The Major was at the top of the lizard Oz digital page this morning, at least for awhile, and provided an opening to the week that was as tedious as it was predictable.
In a routinely majorly way, the Major has chosen the path of the man who looks into a mirror and sees only one eye ...
Or some such thing. The pond is always a bit wonky on its biblical references on a Monday ...
... if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness?
No man, or at least a Major, can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and Chairman Rupert ...
Or some such thing. The pond dimly recollects that mammon might also have been in there somewhere, but never mind, the point is majorly clear ... whenever you read the Major, you are seeing the world through a glass, darkly, and perhaps accompanied by the noises from a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal ...
Indeed, indeed, and we must thank Sky news after dark, and the likes of Killer Creighton for the splendid work that's been accomplished, and what joy that hydroxy and horse paste has saved the day ... as for gold standard Gladys setting the pace, here, have a shot, or a cartoon ...
But the Major wasn't done with his major burst of triumphalism ...
as this morning a splendid deal was announced, though nobody had much of
a clue about the details ...
A party? Now it's a party? But there was a certain gloom on the left hand side of the digital Oz ...
Please, don't be alarmed, simplistic simpleton Simon was on hand below the fold to murmur encouraging noises ...
But the pond rarely has the time for cheer leading simpletons, and so headed back to the Major, where everything was for the best in the best of all possible worlds ...
No surprises that the Major sometimes has a memory loss when it comes to his stout-hearted climate science denialism ... and he's been providing rich comedy for decades, as anyone who heads back to Crikey in 2009 will fondly remember ...
And so to a final brief gobbet of majorly bullshit ...
Good old Major. Raise doubts about the reliability and costs of renewables, spread FUD as the Major has done, and hang assorted awards on the wall, then settle back knowing that the Major has done his parrot work for the day ...
Here, have a Kudelka to celebrate the rigorous standards at work in the land, with more Kudelka to celebrate here ....
Good to see that Kudelka, the infallible Pope and the immortal Rowe are in the running for a Walkley ... the pond would give them all a gong ...
Meanwhile, other reptiles are tortured by climate science, and naturally the Craterist, keen to crater the planet, is at it again today, and when in doubt, why not turn to an expert in the movement of flood waters in quarries to sort things out?
Eeek, it's a sure sign of the way the cratering wind will blow when the reptiles begin with a shot of a vulgar youff whose demonic shape terrifies the reptiles ... and who, in that cheap pick up from Getty images, seems to be conjuring up fire to rain down on the reptiles ...
Ah yes, the poor lad is terrified, what with the climate process propelling the Murdoch tabloids into a farcical path ...
We must join the Caterist in fighting back, lest the image of News Corp suddenly crater ...
Indeed, indeed, and what's better is that Australia will, apparently, single-handedly invent the technology, because is there anything a dinkum beefy boofhead of the Angus kind can't invent, with a bit of barbed wire and a stocking, including but not limited to figures in a letter to a mayor ...
Never mind, throughout, the Caterist seemed to the pond to be a tad defensive. Like the Major, the Caterist has done much useful work for the coal and oil lobby over the years, and now he had to change his tone, pretending that hitting targets might actually matter and people might need to pay attention, as if anyone in Double Bay had the first clue about reality, unlike a man who lives on cash in paw on the government dime in a nice inner city setting ... but speaks freely of Dalby, in much the same way that he was once psychically connected to flood waters in quarries ...
You see, by some mystical vision, new technologies will arise which will transform everything ... and who knows by 2050, we might have done a terraforming of Mars just like Arnie managed, and everybody will be living there, driving around in their new spice-powered Teslas ... (please don't talk to the pond of Dune, thanks to a copy in the wild, the pond visited that unhappy land of futurist monarchs, royalists, dukes and emperors, and left feeling it had been unfair to David Lynch) ...
Indeed, indeed, though to be fair, people are never more fuckwitted than when they blather on in the lizard Oz about their infallible insights ...
And so to the Oreo, because she too is on about the same topic this day, and if you're not satisfied by the flood water man, then surely what a reformed, recovering feminist has to say about climate science will sooth nerves jangled by the Nats wanting to pretend that they want to leave the Canavan caravan ...
What makes the reformed, recoving feminist's comedy stylings this day such a relief?
Why, she spends endless hours moaning about the greenwashing performed by big corporations ... but we already know about some splendid greenwashing of minds and mouths and keyboards ...
More here, about the ugly record, but let's get back to the reformed, recovering feminist's agitation about greenwashers ...
One thing about being a recovered and reformed feminist is that you can trudge through the valley of News Corp delusion with a smile on your face ... with some gimmick always on hand to help the brand ...
To be fair, the Oreo kept her bleating short this day, though she did her best in the FUD stakes, with China the now standard go to reptile way of distracting from what dinkum, clean, innocent, pure, virginal Oz coal might be up to ...
How many times will the reptiles lead with that bullshit 1.2% figure? Probably until planet is truly and comprehensively fucked ...
It's not as if the data hasn't been around for some time. This report back in 2019 did a few calculations, which happened to include exports ... (here, pdf, might be slow to load).
The figures might be a bit old, but we still sing the same statistical song from the same statistical sheet ...
Was it the Caterist himself who proposed that to be morally superior, you had to have the first clue?
Never mind, after the usual dose of reptile logic has reduced the pond to its usual state of Monday numbness, it was time for a Rowe to celebrate the manure on the road ... with more dung frequently imported from the lizard Oz and ritually heaped high here ...
The Craterous one has been very boring and tedious of late - no floodwaters to run free, I guess. So just a couple of short points from today: "Anyone who predicts today which technologies will be viable 29 years from now is guessing." Ok, right, so best not to invest in the Small Modular Reactors technology now, because we just can't be sure - only guessing - whether it will be viable in 29 years time.
ReplyDeleteAnd, Craterous quoting Sowell: "People are never more sincere than when they assume their own moral superiority." Yep, that's our Nick and the Reptiles, right enough, singing their regular song of self-praise.
The Cater tells us “‘The Vision of the Anointed’ was published in 1995, long before the visionaries alighted upon climate change as their chief concern.”
DeleteSo a touch of Henry-style obscure history of Glasgow - to show that we sociologists from Exeter are right up on this history thing - but no recognition that, from a little under half-way through the 20th century, there was sound scientific observation that the planet was warming faster than predicted by consulting aspects of the Milankovitch cycles, that a likely reason for this included changes in atmospheric chemistry, which could change atmospheric physics, and it would be a good idea to measure, by best methods available, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Hence, from 1958 - as they say, ‘do the math’ - a full generation before Sowell indulged himself - there was serious scientific investigation of a likely cause of climate change, to determine how serious it might be for the entire planet.
Excuse the repetition, but it is an old and lame trick to cite someone like Sowell and write as if that defines the issue. No doubt it enticed the usual respondents to add their comments about the climate ‘scam’, and ‘my dad always said’, and, no doubt, that was part of the reasoning of Cater, the sociologist.
Set aside that part of his discussion tries to use an aesthetic issue - preserving old buildings in Glasgow - to, again, so tediously again, cast doubt on an established scientific issue. To hint that it belongs with Sowell’s ‘fantasy unsupported by evidence’.
In that process, the Cater reverts to a version of schoolyard abuse, by accusing those who have accepted the science as those who also ‘assume their own moral superiority’.
I say schoolyard abuse, because in my primary years, a telling insult was to shout ‘you just think yerself’. No, it cannot readily be deconstructed, but we all knew what it meant - the person so addressed saw themselves as superior to the rest of us, and needed to be taken down a peg or two - in the public interest.
If we had the vocabulary we might have tried ‘you just assume your own moral superiority’ - but that was a bit long, those who had not advanced beyond phonics might have had difficulty with pronouncing the ’s’ word - and you had to be prepared to make a quick getaway if the person addressed happened to possess superior ability to run and punch.
Well, we do all remember that back in 1896-1899 Arrhenius and Hogbom did establish the relationship between atmospheric CO2 concentration and Earth's surface temperature but because the 'Industrial Revolution' was in its early stages, and the human population was only 1.6 billion (to become 6 billion by 2000 and 7.8 billion now), Arrhenius wrongly guessed that global warming would take a long time, and be beneficial for humanity.
DeleteSo much for the science, and no Nobel prizes for them. But Arrhenius did win one in 1903 for "the extraordinary services he has rendered to the advancement of chemistry by his electrolytic theory of dissociation". So it goes.
Ketan Joshi: "The company [News Corpse] won't change until it understands the grave damage it has done with its ugly legacy of denialist reporting."
ReplyDeleteAnd that from a supposed "communication consultant" ? Is there really even the faintest idea that News Corpse could understand "the grave damage it has done" ? News Corpse hasn't done any damage - just ask anybody who works for it, or finances it or owns it. It has been wholly honest and responsible, unfailingly, for the whole time.
Not has it ever soiled its reputation by doing any actual reporting which usually is considered to involve describing, and perhaps even commenting upon, things that really, actually happened. Has News Corpse ever done any of that ? Apart from when it can hack a murder victim's mobile phone, that is.
Truly, we are never even going to start getting anywhere until so-called "woke journalists/commentators" understand the grave damage they are doing by even vaguely hinting that organisations such as News Corpse (and Fox News and Sky News etc) have even the faintest hint of "understanding" or "reporting" anything they are not regally paid to understand and report.
Another long but interesting read if you have some spare time:
ReplyDeleteHere’s a weekend brain dump about Facebook
https://jabberwocking.com/heres-a-weekend-brain-dump-about-facebook/
Just one small comment: Drum talks about conspiracy theory origins and passageways: "In the past conspiracy theories were spread via radio; then newsletters; then radio again; then email; and eventually via social media." Well that's what you get from someone as young as Drum; long before any of that, conspiracy theories were spread by assorted means, including, but not limited to: meetings in pubs, tea parties, dinner parties, back fence gossip, sending letters to multiple recipients (especially after the invention of the photocopier) and even faxes sent to multiple recipients.
And before all that, the Tri Via ! (yes, look it up and see where the word trivia originated). And later the village square and wandering minstrels and so on.
Does anybody really believe that the human race hasn't engaged in 'conspiracy theories' for millennia ?
Thanks for the link. John Birmingham published this more global look at FB recently
Deletehttps://aliensideboob.substack.com/p/kill-all-you-see
You can also add pamphlet wars to your list of communication mediums
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamphlet_wars
The first comment starts "I shared this on my FB"
DeletePamphlet wars ! Yes, I had kinda overlooked them - the first case where there were enough people educated enough to be able to read pamphlets. I'll remember to add them to the lost next time.
DeleteDunno what to make of Birmingham though - heart's probably in the right place though. But consider:
Birmingham (from Haugen): "...mostly due to some scary reveals about the damage being done to young women via Instagram".
Drum: "There's been almost a synchronized deluge of stories about Instagram being bad for teenage girls, a conclusion that's so wrong it's hard to know where it came from. The truth is simple: On one metric out of twelve (body image), Instagram had a net negative effect on teen girls. On the other eleven metrics it was positive. And it was positive on all twelve metrics for teen boys."
Ok, so who do we believe ?
Birmingham: "As creatures that live in social clusters, natural selection has sculpted our neurology over thousands of generations to reward certain types of social stimuli and status cueing over others. We can’t help it. Facebook’s engagement metrics are the digital measure of a species which has learned that an individual’s chance of survival is improved when the clan or the tribe is minded to assure that survival."
Ok, so that explains Trump, Bolsonaro, Modi, Erdogan and a pile of others, yes ? Putin, Mussolini, Hitler, Churchill, Johnson and the Myanmar generals ? And we can't help it, so no blame can be landed on any of us.
Birmingham: "When Facebook was first coded seventeen years ago, Zuckerberg and his Harvard roomies had only the vaguest notion of what they were doing."
Facebook was launched in Feb 2004. "Myspace was acquired by News Corporation in July 2005 for $580 million, and in June 2006 surpassed Yahoo! and Google to become the most visited website in the United States." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myspace ] So Faceboook was not a lone act of creation, it was just one amongst others.
Birmingham: "The company should be broken up, it’s constituent pieces buried at a crossroads at midnight, and the ground salted so that nothing ever grows there again." And how long would it be before the 'next one' took its place; after all, "we can't help it".
I have to admit that I discouraged my kids from using social media, more because it was trivial than because it was dangerous, but they never showed much interest in any case.
DeleteDrum seems to be focussing on some first world obsessions like cyberbullying whereas Birmingham is talking about the way the algorithms incidentally drive misinformation with sometimes fatal consequences. It may not have been deliberate but enough evidence is out there to suggest they need to do something. A bit like the young bloke who has one of those weaponised dogs, it seemed really affectionate to him but it just ripped the leg off the neighbour's dachshund. He's not too bright so he couldn't have foreseen the possibility at first but now it's so obvious that he should have to take responsibility for it.
As an aside, a friend from an academic background spends a lot of time debunking tosh that's thrown up on the family Facebook group. They actually get quite cranky with him.
Drum tends to be a bit 'surface focussed' and he makes the point that "the way things are" is much more down to the Murdoch empire than to Facebook. Not being in any way familiar with either, I'm at a bit of a loss about it all. But IIRC Facebook does 'broadcast' the Murdoch crap - hence the recently established need for it and Google to pay for what they 'broadcast'. And I have no real idea where Google fits in to all of this either other than it owning youtube since 2006 - but I only access youtube for the music which it's very good at.
DeleteAs for your friend, if not for Facebook, would he ever have known what tosh his family believed in ? I take it from the expressed 'crankiness' that his efforts to debunk aren't noticeably successful.
'Crankiness' often follows from people's inability to explain something they may believe. There could be some worthwhile point they cannot articulate properly but the implication is usually that they do not know what they are talking about.
DeleteI've caused the odd explosion myself, partly because I don't read very well when someone else is getting close to the edge, but also for the reason above.
A recent example (one of the outlaws) involved the hagiography of St Gladys. I genuinely wanted to know what the sainted one's main achievements were but only got told that the individual didn't like Annastacia Palaszczuk. Enquired as to the relevance of this and things got more acrimonious from there.
This is why I am befuddled.
Ah ... that kind of 'crankiness' and that kind of 'befuddled'. Fortunately being blessed with neither in- nor out- laws, (just a long standing partner whose only two in-laws in Australia had the grace to expire several years ago) and being long retired, I no longer have such experiences.
DeleteMy dear partner always contended that I didn't know how privileged I was to work in ADP (aka IT/ICT) because most of the IT crowd weren't total simpletons. I didn't believe it at the time, but I'm really beginning to believe it now.
The best colleague I ever worked with was a Irish guy who never made assertions or statements of any kind, he just asked questions: so, in a case like that he'd just adopt his innocence personified Irish face and, in his innocence personified Irish voice, just ask questions: "what is it you don't like about her ?"
And he could keep it up - never dropping the innocence of either looks or voice - until his interlocutor just gave up. Pretty soon nobody was game to express an opinion, and especially not a crackpot one, in his presence.
So it goes.
Was there ever a conspiracy theory circulated by telex, GB?
DeleteGood question, Merc. I don't know of one personally, but that doesn't mean there hasn't been one. The telex, after all, was mainly a business communication system and there's always plenty of conspiracies happening in the business world, isn't there.
DeleteSo, add telex to the list and hope we can find an actual example.
How much of Australia is owned by Australians ?
ReplyDeleteApproval given for $500m takeover of Tasmanian salmon farmer by Brazilian meat processing giant
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/oct/25/approval-given-for-500m-takeover-of-tasmanian-salmon-farmer-by-brazilian-meat-processing-giant