The reptiles have put up the shutters again, and the pond, determined as ever, refuses to stump up the price of admission to the Murdochian elite, and the free newspapers from the airport won't be in the home until night, and so the pond is forced to slum in the gutter with the ne'er-do-wells, dropkicks, losers and also rans in the reptile stable …
In particular Adam Creighton, who purports to be an "economic correspondent", though he doesn't appear economical in his homophobia and bigotry.
The pond had thought that poofter bashing had temporarily gone out of vogue with the reptiles, and they'd settled down, and only pockets of fundamentalist Catholics were telling their gay son that they didn't match up to the straights.
But Adam is a reliable sort and he gets out the cudgel in fine style ...
Um, so being gay or trans is elitist?
And perhaps that reference to Woody Allen is a tad unfortunate, unless Creighton is talking about the chance of doubling your chance of a date on a Saturday night with your adopted daughter, or perhaps being mentioned in unsavoury despatches in relation to other matters …
But that aside, the pond is sometimes puzzled why the reptiles think that a commentary piece can show off the real thoughts of the reptile correspondents, including "economic correspondent", and yet somehow this sort of festering howl of rage and hate can be sequestered from 'straight reporting', so to say, if someone will excuse the pond for the unintended pun …
It's as if the original Adam had decided to set down in a foaming frenzy all that agitates the reptiles, be it uppity women or bizarre notions like enjoying health and life ...
Of course at this point everybody will recognise that the original Adam is going to do a "butt, billy goat butt" ...
Yep, the pond was almost reduced to tears by the original Adams concerns for the poor and for badly done by smokers … who will die early not because they're addicted, no thanks to the IPA, but so they can end up funding vice chancellors.
The pond apologises that it's been forced in to keeping the original Adam's company, which in turn means some hapless readers might be exposed, but at the same time, any fair-dealing stray reader will have to admit that his piece is a relatively concise compendium of reptile pathologies and neuroses …
In short, it's pretty much up there, or out there, with anything that the Oreo herself might offer.
Of course it's not a consolation.
Not having the Oreo to hand and being forced to munch on a stale Adam biscuit feels a bit like being evicted from the garden of surreal Eden … but it's just the way it is. Sure, calling the original Adam a tad weird in his obsessions is a bit like noting that the Donald is a narcissist, but hey it passes the time…until the reptiles realise that the pond remains one of the few chances for them to fix their business model with a bit of free publicity.
Meanwhile, the reptiles were as agitated as the Donald over Sarah Wolf's routines, while also being wildly excited by a Liddell power offer - dinkum Oz coal, oi, oi, oi - but the pond will just settle for the Donald being down wit it with Rowe … with more Rowe here …
When the stupid crawls under your skin and causes you mysterious pain:
ReplyDeletehttps://twitter.com/SkyNewsAust/status/990539906815426560
Gotta say I'm with Tommy The Switz on this one: I don't want to see the "financial industry" regulated, I want to see the vastly over-rewarded spivs, crooks and grifters who currently swamp the "financial industry" regulated all the way into jail for very long times.
DeleteBut let's be reasonable about this: virtually every animal species with any kind of group social life (and a few that haven't) has a sub-population of spivs, grifters, conmen and outright thieves. That sub-population grows to a point where the core population can no longer support it, and then there's a big fallout in which most of the spivs, grifters etec are eliminated.
Then the core population rebuilds itself and the game starts all over again.
Well, due to the successes of our wonderful capitalist society/state, humanity can support a veritably huge population of spivs, grifters, conmen and crooks. And that is what we have now: every single aspect of human society is swamped with them. And still we will support more.
So don't blame the spivs, grifters, conmen and crooks; it isn't their fault. It's our fault for being so successful that we can tolerate so many of them.
Wait, what? The reptiles are quoting Piketty as an authority? That's the same Piketty who argues that wealth inequality is detrimental and is a built-in "feature" of capitalism, and can only be corrected by government intervention? The same Piketty who supports a 2% wealth tax and progressive income tax with a top rate of 80% (he acknowledges these are politically impossible, although the US had them for 50 years)? The same Piketty who is a consultant on economic policy to that raving commie Jeremy Corbyn?
DeleteAnd the reptiles are quoting him? Strange days indeed. Most peculiar, mother...
BTW, GB, your analogy to animals is broken. Cheaters remain in animal population because they serve a purpose on the whole-of-species scale, by preventing hypertrophic "Fisherian Runaway". You touch on it in reference to "sub-population", but it spreads through the whole population, and in evolution, it doesn't just prune a bit, it kills the tree.
DeleteSexual selection based on secondary characteristics like an overly elaborate tail or ginormous antlers work on the basis that only the fittest males could lump around such useless impedimenta so must have good genes. So, theoretically, those ones get to reproduce, kicking off a cycle of ever-more elaborate tails and antlers and so on. But if this selection is unchecked, the species as a whole becomes increasingly unfit for its environment, because you get to a point where even the genetically fittest struggle to schlep around that baggage. You finish up going down an evolutionary cul-de-sac, and if some outside stressor arrives - the environment changes food supply, predators, geography - that species is toast. This is seen repeatedly in the fossil record, for example the decline in dinosaur diversity before the famous asteroid strike.
By keeping their "inferior" genes in the pool, cheaters slow the species' walk down that dead end road.
Cheaters are not something to be tolerated in our case, because they are the problem, not the solution. They are more like a parasitic infestation, which like schistosomiasis or malaria will probably kill you without treatment.
Yes, that Piketty; truly strange days indeed.
DeleteWith the animal world, I get the point you're making (and thanks for the reminder), but I had a more behavioural aspect in mind: like, for instance, a meerkat who never actually takes a turn at standing guard (and running any risks involved such as being picked off by predators) but who takes advantage of the service provided by the lookouts. Now clearly, the more meerkats that behave that way, the more stress the rest of the bunch are under.
It was based on my somewhat fuzzy recall of a TV doco of some years ago - starting from the inter-species exploitative behaviour of cuckoos, but considering similar behaviours wholly within species.
In human terms, I guess it's like the thieves who don't till the soil nor herd the domesticated animals, but turn up regularly demanding their 'share'. Kinda like the landed aristocracy who neither sow nor reap but just collect "rent" from the peasants who do - in short, an institutionalised 'protection racket'.
The main point was that if, within a species, there is any possible way for 'antisocial' behaviour to be profitable, then there will be individuals exhibiting, and profiting from, that behaviour. And the more profitable the 'criminality' is, the greater the percentage of a species that will make use of it. Until the percentage of 'criminals' gets to be too great for the others to continue to support, and then, at least for a while, there is a reckoning that reduces the population significantly, especially the reducing prevalence of the 'cheats'.