A few words about travelling the Hume in an EV.
First there's the lack of signs for bowsers (oh that's a quaint word) but in any case the technology has made the signs irrelevant. It's easy to feel superior zooming past the gas guzzlers in search of a place to pray.
Secret, furtive groups of advanced futurists gather in small huddles in out of the way places, with a sense of defiance and community, as they leave their vehicles to wander about in desolate terrains while their cars chow down in a woke way on electricity.
Should there be more than one bowser in place and another EV devotee in residence, secret words and signs are offered in the manner of Masons exchanging hand grips. When did you get it? How's it go? An aged vehicle signals an early member of the cult and high status, possibly a member of the priesthood, as if encountering an early worshipper of the sun god.
Of course in some places you might find a cockroach Tesla, one of those irritating blowhard devotees of the irritating chief blowhard, taking up a space when they should be off at a Tesla bowser. Get thee gone, delusional preening infidels, to Mars ...if the battery will last.
And then there's the range anxiety. Even on the Hume, it's awkward, what with few decent fast chargers, and even with a vehicle with reasonable range, there's only 80% to hand before the bowser slows to the speed of a wet wick.
But still there's a sense of what it must have been like to have been a heretic, fully woke and righteous, virtue signalling up the wazoo, designed to send Sky News after dark luddites into a frenzy, as they yearn for tungsten light bulbs, ingest a yard of plastic or indulge in petrol and exhaust fume sniffing, fully charged to rail at corporate speak ...
... only for Media Bites to show off a typical bit of corporate wokeness and wankiness in a company mission statement by the chairman of News Corp...
Um, is that image defamatory Lachy? Or is it fair to call you and père a couple of disingenuous, dissembling, hypocritical wankers?
Never mind, perhaps the fully woke virtue signalling EV experience is more like walking among the true believers who still think that Adam and Eve are all the go ...
Oh the looks of envy and hostility mixed in even proportions as they turn back to the days of the dinosaur and fossils ...
Think about it. Religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible man — living in the sky — who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever ’til the end of time!
But He loves you.
Yes, another distraction before getting on to the reptiles.
Given the vile Melbourne weather, the pond wiled away its nights in Melbourne, or at least a couple of them, watching the HBO/Apatow/Bonfiglio doc George Carlin's American Dream.
The pond always enjoyed Carlin when he got on to the subject of religion - so many funny routines about imaginary friends and angels ...
Here’s another question I’ve been pondering… what is all this shit about angels? Have you heard this? Yeah… 3 out of 4 people now believe in angels. What are you fucking stupid? Has everybody lost their fucking mind in this country? Angels… shit! You know what I think it is? I think it’s a massive, collective, psychotic, chemical flashback of all the drugs, ALL the drugs smoked, swallowed, snorted, shot, and absorbed rectally by all Americans from 1960 to 1990; 30 years of adulterated street drugs will get you some fucking angels my friend! Angels… shit! What about goblins huh? Doesn’t anybody believe in goblins? Never hear about them except on Halloween and it’s always negative shit too you know? And zombies… where the fuck are all the zombies? That’s the trouble with zombies; they’re unreliable. I say if you’re gonna buy the angel shit you might as well go for the zombie package as well. George Carlin. You are all diseased, 1999.
Unlike Colbert, the pond even liked his so-called "dark" period towards the end of his life. Who could argue with the notion that the planet is fucked, and so it's best just to be here for the entertainment? Is that nihilism or just realism or perhaps even neo-realism?
The reptiles are fucked, but you get your perverse entertainment where you find it.
There were lots of Carlin routines that popped up - it's a long haul with each ep around the 2 hour mark - including that old favourite:
"Have you noticed that their stuff is shit and your shit is stuff? God! And you say, 'Get that shit offa there and let me put my stuff down!'"
The trouble of course is that the reptile stuff is shit, but the pond's stuff is reptile shit, so the pond only gets to put reptile shit down, and that's hardly stuff.
Where's the pond's stuff? Stuffed, of course, or perhaps stuffed away for safe-keeping, so with a recommendation to look out for the doc - it's good stuff - it's on with the reptile shit, and this being Friday, naturally there's a goodly dose of hole in the bucket shit.
The pond uses the word advisedly, not just because Carlin said it, along with all those other unmentionable words he enjoyed celebrating, but because it helps convey the sense of decay that always assails the pond's nostrils when it heads into the Murdochian sewers (and at least the word tells you this isn't a Murdochian in disguise).
BTW, the Carlin references aren't that irrelevant to the pond's reptile mission statement. At the end of the doc, greedy Murdoch père and ghastly Murdoch premier fils appear in a montage proving Carlin's nightmare dystopian vision is on the money, and he saw the Orwellian present.
Hang on a nervous tic, this just in.
The pond is currently recycling Crikey and the mention of the Bolter (paywall) was irresistible.
The pond rarely pays attention to the Bolter but this summary from Charlie Lewis made the pond wonder about Lachy's legal advice when he might have turned to the Bolter for a few in house motoring suggestions:
On his Sky News show last night, News Corp veteran Andrew Bolt addressed his employer’s lawsuit against Crikey (he calls us a “far-left internet gossip magazine, quite scurrilous at times”) during an interview with The Australian’s media writer Sophie Elsworth. And while it would be too much to ask that they wouldn’t report on Murdoch’s statement of claim as though it were literal fact, rather than a collection of allegations, Bolt did at least give an indication that the lawsuit may not have been the best idea.
“Frankly I would not have given Crikey this platform, they’re milking it for all its worth, they’re putting ads everywhere. I wouldn’t give this rubbish thing of Eric Beecher’s a platform, or taken the risk of going up against an activist judge,” said Bolt, adding “if you’re on the right, an activist judge [is] gonna slot you if they can.”
He only spends two minutes on us — he’s much keener to make fun of Meghan Markle’s new podcast at the moment, which we can understand.
Bolt has been sued in the past, for defamation and most notoriously for breaching the Racial Discrimination Act, so he has an insight into Crikey‘s current experience. But he’s never sued anyone else in the media — as far we know he’s never even threatened it. Seems his stance on defamation is a bit closer to Murdoch senior than Murdoch junior?
And so at last from the Bolter to our hole in the bucket man ... it's not as big difference as you might have imagined, apart from the odd reference to Romans (the empire builders, not the book in the bible) and other pretentious allusions ...
All this to get a speaker in tongues to imaginary friends off a painfully obvious secretive hook? It was a clear explosion of narcissist power, designed to enhance distrust of government by its furtiveness, hidden not just from the public but from cabinet, and only a loon of the first water could be bothered to dress in Locke and the Romans to defend it ...
What an excruciating wanker he can be, how right it was to serve up a little Carlin before this indigestible crap took its turn on the pond stage ... taking up space that might be better spent on an infallible Pope...
And so to a bonus, and one thing's certain ... the minor league Milner will not be on the menu ...
The pond left in the ironical juxtaposition with robo-debt. The reptiles are terrified about taking a look at past misdeeds, with blather about a witch hunt, but that's an old routine ...
So the pond went to the commentary section to see if there was any other contender ...
Ah yes, the lizard Oz editorialist, also concerned about taking a look back, as if the abuse of young people was a matter of partisan distractions, and look, there's the meretricious Merritt alongside our Henry, dishing it out to Domdumb, but the pond couldn't look past bubble-headed booby Claire, because there's nothing like talk of the News Corp inspired tyranny of the mob to get the pond going ...
Carlin was right about the zombies, but enough preliminaries, clear the way for Claire ...
The soft tyranny of mob rule? Shouldn't that be the hard tyranny of Murdochian lies? You do realise you're helping keep a sinister company afloat by scribbling for it? Why not join in a legal action against Crikey just to show how the American mobocracy plays the game?
The pond's only complaint regarding the bonus?
Well all those damned American cartoons meant the pond had no excuse for running an aged infallible Pope, regurgitated by the full to overflowing intertubes, or an immortal Rowe, or a climate wars Wilcox ...
"...designed to send Sky News after dark luddites into a frenzy, as they yearn for tungsten light bulbs, ingest a yard of plastic or indulge in petrol and exhaust fume sniffing" And don't forget the carbon monoxide inbreathing with intimate family when they get home and turn the big living room gas heater on.
ReplyDeleteA gem from Sky News last, delivered by the Chief Chucklehead, Rowan Dean. His theme was the utterly predictable demolition of our entire system of government if anyone were to vote for 'The Voice'. To support his case, he invoked several supposed authorities from the legal trade. Well, not just authorities - in OTT Dean fashion they were something like the leading, outstanding scholars - I do not have the exact words, because that would have required steady re-watching of the clip, and you have to be as obsessive/compulsive as Polonius to want to do that sort of thing.
DeleteAnyway, the legal authorities, in order, were Dame Slap, and then the newly ordained Dame Beef - Louise Clegg - whose prominence in the trade was established by her having a pennant fluttering from The Flagship yesterday, then - oh, where has he been these many a month - Flinty, and, finally, the Garrick Professor Allan.
Now, of course, Dean did not offer any words from his authorities on why and how 'The Voice' would cause our nation to implode - it was enough to name 'authority', and cite their dire opinions (imprecations?). The nearest any got to discussion was saying how devilishly cunning PM Albanese had been in the soooo tricky wording of those three sentences - but with no pointers to the precise tricky bits that would have blackfellas taking over your backyard - if you still live in a place with a backyard.
So - revisiting the crazy stuff that was printed, with such confidence, after the Mabo decision, and no corporate awareness that none of that ever happened. But the FUD factor now cranked up several more notches - you know, like those crazy climate change believers do, or those ratbags who thought that isolation and masks could help reduce your chance of acquiring one of the strains of Covid. Setting out to frighten the populace, rather than win them over with sweet reason (or, as Littleproud still mentions - 'a mature conversation')
Dames Slap and Beef, the Fabulous Flinty and a Canadian Garrick. Yep, that's a truly high-powered set of legals: whatever they say must be true - at least in the very sparse mind of the Chief Chucklehead. Clegg, apparently, is even a "board member" of the Sydney Institute - they sure do like to "keep it in the family" don't they.
DeleteAnd I'm truly waiting with bated breath for Very Littleproud to introduce us all to 'a mature conversation', aren't you ? And to explain why we had none of that while he was a minister in government.
"Where would any of the reptiles be without comrade Dan, as if they haven't already exhausted themselves during the plague years trashing every move he made ..."
ReplyDeleteYep, they've really trashed him good:
First Resolve poll since election has huge Labor lead, and Labor also has massive lead in Victoria
https://theconversation.com/first-resolve-poll-since-election-has-huge-labor-lead-and-labor-also-has-massive-lead-in-victoria-188587
Prof Andreas Bolt (certificates in the mail) has been tripped up wonderfully by Australia's g=finest little grifter. This is almost performance art: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKXZux7AUQk&ab_channel=TomTanuki
ReplyDeleteThank you VC - delightful stuff. It did get me wondering if the Bolt might make a case for a 'rule of board' to replace the mythical 'rule of thumb', which was supposed to determine the thickness of a stick with which one was allowed to discipline one's wife. Bolt claims to be a 'conservative', and is very much of the pack of self-proclaimed conservatives of this time - deep reverence for precedent and convention, except where convention does not suit them, or, more particularly, politicians who have their approval - where convention may be disregarded. But that kind is also good at synthesizing new 'conventions' that suit the intellectual vagaries of those they support and promote.
DeleteNo doubt Bolt has discussed this with Ms Morell.
So Madame Quillette on about Sam Harris and mobocracy, which, of course, is truly "both sided". Well, who could, would or should have ever thought otherwise. And who else thinks, even for a moment, about injustices to Sam Harris ?
ReplyDeleteAnd 'not only, but also' we have "the hole in the bucket man always knows how to deliver ..." Indeed he does, indeed he does: a plethora of Romans - even including the rarely mentioned 'last of the Flavians' - and Hobbes (but no Calvin ?).
And of course, Holely wisdom: "a stark warning to opponents of just how far the new ruler would go so as to destroy them, chilling the criticism that alone could have saved the empire from eventual collapse." Well it's so good to know that Pliny's criticism of Domitian was what ended the Roman empire: not for several hundred years, a few epidemics and pandemics, a lost battle or three and the formation of the Eastern Empire in Constantinople mind, but that's what did it.
So beware of criticising Morrison, for if you do it might just end the Australian "empire".