In which some mighty fine dog botherersplaining helps the pond to keep missing the point ...

There's a double delight at the top of the reptile digital page this day, the dog botherer and the taxpayer-grant loving Caterist (talk about utopian visions for right wing institutes), and it was a difficult choice for the pond as the best way to start to the day, but in the end the dog botherer won ...

You see, there's nothing like a little dog botherersplaining to send the pond into a tizz of pondsplaining, and as soon as the dog botherer explains that everyone has missed the point, the pond is pleased to respond that if Chris Kenny and Bill Leak are the point, then the pond is pleased to miss it.

The reptiles routinely fail to understand the notion of freedom of speech, but it goes like this.

Bill Leak is free to scribble racist cartoons and the reptiles are free to print them, but the corollary is that people are free to call the cartoon and Leak racist, or whatever else they like, dumb, offensive, or most perplexing, a cartoonist who regularly has to resort to print to explain or defend himself, because it seems he's incapable of expressing himself clearly in his cartoons ...

There's not another cartoonist in the country in this peculiar situation - how often do we get David Rowe explaining the point of a scatological dropping or a piece of vomit in the corner of a cartoon? -yet routinely Leak has to mount a podium to explain the point he thought he was making, or others in the News Corp bunker have to rush out and abuse anyone within earshot for missing the point.

Never mind, the pond decided it was time to get the dog botherer out of the way quickly, put him out of his misery.

Once the story hit Media Watch last night - yes they're still doing transcripts for that show, oh ABC, ABC, how tragic you are - the pond knew that the story had run out of legs, and it was now being transferred into the Bill Leak archive of idle provocations and trolling nonsense, with all the obvious points made ...

And so to the dog botherersplaining, which is mercifully short, but has a couple of good comic lines ...

Oh he didn't say that did he: No media organisation would have carried more positive or insightful journalism on indigenous issues in the past 50 years??!!

Not after he opened the piece by pissing from a great height on an attempt to produce a positive response to the cartoon?

Along with the bizarre notion that somehow this sort of stuff is disappointing and damaging because it diminishes the crucial point, which is that blacks are fucked and it's all their fault?

Or some such thing. Well if we're looking at responses, the pond made note of this by Luke Pearson at IndigenousX:

I wasn’t actually planning to write anything about the cartoon published on Thursday, the article I wrote last time everyone got angry over a racist cartoon he published had already summed it up. It even predicted this happening, and I don’t usually like having to repeat myself but when I saw his latest cartoon defending himself, making out that he is the victim of angry ‘sanctimonious’ white people, as though there aren’t countless Aboriginal people furious over this cartoon, and even more ludicrous, claiming that he is having a positive contribution on these conversations tipped me over the line. 
He is right when he says that Australia needs to have difficult conversations but he is blatantly wrong in feeling that is helping this to happen, at least not on the topic he claimed to want us to talk about. Just as whenever someone is killed in a pub fight leads us to talk about violence in our country, Bill Leak has done this for conversations about racism in our media. He has embodied it; he has perpetrated the act; and in doing so should provoke a conversation about the roles and responsibilities of those in media, particularly for a media outlet like The Australian who often lauds itself as a leader in dialogue about Indigenous issues. Maybe they need to have a difficult conversation about how damaging this has been to their self-asserted status as a leader on Indigenous affairs reporting?

Yes, self-asserted status just about sums it up, and if they've been producing insightful journalism for fifty years, why is the result of all this insight an abundance of stories and cartoons about how the blacks are fucked and it's all their fault?

Never mind, time to wrap up the dog botherer, and as noted, it's mercifully short, because defending the indefensible apparently doesn't take that much time out of a busy dog botherer's life ...

Oh ffs is that the best he's got?

And is he really contending that Leak's cartoon was part of a continual and intelligent national examination of indigenous issues, rather than an emotive confrontation?

And somehow it's an imagined stereotype?

Indeed, grotesque is just about the right word for Leak's effort.

Sometimes the pond thinks that the dog botherer goes out of his way to suggest that he's a cutlery drawer short of a sharp knife, or a chop short at the barbie ...

And now back to the question of freedom of speech. The pond has a bone to pick with Media Watch.

You see, they blurred the key word in this cartoon ...

If you're going to run a cartoon, treat it with respect. Don't go the Vatican fig leaf, and if that's what you feel you must do, don't bother to run it at all ...

And in their online version of the story, there was only a grudging admission that they had got the cartoon from Vice, which had done what Media Watch had done - We Asked Some Artists to Respond to Bill Leak's Racist Cartoon ...

Worse, Media Watch didn't bother to supply a link, only a grudging acknowledgment in small print that Vice had been the source ... now if you're going to use someone else's work, you only have two defences - you're non-profit, and it's part of a discussion, and (b) you provide a link, so that the mugs in it for the money might get a click or two ...

Now back to the dog botherer, and it so happens that this matter happens to intersect with the current fuss about 18c ...

Well yes, he did get his facts wrong.

But right at the moment there's nothing in 18c stopping the reptiles from printing racist cartoons, and there's nothing stopping people exercising their freedom of speech from publishing a response ...

You see, reptile attempts at silencing dissent and asserting that people have missed the point simply don't work, not when Leak has to write an exegesis explaining what his point was ...

Now the pond has already indicated its preference for the comedy stylings of a Pope - and more papal pleasures here ... and was  a bit miffed that Media Watch overlooked it ...

But the final cartoon in that Vice-commissioned collection was a little more direct and blunt ...

Now the pond would rate that as clever and as insightful as a Bill Leak cartoon ...

After all, female genitals shouldn't be used to describe a male dickhead ... and on a good day the pond can match the drawing skills on display ...

But there you go reptiles, welcome to a post 18c world, and the wild and wacky world of the intertubes ... there's where your non-emotive, insightful and positive cartooning and analysis has led us ...

Now, isn't it about time for another tedious rant from an elderly white man about social media?