Q: What was Mark Latham doing on Channel 7's coverage last night of the cockroach election?
A: Proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that the station has no sense of shame, and no ability to attract decent local talent.
What a pathetic travesty of a FTA station, offering a home for self-promoting ratbags dog whistling to bigots. Still, one less station to watch when snooze time calls ...
Moving right along, one of the tragedies the pond confronts on a daily basis is the cornucopia of fun out there, and the limited amount of time and space the pond has to indulge in it ...
Despite the pond's tendency to bloatware, there can only be passing acknowledgement of the venerable Meade's News Corp columnists opt for bothsiderism on Nazis at anti-trans rally.
That was on Friday and yesterday the returning Marina Hyde offered up a splendid chortling in Never mind the lies on Fox News: Rupert's getting married again. Just be happy for him. Hyde's splendid idea was to cast the chairman in the role of a nervous, equivocating widow wanting to get back on the horse ...
And yet there's a chance with a cartoon-led recovery to have a few laughs, while enduring the likes of Dame Slap, suddenly returned to the pond since she gave up ranting about the voice and the Lehrmann matter ... (though that story continues apace in The Saturday Paper).
Like many on the barking mad far right, she' always resented the way that black people can use the word as an inside joke, an exclusion that limits white invasion. It's the reason that, as soon as they could, the far right despoiled the original black notion of "woke" and turned it into a term of abuse for everything they didn't like.
There's a lot more, but back to Dame Slap on her politically incorrect celebration ... dressed up with a far too big snap of a Sorkin smirking at being loved by Dame Slap...
But Sunday has usually turned into a cartoon-led recovery day for the pond so this helps match that overlarge snap of Sorkin ...
Why a snap from the film? Couldn't the reptiles afford a snap from the play?
Did Dame Slap mention modern-day witch hunts?
Yes, we've been here before, and the pond pities the kids that had the Angelic one as a teacher ...
And so to a final gobbet by the Angelic one, thankfully short ...
That opening line about a business or organisation engaging in fraud is surely intended as a troll. Polonius couldn't be so clueless could he, he couldn't lead with a glass jaw, could he?
How desperate is that? Turning the clock back to 2016 to maintain the rage and the war, but that's Polonius for you, always locked into the con wars ... and when the pond speaks of con, the pond is speaking of the con required to keep the funds moving into the Polonial institute.
Still, as we're speaking of cancel culture and all that, the chance to deviate just a little from Dame Slap's blather is irresistible, what with the current fuss, celebrated in WaPo ... (paywall)
Strange, at this point Dame Slap would usually begin to rant about activist judges, and what with being a MAGA cap wearer, she should know how to deal with the law, and idle blather about justice applying to every single one of us, a risible proposition when you happen to be rich, powerful, protected, or simply barking mad...
It'll be noted that the pond is freewheeling and using Dame Slap as a springboard, because having a good night out that the theatre is not the stuff of a steely dan or a Dame Slap when she's in form ...
And as noted, Dame Slap loves to hear the "n" word. She says she doesn't want to, but she wants the purifying laceration, the cilice to the leg. She wants to wince, but as she happened to mention confronting history, the pond couldn't help but notice what her buddies were up to in the States ...
Of course the Simpsons were there first ...
... but there was an interview in Slate which was a classic, featuring Dan Kois, having a Barney with Barney, in full here ...
...Dan Kois: So the statue wasn’t part of the reason the board forced her to resign?
Barney Bishop III (sic): That was an issue, along with many others. Look, she wasn’t surprised. She knew what was the purpose of our meeting. She had two questions: Have you talked to the whole board, and how long do I have to decide between the two letters? The meeting was five minutes long. It wasn’t like “Oh, my God! You don’t want me at the school anymore?”
Dan: I think in this situation, some boards would say: We’re going to stand by the principal, the trained educator, as opposed to a handful of parents who have an issue. Why did you not go this way?
Barney: What issue do you believe people had?
Dan: That the statue was pornographic.
Barney: You’re operating from the wrong premise. The teacher mentioned that this was a nonpornographic picture, No. 1. The teacher said, “Don’t tell your parents,” No. 2. So the issue, Dan, isn’t whether children should see these pictures or not. Gosh, we’re a classical school. Why wouldn’t we show Renaissance art to children?
Dan: Yes, I had a question about that.
Barney: Did parents know in advance what children were going to see and hear and learn? Dan, 98 percent of the parents didn’t have a problem with it. But that doesn’t matter, because we didn’t follow a practice. We have a practice. Last year, the school sent out an advance notice about it. Parents should know: In class, students are going to see or hear or talk about this. This year, we didn’t send out that notice.
Dan: Just to be clear, last year you sent a notice to parents warning them that students were going to see Michelangelo’s David?
Barney: Yes. This year, we made an egregious mistake. We didn’t send that notice. Look, we’re not a public school. We’re a public charter. Parents, after they saw all the crap that’s being taught in public schools during COVID, decided of their own that they didn’t want their children to be taught that. Here we teach the Hillsdale Curriculum, focusing on civic and moral values. We teach a traditional, Western civilization, liberal classical education. And if there’s controversial topics or subjects, we tell parents in advance. We’re going to be sensitive to everybody at the school.
Dan: I tend to think of a classical education as being the mode in the 17th, 18th century, where you study the Greeks and Romans, and Western civilization is central. A tutor or teacher is the expert, and that teacher drives the curriculum. You’re describing something where it seems the parents drive the curriculum. How does your classical education differ from the classical education as I think of it?
Barney: What kind of question is that, Dan? I don’t know how they taught in the 17th, 18th century, and neither do you. You live in New York?
Dan: Virginia.
Barney: You’ve got a 212 number. That’s New York.
Dan: I lived in New York when I got the cellphone, many years ago. Now I live in Virginia.
Barney: Well, we’re Florida, OK? Parents will decide. Parents are the ones who are going to drive the education system here in Florida. The governor said that, and we’re with the governor. Parents don’t decide what is taught. But parents know what that curriculum is. And parents are entitled to know anytime their child is being taught a controversial topic and picture.
Parents choose this school because they want a certain kind of education. We’re not gonna have courses from the College Board. We’re not gonna teach 1619 or CRT crap. I know they do all that up in Virginia. The rights of parents, that trumps the rights of kids. Teachers are the experts? Teachers have all the knowledge? Are you kidding me? I know lots of teachers that are very good, but to suggest they are the authorities, you’re on better drugs than me.
Dan: How would the teachers at your school feel to hear you say they are not authorities?
Barney: Do you know what classical education is?
Dan: I know it in a historical context, but I guess not in the context you’re using it in.
Barney: The current context is about moral values, civic values, personal responsibility. Those are the things that aren’t being taught in schools. Along with history, science, math, art, music. We don’t have safe spaces for kids so they won’t be offended by a Halloween costume. We don’t use pronouns. We teach them phonics. We teach Singapore math. They learn to speak Latin. Every student learns a musical instrument. And by the way, a large number of our students are Title I, from poor families, underprivileged families. It’s not just rich white people. We don’t even pick our students; it’s a lottery. The mission of the school shows that standards are important—even poor people have standards.
Dan: You say you don’t have safe spaces for kids to be offended by, say, a Halloween costume, but aren’t you just protecting kids, giving them a safe space, from Michelangelo’s David?
Barney: Come on, Dan. That’s ridiculous.
Dan: It seems the same to me!
Barney: You’re determined to make this a story about David. You’re going to give it the mainstream media slant...
The mainstream media certainly had a field day ...
... but everybody did ...
...According to Carrasquilla, one parent felt “point-blank upset” and that “her child should not be viewing” the 16th-century Renaissance sculpture, which depicts David, a figure from the Old Testament’s Book of Samuel made famous for his fight against the giant Goliath.
The Tallahassee Democrat reported that Tallahassee Classical School, a charter school, has now seen three principals resign or be fired since it opened in 2020. Carasquilla was at the helm for for less than a year.
The school follows the “classical education curriculum model” popular in Florida primary education. The pedagogical model stresses the “centrality of the Western tradition,” or, as the Tampa Bay Times describes it, “a historical focus on white, Western European and Judeo-Christian foundations.” The model is most used in Charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately operated, though conservative legislators in the state have made moves to widen its influence.
“Showing the entire statue of David is appropriate at some age,” said Bishop. “We’re going to figure out when that is,” he added. “And you don’t have to show the whole statue! Maybe to kindergartners we only show the head. You can appreciate that. You can show the hands, the arms, the muscles, the beautiful work Michelangelo did in marble, without showing the whole thing.”
This isn’t the first time Michelangelo’s David has sparked controversy. The Italian pavilion at Expo 2020 Dubai featured a to-scale 3D-printed replica of the statue. However according to reports, most of the replica was concealed by stone barriers, for modesty’s sake.
Even the infallible Pope knew that the eternal verities of medieval Catholicism had to be followed in his cartooning, with crucial ways of hiding the shame of Adam and Eve ...
A lump of coal for a fig leaf ... and history to be taught ...
But enough with the riffing, time for another Slap, with another large snap, still not from the play ...
Even Charlie Sykes couldn't resist having a little fun in Florida's Idiocracy: An Update ...
And soon and on and so back to Dame Slap, woefully unaware of what her MAGA cap wearing buddies get up to when let into school ...
As for David, why not just lop off the genitals? In the interests of being deftly modernised without being sanitised in any way ...
And so to the Angelic one, also on an education jag ...
On second thoughts, without an ability to control your thoughts you might end up rooting for a third rate authoritarian fascist of the Vlad the Impaler kind ... enough, back to the Angelic one explaining how to control impure thoughts, chaos and anarchy, with an iron ruler that even Dame Slap might envy ...
Luckily the pond had the solution to hand ...
Lock 'em up ...
Of course the lock 'em up cry has many uses ...
The ideology of behaviour management? Don't ask, just know it leads to charisma bypasses and a world infested by Angelic ones ...
And now to keep the faith, the pond will indulge those devotees of prattling Polonius who insist on their weekly fix. The pond finds the anal retentive, compulsive obsessive attention to the ABC exceptionally wearying, but it is what it is ...
Sadly, you can never go wrong underestimating the level of Polonial idiocy ...
As for the data, the lizard Oz is no shining beacon. The tree killer edition is in terminal throwaway, giveaway decline, and the online circulation is nothing to write home about, and as for radio, if you asked vulgar youff to find an AM station, you'd be greeted with a blank stare.
They don't care, and they never will, and the prospect of an app led recovery isn't that great. The pond turned down that opportunity when the ABC asked for personal details, but vulgar youff are away with the pixies on other platforms, as the clock tik toks ...
Polonius should get out more, but he never does, he's always hovering over the ABC, resenting the way they never gave him a show, and dropped him from The Insiders, and refused to make him CEO, or at least put him on the board, or perhaps make him chairman, and when a man is spurned so often, he's likely to snap ... and what a third rate mind is here o'er thrown ...
But the pond was pleased Polonius mentioned the Bolter, because the pond could recall the work of the Weekly Beast last week in recording the peculiar world of the reptiles and News Corp columnists opt for bothsidesism on Nazis at anti-trans rally...
Perhaps taking his cue from Donald Trump, who blamed the violence in Charlottesville in 2017 “on many sides” of the conflict, Andrew Bolt downplayed the appearance of Nazis at an anti-trans rally in Melbourne last weekend by saying the socialists “wiped out even more people than did the Nazis”.
“Do these wannabe socialists really not know their Marxist creed wiped out even more people than did the Nazis?” Bolt asked, before again blaming both groups of demonstrators.
“Worry more about the culture of thuggery that’s produced not just them but their same-same enemies,” he said.
The Herald Sun columnist also mocked the Nazis not so much for their views but for their outfits, saying they were “the most ludicrous bunch of badly dressed Nazis” who were “too skint and stupid to even get a good uniform”.
Bolt’s Murdoch tabloid stablemate, Joe Hildebrand, warmed to the theme of “bothsidesing” when he said the hammer and sickle should be banned alongside the Nazi salute.
“I am all for banning the Nazi salute,” he wrote in the Daily Telegraph.
“Even the fiercest defenders of freedom of speech usually draw the line at genocidal regimes.
“(Speaking of which we should also probably ban the hammer and sickle by the same logic but let’s leave that argument for another day.)”
Yes, and the first show to be censored should be Morgan ...
Always with the distractions, but one last plaintive howl of rage now from Polonius ...
Does Polonius ever get tired of hitting his shortcut key to produce The ABC then was a conservative-free zone without one conservative presenter, producer or editor for any of its prominent television, radio or online outlets. It remains so today.
It's beyond the valley of repetition, it's never ending, and it's moronic, and yet the pond routinely recoils whenever some Oz hack of the bromancer kind turns up on The Drum or The Insiders to spout the News Corp line ...
Most days it seems to the pond that the ABC is just a front for News Corp hacks.
The real issue? The hacks that appear aren't Polonius, and therein lies the deep, abiding bitterness ...
What a sour old prune he's become, how stultified and ossified, and how incessant, as irritating as the mad uncle sensible folk lock in the attic, so they can enjoy a final flurry of cartoons ... beginning with a Kudelka to set the tone ... because it it was left to the reptiles and the Bjorn-again one, climate science would never get a mention ...
Tom Tomorrow, and I.H.M.O.T.F.M. - why didn't Adam Smith think of engaging a good cartoonist when he was compiling his several books on 'The Wealth of Nations'?. It might have prevented the consistent (and deliberate) misrepresentation of that concept by so many generations of hacks trying to cite Smith's writings to justify to the public what their rent-seeking masters were about. Although, as we see now, the Foxes have no problem assuring viewers that what they, viewers, might think they have seen on TV is almost the exact opposite of what that image represents. Sky is trying to do the same, although with less talent amongst its 'presenters', who consistently over-act.
ReplyDeleteThere's nothing quite so deadly as ignorance combined with stupidity, though either one alone is pretty bad. And altogether that adds up to at least 2/3rds of humanity which provides a huge pool for reptiles to piss into.
DeleteOn David, the marvellous Philomena: https://media.crooksandliars.com/2023/03/52186.mp4_high.mp4 (from https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2023/03/24/art-is-going-to-disappear-when-the-puritans-take-over/ which has a lot of good comments.)
ReplyDeleteThe pond did like a comment at the bottom of that blog Joe ..."If that’s porn, the bible is slasher fic."
DeleteIt certainly got people aroused, if a little anxious ...
The problem with classical porn like this is that delivering the centerfold every month requires a huge truck, costs a fortune and fills up the ballroom pretty quickly.
But perhaps the best bit of smut came with this one ...
This morning I taught a small class of 17 year olds about the Pronomos Vase – a piece of Greek pottery art central to our understanding of Satyr Drama and the changing nature of Athenian theatre culture at the end of the 5th Century BC. There are penises all over it. Lots of them. Fifteen or so. We counted.
Then I did a Latin translation from the third book of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria with a class of 18 year olds. The text was a catalogue of sex positions and which mythic heroines preferred each one. I had to point out several smutty allusions that need close knowledge of 1st Century Roman slang to appreciate.
After break my class of 16 year old girls got on with Aristophanes’ Frogs. We debated whether the famous “lost his oil jar” routine at the end was a barely-concealed sexual reference or not, given the suggestive shape of the lekythion in question. We also had a serious discussion of whether art really can teach people to be morally good, and what role it plays in society – one of the key themes of the play.
Running up to lunchtime I spent some time with my 13 year old Year 8 class. They’re looking at Roman Britain, and between translating some inscriptions on the tombstones of Roman soldiers sent to pacify the province we looked at the depiction of Claudius raping Britannica at the Sebasteion in Aphrodisias. That has boobies too.
It’s lunchtime now, and, after I cover an English lesson for a colleague, I will be teaching a lesson on the use of the subjunctive mood in Latin to 15 year olds. There will be practice sentences involving Roman sculptures and their various body parts, which may or may not still survive.
I teach at a Catholic girls’ school in Surrey. Which is about as Tory as you can get in UK terms. I expect precisely zero push-back on any of this.
Now that's the sort of Catholic girls' school we should all attend ...
The thing that always puzzles me is just when did genitalia become 'censorable' ? After all, homo sapiens sapiens has been around for at least 190,000 years, and homo sapiens for at least 300,000 and all of the stuff we have any knowledge of is about 4000 - 5000 years old at most. And even that isn't uniform by any means as the Greek and Roman sculptures and other 'art' clearly demonstrates.
DeleteSo when, and why ?
"Does Polonius ever get tired of hitting his shortcut key to produce 'The ABC then was a conservative-free zone without one conservative presenter, producer or editor for any of its prominent television, radio or online outlets. It remains so today.'"
ReplyDeleteAw c'mon, the point is that if it's just a tap on a function key, then he never has to waste any time thinking about any of it. Just 'tap' and it's all done and he can wait for tomorrow to do it again. Rinse and repeat.
Besides: The Sage: "It’s laughable how these people just make shit up because they want it to be so."
I don’t watch it anymore because it’s full of the fuckers.
DeleteCouldn't quite come at Slappy (Snappy ?) doing her usual thing of expounding just how much the world is completely the way she imagines it. So instead, a touch of Shannahanna: "As a teacher before I began column writing (a doddle in comparison) it was plain to me before I left teaching in the late 1990s that our education system was in decline. There seemed to be a lot of running free in the classroom."
ReplyDeleteAnd that's what one would kinda expect from a Catholic school girl who went on to have 9 children (can she name them all in age order ?) one of whom she gratuitously disowned because of his love preference. Discipline, discipline, obedience, submission - that's the way.
But then I would like to know if our education is "declining" where do our major companies and governments get their recruits from ? It can't be from Australia because our kids - ever since Angela left the education system in the 1990s, a mere 28 years or so ago - have been getting progressively worse and less education. Is it that our corporations and governments can only hire imigrants who have received a much better education than the locals ? Is that why the farmers can't get fruit pickers - because the immigrants are all in much better jobs than that now ? 28 years is a whole generation, enough time for our 'declining' education to have failed altogether.
Then how come they're still passing exams and getting let into unis ? Does this mean that our standards have declined just to match our education decline ? And what has Angie done to maintain a high standard of education amongst her own kids ? Is just sending them all to Catholic Schools sufficient ? And do they all sit still and stay very quiet as Angie seems to think is essential for a non-declining education ?
And talking about art:
ReplyDeletehttps://twitter.com/i/status/1638503674849656833