Friday, March 05, 2021

In which the pond explains how all reptile study roads inevitably lead to our Henry and Dame Groan ...

 

 

The pond realises that its rigorous curatorial practices in relation to the  reptiles must sometimes seem like a mystery to those outside the arcane world of serious students of science-based herpetology.

How could the pond pass over such an excellent example of blaming the victim, it being all her fault that the reptiles and the NSW Police are in their current predicament? 

And how could the pond overlook the meretricious Merritt making a sterling case against trial by media, when the reptiles themselves have held assorted, various and richly hypocritical kangaroo courts over the years? Haven't they managed some astonishingly clever public shamings, and never you mind about breaking Godwin's Law?




Trial by media? Don't get the pond started, we could be here forever.

But the questing student of reptile ways will ignore the digital top page, and head down to the engine room where the most diligent reptiles shovel coal and shit ... and sure enough ...

 



 

Our hole in the bucket man is on the case, and if looking for bone-headed waffle of the pretentious academic kind, the meretricious Merritt is simply not in the game ...

 

 
 
 
You see, right there from the get go, talk of public shaming, and a picture by Warhol of Kafka, and the tone is set,  and there's no point in the pond reverting to the good old days of public shaming ...
 




What a proud tradition of public shaming there was ... and for those interested in a bit of pelting or ducking, there's a tidy start here ...

But you can bet London to a witch that our Henry won't be interested in what was going down only a century or so ago (anyone for a public hanging?), and instead will revert to arcane references to rouse himself to verbal emissions ...


 
 
Oh for fuck's sake, the Athenians and then Christian scholarship in the 11th century, when there's no talk of the stylish ways of the Inquisition? Is there a ducking stool handy, or at least a cartoon?
 
 
 

 

But cartoons only provide temporary relief from pedantry and humbug...


 

A renewed culture of retribution? Asserting a moral right to be vindicated? A moral obligation to assist where they reasonably could, in justice's timely pursuit?

Well there goes your empathy for a woman so traumatised she killed herself. Flew right out of Henry's hole in the bucket window, and left the pond looking for another cartoon ...




As usual, by the time our hole in the bucket man had reached his final gobbet, a deep, gagging sense of nausea had filled the pond's nostrils, and there was a sense of imminent upchucking in the stomach ... and that, as any student of reptiles knows, is what everyone is looking for, in a Pythonish way, when they reach for that final dinner mint ...



 

Yep, almost every word in that pedantic, portentous, righteous, insulting and demeaning outing is nauseating ... and, not to put too fine a point on its lack of empathy, in the end, sublimely barbaric ... 

But at least it provided some padding before the pond reached for a Rowe, with more Rowe here ...



 

And so to a change of pace and subject matter, with that old pond favourite, Dame Groan ...


 
 
Now before anyone gets agitated about Dame Groan, let us remember that she knows what she's talking about. She knows suffering, she knows deprivation ... she knows struggle street ...
 
 
 
 
 
Is Dame Groan not perfectly positioned to lecture those in a similarly dire situation?

Yesterday, the pond wandered past a dismal, run-down boarding house, no doubt full of cockies in the Sydney way, and possibly with the odd rat for company (the pond often shares its house with the odd passing rat), offering a single room for a tidy $150 a week. (It's on Crystal street, for anyone seeking a place to live).

Instead of meditating on that, and what it might be like to live on dog food, the pond knew that Dame Groan would help these people shape up, and seek an honest living ...

 


It's optional? What, we can't just dob in a bludger, and publicly shame them? Is there something wrong with public shaming? What would old Henry say about that and natural justice and secret trials and beefy Angus, the boofhead that's always doing deals?

 


 

Well it's true it's hard to shame someone without a scintilla of shame or a sense of guilt in their body.

Hmm, as usual, the pond could feel a cartoon coming on ...



 

And now back to Dame Slap, shaming the weak, the poor and the vulnerable ...


 

Indeed, indeed, and as for those other unemployed, why just dob them in and shame them? It's the best way for the justice system to work ... as anyone who scored a 201k redundancy entitlement will tell you. So much suffering, so little time ...


 

Uh huh. Based on a Menzies Research Centre survey, which is to say a Caterist survey, which is to say a survey undertaken by a centre with a keen eye for obtaining government cash in the paw, in a way which would make your average dole bludger salivate, or a beefy Angus go out into the world inspired by the joys of government grants ...




Yes, pathetic dole bludgers ... you really should learn the ways of the world ...

And so to the infallible Pope for a final infallible thought ...





7 comments:

  1. Oh, Holey Henry: "Aided and abetted by a media that, while claiming to act in the public interest, repeatedly ignore the fundamental Roman form of justice -- Audi alteram partem, hear the other side ..."

    Following on from Neddy's fine exposition re the Murdochian reptiles yesterday, we now have Henry expounding on their ways: "hear the other side". And when exactly have the reptiles ever actually attempted to do that ?

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  2. Dame Groan's approach to benefits is stick and carrot, without the carrot bit. It's typical of those that style themselves as conservative but would be more correctly called reactionaries that they assume higher benefits would act as a disincentive to work. It tells you more about them than the unemployed.

    Switzerland was the example I thought of but there are plenty of others apparent on the scatter chart in this article.

    https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/new-analysis-countries-with-higher-unemployment-benefits-have-lower-jobless-rates/

    The sour old puss doesn't operate that way however, no actual analysis, just "reports of jobseekers simply going through the motions" - sure, how many, where, who says?"

    In the rustbelt town I grew up in this sort of shit was the standard response of the conservative press. If you had any local knowledge it usually turned out that the businessman complaining was some shill associated with the Liberal party. One local seafood restaurant was famous for using work experience kids as slave labour but was still complaining loudly about penalty rates. The owner drove around in a high-end BMW.

    Pond readers know all this of course but it's still worth noting that virtually no reptile statements result from actual observations and analysis, they are just a series of default assumptions shared by all in the herpetarium. Just a sort tribal war chant.

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    Replies
    1. Befuddled - I was resisting comment on the Dame; other contributors are probably bored with my references to her time with the larger group that worked across Adelaide and Flinders Universities, and refined some excellent conclusions on incentives for people to work, and, being in work, incentives to increase productivity. More particularly, ways for ‘workers’ to promote productivity to ‘management’.

      She has walked away from all that, and now - I was going to write ‘propounds’, but that is too polite a term - now blathers classic ‘shock jock’ pretense of economics, in return for a still-impressive pay slip. At least she knows her price.

      Presumably she has anaesthetized that part of her brain that might recall her (brief) academic time. The Adelaide/Flinders group would have fallen about if anyone had suggested using something emanating from the Menzies Research Centre in serious studies on labour economics.

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    2. The background is quite interesting - she's now like a broken down footballer bludging drinks. Just living off whatever credibility she established when she briefly did something.

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    3. The grievous Groaner: "While providing basic income support, the best form of welfare is having a job..." Apart from the fact that "a job" is not "welfare", when could it be faintly possible that reptiles et al will admit, or even just vaguely concede, that there is always more unemployed people than there are even the least attractive jobs that they might seek. Can anybody remember when, in Australia, was the last time that the number of even vaguely decent jobs equalled or outnumbered the number of 'unemployed' ? If so, please enlighten me.

      I don't know what it is, but something short-circuits reptile brains at the mention of certain topics, and 'welfare' is one of them. Quite apart from situations such as, for example 'there's a job I could seriously apply for except that it's in Brisbane and I live in Perth' - not entirely uncommon in Australia - there's a simple fact that there are still people who just cannot take up a full-time job. Possibly because of some factor such as physical or mental impairment or just because, as Groany herself admits, of "sickness, childcare responsibilities and for older people".

      Now what percentage of 'dole bludgers' are in real life circumstances like that ? How many jobs are available for blind persons, for interest ?

      The thing is that righteous "conservatives" such as Groany have a simple principle: that no matter what the cost to everybody else, no suspected 'bludger' shall go unpunished. Despite the fact that "professional" bludgers are the ones most able to take whatever the dole offers and then work around it - legally or otherwise - to extend their "welfare".

      She can quite innocently state that: "before COVID, most Newstart recipients received the payment for less than one year" without in any way grasping what that means in terms of desire, or lack thereof, to "bludge".

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  3. So good of the Henry to choose ancient Athens to try to make a point about current events.

    Athens was such a great place to live - well, provided you were not a slave, or - a woman. As it happens, on the subject of shame - the ‘Wiki’ provides a quote derived from John J Winkler’s influential 1989 work ‘The Constraints of Desire: the Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece’, that

    “The ideal that respectable women should remain out of the public eye was so entrenched in classical Athens that simply naming a citizen woman could be a source of shame”

    So constrained were women that almost the only way they could establish some independence and a capacity to influence events around them was to be a high-class prostitute (yes, there is a fancy Greek term for it - but the long-established guidance for sprinkling such terms through your writing is to do so if the ancient term might be root for a modern word or phrase in common use. Too many sprinkle such terms to assert their supposed superior learning).

    Anyway, the Henry might dream of an Athens where blokes could display their learning as they defined civilization, to their satisfaction, but none of that was likely to involve women. Yes, prostitutes of all classes might be present at the ‘symposia’, but purely as performers. The education of women, generally, did not extend beyond what was needed for the management of the household, and in the more prosperous households a male slave more often than not did tricky things like keep the accounts.

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