During the week, pure Angus beef was roaming the range … fudging, and dissembling, and peddling falsified documents … and then this happened …
Well it would be remiss of the pond not to celebrate that last cartoon before Rowe mysteriously, tragically, cruelly disappeared, was given an Orwellian status …
People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word.
A bit like the planet, when you come to ponder on it ...
Curiously the image resonated with another reptile story during the week ...
But enough of beefy Angus, in his prime follies, it was time for a Sunday meditation, and our Gracie allowed the pond to turn to pious thoughts of the impending right to abuse deluded believers in Santa Clause and Jeezus up hill and down dale ...
Yes, our Gracie blew her stack ...
Poor Gracie was in a nightmare world.
For example, a journalist scribbles furiously that climate science alarmism is the work of nincompoops and everybody should enjoy prime Angus beef. The reader, perhaps an actual climate scientist …
... complains of feeling uncomfortable, bullied and distressed. The publisher - why it could be the lizard Oz's publisher - must address the issue. The publisher isn't allowed to say, "oh well, we'll publish some actual science once in a blue moon."
Luckily it's not like that, but it's still fun ...
Staggering? Not really … we all suffer, as the infallible Pope noted recently …
But back to our Gracie's nightmare scenarios … a nightmare for the pond, what with the pond thinking that religion is one of those mind parasites so vividly evoked by Colin Wilson …
Look, the God eye in the brain. She's haunting us all ...
Poor Gracie, fancy expecting this government to provide shelter for anyone, whistleblowers included …
And so to the pond's duty and its burden, the need to celebrate prattling Polonius, even though it goes without saying that Polonious is a virus of the mind, and it is infantile to believe anything a man in the Sydney Institute sky says, when clearly it shouldn't exist ...
Now forewarned is forearmed, and the pond knew it would be in for the usual history lesson, and this week, it dug this story out of the archives (clicking on it for readability might be handy) ...
What a quisling, what a lickspittle, what a useless fellow traveller, an appeaser nonpareil ...
But would the pond be rewarded? Would the usual history lesson include a mention of Ming the Merciless?
Funny. Poor Polonius hasn't mentioned that grand idea, the Multifunction Polis … or even worse, that sinister plot by councils to set up sister cities, so that they might spend $15 million on junketing airfares (or so prime Angus beef tells us), to and fro …
Yeah, yeah, yadda yadda, here but not the bloody Commies …
Eek, the bloody Commies.
Next thing you know we'll be having their digital surveillance abroad in our fair land, and only the mutton Dutton on hand to stop them …
Ah well, never mind … Xi could learn a thing or two from the Central Scrutinizer…
But now it's back to prickly Polonius getting a dose of the mutton Dutton prickles ...
Indeed, indeed, it's so wrong, especially when there are so many other ways to take a shot at SloMo …
The pond has no idea how it's going to cope without a regular supply of Rowe, but it can easily imagine a day when the Polonial virus of the mind might disappear …
But what do you know, the loyal lad watches the ABC religiously, even if he must pretend that it was Sky wot done it first ...
Well yes, but wouldn't it have been simpler to focus on this story, which is a genuine scandal, rather than slide it in on the coattails of a distraction about China?
Was that a way of distracting readers from realising that what Polonius really wanted to do was recycle Four Corners, because he's just a half-arsed borrower of work by real reporters, while the pond is even more pathetically a half-arsed recycler of half-arsed bludgers of the Polonial kind ...
Perhaps Polonius should stay focussed on the ABC … he seems to find it useful, and every so often he seems to learn a few things…
Why in due course he might even discover climate science, the drought and the whole damn thing … though if the ABC keeps sticking in his craw, the infallible Pope will do ...
Poor old polonius must have forgotten that the Darwin port was leased to china by a conservative politician.
ReplyDeleteKGK and the "religious freedom bill": "... no one can concur even on what problem the legislation is designed to solve."
ReplyDeleteWell yeah, a very great deal of law is like that, but in this particular case nobody can even legally define what a 'religion' is, so how can anyone define what 'religious freedom' legally is ?
It is a terrible thing in this brief life when one has to agree, however minimally, with a rampant reptile. I think we should all go back to those good old days when we never, ever talked about sex, politics and religion.
Ah, but all becomes copacetic again, and back to normal, with Polonius. And apart from his total silence about Menzies he had this to say:
"... many nations of the Indo-Pacific region are wary of embracing China - among others, South Korea, Japa, Vietnam, Singapore and India."
Well now, according to Wikipedia, in that minor altercation of 80-odd years ago called World War II, we had the following:
"The South-East Asian Theatre of World War II was the name given to the campaigns of the Pacific War in Burma, Ceylon, India, Thailand, the Philippines, Indochina, Malaya and Singapore."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South-East_Asian_theatre_of_World_War_II
Add Australia to that list, and then point out all of those places that now do not have at least 'formal' if not outright 'friendly' relations with Japan. So it would seem that even war and invasion are readily forgiven quite quickly to 'embrace' former enemies.
But as for Menzies' views of Hitler and the war, maybe it is just a little obvious - at least to everybody except Polonius - why Menzies and his party was dumped during WWII and replaced by Curtin and Chifley.
Ooops, just a small cirrection: I note that now the South Koreans are equating Japan's rising sun flag to the swastika.
Deletehttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/29/south-korea-compares-japans-rising-sun-flag-to-swastika-as-olympic-row-deepens
In her own blundering, back and forth way Gracie almost gets to the point about freedom of religion The point is to carve out a set of behaviours and privileges which are exempted from any sort of requirement for rational justification.
ReplyDeleteThe folk that are all wound up about these issues are quite free to follow their faith but it seems that this is not enough, it is necessary that other people need to be made to conform (or at least subsidise their beliefs). Their other problem is that other folk they really dislike may also benefit.
I'll go with Peter Boghossian's definition of faith - "pretending to know things you don't know". If you want to entertain delusions yourself, that is fine, but if you choose to force them onto others it is quite reasonable for them ask "why should we have to accept this?". "Because we are pretending to know something we don't know" doesn't seem an adequate answer.
As for Polonius, false equivalence (tu quoque fallacy?) seems to be the only tactic he deploys.
Boghossian, Bef ? Oh dear ... chacun à son goût, je suppose.
DeleteBut surely the main problem is that regardless of any issues of 'faith' or its opposite, or anything in between, anything and everything anybody ever says has the possibility (probability ?) to insult or offend someone.