At last a clear choice for the pond, and as it's between Paul Keating and conversational Jay Weatherill, is it a surprise that the pond would prefer Keating?
Back into your popinjay box, Jay, and go start your regressive tax conversation with the infinite void or with idle croweaters willing to listen to your tiresome attempts to be Liberal lite.
The pond has been to the United States and seen how it works, and it isn't a pretty picture ...
The pond has been to the United States and seen how it works, and it isn't a pretty picture ...
Meanwhile, the pond feels infinitely blessed, though strictly in a secular Murdochian way ...
How else to think of these piquant juxtapositions?
Who would Dame Slap be hauling over the coals this day?
Would it be Clive? Would it be teh Donald? After all, that photo of teh Clive is an enormous coup by Gary Ramage, however you frame it ...
Hmm, the pond will go with the widescreen version.
As Fritz Lang once memorably said, Cinemascope is not for men, but for snakes and political funerals ...
Or some such thing.
Thank you Fritz and moving right along, it's the obligatory time when the pond tends to the wailing, moaning and sighing of the commentariat, and helps out with the sackcloth and ashes ... and at last we can discover what has roused Dame Slap to anger this week ...
It turns out that Slap's ire is inspired by positively ancient folk memories ...
Dear sweet long absent lord, she's not still brooding over cricketers and thugby leaguers ...
There must be a real point to the piece, but it isn't quite apparent yet. Perhaps it's a slow build. You know, two acts of unendurable tedium, and then a third act full of pizzazz and chop socky verbal fisticuffs ...
The pond is guessing that we're only in the second act, and if there's a mention of John Stuart Mill that'll be the icing on the cake ...
Okay, okay, the pond gets it. Chris Gayle can be as creepy as he likes, alcoholism in thugy league stars is to be accepted - let's hope all that piss doesn't stain the couch - and the pond must read Hustler for its leftie stance, and Catholics must be able to deplore gay marriage and explain how all those gay wretches can look forward to hellfire for all eternity - though perhaps the tykes should abstain from a little kiddie fiddling with uncle Ernie - and we're all Millsians here, we all exude tolerance and a munificent unstinting capacity to accept stupidity without comment, lest we be tagged with dangerous labels like Orwellian or the neo-puritans of Salem ...
But there is a third act.
And that's where all that blather about tolerance and harmony must take a dive.
You see in inimitable Dame Slap way, having lathered herself up, she simply can't resist doing a Joe McCarthy at another suspect who's been around for almost a week now copping sustained abuse from the commentariat, in a way that makes creepy cricketers and pissed thugby leaguers look like they've copped the kid glove treatment, or least a stint in rehab ...
Uh huh. So it's fine to be a handsomely paid, lavishly rewarded leering or pissed as a parrot boofhead, but an appeal to better instincts is a dangerous threat to the country ...
And so the third act is just another demonisation of the hapless Morrison, who for an allegedly second rrate military man has attracted an astonishing amount of calumny and contumely language ... derision, invective, slander, defamation, denigration, disparagement, insults, slurs, aspersions, opprobrium, obloquy, vituperation, vilification ...
Why you'd have to swallow a dictionary to describe the pounding he's been getting ...
And for what? The sort of speech that urges us all to be a little better, of the kind that the pond regularly endured during its time at Tamworth Primary School ... of the kind that also litters Christian churches as they blather about love and forgiveness and understanding in a way that the conservative commentariat purport to love ...
Yet funnily enough, Dame Slap's column is full of what she blames Morrison for ... false dichotomies and dark talk of victims and villains, and in this case, how extreme can it get, the rapacious colonisation of our communities by the neo-puritans ... as if somehow we're back in Salem ... or the Holy Roman Empire ...
Rapacious?
Living by killing prey, especially in large numbers, taking things by force, plundering, having or showing a strong or excessive desire to acquire money or possess things, greedy, practising pillage or rapine, from Latin rapāx grasping, from rapere to seize ...
Fuck the pond dead, if Dame Slap isn't a tad weird in the head ...
What's the bet if Christ were to come back preaching all his do-gooder lovey dovey nonsense, she'd be at him in a flash, shouting at his fuckwitted attempt at the rapacious colonisation of our communities with his neo-puritanism. He can take his hell and get lost, and she'll take her side of the liberty coin (gays and gay marriage specifically excluded from liberty) and go for a piss on the couch and a leer at a girlie, because dammit, it's her fucking right ...
Is this where Murdochian conservatism has ended up?
Ranting about the ill-treatment dished out to leering cricketers and thugby leaguers deep in an alcoholic stew, while railing about a little harmless do-gooderism, because it doesn't have a quotient of abuse of gays of the preferred Tasmanian Catholic kind ...
How weird is that? To deplore neo-puritans and then provide Tasmanian Catholics with an exemption card? Why in Dame Slap land, high above the faraway tree, they probably don't have to pass Go and might even pick up five hundred bucks of the Clive fondling moola kind ...
Naturally the pond had only one answer, and that was to reel away in search of comfort, by sucking on a David Pope cartoon pacifier ... and you can find more pacifiers here, and you don't even have to sterilise the plastic ...
But please, can someone explain why the image reminded the pond of agile innovator Malware constructing a new NBN? Did they find the nodes in the same freezer?
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ReplyDeleteGreat read. Of all the published Morrison adjectives one that really stood out for me was 'diminutive' c/- Miranda Devine, as though physical stature should be a measure of a man.
ReplyDeleteYes, I noticed that too. Interesting thing to call attention to, wasn't it? But MD likes her posh adjectives - she described Margie Abbott as "lithe", after all.
DeleteHi Dorothy,
ReplyDeleteIn the 1930’s the German sociologist Norbert Elias noted that homicide rates in Western Europe had plummeted over the last 1000 years.
http://ourworldindata.org/data/violence-rights/homicides/
He sort to explain this in his book “The Civilising Process” noting that this decline in murder rates appeared to correlate with the increasing rise of manners and etiquette in society. This social “self-restraint” limited the opportunity for insult amongst individuals and in doing so reduced conflict.
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/the-civilising-process/
For instance, injunctions against spitting evolved over time;
https://books.google.com.au/books?id=jrVW9W9eiYMC&pg=PA346&lpg=PA346&dq=injunctions+about+spitting&source=bl&ots=NAFswtJXJC&sig=iDDSOUR3tAZ-heqBH9JnLBStv1o&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjJuYuzmNrKAhUCNJQKHcbwBOkQ6AEIIjAB#v=onepage&q=injunctions%20about%20spitting&f=false
What Albrechtsen rails against as "censorious neo-puritanism" are in fact social attitudes transforming to reflect our modern social structures and how individuals are respected and expect to be treated. In short… civilisation.
“Manners maketh man”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWYLFizhjHs
DiddyWrote
That's what the pond thought conservatives believed, DW. You know, how to use the right fork and when to use the wrong spoon and all the rest of it. Now it seems, it's let's all go and piss on a couch ...
DeleteStrange days indeed.
Hi Dorothy,
DeletePart of good manners is to consider other people's feelings and moderate your behaviour accordingly, which is why it's not considered good form to spit in other people's faces or call them "baby".
The other part unfortunately is a rise in increasingly complicated formalities invented in order to delineate social classes. This is what the conservatives like as they can then spot a parvenu buttering his roll with a fish knife.
DW
Pissing on a couch might be just a bit parvenu, DP, but pissing and defecating in the corners and/or courtyards was pretty high-class once upon a time (in the time of Louis XIV at Versailles for instance).
DeleteSo I guess we can just put it down to the mistake of granting universal suffrage and permitting the rise of the lower classes.
Neat, DW, very neat ("sought" btw).
ReplyDeleteBut of course Dame Slap is libertarian (or at least, she thinks she is), so ideas such as "manners" and "civilization" don't exist ... other than in the fevered imaginations of left-progressive0Fairfax-ABC deviants and morans.
Hi GB,
DeleteSort/Sought that is a clanger. The sub-editor has been given his marching orders.
DW
I did consider the idea though, and apart from wondering just exactly where they get homicide statistics from 1000 years ago, and whether they'd be in any way accurate, I was also thinking about:
Delete1. feuds - deadly feuds used to be quite common, to the point where a formal compensation scale was devised to cover ongoing fatalitie, and;
2. duels - which were the height of civilized manners; all the best people indulged in them (in fact, only the best people indulged in them because the worst couldn't afford weapons).
It's not like John Graunt trolling the cemeteries and church records and so forth back in around 1640 to get English death statistics (which were absolutely horrendous by the way); well, at least I don't think so.
But I guess (to keep malamuddy happy) I should "tow the line" on this and just agree that I do think that civil homicides have indeed diminished markedly over the preceding 1000 or so years.
Hi GB,
DeleteAccording to Eisner in “Long-Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime” a rich source of information is from court records and jail rolls but he also admits that the further you go back the less certain you can be of the actual percentages.
http://www.vrc.crim.cam.ac.uk/vrcresearch/paperdownload/manuel-eisner-historical-trends-in-violence.pdf
However it does appear that broadly, violence has decreased drastically. As for the cause for that drop, not everyone agrees with Elias that it was due to manners and etiquette. There is evidence to believe there is a genetic component to violence, a so called “Warrior Gene” and that Western society has increasingly selected against this gene by the summary execution of any murderer.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29760212
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/11/25/genetics-and-the-historical-decline-of-violence/
It might not all be just down to the genes either, that environmental stresses can alter gene expression is becoming widely accepted and that physical aggression can be “switched on” by childhood experiences.
http://www.nature.com/news/behaviour-and-biology-the-accidental-epigeneticist-1.14441
Children in the Middle Ages were less protected from violence, death and sex than they are now and this may have led to them being more violent as they matured.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centuries_of_Childhood
DW
DW,
DeleteI'll read your links more thoroughly a little later, but as a quick response I'd have to say that the 'genetic' theory (with or without environmentally affected epigenetics) isn't very tenable. Too short a timeframe and too few murders executed (versus the overall population) for it to have much, if any, effect. Genetics (apart, maybe, from lactose tolerance) just doesn't work that quick.
Besides, since hardly anybody in Europe (or Aus) imposes the death penalty any more (even the USA has cut down a lot) then by the genetic theory, homicides should have increased in the past 50 or so years.
I have a simpler idea: we're so much more prosperous and better educated in general than ever before in human history, and thus we have less need to be violently competitive, or even just angry etc. As it's been put to me, a reasonably prosperous middle class person now lives better than almost all of the nobility throughout history (though kings and emperors usually did a little better).
And even our habit of poisoning our brains via leaded petrol didn't seriously impinge on that, though it may well have upped the general crime rate - and we've now stopped, anyway. I do wonder what effect iodine deficiency might have played, though - probably not all that much in Europe.
One would hope those murtherers of yore were doing their dirty deeds before they started having children, DW. Otherwise that theory about 'breeding out the Warrior gene by summary execution' would hold no water.
DeleteTrue, Mercurial, and especially important the more recent the timeframe and the more reliable the data as to the rate of civil homicide.
DeleteBack a few centuries ago, it was more messy. For instance, in his studies back in the 1640s, John Graunt found that of "quick" births (ie actually born alive) in England, 36% were dead by (what would have been) age 6 and that 60% were dead by age 16. Reproduction would have been most unlikely.
See: 'Against the Gods - The Remarkable Story of Risk' by Peter L Bernstein, p 83.
I wonder if the Slapster saw any irony in demonising the puritans so soon after Abbott pointed out that the Muslims had 'not undergone a reformation' like his beloved Catholics.
ReplyDeleteHonestly, these people will effortlessly talk shit all day without any sign of cognitive dissonance.
I really should work on my technique to see if Rupe will give me a gig.
Bil
Ah Bill, she just wants to see footballers vomiting in the gutters of Newtown, and where's the harm in that? If only Islamics learned to drink like decent folk, pissed to the gills, they might get a gig in the Australian cricket team ...
DeleteDon't know what to make of Keating's comments, in the sense that he was once a supporter of a consumption tax, and knows better than anyone both its regressive nature and its inherent propensity to grow. One only has to have been a resident of the UK to know how the British exchequer relies heavily on a VAT of 20%, introduced way back in the 1970s at… 10%. Well, whaddaya know? Moreover, for most of its 43 year history it has been pegged at 17.5% and has been like a leaky bucket, with evasion rates estimated as highly as 16%. Looking at the UK economy now, it's hard to see what benefit it has brought, but that's by the by. Yet again, Australia has had the bad example of a failed British policy (OK, at first forced on them by the EU/EEC) brainlessly copied for colonial consumption (pun intended). GST must and will only ever go up, soon, because the model requires it, like it or not, and any politician who supported the GST and didn't know that is a fool. The Lucky Country has never been short of those.
ReplyDeleteCouldn't we go the whole hog, leap the frog, and just raise the regressive GST to, say, a hyper-competitive 30% or 37%, redistribute the extra proceeds highly progressively, and watch the GST hawkers, especially those coincidentally also clamouring for corporate and personal income bracket-creep tax cuts, have an apoplectic fit?
DeleteBut don't forget, first we have to 'have the conversation', Anon.
DeleteNeat GB. Moron by the way.
ReplyDeleteThis is fun. My turn.
We should all tow the neo-pedants line.
Yep, malamuddy, we sure should. Especially as 'moran' is a frequently used web 'variant' of moron, eg see http://onlineslangdictionary.com/meaning-definition-of/moran
DeleteSo, maybe "we" should get our comprehension, erudition and basic research right before we indulge our pedantic desires. Don't you agree ?
Neat GB. Moron by the way.
ReplyDeleteThis is fun. My turn.
We should all tow the neo-pedants line.
But repeating yourself so blatantly ? That surely is neo-pedantic.
DeleteTo be truly pedantic, we should all toe the neo-pedants' line.
DeleteI guess, Anon, that depends on whether we're "trolling" or not.
DeleteI dunno, Anon, I go to some trouble to give you an in to continue the conversation and you just go to sleep on me. Any'ow, just for pedantic completion, and to wholly verify malamuddy, here is the primary web definition of 'trolling':
Deletetroll.
VERB
1. to fish by dragging a baited line through water
So, trolling' really is "towing the line" after all.
They are taking the piss aren't they? Really?
ReplyDeleteDog Botherer's nonsensical blather on Monday, The Caterist's near tragic squawking yesterday, and now Dame Slap's first class piffle on a Wednesday - 3 of the greatest wastes of space ever to take space in a "newspaper" in the history of publishing.
Editor? What editor. As per the hi-jinks in this comments thread, surely it's time they saved the money and just ran a nonsense generator on the Op-Ed page with keywords a'la your post earlier in the week Dot.
"Luvvies", "their ABC", "UN plot", "UN government" et al.
Oh I dunno, VC. I don't know of any nonsense generator that can compete with the output of a Cater. Unless, he already is one ...
DeleteI'm confused now (more than usual). Several years ago (2008, in fact), Albrechtsen used her column to excoriate Bill Henson's photography, and celebrated the closing down of his exhibition and the subsequent police investigation.
ReplyDeleteI thought that Pearce's antics were silly, and Gayle's were stupid, but that's about it (and I'm a raving feminist). But how was Henson exempted from this wonderful liberty that Albrechtsen extends to those two?
Because he refused to "think about the children", Mish.
DeletePerhaps merely "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds ..." ?
DeleteBut no, Mish, Anon (above) has it, and a part of that was a Rightist feeling that Henson's work was basically 'paedophilia tainted pornography' which, in these days of social media and such, could 'taint' the children for a lifetime (yes, even as long ago as 2008).
Ah, the Helen Lovejoy factor, of course. Silly me! Thank you both :)
DeleteI was under the impression that forcibly kissing someone with consent explicitly refused could lead to an indecent assault charge in NSW, expecially in cases where the act is followed by further acts of indecency (pissing on the furniture and humping the dog would seem to satisfy that aspect). I'm assuming Pearce's private "buffoonery" took place in NSW. FWIW, indecent assault in NSW carries an all-expenses paid holiday for up to five years.
ReplyDeleteDame Slap's a lawyer, and she says no crime was committed, but that might rest on her description that he "clumsily tried to kiss a woman". It looks to me that there was no "tried" about it, but that he laid one on her.
No charge has been laid, but that is not the same as "no crime was committed".
(Sorry if the above risks legal issues, Dorothy. Feel free to delete if there is any risk.)
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ReplyDeleteInitially, Janet's talk of "sanctimonious neo-puritans" made me wonder "Now what have the Sydney Anglicans done to get her all irked?"
ReplyDeleteMy puzzlement increased when I gazed upon the caricature below the headline, which seemed to depict an outraged Rickmanesque Severus Snape in a witch's hat. "What has a gender-conflicted Hogwarts professor got to do with Sydney Anglicans?" I thought. "And is that some new-fangled 'Aussie Complementarian Prayer Book' he/she is brandishing? Perhaps Janet will be deploring this fresh development in Calvinist villainy..."
ReplyDeleteThanks for that, Grant H. Nearly fell off my cushion laughing :)
DeleteGlad to know it, Mish :)
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