How is Kevin Donnelly still a thing?

Perhaps the most vexatious and tiresome thing still doing the rounds is the ongoing war between fundamentalist Islamic and Christian crusaders ...

For instance, how is this illustration in the Daily Terror this day still a thing?

Kevin Donnelly has been banging on about this sort of stuff for yonks, and once he was a thing - back in the days when the wall puncher is a thing - but frankly the pond would rather be reading about Houdini and Mina Crandon and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, if we must talk of frauds and assorted superstitions (and you can read that story at the NYRB here if you can get behind the paywall).

Donnelly seems to have reached his natural level, scribbling for the tabloid Terrorist. Here he was a week ago ...

The pond is so over it, it's just so tiresome and tedious, what with all the harumphing and carry-on, it's the most radicalising thing the pond has ever managed to read ...

And here is Kev going over exactly the same tedious ground ...

Talk about a bee in the bonnet ... buzzing away, repeating the same mantra over and over again ... Here he is awhile ago ...

You get the impression that what makes western civilisation unique is jingo-istic blow hards ... because here he is again this week ...

What an astonishing pile of jibber jabber and superstition. It doesn't matter how you present it, cut up or sequential, it's just over and over the same sort of shit. Mindless fucking stupidity. As if the Romans and the Greeks hadn't developed the y'artz (or the Chinese or many other tribes - like Africans ripe to be ripped off by Picasso) without a bit of Christianity or T. S. Eliot ...

It's so tedious, such a brain fart, as if quoting one High Anglican poet with a deeply troubled personal life is the beginning and the end of the argument ...

Never mind.

When the rubber hits the ground, and the pedal hits the metal and that caricature is taken into account for the childish way it reinforces everything that's Donnelly-wrong, where does this champion of liberty and rights stand?

What's he got that's actually meaningful, as opposed to banging on like a door on a dunny in a gale about the wonders of Christianity and the evils of Islam?

Well if the pond wanted a spanking, there's no doubt an Islamic fundamentalist somewhere around who'd join with Donnelly to do the job ...

What about teh gays?

Well if the pond wanted a bigoted view of teh gays, no doubt there's an Islamic fundamentalist who'd join with Donnelly to do the job ...

How about jingo-istic displays of mindless spurious nationalism?

So freedom means compulsion and "must"?

Celebration is compulsory - you must be joyous - and war means peace?

Well actually pardon the pond, but it bears no allegiance to a foreign flag or a pommy Queen and we might get around to singing an anthem when they change it to Waltzing Matilda or come up with something better than the current dirge, which is so musically offensive, the pond leaves the room whenever its sounds can be heard ...

And then there's this ...

Actually, the pond is a secularist under threat from rampaging barking mad Christians and fundamentalist barking mad Islamics.

And yes, it's personal, because the Christians have infringed much more on the pond in recent times than any passing Islamic offering a nice tandoor chicken.

What's to be done? Well we must establish a pond secularist state forthwith which will see all signs of religion banished to private rooms ... 

Oh okay, one form of fascism is just as tiresome and as tedious as another form of religious fascism of the spanking kind ...

But we are on the march, we happy band of brothers and sisters, we growing tide of malcontents and dissidents who can't stand much more of this Donnelly-style crap for much longer  ...

There's what's to be done.

Fuck the Islamics and fuck the Christians, and the pond wouldn't mind if Donnelly took a vow of chastity or silence or something ... or just pissed off to the Catholic university and made students and staff at that venerable institution cop his rants over a cup of tea (allowing that he's willing to indulge in strong brews)...

And we thought the Abbott years were over.

What's astonishing was that at one point in those years, Donnelly held an influential position able to determine the shape and future of education in this country...

Never mind, those years are now a fit subject for study, and besides, we feel we owe Rowe a plug, for his many splendid portraits of those useless, wasted years ...