In which the pond filibusters its way through a Friday with the hole in the bucket man ...

 

 

 

What's the pond to do with the rubbish being served up by the lizard Oz reptiles of late? 

It seems that these days the lizard Oz editorialist is being used as filler fodder, with the reptiles unwilling or unable to cultivate their usual supply of loons ... leaving the Friday field to the Speccie mob ... but the pond didn't have the strength to deal with a dashing Donners, or best of all, a Conrad Black returned from fuck knows where ...

Once upon a time, Donners would have proudly featured in the lizard Oz ... and some idiot jabbering about prayer being illegal in Australia would have been considered something of a lizard oz coup.

Of course there are other interesting stories out and about, but the pond always feels ambivalent about running stories from Crikey,  as its paywall serves a purpose ...

But when Crikey gets to sharing its love of herpetology, the pond finds it irresistible ...

 

 

That Vint Cerf link is here,  and that ACCC link leads to another Crikey story, but eventually also to the ACCC 2019 report in pdf form, the Digital Platforms Inquiry ... 

There's a lot more for herpetology students ... including but not limited to ...

News Corp also demanded that the ABC be prevented from benefiting in any way from the revenue — despite the ABC, by the logic offered by News Corp, being in exactly the same position as other media organisations.
Realising such a blatant attack on the ABC might cruel the chances of securing passage of the legislation, the government has now signalled the ABC and SBS could be included in the scheme — to the fury of Liberal MPs. But the ABC haters don’t need to be too worried — the government can always cut ABC funding by whatever amount it makes from Google and Facebook.
The Google and Facebook heist is just one of several initiatives the Coalition is pursuing currently to fund News Corp. Foxtel was handed another $10 million recently from Communications Minister Paul Fletcher without having to even bother explaining what it would be spent on.
That follows, of course, a $30 million handout to Foxtel by Malcolm Turnbull, who has changed his tune somewhat about News Corp in the time since he was forced out of the prime ministership.
Foxtel is a black hole for News — subscriber numbers are only being held up by the volatile seasonality of sport for its Kayo streaming service. The Foxtel Now services are losing subscribers and while streaming service Binge has been something of a success, it lags badly behind Netflix and Stan. News Corp had to lend US$900 million to Foxtel in 2019 to keep it out of the hands of its lenders.
News Corp also lost out overnight when Bertelsmann of Germany (which owns Penguin and Random House) won the auction of US book publisher Simon & Schuster, owned by ViacomCBS, for US$2.2 billion. News tried a cheap offer but lost early and CEO Robert Thomson now claims there was “no logic” to the deal and that the new company would be “a book behemoth. Distributors, retailers, authors and readers would be paying for this proposed deal for a very long time to come”.
That’s rich coming from News Corp — even just in publishing, News already controls Harper Collins, Harlequin and others companies. Simon & Schuster would have given it a huge share of global markets.

And that other Crikey link the pond mentioned (paywalled) provided a handy guide to those who can't be bothered reading the ACCC ...

News Corp charges that when Google (mostly) and Facebook use its headlines and automatically generated “snippets” of News Corp stories on their sites, they are stealing content, and should be made to pay for it via a licence fee that will “reflect the financial benefit digital platforms derive from using snippets”.
It also complains that longer “snippets” deter people from clicking through the attached link to the original story because they get all they need from what’s displayed.
Except the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s (ACCC) digital platforms inquiry found that News Corp’s claims don’t stack up.
Headlines and snippets aren’t theft of content: “generally, digital platforms’ use of article headlines is unlikely to infringe copyright protections in Australia,” the ACCC noted. “Digital platforms reproducing a snippet of a copyright-protected news article does not infringe copyright protections if the snippet does not reproduce a substantial part of the article.”
And the ACCC found that the tech companies, media organisations and consumers all benefit from the use of snippets. Specifically, “media businesses benefit because a snippet provides context and an indication to the user of the value of that content, increasing the likelihood of consumers clicking through”.
Real-world evidence backed this up. “As a result of a German copyright law requiring Google to pay fees to publish snippets from news media websites, Google stopped showing snippets from [media company Axel Springer’s] news articles. Axel Springer noted that the lack of snippets led to a nearly 40% decline in referral traffic from Google Search and an almost 80% decline in referral traffic from the Google News user interface”.
The ACCC also “does not agree that longer snippet lengths necessarily have a negative effect on referral traffic, with users remaining on an aggregator or search platform rather than clicking through to a news media business’s website”. As a result, it did not recommend that a mandatory licence fee be imposed.

Well at least it provided the pond with a distraction, and stopped it heading off to the Speccie mob, and instead the pond could be content with the one genuine, certifiable loon in the commentary section this day, the good old hole in the bucket man frothing and foaming in his usual way, and what do you know, as a result of his solitary looniness, being blessed by the reptiles with cult master certification ...

Now the pond will concede it's not much of an Ozymandias from the cult master ... when doing that poem, the pond always prefers this approach ...

 

 

Okay, okay, the pond is delaying, summoning up the strength to deal with our hole in the bucket man this day, full of the usual sounds of fury, signifying nothing much  ...

 

To call Henry's interpretation of Codrington's actual history scandalous would be an understatement; his denigration of others who disagree with him is every bit as disgraceful ...

The pond couldn't resist quoting this short summary of Codrington's 'achievements' in his short career ...

 Christopher Codrington (1668-1710) was a Barbadian-born English slaveholder, soldier, and colonial governor in the West Indies. Educated at Christ Church Oxford, he was later elected to All Souls college as a probationer fellow in 1690. In 1698, he succeeded his father as commander-in-chief and captain-general of the Leeward Islands, an island group in the northeast Caribbean Sea. He also inherited his father’s estates, plantations, and enslaved people on the islands.

A complaint was made against his rule by the inhabitants of Antigua which was later dismissed by the House of Commons. In 1703, after he failed to capture Guadeloupe as part of a war with France and Spain, he left the governorship and spent the rest of his life on his plantations in Barbados. His body is buried in the All Souls Chapel.

In his will he left £10,000 and £6,000 worth of books to All Souls College, which they used to establish the library. His will also left two plantations in Barbados to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, with instructions to continue slaveholding.

Xians continuing slaveholding? Well of course ...

But back to our Henry, doing his best Colonel Blimp impression, and clinging to British imperialism ...

 

 

On the matter of Sloane, there's a piece at the Graudian here which the pond can' resist quoting ... the pond is in a quoting mood this day ...

How do you erase a figure from the past and rewrite British history? According to some, it is done by taking a bust or statue of the figure in question and carefully placing it inside a climate-controlled glass cabinet that is then put on public display, alongside “artefacts explaining his work” in a free-to-access national museum, in the heart of our capital city. Oddly, this is not the form of “erasure” favoured by al-Qaida and the Taliban, who tend to opt for alternative methods involving sledgehammers and explosives. Perhaps they have been going about things the wrong way.
The supposed victim of historical erasure last week was Hans Sloane, the wealthy physician and naturalist whose collection of artefacts formed the nucleus of what became the British Museum. Accusations that the museum was rewriting history arose when it was reported that a bust of Sloane had been taken off its pedestal and moved, literally just a few metres, so it could be put on display inside a case with other objects. This new display made it possible for the museum to explain the links between Sloane, his collection and slavery.
In less hysterical times, a minor act of curatorial reinterpretation and recontextualisation would be of little interest outside the museum world. Instead, it sparked yet another confected outbreak of needless hostilities in Britain’s ongoing History Wars. Writing in the Spectator, Charles Moore complained that the bust of Sloane had been “locked in a display cabinet”, hardly a unique fate for an artefact held by the British Museum. Although having never thought it a good idea to test if the cabinets in the museum are indeed locked, I am not in a position to determine if the bust of Sloane has been singled out for special treatment.
Little of this, in reality, has much to do with Sloane or even with the British Museum and we are not at the beginning of some Orwellian age of historical erasure. Rather, Britain is gradually coming to the end of a very different and highly effective process of historical erasure that has endured for centuries. What bothers critics of the museum is that the new display makes plain the fact that much of the wealth Sloane used to purchase his vast collection was derived from slavery.
Every contrivance has been deployed to distance Sloane from slavery. As the wealth he accumulated from plantations in Jamaica came to him through marriage, it has been suggested that his involvement was merely tangential. Yet upon Sloane’s marriage to Elizabeth Langley Rose, one-third of the income from her plantations and her human property became his. In one of his letters, Sloane proudly talked of himself as a planter, the 18th-century euphemism for slave owner.
Those who have felt the sudden need to write hagiographies of Sloane have attempted to portray him as an almost accidental beneficiary of slavery, yet he not only grew rich from the sugar shipped from his wife’s Jamaican plantations, he actively invested in the slave trading South Sea Company. No matter how much we are asked to look only at his talents as a physician and his passion for botany and collecting, the fact remains that much of the money Sloane used to purchase the objects that today lie within our national museum came from the murderous exploitation of African men, women and children.

And so on and so on, and of course there's whitewashing, and then there's whitewashing in film ...

Whitewashing is a casting practice in the film industry in which white actors are cast in non-white roles. As defined by Merriam-Webster, to whitewash is "to alter ... in a way that favors, features, or caters to white people: such as ... casting a white performer in a role based on a nonwhite person or fictional character". In film, the practice is as old as the industry itself. The BBC said, "The list of films in which white actors have played other races includes everything from romantic comedies to action adventures and fantasies to historical epics." African-American roles and roles of Asian descent have been whitewashed.

Who can forget Ed Devereaux playing black tracker Jubbal in Journey out of Darkness and Kamahl playing an Arunta man?

But the pond digresses, it being a digressive Friday.

Back to our hole in the bucket man, because what's perhaps remarkable is not his defence of ancient Poms ... but his decision to do a billy goat buttism about slavery ... perhaps only a billy goat buttism about the Holocaust could match it for folly.

Did our Henry really have to say that slavery was unremarkable, and had been around for millenniums, so why bother having a later fit of angst about some of its finest practitioners?

And then things turned really ugly in our hole in the bucket's final gobbet, to do with his proud boast that the West, to its undying credit, abolished slavery ... when in reality the West hasn't abolished it, and the pond has little doubt if it wandered around some of the brothels in the inner west, it might still find workers in enforced servitude ...

States of delusion exist everywhere, and yesterday in a discussion at lunch, the pond noted that even in the New Testament, slavery was treated as an Xian fact of life. 

This immediately produced doubt, which moved to outright disbelief in the debate that followed, and as always in such cases, the pond noted that the Skeptic's Bible did a handy service in pointing out all sorts of absurdities in Xian thinking ... 

Indeed slavery did turn up in the New Testament, though the KJV folk did their best to hide it by using the term "servant" rather than "slave" ...

 

 

This was handy in Roman times,  because it didn't upset the natural order of things.

Of course the Old Testament is a gimme, but for those wanting more enthusiastic support of slavery in the bible can head off to the Skeptic's Annotated Bible here ...

It's not that puzzling. Fine men and women of the South saw nothing incongruous in considering themselves fine Xians, while being devotees of slavery, and heading into a monumental civil war. Rather it was one of those schisms in Xian thinking, akin to between wets and dries, in the style of a Monty Python sketch about schismatics ...

And that's why our Henry truly is an immortal fuckwit, when he credits the West's Judeo-Christian tradition for solving the matter ...

 

Has our Henry, blathering away about the wonders and splendors of the British Empire, ever spent any decent quality time with the bible? Is he an actual Xian? Sometimes the pond wonders ... perhaps he should be assigned some tasks, to fetch and carry at the pond's whim, a menial life for a pandering, servile loon ...

 

So much for fine western Xian traditions ... and now having filibustered its way home with just the hole in the bucket man for company, the pond will take its rest with an infallible Pope ...