It wouldn't be a good day watching the reptiles if an irony didn't leap off the front page of the tree killer edition, and then turn up as a richly ironic juxtaposition in the digital waste of bytes ...
It takes a lot for the pond to ignore the siren song of the Caterists of a Tuesday morning, but attention must always be paid to the man who occupies prime space in the pond's banner, even when he's at his most disrespectful and disagreeable ...
Actually, the onion muncher's behaviour in recent weeks has been even more contemptible and disrespectful and disagreeable than usual - and the usual's usually pretty good - and has proven yet again what sore loses some Australians can be, even before they might have lost ...
Here for Forster talking of the fear-mongering, and the pond can guarantee when a homophobic bigot - self-confessedly threatened by homosexuality - talks of respect, there'll be bugger all respect wafting through the air ...
Oh just shut the fuck up with all this crusader v jihadist talk of defenders of Western civilisation. We've all been there many times before ...
... and for some reason the pond was reminded of Louis Nowra's essay on the whirling dervish in The Monthly here ...
What a deeply confused and unhappy man, spreading his confusions around him so that they might ripple through the fabric of society ...
And even worse, when it comes to a fight, turning out to be a dropkick loser of the black knight kind ...
... snatching victory, claiming it, yea even from the jaws of possible defeat ...
A 40/60 loss would be a moral victory? Paint can drum roll, molester, if you please ...
The bestial Cory the new conservative leader?
Well that puts Brexit in a new light. It seems it was totally lost, in much the same way as the Donald did ...
Okay, it's completely, utterly shameless ... it's ungracious, petulant and childish, a rough equivalent of someone coming off court after a thrashing, and claiming a moral victory, and all the insidious worse because it's actually about staking out more turf to make life as uncomfortable for Malware as possible, and never mind the civilians and innocent gays caught up in the warfare.
It goes without saying that the onion muncher was staking out the legislative terrain, so that the retreat to the bunker in Surry Hills (Berlin being a bit far off) will be long and bitter, with many sent out to die ...
That's why any mealy-mouthed platitudes should be taken in the indecent and ungenerous "40% is a victory" way that they're offered ... especially when couched in terms of gay marriage undermining the ethical understandings on which civilisation has rested ...
It's supposed to be based on love, you homophobic bigot, and deeply unhappy man ...
The latent power of respect for tradition?
If tradition is defined as maintaining the homophobic bigotry of the camel and goat herders of yore ...
It was at this point that the pond felt another ironic Sierra Madre laugh coming on ...
Wrong as usual, wrong as always bouffant one ...
Turnbull didn’t suffer the mortal blow of falling behind Shorten for one reason: one in three voters prefer neither as PM — an uncommitted vote of 30 per cent, the highest it has been since John Howard announced a GST and trailed Kim Beazley briefly as preferred prime minister in 1998. Shorten could pick up just one of the five percentage points Turnbull lost after weeks of chaos. Shorten and Turnbull are the least popular pair on offer as PM in Newspoll’s history, and Turnbull’s dominance over Shorten has been his polling mainstay for months. But Turnbull’s two-point lead over Shorten is less than the poll’s margin of error and sets a Newspoll-inspired deadline before Christmas, well ahead of the 30 Newspolls in a row he nominated. That milestone is likely to arrive around the Ides of March next year.
Long before the Ides of March, Malware will have to deal with the conservative spoilers, led by the onion muncher, manipulating the current instability to mount their rearguard action on what might have been a positive for Malware ...
There'll be bills and speeches and bigotry and homophobia and claims of moral victories and never mind whatever view prevailed in the useless and very expensive postal survey ...
Please, bouffant one, look to the crazy editor at the helm of your herpetarium as he shows the real threat to Malware ...
On what planet is bringing back the onion muncher a good idea? He doesn't even have the residual affection that some deluded people still held for Chairman Rudd, innocents prepared to believe that he wasn't a bitter one-man wrecking machine sniping and leaking from the sideline.
Yet the more that the onion muncher disrupts and creates havoc, in the former Chairman's style, the more the reptiles love his bitter negativity and singular incompetence, and seek to reward him for his truculence, his spite, his undermining and wrecking ...
Yes, let's give the onion muncher a knighthood, or at least a seat at the head table in recognition of his crusading abilities for Cory's conservatives ...
No wonder Malware's fucked, not that the pond much cares ...
Partisan aggressor feared by Labor? The man's a laughing stock, you deluded reptiles ... and soon enough he'll be following the Chairman on yet another book tour peddling some work destined for the remainder shelves before the weekend is out ...
There's nothing the pond can say to that which isn't evoked in Rowe's stunning cartoon this day, with more stunning Rowe here ...
Just when the pond thinks Rowe can't trump his last evocation of a demented, malevolent, consumed and consuming onion muncher, he tops himself with a vision straight from hellfire ...
By golly, that's put the pond in the mood for other Boschian moments from hell ...
"The decency and generosity of spirit that has long characterised Western societies", eh? Charles Dickens spent a lifetime documenting and puncturing such self-admiring nonsense. A lovely irony that Dickens and others are now part of a rich canon of essential reading, both at the core of 'Western society' and also its fiercest critique. But then, one would need to read them, wouldn't one? I wonder what the inventor of Mr Murdstone and Uriah Heep would have made of such a tortured soul as Tony's? And what name...
ReplyDeleteOnion Muncher Man: "Change is part of life, but change for the better is invariably evolutionary, not revolutionary, and builds on our best traditions and historical strengths."
ReplyDeleteThere you go: makes you wonder why the Catholic hierarchy so violently opposed the theory of evolution for so very long. No, don't tell me, I get it: the theory of evolution was revolutionary, not evolutionary, and therefore deserved no place in this "best of all possible worlds" that Tony's invisible mate built and operates for us.
But then, I was reading a back issue of American Scientist (Vol 102, Nov 2014) and I came upon a summary by Sharon De Witte of the beneficial effects of the black (bubonic) plague:
"We know the Black Death marked the beginning or, at the very least an acceleration of, a huge economic and social shift in Europe", says De Witte. It took 200 years for population levels to recover [in Europe, that is]. In the meantime, the medieval system of serfdom collapsed, because labor was more valuable when there were fewer laborers. Despite the dearth of workers there was more land, more food and more money for ordinary people. "You might see this as a benefit to the laboring classes," she says.
So there you see, it really was all for the best - so Tony must be right and the Black Death was just another evolutionary change for the better that was based on "our best traditions and historical strengths."
I'm not sure De Witte has that right, GB. I recently read Dan Jones' "The Plantagenets" (bit of a curate's egg, okay in parts, not great in others), and he points out that in the wake of the Black Death, Edward III passed a number of laws to restrict peasants from offering labour where and at what price a notional market would have dictated. These laws, which tried to turn back the clock on two centuries of very slow liberalisation of feudal conditions, and which were expressly to protect the profitability of large estates, remained in force until a couple of peasant revolts under Richard II, 40 years later.
DeleteRather than marking the beginning of the huge economic and social shift, it might be more accurate to say that it created tensions that could only be resolved by a huge economic and social shift. In the same way that the crop failures and financial difficulties of 18th century France, by themselves, did not create an economic and social shift - it took the Revolution to do that. One big caveat there is I don't know the sitch in other countries post-Black Death, so perhaps it is more true on the continent than England.
Fun fact - the Black Death is commonly referred to as bubonic plague, but bubonic is only one form; there is also pneumonic and septicemic, the difference is whether the infection is in the lymph system, the lungs or the bloodstream. Pneumonic doesn't need fleas as a vector, as it spreads via coughing and was probably the most infectious once plague had arrived in an area. But the champion is septicemic - the necrosis and clotting failure it produces results in (amongst other things) the skin turning a blackish purple, hence the name. The other forms have maybe 60% fatality rates over a couple of weeks, but septicemic is basically 100% fatal within 1 to 2 days.
Yes, I won't argue with that, FD, De Wiite's pronouncements are from a biologist, not a historian. But then Abbott's pronouncements are from an ideologically twisted and childishly 'religious' sad sack, so I wasn't too reluctant to throw De Witte at him.
DeleteIndeed the huge 'Black Death' toll (said by De Witte to be between 50% and 75% of the European population) did certainly enable some changes to begin in earnest, but not immediately. Though the only thing I remember about Richard II was his annual 'one day of the year' appearance at the bottom of the day's flip calendar page: "A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse" (on the first Tuesday in November, BOC)
But then the German Peasant's Revolt of 1524 came a long time after the 'Death' so it's clear that the social revolution was still a 'work in progress', thus validating Abbott's claim that nothing good ever comes from 'revolution'.
I do somewhat admire Martin Luther's fine exercise of bipartisanship though: he condemned the peasants for revolting and he condemned the German nobles for ruthlessly slaughtering them. Would Abbott ever be that fair and balanced ?