble-headed booby with many significant chips on his shoulder.

Johns opens up this way:

Blackbirding is back in Bundaberg and elsewhere in regional Australia. Where Australians do not want to work in “menial” jobs in horticulture, rural producers have had to look elsewhere for a workforce. Backpackers have been a standby, but producers wanted a more reliable source of labour. That source is Pacific Islanders, just as it was 150 years ago in the infamous blackbirding era. 
Bundaberg region, for example, has a Samoan population of about 150, with more than 50 in Childers and another 15 scheduled to arrive in the near future.

Blackbirding is back in Bundaberg and elsewhere in regional Australia?

Yes, it's history as refracted though Gary Johns doing Frank Miller. And he doesn't even look buff and cut.

Blackbirding was the coercion of people through trickery and kidnapping, often of an ugly kind, to gain a form of slave labour (you can do a Greg Hunt on the word here).

So Johns, in a stupid and idle way, casually defames the Australian government and government officials as blackbirders:

They are part of the commonwealth government’s Seasonal Worker Program, established by the Labor government. At least it got one thing right. The scheme offers employers in the horticulture industry the ability to employ workers from eight selected Pacific Island countries and East Timor when they cannot find enough local labour to satisfy seasonal demand.

Oh wait, it's actually a voluntary scheme, there's no coercion or force used, and so the use of the word "blackbirding" is gibberish, unless you happen to be a devotee of Humpty Dumpty.

(Above: a modern Queensland blackbirder, c. 2014. Read Frank Miller if in doubt)

And wouldn't you know it, Johns then spends the rest of his column explaining how the ancient art of blackbirding wasn't so bad at all. What next? Johns explaining how the forced shipment of blacks to the United States saw them end up in the promised land, so they should stop their whinging and whining?

Johns makes any number of errors, suggesting that it was the vapid intelligentsia and rent-seekers that bewailed the notion of blackbirding, thereby ignoring the actual descendants of those who'd been black-birded and thought it a bit rich.

And so he comes to his conclusion:

Australians are not racist. The inner-city mob and their thin-skinned Aboriginal moral shields should take a look out bush sometime and move to a job.

Could Johns sound more fatuously stupid if he tried harder and boned up on Frank Miller?

Probably not. But here's a suggestion. Some Australians are racist, and some aren't. Live with it. And instead of carrying on like a pork chop, why not give up pissing in the wind in the lizard Oz, and piss off to do some hard yakka in the bush? At least it'll save people the onerous task of getting around the paywall to gaze with bewildered fascination at the reptiles in the zoo ...

But wait, there's more:

Yeay, it's Caterist day, and if the Labor party wanted any indication why any attempt to label it the "progressive" party of choice - whatever that stupid word might mean - then it flew out the window with the Caterists celebrating honest Joe Bullock.

Yes there it is, in that header. They imagine that they're aspiring to being called the "progressive" party:

And the funny thing? How did Mark Bishop establish his case for "progressive" in the story here? 

Why by sounding more Tony Abbott than Tony Abbott on any number of policy issues ...

Is there something in the waxing and the buffing that's harmful to the mind?

Anyway, if you can be bothered to give a flying fuck, and get behind the paywall to read Caterist thought in action, you'll be disappointed at the enormously predictable outpouring that constitutes a Caterist diatribe.

But you knew that already, and you only bothered to read Embracing Bullock worth cost because you like the taste of the lash, and the sight of the blood spattering on the lens in 3D (can't they control blood when doing CGIs?)

Of course if you happen to be a Labor party apparatchik and follow the advice of a Caterist, you'd be following a fool determined to do an Icarus ... it's that wax problem all over again ...

Caterists have only a notional idea of history. Here's how it's done:

What we are witnessing in Western Australia is the grotesque end game in a decades-long battle for control of the ALP. On one side are members who have dirt under their fingernails, on the other those who do not. 
It is a battle between the workers and the intellectuals that began in the early 1960s and flared under Gough Whitlam, a prime minister who Bullock helped vote out of office in 1975.

Yes, it's another pale - looking at Cater, it's tempting to say effete - keyboard pounding city-based ponce, obsessed with people who have dirt under their fingernails, seemingly oblivious to the way Solvol fixed this problem decades ago:

Hmm, that child looks vaguely demonic.

So much for the clever country, so much for the NBN, made of sealing wax and cabbages and pigs with copper wings ...

Never mind, what's so completely bizarre is to see the Caterists argue strongly for the ALP to remain captive to crazed conservative unionists. Anything, anything at all to keep the party out of the hands of actual "progressives".

How bizarre does it get? As bizarre as Frank Miller's view of Greek history:

Once, Labor could accommodate working-class conservatives such as Bullock. Indeed, one of them, Arthur Calwell, used to be in charge of the party. 
In a mournful autobiography written late in life, Calwell drew attention to a new faction in the Labor Party comprising “aggres­sive, assertive, philosophical, way-out people” intent on building “an agnostic, hedonistic ­society based on Freudian ­philosophy”. 
“These people seek to challenge all accepted views and standards that govern our society,” Calwell said. They were “philosophical anarchists” and there were more of them in the Labor Party than any other party. He noted wryly: “The newspaper, radio and television media have been the object of similar penetration.” 
It was encouraging to see Labor’s Tanya Plibersek and ­Anthony Albanese extend an olive branch to Bullock last week, even though his views would be anathema to their inner-city Sydney constituencies. It is important, not just to maintain Labor’s voting bloc in the Senate but also to help prevent the party sinking under the weight of its own irrelevance. 
If the cost of keeping Bullock and those of a similar persuasion in the tent is an exodus of votes to the Greens, as occurred in Western Australia at the weekend, it is the price the party has to pay.

You can see why the reptiles would like this thinking.

Even at the height of the 1961 recession, and despite the bizarre sight of Earle Page contesting a seat and dying without even knowing he'd lost, Calwell could only get to within a couple of seats of Ming the merciless (election result here).

It's an exceptionally cunning ploy by the reptiles.

Berate the ALP for being an out of touch bunch of servile pollies dominated by unelected faceless unionists, while at the same time gravely explaining how the party should kow tow, bow down to and be run and represented by said faceless unionists:

That is a pity since, while the discussion may not suit Labor’s prevailing mood, Bullock deliv­ered a cogent analysis of why the party is failing to win elections. 
“Labor should be interested in regular people,” Bullock said. “When the Labor Party says to voters, ‘Trust us, we have your interests at heart,’ the voters don’t trust them. “And the voters are right. The Labor Party hasn’t demonstrated that they are capable of being trusted to look after the interests of working people and their families. When they do, they will win and win and win and win and win, and the other side will never get a look-in.” 
Bullock is a committed Anglican with Calvinist instincts who represents Labor’s socially conservative tradition. Naturally, therefore, he was treated with derision by the bien-pensant commentators on ABC1’s Insiders on Sunday, host Barrie Cassidy urging Labor leader Bill Shorten to change preselection procedures in Western Australia. 
Yet Bullock was preselected fair and square with 109 state executive votes to Pratt’s 61. Since the Left is dominant in WA’s state executive, it was unusual for a member of the Right to snare the top spot, but Bullock was assisted by a blue-collar putsch, led by the Maritime Union of Australia, to regain control of the party on behalf of workers. 
When the union block split, Bullock won the support of United Voice and romped home. 
In a warning shot to Shorten as he tries to reform the party, Bullock insists that without the union movement the ALP is finished. “It provides significant ­financial resources and manpower to the Labor Party. But, more importantly than that, ballast,” he said. Branch-based members, the winners from Kevin Rudd’s leadership election reform, tend to be activists. 
In other words, said Bullock, they were “mad”.

Yes, in the topsy turvy world of the Caterists, anything is better - even unionists leading beer hall putsches - than those deviant perverted modernists with their trendy jibber jabber ...

So how does the Caterist wrap it up?

Shorten and Labor must hold their nerve. Bullock’s brand of conservatism has greater support than sophisticated columnists imagine. 
If the party is not big enough for Bullock, it will struggle to govern in its own right.

Say what? This would suggest that Nick Cater fancies himself as an unsophisticated columnist ...

Why he might even be drop kick and a boofhead ... eager to get a little dirt on his hands ...

Well amen to that ... and how grand to see that he's doing his bit to ensure that the old and ancient guard, heirs to Artie Calwell, keep on ruling the ALP for benefit of old fashioned unions and hard men trade unionists ...

Take it away, David Rowe, we need some bullshit on the dirt floor, because there's gonna be a fiddler and a dance on Sateerdee night ... (and more Rowe here)

Yes, the pond actually had an uncle whose hut actually had a floor made of dirt and dung:

The old hands told me how to build a clean dirt floor: 
Beat it hard with spades and tread of feet, 
Then soak with green cow dung and sweep again. 
Now sprinkle water, fire, and clear creek sand, 
And sometimes strew with cool green leaves; 
Sprinkle and sweep it twice a day 
Until, clean and sweet and hard, 
It gleams, black, polished like a board. (here, in pdf form, in a handy guide to getting dirt on your hands, feet, eyes and everywhere else)

It helps explain why the pond would prefer an NBN made of fibre, and why all this bullshit about dirt under the fingernails might die a stupid, unsophisticated death.

Nope, forget all that waxing and buffing, we gotta get a little bullshit in the mind, on the floor and under the fingernails.

How lucky we are that the reptiles at the lizard Oz supply a daily dose.

Warning, rough source, forced ad, but a song dedicated to blackbirders, unions, Arthur Calwell, Tamworth, and Caterists around the land. Better order a pallet of Solvol, and stop that jibber jabber about a clever smart country with an NBN made of fibre!