In which the pond goes through the usual comrade Dan bashing, before doing a marathon meditation with nattering "Ned" ...

Before the pond disappears down the rabbit hole with prattling Polonius, it's worth remembering a few alternative realities, always worth bearing in mind when the reptiles go on one of their comrade Dan rants ...

Like the current situation in the UK, that's the the progressive UK, with progressive Boris at the helm ...

 Oh yes, apparently it's getting to be great fun in the progressive UK, with many adventures to be had ...

The pond takes no pleasure in this, and there's much more at the Graudian here,  and if the pond was as fuckwitted and fatuous as Polonius, the pond would no doubt be blaming it all on progressive Boris and his progressive policies, including his progressive ability to break international law ...

But instead it's the pond's duty to suffer through one of Polonius's interminable history lessons ... all it asks while so doing is that we should remember that there's a world outside the reptile rabbit hole, and it's not doing that well in places ...

 

Polonius's ability to state the obvious never fails to astonish the pond. Who would guess that an economy reliant on exports might be affected by a downturn in the international economy? But Polonius is routinely amazing, and so it seems that he also understands that the great depression might also have involved some connection with the outside world, with consequent difficulites ...

 

It's impossible to go through all the glib distortions in this, including but not limited to the routine lionising of Lyons - a favourite pastime at the Sydney Institute - and the notion that under Lyons things got better, when in fact the depression lasted a long time and many suffered. There is a good argument that under Lyons recovery was slower and more difficult than those not so hostile to Keynes ...

And then there's Polonius's limited focus, which features talk of Cain being asleep at the wheel, but Ming the merciless was apparently alive and alert during the 1961 recession that almost saw him booted out of office ....

And that was against the hapless, useless Arthur "two Wongs don't make a White" Calwell ...

And then there's that blather that Australia recovered well from the Spanish flu, and didn't shut down large sections of the private sector economy.

The government didn't have to shut down large sections - the virus did it for them. 

As usual there's a thesis on the subject here, (large direct download pdf) interalia including this note at the start of chapter 8:

"The presence of influenza in Queensland in early May 1919 dramatically lowered business confidence, significantly disrupted commerce and seriously affected the day-to-day life of communities throughout the state. Businesses and government departments, if not having to close, functioned with much depleted staffs. One Toowoomba retailer had 30 of his employees absent at the same time; whilst at Ipswich the city's clothing factory ceased operating, as did the schools, hotels, stores and banks in Taroom. The whole of the clerical staff at Toogoolawah Nestlé's condensed milk factory almost simultaneously contracted the virus and for a time the manager of the town's Queensland National Bank hat to cover all duties. Only a single assistant bank teller could be mustered at Charleville and the Bank of New South Wales at Winton had to close its doors. Shearers who had gathered near Gowrie Station, Charleville, in anticipation of the start of the shearing season in early July 1919, quickly moved on after being informed that the station's manager and the cook were "down with the flu".

 

And so on, and on, and there are remarkable similarities in the impact and the disputes, what with the ancient anti-maskers, and the old 'we must all get back to work tomorrow, dying if necessary' brigade, but why did Polonius head off on that track?

Why it's to compare comrade Dan with Jack Lang, which is a risible bit of ahistorical nonsense ...

 

Here's the funny thing the reptiles can't get their head around, cocooned as they are in their own sheltered worlds, but keen to get others out to work, and if there's a culling of the herd, then what the hell, that's just the way it goes for low-rent workers. 

Death is the price to be paid for keeping the well-off and the well-heeled in comfort, and yet see how this confuses the likes of the oscillating fan ...

They seem to support the restrictions? What, they don't want to die to keep Polonius in the prattle to which he's accustomed?

Hey ho, on we go, and as anyone might expect, at least those who suffer the reptiles with the pond, the dog botherer is peddling the same stuff ...

This time the dog botherer gets out the violin, and plays a mournful tune full of hypocritical sympathy, because he's really just interested in berating premiers and so on and so forth, because the whole thing is just a bit of alarmist nonsense ... (much like climate science, which has absolutely nothing to do with the current burning of the United States) ...

Here the pond should pause to note the situation in the United States, where the same sort of nonsense has lead to a dire situation ...

Oh Fauci, here...

The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases stressed that efforts to reopen the economy had caused surges in both regions, but that the U.S. was undoubtedly the “worst hit country in the world.” He called its inability to lower its baseline “extraordinarily unacceptable.”
“Every day when we get with the task force and we go over the data from the night before, I keep looking at that curve [of COVID-19 cases], and I get more depressed and more depressed about the fact that we never really get down to the baseline that I’d like,” Fauci said when answering a question about a potential second surge of the coronavirus in the U.S.
“I don’t talk about second surges because we’re still in the first surge,” he added. “It isn’t as if we went way down.”
Fauci argued that the U.S. had failed to shut down its public areas and workplaces to the extent that some countries in the EU did, including Italy and Spain. He also highlighted some southern states that opened early and then saw a spike in cases.

Oh Fauci, here ...

...Trump said the U.S. was "rounding the final turn. And we're going to have vaccines very soon, maybe much sooner than you think."
Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said he disagrees with Trump's assessment, noting that if Americans aren't careful, the pandemic could worsen.
"I have to disagree with that, because if you look at ... the statistics, they are disturbing. We're plateauing at around 40,000 cases a day. And the deaths are around a thousand," Fauci told MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell.
Fauci said he hopes there is not a post-Labor Day surge of cases like there was following Memorial Day and July 4th, because the country's infection rate is already too high.
"When you have a baseline of infections that are 40,000 a day and you have threats of increased test positivity in certain regions ... what we don't want to see is going into the fall season, you don't want to start off already with a baseline that's so high," Fauci said.

And so on, so when you read about governments hurting people, does it get much more hurtful than lying about the deadly nature of a virus, and the thousands of deaths that followed from that lie?

You know, the pond's ability to take a dose of the dog botherer is getting more and more limited by the week, which is why the pond can't resist slipping in a little Marina Hyde (here):

Another dignified week for Boris Johnson’s administration, which now wishes to override its own Brexit deal by claiming not to have understood what it was signing when it signed it. Traditionally, this excuse is used by people who’ve just been subject to 72 hours of police beating; or by the harmless local weirdo who’s been tricked into confessing to a highly complex sex murder; or by the children of 96-year-old petrochemical tycoons who’ve left the entire family estate to a teenage stripper.
It is now being used by the British government’s alleged mastermind, Dominic Cummings, and by its sheepdog mascot, Johnson, who no longer even looks housebroken. Meanwhile, the same government would like you to believe that it would be notionally capable of pulling off the most sophisticated testing programme on the entire planet. This is the so-called Operation Moonshot, which would see Matt Hancock – literally Matt Hancock– preside over a hyperfunctional system for carrying out 10 million coronavirus tests a day using technology that hasn’t yet been invented. Leaked Whitehall papers estimate the cost at £100bn.
This week, Hancock announced he’d already spent £500m on the plan, leaving us just £99.5bn (NINETY NINE POINT FIVE BILLION POUNDS) short of a moonshot. Which feels less of a space rocket, and more of a reminder not to approach the firework when it doesn’t go off.
For some people it will always be too soon to call this one, but are we near the point at which we can conclude that Dominic Cummings is the Samantha Brick of statecraft? I wonder if you were ever familiar with Samantha. A few years ago, this previously obscure journalist torched the internet with a Daily Mail article so provocatively ludicrous that it would ultimately land her a slot on Celebrity Big Brother. As the headline put it: “There are downsides to looking this pretty: why women hate me for being beautiful”. The accompanying picture, of a perfectly ordinary 41-year-old woman, marked Samantha out as something of a Florence Foster Jenkins type: convinced of truly exceptional gifts where merely a lack of them lay.
And so with Cummings’ record in government. He seems to suffer from a sort of inverse dysmorphia. Instead of looking in the mirror and seeing the reality of the latest clusterfuck staring back, he sees a Steve Jobs or a Warren Buffett, or even a guy who remembers that the label is meant to go on the inside of his pants. As recently as January, Cummings was claiming there are “trillion dollar bills lying on the street” if you just knew how to run government properly. Has he found one yet? I bet you a trillion dollars he never does.
This week he was trillioning again, writing to the Department of Culture to inform them that the government wants to build trillion-dollar tech companies in the UK. And I want a Covid test closer than 300 miles away, but we’re all having to make our peace with stuff, aren’t we.
It’s not clear whether people like Cummings have best friends. One’s instinct is not, but if they did it would be very much the duty of that individual to look Dom in the eye and say: “Mate, with the best will in the world, what on EARTH about the last six months makes you think you can build the next Apple?”

Mate, with the best will in the world, the pond wouldn't trust the dog botherer to peel an orange, let alone hire a ute or help win the war in Iraq, or fight a virus ...

Of course all of this is just the usual, which is a reptile raging at comrade Dan ... but inevitably, being a bear of little brain, the dog botherer will find it hard to stay focused, and will begin to wander off into his usual litany of the things that irritate him ...

Indeed, indeed, it's shocking that anyone should have a plan for gender equality, when everyone knows it's so much better to have a fundamentalist Sydney Anglican idea of complimentary women, or perhaps an AMP approach (or come to think of it, as we're losing focus, why not a Taliban approach to Aboriginal heritage?)

 

And there you have it, but if you're speaking about ideological adventurism, does it get any more adventurous than Boris, the Donald, and thousands upon thousands of deaths? 

Whatever mistakes the Premiers have made - whether it be the Ruby Princess or comrade Dan's security guards - the pond is grateful each day that we've avoided the worst of Murdochian-supported excesses ... because if SloMo and the reptiles of the Killer Creighton kind had had their way, we'd be catching the bus to the rapture ...

 

The pond slipped that cartoon in as a warning for amateur readers of the pond. 

We've done with comrade Dan bashing for the moment, and this is where hardened pond professionals must knuckle down and do the hard yards ... an endless encounter with nattering "Ned" ... but it's Sunday, and meditation on loons can know no limits if nirvana is to be obtained ...

 

 

This pair has entranced the reptiles, and already been extensively featured, and no doubt will cop more column inches in the future ... and yet if the pond might be so bold, it was most reminded of that great fraud, Ern Malley ... and his remarkable poems, which the pond still finds entrancing ...

 

There's more here,  the complete set in fact, and yet a funny thing happened to the fraudsters along the way.

Who remembers James McAuley's poems these days? Who has even heard of Harold Stewart? Oh they were passable enough in their day, and the pond has a sentimental, ancient attachment to Stewart's Japanese translations, but as Ern's wiki here notes ...

The fictional Ern Malley achieved a measure of celebrity. The poems are regularly re-published and quoted. There have been at least 20 publications of the Darkening Ecliptic, either complete or partial. It has reappeared – not only in Australia, but in London, Paris, Lyons, Kyoto, New York and Los Angeles – with a regularity that would be the envy of any real Australian poet.

Some literary critics take the view that McAuley and Stewart outsmarted themselves in their concoction of the Ern Malley poems. "Sometimes the myth is greater than its creators," Max Harris wrote. Harris, of course, had a vested interest in Malley, but others have agreed with his assessment. Robert Hughes wrote:

The basic case made by Ern's defenders was that his creation proved the validity of surrealist procedures: that in letting down their guard, opening themselves to free association and chance, McAuley and Stewart had reached inspiration by the side-door of parody; and though this can't be argued on behalf of all the poems, some of which are partly or wholly gibberish, it contains a ponderable truth... The energy of invention that McAuley and Stewart brought to their concoction of Ern Malley created an icon of literary value, and that is why he continues to haunt our culture.

In the end, modernism and Ern won, and railing at T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (as if he wasn't a high Anglican conservative ponce of the first water) turned out to be an incredible waste of time, and perhaps this should be kept in mind while reading nattering "Ned" ... because there's going to be a lot of silly railing at Social Justice, as if if somehow everything is the fault of post-modernism (but what about the Donald and his love of Vlad and North Korean dictators and such like? Stay, more about 'what about the Donald?' later, first the hard yards must be done) ...

Now there's a laugh, right there. Steven Pinker is a ponce loon of the first water too, and you don't have to google very far or wide to discover all sorts of studies of his epic poncedom, not limited to Steven Pinker's ideas are fatally flawed to You can deny environmental calamity - until you check the facts.

And so on and on if you have an endless appetite for googling silliness.


The pond doesn't much mind Pluckrose and Lindsay attention seeking where they can find it - they have a book to flog, but as soon as you find yourself being taken up by the likes of nattering "Ned" and placed in the company of a Pinker, you might begin to wonder if it's all worth it ...

The pond also doesn't mind the odd bit of railing at academic nonsense. The pond has been through all sorts of academic fads ... sociology, structuralism, semiotics, etc, etc ... but really it's all just a lot of navel-gazing, because ... what about Donald Trump?

Actually, when you start to put things into boxes - categories if you will - under headings like knowledge, and belief, and reason and emotion and men and women, you're actually starting to sound as stupid as those you purport to criticize ... though it helps to explain why it's music to the ears of an aged white reptile bigot of the nattering "Ned" kind, who probably hasn't spent that much time with TG folk, and like Tony Abbott, might be a tad uncomfortable in the company of gays ..

As for difficult, uppity blacks ...

Ah, the old line the pond loves, much has been done, but much remains to be done, provided nobody comes to take away money from the filthy rich ... and yes everything is hunky dory in America, because the Confederacy was just about state rights, they're going to ruin the suburbs (the pesky, difficult blacks), and why not shoot a black if he's not behaving with proper respect, and ... what about the Donald?

Oh dear, it's the long march through the institutions yet again, though it's a pity that it seems that the authors don't seem to have caught up on the term.

Indeed, these are the sort of useful idiots who think they're helping, when really all they're doing is giving Murdochians of the nattering "Ned" kind the sort of information that will act as News Corp fodder for months ...

Around this point, the pond should ask of all this navel-gazing and carry-on yet again ... but what about Donald Trump? Is he the way to social justice, or even Social Justice?

 

You see, at the end of the day, the Murdochians couldn't give a stuff about "social justice" as opposed to "Social Justice". They don't think there's any need at all to worry about justice. There's the disease of crime, and then the Donald and the Murdochians are the cure, and that's all the justice you and Dirty Harry need to know about ...

 And there you have it, and there's the belling of the cat.

The authors ... make clear they believe in gender, racial and LGBT equality. Nor do they seek to attack universities and scholarship in general.

No they don't, and yes they do, and in case what does it mean to believe in gender? What the fuck does that mean?

Oh wait, the pond knows what it means. They believe the way Germaine and Harry Potter believe, and  how the reptiles will love them for it. But what about Donald Trump?

Why does the pond keep asking about the Donald, like some ancient pre-modernist monastic chant in Latin? 

Well at the end of his tedious exercise, "Ned" has the cheek to say that humans are susceptible to utopianism, even if it is authoritarian, fundamentalist and hostile to human nature, witness communism.

Uh huh, and what about Fox News, witness the Donald? Has that done tremendous damage in the process?

Well the Donald and Fox News and the reptiles and all the Murdochians and News Corp and "Ned" himself don't merely exist in tension with liberalism. 

 

They are almost directly at odds with each other, as they support the rule of a Mussolini-light snake oil selling nepotic pussy grabber, and urge his re-election ... but don't expect this central truth to be recognised any time soon in the lizard Oz ...

Meanwhile, here we are with the reptiles and Murdochian theory and Donald Trump ... and the result is we're drowning in books, while simple-minded fellow travellers eager to push their own book don't have the first clue about what's going on, and what's going down ...