In which the pond almost gave the reptile game away for the day before embarking on a forced march with Wellington for the sake of the cartoons ...

 

The pond woke with the knowledge that the reptiles' talk of the woke is always minor key on a Thursday, but even so it was startling to discover how little was on offer...

Sure, the tree killer edition was powered up, continuing in a full flap, stepping on the gas ...

... and so was the digital edition, though surely the tree killers had the best of it, persuading some mugs to pay them cash in the paw to promote national reconciliation week. After the recent efforts of the bromancer and Dame Slap, how about an ad in Der Stürmer to help avoid the war?

Petulant Peta was out and about, and there was a little gloating about comrade Bill ...

But the savvy Savva seems to have gone missing in the Nine papers, thereby avoiding the chance to show us the human side of the mutton Dutton. Keep at it  Jacqueline Maley ... your work is appreciated because the comedy shouldn't be restricted to the lizard Oz ...

Reading Maley reminded the pond of a humour piece in The New Yorker by Ian Frazier (maybe paywall affected), which began this way ...

I do not have a bullshit detector. I used to have one, but I don’t even know where it is anymore—maybe out in the garage. It was an awkward thing, like one of those little roll-aboard briefcases, but made of bright-orange high-impact plastic, and it didn’t work very well. It was O.K. on ordinary, everyday bullshit, but it could not detect cant. It was also not too reliable on sanctimony or pomposity, and only so-so on hypocrisy. Supposedly, it could puncture self-importance, but I could never get that feature to turn on. Over all, the detector was more trouble than it was worth, so I quit using it.

I read recently about someone who had a “built-in” bullshit detector! I am completely unable to picture how that might work, but, then, I would not be the person to ask. Kids, I’m told, have built-in bullshit detectors, so maybe you need to be young. Like a lot of older consumers, I have not kept up on the technology.

Living without a bullshit detector can be peaceful and relaxing. As you know, there is a lot of bullshit out there, and I got sick of having the alarm go off all the time. On the other hand, I do feel a need for the ol’ detector occasionally.

The other day, I was at Ikea (as we call it) with my wife when we had a disagreement. We had been there for a while, looking for a piece of furniture for our living room. As I waited for her to make up her mind about one chair or the other, I checked my phone and saw that I had received a solicitation from something called the Flat-Ikea Society. For some reason, I clicked on it. The Flat-Ikea Society is made up of people who believe, in defiance of science and logic, that Ikea is flat. Now, everyone knows that Ikea is round. We take that for granted. But, rather than dismiss the group as crazy, I read on to see what it had to say.

According to these folks, Ikea is a huge flat thing surrounded on all sides by asphalt. If you continue far enough in Ikea, they say, you will go through a sort of portal, and then fall off the edge, or curb, of Ikea. You will then find yourself on a vast asphalt sea, where, they believe, there are monstrous S.U.V.s, many of them a spectral white, along with white and other-colored vans and enormous trucks with rubbery, finlike mud flaps. This asphalt sea rests, in turn, on the back of a giant turtle, or tortoise, that they have named the Planet. This turtle, or whatever, is a being of which they have only the fuzziest notion—so fuzzy, in fact, that they don’t even concern themselves about it...

And so on, but speaking of bullshit, the reptiles were depressingly short of it this day. Oh sure, there was simplistic Simon rabbiting on, 'look, Bid, no conflict of interest here' ...

But it was only of use to the pond so it could find a spacer for a Rowe cartoon dealing with bullshit in the Augean stables ...

If the pond might continue the scatological theme, there was some low comedy to hand at Current Affairs ...with Elizabeth Sandifer talking about The Strange and Terrifying Ideas of Neoreactionaries ...

There was some splendid abuse, with this just one of many examples ...

SANDIFER: It’s complete festering dogshit. It’s horrible. It is verbose. It makes a painful lack of effort to get to the point on the occasion when it actually makes a point. His argumentation aspires to shoddiness, because that would at least imply that there’s a degree of construction there. It’s absolutely awful. I take it apart in some meticulous detail in Neoreaction a Basilisk because in that book, I thought it was important to pay it as much intellectual respect as I could before I took it out back and shot it. But it was not hard to argue against and to find the flaws. You’re really playing on easy mode there.

ROBINSON: Your book does a public service. People don’t have to comb through thousands of pages to try to understand the things you’ve read. You’ve laid it out.

SANDIFER: I’ll make this fully explicit. I cannot encourage you enough not to bother reading this. You have something better to do with your life—clipping your toenails, perhaps. Staring at a wall. Many small crimes that only do a little bit of harm. Avoid reading him. Literally almost anything you can think of to do right now is a better idea than reading Curtis Yarvin.

The pond took Sandifer at her word, and so Yarvin will remain a complete mystery to the pond, save what turned up in the talk ... but the pond did pay attention when Tuckyo Carlson turned up ...

Carlson presented Yarvin as this fascinating intellectual who is silenced by the mainstream but who has really, really valuable and interesting ideas. The whole hour they spent was Yarvin expounding this theory that there is this kind of conspiracy of elites that he calls “the cathedral” that consists of Harvard and the New York Times and the government and all that. And he was explaining to Tucker how people who put Black Lives Matter signs in their yard, that the sign really says, “I love power and conformity.”

He talked about the red pill. He said, you’re going to take the red pill, you’re gonna see things for how they really are. And Tucker Carlson has his mind blown by Curtis. But, importantly, all of it is about the big woke conspiracy that rules the country. None of it is about the solution being fascism, even though that’s what Yarvin believes.

What made the pond realise that Yarvin was a complete loon?

Yarvin has been quite influential on a number of key people. He has a demonstrably huge influence on Peter Thiel. We know he’s got influence on Blake Masters and J.D. Vance, as that Vanity Fair articlee makes clear. We have very strong evidence that he’s had influence on Steve Bannon. He’s just a guy a lot of these people look to as kind of an intellectual light. He’s been on the Tucker Carlson show, which did a fair bit to mainstream him. So a lot of people look up to him as something of an intellectual light, which is interesting if you actually read any of his work, because, well… I call him outright stupid in my book, and I’m gonna largely stand by that.

I think that there is a long tradition of right-wing “philosophy” that’s really popular among right-wing nutters and as soon as it gets outside that little bubble, it gets absolutely shot to hell by other philosophers. And I think to describe Yarvin in terms he would probably take as a compliment—and I very much mean as an insult—he’s kind of a modern day Ayn Rand.

So his broad philosophical idea is he’s just really obsessed with order. He thinks that order is the absolute best thing that can happen. Chaos, unruliness, rebelliousness—all these things are inherently very, very bad.

And so his belief, as he expressed back in his Moldbug days—and he’s not really backed down off of it in any substantive way—is that basically, California should secede, become its own nation, and simply impose a CEO with monarchic, godlike powers. At the time, he suggested Steve Jobs would be a particularly good pick for the absolute monarch of California and that the purpose of owning California and running it as a corporate monarchy is explicitly for profit. That was also a part of Yarvin’s philosophical vision for what the world should do.

I don’t want to pin him too much with the slightly satirical and deliberately over-the-top clickbait-y idea of making Steve Jobs king of California—that is him using a rhetorical device to get attention. But he does very, very much believe that rich elites should be in absolute control of everything, and people who are not landowners and do not have a ton of money should basically be thought of as the equivalent of slaves.

Steve Jobs? If we're going to talk of a monarchy, how could the loon have gone beyond the Son of Rupert? It's the breeding, the genes that determine who should have monarchic, godlike powers ...

The pond could have stayed with this distraction the whole morning, but remembered its mission was to find reptiles aspiring to shoddiness down under ...

How disappointing was the search ...

A couple of lizard Oz editorials, Jim himself talking of dire difficulties, a dog collar type trying to redeem the bromancer and Dame Slap, and Hedley getting hot under the DNA collar?

The pond almost chucked it in, but it needed an excuse to catch up on the immortal, and lately prolific Rowe ...

So the pond decided on a forced march with Wellington ...

There's nothing like a moving plea for the big end of town to reduce the pond to tears, but as the pond wiped away some nasal discharge from the upper lip, it remembered that the point was to find spacers for the immortal Rowe ...

That was worth the effort, especially that portrait, which could be seen from all sorts of angles ...

Apologies to the master, and now back to that forced march with Wellington and more copious tears ... together with the sense that the pond was in the presence of a whiteboard, or perhaps one of those bloody Powerpoint thingies where everything was reduced to a few initials or acronyms, where BS might stand for Bull Shit, Bi Sexual,  Baking Soda, Business Studies or Business Systems ... or, if you will, ESG ...

By golly, this Wellington on his first forced march with the pond shows an astonishing capacity for verbal diarrhoea, including setting "clear parameters" and having a "fully rounded awareness", when surely a well rounded awareness is entirely the problem.

Surely just a "why don't you just shut the fuck up with all that woke nonsense" would have done the trick ...

Yes, if our noble Wellington has his way, any political slip into being woke by corporate clowns will see the mutton Dutton revert to form, as boofhead hard man head kicker, and won't that be a treat.

These party goers could do with a good kicking for starters ...

And so the final gobbet, with the pond feeling it might need a whack of ECT to stay awake? Is it proper to make that sort of joke? Perhaps only in dire circumstances ... or at a time when the steely threats are hidden behind a velvet glove of verbal bullshit ...

Yes, get with the mutton Dutton, and be bloody and brutal, or the IPA will be on your case, or Chapel Lane Advisory or whatever ...

And in that context, the immortal Rowe's awareness of what a lack of oxygen might do for the light headed is timely ...

By golly, there he is again, and that "Hug me" must be some kind of Napoleonic threat to the valiant Wellington ...

Sadly, beldatedly, the pond must note that the infallible Pope is now more securely locked behind a paywall, so only truncated versions leak out onto the full to overflowing intertubes ... but at least there's enough to show the synchronicity, with Pope also concerned with Everest ...