Okay, that's more than enough of the federal election campaign, with things going swimmingly for the onion muncher, and enthusiasts swarming to his twitter account here for the latest stunning examples of his political genius …
That done and dusted, it's difficult times for the pond because it's so over the politics already, and inevitably most of the reptile energy is dedicated to forelock tugging and lickspittle fellow travelling …
I know, I know, it's the duty of Pravda down under to rally to the cause, beat the drum and carry on like pork chops, but it's against the spirit of the pond. It's just bare-arsed naked politics, and boring … even nattering "Ned", who feigns some kind of objectivity, is in on the cheer-leader game …
Is there not a single reptile who could save the pond by offering up some genuine loonacy?
The pond is very pleased you asked that question, because yes there is … enter Dame Slap from the far right of the stage …
The pond is very pleased you asked that question, because yes there is … enter Dame Slap from the far right of the stage …
Oh sheesh, as soon as Dame Slap announces a new brawler, the pond knows it's going to be in the company of a sublime fuckwit, and so it proved to be …
Ah, the worst of the worst …a secular militant atheist, who suddenly discovers he believes in imaginary friends, and wants to follow a church which has spent decades covering up fiddling with children, and most recently sought to blame it all on the alleged sexual revolution of the 1960s …
It reminds the pond of one of its key theses … that your barking mad fundamentalist doesn't really mind which fundamentalism is to hand, provided it's some kind of fundamentalist thinking. The late unlamented Christopher Pearson exemplified this tendency ...
So it didn't take much of an epiphany to turn around, support the onion muncher and the Catholic church, embrace Latin, and no doubt if Pearson were still alive, wage war on electric cars …
You see, it doesn't matter the form of the fundamentalism, it's just the love of the fundamentalist path … which is why the pond is almost as suspicious of militant atheists as militant Catholics, because who knows when they might bung on a switcheroo?
So he follows an inveterate liar, a grifter, a cheat, a liar and a fraud?
By the way, it was just by happenstance that the pond couldn't resist clicking on a reptile EXCLUSIVE …
Now it's not so much the silliness of the migrant wife, as the sensitivity of the preening narcissist that amuses ...
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Of course what's really funny is the way that the reptiles presented as an EXCLUSIVE a story which first turned up in New York Magazine (always a fun read) back on 10th March under the header Melania Trump Mistook Australian Politician Julie Bishop for a Minister's Wife, and Cameron Stewart is so dumb, he mentioned the story, even if he didn't provide a link ...
Distractions, distractions. The pond apologies, cuts Stewart short, and returns to the main Dame Slap game, its only excuse being that Stewart's story is a microcosmic illustration of the stupidity of Trump worshippers of the Dame Slap, Bauerlein kind …
Oh fucketty fuck, raging at the young and talk of original sin? And in the world of the Donald talking of satisfying moral drama?
And yet here's a loon who doesn't mention what Hitler did in the Spanish civil war? Might not, in the interest of balance, it ought to have been noted? Why it's only a click away in these post-modern times for Greg Hunters in German involvement in the Spanish Civil War …
And yet here's a loon who doesn't mention what Hitler did in the Spanish civil war? Might not, in the interest of balance, it ought to have been noted? Why it's only a click away in these post-modern times for Greg Hunters in German involvement in the Spanish Civil War …
Of course the onion muncher and the local Catholics loved their dictators and their fascists and were quite happy to fellow travel with Adolf …
‘When the bullets of the communists hit the statue of Jesus outside the Cathedral of Valladolid, for some it was just lead striking brass,’ he famously told the great Melbourne University Spanish Civil War debate; ‘but for me they were piercing the heart of Christ the King.’ (onion muncher here)
Why learn the classics? Well apparently you can learn sweet fuck all from studying history …especially if you have one eye carefully shielded …
Nietzsche, great heroes and ressentiment?
By another of those curious coincidences, the pond has been reading a piece in the NYRB about Napoleon - naturally Nietzsche was a big fan. (Unhappily inside the paywall here). It ended this way:
...Zamoyski does his best to give credit for Napoleon's good intentions, while detailing the swathe of damage he inflicted on a whole continent over two decade. Yet ultimately I find the same sensation in reading his Life as I do in reading Andrew Roberts' much more admiring blockbuster or Philip Dwyer's relentlessly caustic trilogy. One suddenly perceives a strange emptiness at Napoleon's core, a lack of any real purpose beyond gaining and retaining power. What exactly are his armies plowing through the sands of Syria and the snows of Russia for? Never has the term "ego trip" seemed more fitting …
Speaking of ego trips, it would be wrong not to mention the Donald again.
It's not a matter of hating him, it's a matter of noting that the narcissist is a pathological liar and in his actions and deeds, stands directly opposed to Christ's teachings. It's a matter for fundamentalist Christians to reconcile how they support a man who would make Christ blanche, but there's no reason for sensible people to follow them in their abject surrender to the base and the corrupt …
As for Milo?
You might as well mount the same sort of argument for Alex Jones, at least until he got into trouble for his Sandy Hook conspiracies.
The US government used chemicals to make people gay? Apparently that's just a satirical provocation …
So that's why Milo's just a bit player wanting a role in American Hustle so he can talk of magic science ovens?
Oh and then there's been the most recent backflip by the Donald, which has generated a massive swamp of clips from times past ...
By golly, this is more like it, full blown monstrous stupidity of a far right kind, with Dame Slap distracting from the election and delivering the goods, and thanks be unto the IPA, and remember children, tobacco is excellent for your health, and coal will make the planet whole again …
The pond was bereft when it realised there was only one gobbet to go ...
Yes, our colossus civilisation … why not start with the two world wars, the Holocaust or the newly won ability to destroy the planet with nukes?
There's your liberal democracy at work … and then you might move on to the joys of imperialism and colonialism, which allows the pond to give another NYRB story about the joys of the British in India a plug (sadly inside the paywall here).
...The grandest of them, Mrs. Hermione Montague, who lived with an English companion and twenty-three dogs, spurned social contact with two sisters who occupied a modest house less than a mile away. Their father had been in trade, owning a store at the foot of the hills. He was thus classed, in Raj vernacular, as a “boxwallah”; he was not a “pukka sahib,” a proper gentleman.
Encounters with such people in various corners of the world imbued me with pity for the melancholy of the circumstances of many imperialists abroad, rather than envy of the grandeur that permitted William Hickey, for instance, an early-nineteenth-century lawyer in India, to boast a household of sixty-three servants, including eight men who waited at table, eight who worked in the stables, a coachman, three mowers, and four grooms. To us of the twenty-first century, there is a preposterousness about the manner in which a few tens of thousands of British soldiers and civilians lorded for three centuries over an ever-expanding mass of the subcontinent and its inhabitants.
Yes, there's a preposterousness about them, just as there's a preposterousness about Dame Slap and Mark Bauerlein, but the most preposterous thing of all is their self-seriouness and their complete inability to recognise their preposterousness, easy enough if you come from the boxwallah class of Tamworth …
And so to the Rowe of the day, with more Rowe here, and he just happens to mention the latest preposterous denials of the Donald …so much preposterousness, so little time ...
'Did they cut you off mid-sentence?' Judging by that lovely photo, I'd say they cut him off mid-syllable.
ReplyDelete"Is there not a single reptile who could save the pond by offering up some genuine loonacy? ... enter Dame Slap from the far right of the stage …"
ReplyDeleteSo very right, DP, Dame Slap is really way out and far gone now. Though I suppose that as a "director of the Institute of Public Affairs" she really does have to espouse the group madness.
Anyway, now that she's got past Monckton and Trump and Milo, why not Bauerlein (whoever he is) ?
Though I do have to say that Bauerlein has illustrated a major question of our modern day when he praises Jefferson. I note that people becoming more aware of Michael Jackson has led to all sorts of agonised questioning about whether we can and should "separate the art from the artist". And so now Bauerlein has added questions about "separating the philosophy from the philosopher" to the general discussion.
But then we have to consider what Bauerlein says about Jefferson: "[he] grows up in a slave society, his family owned slaves, his plantation depends on slaves, his material wellbeing depends on slaves ..."
Well that settles it then, who could be other than admiring of a man so loyal to his established family values and so considerate of his own "material wellbeing". Let statues of him abound for our greater glory.
And anyway, the Roman Catholic cult that Bauerlein believes in has their god's word that practising slavery is just fine: consider Exodus Ch 21, and in particular:
(1) Exodus 21:4
If his master have given him a wife, and she have born him sons or daughters; the wife and her children shall be her master's, and he shall go out by himself.
In short, the children of slaves are themselves slaves for life.
(2) Exodus 21:6
Then his master shall bring him unto the judges; he shall also bring him to the door, or unto the door post; and his master shall bore his ear through with an aul; and he shall serve him for ever.
Slaves may be marked or "branded" at their owners discretion.
So there we go: slavery is all ok according to the Catholic god's words and Jefferson was just loyal to his ancestry and family values. All good.
Dorothy wrote
ReplyDelete"which allows the pond to give another NYRB story about the joys of the British in India a plug"
A Canadian staffer at their UN Delegation told me that at no time did the total British population of the Raj exceed 100,000! I pointed out to her they had the help of the East India company's private army which evolved into the Imperial Indian Army, in addition to which the British made sure for every 3 Indian regiments there was a British one posted there.
Still, it is amazing the Brits were able to dominate India so long, mainly through playing the Indian 'nations' off against each other. The various Indian groupings could put up for the present with the British as top dog but they'd be damned if their historical enemies next door like the Tamils or Sikhs were going to be in power. Plus with the enforced Pax under Britain, new road/rail networks etc, the Indian ruling classes made fortunes from trade internal/external, it wasn't just the British colonists/investors/exploiters who made out.
The Indian One Percenters, Rajahs, got their cut of the action, who needs independence, "screw you Jack I got mine."
Gandhi's reactions when he first visited Britain in 1931 are fascinating, he was gobsmacked at the poverty, the slums, the poor diet and malnutrition of the lower classes and declared if the movers and shakers of India were to see it they would be moved to revolution, as how could they be ruled by such a tiny island with seemingly so little relative wealth other than what they squeezed from India. A stretch perhaps(they were 'liberating" wealth from all over), but such sights moved him deeply.
Canada itself only became fully independent of Great Britain with the passing of its Constitution Act in 1982 whereas India became a fully independent republic in 1950. But if you are interested in British post-WWI poverty, I can recommend Eric Blair/George Orwell's 'Road to Wigan Pier' which describes it, and Britain's class war, in mind-numbing detail.
DeleteThank you GB, I have made a note to read it. German General Guderian, one of the fathers of Blitzkrieg, in his memoirs pointed out how shocked the Germans were at the physical condition of the British soldiers they captured. Scrawny, hollow chested, poor diet since childhood, bad teeth(modern armies make a point of addressing all dental problems lest something arise during deployment and they lose the use of the soldier; 4 months after Pearl Harbor 40% of all US dentists had been temporally drafted to work on the hordes of new recruits 24 hours a day). Germany had always put a emphasis on Youth Culture, inventing kindergartens, stressing fitness.
DeleteThe Germans wondered why the British youths fought for a system that so little rewarded them. Nazis were appalled by the British Class system! This contrasted with the relatively robust health of the New Zealanders and Australians with their better living conditions and diet, though one might see the irony in being complimented for being healthier cannon fodder.
Bauerlein features a regular conversation/interview with "notable" bloviators on the right-wing "catholic" First Things.
ReplyDeleteOne recent interview featured Salvatore Babones who is now regularly featured in Quadrant magazine. He has also been featured in the reptilian swamp-paper defending the Ramsey storm-in-a-teacup meme.
Because of these associations I decided to listen to it.
It was completely boring and one-dimensional - quite pathetic.
Speaking of very real threats to both freedom of speech and freedom altogether, the case of Victor Oban is leading the charge, especially in closing down the Central European university etc.
ReplyDeleteFor details check out the essay on Zeit online by Beda Magyar titled Hungary Is Lost.
It is also interesting that one of Oban's most prominent Western supporters is the golden-haired-wonder-boy of "conservative" philosophy, notably Roger Scruton who is sometimes featured at IPA gabfests, and very much admired by the Quadrant cabal - there is a review of his most recent book in this months edition
I see that Scruton just got sacked as May's "housing advisor" (whatever that might be) for some anti-Soros ravings (amongst other things):
Deletehttps://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/apr/10/roger-scruton-calls-for-dismissal-islamophobiad-soros-remarks
"He is a thinker whose time has come" Well no, his time has past, that's why Dame Slap is a fan. She has got to stop this big build up when there is nothing to follow.
ReplyDeleteIt shows how bereft of ideas the conservatives are that most of this is about the "left". An extended moan about modern life, modern attitudes and people that disagree with them generally. Bauerlein doesn't offer anything new or insightful and no amount of boosting will make his ideas anything but pedestrian.