Before getting on to a generous serve of bothsiderism and whataboutism, the pond realised it was remiss yesterday and didn't feature the lizard Oz tree killer edition, and what a beauty it was, with the demonic Fauci risen from the grave to dominate, hand on worried forehead, exuding black and white criminality...
Is there an irony in the lizard Oz denouncing the silencing of science, while routinely disappearing climate science and climate change news into the cornfield?
Possibly, but the pond was too overwhelmed to notice. Sunday is a quieter time, a time for a little prattle and a few cartoons and guests overlooked in yesterday's comments section ...
Now there were some doozies. Ramesh Thakur's reference to "sectarian ancestry" was beyond the valley of the fruity.
In ancient times, the pond understood that "sectarian" as a tribal thing, as per the dictionary definition of an excessive attachment to a particular sect or party, especially in religion. Suddenly...
Using sectarian ancestry as the organising principle to add a chapter to the nation’s foundational governance document will inject the poison of race-based preferential access to parliament and government into the heart of the body politic.
What was even more astonishing was the tag:
Ramesh Thakur is emeritus professor at ANU’s Crawford School of Public Policy and is a former UN assistant secretary-general.
The pond had noted some correspondents had been sniping at ANU, and thought it a never no mind, but maybe things were as dire as had been proposed ...
If an emeritus prof can abuse the meaning of "sectarian", what on earth is happening to the freshers?
It was simply too much, and there were other items that the pond gave short shrift to ... the 'here no conflict of interest' offering from simpleton Simon, and the oscillating fan blowing in the wind in his usual way could be summed up as being just more reptile sludge, space fillers, makeweight padding...
The pond also discounted Dame Slap, still doing what she must do to attract attention to her land above the faraway tree with a never ending attention to the Lehrmann matter ...
How close is too close? Is a paranoid obsessive compulsive relentless scribbling on the matter too close. And yesterday the Rice cooker seemed shattered by bad news, while the pond went sailing by ...
No, it was just going to be a quiet, meditative day, a little both siderism here, a little whataboutism there, and a few cartoons to help it all go down ...
Now in his frantic bids to save the Catholic church and Pellism, Polonius has been trotting out this sort of bothsidirist whataboutism for yonks.
Back in March 2022
brave souls who visited the Sydney Institute might read ...
...The Royal Commission found that some 60 per cent of those who complained of child sexual abuse – most of which related to the period of the 1960s and 1970s – in a religious institution were in Catholic institutions. But it overlooked the fact that, at this time, the Catholic Church ran its own education system – along with numerous orphanages, hospitals and the like. In other words, around 80 per cent of children in religious institutions at this time would have been in Catholic institutions.
This suggests that a child in a religious institution in the 1960s and 1970s would have been safer in a Catholic than in a non-Catholic religious institution. When I asked Robert Fitzgerald, a member of the Royal Commission, about this he said that he and his colleagues had made no prevalence studies of this kind. He then avoided the question and, soon after, went into off-the-record mode. In short, Mr Fitzgerald refused to address the issue.
Due to its overwhelming focus on the Catholic Church – and, to a lesser extent, the Anglican Church – the Royal Commission let many a government institution off-the-hook. In particular, State police forces and government education departments.
In its innocence, the pond thought that child abuse should be above tribalism, and that pointing the fingers at others to excuse the behaviour of your own tribe was beyond the pale.
Did not Matthew 7, v 3-5 say:
And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?
Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.
True, there's not much concern for thy sister's eye, but the point holds, a point resolutely ignored by Polonius's constant harping on about the mote in other eyes, while routinely downplaying the mote in Catholic and Pellist eyes ...
It reminds the pond of that old song, the lyrics of which the pond can barely remember, but it ran something like this ...
Well there's a little Polonius waitin' at the Royal Commission store
He's been waitin' down there, waitin' half the day.
They never seen to have the time
Catholics get pushed around
Knocked to the ground
Sure they did it, but why does the RC care
He gets to his feet and he says.
"What about them? It isn't fair.
We've copped enough, now they should get their share
Can't you see? The way to forgive
Is to just dole out more to them than what we tried to avoid copping..."
Hmm, doesn't really scan ...
At this point the reptiles interrupted the pond's musical musings with a shot of a dreadful harridan who really should have been taken out to sea in a chaff bag, it being the next best thing after the Inquisition for dealing with trouble makers ...
Speaking of harridans, the Church still knows how to deal with them and so does the GOP...
Sorry, the pond has been over this turf with Polonius so many times and it's not just the mote in the eye, it's in the enduring chip on the shoulder, the sense that the whole world is agin him and barking mad crooked tykes embedded in a deeply corrupt Ponzi scheme running church ...
Could it be that for all the both siderism and the whataboutism, the Catholic church had a particularly shameful record, producing a dire legacy still not resolved?
The pond has no sectarian axe to grind in this matter (as the word was once understood).
The pond had enough experience in public schools to know that child abuse of one kind or another was common in the dark days in many areas ...but that doesn't serve as a
distraction from other crimes ...(paywall) ...and not just your average ones, but ones committed on an astonishing scale around the planet ...
And so on and on, and all over the shop, and it's the international scale of the dank and dire corruption that continues to astonish ... but when you're desperate to distract, there's nothing like whataboutism to help ...
In his own humble way, Polonius is part of the sickness, and the disease. If it were a crusade to expose the abuse of minors in all sorts of places by all kinds of people, well and good, but at bottom, it's the classic way of the criminal, a matter of confusing and conflating and distracting, and in a perverse way, almost an excusing ...
It wasn't just me that done it, your honour, he did it too ... maybe you've been too hard on me, maybe you should give me a lighter sentence, because while I might be guilty as hell, so is he ... (or she, as the case may be).
Well one serve of bothsiderism and whataboutism deserves another, and so the pond can move on to the Angelic one making plans for Nigel ...
Usually when confronted by gibberish about 'woke' and cancel culture and all the rest of the moronic overuse of reptile shorthand, the pond would go the obvious ...
But there's another disconnect here. It's possible to have a matching contempt for banks and for Nigel.
Well yes, who cares if a bottom feeding leech, who sucked the life out of the country with his Brexit lies, has had trouble banking with the dead Queen's banker and, pride hurt, felt slighted and didn't want to do his banking with common folk...
And that's why the pond finds the Angelic one so piquant, reaching like a prize maroon for the usual sort of abuse of the English language by egregiously evoking for the zillionth time "cancel culture" ...
Whatever a disingenuous grifter is? Must the pond explain even the most obvious things to the Angelic one ...
At this point the reptiles stuck in a snap of a banking person as if the pond might care ...
But the pond decided it would be better off putting the Kettle on for another cup of tea, while learning you can chew gum and talk before having your first sip ...
Well yes, you don't have to be in the business of defending banks to find Nigel completely indefensible ...
That's a bit like recent attempts to defend slavery for the alleged benefits it produces ...
Sorry, the pond did promise cartoons, but it was a tad cheeky to sneak in so many before the Angelic one had her final word. On the other hand, it seems that like Spartacus, we are all Nigels ...
Oh the poor, pathetic, timid little mouse, still frightened by teh gaze and teh voice and all the rest of it ...
The pond must bear her fear and suffering in mind the next time it opens a Swiss bank account or sets up a tax dodge in the Cayman islands ...
And now to a quick bonus, the lizard Oz editorialist gassed up and full of gas ...
Truth to tell, the pond only went with that gaseous outburst, (1), to confirm that you can never tear fossil fuels from the cold dead claws of the reptiles and (2) because the pond could segue to a couple of climate cartoons ...
As for these cartoons, the pond has no excuse and no segue, they simply are that they are ... and very suited to a Sunday meditation on recent events elsewhere ...
So, I just don't get it: was Farage really just too woke (or was that anti-woke ?) for Coutts, or was his account level too small for them, or both of the above ? Or was it just so that Coutts didn't have to admit to having (relative) paupers as customers ?
ReplyDeleteI admit I wouldn't want Farage as a neighbour, but still, what was it really all about ?
Further reading:
Deletehttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/29/give-nigel-farage-grievance-whip-up-storm-coutts
...Untainted by political office – the only election Farage has ever managed to win, ironically, is to the European parliament – he was free to play the professional rabble-rouser or, as it’s also known, “man of the people”. He excelled in the role because he is a gifted blamer of others: Europeans, bureaucrats, the establishment, immigrants, Tories, Labour, anyone and everyone.
As a serial loser in British politics (he stood in seven constituency elections and lost them all), what he’s never had to worry about is outcomes. His power has always been at one remove, where responsibility rests with some fool who will sooner or later be subject to Farage’s I’m-just-telling-it-like-it-is brand of scorn. He even expressed disappointment with Brexit, as if its grey reality was not of his making.
In this respect, if no other, Farage is resolutely modern: a born disrupter, a habitual fomenter of grievance with zero obligation to produce results. He is the loudmouth curmudgeon, the carefree voice of old fogeyism, the bar-room bore who thrives on the national stage.
But after the grim spectacle of Brexit, and his proclaimed retirement from politics, where could he go? Not to the House of Lords, because Boris Johnson, in jealous protection of his own saviour myth, had no desire to honour his progenitor. So the obvious answer was GB News, where rightwingers move to moan about the state of the nation after so many years of rightwing government.
Condemned to live among the undead with Dan Wootton and Eamonn Holmes, he was rescued last month by Coutts. You don’t have to be a semiotician to see that the bank, with a background in offshore tax avoidance, was guilty of virtue-signalling when it closed his account because of his political beliefs. That error was compounded by Rose briefing a BBC journalist with false information about Farage.
He is not really a politician but a consummate complainer, because his animating passion is to be against things
As a consequence, the BBC was forced to apologise, Rose lost her job and Farage found new purpose in his. He’s calling for the rest of the NatWest (of which Coutts is a subsidiary) board to resign and wants to guarantee the right to have a bank account. Some commentators wonder if this is the opening skirmish in a battle to rein in the ESG (environmental, social and governance) movement aimed at building sustainability and progressive values in corporations. For the moment, Farage is maintaining his focus on matters of individual rights, although he’s already calling it a “war on woke banks” – this weekend it emerged that Britain’s newest “consumer champion” was launching a tool to help consumers who believe they have been “debanked”.
What’s not in doubt is that he is back in the headlines, and once more able to present himself as the little guy taking on the establishment – Coutts, renowned for its royal clients, is nothing if not a conspicuous emblem of elitism and entitlement. It doesn’t matter that there is little the ex-public schoolboy, one-time commodities trader and former Coutts client has in common with the average person in the street. Nor is it much of hindrance to him that his populist opinions are not that popular with the British public. The point is he makes himself a kind of lightning rod for public disaffection. There remains a huge reservoir of anger towards the banks, and he will know how to draw on it, although the libertarian friend of hedge-fund owners is unlikely to push for meaningful regulation in that regard.
In the end, he is not really a politician but a consummate complainer, because his animating passion is to be against things. It led to the event by which history will remember him, Britain’s inglorious exit from the EU. But it’s essentially a destructive talent. What replaces the targets he so vociferously attacks will always be somebody else’s concern.
Some very descriptive words there: "a gifted blamer of others", "he’s never had to worry about is outcomes", "GB News, where rightwingers move to moan about the state of the nation after so many years of rightwing government" [Just like Australia !]
DeleteAnd "That error was compounded by Rose briefing a BBC journalist with false information about Farage." Oh dear, the Coutts lady did lie and Farage really is rich enough to be a Coutts customer after all. So then: "In the end, he is not really a politician but a consummate complainer, because his animating passion is to be against things." Yep, we've got a lot of them out here too - eg the Doggy Bov - but maybe none quite so accomplished as Farage.
What has Julia Holman really got to do with the theme of Gerard Henderson’s article, except to use her to yet again attack the ABC via her employment there? Julia Holman’s mentioned at the start and the final conclusion of his article. In what way has Julia Holman, or the ABC for that matter done “cancel culture” with regard to child sexual abuse? The ABC has reported on the matter at state government schools and institutions.
ReplyDeleteA quick glance at the internet archives:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-30/adelaide-school-principal-charged-with-child-sex-offences/11655522
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-27/independent-inquiry-sexual-abuse-tasmanian-government-schools/12603198
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-28/daniel-andrews-announces-inquiry-into-abuse-at-beaumaris-primary/102536002
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-12-15/royal-commission-into-to-child-sexual-abuse-final-report/9262026
In the final link above, if one scrolls down to about the third entry, the ABC published the list of the roles of abusers as found by the Royal Commission:
“Perpetrators who held multiple roles, such as residential care workers in religious ministries, are counted in multiple categories….Person in religious ministry: 2113; Teacher 1378”.
Henderson also fails to comment that the Royal Commission based its conclusions on the evidence provided to it by child sexual abuse survivors. One can only assume Gerard Henderson wants a full Royal Commission into every state or government institution and the police forces even without any allegations from anyone.
We get none of Gerard’s both sides with regard to the media in any of his commentary. There's no criticism of the Murdoch media, as he often has claimed the ABC should do of itself, or his mention of the failures of the Murdoch media to ignore issues, which the Pond has previously highlighted. His Media Watch Dog is incorrectly named. It should read: Murdoch Media Lap Dog or perhaps Ultra-Conservative, rational-free zone of all things anti-ABC.
I think that just about covers it, Anony. In short: snafu.
DeleteBut we really can't expect Polonius to honestly cover this ground considering that he's never honestly covered anything in his entire life. It really is a question as to what Polonius and Bromancer and Doggy Bov etc etc without their various causes to get paid to lie for.
The Bromancer on 'Insiders' this morning. Under studio lights, we can appreciate what a great job his hair colourist is doing; a convincing matte black, without the odd chromatics that were always so distracting when Kevin Andrews was in the spotlight.
Delete:)³ Once again the comments are more interesting than the drivel above them ...
DeleteI’ve been waiting to see whether any non-News Corp media have followed up the claims made in the Reptiles’ WORLD EXCLUSIVE! on Covid. So far - nuthin’. Funny that….. (and I don’t mean “funny” as in “evidence of a world-wide conspiracy to conceal the truth”).
ReplyDelete