In these troubled times, it's perhaps best to start with a cartoon, especially for a Sunday meditation where the pond has already issued stern warnings about the benefits of social distancing … because we begin with prattling Polonius, and readers should best just stop right now, and go do something useful, or if they persist, please maintain your distance, leave your device and move into another room …
Actually, in the sense that death as total shutdown is not in our interest, Polonius might be on to something.
But of course the smugly isolated Polonius isn't really interested in anyone's interest, or those who are dead, death being for an exceptionally long time …
The pond suspects that the Sydney Institute is probably suffering hard times, it being designed to produce gab fests for the self-interested and the filthy rich …and in hard times, about all that's left for Polonius is his usual attack on the ABC, the source of all wickedness and evil in the world.
If the pond might be so bold and diverge from Polonius for a moment, the pond thinks that Micallef's Mad as Hell is doing as best as might be expected in the current dire circumstances, and remains diverting … which is more than can be said for Polonius, from whom anyone sensible will now divert …
This is of course the same rhetoric that the reptiles deploy in all crises. If all that action taken to avert Y2K succeeded, then where was the crisis, and where was the need for all that action? If averting climate change actually worked, then why did we bother to avert climate change? If we manage to limit the deaths the virus causes, why the fuss, and why the panic?
If SloMo had been left to go to the footy and to speak in tongues on a Sunday, how much safer we'd all be, and what a waste of time and energy it would have been for the NSW and Victorian premiers to push him into stronger action, and how useless Norman Swan would have sounded up against the complacent, I'm all right Jack, she'll be right, self-satisfied reptiles, caught like deers in the rampaging viral headlights …
And a strong air of complacency lingers in Polonius, who apparently can't wait to get his gab fests cranked up again ...
Ah, a conversation on the ABC which sounded suspiciously like reading the lizard Oz … where everyone agreed with everyone else and alternative views were not heard …
As for the Great Depression, the pond will stick with the memories of its working class parents and with the NMA here as to who suffered the most …
The pond can still remember its mother's shame when it stumbled on a heap of ancient pawn tickets, as many had to do to survive …
It's one of the reasons there was a streak of hoarding that ran in the pond's family, with the pond's Aunt the best at the art, with a walk-in pantry stocked full of canned and bottled goods, at a time when words like prepper and bug out were just a futurist dream …
But enough of the pond remembering the times when it got up to breakfast on grass and thought it a fine breakfast, because not everyone recovered and lived on easy street in later times, let us instead return to the Sydney Institute worrying about the source of its gruel …
Yep, the Sydney Institute must be really hurting. And does the pond feel sorrow or compassion or some sense of shared suffering? Nope, not a whit or a jot ..
And so to Dame Slap, the IPA propaganda machine, and Gina's puppet …
Well our Adam's right about one thing … Dame Slap always makes the pond very angry, and it should issue a warning that this may make you very angry …
IPA trolling at its finest, and the day they dub Dame Slap's scribbles an essential service is the day that the pond can afford a trip to Planet Janet, or at least the moon, which apparently is a lot closer …
Now perhaps sensing this, the reptiles seized the moment to introduce a rotating set of government propaganda splashes …
The pond, out of a sense of completism, includes them, but has kept them small and unreadable, so as not to interfere with the flow of Slappist thoughts …
If you click on them, you might be able to enlarge and read, but remember, the pond has issued a hagiography alert of eleven … and now, back to Dame Slap …
Indeed, indeed, Dame Slap doesn't bother with any of the tricks, she's just pure climate science denialism, a Gina IPA lackey, and a MAGA cap wearer and a hysteric who proposed that the UN would use the science to establish a world government by Xmas.
Now confronted with this standard IPA drivel, the reptiles must have had an attack of the guilts, because for no particular reason they inserted a piece of bald 'community advice' into the piece ...
It was an epic fail, because this bald statement seemed mainly designed to produce panic, alarm, hysteria and paranoia, all conditions the reptiles love, and yet there was nothing in it to suggest how damaging exposure to Dame Slap might be, or how long the Dame Slap virus might last in the air, or on your glass screen ...
And there's the real reason for this Dame Slap rant. Oh sure, she's smiting Labor and Albo in the usual IPA way, but the real paranoia, the real fear, is the talk of big government, and people on New Start actually getting something that allows them to live …
As for a real job, is what Dame Slap does a real and useful job?
The pond thinks the current crisis shows what a real job is … a garbo to deal with the trash, a shelf-stacker to stack shelves and a checkout operator to process the sales without flinching from the parade of customers, a nurse on the front line, and paid a pittance for the dangerous pleasure, a transport worker or a truckie keeping things flowing, and so on and on, and routinely screwed by the IPA and its lackeys in brighter times ...
What Dame Slap does is shill for the rich, and like a leech or a tick, live handsomely enough from a tithing of the blood ...
Well it made the pond angry, and sure enough the copy that made the cut describing who she is left out that bit about her being current chairman - no person for her - and lickspittle lackey for Gina's IPA mob … and that made the pond even angrier, as our Adam had guessed … because this is the real Dame Slap and this is what she does outside her reptile propaganda column ...
Yes, the reptiles even allow Dame Slap copy to turn up at the IPA site, and by golly, that looks like a Lobbecke…
No name, but surely the style should intrigue experts attuned to the cult master?
Well, all that time with Polonius and Dame Slap made the pond break the golden rule, and allow Bob Carr a place, and a final gloating word …
The pond has been down on Carr ever since he preferred the panem et circenses of the Olympics to spending money on Sydney's infrastructure, when a little spending might have avoided the shambolic later efforts by our Gladys, and others without a clue, conspiring to wreck inner Sydney …
But with all that nauseating muck above, the pond decided that the time was right for a little gloating of a kind sure to terrify Polonius and Dame Slap…
And just to make the gloating bearable, please allow the pond to replicate a reptile trick and offer some public health advice …
The gloating might be as useful as that health advice, because the Donald has only one real expertise … and that's going bankrupt .. with the snake-oil selling just a tension-relieving activity, a Trump university, Trump steak-devouring form of fraud, which is only a distraction from the main game of managing to go broke running casinos …
And if he manages to produce a great depression in the USA - the pond has a bet riding on the most reasonable odds - then gloating isn't going to be much use … but all the same, let's keep on with it ...
At least that talk of nationalising industries will lather up the reptiles into a frenzy, which is good, but what will be left to nationalise in Florida?
Good old guns and ammo, talk about essential services, along with calling on that imaginary friend for protection ...
And so to one last gobbet of gloat …
Oh they don't like it up 'em, the reptiles, especially when they're given a Carr kidding …
And with that balancing of the books, here's a few more cartoons, one with a genuine health warning, because the pond trusts that its readers, at least those who survive the deadly reptiles and their gift to the world, the Donald, are staying safe …
Wandering aimlessly through the intertubes the other day I stumbled over this Crikey piece from 2009. Ostensibly about the Onion Muncher, it takes a nice swipe at Polonius as well.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.crikey.com.au/2009/12/08/rundle-abbott-has-a-deep-and-original-desire-to-fail-nobly/
"The chaos was catnip for Bob Santamaria, whose political life had started defending Mussolini and Franco in student debates in the ’30s, and had — in Abbott and co — a last generation to hatch, and project into the future beyond his death.
The effect of a formidable political operator such as Santamaria is lifelong — the influence either lays down some iron in your soul, as it has with Abbott, or reacting against it turns you into a simpering and neurotic man on the make (as it did with Gerard Henderson)."
Adjective: neurotic (in non-technical use) abnormally sensitive, obsessive, or anxious.
Dame Slap may take some further research.
Bitter and delusional? Certainly. Thrashing her way through the usual field of strawmen. Inner city elites? Hmm - wonder where the average IPA director hangs out?
Lying or just ignorant? Probably a mix of both. The point about ideology is that once you have established a belief you can happily dispense with any facts
I recall the first time I ever read a Dame Slap article. I'd just purchased my subscription to the Oz, in my quest to correct some of their more ridiculous climate denial articles, and she appeared at the top of the page with some interesting climate related headline.
ReplyDeleteAfter reading the very first sentence I remember thinking that I must have read it wrong as the sheer stupidity of it amazed me. So I read it a second time and discovered, with horror, that I had read it correctly. At this point I honestly thought that it would tone down later on or turn out to be satire, so I read on. By the time I had read the first two or three sentences I was in total disbelief so I headed on down to check out the bio at the bottom. She seemed to be well credentialed and she looked sane in her picture? By the time I had read the entire article (I actually needed to take a few breaks and reread some of it because it was too stupid to believe I had just read it) I was honestly in shock. Prior to getting the subscription I had never read the Australian and didn't truly understand the depth of denialism and right wing propaganda that they published.
I think that was the first time I thought to myself whether or not it was actually legal to publish such obvious rubbish. Surely media outlets have some responsibility to publish actual facts? But apparently not, even "broad sheets" can publish what ever crap they like and Dame Slap bought that realisation home to me in no uncertain terms.
Sadly, GM, The Australian was once actually moderately readable. But quite quickly it degenerated into what it most appears like today: an upper-class private school's attempt at a right wing spoof. With the Dame the most spoofable of all.
DeleteMy sympathy, Guy M. A significant characteristic of those opinion writers for whom I know something of their earlier professional lives, in economics, is - abandoning conclusions or understandings they had reached from actual research. I almost wrote 'apostasy', but, strictly, that should apply to beliefs and ideologies, not what are now called 'evidence based findings'.
DeleteDame Groan found that writing tory tosh on labour relations paid much better than referring to the research she was engaged in as she ascended the academic ladder.
Our Henry managed to go from tacit approval of the very substantial expenditure of the Australian governments who spread instant sources of information - the telephone - across the country, to damning a more recent administration because it intended to commit a much smaller proportion of expenditure on something called an NBN.
For Dame Slap, I have not been able to trace significant writings, reflecting actual research and intellectual effort, from earlier in her life. It may be there, but has not made its way onto the internet, because that is also true of the earlier work of Henry and Dame Groan. Perhaps some other friend of this Dorothy might be able to point us towards such work, from their own professional background reading.
Other Anonymous
Dame Slap did get herself a 'Doctorate' at least according to her Lizard Oz blurb, but that doesn't imply anything much. And regarding Henry, I've never seen anything of his except for his reptile outpourings - though apparently he did write a book - Wrong Number - back in 2008. Can't have been exactly a runaway best seller.
DeleteBut you do seem to have just a bit of regard for Dame Groan, OA. Or at least for her academic potential until she turned to the paid mendacity of writing 'tory tosh'.
One might even say, Bef, that one must dispense with facts in order to form a wingnut belief in the first place.
ReplyDeleteAh, but do they believe, or is this just paid mendacity ? The thing about the Dame is that she has to have some contact with the world in order to be able to tell the best lies. Polonius, in the other hand, is just a lost and lonely fuddy duddy (and how good to be able to use that term correctly).
But then we can examine the Crikey take on Abbott and Co.: "a last generation to hatch, and project into the future beyond his death." Well that worked a treat, didn't it. Who pays Abbott, or his young Bromancer, a moment's attention now ?
Lying or ignorant ? Now remember Johnny Howard's foundational work on lying: it's not a lie if you believe it. And it surely isn't, though it is very likely an ignorance formed untruth.
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DeleteOh, I don't know GB, the lies seem of a pretty poor quality to me. She is kind of grouped with Cater and Dogger in that she lacks either the wit, or is too lazy, to make up suitable new falsehoods. At least some of the others throw in a bunch of outdated figures or reference some long discredited report.
DeleteMendacity though, that describes them all to a T. Does anyone doubt they would pull on the handbrake and go in the opposite direction if the master directed them to?
As Grand Wizard of the IPA, the Dame is in a funny position at the moment. They have never had public support but now the government is running away from them as well. Must be driving her nuts.
Well now, that the best lies that Dame Slap knows how to tell are pretty poor quality isn't necessarily a contradiction.
DeleteBut she must know about them in order to tell them which requires some contact with the reptile world, anyway.
“What Dame Slap does is shill for the rich, and like a leech or a tick, live handsomely enough from a tithing of the blood”
ReplyDeleteSpot on DP. The IPA are like heroin when it comes to their ideology, and once you’ve had a taste there seems there is no going back. Your cross-eyed and painless, anyone that isn’t in on the gig is the enemy........who will be subject to their lies, abuse and exploitation........And don’t forget the rorting!......yet even when their whole world philosophical view is crashing around their ears, onward they insist. It is an ideology of the greedy and self serving, of never having enough.
Carr quite perfectly puts Polonius, the Slap and all the rest straight in the bin, along with their dealers of illusion.
The Slap as you note is way out there. There are no rides to planet Janet, but there is a flyby. Cheery Anon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKuc3faQAEs
Interesting link, CA, and another mob I'd never heard of. Thanks.
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