In which the pond turns to the urbane Urban and Dame Slap for a dangerous dose of critical and creative thinking ...

The pond deeply regrets that it had to delay consideration of urgent matters flagged by the urbane Urban, in order to get through its Saturday matinee trilogy … but in a way, it's just as well, a kind of serendipity, because the urban Urban contained an astonishing example of screen villainy, more deeply disturbing than even the boogeyman in Halloween ...

The pond could hardly contain itself.

What an outrageous, fashionable but contentious skill set. Who on earth imagined that critical and creative thinking might be of use to modern readers of reptile publications?

The pond is deeply disturbed that fashionable but contentious 21st century skills such as critical and creative thinking are being contemplated …

Where will it end if this filthy disease gains a foothold? 

The intellectual roots of critical thinking are as ancient as its etymology, traceable, ultimately, to the teaching practice and vision of Socrates 2,500 years ago who discovered by a method of probing questioning that people could not rationally justify their confident claims to knowledge. Confused meanings, inadequate evidence, or self-contradictory beliefs often lurked beneath smooth but largely empty rhetoric. Socrates established the fact that one cannot depend upon those in "authority" to have sound knowledge and insight. He demonstrated that persons may have power and high position and yet be deeply confused and irrational. He established the importance of asking deep questions that probe profoundly into thinking before we accept ideas as worthy of belief. (here)

As for creative carry-ons, the pond has had enough of that nonsense to last several lifetimes, and resorted to an encyclopaedia to see where this hideous 21st century idea might have started ...

Renaissance men had a sense of their own independence, freedom and creativity, and sought to give voice to this sense of independence and creativity. Baltasar Gracián (1601-1658) wrote: "Art is the completion of nature, as it were 'a second Creator'"; … Raphael, that he shapes a painting according to his idea; Leonardo da Vinci, that he employs "shapes that do not exist in nature"; Michelangelo, that the artist realizes his vision rather than imitating nature. Still more emphatic were those who wrote about poetry: G.P. Capriano held (1555) that the poet's invention springs "from nothing." Francesco Patrizi (1586) saw poetry as "fiction," "shaping," "transformation," Finally, at long last, someone ventured to use the word, "creation." He was the seventh-century Polish poet and theoretician of poetry, Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski (1595-1640), known as "the last Latin poet." In his treatise, De perfecta poesi, he not only wrote that a poet "invents," "after a fashion builds," but also that the poet "creates anew" (de novo creat). Sarbiewski even added: "in the manner of God" (instar Dei). (here)

It was all shockingly modern, the sort of blather one might find in a course about the glories of Western Civilisation … though sadly the rest of the urbane Urban was inclined to the dull, and the pond wondered whether it should skip the lesson, and go straight to Dame Slap … but being a studious student, the pond pressed on ...

At this pond, all the pond could think was, 'why hasn't the urbane Urban consulted the dashing Donners, a man of infinite understanding and awareness? He'll explain why creative and critical thinking are completely useless ideas ...'

Ah, the wise dashing Donners, a star of computers, robotisation, changing times, modern technologies and globalist Catholic cannibalistic groupthink …

What a relief he was dragged in to offer a vision of the future for young things … but by now the pond was hoping that the urbane Urban would recognise that, with her dashing Donners flourish, she'd done her job and the future was safe, free of creative and critical thinking, with the chanting of 'angus dei' a much more useful form of thinking …

Dame Slap awaits, be short about it, urbane Urban, perhaps just another dash of Donners and then in lieu of the IPA, how about a bit of CIS? 

Well that puff piece of hysteria and loathing is done, and so the pond could move on to the latest Dame Slap litany …

Such is the paranoia in reptile la la land that the faintest whiff of criticism sends them into a paroxysm of fear and loathing …

Not critical or creative thinking, that would be reprehensible, but such is the familiarity of Dame Slap's rant that the pond thought it should import a few cartoons to celebrate the man Dame Slap hailed as the man to MAGA …

 

Ah there you go, 'snap', and so to snap along with Dame Slap ...

Yes, true democrats must stand up … why not don a MAGA cap and rush out into the streets of New York to celebrate?

Meanwhile, Dame Slap is still holding a candle for that moderate seminal creative and critical thinker Steve Bannon ...

Uh huh … another cartoon to maintain the fear and the loathing …

The pond makes no apology for the cartoons.

When Dame Slap goes into one of her paranoid fearful crusading rants, it can turn endless and monotonous, a feast of crazed and crazy nonsense ...

Actually section 18C has three fifths of fuck all to do with the reaction to Knight's cartoon in the United States, but the pond apologises for attempting to introduce some sort of notion of critical thinking into the litany. 

That's shocking, reprehensible behaviour and a cartoon celebrating Dame Slap's MAGA would be much more civilised …

And still the litany goes on, but the pond suspects that Dame Slap is starting to run out of puff, if not out of rage, paranoia, fear and loathing ...

What's funny about this? The way the reptiles, a kind of a kool-aid sipping bunch of Jonestowners, linked together in their polarised Surry Hills bunker, keep shrieking in unison how everybody else is wrong about everything …

Dame Slap wants to thwart tribal tendencies?  She's the living, breathing heart of reptile climate science-denying tribalism …

As for that talk of creative and critical thinking? Just get an app, and that'll fix what ails ya … remember everything can get sorted by an app, an app is all you need, the logarithms will work a treat, and all will be well, and the garden will be fruitful or at least fruity in the spring ...

Be alarmed? Be alarmed about the age of outrage? 

But all the reptiles, Dame Slap, the Bolter, the dog botherer, after dark at Sky, all of them, are in the outrage industry, being outraged on a daily basis. It's their business model, and the pond has responded with its own business model built on the same rage and hysteria …

And this Dame Slap outing is yet another classic example of the anger, the rage, the outrage, the paranoia and the fear and the loathing and the intolerance and the complete inability and lack of interest in walking a few yards, let alone a mile, in someone else's shoes …

And what has been the result of all the Dame Slap's rage and intolerance? Epic love of Lord Monckton and the donning of a MAGA cap, so that she might dance at night in the streets in New York … 

And meanwhile, all the pond was left with was a bunch of cartoons …