In which a dread paranoid sense of persecution infests prattling Polonius, Shanners and Dame Slap ... with only our Gracie on hand to offer a form of reptile heresy ...

 

Here's something the pond should offered to nattering "Ned" as he blathered about climate science yesterday ...

 

 

 

Moving right along, there was clearly something in the reptile air or kool aid this weekend, and it wasn't just the demise of Gladys, though that might have been part of the yellow fog that rubs its back upon the reptile window panes ...

The pond's favourite reptiles had clearly done their columns before Gladys's farewell, and yet they were spooked, nervy, restless, and even the staid Polonius could see dangers lurking everywhere ... dark, threatening figures in the shadows, or perhaps monsters under the bed ... and curiously the monsters were related to the issues that traumatised the dunce in Kudelka's cartoon ...

While some might look at the opening snap below and think staid cardigan wearer, Polonius got more than a tingle, it was like an electric shock of alarm and panic coursing through his system ...

 

 

 

Tching! That's the sound of the pond dropping its zillionth coin into the Polonial swear jar for his zillionth rendition of "The ABC is a conservative-free zone without a conservative presenter, producer or editor of the Polonial kind, and just why did they drop me from The Insiders, when David Marr and I had a splendid schtick going?"

But here's where the hair on the back of Polonius's neck began to stick up, as he felt a blast of a demonic, conspiratorial, vengeful ectoplasm ...

 

 

See him scribble in a foaming, frothing frenzy about this fiendish conspiracy, which is more than enough to startle the horses and Polonius and lead to dire warnings of devilish mayhem ... and worse, you see, because they're all in the conspiracy together, the cardigan wearers and the deviants ...

 

Indeed, indeed, it's a difficult feat, warning both of an astonishingly dangerous conspiracy involving cardigan wearers and locals, and then at the same time discount the numbers as minor, trivial, of no import or significance ...

And there might be another reason for reporters wanting to do a novelty item outside the usual staid run of dull candidates. 

Why you might even find Ben Smee doing a story for the Graudian, What Campbell Newman did next: the making of an unlikely Queensland libertarian.

It was richly comic ...

“I think it’s truly amazing that Campbell Newman is running as a libertarian,” says Michael Cope, the president of the Queensland Council of Civil Liberties.
“He passed the most extreme legislation that was introduced in Queensland in my lifetime. From our point of view, he was Joh Bjelke-Petersen 2.0. He behaved like a classic Queensland authoritarian.”
Newman still defends the most extreme of those measures, the controversial anti-association “Vlad” legislation introduced after a brawl on the Gold Coast involving bikie gang members.
“That’s probably the major one where some people in the Liberal Democrats would have been concerned about,” Newman says, when asked about the apparent contradiction.
“What I say is that it was something that had to be done in the time, in specific circumstances. It didn’t happen because I decided one morning to go after bikies. It happened because bikies rioted.”
Newman’s government scrapped same-sex civil unions. He says the move was “democracy” and didn’t reflect his personal position; that he had “backed gay marriage publicly on national TV prior to Penny Wong”.
“I got into a lot of trouble over saying that. I think for a moment [the LNP] thought they’ve got the wrong guy here.”
Newman points to other policies – opposition to lockouts in the Fortitude Valley nightclub district and removing a statewide mandate for local councils to put fluoride in the water supply – as evidence of his liberal credentials. He has also spoken in favour of drug legalisation.
The former premier had been on the outer with the LNP for some time but a final straw came when the former president, Cynthia Hardy, attempted to install him as a party trustee – a position that would tap into his fundraising network. He was appointed but the nomination was opposed by many, including the federal defence minister, Peter Dutton...

Et tu mutton Dutton? And for a bloke intent on preserving precious bodily fluids from that vast Commie fluoride plot? And that's evidence of liberal credentials, as opposed to Dr Strangelovian loonacy?

But Polonius doesn't do comedy, he does conspiracies, and dark, dire warnings ... and everyone's involved, they're everywhere, raining down on him ...

 

 

Poor haunted Polonius, see how he suffers ...

 

Yes, the fix is in, and who knows what might happen ... as dank ghosts, millionaire radicals, stalk the battlements and dream of revenge ...

 

 

Ah yes, the deadly, dangerous, greenie leftie menace ... who knows where this fiendish plotting might end?

 

 

Speaking of fundamentalist Catholics, Shanners was in good form this weekend ...

 

 

Well it's easier than heading off to mass and listening to the sermon ...

 

 

She got a bloody good litany going there, and wonders of wonders, she called herself an illiberal reactionary, thereby saving the pond the trouble ...

You have to appreciate that sort of thoughfulness, much like someone dying in excruciating pain of a terminal illness, zonked out of their gourds and living in a twilight zone, would appreciate Shanners' deep caring ...

 

Actually the pond remembers its mother, who after suffering a bad fall, had no alternative but to head to a nursing home. It wasn't a bad home as things go, and had a friendly rustic atmosphere, if you could get past the demented ones howling at the moon, or others in pain, gibbering and wailing through paper thin walls.

The pond's mother was on a downhill slide and knew it, and she reached out and begged the pond, "just kill me, if you love me, you'll kill me ..."

Of course the pond couldn't, that not being the way that nursing homes work. There was no friendly doctor standing by to ease my mother into death with a dose of morphine, as the kindly doctor had done for the pond's father, and who thereby got off lightly compared to the pond's mother ...

But cruelty is a way of life for fundamentalist Catholics, it's a bit like the empathy shown in other areas ...

 

 

But how else are they going to get fresh babies to support their Ponzi scheme? And so for a last benevolent offering ...
 

 

Yes, in the world of Catholic fundamentalists, harm is a flexible concept, and carrying your rapist's child for nine months is just one of many benevolent ideas offered by them, until you're sentenced to an eternity in hellfire ... just as living a life of hell on earth is a splendid cause, for fear that you might get to live an imaginary afterlife in an imaginary hell ...

After that, the pond felt like a little palate cleanser, because - spoiler alert - Dame Slap will soon be on hand to do a tediously long rant as a closer ...

 

 

Good old Gracie. Remind the pond again why she sticks with the reptiles? As for not knowing what life will be like, here's a clue and a singalong in the same spirit as can be found among the correspondents at the bottom of the page ...

 

 

 

Our Gracie seemed to be the only reptile aware that a pandemic was still out and about ...

 

 

Even worse than all this attention to detail and talk of duty of care and such like, at the very end came an unmitigated heresy, which in normal reptile times would have seen our Gracie drummed out of the reptile league and sent to purgatory (limbo apparently isn't a thing anymore) ...

 

Comrade Dan? Responsibility? 

If the pond had a bar of sunlight soap handy, it would send it off to our Gracie, for washing out of mouth ... please never again talk of Comrade Dan's evil regime in that way ...

And so to a rousing finale, with Dame Slap gone quite hysterical ... and worse, at great length ...

 

 

How weird does it get? Well start with that tag to the photo suggesting that Dame Slap gives a flying fuck about activist judge Ruth Bader Ginsberg and her legacy ...

It's such an absurd proposition, the pond thought it might be impossible to continue, what with the tears and the laughter ...

But remember how we started with Polonial paranoia and persecution complex? Crank that up to eleven ...

 

Speaking of abominations, how is it that the abominable Dame Slap gets the podcast player treatment, when nary a mention was made of it when the pond contemplated nervous nelly "Ned" yesterday?

And the trans movement didn't exist in RGB's day? The pond's very dear trans friend transitioned in the 1960s ... and if you take a squiz at a timeline of transgender history, TG people have been around for a very long time, though you wouldn't necessarily know it from the likes of Dame Slap, still intent on wiping the trans experience from the record ...

Is it a movement to finally dark come out of the shadows, and cop the bigotry of Dame Slap and her odious crew?

 

Dame Slap is a live-and-let live kind of person? You could have fooled the pond. Kroger the pond dead, has there ever been a meaner, more spiteful and angry troller in the lizard Oz ranks ...

If the pond wants to read a woman writing about women, the pond would much rather spend time with Marina Hyde, this week dealing with something much more germane and relevant, compared to Dame Slap wanting to own the libs and the trannies.

All women know they are prey - and that no one with any authority seems to care ...

But back to Dame Slap blahtering on about permanently demeans women and the women's movement, as if that matches up to a copper putting on the cuffs and taking you off for a rape and a killing ...

Well the pond did mention a particularly rarefied and peculiar form of paranoia and persecution complex, but a recent TT cartoon identified another element in the strategy, in the form of that aforementioned trolling ...

 

 

More TT here ... but the strategy's clear enough, all that needs to be worked out is whether Dame Slap is so demented and hysterical that she's triggered herself rather than triggering the snowflakes ... because there's a lot more paranoid ranting about persecution to come ...

Ah, if you ask Dame Slap, trannies want to round up all the women and hunt them for sport. That should really trigger the base, and the fear of the other, as it's the pond's experience that few have met a TG person in person, and so got to know them, and so the fear of the other and the different is easy to stoke (in much the same way that few in Tamworth ever venture over to Coledale for an indigenous experience)...

 

It must seem weird to Dame Slap, but the TG person the pond knows very well doesn't want to treat "woman" as a dirty word, or even "womyn:, and doesn't seek to demean women. In fact, she acts, thinks, talks, dresses and lives as a woman, and she isn't consumed by the self-hated, the self-fear and loathing that devours Dame Slap.

Only a woman who's been Krogered into a form of woman-hating self-loathing would seem incapable of understanding this, and responding with a generosity of spirit ...

Fortunately the last paranoid, persecuted gobbet is on its way ...

 

 

 

Many women may look elsewhere for representation of their basic existence? Of course ... of course ... Dame Slap can don her MAGA hat and head off to Texas, and who knows, someday soon might be a respected and admired leader in the Texas Taliban movement, where women are treated with tremendous respect... (along with Shanners) ...