When the pond left Polonius yesterday, the humourless sod was berating the ABC for using a virus as a source of humour, while the reptiles were busy publishing a cartoon using the virus as a source of humour.
When the pond left the reptiles yesterday, they were languishing outside the top ten, as noted here …
It's worth remembering all this as the pond wanders down memory lane with Polonius for a Sunday meditation ...
Oh dear, as if the pond hadn't already feasted at length on nattering "Ned"!
Is there anything more tedious, tiresome and tiring than anal retentive reptiles quoting each other?
Yes, of course there is, and it invariably comes when Polonius steps into his time machine and whizzes us back for one of his patented history lessons… though the pond thought it was a little cruel for Polonius to forget that at one point not so long ago, the carping Crowe was a badge-carrying member of the reptile Illuminati …
But once cast out of the sanctum, there can be no forgiveness of the wayward, wandering heretic, especially if he ends up in a consortium with a paper in the top ten … L'Age at number 9, the reptiles outside the top 10 at a lazy, indolent 16th!
How can this be?
Well even worse, that bloody savvy Savva is still allowed to preach in the lizard Oz temple, and then peddle her heresies on the ABC!
Just as the Donald keeps returning to 2016, and sprinkling his memory dust with lies, so Polonius wanders back in history, but to what avail?
Could it be that looking at the present is too terrible to contemplate? Is there so little to say about the figures fiddler getting away with it? What about the rorters and their paperwork, shuffling between office and PM HQ? What about the dire need to construct an actual energy policy? What about the electricity bills that continue to rise along with the dissembling and the lies?
Reasonable questions perhaps, but not to Polonius, who instead must revert once again to "Ned" ...
Oh for fuck's sake, you humourless sod. The reptiles came in at position 16. Try to scribble furiously about the present, instead of thundering on about the past, and you might get somewhere ...
And so to a bonus meditation.
How could the pond resist the dog botherer, at one point topping the digital commentary page?
The thing about the dog botherer is that his howls of despair are so predictable, they have to be eaten in the same way that a dog might contemplate yet another bow of dry pellets purporting to be chicken or beef or lamb ...
Yes, it's best to take the opening serve of dog bothering in a short lump. How else to cope with an opening that began "first they came for the coal", which is beyond the valley of the pathetic, and must have sent poor old Martin Niemöller spinning in his grave …
It's exactly the sort of shallow scribbling and thinking you might expect of actors, already haunted by the way they make a living pretending to be someone else.
You know, if you've starred as a reprehensible Joker in a reprehensible film, of course you're going to be traumatised.
At least Phoenix has an excuse … but the pond can't think of one for the dog botherer and his ongoing infatuation with coal and his Joker-like fixation on destroying the planet ...
What's funny in all this?
Well for no particular reason, the reptiles decided they'd interrupt the dog botherer proceedings with a couple of snaps of Jane Fonda ...
The excuse?
Well the dog botherer apparently is agitated at the notion that she might have worn the dress twice.
Of course the dog botherer himself is an impeccable example of doing it right.
When he goes on Sky, he waves away the make-up artist, insists that the chaff bag he wears daily will do - no fripperies for me he harumphs. Apparently on some days, he thinks even a chaff bag is a little too ostentatious, and he insists on showing he has absolutely no fashion sense whatsoever …
Perhaps the best example of his modest, frugal approach to life was his refusal to take legal action against comedians sharing a dog bothering joke his son famously found more amusing than his father's politics ...
Yes, our beloved coal, dinkum, clean and pure, is helping save the world, and if you're wondering about the logic of the 1.3%, here's how it works.
Think of a heroin supplier. Sure the product might do a little harm, but it's not up to the heroin supplier to dictate what the end users might do with it …
Whatever happens, it's all the fault of the end user - especially any overdose or death or such like - and so dinkum Oz coal lovers can sleep at night ...
How the reptiles hate Greta. And yet they spend an inordinate amount of time and energy keeping her in the public eye. The young thing must thank them daily …
And so to that line that so bemused the pond yesterday …
Why did the pond find it so funny?
Well yesterday nattering "Ned" was lecturing the world.
And today astonishingly, amazingly, as well as lecturing the world, the dog botherer imagines that he speaks for the world …
And there scribbles a man for a rag that came in 16th, and the irony and the humour and the sheer fun of it, and the delusional imaginings of the Surry Hills 'leet that they speak for mainstream people in a host of Western democracies is a comedy wonder to behold …
No wonder Polonius is a humourless old sod, and the dog botherer along with him …
Sour and wretched and bitter and cynical, and yet perhaps knowing that the young will inherit the earth, and they will do things differently, and look back to the time of the old farts at the lizard Oz in the same way that they look back at the dinosaurs ...
And that noted, luckily there's an amusing Rowe to hand dealing with the matter of coal and rorts, and as always there's more Rowe here ...
Hi Dorothy,
ReplyDelete“But now the fashion goes with the zeitgeist, advocates for groupthink and shames individuals into conforming.”
Now we all know that Kenny as a dutiful reptile has only a limited number of arguments and has to repeat his grievances ad infinitum but does he really have to insert “zeitgeist” into every bloody column.
I’m not certain if he even understands what it means, as he first argues that the “spirit of the age” or “the spirit of the times” is defined by all the lefty, greeny celebrity types but then finishes by contradicting himself;
“Fortunately, mainstream people in a host of Western democracies who are sick of sanctimony on climate change, energy, border protection, Brexit and, yes, even veganism have been able to express their will through the ballot box. Just because the so-called elites are enraptured by the sound of their own exhortations, it doesn’t mean they’re resonating.”
So which zeitgeist is it? One controlled by sanctimonious elites or one run by a disdainful mainstream.
He could at least try out a few other Hegelian terms instead such as; Weltgeist “world spirit” or Volksgeist “national spirit”.
You can get into the Geist of things here;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geist
DiddyWrote
The reptiles have irredeemably trashed the word 'zeitgeist', DW. Just like 'woke', 'long march' (I thought that only applied to Mao)and numerous others.
DeleteI wouldn't expect Doggy Bov's arguments to ever amount to a hill of beans, would you? But thank you for pointing out the contradictions for our amusement.
I wonder, is there such a thing as a Geistgeist?
"I’m not certain if he even understands what it means"
DeleteI'm personally in extreme doubt that Doggy Bov understands anything at all, DW. He certainly has not even the ghost of a clue about Greta.
Hi Dorothy,
DeleteAs Kenny has such a predilection for using his favourite pet word, it got me wondering if the mysterious ‘Mocker’ also showed as much enthusiasm for mentioning the zeitgeist.
A quick google search for The Mocker and zeitgeist threw up at least three examples in the last six months.
Coincidence?
DW
A nice summary DW - a vast battle between an imaginary conspiracy and an imaginary consensus.
DeleteIt's all made easy by working backwards from the result. If it suits you, the mainstream have spoken, if it doesn't, it must be the elites again.
As for The Mocker, you may have seen this in the past:
https://www.crikey.com.au/2017/06/21/is-the-australian-columnist-chris-kenny-behind-the-mocker/
"Our tipster ran a textual comparison between the work of The Mocker and that of The Australian‘s associate editor Chris Kenny. Our tipster ran three Mocker columns and three Kenny columns through the online research consortium’s language-matching application (which “determines the degree to which any two samples of language are similar in their language styles”, according to the website) and found it had a 97% match. And the Mocker’s Twitter account has retweeted Kenny four times since its inception in April — more than any other person."
I guess it's a good thing that Kenny doesn't talk to Bernard Keane, who describes milk as "animal cruelty in a glass".
ReplyDeleteI only drink soy latte now - at least that's what they tell me it is.
DeleteOh FFS, DP, does Henderson think the pinnacle of the journalism trade is accurately predicting election outcomes? I suppose it might if your journalism mainly consists of trying to read tea leaves and runes.
ReplyDelete"Most of the media got the politics wrong, they got the policies wrong and they got the mood of the country wrong." Well, "Ned" is right about one thing: journalists comprehensively failed to explain what the parties' policies were about, and what effect they would have on the country. Given the fact the polls pretty much reversed themselves in the final days of the 2019 federal election campaign, it is totally plausible that media - especially legacy media - would not be 'agile' enough (to use a Turnbullism - perhaps the only one he will leave the nation) to pick this up. Having watched Hewson lose in 1993, I for one, wasn't surprised when ScoMo pulled it off.
Analysis of policy doesn’t require one to be psychic. There’s no special touch that enables a journalist to ‘read the mood of the country’; there’s a lot of hack work, most of which consists of talking, listening, fact checking and number crunching. Polonius's attempts to equate journalists' bad calls with politicians' sins is particularly rank. Calling a Labor victory three days out from an election is hardly comparable with the level of pork barrelling seen from the likes of McKenzie and Morrison. At least this is what I assume the prattler means when he refers to politician’s “mistakes”.
“The pond thought it was a little cruel for Polonius to forget that at one point not so long ago, the carping Crowe was a badge-carrying member of the reptile Illuminati … But once cast out of the sanctum, there can be no forgiveness of the wayward, wandering heretic”
I don’t think Crowe was cast from the herpetarium, DP. I think like most recent departures, he jumped. It would have meant a pay cut, no doubt, but I imagine Crowe judged it was better than continuing to sell what was left of his soul to the devil.
I also think it pays to be very wary of what spouts from the pen of a former reptile. I’m not sure you can trust them any more. Crowe, Maiden, Karvelas, le Grand, Morton… All jumped from News Corp - although perhaps going to Schwartz Media is close to fully redemptive. Especially when you dump on the remains of News.
Yeah, Hewson's failure gets forgotten pretty much completely these days, doesn't it. But it was kind of a reverse Shorten: Hewson had very comprehensive policies and a large document explaining them, and he got totally rolled. How very surprising.
DeleteAnd we got the world's first Trump (aka Keating) in his place.
Hi M,
DeleteMost of the media were also probably unaware that the Coalition were engaging in industrial scale pork-barreling and that there would be a sixty million dollar anti-Labor advertising campaign paid for by Clive Palmer.
DW
I dunno how hard it might have been to remain ignorant of Palmer's anti-Labor campaign, DW. After all "Shorten, the Bill we can't afford" got a very good run on the media - not by journos so much, but in Palmer's ads blitz.
DeleteThough I think some non-reptile journos did finally notice that if Labor got to implement its policies, it would cost Clive a packet. I wonder if many (any ?) of the people who signed up as Palmer United Party candidates thought they were actually standing for parliament.
Polonius: "In May last year, the Liberal party was neither in ruins nor broken."
ReplyDeleteOh yes it was, though it's taken the best part of a year for the degenerative disease to reach peak suffering. How much 'buyer's remorse' is out there now, d'you reckon ?
And the Prattler again: "...in view of the fact that the Morrison government had increased both the Coalition's seats and votes."
He really just can't let go of his lies, can he. Consider that the actual result was that the Liberals actually lost one seat, but the Queensland Lib-Nats party won two seats for a net gain of one single seat Not "seats" but one single seat.
Furthermore, the overall LNP vote (Liberal + Qld LNP + National) actually dropped by 0.6%. Yes, their primary vote decreased. Ok, sure, the Two-Party Preferred increased by 1.17% but that's hardly a gigantic, nation-changing success, is it.
But now onto the Doggy Bov when he raves about: "globetrotting climate hypocrites lke Prince Harry, Leonardo DiCaprio, Sydney Lord mayor Clover Moore and so many others"
And there we go: there's no doubt about the reptiles, they hear a lie once and they blabber it forever. So Angus's little fabrication of Clover and the Sydney Council being "globetrotting climate hypocrites" is now a part of the reptile catechism.
And even including "Prince" Harry is a bit rich - he did purchase 'emissions offsets' to balance his flying. Not quite as purist as we might prefer, but not by any means outright "hypocritical".
And yes, he and the reptiles just can't get Greta out of their tiny minds for even a moment, can they.
Meanwhile, in another part of this journal, Adam Creighton fires away at superannuation, in similar fashion to the Associate Editor (National Affairs) firing at everything else. That is, using whatever ammunition comes to hand, in whatever direction the chair happens to have spun around to.
ReplyDeleteCreighton cites a chart produced by Fidelity International (headquarters in Pembroke, Bermuda, to show that it is a genuine fund manager) which Creighton says is ‘showing the parallel ascent of superannuation assets and household debt.’
The chart is easy enough to find - it is the ‘Chart of the Week’ on FI’s Australian site. The commentary there, to be fair, says it shows that ‘total super assets and household debt have grown at a similar rate since 1992, suggesting that the super saved by Australians has largely been offset by increased borrowing.’
Now, Creighton (I resisted the urge to dub him ‘Admirable’ - mainly because it is unfair to Barrie’s excellent play, and the quite passable movie version of the 50s) claims a MPhil (Oxon). So his reading and tutors should have exposed him to being cautious about correlation and causation. He may well be cautious in his own life, but, when he is sitting in front of the screen, needing to fill however many (and I suspect they are still called ‘column inches’ in the trade) then - here’s a chart, oh, rewrite that difficult, convoluted caption by the person from FI so our readers can understand, and fire away.
The actual chart probably is being used in undergraduate courses already, inviting students to think of all the other factors that might be in play in this apparent association. Even that would take the current crop of undergrads back in history, to certain federal fiddling with the housing ‘market’, and how to transfer more of what you think you have gained from sale of your residence into tax-advantaged super funds; but I digress. Remember, even the person from FI said it was ‘suggesting’ a relationship.
Of course, this confusion of correlation and causation is endemic in the climate ‘skeptic’ industry, although there it is deliberate.
Other anonymous.
I don't know that it is actually "confusion" between correlation and causation, OA. That would require that the reptiles are actually aware that correlation and causation are two different things; after all, causation implies correlation so really they must be the same thing. Mustn't they ?
ReplyDeleteBut people in general don't seem to get that 'money' is only meaningful at an individual, personal level; at a group and higher level, money is just another conceptual thing. After all, banks create huge amounts of money every single day and just think about Bitcoin which is also group created.
Fair comment GB. I got a little carried away recalling bright-eyed undergraduates who listened to me, those few years back, and had no problem with those 'c' words.
ReplyDeleteThere are regular examples of almost total non-correlation in this journal, in the columns of Honorary Professorial Fellow Sloan. Her actual academic work was with institutes of labour studies in South Australia. Those groups produced good to excellent research (and still do). You would have to look long and hard at the current columns of the HPF to find so much as a hint or a trace of the results of that research - and life is too short to have to read those columns, for any purpose (thank you again DP for saving us that drudgery). I suppose it is easier anyway to write Chairman Rupert's orthodoxy, and, if one feels a twinge of regret for one's time in research - seeing $1000 drop into the bank account each day, every day, including Sundays, could ease any such pain.
Other anonymous.