Momentum! And with a sprightly gait, especially over the last ten feet, the pond moved towards nattering "Ned", knowing it would require two hands to lift the cup of tedium and drink deep of his reptile wisdom ...
Does it ever strike anyone else that the reptiles are always railing about slogans, and yet the reptile mindset can usually be reduced to a few tropes and memes: 'identity politics', 'virtue signalling', and of late 'cancel culture', the latter now so popular in reptile circles that the pond is deeply troubled by the notion that 'virtue signalling' might be drifting out of reptile fashion, and be lost forever, only to be rediscovered a thousand years hence, like that monolith in 2001?
Does this thought ever trouble mindless nattering "Ned" as he blathers about tribalism, while failing to note the "moral matrix" (now there's a new meme in the making) that envelops News Corp, most notably at Fox News, but everywhere else in the company. Is he worried that "matrix" might be a double-edged TG sword?
Not to worry, it'll stand in for the pond's usual metaphor of an almost intuitive hive mind, worthy of an X-Files episode …
See how the tribal passions run deep in "Ned's aged veins ...
Polls showed that more than half of Americans agreed with Cotton? Well of course it depends on your poll …
In a Morning Consult poll conducted Wednesday into Friday, 42 percent of Americans said they would support the cities’ move to call the U.S. military to supplement city police forces, down 13 points from a survey conducted Sunday into Monday. On the back of an 18-point uptick, nearly half (48 percent) of Americans said they opposed bringing in the military. (here)
Live by the polls, die by the polls, but as for "The paper's prejudice against Trump is legendary"?
Adopting a strictly binary system of notation, does that mean "Ned's" wild-eyed support for the Donald is equally legendary?
Is there an irony in "Ned" approvingly quoting Bret Stephens, and even worse, Ross Douthat?
Is it bizarre that "Ned" thinks that there must be a columnist on the paper who supports Trump? Surely that's what Fox News and News Corp are for, because they've developed tribalism to peak level, way beyond eleven …
What about the notion that, in a democracy, it's the business of majorities not to infringe on the rights of minorities?
Even the Supreme Court had a gutful of the Donald, and the usual blather about identity politics, instead settling for the simple proposal that minority rights matter ...
Oh fucketty fuck, you boring old goose, as soon as you speak that way, you should hold up a mirror to an alternative truth the pond has garnered over years of herpetological study ... News Corp leads to conformity, and to a suppression of views and positions, usually involving simplistic slogans of the moronic "identity politics" kind …
And so to an explanation of why the lizard Oz rarely features black faces or homosexual voices or any alternative views outside the reptile tribal hive mind ...
Yes, let's hear it for old white farts, holding tenaciously to their privilege and their power, and to their assorted forms of denialism …
Could it get any worse? Of course it could, as Dame Slap wanders far beyond the mountain of nostalgia, into the valley of pitiful desperation, and somewhere off into the land of the 1950s picket fence …
The pond has noted that Dame Slap of late rarely spends much time contemplating the Donald. Once she was a proud wearer of the MAGA cap, but these days she seems happiest wandering back in local time ...
Strange really, what with that talk of the poodle and the asbestos lady, and little Johnny, but no mention of the onion muncher and his heroic deeds? Oh come no, let us not have the lad erased from history ...
He might yet return, and the pond lives in eternal hope …
And so to broaden the conversation, apparently already bored with little Johnny, the Dame then goes full "cancel culture", and the pond experienced dread tremor that within a reptile year, "virtue signalling" might be as dead as a dodo or perhaps a Diamantinasaurus matildae, a Fulgurotherium austral, a Leaellynasaura amicagraphica, a Minmi paravertebra, a Muttaburrasaurus langdoni, a Qantassaurus intrepid us, a Rhoetosaurus brownie, or even a Umoonasaurus demoscyllus… (lovers of dinkum dinosaurs waste no further time with the reptiles, go here).
Now reptile devotees will appreciate the sublime irony of that penultimate par.
Dame Slap, in an exercise worthy of Conan Doyle, manages to channel "Ned's" ectoplasmic feelings about "cancel culture" and "illiberalism", or did "Ned" gain his Slapian insights into identity politics by imbibing from the same Surry Hills kool aid? Which comes first, the flapping "Ned" chook, or the Dame Slap egg?
Working out the hive mind and its interactions is a bit like trying to work out how fungi communicate …
Sheldrake notes that the hyphal tips of mycelium seem to communicate with one another, making decisions without a real center. He describes an experiment conducted a couple of years ago by a British computer scientist, Andrew Adamatzky, who detected waves of electrical activity in oyster mushrooms, which spiked sharply when the mushrooms were exposed to a flame. Adamatzky posited that the mushroom might be a kind of “living circuit board.” The point isn’t that mushrooms would replace silicon chips. But if fungi already function as sensors, processing and transmitting information through their networks, then what could they potentially tell (or warn) us about the state of our ecosystem, were we able to interpret their signals?
Sheldrake also tells us about Toby Kiers, an evolutionary biologist who was taken with Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” and its insights on inequality. She wondered how mycorrhizal networks, the symbiotic intertwining of plant systems and mycelium, deal with their own, natural encounters with inequity. Kiers exposed a single fungus to an unequally distributed supply of phosphorus. Somehow the fungus “coordinated its trading behavior across the network,” Sheldrake writes, essentially shuttling phosphorus to parts of the mycelial network for trade with the plant system according to a “buy low, sell high” logic.
The anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing has explored the story of global capitalism through mushrooms. In 2015, she published “The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins,” which followed the trade in the prized matsutake mushroom from a community of Southeast Asian refugees who are among the top foragers in the Pacific Northwest to the auction markets of Japan, where matsutake fetch a thousand dollars a kilogram, and on to chefs and discriminating diners in the world’s most cosmopolitan cities.
There’s a double meaning to Tsing’s title. The mushroom is at the end of the known world because it’s hard to find, a secret tucked deep in the forest. But she’s also hinting at the end of the world as we know it, given our instinct for extracting as much from the earth as we can. Humanity has never seemed so finely calibrated and rationalized: the seamless journey of a very expensive mushroom from nature to a dinner plate tells this story. But things have never seemed so precarious, either. During the current pandemic, images have circulated which suggest that the earth is better off with many of us staying at home. There have been fantastical stories of dolphins in the canals of Venice, penguins sauntering through an empty aquarium. And, as industry idled and vehicles went undriven, there was the rare sight of clear skies in Beijing and Los Angeles. Following the nuclear blast at Chernobyl, the industrious, resilient fungi were among the earliest living things to appear. They seemed to grow on the reactor walls, attracted to radioactive “hot” particles. In fact, they appeared capable of harnessing radiation as a source of energy, as plants do with sunlight. The first thing to grow from the soil after the atomic bomb decimated Hiroshima was, reportedly, a matsutake mushroom.
Scientists still don’t understand how fungi coördinate, control, and learn from such behaviors, just that they do. “How best to think about shared mycorrhizal networks?” Sheldrake wonders. “Are we dealing with a superorganism? A metropolis? A living Internet? Nursery school for trees? Socialism in the soil? Deregulated markets of late capitalism, with fungi jostling on the trading floor of a forest stock exchange? Or maybe it’s fungal feudalism, with mycorrhizal overlords presiding over the lives of their plant laborers for their own ultimate benefit.” None of these attempts to fit fungi into the logic of our world are entirely persuasive. Perhaps it’s the other way around, and we’re the ones who should try to fit into the fungus’s model. A truffle’s funky aroma evolved to attract insects and small rodents, which feast on the spores, then spread them throughout the forest via their fecal matter. For many, the pleasure of psilocybin is in giving oneself up to the weft of a connected world, and making peace with one’s smallness. (more at The New Yorker, currently outside the paywall).
Sorry, but every so often, the pond gets batshit bored reading the same old hive mind crap … and appreciates readers attempts to remind it via the links in the comments section, that there's a real world out there, far beyond the drones of News Corp … and that sometimes when searching for variety, a visit to Planet Janet's world above the faraway tree can only lead to tears ...
Painfully shy about making appointments?
Oh it's rich, it's fucking rich, no doubt about it …
Janet Albrechtsen joining ABC Board
The Federal Government has appointed newspaper columnist and former lawyer, Janet Albrechtsen, to the board of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
The move ensures there will be a feisty series of board meetings at the top of the ABC in the next five years. Albrechtsen, currently a columnist for The Australian newspaper, is a strident critic of the national broadcaster and is on the record saying she believes the ABC is full of entrenched bias.
She and the ABC’s Media Watch program had a high profile slanging match over bias, misrepresentation and plagiarism in 2002 when Albrechtsen wrote about Islamic youths and Media Watch questioned her sources.
Albrechtsen responded saying Media Watch, “like many things at the ABC… has been hijacked by sectional interests….”
….Shadow Communications Minister Stephen Conroy says the appointment continues the Government's policy of “stacking the ABC with its political mates.”
“John Howard seems to regard the ABC Board as a private club, with memberships to be handed out to his supporters as a reward. The Government's practice of appointing strident coalition supporters to the ABC Board undermines public confidence in the independence of the national broadcaster,” says Conroy. (here)
Ah, ancient lost times … how could the pond forget the man who wanted to ban the intertubes, up there with Dame Slap wanting to ban the ABC?
Just a last question before allowing Dame Slap to go? Is there a musty museum handy for the reptiles and dinosaurs trapped in some long lost valley of nostalgia for old days and old ways?
And so to an honourable mention.
For a brief moment of digital glory, Megan Lehmann made it to the top of the digital page, ma ...
But who is this member of the hive mind?
Well now the pond has more of a clue about the legendary Lehmann, but her effort to give the "cancel culture" meme a cultural aspect turned out to be pretty thin gruel ...
Well yes, but that's because white privilege has always ensured that it's been a struggle for indigenous people and minorities to get a role in white-dominated Australian story lines, a dominance that continues to this very day with reptile blather about the glories of Anglo-Saxon (with a dash of Celt) western civilisation … and if you're not written into the script, you don't get experience, and if you have no experience, why change the script?
Ah, the old "somebody hacked my Weetbix" routine, always a favourite … and yet Lehmann missed a chance to note that blackface has always had a role in Australia. Sometimes it was imported, as with The Black and White Minstrel Show …a big hit in Tamworth ...
Sometimes it was just bizarre, as with the 1967 feature film Journey Out of Darkness, which saw Ed Devereaux do blackface as a cop, and Kamahl play an Aboriginal person …
And it was all through vaudeville, and weirdly so, with a Jewish comedian doing "blue humour" …
And yet the world moved on, and the pond only gets blank looks when it talks about Australian cultural history …
And so to David Rowe, who has also discovered the joys of the picket fence, here …
But what's happened to the infallible Pope. Sure, he's re-tweeting a lot, but must we live, like Dame Slap, on nostalgia and memories?
Well - fungi probably describes the spongy texture of Ned's brain fairly accurately.
ReplyDeleteCrikey has lowered the drawbridge for a couple of weeks, so you can access this link if you are interested. It's a question that puzzles me all the time, in a world full of real problems, why agonise over preserving every obvious falsehood or entrenched prejudice?
https://www.crikey.com.au/2020/06/16/news-corp-moral-panic-culture-war/
"It’s not unusual for journalism to be slow to keep up with Australia’s changing understanding of itself. Historically that understanding travels on a long, imperfect arc through music, academic research, feature film, books, even advertising and television, long before it lands on the news desks to be integrated into daily journalistic practice.
Australian journalism is slower than most, in part due to its lack of internal diversity and in part to its cultural domination by News Corp. Political leaders from John Howard on have contributed too, by bullying journalists to join them in the culture war galleys to beat against the current, borne ceaselessly into the past."
Yeah, Ned's reached that stage where he's perfectly happy to contradict himself several times per rant, because he just doesn't notice that he's doing it. But then, did he ever ?
DeleteBut why "agonise over preserving every obvious falsehood or entrenched prejudice" ? Simply because there are no falsehoods or entrenched prejudices amongst the reptiles. There is only truth and enlightenment - now c'mon Bef, you know that: every word written by every reptile is simply pure, eternal truth.
Neat tip to Gatsby in that final para. from Crikey; thank you Befuddled.
DeleteChadwick
‘how identity politics can ruin liberal institutions’ AND ‘compromise the fragile role of reason in public debate.’
DeleteFor a few moments I thought the Ned was being ironic. I thought the concept of identity politics ruining ‘liberal’ institutions was his way of signifying that he had looked at scholarly works on ‘identity politics’, such as the entry in ‘Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’, which is often cited for its explanations of the origin of the term and its purpose.
Unfortunately, any attempt to credit the Ned with actually thinking about the term he, and his ilk, throw around so generously runs up against comments by Cressida Heyes, the main author of the Stanford reference. She writes ‘Predictably, there is no straightforward criterion that makes a political struggle into an example of “identity politics;”’
and ‘A key condition of possibility for contemporary identity politics was institutionalized liberal democracy’.
She also refers to criticism from the ‘left’, for what appear to be reasons similar to those that the Ned is not quite able to articulate - or sees no need to.
So, no surprise, the Ned disregards that part of journalism 101 that should have introduced the young Ned to ‘reviews and criticisms’ - that the purpose of the reviewer or critic is to assess the object for what it is, not for what it is not.
Chadwick
Some of us even think, Chad, that in it's simplest manifestation, 'identity politics' is just a bunch of people with similar needs and/or problems getting together to put some democratic pressure on the wielders of political power in order to get their problems solved or needs met.
DeleteWhich some appear to think is a major part of the essence of representative 'democratic' politics. But definitely no reptiles - they're more in the Edmund Burke tradition, say as expressed in his speech to the electors of Bristol.
http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch13s7.html
Just as long as it doesn't 'compromise the fragile role of reason in public debate', GB. I did wonder if that statement would make any better sense if I put it into an electronic translator, to be rendered in, oh, I dunno - Uzbek? - then retranslated, perhaps via French, into Aussie English, but I think it is a hopeless case.
DeleteYou and Cressida Heyes have reached quite similar conclusions on 'identity politics'. And, surely, the purpose of composing a phrase like 'identity politics' is to save authors having to write entire paragraphs for a concept that can be covered quite adequately by two words?
Edmund Burke? It would be amusing to select sentences and paragraphs from his writings and put them before self-proclaimed 'conservative' contributors to Limited News, to see if they would recognise them as coming from the major source of their supposed faith.
Chadwick
Then I wouldn't be particularly surprised to learn, in these fractured modern times, that people have several 'identities', concurrently and over a lifetime. Except for those simplistic, fixed-natured reptiles, of course, who notably have only one.
DeleteNed: "Events in America, notably at The New York Times, once the shining light of journalistic inquiry ..."
ReplyDeleteOh yeah, yeah: the NYT as "the shining light of journalistic inquiry" that spread lies about WMDs and such that supported and promoted the wonderfully successful Iraq War.
How The Iraq War Still Haunts New York Times
https://www.mediamatters.org/new-york-times/how-iraq-war-still-haunts-new-york-times
Just one more large example of how yesterday never happened if it in any way appears to negate the current set of reptile lies, memes or tropes. But at no particular cost to Judith Miller who just went off and joined that other "shining light of journalistic inquiry", Fox News in 2008 where she got involved in outing Valerie Plame after initially having been a "victim" of the anthrax hoax back in 2001. A stellar career all round.
But then Ned goes on to showcase the reptile love affair with Jonathan Haidt who disingenuously claims that: "inclusive liberalism is not the natural order for humanity. The natural order for humanity is tribalism."
Yep, that's why, through it's entire documented history, humanity has never formed large nations or societies, and has never had populaces of mixed ethnic and geographical memberships. So the Roman Empire - of very mixed membership - never existed and, to take a present day example, the EU was never formed from multiple separate states.
So, says Haidt: "Once we bind ourselves more tightly to the group, we embrace the group's moral matrix and we stop thinking for ourselves." And that is why, once there is a "group" (and how did that form again ? From a bunch of dedicated tribalists ?) then no further moral changes are possible - we're all "in the matrix". So, for example, it was impossible in this group-matrix world for slavery to be rejected; it was "in the matrix" and so, in the matrix it stays. And that is why slavery is still permitted all over the world.
It's truly a joy reading Ned, isn't it. And PS, DP: don't forget to add 'gesture politics' to 'identity politics', 'virtue signalling' and 'cancel culture' - though some might claim that it's really only a variety of 'virtue signalling'.
But enough of Nullius Ned for one day. Well, maybe just one wee bit more: "Indeed, this is its logic: the real lesson from the Cotton saga."
And what, pray tell, would be the lessons from the Judith Miller saga, the Ross Douthat saga, the Brett Stephens saga, the David Brooks saga, the Thomas Friedman saga .... so many sagas, so few real journalists.
Thank the long absent lord someone remembered GB …
Deletehttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/aug/29/correspondence-collusion-new-york-times-cia
… but then the Times, US version, has a long history of doing a dirty dance with the CIA, etc, savouring the glories of power and being in the know, and occasionally helping out …
From the agency’s earliest days, it has attempted to control the flow of information to the public. In his book Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA, former New York Times journalist Tim Weiner documented how much influence the agency’s first civilian director, Allen Dulles, had among major media companies:
Dulles kept in close touch with the men who ran The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the nation’s leading weekly magazines. He could pick up the phone and edit a breaking story, make sure an irritating foreign correspondent was yanked from the field, or hire the services of men such as Time’s Berlin bureau chief and Newsweek’s man in Tokyo.
https://www.amazon.com/Legacy-of-Ashes-Tim-Weiner-audiobook/dp/B000TD15NE/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=tim+weiner&qid=1592430005&sr=8-1
I think we've had a few problems of our own in such matters, DP. My remembrance is that we did, or still do, have laws akin to the UK's 'Official Secrets Act' ( https://www.theguardian.com/media/2004/feb/05/broadcasting.politicsandthemedia ). My recall from quite long ago is of matters being basically declared 'off limits' for reporting with some lawful consequences if that is breached.
DeleteNot sure I entirely trust or believe Glenn Greenwald - now of the Intercept - though. A bit too hardline, and occasionally far out, left for my comfort. Dulles was, of course, CIA director from shortly after WWII (1953 to 1961) and there is always a 'war carryover' both in states of mind, loyalties and in collusion and other practices.
Not sure we ever got to a Dulles situation, but that could just be because I was too young at the time to be aware of such things. And too old now to pick up on such things.
So we get to good ol' Slappy: "Howard was as comfortable and confident taking a stand on values as he was when pursuing economic reforms."
ReplyDeleteWork Choices ! Johnny W spoke out and implemented Work Choices ! No greater combination of values and economic reforms (excepting, just maybe, the Hawke-Keating-Kelty-Ferguson Accord). Johnny's fabulous initiative that showed just how much he understood Australia and Australians: it simply resulted in a landslide defeat for the LNP government in which Howard comfortably lost his own safe seat.
And that is why little Johnny is the greatest 'conservative' PM of all time; much greater than that old Queen-loving git Menzies.
But oh, DP: Sheldrake ? Strewth, is he still around and still spouting "morphic resonance" ?
Hi Dorothy,
ReplyDelete“This brings us to The New York Times. Its opinion editor, James Bennet, was forced to resign after publishing a piece by Republican senator Tom Cotton calling on the federal government to deploy troops to restore law and order to the cities, as Donald Trump threatened.
Bennet defended his decision against a staff rebellion, saying it would undermine the integrity and independence of the newspaper “if we only published views that editors like me agreed with and it would betray what I think of as our fundamental purpose — not to tell you what to think but to help you think for yourself”. That didn’t cut it. Bennet had to quit.
Polls showed more than half of Americans agreed with Cotton. His tone was hardly inflammatory as he drew the distinction between the majority of peaceful protesters and bands of miscreants. He wanted troops deployed as other presidents had done since World War II.
With a staff and readers’ revolt, the paper decided publication had been wrong. Its readers should not have been exposed to the article. It constituted a negation of The New York Times’ values.”
Just imagine for a moment that The Australian had hired an “opinion editor” without doing the necessary RWNJ background checks and ended up with a left leaning scientifically literate person who believed his newspaper should reflect the views of the general Australian public.
What would the reaction be from his staff and readers if he started publishing a series of articles by leading scientific climate change researchers that posited the need for urgent action to be taken. Urgent action that 72% of the population think is necessary.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-05/australia-attitudes-climate-change-action-morrison-government/11878510?nw=0
Apart from the fact such an event would never occur in a sheltered workshop like NewsCorpse, even Ned would have to concede such a mythical editor would be out on his arse in ten seconds flat.
Kelly’s argument (or is it just a decades long whinge) appears to be that politics and media coverage has become increasingly partisan and the centre can no longer hold.
So what pushed media coverage into such a tribal standoff? Reagan’s revocation of the FFC Fairness Doctrine certainly didn’t help polite conversation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine
But it certainly helped the Murdoch business model at FauxNews;
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/01/17/how-policy-decisions-spawned-todays-hyperpolarized-media/
Keep wringing those hands Ned but remember who pays you.
DiddyWrote
A few commentators have pointed out, DW, that this RWNJ/reptile moralising about "help[ing] you to think for yourself" is actually very tightly constrained: for instance, nobody is rushing to print articles praising chattel slavery, or advocating colonial takeover of so-called third world countries. Or perhaps state imposed eugenics ?
DeleteSo even our reptile mates engage in quite extensive self-censorship. I think we all really recognise that the only "thinking" they want to help us to do, is thinking the things they are pushing for. But no news there.
Interestingly, nobody appears to be making much of a point that Cotton's article was actually solicited by Bennett, who then apparently published it without actually reading it. Which is the kind of "journalism" that I'd expect from a Bauer Media rag (say New Idea or Woman's Day' - both now ex-Bauer, apparently sold to Mercury Capital) in respect of an article from "a royals watcher" saying what a terrible person Meghan Markle is.