Likely the lizard Oz will be out of bounds for some time, and the pond had a choice.
Fold up the tent and steal into the night, or run wild and free, and then the pond came up with a wiz idea.
What if it managed to produce the same sort of defensive lockdown in other chairman publications?
What if it began sampling the delights of the WSJ, for example?
The trouble is, when the pond looked, all it turned up was mouldy old Rove ...
Back in the day, the roving Rove used to turn up in the lizard Oz, together with sundry other WSJ imports, and the pond routinely ignored him, and them ...
But dire times call for dire strategies, and so the pond went a roving and a wooing ...
Which is of course entirely different from the disconnect the pond experiences with each new George Santos revelation, but say what you will, at least the roving Rove is short, and the pond was almost temped by that offer of that gutless wonder Paul Ryan musing on populism and the return to conservatism ... perhaps another day, perhaps another time ...
Now the pond won't pretend that this is the same as the hole in the bucket man blathering on about climate, but for the moment, the pond is in a new world order and so it turned to the NY Post, because one of the pond's rules must be that it features the Chairman's publications ... and what do you know, there are aliens involved in a world wide conspiracy ...
Elites and they're extraterrestrial and freedumb, always with the freedumb, and the pond wouldn't know the bloviating Bovard from a hole in the tar in King street, but immediately liked the cut of his jib ...
The pond felt no need to hide its workings - note that NY Post obsession with Joe Biden - even when dealing with WEF there was more on jolly Joe - but had to get to the alien punchline ...
Ah. here it's the NY Times as the axis of weevils, and there's kind words for Uncle Elon, and an absolute disinterest in mentioning Faux News howlers, or George Santos or Kitara or whatever, and a sense that the bloviating Bovard was part of an international brotherhood ...
What does the pond think? File under coronavirus, freedumb, Joe Biden, Switzerland and uncle Elon, and extraterrestrials and aliens conquering earth ...
And then the pond decided it could go freelance.
It had served up a couple of offerings from behind the chairman's paywall, and then thanks to that mention of the NY Times, it remembered that in the distant past The Bulwark had noted the NY Times doing a classic bit of both siderism by offering up a serve of Kellyanne Conway, a way of bringing her in, much as they tried to do with Jason Bourne, and, back in the old days, with Smiley, who was always coming in from some sort of cold ...
Sure the pond could have gone Ross Douthat or David Brooks, but why not go there, because the Gray Lady reached some sort of peak of cluelessness and offer a much better brand of illustration than the lizard Oz ...
Why that almost gives the mango Mussolini a kind of Piss Christ feel, and note the headline ... it's far superior to the graphics department at the lizard Oz.
And talk about class, here was the old gray lady offering a notorious fraud, offering a case for the mango Mussolini .. and the case against, because that's the both siderist way ...
Best of all, there's no need to comment ... the piece is sufficient unto itself ... and besides some time ago Jonathan Last said it all in The Bulwark ...
The New York Times is such a liberal media bubble that it paid Kellyanne Conway and handed her real estate on its opinion page for a piece about Donald Trump. Because Kellyanne has a long history as a straight shooter and honest broker who can give truthful and unbiased information while adding value for Times subscribers.
Three cheers for both sides.
At last the pond can reveal its secret vices and the sort of reading it does outside the lizard Oz bubble.
And at least the pond can a cheer for the illustrations, which are spiffing, though up against them the text gets a tad compressed ... but still what a vision of an orator at work, well worth the blemish ...
Why that's distilled essence of art, worthy of a worthy orator.
Then there were more gobbets to go ...
As for the media bubbles people keep themselves in, say what you will about the woke socialist antifa subscribers of the New York Times—but they are paying their hard-earned money to get the views of Kellyanne Conway and Ross Douthat. How about the people watching Fox News and Newsmax and reading the Federalist and Townhall? Is both-sides journalism a thing at those places, too?
It was a whole new world for the pond, getting out of the tent and spending a little time in a howling blizzard ...
And then came another splendid illustration, again forcing the text into a smaller size, but by this stage the pond was beyond worrying, it just wanted the production values ... a sense of a colossus in our midst, worthy of a kind of Leni Riefensthal, Triumph of the Will styling ...
Splendid stuff, with those roiling clouds evoking the ancient Greeks and Romans, of the sort seen at the beginning of Olympia ... (plus bonus nudity, but of an Aryan kind, so entirely okay).
And so to a final gobbet ...
Well there's always the cartoonists, and strangely that bid by the old Gray Lady to help buff up Conway's image as an informed, insightful commentator was only matched by the taking seriously of the mango Mussolini and his chances, and meanwhile ...
The mango Mussolini didn't even make the infallible Pope's list of jerks who'd hung around too long ... not even worth sharing a stage with the sociopathic Vlad, the autocratic Xi, or the theocrats of the Ali and Benji school...
By this time the pond was in a state of delirium ... so this is what freedumb is really like. Why the pond might even sneak off to Quadrant, or back to the Speccie mob for a serve of old Flinty, aaagh me hearties ...
Sure this serve of Flinty, aagh me hearties was positively ancient by pond standards, you could see the greenish mould on the side of the bowl.
And sure anyone could head off to the Speccie mob to get a serve of it, but there was something wild and licentious about leaving the reptile bubble ... to be reminded that it wasn't just Sharri who knew all about that military lab and the wicked Fauci ...
And there you go, ex abundanti cautela! Who needs the hole in the bucket man on a Friday, when our Flinty can do the job, aaargh me hearties ... and what's the bet that climate science will result in a mention of the faithful at prayer?
Splendid stuff ... and while the pond isn't sure how long it can keep all this up, and how long it might take before there's a fix done on the paywall crack, consider it a way of holding the fort for those who care to comment on just about anything ... while the pond wraps up proceedings in the usual way with an immortal Rowe ...
How wonderful to welcome Flinty back, and to see him reinforcing his anti-elitist, Man of the People credentials by going full-on COVID conspiracy theorist. And a bit of Latin. That,s the cherry on top!
ReplyDeleteIt’s a bit sad, though, to see that he’s abandoned his his attacks on the Leets in favour of the more traditional, duller, “Ruling Classes”; in his prime, nobody could direct a more curdled sneer towards the Leets than Flinty. He also seems to have taken a few decades to have realise that China has become something of a major economic player. Still, if Polonius isn’t available to bemoan the treachery of Whitlam selling out to the Commies 50 years ago, than Flinty’s your man!
So is the Speccie the last refuge for those loons now deemed too gaga for the Lizard Oz?
Your trivia for the week:
DeleteWho was "the launch editor of The Spectator Australia in 2008" ? Why, none other than Oscar Humphries. But you knew that, yes ?
They might do both sides, but not the other side.
ReplyDelete"and an absolute disinterest in mentioning Faux News howlers, or George Santos or Kitara or whatever, and a sense that the bloviating Bovard was part of an international brotherhood ..."
"and an absolute disinterest in mentioning";
"I’m a millionaire – this is why I’m at Davos begging to pay more tax"
Phil White
"I’ve seen how growing inequality is tearing societies apart. Now I’m calling for the world’s richest people to pay their fair share"
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/19/millionaire-davos-tax-inequality-rich
Perhaps DP you may enlighten us as to "Which Political Victories Cause Backlash?" by Scott Alexander at astralcodexten.
ReplyDeleteThe thermostat effect or ?
DP -"Best of all, there's no need to comment ... the piece is sufficient unto itself ... and besides some time ago Jonathan Last said it all in The Bulwark ..."
Scott Alexander writes:
"Which Political Victories Cause Backlash?
...
"One natural alternative theory is a thermostatic effect.
...
"Or maybe this is totally random and I shouldn’t try to conclude things from n = ~5 examples. But I’m still confused why the Trump and abortion backlashes were so noticeable, and don’t feel like I have any strong predictions to give on whether some other policy victory will produce a backlash or not."
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/which-political-victories-cause-backlash
Hmmm: Kev Drum's commenter's "righteous rant about the George Bush era:
DeleteRepublicans got the tax cuts they wanted. They got the financial deregulation they wanted. They got the wars they wanted. They got the unfunded spending increases they wanted. And the results were completely, unrelentingly disastrous. A decade of sluggish growth and near-zero wage increases. A massive housing bubble. Trillions of dollars in war spending and thousands of American lives lost. A financial collapse. A soaring long-term deficit. Sky-high unemployment. All on their watch and all due to policies they eagerly supported. And worse: ever since the predictable results of their recklessness came crashing down, they’ve rabidly and nearly unanimously opposed every single attempt to dig ourselves out of the hole they created for us.
But despite the fact that this is all recent history, it’s treated like some kind of dreamscape. No one talks about it. Republicans pretend it never happened. Fox News insists that what we need is an even bigger dose of the medicine we got in the aughts, and this is, inexplicably, treated seriously by the rest of the press corps instead of being laughed at."
https://jabberwocking.com/george-bush-has-been-tossed-on-the-ash-heap-of-history/
Maybe people just react to the actual state of affairs sometimes. Like us reacting to the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison era.
One of my former correspondents in the USA - now deceased - but a registered Republican in California, did tell me of the saying that 'reality has a liberal bias'.
DeleteMight even be so, Chad. Looking at the history of the human race over the past few thousand years, it does seem that there's an ongoing 'liberalisation' happening within many nation-societies.
DeleteThough I do remember a pronouncement I once encountered about 'impatience': that when pursuing some long-sought outcome, the closer the parties get to realisation, the more impatient they become. We might even be seeing just a little of that.
ReplyDeleteI was in town early this morning, saw the splash, up front, on the print edition of the Flagship, and had a vision of the reptile response to events that had delivered a common target to them. It was not so much a vision, more remembered text from an old book,
So, in a building in Surry Hills, Sydney ‘It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department, where Winston worked, they were dragging chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for the Two Minutes Hate. . . . . . the face of Jacinda Ardern, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. The little sandy-haired woman gave a squeak of mingled fear and disgust. . . . . .Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room.’
Some of the Blair family wrote well, but I am fairly sure there is not a trace of Eric’s DNA in Timmy.
The beauty of the Reptile hate-fest is that it will have zero impact in Kiwiland; there’s no real Murdoch presence there and nobody will give a flying fuck. Talk about old men shouting at Long White Clouds…….
DeleteHow many will give a 'flying' even here, Anony ? Sure the Mordochrats are feasting, but who's eating ? After all, she is (1) female and (2) an NZedder and how many here who read the reptiles care about either of them, separately, or even more so combined.
DeleteSome of the nonentities invited (?) to comment on Sky concede, grudgingly, that Jacinda Ardern handled major crises well. Of course, with the Christchurch mosque shootings, it was easy to rally the populace because they were carried out by a furriner, and you can easily unite against such a furriner, particularly when he was from a country noted for its crazies - that country, that - oh . . . yes, um . . that one that's, well, just, er, just over the water there to the west
DeleteBack in my high school days, the year 3 (or 9 now) history teacher asked the class a question: why didn't NZ join Australia as a State ? Well, none of us kids could think of a reason, so he just said: "Because the NZedders had 2500 reasons not to". So it goes.
DeleteThe (whitefella) founding fathers also had the great wisdom not to establish two states of North Island and South Island.
DeleteSharri & the 4+1 Free Sky Thinkers!
ReplyDelete"there was something wild and licentious about leaving the reptile bubble ... to be reminded that it wasn't just Sharri"!
Not just Sharri The Free Thinker (Exclusive!), but also "the “free thinkers” on the Sky After Dark line-up of Andrew Bolt, Peta Credlin and Paul Murray."
"Sharri Markson will front a new show at 5pm Monday to Thursday time slot, with stablemate Chris Kenny moving to 8pm Monday to Thursday."
In " The weekly beast
"Michael Clarke and Karl Stefanovic clash proves tabloid gold as Daily Mail chastises Nine and ABC
Amanda Meade
"Mail accuses Nine and ABC of ‘radio silence’ over fracas. Plus: conservative media attacks Jacinda Ardern
https://www.theguardian.com/media/commentisfree/2023/jan/20/michael-clarke-and-karl-stefanovic-clash-proves-tabloid-gold-as-daily-mail-chastises-nine-and-abc
Sky backward is yks! See. Free Thinking.
"Free thinking"? Yeah, right on: the reptiles and the Sky weevils are completely free of any thinking. Just cop all of those names: Bolt, Credlin, Murray, Smith, Gleeson, Markson, Kenny and Stoker.
DeleteStoker had a brief run as a columnist at the AFR after the timely demise of her political career. It’s only right that she’s ended up at her true spiritual home, Sky After Dark. Perhaps she, Sharri and Credlin could team up for some sort of regular “Sisters Doin’ It For Themselves” show?
DeleteQuite a read for a Friday; next time, if you're going to resurrect the likes of the head of Flint, see if you can turn up Piers Akerman for just a wee touch of joyful reminiscence. There's really nobody quite like him. Except maybe that pomme Piers.
ReplyDeleteAnd I really didn't realise until today, just how much alike are Kellyanne Conway and Dame Slappy. Either one could replace the other and nobody much would notice.
But reading Rove brought back my perennial question: just how much of what they spout do they actually believe ? Is it a real delusional state, or is it just 'salesman's belief' (they believe everything they say for just how long it takes them to say it).
And to what extent is a politician's life just a slightly lesser case of 'salesman's belief' ?
Piers - don’t tell me the Fat Owl is still yaroo-ing around some obscure corner of the Murdoch tuck-shop, desperately requesting an advance against his next Postal Order? It’s difficult to imagine anything he could say that might be of the slightest relevance, though I suppose the recent Rudd Ambassadorial appointment might encourage him to resuscitate the Heiner Affair yet again, just for old times’ sake.
DeleteYair, still piss-farting around at the Daily Telly apparently. Not one of my regular reads, though.
Delete