In which the pond sort of pays attention to the bromancer, but gets Boltified along the way ...

Following on from Dame Slap, a friend reminded the pond of a recent piece in The New Yorker by John Lanchester asking Can Economists and Humanists Ever Be Friends?

Spoiler alert, it ended this way, though anyone who's a subscriber or keen to use up their free articles allowance can follow the link to get the full piece …

The pond regretted not putting that gobbet, with its talk of churn, next to Dame Slap, but then the tendency might not be so much churn, as chuck …

Still, it allowed the pond to turn away from the usual reptile fodder for a bit of a light luncheon … safe in the knowledge that a snack fest wouldn't include nattering "Ned" …

Yes, the armchair general was at it again, getting all misty and emotional about the carnage and the killing fields of the first world war …

It made the pond wonder whether Kelly had ever seen active service, but his wiki didn't record any …Greg Hunt away here … and then that's when the pond noticed a bald-faced single line in the wiki reading …

Paul Kelly opposes same-sex marriage, because according to him these marriages threaten freedom of speech.

That couldn't be right. Surely the flag-waving armchair general couldn't have been that fatuous? But the link led to the Bolter's blog …

And sure enough, when you boil "Ned's" bigotry down to a single line, nothing much is lost in the reduction ...

This in a rag which today featured this piece of piety …

Is it any wonder that the pond turned to the smiling bromancer for a good news story and a bit of uplift?

Hooray, huzzah, hurrah, Huzza! Huzza! Huzza! Long live the King! 

One of the problems with our debate?

Is there an elephant in the room?

Yes, they do their best to hold their noses and ignore the elephant in the room, and it's left to others to sweep out the dung of permissible racism …

And so on, but in all the ruckus about the importation of neo-Nazi white nationalist thinking in the shape of Murdochian rags, the pond almost forgot the final bout of good news from the romancer ...

Say what? The bromancer has gone socialist and has a job for government?

But what really appealed to the pond was that final line, a splendid example of the noble cliché in action.

The pond will confess it has a very soft spot for "Much has been done, but much remains to be done", though it will allow that "the children of today are the adults of tomorrow" has much appeal …

As for the nation and migration, here's a different thought …

On 6 January 1996, a letter, written by the preselected Liberal party candidate for Ipswich, Pauline Hanson, was published in the Queensland Times. It claimed nothing more than showering the admittedly once-wronged Aboriginal people with “money, facilities and opportunities” not available to other Australians was harming them and “causing racism”. The letter caused pandemonium at Liberal party headquarters. Hanson was stripped of her preselection. (The rest as they say is history.) Today, such a letter would be barely noticed by anyone. 
Twenty-two years later, on 2 August 2018, the country’s most influential columnist, Andrew Bolt, regularly published in four Murdoch tabloids, claimed that Australia was being destroyed by waves of immigrants – Chinese, Jews, Vietnamese, Indians, Muslims etc – who refused to assimilate and who, as colonists, treated Australia not as a home but as a hotel. That a column like this could be published in the mainstream media, unthinkable 20 years ago, is a consequence of the steady and sinister and perilous drift of Australia’s national conversation towards a permissible racism.

The QT?

Still doing it …

If we're going to start somewhere, should we begin by kicking out the useless Dutch who've done so much to harm and change our culture?

Oh forget it, that's just a good-humoured Bolterish joke ...

And so to a few cartoons celebrating the white nationalist Boltification of Murdochian rags …