In which the pond is tortured by our Henry, cackling Claire and the grave Sexton ...

 

Spring has finally sprung, at least if you believe in the notion of dividing the seasons by days on a calendar, as opposed to a proper pagan worship of the spring equinox, which the google assures the pond will fall on Saturday, September 23, 2023 at 06:50 UTC.

Then it'll be time for Ostara in the Wiccan way ... oh sheesh, does that involve hippies and regaining balance and all that jazz?

Sorry, the pond is on a trek to October 14, in the wilderness, shunning the reptiles maintaining their rage or, if you will, urging "Voice debate must unfold in respectful spirit of unity".

As if any reptile had the first clue about the respectful spirit of unity. And this led to a profound problem for the pond. 

The pond had decided to red card any talk of the Voice, but of course there was our Henry, the hole in the bucket man himself, at the head of the reptile pack ...

What to do, what to do? 

The few remaining devotees of the pond's herpetological studies must have their Friday serve of portentous, pompous humbug, and pretentious drivel, and ostentatious referencing of long dead pioneers of white civilisation.

How could the pond reconcile these quite fair and reasonable needs with a red card? 

In the end the pond decided on a compromise. The pond would strip our Henry of the right to gobbets, and so the right to roll out the drivel at length in an uninterrupted way, and instead the pond would provide right and proper annotations on a line by line basis ...

Not all of the hole in the bucket man could make the cut, but this should surely sate those yearning for their Friday fix of unendurable pomposity ...

...No one was more influential in defining that role than the great German philosopher, GWF Hegel (1770-1831), who placed “recognition” (Anerkennung) at the heart of his political theory. (Bigot says NO)
The question with which Hegel grappled was how the ever-growing demand for individuality could be reconciled with the cohesion societies needed to survive and prosper.  (Bigot says NO)
The key to addressing that dilemma, he argued, lies in the fact that we naturally “recognise” each other as both profoundly similar and profoundly different: similar in our common humanity, which endows us with the faculties needed to flourish, yet utterly unique in where those faculties ultimately lead. (Bigot says NO)
Only the modern state, Hegel believed, could successfully reconcile that duality’s two faces. By granting all citizens political equality – that is, equal rights and obligations – it could recognise and enshrine our common identity as rational beings; at the same time, by allowing the freedoms of expression, religion and association, it could create the room for human diversity to thrive. (Bigot says NO)
As a result, the joint “recognition” of commonality and plurality was the deepest justification both for political equality and for rigorously separating the political sphere – “the realm of universality” – from “civil society”, which Hegel described as the “realm of particularity”. (Bigot says NO) 
For Hegel, “recognition” was consequently an essentially individual process: it was the respect each citizen paid every other, laying the foundations for a politics of equal dignity. And then, as now, the promise of the politics of equal dignity was that the equality of rights and voices would breed an equality of hopes and duties. (Bigot says NO)
Yet the politics of equal dignity was soon challenged by the politics of difference. Originally theorised by Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), it viewed the world as an aggregate of ethnic groupings – the “Volk” – whose members could only flourish within the confines of their collective identity.  (Bigot says NO. Lebensraum for volk and Volkswagens)
Recognition was, in this perspective, not to be accorded to individuals as citizens who deserved an equal opportunity to shape a shared future; it was instead owed to collectivities forged by the burdens and memories of a shared past. Grafted over time on to notions of national liberation and self-determination, this approach – which was the wellspring of ethnic nationalism – transformed “recognition” into an increasingly vociferous demand for political sovereignty. (Bigot says NO)
However, the “volk” was, more often than not, a myth; and even when it was not entirely fabricated, the challenge for its proponents was to form a unified people out of a heterogeneous population. (Bigot says NO. Lebensraum for volk and Volkswagens)
That challenge was, of course, not theirs alone: it had plagued the notion of “the people” from the outset. Thus, when the brilliant 17th century royalist Sir Robert Filmer wanted to attack the use made of the notion by Charles I’s adversaries, he was able even then to point out that “What the word ‘people’ means is not agreed upon”. (Bigot says NO)
As for the conceit that “the people” could be the underlying source of political authority, it was patently absurd, since it was the political system that determined who constituted “the people”, not the other way around. (Bigot says NO)
It was against the backdrop of that controversy – and of the blood-soaked civil war which followed it – that Thomas Hobbes defined the conceptual framework that permeates modern political theory. (Bigot says NO)
As Hobbes well knew, it was being represented in parliament, with its elaborate rituals and ongoing political bargaining, that had gradually fused the English nobility and the gentry into assertive, self-conscious estates, whose collective identity transcended their deep differences. (Bigot says NO)
In his masterpiece, Leviathan (1651), which was published in the same year as the first application of the noun “representative” to parliament, he therefore argued that it was the political process itself, with its unifying symbols, ceremonies and practices, that converts the mass into “the people”. (Bigot says NO. Words are the money of fools)
Instead of the people creating the polity, it was the polity that brought “the people” into being, defining the “who, what and when” that took disparate individuals and through participation in the political system gave them a collective identity. (Bigot says NO. A man's conscience and his judgement is the same thing, and as the judgement, so also the conscience may be erroneous)
But nothing ensured the process of constructing a “people” would be a pretty sight – least of all where the politics of difference was involved. Rather, as the subsequent centuries painfully showed, the politics of difference relied on a logic that defined “us” by the exclusion of, and vehement opposition to, “them”. Drenched in grievance, and exploiting it to create group solidarity, ethnically and racially based representation was invariably deeply divisive – as each of the voice’s predecessors, and its overseas counterparts, proved to be. (Bigot says NO, for the life of a scribbler for the lizard Oz is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short).

The pond realises this compromise won't satisfy everyone, but it's all the pond can offer.

And so to the rest of the field, and this day the reptiles were all about Qantas, up there in the digital edition's pictorially rotating centrefold ...

What's amusing about this? Well this additional offering caught the pond's eye ...

That talk of a culture of arrogance was surely only inserted so that the pond could reference the keen Keane in Crikey, offering What is Australia’s most hated company? A Crikey form guide (paywall).

Naturally Qantas made the list, but so did News Corp ...

It’s understandable that companies attract our ire because of their determination to make money no matter what damage they do to their customers. But News Corp goes beyond mere profiteering to actively working to undermine democracy, spread misinformation and propaganda, and distort public debate in the interests of encouraging division, inciting racial grievance and white victimhood, and punching downward. Plenty of companies are bad, and many hated. Few are actually evil. But News Corp is one.

Well yes, and speaking of evil, Michael Bradley was also in Crikey, offering a caution in Why I advise survivors engaging with News Corp to keep their eyes wide open (paywall).

...For worked examples of what I mean, look no further than the campaigns waged against the deceased victim of an alleged rape by Christian Porter, and against Brittany Higgins, in the pages of The Australian. The former was a political campaign in the interests of the then-government of Scott Morrison, the latter a more classical culture war in defence of a patriarchy that feels the #MeToo movement has gone too far. Both did indescribable harm...
...Obviously News Corp isn’t going to stop being a political operation or remove the campaigning instinct from its DNA, but for advocates in any field it’s useful to understand that this is the nature of the beast. Engage, if you choose to, with open eyes.

Actually the harm done is not entirely indescribable. Richard Ackland does a pretty fair job of surveying the wreckage in The Graudian, in The Higgins-Lehrmann case has become a lawyers’ feast. Can we expect more litigation?

...Conspicuously, the Australian had been running one of its heavy-handed campaigns, targeting a mixed bag of villains: Drumgold; the #MeToo movement; Brittany Higgins and her supporters; and “victim-centric” sympathies in sexual assault cases.
It’s at the weirder end of the culture war spectrum.

Yep, you don't get any weirder than the lizard Oz and Dame Slap and all that, but that's a mugwump swamp the pond has refused to enter, and so to retreat to the safety of cackling Claire, suddenly an energy expert nonpareil ...

What makes cackling Claire such an astonishing expert? Why she knows how to act like a bowerbird, collecting shiny things for her nest, plucking references from hither and yon, out of the ether...

And now here's how the pond knew it was in the company of an Ouroboros, or perhaps reptiles so far up their collective bums that all they could do was reference each other, with cackling Alex referencing cackling Claire who naturally in turn referenced cacklingAlex, and so produced a hermetically sealed casing for all the cackling...

Before going on with that, the pond thought it might borrow from its own comments section, on the basis that if reptiles can reference reptiles, then the pond can reference its correspondents ...

...GB - well picked - it is fairly easy to pick up the Coram's own assessment of himself in his present possie with 'Lateral Economics'. If I may - and remember, this is Alex on Alex -

'Main area of academic research: Mathematical social science with particular emphasis on developing models and approaches to deal with non-standard problems and those not readily framed within existing approaches to formal analysis. Among these are: struggles over distribution; competition between political parties; the dynamics of arms races with asymmetric agents; conflict over resources; environmental problems; problems involving arbitrarily large numbers of coalitions; dynamic feedback problems; optimal trajectories for emissions reduction; problems in control theory.

Consultancies and other activities: Among the problems I have worked on are: emissions problems in aviation; designing and implementing a dynamic graphical interface for estimating changes transport networks; estimating world demand for nuclear fuels; the potential for nuclear storage and processing; water systems; modernizing electricity in Australia; total economic costs of electricity generation with different technologies.'

He has also grasped the reptile reporting method - cite other reptile contributors (but the Eclair? - for observations like 'may well exceed generation costs' - um, thought you were pretty good with numbers, Alex?) and recycle; much of what flies from the rigging of the Flagship this day appeared in an 'Opinion Piece' in the 'Fin' earlier this year - complete with that mangled metaphor of the navigation app. that already has amused our esteemed Hostess here.

The rest of it - is, at best, muddy. He follows the Dame Groan in confusing conventions in accounting with economic analysis, and I would not want to be minutes secretary of his grouping of economists and engineers to nut out what he envisages as an optimal solution, but it is otherwise difficult to determine from this writing where that 'solution' might be, except that it is someplace else. Perhaps he needs a new kind of navigation app.

...GB - I have worked in some of the areas in which Alex claims to nominate problems. There are well-established solutions to the ones with which I am familiar; the challenge is to persuade the politicians with the appropriate power to apply those solutions. From Alex's garbled writing this day, I suspect 'Lateral Economics' is firmly in the business of promoting paralysis by analysis. This is much favoured by the coalition, and particularly the Nationals. For example - the Murray-Darling Plan - endless calls from Nats for interminable analysis. Don't proceed with buy-back of water for environmental value until you have analysed the possible impact of the extraction of every gigalitre of every Nat voter along the river. Enter economic consultants, who will happily take years to produce large 'reports', ideally raising more questions, which require further studies.

Moving provision of energy from burning hydrocarbons to - something else - is clearly a fertile area for report after report after report. Each report will allow a coalition administration to say that it stands ready to save the planet - just as soon as it has worked out a way to do that without disrupting anything that people currently indulge themselves with.

It still amuses me that coalition administrations used to lecture me that they were great believers in markets to achieve economic reconstruction in particular industries - but, when I offered a market plan to do that - called for 'socio-economic assessment', or, in a couple of cases - having participants in that industry vote on whether they would use a market to reconstruct.

Now that's a far more useful introduction to Alex than the pond could ever devise, as he and cackling Claire brown nose each other ... as the pond turns to the final gobbet ...

Still the same b/s,  mindless blather about honesty and transparency, as if cackling Claire could offer a solid foundation of empirical rigour, when what she does is cherry pick a few ideas from birds of a feather ...

... and perhaps, after the blather is done and the dust is settled, what we're being offered are dreams and delusions about SMRs arriving from Neverland with Peter Pan, or via a Qantas phantom flight.

And so to the bonus for the day, and this time it's the venerable Sexton ...

Actually if the pond can offer a personal experience, that's a lie. Soldiers returning from Vietnam were abused for their role in the war. The pond has direct personal experience of that happening to a soldier and his family.

It was a troubled and difficult time, and the pond also had a friend who did time in jail for being a conscientious objector and so was scarred for life, and another who went on the run to avoid the draft, when he might have been better off faking his medical examination, like many did ...

It's difficult for some to remember the bitterness at the time, and it goes without saying that the pond wasn't enamoured of Ming the Merciless and one of the most useless wars of all time, but still ...

...Caught between these two diametrically opposed positions were the men and women in uniform. Due to their position in the armed services, they were obliged to fight the war — a war many of the youth wanted to have nothing to do with. Once in Vietnam, the soldiers were faced with having to fight a 'dirty' war — a guerrilla war against an unseen adversary in a hostile terrain and an equally hostile climate. Winning the war became synonymous with high body counts; consequently, soldiers were branded 'murderers and rapists or at best, duped fools', while the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were considered 'exemplars of all human virtue'. Also, through the media, the increasing aggravation towards them and the war was filtering through to the men in Vietnam. Wharfies had gone out on strike and for a time had refused to handle goods destined for Vietnam. University students had begun raising funds for the Viet Cong.

For many soldiers, 'the feeling of having been disowned by their own country was the greatest and most profound insult of all'.

It was not only the soldiers themselves who bore the brunt of this conflict in society, but also their families. Many wives were harassed directly through the mail and by telephone and drew scorn or an implied 'it serves you right' when they answered the question, 'Where is your husband?' Outside service circles, many learnt to evade a reply or simply say he was away on a course. Sons of servicemen were sometimes 'punched up' at school for defending their fathers' role.

Once home, thousands of veterans were confronted with, paradoxically, the same deep intrapersonal conflict many conscientious objectors had faced during the war. Many veterans questioned their own involvement in the war, while others found that, while one war was over, another one was just beginning. Some found it easier to dodge the enemy's bullets and booby traps than to confront the 'disfavour and outright hatred' that greeted them on their return. Australians have traditionally held their war veterans in high regard and a major custom in our society has been to welcome them home with ticker tape parades and the like. In the case of the Vietnam veterans this privilege, in the main, was withheld by the Australian public.

That's from a 2004 PhD Monash University thesis, with all the usual footnotes, by Ambrose Thomas Crowe, available online here.

Perhaps some of it was mythology, perhaps some moments were mythologised, but some were real enough to avoid dismissing it all as a myth. Perhaps some did have outlandish expectations of being treated as returning heroes, but after the fuss died down, veterans were treated as part of a war that needed to be forgotten.

Perhaps the most shameful treatment dished out by assorted Liberal governments after press ganging victims into a useless war came with the refusal to acknowledge the impact of the war on veterans ...

• When veterans were compared to non-veterans, National Service veterans who served in Vietnam experienced a 23% higher overall mortality than nonveterans who did not serve in Vietnam.
• Specific causes of death that were significantly higher amongst veterans include mortality from digestive system diseases (primarily alcoholic liver disease), lung and pancreatic cancer, motor vehicle accidents and suicide.
• National Service veterans had a significant 14% elevation in their rate of cancer incidence compared to non-veterans. Specifically, cancer incidence was higher for lung cancer, head and neck cancer, and cancer of the pancreas. (out of the Government's own mouth)

And so on ... naturally there are endless studies afterwards of what never needed to happen in the first place, except for Ming the Merciless's desire to be a war monger ...

And after that little outburst, another gobbet from the venerable Sexton ...

And for once the pond and the venerable Sexton can agree. It was one of the most shameful examples of war mongering in recent times, and the likes of prattling Polonius still refuse to admit their complicity ... so many armchair warriors blathering about dominoes, so little time ...

The pond still remembers the bitterness in the family when it was decided that the pond had become a Hanoi Jane ... and as for Ming the Merciless, that wretched clown who paraded as the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, in faux military gear, like some relic from the eighteenth century ...

... what a contemptible man he was, though with a certain rat cunning ...

Indeed, indeed, and unsurprisingly that was published by New Holland rather than Connor Court, with a revised edition reviewed way back in 2002 ...

And now to celebrate Qantas as only Golding and the immortal Rowe can ...

And as the pond will be saving its infallible Pope, should one land, for the morrow, here's an oldie to go on with ...

UPDATE:

Heck once the pond gets hold of the latest infallible Pope, it can't resist rushing straight into the nearest store and spending it at once ... especially if it's on the same theme ...