In which the pond spends some quality time with that Polonius dude, still campaigning for Team Australia ...

What better way to start off a weekend than a walk amongst literary giants and this tremendously successful and busy book launch?

The pond blames the media, and so to First Dog setting the mood ... and the full First Dog here ...

Indeed, indeed, and somewhere near that cartoon was this splash ...

Now you might hie off to read Malcolm Turnbull bins Team Australia and dials down the rhetoric, and find lots to consider and to contemplate. Like this:

...conservative commentators seemed to be pining for the old “death cult” days. It’s crazy political correctness, they said. (about Turnbull's response to the brutal murder) .No one was denying the obvious evidence suggesting Jabar had been influenced by people pushing a misguided interpretation of Islam. But because no one was making broad-brush statements about Islam’s culpability either they lined up to denounce the absence of sweeping religious denunciation. 
One even argued that suggesting the Islamic community should be partners in combating radicalisation was like the “unthinkable” suggestion that men should be partners in stamping out the scourge of domestic violence – which I thought was the whole point of White Ribbon Day, but anyway … 
The experts, the people who know a lot about radicalisation – which let’s face it, most columnists (including this one) don’t – say the new approach is more likely to help the police and the intelligence services and the anti-radicalisation programs work. The absence of sweeping statements, the attention to social policy and social cohesion as a part of national security, is more likely to help achieve what is obviously every prime minister’s primary goal – to keep all Australians safe. Turnbull said this was the advice he had received from the police and intelligence agencies. 
And it’s advice they have been giving for a while. “We will do all that we can to protect the community, but we understand we can’t arrest our way to success,” the director general of security, Duncan Lewis, told Fairfax Media in May. 
“If there is indeed a silver bullet to solving the issue of radicalisation it is in the area of social cohesion.”

But it's not the pond's pleasure to spend time with intelligent folk, instead it's the pond's duty to head off to muddle-headed wombat conservative commentators who can't let go of simplistic slogans ...

Oh dear ... it's Saturday and the beast of the inner city Phillip street 'leets is on the loose yet again.

Now the pond doesn't want to delay too long in getting to the unfashionable truths, but dude, you really don't have much of an idea of the flexibility of words, do you, you old-fashioned shouter at clouds?

Actually there are some forty pages at the Urban Dictionary, starting here, on the almost infinite malleability, flexibility and variety of uses involved in the word "dude", none of which the pond uses except when talking about the dude in The Big Lebowski. It takes only a few pages to realise there's more to "dude" than irreverent affection, and that it can be deployed in almost any moronic way to conjure up a moronic point.

But let's not let idle chat of kids and dudes distract us from prattling Polonius's bigger message:

Indeed, indeed. So it might be a quantum leap, but Polonius isn't interested in a quantum leap, not when it interferes with the fear and the loathing, and the peddling of the hate ...

Put it another way ...

Sorry the pond doesn't know where that left over bit of First Dog came from.

Please, do go on, prattling Polonius.

Oh indeed, indeed. Because nobody's actually allegedly murdered or assaulted Muslims for being Muslim, there's no point in holding their hands and mollycoddling them and being goody two shoes about it all and pampering the milquetoast milksops ...not when they're full of filthy murdering vile scum ... .

And it's certainly unfashionable to blather on about Team Australia, no doubt because some viewed it as a spectacular disaster of a kind only Polonius could continue to support ...

As usual, the devil is in the detail.

If Team Australia merely and simply meant accepting the Australian system of government, how simple everything would become.

But in fact it's a heavily weighted concept carrying all sorts of loadings and bearings, and with many implications, down there with the many interpretations of "dude".

Which is why everything Polonius scribbles in that final dot point is loaded with dog whistles, and prejudice and tone deafness ...

It's not really about the Australian system of government, is it? It's about a monotonal, monochromal, black and white view of the world infested by conservatives ...

It means that for the pond to get into Team Australia, it has to go along with known radical extremists and fundamentalists blathering on about women and abortion rights and dressing it up as a censorship issue...

And it's not just religious fundamentalists. There's also the bigots berating multiculturalism and anything else that might attempt to make people feel good about themselves ...

Yep, Murdochian terrorism a culture of hatred...

Now you might prefer to read:

Careful to first make clear all Australians had to accept national values and the primacy of Australian laws, Turnbull then said on Friday: “People who try to tag all Muslims with responsibility for the crimes of a tiny minority and convert that into a general hatred of all Muslims are also undermining our national interest. Those who do that are making the work of the police and security services, governments who seek to prevent violent extremism, much harder. They also make the work of parents and community leaders who seek to prevent violent extremism much harder.” 
With small anti-Muslim rallies starting, and Geert Wilders coming to Australia to launch the the Australian Liberty Alliance – with its manifesto to “stop the Islamisation of Australia” because “Islam is not merely a religion, it is a totalitarian ideology with global aspirations” – that is a clarity we sorely needed. 
According to Barton there are a few more things Turnbull could do to cement the change. He is warning against rushing ahead with the Abbott government’s controversial laws stripping citizenship from dual nationals. The Coalition and Labor have now agreed to a set of amendments and the bill is listed for debate next week, despite the concerns of most constitutional lawyers that it may not withstand a high court challenge. 
Barton says it would be better to put the bill “on the backburner” and come back to it at a “less charged” time. Given Turnbull’s general approach, the amendments are likely to go back to cabinet for reconsideration. 
Meanwhile Turnbull’s redefinition of who is “us” and who is “them” could help the work of those trying to make “us” – in all our wonderful diversity – a bit safer.

But the pond realises it has a choice ... it can now stand with Polonius and Team Australia and his many acolytes, who stand firm in favour of the Australian system of government ...

Oh okay, maybe it's not much of a choice, but at least one such display did lead to an excellent joke ... which the pond faithfully repeats because twitter and social media irritates the reptiles so ...