In which the pond looks forward to a break from the likes of the Major and the Caterist ...

 

The pond is a few days away from taking a celebratory break, and one of the reasons is the wearisome nature of enduring the reptiles' incessant repetitions ...

There's Polonius on the weekend prattling away about the ABC, and then on a Monday, the reptiles trot out the Major to perform the same trick. 

Every so often the pond feels like doing a Jack in mid-winter and repeatedly typing out "All blather and no play makes the Major a very dull read", but hey ho, ninny in the kitchen, on we go ...

You see? Just the usual shit, and sure, there's the usual irony, with blather about "lazier group think", with the Major going on in his usual way to have a lazy group think with the Bolter... while indulging in the same group think as Polonius ...

And then to talk about "complex problems", only to invoke the Canavan coal caravan ...

It's just too stupid for words, and the pond found itself nonplussed, but apparently not the Major ... 

Instead it's on with the usual yadda yadda bout renewables ... and Europe's energy crisis, and accusing the ABC of ignoring things, and yet it would have only taken a nanosecond for the Major to glance at the current headlines, and wonder if he and the Bolter might be missing something big going down ...

If he'd bothered to take note, he might have sounded a little more relevant and up to date ...

Why even the ABC managed to get a couple of stories into that montage ... 

But the Major could have headed off to NASA days ago ... back on 13th July ... and found a tidy map to go with his talk of ignoring things ...

But you don't get to be a Murdochian without a Major set of blinkers, so on we go ...

At this point, the reptiles inserted a snap in relation to Abe and his funeral ...

How that counts as a profound insight into the assassination, the assassin, or the background to the murder, the pond must leave to others. 

You can find articles, just not the Major. There was the Financial Times here, paywall affected ...

The one thing you notice in Tokyo is the inordinate amount of convenience stores ... and there was another FT story here about the Moonies, inter alia ...

If the Major had gone there, he might have held the pond's attention. Any talk of a cult is always an attention-grabber for the pond ...

Yes, 100 million yen, roughly US$722,000, is more than loose change, and you might think the Major would have wanted to cover all angles ...

Sadly the pond had to create its own angle... before heading back to the Major ...

And so to a final gobbet, and the ultimate Major heresy, but before that a note about anonymous sources.

If they feel that the ABC is such a wretched organisation, doing a terrible job, and yet have time to bleat about it to the Major, why not tender your resignation, go public with all your issues, or better yet, seek out a job at News Corp?

Frankly there's been too much one-way traffic, with all those News Corp refugees heading across to the ABC, donning cardigans, and leaving the Major to carry on like a pork chop ..

You know who you are, News Corp refugees - PK, Speersy, and so on and etc - and so it's time for that anonymous internal ABC critic to do more than just try to help the Major, bleating away like an abandoned, solitary shag on a rock ... piss off and work for News Corp, end the one-way refugee street ...

And there's the Major heresy. Apparently an interest in the UK is no longer required, and yet surely knowing what's going down with AUKUS is required bromancer reading. 

And then there's the implications for Brexit and the ongoing war with Russia and sociopath Vlad the impaler, and so on and so on, not to mention a lashing of inflationary jam ...

And damn it, there's the sheer entertainment value, which is more than can be said for the Major ...

And then there's the way that the heatwave has interacted with proceedings ...

Yes, the pond would rather be reading the Graudian, or at least taking in the cartoons, but instead must press on with the Caterist ... who at least always offers a chance at a comedy routine ... and so it came to pass, with the Caterist, in lieu of the reformed, recovering feminist, the Oreo, suddenly discovering he's appalled by misogyny ...

Sure some might like to offend their eyeballs and head off to the MRC for this valiant Caterist effort defending the deplorable, and in the end soundly defeated, Deves ... a really silly captain's pick

...In no time at all, the object of abhorrence has changed from the statement itself to the person who made it. He or she is irredeemably racist, misogynistic or transphobic and should immediately be purged from the company. They should be granted the stigma of a disgraced person deprived of any hope of rehabilitation. 

Those in command of the besieged institution are panicking, beset with the fear that the cost of saving the accused’s reputation may be to damage their own.

To pardon an unpardonable moral crime turns the pardoner into a criminal, and those above the accused sense an acute risk to their own reputation and livelihoods. 

At this point of the cycle of outrage, the temptation is to appease.  A powerful social dynamic is at work that is old as humankind: purge the community of the apostate, lest you yourself be purged.

The pond only offers that for the splendid ironical juxtaposition to what follows ...

Indeed, indeed, the pond is always agitated by attacks on women for being women ... so what about some quotas in the Liberal party to fix the balance? 

Sorry, sorry, that might lead to an assault on "the sisterhood", moral posturing, and the group think of modern feminism, worthy of a grubby Setka ...

The sisterhood’s narrative on women’s representation is one of victimhood. It demands women receive special treatment simply because they are women.

The flimsiness of the feminist critique was exposed by Julia Gillard’s notorious misogyny speech in October 2012 that invited us to consider her as a victim. The woman who occupied the highest political office in the land wanted us to believe she had been injured by the “sexist” behaviour of opposition leader Tony Abbott, who had committed the grave misogynistic sin of glancing down at his watch. Superficial arguments such as these do nothing to advance the cause of women. Neither do the word games that lead a major Australian university to waste its time debating renaming a genus of spider as “Huntsperson”. The moral posturing, linguistic engineering and groupthink of modern feminism have alienated men and women alike.

The Liberal case for gender balance has a stronger foundation. It is motivated not by the politics of identity but the politics of empowerment, recognising that women should be selected on merit, not on the back of a sympathy vote....

So quotas then? 

Sorry, sorry, what you need is linguistic engineering, whereby quotas become "targets", in keeping with the thinking of Ming the merciless ... because one thing's certain, doing it the way it was done in the 1950s is a sure way to save picket fences and keep women in the kitchen where they belong (oh they came in handy during the war years, but this is the 1950s, where the Caterist permanently resides) ...

Long before the invention of the glass ceiling, the removal of barriers to the advancement of women’s progress had been enshrined in the Liberal Party’s platform.

The statement of principles known as “We Believe” incorporated in 1954 promised all Australians “the opportunity to reach their full potential in a tolerant national community”.

Eleven years earlier, Robert Menzies had declared it “outmoded and absurd to treat a woman’s sex as a political disqualification”. It is doubtful, however, the party’s founding intellect would have been comfortable with today’s suggestion of quotas. For as Menzies went on to say of womanhood, “it seems to me equally absurd to claim it as a qualification in itself”.

Quotas are an ineffective tool beloved of socialists that attempt to regiment equality and sideline merit. In an attempt to end discrimination against women, quotas seek to discriminate in their favour, and arguably to discriminate against men. Their proponents denounce the fallacy that women are the weaker sex while treating them as victims and offering them a protective hand.

While quotas may satisfy Labor’s quest for equal outcomes, at least on paper, they are hardly the solution for a party committed to the far nobler aim of equal opportunity like the Liberal Party. Nor, as it happens, have they been the solution in the corporate sector, where gender neutrality has advanced faster than in politics not by quotas but by targets.

The pond never links to the lizard Oz, so you'll just have to trust that this was the Caterist beavering away on 24th March 2021 ... and here he is again ... wondering if there is such a thing as toxic masculinity ... as only a toxic Caterist could do ...

And at that point the pond became thoroughly confused. Misogyny and baleful unionism is rampant and the ruination of the nation, and yet at the same time, unionism is a wreck and a ruin, and nobody belongs to a union, and nobody cares?

Only a Caterist could arrive at that logical construction, though it does help explain his skill at decoding the movement of floodwaters in quarries ...

Law-breaking and disorder flourishing on construction sites? And yet apparently only one in ten are union members ... or so the Caterist says ...

And at that point, the pond will rest content, because surely the man adept at cash in the paw is in the very best position to talk about how to hold out the paw ... 

Talk about cash favours? The pond loves to talk about cash favours ...

And so to some good news, because the immortal Rowe has finally returned from his break, and dared to mention the elephant in the bedroom ... routinely ignored by reptiles of the Major kind ...

As always, it's the detail in the shadows that catches the pond's eye, and that saucy cleaner, scrubbing clean the termination record, and the ghostly figure almost hidden by the curtain ... ready to help out in the crisis by taking a much needed holyday ...