In which the pond stands corrected, and makes no attempt to correct our Henry, bubble-headed Claire or the Groaner ...

 

The pond woke to stories featuring the authoritarian fascist behaviour of the Chinese government led by Xi, featured in the UN report on Xinjiang, Graudian here …

The pond realised that it had goofed off when it came to talking of fascism yesterday, simply because Killer Creighton is so goofy … how can anyone take his Freudian fear of masks and all the quasi-fascist drooling that follows from it seriously? And yet that's how fascism slips through the Freudian keyhole and emerges in plain sight.

A correspondent rightly corrected the pond with a reference to Robert Reich’s Maybe US mainstream should begin using the term ‘fascism’. Inter alia:

...DeSantis also spews culture-war rhetoric. “We are not going to surrender to woke,” he said last Tuesday. “Florida is the state where woke goes to die.”
He describes an America under assault by leftwing elites, who “want to delegitimize our founding institutions”.
He calls the state of Florida a “citadel of freedom” and says his job as governor is to fight critical race theory, “Faucian dystopia”, uncontrolled immigration, big tech, “leftwing oligarchs”, “Soros-funded prosecutors”, transgender athletes and the “corporate media”.
He charges – using a standard racist dog whistle – that “we’re not letting Florida cities burn down … In Florida, you’re not going to get a slap on the wrist. You are getting the inside of a jail cell.”
So, is it useful to characterize DeSantis’s combination of homophobia, transphobia, racism and misogyny, along with his efforts to control the public schools and universities and to intimidate the private sector (eg, Disney), as redolent of fascism?

America’s mainstream media is by now comfortable talking and writing about “authoritarianism”. Maybe it should also begin using the term “fascism”, where appropriate.

Well, yes.

There are, of course, ‘redolences’ all over the place, and deeply appropriate, whether it’s the fascism of Vladimir Putin and his wanton invasion and war on another country, reduced to a word salad notion of a special operatiron, or the fascism of the Taliban, or the fascism embedded in the Taliban far right in the United States, or the fascism of the authoritarian rulers in Saudi Arabia, which made this effort by Twiggy in the lizard Oz's digital edition sound especially tone deaf ...

 

No Twiggy, we don't need to be Saudi Arabia, nor emulate the lickspittle Australian golfers kowtowing to oil money while putting past a fascist regime, though the pond couldn't help but slip in that very early digital edition screen cap, simply so it could note how it must have stuck in simplistic Simon's deeply conflicted craw to scribble "Albanese delivers on election pledges..."

Meanwhile, a publication ostensibly intended to deliver news with some objectivity managed to stick "jobs love-in" in its header, and splashed it all over the tree killer edition too ...

That sort of phrasing is pure, undiluted tabloidism of the most vulgar and base Daily Mail kind, and that brings the pond to the fascist 'redolences' in Murdoch la la land, not least devotees of the MAGA cult, as exemplified by Dame Slap.

Speaking of Dame Slap the pond should add a short correction to the piece the pond featured a few days ago. It came by way of Charlie Lewis in Crikey under The Oz’s Albrechtsen swings and misses Lidiaa Thorpe sledge on the Voice…(paywall)

The Australian’s Janet Albrechtsen has been obsessively orbiting the debate around the proposed Indigenous Voice to Parliament for some time. This week she’s been eclipsed by a photo-captioner. Sledging the Albanese government’s Voice proposal, Albrechtsen claims it is so out there “it could have been drafted by Senator Lidia Thorpe, who revels in her radicalism”.
Which would have been a highly effective sledge if it weren’t for the fact that Thorpe has been a consistent and vocal critic of the Voice proposal, as Bernard Keane notes today.
She wrote a long opinion piece in the Nine papers in early August to that effect. And only this morning, the Greens Senator and DjabWurrung Gunnai Gunditjmara woman called a Voice referendum a “waste of money” that could be better spent on Indigenous communities. She also expressed her (again, consistent and on the record) preference for a treaty.
Given this is unfair enough to invite the suspicion that the point is being wilfully missed, the photo caption lands a little differently:

At this point Charlie inserted the still which ran originally under Dame Slap's risible heading Questioning Albanese’s voice isn’t idiotic, racist or ideological, a clear pointer to it being idiotic, racist and ideological. For those who've forgotten:

Charlie returned to note of that photo:

Every other caption in the piece is simply a straight description of who is being photographed (e.g. “Shaquille O’Neal with Anthony Albanese and Linda Burney”), so the sight of Thorpe raising her fist on the Senate floor, captioned “Lidia Thorpe revels in her radicalism” almost lands as a sarcastic comment on the piece.

Almost, Charlie? Sorry Charlie, it's fully beyond the valley of sarcasm, and lands on the heights of racism, idiocy and rampant right wing ideology.

A chastened pond admits it’s been entirely too soft, as in the matter of Lindsey Graham, as another esteemed correspondent noted: 

It is not exactly a secret that the senator is gay and raided J. Edgar Hoover's closet for his weekend party clothes. But all respect for how a individual leads his private life is "trumped" when he sells his soul and his country to a one time game show host lest said host exposes his secret. What a gutless punk, jello has more backbone. If there was an annual Uriah Heep Award, they would give it to Graham in perpetuity.

Uriah Heep was one of the pond’s earliest cult figures, and the pond would frequently wander around tugging the forelock and going “ever so ‘umble”, but perhaps it’s not wise to be ‘umble all the time and perhaps the occasional truth telling about racism and fascism wouldn’t go astray.

And yet the pond still has a tendency towards what might be called "Mollie-ism", in honour of Mollie in Animal Farm ...

At the last moment Mollie, the foolish, pretty white mare who drew Mr. Jones's trap, came mincing daintily in, chewing at a lump of sugar. She took a place near the front and began flirting her white mane, hoping to draw attention to the red ribbons it was plaited with. 

... it helps explain that orgy of cartoons, and why the pond couldn't resist this bauble, found here ...

Well it was written by a woman, and so there's a meta irony to that note about ribs which would possibly please even an angry Sydney Anglican in search of a complimentary woman (they're welcome to MTG).

And that’s as roundabout an introduction to the hole in the bucket man that the pond could manage this morning, and what do you know, the confused old fart manages to mangle together racism and colonialism with a righteous air of indignation…

Of course you won't hear anything from Henry in his piece about assorted knock-offs of Aboriginal art. 

There was a story about this in the Graudian, back in July, though it's been a running sore since the time long ago that the pond worked in Alice Springs ...

Two out of three “Aboriginal” souvenirs on the market are fake, with no connection to Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander people, according to a new report by the Productivity Commission.

The commission is calling for mandatory labelling of these inauthentic products to help warn consumers, and curb the significant cultural harm that “Indigenous-style consumer products” do to artists and communities, in its latest report released on Tuesday.

“Inauthentic products can mislead consumers, deprive Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists of income and disrespect cultures,” productivity commissioner, Romlie Mokak, a Yawuru man, said.

Almost 60% of spending on souvenirs – a market worth many tens of millions of dollars – was on fake “Indigenous-style consumer products” bought predominantly by international visitors, Mokak said.

Labelling products as inauthentic would be more cost-effective than trying to ban them, he said.

“Mandatory labelling would steer consumers toward authentic products and put the compliance burden on those producing fake products, not Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists,” he said.

​​According to a separate part of the report, sales of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art were worth $250m in 2019-2020, but artists themselves received only a small fraction.

While a few big-name artists can command high prices, the commission found the average income for an Indigenous artist who sold work through an Aboriginal art centre was just $2,700 a year. For independent artists, the average income was about $6,000.

It's a tricky problem, and leading with Margaret Preston amounts to a form of misleading conduct and trading off ...

6k a year while being rorted and ripped-off? Sounds like a honest day's colonial work to your fair average racist ...

The pond was thinking just the same thought when it wandered around the ground floor of the Potter in Melbourne recently and realised "there is no usual or customary practice whereby artworks are held in trust for Melburnians."

Some stupid gallery assistant failed to realise this just as the pond was about to take one of the pieces and wander out the door ...

There goes the pond, goofing off again, while Henry rabbits on, apparently without the first clue that he's sounding like an aged colonial patriarch telling Aboriginal people what's good for 'em, in an ever so un'umble way...

Is it just the pond, or is the notion that our Henry is in a position to blather about the "lived experience of all artists, regardless of race or ethnicity" deeply risible?

By the time the pond arrived at the final gobbet, it felt too tired to argue ...

Well he's right about that. With the likes of Dame Slap and the hole in the bucket man thinking they know how to devise the right sort of policies for indigenous people, things are truly fucked and couldn't be bleaker, and speaking of patronising attitudes, could anyone sound more patronising than our Henry, and yet, and yet ... the pond still retains its Mollie tendencies ...

Indeed, indeed, and what better introduction could be found to this outing by bubble-headed booby Claire ...

There is a rich irony in all this - for decades the reptiles at the lizard Oz and elsewhere in News Corp have suppressed, distorted, downplayed, disregarded and abused climate science and its implications for humanity, and yet bubble-headed Claire invokes the Vatican without the slightest sense of irony, thereby sending the pond into another Mollie moment ...

And that reminds the pond of a note by another esteemed correspondent, reminding the pond of Bertrand Russell's point that if he had the money to recruit and train an elite army to "persuade" people, he could get them to believe that you boil water by freezing it:

Of course, even when these beliefs had been generated, people would not put the kettle in the ice-box when they wanted it to boil. That cold makes water boil would be a Sunday truth, sacred and mystical, to be professed in awed tones, but not to be acted on in daily life. What would happen would be that any verbal denial of the mystic doctrine would be made illegal, and obstinate heretics would be "frozen" at the stake. (link)

In much the same way you could get bubble-headed booby Claire thinking she cares about calm, objective useful science, while scribbling for a pack of climate science denying tossers in Murdochian la-la land ...

What of past attempts at alleged objective science dressed up as homophobia or TG baiting or sexism or racism or all the rest of it? 

What of that bullshit window-dressing that passed across the sky like a meteor melting in the atmosphere some time ago?

After years of casting doubt on climate change and attacking politicians who favored corrective action, Rupert Murdoch’s media outlets in his native Australia are planning an editorial campaign next month advocating a carbon-neutral future.

Depending on its content, the project, described by executives at Mr. Murdoch’s News Corp on Monday, could be a breakthrough that provides political cover for Australia’s conservative government to end its refusal to set ambitious emission targets. If sustained, it could also put pressure on Fox News and other Murdoch-owned outlets in the United States and Britain that have been hostile to climate science.

But critics, including scientists who have been a target of News Corp’s climate combat, warned that the effort could be little more than window dressing that leaves decades of damage intact.

“Color me skeptical,” said Michael E. Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University. “Until Rupert Murdoch and News Corp call off their attack dogs at Fox News and The Wall Street Journal, who continue to promote climate change disinformation on a daily basis, these are hollow promises that should be viewed as a desperate ploy to rehabilitate the public image of a leading climate villain.” (NY Times, paywall)

Indeed, indeed, it's a lot easier to blather about the Vatican or uncle Joe Stalin than look at your own Augean stable full of crap and rats...

Oh fuck off with your talk of religious and political zealots, and the battle for science and reason. You're scribbling for a company that does its business by appealing to a bunch of MAGA-hatted fascists ... replete with white Xian nationalist tendencies ...

There, at last the pond has said it!

And so to an immortal Rowe ... with a meditative aspect and a terrifying dome ...

... and that's so the pond can segue to a bonus, a very brief groan by the Groaner-in-chief ...

It should go without saying that the Groaner herself has an enormous amount of skin in the game, and is responsible for employing many, many people. It would be idle and wrong of the pond to suggest that she's a representative of all that's wrong with the representatives representing Chairman Rupert ...

And with that correction in place, it's just a short hop, skip and jump to complete this missive from a ticket-clipping sometime academic and current Murdochian ...

Or, as a tabloid rag indulging in opinion rather than news might put it, Bosses wedged at jobs love-in ... because what's the point of news, opinion and editorial if you can't conflate and confuse them and compile them into a giant-sized mess of idiotic ideology, with a fragrant whiff of racism, sexism and homophobia ...

And so, in a calendar-arranged order of seasons, the good news is that spring has sprung, Dame Groan has become a devotee of accommodating temporary migration, and the infallible Pope has a master class in hand ...