In which the bromancer and nattering "Ned" ruin Saturday by offering talk of a revival in cannibalism and emitting signs of copeous gaseous flatulence ...

 

Speaking of the pond's attempts to learn and speak reptile, there's a very handy guide landed at The Atlantic, and if others haven't used up their free reads, they might find Megan Garber's insights handy too:

Political theorists, over the years, have looked for metaphors to describe the effects that Fox—particularly its widely watched opinion shows—has had on American politics and culture. They’ve talked about the network as an “information silo” and “a filter bubble” and an “echo chamber,” as an “alternate reality” constructed of “alternative facts,” as a virus on the body politic, as an organ of the state. The comparisons are all correct. But they don’t quite capture what the elegies for Fox-felled loved ones express so efficiently. Fox, for many of its fans, is an identity shaped by an ever-expanding lexicon: mob, PC police, Russiagate, deep state, MSM, MS-13, socialist agenda, Dems, libs, Benghazi, hordes, hoax, dirty, violent, invasion, open borders, anarchy, liberty, Donald Trump. Fox has two pronouns, you and they, and one tone: indignation. (You are under attack; they are the attackers.) Its grammar is grievance. Its effect is totalizing. Over time, if you watch enough Fox & Friends or The Five or Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham, you will come to understand, as a matter of synaptic impulse, that immigrants are invading and the mob is coming and the news is lying and Trump alone can fix it.

And so on and on here ...

Of course there are regional variations, differences in accent, warped meanings assigned to certain words, which means that American reptile speak is different from the reptile spoken down under, but it's a good starting point ...

And so to two fine examples of local reptile speak, and do they ever get any better than the bromancer and nattering "Ned". 

First to the bromancer, because "Ned" is full of gas, and burns endlessly, just the sort of bottle you need hooked up to your BBQ...

 

Already there's a complication, right there in the header. This is the peculiar form of Catholic Boys' Daily reptile speak, wherein we are all guilty of original sin, and so assorted plagues - frogs, pandemics, Sydney cockies, Adelaide millipedes, or whatever - are sent to punish us for the behaviour of that wicked apple-munching woman, who willfully refused to settle down to her duties as a complimentary type (free at Sydney Anglican BBQs) and has been causing trouble these past few thousand years ...

That's how plagues of the covid kind are all the fault of our decadent society. Trust the pond - you have to have been belted around the ears by a few nuns to truly understand the infinity of mindless stupidity that infests the bromancer's brain ...

Actually, Douthat is a loon of the finest water, a great example of the both siderism that bedevils the New York Times and leads it into endless follies - such as the notion that it's  "left liberal" institution. It's the same sort of thinking that saw Fairfax publish Miranda the Devine and the unlamented, now totally forgotten Paul Sheehan for years, and currently embrace a fuckwit of the Chris Uhlmann kind.

Here we should note the adept way that the bromancer hands out labels, because labeling is a crucial part of reptile thinking ...

Language, too, is a norm. It is one more shared fact of political life that can seem self-evident until someone like Trump, or something like Fox, reveals the fragility that was there all along. You might have observed, lately, how Americans seem always to be talking past one another—how we’re failing one another even at the level of our vernacular. In the America of 2020, socialism could suggest “Sweden-style social safety net” or “looming threat to liberty.” Journalist could suggest “a person whose job is to report the news of the day” or “enemy of the people.” Cancel culture could mean … actually, I have no idea at all what cancel culture means at this point. Fox, on its own, did not create that confusion. But it exacerbated it, and exploited it. The network turned its translations of the world into a business model. Every day, the most watched shows of the most watched cable network in the country—a prime-time destination more popular than ESPN—take the familiar idioms of American democracy and wear away at their common meanings. The result is disorientation. The result is mass suspicion. Like a vengeful God bringing chaos to Babel, Fox has helped to create a nation of people who share everything but the ability to talk with one another.

Indeed, indeed, and so in the bromancer's vengeful world, bringing chaos to Babel, the Donald and Joe are directly alike, both blights on the universe, though in the old days, the nuns would have called the Donald's heart black as the ace of spades, thanks to the endless lying which would have resulted in a vast layer of sinning charcoal on his soul ...

 

It goes without saying that apocalyptic thinking about societal decadence has been a favourite theme of Catholics since the year dot ... it's the way you get the faithful to stay true, huddled together to say their prayers, fearful of the outside world, a strategy the reptiles and the GOP emulate at every turn ...

Yes, there's the level of insight on offer - the kitchen as reptile metaphor, the suburban mindset on the move. Much as the pond loves its Aldi egg timer, there are only so many ways to boil an egg, or to brew up another fascinated, compelled bromancer, channeling Douthat stupidity ...

 

Indeed, indeed. Meanwhile, on another planet ...

When scholars discuss the effects of propaganda, that dissonance is often what they talk about. Hannah Arendt described it in terms of cynicism: the mental exhaustion that, over time, can make people “think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.” Masha Gessen, the great observer of modern autocracy, writes of a more generalized kind of dissolution: “When something cannot be described,” Gessen notes, “it does not become a fact of shared reality.” The fog can descend, as well, when words have had new meanings imposed on them. In George Orwell’s 1984, freedom is captivity, peace is war, truth is a lie. In his 2015 book How Propaganda Works, the philosopher Jason Stanley defines political propaganda as “the employment of a political ideal against itself.” He describes in particular how self-negating language can make for self-negating politics. “The most basic problem for democracy raided by propaganda,” Stanley writes, “is the possibility that the vocabulary of liberal democracy is used to mask an undemocratic reality.”

The Fox News Channel itself arose as a matter of negation: Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes, guided by the Nixonian notion that America’s “unelected elite” had amassed too much power, created the network in 1996 as a counterweight to the liberal bias that many conservatives saw in journalism writ large. But Fox’s initial project now reads as quaint. War is, at this point, Fox’s defining metaphor. Like the other outlets that both inspired Fox and were inspired by it—conservative talk-radio shows, Breitbart News and other websites—the network often processes the facts of the world as assorted weapons of war. On Fox, there are enemy combatants (Hillary Clinton, James Comey, “the Media,” Nancy Pelosi, Robert Mueller, Christine Blasey Ford, China, immigrants, Democrats) and there are allies. The sides are always clear. So is the cause.

Sorry, actually, so is the infinite stupidity, as the fascinated, compelled bromancer, channeling Douthat, asks reptilian readers to indulge in a thought experiment ...

Ah, the pond should have guessed it. Just as it was about to get started on the stupidity of that talk of crappers and running water - try running your internet without electricity - along comes a standard Catholic ploy, as if we haven't already been there many times before ...

 

New days, but same old same old ...

How stupid can it get? Well there's the constant conflating and confusing the United States with the rest of the world, always to be expected in Douthatian American exceptionalism, but made all the more poignant by the inability to distinguish between porn and big pharma and the astonishing amount of advertising of drugs on display in the United States. 

Truly, an hour or so watching television in the United States, and you'd be like the pond's mother, with a copy of the Australian Medicines Handbook and the Australian Pharmaceutical Formulary on hand so you could head down to the doctor to try the latest script that took your fancy for whatever disease you happened to catch on the box ...

 

 

Japan has become uniquely sexless? But what about all that manga, what about all that comic book porn in the corner store? Isn't that the reason for the ruination of the country?

As a generalisation, there's nothing like meaningless generalisations to bring out the inherent stupid in the stupid, or the ideologically or theologically fixated ...

“For the past five years, I’ve had a front row seat to the Trumpification of Fox and the Foxification of America,” Brian Stelter writes in his new book, Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth. Stelter, as a media correspondent and analyst, covers Fox for CNN. His book is deeply reported: For it, Stelter spoke with more than 140 staffers at Fox, along with 180 former employees and other people with direct ties to the network. (“Fox did not cooperate with the book,” Stelter told The Washington Post, but he “was in frequent touch with Fox News spokespeople” for fact-checking and the like.) Many of Hoax’s revelations are shocking, even—especially—if you follow the network. Fox really does function, Stelter suggests, as Trump’s presidential daily briefing. (The president reportedly once told the Fox legal analyst Andrew Napolitano: “Everything I know about the Constitution, I learned from you on Fox & Friends.”) And Fox really does serve as a kind of adviser to its most fervent fan. Trump, Stelter writes, “granted pardons because of Fox. He attacked Google because of Fox. He raged against migrant ‘caravans’ because of Fox. He accused public servants of treason because of Fox.”
The leader and the news network speak, and enforce, the same language. Trump regularly lifts his tweets directly from Fox’s banners and banter. Last year, Media Matters for America’s Matt Gertz counted the times the president tweeted something in direct response to a Fox News or Fox Business program. Gertz found 657 such instances—in 2019 alone. Fox hosts and producers use that power to manipulate the president. “People think he’s calling up Fox & Friends and telling us what to say,” a former producer on the show tells Stelter. “Hell no. It’s the opposite. We tell him what to say.”
But the manipulation flows in both directions. At Fox, Stelter reports, executives live in fear of angering the opinion hosts, who in turn live in fear of angering viewers—who of course have been made angrier by the hosts themselves. A former producer tells Stelter: “We were deathly afraid of our audience leaving, deathly afraid of pissing them off.” Stelter’s sources describe “a TV network that has gone off the rails,” he writes. “Some even said the place that they worked, that they cashed paychecks from, had become dangerous to democracy.” A well-known commentator on the network tells Stelter: “They are lying about things we are seeing with our own eyes.” An anchor laments that “we surrendered to Trump. We just surrendered.” The capitulation has become so complete, and so widely recognized, that when a Fox news reporter actually questions the president, the questioning itself makes news.

 

When you've got a country so completely fucked by Chairman Rupert, how can anyone expect it to make sense?

The pond finds it impossible not to keep quoting ...

Fox is fond of accusing its alleged enemies of “politicizing” the news; the irony is that politicizing the news is Fox’s most basic move. Take the network’s coverage of COVID-19 in the spring. The opinion shows often treated the pandemic not as a public-health emergency, but as a political threat to Trump—as a front in its ongoing war. The Fox host Pete Hegseth: “I feel like the more I learn about this, the less there is to worry about.” The host Jeanine Pirro: “If you listen to the mainstream media, it's time to buy the family burial plot.” The language mocked, and minimized. Geraldo Rivera announced, baselessly, that if you could hold your breath for 10 seconds, that was a sign that you were COVID-free. On March 6, Fox’s longest-tenured medical analyst, Marc Siegel, told Hannity that “at worst, at worst-worst-case scenario, it could be the flu.”
Every news network struggled to understand the threat of the coronavirus in those early days. But Fox struggled much more. Stelter quotes several staffers who were ashamed and angry with the network’s coverage at a time when it was crucial for Americans to grasp the severity of the virus. “Hazardous to our viewers,” one told him. “Dangerous,” said another. “Unforgivable,” said another. And also hypocritical: Even as Fox was airing segments that downplayed the threat of the virus, Stelter reports, executives at Fox headquarters in Manhattan were ordering deep cleanings of their offices and making preparations for their talent to work remotely. On March 9, Stelter notes, Hannity poked fun at his favorite targets—Dems, the Media—for, he claimed, exaggerating the threat of the virus. “They’re scaring the living hell out of people, and I see it again as like, Oh, let’s bludgeon Trump with this new hoax,” he said.
Nine days later? He was insisting that “we’ve never called the virus a hoax.”

Perhaps the pond should have stuck with cartoons ...

 

Never mind, we've reached the final bromancer gobbet, without a nanosecond's self-reflection or even navel-gazing, though there's been plenty of Douthatian fluff-gathering ...

 

 

The most likely a renaissance in religious belief? Thank the long absent lord, the pond had the pleasure of watching Antonio Campos's The Devil All the Time, a film which tortured American reviewers, but which reminded the pond it was just a hop and a step, not even a jump, from Ohio to Tamworth ...

 

As for the return of mindless superstitions of the bromancer transubstantiative cannibalistic Catholic kind, the pond's not holding its breath, and neither is climate science ...

 

 

And speaking of climate science, it's now off to the gassy nattering "Ned", who thinks he's found a terribly clever way to confound his enemies ... 

As usual with "Ned", this is going to be a long haul, and the pond invites stray readers to find a role model in the Murdochian universe ...

War, in the field, rationalizes behavior that would be deemed immoral in times of peace. War, used as language, can amount to a similar kind of exceptionalism. If your side is the right side, you might do whatever it takes to make sure that your side keeps winning. You can justify a lot in the name of liberty. (The title of Hannity’s 2002 book, Manichaean and Mad Libbian at once, is Let Freedom Ring: Winning the War of Liberty Over Liberalism.) One Fox & Friends staffer Stelter spoke with describes being upbraided for a particular piece of copy she’d written for the show: an update sharing the news that White Castle would begin to serve vegan burgers. The copy presented the introduction as a positive development. But that was wrong, the staffer was told: The new burgers were actually part of the “war on meat.”
2019 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute tracked the differences between “Fox News Republicans” and other Republicans who said Fox was not their primary news source. Of the Fox loyalists, 55 percent said that there was nothing the president could do to lose their approval. That figure helps to explain how Fox can serve the state even as it operates independently. The “home team” is a powerful thing. Peter Pomerantsev, the author of Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia, points out how cannily Fox employs the metaphor of the family in its packaging of its opinion shows: Bill O’Reilly, Pomerantsev told me, was for a long time the network’s cynical uncle. Tucker Carlson is the quirky cousin. Sean Hannity, meanwhile, is “the father coming home, ranting about this horrible world where the white man felt disenfranchised.” Familiarity, literally—this is the “strict father” model of political discourse, rendered as infotainment. The upshot, Pomerantsev noted, is a constructed world that is above all “very, very coherent.”

The pond likes to think of "Ned" as the boring old uncle who comes down from the attic, and reckons he can always win by boring the socks off the young 'uns ...along with some clever strategic shifts in thinking, showing the old fox has still got his mojo and his moves.

Remember when coal was all the go in the reptile universe? How suddenly, how quickly it changed, and yet in this constructed reptile world, the change seems coherent and thought out ... because among the many arts of being a reptile, the ability to argue that black is white, and vice versa, and coal is the solution, but gas is the real solution, comes after years of study with Jesuits ...

It's impossible to make this sort of stuff up. From climate denialism through coal to gas, and really only a Rowe can catch the inherent absurdity behind it all ...

 

As always, there's more carbon-capture Rowe here, and as experienced "Ned" readers know, there's much more "Ned" carbon-emitting, bloated gaseousness to follow ...

Of course the pond shouldn't forget the infallible Pope, who carbon captures the sublime element of cynicism that runs through the ploy and nattering "Ned's" handwringing text ...

 

 

And now, refreshed with that natural cool change, just like a menthol cigarette, and billboards on display, back to nattering "Ned" ...

And so all the reptile talk of coal has gone, and now we must talk of gas, and yet there's beefy Angus Taylor pretending that climate denialism hasn't been his go all along, and the pond feels like it's just taken a trip back to the future past ...

 

What a rogue's gallery and what an explanation of why the country, and no doubt the planet, is comprehensively fucked ... (the pond does particularly love that impression of caveman Joel, a perfect match for the beefy Angus ...)

Let's get real. In the Murdochian universe, coal might change to gas, but climate science remains a hoax ...

 

And now back to "Ned" ...

Of course there are other ways of looking at it ...

It really is remarkable, to have lived through the bushfire season at the start of this year, and emerge from that as a political leader stronger in your conviction that the answer is locking in more fossil fuels, for longer.

Mind-boggling, in truth.

But this is the point we’ve now arrived at. Scott Morrison’s gas-led recovery right now remains more like a plan for a plan than a concrete set of propositions. But that will change in the October budget, and the prime minister used a speech on Tuesday to make sure everybody understood that’s where he was heading.

Let’s be clear about why we have arrived here. We are here because Morrison’s corporate advisers, with backgrounds in the fossil fuel industry, are pushing for precisely this outcome.

The prime minister was refreshingly clear in his attribution on Tuesday. A key voice, he said, had been Andrew Liveris, a former Dow Chemical executive and current Saudi Aramco board member, who “sat down with me at Kirribilli” and said if “you want to change manufacturing in this country, you’ve got to deal with gas”.

Quelle surprise.

The second reason we’ve arrived at gas being great for humanity (apart from the need to project that the government has a plan for economic development post-Covid) is that when it comes to Australia’s toxic climate change politics, the Liberal party needs to creep very slowly away from coal without causing an internal conflagration.

In order to creep away from coal slowly (at a price of pumping yet more taxpayer money into carbon capture and storage – a technology that has somehow managed to be the next big thing at our expense for about 30 years) gas will be branded as the bridge to Australia’s low-emissions future. (Graudian here).

And there are other items reading ... Gas industry donates millions to Australian political parties ...

But the pond has had more than enough of its attempts to learn reptile speak this day - there's so much double-think and hypocrisy involved, it's hard even for a Catholic-trained mind to make all the leaps required - and so is eternally grateful to have reached the last nattering "Ned" gobbet ...

Actually there's a third political pillar - climate science denialism still runs strong in SloMo's and beefy Angus's, and the reptiles' universe - and that's why the pond takes this cartoon as a metaphor for more than just masks ...

Think of it as embracing both the bromancers' love of imaginary friends as the solution to it all, and "Ned" down from the attic to bloviate, and meanwhile, the lemmings cheerfully head to the cliff brayng at those left outside the Murdochian universe...