In which the reptiles do a standard set of FUD Chicken Little ostrich routines ...

There's no more awe-inspiring and fearful sight than the reptiles in a panic, rushing about helter skelter ...

A few procedural votes awry, and the FUD Chicken Little factor is strong, but the askance reptiles were also missing in action ...

Here's the pompous, portentous Kelly whipped in to provide a bit of filler coverage for this Friday  ... note the time on the posting ...

Say what?

Now they have to transcribe his views, expressed in an appearance on cable TV, to score a column?

Desperate stuff, desperate days ...

But perhaps the silliest advice came from the immortal Hartcher doing it for Fairfax ...

Sure, the way to fix things is to send the poodle to the back bench to gnaw on a bone or three, throw out the kitchen sink, and sail straight at the iceberg ...

There's a reason journalists aren't politicians ... but it's a sign just how excitable and fractious the reptiles are these days, with Canberra agog with speculation and betting on just how long Malware and his regime will last ....

And in that context Malware faces bigger problems than a few procedural eggs in the face, and an inept bunch of whips who couldn't organise a chook raffle in Baiada factory dedicated to exploiting foreign workers in the Tamworth way ...

For starters there's the complete contempt that Cory and the Senate backbench, bar one, showed for the leadership to make a fatuous and impotent point about 18C.

And then there's the poisoned chalice of the Abbott legacy.

Not only is the man who helped send Hanson to jail now smarming up to her in the most astonishing and shameless way - here no shame, no shame here - he reptiles simply don't know what to do or how to help when it comes to his immortal plebiscite legacy ...

Yes, there was much hand-wringing this day, as Crowe contemplated another vote, and curiously, what for Turnbull should have been a moment of triumph - social and liberal and caring for Freedom Boy - has now become an extremely precarious matter ...

Actually, it seems Bentham might have developed some doubts about his formula in later life ...

Greatest happiness of the greatest number. Some years have now elapsed since upon a closer scrutiny, reason, altogether incontestable was found for discarding this appendage. On the surface, additional clearness and correctness [was] given to the idea: at the bottom, the opposite qualities. Be the community in question what it may, divide it into two unequal parts, call one of them the majority, the other the minority, lay out of the account the feelings of the minority, include in the account no feelings but those of the majority, the result you will find is that to the aggregate stock of the happiness of the community, loss, not profit, is the result of the operation. Of this proposition the truth will be the more palpable the greater the ratio of the number of the minority to that of the majority ...

Why there's a whole paper here in pdf form dedicated to a consideration of the matter ...

...there may be at least one legitimate question to be asked – the question whether Bentham’s greatest-happiness principle can serve as an effective criterion for moral decisions taken by individuals faced with moral choices. It seems to me (and I make no claim more ambitious than the personal statement) that the principle is remote from the realities of situations where such choices have to be made. Nor is this (I suggest) merely a particular case of something that might be seen as necessarily true of any formula purporting to be generally – even universally – applicable to decisions of that kind. It could, for example, be argued that the same objection does not apply to the Kantian principle that other people should always be treated as ends, never merely as means. Such a principle does offer a criterion it would make sense to apply to many of the choices we have to make as well as to the more general shaping of a way of life.

Phew read a reptile and stumble into a great moral and philosophical maze, and with the moral high ground nowhere in sight ...

So it's back to Crowe, hand-wringing and bewildered ... mother of plebiscite mercy, could it come to this?

The plebiscite was a hard-won compromise? The plebiscite is Abbott's legacy?

The plebiscite is Abbott's poisoned chalice, and now all that's left for the reptiles is hand-wringing and a deploring of the cantankerous, when it was their own cantankery that helped produced the current set of calamities ...

And everyone doesn't want to drive down their own one-way street, and every street doesn't lead in a different direction. 

The one way street is the conservative bigotry routinely celebrated each day in the lizard Oz, and it has now produced its own set of car crashes, currently being filmed in slo mo ...

How desperate does it get? Well the fears surrounding the plebiscite are directly related to the current inexhaustible campaigning by the reptiles about 18C ... which is why the pond was also attracted to this splash ...

It seems serious enough, as if the learned judge was on politically inept and had let the cat out of the bag and sided with the Bolter and the fundamentalist reptiles ...

And yet when you cut through the inordinate amount of verbiage, this is the crunch point ...

Pathetic... or desperate, or perhaps desperately pathetic ...

It would be silly to glean ...?

And yet all the wretched Michael Pelly does is a silly attempt to glean, glean, glean, building a nest of suppositions and hopes out of a gossamer set of threads ... 

They just can't shut up about it, these angry white men eager to let the Bolter off the leash ...

And that's how they've helped Malware's government get in its present pretty pass ... with constant gleanings dedicated to 18C, and a hopeful chance for the hate speech to crank up during the plebiscite, at one with their own routine demonising of Safe Schools and the homosexual agenda...

And at the end of it, apparently they themselves have nothing to do with the reality of this brutal political culture, and instead all that's left at the end is another jibe at the social media age ...

As if Pelly never sat in an eighteenth century coffee shop and read a decent pamphlet or celebrated a political cartoon ...

More here ...

Oh okay the pond hasn't sat in an eighteenth century coffee shop either, but there is a thing called imagination, and by comparison, these days cartoons are quite jolly and full of good-hearted singalongs ... and more Pope here ...