In which the pond speaks in an Anglo-Saxon way to a reverend ...though that's not to say he's revered ...

The pond is a great believer in coincidence, or serendipity if you will ...

Not the movie with John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale, or this sort of simplistic new age American blather ...

Ideation process? Do you get funny colours in the brain with that?

Nope, it was simply the way that a prime doofus like Peter Kurti should turn up on the front page of the Daily Terror, at the same time as the pond happened to be reading Joan Acocella's piece for the NY Review of Books, 'Fuck'-ing Around, and even better, in a serendipitous way, that piece is currently outside the paywall ...

Now some might have come across Kurti before. He lurks at the CIS - Greg Hunt him here - and dares to call himself a Reverend, as if people should think he's reverential or referential or whatever ...

Worthy of being revered?

Fuck that for a joke. Not in the pond's world ... and so to Kurti, believer in imaginary beings, conversationalist with fictional characters lurking in the heavens ...

The pond routinely swears it won't mention 18C again ... or that Bill Leak cartoon which routinely goes along with the reptile discussions.

But then along came that piece by Acocella and somehow one illustration seemed to fit with Kurti ...

Hmm, choices, choices.

So did some of the language in the piece. The pond really enjoyed expanding its German vocabulary, as in Arschloch (asshole), Arschgesicht (ass face), Arschgeburt (born from an asshole), et cetera. 

You see, in an arschloch style, the reptiles couldn't resist running that Bill Leak cartoon yet again ...

The only sensible response seemed to be to go full Acocella.

After all, as she assured the pond ...

...even when anger is not involved, obscenity seems to operate on the side of fellowship. The philosopher Noel Carroll told me once of an international conference in Hanoi in 2006. On the first day, to break the ice, the Vietnamese and the Western scholars, taking turns, had a joke-telling contest. The first two Vietnamese scholars told off-color jokes, but the Westerners, still fearful of committing some social error, stuck to clean jokes. A stiff courtesy reigned. Finally, the third Western contestant (Carroll, and he recounted this proudly) told a filthy joke about a rooster, and everyone relaxed. The conference went on to be a great success. 
This barrier-crossing function, together with other forces—boredom, machismo, the analgesic effect—helps to account for the notorious frequency of fuck and, perhaps more frequently, of motherfucker in speech exchanged by people in the military and by men in work crews, jazz groups, and similar situations. Adams proposes that the reason dirty words foster human relations is that they depend on trust, our trust that the person we are talking to shares our values and therefore won’t dislike us for using a taboo word. “If a relationship passes the profanity test,” he writes, “the parties conclude a pact that whatever they say in their intimate relationship stays in their intimate relationship.” I would say, indeed, that they make a pact that they have an intimate relationship. (This is the place to add that many people find that “talking dirty” enhances sex.) But such considerations seem too tender to apply to the ubiquity of fuck and motherfucker among soldiers and workmen, to whose interchanges these words seem, rather, to apply a sort of hard, even glaze, a compound of irritation and stoicism, together with, yes, a sense of subjection to a common fate.

And so the pond turned to the thoughts of the not very revered fuck face fuckwit Kurti, with good cheer, and did its best to listen in a sober-sided way to the fuckwad's merde ...

Indeed, indeed, though as Acocella notes, freedom of speech has its limits, at least for thoughtful people, though perhaps not for fuckwits like Kurti ...

...Bergen hates righteousness, which, to him, I believe, would include all those who, when under the necessity of saying “nigger,” even to designate a word (e.g., “He said ‘nigger’”), not a thing (e.g., “He’s a nigger”), will substitute the phrase “the n-word”—a usage that seems designed not so much to avoid giving offense as to point to the speaker as a person who could never commit such a wrong. And like other recent commentators on this matter—Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in their much-discussed essay “The Coddling of the American Mind” in The Atlantic of September 2015 and Timothy Garton Ash in his recent book Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World—he is worried that our brains will become enfeebled if we avoid disagreement and debate. 

I applaud his sentiment. But he should not have tried to make this controversy parallel to quarrels over obscenity. Calling someone a fuck face is not nice, but it is meant to insult only one person. By contrast, a white person calling a black person nigger, the word the slave owners used, is insulting 13 percent of the population of the United States and reinvoking, in a perversely casual tone—as if everything were okay now—the worst crime our country ever committed, one whose consequences we are still living with, every day. (By the end of his discussion of slurs, Bergen seems to agree. I think his editor may have asked him to tone it down.)

Indeed, indeed, which is why the pond, with a cheerful smile on the dial,  calls Peter Kurti a fuckface ...

Now hold on, please, this isn't designed to be offensive. It's a form of social pleasantry.

It's only a bonding exercise, a matey way of speaking, though it does raise the question ... if this form of pleasantry, if this cheerful joyous exchange of ideas is already available to Australians, what's all this blather about 18C and onerous, burdensome restrictions on freedom to speak the mind?

I mean, after all, the reptiles keep incessantly publishing Bill Leak. Does he show any sign of intimidation or of backing off? Do the reptiles really feel that their chance to bray about things in a bigoted way are hampered, restricted or limited?

The pond doesn't notice, though it understands that the Bolter might feel a little agitated about not being able to carry on about the niggers in the way he'd like to ...

Of course if Kurti were a spoilsport, he could head off to the courts, with the pond in tow, but what sort of goose would that make him?

Freedom of speech and he gets agitated about a few dinkum words?

Well you can't expect a dickhead dimwit to provide a satisfactory answer to these sorts of  questions, so it's probably time to wrap things up, preferably with a glowering, clearly grumpy Islamic ...

Well the pond can leave talk of the Pope dropping the cazzo word, and other inventive use of language to those who head off to the NY Review of Books for the read ... 

But as for Cazzo Kurti, there doesn't seem anything else to do or say than to leave him with this thoughtful message, and the hope that he might, with his blather about 18C, just disappear to somewhere where he might be revered ...