Well there's no point complaining to a reptile or talking to the hand ... though the pond can at least note the mysterious disappearance of all news in relation to the Dominator at the lizard Oz ...
On the weekend, the Sunday edition of the magic water paper did a big splash (as magic water papers are wont to do) ...
And there was a follow-up in today's edition ...
Crickets.
Deporable really, but the pond had to mention it, or otherwise the Rowe down the bottom of the page would be completely inexplicable ..
Incidentally that deplorable example of journalism missing in action reminded the pond of a recent bold desire to use the revive the word in The Bulwark's Deplorables Are Real ...
The excuse was Alex Jones ...
...I suspect that a vast judgment against Jones won’t have much value as a deterrent or proclamation of truth. Jones is loathsomely rich because people want to consume his art. His landscapes of hate and fear and mistrust resonate with a frightening number of Americans. The people who enjoyed his Sandy Hook trutherism didn’t enjoy it because it was factually convincing or coherent; they enjoyed the emotional state it conveyed because it matched theirs. The plodding technicalities of law are probably inadequate to change their minds.
Defamation cases like this one — or Dominion’s case against Sidney Powell, or the parade of defamation claims against Trump — are just, and it’s just that the victims receive compensation. But they don’t solve the problem. America can survive the demagogues themselves, it’s their audience that will kill us.
Oh fair go, give some credit to the demagogues themselves, and their fearless exemplar, Chairman Rupert ...
There are many kinds of demagoguery and many deplorables, and many of them are at the lizard Oz, and so finally can tun to noting that the routinely deplorable Oreo was out and about this day, returning after an absence - it was way back on 12th July that she announced Woke politics has no place in the Catholic church - and as the pond had no bear handy, so had to register a complaint with the ether ...
The pond has absolutely no idea what the routinely deplorable Oreo is blathering about ... especially as the magic water papers were running with a story about EVs locally ...
That would have been an interesting story to explore, but instead the pond was left with the babbling of the returning, recovering, reformed feminist...
It always strikes the pond as truly wondrous, or genuinely deplorable, the way the reptiles do simplistic moronic number counting tricks, while ignoring the way the country continues to ride on the back of dinkum, clean, pure, innocent Oz coal exports ...
And if this story from the cardigan wearers back in April is to be believed, a lot of that will come about thanks to meeting demand from China ...
If you were a reliably deplorable person, you'd probably seek refuge by blathering about Greens hysteria, but fair shake of the raw prawn sauce bottle, it takes two to do the coal tango ... so how do you get around it?
Well if you're a deplorable reptile, you'd probably run a snap of a coal train in China ... apparently unaware that there are plenty of local snaps to hand...
Now that's a coal train, perhaps carrying a little of the Hunter Valley off to China ... but of course the reptiles went with a snap of a train in Jiujiang ...
A lens of realism? So we sell the coal under more favourable trading conditions to democracies and that somehow fixes things? And we must rethink climate policy because of Taiwan rather than the planet? And the reptiles are now seeking a ban on coal exports to China?
So many Alex Jones moments in those flashes of Oreo logic ... so much performance art, so little thinking ...
The pond will now confess it started with the reformed, recovering feminist because the alternatives were dire ...
Really George? Labour should stand back so that the reptiles could have full control of the town square? Share ownership sounds terribly woke, but also out and about this day was the Major, a true deplorable, showing what sharing ownership might mean ...
Stand back, reluctantly, the pond must bring on the Major regurgitating the onion muncher to produce a terrible stew ...
Poor old Pearson, but as the pond has said before and will say again, if you lie down with reptiles you get up with claw marks, and if you fellow travel with onion munchers, you end up stinking of onions, but with three fifths of fuck all else to show for it ...
The pond would really, truly like to duck the debate, but the reptiles are obsessed with bringing down any notion of a voice, and the referendum, and all the rest of it ...
How far will they go? Watch the Major slip in a kind word for that more recent invasion than the original ... and note how he does it ...
Note the Major's form of argument.
"Many Aboriginal people."
So lazy, so vacuous, so meaningless ...
At least it's easy to counter by adopting the form.
Many people think the Major is a fuckwit of the first water ... and his talk of the voice being vulnerable to a scare campaign a nice evasion, because the scare campaign has long been running, and its home is News Corp, in particular Sky News and the lizard Oz, because that's all the reptiles can find to complain about ... and their brand of performance art demands heat, outrage, and much malarkey ...
Ethnic cleansing? Well that's one way to talk about an attempted genocide, by converting Aboriginal people into an ethnic tribe ... yep, suddenly Aboriginal people are merely an unwanted ethnic group.
But as the Major has finally discovered George Augustus Robinson, he also seems to have discovered Henry Reynolds ...
For those who've come in late, Reynolds was a figure who featured prominently in the reptiles' history wars and routinely was demonised, until fresher victims came along ...
The pond did a thought experiment and googled a recent work by Reynolds, searching for a reptile review or even a mention ... and came up with this front page of results ...
The ABC snuck in at the end, The Canberra Times scored a mention, and the ABR led the pack, and following the old google rule, the pond suggests that if you don't make it on to the front page, you're pretty well irrelevant ... and so the pond suspects that this is the first time that any reptile in the lizard Oz had made mention of Reynolds' recent work, which had been disappeared into the ether in the style and manner of the Dominator's disappearance ...
The ultimate point? Well it isn't George's deluded notion of community sharing ownership. It's having heated discussions, getting the outrage machine cranked into gear, selling tree killing newspapers, generating heat, preferably without light, trying to attract subscribers to the dying form of TV supplied by Foxtel ...
It's what deplorables and deplorable reptiles do ... remember that in the United States, the current crop of deplorables learned their trade at the teat of Faux Noise, but realised that to get attention, you had to crank up the performance to eleven ...
...modern American political culture is emotive and even artistic. It uses language like a musician uses notes or an impressionist uses brush strokes. Whether it’s Marjorie Taylor Greene talking about Bill Gates' efforts to colonize our bowels through "peach tree dishes" or Alex Jones ranting about gay frogs, modern politicians and pundits use language to convey feelings and attitudes and values, not specific meanings. If you demand Alex Jones defend the specific meaning of his words, it’s like demanding your eight-year-old defend his statement that his birthday party was the best day ever when previously that’s what he said about Disneyland.
And that's why the Major wants the debate to heat up.
That way any referendum will be defeated, Noel Pearson will walk off with a bad case of claw scratches, and the onion muncher will be righteous and justified ... and the Chairman will keep on pocketing the loot, though why a nonagenarian bothers, perhaps only his brood can say ...
And now, as John Oliver would say, this.
Those with a long memory will recall that the pond started off with the Dominator, just so that this Rowe cartoon would have an echo in the mind, with more echoing Rowe here ...
It's a show not coming to News Corp soon ... but right now it's travelling all over the world, and is something of a smash hit for cockroach lovers ...
I have been looking for a succinct version of the claimed dictum of Lord Northcliffe that his papers were not to sell information, but controversy. I suspect he may never have said it in such precise terms. The historian of the British press, Adrian Bingham yielded this -
ReplyDelete‘For him, the role of the popular newspaper was not just to inform and entertain readers — it was to get them talking. Newspapers should generate controversy, either by printing provocative opinions or by crusading for change. In that way, they would engage readers and get noticed in the public realm.’
Why is this significant? When Keith Murdoch was getting himself in a mess with his meddling in the politics of British command in WWI, Northcliffe took up his case. After initial wariness, the senior Murdoch apparently became something of a protégé for Northcliffe, absorbing much of the then Baron’s thinking on how to be wealthy and powerful in the newspaper business.
It is a fair guess that much of this was instilled in Rupert, and, in turn, noted by his minions - such as the minion Mitchell.
Which is what gives us high-sounding pap like ‘Conservative opinion writers led by this newspaper’s Greg Sheridan and Peta Credlin, and Andrew Bolt in the News Corp tabloids, argue the voice will enshrine race in the Constitution.’
I suppose the minion Mitchell should not be expected to have to read what Sheridan, Credlin (yes, I have mentioned her by name, but it seemed appropriate) and Bolt actually write, and blather on ‘Sky’. We can set aside his assertion that they are ‘conservative’, but their contributions to discussion of ‘The Voice’ are simply not as structured as Mitchell would have us - or himself - believe.
They simply dip into the jar of F U and D, and offer bits of - whatever- as either their commentary, or as rambling questions that invite their ‘guests’ to say ‘Yes, that’s right’.
They are not so consistent that they could be said to argue that the voice would enshrine race. They will try anything - shades of post-Mabo - ‘they’ will be able to take over your land - or tap the taxpayer - ‘they’ will be able to claim immense reparations - and, in distinctly un-enshrined racism ‘who will be franchised by the voice’?
Given the semi-literate feedback many of their ‘opinions’ receive, it might take some time before they are able to identify a consistent opposition from the 0.1% of the population that look at their TV segments, so they are like aspiring stand-up performers who are not getting audience recognition from any of the lines they try, so we can expect it not to rise above the ‘where’s the detail?’, which is as near to a common theme as they have managed so far. Not much of a controversy, though.
Lord Northcliffe was a noted megalomaniac who, towards the end of his life, was widely considered to have gone barking mad. A fine model for many a later media mogul.
DeleteGoodness (or not) both the 'Orrendous Oreo and the Minor Major Mitch together on a Monday: Monday, Monday, can't trust that day. Anyway, between DP and thee, Chad, all that needs to be said has been said, so nothing further is needed from me.
ReplyDeleteThough I was listening (with one ear anyway) to the Vision Australia Radio (1179 in the great state of Victoria), and caught a bit about a centenarian pair - apparently still married and lively - discussing the holocaust and about how they still believe that people are good but they can be corrupted by lies and propaganda and end up doing appalling things - eg the holocaust.
Yeah, that's what I'd credit the Oreo and Maj. Mitch with: the deeply shared hope that they can inspire people to do appalling things.
So talking about appalling things, now some non-China Chinese report that our very own, locally grown and developed "Shadow Minister for Defence", one Andrew Hastie, would like to say that Australia should "develop and operate its own missiles, saying that the era of the 'lucky country' is over."
ReplyDeletehttps://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2022/08/08/2003783157
Well of course the "lucky country era" is over - ever since Hastie's lot got scrambled in the last Fed. election.
And of course, the "conservatives" only had a mere 9 years to have done something about that, and didn't. Which I think illustrates the problems with LNP governments now: they practice "interrupt driven government". Just like a primitive computer operating system, unless something crosses a major threshold to become too insistent to ignore, they pay no attention to it.
Nine years of that gross dereliction of duty, we've had.
Things might just be a tad worse in Britain, though:
Delete"There is a reason that both candidates talk about their potential leadership as though the Conservatives are an opposition party: everything about modern Conservatism is about putting as much distance as possible between the party’s actions and their consequences."
It’s the culture war games – and the last Tory contenders are on the run from reality
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/aug/08/culture-war-games-rishi-sunak-liz-truss-war-on-woke
I know DP counsels against fact-checking the reptiles but I sometimes find checking the odd claim useful just to see how they have tortured the numbers or twisted the facts.
ReplyDeleteThe per capita emissions the Oreo quotes caught my attention because, off the top of my head, I seemed to recall that Australia's per capita emissions were not quite twice the amount she nominates. The full text of the IEA summary she cherry-picks explains the discrepancy
"On a per capita basis, CO2 emissions in advanced economies have fallen to 8.2 tonnes on average and are now below the average of 8.4 tonnes in China. However, the overall average for advanced economies masks significant differences: per capita emissions average 14 tonnes in the United States, 6 tonnes in the European Union, and 3.2 tonnes in Mexico."
https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-co2-emissions-in-2021-2
Oops, rookie error! Didn't read it carefully enough. It would be more instructive to point out how the US and Oz are a drag on the advanced economies.
I think "blather" just about summed it all up.
Not 'blather', Bef, just good old-fashioned agitprop lies. Australia is really bad at per capita emissions:
Delete"Among OECD countries, only Iceland, a nation of 350,000 people, has higher emissions per capita than Australia. Of all the major economies included in the study, only the United States comes close to Australia’s emissions of more than 20 tonnes per person."
OECD says Australia is 2nd dirtiest economy per capita, tells it to clean up
https://reneweconomy.com.au/oecd-says-australia-is-2nd-dirtiest-economy-per-capita-tells-it-to-clean-up/