The pond must begin with an apology, for the many things its early morning beat misses in the outpourings of reptile mania in the lizard Oz afternoon shift ...
The pond never gets to mention this anonymous troll ...
But if the reptiles and SloMo are serious about trolling the trolls, the first thing that must be done is the unmasking of this rabid troll. If it's the dog botherer, then let it be done ... because apparently anonymous trolls are ruining western civilisation.
But where does that leave this blog, with the real Dorothy Parker likely absent from the pond as a result of personal issues?
Well the pond has no problem with anonymity or its anonymous correspondents. They might provide snippets of personal information, but they're entitled to their privacy, and must stand or fall on their ideas and arguments, as must the pond ...
But the reptiles can't have it both ways, joining in the SloMo railing against trolls, while offering a feeble, wretched troller each Thursday ...
What else did the pond miss?
There was a bloody good groaning, mixed in with a little sighing and weeping, and then there was the deep suffering of men deprived of the right to send their dick pics out into the world ...
The pond felt deeply the pain of the chilling intolerance towards dick pics, a form of cruel, inhumane exremism, when everyone knows the world waits with bated breath for news of the next sporting figure's dick pic ...
And then there was this, confirming what the pond always suspected ...
They really do want the right to keep on sorting out the poofters, and perhaps give them a hearty bashing or an explusion, just to remind them of their ungodly ways, as they head off to their eternity in hellfire ...
And so to today's reptile fusses and follies, knowing that the pond will be missing the best of them, but also content that the reptiles were in a state of hysteria and chaos ...
Chaos! But such a lovely couple, don't they look sweet together, and for once the pond had to abandon the opinion makers to see how simplistic Simon might gild this particular lily ...
Such a lovely couple, and yet simplistic Simon found the going tough ...
Poor trudging Tudge ... and him a little mate too, of no talent, but in with the big bloke ...
Oh well there's always the war on Xmas to fall back on ...the pond was reading this in The Bulwark and felt a warm glow ...
Now that we’ve left Afghanistan, the War on Christmas is the longest-running war in American history. Though a war, technically, needs two sides, and this one is really only being fought by social conservatives searching for an enemy.
With Thanksgiving in the rearview mirror and Christmas trees going up, Fox News and the right-wing hype machine have done what they always do to get into the holiday spirit: started huffing and puffing about supposed outrages by the libs against our holiest of shopping seasons.
There's still a chance to pull the bacon fight from the fire, and end the war on SloMo with a war on Xmas and China, though we should remember what happened to Adolf when he took on two fronts ...
Now back to the lovely couple ... with bonus click bait video ...
By golly, it's sounding grim and even simplistic Simon was sounding gloomy. Perhaps an infallible Pope before we move on to the final click bait video ...
Oh dear ...
What simplistic Simon needed was a Wilcox at hand ...
What else? Well again the pond must report on the stories and columns it won't be covering ...
Of course Cameron would scribble about AOC, thereby entirely missing out on the splendid in-house GOP cat fight that has transfixed the media the past few days ...
Truly each day the pond thinks US politics couldn't get any weirder, alleged US politicians double down ... so many mad tweets, so little time ...
Call them The Fascist Five, The Dumb-Dumb Club, Y’All Qaeda, The Insurrectionists, The Traitor Tots, Karen and the Gang, or The Deplorables. Pick a name. Stick with it. (Beastly stuff here, and if paywalled, check out Yahoo News).
The reptiles have never had a sensa huma, but now the pond supposes it must turn to the serious side of life, with a serve of our Henry ...
Astute readers will have noted that the Mocker had already made mention of Eureka a little earlier. There must have been something in the British civilisation, white supremacy reptile water cooler this week ...
Of course one of the ironies of the whole affair is that one of the few to record the events wasn't a British civilisation dude, but an Italian, one Raffaello Carboni, who in later times would have been dismissed as a wog - he self-confessedly had trouble with the English language - and who claimed noble Roman heritage ...
It's a short work, and good fun, and it can be read at Project Gutenberg ... but back to our Henry, making a mountain out of a rebellious mole hill ..
Here's the thing. When you contemplate what happened afterwards, the event itself was something of a blip, and the subsequent career of Peter Lalor a good indication.
The kindly biographer at the ADB did feel the need to put the best gloss on Lalor's behaviour, but had to mention a few things ...
Just another self-seeking, self-serving politician ... we know the sort ... it's become something of an antipodean tradition ...
And so back to our Henry, ending up in his final gobbet doing his usual rah rah white supremacist rabbiting on about the British tradition of freedom under law, which is to say the right of rich folks to join the right clubs and protect their interests ...
Oh just fuck right off ...who'd want a return to this sort of wide, arbitrary and discretionary form of death ... as noted here ...
The immortal Marina Hyde put paid to the sort of cheap rhetorical flourishes indulged in by our Henry ... in the Graudian here.
Forgive the pond if it quotes her at some delicious length ...
Or to make it easier, try to imagine a self-satisfied Henry, slumped in his leather chair, exceptionally dry sherry in hand, harumphing Freedumb, cry Freedumb ...
Well it's been a messy, chaotic end to the week, but the pond has every confidence the reptiles will return to form on the weekend, and in the end, the immortal Rowe is on hand to send them there in good cheer, with more cheery Rowe here ...
Here we are, right in the midst of the weekly Holely day, and what ? Bucket Henry wants to tell us all about Eureka and what it meant to one small outpost of the mighty British Empah. Which actually wasn't much, and it still isn't much and it will never be much. After all, consider that British "tradition of freedom under law" and how well that was respected in the Peterloo massacre in 1819 - about 35 years before the Eureka incident.
ReplyDeleteYep, no effect at all - and who remembers Eureka or Peterloo anyway ? But not a single mention of Dictator Dan, or how the State of Victoria is exercising tyrannical powers, or how all the impositions imposed on us haven't saved any lives and have just destroyed our economy and the Melbourne CBD is just a ghost town and ...
Well, I went into the CBD yesterday (Thursday) to have some lunch with old colleagues, and the Hardware Lane restaurant was choc-a-block and we had to depart from our table by 14:00 to let the next shift of diners in. So it goes, eh ?
And not one single mention of Greek or Roman historians could I find, Chad, nor any mention that our wondrous Judeo-Christian Western Democratic Civilisation was gifted to us by those pagan Greeks and Romans and the Catholic Church - unless maybe the "British tradition of freedom under law" is synonymous with Judeo-Christian Western Democratic Civilisation. After all, you wouldn't want to assert that any other nation of Europe, or anywhere in the world, had actually achieved a state of democracy by the 19th century, would you, the Ramsay Centre would have your balls.
I wasn’t going to spend time on the Henry when there are better works to read; ones which offer the real prospect of learning something of interest, but - there was the Henry, as ever, reconstructing 15 minutes of confusion into a mighty - myth.
ReplyDeleteAn economic historian (as our Henry claims to be) might have pointed out that there was a bit more than tyrannical oppression’ involved in reaching those 15 confused minutes.
There were people coming into the colony looking for the opportunities that the authorities were publicising. In agriculture? - well, as it happened virtually all of the promising land that could be identified was already signed away, often for minimal rents, to those settlers deemed ‘worthy’. So where else might a man with little more than ambition, some minor trade skills, and reasonable health, apply that ambition?
By happy chance for the colonial administration, gold - initially of the alluvial kind - turned up, close enough to Melbourne and the ports for men, and women, and children, to walk to the ‘field’. There, they might assert a laughably small ‘claim’, and start to dig, or, if they were fortunate enough to elbow into claimable country near a stream - dig and wash.
The administration thought that was all fine - there was something for that labour to do, and it produced an exportable commodity for the colony.
The only thing the administration was not inclined to do was to try to reach some kind of balance between the diggers and the apparent extent of the fields. In any case, the newspapers of the day loved nothing more than confirmation of a new field - or even a new rumour of a new field.
The imbalance between diggers and possible, accessible, yellow metal is shown in the production figures. In simple numbers, through much of the 1850s, the value of gold weighed in, divided by the number of licences issued, did not leave a living income per digger, after they had paid their licence fee. Sometimes it did not, on average, reach the price of the licence,
And for all the rhetoric bandied around at meetings, for all the proclamations of supposed rights and freedoms - even as the differs were debating what to do, men of money were bringing in machinery to grind down the source rock for the alluvial gold. The industry moved to deep mining and machine processing and extraction, and its financiers were able to build those remarkable houses, and invest in other industries, and Victoria was seen to prosper mightily.
And Threadneedle Street prospered to, or so I seem to recall Chad. A large amount of Victorian gold apparently ended up in or near the Bank of England.
DeleteAnd some of it funded Melbourne becoming Australia's biggest city for a while - a state it's almost back to.
One for the Major maybe? Quoting a tweet from Nicholas Gruen:
ReplyDelete"Manning Clark is back in the news with a demolition of Peter Ryan’s assasination of Clark
Ryan’s fulminating style was always suspect. He came over as a thinking man’s Alan Jones
The bad faith was palpable, and has now been exposed"
https://twitter.com/NGruen1/status/1466424323095343118
And the relevant book review is here :https://insidestory.org.au/tall-poppy-lopping/
A combination of 'radical conversion' together with histrionic personality disorder, perhaps ? Kinda like the Oreo with her 'radical conversion' away from feminism combined with a need to be noticed by putting down people who continue as feminists ?
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