In which there's prattling Polonius, the angelic one, Jimbo from the deep north, and a surprise appearance by doggy boy ...

 

Such are the pond's travails that it somehow feels soothing and comforting to turn to Polonius's prattle for a Sunday meditation.

Most likely the ABC will be responsible for the destruction of the country, a mantra crooned so often it has the hypnotic power of Krishnas chanting Hare Krishna ...

Was it so long ago that Polonius was berating this talented and fine journalist and broadcaster as a myth-maker?

...The problem is that the myth has been perpetrated by some high-profile and influential Indigenous Australians, including Stan Grant (in his January 2016 address to the Ethics Centre, which was a finalist in the United Nations Media Peace Awards) and Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney (in the House of Representatives on September 23 last year).

Actually it was in February of this year, and while it wasn't Polonius - it was his dog - who took a negative view in the March issue of the Sydney Institute's media scratchings, still this was hardly a grand write up of a fine and talented journalist ...

... Stan Grant has become boringly preachy.  Moreover, many Q+A panels are flat due, primarily, to the fact that they frequently are bereft of prominent Australians. It would appear that some well-known Australians will not appear on the program.  And then there is the fact that the ABC has “cancelled” quite a few political conservatives who do not get the opportunity to decline an invitation because they are not invited in the first place.

The “highlights” of Q+A on Monday 13 March consisted of yet another appearance by British socialist activist and singer-songwriter Billy Bragg.  It’s difficult to imagine that a leftist Australian singer visiting Britain would be invited on the BBC TV’s Any Questions?  program, on which Q+A was modelled.  The highlight of the program occurred when Comrade Bragg praised the British taxpayer for paying for his apprenticeship as a rock ‘n’ roller.  Apparently, he was on the dole at the time.

Stan Grant used the Q+A bully pulpit to editorialise against the proposed Stage 3 tax cuts which he (falsely) claimed will go to “the richest people in the country” – overlooking the fact that they will also benefit middle income earners and prevail against bracket creep at a time of high inflation.

Comrade Grant also complained that the ABC is “still predominantly a white-managed, white-run organisation”. And so it is.  But he did not mention the fact that ABC’s leading presenters are overwhelmingly white – in spite of the fact that they are wont to call for ethnic diversity in other areas of society.

What’s more, Stan Grant said nothing when panellist Antoinette Lattouf suggested that Australia is into “neo-Nazism”. Yet another lightweight comparison between democratic Australia and the Nazi totalitarian dictatorship in Germany between 1933 and 1945.

And then there is the Q+A survey. This is the result of the (leading) question on AUKUS which viewers were asked to vote on at the beginning of the 13 March program – as announced by Stan Grant:

Stan Grant:  Let’s bring you the results of our online poll now.  Remember we asked you…”Can we afford to spend $200 billion on nuclear submarines for war that may or may not happen?” 62 per cent ‘No’ and ‘Yes’ 30 per cent. ‘Unsure’ 8 per cent.

That’s just push-polling.  No one has suggested that Australia should spend money “for war”.  The idea of security is to prevent war.  Little wonder that around two-thirds of the Q+A audience (if there was one) ran the left-wing line against AUKUS in such numbers.

And so on and on, from back in the day this fine and talented journalist was a mere comrade Grant. 

A better student could find other examples - Polonius's dog was always on about QandA, but the pond is content in its enlightenment. It is possible to be a fine and talented journalist, and a boringly preachy myth maker at one and the same time - a kind of Schrödinger's journalist ...

Of course there came the moment when Stan berated the ABC, and then suddenly the enemy of the enemy became a Polonial friend ... and now it's time to march on and to take down the Constructivist Institute, because everyone knows that Constructivism lacked the charms of Objectivism and Instructivism, and lordy, long absent lordy, does Polonius know how to instructivise ...

On the upside, Polonius seems to have completely forgotten about the ABC ...can that memory lapse last? 

Of course not. Regular readers of the pond's Sunday meditation are likely to have forgotten that the ABC is a conservative-free zone, what with Polonius going in one ear and out the other, but please remember its a barren wasteland, likely filled with baying leftist mobs, and definitely free of Polonius, though he's an astonishing ratings reaper ...

Strange, in all the times the pond has read Polonius, it seemed commentary writing was all about agreeing to agree that everybody but Polonius was in grievous error, with sins ranging from the venial to the mortal ... with anybody who disagrees immediately assigned the label of 'leetist', an insult preferably best deployed from the inner CBD leet eyrie of Phillips street where you could look down on the passing mob and do an Orson Welles' impression ...

...Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax - the only way conservatives at the Sydney Institute can save money nowadays.

The good thing about Polonius is that he keeps his prattle to three gobbets and the same can be said for the Angelic one ...

Okay, before we get on to the Angelic one, take a squiz at that graphic. It looks even worse than the crap that Meta dumped into Meta world, though the Oz teens do at least have legs ...

Is this where the lizard Oz graphics department is going to end up? Using AI to generate images relying on fodder from the 1960s?

As for the Angelic one herself, he pond realises that all this will be familiar to devotees of fundamentalist Catholic thinking and the Angelic one's urgent call for marriage, families and breeders - thereby to feed the maw of a voracious animal always in need of fresh victims - contains nothing new, but the pond enjoys the way that familiarity reliably breeds contempt ...

There's even a hint that at some point the Angelic one might have heard the old Python sketch, but really that joke about one bedroom shacks, smelly oily rags and sushi is no match. How are the younglings and vulgar youff going to learn how to do it if they don't know the classics ...

...TJ: You were lucky to have a LAKE! There were a hundred and sixty of us living in a small shoebox in the middle of the road.

MP: Cardboard box?

TJ: Aye.

MP: You were lucky. We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six o'clock in the morning, clean the bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down mill for fourteen hours a day week in-week out. When we got home, our Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt!

GC: Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at three o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, go to work at the mill every day for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would beat us around the head and neck with a broken bottle, if we were LUCKY!

TJ: Well we had it tough. We used to have to get up out of the shoebox at twelve o'clock at night, and LICK the road clean with our tongues. We had half a handful of freezing cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at the mill for fourpence every six years, and when we got home, our Dad would slice us in two with a bread knife.

Well that's it. Try to be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations, and do make sure to get married and breed a lot, remember every sperm is sacred, every sperm is great, and if a sperm is wasted, god gets quite irate, and do make sure that the children grow up within the Catholic faith, because molestation is great way to develop character ...

 

The pond should have added a reminder to install a picket fence, a snap of Queen Liz II in the lounge, sundry mementoes from the 1950s and a snap of Petey boy in the toilet as an inspiration to all visitors ...

And so to an eccentric tucked away below the lizard Oz fold early in the weekend, but a nugget well worth the finding ... sure it's about the Voice, but it's also a gripe about vulgar youff and academics and eating people is wrong but eating other academics is okay, and whatever, and the pond is always on board for a burst of that from Jimbo of the north ...

Please take note of the use of "virtue signalling". It will come in handy later as Jimbo continues his rant ...

There you go.  Talk of a need for diversity followed by a complaint about diversity, followed by "Virtue signalling", followed by "the prism of identity politics" and at that point the pond always reaches for its Glock. 

It's shallow, lazy, tribal, a form of dog whistling to those of like minds, and to be blunt, it's the sort of mindless moronic invocation you'd expect of a second rate academic hack bereft of a decent vocabulary, but always willing to resort to short hand ...

It does make the invocation of John Stuart Mill comical, but irony and self-awareness are singularly lacking in Jimbo's whining and claiming of victimhood, helped along by a healthy paranoid persecution complex ...

About all that might be added is "Orwellian" or in lieu of that, "groupthink", and sure enough ...

A sadder state of affairs would be having to take a course with Jimbo, but while on the subject of group think ... how much blather about group think, virtue signalling and identity politics would a student have to endure? 

Is it true that they'll look back and remember how they used to have to get out of lecture theatre at three o'clock in the morning, clean the prof's glasses, eat a handful of hot gravel, and write a paper about 'Orwellian' for a mate each day, for just tuppence a page?

At this point the pond had a touch of the guilts. Why had the pond banned the dog botherer simply because he was scribbling in favour of the Voice?

Fair enough to blame Dame Slap, and give her the usual red card, but why not let the dog botherer run wild and free and perhaps show to Jimbo that instead of navel gazing and fluff gathering about life on campus, some of the issues might actually be discussed?

So here he is ...

What's astonishing - spoiler alert - is that the pond did a check and that there's not a single mention of climate science denialism.

That alone is a remarkable achievement for doggie boy ...

Would it have been so hard for Jimbo of the deep north to have mounted persuasive arguments for the "no" side, instead of blathering on about life on campus, identity politics, virtue signalling and the like?

Apparently not, if you're just an addled, idle-minded dog whistling prof, and yet look, the prof has whistled up the dog botherer ...

Some might wonder why the pond hasn't interrupted with a cartoon by this point, but the dog botherer is on a roll, and the pond let him keep rolling ...

Frankly it was an easier read than the rain-sodden pamphlet on the issue that dropped into the pond's letter box a few days ago and has since spent an interminable amount of time drying out ... and as promised, not a single mention of climate science denialism, surely a novelty worth noting several times, because the dog botherer usually couldn't resist a mention, if only as proof that he hadn't gone over entirely to the wrong side ...

And with that the pond can turn to a few cartoons to wrap up the day. The pond overdid the cartoons yesterday, so here's just a few to go on with ...

And that final panel featuring Jesse reminded the pond of a man desperately trying to avoid coming out. 

The best he can do is to confess that he likes it hard, really hard ... oh hurt me with your hard ...