First the good news: the infallible Pope can still be found, and the pond can still worship at his feet, and so all is well in the world.
Then on to some shocking, traumatic news.
The pond innocently followed a link supplied by a reader, and ended up in a veritable cesspit of tweets, a nest of vipers, enough to turn a reptile's scales grey with panic, fear and loathing. A sample will suffice ...
Dear sweet long absent lord, on and on they carried on, providing links to the Graudian and other shameless displays of hubris, and the pond could almost feel Dame Slap wilting and the dog botherer shouting into the ether with rage ...
No wonder the reptiles are in a tizz, and the tizz continued today ...
Yes, our Henry and the bromancer were out and about, catching the tiger by the tail, but look at the pitiful stuff on the leftie side of the digital page.
Poor old reptiles, urging on SloMo, with simplistic Simon suggesting it was his time to lead, and a link to the lizard Oz editorialist doing the same ...
Um, it's a little late for all of that, what with comedy sites having had a field day ...
And so on and on, and yet the reptiles seemed to think it was all as clear as whatever, including mud ...
SloMo stepping up will restore confidence? Does the immortal Rowe have a helpful portrait of the current situation?
And so to the thoughts of our Henry and the bromancer this day, and the pond decided that the bromancer should go first, given his penchant for stupid analogies. There would surely be at least one gem to delight ...
The kingdom of kitsch?
The pond will admit to having a few Mao clocks around the house, just to remind itself of the awesome way a mass murderer can command the adulation of millions, but let's be fair, once again the bromancer is dragging Catholicism into the discussion, and the pond was swamped for choice when it goggled Catholic kitsch, though this rare offering caught the eye ...
And so to our Henry, on the same theme ...
Did anyone notice how cheap the reptiles have become in their illustrations?
That snap of Xi is just a more expansive view of the Reuters snap that the reptiles cropped and deployed for the bromancer ...
Truly the desperation in the cost-cutting is becoming more noticeable by the day ... and yet still the reptiles defiantly kill trees so that they might have the vanity of giving away old fashioned paper copies ... and fuck Canada and heat waves and such like ...
Not to worry, on with our Henry ...
There we go again with the Leninism, but Lenin is long go, and so is Trotsky, and so too is Stalin, and yet various ideologies are just cloaks for ancient urges ...
And so on and on for the odd few thousand years ....
Up against Henry, the pond almost began to feel that the bromancer was on to something with his talk of the Pope, because truly, the authoritarian impulse doesn't just belong to the Maoists or the Chinese Communist party ... it belongs to the Donald, chairman Rupert, and the current iteration of the GOP, with that red MAGA cap an almost blatantly Freudian imitation of Maoist ways ...
Actually the pond got a couple of those vintage 1950s Mao clocks when in China, when they were virtually giving away trinkets celebrating the old emperor, what with the new emperor installed and getting on with emperor's business ...
Indeed, indeed, thank the long absent lord that the United States knows nothing of belligerent nationalism, and Australia is entirely free of belligerent nationalism ... why, the Murdochians are gentle lambs, leading the world to peace ...
Our national defence effort is woefully inadequate and concentrated heavily on capabilities which can have no relevance to maritime conflict. The few relevant major platforms we are developing are caught in the perennial Defence narrative — “a hundred of years of solitude” — and do not come online until mid-way through next decade.
The senior echelons of our defence establishment are caught in a deadly paradigm paralysis, born of complacency, an almost narcotic institutional inertia, intellectual narrowness and a complete failure to internalise the new dynamics of the international system.
On second thoughts, scrub that, and let's just get the last Henry gobbet out of the way ...
Indeed, indeed, and yet again the reptiles have managed to talk about a country's history without once mentioning that country's rich history ... perhaps a wiki listing massacres in China might help?
And so to end where the pond began this day ...
I couldn't find a quote by Lenin "allowing freedom of the press amounts to suicide", but Henry is much better read than me, so...
ReplyDeleteLenin did say, however, "All over the world, wherever there are capitalists, freedom of the press means freedom to buy up newspapers, to buy writers, to bribe, buy and fake “public opinion” for the benefit of the bourgeoisie." Not apposite though.
"That's almost as rich as comparing Xi to the emperors of ancient Rome, when there are perfectly good Chinese emperor models to go around..."
ReplyDeleteMaybe the Sons of Heaven are closer to the Pharaohs of Egypt ? Live as quasi-humans then, as gods, ascend to Heaven (aka to die) never to be heard of or from again. Come to think of it, quite a few Roman Emperors did that, too.
Really, the things Homo Saps Saps believes in in the name and cause of religion almost makes the things that people believe in the name of QAnon seem nearly normal.
Thank you Joe. I was thinking the Henry might be succumbing to ennui - his 'effort' for this day is pretty much formulaic. About the only interest for this reader was that the principles he claims to have uncovered apply to almost any country that thinks it is large and powerful. Those from the ratbag republic spouting 'American exceptionalism' could be similarly categorised.
ReplyDeleteThe good news, of course, was that we might continue to see the work of the Infallible Pope.
ReplyDeleteBro: "He [Xi Jinping] said nations risked confronting China's "wall of steel" which was made by "1.4 billion people"." Yair, and using millions of tons of Australian iron ore ! But going back just a little bit, the Bro says: "A captious critic, sidetracked by facts, might note that no-one has attempted to bully the Chinese nation in many, many decades."
ReplyDeleteWhat about the Japanese then ? They gave up "bullying China" about 70-something years ago when they finally lost WWII. But ok, that wasn't really "bullying" was it, that was invading, massacring, enslaving and casually murdering Chinese. And not even for some useful purpose, like building a railway line.
And people get upset because in return, the Japanese merely copped a couple of nukes. Oh, and the repeated firebombing of Tokyo and a few other places.
So, anyway, does 7 decades constitute "many, many" ? There are plenty of Chinese people still alive who suffered under the Japanese.
Lastly from the Bro: "The great Czech writer Milan Kunderer [was he ?] once called communism "the kingdom of kitsch"." Yep, Yuri Gagarin's space ship was just the essence of kitsch, wasn't it.
PS Bro: neither Russia nor China are now or ever have been "communist" - not as Marx would recognise it anyway. But then neither the US nor the UK is now, or ever has been, "capitalist", just oligarchic neoliberal libertarian.
Oh my, here comes Holely Henry: "Confusing stridency with substance, [!] their "endless swearing at [woke progressives and militant Lefties]" betrayed "a sort of voodoo belief in the power of curses and incantations", deepening every conflict and vitiating every attempt at productive discussion."
ReplyDeleteBy heck, those reptiles are just supreme masters of "attribution and projection" aren't they. And then they give us: "eulogies turn the leader's head, discourage him from "listening carefully" and induce hubris and "subjectivism" with disastrous consequences." So how did those CCP types learn so very much about ScottyfromMarketing ? That's just such a stunningly accurate portrayal of him.