In which the dog botherer produces a useless metaphor and Dame Slap offers a useless view of history ...

 

There's madness and then there's undiluted insanity. 

The pond rarely mentions thugby league but did notice that it's going to be A record-hot Sunday for NRL final. ABC meteorologist Tom Saunders reassuringly cooed ...

Players and spectators will be thankful the NRL grand final is a night game considering the weather forecast.
A scorching hot north-westerly will send Western Sydney to about 35 to 36C on Sunday, as much as 12 above the October average.
This should pass the previous hottest NRL decider maximum of 34.7C at Olympic Park in 2014.
While it should cool down before kick-off at 7:30pm, a temperature in the high 20s is still likely, similar to the average maximum in the height of summer.

The female rugby league grand final will kick off at 3.55 pm ... but they're women, so you know, whatever ... 

At least the pond has been provided with an excuse to run an immortal Pope cartoon about an alarming toad invasion, not to mention climate tipping points..

Of course you won't read anything about record heat in the lizard Oz, so it's on to the usual reptile duties, and here the pond must explain, as it often does, how it got from there to here ...

First up is what's on offer in the commentary section ...

Not the bromancer on the bloody war with China again. The pond is as full as a Tamworth goog with the bromancer, and knew that war could keep for a Sunday ... it's bloody long and as useless as any bromancer screed, and ditto prattling Polonius doing his usual whataboutism about state schools as a way of excusing fiddling priests ...as if fiddling in state schools excuses the rampant fiddling done by members of the Catholic church ...

And the pond could do without the latest bout of womensplaining, at its most virulent in garrulous Gemma ...

Young men have no idea how to fit in? The pond's bet is that sitting down to a serve of garrulous Gemma would leave them completely bewildered ...

Years of mansplaining, and now we have to endure years of womensplaining?

That just left the poor old dog botherer.

 Why does the pond say "poor old"? The splash should give a clue ...

Like the America's Cup? 

Of all the useless and stupid comparisons, that should surely take the cake. A billionaire's idea of a sporting contest? The pond hadn't thought about the America's Cup for years. Apparently the next one is happening in Barcelona in 2024, but back in 2021 New Zealand wasted gazillions staging it, and now the boats are a funnier shape than a winged keel and might set any player back US$4 million, just to get a seat at the table ...

And so on ... the pond can't believe it had to waste time on such a useless and mindless comparison, such a heedless metaphor, as if contemplating a zillionaire's boat was an inspiration for Aboriginal people, but there was the dog botherer making it ...

Completely clueless ...it was the age of Alan Bond, of looting, rorting and pillaging. 

What has Alan Bond got to offer to anyone except nostalgic moments of comedy?

For those who can't remember the moment, he took the card, threw it on the ground and stamped on it ...

And yet still the dog botherer carried on with the idle, tone deaf comparison ...

The pond realised that the Voice might well be doomed ... that conflation of a superb triumvirate, the lizard Oz, alleged billionaires playing boats, and the dog botherer's birthday seemed to summon a death knell ...

The pond will be voting yes, but why does the dog botherer want to make it so hard?

At this time, the reptiles slipped in a snap ...

The pond would much rather have had a cartoon, but all the reptiles have got is a leaky vessel and a lot of Spoonerisms ... and so ...

It's an old joke, newly minted afresh, but as old as a story in the Fin ...

The dog botherer would have been better avoiding racing on the waves, and stuck to firmer ground. Meanwhile, at least the dog botherer had let the boats go ...

Alas, it's more verbiage, because much of the fearmongering has come from inside the dog botherer's house. If only he'd taken a principled stand and resigned from News Corp, cursing all and sundry as he stormed out the door ...

Okay, okay, just another idle dream ...

Sorry, the pond has already done the "Canberra voice" joke, and apparently principled stands of the Leeser kind are completely useless, so in due course we can expect more ranting climate science denialism from the dog botherer in the cesspit known as Sky after dark ... to accompany the apocalyptic end of world doomism the Voice will supposedly bring ...

And so the pond was left with just one short gobbet to go ...

Yes, fraudulent billionaires can play at boat racing, and the dog botherer will fall for it hook, line and sinker as an inspiration? If a lizard Oz headline about a fraudulent billionaire's boat race is the best the dog botherer has got, the Voice is doomed ...

The pond tottered away from the wreck looking for a bonus, and landed on Dame Slap ...

The pond rarely visits Planet Janet these days, what with all the red cards required to deal with the Lehrmann matter, and the rest of her blather, but talk of history seemed like safer turf ...

As for wanting to stop moralising about the past, that sounded like Dame Slap grasping at straws. If you wanted to look at her past, she invariably, almost infallibly gets things wrong ... from Jordan Peterson to the almost completely forgotten "Lord" - just a faux Viscount really - Christopher Monckton, she's kept bad company, topped by her donning a MAGA cap and storming out into the New York night.

Do these podcasters realise the company they're keeping?

Dear sweet long absent lord, say what? 

Is this Dame Slap's coded way of saying that she doesn't read our Henry, the famous hole in the bucket man each Friday, musing on the wonders of Thucydides? Never gets a single history lesson from Henry?

Yes, Thucydides was Greek, and some have wondered whether he's really worth just being mentioned as a trap, but whatever, our Henry routinely dwells on ancient times each Friday ... and apparently it's all water off a pizza-gorging and wine-swilling Dame Slap back ...

The pond felt shattered from the get go, but pressed on ...

Uh huh, but if the pond might be so bold, it was two men having a fuck, and these days if they happened to do it in certain parts of Africa, inspired by fundamentalist American missionaries and the British colonial legacy and woeful Xians, they'd face the death penalty for doing it. The correct word is dead, dead as a dodo, defunct, a dead parrot, dead, dead, dead ...

The pond can of course see why Dame Slap might b wanting to expunge or rewrite bits of history ... these days you have to use the Wayback Machine to get her greatest hits ...

And so on, and sorry, the pond has an obsession with overlaying the past with talk of rampant ignorance and monstrous stupidity ... and you can call that moralising if you like, and dismiss it, but do these English loons realise the company they're keeping?

It's not a matter of judging the past through our standards or our eyes - even a few Romans thought that Tiberius getting young boys to lick his balls was a bit iffy ... (else why would Suetonius have thought it a tasty, salacious tidbit?)

Say what? Lives of such tremendous richness and colour? Right there is a moral judgment. Sure, Stalin led a life of tremendous richness and colour - his death made a great comedy movie, if you'll pardon the aesthetic judgement - but it would have been interesting to have seen a couple of smug Englishmen sound so smug while living under Stalin's roof ...

The notion that you can quarry the past without the freight of the present is a profoundly silly notion. The moment the pond digs into Dame Slap, there's a visceral reaction ...

And so on, and almost anywhere you look in the past, there it is ... Dame Slap celebrating false gods ...

Meanwhile, these two dorks were blathering on as if none of it matters in the here and now because that was then and this is now ... and the pond wondered why, and then it became clear ...

Ah, but he is a nostalgic Xian.

He's the sort of Xian who turns up at Patheos in Tom Holland: "I began to realise that actually, in almost every way, I am Xian."

Back in 2016 in the New Statesman, he scribbled the usual stuff ...

...“Every sensible man,” Voltaire wrote, “every honourable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror.” Rather than acknowledge that his ethical principles might owe anything to Christianity, he preferred to derive them from a range of other sources – not just classical literature, but Chinese philosophy and his own powers of reason. Yet Voltaire, in his concern for the weak and ­oppressed, was marked more enduringly by the stamp of biblical ethics than he cared to admit. His defiance of the Christian God, in a paradox that was certainly not unique to him, drew on motivations that were, in part at least, recognisably Christian.

“We preach Christ crucified,” St Paul declared, “unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness.” He was right. Nothing could have run more counter to the most profoundly held assumptions of Paul’s contemporaries – Jews, or Greeks, or Romans. The notion that a god might have suffered torture and death on a cross was so shocking as to appear repulsive. Familiarity with the biblical narrative of the Crucifixion has dulled our sense of just how completely novel a deity Christ was. In the ancient world, it was the role of gods who laid claim to ruling the universe to uphold its order by inflicting punishment – not to suffer it themselves.

Today, even as belief in God fades across the West, the countries that were once collectively known as Christendom continue to bear the stamp of the two-millennia-old revolution that Christianity represents. It is the principal reason why, by and large, most of us who live in post-Christian societies still take for granted that it is nobler to suffer than to inflict suffering. It is why we generally assume that every human life is of equal value. In my morals and ethics, I have learned to accept that I am not Greek or Roman at all, but thoroughly and proudly Christian. (Tom Holland: Why I was wrong about Xianity, soft paywall).

Poor old Voltaire, to be so cruelly judged ...

It reminded the pond of other recent cruel judgements and persecutions, as celebrated by Kudelka ...

Meanwhile, Dame Slap was starting to wind down, with a truly awesme line "...Holland makes no judgement about this; he is simply observing that Xianity explains wokeism" ...

At the very mention, the pond had to revive that fateful cartoon, because the word "woke" always produces that reaction ...

Now on to that wokeist moment...

Never mind, the pond has already shot the bolt on Dame Slap's contribution to the hysterical polarisation of American politics around a known fraud, snake oil salesman and bankrupt businessman ...

Far too late in the piece the reptiles introduced a snap of the pair, smirking away, pleased as punch to be picked up and celebrated by Dame Slap ...

The rest was just one final gobbet of nonsense, beginning with the sort of turn the other cheek guff that would simply produce a smack across the chops from Dame Slap when in a feisty mood ...

Are they are aware that they've become part of Dame Slap's rogue gallery? That they're now rubbing shoulders with the likes of Jordan and "Lord" Monckton?

Never mind, it was different to endless ranting about the Lehrmann matter and activist judges and climate science denialism, and the pond was relieved that the past didn't really matter or count in current lives, and so could close with an immortal Rowe ...

Tomorrow, let the eternal war with China resume, and let whataboutism reign supreme...