In which the pond has much business, but in the end goes howling at the moon with the dog botherer and turns authoritarian crypto-fascist with the bromancer ...

 

A lot to cover in the lizard Oz this day, so why not start with the top of the page ma, digital and tree killer editions ...

 

The pond has always thought the Olympics were a bad idea, ever since watching Leni Riefenstahl demonstrated what an easy mix the games were with Adolf and the Nazi party, and it seems that mixing cane toads with the Olympics might be just as bad ...

Who on earth is this Andrew Liveris? There are a few that travel by that name, but the AFR gave a clue ...

At one time, back in the day when gas was all the go, the buddy of clap happy SloMo was a figure of fun for the reptiles ...

And so on ... if you can break the reptile paywall, you can see what a doofus he is, and inevitably why the reptiles were wildly excited this day by his call to nuke the games ... they won't be happy until they've nuked Queensland, the country and the planet ...

Moving right along, Dame Slap was also at the top of the digital edition ...

As it's Dame Slap slapping the Voice yet again, the pond issued an automatic red card, but before sending her from the field, couldn't help but notice that for a moment she sounded like the pond ...

...It was no surprise, then, though highly amusing, to read that constitutional law professor Greg Craven said he “was beside myself with rage” after one of his quotes was repeated, perfectly accurately, in the official No pamphlet. Craven had said: “I think it’s fatally flawed because what it does is retain the full range of review of executive action. This means the voice can comment on everything from submarines to parking tickets … We will have regular judicial interventions.”
Craven claims he was taken out of context because he is a Yes voter. Being a Yes voter doesn’t alter the substance of what he said. He was right to point to the fatal flaw. Craven should be grateful the No pamphlet didn’t quote some of his other equally accurate and incisive comments. For example, writing in The Australian on March 24, Craven described “Anthony Albanese’s much-hyped revelation of his constitutional words for the voice” as “a ruthless con job”. Why should we doubt him?

Once again the craven Craven had fed rich red meat to the likes of Dame Slap. Talk about another prize doofus ...and there was another moment worth noting ...

...Langton’s threat in an interview with this newspaper a few months ago that if Australians were so ungrateful as to vote No, they could forget about asking her to do a welcome to country: “I imagine that most Australians who are non-Indigenous, if we lose the ­referendum, will not be able to look me in the eye,” she said. “How are they going to ever ask an Indigenous person, a traditional owner, for a welcome to country? How are they ever going to be able to ask me to come and speak at their conference? If they have the temerity to do it, of course the answer is going to be no.”

It was an unfortunate thrust by Langton, apparently not realising that it wasn't about being able to look in the eye, a tricky business given that the Aboriginal people the pond has done business with tend to shy away from looks in the eye as confronting.

No, Dame Slap would cheerfully spit in her eye at the thought of a welcome to country, and will be pleased to do the same again should the referendum go down ... because nothing pleases Dame Slap more than doing down uppity, difficult blacks. Perhaps it's a blonde thing, Leni would know ...

But enough of all that, the pond simply has to make room for the dog botherer's whine and bark about everything, a feature of the lizard Oz now that ponderous, portentous and pompous "Ned" Kelly seems to be taking more and more time off ...

Right out of the gate the reptiles led with climate change, and the pond seized the moment to slip in a NY Times story as a reminder of an alternative world outside the lizard Oz ...

Now it's on with the whining, the barking at the moon, and the scratching for fleas ...

This is not regular turf for the dog botherer, but a measure of the way that assorted phobias have infested the reptiles.

Once upon a time poofter bashing used to be a sport much loved by a section of the populace, until assorted murders suggested it might be time to stop; now snide and malicious bashing of those who are other, or different, or in a minority is part of the regular routine for reptiles ...

Inclusion? Forget it. Exclusion and mockery and abuse are where it's at in dog botherer and reptile la la land.

Naturally the graphics department slipped in a snap to go with the bashing ...

But this is a general dog botherer barking and whining and howling at the moon, encompassing all sorts of thought crimes ... so we must note how fluidly and expertly the dog botherer slips through topics, co-joining them in bizarre couplings ...

There he blows, climate science denialism is never far from the dog botherer surface, and speaking of lived reality, there was a bit more in that NY Times' story ...

Why not wash it down with a Kudelka?

A lived reality no doubt coming to a southern country or two this summer ...

Will masks and virtue signalling get a mention? Of course they will, the dog botherer is a Kompanion in arms when it comes to Killer's mask Krusade ...

This will be a familiar line to those who devoured the hole in the bucket man yesterday. How the lizard Oz reptiles want conspiracy theories to run wild and free, to run rampant around the world ...

It's understandable. Why, when the pond wants wild disinformation and disingenuous lies and a heady dose of authoritarianism heading towards fascism, it always turns to the mother of all disinformation fountains, wacky and zany and way out there News Corp ...

Here's the thing. No one knows the source of the virus, and likely, given the opaque ways of Chairman Xi's dictatorship, no one is likely to know with any confidence ... and yet through the magical powers he possesses, the dog botherer shows the same sort of confidence about that as he does about climate science ... speaking of which ...

An interesting dynamic? Well that's one way of putting it ... and now back to the dog botherer in full certainty mode, doing that well-known Killer thing about masks, without bothering to explain why stupid surgeons insist on wearing masks in operating theatres ...

Made it to the end without howling in rage? Congratulations, here's your prize ...

And now, in lieu of "Ned", joyously absent, the prize place for reptile Everest climbers goes to a lengthy piece by the dog botherer.

Here the pond should warn that having already once broken Godwin's Law in the matter of the Olympics, the pond feels empowered to keep on breaking it, if only because the dog botherer is such an inspiration ...

The pond will start by slipping in a note before the bromancer really gets going, before the dog botherer truly hits his stride and starts to wax lyrical about authoritarians, crypto-fascists and old-fashioned fascists ...

It came at a book launch and has generally been erased from the intertubes, apart from the pond, and it featured the bro's good buddy, the onion muncher, speaking at said launch and recalling ...

...In the famous Melbourne University debate about the Spanish Civil War, he declared: “when the bullets of the atheists struck the statue of Christ outside the cathedral in Madrid, for some that was just steel striking brass. But for me, those bullets were piecing the heart of Christ the King”. He could engender a thrill in the heart that was part patriotism, part Christian idealism and part “fighting the good fight”. I was lucky to know BA Santamaria for the last 22 years of his life, to have attended diligently to his writing and speaking over that time and to have been the beneficiary of the occasional private lunch and long phone call.

No need to decode that, it's clear enough. The heart tells where the heart is ...

The Catholic Church and its minions have long had a comfortable relationship with far right ratbaggery and outright fascism ...

As usual there's a wiki on the topic, clerical fascism, which ranges much further than the pond can, but just a slice will serve as a reminder of the bromancer's roots and the reasons for his authoritarian inclinations ...

The term clerical fascism (clero-fascism or clerico-fascism) emerged in the early 1920s in the Kingdom of Italy, referring to the faction of the Roman Catholic Partito Popolare Italiano (PPI) which supported Benito Mussolini and his régime. It was supposedly coined by Don Luigi Sturzo, a priest and Christian democrat leader who opposed Mussolini and went into exile in 1924, although the term had also been used before Mussolini's March on Rome in 1922 to refer to Catholics in Northern Italy who advocated a synthesis of Roman Catholicism and fascism.

Sturzo made a distinction between the "filofascists", who left the Catholic PPI in 1921 and 1922, and the "clerical fascists" who stayed in the party after the March on Rome, advocating collaboration with the fascist government. Eventually, the latter group converged with Mussolini, abandoning the PPI in 1923 and creating the Centro Nazionale Italiano. The PPI was disbanded by the fascist régime in 1926.

The term has since been used by scholars seeking to contrast authoritarian-conservative clerical fascism with more radical variants. Christian fascists focus on internal religious politics, such as passing laws and regulations that reflect their view of Christianity. Radicalized forms of Christian fascism or clerical fascism (clero-fascism or clerico-fascism) were emerging on the far-right of the political spectrum in some European countries during the interwar period in the first half of the 20th century ...

As usual, the pond left the footnotes at the wiki so it could get on to the bromancer applauding the rise of the far right in the first half of the twenty first century ...

And there's the nub of it, and the reason why the pond slipped in B.A. Santamaria early, because you won't find the bromancer sniping at those who fraudulently valorise the fascists in the Spanish civil war ... or the way that Adolf helped them win it ...

But after re-naming far right loons, authoritarians and fascists as "national conservatives", it's on with more faux purging ...

At this point the reptiles interrupted with a snap ...

The pond would like to counter with a reminder that Mussolini is still revered in some parts of Italy, and there's something of a track record ...

It helps in understanding the bromancer's instinctive yearnings...

Note how quickly and easily the bromancer resorts to both siderism as a defence ... but then that's needed when you take a look at the lickspittle fellow travelling of the church ...

Inevitably it isn't long before the bro switches from both siderism to his deep love of Viktor ...

It goes without saying, though the dissembling fellow travelling bromancer can't bring himself to say it, that Orban is a far right authoritarian power mongering thug who has set himself up in style for a long reign ...

It doesn't surprise the pond ... there's a history there ...

In Hungary, as elsewhere in Europe, the Nazi onslaught against the Jews took place in a climate of opinion that had been conditioned by centuries of Christian hostility to the Jews and Judaism. The Christian churches were involved in laying the groundwork for the public acceptance of the everharsher measures adopted against the Jews, including those relating to the “Final Solution.” Both before and during the Nazi era, the three major Christian denominations in Hungary—the Catholic, Reformed (Calvinist), and Evangelical (Lutheran)—espoused venomous anti-Judaism and antisemitism, portraying the Jews as a people who had betrayed God and had become forever cursed for the crucifixion of Jesus.

Dedicated to the protection of their institutional interests, the Christian churches emerged as major pillars of Hungary’s reactionary regimes. They shared with the ultra-conservatives and the Right radicals their opposition to modernization, liberalism, Communism, and freemasonry—movements that had within their ranks a relatively large number of secular Jewish intellectuals. They were also in the forefront of the chauvinistic-reactionary campaigns that aimed to preserve Hungary’s antiquated semi-feudalistic socioeconomic order and to safeguard the purity of the national-Christian spirit. In pursuit of these objectives, the church leaders rationalized their role as a mandate to counter “radical” leftist ideas and movements and to defend the nation from the “harmful” economic and cultural influence of the Jews. They championed these causes, which often involved the subjection of the Jews to an institutionalized policy of humiliation and discrimination, with fervor until the end of the Nazi era.

Perhaps something a little more up to date? 

How about Hungary's authoritarian leader is no gift to US conservatives ...

Since 2012, I have documented for Human Rights Watch this realization of Orbán’s vision — and the draconian policies and practices he has employed to this end. Orbán hijacked public institutions, attacked the independence of courts, and left almost no independent media standing. He has criminalized basic democratic activities by civil society organizations, attacked the rights of LGBT and transgender people, and banned same-sex unions. He encouraged ruthless and rights-abusing treatment of migrants and refugees and the criminalization of those who help them.

His alleged “pro-family” policies actually reinforce traditional gender roles and undermine equality between men and women, reducing women to their reproductive function. Orbán’s previously subtle adherence to the racist “great replacement” theory, which contends that Western countries’ elites are trying to replace white people with nonwhite people for political gain, has reached a shocking fever pitch, risking emboldening white supremacists.

Orbán also has tinkered with the electoral laws to the point that his party needs less than a simple majority of the vote for him to rule with a majority in parliament, and thereby to continue gutting Hungary’s democracy. He has done all of this while using nationalist rhetoric to cement himself and his party as the defenders of the Hungarian, conservative Christian way of life.

In late July, he caused an international uproar when he delivered a stunningly racist speech against migration to ethnic Hungarians in Romania, claiming he wants to prevent Hungary from becoming a “mixed-race” country. Doubling down on white nationalism, Orbán claimed that countries where Europeans live alongside non-Europeans “are no longer nations: they are nothing more than a conglomeration of peoples.”

In the same speech, he made a veiled reference to Nazi gas chambers as a joke. One of Orbán’s advisers resigned shortly after the bigotry-riddled speech, and Romania’s foreign minister and the International Auschwitz Committee of Holocaust survivors condemned his remarks.

But Orbán’s headlining appearance in Dallas, at one of the most influential gatherings in the U.S. of conservatives and Republican Party leaders, apparently will go on. So, why would they want to hear from this wanna-be autocrat? What lessons could he offer for a movement that historically has supposedly stood in opposition to authoritarian rule?...

Why would the bromancer be so devoted to Viktor? You don't have to look far to see the dissembling for the cause ... wherever the cause can be found ...

It's never gone way, and has always lurked beneath the surface, except when it bubbled up to the top ... as when Catholic prelates led by Archbishop Aloysius Stepinac attended the funeral of Marko Došen, one of the senior Ustaše leaders, in September 1944 ...

Meanwhile, it goes without saying that the bromancer has time to spare a thought for Marine Le Pen ...

And so the bromancer cheerfully joins in with the climate denialists, while cheekily providing a link to Times story picked up by the lizard Oz ...

And so on, and that, in essence, is what the dog botherer has spent his time celebrating this day ... the destruction of the planet, urged on by far right loons ...

By this time the pond was vastly relieved that there was just one gobbet of this authoritarian tosh to go ...

Ah the bromancer, full of hope for authoritarian dictators and not so crypto-far right loons with fascist tendencies and all because of a meaningless "stand for everything" word ...

Blather about "woke" is a level of inanity and stupidity that only a bromancer or a Ron DeSanctus could buy, and whenever the pond sees it deployed it usually reaches for that infamous cartoon...

But also why not pick up the end bit of a yarn in The Tampa Bay Times ...

...“Woke” is ill-defined. Margie Omero, a Democratic pollster and principal at GBAO, a Washington, D.C., research company, said “woke” raises an important polling conundrum: If there’s no shared understanding of what a word means, can you still test it?
“Despite Republican efforts to make the word a rallying cry, voters in the (American Teachers Federation-Hart Research) poll clearly say (’woke’ is) not a top-tier concern — either because of unfamiliarity with the word or because of a rejection of the divisiveness its use now represents,” Omero said.
The questions imply false connections. Justin Gross, a University of Massachusetts, Amherst political science professor, said the Harvard CAPS Harris poll, for example, implies a plausible causal connection between “woke politicians” and crime, which pushes respondents more toward answering that “yes,” higher crime and “wokeness” are linked.

The questions lead the witness. Tatishe Nteta, a provost professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Gross’ colleague, said including “woke” primes poll respondents to apply their own views of the term and the groups associated with it (progressives and people of color) rather than objectively assessing the “woke” policies or candidates.
The questions make false assumptions. Gross said the Harvard CAPS Harris poll’s question about whether “stopping the teaching of woke ideologies in schools” is an important issue assumes that “woke ideologies” are being taught in schools.
“Even if I don’t know what it means, it clearly doesn’t sound like something I should be happy about,” Gross said. “Try this question and see what happens: ‘How concerned are you about the euthanizing of puppies and kittens for dissection in high school biology classes?’”
Janine A. Parry, a University of Arkansas political science professor who directs the 24-year-old Arkansas Poll, said polling provocative “culture war”-type constructs such as “woke” struck her as simultaneously irresistible and silly. When concepts such as “woke” are trending, she said, it’s natural for pollsters, political actors, news organizations and others to want to gauge their broad level of support.
“(But) the reason they’re trending is because — despite being conceptually squishy — loud swaths of the electorate have staked out hyperbolic positions on them,” Parry said. “So, when we poll them, we’re really just measuring support for a progressive versus a conservative worldview, not support for any particular policy.”

And after all that, is it any wonder the pond reaches for an infallible Pope and a serve of pink, the more pink the better ...