In which the pond resumes normal usual Caterist service with idle chatter of "boutique human rights" ...

Being deeply conservative, the pond appreciates how quickly things have swung back to a traditional cycle, with Caterists turning up on a Tuesday and five bells sounding, and all well in the world ...

And tried to hear your voice, 
but all I heard 
 Was a boat's whistle, and the scraping squeal 
Of Caterists whining 
Of seabirds' voices far away, and bells, 
 Five bells. Five bells coldly ringing out. 
 Five bells. (here for the original)

Caterists, it will be remembered, are a rabble with a deep and just cause ... plunder the taxpayer's purse, preferably while denouncing rent-seekers ...

For pure comedy, it helps if the Caterists talk of the prosaic challenged of government, such as balancing budgets, while the pond contemplates the $1.5 trillion or so the Donald and the GOP are busy adding to the national debt ...

Not that the pond cares about the fate of the young in the United States, except when the pancake flattens around the world.

Talk about being easily bored by the prosaic challenges of government and cheap jokes about rainbow dances...

Indeed, indeed, it's outrageous, this reaching for the cliché bowl, when as everyone knows, the best thing to do is to reach for the public purse ...

And once fuelled, funded and fired up, it's possible to make light of the past, and ignore that which went down. 

Within the pond's lifetime in Australia, people have been bashed and murdered for being gay, jailed and fined and publicly humiliated and disgraced, while in Britain they were chemically castrating Turing ...

And it's not that it's gone away. Islamic fundamentalists in certain parts of the world, and Xian fundamentalists of a Deep South mentality maintain the rage and the hate, and here in Sydney, there's a band of complimentary women devotees who still seek to demonise teh gays ...

The Caterist is particularly expert at offensive, obnoxious condescension ... viz his reference to "boutique human rights."

What a trolling fucker, what a small minded dimwit, what a loathsome toad of a wretched creature ...

As we're on the subject of language, it reminded the pond of a recent piece in The New Yorker on the matter of style guides for the Daily Stormer...

One section is called, simply, “No Such Thing as Too Much Hyperbole.” “Even when a person can say to themselves ‘this is ridiculous,’ they are still affected by it on an emotional level,” the guide says. “Refer to teenagers who get arrested for racist Twitter posts as ‘eternally noble warriors bravely fighting for divine war to protect the blood heritage of our sacred ancestors’. . . . You and anyone reading can say omg corny lol. But it just doesn’t matter to the primitive part of the brain.” 
Since the Daily Stormer was founded, in 2013, some non-Nazis have wondered how seriously to take it. Surely a site named for Der Stürmer—a Third Reich tabloid so crude that Joseph Goebbels, in his diary, called it “simple pornography”—couldn’t, in the current century, mean what it appeared to mean. Maybe it was an elaborate joke, or an attempt to test the boundaries of free speech. “The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not,” the author writes, in a section called “Lulz.” “This is obviously a ploy and I actually do want to gas kikes. But that’s neither here nor there.” For legal reasons, the guide continues, writers shouldn’t openly incite violence; “however, whenever someone does something violent, it should be made light of.” The ultimate goal is to “dehumanize the enemy, to the point where people are ready to laugh at their deaths.” That settles that.

Make light of it. That's right, that's the strategy, the mocking and the lightening. No need to talk of walking a mile or even a kilometre in someone else's shoes, unless they happen to be walking in search of a grant ...

And speaking of  making light of things, it's back to that talk of "boutique human rights" ...

Indeed, indeed, and it seems that the unopposed absurdity of a grant yesterday will become the conventional wisdom of the urgent need for a grant tomorrow ...

Have the Caterists been abandoned?

Will a new grant be announced?

The pond realises everyone is on tenterhooks. Has the joke gone as old and as crusty as a Caterist joke, or will the Department of Finance deliver the goods this year?

In the end it doesn't matter much.

There will always be the need for a new moral crusade espousing fruity causes, such as mocking gays, blathering about "boutique human rights", diminishing and redefining what actually happened in the past, and denying what climate scientists have established in the present ...

The work of the Caterists is never done, and thank the long absent lord there are special interests willing to pay for it ...

Urgent questions must be asked by a man who lives in a suburb not notably populated by plumbers ... unless they happen to service the mansions of the lower north shore, or perhaps the eastern suburbs ...

As always shamelessness is its own reward, and so to a particularly shameless bunch of cartoons ...