In which the pond finally goes there with Polonius and the bro, but only on condition that it can do a cut and paste ...

 

Referendums come, referendums go, Aboriginal people have been reminded of their place, and that's more than enough of that, but before getting underway with a serious Sunday meditation, the pond would like to pay a tribute, via Crikey, as featured in Farewell, Joe Aston: The hits, the scalps and the misses ...

On News Corp and Gerry Harvey: “The Murdochs’ entire Australian apparatus — from its tabloids’ anti-PC layabouts through to The Australian’s plodding business section — guzzles Gerry’s warm Coomboona bull sperm by the pailful so its publishers can shake down the rabid old fool for the very last $40 million print advertising account they’re ever going to see.”

If you could get past the AFR Rear Window paywall, the full version was possibly even tastier ...

...It’s no different to News Corp’s indecent grovelling to Harvey and Page. The Murdochs’ entire Australian apparatus – from its tabloids’ anti-PC layabouts through to The Australian’s plodding business section – guzzles Gerry’s warm Coomboona bull sperm by the pailful so its publishers can shake down the rabid old fool for the very last $40 million print advertising account they’re ever going to see. The editors aren’t even shy about their whoring. While he’s still got a cheque book and a pulse (in that order), old man Gerald can have any puerile headline he likes.

Was Crikey worried about talk of whoring, even while observing a bordello?

Never mind, speaking of tasty, there was Charlie Sykes in The Bulwark, Chaos. Utter Chaos, Giving flamethrowers to clowns.

...“Observing the House GOP electing a speaker is like watching a monkey trying to hump a football,” wrote former GOP strategist Jeff Timmer.
Frankly, I’m not sure what that means. But I have no trouble envisioning it. And it seems like an absurdly apt image for our absurd moment.
But this is what Republicans wanted, isn’t it? They wanted revolution; they cultivated chaos; they embraced dysfunction. They wanted to burn it all down. This is what they asked for. And now they are getting it good and hard.

Monkeys seem to be the metaphor of the moment, though the pond means no disrespect to them. Cf John Naughton's Musk’s plan X: keep users in the dark, feed them dung and watch sales mushroom:

Welcome to social media, Musk-style. When he first bought what was then Twitter, the image that came to mind was of a delicate clock being donated to a monkey. That has turned out to be an understatement. In his desperation to find a way of getting the platform to earn enough revenue to pay off the debt he incurred to buy it, Musk has become a pretty malignant monkey. Among other things, he sacked half the staff (including many of those who were responsible for moderating content), alienated advertisers, started charging for premium access – and in July instituted “creator payouts to select accounts”, many of which had followings in the hundreds of thousands (and included some of Musk’s favourite users). The guy who broadcast Carson’s murder might well be one of them. If so, God alone knows how much he would have earned just from that post. Musk, though, does.

Speaking of a dry humping, the pond decided to pass on "Ned" this day. 

Most of his interminable scribbling was the usual turgid recycling of warrior Spud's talking points, and a full on gung ho carry on it was, to the point where this could pass without significant comment ...

...Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, in ordering a “complete siege” of Gaza, said there would be “no electricity, no food, no fuel” as Israel prepares its ground forces retaliation. Its condition seems to be the release of hostages. How will this play out in multicultural western Sydney with significant Muslim populations represented by senior ALP politicians with a proven sensitivity to Islamic sentiment?

More to the point, how do notions of collective guilt and collective punishment play out in a world that might still remember a few points of international law, as in Collective punishment ...

Collective punishment is a punishment or sanction imposed on a group for acts allegedly perpetrated by a member of that group, which could be an ethnic or political group, or just the family, friends and neighbors of the perpetrator. Because individuals who are not responsible for the wrong acts are targeted, collective punishment is not compatible with the basic principle of individual responsibility. The punished group may often have no direct association with the perpetrator other than living in the same area and can not be assumed to exercise control over the perpetrator's actions. Collective punishment is a war crime prohibited by treaty in both international and non-international armed conflicts, more specifically Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocol II.

Never mind, in a moment of stark terror, the pond thought that forsaking "Ned" might result in an entire dearth of reptile ingredients for the usual Sunday stew ...

The reptiles hid Polonius's prattle deep, and for a moment the pond thought the desiccated old fogey might have been dropped or switched around, as the reptiles try to rearrange the commentariat deckchairs on their aging Titanic...

For a desperate moment the pond thought it might have to disinter that column where Polonius pretends to be a dog and thinks his barking and whining is astonishingly witty ...

One burst of the barking dog dry humping the ABC and Graudian was more than enough ... (it went on, but the pond for once thought that an electronic collar might be the only way to keep the hound under control, and even be considered humane, rather than simply send the dog off to a farm, where dogs run wild and free in doggie heaven).

But then a bigger problem arose. After being disinterred, it turns out that Polonius was treading the same turf as "Ned" and the bromancer ... and it was an area that the pond had studiously avoided.

Never mind, any wailing dog in a Sunday storm, and so the pond finally went there ...

One of the reasons that the pond went there was to observe the way that the reptiles clearly thought that Polonius needed a lot of pictorial help ...

The other reason was to celebrate because surely only Polonius could start off a piece with the line "Former Australian prime minister has a good turn of phrase."

The only explanation the pond could think of was that when you're a dry humper of the Polonial kind, suddenly little Johnny must look like a lexicon of wit, a veritable Mark Twain of phrase turners ....

Yet another reason was that the pond recently read a Q and A in The New Yorker, Where the Palestinian Political Project Goes From Here ... (possible paywall).

In it Isaac Chotiner interviewed Tareq Baconi, president of the think tank Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network.

You can find Baconi's board listing here, and coincidentally a few days ago, he wrote in The New York Review of Books a piece Gaza Without Pretenses ... (paywall)

Of course the pond isn't defending the recent Hamas atrocity, or Hamas itself, not being entranced by any form of fundamentalism. Rather, the pond is, in classic reptile style, just wondering and just asking questions, doing performative what aboutism in a way which would almost qualify the pond for a gig as a GOP in the Reps ... the result is remarkably long, but that's what happens when you embark on a 'just asking questions' gig. 

What better way to respond to the reptile answers than to ask questions, using one of the pond's notorious tricks, a revival of the Burroughs' cut and paste method, first with a clip from the NYRB essay, starting a little way into the piece ...

It's easy to see that this sort of heresy isn't going to sit well with Polonius, burbling away ...

Forget Doc Evatt, it was Israel that created the current Gaza, and so back to the NYRB ...

Naturally Polonius isn't much interested in any of that, and instead that old hobby horse the ABC came back into play for the zillionth time ...

Now the pond could spend time picking out Polonial lies and dissembling. That talk of an exit from Gaza into Muslim-majority Egypt is a quintessential Polonial misrepresentation - Egypt says Israel seeks to empty Gaza, rejects corridors for civilians or cf the Graudian's Netanyahu told 1.1 million Palestinians they had 24 hours to evacuate. What is that if not ethnic cleansing? - but the pond would prefer to head back to the NYRB ...

And that left just a Polonial dry hump to go ...

Meanwhile, back on the matter of collective guilt and collective responsibility, which the pond recalls was very popular back in the 1930s, there was this in WaPo under the header Israel orders 1 million Gazans to evacuate; U. N. says that's impossible (paywall).

And so on and so on ...

But in for a penny, no chance of a pound, the pond thought it might also give the bro - in full bloody thirsty war monger flight - a go. Having gone there once, why not go there again?

The pond had yet to note anything in the New Yorker q and a. It's much the same as per the essay above, but still, anything to punctuate the bro's rant ... starting with a short intro ...

Then back to the ranting bro ...

Meanwhile, in that Q and A ...

At this point the reptiles interrupted the bro with a snap, and the pond thought it best to get them all out of the way, as heated images rarely produce light ... and you won't find any images from The Times of Israel story 2 Palestinians killed after settlers said to ambush funeral in West Bank ... (possible paywall) nor any mention by the bro of those murders or the many murders that preceded them...

On with the bro, maintaining the rage and the lust for blood, as you might expect from all the fundamentalists involved in this never ending story ...

Actually if the pond wanted an insight, it would routinely avoid a barking mad fundamentalist Catholic enthralled by one form of fundamentalism... because anybody who thinks that Jewish fundamentalists are representative of what the West should represent may as well go ahead and embrace Islamic fundamentalism, because what the heck, any form of fundamentalism will do ...

Meanwhile, the bromancer is in thrall to Benji, a corrupt politician who made deals with assorted devils to keep himself out of the clink ... and look at what that produced, with millions marching, chaos in the land, and now this ... and the bro still clueless and eyeless in Gaza ...

Back to that Q and A ...

The good thing is that the pond has lots of chunks to slip in between the bro's gobbets. It might be a little mind bending - alternative realities colliding - but it's an interesting exercise ...

Uh huh, but as the pond is doing what abouts, what about ...

Back to the bro ... still eyeless in Gaza ... “Avem intotdeauna tendinta sa atribuim propriile noastre defecte si celorlalti.” “As though you could use violent, unjust means and achieve peace and justice! Means determine ends; and must be like the ends proposed. Means intrinsically different from the ends proposed achieve ends like themselves, not like those they were meant to achieve.”

A short gobbet from the Q and A ...

And then a longer one, because the Q and A runs longer than the bro, hard to imagine as that might be ...

Now back to the bro for his penultimate gobbet ...

Back to the Q and A interview...

For those unfamiliar with "Bantustan", there's a handy wiki here, which begins ...

A Bantustan (also known as Bantu homeland, black homeland, black state or simply homeland; Afrikaans: Bantoestan) was a territory that the National Party administration of South Africa set aside for black inhabitants of South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia), as part of its policy of apartheid. By extension, outside South Africa the term refers to regions that lack any real legitimacy, consisting often of several unconnected enclaves, or which have emerged from national or international gerrymandering.

The term, first used in the late 1940s, was coined from Bantu (meaning "people" in some of the Bantu languages) and -stan (a suffix meaning "land" in the Persian language and some Persian-influenced languages of western, central, and southern Asia). It subsequently came to be regarded as a disparaging term by some critics of the apartheid-era government's homelands. The Pretoria government established ten Bantustans in South Africa, and ten in neighbouring South West Africa (then under South African administration), for the purpose of concentrating the members of designated ethnic groups, thus making each of those territories ethnically homogeneous as the basis for creating autonomous nation states for South Africa's different black ethnic groups. Under the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act of 1970, the government stripped black South Africans of their South African citizenship, depriving them of their few remaining political and civil rights in South Africa, and declared them to be citizens of these homelands.

Another gobbet from the Q and A ...

And that leads to the final bro gobbet ...

And so at last to a final gobbet from the Q and A ...

Complexity? Sorry the reptiles of the lizard Oz don't do complexity. Complexity is anathema to any fundamentalist ...

And that's why the pond does comedy, and grieves that it can't run with comedy today, and that it can only catch up on Luckovich at the very end, what with cartoons not required in that cut and paste of fundamentalists clashing without light  ...

...Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night. (in full here)